A 6-Year-Old Black Boy Shot His Teacher. The Bodycam Video Is Worse

I think I’m a pretty good person.  I don’t steal.  I don’t cut in line. I pick up after my dog.  I open the door for ladies. I don’t talk loudly in movie theaters. I work hard. I’ve never cheated on my wife.  I try to be polite.  I put my shopping cart back, I don’t litter and I pay my taxes.

All in all, I sound like a pretty good guy. But here’s the thing… All that stuff… it’s a pretty low bar for a person to be considered good in a civilized society.  None of that stuff is anything I should be patting myself on the back for.

Actually, I’m not. I, like many people, gauge myself more by my failures than by my successes.  Despite all the above, I’ve failed at numerous businesses, sent out seemingly millions of resumes and mostly got crickets in return and I’ve been in debt for most of my life. 

Those things are not good.  They are terrible as a matter of fact.  But they are what they are.

All of that being said, I hope, when I leave this mortal realm, I find St. Peter welcoming me at the pearly gates. But hey, who knows?

Why the introspection?  Because I recently watched a video of a very troubling interaction.

Before I get into that, I have to admit that I kinda feel like I’m the way I am because of osmosis.  Other than my parents telling me to respect my elders and not to lie or steal – particularly after an incident with a candy bar when I was about five - I don’t remember getting a bunch of explicit moral lessons while growing up.  I’m sure they were there, but I just don’t remember them. No doubt there were teachers and priests (I was an Altar Boy) and coaches who helped form me into who I am along the way.  I appear to be the product of my own agency and the people around me, but I can’t say for sure what the ratio is, nor when I became the biggest driver of my character.

And now, that troubling interaction.

There was a story recently of a little six-year-old boy who brought a gun to school and shot his teacher.  That by itself is very troubling, but it’s not the most troubling part of the story.  That starts when the police bodycam video picks up the little boy sitting on the lap of a different teacher. Over the course of a two-minute video we hear that little boy say “Fuck you, Bitch” to the teacher and about someone to whom the police referred “That nigger retired last year”.  He continues, saying to the police “You wanna piece of me, come and get it, bitch.” and “I don’t care if you call backup, I don’t care if I go to jail, bitch.”

That was the catalyst for the above introspection.  I wondered, how does a six-year-old boy become such a menace?  He didn’t come out of the womb already knowing that language or how to shoot a gun.  Somewhere over the first six years of his life he learned such, either by explicit intent or osmosis.

What kind of family life must that child have been raised in?  What kind of community? What kind of socialization was he exposed to? 

I immediately wondered what the reactions from the parents might be.  I’ve not seen their reactions, but I’ve seen many videos of black family / friends saying about black criminals some version of “He was a really a good boy” or  “He just fell in with the wrong crowd”.  And in one memorable case where a homeowner shot an intruder dead, someone asked how else someone raised in the hood was supposed to get money for school clothes.

All of this got me thinking about not only that little boy, but black America and America writ large. 

America is a nation like no other.  We’ve existed for 250 years guided by a piece of paper. Seriously… a piece of paper. Unlike most nations in history, we’re not controlled by a heredity dynasty or military regime where fear of violence keeps our union together. What’s more, we’re not a democracy where the mob or majority rules at the expense of the minority. No, we’re a republic where individuals have their own rights that the majority can’t, ideally, trample upon.

A nation such as ours only survives if the vast majority of the citizens share roughly the same values and mores.  The big values are right there in the Constitution, things like freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to trial by jury, etc.

But a nation needs more than that to survive for a quarter of a millennium. Religious hegemony isn’t a requirement, but something close to it has helped.  A belief in hard work and merit being a key element of success was a bedrock principle from early on, whether on the part of frontiersmen, farmers or factory workers.

Closer to home, things like doing chores, respecting other’s property, and supporting the community were traditionally common throughout most of America’s history. 

Together, those things and more created something of a social contract that allowed Americans to thrive like no people ever had.  America was never perfect nor were any Americans, but most were fundamentally good and lived by that implied contract. 

But 60 years ago LBJ destroyed that contract. His Great Society programs weakened the family structure for far too many and sent America down the path that led to that little six-year-old boy bellowing “Fuck you, Bitch” after shooting a teacher. Virtually everything in the story of American success is based on individual responsibility. To the degree that LBJ eviscerated that core principle, he opened the door to where we are today, a point in time where a staggering number of blacks feel no respect for anyone, no affinity to America and no respect for the mores and values that made America great in the first place. 

Forty years ago activists pushed for dashcams and later police bodycams because they were expected to show large numbers of police abusing minorities. They didn’t.  What they showed instead was the disdain and contempt many blacks have for police and a willingness to use violence. We see it regularly.  One doesn’t have to imagine very hard that without a drastic change, that little six-year-old boy is going to grow up to be the next Decarlos Brown or one of those “teens” we see so often trashing stores or otherwise causing mayhem.

This 6-year-old should be a wakeup call.  When we see a little boy who, through either instruction or osmosis, has such anti-social behavior problems, we need to recognize that he wasn’t born that way.  He was indoctrinated by a culture that no longer even pretends to conform to the norms that made America so successful.  That’s a problem.  Not only for the child, the family and the community, but for America as well.  Until that is dealt with, we’ll likely end up seeing more heartbreakingly maddening bodycam videos…

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

France's Slow Motion Collapse

Guest post by Martha Careful

We’ve all seen reports about the riots in France. I live in Paris, not far from the town where all this started. Yesterday, I walked by two of the best high schools in the country, and the kids were blocking the doors with trash cans (but you could walk around them). Everyone was smiling and laughing; it was more like a tailgate party than a protest—but these places are in the heart of Paris.

 

Next week, I have to go down south for a few days to be with family, and we stay in one of those banlieue neighborhoods. It’s funny—the building is where my wife grew up. I’ve been going there for 25 years. It used to be 100% French, like a French version of a nice American suburb.

 

Today... not so much. In the last five years, it’s changed completely. I’ve watched the neighborhood go from bucolic to ghetto in a relatively short period of time. On the one hand, it doesn’t look like the Bronx or East LA, with drug dealers and hookers on the corners and gunshots every day—yet—but, on the other, the signs are right there, like the car that was immolated in the building parking lot, rocks through lobby windows, and ever-increasing trash everywhere. The city’s not quite Marseilles yet, but it’s not far from it either.

 

As for the protests themselves, the funny, or not-so-funny, thing is that the kids have a valid point. A friend of mine who lives in one of the nicest areas of Paris has kids in elementary school and says that one of them (along with the other 35 kids in the class) spends probably one day a week or more sitting in the library for eight hours a day because the teacher never showed up and they have no substitutes. Add to that a shortage of books and basic supplies, plus behaviorally challenged students, and things are less than optimal.

 

One of the key issues is actually HVAC, or the lack thereof. Stone and brick buildings often have minimal, or sometimes no, heat in the winter, forcing students to dress like Eskimos IN class. Similarly, most have no AC, and many have no ventilation, which can make years like this one, with 90+ degrees in early May, simply unbearable.

 

Many are talking about the protests being taken over by radicals. That’s mostly wrong. The young Muslim students ARE the radicals. That doesn’t mean there are no radicals with traditional French backgrounds, but they are a minority. (During “protests” in 2023, Mohammed was by far the most popular name among those arrested.)

 

Nor does that mean the left isn’t trying to take advantage; they are—they’re calling for a third wave this week—but thus far, they have not had much luck widening the protests/violence in terms of getting other groups to join, although there was a general strike last Monday that included trash pickup but not transportation. And now the teachers have joined the fray.

 

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the left and likely presidential candidate, posted on X that members of his party “call for non-violence in methods of struggle” so he can pretend he’s calling for peace, knowing his followers do just the opposite. Just the day before, he stated, “violence can be legitimate,” though he qualified this statement by saying it was “better to avoid it.”

 

There have been calls for the government to crack down on... the police for being too rough on the protesters! What’s more, the mayor of St. Denis, one of the most important suburbs in France, has been accused by the police of “incitement to commit a crime” after joining arms with and encouraging the protests, as well as presenting the protests as legitimate.

 

The government is having a hard time responding. I’m not suggesting there’s going to be a giant cataclysm right around the corner, although there might be, but the reality is that the economic struggle is real. I see it every day as I walk around my neighborhood and see homeless people and closed stores—and again, I’m in the center of Paris, one of the nicest places in the city, if not the country.

 

Much of the problem, I would suggest, aside from the immigration problem, is the fact that 60% of the GDP comes from government spending, and more than half of the remaining 40% is made up of big companies. Entrepreneurship, the magic elixir that created so much prosperity in the world, is almost anathema in France.

 

It honestly breaks my heart every time I walk by one of the many, many boarded-up buildings in so many places in the city, including many tourist spots. Every one of them is someone’s broken dream. Sure, some of them were bad ideas, bad operators, or bad timing, but just as many, if not more, are the result of government regulations that choke the life out of that entrepreneurial spark.

 

How do we know this? Because if it were just the necessity of entrepreneurial spark, we’d see those boarded-up storefronts going through a series of stores until one sticks. But that’s not what’s happening.

 

Storefronts on main boulevards and on heavily trafficked tourist paths—despite having plenty of people living in the neighborhoods—find themselves boarded up for years on end. In any given month, one new shop will open just to see two more close.

 

Even in the area of government spending, things aren’t working. In areas that are arguably the most important in a person’s life, education and healthcare, failure is setting in. Results in the vaunted education system are rapidly declining, and getting appointments can take months in Paris and far longer in many other places. They can’t find enough teachers or doctors, as both professions are bleeding practitioners.

 

Unfortunately for France, all of that spells a fiscal train wreck heading their way. While these “protests” may have taken a violent leftist turn, the reality is that the problems that sparked them are completely valid. As the fiscal challenges that bedevil education spread to other parts of the economy and the demographics change, such violent “protests” will likely become more frequent.

 

I don’t see that the government has an answer for this, and, from what I can tell, most of the French people don’t either. Sadly, it doesn’t seem as if many people recognize that the problem is the government—and I don’t mean the left or right in this case—I mean the government writ large. Too big. Too inefficient. Too much inertia. Too much cowardice to tackle the problems of immigration and benefits.

 

We can only hope that one of these days, these tinderboxes that keep catching fire alert the French that it’s just not possible to wait out the problems. Because they’re not going anywhere on their own. It will take a leader of courage and vision to do what needs to be done, and an army of French patriots to put him or her into the Élysée (the French White House).

 

Say what you will of Napoleon, he brought an end to a decade of upheaval, chaos, and violence and brought order to a nation very much in need of it. France in the 21st century certainly doesn’t need someone to lead it on invasions across the continent, but it does need someone with the willingness to take on the entrenched bureaucrats, politicians, and activists who suckle at the teat of the state while French citizens watch their country collapse around them... metaphorically, at least for now.

What Good Are Billionaires Anyway?

A couple of years ago there was a story of a woman from Texas had a $60 million wedding in Paris.  She flew in her guests, everyone stayed in the best hotels and had the finest food France had to offer while everyone left with spectacular gifts.

Likewise another money-to-burn story was about Jeff Bezos spending half a billion on a yacht.  It was so big required another boat for support and had its own helicopter and landing pad! Needless to say, that boat is slightly larger than the barrel boat we used to fish off of when I was a kid.

Then there’s the story from a few years ago where some genius with more money than brains paid $6.2 million for a banana held onto the wall with a piece of duct tape.  As an artist I’d have taped a watermelon to the wall for half that!

Of course one doesn’t need to be embarrassingly rich in order to go overboard.  I saw an Instagram post recently of a woman planning a birthday party for a one-year-old. It was insane. There were all kinds of happy birthday signs, balloons, cakes (yes, plural) and a stack of presents halfway to the ceiling.  I was thinking to myself, this is insane. The baby’s one year old! He’s never going to remember!

There are countless other things like this that never make the news or someone’s Instagram feed.  The reality is, the amount of money these people spend on things like this is simply insane, by almost any measure. Some people would even say it’s obscene, and maybe it is. But the truth is, it’s their money.  If they wanted to set it on fire, it’s theirs to do what they wish. But most don’t do that… Although maybe they should, given that a record number of Americans support Socialism and the Communists in Democrat and DSA clothing think there should be no billionaires! Of course taxing them out of existence does sound kinda appealing when we see so many of them or their progeny donate fortunes to leftist causes that hinder others from finding the same success… but I digress. 

How many times have you heard some leftist say “Do you know how much poverty could be relieved for the amount he spent on XXX?” or “How many poor children could be fed for what she spent on XXX?” Blah, blah, blah… They are, by and large, broken records.

But could the money that these billionaires waste really solve world poverty? 

No. 

NGOs spend billions annually “fighting” poverty and the government has spent more than $50 trillion over the last half century, and the results are less than spectacular. But on the upside, we did get a giant, permanent poverty bureaucracy and massive amounts of fraud enriching grifters from sea to shining sea.  If spending billions or trillions cured poverty, it would have been accomplished decades ago.

Nonetheless, aren’t we getting to a point where the rich simply have too much and the poor don’t have enough? Shouldn’t they be forced to share?  As a guy whose bank account is more often red than green, and as much as I could use the infusion of cash, the answer is no. 

The hard truth is, we’re far better off with a bunch of obscenely rich Americans living among us. Why?  Because, unlike command economies, in America most people who get rich did so by providing goods and services that other people value enough to exchange their hard-earned money for.

What’s more, rich people’s money works for everyone else. Unlike Scrooge McDuck, most rich people don’t keep their money in a vault and go in and swim around in it. They usually buy stocks, buy companies, invest in startups, make donations, and probably keep some in banks. Whatever they choose to do with their money, it usually makes its way back into the economy by helping firms hire staff or buy inventory or invest in machinery.  It helps get startups off the ground, funds lending by banks and pays the salaries of NGOs – and sometimes accidentally does some good in the process. 

Take Jeff Bezos’ 417-foot yacht. The Koru, which costs over $25 million a year to operate, cost $500 million to build and has a $75 million boat that follows it to carry all the stuff it can’t hold! 

But that half billion dollars didn’t magically make that boat appear.  It went to pay thousands of dockworkers, steel makers, artisans, woodworkers, not to mention lumberjacks, oil riggers and designers and the restaurants those people ate and the stations where they filled up their gas tanks.   Now, in this case most of those people were in the Netherlands because the US doesn’t build those kinds of ships, but you get the idea.

When it comes to private jets, however, the US rules, and many of the buyers are rich people from around the world. Gulfstream, which manufactures top-of-the-line private jets that sell for between $65 and $80 million, has sold planes to not only Bezos, Musk and Gates, but to many non-Americans like Jack Ma, Cristiano Ronaldo and James Dyson. And just like the giant yachts, when some billionaire buys one of those jets, they’re providing an income not only to the people working at Gulfstream, to their suppliers and subcontractors as well, but in the process they’re supporting those people’s families too.

The same holds true for lavish weddings or the over-the-top birthday parties or private golf outings.  All that spending that seems so obscene is in reality anything but in the big picture.  Sure, it may be ostentatious, but so what?  Every dollar spent provides incomes for countless people down the line that never make the coverage.

There’s inequity in every country and in every civilization.  The only thing that differs is how it comes about and who benefits. In Soviet Russia, in Cuba, in Venezuela, Nigeria and countless other nations where the government basically chooses the winners and losers, what you end up with is a few ultra wealthy people ruling over the impoverished masses. 

American inequality today might be greater than in the past, but the difference between now and when the Robber Barons reigned is that today not only do we have a thriving middle class, but even America’s poor live better than most people around the world. 

America has almost 30% of the world’s billionaires.  That’s a pretty good number for a country that represents 4% of the world’s population.  The thing the left doesn’t get is that that number isn’t a sign of coercion or theft or corruption, but rather it reflects the fact that there’s no place like America for someone to start a company that meets the needs of willing buyers. Does it matter to me that that leftist weasel Bill Gates is a gazillionaire?  No, it doesn’t change my life one iota. But you know what does, the PC I’m typing on that’s running on Windows software. I spend hours behind it every single day, and my life is far better because of that weasel.

That’s the point.  Americans don’t need to like billionaires.  They can even hate them.  But the reality is, Americans thrive because of them.  Most of the billionaires and even millionaires in America got that way because they did something to make other’s lives better. America is a place where people can become obscenely rich by creating goods and services that others are willing to exchange their hard earned money for. It’s not perfect, and things sometimes go wrong, but the freedom, opportunity and choice combine to make the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans far better.  The fact that a few become billionaires along the way is easily a tradeoff worth making. 

The Terrorists’ Real Victory Wasn’t The Towers; It Was Much Worse

The year 2026 is an interesting one. It has both the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States and, simultaneously, the 25th anniversary of September 11.

The two events are inescapably intertwined. For me, 9/11 shattered much of what had come before it.

I was born twenty years after World War II ended. Growing up—and being educated—in the 1970s and 1980s, I knew America was good. Raised on military bases in Italy and Cuba, I was exposed to parades, marches, and military drills that bred patriotism.

We flew on military planes, we sang the National Anthem before every movie in the theater, and my friends and I would regularly eat lunch in the Gold Hill Barracks galley (cafeteria), with a table of Marines on one side of us and a table of Navy NCOs on the other.

While my specific experience was unique, the feeling of patriotism wasn’t. For the most part, Americans knew America was fundamentally good.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that I had imprinted on my soul that America was always destined to win WWII. Not because the Kaiser shipyards together delivered a new Liberty Ship every day for years, or because North American Aviation could produce 30 Mustang fighters per day, but rather because we were the good guys and the Nazis and the Japanese were the bad guys. Like Manifest Destiny before it, America was destined to triumph.

I carried that same framework long after college. Sure, you could look at Vietnam and make the argument that the United States was involved in something that it should not have been—an arguable, but far from convincing, point—but that didn’t change the fundamental nature of America. Nations, like humans, make mistakes, but ours was essentially good.

For me, that was the backdrop upon which everything else operated. Like gravity, it’s not something that you think about regularly; you just know it’s there. It’s true, and you go about your everyday life.

September 11 shattered that for me. Like most Americans alive on that day, I remember exactly where I was. I was in Atlanta, having gone back to bed after returning from the gym. My sister called me after the first plane hit the tower, and I turned on the TV and watched.

“What the hell!” I asked myself. “How the hell does that happen?” It was only a couple of minutes later when the second plane crashed into the South Tower. Suddenly, it was like Americans must have felt when they heard of Pearl Harbor. America was being attacked!

I spent the next seven days sitting in front of my TV, probably 20 hours a day. Other than going to the eerily empty Publix across the street for food, I was glued to my set. Of course, it didn’t take long to understand exactly what was going on. Osama bin Laden’s Muslim terrorists had attacked America.

I must confess, I knew very little about Islam or Muslims at the time, and what little I knew was from headlines: the ’72 Munich Olympics, Ayatollah Khomeini’s takeover of Iran, the 1993 WTC bombing, the twin embassy bombings in 1998, and a few other events.

So I did some reading… Things like Bernard Lewis’s The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years, Dore Gold’s Hatred’s Kingdom, Steven Emerson’s American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, as well as anything I could get my hands on from Robert Spencer and David Horowitz.

That reading, along with observing actual events, made it clear we were seeing the revival of a 1,400-year clash of civilizations that had largely waned for most of the last 400 years. A crystal-clear result of 9/11 for me was the realization that Islam is simply incompatible with the United States.

But 9/11 turned out to be a catalyst for much more. George Bush, against all observable facts, claiming “Islam is peace,” was just the beginning and the latest iteration of political correctness that was beginning to infect America.

Although Americans were united in a way not seen in decades in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it would not last. The media would showcase every American wartime mistake and lionize those calling for America to withdraw.

By 2003, rallies were common, with activists calling George Bush “Hitler”, and in 2004, the Democrats would nominate a globalist, John Kerry, for president. Four years later, America would send Mr. “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” to the White House.

The quarter-century following 9/11 would see “political correctness” meld the interests of Communists, environmentalists, gays, minorities, and Islam, and together they would morph into a largely anti-American party, i.e., Democrats. They were and are anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, and, fundamentally, anti-Western civilization. Their immediate need to protect the “religion of peace” started an avalanche of victimization that would pick up every minority or disgruntled group along the way.

Statues would come down, and not only those of Confederate Civil War generals, but men who built our history, men like Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and more. Language would change. Marriage, which had meant one man and one woman for more than 2,000 years of Western civilization, was suddenly something else.

Wearing a sombrero or dressing like an Indian for Halloween was suddenly cultural appropriation. The “Broken Windows” policing and “stop and frisk” approach to manifest criminals that had saved urban America from the devastating crime rates of the 1990s were replaced with “Defund the Police” and “community responders.”

Our borders were essentially eliminated, and blue states and cities decided that protecting invaders was more important than immigration law. Not to mention that millions of years of biology were erased by the sudden “reality” that men could become women and women could become men. And from that, children could be butchered without their parents’ consent.

For too many Americans, the legacy of September 11 is a nation that is something of a Bizarro world, where up is down, right is wrong, and anything pro-American is somehow bad.

I’m not one of them. For me, the legacy of September 11 is just the opposite. It reinforced much of what I already knew to be true and, regrettably, took for granted.

By forcing me to examine the history of America, of the world, and of civilization in general, I now understand that I was right to believe that America is the greatest nation in human history, but now I understand why. Our Founding Fathers, while imperfect, left us with the greatest document since the Bible.

The freedoms protected by it, the separation of powers dictated by it, the limited government established by it, and the entrepreneurial tsunami it unleashed combined to birth a people who created more prosperity for more people than any nation in human history and saved the world from fiery suicide twice along the way.

My blog is called Imperfect America, and the subtitle is Voltaire’s observation that “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” Nothing demonstrates that reality more than America. From her “Original Sin” to today, America is imperfect, but very much a force for good.

To the degree that September 11 set in motion the cleaving of too many Americans from the understanding of the things that make her the greatest of God’s creation, the terrorists succeeded far more than they ever imagined.

I, for one, try every single day to correct that, either by writing here and elsewhere or by suggesting that we might not want to take it all for granted. Because if history shows us anything, unappreciated and unprotected civilizations can collapse, and sometimes do very rapidly.

Follow me\ on X at: @ImperfectUSA

Cloward, Piven, And Zinn Told Us They Wanted To Bankrupt America

I remember when the National Debt Clock first went up.  I don’t remember the actual day, and honestly, I thought it had gone up during Reagan’s 2^nd term, but I was wrong. I looked it up and it actually went up on February 20^th 1989, exactly a month after Reagan left office. 

I’m certain my confusion was because, the entire time Reagan was in office, all the Democrats could talk about was the national debt.  And it was a big deal. The growth under Reagan was unprecedented, rising about 184% during his 8 years, more than double that of Nixon and Ford combined (as a percent), 4 times that of Carter in one term, not to mention 5 times Clinton, and more than double Bush and Obama combined.

Now of course we all know why the debt ballooned so much under Reagan.  Tax cuts and the military, especially Star Wars!  Well, all of that, but really the most important thing was: Democrats.  What did Democrats have to do with anything?  Pretty much everything.  Democrats, led by the liar / streetfighter / Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, never saw a government program outside of Defense that they wanted to cut. Well, technically, to be fair, there was something else they didn’t spend money on… the boarder wall they promised Reagan in 1986 in exchange for his granting amnesty for 2.7 million illegal aliens.  The illegals got amnesty, but Reagan never got the promised wall.

And so it goes. 

That first clock clocked in at $2.7 trillion. Boy, does that feel like a long time ago!  And it was.  Back then a trillion dollars actually meant something.  Today’s Debt Clock just recently crossed the $40 trillion mark.  At some point these numbers stop feeling real.  We hear things like if the government spent $1 million a second it would take them over a year to spend $40 trillion and other things we can’t quite wrap our heads around. 

An easier way to think about it is this:  In 1989 the $2.7 trillion National Debt worked out to be about $11,500 per American. Today, at $40 trillion that number has jumped to about $116,000 per person,

What’s worse is the pool of “Unfunded liabilities” that are mostly Social Security and Medicare.  In 1989 such liabilities sat at approximately $4 trillion, or about $17,000 per American.  Today, unfunded liabilities sit at approximately $130 trillion, or… about $250,000 per person.

To put this in perspective, forty years ago it would have taken the average American about a year and a half to work off all of their “share” of the nation’s public debt.  Today, it would take five years! I thought computers and the Internet were supposed to make things more efficient.    

Those numbers are simply insane.  One simply has to ask:  “How the hell did we end up here?”

Well… since you’ve asked, I can tell you.  We are largely here for three reasons, or more accurately, because of three people:  Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and Howard Zinn… and the tens of millions of useful idiots who believe their ideas. 

Cloward and Piven were the authors of the Cloward–Piven strategy. At its most fundamental level the 1966 strategy is a roadmap for destroying the United States as a free-market, capitalist society and turning it into a “socialist” nirvana. Specifically, the goal was to collapse the federal government by overwhelming it with welfare and redistribution obligations.  Doing so, in turn, would create a permanent dependency class that could be counted on to vote Democrat for basically forever:  “If organizers can deliver millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalty to their benefactors.” 

Given that their strategy was such a big departure from most of American history, they understood that they would need the media to help sell the idea: “As the crisis develops, it will be important to use the mass media to inform the broader liberal community about the inefficiencies and injustices of welfare.”

Basically Cloward & Piven wanted to drive poor people from across America into her major cities, access public services, spark anarchy and watch as the various levels of government became overwhelmed and dysfunctional and reached out to the federal government for help.  Eventually Capitalism would be obliterated and the central government would control everything and wealth would be distributed evenly. 

So, they had a blueprint (which Democrats have been following for 60 years) and a complicit media, but that wasn’t enough. It takes a lot of work and a long time to convince people who grew up in a free and prosperous nation that somehow the driver of that prosperity is evil…

It would be much easier to teach that lesson to young people and let them grow up knowing it.  Fortunately, a fellow traveler – and fellow professor at Boston University with Piven – Howard Zinn – stepped up to the plate.  In 1980 he published A People's History of the United States, possibly the most cancerous history of America that’s ever been written.  For him, America is a history driven by a tyranny of whites over everyone else, men over women and rich over poor.  Practically everything, from her founding documents up to the middle of the 20th century was designed to either subjugate minorities, women and the poor or maintain that reality. For him, America is a nation created by, controlled by and controlled for white elites, at the expense of everyone else.

His book has sold millions of copies commercially and its used by almost 200,000 teachers around the country and fully a quarter of high school history teachers!  It’s no surprise that less than half of young people are proud to be Americans. 

Between Cloward, Piven and Zinn, they created the victimization / government largesse ecosystem that we see playing itself out in America today. That has been the Democrat party for the last 60 years, and it worked exactly as they suggested it would, a mass of dependent voters who march to whatever tune the Democrat party is playing, and bankrupting America along the way.

At some point the bill comes due. America has third world levels of debt and the reality is, it can’t go on forever.  This year alone the federal government will spend in the ballpark of 25% more than it brings in… and it’s been going on like that for almost a decade.

Make no mistake, Communists like Mamdani, AOC and El-Sayed are simply executing the Cloward, Piven & Zinn playbook.  The mistake they make is that they think it will lead to some “socialist” nirvana.  It won’t. It will lead to Armageddon. And the sad part of it is, Cloward, Piven & Zinn told us what they were doing for decades… we should have listened.  

As an aside, if you want to refresh your American history or teach your kids what America is really all about, I recommend Paul Johnson’s History of the American People and Harold Evans’ They Made America.  Both written by Brits who were not poisoned by America’s leftist media and academia, they are easily two of the best books on American history you will ever read.  

The Yin and Yang of American Prosperity: Freedom and Entrepreneurship

Some people are born entrepreneurs. I have an ex-friend (we had a falling out over BLM) whom I’ve always imagined was selling washcloths to doctors when he came out of the womb. As a teenager, he started mowing lawns and was so busy he had to hire other kids to do the mowing for him. He ended up being a service provider who was too successful to actually provide the service himself.

From there, he started a company teaching entrepreneurship, took a stab at restaurants, and later bought an education company he eventually sold for eight figures. Honestly, the guy’s like Midas incarnate.

His story is far from remote. Although we all know about guys like Michael Dell and Daymond John, for every one of those guys, there are dozens more whose names we’ve never heard of. Guys like Jim Scott, a college dropout who started a ski-focused limo company, followed by a moving company, followed by a beverage company.

And if you think you’re not familiar with Scott’s success, think again. His Good2Grow licensed-character drinks are a staple in stores across America. As a matter of fact, your kids probably have some of their character-themed bottles on their shelves right now.

Sadly, I’m not one of those people. Although I traipsed through waist-high grass filled with raccoon-like creatures with giant teeth looking for lost golf balls in high school, the only thing I had to show for my efforts was stacks of ball-filled egg cartons I could never sell.

I most certainly have the entrepreneurial bug, but in my case, rather than being characterized by a beautiful butterfly that brings beauty to the world around it or a busy bee that pollinates and, as a result, feeds the world, I’m the moth that gets lost in the plastic of the lampshade, can’t find his way out, and the next morning is found trapped in a spider’s web. I’ll not bore you with the sad details….

But here’s the thing: My story, just as much as Dell’s, John’s, and Scott’s, is the story of America. What I mean by that is that America is the story of opportunity, the story of possibilities, and the story of empowerment. It’s not that you can’t have success without failure—some do—but the reality is that failure, and the resiliency it builds, is the fertilizer from which success eventually grows.

Human nature is such that not everyone will succeed. Although tens of millions of kids play ball in America, only a few thousand will ever make a living doing so. Contrast that with entrepreneurship. While a relatively small percentage of people have the physical skills to play pro sports, vastly more can look around, examine their lives and those of their friends and community, see what problems exist, and formulate a solution. They can do so understanding that, if they’re successful in solving problems, vast opportunities might exist for them that they otherwise might not have had.

So far, none of what I’m saying is particularly unique. Countless websites, university programs, and youth organizations seek to foster entrepreneurship. Which is good, because entrepreneurship is a key element of the prosperity that America enjoys. But the thing about entrepreneurship is that, while it’s necessary to build a society with widespread economic freedom and prosperity, it’s not sufficient.

And that matters because today we hear politicians and influencers tell us that capitalism is evil, that governments should basically provide everything, and that successful capitalists should be taxed to the hilt to pay for it. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Curiously, many successful entrepreneurs—guys like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Mark Cuban—have become billionaires many times over but somehow pour their support and money into un-American, leftist causes. It’s almost as if, while they’re pretending to care about the little guy, they fund programs and people whose leftist ideologies undermine the very things that allowed them to become successful in the first place….

And by that I mean the American system of individual freedom, free markets, private property, and, most of all, limited government. Without those things, America would never have become the most powerful and prosperous nation in history.

And all of that is under attack. From community supermarkets to public housing to “free” transportation, government “solutions” are making a comeback in the American political lexicon.

But the problem is, government doesn’t generate actual solutions. “For proof, look no farther than Samuel Langley, the university professor and establishment darling upon whom the American government heaped the equivalent of millions of today’s dollars in the pursuit of flight, only to see his full-scale aircraft fail while the Wright brothers, neither of whom had high school diplomas, achieved the first successful powered flight.

Government action—the cradle-to-grave kind being proffered (AKA Communism)—is finding new footing in America, and it’s generally hiding behind a Democrat or DSA mask. Make no mistake: “community this” or “government that” are the gateway drug to Communism, and its widespread application will be the end of the American experiment and, eventually, of America herself.

Well, I, for one, am not interested in seeing her disappear. While I spend a good deal of time writing about the evil of the left, I’ve created something that I hope will actually…help. It’s called Gratitude for America.

The reality is, countless efforts showcase entrepreneurship, but far fewer focus on the most important—and least recognized—part: the indispensable yin-and-yang relationship between the American system and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship cannot drive widespread prosperity in a tyranny. It can do so only when citizens understand that everyone is supposed to play by certain rules, that individual freedom and private property are protected, and that competition is the best way to define success.

GFA is an effort to showcase the American entrepreneurs who built so much of the world we live in. With America celebrating its 250th birthday, I’m putting that idea into practice through GFA’s 250 for 250 Initiative: 250 stories of the entrepreneurs, inventors, and innovators whose ideas helped create the world we live in today.

Whether it’s Joseph Glidden, whose barbed wire helped tame the West; Steve Jobs, who drew on Xerox PARC’s pioneering graphical user interface work to help bring computer accessibility to the masses; or Malcom McLean, whose shipping containers, which dropped cargo-loading costs by roughly 97%, dramatically reduced overall cargo-handling costs, most aspects of our modern lives were forged from the minds, sweat, and perseverance of American entrepreneurs.

My goal is to showcase that reality, inspire gratitude for it, and then spur Americans to turn away from the dark side as they recognize how essential individual freedom, private property, and free markets are to their prosperity. Not all of them will become entrepreneurs, but the more Americans who understand that it’s freedom that drives prosperity and not government, the less sway leftists championing a government-delivered “better” world will have.

I’m not the only one out there championing this reality, but I think I might be the only one doing so by inspiring gratitude. In a world where Instagram “influencers” use AI to sell a variety of fictions to millions of gullible and envious followers, I’d prefer to inspire with stories of actual people who did real things and, in the process, changed the world in ways we can see in our everyday lives.

Gratitude for America… showcasing the people and ideas that built a world too many of us take for granted.  Support GFA here!

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Communists in America: Abolish The Police, Seize The Corporations, Erase The Borders

From coast-to-coast, voters on the left are turning to the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) to lead them to the promised land. For them, of course, the promised land is communism.

Not surprisingly, the DSA candidates usually run under the Democrat banner. Democrats and communists have always been soul mates.

In 1948, Henry A. Wallace, who had been FDR’s vice president from 1941 to 1945, ran for president under the Progressive Party banner. The Progressive Party was hard left and strongly aligned with, and supported by, the Communist Party of America. Wallace received 2.4% of the vote. Unfortunately, today’s communists (costumed in DSA clothing behind the Democrat curtain) are getting ten times that.

But don’t call them communists! Ask Democrats or DSA members, and they’ll vehemently deny they’re communists. The DSA will assert, “We’re not communists, we’re socialists. BIG difference!” Really? And Democrats often won’t even agree that they’re socialists, despite having mirror image policies.

The one good aspect of the DSA getting so much traction is that it encourages patriots to investigate their ideas.

So, let’s explore some of these ideas, shall we? Go to the DSA website and literally the first thing you see is “A Day Without Capitalism.” This is going to be good…

Guarantee universal healthcare at no cost to individuals, including complete access to reproductive and gender-affirming care.

America will spend approximately $6 trillion on healthcare in 2026, half by government and half by companies and individuals. The US already spends almost 20% of GDP on healthcare, far more than any country on the planet. And for all that spending, we end up at #55 in the world in terms of lifespan. So clearly, we should shoot for 30%.

‎Housing is a human right. Build new, publicly-owned social housing, strictly regulate investment properties, establish universal rent control, and guarantee right to counsel for all tenants.

A human right? Publicly owned housing? Has anyone at the DSA ever visited government-owned housing communities or Section 8 housing? Or rented a car? Do they even understand the concept that people take care of things that are theirs and rarely take care of things that belong to others, particularly when they’re not paying for them?

Demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect funding to public services as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.

So basically, they want to eliminate police and open up the jails. Is there a single policy on any platform in American politics that screams insanity more than this?

Does anyone in the DSA remember the crime wave America experienced in the late 1980s and 1990s? Or at least read about it? Or even saw a movie about it? And all that was happening long before “Abolish the Police” became a thing, so no doubt getting rid of pigs and prisons is the recipe for improving life in America.

Establish paid family leave for all workers, a 32 hour work week with full pay and benefits, and a living minimum wage. Provide free, quality public education from pre-K to college and cancel all student debt.

The government already spends almost $1 trillion on K-12 education and yet somehow across the country we have places where few, if any, kids can read or do math at grade level. At the same time, students from high-spending states like California and New York are getting throttled by those from far poorer states like Mississippi and Louisiana. Certainly, the answer is more government in education.

Workers must lead our democratic transition to a green future. Pass a federal jobs guarantee. Implement massive investment in sustainable, publicly owned energy and transit infrastructure. Phase out the use of fossil fuels. Reclaim and repair our earth’s resources for all.

Aside from the whole “climate change” idea being a globalist anti-Capitalist hoax, there is no such thing as a green future...although there could be with nuclear, but we’re not allowed to have that. Fossil fuels may be dirty, but so too are the fictions of green energy, from the massive damage done to extracting minerals to the destruction of cropland to the unmitigated disasters associated with what to do with windmill arms and solar panels when their lifespans are over. At least fossil fuels have the benefit of being efficient, reliable, and easily transportable, none of which are characteristics of “green energy.”

End ICE detention and deportations and punish federal agents’ brutality. Legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provide a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end visa caps and quotas.

And there you have it. Literally, they want to erase America’s borders. They want everyone in India, Mexico, Syria, Haiti, Somalia, and every Third World country to come to the United States.

With more than 170 million people around the world expressing a desire to move to the United States, the DSA would increase our population by 50% by adding tens of millions of people with no connection to America, no shared values, and no culture. That’s worked out so well for America and Europe so far. We should definitely double down on it.

Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.

This is a knife into the heart of our Republic. Our government is dysfunctional, that’s true, but it’s so because our leaders have moved the country away from the original intent of the Founding Fathers. What little is left of Franklin’s “Republic (if we can keep it)” is held together by the Electoral College. A President and Supreme Court subservient to Congress is anathema to a free nation and limited government.

Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people. Enact aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations to spend on public goods and infrastructure.

Combined with eliminating the Electoral College and putting the President and SCOTUS under the boot of Congress, this gets to the heart of the cancer of the DSA, the Democrats and their communist ideology. They want to control industry, and they want to tax the successful and essentially plan every aspect of life in America. To do this, they want the full power of government.

And where is any of this any different from communism? Where is any of this different than mainstream Democrat party talking points? There is no light between these things. They are the same, regardless of how much they try to disguise it.

Invariably, when you call them out on the fact that their parties are doppelgangers for communism, they say they’re not, but even if they were, “real” communism is actually good; it just gets a bad rap because it’s never really been tried. Because Lenin and Stalin got it wrong. Because Mao got it wrong. Fidel and Che got it wrong. Pol Pot got it wrong. Because Hugo Chavez got it wrong.

Over 100 million dead and counting, but somehow none of that is the fault of the “real” communism. It’s never been tried...

So, absolutely, let’s try all of that here in America, because as we can see from New York City and California, communism lite has worked out so well that we should definitely try it just one more time on a national scale. It will work out perfectly this time...we promise.

 Follow me on X at: @ImperfectUSA