Never Tell A Leftist They Hate America...

Never tell a leftist they hate America.  They will correct you every time.  They don’t hate America they’ll tell you, they just want to improve it.  They just want to help make it better.  They just want America to live up to her ideals.

No, it’s not America per se that they hate, but rather the things that made America so spectacular in the first place.  Free enterprise.  Limited government. Federalism. Separation of Powers.   Individual freedom.

But, while they don’t hate America, it is, according to them, racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric, intolerant and more. In addition, the Constitution is an outdated document written by old racist white guys and needs to be reimagined.

So, OK, sure, I’ll buy that leftists don’t technically hate America. And apparently they don’t, because even when they have Hollywood or Silicon Valley or Wall Street type money and could live anywhere in the world… big surprise, they never actually leave!

When I tell leftists that America is the greatest nation that’s ever existed it seems to send them over some sort of cliff. They often get angry and look at me as if I just told them I the earth is flat.  But the funny thing is, when I ask what nation is better or empire was better… crickets.  They immediately launch into a polemic about how America is racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric etc. It’s ripe with inequality, inequity and is run by rich white men.  And not to be forgotten, its Constitution is an outdated document written by old white racist guys and as such, shouldn’t control our lives today. 

Then I suggest that even if it were the case that America was the hellscape they suggest, where should we go to escape it?  Again, crickets. 

Despite the fact that the leftist snowflakes can’t point to a single place on earth or in history that is or was superior to the United States, that had a more successful combination of prosperity and freedom than the US, they most certainly have an endless supply of ways to improve it:

• Bans on hate speech, which they define as anything that hurts anyone’s feelings.
• Defund the police.
• Pack the Supreme Court.
• Disband the INS.
• $15 minimum wage.
• Demonize the Founding Fathers.
• Eliminate the Electoral College.
• Cancel anyone who ever uttered an opinion that doesn’t comport with the currently favored position on any given subject.
• Eliminate bail requirements & sentencing minimums.
• Participation trophies.
• Eliminate academic requirements and standardized testing for entrance into college.
• Universal healthcare
• Free college tuition
• Green energy mandates and subsidies
• Eliminate fossil fuels
• Repeal the Second Amendment
• Eliminate capitalism.
• Eliminate the binary gender construct
• Make the Pentagon the bleeding edge for social experiments
• Tax the rich
• Forgive student debt
• Mandate vaccinations

And the list goes on, and on, and on. It literally never stops.  Griswold v. Connecticut begat Roe vs. Wade which begat partial birth abortion.  Gay rights turned into civil unions turned into gay marriage.  Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act turned into coerced lax lending standards which turned into the housing crash.  And the Americans with Disabilities Act started out as compassion for the handicapped and mutated into a vehicle for extortion of small businesses by a cabal of pernicious lawyers. Removing the Confederate Battle Flag from state flags led to pulling down statues of Abraham Lincoln and Fredrick Douglas to cancelling Dr. Seuss & Aunt Jemima. 

At exactly what point will America cease to be the racist sexist hellhole that the left tells us it is?   Must the military perfectly reflect the hue and sex of America itself?  Must corporate executives be promoted based on their socioeconomic heritage?  What else needs to be reflective of the demographics of the American populace?  How about the NBA & the NFL? Black men make up 74% of the NBA and 70% of the NFL.  Do we fire 90% of them to hire more white men and women of every race?  Would that make the games more competitive, more exciting?  Probably not.  Or how about nurses? 93% of nurses are women.  Should 40% of them be fired in order to hire men to make the industry reflective of the rest of the country? Would that make healthcare better or patients happier and safer? Unlikely.  And this could go on endlessly for every area of the economy: Ditch diggers.  Sanitation workers.  Teachers.  Barbers.  Rap artists. Surgeons. Lawyers.   

The bottom line is the left knows how to do one thing well, and that is destroy what someone else built.  We’ve seen that play out across America time and again.  From the burnt husks of Detroit and Washington that rotted for decades following the riots of the 1960’s to turning once great American cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles into giant homeless camps strewn with needles and feces to the economic devastation wrought in cities like Minneapolis and Portland and Seattle from a year of “mostly peaceful protests”.  When the left comes to power in successful cities the march to a real hellscape begins.  And it’s not just cities.  The left broke the Boy Scouts, they destroyed the NFL as a truly national form of entertainment, they’ve ruined Disney and Marvel and they are in the process of destroying women’s sports. Dennis Prager often says “The Left destroys everything it touches” and he’s right.  The left has never built a nation millions of people risk their lives to enter.  The left has never built a society where freedom of thought, speech and the press have thrived.  The left has never built an economic juggernaut founded on free markets or anything else. 

The left can do nothing more than take advantage of the freedom and prosperity that others have created and throw stones at it for its imperfections.  Voltaire was prescient when he observed “Perfect is the enemy of the good”.  America is no doubt imperfect.  It is flawed and sometimes unfair and often inequitable… but mankind is all of his creations are.  The reality is, the United States is by far the greatest nation God has seen fit to grace man with and while it will continue to be imperfect until the end of days, it is nothing like the racist, fascist hellscape the left makes it out to be.  But of course none of that matters because for the left, building something great is never a necessity, in fact, it’s never even a consideration.  Why bother trying to build anything when it’s so much easier to throw stones at those who are too busy actually building things to notice they’re being targeted for their imperfections by those who don’t have the courage to try.  

I’m not sure what the textbook definition of hate of county might be, but everything the left does and says most certainly looks like it.  There’s an old saying: “If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck and acts like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” Replace duck with hate and you have America’s left:  too cowardly risk doing anything but more than willing to demonize those who aren’t.     

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Part I

We are watching the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse attempt to destroy the United States and everything it stands for. Never in American history has such a cabal of cultural and political players banded together with the specific purpose of undermining not only the serving president of the United States but the very fabric of the country itself.

The idea of American Exceptionalism has been with this country since its founding. The American Constitution was the first constitution in history where the government was granted limited power and was explicitly barred from infringing on specific rights of citizens and the governed. From the beginning the premise and reality of limited government and individual rights such as free speech, exercise of religion and private property created a virtual – albeit imperfect – Eden of creativity and experimentation that changed the face of the world.

Whether it was Cyrus McCormick inventing the mechanical reaper, JD Rockefeller driving the petroleum industry, Bill Gates putting a computer on every desk or Steve Jobs essentially creating the mobile revolution, the United States has done more to bring prosperity to the world than any nation in human history. And it’s not even close. Add such government led endeavors such as winning World Wars I & II and the Cold War, putting a man on the moon, inventing the Internet and mapping the human genome and it’s clear that the United States is the most consequential nation that has ever existed on the planet Earth.

None of this suggests the United States is or has been perfect. It’s not today and it never was… but as Winston Churchill once noted “…it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” We’re of course not a democracy, but in this case his words apply to our republic.

Any objective analysis of human history will clearly demonstrate that, while no doubt standing on the shoulders of giants, the United States has led a march that has done more good for more people than any nation in history.  From more prosperity, more freedom and more opportunity to less poverty, less war and and more democracy, life on earth today is spectacularly better for a higher percentage of the world's population than has ever been, and much - but not all - of that was driven by the United States, both as a nation as as a result of the efforts of individual Americans or those working together in one corporate form or another. 

Image:  www.deviantart.com/packwood

But in 2018 none of that is relevant. What is relevant is that America (i.e. conservatives or Republicans) is racist. America is sexist. America is homophobic. America hates Muslims.

Of course none of those things are true of the United States. While a small minority of individual Americans may carry one or more of those characteristics, America as a nation does not.  (Even the very left leaning Southern Poverty Law Center says there are only between 5,000 and 8,000 KKK members in the United States today.  That's out of a population of 320 million, or .000003%.  Compare that to the 3-6 million KKK members the United States had in the 1920s.  That was out of a population of 115 million, or fully 5%.  An equivalent number today would be 16 million klan members... vs. the reality of 5-8,000.) 

America as a nation is none of those things.  On the contrary. Minorities of every sort have more opportunity to succeed in the United States than in any nation on earth. As an example, the average income for black American households in 2016 was approximately $38,500 in 2106. That is over 7 times the $5,300 of Botswana, the highest average HH income on the continent of Africa. At the same time it’s almost 60% higher than the Bahamas’$24,603 the highest HH income of any majority black country in the world. Similarly, gays in the United States are largely able to live their lives as they choose without fear of being jailed, thrown off buildings or executed as they might be in many countries.  Women attend college at higher rates than men and half of the Fortune 500 was founded by immigrants or their children.

None of this means that there is no hate in the United States or that minorities do not encounter challenges. There is hate, but there is hate everywhere on every continent and in every nation where humans live. There always has been and always will be, at least until we’re replaced by machines without hearts and brains. But that fact does nothing to alter the reality that the United States offers more people more freedom and more opportunity for success than any place on the planet ever has. And that is fundamentally because of our Constitution based limited government, our free markets and, frankly, the American spirit that drove the country to simultaneously take on and defeat the Nazis and the Japanese at a time in history where it looked as if they would take over the world.

All of that is imperiled today by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who are together seeking to destroy everything that made America great in the first place. These Horsemen are: 1) Hollywood and the Mainstream Media 2) Social Media 3) Unions and the Education Industrial Complex 4) The very real Deep State.

What conservatives can to learn from Hollywood: Good stories told well can influence political perspective

Watching movies are one of my favorite pastimes. Our favorite movies say a lot about us… although I’m not exactly sure what. My top five (in no particular order) are Gladiator, Valley Girl, Galaxy Quest, Lost in Translation and probably Tombstone. Movies are a unique form of entertainment because they are touchstones, shared experiences which so many Americans have in common. Lines like “I’m walking here!” or “You had me at hello” or “Make my day, punk” have made it into the American lexicon and are often used in our everyday lives in order to call up certain shared understandings of situations between a speaker and their listeners.

Movies are unique in that most of the people watching them experience the same thing. Not that they always have the same reaction, which is obvious by the divergent reviews a single movie can get, but they are watching the same thing on the screen. The colors are the same, the actor’s faces are the same, the music is the same. Contrast that with reading a book. With a book the experience is yours as your brain takes the author’s words and creates its unique version of the characters, faces, colors, sounds, accents, landscapes, and basically everything in terms of bringing the author’s words to life. Contrast that with the way we experience movies. All of us instantly recognize the voice of James Earl Jones when we hear Darth Vader speak. All of us know exactly what Harry Potter looks like, and he’s the same for every one of us. We all have a vision of Jack and Rose flying at the bow of the Titanic, it’s exactly the same.

Movies have a unique place in American life because of that shared experience and its breadth. Your experience watching a movie is going to be essentially the same if you watch it on Miami Beach, in Brooklyn or Brownsville, Texas. And Hollywood has used that unique place to great advantage. From giant studios that produce hundred million dollar epics that earn billions around the world to art house films that gain critical praise consumer indifference, Hollywood almost has a monopoly on American storytelling. (And that includes its dominance of the small screen… “We were on a break” or “You’re Fired”.)

One of the most interesting aspects of this Hollywood dominance is the fact that it seeks to earn money while producing unabashedly leftist propaganda. Think An Inconvenient Truth, Erin Brockovich, or Gasland. The interesting thing is not that they are making money telling stories, but rather the impact that it has on viewers. Hollywood has learned what the GOP has never learned, that a good story told well can impact and perhaps change viewer’s political perspective. Researchers at Notre Dame found that “Hollywood movies are better able to change attitudes – in a left-wing direction – than advertising or news reports.” Essentially Hollywood has perfected the art of using movies to turn people into liberals. Whether it’s the Matt Damon character in Good Will Hunting or Sally Field’s character in Norma Rae, movies that grip us seem to impact us long after we leave the theaters. The fact that movies, particularly sob stories, impact us is definitely not news, but the fact that we keep the critical thinking switch turned off once we leave the theater is. We should know better, but we don’t… at least according to the research.

If conservatives hope to save the country from the liberal dystopia that the Democrats and the establishment Republicans are leading us into, they need to understand the lesson Hollywood learned so long ago… You have to touch people in order to impact them. You have to make them connect with something in order to understand it, appreciate it, take time out of their lives to focus on it. While it’s unrealistic to expect conservatives to take over Hollywood, they can at least begin to tell stories that reflect the conservative perspective.

The country is full of real life stories that are just as touching as anything Hollywood ever wrote. (see "Waiting for Superman" or "The Lottery")  As much of a boogieman Hollywood has created out of capitalism, big government is far scarier. As many lives as one company might have destroyed due to the duplicity of some employee or board of directors, government has destroyed far more families and communities simply by its catastrophic social policies. Kids stuck in failed schools in crime riddled neighborhoods are just as sympathetic as workers trying to form a union at some trucking company. An entrepreneur struggling to feed his family against the borg of government regulation is just as sympathetic as someone whose drinking water catches fire supposedly due to drilling. The difference is, Hollywood often has to use hyperbole, “artistic license” and sometimes outright lies in order to get its points across. In a world where the omnipresent tentacles of a dysfunctional government destroy jobs, gut education and undermine families, the stories of despair are legion, and very real.

If conservatives ever hope to win the battle of ideas, win over the hearts (and votes) of a majority of the American people, we have to figure out to do what came so naturally to Ronald Reagan… we have to connect with people through well told stories. We have to figure out how to talk about cold, sterile, opaque issues that are sometime counterintuitive, and do it in a way that really engage the viewer or the listener. Hollywood swayed the nation by selling liberalism wrapped in well told stories. If we want to bring it back we’re going to have to do the same. Maybe Dinesh D'Souza’s forthcoming “AMERICA” will be a first step in the right direction… although most of us won’t have two hour blocks in a darkened theaters to make our points... so we’d better get creative.

My take on Hollywood's heartwarming paean to Barack Obama

I’ve just sat through the 17 minute homage to Barack Obama narrated by Tom Hanks. How is it possible that Barack Obama’s approval rating is even close to 50%? Why isn’t it 100%? According to Hanks, Barack Obama is the real deal. Fearless. Intrepid. Selfless. And most of all: Successful. Like Lincoln before him, the events of the day forced his hand and the resulting display of courage and skill showed the greatness of the man.

Like most of what Hollywood creates, this movie is fiction, utterly devoid of a real connection to the real world. In reality, Barack Obama is easily one of, if not the worst President in American history. If he were a contestant on Jeopardy he would have a five digit negative score.

The crime in Hollywood however is not being inaccurate, it’s being boring. If I were writing a script for our hero President it might include a bit more action.

Here’s an outline of my script:

It’s a cold November when the economy is in turmoil, and Americans are trudging to the polls in the final climax of a battle between the proxy for the hated oil industry President and the beloved man of the people. Finally night fell and victory is his. The despot from the state of Texas who led the country into two wars and lined the pockets of his Big Oil friends had been vanquished - along with is would be successor. America now had a leader worthy of respect where Americans could once again be proud to say they’re American. This new President is going to save the planet from turning into a fireball, make sure fairness and equity reign supreme and make America respected again around the world. He’s going to stop the bloodletting, both fiscal and actual and like Lincoln before him, he’s going to save America. Americans weep in the street at their good fortune.

Our Protagonist in Chief rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. The first thing he does is pass a three quarter of a trillion dollar stimulus bill that will rebuild the infrastructure of America, bridges, roads, railroads… the literal foundation of the country. More importantly, it’s the working people that count and his bill is going to put Americans back to work and keep the unemployment rate from even approaching 8%, 1% lower than it would be without his brilliant plan. At the 11th hour, after a knock down drag out fight our hero signs the legislation into law and the economy is saved. The country lets out a collective sigh of relief. That was close.

Next our hero turns his attention to saving the tens of millions of Americans who are at risk of dying in the street because of the healthcare system leaves them to suffer at the hands of the greedy pharmaceutical companies. A minor bump in the road to salvation is experienced when the lionhearted Ted Kennedy passes away and is replaced by the milquetoast Scott Brown. No problem. After much hand-wringing our hero saves the day as he maneuvers around Brown and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is passed. Americans from coast to coast are now finally safe from medical tyranny. Bells are ringing in the street as people gather in public places to give thanks for their having elected such a brilliant tactician.

Our bold young hero is recharged and poised to take on the scourge of red ink that is bedeviling the government and constraining its ability to serve its citizens. But before he can implement his secret plan to return to fiscal rationality the nation is confronted with the news that things are far worse than he might have ever imagined. This calls for something audacious. Deficits be damned! Our hero throws caution to the wind and has his minions write three budgets in a row that bust the bank. He doesn’t want to, but in the face of such great economic danger, and despite the potential danger to his legacy, he knows he must.

Fast forward in my movie to three years later and all is right in the world. Our hero has vanquished all evils and after playing a few rounds of golf per week is rested and ready to take on all comers. He has delivered the nation from the brink of Armageddon and to the land of milk and honey.

As we see the silhouette of our intrepid hero against the setting sun we understand that he is anxiously awaiting the next day to arrive so that he can once again share his greatness with America and all of humanity. If only the citizens would repeal the 22nd Amendment America he could spend his life making their lives better.

Unfortunately for actual citizens, my story too is fiction. Three years after our hero takes office, virtually everything he has touched has turned to a disaster. His $787 billion stimulus plan not only did not keep inflation from getting to the 8.8% he warned of, but it bumped up against 9.9%, a full two points higher than what his plan was supposed to produce. Not only that, it created almost no jobs and those that did were ridiculously expensive.

Almost exactly two years after his ObamaCare mandate passed the CBO now suggests that rather than costing a mere $938 billion over 10 years as the President suggested, in reality it will cost at least $1.4 trillion, and it has already increased costs for private insurance and it’s not even fully implemented yet.

Finally, our savior’s 2013 budget. Rather than saving $3.2 trillion over 10 years is in actually going to increase them by $3.5 trillion over the decade.

In reality, as the movie closes it is not our hero that we see, but rather the crumbling silhouette of once great nation growing faint against a setting sun, not unlike Athens’s Parthenon or Rome’s Coliseum that suggests a long gone past glory.

If Americans want to watch fiction about a mere mortal who overcomes great adversity to become a demigod I might suggest Braveheart or Gladiator rather than this paean to Barack Obama. At least in that case it’s a pretty straightforward transaction where you spend a few bucks for a couple of hours of good entertainment. In the case of this Obama fiction you are not only being asked to sacrifice 17 minutes of your life, but when it’s over you’re being asked (or told) to sacrifice your liberty and property too. If nothing else it certainly brings a tear to one’s eye…