2024 Is 1800 All Over Again, Because Free Speech Is On The Ballot

Sex, sexual ambiguity, race, incompetence, war mongering and foreign interventions. While those are familiar issues in 2024, they’re merely echoes of earlier times… like the election of 1800!

The presidential campaign of 1800 was the sequel to the first truly contested American presidential election in 1796 and featured the same two primary players.  John Adams won and Thomas Jefferson lost and became vice president – the only time in history that’s happened.

Although friends, the men became viscous rivals – although never actually campaigning themselves – and the campaigns were as brutal as any seen in modern times. 

With the French Revolution still ravaging our first ally, their ambassador openly advocated for the Francophile Jefferson, seeking to defeat Adams who was thought to be considering war with France. At the same time the Federalists – Adams’ party – tried to paint Jefferson as potentially getting the US into a war with Britain. 

Four years later the campaigns became far more personal and far more viscous. “Jefferson's camp accused President Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." In return, Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." As the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward.”

Perhaps most consequentially as it relates to the election of 1800 vs. that of 1796 was the 1798 passage of the Sedition Act, part of what’s commonly referred to as the Alien and Sedition Acts.  The Sedition Act essentially targeted Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson’s party) editors and made it illegal to “write, print, utter or publish…any false, scandalous and malicious writing…with intent to defame the…government” To demonstrate how partisan this law was, the Federalists, who controlled Congress, wrote it to expire on March 3^rd 1801, so that it wouldn’t be available to the Democratic-Republicans if they prevailed in the election.

Ironically, the law, which was intended to help Adams and targeted Jefferson supporters didn’t have the desired effect at all, and Jefferson won.  It’s interesting, that John Adams, one of America’s primary Founding Fathers, sought to undermine the Constitution the first opportunity he got.  Indeed, he understood that the Constitution itself was little more than a piece of paper, telling the Massachusetts Milita:  “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” While the law was highly controversial and was enforced only sparingly, it stands as a monument to the reality that Americans must be vigilant in the protection of the right to free speech.

Which brings us to Democrats in the 21^st century.  Everywhere we go we see limitations on free speech from campus speech codes to hate speech legislation to schools coercing teachers to use “correct” pronouns.  And government interventions are almost never productive. Take “hate speech” where the feelings of victims are elevated above the rights of speakers. Does it change the opinion of the speaker? The person towards whom (if any) the speech is directed?  Not usually. If the premise is that government can protect “victims” from hearing speech that offends, where does it stop?  Must blacks be protected from discussions of IQ differences based on race?  Must whites be protected from being characterized as racist? Facebook recognizes 56 different genders.  Are Americans going to be forced to learn all 56 pronouns so as to not hurt anyone’s feelings? 

As if all of that was not bad enough, COVID and the 2020 election opened a Pandora’s Box of speech restrictions. The Democrats and their fellow travelers in the media, the intelligence community and the Healthcare Industrial Complex spent years seeking to ban speech with a different perspective of the official narrative. Doctors who wanted to talk about alternatives were suspended while videos opposing “lockdowns” were deleted and those mentioning “vaccine misinformation” were banned.

Then of course there was the election. This was easily the single most treacherous use of government to quash speech in American history.  Between the 51 liars from the Intelligence Industrial Complex claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation to the social media companies being coerced (it didn’t take much) into banning stories about it, no other effort at censorship ever turned an American election as this one did. 

This is where 1800 and 2024 may, and indeed should, converge.  In 1800, Americans were so disgusted with the Sedition Act that they handed the Federalists a defeat from which they would never recover. They lost the presidency. They lost 22 of their 60 seats in the House and as a result lost their majority. In the Senate they lost 4 of their 7 seats that were up and would lose their majority two years later when they lost 6 of their 9 contested seats. Other than a minor uptick when opposing the War of 1812, the party would remain on life support until finally being dissolved in 1828.

Essentially the Federalist Party’s attempt to eliminate the 1^st Amendment so galvanized the American people that it signed its own death warrant.  The Democrats’ attempts to obliterate the 1^st Amendment should generate the exact same result. And if anyone had even a remote notion that somehow that was not the Democrats’ plan, they need only look back two years when Biden created the Disinformation Governance Board.  That short lived board was, far more than the Federalists’ Sedition Act, a tool to regulate virtually every aspect of American life by a leviathan government that knows no bounds.

The bottom line is, free speech is at the core of American culture, indeed western civilization itself.  From Copernicus and Galileo questioning an earth centered universe to Matt Walsh asking What is a Woman, and virtually everything in between involves speech of one sort or another. Free speech, questioning one another and exchanging ideas are the bedrock of growth and liberty, both individually and as a society. 

Any party which, in contravention to our 1^st Amendment, seeks to crush free speech in order to accumulate or keep power should by default, be destroyed, and in 2024 that is the Democrat Party. Democrat constituencies, whether gays or blacks or Jews or Muslims or crazy cat ladies should be wary of feeling secure just because they are part of the “majority”.  As New York mayor Adams discovered this past Wednesday, it doesn’t matter how strong your Democrat bona fides are, if you cross the leadership you will be targeted. Now imagine what they can do to average Janes and Joes who stray from the plantation. 

America is at a critical point in her history.  The choice we make in November will send a message for centuries to come, just as did the election of 1800. Do we value free speech or not?  Soon we’ll know if Americans of 2024 understand the importance of our most important right to the degree they did 224 years ago…

Follow me on Twitter at ImperfectUSA

The Downside of Prosperity - Too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious

I’ve always been a fan of the prosperity created by Western civilization in general and the United States in particular. Indeed, I even created a website called Gratitude for America, where I write about American entrepreneurs who invented things like barbed wire and standardized shipping containers. But maybe there’s a downside to this prosperity because we’ve created a class of people (especially in government) completely disconnected from how the world actually works.

Cyrus McCormick, who invented the mechanical reaper, is the most important entrepreneur in human history. He basically untethered mankind from farming, one of the most dangerous occupations on earth. In 1831, when he invented the mechanical reaper, approximately 80% of the American population was involved in agriculture, and, in most places in the world, it was higher—in some cases, 95%.

Back then, farming’s efficiency hadn’t changed much since the time of the pyramids. A man, using a scythe, could harvest approximately one acre of grain a day. Fifty years later, McCormick guaranteed that, by using his machine, a farmer could harvest 15 acres a day. With today’s machines, a farmer can harvest up to 100 acres in a day. Small wonder that only 3% of the US population today farms.

The reason McCormick is so important is not because of farming, per se, but because he freed up most of the population to go out and do other, less dangerous things. With that shift, work-life expectancies began to skyrocket in the latter half of the 19th century. In 1800, the average life expectancy was approximately 30 years, with Europe averaging 33 and the US close behind. By 1900, the world average had increased to 32, but in Europe it had jumped to 43 and in the US to 47.

Since they didn’t have to be on farms, people became inventors, entrepreneurs, and innovators. During the late 19th century, countless inventions (e.g., usable electricity, automobiles, and the telegraph) and innovations (e.g., drilling for oil, railroad expansion, and the widespread adoption of the assembly line) changed the Western world. Food became more abundant, transportation became easier and safer, housing became cheaper, and medicine began to improve.

In the 20th century, things really took off. Today, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, world life expectancy is 72 years, while in the US, it’s 78, and in Western Europe, it’s above 80.

Not only are we living longer, but we’re also prosperous beyond anything in human history. Our food is more varied, dependable, and plentiful than ever. We have transportation, hospitalization, housing, employment, clothing, education, sanitation, entertainment, and leisure opportunities exponentially beyond anything in all of human history.

Contrast all of that with what humanity endured through most of our history. Poverty and scarcity were the norm. Food availability was always an issue. War was almost constant. Work was dangerous. Slavery was everywhere. Many worked seven days a week, changing clothes was rare if at all, people rarely bathed, virtually everyone was illiterate, plumbing didn’t exist, disease was rampant, shelter was overcrowded, heating in the winter was from burning wood or dung if either could be found, infant mortality was stratospheric, and leisure was a luxury only the elites could afford.

The average Westerner’s life is far superior to any experienced by 99.999% of the people who ever lived, but, somehow, everyone today is a victim—and we know that everyone is a victim because the elites tell us so. Through schools, media, and government, we’re told that Western culture is racist, sexist, fascist, or somehow otherwise oppressive. Basically, the better things get, the worse they get.

America today reminds me of a Jetsons episode I saw as a child. George Jetson, the father of the “Space-aged family,” came home one day exhausted from working at Spacely Sprockets and said, “Jane, these one-hour-a-week workweeks are brutal.” No doubt we’d be told he’s still a victim.

The reason those elites, the ones who seek to manipulate the public, get away with it is because a significant portion of the population believes them. And they believe them because of the division of labor-driven prosperity that McCormick unleashed.

Virtually the entire left in this country has zero connection with anything having to do with creating anything, growing anything, building anything, or risking anything. They spend their days pushing paper in offices or selling cappuccinos, if they work at all. Not only are few of them farmers, but few are truckers, lumberjacks, steel workers, plumbers, electricians, or entrepreneurs. Few have ever had to balance paying a credit card bill versus making payroll. Few ever risked their money and invested sweat equity to start a business.

The left today is largely government employees, students, college-educated white women working inside large corporations, Wall Street, academia, the cabal of NGOs, the media, the 40 million who suckle on the government teat through programs like SNAP, and the 47% of the country who either pay no tax or get “refundable tax credits”.

Few of those people do anything remotely productive for the economy. Few understand that the government doesn’t have money beyond what it takes from taxpayers or prints via taxpayer IOUs. They have no appreciation for Capitalism, the thing that gave us our prosperity. They flush the toilets and expect them to work, flip the light switch and expect the room to illuminate, and go to the store to pick up a pound of beef without knowing how it gets there. Few of them have any real connection to the basic functionality of life.

The result of this societal bifurcation is that half of our population has little understanding of or vested interest in the country’s or the economy’s continued functioning. More regulations and higher taxes are always the answer because none of them are affected. Regulations make it harder to open a business or keep one running, but they’re easy promises for politicians to offer as the solution to every problem because their voters never pay the price for the consequences.

We’re living in the world Ayn Rand envisioned in Atlas Shrugged. Everything we see going on in our cities, on our streets, and on our border is so because the division of labor has allowed so many people to bask in prosperity without having a clue about how it’s actually created or what’s necessary to maintain it. Their checks come, their jobs are secure, and they don’t have to deal with the government’s suffocating regulations, so everything is good.

Of course, it’s not good, and things are getting worse. Thomas Jefferson understood the problem, saying in 1824: “I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” That is 2024 incarnate.

This needs to be fixed. How we do that, I’m not quite sure, but, at a minimum, we need to slash government spending and regulations at every level. Perhaps only those who pay taxes should vote. Perhaps government employees should not be allowed to vote. Maybe we make election day the day after Tax Day. Whatever the solution, until those voting have some vested interest in a well-run government and a functioning economy, things will only get worse, and they’re already pretty bad.  

 

How the Greatest Generation Begat the Stupidest Generation and Lost America

The first half of the 20th Century was one of the most devastating in human history. The people who lived through that calamitous period are called the Greatest Generation for good reason. They came of age during the Great Depression and went on to save the world from the Nazi and Japanese tyrannies. They fought hard to save the world and later built the United States into the dominant economic and military superpower on the planet.

The thing about the Greatest Generation was that their lives were tough… with a great depression sandwiched between two world wars, life was simply brutal. So when peacetime came around, they were enthusiastic about finally being able to focus on raising their families.

They of course wanted their kids to have better lives than they did. They didn’t want their kids have to deal with the food shortages, the unemployment and the wars that they had lived through. And so they pampered their children and tried to give them good lives. The problem is, their children became spoiled brats and grew into unrepentant socialists and Communists.

America saw that play out in front of their eyes during the 1960’s and 70’s. The postwar years saw an unprecedented economic boom in the United States with jobs and incomes growing to spectacular levels. Families moved to the suburbs, cars became ubiquitous and the golden age of television was upon us. So it’s not a great surprise that when things are going fairly well, spoiled children become spoiled young adults. Which is exactly what happened. From student protests demanding universities bend to their wills to anti-war marches demanding an end to the Vietnam War (really what they wanted was to not be drafted…) to supporting terrorist groups like the Weather Underground & the Black Panthers, young people spent much of the 1960’s & 70’s protesting and demanding pretty much everything. And when they didn’t get their way, they would cause mayhem, taking over universities, rioting and occasionally setting off bombs…

If that sounds a lot like what’s going on today in the streets, it’s no coincidence. The thugs out in the streets today causing mayhem are the children of those 1960’s hippies. One might think that parents who grew up in the midst of the chaotic, anything goes 60’s and 70’s might swing somewhat in the opposite direction and raise their children with a bit more discipline than they had growing up. But that’s not what happened. Just the opposite.

The children of the 80’s and 90’s and 00’s were even more spoiled than their parents. There was virtually no war – and of course, no draft – and although there were economic hiccups along the way, the economy grew steadily from the early 80’s. Things were often comfortable… Video games, participation trophies, MTV and grade inflation… what wasn’t to like? But something was going on… the hints of today’s chaos were being sowed without anyone noticing…

It was during this time that the radical students of the 1960’s and 70’s became the professors and administrators in the colleges they had previously attacked. They became politicians and media personalities and corporate flunkies and whatever passed for journalists. They became board members of foundations and literally wrote the text books used by their fellow travelers who’d become teachers in classrooms across the country.

And so here we are today… Not surprisingly, after these hippy fans of Marx and Lenin and Castro spent decades teaching America’s youth that the United States is evil and racist to its core, the youth have little respect for anything, much less their country. But more importantly, they have no awareness of context and history and reality. That Thomas Jefferson might have been a great if flawed man… Nope. That Gone with the Wind or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn might be masterpieces of literature despite their decidedly “unwoke” themes… Nope. That St. Louis might have been in the middle of a known world war when he led the Crusades… Doesn’t matter. That men can’t actually have babies… Scoff. Ronald Reagan once said: “It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”

And that is what makes the current generation of people wreaking havoc in the streets so stupid. Not because they can’t score well on the SAT, because they can – which like so much else in America these days has been watered down to almost irrelevancy – but because they refuse to see what’s right in front of them. Venezuela and Cuba are “worker’s paradises” but both are economic trainwrecks caused by socialism. Yet somehow these young people seek to take the United States down that same path. They are out in the streets protesting the death of a tiny handful of black men at the hands of police while black men kill 8,000 fellow black men every year. Activists and anarchists claim they want to remove monuments of a racist past yet they destroy statues of giants in the battle against slavery like Lincoln, Grant and Douglass. They decry capitalism but are seemingly oblivious to the fact that they live in a world of mobile phones, the Internet, Uber and Amazon that capitalism built.

That the imbecilic BLM and Antifa thugs currently seeking to erase history and destroy the country are the progeny begotten by the Greatest Generation brings to mind a quote from author G. Michael Hopf in Those Who Remain: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” In their desire to give their children and grandchildren better lives than they had to endure, the Greatest Generation created two generations of idiots not smart enough to recognize that in the lottery of life they have been gifted the Golden Ticket.

It’s only because they’ve had life so good that they have the luxury of excoriating the country in the first place… Rather than being caught up in the many wars that crisscross Africa or living daily with the threat of starvation or the lopping off of limbs, they can craft the fiction of “institutional racism”. Rather than being shot or have tanks roll over them for speaking “Truth to power”, they can put on their Che Guevera tee shirts grab their skateboards and scream “Fuck the Police” while firebombing police stations secure in the notion that they’re unlikely to face any consequences. And on the off chance they did face the possibility of consequences for their actions, they’re confident in the notion that they’ll have an army of empty headed Hollywood and Twitter personalities ready to raise money for their defense and turn them into martyrs for the cause. They can burn the flag, blockade highways, tear down statues and vandalize churches and monuments, comfortable knowing the protections afforded by the very system they want to destroy will likely protect them from harm.

That so many Democrat politicians across the country have thrown in with and knelt down with these modern day Jacobins and sans-culottes, and allowed so much of our history to be destroyed will one day be written about as a turning point in American history. It will be the beginning of a revolution… either one in which real Americans decide to take back their history from the Stalinists running academia, the media, Silicon Valley and increasingly, “woke” corporations; or one in which the “woke” Democrats prevail in November and set about destroying the Constitution and the killing the goose that laid the golden eggs they have been eating their entire lives. One will see a free United States leading a the world as the 21st century unfolds while the other will see the world collapse into a fire of war as the world’s beacon of freedom, prosperity and strength is replaced with a fascist state wrapped around a Zimbabwe like economic disaster.  Forrest Gump said "Stupid is as stupid does" and that's exactly what the country is looking at as the progeny of the Greatest Generation destroy the very legacy that was built for them. Hell is after all, paved with good intentions. 

Congress allows Barack Obama to exercise his inner John Marshall... and they will live to regret it.

In 1803 Chief Justice John Marshall changed the face of American government. He did it in such a subtle way that few people understood the consequences of his act at the time. After losing the election of 1800 and in an effort to thwart the power of victor Thomas Jefferson, John Adams sought to place dozens of party loyalists into various positions in the judicial system. He made the appointments and signed the commissions. Some of the commissions were delivered by the time Jefferson took office. Others were not and the new president simply ceased delivery of those, positing that with the commissions undelivered the appointees could not take their seats. One of those commissions belonged to Maryland’s William Marbury, who promptly sued to have the commission delivered.

The resulting case, Marbury vs. Madison, would change American government forever. Although Marshall was a Federalist like Adams, and sympathetic to Marbury’s plight, he decided that the Supreme Court could not force the Democratic-Republican Jefferson’s hand, despite Marbury’s right to his commission. He wrote that that although Marbury had indeed been wronged, the manner in which he sought relief was unconstitutional, because Congress had overstepped its bounds when it passed that aspect of the Judiciary Act of 1789.

And this is where Marshall’s shrewdness becomes apparent. For the first time the Supreme Court acted via judicial review, which is the notion that the judiciary gets to decide what is Constitutional and what is not. Rather than antagonize the new president and congress however, Marshall did exactly what they wanted, he let them win by allowing the commissions to go undelivered and therefore keeping the Federalist partisans off the various bench seats. In giving the Democrat-Republicans what they wanted he assured that they would not challenge the decision, and by extension his assertion that the courts had the power to overturn Congressional legislation it deemed unconstitutional, something not actually in the Constitution. In essence by not objecting to Marshall’s interpretation of the Court’s power, President Jefferson and the Congress were acquiescing to that interpretation and setting a precedent that has lasted for over 200 years and set a foundation for the plague of judicial activism that would emerge in the next century.

That is often how power gets shifted in a relationship – whether it’s a marriage or a government or between nations – with one party acquiescing to another party’s play until the point where the shift becomes accepted as natural.

Congress to its great discredit, is doing the exact same thing that Jefferson and the Congress did 210 years ago, they are acquiescing to Barack Obama single handedly rewriting the Constitution, something it has done before, when the President has used various directives to essentially implement the Dream Act without Congressional action. By using executive fiat to decide who stays and who can be deported the president is explicitly ignoring laws passed by Congress and signed by previous presidents. Can one imagine if Richard Nixon had similarly deemed the Civil Rights Act applied to only certain minorities? Does one imagine there have been more than a few peeps from Congress?

The most egregious example of Barack Obama ignoring the Constitution is his use of more than a dozen “exemptions” or delays for Obamacare. Indeed, he’s taking a page right out of John Marshall’s book as he tears asunder the document upon which our Republic is based. Just as Marshall purchased the acquiescence of the Democratic-Republicans by giving them exactly what they wanted, Barack Obama is buying Congress’s acceptance of his eviscerating the separation of powers by giving them what everyone wants, including their constituents, and that’s relief from the unworkable disaster that is Obamacare. But instead of accomplishing that task through legal means, Obama is simply obviating parts of the law by executive fiat. And Congress is allowing him to do so.

While Senators and Congressmen may stand by for this because they know their constituents (understandably) demand relief, they will rue the day they gave Obama, and every subsequent president, the power to rewrite legislation to their liking. If Barack Obama can simply decide that legislation is not constitutional, if he can just rewrite parts of laws he doesn’t like, if he can enforce laws whenever he feels like it, the real question isn’t what law he will annul or modify or ignore next, the real question becomes how much longer will the fig leaf of a Congress even be necessary?