War By Other Means: Demographics

I’ve heard enough about the Crusades, that America was built on stolen land or that Israel sits on occupied land. That’s life. Get over it. 

The reality is, for most of mankind’s and civilization’s history, the world has been ordered by the most physically powerful individuals and civilizations.  I mention the Crusades first because for the last quarter century we’ve been told that Muslim terrorism is somehow understandable because of the Crusades. We’re led to believe that the evil European Christians were invading the lands of the innocent peaceful Muslims and trying to steal the Holy Lands.  Well, that is partially true.  Beginning in 1095 and lasting to 1291 various Christian expeditions were indeed sent to the Holy Land in order to reconquer Jerusalem and its environs.  The First Crusade succeeded in in 1099 and established four Christian states in the area that would stand until the last was conquered in 1291.

It definitely sounds like the Christians were the aggressors… until one actually picks up a history book. In 600 AD the Eastern Roman Empire, what we today call the Byzantine Empire, stretched from the Strait of Gibraltar to the eastern most part of modern day Turkey and included half of Italy, all of Greece, all of Egypt, Israel, Syria and Jordan.  It was a Christian Empire and it had been built by the military power of the Roman legions over the previous 1200 years. By 640 the Byzantine Empire was a shadow of itself but would remain a regional power for the next 800 years.

The Islamic caliphate, which had its beginning in Medina in 622 would by 640 conquer all of the Arabian peninsula, by 661 take all of modern Iran, half of Turkey and much of Egypt and Libya.  By 750 the caliphate would include all of Spain, southern France in the west and much of the Caucasus’s in the east. Indeed, it was only the heroic stand in the Battle of Tours in 732 that kept the Muslims from taking all of France and potentially all of Europe. 

This is the actual backdrop upon which the Crusades were launched.  And just to be clear, that caliphate was not established, enlarged or maintained by peaceful acquiescence.  Muhammad alone fought 27 battles against “unbelievers” and the bloody conquest continued for centuries after his death. 

But here’s the thing… What the Muslims did is no different than what anyone else did.  The Mongols built the world’s largest land empire by conquering 25% of the planet’s land mass and killing 10% of the world’s population while doing it. 

The British killed millions building an empire upon which the sun never set.  The Americans killed hundreds of thousands of Indians during the establishment and growth of the United States. But they were no different than the Aztecs, the Māori, the Comanche, and most civilizations around the world. 

Indeed, right up until the middle of the 20^th century conquest was how much of the world ordered itself and violence was how it was decided who would be ruling a country.  In much of Africa it has remains so.  Violence, or the threat of it is how problems were solved in most interactions for most of human history around the world. The guy with the physical power to make others obey usually makes the rules.

While violence remains and sometimes breaks out in conflicts between or within nations, the truth is that the last 75 years has seen, admittedly largely midwifed by the United States power, an historic collapse in the number of deaths from war. Violence, at least in the west, has, for the most part, been abandoned in favor of other forms of decision making. Whether it’s economic trade, international bodies like the UN or diplomatic negotiations, when mortal conflict does break out, its typically the last of a long series of resolution attempts. 

Why is this relevant in 2025?  Because the civilization the west has developed has metastasized into idiocy on the part of much of the population, particularly among elites. Prosperity has, apparently, dulled their senses. They have zero understanding of actual history. They recline in their comfortable chairs and watch movies and TV shows and read social media posts that tell them that the world is oppressed because of western imperialism and that it was the violence of white Europeans that shattered humanity’s peaceful harmony.

The consequence of this historical ignorance and self-hatred is suicidal empathy.  Across the west leftist elites have indoctrinated much of the population to think that somehow the institutions and civilization Europeans built will exist forever.  That somehow – while simultaneously being evil – the building blocks of our relatively peaceful and prosperous civilization can and will survive regardless of who actually inhabits the west. They take Francis Fukuyama literally when he suggested history basically stopped because liberal democracies had won. 

The logical result of this delusion is, rather than strengthening the foundations of liberal democrat civilizations elites instead import millions of mostly military aged men who harken from a completely different worldview, Islam. With the expectation that they will assimilate and internalize those western values.

Anyone paying attention recognizes that’s not happening. Jordan Peterson articulates the reality:  Forty out of fifty Muslim majority countries in the world are authoritarian hell-holes. And only three are democracies: Morocco, Indonesia and Turkey. And I wouldn't put them in higher echelons of stellar states. Why is that? Is that a deviation from Islamic principles or is it the consequence of Islamism? Now nobody wants to have a discussion and it's no bloody wonder.

There are certainly doctrines in Islam that are very, very difficult to square with free, liberal, western Christian democracies. And those differences are not just apparent, they are deep!

Islam is a problem for the west and it’s growing. But the western elites, with their bodyguards, Swiss bank accounts and exclusive neighborhoods have no clue about the chaos they are inflicting on their nations. This is an invasion just as much as the 4^th and 5^th century barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire were. The difference is, the Romans at least fought until they were defeated whereas most western leaders are embracing those who will eventually subjugate them. 

To understand exactly how serious this ostrich like behavior is, one need only look at Britain’s latest attempt to address its violence problem. Deportation of criminal aliens?  No. Severe enforcement of laws?  Of course not. No, the Brits are now banning Samurai Swords and giving white men longer prison sentences for… checks notes… being white. 

Whether it’s the establishment of a Sharia compliant town in the heart of Texas, protests in Europe calling for a caliphate or the 50% higher birthrate among European Muslims compared to the general population, this is war by other means: Demographics. 

Western civilization has created more prosperity, freedom and technological advances than any civilization in human history.  The result of those advances has been to make westerners soft, fat and willingly ignorant of the nature of mankind and the history of civilizations. That’s unfortunate, because bondage has a way of clarifying reality, and that’s exactly where the west is headed if it doesn’t wake up soon. The world will once again become a violent place ruled by those with the most power and the least compunction about using it. That won’t work out well for anyone, but on the upside, at least the elites will finally have to face the consequences of their actions…

Can a Nation Built By Giants Survive the Disability Industrial Complex?

Vivek Ramaswamy got himself in some hot water a couple of weeks ago when he tweeted about American culture. He’s wrong on the big picture, but his comments about American workers hits a nerve… 

While the US Constitution and free market capitalism set the foundations for American prosperity, it took a rugged, passionate, free people to build it. From George Washington to George Washington Carver to millions of other Americans, the United States was carved out a continent of forests that seemed to go on forever, fertile plains, vast mountain ranges and scorching hot deserts.  Over time American frontiersmen, settlers and entrepreneurs forged a country that seemed to have all of God’s blessings in abundance.

Conditions were rarely easy for most Americans throughout most of our history. Coal miners spent 12 – 16 hour shifts in dangerous mines in which they sometimes couldn’t even stand up. Frontiersmen built a homestead and a farm out of a thick Appalachian forest while fighting brutal winters and a tenacious Indian population. Slaves toiled for years at backbreaking work during freezing winters and boiling summers. At the end of the 19th century over 50% of Americans still lived and worked as farmers, a far more dangerous job than most people understand. The industrial revolution brought sweatshops and drove a thirst for steel, trains and petroleum, industries that brought new dangers.

One sometimes has to marvel that the colonies survived long enough to coalesce and challenge the British for independence and then go on to grow and prosper (mostly) for over 200 years as it changed the world.

Were the Americans who carved a nation out of a continent somehow so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who crisscrossed a continent with railroads, telephone lines and highways so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who won two world wars and sent a man to the moon so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who invented the mechanical reaper, air conditioning, vulcanized rubber and the microchip so different than Americans today? Not based on DNA they weren’t. But that doesn’t mean they were the same. While the DNA of the American people today is no different than that of the people who invented the elevator or the light bulb, the American people writ large certainly appear to be.

Go back little more than one generation and it seems like Americans were something of another species. Compared to 2025, they appear to be relative supermen. In 1970 there were 79 million people working in the United States supporting 1.5 million workers on Disability Insurance (SSDI). That means that one person out of every 52 workers was on Disability… Fast forward 5 decades and it seems as if the country has turned on its side. By 2024 the number of Americans working had risen by 100% to 161 million people. During that same period however, workers receiving disability insurance skyrocketed up 380% to 7.2 million. Today, instead of one out of every 53 workers being on disability, it’s one in 22! That number is particularly interesting because the United States of 1970 was a far grittier place than the United States of 2025.

First off, the United States in 2025 is a much different workplace than the one that existed in 1970. In 1970 fully 25% of the American workforce worked in manufacturing while 50% worked in the service industry. Today, 8% of the American workforce works in manufacturing while over 70% of workers work in the service industry. Given that designing a website, taking an order at Chili’s or greeting a guest at Marriott is generally less dangerous than welding together various pieces of a Ford Ranger or operating a blast furnace at a US Steel plant, America should be a safer place to work. And indeed it is. The death rate for American workers in 1970 was 18 per every 100,000 workers. By 2023 that rate had dropped to 3.5, a decline of 80%.

But of course work is not the only place where one gets hurt. Today, virtually everywhere Americans go everything seems safer. Cars have seatbelts, antilock breaks and airbags. Houses have GFCI circuit breakers in bathrooms and kitchens and smoke detectors in almost every room. Lawn darts are but a distant memory and towns across the country require helmets for bicycle riding and virtually every appliance and medicine comes plastered with book length warning label. At the end of the day, America has become a far safer place to live and work than it has been at any time in its history.

But somehow in that much safer America, the total of people listed as disabled and receiving disability payments has skyrocketed:  The government spends more on disability than on food stamps and welfare combined.  American workers paid .5% of their paychecks for SSDI when it began 70 years ago, but in 2022 they paid 2%.  That means that $2 out of every $100 an American worker earns goes to support someone not working.

How is that even possible? Have Americans become weaklings, unable to stay healthy? Has some unknown affliction made us incapable of working? No. There is an affliction, but it’s not biological. It’s called the nanny state. From judges who rubberstamp virtually every claim they ever see to a quarter of applicants suffering from musculoskeletal injuries – which conveniently enough cannot be detected by doctors – to outright fraud (more)(more)(more) and states seeking to shift costs to the federal government, SSDI is a symbol of much of what is wrong in America today, where in 2022 fully 4.5% of working age Americans were on disability. The worst thing about this dysfunctional program is that the fraud keeps people who are in real need of help waiting in line, sometimes to die.

When government decides to play the role of caretaker and redistribute wealth from workers to everyone else, it should come as no surprise that many people will choose to jump from the working pool to the everyone else pool. For more proof just look at the food stamp program over the same 50 year period. While the population has increased by about 75% since 1970, workers by 100% and disability by 380%, food stamp recipients grew by over 1,000%!

The economics of the welfare state, including the “disability industrial complex” cannot be sustained. If the record of the last 50 years were to be repeated over the next 50, in 2075 the country would have 320 million workers supporting almost 30 million people on disability and 450 million people on food stamps. Those numbers are simply unsustainable, particularly if the goal is to Make America Great Again.

American workers and entrepreneurs have together created the greatest wealth and prosperity the world has ever seen, but eventually the numbers stop working.  The thing I think Ramaswamy misses is that it was inevitable that the spirit that helped forge a nation out of a continent and dot it with jewels like the Empire State Building, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge would reemerge and shrug. That’s what happened in November. For it to make any difference however, the nanny state will have to be eviscerated, and not just the regulatory part of it. The redistribution apparatus will have to be dismantled too, and the disability industrial complex is a good place to start. 

Donald Trump, Tiberius Gracchus and a Canary in a Coalmine...

Donald Trump’s indictment makes one wonder if the members of the Democrat party have ever picked up a history book, walked by one in a library, or accidentally heard an episode of the History of Rome podcast. I doubt it because if they had, they’d know that Rome didn’t transition from a republic to an empire overnight, and they’d be familiar with the modern iteration of the George Santayana adage: Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

By the time Caesar became dictator in 49 BC, the Republic was already gone in everything but name only. The Republic’s collapse had been put in motion 80 years before with the murder of Tiberius Gracchus.

Gracchus was a populist Plebeian tribune, essentially the equivalent of being a member of our House of Representatives. Citizens loved him, and the aristocratic Senate hated him. His assassination points the way to Caesar:

"[T]he oligarchy had introduced violence into the political system with the murder of Tiberius Gracchus and over the years the use of violence became increasingly acceptable as various political disputes in Rome led to more and more bloody discord."

With Gracchus’s death, violence became an increasingly common political weapon in Rome, with Sulla’s purges early in the 1st century BC as the clearest example. Sulla executed 9,000 rival Marian partisan supporters, without regard for age or sex.

Three decades later, Caesar would take control, only to lose his life at the hands of a cabal of his establishment rivals. This widespread political violence only came to an end (temporary as it might be) when his adopted son, Augustus, become emperor. Tellingly, however, Augustus achieved that peace only after executing thousands of his political enemies.

Rome devolved from a republic in which domestic politics were decided mostly by words and relatively objective laws, to a dictatorship where laws were anything but objective, and the emperor could take life and property on a whim.

The late Roman Republic had the equivalent of our “Swamp,” which it called the Senate. While ostensibly there were balancing powers of influence, such as the assemblies, two Consuls (a split executive office with a term of one year) and, occasionally, the appointment of a temporary Dictator, the reality is that the Senate, made up of the richest and most powerful citizens, ran the Republic. Even when one of the assemblies or one of the Consuls seemed to be ascendant, it was the senators calling most of the shots through their relationships with the state officials, familial connections to this or that general, and their control of the purse strings.

So, you have a body of rich and powerful citizens having ostensibly limited power through the visible levers of government, but actually exercising real power through the connections, relationships, and shared ideology of the apparatchiks in the bureaucracy, the opinion makers, and those who indoctrinate the youth who always act as the frontline shock troops. Sound familiar?

Things have changed a lot in 2,000 years, but the nature of man…not so much. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As with most things today, political changes happen faster than they did in the past.

It took 100 years—from Gracchus’s emergence on the Roman stage until Augustus’s ascendance—for Rome to transform from a republic to an empire. It has taken less than 20 years since Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” America for the country to change from a functioning but imperfect republic into a farce of a country characterized by a banana-republic-level tyranny.

With a complicit bureaucracy, Obama used the IRS to target political opponents, the Justice Department to coerce banks into blacklisting businesses he didn’t like, and Obamacare to give government unprecedented control over Americans’ health decisions while doubling the cost. He unconstitutionally opened the immigration spigot that has now become a torrent.

Within six months of taking office, Obama would set the tone for an administration that would set race relations back 50 years. His “evolution“ on gay marriage would give cover to the spineless Supreme Court to impose that travesty on the country and lay the ground for the fascist LBTQ hellscape America endures today. And finally, he weakened two of the most foundational elements of American society: The military and residential communities.

Obama set in motion a new set of rules in America, and Trump’s indictment, the Soviet style attack on J6 attendees, and the prosecution of Douglass Mackey combine to demonstrate exactly what those new rules are: Thou shalt not oppose the Democrat party, thou shalt not speak badly of or mock the Democrat party or its minions, thou shalt not push back against the regulatory state, and thou shalt not express traditional American values.

These sham “prosecutions” are really persecution. They are nothing more than the Democrats’ regulatory state wrapping itself around American citizens’ necks like the Burmese Pythons killing most native species in the Everglades. The indictment of a former president and current presidential candidate on such a weak and preposterous theory as this one puts the lie to the idea that the Constitution limits our government. This is nothing less than the established “swamp” inventing new legal theories while ignoring existing law to crush a political opponent. That foretells the end of the Republic.

Our Republic has survived for 230 years because most Americans believe in our Constitution and respect the laws that emanate from it. But the Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper… it’s not a gun, it’s not an army, it’s not police state stormtroopers. It’s a piece of paper that states how the government should operate, limits that government’s power, and guarantees the citizens’ various inherent liberties and freedoms.

For most of our history, the Constitution’s words guided how our nation operated. Citizens had two ways to change the way the country was governed: voting and amending the Constitution. Today, however, neither works. The former has been undermined by a Democrat party that steals elections under the cover of night and calls you a conspiracy nut when you notice. The latter isn’t even a consideration because the Democrat party and the apparatchiks running the regulatory and security states are no longer constrained by its words.

America has become a tyranny where the people in power no longer feel the need to seek validation from the citizens. They decide on the outcome and manipulate the numbers to produce the result without even a fig leaf hiding their disdain for citizens. Whether it was Bernie Sanders in 2016, Donald Trump in 2020, or Kari Lake in 2022, the Democrat party and its entrenched government comrades have decided they no longer need to subject themselves to the will of the citizenry and, if anyone objects, they use the judiciary to crush that person.

America has been loosed from the anchor of the Constitution and the rule of law that kept our citizens free for two centuries. While the blood of the regime’s enemies may not yet be flowing in the streets, history very clearly tells us that, unless we change what’s happening, it will be. The question is, are there enough Americans who are familiar with history and willing to pull us out of our national death spiral before that terrible end is upon us? How Americans respond to Donald Trump’s persecution is the canary in the coal mine that will likely answer that question.

Follow me on Twitter at:  ImperfectUSA

If The "Peaceful Protesters" of Antifa and BLM Really Had The Courage of Their Convictions...

For the last two months we’ve been watching as BLM and Antifa have knocked over statues, defaced monuments and churches and set fire to basically anything they can get their hands on. St. Louis had to go because he led the Crusades. Christopher Columbus has to go because he opened the door to colonizing a new world. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have to go because they owned slaves. Fredrick Douglas and Ulysses S. Grant and Teddy Roosevelt and Jesus Christ had to go because… never mind.

And it’s not just statues that are under fire. There’s Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, Eskimo Pies, Mrs. Butterworth and the girl from Land O' Lakes butter. There’s the NFL’s Redskins, the TV show Cops, the National Anthem, Goya foods, and basically all the police.

What started out as protests against the killing of George Floyd has metastasized into a battle against everything American, everything capitalist and anything that is not sufficiently woke.

Once can certainly appreciate those sentiments because the United States has obviously been a plague on humanity. America was built on land stolen from the Native Americans. The country had slavery from the beginning and Jim Crow laws until the 1960s. As a result, blacks are disproportionately represented in the justice system and those of European descent enjoy white privilege. Anything below a living wage is basically slave labor. College and healthcare are human rights and should not be the kinds of things that Americans should have to pay for, or the kinds of things people can make a profit off of. Some people have more money than they need while others don’t have enough to feed their families. And perhaps most of all, we elected Donald Trump as our president...

If the “peaceful protesters” who are telling us that capitalism needs to go and the United States is the problem had real principles, they would take their demands to the next level. It’s not enough to boycott Goya foods or MyPillow.com or Hobby Lobby. No, if these activists really wanted to show the world that it can do without capitalism and the United States, they should refrain from using anything that American capitalism has produced.

Twitter - Gone. Apple. Gone. Air Conditioning - Gone. Facebook- Gone. Netflix - Gone. McDonalds - Gone. Google - Gone. Cell phones - Gone. Uber - Gone. Call of Duty - Gone. Flight - Gone. Amazon - Gone. Quicksilver - Gone. Nike - Gone. Starbucks - Gone. Fortnite - Gone. Supreme - Gone. X Box - Gone. Batman - Gone. North Face - Gone. Elevators - Gone. CNN - Gone. Not to mention staples like Coke and Pepsi and McDonald's and Frito Lay and Disney and countless others.

If the goal is to tell us that capitalism is bad and should be destroyed, then doesn’t logic demand that the fruits of the imperialist, racist, sexist American capitalist system be obliterated? Isn’t using an iPhone or wearing a Supreme sweat shirt or Nike shoes the watered down equivalent of using the data from Nazi experiments on prisoners to develop new medicines?

Do these “activists” have the courage of their own convictions? Are they really ready to destroy American capitalism and everything that it’s created? If they want to burn the system down and replace it, then they should say so and start living a life without its fruits as an example to others. If their goal however is to continue to enjoy the fruits of the capitalist system but just steal the profits or take the ownership, they are not the freedom fighters they style themselves to be, they are not heroes of the downtrodden seeking to destroy the racist oppressive system of America, but rather, they are in fact simply spoiled, envious, sociopathic thieves who want to take what others have built and use it for their own purposes. They are nothing more than common criminals who covet their neighbor’s wares and seek to exercise power over them… and everyone in the country while they’re at it. George Orwell recognized this in 1984: “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.”

Astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson misses the target and gets lost in the race space...

I recently saw a clip of Cosmos host and all round brilliant Neil Degrasse Tyson answering a question posed during a panel discussion. The question, which wasn’t really a question at all, had to do with former Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ comments on the disproportionate representation of women in science and math fields and his wondering if innate differences in sex might partially explain it.

The heavily mustached Tyson, seeking to ensure clarity in the event that there was any confusion, stated emphatically “I’ve never been a female.” He quickly followed with “But I have been black my whole life”. He went on to suggest that he might be able to tangentially address the issue. “So let me perhaps offer some insight from that perspective because there are many similar social issues related to access to opportunity that we find in the black community as well as the community of women in a male dominated, white male dominated society."

He goes on to talk about the roadblocks, he faced beginning as a 9 year old who had decided that he wanted to study astrophysics. Teachers would ask if he wouldn’t rather be an athlete. Later, security guards would follow him in stores thinking he might be a thief. He states that the decision to become an astrophysicist was for him “The path of most resistance through the forces of nature in society, the forces of society.” He then follows with this: “And fortunately my depth of interest in the universe was so deep and so fuel enriched, that every one of these curveballs I was thrown and fences that were built in front of me and hills I had to climb… I just reached for more fuel and kept going.”

He then wonders why there are so few others (blacks or women) where he is: “Where are the others who might have been this? They’re not there. And I wonder how, who, what is the blood on the tracks that I happened to survive that others did not, simply because of the forces of society that prevented, at every turn, at every turn…”

Finally, wrapping up he says: “My life experience tells me that when you don’t find blacks in the sciences, you don’t find women in the sciences, I know these forces are real and I had to survive them in order to get where I am today. So before we start talking about genetic differences, you’ve got to come up with a system where there’s equal opportunity, then we can have that conversation.”

Just as Tyson has never been a woman, I’ve never been a black person. But as a sentient person I recognize that discrimination exists. It always has and until we’re all either clones or robots, it always will. Discrimination is about making choices and making choices is part of life, and people make them for all different reasons. Whether it’s hiring a cousin over a more qualified stranger, a man choosing the younger more attractive secretary over the older more experienced applicant, a woman choosing the 6’ ft brooding Adonis over the 5’4” nice guy, or a white family choosing to attend the mostly white church 4 blocks from their house rather than the mostly black church a block and a half away… discrimination of all sorts exists and takes place every single day.  It exists everywhere... and for lots of different reasons, some of which society can seek to minimize and some of which it can't. Think about it, when was the last time you chose to hit on someone you found unattractive? At the end of the day, life is not fair because we’re all different, with different characteristics, abilities, skills, personalities, likes, dislikes, prejudices and as Tyson pointed out, drives.

And that’s where Dr. Tyson misses the mark. He said it himself when he talked about his desire being so deep that it fueled him to overcome all obstacles to his success. Despite what he calls the “forces of nature” set against his success, he succeeded to a level he would likely never have imagined. His success was not due to some phantom “system where there’s equal opportunity” but rather his success was due to his desire to succeed and his willingness to work for it. Just as it was for Clarence Thomas, Jackie Robinson, Oprah Winfrey, Robert Reich, John Stossel and millions of other Americans. Is Tyson suggesting that he is superman and that other blacks and women don’t have what it takes to succeed in life as he did, and therefore they need some special advantages he did not have? I don’t think so. By his own words one could make the argument that Tyson succeeded because of the challenges he faced, not in spite of them. After all he used the roadblocks to fuel his passion to achieve, which led him to become one of the best known scientists in the country.

The problem with Tyson’s comments is that he puts the focus in the wrong place. He suggests that we don’t currently have “a system where there’s equal opportunity” and implies that it is possible to create one. The United States may not be perfect, but for those who are willing to work, for those who have the drive, for those who have the passion to pursue their goals, the United States offers more opportunity than any nation in history. Tyson and tens of millions of others prove that point. But by focusing on a mythical, unachievable, discrimination-free society or system, he undermines the single most powerful factor in someone’s success… their own willingness to overcome obstacles in order to achieve their goals.

There are indeed challenges that blacks face in the United States. And likely they are greater and different than those faced by whites. But the question is, what is keeping more blacks from achieving success? Is it white racism in a world where even the hint of racism can cost a company millions of dollars or open an individual’s life up to social and online scorn and ostracization? Or is it teachers’ unions that force mostly minority students to stay in failing schools? Is it minimum wage laws that keep black youth unemployment near or above 50% and remove opportunities for work experience? Is it government welfare programs that make it feasible for 77% of black babies to be born to unwed mothers?

What has a better chance of unleashing the potential power of success for blacks who have yet to achieve it? Focusing on some impossible dream of a where equal opportunity is equated with equal outcomes or rather empowering everyone by focusing on equipping children with the tools and skills to pursue their passions and overcome all obstacles with the vigor Dr. Tyson did. My guess is the latter would.