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

The Mona Lisa and the Louvre demonstrate why when art imitates life, the west should pay attention.

Guest post by Martha Careful

A couple of months ago a “spontaneous strike erupted” among employees at the world’s most-visited museum, the Louvre. In protest over overwhelming crowds and chronic understaffing, employees refused to take their posts on Monday, forcing the iconic Paris museum to shut its doors. But the crowds and unmoving lines weren’t always this way, and to understand how bad they’ve gotten, one must understand how nice a visit to the Louvre used to be.

I first visited Paris 25 years ago. The Louvre was simply extraordinary, and even from the outside it is breathtaking. But on the inside, my personal favorite is the Marie de’ Medici cycle, a series of 24 giant paintings by Peter Paul Rubens chronicling the life of Marie de’ Medici, the widow of French King Henry IV. There is also Winged Victory, Venus de Milo, and paintings by everyone from Rembrandt to Jacques-Louis David to Raphael.

But, as everyone knows, the most famous and the most sought-after artwork in the Louvre is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. I remember walking into the room that held her. There were a lot of people, but it wasn’t crowded per se. You could easily walk around, and eventually you could get fairly close and try and examine her famous smile.

Since that first visit, I’ve been back to Paris many times, including a few visits to the Louvre itself. About a month ago I went once again, this time with my sister and brother-in-law. The first thing I have to say is that the throng of people in the museum was extraordinary. The line just to get through security was more than two hours!

Once inside, as the Mona Lisa was on the top of my sister’s must-see list, we headed there. The museum was as crowded as I’ve ever seen it, but you could mostly navigate around. But when we arrived at the room with da Vinci’s masterpiece, it was like something I’d never seen. It was simply insane. You were shuttled through ropes towards the masterpiece and then out on either side before actually getting within 10 feet of her. What’s worse, almost every single person was holding up their phones to take a picture or a selfie, so it was virtually impossible to get even a good glimpse of the presumed Italian beauty.

The experience was simply sad. The building I had experienced a quarter century before was the same. The works were largely the same. But the museum experience was … not. No, now there were so many people in the museum that the thing one remembers is not standing there pondering what was behind that enigmatic smile, but rather feeling like a steer in the middle of a cattle drive being prodded along with no focus on anything other than not getting trampled.

I’m no expert, but I don’t think that’s the goal of any museum. The goal of allowing ever more people in, while egalitarian, actually diminishes the experience for everyone.

So too with the West. By any measure, Western nations have built the most free, prosperous and advanced civilization in human history. Everything from cars to flight to nuclear power to advanced agriculture to television to computers to MRI machines and more, western culture has been almost exclusively behind the advances civilization has made over the last 500 years. The result has been the creation of nations that are largely more free, prosperous and functional than any in the world. Which is of course, why people want to come here.

But the problem is, like the Louvre and the Mona Lisa, too many people simply overwhelm the system and destroy the experience for everyone. But at least at the Louvre visitors buy tickets with money that is then used to maintain the museum and pay for its operations. Not so with nations.

Most of the illegal immigrants crossing rivers and seas and borders to move to the West are not paying to maintain them. In fact, not only do Western nations have to support them, but most bring with them values and cultures that are anathema to the very ideas that made Western civilization successful in the first place, i.e. Christianity, individual freedom, and capitalism.

It’s the equivalent of visitors being allowed to sneak in the back door of the Louvre then painting graffiti everywhere before starting barbecues in the rooms and using the artwork as kindling. Eventually, the museum would not only run out of masterpieces to burn, but once everything was gone, the building itself would be taken apart piece by piece and carted off. Thereafter, the progeny of the legitimate visitors and the vandals alike would be left standing by the River Seine looking at the ruins and wondering what used to stand there.

Would anyone say that such a scenario would be a good thing? That somehow the Louvre benefited from its new “undocumented” or “irregular” visitors? The answer is clearly “No.”

Just as is true on the small scale, it applies equally, if not more on a larger scale because while the Louvre’s works are generally displayed in the museum itself, the West has not only created a civilization that benefits itself, but it’s created one that has helped bring billions of people around the world out of abject poverty.

It’s understandable that Westerners have sympathy for the conditions others’ experience. The sad reality is that poverty, scarcity, war, and tyranny remain problems for many places, as they have for most of the world throughout human history. That’s troubling and most people who are relatively better off would feel some pull to try and help. But the question is, does allowing tens of millions of people from failed or war-torn or dysfunctional nations to enter the West make the world a better place? For those who escape to the West, it most certainly does. But for the West itself, not so much. Overwhelmed schools, hospitals, governments, communities, trillions of dollars of debt spending and increased rates of crime and social discord. Clearly not better.

The French national motto is “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” or Liberty, equality, fraternity. The West has taken the idea of equality and made it first among equals in terms of objectives over the last half century, and they’re well on their way of achieving it. But not in the way our leaders promised. No, rather than helping to bring freedom and prosperity to the rest of the world, they’re making the world equal by destroying those very things within their own countries, the outliers that escaped the history of man.

This should be obvious to anyone paying attention, but the elites, living in their gated communities, with their bodyguards and their Swiss bank accounts, never have to actually interact with the unwashed masses who live with the realities driven by their policies. No, they get private tours of the Louvre, fly on private jets, and enjoy private club memberships, all while making policies the consequences of which they never actually have to experience.

For anyone who loves art, the Louvre becoming a cattle drive is not a good thing. For anyone who loves liberty and prosperity, the West becoming a borderless society is a terrible thing.

From Carthage To Berlin, A Modest Proposal

The First Punic War began in 264 BC, lasted 25 years, and was fought between the Romans and the Carthaginians, a civilization in what is today modern Tunisia. The Carthaginians were the most powerful and prosperous force in the Western Mediterranean and North Africa, while the Romans were a growing power on the Italian peninsula. After two decades, with both sides financially and demographically exhausted, Rome prevailed. Carthage ceded Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and paid substantial reparations.

The Second Punic War lasted from 218 to 201 BC. This is the war that saw Hannibal attack from the north, taking his war elephants across the Mediterranean, then down over the Alps, becoming the scourge of the Italian Peninsula for more than a decade. Across the Italian mainland, Hannibal would go from city to city, winning virtually every engagement, including Cannae, which almost ended Rome. Rome recovered, however, and pursued a cat-and-mouse strategy with the goal of tiring Hannibal’s army.

In one of history’s great mysteries, after a decade of winning almost every encounter and with virtual free rein over most of the Italian mainland, for some reason, Hannibal never attacked Rome to deliver the death blow that kept the Romans awake at night. Eventually, Publius Scipio, known to history as Scipio Africanus, would bring the war to Carthage itself, which would lead to Hannibal being recalled.

Unable to overcome the Roman cavalry advantage, Hannibal would be defeated, and Carthage would sue for peace. Again, Carthage would pay substantial reparations, concede wide swaths of land, and this time lose much of its autonomy.

The Third Punic War, begun in 149 BC, would be the shortest and the last. Using a Carthaginian response to an attack by the Numidian king and Roman ally Massinissa as a pretense, Rome declared war. Three years later, the city of Carthage lay in ruins as the Romans destroyed virtually every structure.

This would be final. Tired of having to fight the Carthaginians, Rome would obliterate them. They subsumed everything the Carthaginians had, declared it illegal to rebuild the city, and sold off its remaining population into slavery. As intended, Carthage would never again pose a problem for the Romans.

Fast forward two millennia, and you see echoes of one of the greatest conflicts in history. In 1914, the Germans launched Europe into World War I. For three years, the sides would largely battle over inches as soldiers looked at one another across the hundreds of miles of trenches dug on front lines that rarely moved. By 1918, the Germans were defeated and the allies—mainly France & the UK—imposed the draconian Treaty of Versailles, which included staggering reparations and strict military limitations.

Two decades later, Germany, once crippled by reparations and limitations on industry and its military, would launch a second world war. For the previous decade, it had slowly but consistently pushed the limits of what it was allowed to do under the Treaty of Versailles, and usually found little or no resistance. As such, Germany kept pushing until it was strong enough that the allies could do little to prevent its expansive designs. And thus began a true world war that would fully engulf half the planet, and it would take half a decade for victory to come.

Fast forward another eighty years, and the world once again finds itself in a crisis. A different crisis, to be sure, but one that threatens civilization every bit as much as the two world wars.

What crisis? Why the immigration crisis, of course. And why is it an existential threat to civilization? Because the West has been the primary driver of the advance of civilization around the world for the last 500 years.

The list of things Western civilization is responsible for that are central to the world today, while not endless, is very long. Flight, telephony, harnessing electricity, nuclear power, plastic, television, air conditioning, automobiles, the best of modern medicine, space travel, MRI machines, advanced agriculture, and much more, not the least of which was virtually ending slavery worldwide.

This Western civilization was built on Christianity, individual freedom, freedom of speech, religion, and the press, capitalism, liberal democracy, and relatively free markets. Other than that first foundation (Christianity), most of those elements developed into keystones over the last three centuries.

Today, all are at risk, and once again, the catalyst is Germany. In particular, German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In 2015, as the leader of what was then the most economically powerful nation in Europe, she essentially dictated that the continent open its borders to “migrants” from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. While ostensibly humanitarian, this policy was suicidal. Europe had been failing to integrate immigrants for decades, and now Merkel had opened the door to the entire Third World.

The consequences have been extraordinary. Thirty million, mostly undocumented male, military-aged “migrants” from the third world have inundated Europe over the last decade, overwhelming services, straining budgets, and committing crimes.

Today, across the West, there is a growing ideology that is anathema to free speech, freedom of religion, free press, women’s rights, and more. And it’s violently so. At the current rate of demographic change, native Europeans will be a minority in Europe soon after the middle of the century, and Western civilization will not be far behind, if it survives that long.

If it were just Angela Merkel, we might be able to give Germany a pass, but it’s not. The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen and the WEF’s Klaus Schwab are both also spawn of Germany and were Merkel’s fellow travelers when she was in power—and maintained her cancerous ideas once she left.

At the end of the day, from giving us Karl Marx to facilitating the Bolshevik revolution by returning Lenin to Russia, to beginning two world wars and shepherding the current collapse of the West, Germany has been the fount of more strife and more bloodshed over the last 200 years than any nation on the planet. And it’s not even close.

It’s likely too late for Europe to save itself, although it’s possible that Western civilization could survive the collapse of the place of its origin. Nonetheless, while the odds are against it, there is hope, but it will take drastic measures.

The West should do to Germany what the Romans did to Carthage. Not in the literal sense of razing it to the ground, of course. Instead, it should split it into a dozen or more autonomous nations. Separately, these tiny states would spend so much time trying to survive that they couldn’t lead the world off another cliff.

Sure, you can say this proposal is insane, and maybe it is, but so too is leading the charge to destroy the most successful civilization in history. In thrall to the climate change hoax, Germany recently shuttered the last of its nuclear power plants and is well on its way to collapsing its economy.

It’s a statecraft version of someone who wants to commit suicide and decides to take as many others with him as he can. The West should not allow it. We know what the collapse of Western civilization looks like: It’s somewhere between Afghanistan and Communist China. Both spell the end of freedom and prosperity. If the West wants to avoid that fate, the first step is to eliminate the führer / Pied Piper leading the way. Maybe then it will be possible to focus on saving what’s left...

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

With Zohran Mamdani On The Cusp of Becoming Mayor, NYC Embraces Its Own Demise

As a child of the Cold War with the Soviets as America’s enemy, when the wall came down and the threat of Communism faded, I was under the illusion that the world had inexorably turned a corner and that history was on the march to bring freedom, Capitalism and prosperity to the whole world…

The events of September 11 exposed that illusion for what it really was, a delusion.  There were actually people out there who wanted to start a war with the United States.

With 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq Islam went from an almost nonexistent issue for most Americans to front and center.  Suddenly Islam and Muslims are in the news on a daily basis, doing unspeakable things to one another and others. 

Knowing nothing of this threat and wanting to know more I picked up books like Dore Gold’s Hatred’s Kingdom and Benny Morris’ Righteous Victims, and even a copy of the Koran, which honestly, I couldn’t get through. And I read a lot more online from guys like Steve Emerson, Robert Spencer and David Horowitz.

Over the following years you had everything from the Shoe Bomber to the Ft. Hood shooter to the San Bernardino attack and countless others.  And elsewhere in the west you had everything from the murder of Theo Van Gogh to the London 7/7 attacks, the Charlie Hebdo attacks and others.  It seemed like Islam was at war against the entire world.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the news, despite everything we were seeing with our own eyes, the blood, the carnage, the innocent victims, we were told that Islam wasn’t the problem, but rather the individual terrorists who just happened to be Muslim. “Islam isn’t violent” we were told despite the fact that most of the wars going on in the world involve Muslims and the Koran itself both directs and allows killing in Allah’s name.  Seemingly we see Muslim violence everywhere but we’re told that there’s no connection to Islam, despite the fact that most of the time the perpetrators actually invoke Allah’s name during their attacks.

So the west, seeking to demonstrate their lack of “Islamophobia” decides to open the floodgates to Muslims from around the world with blind expectation that they would integrate into their societies – despite decades of proof of the exact opposite. And that held for the United States as well. You visit places like Dearborn, Michigan or Minneapolis, Minnesota or increasingly even places as far afield as Texas and it sometimes feels like you’re not actually in America.    

But if one looks, it’s not hard to understand why.  For the west, for most of the last 500 years there have been two poles seeking to influence life, the state and the church. The result of that pull between the state and Christianity is a civilization with extraordinary scientific and economic advancement, unprecedented levels of individual freedom and the miraculous levels of prosperity that came with them.

But for Islam, there is no such separation.  There is one law and it covers everything.  Freedom of speech and religion don’t exist. Both are tolerated when the numbers of Muslims are small in a nation, but once the numbers grow, they’re strangled.  About 15 years ago Evangelist Peter Hammond demonstrated how this works:

1)         As long as the Muslim population remains around or under 2% in any given country, they will be for the most part be regarded as a peace-loving minority, and not as a threat to other citizens.

2)         At 2% to 5%, they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, often with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs.

3)         From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. For example, they will push for the introduction of halal food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarkets to feature halal on their shelves — along with threats for failure to comply.

4)         When Muslims approach 10% of the population, they tend to increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions.

There’s more, but you get the point. Couple that with the fact that Islam has basically been on a 1400 year quest to take over the world and one wonders why western leaders have not only opened up their countries to followers of an ideology that literally seeks their destruction, but funds them a well! 

Islam’s not a religion, it’s a supremist, expansionist and tyrannical ideology that is anathema to the very foundations of western civilization. Don’t take my word for it, take the words of Imams across the west.  They seek to use demographics to overwhelm natives politically then impose a caliphate.  Very soon western leaders are going to have to confront the fact that they have injected their polity with a virus that seeks to kill it. 

Europe successfully defended itself from the first Islamic invasion in 732 in behind the leadership of the French Duke Charles Martel at Tours.  It did so again in Vienna in 1683 following King John III Sobieski of Poland.  Those men were true leaders. Today, with few exceptions, the west is led by cowards and traitors to their civilizations, more interested in being feted by their fellow globalists than defend their heritage.  Indeed, today Europe isn’t even fighting for itself.  It’s invited the enemy into its bosom and allowed him to thrive.

Why?  White guilt, of course.  To the point that the west will literally sacrifice their daughters so as not to be called Islamophobic. Across the west we’ve seen Hammond’s observations play themselves out. Sweden, formerly one of the safest countries in the world is today overwhelmed with rapes and bombings, and native Swedes aren’t responsible. Is any western city better off for having invited in hundreds of thousands of Muslims?  London?  Paris?  Amsterdam? No. The story is the same across Europe, yet most “leaders” pretend otherwise. 

Winston Churchill, a son of Britain and America understood the threat.  While he admitted “Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities” he knew the score.  “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.”

And why does any of this matter? New York, of course. One need only to look at the dystopian nightmare that London has become to understand what lays ahead for New York. Once America’s greatest city, the disaster it already is has been driven by grievance, victimization and illegal immigration.  And now the guilt ridden college educated whites have essentially elected a terrorist supporting Communist as mayor. 

This does not bode well for freedom, prosperity, New York or for America. Freedom of speech and religion are literally written into our founding documents. They are fundamental to our nation.  Islam, tolerates neither.  At the end of the day, Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology that seeks to overthrow the west.  It’s well on its way in Europe.  We should not allow it to do so here.     

The Danger Of A Successful Society: Absurdity

I spend a lot of time talking about how western civilization – in particular as driven by the United States – is easily the greatest that mankind has yet created.  If one looks at it objectively, it’s not even close.  The list of things that are part of the everyday life of people around the world is basically a list of things that were invented or developed in the west.  From cars to planes to advanced agriculture to elevators to plastic and mobile phones and computers and DNA and much, much more. 

But every now and then something happens that makes me question that.  A couple of years ago I watched Matt Walsh’s “What is a Woman” where he spends most of the movie talking to leftists and doctors trying to get a definitive answer to the question of the title.  Most of the time he’s unsuccessful.  The most interesting part of the movie however didn’t take place at a feminist conference or in a studio, but rather in Africa when he was speaking with Maasai tribesmen.  When asked a simple question about whether a man can become a woman, he was quickly given a definitive “No”.  Straightforward, no debate, no hedging. Essentially 180 degrees from the insanity that Matt encountered in the United States.

This was brought back to me last week when reading about Justice Thomas’ destruction of the “expert class” in Skrmetti.  The Justice took direct aim at the notion that Americans must ignore their common sense, relinquish their lives and give up their Constitutional rights to those the elites have pronounced as “experts”.  As we all learned during COVID, with the Hunter Biden letter, and have been seeing with climate scares for decades, “experts” are rarely that, and often are simply shills for this or that monied interest. 

Justice Thomas stated clearly that the government can no longer use such “experts” to manipulate and control the lives of citizens.  Although the specific case had to do with the butchering or harming confused or coerced minors, it applies everywhere else as well.

Which is a very good thing. Because there’s a danger in success – as in a successful civilization.  It breeds complacency, entitlement and most importantly, the loss of a functional memory of how things work and how they became successful in the first place… which leads to an over reliance on “experts”. 

I frequently mention Cyrus McCormick as the man most responsible for the rapid advance of western civilization.  Of course people can argue that others, like Isaac Newton, Jethro Tull, James Watt, J.D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford or any number of others could wear that badge.  I choose to award it to McCormick because he almost single handedly helped 85% of Americans and substantial numbers of others around the world, escape the farm.  Not that there’s anything wrong with farming, obviously, but because of the efficiencies McCormick brought about, 95% of Americans work at something other than farming while in his day that number was in the mid-teens.

So basically he freed up 80% of the nation to go out and be everything from baseball players to scientists to doctors to entrepreneurs to inventors to, sadly, social media “influencers”.  It’s basically division of labor on steroids, where people focus on what they want to do, are good at, or can make a living at, while paying others do the things they can’t or don’t want to do.

That works well when the choices of options are shoemaker, baker, blacksmith, farmer, soldier, etc., i.e. things society actually needs.  It even works when options include things that society wants, like literature or sport or art.  Baseball may not be as critical to the continuation of society as say, electricity generation or infrastructure maintenance, but there’s a demand and people are willing to work for money to pay for it out of their own pockets.

Where it breaks down is when options include things that no one actually wants or needs, yet they get produced nonetheless, or get produced in quantities that make no sense. Things like gender studies graduates, therapists and lawyers. Shakespeare talked about lawyers (as a bulwark against the masses) so we don’t need to.

The fact that gender studies even exist in the first place tells you how far America has moved from the fundamentals of a successful society.  In a normal, functioning universe such things wouldn’t even exist.  While one can at least make an argument that being gay is at least theoretically natural – if still deviant – a universe where men are women, women are men and the difference between the two is “fluid” is a fiction created by people who have too much time on their hands and no connection to how the real world functions.  We’ve strayed so far from the time when 85% of the people worked on farms and did things that actually helped society that we now have people who create an illusion and then set about trying to force society to accept it as normal. 

Another example of this a disconnect between actual demand and supply is therapists. Before the late 19^th century therapists didn’t exist. (Well, they sort of did, but they were your friends.) Today tens of millions of Americans go to “therapists”, mostly women, and white women at that.   Essentially 40% of white women receive mental health treatment in the form of anti-depressants and or therapy.  If you look deeper you’ll see that the numbers skew towards college educated, as in liberal, white women.  Has our ostensibly successful society somehow become so bad that fully 40% of the women of the majority population are now sufficiently damaged that they need mental health treatment? Or are they suffering from a mass psychosis of grievance and guilt created by people being too prosperous and having too much time and money on their hands?  They say that idleness is the devil’s workshop and there is perhaps no better example of the truth than that. While there are certainly people who are in need of mental help, the fact that 40% of any ostensibly normal demographic needs either anti-depressants or therapy is absurd. 

But that’s what happens when society veers so far from the fundamentals of society and common sense that many see a future in pursuing nonsensical fields like gender studies, political science (my major…) and countless others where there is no real demand in society beyond that generated by government fiat. More importantly, without the individual feeling of accomplishment that goes with doing something that actually benefits society, not the least of which is raising good children, people create the absurd in order to fill the void, and then demand society congratulate them for their “courage”.   

Thankfully, we may slowly be coming to the point where the larger society recognizes that absurdity is no longer acceptable, or worse, compelled.  Justice Thomas and Matt Walsh are actually addressing the same thing. Common sense should have to be discarded just because “experts” say it must.

The world is a challenging place with dangers of all sorts around every corner, the sooner America gets back to being a place ruled by common sense rather than absurdity, the better we will be prepared to deal with them…

Ingratitude and Ignorance Are Driving The Destruction of The Greatest Civilization In Human History

I started writing my Imperfect America blog in 2009.  It’s my passion, despite the sad fact it’s never made me a penny.  Not even on Twitter, new or old, where my account is constantly throttled!

My first post was titled “Racism, America’s Original Sin”.  It was a response to the new normal of anyone disagreeing with Barack Obama being called a racist.  In it I talk about the 3/5^th Compromise and the fact that it gave southerners less power in the House than they wanted, but more importantly, it was the key to America being one nation rather than two, one free and one slave. I pointed out that blacks would likely have been much worse off in a nation of only slave states. The 3/5^th Compromise is a literal example of the subtitle of my blog: “Perfect is the enemy of the good.”

At the end of the day, over the last million or so words I’ve written about everything from race to the judiciary to entrepreneurship to European travel and more, most from a conservative, even libertarian perspective. I regularly make the argument that western civilization is the greatest that has thus far been produced by men. And it’s not even close. While the Egyptians built the pyramids 5,000 years ago, the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Greeks developed math and the Chinese invented gunpowder and paper, the reality is, almost every single thing used by most people around the world today is a consequence of western civilization.

For most of human history, life was brutal, short and dangerous. For most today, it’s not.  And there’s a reason. These five elements: Free speech, the rule of law, limited government, private property and Capitalism combined to give humans the unprecedented ability and motivation to be creative and productive. And the results were extraordinary. Longer lifespans. More food. Larger and safer living quarters and conditions. Vastly more options for making a living and safter conditions when doing so.  Cheaper, faster and more comfortable transportation. Unprecedented communication tools and energy. Exponentially more information available and accessible. Leisure time, something almost unheard of throughout history.  And the list goes on.

But none of that happens in a fascist state.  Nor a Communist state. None of that happens in a tyranny, nor in a cradle to grave nanny state. None of that happens when science and math and human nature are ignored, and finally, none of that happens when there are no consequences for bad actors. 

But those are all elements of what America is becoming.  Families on welfare for generations.  Giant banks and corporations privatizing profits and socializing losses.  Government regulation of virtually every aspect of life. Violent criminals let loose on society with slaps on the wrist. Freedom of speech defined by whose feelings get hurt.  Merit taking a back seat to a spectrum of victimization categories.  And this list too goes on.

But here’s the thing.  No society ever prospered on the basis of victimization and a nanny state culture where citizens turned on one another and the few worked to support the many. Never, not one.  And no, modern European nanny states haven’t prospered because of their paternalism, they prospered in spite of it because the United States guaranteed their security for the last 75 years.

I write to try and make a difference. I try to showcase the fact that most Americans, indeed most westerners, have lost sight of the reality that we’re living in the greatest and most prosperous time in human history, and more importantly, they willingly choose to ignore what created it and indeed attack those responsible. It’s not politically correct to say, but this civilization was largely created by white people, most originating in western Europe. Nor is it PC to say that Christianity was the force that impelled it. And finally, it’s individual liberty, private property, limited government and Capitalism that were the oil that lubricated the engine of advancement. 

To the degree that modern America and western civilization are making policies that are antithetical to all of those things, they’re killing the goose that laid the golden civilizational egg.  And it would be one thing if they could point to an example of some place, some time, some civilization that was equal to or greater than ours, particularly at scale.  But they don’t because they can’t. It didn’t work in New Harmony, Indiana, it never worked in the Soviet Union and it didn’t work in the 1960’s communes.

It was western civilization and the United States that took men to flight, put men on the moon, discovered DNA, invented the computer, harnessed nuclear power and revolutionized farming.

Nonetheless every day we’re faced with a growing faction of citizens who whine because someone else has something they don’t, because they’re victims of someone else’s success, that bad actors shouldn’t have to face the consequences of their actions or that someone is saying something that hurts their feelings.  And for them, the solution is always the same: More government.  More government to take from others to give to them. To stop others from being successful. To silence and imprison enemies and allow fellow travelers to do anything with impunity. That’s called tyranny and it never, ever, leads to prosperity.

Teddy Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the enemy of joy.”  I think it’s no coincidence that he also said, “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.” Both refer to setting oneself apart from others. 

Which is, I think, the fundamental problem with America and the west right now:  comparison, envy and the lack of gratitude for exactly where we are in the big picture.  That skewed perspective is what leads huge swaths of the population to be willing to destroy the good in pursuit of the illusion of perfection. I write to try and wake America and the west up to the fact that continued prosperity is not guaranteed. Much had to go right for us to get here but it wouldn’t take much going wrong to destroy it. 

You can only lay siege to the foundations of a civilization for so long before it collapses. We’re seeing that across Europe and the United States today. Gone is the appreciation of and gratitude for men who did great things and built this civilization, replaced by reverence for and desire to become influencers, most of whom have accomplished nothing. You have large numbers of illegals who don’t share western values and native-born minorities who hate the majorities and think the rules don’t apply to them. Add to that a self-hating wing of the majority and you have a perfect storm that will destroy the west and take civilization as we know it with it. 

Europe will find itself part of the caliphate while the United States will devolve into a bloody morass of demographically defined armed camps. And eventually the economically and militarily empowered Chinese Communists, not constrained by morals of any kind, will enslave much of the world.

When that history is written it will say that a once great west committed civilizational suicide, having crucified itself on a cross anchored by diversity, globalism, environmentalism and compassion. 

I’d prefer not to go quietly into that good night, thank you. Which is why I write. I may make all the noise of a tree falling in the woods, but I’m going to continue doing so for as long as the Lord allows.