Popper's Paradox: Does America Have a Duty to Tolerate That Which Threatens It

As someone who looks at culture and politics regularly, I often write about problems and on occasion, proffer solutions. Sometimes the solutions are relatively straightforward and obvious, like suggesting to the GOP that if they don’t pass the SAVE Act and bring about something resembling honest elections they’re going to get their asses handed to them in November.   Others, I recognize, are far more complex than my 30,000 foot take on the issue. This is most certainly the case when I suggested the government should get out of the wealth redistribution business. Knowing that there are thousands of programs handing out trillions of dollars annually, just suggesting the government should get out of the business of taking money from Peter to give to Paul seems a bit trite.  And it might be, but trying to explain a problem and proffer a detailed solution in under 1200 words is a bit challenging, at least it is for me. 

But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop highlighting issues and making suggestions. 

One of the most important and challenging issues from both a cultural and political perspective is tolerance. What should we tolerate?  How much of it should we tolerate?  And, perhaps most importantly, what should be not tolerate… and why.

For years I’ve struggled with the idea of limits on tolerance, but didn’t really have a definition for it.  I do now. I recently saw a post that referred to Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, something with which I was unfamiliar. I looked it up and immediately recognized it as the perfect distillation of exactly what had been running through my head, basically: Does society have a duty to be tolerant to that which seeks to destroy said society?

For a long time, America clearly understood the answer was no. The obvious example is Communism. America knew that Communism was a threat and Congress did what it could to thwart the party and extinguish the idea itself. Under the Smith Act (Alien Registration Act of 1940), it became illegal to act “with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence…”

The party was outlawed and leaders were thrown in jail, and while being a Communist wasn’t technically illegal, just being one could get you fired or blacklisted, both in Hollywood and beyond.  Eventually the Supreme Court, in Yates v. United States (1957), narrowed Smith, ruling that abstract advocacy of revolution or teaching doctrine was protected by the First Amendment. Only advocacy directed at inciting imminent illegal action could be punished. 

Today Communism is tolerated in America, and sadly, celebrated even. Indeed, it’s basically merged with the Democrat party and their love child has just been elected as mayor of New York. And the reality is, the Democrat party of 2026 is far more of a danger to the Republic than the Communists ever were.

The merger actually dovetails with the primary subject of this piece on tolerance:  Islam. 

Our 1^st Amendment guarantees Americans freedom of religion. Indeed, it’s literally the very first right protected in the Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

There is no definition in the Constitution or anywhere else in government however that states exactly what a religion is.  In truth, religion in America encompasses everything from traditional Catholicism, reformed Judaism and thousands of Protestant sects to the late Heaven’s Gate cult and being a conscientious objector!

Perhaps nothing else demonstrates the reality that America is, in a word, tolerant. 

But are there limits to that tolerance? And should those limits apply to Islam?

I’d like to suggest that there should be, and yes they should apply to Islam.

The reality is, while Islam is most certainly a religion, it is also something else. It is a theology of conquest and subjugation. From its very beginning Islam was about conquering and conquest, through any means necessary, including deception. 

On a daily basis we hear Muslim “scholars” and others speak in the streets, on college campuses and online among other places, telling us that Islam will basically take over.  Even in high schools they are welcomed to proffer Sharia. 

And that gets to the crux of the problem.  At its very core, Islam is incompatible with western civilization.  It does not believe in freedom of speech. It does not believe in freedom of religion.  Women are 2^nd class citizens and non-Muslim women fare even worse. 

All of this might just be an exercise navel gazing, if it were not so deadly. Since 9/11 there have been more than 64,000 Islamic terrorist attacks around the world.  Most were actually in Muslim countries, particularly those with American troops on the ground. But not all.  Here in the United States, since 1994 there have been a total of 740 Islamic terrorist attacks or plots disrupted while in Europe between 1994 and 2021 that number was 367.   

But it’s not just naval gazing. Across Europe, they’re seeing what happens when Muslims reach just 5% of the population. In France over half of young Muslims want Sharia law, in Austria a court made Sharia legal, while in the UK Muslim rape rings were allowed to rape thousands of young white girls for more than a decade because the authorities were scared of being called racists. Indeed across Europe Muslims are rapidly increasing in numbers and not only are they not assimilating, they are bringing unprecedented rates of violent crime across the continent.  Here at home Muslims gather in large groups tell us they are taking over, something they have explicitly wanted to do for over 30 years! 

And so back to my original question: Does society have a duty to be tolerant to that which seeks to destroy said society?  Is Islam to be tolerated? If yes, ask yourself, is there a “religion” that might ever NOT be tolerated? What tenants might it have that are not present in Islam?  What kinds of activities would its adherents have to engage in that have not been so by Muslims?

Our Constitution was written as a vehicle for preserving the fundamental ideas of limited government, free speech, freedom of religion and individual liberty. A creed that explicitly targets those simply cannot be tolerated. 

This is one of those problems for which solutions would take far more 1200 words to cover.  Whatever solutions are to be had, they must start with recognizing that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. 

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.    

Of Foxholes and Atheists and Donald Trump

 The leftist elites always hate Republicans, but there is something much deeper going on with their hatred for Donald Trump. The desire to destroy him has an almost religious element to it.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. The basic premise is that when facing an existential threat, particularly when lives are on the line, people will look for something stronger than themselves, often God, to pull them through.

The opposite might be when things are good. Then, atheism, or at least an indifference to God, grows.

Sadly, in this context, the last 75 years have been very good for the West. WWII was horrible, of course, but there were some good things that came from it.

The first good thing features two sides of the same coin, and that coin is the utter destruction of Germany and Japan. I don’t mean their defeat, but rather the utter destruction of their infrastructure and that of many of the nations fighting them. The result for the relatively unscathed United States was that its full wartime manufacturing footing put it in a position to provide pretty much of everything the war-torn world needed. The result was that by the middle of the 1950s, the American economy, with 5% of the world’s population, approached 40% of world GDP. Times were indeed good.

The other side of that coin was that because the German and Japanese infrastructures were so completely destroyed, they could leapfrog over many iterations of evolution and begin again with the latest technologies, machinery, and processes. The result was that by the 1980s, the Japanese and German economies were the most powerful in the world after the US.

The second positive outcome of WWII was the Cold War. Now the Cold War had many downsides, including the hot wars in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, but what it did was draw a clear line between who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. America and the West were far from perfect, but we knew that at the end of the day, the West was the land of freedom, while the communists were tyrannies constantly seeking to expand.

The result of that clarity was that, for the most part, Western nations understood there was real danger in the world and prepared for it. They focused on trading with one another, they took defense seriously, and while they sometimes tolerated communists in their midst, they rarely made heroes of them.

The consequence of that Cold War clarity, and the Soviet and Chinese understanding that the West was willing to fight to preserve freedom across the planet, was a relative peace. And that relative peace was the West’s undoing.

For the half-century from the end of World War II until 2000, the world experienced more economic growth than it had in the previous 2,000 years combined. Driven by relative peace, world trade took off both within the West and with the developing world.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to perpetual prosperity. The West, basking in its victory over the Soviets and its certainty that communist China would evolve into a modern Western democracy if only allowed to sell us tchotchkes, began to turn on itself.

The peace / communist parties, which had been funded by Moscow and had always been a fringe element of modern Western polity, suddenly morphed into environmentalists and cloaked their anticapitalist ideas in far more voter-friendly “Earth First” shibboleths. Now, just as the money spigot from Russia was coming to an end, a far larger resource was becoming viable…Western governments.

The result was the extraordinary growth in the power of the far left in Western politics. And it wasn’t just environmentalism that was driving the train. As the Cold War wound down, Western nations used their “peace dividends” to shower citizens with benefits while simultaneously seeking to regulate their economies into perfection. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t work!)

The perfect encapsulation of the West’s metastasizing can be seen in the form of the European Union. Imagined as a vehicle to foster peace and then trade between perpetually warring European states, it morphed into a leviathan that not only seeks to control virtually every aspect of citizens’ lives in its member states, but it seeks to control who can grow what and when, how states can control their borders and even whether sovereign states can conduct their own elections.

Like so much of the modern West, an idea that started out as something ostensibly good metastasized into cancer. Stopping the pouring of chemicals directly into rivers morphed into eviscerating farms. A temporary safety net for the downtrodden morphs into generational welfare. An empathetic desire to help victims of war morphs into an invasion by legions of military-aged men.

And it’s not just capitalism and freedom that have taken body blows. The third leg of the stool upon which western civilization stands is Christianity, and it has been brutalized by Western prosperity, as have the foundations of Christianity, namely, marriage and children.

As they say, idle hands are the Devil’s workshop. The West’s relative prosperity has caused citizens not focused on a common enemy to turn on their own history. From British universities dropping Shakespeare and Chaucer to the New York Museum of Natural History removing Teddy Roosevelt’s statue to the Spanish government’s vow to “decolonize“ the nation’s museums, to the cancer of DEI, across the West, nations are turning their backs on their own foundations, the things that set them apart from—and above, frankly—every other civilization in human history. From socialism to communism to Islam, Western intellectuals have led the charge, via schools and the media, to champion everything that is anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-masculine, and anti-white.

At the end of the day, the globalist elites co-opted the hard-won prosperity and peace by leveraging technology, Chinese tchotchkes, and social media algorithms to aim society’s guns at the very things that built success in the first place. They’ve created a Mexican standoff where everyone loses as the core elements of Western civilization are undermined by policies specifically formatted to destroy them, while the resulting “culture” is not equipped to support anything close to the same level of civilization.

All of this is why Donald Trump is for the left, a new Jesus Christ—not in the sense that he’s godlike, because I think we can all agree that he’s not, but because he embodies their eventual destruction. Thus, just as Christ was a heretic whose message of love and a gracious God had to be destroyed because it threatened the established order, Trump’s pro-America, pro-masculinity, and pro-Western civilization message must be destroyed because it threatens the New World Order.

The globalists argue that they are best equipped to structure the lives of citizens, organize world economies, and control everything from speech to cow farts to electricity generation. Any message that suggests that citizens should control their own lives, that capitalism makes for the most prosperous outcomes, and that free speech is a cornerstone of civilization must be quashed.

Western elites think Donald Trump is the common enemy they need to unify citizens under the banner of globalism. They’ve got it backwards. They’re more likely to discover exactly how many of their citizens feel like they’ve been crouching in a foxhole waiting for someone to inspire them to climb out, pick up their weapons, and charge into a battle of ideas to take back their lives. Imagine the sheer horror on the globalists’ faces when they realize that Donald Trump just might be that guy...

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 West Should Stop Being Ashamed of Its Success And Stop Committing Cultural Suicide

I used to debate one of my teachers about culture.  As a fan of Rome I posited it was the greatest and most consequential civilization in human history.  He queried me about why. It’s laws, its size, its economy, its longevity? I suggested the clearest proof was the fact that there may be more Roman ruins remaining than from any ancient civilization in the world.

He disagreed, believing there were African empires whose cultures were equal if not superior to Rome's. The grandest of such being the Mali Empire in West Africa. Lasting from 1226 to 1670, it’s greatest king was Mansa Musa, who is sometimes said to be the richest man who ever lived.

He pressed me on others, stating that architecture and its survival might not be the best measure by which to measure a culture’s greatness.

Wondering if he might be right, I looked a bit more into some of those other societies about which I knew less than Rome.  There were the Incas, the Aztecs, the Egyptians, the Qin and Han Chinese, the Mongols, the Abbasid and Umayyad Caliphates and aforementioned Malian Empire.  All were fascinating.  The Mongols had the largest landlocked empire in history, but left very little in the way of architecture.  There were the Qun and Han dynasties who controlled a quarter of the world’s population some 2000 years ago and built the longest sections of China’s Great Wall. The Abbasid caliphate, which is considered the Islamic Golden Age, was considered to be the most advanced society of its time in reference to things like science, astronomy, math, and medicine.  The Egyptians not only left the Pyramids and Abu Simbel, but their papyrus was the earliest known paper. The Median and Achaemenid Empires of modern day Iran left extraordinary ruins that go back 500 years before Christ. 

Depending on how one wants to characterize them there have been thousands of cultures and civilizations and dynasties throughout human history.  As much as we might know about them, it’s likely there are even more about which we know nothing.  Which brings me back to my original point… how does one measure what a great culture is?  Is it the language they left, is it the ruins they left, is it how much of the earth or her population that it controlled?

It's possible to make an argument for any one of those, but the reality is that given the differences in time, geography and populations, it’s impossible to draw a hierarchical chart that defines “Greatness” with precision, particularly given the differences in what’s left of them.

Nonetheless, I stand by the opinion of my 15-year-old self about Rome being the greatest civilization of the ancient world.

That being said, there’s nothing in the ancient world to compare with what we have in the 21^st century.  And the world of the 21^st century was built by Europeans.  As much as Europe is in the midst of committing cultural suicide, it might be helpful to examine what that European culture has produced.

Yes, it has been cruel, barbaric at times, sanctioned slavery and resulted in bloodshed of native peoples in far off lands.  All those things are true.  But none of them are unique to Europeans.  Depravity is a mark that mankind shares across civilizations and has been constant from one degree or another across the space and time of human existence.

With that out of the way, back to western civilization. It’s brought the world democratic governance. It’s brought the world individual liberty, individual rights ordained by God, limited government and capitalism.  Together those things set the stage for the greatest advancement in the condition of man in all human history.

From the moment most of the people on the planet today wake up until the moment they lay their heads down at night, almost everything they do or interact with is a result of western civilization. Here is a short list of just some of the inventions western civilization has produced:

Automobiles. Telephony. Mobile phones. MRI machines. Plastic. Nuclear power. Bessemer Process steelmaking. Gasoline. Vulcanized rubber. Television. Radio. Elevators. Computers. Flight. Rockets. Electric light. Mechanical reaper. Heart transplants. Vaccines. The Internet. Sewing machines. Skyscrapers. Railroads. The steam engine. Internal combustion engines. Electric washing machines. Barbed wire. Air conditioning. Satellites. Movies. Submarines. Microwaves. Radar. Lasers. Artificial knees and hips. Robots. The movable-type printing press. Antibiotics. Batteries. Refrigeration. And much more.   

Then there are innovations that western civilization has produced:  Containerized shipping. DNA discovery and sequencing. Stock markets. Social media. GPS. Advanced farming. Google maps. Space travel. Blood transfusion. Constitutional Democracy. Individual freedom. Limited government. X ray machines. The assembly line.  Mars landers and solar system probes. And again, much more.

And then there’s science. Of the approximately 800 Nobel Prizes that have been handed out since 1901 in fields like Physics, Chemistry, Economics & Medicine (not including Literature because it’s so subjective and Peace, which after giving one to Barack Obama, has about as much credibility as the UN) Europeans and their offshoots have won approximately 750, including 350 for the United States alone.  

This is the world of the 21^st century and it’s been built by the west. Aside from lost tribes or primitive societies who live like their ancestors did thousands of years ago, there’s virtually not a thing people around the world do on a daily basis that hasn’t been developed by the west.  The west won on the field of battle of ideas and power.  To pretend otherwise is simply fiction.

But that which the west has built is under assault… mostly from within. From citizens who became fat, dumb and happy during the prosperous times to the invitation into their nations tens of millions of people who don’t share their culture, most of whom come from cultures anathema to it.

Prosperity is a two edged sword.  On the one hand it has created a civilization greater than anything in history, but the beneficiaries of that prosperity have lost sight of the hard work, sacrifice, risk and perseverance it takes to create prosperity or how difficult it is to maintain. 

As a result, many, if not a majority of western citizens detest their own culture.  They have tunnel vision, focused with a modern day perspective on their forefathers’ flaws while creating a fictional nirvana-like perspective on every other civilization in history.  The self loathing is rampant within the west.

It's one thing to tolerate or even encourage self reflection in the pursuit of self improvement.  But that’s not what the left does. Like a 78 pound college student suffering from anorexia who looks in the mirror and sees herself as a “fat cow”, western liberals see the sins of their fathers or focus on the imperfections of their society and believe it’s evil, and like the anorexic, they engage in self sabotage, only in this case, it’s the culture they harm.

Culture and civilization are fragile, hard to build and harder to maintain. It’s particularly difficult when the youth of a nation despise their birthright, disrespect its legacy and actively undermine its foundations. Combine that with elites who are the fountainhead from which that disdain arises, and you have a dire future.

The left accuses Trump and the MAGA adherents of being racist nationalists. We’re not.  Charles de Gaulle perhaps said it best: “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism is when hate for people other than your own comes first.”  America and the west will not survive the rest of this century if their citizens don’t become patriots.  Indeed, Osama bin Laden saw the writing on the wall:  “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” Self loathing may communicate many things, but strength is not one of them. 

Don't Look Now But The Democrats of 2020 are Eerily Similar to the Nazis of 1933...

One of the brilliant things about the United States’ founding fathers was their understanding of human nature. They understood that it is the nature of man to seek to accumulate power. It’s been that way throughout human history. The seemingly unquenchable thirst for the accumulation of power has created empires across the globe. In Africa you had the Egyptians, the Songhai and the Carthaginians. Asia had the Ming, the Han, the Mongols, and of course the Ottomans. Europe had the Greeks, Romans, and the Spanish. The Americas had the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Incas. The British eventually assembled an empire that literally circled the world.

The parts of the world that were not subsumed into giant empires were part of smaller civilizations of varying sizes that operated, in most cases, through the accumulation of power via conquest and slavery. It was usually the conflict or potential conflict with competing powers that dictated how large a nation or an empire would grow. Because, after all, it is largely a trait of men to seek to accumulate more power until prudence dictates not doing so – and even then in some cases prudence is not much of a deterrent. And that applies even more to competing powers within a state than to those between states.

Our founding fathers knew this and decided to craft a Constitution to yoke the darker nature of men. Thus we have the federal system, where states have some powers and the federal government has others. The federal government would handle most large national issues while states would handle those closer to the people.  We have a separation of federal power between three theoretically equal branches of government. Within the legislative branch – which at the time of writing was expected to be the first among equals – there is a separation between the houses, and within the houses different powerbases. The states appointed Senators and the citizens elected the Representatives. Add to all of this the staggering of terms of office and you have a vehicle that was designed to limit the powers of mobs and keep any single group from being able to play on the emotions of men and take power.

And finally of course, for the single most powerful limit on the accumulation of government power, you had the Bill of Rights which clearly articulated the rights of the people, both individual and collective, that could not be tread on by the government. Free speech, a free press, free practice of religion, the freedom of assembly, a right to be secure in their persons and homes, and most important of all, because it protects all the others, the right to bear arms.

Our Constitution, like its authors, was and is not perfect, but over the years it’s evolved to ban slavery, grant equal application of laws and to expand suffrage. What is perhaps most interesting about the American Constitution is the fact that it’s guided the country for 233 years without a standing army of enforcers. Yes, there is an army of course, but it’s not used to keep citizens in line, because there is no line to be kept in. America was, for most of its history, a nation defined by freedom. Citizens could largely go about and do and say what they wanted. They could buy land where they wanted. They could start just about any kind of business they wanted. They could worship as they wanted. They could say anything that came to their minds… although whether or not that was prudent is another matter. Americans could move from place to place without permission of the government. They could, at the end of the day exercise their freedom, and that came from the Constitution. Barack Obama accurately stated “Generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you. But it doesn't say what the state or federal government must do on your behalf.” Obama meant that as a criticism of the document, but the fact is, that is exactly why our nation has endured and our freedom has endured so long and allowed us to change the face of the world along the way.

Which brings us to America circa 2020… Virtually all of those key elements that have kept our nation and her citizens free are today under direct assault… largely by the Democrat party and their partners in the media, academia, BLM and Antifa.

The left is today using the blueprint of the Nazi party to bring America as we know it to an end. Although the Nazi party came to power legally, constitutionally in Germany in 1933, prior to that the Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung - SA) had spent a decade using violence and intimidation to cow some Germans into submission while simultaneously emboldening others to take up their cause. Once the Nazis were in power it was game over for a free Germany. The model of using the freedoms / rights afforded citizens of a nation to take control of that nation and then eviscerating those very laws and rights that allowed them to come to power in the first place can have staggering results. The Nazis took a dysfunctional post WWI Germany and turned it into an extraordinarily efficient killing machine, both of its own citizens and millions of others as it set the world on a course of war. That model of gaining power followed by death and destruction has proved highly effective in modern times from Robert Mugabe to Hugo Chavez to Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping.

And today the left is seeking to use that very model to destroy America. Not sure? Just listen to them. They want to pack the Supreme Court. They want to eliminate the Electoral College. They want to eliminate free speech. They want to take away your guns. They have no compunction about using the IRS to stifle opposition. They have no problem using the FBI to overturn a fair election. They want to defund the police. They want to expropriate your property. They seek to rewrite American history. They want to implement laws based on race. They want to decide what communities look like. They want to keep schools and churches closed. They want to obliterate science. They want to decide what art you see. And of course they want to control the means of production to save the planet from the fiction of global warming.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Make no mistake, Democrats do not decry the violence in the streets, they seek to harness it. Make no mistake, Democrats hold no love for the Constitution other than how it can be used to bring them more power. Make no mistake, the Democrats don’t care one iota about your freedom or your liberty and they will take them in a heartbeat, if you let them. And this is not a bug in their system, it’s a feature. The Democrat party in 2020 no longer has a vested interest in freedom. Their only goal is power and subjugation. “Think what we believe or you’ll be cancelled.” “Say anything we don’t like and you’ll be cancelled.” “Support our opposition and you’ll be cancelled.” Today mostly what they do is get you fired, kicked out of school and shamed on social media, but with amorphous “hate crime” legislation advancing on every front, soon there will be literally no place to hide, because words no longer mean anything so the woke can literally characterize anything as “hate”. Taken individually some may argue these are nothing like Hitler’s fascist state. Perhaps, but collectively they are as clear a portent to the future as was Mein Kampf.

The most telling thing about this situation is that it’s not actually the Democrats per se leading it. It’s the Twitter and Facebook mobs. It’s the fascists at BLM and Antifa. It’s academia and the media. The Democrats (who nonetheless agree with all of it) are too spineless to actually believe in anything other than power. They are not leading, but rather playing catch-up, trying to run to get out in front of a parade that’s already in progress and pretend they're leading it to keep the money flowing in. Once in power – i.e. having the White House and both houses of congress – they will enact every over the top progressive policy BLM and George Soros can come up with because they understand that if they are not on the bleeding edge of wokeness, the mobs will simply replace them with people who are even more hardcore.

One wonders what the reaction to all of this will be from Americans who still value liberty and freedom… will they go quietly into that not so good night or will they “cling to guns or religion” and decide to push back against the new fascism?

First They Came...

With a respectful nod to Martin Niemöller, I present First They Came...

Obama, Mohammed & ICANN - The Biggest Bad Deal No One's Talking About

Thankfully humans are no longer slaves to their environment. We have been able to use our creativity and ingenuity to adapt (some of) the world around us to make our lives longer, less dangerous and in many cases, more enjoyable. Throughout history there have been many inventions or innovations that have changed the world: The printing press. The internal combustion engine. Flight. The wheel. Plastic. Penicillin. Computers. Nuclear power. And much more.

Of all of the inventions of man however, the Internet has changed the world more, and more quickly, than any invention or innovation in human history. In what comes down to basically a quarter century – although it’s roots were laid in the late ‘60’s – what most people think of as the Internet, has changed practically every aspect of civilization. It has created a worldwide library people have easy access to from Manhattan island to an island is the south Pacific and most places in between. It has given a voice to the oppressed across the planet. It has changed the way we shop. It has changed the way they play. It has brought everything from scientific study to pornography to investing to our fingertips with the click of a button. It’s even changing the way people date and get married!

It’s no surprise that the roots of the Internet and most – although not all – of its innovations and superheroes have been American. At its root the Internet is about the sharing of information and ideas, and the United States has a stronger foundation for free speech and the free exchange of ideas than any nation in history. That fundamental freedom of speech, protected by the 1st Amendment, has fully taken root in the Internet and the result has been (mostly) spectacular.

It’s because the Internet has been such a revolutionary force for (again, mostly) good that the latest example of Barack Obama‘s hostility towards American Exceptionalism is so despicable. Although the Internet is truly international, since its beginning at its very foundation has sat an American guiding hand, seeking to ensure its basic functionality, smooth operations and widespread access. Barack Obama doesn’t like that. He doesn’t’ believe there should be an American guiding hand. Last year, his Department of Commerce announced that it was planning on relinquishing the last bit of control the United States has by transferring the power to assign domain names to an international body.

That might not sound like much… but it’s a BIG deal. Right now, the United States is the only country on the planet who can decide who is allowed to have a domain and who can’t. While Barack Obama and most of Washington regularly demonstrate exactly how incompetent our government can be, on the domain front they have been rock solid in support of free speech. Today I can register a domain criticizing Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Mark Zuckerberg, Iran or anyone else and not worry about the ability to say what I want… even if no one else was listening. Under Barack Obama’s plan that would no longer be true.

Today domains are managed by an international organization called ICANN, via a contract from the Department of Commerce.  That plan is to have ICANN accountable to some international organization, very possibly the United Nations. Yes, the very same body that put Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Russia on the Human Rights Council. That should work out well from anyone who wants to create a website promoting Falun Gong or exposing the Global Warming hoax, supporting Israel, or criticizing a rich and influential neighbor. Of course it might end up being some other "international" or "multistakeholder" organization that's even less accountable than the UN...  An OPEC for the Internet if you will. At least on the UN the US has a permanent seat on the Security Council!

Although Congress stepped in in December and stripped the Department of Commerce of the power to spend resources on transferring control when the ICANN contract is up in September, Barack Obama seems undeterred.  Last month Department of State Ambassador Daniel Seplveda told a Brussels press conference that he hoped that if the transfer was not completed by September, “significant progress would have been made”.

Once again Barack Obama wants what he wants, regardless of what the Constitution says. As we all know from his immigration power grab and his Obamacare waivers, the law is little barrier to Barack Obama's action.  This time however his disdain for the idea of American Exceptionalism is going to harm not only Americans, but anyone around the world who has looked to the Internet as a forum for free speech and the free exchange of ideas.   When censorship and crony capitalism replace free speech and free markets as descriptors of the Internet, we'll know how that happened.  When Beijing and Moscow get to decide what you can and can't say on the Internet, we'll no doubt look back longingly to the relative Wild West Internet of the early 21st century. When your ISP shuts off your service as they enforce a "multistakeholder" ban on Mohammed cartoons, we'll know exactly who's responsible.  Thank you Mr. President.

Net Neutrality exposes Barack Obama's not so well hidden inner Vladimir Putin

On Thursday the FCC moved to regulate the Internet via what’s commonly called Net Neutrality – although like Obamacare before it was passed, we don’t know everything that’s included in it! Net Neutrality is beyond a doubt the single most despicable thing Barack Obama has done as president. (The FCC is ostensibly an independent agency, but under Obama it’s been anything but.) The big push for Net Neutrality came from Silicon Valley content companies who were whining that ISPs such as Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T were slowing or threatening to slow content that sucked up massive amounts of bandwidth. They are after all the ones who have to invest to expand that bandwidth. These ISPs were at the same time telling companies like Netflix and Google that they could ensure timely delivery of their content if they paid for the extra bandwidth that was being used. The Silicon Valley companies squealed to Barack Obama and he started leaning on the FCC.

Now this should not be viewed as a defense of Comcast or Time Warner. Both are horrible companies when it comes to service and customer service. Terrible! And you might ask how can they survive if they piss off so many customers? Government, of course. In most places they reign as the result monopolies… imposed by government.

This might sound like it’s just about whether you can have House of Cards running simultaneously in three rooms in your house or in every home in your neighborhood. It’s not. It’s about the government seeking to control the Internet, the single most powerful vehicle for the advancement of the human condition in history. That might sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. Today, because of the Internet more people have access to more information, more quickly than at any point since… well, ever. Not only that, they also have access to more products and services, usually at lower cost than any generation ever enjoyed. And perhaps most importantly, they have a vehicle through which they can express their thoughts and share their ideas and highlight oppression & injustice more freely and to more people more quickly than has ever been possible in human history.

A decade from now much of that will be a mere distant memory. Not that the Internet won’t exist, it will. But it will be a government controlled utility rather than the Wild West platform for the free exchange of ideas that it is today. Don’t believe it? Don’t forget, a year ago this same FCC proposed sending “researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run.” Six months before that Democrat Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Durbin were debating whether bloggers deserved 1st Amendment protections. And of course this is the administration that used IRS commissioners to stifle the free speech of opponents and the Justice Department to go after reporter James Rosen who just happened to be critical of it.

So now, we have Barack Obama’s FCC telling the country that the government gets to be the arbitrators of what can be said or done on the Internet. Imagine if the government decided that WiFi was a bridge too far when we were all hooked up to the Internet by those static filled phone lines. Imagine if the government put the kibosh on online music sharing when record companies complained about declining CD sales. Imagine if the government supported the status quo when Yahoo was the dominant search provider or MySpace was the dominant social networking site. In what universe would have any of that have been a good thing?

As bad as stifling innovation is, that’s not the worst of it. The worst? The death of free speech. Imagine if Richard Nixon had at his disposal the kind of control the FCC says it has now during Watergate. Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinski affair. George Bush in reference to GTMO or Abu Ghraib.

Barack Obama no doubt wishes he had that kind of power during Fast and Furious, the IRS Tea Party Scandal, Benghazi and countless other times. Now he pretty much will have it through his puppets on the FCC. Unfortunately the spineless obsequious leadership in the GOP will likely do nothing to stop this abuse of power. The result will be something slightly less onerous than being perpetrated by Barack Obama’s hero, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow. Putin can simply kill his opponents with little worry of consequence. Here in the United States, thankfully, that’s unlikely to go over as smoothly, however with the FCC’s unconstitutional overreach such measures wouldn’t be necessary. Why kill someone and make a martyr out of them when it’s much easier to simply muzzle them, or if that doesn’t work, label them a criminal and jail them with arbitrary regulations that you’ve set up specifically to target opponents? When government gets to decide who can be its critics or what its critics can say, it’s not a long march to a dictatorship.

Alas, our freedoms aren’t being taken from us by some foreign power with a gun pointed at our collective heads. No, staggeringly, American freedoms are being taken away by the very government a majority of brain-dead voters somehow sent to Washington. What’s worse, the opposition in Congress seems more than willing to capitulate and let the president get away with whatever he does, regardless of what’s in the Constitution, so long as they can stay in power in their little fiefdoms. With Obamacare and what the WSJ dubs the Obamanet, Barack Obama has succeeded in gutting both economic freedom and the freedom of speech in less than six years. Things that largely survived for 220 years... down the drain in six years! The consequences of the mistake that is Barack Obama in the White House will haunt Americans for decades to come, including those who were smart enough not to hand the keys of the greatest kingdom in human history to a petulant man more than willing to lie to get what he wants and a disdain for the very Constitution he swore to uphold.