Tag Archive for: America

Preserving Freedom in the Face of Challenges

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think and act anew.” — Abraham Lincoln


America, the land of liberty, has long been a beacon of hope and opportunity for people worldwide. Its founding principles – liberty, freedom, and justice – have shaped its identity. This foundation, laid by the framers, has come to be known as American Exceptionalism.

However, in the face of evolving challenges, it is imperative that we not only understand the concept but actively work to preserve and strengthen it for future generations.

When asked what kind of government the delegates had created, Benjamin Franklin famously replied, “A republic if you can keep it.” These words hold even greater significance as we confront a crucial juncture in our country’s history.

The slogan “Make America Great Again” is not merely a catchphrase; it embodies a call to action, a commitment to uphold the values that have made America exceptional. In recent years, however, these values have come under attack. The Obama/Biden administration failed to deliver its promises, leaving many Americans disillusioned and disheartened. To the leftists, failure is not only acceptable but expected.

Since Donald Trump announced his candidacy, the Democrats have launched one failed hoax after another in an attempt to derail his presidency. Their efforts, driven by fraudulent claims and partisan agendas, have only sought to erode the genuine efforts of a president with good intentions.

But now is not the time for despair. Our highest priority must be the preservation of our nation’s freedom. We have faced challenges before and emerged more robust, and we must do so again.

The threats we face today are manifold: encroaching Islamism, socialism, Marxism. These ideologies seek to undermine the very foundations of our society, threatening our individual liberty and prosperity. But we cannot afford to succumb to fear or complacency.

To combat these threats, it is crucial to articulate clear policy proposals that uphold American values. This includes:

It is strengthening educational programs that promote an understanding of American history, values, and the principles of democracy.

We are advocating for policies that support the free market and individual freedoms, thereby countering the collectivist ideologies that seek to undermine these principles.
Promoting international cooperation and alliances that support the spread of democracy and the rule of law, thereby countering the global reach of authoritarian ideologies.

Freedom, in all its forms, is our greatest legacy. Throughout history, brave men and women have fought and died to protect it. From the battlefields of Europe to the jungles of the Far East, Americans have made countless sacrifices to safeguard our way of life.

In the not-too-distant past, we confronted and defeated the forces of Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. We stood firm against tyranny and oppression, refusing to waver in adversity. And now, we must once again rise to meet the challenges of our time.

The insidious threat of leftism, socialism, Islamism, and Marxism looms large, but we cannot afford to shrink from the fight. We must meet these challenges head-on, with courage and determination.

Now is the time to stand up and be counted. We cannot give up or give in. We must be willing to do whatever it takes to preserve our nation’s freedom and ensure a bright future for generations to come.

This will require unity, resolve, and a steadfast commitment to our core principles. We must be willing to defend our freedoms against all who seek to undermine them, whether foreign or domestic.

But we cannot do it alone. We need the support of every patriotic American who believes in the principles that make this country great. Together, we can overcome any challenge and emerge stronger than ever before.

For those who are concerned about the direction of the country, there are practical actions that can be taken to support the preservation of American values:

Vote in elections, and this is a must.

Participate in local community activities and public discourse to influence policy and public opinion.

Educate yourself and others about the principles of American exceptionalism and the importance of defending these values.

Defending America against all enemies is not just a slogan but a solemn duty that falls on everyone. We must be willing to stand up for what is right, defend our freedoms, and ensure that America remains a shining beacon of liberty for the world to see.

Now is the time to rise to the occasion, embrace the challenges before us, and reaffirm our commitment to the principles that have made America the greatest nation on earth. United, we will prevail.

These profound words from John F. Kennedy still resonate deeply: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

©2024. Amil Imani. All rights reserved.

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Reflections on Russia-Ukraine War — 2 Years Later

This is a repost of an article authored by a priest in the Orthodox Church of America whose wife is Ukrainian and still has family in Ukraine. The article was written two years ago, just as the war broke out, and as I read over it, it struck me how it could have easily been written yesterday. Truth is like that. It ages well. Below is an excerpt from his article, published February 25, 2022, under the title A Reflection on Ukraine, America, Russia, and War


A Reflection on Ukraine, America, Russia, and War

By Fr. Zachariah Lynch

Few it seems have cared, up until now, that the faithful of Ukraine are being subjected to spiritual violence (which has manifested physically). Few it seems have cared that the Ecumenical Patriarchate is in open and full communion with unrepentant schismatics.

(To educate yourself on the Ukrainian government’s pernicious work to divide the Orthodox in that country and use one side to commit violence against the other, see my article from last year, U.S./NATO-funded proxy war in Ukraine fueling hatred, persecution of ancient Christian community.)

So spiritual violence has been ravaging Ukraine, and few have said much. We value a nominal “peace” above true peace, for true peace cannot be had in communion with false brethren. Now major physical violence is taking place, but what is worse for the soul, spiritual or material violence?

Could it be that the assault on the spiritual peace of Ukraine has affected its physical peace?

How many Americans have been aware that there has been an effective civil war in eastern Ukraine since 2014? How many of us were concerned when Ukrainians were shooting at and killing Ukrainians? Was that okay?

As an American, I will speak to my country. I’m not in Russia. I don’t support the attack. But, we, as Americans, should ask ourselves – is Russia doing anything much different than our own country has done? When in the 21st century alone have we “respected” other nations’ sovereign boards? (Look at our southern border at current!)

At the end of the 20th century, it was a US-led NATO that dismantled Yugoslavia. New borders, created by the US and friends, were established. These borders served US interests. Let us look at the Middle East, when did we respect borders there? The US has stated and acted upon the notion – if a leader is deemed bad and against “freedom and democracy,” it is a duty to overthrow such a leader and carve up the country as the Western powers see fit. When we do it, it is “good.” When Russia does the same thing, it is bad. (Again I’m not justifying anything, I’m making an analogy.) The US government is the epitome of the pot calling the kettle black, as are most of the European powers. Let us as Americans reflect that in this century alone our government waged almost none stop war since 2001. The US government has been in conflict with some countries or states for two decades. If we go back and count the years starting from the end of World War II, the number of years of war or conflict involving the US government is much more than the number of years with no conflict. And we are going to lecture the world on peace? All that to say, we are guilty of the very things we accuse Russia of doing. I guess that is called hypocrisy. The finger we are pointing at Russia is dripping with blood. Maybe we should wash our own hands first.

I’m an American. I honor my country, but I do not support the agenda of war and violence driving much of foreign policy. I’m very grieved by it. Let us take care of our own house first. As in many places, I do not think the government always reflects the people. I think most people want peace and to live their daily lives in calm. Sadly, there are many in power who are hell-bent on stirring up conflict and trouble for the world and people at large. We should also realize that US foreign policy has also played a role in cultivating the current events in Ukraine.

I think that a part of what is transpiring is the typical distraction tactic. The Covid crisis has revealed that the “free” West is not as “free” as it claims. Many Western countries went full dictator mode, thus revealing their true colors. Oh, yes, of course, to keep us all safe because they care for us from their million-dollar mansions. America is in deep crisis and turmoil, much of it fed by certain agendas that are actively seeking to encourage fear, hatred, and division. Our own house is tumbling and corroding away. Oh, but look! That dastardly Putin! He’s a new Hitler. I guess it takes one to know one. In America, the attempt is being made to distract us again. And yes some are insane enough to pursue a war with Russia to do so. I don’t know how far the events will go, but I do know from history that war is a great distraction and even a wonderful tool for “rebuilding” the world.

Of course, one could wander down the labyrinth of geopolitical agendas. I’m familiar with a number of them. I won’t do that right now. The historic discrimination of the Western world against Orthodoxy could be noted as an aspect also. But that is a big subject.

In closing to this my few thoughts, I will return to the spiritual aspect.

What can we as Christians do? Repent. Russia, for all its problems, is not our enemy.

Have we in America repented of the many wars and atrocities perpetrated in the name of our country? Should we not start there? Are we repenting for the “legal” slaughter of babies in their mother’s womb? Are we repenting for the open promotion, in the name of our country, of numerous forms of debauchery and immorality? Are we repenting for the epidemic of drug abuse and suicide in our nation? Are we repenting for being the top exporter of corrosive “culture” and “values?” Are we repenting for the destruction of the family and the explosion of divorce, adultery, fornication, and porn? This list could go on. It seems our own house is full of enemies.

Read the entire article here.

Copyright 2024. Leo Hohmann. All rights reserved.


LeoHohmann.com is 100 percent reader supported, not beholden to any corporate ads or sponsorships. If you appreciate the independent analysis you see here and would like to support my work, you may send a donation of any size c/o Leo Hohmann, P.O. Box 291, Newnan, GA 30264, or via credit card HERE. Thank you.

Will America Survive the Threat of Islam?

Nearly 1400 years ago, a large number of Muslim jihadists from across the scorching Arabian desert, motivated by the ideology of Islam, indoctrinated by Muhammad, unafraid of death, conquered Iran (Persia), one of the greatest, strongest and most tolerant empires known throughout the history of man. The invasion of Persia was completed five years after the death of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, though Persian resistance continued for centuries up to and including the present time. (Most Iranians consider the current Islamic regime as the continuation of 1400 years of Islamic tyranny and oppression).

The Bedouin Arabs who toppled the Sassanid Empire were propelled not only by a desire for conquest and to steal Persian jewels and treasures, but also to enslave Iranian women and children, while imposing their barbaric ideology upon the entire population. With that, they almost wiped out one of the most benevolent and ancient religions, Zoroastrianism, which is often called the mother of all revealed religions.

The political nature of Islam demanded that a conquered people not only convert to Islam but also regard its past history as a time of darkness before the light of Islam came. Today the Islamic Republic of Iran is busy purging Pre-Islamic Persian history from children’s textbooks. Islam required conquered people to scorn their own past and love their Islamic Arab conquerors by striving to imitate them. According to Islam, all history before Islam was an era of “darkness” and should be discarded. Islam is a brutal, hyper-masculine, barbarian, tribal warrior cult that glories in murder, mutilation, rape, genocide, terrorism, destruction, and anarchy.

When Arabs, a collection of backward, nomadic warrior tribes who did not even have a fully developed scripted language, conquered sophisticated cultures such as Egypt, Syria, Persia, and the Byzantine Empire, they took control over some of the world’s largest centers of accumulated knowledge. To claim that there was an “Islamic Golden Age” is like saying a group of savages storming into the world’s largest libraries, murdering all the librarians, and then claiming to have written all the books there, gives credit to this myth. Islam’s much-vaunted “Golden Age” was in fact just the twilight of conquered pre-Islamic cultures, an echo of times past. In all honesty, Islam’s trophy to human civilization is and always has been, Islamic terrorism.

The prophet of Islam motivated his rapidly growing body of followers to rally around him by proclaiming: if they are victorious, they will have the treasures of the infidels as well as their women and children as slaves to hold or sell; if the faithful kill the infidels in doing the work of Allah, a further reward awaits them in paradise; and, in the unlikely event that they are killed, they find themselves in Allah’s glorious paradise for an eternal life of joy and bliss.

The Persians underestimated the power and dedication of this newly formed Islamic ideology of hate and violence by desert dwellers. An unexpected unorthodox attack on the Persian army caused it to fall into the hands of the butchers of Islam and eventually, the culture of death prevailed and the era of Islamic terrorism began. Americans need to learn from the Persian experience and become more vigilant.

Americans must understand the history of Islam if they want to avoid the Persian experience. However, 1400 years later, a few Islamic terrorist States, flushed with petrodollars, are seeking and working hard for Islamic world domination through worldwide Islamic terrorism. They are determined to destroy everything America and the free world stand for and intend to replace it with the most barbaric ideology known as Sharia. Islam sees Christian America as a formidable enemy standing in its path of world domination. Hence, it has waged stealth jihad on Christian America. It is time to wake up and wake up fast.

In many surprising ways, America resembles the great ancient Persia. Like the ancient Persians who were the first-world managers and the most tolerant empire-builders, America, by its constitution, is also the most tolerant and benevolent nation in the world. Let us hope that America’s destiny will not end up like Persia’s.

Regretfully, reading about the Islamic religiously mandated horrific acts and even seeing them on television or the Internet may momentarily repulse, but does not terribly concern many Americans. After all, those things still are happening on the other side of the world and away from their homes, we are safe in Fortress America, so goes the thinking.

“Fortress America” is a delusion that even the events of 9/11 and the Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan massacre seems to have failed to dispel. Many prefer to believe that the assault of 9/11 was an aberration, since nothing as it has happened since, and it is unlikely that anything of the sort will ever happen again, so goes the wishful thinking. Reality portrays a vastly different picture. America is far from a fortress, given its vast wide-open borders. It is a nation of laws where all forms of freedom are enshrined in its constitution; where Americans live by a humane ethos diametrically different from those of Islamist savageries. Sadly, these differences confer great advantages to the Islamists and place America in imminent danger.

The breach of “Fortress America” from the air on 9/11 is only the first installment of many more forthcoming heinous assaults, about which we have been repeatedly warned by Muslim thugs living in caves. Unless we abandon our way of thinking, we will suffer the consequences of a dangerous complacency. We need to stop relying on the invincibility of the law-enforcement people and willingly make the sacrifices that would protect our way of life.

I have never claimed that the reported 1.5 billion Muslims are all jihadists aiming to destroy civilization and establish Muhammad’s Ummah over all of us. I certainly know that the active jihadists are a small minority. Yet, it takes a blind eye to ignore militant minorities. Did Hitler become the Chancellor of Germany because he and his gang got the majority vote in Germany? More than 65% of Germans were not supporters of Hitler and his party and viewed the Nazis as louts and worthless. Yet, we all know what this little minority did while being ignored.

What about forest fires? You cannot ignore a little smoldering fire here, a little smoldering fire there because the rest of the forest is not on fire. Only a fool will ignore these fires because they will eventually devour the forest.

The recent migration of Muslims to non-Islamic lands began as a seemingly harmless, even useful; trickle of desirable cheap needed labor. Before long, greater and greater numbers of Muslims deluged the new territories, and as they gained in numbers—by high birth rate as well as new arrivals—Muslims began reverting to their intolerant ways by, for instance, demanding legal status for Sharia (Islamic laws), the type of draconian laws that for the most part resemble those of man’s barbaric past.

Just a sobering note; mild Islamism is already here. As an example, there was the Muslim cab driver of the Minneapolis Airport and his refusal to ferry passengers with alcohol or even those with seeing-eye dogs; Muslim inmates demanding to be served only halal food, Kentucky Fried Chicken opens first halal restaurant in New York City, honor killing, Muslim students badgering universities for special facilities for their meetings, and, for the first time ever two Muslim Congressmen assuming the office by swearing on the Quran and not the Bible.

Islam need not even literally destroy the civilized world. All it needs is to gain enough power to impose its worse-than-death Sharia on everyone. If you are not up to speed with the horrors that Muslim governments and their jihadist foot soldiers commit on a daily basis, you need to open your eyes and deal with this deadly threat of Islam with much more realism.

Ignoring the smoldering fire and relying on a few local “firefighters” to keep the fires from spreading is either naive or outright criminal, but it is certainly the easiest thing to do. That’s why I have chosen to fight the fire and I am calling for help to put out Islam, the source that raises arsonists — the minority that they may be. It takes one arsonist to set a fire that a thousand firefighters will have difficulty putting out. The few Muslims who are brave enough to advocate reform of their religion are tossed out of mosques or, very likely labeled as apostates with a death warrant.

When our leaders, for instance, call Islam a great religion, they are appeasing, if not lying outright. We the people, elect our leaders and we hold them accountable to be honorable. When they are using their voice to call Islam a great religion, the most deadly threat to everything we cherish, not only do they legitimize Islamofascism, but also they infuse the rest of us with a false belief.

While people like former President Obama glorify Islam, the barbarians have made it inside our fortress. They have infiltrated our system of government. This time around, the people of the sword have their collaborator, Useful Idiots, inside busily doing all they can to dismantle our republic and replace it with worse death Islamic ideology by appeasing the enemy.

©2023 Amil Imani. All rights reserved.

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European Author Explains the Massive Disconnect between Young and Old Americans on Capitalism

FEE recently sat down with German author Rainer Zitelmann to discuss his latest book, the global financial crisis, and the future of capitalism.


The great writer Henry Hazlitt once observed that the path to prosperity is achieved through production, and the best way to achieve production is to maximize incentives.

“And the way to do that, as the modern world has discovered, is through the system known as capitalism,” wrote Hazlitt, “the system of private property, free markets, and free enterprise.”

Despite the fruits of modern capitalism, free markets around the world find themselves under assault and in decline. I recently sat down with author and entrepreneur Rainer Zitelmann to discuss this phenomenon as chronicled in his latest book: In Defense of Capitalism.

In a wide-ranging discussion, the German author talked about central banking, the rise of planned economies, and the uncertain future of capitalism. [Editor’s note: The interview has been edited and abridged for clarity and concision.]

Q: Your book was recently released. It’s your twenty-seventh book, by my count. Who is this book targeted for?

I wrote this book for people who are pro market. Maybe more emotional or anti-socialist. To provide them with the facts and all the arguments so they can have the discussion. Whether it’s about poverty, inequality, climate change, or monopolies. It’s not a book written for anti-capitalists.

It’s written for a global audience. It was an attempt to reach people in every country. It’s an expensive process. Every country costs 14,000 Euros. No one helped me. I paid from my own pocket (laughs).

This book is published in 12 languages.

You’ve written many books. What makes this one different from your other books?

The difference is, first, I address all these arguments from anti-capitalists.

It helped to get this international approach. There will be editions in Italy, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, the United States, the Netherlands, and many other countries. People in Albania can access it.

It includes a great deal of original research and surveys. It contains the biggest poll ever done on the image of capitalism, the most comprehensive.

What did you find?

I knew in the beginning that capitalism is a dirty word for many. I wanted to know how much. It’s not the word. Even if we don’t use the word, we still have a negative connotation. The difference is negligible.

Q: There’s a chapter in your book that breaks down attitudes about capitalism by country. But let’s first talk globally. What is the state of capitalism today?

I think it’s under attack almost everywhere in the world. When you compare the situation in the 1980s and 1990s with today it’s a huge difference. In the 80s we had Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. We shouldn’t forget Deng Xiaoping in China, he was very important. We had pro market reforms in Vietnam and Sweden and many other countries.

Today the situation is completely different. I read the last index of economic freedom from the Heritage Foundation. The US has the worst ranking since it started in 1995. There are sixteen European countries more capitalist than the US. The UK has its worst ranking ever. China has its worst ranking ever.

You see it everywhere. I don’t have to tell you about the United States. But in Europe we are heading the direction of a planned economy. It’s a total disaster right now. In China, we had these great economic reforms in the 1980s that made them so successful. Xi Jinping is now going back into the direction of more state intervention. In Latin America it’s much the same, right now in Chile, for example. One of the few exceptions, as I’ve noted, is Vietnam.

Q: I was surprised to see, from data in your book, that Americans have the second highest attitude toward economic freedom in the world. Can you explain?

Yes, it does. But it goes deeper than that though.

You see a huge difference in the perception of capitalism among Americans older than sixty and younger than thirty. Americans over 60, they are what Europeans think about Americans: pro markets, pro entrepreneurship.

They are very enthusiastic about it. We calculated this anti-capitalist and capitalist coefficient; Americans over sixty have one of the highest coefficients in the world. The younger ones, it’s slightly negative.

This is the biggest difference of all the countries we measured. There’s no other country in our survey where there’s such a large difference in age groups. In fact, in some countries you see the opposite, like in Italy. Young people in some countries are even more pro capitalist than older people. Not as a big a difference as it is in the United States, but it’s an inverse relationship.

That’s fascinating. What do you attribute this to? Why is there such a gap here in the US between younger and older generations in their perceptions on capitalism.

I’ve thought a lot about it. I don’t know if I have the answer.

Of course first you think about schools and universities. Every day they tell students about the evils of capitalism. But to be honest, this is also true in a lot of other countries. Maybe it’s worse in the United States, I don’t know. But if you go to Europe, universities are also this way.

Again, one exception is Vietnam. I was invited by four different universities, and had a lecture in Hanoi at Foreign Trade University, which is one of the best universities. They invited me to do a workshop on how to improve the image of rich people. Can you imagine a workshop like that at a university in the US (laughs)?

I have another theory as well. Take someone who is 30 today. In 2008, he was about 15 years old and paying attention to politics for the first time. The first thing he heard is there’s a financial crisis and this is caused by capitalism, and almost everything breaks down. This is the first political experience in his life!

Of course, you and I know that this was not a crisis of capitalism. This crisis was not because of a lack of regulation. But it’s not important what you and I think. Their interpretation is important. And for many young people this was the first experience in their political life.

And then there are other things like student loans and other problems. I don’t think there’s one answer but many.

You should know better than I. You live in the United States. What is your answer?

Hey, I’m asking the questions here. Just kidding. I agree that universities and schools play a big role. They have grown more naked in their anti-capitalism in recent years. I think culture plays a big role. Movies. Television …

By the way, sorry to interrupt you.

Not at all.

You mention movies. You should read a book I wrote on this. It was published by Cato: The Rich in Public Opinion. I have one chapter in this book—we had very detailed research about Hollywood movies, and how rich people are portrayed in Hollywood movies. It’s the first book about prejudice against rich people. Rich people as a minority.

There are so many books about prejudice against people. Against black people. Gay people. Overweight people, and whatever. There was not a single book on prejudice and stereotypes against wealthy people.

It was great stuff. We looked at more than 600 movies, and in the end we looked at 43 in which rich people played an important role. And you’re absolutely right…rich people were portrayed overwhelmingly negatively.

Your book is about capitalism, but it’s hard to talk about that without talking about socialism a little. I was in middle school when the Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet Union collapsed not long after. Yet Marxism seems to be thriving again in many parts of the world in various forms. Does that surprise you?

Yes and no. That was a long time ago. The younger generation hasn’t lived in a world with socialism. For them it’s only history. Of course they should learn this in school, but teachers don’t tell them about it.

I do lectures all over the world, and I have one test question I ask students when I visit them in Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America. I ask them, Have you heard about Mao’s Great Leap Forward at the end of the 1950s in school?

Whether I’m speaking to thirty people, three hundred, or three thousand, I ask this question. Very few people say yes. They haven’t heard about it! This is the biggest socialist experiment in history. Forty-five million people died. I write about this at length in my book The Power of Capitalism. They haven’t heard about it at school. And socialism is not part of their experience, and if teachers don’t tell them at school, most are not going to learn about it.

In universities, education is very left-leaning. I saw a statistic recently about the United States. In the 1980s, the ratio of left-leaning professors to conservative professors was 3-2. Today it’s 12-1. If you look at assistant professors, it’s about 45-1, or something like that.

So this is part of the explanation.

But not all of it.

No, no.

I also have this theory. Sooner or later people in most countries simply forget why they became successful. It happens almost everywhere in the world. Look at Chile. Chile was the most successful in Latin America for a very long time. Compare them to Argentina or Brazil or wherever. It happened because they were mostly capitalist. Now they voted for a socialist. [Editor’s note: In 2021, Chileans elected Democratic Socialist Gabriel Boric.]

They forgot why they became successful. The same thing has happened in Germany. We became prosperous because of Ludwig Erhard’s market economy. People forget it, and they go more in the direction of a planned economy.

Why did the United States become successful? Because of capitalism. But people forget it.

Look at China. What happened there was amazing. In 1981, 88 percent of the Chinese people lived in extreme poverty. Today it’s less than 1 percent. This started with Deng Xiaoping’s pro market reforms, and the introduction of private property.

I have a friend in China who wrote one chapter in this book. Zhang Weiying. He’s an economist at Peking University. He always says, “we became successful not because of the state but in spite of the state.” But this is what people forget. China today is going the other direction. This happens in almost all countries.

And then there are capitalists themselves.

Capitalists? I think I see where you’re going. Can you explain?

Sometimes I think the biggests problem is not anti-capitalists. Left-leaning people are not the problem. The problem is that people who should defend capitalism often do not. I speak especially about entrepreneurs. They are silent. This is a big problem.

In my first pages in my book, I have a quote from the founder of Whole Foods.

Yes, I saw that quote. John Mackey.

John Mackey, yes. I met him last year at a Students For Liberty conference in Miami. The CEO of SFL, Wolf von Laer, is a friend. He interviewed and praised Mackey for his book on capitalism and for opposing Obamacare. But do you know what [Mackey] said during this interview?

No.

He said, I wouldn’t do it again. Because of the sanctions from the left, and the boycotts of his company, and because he was targeted so much. And I understand it. Entrepreneurs don’t have to be heroes in politics; they have to be heroes in the economy. And it’s hard to be a hero in the economy and a hero in politics at the same time. So many are silent. Sometimes they give some money to free market think tanks. But this is a big problem: people who should defend capitalism don’t.

But you do. Is that why they call you “the big biceps of capitalism” in Germany? I notice you’re a pretty buff guy for someone in his 60s. What’s your secret?

I have been training with weights for 45 years. Always natural, no doping. I do not train long, usually only 30 minutes, but 4 to 6 times a week.

Back to business. What are the biggest threats to capitalism today? One you’ve identified already: time. People seem to forget. But what else?

It’s the development more and more of the planned economy. They don’t call it a planned economy, but of course it is. In a market economy, entrepreneurs decide what to produce; in the end, consumers decide what to produce. In a planned economy, government officials decide what to produce. And this is what we’re seeing today.

In Europe, the EU is forbidding internal combustion engines for cars. It means you as a consumer don’t decide what car to buy. Government tells you what car to buy. I think it will be a big disaster.

We have this development in Germany. They are transforming it from a market economy to a planned economy. First they banned nuclear power plants. Then they started to phase out coal power plants. They forbid fracking. Now they’re importing fracking gas from the United States. They made us dependent on Russian gas. It’s crazy. It’s an idolatry.

And what’s happening now? Our companies are leaving because of regulations and because we have the highest price for electricity in the world.

So BASF, the largest chemical company in the world, leaves Germany and goes to China. And automobile companies also say they’re leaving.

Joe Biden and others want to do similar things in the US. With the Green New Deal and so forth. They don’t call it a planned economy, but it is. This is a major threat.

And how about the global financial system?

Yes, that is of course a big problem: the crazy policies of central banks. They set themselves in a trap. We might be heading for another financial crisis, and I predicted all this in The Power of Capitalism.

You did?

Yes. Here is what I wrote (grabs his book, begins reading):

“Misdiagnosing the causes of the [2008] financial crisis means that the proposed therapies are also wrong. The financial crisis was caused by excessively low interest rates, heavy-handed market interventions and over-indebtedness. Are we seriously to believe that the right therapy involves even lower interest rates, stronger market interventions and more debt? These measures may well have a short-term impact, but markets are becoming increasingly dependent on low interest rates. Such low interest rates do nothing to solve the underlying problems — they only suppress the symptoms and push them into the future. The current combination of overly excessive regulation and interest rates of zero will cause considerable medium-term problems for many banks and is the breeding ground for new, even more severe crises.”

This is what I wrote in the book and this is what has happened. This is the next problem with central banks, not only the Federal Reserve but also the European Central Bank. They act like planning authorities.

A lot of people say we have no choice. Because climate change.

Of course that is part of the discussion. Chapter three in my book talks about this. I read a couple weeks ago the new book by Greta Thunberg (The Climate Book: The Fact), the Swedish climate change activist. The only thing I found in this book is that we should abolish capitalism (laughs). I explain in my book why that’s a bad idea.

Now, I don’t belong to the group of people who say it’s all a conspiracy. I think it’s a real threat, though maybe exaggerated. I don’t think it’s as bad as some tell us. I think there is a threat but I’m a hundred percent sure a planned economy has never solved any problem in history, particularly environmental ones. They’ve caused more environmental problems than any other system. So I think it’s foolish to believe this will be the first problem solved by a planned economy.

From our discussion, I get the feeling you are not very optimistic about the future of capitalism—at least right now. So, I guess I’ll just ask: Will we see a resurgence in free markets over the next few decades or a continued rise of statism and centralization?

If I look right now, there are more reasons to be pessimistic than optimistic. But by nature, I’m more of an optimist.

I spoke recently with Madsen Pirie, founder and president of the Adam Smith Institute in the UK. He’s older now, like 83. [Editor’s note: He’s actually 82.] He knew Hayek and Margaret Thatcher and others. He told me he believes the ideals will remain in the world, and there will always be countries that go in this capitalist direction, and they will be role models for others. Other countries will see that it works.

So, I don’t know, to be honest.

The good thing is I’m a historian, so I know you can predict some things. But history is full of surprise. Sometimes positive surprise, sometimes negative surprise. Let’s hope for positive surprise.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.)

His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Power of Woke: How Leftist Ideology is Undermining our Society and Economy

Neo-Marxism is a cultural cancer spreading through America and beyond.


“It’s an important part of society whether you like it or not,” lexicologist Tony Thorne, referring to “wokeness,” told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in January. That’s an understatement.

Wokeness is poisoning the Western workplace and constraining small and family businesses, midsized banks, and entrepreneurs while enriching powerful corporations and billionaires. It’s eating away at the capitalist ethos and killing the bottom-up modes of economic ordering and exchange that propelled the United States of America to prosperity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It’s infecting Gen Z and millennials, who, suffering high depression rates and prone to “quiet quitting,” are not as well off as their parents and grandparents, and who feel isolated and alone even as they enjoy a technological connectivity that’s unprecedented in human history.

What, exactly, is wokeness, and how does it impact business and the wider society?

Subversion

The term as it’s widely used today differs from earlier significations. “Woke”, which plays on African American vernacular, once meant “awake to” or “aware of” social and racial injustices. The term expanded to encompass a wider array of causes from climate change, gun control, and LGTBQ rights to domestic violence, sexual harassment, and abortion.

Now, wielded by its opponents, it’s chiefly a pejorative dismissing the person or party it modifies. It’s the successor to “political correctness,” a catchall idiom that ridicules a broad range of leftist hobbyhorses. Carl Rhodes submits, in Woke Capitalism, that “woke transmuted from being a political call for self-awareness through solidarity in the face of massive racial injustice, to being an identity marker for self-righteousness.”

John McWhorter’s Woke Racism argues that wokeness is religious in character, unintentionally and intrinsically racist, and deleterious to black people. McWhorter, a black linguist, asserts that “white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species.”

Books like Stephen R. Soukup’s The Dictatorship of Woke Capital and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke, Inc. highlight the nefarious side of the wokeism adopted by large companies, in particular in the field of asset management, investment, and financial services.

Hypocritical neo-Marxism

Wokeism, in both the affirming and derogatory sense, is predicated on a belief in systemic or structural forces that condition culture and behavior. The phrases “structural racism” or “systemic racism” suggest that rational agents are nevertheless embedded in a network of interacting and interconnected rules, norms, and values that perpetuate white supremacy or marginalise people of color and groups without privilege.

Breaking entirely free from these inherited constraints is not possible, according to the woke, because we cannot operate outside the discursive frames established by long use and entrenched power. Nevertheless, the argument runs, we can decentre the power relations bolstering this system and subvert the techniques employed, wittingly or unwittingly, to preserve extant hierarchies. That requires, however, new structures and power relations.

Corporate executives and boards of directors are unsuspectingly and inadvertently — though sometimes deliberately — caught up in these ideas. They’re immersed in an ideological paradigm arising principally from Western universities. It’s difficult to identify the causative origin of this complex, disparate movement to undo the self-extending power structures that supposedly enable hegemony. Yet businesses, which, of course, are made up of people, including disaffected Gen Zs and millennials, develop alongside this sustained effort to dismantle structures and introduce novel organising principles for society.

The problem is, rather than neutralising power, the “woke” pursue and claim power for their own ends. Criticising systems and structures, they erect systems and structures in which they occupy the center, seeking to dominate and subjugate the people or groups they allege to have subjugated or dominated throughout history. They replace one hegemony with another.

The old systems had problems, of course. They were imperfect. But they retained elements of classical liberalism that protected hard-won principles like private property, due process of law, rule of law, free speech, and equality under the law. Wokeism dispenses with these. It’s about strength and control. And it has produced a corporate-government nexus that rigidifies power in the hands of an elite few.

Consider the extravagant spectacle in Davos, the beautiful resort town that combined luxury and activism at the recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, perhaps the largest gathering of self-selected, influential lobbyists and “c suiters” across countries and cultures. This annual event occasions cartoonish portrayals of evil, conspiratorial overlords — the soi-disant saviours paternalistically preaching about planetary improvement, glorifying their chosen burden to shape global affairs. The World Economic Forum has become a symbol of sanctimony and lavish inauthenticity, silly in its ostentation.

The near-ubiquitous celebration of lofty Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategies at the World Economic Forum reveals a seemingly uniform commitment among prominent leaders to harness government to pull companies — and, alas, everyone else — to the left.

ESG is, of course, an acronym for the non-financial standards and metrics that asset managers, bankers, and investors factor while allocating capital or assessing risk. A growing consortium of governments, central banks, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), asset management firms, finance ministries, financial institutions, and institutional investors advocates ESG as the top-down, long-term solution to purported social and climate risks. Even if these risks are real, is ESG the proper remedy?

Attendees of the World Economic Forum would not champion ESG if they did not benefit from doing so. That plain fact doesn’t alone discredit ESG, but it raises questions about ulterior motives: What’s really going on? How will these titans of finance and government benefit from ESG?

Follow the money

One obvious answer involves the institutional investors that prioritise activism over purely financial objectives or returns on investment (for legal reasons, activist investors would not characterise their priorities as such). It has only been a century since buying and selling shares in publicly traded companies became commonplace among workers and households. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), created in response to the Great Depression, isn’t even 100 years old.

Until recently, most investors divested if they owned stock in a company that behaved contrary to their beliefs. They rarely voted their shares or voted only on major issues like mergers and acquisitions. In 2023, however, institutional investors such as hedge funds and asset management firms engage boards of directors, exercise proxy voting, and issue shareholder reports with the primary goal of politicising companies. As intermediaries, they invest pension funds, mutual funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, 401(k)s and more on behalf of beneficiaries who may or may not know what political causes their invested assets support.

If a publicly traded company “goes woke,” consider which entities hold how much of its shares and whether unwanted shareholder pressure is to blame. Consider, too, the role of third-party proxy advisors in the company’s policies and practices.

Big companies go woke to eliminate competition. After all, they can afford the costs to comply with woke regulations whereas small companies cannot. Institutional investors warn of prospective risks of government regulation while lobbying for such regulation. In the United States, under the Biden Administration, woke federal regulations are, unsurprisingly, emerging. Perhaps publicly traded companies will privatise to avoid proposed SEC mandates regarding ESG disclosures, but regulation in other forms and through other agencies will come for private companies too.

The woke should question why they’re collaborating with their erstwhile corporate enemies. Have they abandoned concerns about poverty for the more lucrative industry of identity politics and environmentalism? Have they sold out, happily exploiting the uncouth masses, oppressing the already oppressed, and trading socioeconomic class struggle for the proliferating dogma of race, sexuality, and climate change? As wokeness becomes inextricably tied to ESG, we can no longer say, “Go woke, go broke.” Presently, wokeness is a vehicle to affluence, a status marker, the ticket to the center of the superstructure.

ESG helps the wealthiest to feel better about themselves while widening the gap between the rich and poor and disproportionately burdening economies in developing countries. It’s supplanting the classical liberal rules and institutions that leveled playing fields, engendered equality of opportunity, expanded the franchise, reduced undue discrimination, eliminated barriers to entry, facilitated entrepreneurship and innovation, and empowered individuals to realise their dreams and rise above their station at birth.

When politics is ubiquitous, wokeness breeds antiwokeness. The right caught on to institutional investing; counteroffensives are underway. The totalising politicisation of corporations is a zero-sum arms race in which the right captures some companies while the left captures others.

Soon there’ll be no escaping politics, no tranquil zones, and little space for emotional detachment, contemplative privacy, or principled neutrality; parallel economies will emerge for different political affiliations; noise, fighting, anger, distraction, and division will multiply; every quotidian act will signal a grand ideology. For the woke, “silence is violence”; there’s no middle ground; you must speak up; and increasingly for their opponents as well, you must choose sides.

Which will you choose in this corporatised dystopia? If the factions continue to concentrate and centralise power, classical liberals will have no good options. Coercion and compulsion will prevail over freedom and cooperation. And commerce and command will go hand in hand.

This article has been republished with permission from Mises Wire.

AUTHOR

Allen Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall is an associate dean at Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, executive director of the Blackstone & Burke Center for Law & Liberty, and Managing Editor of Southern… More by Allen Mendenhall

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EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Recovering a more perfect union: A rebuke of the 1619 Project

A new book describes the importance of memory, history, and national identity in saving America from desolation.


One of the worst sins of the present — not just ours but any present — is its tendency to condescend toward the past, which is much easier to do when one doesn’t trouble to know the full context of that past or try to grasp the nature of its challenges as they presented themselves at the time.
— Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story

Jay Leno used to do a regular schtick, Jaywalking, in which he would interview random persons on the street, often young ones, and ask them questions about American history, such as: “Who did America fight in the Revolutionary War?” “How many branches of the U.S. government are there?” “What year was the War of 1812?” Invariably, they could not answer the question, standing mute with Leno’s impertinent microphone pointed at their gaping mouths, or they gave a ridiculous answer.

As deflating as these performances were, it turns out that the state of American education is even worse than Leno documented. Not only does ignorance characterise so much of the citizenry, but Americans are now also imbibing, i.e., being taught, pernicious lies or partial truths about the founding and history of the United States from a tendentious, ideological, and solidly left-wing perspective.

Twisted narrative

This sorry state of affairs is documented in excruciating detail in Timothy S. Goeglein’s enlightening, depressing, and, ultimately, hopeful new book, Toward a More Perfect Union: The Moral and Cultural Case for Teaching the Great American Story.

The distortion of history now routinely fed to elementary and high school students, as well as those attending hopelessly “woke” universities and colleges, has produced many young people who are “cynical, entitled, and aggrieved.” Continues Goeglein:

Rather than being thankful, they are indignant. Rather than proud, they feel ashamed. Rather than feeling free, they feel oppressed. Rather than wanting to fix America’s faults, they want to burn America down. Rather than asking what they can do for their country, they demand to know what their country can do for them — and the answer is increasingly to “cease to exist.”

We have created “a citizenry divorced both intellectually and emotionally from its heritage.” Further, “[w]hen we disassociate history — and memory — from facts, we are lost,” writes Goeglein, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, a former Senate staffer, and, presently, vice-president of external and government relations for Focus on the Family.

Our predicament is exemplified by the absurd, anti-historical 1619 Project of the New York Times, an initiative repudiated by many respectedliberal historians. It is being taught in roughly 4,500 schools nationwide.

In a feat of historical and moral inversion, it maintains that the American Revolution was designed primarily to protect the institution of slavery from being destroyed by the British Empire.

Such a one-sided view of history will alienate Americans from one another, given the dissolution of a common identity and love of country, and disregards those who struggled to make the Declaration of Independence a reality in spite of its obvious flaws, such as slavery.

On the matter of slavery, always a leading complaint against America’s founding, the Washington Post’s George Will has rightly observed that the founders’ Constitution “gave slavery no national validation. It left slavery solely a creature of state laws and therefore susceptible to the process that, in fact, occurred — the process of being regionally confined and put on a path to ultimate extinction. Secession was the South’s desperate response when it recognized this impending outcome that the Constitution had facilitated.”

So, it comes as no surprise that, as “a 2020 Pew Research study found a month before the presidential election, roughly eight in ten registered voters in both camps said their political disagreements with others were about core American values, with roughly nine in ten — liberal and conservative — worried [that] a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States” [emphasis added]. We are now in a situation in which tribe is pitted against tribe, race against race, rich against poor, red against blue states.

We have succumbed to the “termites of self-loathing,” to use a term coined by Ben Stein. There is hardly a historic personage — Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Columbus, St Junípero Serra — who is not vilified, “cancelled,” and banished into outer darkness by woke activists and educators. One should be grateful that at least Frederick Douglass and Dr Martin Luther King Jr are spared such treatment, given their devotion to American ideals in the Declaration of Independence, classical literature, and Scripture. They are just ignored.

Dearth of patriotism

Recently, a friend whose daughter attended one of the tonier prep schools in Washington, DC, related that his conversations with her on US and Western history were disappointing. She, and her friends, showed no “piety” toward her country or heritage.

It was an interesting word choice and recalled my own school days studying Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic poem written between 29 and 19 BC. It tells the story of the Trojan Aeneas, who fled the destruction of his city, travelled to Italy, and would later become the ancestor of the Romans.

I remember my Jesuit instructor lauding “pius Aeneas,” “pious” being the most used adjective throughout the poem. In following the will of the gods — he even left the captivating Dido in Carthage — Aeneas demonstrated pietas, a virtue in the eyes of Virgil and my teacher, in his devotion to family, country, and mission. Such piety is no longer encouraged in our educational institutions, or so it would seem.

Major culprit

What brought America to this sorry state? In the beginning there was the “Original Zinn” — Howard Zinn, that is, a Boston University professor of political science and “the godfather of the radical attack on America’s history”, as Goeglein outlines in a pivotal chapter of Toward a More Perfect Union.

Zinn’s “epic screed,” A People’s History of the United States (1980), and his supplemental book for high schoolers, A Young People’s History of the United States (2007), have had an unparalleled impact on social studies teachers. The historian refram[ed]” and “reimagin[ed]” facts to fit a Marxist critique of the US and a Western civilisation marred, claimed Zinn, “by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money.” For Zinn, “standards of historical analysis are merely ‘technical problems’ to be dismissed.”

“You wanna read a real history book?” Matt Damon’s titular character, Will, asks Robin Williams’ Dr Sean Maguire in the movie Good Will Hunting (1997). “Read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f***ing knock you on your ass.” Indeed, it does. It also boggles the mind.

Zinn claims that the nation “has been taken over by men [the founders] who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties.” Again, in service to ideology, Zinn does not believe in objective history as documented by Mary Grabar, PhD, a refugee of communist Yugoslavia, on whom Goeglein draws heavily.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the main author of the 1619 Project, backtracked after respected historians critiqued her work. She claimed that the project was not about history but about “memory.” This is not historically grounded memory, but memory saturated with ideology and politics. This is pure Zinn in methodology. Hence, noted historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Eugene Genovese, and Michael Kammen — hardly a crowd of right-wingers — criticised Zinn as a “polemicist, not a historian.”

“His ultimate goal is not a historical one but a political one,” writes Goeglein. “[H]e wanted to depict the United States as an illegitimate enterprise, one demanding a revolution.”

Pushback

According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, today, only 18 percent of colleges require that students take a US history or government class to graduate. Maybe that is a blessing, given what passes for “history” in today’s woke environment. Ultimately, however, this is devastating to national unity.

Goeglein describes survey after survey that all indicate Americans’ ignorance of their rights under law and history. When the Constitution is taught, it is derided as being not radical enough in terms of the outcomes desired by left-of-centre teachers and advocates.

Toward A More Perfect Union does not specify a political agenda for reform, although it does note efforts made by some governors to reign in educational bureaucracies on, say, critical race theory. It does make a plea for parents to make a concerted effort to teach and counsel their children on the history of the nation and to pay close attention to what their schools are teaching.

It points to excellent resources available with which parents can educate themselves and their children on the complete story of American exceptionalism, not excluding the darker chapters. Parents who can afford the cost should look for alternatives to public schools that sacrifice true learning for the sake of ideology. “Classical” schools, home schooling, and parochial schools — all of which boomed during the COVID lockdowns — are possible options.

Parents who cannot afford private schools or who have special-needs children “must be extra vigilant and expect to receive the full wrath of Leftist activists if they stand up and demand that civics be taught while also standing against the indoctrination their children are receiving.” Specifically, they need to insist on the rights to inspect curricula, to opt out of the teaching of certain subjects, and to insist that controversial issues be discussed impartially. No easy tasks these.

Goeglein concludes:

[W]e must rededicate ourselves to the teaching of history — true, verifiable, factual history, with all its glories and tragedies. We need not fear to teach the ugly truths about America alongside the beautiful ones, because America’s founding vision is pure and her ideals are noble. Our failures do not change that.

Toward a More Perfect Union makes a compelling case that the country’s future, as one nation, demands a reclamation of our educational system and a recovery of the authentic teaching of history and constitutional government rightly understood.

This article has been republished from The American Spectator with permission.

AUTHOR

G. Tracy Mehan III

G. Tracy Mehan, III, was Assistant Administrator for Water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the Administration of President George W. Bush. He is an adjunct professor at Scalia Law School,… More by G. Tracy Mehan III

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Radical K-12 Reform: Pay Homeschoolers

Governments should focus on funding effective education.


What if we just cut through the morass of programs and take all the money being provided at the federal and state level and put it into individual student endowment accounts?

The late 1970s in the United States was a time of surprising deregulation. It was the beginning of the end for the telephone monopolies. Those inside the regulated industries, and the regulatory agencies, warned of doom and disaster if competition were allowed. The doomsayers were wrong. The free market provided solutions that were impossible to forecast. Competition and the profit motive brought out the best that humans can create.

Communications solutions today are employing far more people than the old phone monopolies, and are delivering services never dreamed of in that era. The forecasts of disastrous unemployment and system collapse if the phone monopolies were opened to competition were totally and completely wrong.

K-12 is the phone monopoly of our time.

This seems like the best time in years to truly reform K-12. However, the focus seems to be on charter schools, leaving behind thousands of students in poorly performing districts, and most proposed solutions leave out homeschooling.

The fundamental problem is the lack of competition. There is a simple way to introduce it.

Individualised investment

Instead of pouring money into the local school monopolies, the solution is to simply endow individual students. Open the door to the free market in a meaningful way.

We should create an individual educational endowment fund for each K-12 student. Student endowment funds would pay out annually for students who achieved minimum grade level knowledge, including to the parents of homeschooled students. The determination of minimum achievement would be through testing, with the tests also from free market providers.

Providers for students who did poorly would not be paid, leaving twice the annual amount available next year to educators who could catch them up. Seriously underperforming students would accrue several years of catch-up funding, providing extra incentive for the type of personalised attention that would benefit them. Military veteran servicemen and women teaching small groups of students, developing personal relationships, can change lost kids into enthusiastic young adults.

Opening educational services to the free market will allow for practical job-related instruction and college level courses to be included as providers fight for market share.

Competition among educational providers will make full use of technology, will provide useful training for actual jobs, and will deliver far more education for the same money. Gamification will keep students involved in ways that existing K-12 material can’t touch.

Instead of leaving dropouts to fend for themselves, the funds should remain on deposit indefinitely, allowing those who get their act together after some time in the adult world to get an education.

Modelling the idea will show that existing school structures and transportation fleets will be used, more than with charter schools. Most school systems will continue as they are, but a new element of potential competition will focus their efforts.

Essential pruning

A major early effect might be defunding some inner-city school systems, with the carry-over of endowment funds providing an incentive to corporate providers. These districts are a disgrace, but there is almost no way to change them now. Defunding poor performance in a way that will bring new providers could work.

The new providers will be renting space and transportation for their offerings in most cases from existing school districts. Just as with telecom deregulation, it will take several years to see the full impact, but requiring minimum accomplishment for payout will protect students and taxpayers as solutions evolve.

Homeschooling pods will explode, but those kids will still participate on local sports teams, and transportation to practice (and back) will also be rented from existing fleets by their parents.

Special needs students would still have extra funding, but at an individual student level.

Let’s end the monopoly. Let’s open the door to competition.

Unleash technology, but pay only for results.

Homeschoolers would be an unstoppable force for reform if a realistic plan to pay them existed. The endowment idea would do it.

Stark contrast

I was radicalised on this issue by an experience with a black tow truck driver. When I was in the Army during the era of the draft, my platoon had a bunch of black guys from inner-city Detroit. Our off-duty pastime in Germany with no English language TV was reading paperback novels. They were traded over and over, and it was common to see everyone on his bunk with his head propped up reading. The black guys read effortlessly.

Recently I needed a tow, and a black tow truck driver did a good job hooking me up and handling his equipment. He was a solid guy, the same type as the guys I knew in the Army. As we rode to the destination, he said he had graduated from one of the big inner city high schools.

When we got to the destination, he asked me to help him do the paperwork, and as we worked through it, I discovered that he could hardly read. This is ridiculous. These schools are a disgrace. Here is a guy who will probably never be able to read effortlessly because of terrible, crappy inner-city schools he was stuck in.

The black guys in my platoon from inner city Detroit went to schools that didn’t have unions in the 1950s and 1960s. School management was adequate at that time to produce acceptable results. They became the Motown generation that led to ending segregation and providing great music that I still enjoy.

Preference falsification among Democrat voters on K-12 has created a situation where explosive change can occur. The Overton Window can suddenly shift. K-12 seems to be that issue.

What is needed is a practical method. Endowment Accounts provide that method.

There is no way to fix the current K-12 situation beyond radical demonopolising. I can see a future where school infrastructure is owned by large competitive providers in much the same way Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, etc. operate today, fighting for market share by providing educational services that work and that kids and parents want.

This is a great opportunity to apply technology and dramatically improve the way we educate our children.

AUTHOR

Richard Illyes is a retired electronic designer and programmer in rural Texas south of Houston. He is an active pilot and flight instructor and flies off a grass strip at his place outside Alvin, where… More by Richard Illyes

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

How Migrants Make The Economies They Move To A Lot Like The Ones They Left

Ponder the implications of this for mass Muslim migration into Europe. And those implications are by no means solely economic.


Coming to America: REVIEW: ‘The Culture Transplant’ by Garett Jones

by Charles Fain Lehman, Washington Free Beacon, December 11, 2022:

Imagine that you are a U.S. immigration officer, handing out green cards to the would-be Americans of the world. You have before you two applicants who look almost completely the same; for some arcane, unspecified bureaucratic reason, you can only approve one of them. They’re both well-educated by American standards, both bringing identical families, both passed their background checks.

The major difference is their nation of origin. One is from a nation with a strong tradition of rule of law, free markets, and democratic pluralism. The other is from a country where kleptocracy, autocracy, and socialism are standard. The difference, in other words, is the character of the society that your two would-be immigrants come from. The question is: Should this difference matter?

The basic argument of The Culture Transplant, the new book from George Mason University professor Garett Jones, is that at least in the aggregate, the answer to this question is “yes.” The marginal immigrant, to be sure, may not matter. But Jones shows, through an engaging and digestible tour of the academic literature, that people bring their national character with them when they migrate; that those values persist for up to several generations; and that some values really are better for societal flourishing than others, so the values immigrants bring matters a great deal.

To reach this conclusion, Jones relies on a fairly diverse set of evidence. Much of the basis for his argument, though, is drawn from the so-called deep-roots literature. That research, in essence, looks at what today’s countries were like 500 to 2,500 years ago, in terms of level of governance, agricultural development, and technological development. It observes that what a country was like hundreds of years ago is a strong predictor of how developed it is today. More to Jones’s point, it observes that what a country’s people were like hundreds of years ago predicts what they are like today.

The point here is that, for whatever reason, certain fundamental facts about a civilization—i.e., its level of development—are both highly relevant to its performance on the centuries timespan and transplantable from one place to another. One plausible explanation is that whatever determines this outcome inheres in the people from those civilizations, who carry it with them and “transplant” it wherever they migrate.

Indeed, Jones reviews extensive research that shows immigrants often look more like their ancestors than the countries they arrive to, even several generations after arrival. If your ancestors believed in things conducive to development—social trust, cooperation, fairness, etc.—then you probably do too. And those beliefs matter for how the country you now live in does.

What are the concrete implications of this view? Jones offers two. One is that the countries with the highest rates of innovation—China, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States—should be extremely cautious about changing the population composition through migration. These countries produce the overwhelming majority of the world’s progress, and if progress is a function of your country’s composition, then we should care a lot about keeping their current mix, because otherwise all of humanity loses out….

Read more.

AUTHOR

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‘My Son Hunter’: An imperfect but necessary indictment of media’s corruption

This satirical film reveals a disturbing truth about modern mainstream journalistic standards.


We all love the literary motif of the unwilling prostitute who, at the end of the story, does virtuous deeds to save herself and others. In Crime and Punishment, Sonya is instrumental in Raskolnikov’s redemption. Director Robert Davi uses the same formula to tell the story of President’s Biden son in My Son Hunter.

Grace struggles to pay for her college tuition, so she is a favourite escort of powerful men. As she encounters Hunter Biden in a world of cocaine, wild sex, and rampant corruption, she offers him a path to redemption — and of course, he rejects it.

Now, Davi is no Dostoevsky — nor does he intend to be. My Son Hunter is first and foremost political satire, all-too-frequently engaging in cheap shots. But it does take a stab at Dostoevskyan psychological profundity, and in that endeavour, it partly succeeds.

The shadow of successful Beau Biden — Hunter’s deceased brother — looms large over Hunter, who struggles to find meaning in life. Very much as Raskolnikov, he comes across as a pathological narcissist who engages in criminal activity as a way to prove to himself that he is so great so as to be above the law.

Overblown

Unfortunately, My Son Hunter often goes overboard and loses effectiveness. I lost count of the number of times Joe Biden sniffs the hair of women in the film. Is that necessary? That portrayal runs the risk of playing into the left-wing narrative that criticisms of the Bidens focus on petty things that can be easily dismissed.

The stakes are high, so a more focused and incisive portrayal was needed. Say what you want about Oliver Stone’s leftist politics and penchant for conspiracy theories, but he surely can strike an opponent in his films — Richard Nixon and George W. Bush being the most notorious cases.

The story of Hunter Biden lends itself to Stone’s sober cinematographic style, but My Son Hunter misses an opportunity, to the extent that it aims for low-hanging fruit. Yes, the Bidens are corrupt, but one is left wondering: can they be that corrupt? While the dialogues between Joe and Hunter are clever and amusing, the perversity defies credibility. Perhaps Davi was deliberately aiming more for Saturday Night Live’s lampooning style all along. If so, the film works at some level, but never entirely.

I would have personally enjoyed a more sober style because there is a far darker theme in the film. My Son Hunter is not about the moral failings of a privileged, corrupt drug addict. It is not even about crony capitalism and globalist elites. The real central theme is the media’s rot.

Media manipulation

Two scenes are particularly frightening. At the beginning of the film, Grace is at a Black Lives Matter protest, and records some of her comrades engaging in violent deeds. A fellow activist says: “You can’t post that video… it will make the protest look bad… Those people are too ignorant to understand complex moral issues. You have to withhold things for their own good. We choose truth over facts.” Grace acquiesces.

Towards the end of the film, Grace summons a journalist to expose Hunter’s corruption. The man tells her: “Even if what you are saying is true, it’s not news. We have the chance to take down a fascist dictator [Trump]… I’m sorry Grace, this one is not for me.” We now know that Twitter and Facebook — with their disturbing algorithms — were not the only ones trying to bury Hunter’s laptop under the sand.

As Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged, the FBI itself pressured him to do so, because they did not want the bad Orange Man to win the election — all with the excuse that the whole story was Russian disinformation. Later on, both the Washington Post and the New York Times had to reverse their stance and admit that, in fact, the laptop does contain compromising emails.

Plato infamously recommended telling people the Noble Lie. Very much as the Black Lives Matter activist in this film, Plato believed such lies were for people’s own good, as they were too stupid to understand things. In his seminal study of totalitarianism, Karl Popper persuasively argued that Plato’s plan became a central tenet of totalitarian regimes. That is the real fascism.

While being far from a perfect film, My Son Hunter provides meaningful insight on this issue, and hopefully it might become an important step towards much-needed media accountability in this woke age.

For the time being, we need to be realistic. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Hollywood to make an Oliver Stone-like blockbuster about the corruption and hypocrisy of the Left.

Rather, keep an eye out for low-budget productions like My Son Hunter that are bypassing the Hollywood production and distribution system. These include Uncle Tom I and II, various Christian films, such as Run, Hide, Fight.

They will not be great works of art, but at least they will be something. And from there, the quality of such films may gradually improve, until we again see mainstream studios portraying corrupt politicians from both sides of the political spectrum.

AUTHOR

Gabriel Andrade is a university professor originally from Venezuela. He writes about politics, philosophy, history, religion and psychology. More by Gabriel Andrade

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

No, Slavery Did Not Make America Rich

The historical record of the post-war economy demonstrates slavery was neither a central driving force of, or economically necessary for, American economic dominance. 


In 1847, Karl Marx wrote that

Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry…cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.

As with most of his postulations concerning economics, Marx was proven wrong.

Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in 1865, historical data show there was a recession, but after that, post-war economic growth rates rivaled or surpassed the pre-war growth rates, and America continued on its path to becoming the number one political and economic superpower, ultimately superseding Great Britain (see Appendix Figure 1).

The historical record of the post-war economy, one would think, obviously demonstrated slavery was neither a central driving force of, or economically necessary for, American economic dominance, as Marx thought it was. And yet, somehow, even with the benefit of hindsight, there are many academics and media pundits still echoing Marx today.

For instance, in his essay published by The New York Times’ 1619 Project, Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond claims the institution of slavery “helped turn a poor, fledgling nation into a financial colossus.”

“The industrial revolution was based on cotton, produced primarily in the slave labor camps of the United States,” Noam Chomsky similarly stated in an interview with the Times. Both claims give the impression that slavery was essential for industrialization and/or American economic hegemony, which is untrue.

The Industrial Revolution paved the way for modern economic development and is widely regarded to have occurred between 1760 and 1830, starting in Great Britain and subsequently spreading to Europe and the US.

As depicted in Figure 1., raw cotton produced by African-American slaves did not become a significant import in the British economy until 1800, decades after the Industrial Revolution had already begun.

Although the British later imported large quantities of American cotton, economic historians Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode note that “the American South was a late-comer to world cotton markets,” and  “US cotton played no role in kick-starting the Industrial Revolution.”

Nor was the revolution sparked by Britain’s involvement with slavery more broadly, as David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman assessed that the contribution of British 18th-century slave systems to industrial growth was “not particularly large.”

There is also the theory that the cotton industry, dependent on slavery, triggered industrialization in the northern United States by facilitating the growth of textile industries. But as demonstrated by Kenneth L. Sokoloff, the Northern manufacturing sector was incredibly dynamic, and productivity growth was broad-based and in no way exclusive to cotton textiles.

Eric Holt has further elaborated, pointing out that

the vast literature on the industrial revolution that economic historians have produced shows that it originated in the creation and adoption of a wide range of technologies, such as the steam engine and coke blast furnace, which were not directly connected to textile trading networks.

The bodies of the enslaved served as America’s largest financial asset, and they were forced to maintain America’s most exported commodity… the profits from cotton propelled the US into a position as one of the leading economies in the world and made the South its most prosperous region.

This is the argument made by P.R. Lockhart of Vox.

While slavery was an important part of the antebellum economy, claims about its central role in the Industrial Revolution and in America’s rise to power via export-led growth are exaggerated.

Olmstead and Rhode have observed that although cotton exports comprised a tremendous share of total exports prior to the Civil War, they accounted for only around 5 percent of the nation’s overall gross domestic product, an important contribution but not the backbone of American economic development (see Appendix Figure 2).

One can certainly argue that slavery made the slaveholders and those connected to the cotton trade extremely wealthy in the short run, but the long-run impact of slavery on overall American economic development, particularly in the South, is undeniably and unequivocally negative.

As David Meyer of Brown University explains, in the pre-war South, “investments were heavily concentrated in slaves,” resulting in the failure “to build a deep and broad industrial infrastructure,” such as railroads, public education, and a centralized financial system.

Economic historians have repeatedly emphasized that slavery delayed Southern industrialization, giving the North a tremendous advantage in the Civil War.

Harvard economist Nathan Nunn has shown that across the Americas, the more dependent on slavery a nation was in 1750, the poorer it was in 2000 (see Appendix Figure 3.). He found the same relationship in the US. In 2000, states with more slaves in 1860 were poorer than states with fewer slaves and much poorer than the free Northern states (see Appendix Figure 4.)

According to Nunn,

looking either across countries within the Americas, or across states and counties within the U.S., one finds a strong significant negative relationship between past slave use and current income.

Slavery was an important part of the American economy for some time, but the reality is that it was completely unnecessary and stunted economic development, and it made Americans poorer even over 150 years later.

The historical and empirical evidence is in accordance with the conclusion of Olmstead and Rhode—that slavery was

a national tragedy that…inhibited economic growth over the long run and created social and racial divisions that still haunt the nation.

Figure 1. US share of British Cotton Imports over time

Figure 2. Cotton Exports and Gross Domestic Product

Figure 3. Partial correlation plot between the slave population as a share of the total population in 1750 and national income per capita in 2000 of countries of the Americas

Figure 4. Bivariate plot showing the relationship between the slave population as a share of the total population in 1860 and state incomes per capita in 2000

AUTHOR

Corey Iacono

Corey Iacono is a Master of Business graduate student at the University of Rhode Island with a bachelor’s degree in Pharmaceutical Science and a minor in Economics.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Why Do The Woke Hate Clarence Thomas So Much?

Justice Clarence Thomas, being African American, is seen as a traitor to the woke cause.


After the overturning of Roe v Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas has been a particular target of venomous attack from the woke mob. Why do they hate him so much? One might be forgiven for thinking that it is due to his staunch anti-abortion views. But that explanation does not work.

Pope Francis has long expressed that opposing abortion is “closely linked to the defense of each and every other human right”, and yet, the Left is not obsessed with him (in fact, many even take a liking). At some point, even Joe Biden supported letting States overturn Roe v Wade, and again, the Left did not go ballistic on him.

Not behaving as expected

So, why the animus against Thomas? There can only be one explanation: race. In 1991, as he was accused of sexually harassing Anita Hill, Thomas countered that he was the victim of “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you.”

This was loose talk, as it trivialised the suffering of real lynching victims in America’s troubled history of race relations. But Thomas did have a point in arguing that in the United States, any black person who dares to deviate from the official narrative of how blacks are supposed to act, will face severe harassment.

In 1991, he anticipated a trend that would become mainstream in our times: if you are born with a particular skin colour, you are supposed to behave in a certain way, and uphold a specific ideology. If not, you are a race traitor. As Biden so neatly phrased it:

“[I]f you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

Any competent scholar of the history of racism would immediately recognise this as race essentialism. As Angelo Corlett explains in his book Race, Racism and Reparations,
“proponents of race essentialism define human races by a set of genetic or cultural traits shared by all members of a ‘racial’ group.”

Who are the neo-Nazis now?

In the first half of the 20th Century, this view was popular amongst proponents of so-called “racial science”. They believed that racial biological traits determine how people behave. Hitler believed that no matter how much a person with Jewish ancestry tried to assimilate to German society (even converting to another religion), he or she would still be a dangerous Jew, because it was in his or her essence.

Race essentialism is abhorrent, and one might think that after 1945, the world learned a lesson. And yet, race essentialism is alive and kicking, but this time, under the guise of woke progressivism. As per today’s woke rules, if you are black, you must embrace the whole woke mindset.

White people (such as Pope Francis) may occasionally be forgiven for having anti-abortion views, but if you are black and you deviate from the woke line (such as Clarence Thomas), you are a race traitor, an Uncle Tom. Unsurprisingly, Thomas has been called “Uncle Clarence” multiple times.

If you are black, not only do you have to act a certain way, but you must also have a special sexual preference. The woke pay lip service to interracial relationships, but amongst them there is a sense of unease when they contemplate a successful black man marrying a white woman.

For example, when Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States, USA Today columnist Barbara Reynolds wrote: “Here’s a man who’s going to decide crucial issues for the country and he has already said no to blacks; he has already said if he can’t paint himself white he’ll think white and marry a white woman.” Russell Adams, chairman of African American studies at Howard University, said that Thomas “marrying a white woman is a sign of his rejection of the black community.”

Truly racist

Frantz Fanon is a figure beloved by the Left. In 1952, he published Black Skin, White Masks, a canonical text of wokeness. In that book, he also scorns black men who fall in love with white women. Fanon castigates himself for, at some point, having had these thoughts: “Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white… I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.” The implication of this passage is that loving a white woman is an act of racial treason.

Fanon felt disdain for black people who embraced Western values. He claimed they were wearing white masks, as if somehow, they were deviating from their real essence, and were therefore living an inauthentic life. Therefore — so Fanon believed — Western civilisation must be rejected entirely. As he explained in The Wretched of the Earth“When the colonized hear a speech on Western culture, they draw their machetes or at least check to see they are close to hand.” He who admires Western values is a sellout.

Ever since Fanon, racial essentialism in the name of progress has only grown worse. People of color are now encouraged not to honour punctuality, because being on time is part of whiteness. Black kids who are academically talented run the risk of being told they are “acting white”. Analysing things objectively is an act of white supremacy. And so on.

Consequently, Clarence Thomas is not allowed to have anti-abortion views. Nobody cares about his anti-abortion arguments, because he is not supposed to make them in the first place. Other jurists, philosophers or theologians will be allowed to oppose abortion, but only if they are white. Thomas is hated not because of his views, but because of his skin colour. He upsets the arbitrary racial classifications that the woke are so eager to embrace.

As per woke taxonomy, black people cannot be conservative, and if they are, they are only wearing a “white mask”. To paraphrase the late Christopher Hitchens, “identity politics poisons everything”. We can no longer have a meaningful discussion about anything as vital as the ontological status of a fetus, because the race of the discussants will determine who is allowed to uphold a particular view. It’s time to push back against this madness.

AUTHOR

Gabriel Andrade

Gabriel Andrade is a university professor originally from Venezuela. He writes about politics, philosophy, history, religion and psychology. More by Gabriel Andrade

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

$30K a year, and my kid can’t tell the difference between a boy and a girl

Parents must hold their local school systems accountable for what is taught to their children.


Everything has a price.

Like every American family, our family runs a constant cost/benefit analysis on our lives. There are the small decisions: is it worth the time to drive to Target for the cheaper diapers? Or should I just get the pricier ones at the grocery store? And there are the bigger ones: like, should I live in the suburbs and pay lower taxes but more for car expenses and gas? Or flip that decision?

For our family, one of the toughest decisions was where to send our kids to school. We could send them across the street to the poorly performing public school for free. They’d meet a wide variety of kids and learn some valuable self-advocacy skills, but they would not be academically challenged. For $30k, I could send them to the nearby private school, where they’d benefit from engaged teachers, kids, and families. We’d have to drop the music lessons and fancy trips, but hey — I don’t like Disneyland anyway.

So, with some scholarships, sacrifices, and family assistance, we made the choice to send our kids to a fancy private school. The benefits have been great: warm, caring, patient teachers; outstanding academics; beautiful buildings; even a pretty good lunch. But there’s been a hidden cost, beyond the incredibly painful tuition bills: my kids can’t tell the difference between a boy and a girl.

This seems shocking, I know. How can a concept so obvious, so instinctual that nearly every 2-year-old on the planet can master it, be an idea that my very expensively-educated children don’t understand?

Simple-minded educators

Because some teachers don’t understand it. Because some administrators don’t understand it. And this is where I have to remind myself of something true: half the world is dumber than average.

I know this sounds incredibly snobby. I know this sounds judgmental and awful, but this is true. And this fact helps me take a breath, find some compassion, and slow down.

These teachers are good people. They are kind. They like kids, and want the best for children. They believe that education can make the world a better place. And additionally, they were hired for their people skills: they are empathetic, good communicators, patient, and open-minded. Those are exactly the skills my tuition dollars are paying for.

But these teachers are not well-trained critical thinkers. They were not hired for their ability to analyse complex research studies, nor to follow the various paths of different complex scenarios. They are not philosophers, ethicists, or religious scholars. They are not lawyers or developmental psychologists. They are not endocrinologists or pediatricians. They are experts at connecting to kids and explaining the types of K-12 content that kids should learn. Thank god for teachers and their talents and skills. Our society needs them. But they are not the experts here. They are just trying to do their jobs.

So when faced with the concept of “gender identity” — the idea that “people have an innate feeling of being female or male,” the typical teacher will say “Sure — that makes sense. I’m female, I know it. That’s not a controversial idea.”

When faced with the diagnostic definition of “gender dysphoria”, the idea that “some people have great distress with their biological sex, and wish they were the opposite sex,” these teachers say, “Sure — I know about Jazz Jennings and Caitlyn Jenner. That’s a real thing.”

When faced with the fact of “Disorders of Sexual Development” (formerly known as Intersex conditions), the scientifically observed and natural phenomena of various biological sexual characteristics and markers, teachers say, “Yep — I learned about that once.”

And when urged to consider the negative impacts of the difficulty of being an outlier, and the impacts of social isolation and/or ostracism, the teachers say, “Not on my watch. My cousin was gay and poorly treated. I won’t let any of my kids be bullied or left out.”

So when teachers combine all these ideas and impressions and blend them into their natural “be nice” personalities and “open-minded” natures, they are primed to become believers and advocates of transgender ideology. If Johnny likes skirts and thinks he’s really a girl inside, who are we to judge? We really can’t blame the teachers. They were born this way.

So our society has laid yet another burden of expectation on teachers. They must educate kids, they must socialise kids, they must address and resolve the emotional and behavioural dysfunctions of these kids. And now they must be responsible for nurturing, protecting, and advocating for the “internal feeling of being female or male” for a kid, otherwise they’ll be held responsible for the kid’s ostracism.

This is nuts. These teachers don’t stand a chance.

To the top

So we can’t fight the teachers. We’ve got to get the administrators and school boards to stop, listen, and think. These people were hired to be critical thinkers, to balance different opinions, to consider the different consequences of different choices. They still aren’t likely to read the studies or think through the ethical or philosophical consequences of different complex scenarios, but they are primed to consider one thing above all: legal threats.

Right now, principals and school boards are hiding behind the guidelines that WPATH (an activist-led organisation), the American Psychological Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, and the National Association of Secondary School Principals have created. These organisations have good intentions, but they are also human and flawed (and remember — half their members are below average). Even the ACLU seems to have lost its mind on this topic.

I suggest American parents adopt the “Maya Forstater Approach.” This strategy, based on the case in England, relies on fundamental and constitutional American legal rights: free speech and free religion. I don’t care if you haven’t been to church ever. This is what you say to your school board:

“For scientific, religious, and social reasons, I do not believe that you can change your sex, and I do not want my children to be taught “gender identity”, the belief that you have a gendered soul, and that your gender soul feelings trump your biology. How is your school protecting my family’s religious beliefs and our right to be free from compelled speech?”

Ask your school’s principal this question every Fall. Send it as a statement to your kids’ teachers every fall. Tell them to inform you of any lesson on gender identity before it happens so that your children can have a substitute lesson. Ask them what their policy on requesting pronouns is, so that your child does not feel compelled to use certain speech. Ask them how they balance different opinions on this topic in the community.

I can guarantee you they do not see this as a religious issue, but as a social justice issue. Say the magic words “freedom of religion/freedom from religion” and “freedom of speech” and see if that works. We’ve got a long history of protecting underdogs in this country, and right now the culture glorifies the status of victim. Use this knowledge wisely.

And here’s the thing: this is going to cost you. Be ready. Do the cost/benefit analysis. Whether your kids are getting a free public education or an expensive private one, when you ruffle the feathers of the principal, the winds blow. Then again, if you remain silent, your kid may not understand that sex never changes. Be prepared. Everything has a cost.

This article has been republished from Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT).

BY

Anonymous author

In exceptional circumstances, MercatorNet allows contributors to publish articles anonymously. Sometimes the author’s privacy or safety might be at risk. More by Anonymous author.

RELATED ARTICLE: “Without Logos, the West is lost”

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

America must take care of its families, or go the way of the Roman Empire

Time to turn away from materialism and imperialism.


One thing demographers have known all along is something you cannot deny: “Demography is destiny.” The phrase was coined by 19th century Frenchman Auguste Comte. Agree or not with his positivist philosophy, he nailed it about demography.

While clickbait comes at us with news of wars, markets and celebrity gossip, the bigger story, the backstory behind so much of everything, is demography.

Demography didn’t get much attention in legacy media until 2020 when the British medical journal The Lancet released the most comprehensive world fertility study to date. The study documented a mysterious, unprecedented earth-shattering trend: a 50% decline in world fertility over 50 years, with no end in sight. Even the study’s scholarly authors described their findings as “jaw-dropping.”

We are only beginning to realise the social, economic and political impact. Look no further than the United States. Trends in America are followed worldwide and tell quite a tale.

Rising cost of living

For decades, well into the 1960s, US pensions and retirement benefits proliferated. Why not? Back then, relatively few people lived beyond 80, and it was a given that there would be four or more workers to support every retiree.

But things have changed mightily since Social Security and elderly healthcare schemes came of age. The heady days of easy money are gone.

First, people live much longer and have fewer children. The US fertility rate is 1.7 children per female, 20% below replacement level.

Also, the dominant world reserve currency — the US dollar — has diminished in value. Back in the 1960s you could buy a Coke for a dime. Now it’s at least ten times that. Is the soda worth more, or your money worth less?

Today two incomes are necessary to support the average family. That wasn’t the case back when a Coke cost a dime. Women, mostly out of necessity, entered the workforce.  That meant less family time. In such a system, children become a financial liability.

Then there is the uniquely American higher education industry, a colossal con commanding exorbitant subsidies and insanely inflated fees for a ticket to upward mobility. For the average American family, the costs of college are their largest expenditure apart from the family home.

Covid, the economy and lower fertility are testing the diploma mills as never before.  Also, a growing number of Americans are beginning to push back against a pious professoriate that subordinates authentic education to woke indoctrination.

Today there are over 65 million Social Security beneficiaries and 132 million people who work full-time, just two workers kicking in for each beneficiary. And a lot of those full-time folks don’t make much. On top of that we have Medicare, Medicaid and a vast global imperial footprint, all financed by a fiat currency that is losing value. Without at least replacement fertility, these systems will see a slow-motion collapse.

Thus two troublesome trends confront American families: A diminishing currency (chronic inflation) and declining fertility. Each exacerbates the other.

Also in the mix is an American popular culture promoting consumerism and instant gratification, prioritising creature comforts over children. Hedonism is not family-friendly.

Stop-gap measures

Over time the powers-that-be have tried to fix things with:

  1. Immigration: For years, cheap labour flacks told us that importing vast numbers of unskilled low-wage workers would save Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Not true. Mass immigration does not generate sufficient revenue to offset social welfare costs. (Funny thing about immigration: moneyed interests privatise the profit [cheap labour] and socialise — via taxpayers — the costs). Mass immigration instead suppresses wages, making it harder to rear children. Not only that, recent immigrants and their descendants feel the squeeze like everyone else, and their fertility is now below replacement-level.
  2. Printing money: In order to finance the welfare/warfare state, the government just continues to spend. We’ve become accustomed to debt financing and printing money to prop up a broken system. This works for a time if your money is the dominant world reserve currency. Imagine if you maxxed out your credit and could print your own money to finance it. Works fine until creditors say your money is no good or worth much less than you think. Inflation hurts families.

The above short-term fixes have not worked. And let’s face it: the days of global dollar dominance are numbered. There is a disastrous disconnect between public policy and demographic reality. Try as we might, there is no substitute for children.

America has a large middle class that binds the social fabric and includes most intact families. What is good for the American middle class is good for the family. But the middle class — the establishment’s cash cow — is shrinking.

At the very least, supporting families and children should take priority over subsidies for the elderly. But the elderly vote, and politicians care more about the next election than the next generation. However, supporting parents and children is the solution to preserving retirement programs and the society at large.

Superpower status at the expense of family is a Faustian bargain. We need to hunker down and focus on the family instead of propping up the wastrel welfare/warfare state. Yes, it can be done, though it will require changing our ways, establishing new priorities and investing in the future of families.

If not, look no further than ancient Rome. They also dumped their Republic, became an Empire, spent like crazy and came to neglect the welfare of families.

Is there a lesson here?

AUTHOR

Louis T. March has a background in government, business and philanthropy. A former talk show host, author and public speaker, he is a dedicated student of history and genealogy. Louis lives with his family… More by Louis T. March

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Election Day Sermon for 2020 — ‘Church in America, Wake Up!’

Watch an Election Day Sermon for 2020:

Tomorrow Americans are granted the privilege to choose a leader who will either steer us toward our founding principles, or one who will clearly continue to push our Nation away from our founding principles. John Winthrop was a Puritan who led a massive movement of immigrants from England to America. Winthrop wrote to the new immigrants settling in Massachusetts his vision of this new land; “this new land is established for the will and purposes of God; it will be a unique civilization, one in which all the nations of the world would look. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” The image Winthrop speaks is from Matthew 5:14. It implies that America is to be lifted up among all other nations and was (is) to be exemplary, a model other countries would seek to emulate, a nation called to extend its’ light to the world. Ponder this…America was so blessed by God to be the head of ALL nations, the very heart of the present world order. America was ordained to be a guiding light , to stand on behalf of all other nations. What happens to America touches all nations. Our Forefathers made a covenant with God to accomplish this, and seek God’s blessings and provisions for our land. My quick reading booklet “Our Forefathers Truly Appealed to Heaven” Amazon Kindle will take you behind the curtain so you may appreciate the covenant made by our founders with God, and what happens when a covenant with God is broken and deliberately cast aside.

America has turned away from God, and has not only violated the covenant made, but has done thus with growing intensity toward rebellion even denying God! Inasmuch as our country followed the ways of God and kept the covenant to submit (cooperate) with the Lord, America was blessed among all nations, more so than any other nation. But the near removal of God from our Land has brought calamity and a series of discipline with the intent to humble this country and have it return to its’ foundation. When a people or nation turns away from God and the very foundations from which it was established, rapidly you will experience a change of values, the removing of standards, laws, customs, heritage. Furthermore that which was considered right and just will be abolished, and labeled evil, and that which had long been opposed as evil will be touted as good; what was once viewed as immoral will be celebrated, and what once was viewed and taught as wrong and evil will be raised up and championed. Same will be true for those who oppose God, they will be viewed as learned and to be emulated, while those who uphold God’s ways will be persecuted.

As I have previously written the pastors of early America were clear advocates of not only the Gospel of Christ, but defenders of the heritage and foundational principles of America. From their pulpits these pastors did not mince words about either topic. The pastors of early America even to the mid-1960’s, spoke clearly, eloquently, with strong conviction about standing up for America, her heritage and founding principles, and God who gave us this exceptional nation. Below is an “Election Day Sermon” from a pastor who would have fit right perfect with the early pastors of America. Listen and watch as Pastor Gary Hamrick in Leesburg, Virginia speaks truth!

On Friday, I listened to a remarkable “Election Day Sermon” for 2020 and I am sharing it with you. It was delivered by Gary Hamrick of Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, Virginia.

Copyright Lyle J. Rapacki, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Assault on Religious Freedom During COVID-19

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When the Counterculture Becomes the Culture

In November 2015, three years after taking the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl, quarterback Colin Kaepernick was benched in favor of Blaine Gabbert, a career journeyman most recently unsuccessful with the Jacksonville Jaguars.

The following preseason, Kaepernick began donning garb designed to mock police officers, including socks with cops dressed as pigs. He also remained seated for the national anthem during a preseason game, claiming, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”

At the time, multiple NFL players spoke out in opposition to Kaepernick’s symbolic move: New York Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz said, “You’ve got to respect the flag, and you’ve got to stand up with your teammates. It’s bigger than just you, in my opinion. You go up there; you’re with a team; and you go and pledge your allegiance to the flag, and sing the national anthem with your team, and then you go about your business.”

At the time, this was a majority proposition: Seventy-two percent of Americans thought the gesture unpatriotic, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.


How are socialists deluding a whole generation? Learn more now >>


Kaepernick never regained a starting role in the NFL … but his career took off again. He signed a lucrative endorsement deal with Nike to cash in on his supposed bravery; he cut a content deal with Disney.

When he was offered a private tryout with NFL teams, he promptly violated all protocols and blew up the process. In June 2020, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell urged NFL teams to sign Kaepernick anyway.

On July 4, Kaepernick tweeted: “Black ppl have been dehumanized, brutalized, criminalized + terrorized by America for centuries, & are expected to join your commemoration of ‘independence,’ while you enslaved our ancestors. We reject your celebration of white supremacy & look forward to liberation for all.”

Today, Kaepernick’s symbolism has become the new normal, morphed into a rote ritual of wokeness thanks to the ugly sight of then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, who would later die.

Democratic elected officials knelt in the halls of Congress. Major League Baseball players knelt before the national anthem to protest supposed systemic American racism. NBA players knelt as well, wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts.

And players who refused to comply were publicly cudgeled. When San Francisco Giants pitcher Sam Coonrod refused to kneel, stating that he would not kneel for anything but God, he was castigated as benighted at best, racist at worst.

When black Orlando Magic basketball player Jonathan Isaacs stood for the national anthem, again citing the unifying anti-racism of Christianity, he was ripped as “dangerous.”

Only Gregg Popovich, coach of the San Antonio Spurs, who has spent years utilizing purple progressive language about President Donald Trump, was exonerated for standing for the anthem—and that was because he wore a Black Lives Matter T-shirt.

So, what changed? Certainly not the data. Despite the presence of individual racism in American life in all walks of life, America’s police are not systemically racist. Until the pandemic wrecked the economy across the board, black Americans were experiencing historic lows in unemployment and historic highs in median income.

What changed is that Americans surrendered to the narrative promulgated for so long by those who seek to undermine American comity: that American history is not the story of moving toward the fulfillment of the promises of the Declaration of Independence but of the continuous, chameleonic perversion of bigotry; that America’s founding ideas were lies, then and always; that only racial identity provides credence for talking about racial inequalities. The burden of proof has shifted to America’s defenders.

And those defenders can never prove their case: first, because no country is perfect, and second, because systemic racism is a nondisprovable theory.

Four short years ago, we mostly assumed the best of our fellow Americans—that they weren’t endemically racist, at the very least—and the best of our country’s ideals. No longer.

The counterculture has become the culture. And that is both a tragedy and a travesty. There can be no future for a country in which standing for the national anthem is considered gauche, while kneeling is considered heroic.

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Ben Shapiro is host of “The Ben Shapiro Show” and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is The New York Times best-selling author of “Bullies.” He is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, and lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles. Twitter: .


A Note for our Readers:

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