August 22, 2023
Dear Friends and Family,
Political Instability was one of the major reasons for the downfall of the Roman Empire. I think after you read this segment you will concur there is significant political instability in our country today also.
In my personal judgment, political instability of our government took a decided turn to the negative with the terrorist attack on 9/11/2001 and has progressively worsened since then, most particularly in the last three years. The evidence for this last statement includes the following:
In its totality, that is a tremendous amount of change for a society to absorb in a very short period of time, resulting in a great deal of angst, confusion, and political instability.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Political Instability was one of the major reasons for the downfall of the Roman Empire. I think after you read this segment you will concur there is significant political instability in our country today also.
In my personal judgment, political instability of our government took a decided turn to the negative with the terrorist attack on 9/11/2001 and has progressively worsened since then, most particularly in the last three years. The evidence for this last statement includes the following:
- We went from a 50+ year strategy of striving for energy independence, which was attained for a short period of time, to a contrary strategy of doing away with oil and natural gas without any public debate or supportive Congressional action.
- We went from building a wall to protect our southern border and over a 100 years of controlled immigration, to open borders busing illegal immigrants throughout the country.
- We went from a society who embrace meritocracy, hard work and equal opportunity for all, to a society that rewards diversity and inclusion and strives for equity for all.
- We went from a society with a military promise of leaving no one behind in a withdrawal, to a military who hastily withdrew from Afghanistan leaving personnel, an air force base, and billions of dollars of equipment behind.
- We went from a society who expected, respected, and trusted our citizens to do the right thing following instructive education, to mandates of many varieties by the government.
- We learned that some of our institutions that we respected and trusted (FBI, Department of Justice, Intelligence Community, and Public Health) had become corrupt, engaged in deceit, and censored dissent such that our faith has been considerably shaken.
- We witnessed our school systems and national teachers’ unions putting politics above the interest of our children in their policies and activism.
- We have a president who supports an ideology that all white people are racist and the biggest danger to our country is white supremacy backed up by his policies within his Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion edict.
In its totality, that is a tremendous amount of change for a society to absorb in a very short period of time, resulting in a great deal of angst, confusion, and political instability.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SEEKING WISDOM FOR AMERICA – SEGMENT 7
ROMAN DECLINE #3: POLITICAL INSTABILITY GOV’T. (A) – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: It is impossible not to notice that something is taking place today. The bipartisan consensus that steered the United States through the Cold War is gone. Today, there is very little countrywide consensus on any political or cultural matters. What’s more the internet, social media, and the 24-hour news cycle have exposed the corruption and incompetence of many of our political and cultural elites, to the point where most Americans no longer have any faith or trust in elites. This in turn has led to low levels of voter participation in local and state politics, declining rates of church attendance and religious belief, and plummeting rates of family formation. Meanwhile, these same American elites have been selling off their own country to China, spending decades shipping as many America jobs to China as possible, eroding America’s industrial and manufacturing base and supply chains, leaving the country vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Millions of ordinary Americans have been plunged into chaos and ruin in the process. The response from elites has not been to help these people, but to stigmatize them all as racists, bigots, transphobes and insurrectionists, in order to justify their declining fortunes.
Source: While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park (2023)
AMERICAN COMPLACENCY: The United States has grown complacent. After years of globalization, our towns have been hollowed out by the loss of factories and jobs. It is no longer possible for the vast majority of Americans to raise a family on a single earner’s wages. Our military, which has spent two decades mired in conflicts in the Middle East, is failing to meet its recruitment quotas. In towns all over the U.S., an opioid epidemic is tearing families and communities apart.
The response from our country’s elites – the same ones who have created these problems – has been mostly silence. In the White House, President Joe Biden is unwilling to address the major problems of our time. Instead, he has pursued the most inflationary economic policies in modern history, driving the costs of consumer goods to record levels. He has given in to the demands of the radical left wing of his party on climate and green energy, sending a message to fossil fuel companies that drilling for more oil and natural gas is not worth their time.
Rather than using this dire moment to bring our nation together, our elites are focused on shoving far-left cultural war issues down Americans’ throats and self-flagellating over our history. We have begun teaching our children that the United States is nothing more than a nation of pirates built on the principle of white supremacy. Anyone who dares to disagree runs the risk of being called a racist or a bigot in public, a charge that has become nearly impossible to deny or disprove.
Source: Decades of Decadence by Marco Rubio (2023)
THREATS OF A PRESIDENTIAL MONARCHY: When a chief executive ignores checks and balances, he may maximize his authority temporarily. But after a while, the royal saddle tends to chafe. We are now approaching an inflection point in the U.S.: Do we want an elective monarchy, or not? A great many Americans seem perfectly comfortable with such a system, so long as the president is of their party. Today, the president of the U.S. is elected once every four years; he mouths platitudes about respect for norms and institution; and then he proceeds to do what he wants, using the authority of the administrative state as his scepter. The legislature has become a vestigial organ, delegated only the power to fund enormous omnibus packages. True rule-making authority lies with the chief executive.
There are only two institutions standing in the way of full-fledged presidential monarchy: the courts and the states. Biden has pledged to override the states: “If these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way,” And while Biden has pledged not to stack the courts, his prior institutional pledges have lasted only as long as his power remains unchallenged; he repeatedly suggested he would not seek to destroy the filibuster but has now apparently flipped on that subject. The problem with elective monarchy is that it destroys the feedback mechanisms that help balance a pluralistic, decentralized society. The lesson for us is simple: We may want change, and we may want to carve a path through the checks and balances that obstruct that change by granting near-total power to an elective monarch. But unity won’t follow. Chaos will.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
POLITICAL INSTABILITY IN THE STATES: Blue State Decline: As California sinks into the mire, it embraces ever more radical social policy. This is a state that currently houses some 162,000 homeless people, a number that increased approximately 24% from 2018 to 2020. About a quarter of all homeless people in the U.S. currently reside in California. Meanwhile, crime in California has become endemic, with smash-and-grabs roiling major cities and even wealthy residents murdered in their homes. This week (12/15/2021) the head of the Los Angeles police union warned people to stay out of the city, explaining, “We can’t guarantee your safety. It is really, really out of control.” California’s economy trails the nation’s, too. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, California is tied for the worst unemployment rate in the nation, at 7.3%.
So why does California keep embracing ever-more-radical policy? Because radicalism is itself the moral justification for policy failure. Sure, Democrats can argue, crime and homelessness are out of control. The economy is stagnating, and businesses are leaving. But that’s morally excusable, because California seeks a higher purpose: the purpose of Leftist utopianism. For years, Democrats have claimed that California leads the nation. We can only hope they are wrong.
Between July 2020 and July 2021, approximately 352,198 residents of New York State embarked for warmer climates. Over that same period, the District of Columbia lost 2.9% of its population. California lost 367,299 people via net domestic migration. Illinois, another failing blue state, saw a net domestic out-migration of 122,460. Where did all these blue state refugees go? To red states. Texas picked up 170,307, Americans migrating from other areas. Florida picked up 220,890 people. Arizona picked up 93,026. Idaho had the fastest annual population increase in the nation. The only region of the country to gain population was the South, which now holds 38.3% of the total population of the country – and which picked up 657,682 Americans migrating from different areas. The Northeast is now the least populous region in the U.S., and saw a net population decrease of 365,795 residents.
It's not just individuals – it’s companies. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, just signed the largest-ever lease in downtown Austin for floors 34 through 66 of the tallest tower in the city. Elon Musk has relocated his company to headquarters in Texas. My own Daily Wire relocated in 2020 from California to Nashville, Tennessee. In other words, red state governance is a magnet; blue state governance is a disaster. Yet blue states cannot change course. They cannot simply jettison their adherence to failed ideas like single-payer health care or voting for illegal immigrants. To do so would acknowledge error.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION: Joe Biden is the luckiest man to ever assume the presidency. He succeeded an unpopular figure. He was inaugurated just two weeks after the dramatic storming of the U.S. Capitol by extremists Trump supporters seeking to stop the certification of the 2020 election. He inherited COVID-19 vaccines and a vaccine rollout plan and could rightly expect to ride the tsunami or natural economic recovery that was predicted for the aftermath of the Covid pandemic; he inherited a series to historic Middle Eastern peace deals. In other words, President Biden had it easy. All he had to do was nothing. He could expect a booming economy, a more peaceful Middle East, a solution to the pandemic. All he had to do was calm the waters.
Instead, Biden has served as façade for the most radical administration in modern American history. And America is already paying the price. In his first few months in office, Biden rammed through a $1.9 million spending package that completely rewrote the bargain between individuals and the state, shifting the incentive structure for people to go back to work. He simultaneously proposed a $4 trillion in spending to go along with the annual $4 trillion with the annual budget. The result: skyrocketing inflation in commodities, along with dramatic labor shortages resulting in an April shortfall of three-quarters of a million new jobs.
He downplayed the efficacy of a vaccine he insisted was the key to ending the pandemic. His FDA pressed pause on a highly successful vaccine based on six cases of blood clots; his CDC rewrote its school reopening guidelines, apparently with input from the teachers’ unions. He wore a mask publicly despite being vaccinated, despite being outdoors, despite being indoors with other who had been vaccinated – and declared such activity “patriotic.” The result: widespread vaccine hesitancy and a tremendously uneven national reopening with red states going back to normal and blue states continuing nonsensical shutdowns.
He ramped up the rhetoric with regard to racial polarization, injecting the terms “anti-racist” and “equity” into every element of federal policy, supplanting meritocracy and individual rights with equality of outcome and outright discrimination. The result: undercutting police forces nationally, resulting in a continuing crime wave in America’s biggest cities.
And he abandoned the Trump administration’s Middle East policy, refunding the Palestinians with money that will obviously go to terrorist groups and defy the Taylor Force Act; making concession to the Iranian terror regime; and pressuring Israel. The result: riots in Jerusalem, chaos on the Temple Mount and an increase in regional Iranian aggression.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
CITIZENS RIGHTS: Those of Parents: The war on Parents continues. In September 2020, January Littlejohn went to pick up her 13-year-old daughter from middle school. Littlejohn is a stay-at-home mother of three children and a licensed mental health counselor in Florida. So, when her daughter informed her that the school administration had begun encouraging her to identify as transgender, Littlejohn was shocked. Littlejohn’s daughter told her that school administrators had asked her about changing her name, which restroom she wished to use, and whether she wanted to sleep with boys or girls on school trips. According to the district, parents were to be cut out of the loop unless the 13-year-old gave her consent to their involvement; the district stated that “outing a student, especially to parents, can be dangerous to the student’s health and well-being.”
So, to be clear, the school would have had to phone Littlejohn for permission to administer an Advil; presumably if Littlejohn’s daughter had been suffering from depression or anxiety in school, parents would have been notified as well. But the school purposefully avoided telling Littlejohn about her daughter considering whether she was a boy or a girl, and the attendant acts toward social transition – all of which is often followed by hormone replacement or surgery. The school not only felt no duty to keep Littlejohn in the loop, but they also treated Littlejohn as an enemy to her own child. This, indeed, is the mentality of an enormous swath of the social Left these days. None of this should be controversial: Parents have always been and will always be the adults with the most stake in their children. It is parents who care the most about their children, not school administrators; it is parents who shape the values and choices of their children.
But that’s precisely what the Left hates. To the Left, parents are the enemy. Without any evidence of abuse—or even any allegations of abuse – the Left now states that forcing schools to provide transparency to parents about their children is a form of abuse. As California Gov. Gavin Newsom put it, telling schools to keep parents in the loop is “nothing short of a state-sponsored intimidation of LGBTQ children. It will put kids—who are already navigating stress—in physical and psychological danger.” The Left, instead, wished to teach its own version of sexual morality and gender identity to small children without the messy intervention of parents.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
Equality of Results: The closer we arrive to full racial, ethnic, class, gender, and religious equality, the more we are damned for nearing but not quite achieving our utopian ideals? As the state ensures “equality” of opportunity, it is blamed for failing to provide “equity” or equality of outcome. Amid this desire to ensure equality of result through the use of government power, Americans currently feel that something is being lost in their daily lives. They often describe their frustrations as an attack on their very rights as citizens. In a December 2019 Harris Poll survey, a vast majority of Americans – some 92% -- believed that their rights were “under siege.”
Illegal Immigration: Many Americans do not know or worry much about the consequences of radical demographic, cultural, or political influences for the status of citizenship. They are indifferent to millions of immigrants of uncertain statues in their midst. Many new arrivals believe that moving to and residing in the U.S. without legal sanction should nonetheless guarantee them all the benefits of American citizenship. Meanwhile, far too many citizens see no need to learn about the history and traditions of the United States or the civic responsibility of being an American. The contention that their country is irrevocably flawed becomes a justification for intellectual laziness and an unwillingness to learn about America’s supposedly dark origins and customs. We now live in an increasingly borderless world, where the notion of anyone more blessed at birth than another is seen as unfair – as if, in an age of affordable and rapid travel, an accident of birth should not deprive any of the planet’s eight billion people from entering and living in the United States. Citizenship, however, is not indestructible. The more it is stretched to include everyone, the less the likelihood it can protect anyone.
Source: The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson (2021).
THE CURRENT POLITICAL SYSTEM: Impact of Money: In the US political system, money talks. The effects of money on US elections are pretty alarming, and particularly in a country branded as a vibrant model of democracy. Brutal TV advertisements funded by wealthy super PACs target the candidates personally and their policies, stoking up fear on particularly emotive touchstone issues like gun rights, religious freedom, tax, immigration and crime. There is almost no formal oversight, and certainly no process that can react quickly enough to blunt the impact of the deceit and fearmongering of the political commercials which spread quickly around the internet as soon as they are released. Outright lies from supporters of both sides are not uncommon, although half-truths, exaggeration or over-simplification complex issues are much more widespread. The impact is the same – distorting the electorate’s views on candidates and their parties and making it more difficult for voters to make a sensible, rational choice.
The scale and power of the US lobby industry is extraordinary. Almost $3.5 billion was spent on lobbying in Washington alone in 2019, with the most active industries, health, finance, and telecommunications/media – spending around $0.5 billion each. Lobbyists build influence to deliver for their corporate clients by throwing fundraisers for elected officials who have a constant need to bring in money to donate to candidates and campaigns, and by offering highly paid jobs to members of Congress and the aides for when they leave office. With issues becoming ever more complex, expert lobbyists are also increasingly drafting legislation or contributions to bills themselves and touting them on the Hill on behalf of corporate clients. As members of Congress simply can’t be experts on all the issues they have to cover, the lobbyists’ proposals are often taken up whether or not they reflect the greater good.
There is no doubt that money buys access, influence and results in the US in a way that would be considered unpalatable and even corrupt in many other Western democracies. Unless the system is changed, Congress risks ceasing to be the collective voice of the people in the US, but rather the legislative arm of corporations and wealthy interest groups.
The most likely result of this was growing public fatigue of politics, leaving the field ever more open to those with an agenda and large amounts of dollars to spend. The massive impact of money in US politics must now raise very serious questions about just how democratic the American system really is. But it’s now the only thing to worry about when assessing America’s leading democracy myth. Who gets to vote in the US, where their votes are counted and how ballot are ultimately tallied up to determine the results all influence American elections outcomes. It’s a disturbing picture, particularly when both the Democratic and Republican Parties are not at all averse to pursuing democratic actions simply to increase their chances of winning.
Source: The Great American Delusion by Patrick Davis (2020)
SHIFTING OF POWER: A large percentage of the country believes in nearly religious fashion that all risk can be mitigated, so long as we grant the authorities and experts absolute power. We have been told that we need no longer face health risks, so long as we give the government power to mandate vaccines, mask our children and lock down our businesses – even without solid evidence that such measures are effective. We have been told that we ought to delegate all of our economic policy making to unelected centralized bureaucracies, which serve as the source of both our monetary and fiscal policy, and that this will insulate us against the possibility of financial difficulty. We have been told that individually planning for the future, which entails risk, should be foregone, in favor of a cradle-to-grave government safety net.
We thus have a choice before us between the false promise of individual enervation and endless paternalistic caretaking from centralized authority and the real and chaotic world of liberty and risk. Which option we choose will decide whether our civilization survives.
Klaus Schwab is the head of the World Economic Forum. He has issued a call to action for elitists the world over. They appoint themselves the representatives of global interests – without elections, without accountability – and then create mechanisms of national and international order to control citizens over whom they claim to preside. He, and his rationalist buddies – brilliant businessmen and ambitious politicians, striving bureaucrats and myopic experts – will cure the world of all its ills, so long as we grant them power. Or, more likely, so long as they seize power in the name of “stakeholders” to whom they are never answerable.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
Unelected Bureaucrats: The US Congress has ceded to federal agencies, manned by the unelected, the power to make regulations, administer them with the force of law, punish perceived offenders, and muster unlimited resources to quash citizen’s appeals and objections.
Source: The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson (2021)
MARXISM: In America, many Marxists cloak themselves in phrases like “progressives,” “Democratic Socialists,” “community activists,” etc., as most Americans remain openly hostile to the name Marxism. They operate under a myriad of newly minted organizational or identifying nomenclatures, such as “Black Lives Matter,” “Antifa,” “The Squad,” etc. And they claim to promote “economic justice,” “environmental justice,” “racial equity,” “gender equity,” etc. They have invented new theories, like Critical Race Theory, and phrases and terminologies, linked to or fit into a Marxist construct. Moreover, they claim, “the dominant culture” and capitalist systems are unjust and inequitable, fascist and sexist, colonialist and imperialist, materialistic and destructive of the environment. Of course, the purpose is to tear down and tear apart the nation for a thousand reasons and in a thousand ways, thereby dispiriting and demoralizing the public; undermining the citizenry’s confidence in the nation’s institutions, traditions, and customs; creating one calamity after another; weakening the nation from within; and ultimately, destroying what we know as American republicanism and capitalism.
Their demand for absolute one-party control over the body politic through various schemes and other means, as Marxism does not tolerate the competition of ideas or political parties. These efforts include changing the voting system to ensure Democratic Party control for decades, which has as its purpose the eradication of the Republican Party and political competitions, attempting to eliminate the Senate filibuster rule so all manner of laws can be imposed on the country without effective deliberation or challenge; threatening to breach separation of powers and judicial independence by plotting to pack the Supreme Court with like-minded ideologues; planning to add Democratic seats to the Senate to ensure its control over that body; using tens of billions in taxpayer funds to subsidize and strengthen core parts of the Democratic Party (such as unions and political activists): and facilitating massive illegal immigration, the purpose of which is to, among other things, alter the nation’s demographics and eventually add significantly to the pro-Democratic Party voting base.
What is occurring in our country is not a temporary fad or passing event. American Marxism exists, it is here and now, and indeed it is pervasive, and its multitude of hybrid but often interlocking movements are actively working to destroy our society and culture and overthrow the country as we know it.
Source: American Marxism by Mark R. Levin (2021)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
ROMAN DECLINE #3: POLITICAL INSTABILITY GOV’T. (A) – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: It is impossible not to notice that something is taking place today. The bipartisan consensus that steered the United States through the Cold War is gone. Today, there is very little countrywide consensus on any political or cultural matters. What’s more the internet, social media, and the 24-hour news cycle have exposed the corruption and incompetence of many of our political and cultural elites, to the point where most Americans no longer have any faith or trust in elites. This in turn has led to low levels of voter participation in local and state politics, declining rates of church attendance and religious belief, and plummeting rates of family formation. Meanwhile, these same American elites have been selling off their own country to China, spending decades shipping as many America jobs to China as possible, eroding America’s industrial and manufacturing base and supply chains, leaving the country vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Millions of ordinary Americans have been plunged into chaos and ruin in the process. The response from elites has not been to help these people, but to stigmatize them all as racists, bigots, transphobes and insurrectionists, in order to justify their declining fortunes.
Source: While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park (2023)
AMERICAN COMPLACENCY: The United States has grown complacent. After years of globalization, our towns have been hollowed out by the loss of factories and jobs. It is no longer possible for the vast majority of Americans to raise a family on a single earner’s wages. Our military, which has spent two decades mired in conflicts in the Middle East, is failing to meet its recruitment quotas. In towns all over the U.S., an opioid epidemic is tearing families and communities apart.
The response from our country’s elites – the same ones who have created these problems – has been mostly silence. In the White House, President Joe Biden is unwilling to address the major problems of our time. Instead, he has pursued the most inflationary economic policies in modern history, driving the costs of consumer goods to record levels. He has given in to the demands of the radical left wing of his party on climate and green energy, sending a message to fossil fuel companies that drilling for more oil and natural gas is not worth their time.
Rather than using this dire moment to bring our nation together, our elites are focused on shoving far-left cultural war issues down Americans’ throats and self-flagellating over our history. We have begun teaching our children that the United States is nothing more than a nation of pirates built on the principle of white supremacy. Anyone who dares to disagree runs the risk of being called a racist or a bigot in public, a charge that has become nearly impossible to deny or disprove.
Source: Decades of Decadence by Marco Rubio (2023)
THREATS OF A PRESIDENTIAL MONARCHY: When a chief executive ignores checks and balances, he may maximize his authority temporarily. But after a while, the royal saddle tends to chafe. We are now approaching an inflection point in the U.S.: Do we want an elective monarchy, or not? A great many Americans seem perfectly comfortable with such a system, so long as the president is of their party. Today, the president of the U.S. is elected once every four years; he mouths platitudes about respect for norms and institution; and then he proceeds to do what he wants, using the authority of the administrative state as his scepter. The legislature has become a vestigial organ, delegated only the power to fund enormous omnibus packages. True rule-making authority lies with the chief executive.
There are only two institutions standing in the way of full-fledged presidential monarchy: the courts and the states. Biden has pledged to override the states: “If these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way,” And while Biden has pledged not to stack the courts, his prior institutional pledges have lasted only as long as his power remains unchallenged; he repeatedly suggested he would not seek to destroy the filibuster but has now apparently flipped on that subject. The problem with elective monarchy is that it destroys the feedback mechanisms that help balance a pluralistic, decentralized society. The lesson for us is simple: We may want change, and we may want to carve a path through the checks and balances that obstruct that change by granting near-total power to an elective monarch. But unity won’t follow. Chaos will.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
POLITICAL INSTABILITY IN THE STATES: Blue State Decline: As California sinks into the mire, it embraces ever more radical social policy. This is a state that currently houses some 162,000 homeless people, a number that increased approximately 24% from 2018 to 2020. About a quarter of all homeless people in the U.S. currently reside in California. Meanwhile, crime in California has become endemic, with smash-and-grabs roiling major cities and even wealthy residents murdered in their homes. This week (12/15/2021) the head of the Los Angeles police union warned people to stay out of the city, explaining, “We can’t guarantee your safety. It is really, really out of control.” California’s economy trails the nation’s, too. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, California is tied for the worst unemployment rate in the nation, at 7.3%.
So why does California keep embracing ever-more-radical policy? Because radicalism is itself the moral justification for policy failure. Sure, Democrats can argue, crime and homelessness are out of control. The economy is stagnating, and businesses are leaving. But that’s morally excusable, because California seeks a higher purpose: the purpose of Leftist utopianism. For years, Democrats have claimed that California leads the nation. We can only hope they are wrong.
Between July 2020 and July 2021, approximately 352,198 residents of New York State embarked for warmer climates. Over that same period, the District of Columbia lost 2.9% of its population. California lost 367,299 people via net domestic migration. Illinois, another failing blue state, saw a net domestic out-migration of 122,460. Where did all these blue state refugees go? To red states. Texas picked up 170,307, Americans migrating from other areas. Florida picked up 220,890 people. Arizona picked up 93,026. Idaho had the fastest annual population increase in the nation. The only region of the country to gain population was the South, which now holds 38.3% of the total population of the country – and which picked up 657,682 Americans migrating from different areas. The Northeast is now the least populous region in the U.S., and saw a net population decrease of 365,795 residents.
It's not just individuals – it’s companies. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, just signed the largest-ever lease in downtown Austin for floors 34 through 66 of the tallest tower in the city. Elon Musk has relocated his company to headquarters in Texas. My own Daily Wire relocated in 2020 from California to Nashville, Tennessee. In other words, red state governance is a magnet; blue state governance is a disaster. Yet blue states cannot change course. They cannot simply jettison their adherence to failed ideas like single-payer health care or voting for illegal immigrants. To do so would acknowledge error.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION: Joe Biden is the luckiest man to ever assume the presidency. He succeeded an unpopular figure. He was inaugurated just two weeks after the dramatic storming of the U.S. Capitol by extremists Trump supporters seeking to stop the certification of the 2020 election. He inherited COVID-19 vaccines and a vaccine rollout plan and could rightly expect to ride the tsunami or natural economic recovery that was predicted for the aftermath of the Covid pandemic; he inherited a series to historic Middle Eastern peace deals. In other words, President Biden had it easy. All he had to do was nothing. He could expect a booming economy, a more peaceful Middle East, a solution to the pandemic. All he had to do was calm the waters.
Instead, Biden has served as façade for the most radical administration in modern American history. And America is already paying the price. In his first few months in office, Biden rammed through a $1.9 million spending package that completely rewrote the bargain between individuals and the state, shifting the incentive structure for people to go back to work. He simultaneously proposed a $4 trillion in spending to go along with the annual $4 trillion with the annual budget. The result: skyrocketing inflation in commodities, along with dramatic labor shortages resulting in an April shortfall of three-quarters of a million new jobs.
He downplayed the efficacy of a vaccine he insisted was the key to ending the pandemic. His FDA pressed pause on a highly successful vaccine based on six cases of blood clots; his CDC rewrote its school reopening guidelines, apparently with input from the teachers’ unions. He wore a mask publicly despite being vaccinated, despite being outdoors, despite being indoors with other who had been vaccinated – and declared such activity “patriotic.” The result: widespread vaccine hesitancy and a tremendously uneven national reopening with red states going back to normal and blue states continuing nonsensical shutdowns.
He ramped up the rhetoric with regard to racial polarization, injecting the terms “anti-racist” and “equity” into every element of federal policy, supplanting meritocracy and individual rights with equality of outcome and outright discrimination. The result: undercutting police forces nationally, resulting in a continuing crime wave in America’s biggest cities.
And he abandoned the Trump administration’s Middle East policy, refunding the Palestinians with money that will obviously go to terrorist groups and defy the Taylor Force Act; making concession to the Iranian terror regime; and pressuring Israel. The result: riots in Jerusalem, chaos on the Temple Mount and an increase in regional Iranian aggression.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
CITIZENS RIGHTS: Those of Parents: The war on Parents continues. In September 2020, January Littlejohn went to pick up her 13-year-old daughter from middle school. Littlejohn is a stay-at-home mother of three children and a licensed mental health counselor in Florida. So, when her daughter informed her that the school administration had begun encouraging her to identify as transgender, Littlejohn was shocked. Littlejohn’s daughter told her that school administrators had asked her about changing her name, which restroom she wished to use, and whether she wanted to sleep with boys or girls on school trips. According to the district, parents were to be cut out of the loop unless the 13-year-old gave her consent to their involvement; the district stated that “outing a student, especially to parents, can be dangerous to the student’s health and well-being.”
So, to be clear, the school would have had to phone Littlejohn for permission to administer an Advil; presumably if Littlejohn’s daughter had been suffering from depression or anxiety in school, parents would have been notified as well. But the school purposefully avoided telling Littlejohn about her daughter considering whether she was a boy or a girl, and the attendant acts toward social transition – all of which is often followed by hormone replacement or surgery. The school not only felt no duty to keep Littlejohn in the loop, but they also treated Littlejohn as an enemy to her own child. This, indeed, is the mentality of an enormous swath of the social Left these days. None of this should be controversial: Parents have always been and will always be the adults with the most stake in their children. It is parents who care the most about their children, not school administrators; it is parents who shape the values and choices of their children.
But that’s precisely what the Left hates. To the Left, parents are the enemy. Without any evidence of abuse—or even any allegations of abuse – the Left now states that forcing schools to provide transparency to parents about their children is a form of abuse. As California Gov. Gavin Newsom put it, telling schools to keep parents in the loop is “nothing short of a state-sponsored intimidation of LGBTQ children. It will put kids—who are already navigating stress—in physical and psychological danger.” The Left, instead, wished to teach its own version of sexual morality and gender identity to small children without the messy intervention of parents.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
Equality of Results: The closer we arrive to full racial, ethnic, class, gender, and religious equality, the more we are damned for nearing but not quite achieving our utopian ideals? As the state ensures “equality” of opportunity, it is blamed for failing to provide “equity” or equality of outcome. Amid this desire to ensure equality of result through the use of government power, Americans currently feel that something is being lost in their daily lives. They often describe their frustrations as an attack on their very rights as citizens. In a December 2019 Harris Poll survey, a vast majority of Americans – some 92% -- believed that their rights were “under siege.”
Illegal Immigration: Many Americans do not know or worry much about the consequences of radical demographic, cultural, or political influences for the status of citizenship. They are indifferent to millions of immigrants of uncertain statues in their midst. Many new arrivals believe that moving to and residing in the U.S. without legal sanction should nonetheless guarantee them all the benefits of American citizenship. Meanwhile, far too many citizens see no need to learn about the history and traditions of the United States or the civic responsibility of being an American. The contention that their country is irrevocably flawed becomes a justification for intellectual laziness and an unwillingness to learn about America’s supposedly dark origins and customs. We now live in an increasingly borderless world, where the notion of anyone more blessed at birth than another is seen as unfair – as if, in an age of affordable and rapid travel, an accident of birth should not deprive any of the planet’s eight billion people from entering and living in the United States. Citizenship, however, is not indestructible. The more it is stretched to include everyone, the less the likelihood it can protect anyone.
Source: The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson (2021).
THE CURRENT POLITICAL SYSTEM: Impact of Money: In the US political system, money talks. The effects of money on US elections are pretty alarming, and particularly in a country branded as a vibrant model of democracy. Brutal TV advertisements funded by wealthy super PACs target the candidates personally and their policies, stoking up fear on particularly emotive touchstone issues like gun rights, religious freedom, tax, immigration and crime. There is almost no formal oversight, and certainly no process that can react quickly enough to blunt the impact of the deceit and fearmongering of the political commercials which spread quickly around the internet as soon as they are released. Outright lies from supporters of both sides are not uncommon, although half-truths, exaggeration or over-simplification complex issues are much more widespread. The impact is the same – distorting the electorate’s views on candidates and their parties and making it more difficult for voters to make a sensible, rational choice.
The scale and power of the US lobby industry is extraordinary. Almost $3.5 billion was spent on lobbying in Washington alone in 2019, with the most active industries, health, finance, and telecommunications/media – spending around $0.5 billion each. Lobbyists build influence to deliver for their corporate clients by throwing fundraisers for elected officials who have a constant need to bring in money to donate to candidates and campaigns, and by offering highly paid jobs to members of Congress and the aides for when they leave office. With issues becoming ever more complex, expert lobbyists are also increasingly drafting legislation or contributions to bills themselves and touting them on the Hill on behalf of corporate clients. As members of Congress simply can’t be experts on all the issues they have to cover, the lobbyists’ proposals are often taken up whether or not they reflect the greater good.
There is no doubt that money buys access, influence and results in the US in a way that would be considered unpalatable and even corrupt in many other Western democracies. Unless the system is changed, Congress risks ceasing to be the collective voice of the people in the US, but rather the legislative arm of corporations and wealthy interest groups.
The most likely result of this was growing public fatigue of politics, leaving the field ever more open to those with an agenda and large amounts of dollars to spend. The massive impact of money in US politics must now raise very serious questions about just how democratic the American system really is. But it’s now the only thing to worry about when assessing America’s leading democracy myth. Who gets to vote in the US, where their votes are counted and how ballot are ultimately tallied up to determine the results all influence American elections outcomes. It’s a disturbing picture, particularly when both the Democratic and Republican Parties are not at all averse to pursuing democratic actions simply to increase their chances of winning.
Source: The Great American Delusion by Patrick Davis (2020)
SHIFTING OF POWER: A large percentage of the country believes in nearly religious fashion that all risk can be mitigated, so long as we grant the authorities and experts absolute power. We have been told that we need no longer face health risks, so long as we give the government power to mandate vaccines, mask our children and lock down our businesses – even without solid evidence that such measures are effective. We have been told that we ought to delegate all of our economic policy making to unelected centralized bureaucracies, which serve as the source of both our monetary and fiscal policy, and that this will insulate us against the possibility of financial difficulty. We have been told that individually planning for the future, which entails risk, should be foregone, in favor of a cradle-to-grave government safety net.
We thus have a choice before us between the false promise of individual enervation and endless paternalistic caretaking from centralized authority and the real and chaotic world of liberty and risk. Which option we choose will decide whether our civilization survives.
Klaus Schwab is the head of the World Economic Forum. He has issued a call to action for elitists the world over. They appoint themselves the representatives of global interests – without elections, without accountability – and then create mechanisms of national and international order to control citizens over whom they claim to preside. He, and his rationalist buddies – brilliant businessmen and ambitious politicians, striving bureaucrats and myopic experts – will cure the world of all its ills, so long as we grant them power. Or, more likely, so long as they seize power in the name of “stakeholders” to whom they are never answerable.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
Unelected Bureaucrats: The US Congress has ceded to federal agencies, manned by the unelected, the power to make regulations, administer them with the force of law, punish perceived offenders, and muster unlimited resources to quash citizen’s appeals and objections.
Source: The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson (2021)
MARXISM: In America, many Marxists cloak themselves in phrases like “progressives,” “Democratic Socialists,” “community activists,” etc., as most Americans remain openly hostile to the name Marxism. They operate under a myriad of newly minted organizational or identifying nomenclatures, such as “Black Lives Matter,” “Antifa,” “The Squad,” etc. And they claim to promote “economic justice,” “environmental justice,” “racial equity,” “gender equity,” etc. They have invented new theories, like Critical Race Theory, and phrases and terminologies, linked to or fit into a Marxist construct. Moreover, they claim, “the dominant culture” and capitalist systems are unjust and inequitable, fascist and sexist, colonialist and imperialist, materialistic and destructive of the environment. Of course, the purpose is to tear down and tear apart the nation for a thousand reasons and in a thousand ways, thereby dispiriting and demoralizing the public; undermining the citizenry’s confidence in the nation’s institutions, traditions, and customs; creating one calamity after another; weakening the nation from within; and ultimately, destroying what we know as American republicanism and capitalism.
Their demand for absolute one-party control over the body politic through various schemes and other means, as Marxism does not tolerate the competition of ideas or political parties. These efforts include changing the voting system to ensure Democratic Party control for decades, which has as its purpose the eradication of the Republican Party and political competitions, attempting to eliminate the Senate filibuster rule so all manner of laws can be imposed on the country without effective deliberation or challenge; threatening to breach separation of powers and judicial independence by plotting to pack the Supreme Court with like-minded ideologues; planning to add Democratic seats to the Senate to ensure its control over that body; using tens of billions in taxpayer funds to subsidize and strengthen core parts of the Democratic Party (such as unions and political activists): and facilitating massive illegal immigration, the purpose of which is to, among other things, alter the nation’s demographics and eventually add significantly to the pro-Democratic Party voting base.
What is occurring in our country is not a temporary fad or passing event. American Marxism exists, it is here and now, and indeed it is pervasive, and its multitude of hybrid but often interlocking movements are actively working to destroy our society and culture and overthrow the country as we know it.
Source: American Marxism by Mark R. Levin (2021)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| america_7l_political_instability_government_--_segment_7.pdf |