Will Americans Fight for Globalism?

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Imagining a cascade of catastrophic escalations plunging humanity into the next world war is no longer a stretch, and it could happen fast. Israel invades Gaza to destroy Hamas, and Hezbollah goes to war. America targets Hezbollah to help defend Israel, and Iran and Syria, with Russian assistance, attack Israel. Hezbollah cells strike targets within America, and Israel and America strike targets inside Iran. Russia launches a major new offensive in Ukraine with support from Belarus. China openly supports Russia and Iran with weapons. All of this is more plausible than ever.

It also shouldn’t be necessary to debate moral distinctions. Gaza, Lebanon under Hezbollah, and Iran, are all ruled by ruthless Islamic extremists. Syria and Russia are corrupt and brutal dictatorships. China is a fascist ethno-state. Whatever Israel and America’s shortcomings may be, they don’t begin to rise to the level of oppression of these rivals.

During the Cold War, when memories of the 2nd World War were still relatively fresh in the minds of Americans, that sort of moral argument was enough. We weren’t perfect, but the Soviets, who had to build a 4,000 mile long fence to keep millions of their most talented subjects from migrating to Western nations, were obviously much worse. That moral distinction got us through the Korean War, and though more fitfully, it got us through the Vietnam War. And then it was enough to justify massive defense spending during the Reagan years. Ultimately, this containment doctrine worked. In 1989 an exhausted Soviet Union dissolved and the Iron Curtain came down.

Today, though it shouldn’t be, it is necessary to revisit all these premises. To begin with, the American people have changed. When the Cold War began, 90 percent of Americans were of various European descent, and the conflicts of the early 20th century had a unifying impact on the culture, erasing much of the bitterness left over from the Civil War as well as most of the tribal animosities their families might have brought with them from Europe. That has all changed.

Starting in the 1960s, America’s demographics have been transformed at a pace never seen before in its history. Newborns in America today are less than 50 percent white, and these nonwhite students are growing up in a nation where, primarily in Democrat dominated urban areas, they are taught in public schools to resent and distrust white people. For at least the last 30 years, in a process that has worsened every decade, every unifying norm in American society has been under assault by the institutions we have traditionally relied on to protect and reinforce national unity.

One must wonder what America’s leaders are thinking when they endlessly assert that “diversity is our strength” at the same time as they’ve spent years saturating mainstream news commentary with warnings about white supremacists and “systemic racism.” If you want to convince people to go to war with a foreign enemy, you might refrain from encouraging them to go to war with one another.

This is one of the conundrums of incorporating such a flawed model of globalism into a national agenda. If you fracture a nation’s ethnic homogeneity at the same time as you anoint the new arrivals as victims of oppression by the people already living there, you’re going to divide and weaken that nation.

Globalism as it is currently expressed has other flaws, particularly if the goal is to convert a nation into a powerful and persuasive agent of a globalist agenda. Indoctrinating children that are barely old enough to talk to think they can choose their sex is guaranteed to set an unacceptable percentage of them onto a road fraught with confusion and worse, while infuriating millions of parents. Moving from tolerance to obligatory endorsement of LGBT culture across every cultural institution is divisive; shifting the abortion debate from the heartbeat threshold to no restrictions right up until the ninth month is evil. And yet these are some of the terms of mainstream conformity in America today.

Is this what Americans are going to be asked to fight for, if the conflicts we’re heading into expand into war commitments that can’t be fulfilled by a volunteer military and a peacetime economy? Shall we be drafted, trained, and sent to die so America’s establishment institutions can continue to marginalize if not explicitly demonize white people, straight men, Christians, and concerned parents as oppressors, at the same time as they teach nonwhites, LGBTQs, atheists and people of non-Christian faiths to believe they are victims who live in a hostile nation?

Who will be left to fight, and what will they fight for? Not America’s historic traditions or values, which are now controversial if not toxic. Nor may we fight to preserve our standard of living, which is now seen as unsustainable.

The impact of the globalist green agenda has only begun to be felt, but it is already further alienating millions of Americans from their government and the utterly corrupt corporations that are complicit in the project. To allegedly save us all from a “climate crisis,” development and use of oil, natural gas, and coal is being halted. For reasons clearly unrelated to climate change, but apparently equally compelling, development and use of hydroelectric power and nuclear power is also being slowed down if not completely stopped. Instead, energy is now going to come from wind, solar and biomass energy, with massive battery backup systems to buffer their intermittency. These are horridly destructive to the environment, require more raw materials than we’ll ever manage to extract, and cannot possibly deliver the amount of energy the nation (or the world) requires to prosper.

The consequences of “Green” policies are the primary reason why most Americans can no longer afford to own homes or pay rent, buy gasoline, or pay their utility bills. And these elevated prices for essentials factor into price increases for everything else. How will doing this make America strong enough to withstand a prolonged military conflict with peer adversaries?

In a nation with a divided people, most of them alienated from their government, saying we’re not as bad as our enemies may no longer be enough to make people willing to fight and die. If all that globalist visionaries who inform our government, and the corporations that control it, and the uniparty puppets who pretend to be our representatives have to offer us is a future where we’ll own nothing – eating bugs, replacing faith with narcissism, exchanging love for AI, fearing encounters with actual living people whenever we take off the VR goggles, packed into “pods” inside megacities like cattle, wasting away, childless, aimless – and be happy, who cares?

Green. Woke. Such are the globalists who control America today. Unless that changes, this is what we’re going to be asked to fight for, and impose on any nations that resist, whether it’s tomorrow or years from now. We will be told we are going to war to save the planet from regimes that deny the climate crisis, and to liberate the world from fascism, racism, tribalism, nationalism, sexism, homophobia, and now, transphobia.

To be sure, if this plays out among the actors confronting us today, the nations we may be asked to fight are undeniably worse. They commit atrocities. They don’t bother with psyops to manipulate their people into compliance, they just brutalize and slaughter them. But those nations, and the regimes that control them, also reject globalism for all the repellent features that presently define it. For just that one thing, and not in any way to excuse the rest, can we honestly blame them?

Perhaps the globalists that run America should reconsider their strategy. If they want Americans to fight for them, they need to give back a future worth dying to protect. Get the monopolistic corporations under control so they have to compete with each other and make goods affordable again. Knock off all the divisive “woke” garbage. Quit pretending there’s a climate crisis when it’s obvious that the true motivation is to consolidate property ownership and control of resources. Stop flooding the nation with millions of people who are then trained to hate us, if they don’t already.

Make America overwhelmingly strong again. Make America affordable again. Modify if not entirely scrap the globalist agenda that’s being imposed on the rest of the world. Nobody wants it. Then, and only then, ask Americans to fight. At that point, if those things were done, it probably would no longer be necessary.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Finding Unity in a Divided America

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We are in the middle of a national identity crisis. Faith, patriotism and hard work have disappeared. Wokeness, gender ideology, and the climate cult have taken their place. We spend so much time celebrating our diversity that we forget the values that bind us together. And I believe deep in my bones that those values still exist. We can take our country back.
– Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for GOP nomination for US president

Before writing off one of the most interesting candidates to jump onto the national political stage in years, merely because he happens to be saying literally everything you want to hear, peruse what his actual ideological opponents are saying about him. From Vox, an attack piece with an incoherent theme that might best be exemplified by this excerpt: “At the root of Ramaswamy’s appeal is the pernicious ‘model minority’ stereotype — a story about self-sufficiency and innate talent woven around the creation of an Asian American professional class in the 1960s — that has since been used to dismantle civil rights, divide communities of color, and perpetuate the myth of America as colorblind.”

According to Vox, and by extension, the American Left, the story of an individual achieving success is divisive. No surprise there. The political currency of the Left, spent lavishly and to dreadful effect, is resentment and fear. America is racist. Capitalism is oppressive. A climate catastrophe is upon us. The blame falls squarely on the shoulders of heterosexual white men, and Vivek Ramaswamy is their stooge.

Leftist attacks on politicians and influencers like Ramaswamy aren’t anything new. Every time a conservative “of color” surfaces, they’re marginalized. Larry Elder, also running for the GOP presidential nomination, has been dubbed “the black face of white supremacy.” But despite coordinated smear campaigns from the Left, increasing numbers of black and Latino politicians are moving right of center. And Ramaswamy’s core message – that we are in the middle of a national identity crisis – is directly on target. Until a new coalition forms, transcending ethnicity, income, and geography, and wielding landslide, supermajority electoral dominance, American culture will remain divided and adrift.

During the final decade of the Cold War in 1984, President Ronald Reagan was reelected by a landslide. His “big tent” approach brought together fiscal conservatives, Neocons, and conservative Christians. Scarcely a generation later, in 2004, George W Bush also won a decisive victory by unifying these same factions. But the model that worked then will not work today. Fiscal conservatives have to answer for a bipartisan debt binge that started in 1980 and has gotten progressively worse. Neocons have to answer for a foreign policy that has, among other things, destabilized the Middle East, created a surveillance state at home, and is supporting a horrific war in Ukraine with no exit strategy. As for conservative Christians, the Left has unfairly but successfully defined them as anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-“trans,” and is using them to stereotype conservatives as dangerous extremists.

Restoring a positive, powerful and widely shared American identity will require assembling a new coalition, and there are plenty of new approaches that will bring Americans together again. Ramaswamy offers one avenue – a hyper-articulate messenger who is too good to be true for white conservatives, and authentic enough to attract nonwhite voters who never heard a conservative speak to them so directly. Ramaswamy embodies the colorblind essence of American values, and knows how to express them with clarity and without compromise. His presence, and the presence of politicians like him, will bring millions of ethnic voters into the conservative coalition.

Another avenue towards realignment is being trailblazed by Donald Trump, who instead of participating in this week’s GOP primary candidate debate, plans to speak to an audience of striking auto workers. The audacity of this decision is historic. Republicans never presumed to stand before thousands of striking workers, but as a populist conservative, Trump seizes the opportunity. Expect him to talk about the stupidity of trying to force EVs onto American drivers before the technology is ready. Expect him to defend conventional energy and conventional automotive technology. Expect him to tell the truth about immigration – when it is unregulated and absent merit-based criteria, it is nothing but an economic drain on the nation. Trump recognizes something the leftist leadership of these unions deny – the vast majority of autoworkers love America, believe in traditional values, and want politicians who will first protect them, before prioritizing economic refugees that arrive illegally by the millions.

What desperate leftist media institutions call “far right” are in fact common sense reforms that most Americans support. Politicians like Trump and Ramaswamy, along with hundreds of other prominent national politicians in the U.S. Congress, are promoting a pathway to restoring American greatness and a shared national identity. Joining this common sense crusade that crosses lines of ethnicity and income are not only members of minority groups and members of trade unions, but civil engineering companies that want to build infrastructure that makes economic sense, and academic reformers that want to return K-12 education to the basics and return higher education to uplifting Western values and issuing marketable degrees.

The common sense crusade can also include members of law enforcement and the judiciary, along with social workers and other public bureaucrats who have the integrity to recognize and reject the special interest capture of public institutions, resulting in rising crime along with a host of other failed public policies. Included in this cohort would be so-called Blue Dog Democrats and independent voters, tired of watching every American institution fail, one after another, always spending more and delivering less. Even disaffected environmentalists will join the common sense crusade, as they realize that environmentalism has been hijacked by financial special interests and is now doing more harm than good to the environment.

With all this potential for unity, and with this deep American reservoir of common sense, who is left? Only the scourge of civilization, that propensity for the powerful to want more power, the timeless reality that power disproportionately appeals to the corrupt, the sad erosion of checks and balances that America’s founders thoughtfully constructed in history’s finest attempt preserve a nation that respects and nurtures individual freedoms. America’s business and political elite share a vision that abandons normal citizens. A donor fed uniparty, dominated by special interests for whom profit and power is acquired because of failing bureaucracies, punitive regulations, scarce and expensive commodities, a massive dependent class of citizens and noncitizen permanent residents, and corporate consolidation of wealth.

Americans see this reality. The hardships they’re enduring offer clarity, suggesting obvious solutions. Drill for oil. Develop nuclear power. Build roads, bridges, and buses before spending countless billions on “light rail” and “bullet trains” that hardly anyone will ever ride. Replace 100 percent EV mandates with incentives to build advanced hybrids, with no technological possibilities excluded. Bring manufacturing back onshore. Preserve cash and reject digital IDs and digital currencies. Replace ridiculous energy efficiency mandates – that merely guarantee planned obsolescence and poor performance – with reasonable innovations that deliver genuine value to consumers. End the war on housing. Restore responsible logging to lower the price of lumber, create jobs, and prevent forest fires. Protect the environment but without sacrificing the obligation to preserve opportunities for Americans to afford homes and a pleasant quality of life. Restrict immigration to merit based entry, and prioritize the patient millions who have been waiting years to come in the front door. Put criminals in prison. Compel addicts and alcoholics to get treatment; compel homeless people to go to cost effective shelters. Implement school choice, and rescue public schools from the woke mafia. And so on.

These are practical, common sense policies that Americans are ready to support. They represent a consensus that defies and transcends the stereotypical notions of Right and Left, or even Democrat and Republican. They are pro-capitalist but anti-monopoly. They embrace publicly funded infrastructure, if it is practical and yields long term economic benefits, but reject welfare dependency. They support merit-based immigration but reject open borders. They believe in meritocracy but abhor racism. They support free speech, while condemning yet permitting hate speech. They support the 2nd amendment but demand the deterrent effect of strict law enforcement. They defend traditional culture and want to return it to the mainstream, but reject prejudice and bigotry.

If the candidates that offer these solutions can do so without compromise, and leaven their delivery with firm but friendly optimism, they will get elected. If they keep their promises, they will be reelected. And the new supermajority that will elect them will be impossible to stop, because apart from those members of the elite that remain recalcitrant – few in number, wielding a narrative that has been utterly discredited – everyone will be part of it.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Hidden Agenda Behind Lockdowns

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You can call it a “road diet,” or “15 days to stop the spread,” or a “fifteen minute city,” or a “smart city,” a “central bank digital currency,” or just an EV that comes with a virtual leash attached in the form of limited range and limited recharging options. Or you can be more explicit and just call any one of these examples an assault on your mobility, i.e., a lockdown. Whatever you want to call them, they’ve arrived, and it’s just begun. Americans, along with their European brethren, are being turned into livestock, living in high-tech pens, where literally every aspect of our lives is monitored and everything we do or consume is rationed.

The justification for these lockdowns is to protect us from pandemics, to protect the environment, and – in a society with diminished opportunities and a reduced standard of living – to ensure “equity” for members of protected status groups. The common thread? Protection. And where there is a need for protection, there is a threat. A killer virus. A “climate crisis.” A toxic environment of white privilege.

In reality, however, the policies being promulgated to counter these supposedly existential threats are grossly out of proportion to the actual threats. There is a hidden agenda.

While the worst interpretations of this hidden agenda may be overstatements, we would be well advised to hear them out. An early and comprehensive assessment of how the COVID pandemic was exploited to move Americans closer to the status of livestock came from Catherine Austin Fitts in her video “Planet Lockdown.” Some of her ideas and allegations may stretch credulity, but nonetheless are essential concepts for anyone trying to make sense of where we could be headed as a civilization.

Fitts observes that the wealth of the world is becoming more and more concentrated into nations with advanced technology, and within those nations, disproportionately to a small elite. She claims the COVID pandemic provided an excuse to institute controls necessary to convert the planet from democratic processes to technocracy.

According to Fitts, in 1995, as neoliberal ideology took hold in both political parties in the U.S., the decision was made to transfer most of the wealth out of the country. This is the hollowing out that Trump’s populism attempted to reverse. But now, with the process nearly complete, Pitt alleges the pandemic is the cover whereby the unsustainable financial situation in the United States – because it was hollowed out – can be “reset.” She then claims the virus is being used as the means to compel mass vaccine injections that will make it possible to digitally identify and track every person. These biometric markers will then be used to connect people to a new cyber currency, allowing complete control. She believes there are five sectors working in tandem to create this new world order:

(1) Technology industry building clouds. (2) Military doing space development. (3) Big pharma developing injections to modify human DNA. (4) Media providing propaganda. (5) Central bankers engineering a new crypto system of global currency.

What Fitts is describing is a dark version of futurism. Her perspective is negative, but coherent. Technology has created barriers to entry that make it easier for a shrinking group of elite special interests to consolidate entire sectors of the economy and become very powerful. But why the new world order? Why the “reset”? Why turn humans into livestock, without rights, without property? Fitts offers a logical answer:

“If technology can make it possible for people to live 150 years, and it isn’t possible to keep this a secret, then why not downsize the population, integrate robots, so you can have a very wealthy and luxurious life without the management headaches?” In one particularly chilling quote, Fitts says “I was having a conversation with a venture capitalist, billionaire type, and he looked at me with these amazingly dead eyes and said ‘I can take every company and completely automate it with software and robotics and fire all the humans. We don’t need them any more.’”

Another explanatory warning, much more recent, came from Vera Sharav, a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, speaking at the 75th Anniversary of The Nuremberg Code. Next to America’s Bill of Rights, the Nuremberg Code is one of humanity’s greatest weapons against medical slavery. For an 86-year-old who can personally recall being herded into concentration camps, Sharav is remarkably lucid.

Sharav describes the gradual onset of slavery in Nazi Germany, how the instruments of oppression rolled out over several years. In particular, she explains how medicine was perverted from its healing mission and was weaponized. She puts forward the ten point statement handed down by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in 1948 as essential guidelines that restrict medical experimentation. As COVID variants, and COVID vaccines, appear poised to make a timely comeback, it will be useful to be familiar with the human rights set forth in the Nuremberg Code. But why is this happening? Sharav is explicit, and like Fitts, references transhumanism:

“Transhumanism is a bio-tech enhanced caste system. Transhumanists despise human values and deny the existence of a human soul. This is the new eugenics. It is embraced by the most powerful global billionaire technocrats who gather at Davos: big tech, big pharma, the financial oligarchs, academics, government leaders & the military industrial complex. These megalomaniacs have paved the road to another Holocaust. This time, the threat of genocide is global in scale.”

States of Emergency, Permanent Lockdown

To categorically dismiss these terrifying scenarios is to ignore the history of the world and the human capacity for evil. It is to deny the power of deception, and the propensity of millions, gripped by mass psychosis, to participate in abominations while thinking all the while that they are saving the world.

For each of the big three alleged existential threats to the American people – disease, climate catastrophe, and systemic bigotry – there is a curated, sponsored groundswell of popular demand for the government to declare an emergency. And in a state of emergency, human rights are suspended. But some of the more insidious threats to American freedom are moving forward without needing a state of emergency. The official response to the “climate crisis” offers countless examples.

If ongoing pandemics condemn Americans to recurrent lockdowns (a word once only used in the context of maximum security prisons, but to which we are now completely desensitized), it is to save the climate that might inform how our cells are designed. They’re not pretty. Across America, single family homes with yards are being outlawed. New construction is prohibited and existing suburbs are being rezoned. This is to reduce “greenhouse gas,” despite weak arguments that low density housing causes more “greenhouse gas,” even if you think “greenhouse gas” is a real problem.

More generally, a whole new genre of creative accounting has been invented, called “carbon accounting,” whereby corporations, along with state and local governments, are now required to calculate how they will reduce their “carbon footprint.” Failure to do so results in the loss of subsidies and grants, as well as access to investment capital. Carbon accounting encompasses every imaginable aspect of life. Have a look at this “Climate Action Plan,” prepared for California city with 400,000 residents. There is nothing it will not regulate; all personal appliances, building codes, real estate zoning, transportation policy, every business, every industry, right down to cow farts and light bulbs.

The variables that “carbon accounting” purports to measure and manage are infinite. Rarely in human history has a new enterprise been so riven with subjectivity, so conducive to manipulation, so unnecessary, or so parasitical. But these credentialed minions, most of them utterly convinced of their messianic indispensability, are the foot soldiers of the great reset. When they’re done, you will live in small apartments, consuming strictly rationed resources, and locked down like an inmate, like a penned veal calf, whenever there’s a viral surge or the sun is too hot.

The third leg of the triad, equity, is a risky strategy. But so far, it’s working spectacularly well. Every time another outrageous and divisive initiative is announced, whether it’s paying reparations, condoning the 2020 riots, or taking children away from their parents so they can be castrated, the population is distracted. But it is possible that members of these disparate, artificially enflamed identity groups may someday recognize a planetwide lockdown being orchestrated in the background, and stop fighting each other.

It is possible that tens of millions of Americans will begin to question the credibility of pandemic and climate catastrophists, and realize the already red-pilled skeptics are not “conspiracy theorists,” or “haters,” but people just like them, fighting to keep everyone free. That day may arrive, and if it does, there is hope. We may be allowed to remain humans after all, possessing our dignity and our agency, and not turn into livestock.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

Unexplained Excess Deaths Persist in Post-COVID Era

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According to data reported weekly by the CDC, the death rate in America remains elevated. In the six years prior to the COVID era, deaths in the United States averaged between 2.6 and 2.8 million people per year. These averages are adjusted for population growth, and with a population as large as the U.S., the numbers should be, and are, remarkably stable. During the three years immediately preceding the 2020, for example, the population growth adjusted death rate from all causes varied by only 1.5 percent.

None of that is true today. The increase in total deaths – deaths from all causes, not just COVID deaths – is up significantly. If the period between October 2019 and June 2023 had adhered to predictable mortality rates, 10.5 million Americans would have died. Instead, during that period, 12.4 people died. This prolonged period of so-called excess deaths, 17 percent above normal, is only rivaled by the estimated 675,000 deaths from Spanish Flu in America in 1918-19 when the country had a much smaller population.

To illustrate how aberrant these grim statistics are, the chart below plots on a blue line the actual weekly deaths from all causes in the United States from the Fall of 2019 through the Spring of 2023. The grey line plots how many deaths would have occurred if mortality rates had adhered to predictable trends based on highly consistent statistics from the six prior years, 2013 through 2019. The data is indisputable, even if the causes remain mired in controversy. During the so-called COVID era, nearly 2.0 million people are dead who, if it had been normal times, would still be alive today.

There appears to be no end in sight, even though the horrific surges appear to be behind us. As shown on the right edges of the chart, going into the summer of 2023, weekly deaths from all causes remained persistently higher than normal. For example, during the last week of June, which is the most recent week for which there is reasonably complete reporting, 55,000 Americans died. Based on historical patterns, only 51,000 Americans would have died. Excess deaths in the U.S. are still about 7 percent above normal.

Equally if not more alarming, even though the number of reported cases of COVID has been sharply down ever since the last major surge in January 2022, they now account for less than one in five of this persistent elevated death rate. Even during the first week of January 2023, when total deaths reached a yearly peak of 70,165 compared to a normal average estimate for that week of 57,545, only 3,656 of those 12,620 excess deaths were reported as COVID deaths. During the last week for which we have completed data, the week of June 26, 2023, of the estimated excess deaths of 3,265, only 566 were reported as caused by COVID.

In an attempt to get an idea of who is dying, the next chart shows deaths by week for the period January 2015 through June 2023, plotted by age group. The results are interesting. The most obvious observation is that the top two lines, which plot weekly deaths of people over 75 and over 85, respectively, account for most deaths in the U.S., as would be expected. These two age groups also experienced the highest spikes in mortality during the COVID years. The next two lines, representing Americans from 65 to 74, and from 45 to 64 track remarkably close to each other up until the COVID years and don’t diverge sharply even during the COVD years.

To dive deeper into the trends among Americans over 45, notice where each line begins and ends. The very old Americans are dying today in about the same numbers as they were in 2015, as are Americans between 45 and 64. In the case of the 85+ Americans, the cause may be there simply aren’t as many of them left, since so many were lost during the COVID years. In the case of the 45-64 year olds, the return to normal may be attributable to their relative good health and resilience compared to their older counterparts. But notice the trend that applies for the 65-74 and the 75-84 year olds. The summertime low for 65-74 year olds in 2015 was around 9,000 per week, and today it is elevated to around 13,000 per week. Similarly, and in even more dramatic fashion, the summertime low for 75-84 year olds in 2015 was around 12,500 per week, and now it is all the way up to nearly 18,000 per week. Most of the persistent increase in the death rate can be found in Americans between 65 and 84.

For young Americans, two things are evident. First, during the COVID years there was a significant increase in the death rate among 25-44 year olds, and even though the numbers are relatively small, they are currently dying at a significantly greater percentage rate than in the pre-COVID years. Second, it is quite clear that for Americans under the age of 25, as shown in the virtually horizontal plot at the bottom of the chart, COVID was of zero statistical significance, nor are they experiencing statistically relevant excess deaths today.

Wading through this data reduces to a sobering reality: Americans over the age of 65 are dying in numbers and at rates far in excess of what data from recent but pre-COVID years would predict. These are not Americans that typically show up in the elevated drug overdose and homicide statistics. And at least according to the CDC, the vast majority of them are not dying of COVID.

Altogether, based on CDC statistics, the difference between excess deaths and deaths reported as COVID deaths in the United States over the past three years now exceeds 650,000. The percentage of excess deaths that are not recorded as COVID deaths has never been higher, and currently exceeds 80 percent. Without far more analysis, as well as the truths that will eventually emerge through the filter of history, it is sufficient to say excess deaths in the United States that aren’t caused by COVID might be primarily the sum of increases in suicides, murders, car accidents, drug overdoses, a disproportionately large number of 1946 babies reaching the limit of their life expectancy, and deferred diagnoses and deferred treatments. Or it might be something else.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Christianity and the Globalist Agenda

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When God tells you what to do you cannot hesitate.
– “Vampiro,” played by Bill Camp, in the Movie “Sound of Freedom“

The power of these 10 words threatens the most powerful individuals and institutions on the planet, and what might otherwise be their total control over governments. These words express a principle that an authoritarian government cannot tolerate. They proclaim “Government is not the ultimate sovereign. God is the ultimate sovereign. And if you challenge my God and make me choose, I will obey God, and I will defy you.”

There’s plenty out there to defy these days. One big piece at a time, the whole world is coming under the control of fewer and fewer people. That is inherently suspect, but their avowed and allegedly benign objectives make matters far worse.

Just two hedge funds, Vanguard and Blackrock, with combined assets well over $20 trillion, are the biggest shareholders in 88 percent of the companies on the S&P 500. These massive wealth managers work in concert with the World Economic Forum, the World Federation of Advertisers, and other transnational institutions to, as Ben Shapiro documents in a must-watch video, “create a universal framework full of guidelines and ratings designed to enforce approved narratives.”

And what is the purpose and objective of these narratives? In a 30,000 word essay, “The China Convergence” published earlier this month on Substack, author N.S. Lyons writes: “The less the people are willing and able to practice self-governance individually and collectively, the more formal rules and systems of external authority will step in to micromanage what they want and how they behave.”

From these two sources, one succinct and the other comprehensive, both scrupulously documented, ample evidence is offered to help explain why Christianity is a threat to the narrative. Christians not only fail to recognize government as the ultimate authority in their lives, they are self-governing. They don’t need to be micromanaged. And on every issue of consequence, issues that will determine our identity and our destiny, they don’t accept the narrative.

The obvious clash between Christians and the globalist narrative is over how to define morality. But acrimonious debates over abortion and sexuality aren’t what makes Christians a threat. It’s that when Christians believe something is wrong, they will take action to change it. As the approved narrative aims increasingly to divide people by race and gender, at the same time as it aims to convince individuals to indulge decadence, depravity, indolence, victimhood, and general selfishness, Christians see this for what it is: the destruction of a culture and the erasure of a free people.

Hence the overwrought scorn brought down by the approved narrative onto the movie “Sound of Freedom.” From Rolling Stone, “The QAnon-tinged thriller about child-trafficking is designed to appeal to the conscience of a conspiracy-addled boomer.” From The Economist, “Turning the culture war into profit.” From USA Today, “a recruiting tool for the far right.” From People, “creative liberties” taken by the film included “scenes in which children are held against their will within shipping containers.” Creative liberties? It happens all the time! And from state-funded NPR, “QAnon supporters are promoting ‘Sound of Freedom.'”

This derision obscures establishment fear. Child trafficking, like sex changes on kids and radical gender indoctrination in elementary schools, crosses a red line for Christians. And they are not going to back down. Nor are these examples the only areas where Christians are ready to fight.

The extreme environmentalist agenda, a fundamental part of the approved narrative, is guaranteed to convert the vast majority of humanity into second class creatures. It not only condemns humanity to be reduced to the status of livestock, it puts the interests of plants and animals in front of the interests of people. Christians are as willing as anyone to strive for balance between nature and civilization, but Christianity explicitly rejects the primacy of “Gaia”: In Genesis 1:28, it reads “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Extreme environmentalism is a false religion, and Christians will never submit to it.

If the approved narrative relies on extreme environmentalism as the state religion that provides the alleged moral justification to effectively enslave the vast majority of humanity, the ultimate technology to enforce the lockdown is Central Bank Digital Currency. Christian scripture is so explicit on this phenomenon it might even make an agnostic think twice. Here is a modern translation of Revelation, 13:17: “Then it compels all, small and great, rich and poor, free men and slaves, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads. The purpose of this is that no one should be able to buy or sell unless he bears the mark.” Cash is freedom.

Secular conservatives recognize the power of devout Christians as indispensable allies, and even after decades of negative indoctrination, Christianity remains the dominant faith in America. Despite statistics demonstrating a decline in America’s “shrinking Christian majority,” even among Americans in their 20s, more than half still identify as Christian. Overall, two-thirds of Americans, over 220 million people, identify as Christian. What percentage of them are devout Christians? What percentage of them will become more devout as they recognize the hidden agenda behind the approved narrative, and see the decadence rolling out now in plain sight?

Christianity in America may have declined in recent decades, but that decline may be over. Moreover, with America’s fertility rate for devout Christians holding at 2.4, while only 1.3 for the irreligious, the long-term demographic ascendancy of Christians is inevitable. No wonder the culture seeks to stigmatize Christians. Their only hope is to convert millions of young Christians to atheism. But that trend, as well, may have already peaked. An authentic youthful rebel in 2023 America turns toward Christianity, not away from it. And in any case, watch the Christian resistance grow the first time, and every time, the government turns off digital money to enforce a carbon ration.

Christians recognize something the purveyors of the approved narrative only pretend to see, which is the existence of absolute good and absolute evil. The elites have done us all a favor, and perhaps committed a fatal error, by thinking humans were already so brainwashed they would believe it’s ok to tell five year old children they can choose their “gender,” or that it’s a healthy display of liberal tolerance to allow drag queens to twerk in front of elementary school children, or for doctors and “therapists” to coerce parents into having their pre-adolescent children castrated.

These things are abominations to Christians, along with pretty much anyone else with an ounce of common sense, and that they are institutionally promoted stimulates a more generalized skepticism of the approved narrative. It certainly calls into question the conventional wisdom that the approved narrative is “science based.” Under scrutiny, the entire narrative falls apart. No, we don’t want to live in techno-pens like human livestock to appease “Gaia.” No, we don’t want digital money that the government can track and turn off at will. Yes, we want to be free.

Christians are also a threat because they believe in an afterlife. They are not afraid to lose their possessions or even their lives, because they believe their experience in this world is only a preliminary to heaven. Animating to action a mere fraction of America’s Christians raises an army of millions. They have no fear, because they are God’s army.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

How Unions Have Betrayed America

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Anyone suggesting there is no role for unions in America today might first consider a fact of history: over a century ago, when oligarchs and the companies they owned had treated workers as if they were livestock, reduced to living in squalid pens with rationed food and water, it was unions that organized these workers to resist. It was unions who gave these workers back their humanity, and negotiated collective bargaining agreements and laws that eliminated child labor, enforced workplace safety, established an 8 hour work day, paid overtime, health benefits, and retirement pensions.

Unions today operate in a very different America. But how big labor has adapted calls into question their commitment to helping all American workers have a chance at a middle class lifestyle. In critical areas affecting everyone trying to thrive in 21st century America, unions have betrayed the American worker. In particular, their failure to challenge the globalist agenda of open borders and environmentalist extremism has inverted their priorities, putting them into alignment with the corporations and oligarchs they once so nobly opposed. This betrayal is most exemplified in the agenda of unions that didn’t exist a century ago, America’s powerful unions of government employees.

Government Unions Control and Corrupt Public Services

A distinction must be made between public sector unions, and the now less influential private sector unions. Public sector unions today have embraced a potent blend of toxic ideologies, centered around woke politics and environmentalist extremism. The most powerful public sector unions, those representing teachers and school employees, have forced this ideology into the public schools. This has not only indoctrinated a generation of young voters to vote for leftists, it has left them without the literacy and numeracy necessary to more easily grasp the nihilistic essence of leftism.

In critical ways, government unions don’t even fulfil the basic definition of a union. They don’t negotiate with independent management, they “negotiate” with politicians they elect. In California, public sector unions collect and spend nearly $1.0 billion per year, applying at least one-third of that spending to explicitly political activities such as lobbying and campaign contributions. Another third is spent on allegedly nonpolitical activities such as public education which almost invariably has a political objective. Even in a state as big as California, spending $1.2 billion every election cycle will buy a lot of politicians and profoundly influence public opinion.

Government unions also don’t have to rely on the profitability of the enterprise they’re negotiating with. Unions have to be more reasonable when negotiating with private employers because they can go out of business. But government agencies just increase taxes, and in “information campaigns” using public money, abetted by public union money, more taxes and more borrowing are repeatedly sold to voters. In November 2022, in deep blue, union controlled California, taxpayers approved 92 bonds totaling $23 billion in new local government borrowing, and they approved 152 local tax increases, set to raise another $1.6 billion per year in perpetuity.

Government unions, contrary to the essential notion of a union, are not fighting power structures. They are the power, and they use it to further their agenda – higher pay and more workers, which in-turn means more government programs and higher taxes. And thanks to their ideological preferences, the programs they promote, such as inefficient renewable energy mandates and counterproductive policies towards crime and the unhoused, repeatedly fail and in so doing require even more spending. Thus for government unions, failure is success, because the remedy is always more government. But what about private sector unions?

How Private Sector Unions Betray the American Worker

The problem with private sector unions is not because they want to maintain and increase their wages and benefits. There are compelling reasons why private sector unions, properly regulated, ought to be a necessary counterweight to private corporate interests. The problem is that the American oligarchy, which intends to flatten the world, erase national sovereignty, obliterate the middle class, and abolish borders, cultures, cash, small businesses, medium size businesses, and decentralized private ownership, has coopted private sector unions.

When was the last time anyone heard the leader of a national labor organization call for controlled immigration, which is a certain way to keep upward pressure on wages? When in recent years have any private labor leaders called for anti-trust legislation against the handful of trillion dollar hedge funds that are buying up America’s housing stock to turn us into a nation of renters, or called for the breakup of the cartel that controls the nation’s food supply? Where were the unions, when the nation was in lockdown for nearly two years, devastating small businesses and driving households into crippling debt and bankruptcy?

America’s private sector unions are vocal proponents of every item on the leftist agenda, but they are not doing anything to help the vast majority of American workers, even as they engage in a handful of labor actions, scattered across the country. And what every defender of leftism and unions must understand is that there is no longer any significant functional difference between “leftist” state ownership and “right-wing” ownership by monopoly corporations that have coopted the state. One is called communism, the other fascism. They are both authoritarian political models that are founded on centralized control. What the American oligarchy has evolved into is soft fascism. Soft, because with the high-tech tools available today, mass persuasion is easy. And it is here, where private sector unions have committed perhaps the biggest betrayal of all.

Instead of recognizing the so-called Green New Deal, or Great Reset, as a corporate tool designed to transfer upward and further centralize wealth at the same time as it reduces ordinary workers into living in micromanaged pens with rationed food and water, unions endorse it. Their endorsement finds expression in their support for policies guaranteed to achieve this pernicious goal. They support hundreds of billions, and ultimately trillions, in government spending to build, for example, large-scale CO2 capture facilities, EV charging stations, and floating wind turbines. They support urban rezoning to construct high-rise apartments, and light rail mass transit. All of these projects are staggeringly expensive, and not one of them will yield practical economic benefits downstream. Union construction workers will get jobs, big civil engineering firms will get government contracts, but the ordinary American will pay for these projects at a price they can’t afford. It isn’t as if there aren’t obvious alternatives.

Private sector union leadership has abandoned a common sense principle of fundamental importance: how public infrastructure priorities are set determines whether or not ordinary Americans are able to achieve and maintain a middle class lifestyle. California’s bullet train project is a classic example. After over a decade of work and over $10 billion already spent, not a single track has been laid. The cost for the first segment, which transits the emptiest, flattest stretch of the entire planned line, is estimated to cost over $200 million per mile. The entire project is now projected to cost $130 billion, with no credible completion date, and it will always be an economic drain on Californians.

In order to follow the path of least resistance private sector unions in California support this fraud. It is make work, designed to appease unions while preventing their workers from completing projects that make economic sense: widening and upgrading roads and freeways, upgrading existing railroad lines, bringing California’s remarkable system of water storage and transport into the 21st century, building wastewater recycling and desalination plants, upgrading the state’s capacity to engage in oil extraction and refining, increasing natural gas drilling and upgrading the distribution pipelines, and building more nuclear power stations. Much of this work could be accomplished with private funds. But the unions, and the corporations with which they have made common cause, will not challenge the extreme environmentalists, or the oligarchy that finds them so useful.

Private sector unions are one of the last special interest groups left in America that still has the power to change national policy. As the nation slowly transitions into a technology driven police state, with a workforce disenfranchised and impoverished by “climate” mandates, mass immigration, and intelligent machines, the potential will grow for unions to exercise bipartisan appeal. The only question that remains is will any of them have the courage to fight the trend and challenge the power. Or will they continue to be part of the establishment they were meant to oppose.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Turning California Purple

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California is the epicenter of Democratic power in the United States. The ultra-blue state backs up its progressive agenda with a state legislature that commands a Democrat “mega” majority in both the State Assembly (62-18) and the State Senate (32-8). Every higher office in the state, from Governor down to State Superintendent of Public Instruction, is occupied by Democratic politicians. California’s last Republican governor was Arnold Schwarzenegger, a RINO whose legacy includes his 2006 signing of the Global Warming Solutions Act, an authoritarian, economic power grab that has further concentrated the wealth and all but destroyed upward mobility in the once golden state.

By now every American who values their political and financial freedom should know that what happens in California does not stay in California. At $3.6 trillion, the state’s GDP is not only by far the largest in America, but the wealth imbalance in the state – only edged by New York among among large states – spells even more billions for California’s plutocrats. There are an estimated 186 billionaires living in California, almost all of them Democrats. As Mark Zuckerberg proved when he deployed over $400 million to “get-out-the-vote” in Democrat-heavy urban precincts in crucial swing states, California’s billionaires aren’t shy about using their financial clout to buy national elections.

And then there is the music and entertainment industry, still centered in California, along with all the new high-tech giants that have come to dominate communications and online finance in America: Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, and PayPal. Elon Musk may have disrupted the space with his purchase of Twitter, and there are a few other mavericks left in Silicon Valley, but it’s not the haven of free thinking it once was. California’s once eccentric, individualist culture has given way to compliance. In the epic – and very recent – shift by Democrats from antiwar, anti-corporate, pro free-speech zealots into pro-war, pro-corporate, anti free-speech zealotry, Silicon Valley has led the way, abandoning everything it once represented.

Can Conservatives Ever Win Again in California?

The one-sided war being fought by conservatives in California ought to animate every conservative in America. It isn’t as if there isn’t a conservative base. In 2020, six million Californians voted for Donald Trump, up from 4.5 million four years earlier. This total exceeded that of any other state, narrowly beating #2 Florida (5.3 million) and #3 Texas (5.2 million). This total also exceeded the entire Republican registration in California at the time, 5.3 million. California may be a Democratic stronghold, but there are millions of Californians who’ve had it with Democratic rule. With crime, homelessness, violence, and the cost-of-living all rising since November 2020, one would think Democrats would be starting to lose their grip. So why aren’t they?

To answer this question, it’s useful to compare registration by party in California today to where it was ten years ago, and then identify geographically where the Democrats have increased their numbers, as well as the places where they have lost ground. In October 2022 there were 10.3 million registered Democrats in California, and 5.2 million registered Republicans. Ten years earlier, there were only 7.9 million registered Democrats in California, and 5.4 million registered Republicans. It isn’t hard to see that trend. Democrats went from having a 14 percent registration advantage over Republicans ten years ago to having a 23 point advantage today. Statewide, that is an insurmountable barrier. But what about individual counties? Were Republicans successful in any of them?

The answer to this is unequivocal, and revealing, because it echoes what is in store for the rest of the country if the Democrats – and the RINOs – aren’t stopped. California’s Republicans gained ground in 16 of the state’s 58 counties. All of them are rural, all of them are geographically huge, and none of them have populations big enough to matter in a statewide election. In Lassen County, for example, there was a 15 percent shift, increasing the Republican advantage in that county to an overwhelming 39 percent. But there are only 21,984 eligible voters in the entire county. In all 16 counties combined that were Republican ascendant in California, the net number of new Republican voters totaled a mere 32,822. This in a state with 21.9 million registered voters.

This pattern is felt around the U.S. Rural counties are Republican, urban counties are Democrat. In California, 25 counties have a Republican voter advantage. Every one of them is sparsely populated and rural. In actual numbers, the amount by which registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats in these counties amounts to 144,235 votes. In state politics, they are powerless.

Being powerless has consequences. These counties are red and getting redder because their economy, which relies on ranching, farming, mining, and timber harvesting, has been under relentless and escalating attack for decades. Using state and federal environmentalist laws and regulations, often dropping eye-watering “grants” to enlist the support and unique legal standing of Native American tribal nations for additional leverage, a coalition of state agencies and billionaire supported “nonprofits” have been waging lawfare against every facet of their lives. Whether it’s dam removal, closing another sawmill or mine, rolling back the timber harvests to a fraction of their historical size (the real reason for California’s catastrophic fires), denying farmers their water allocations, cancelling property insurance in the pristine “urban/wildland interface,” exercising eminent domain to expand protected “green spaces,” or prohibiting ranchers from shooting wolves that prey on their livestock and are now threatening their children, California’s rural population is being driven off their land and out of their homes. This litany of abuse barely scratches the surface. The onslaught is endless.

In general, Republicans in California have failed to increase their registered voter numbers, actually losing 124,514 voters between 2012 and 2022, while during that same period Democrats increased their numbers by 2,316,836. California’s registered Republicans, statewide, are down by 2 percent over the past decade, while Democrats are up by an astonishing 29 percent. What happened?

California’s Urban Democrat Dominance is Coming to America

In a nutshell, California’s Republicans get shellacked by Democrats in every heavily populated county, starting with Los Angeles, and it’s getting worse every election cycle. Already a Democratic stronghold ten years ago, the Democratic voter advantage in Los Angeles County increased by 644,133 between 2012 and 2022. In the once solidly red Orange County, 242,315 voters shifted their allegiance to Democrats, giving that county a 4 percent Democrat advantage for the first time in modern history. The story is the same up and down the state; the big counties, already blue, got bluer still. San Diego went from a purplish 1 percent Democrat advantage to a decisive 15 percent Democrat edge. Big Santa Clara County, home of the Silicon Valley, went from 24 percent advantage Democrats to 35 percent. Without exception, Democrats wield a crushing advantage in California’s populous coastal counties.

This ought to be inexplicable. As California’s rural population endures a withering attack by Democrats that threatens their very existence, it isn’t as if California’s cities are getting a pass. As noted, crime, homelessness, violence, and an unaffordable cost-of-living disproportionately afflict the cities. Add to that worthless, failing schools, and escalating episodes of energy and water rationing, and you ought to have a recipe for Democratic political oblivion.

The problem is California’s GOP offers no solutions. Conservatives correctly complain about a biased media, as well as a lack of donor support to even remotely approach financial parity in campaign funds. They cite legacy stigmas still effectively exploited by Democrats, such as the GOP supported initiative all the way back 1994 that banned public benefits for illegal immigrants, or the 2008 initiative that banned gay marriage. Both of these were approved by voters, but the first, which is still used to tag California’s Republicans as racist, was overturned in court. The second, still used as evidence of Republican homophobia, was ignored by then state Attorney General Jerry Brown. And then there’s Trump, and according to Democrats, if you don’t like Trump, you don’t vote Republican in California. All of these factors are indeed disadvantages. But they don’t mean Republicans can’t win.

The reason all of these supposed fatal obstacles to a Republican resurgence in California are merely excuses for failure is because for every flaw facing a Republican, there is a flaw of equal weight pulling down Democrats. Most voters in California are now registered independents. Neither party is popular. What California’s Republicans need are messages that matter, and politicians with the charisma to communicate them. They’d better get busy.

It is important to note that California, a vast state, is nonetheless the most densely populated in its urban areas. Over 94 percent of California’s population lives in urban areas, which occupy barely 5 percent of its land area. This fact, a result of relatively late settlement, combined with remarkable investments in infrastructure back in the 1950s and 1960s to bring water and power to attractive coastal areas, puts California at the front of the forced-density pack. The agenda of Democrats, integral to the Green New Deal, is to densify every urban area in America, while simultaneously depopulating rural areas. Voters are being herded into urban areas controlled by Democratic political machines, fueled by public sector unions, billionaire supported nonprofits with armies of semi-professional militant activists, and grasping businesspeople desperate to get their hands on public money and public contracts.

How to Beat the Urban Political Machine

The key to winning back California, along with saving the nation, is to recognize the foundation of Democrat power is also its ultimate weakness. Democratic messaging relies on the politics of race and gender redress to overcome oppression, and politically contrived scarcity in order to save the planet. Their remedies are to abandon meritocracy and impose rationing on every essential good including housing, energy, water and transportation. These are false premises with destructive consequences. This destruction is manifested in every pathology afflicting California’s cities.

Convincing voters to fix California can rest on three messages that transcend identity, income, and in some cases even ideology:

Reduce crime and homelessness.

Restore quality education.

Lower the cost-of-living.

For each of these issues, there are specific policies that can be advocated without equivocation or compromise.

To reduce crime in California, repeal Proposition 47, the 2014 ballot initiative which downgraded penalties for drug possession and petty theft. To reduce homelessness, start constructing inexpensive shelters in inexpensive parts of California’s cities, instead of continuing to pay corrupt, politically connected developers to build “permanent supportive housing” on beachfront property at an average cost of $500,000 to $1.0 million per unit (yes, that is really happening).

To restore quality education, refuse to negotiate with the teachers union, end unreasonable restrictions on charter schools, bring discipline and standardized tests back to public schools, and implement vouchers or education savings accounts to give parents the option to send their children to private schools.

To lower the cost-of-living, deregulate the housing market, end the war on natural gas and nuclear power, and cancel the “bullet train” in order to invest the money instead in infrastructure projects that yield practical value and long-term economic returns.

That’s the message, and those are the policies behind the message. But who will carry that message? Who will fight for those policies? And more to the point, who will do more than just run another bait-and-switch, straight out of the RINO playbook, talking up these points to get elected then do absolutely nothing once in office?

Supporters of President Trump will accurately claim he would support all of these policies. And it would be a mistake to write Trump’s chances off in California if things get much worse, and if he were to decide to make it a priority to campaign in the state. But in a gubernatorial race what California needs is someone who can expose the woke and green foundations of Democratic policies as extreme, and do so in a way that embraces the inevitable controversy but deflects counter-accusations of extremism.

Someone like Vivek Ramaswamy, for example, could come to California and would not be tripped up by the biased media. Ramaswamy would rhetorically destroy, relying on facts and logic, any politician the Democrats might select to oppose him. Trump’s gift to America is the ongoing transformation of the Republican party into a party representing working people who are having their ability to achieve and maintain financial independence taken away from them in the name of woke and green ideals. Trump has exposed this as a special interest driven fraud. Ramaswamy’s gift is to embody a future for the Republican party that recognizes and extends Trump’s peeling away the Democrat façade, as well as mirror and extend Trump’s policy solutions.

California will turn purple, and then red, if and only if the Republicans still standing in that state decide to espouse a message, and policies, that attack the heart of the Democrat agenda. Instead of fighting an incremental, defensive battle, they must insist, without reservations, on tougher penalties for repeat drug and theft crimes, immediate transfer of homeless to popup, cost-effective shelters, school choice and restoring school discipline, standardized tests and teacher accountability in public schools, and radical deregulation of environmentalist laws that have crippled California’s housing, timber, food, cattle, natural gas, and nuclear power industries.

That agenda will save California, and nothing else will. It has the virtue of being the truth, ready for anyone with the courage to wield it against a corrupt political machine that runs on lies. This truth has the added benefit of offering anyone willing to listen to it a vision of a bright future in a state that works again, where people are safe, can pay their bills, and rely on a good education for their children.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

How the Establishment Uses “Hate and Fear” to Manipulate Voters

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Hate and fear might as well be the GOP’s motto. And while there was a time when a liberal like me saying that would be accurately labeled hyperbolic, that time has passed. Show me what, aside from hate and fear, the modern Republican Party is all about.
Columnist Rex Huppke, writing for USA Today, July 16, 2023

Huppke’s comment is something we hear all the time. The campaign to dehumanize MAGA Republicans as hatemongers and fearmongers is a staple of the liberal media, is the playbook for Democrat politicians all the way up to President Biden, and is supported by almost the entire academic community. This dehumanization campaign isn’t restricted to Democrats. Establishment Republicans either equivocate, or explicitly join Democrats in demonizing MAGA Republicans.

If Huppke’s self-described hyperbole typifies how housebroken establishment pundits attack MAGA Republicans, a more intellectual approach to sowing hatred and fear of MAGA Republicans is exemplified in the writings of an influential political commentator, Heather Cox Richardson, who earns an estimated $1.0 million per year from her Substack subscribers. When writing about alleged “messages of anti-inclusion and hate” proffered by the grassroots group Moms for Liberty, Richardson quoted Chris Rufo to make her point about a supposed “attack on democracy” coming from the American Right:

“Radical right activists like Rufo believe they must capture the central institutions of the U.S. and get rid of the tenets of democracy—individual rights, academic freedom, free markets, separation of church and state, equality before the law—in order to save the country.”

In an extensive body of work, Richardson’s consistent theme is that Republicans are dangerous extremists, relying on misinformation to spread hate and fear. While her tone is objective and she carefully avoids the appearance of hyperbole, her message is consistently biased. Richardson is not objective, or she would blend empathy with her criticism of right-of-center groups such as Moms for Liberty. Instead, Richardson is an active participant in a process of polarization, not mutual understanding.

What Richardson misses, perhaps willfully, is that the “central institutions” of the U.S. have already been “captured” by left-wing extremists, who use them as a platform to spread the most potently seductive blend of hatemongering and fearmongering in the history of propaganda. Equally significant, and also ignored by Richardson, is that America’s most powerful corporations and wealthiest individuals have, with rare exceptions, determined that embracing the leftist narrative offers them a path to more profit and more power.

How Democrats Sow Hatred and Fear

On a host of critical issues the pervasive reach of this narrative of fear and hate is omnipresent. The strategy is obvious: saturate the population with fear, then tacitly urge them to hate anyone who is allegedly responsible, and, crucially, hate anyone who attempts to diminish or deny the threat posed by whoever or whatever is so allegedly fearsome. The “climate emergency” is a perfect example.

When it comes to spreading fear, catastrophic floods, rising seas, deadly heat and raging fires are images that tap something primal in humans. All of these threats are now conveyed to the American public, nonstop, by every establishment institution. A normal heatwave is now “historic,” despite evidence to the contrary, and television screens show temperature maps smothered in red, as if the world was on fire. A powerful storm is now called a “bomb cyclone,” and whatever damage or death may result is blamed on “human caused climate change.” To cope, laws and regulations are demanded, and passed, that convey unprecedented new powers to government bureaucracies and politically connected corporations.

With the fear comes hate. Anyone questioning the climate crisis narrative is a right-wing extremist. The use of the word “denier” to describe a climate skeptic is a particularly effective choice, since it triggers associations with the commonly used term “holocaust denier,” used to describe anyone repugnant enough to deny the Nazi genocide against Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. In a classic and typical strategy of inversion, as well, climate skeptics are accused of being funded by fossil fuel companies. And this accusation sticks, despite the obvious fact that if supplies of the most indispensable fuel on earth are constrained, fossil fuel companies make more profit.

The militancy and fanaticism of climate alarmists is well documented and growing. But it isn’t love for the planet, much less people, that motivates them. It is obsessive anxiety, nurtured by fearmongers on the corporate, Democratic Left, who have captured America’s institutions and stoke that anxiety with every new storm and every hot day. And with existential anxiety comes hatred for anyone who would get in the way of whatever radical solutions might ease that anxiety.

Fearmongering from Democrats is everywhere. The “war on women.” “Systemic racism.” The “genocide against black men by police.” “Turning back the clock” on rights of women and minorities. And, of course the latest, the campaign to “erase” transsexuals.

The False Premises of Democratic Fearmongering

None of these claims have any solid basis in facts. Women have more rights in America than they ever have, anywhere in the world, today as well as throughout history. Systemic racism in its modern incarnation favors virtually anyone belonging to a “protected status group,” which in practice means anyone who is not a heterosexual white male.

The number of blacks killed each year at the hands of police is vanishingly small. Between 2015 and 2021, a total of 135 unarmed blacks were killed by police, an average of 19 per year. With more than 23 million black males living in the U.S., the chances of an unarmed black man in America dying at the hands of police in any given year is less than one in a million. In most of these cases there is an explanation for what happened, while some of these killings are clearly inexcusable and horribly wrong. But with over 1 million sworn police officers in the United States, some abuses are a statistical inevitability. That doesn’t justify them, but it is not evidence of an “epidemic of violence against black men,” much less “genocide.”

This doesn’t stop the Democratic hate machine. If you question the black genocide narrative, you are a racist. If you are a racist, you deserve to be hated.

As for “turning back the clock,” there is a gaping difference, completely ignored by Democrats, between trying to restore common sense, fairness, and sanity to America’s culture and American institutions, and going back to the 1950s, much less the 1850s. Moms for Liberty can be forgiven if they want to keep books written at the third grade level that offer graphic instructions on how to perform oral and anal sex, out of the libraries of elementary schools. Similarly, activists like Chris Rufo have a point when they suggest it might be a tragic mistake for America’s medical and psychiatric establishment to endorse hormone blockers and genitalia altering surgery on minors.

These people are not “haters.” They are fighting madness, curated by an establishment that has traded sanity and standards for a manipulated, collectively psychotic, fearful, hateful, and very useful Democrat mob.

Democrats (and RINOs) Are Corporate Puppets

The truth about climate, identity, and healthy morality doesn’t matter to Democrat leaders, and if all you care about is acquiring, keeping, and growing political and economic power, why should it? Fearmongering and hatemongering is the hard currency of Democrats. It is being used to purchase and transform a nation. Pundits like Rex Huppke traffic in this currency because it’s an easy schtick. It also pleases the corporations and oligarchs that pay Huppke. These special interests recognize how coopting the rhetoric of leftist fear and hate diffuses what until recently was a virulent leftist aversion to corporate power and private wealth. At the same time, they recognize how the green agenda and equity agenda will enable them to acquire still more power.

The biggest lie in American politics is that Democrats and RINOs care about the American people, especially the underdog or “disadvantaged.” They do not. Democrats have become a party controlled by transnational elites, multinational corporations, international banks, and supranational institutions. Worse, much worse, is the flawed, misanthropic agenda of this coalition: turning America into a technology driven police state, using environmentalism and “equity” as justification to level down and subdue the American people. And the psychological weapon to advance this agenda is to foment fear and hatred against whoever might expose the lie.

Partisan academics like Heather Cox Richardson hide the propagandistic essence of their work by adopting an intellectual tone, and selectively omitting relevant facts. But they, too, are feeding the fear and hate machine that defines corporate Leftism in America today. If Richardson, or Huppke, and all the other thousands of hacks who have climbed the greasy pole of leftist influencing truly cared about fighting hate and fear, they would look in the mirror. They might recognize that corruption and hate, sadly, can be found everywhere. Starting from that novel premise, from time to time they might honestly examine what merit and moral worth might be found in MAGA Republican populism, and what nihilistic madness might be found in their own backyards.

That would constitute balance. That would be a step towards reconciliation and unity. It might lead to a new political consensus that demands freedom be more than an illusion, and rejects a national policy of managed decline.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Jason Aldean’s Primal Scream

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On July 13, 2023, a country western artist little known outside his genre stepped into the national spotlight when he released a video of a song that channeled the feelings of at least 100 million Americans. In less than a week it was ranked #1 on iTunes and as of July 25 it is the #1 trending music video on YouTube. But you won’t see it on Country Music Television, because it’s been banned.

By now the story line is well established. Jason Aldean, 46 years old, who already had 24 number 1 hits on the US country charts, has released a music video where against a backdrop of protests and rioting, he sings “don’t try that in a small town, see how far you make it down the road…” Reaction to Aldean’s alleged endorsement of vigilantism and allegedly coded racist undertones has been swift and unrelenting.

According to Variety, Aldean has released “the most contemptible country song of the decade.” From NPR, the song “contained lyrics that glorified gun violence and conveyed traditionally racist ideas.” From The Guardian, “lyrics threatening violence against protesters.” From the New Yorker, “the repellent ‘Try That in a Small Town,’ an ode to vigilantism.”

Mentioning Aldean in the New Yorker was just an aside in that magazine’s recent feature article entitled “Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville.” The article was a lengthy diatribe against “bro country” taking over the industry, dominated by “slick, hollow songs about trucks and beer, sung by interchangeable white hunks.” The article goes on to lionize an emerging counterculture, “made up of female songwriters, Black musicians, and queer artists.”

The myopia displayed by this writer is revealed in how she characterizes the industry. So-called Bro Country is commercially successful because it’s popular. People like it. The “new guard,” on the other hand, is propped up by producers and their corporate sponsors who are trying to bring woke culture to country music, presumably to transform its conservative audience into liberals who will vote for Democrats. Hence CMT bans Aldean’s song, but pushes drag queens and “nonbinary” artists to the top of their playlist. And nobody is buying it.

An influential music blog “Saving Country Music,” without explicitly praising or condemning Aldean’s song, explained its inevitability. “Country music is more conservative now than it was when academia and the media decided to target the genre after the election of Trump, believing the way to enact a blue wave among the electorate was to seed politically-motivated ‘journalists’ into the industry to larp as country fans… Activists would have been much better served leaving mainstream country music alone to continue to release pallid, soft, unimaginative, inoffensive, and apolitical songs to a passive listening audience… Instead, the media and academia disrespected country artists and their fans with their down-looking, arrogant ideas that they could mold their minds through the country art form. Now it’s officially backfired.”

What Aldean’s song represents, and the reason for its popularity, is much bigger than the song itself, or the artist who sings it. For every American who watched tens of thousands of violent mobs rampage across the nation in the summer of 2020, looting and burning, while police were prevented from rounding them up and prosecuting them, and for those Americans, to this day, who watch endless videos of smash-and-grab gangs, or brazen, unmolested shoplifters, or intimidating lunatics free to terrorize the streets, this song is a primal scream.

For every American who watched statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, and countless other symbols of our heritage spat on, vandalized, toppled and smashed, this song is a primal scream.

Chris Willman, writing for Variety, claims “the most dangerous part of the video is how it conflates the act of protesting with violent crime.” But Willman misses the larger point. Of course protesting isn’t the same as violence, but the same mentality informs the leftist movement whether or not they graduate from peaceful protest to aggravated violence. They want to burn the country down. They hate us. They want to destroy us.

In a way the failure of authorities to contain the mobs of 2020, or the anarchists and psychopathic “unhoused” who have overwhelmed our cities, has done a favor for Americans who still love their country. They have sent us a clear message: We don’t care about you. We are going to use the “white supremacists are the true threat” mantra to turn America into a fascist police state, and these insane leftist mobs are our foot soldiers.

What the political pundits and corporate tastemakers don’t understand is that for tens of millions of listeners who love this song, America is a small town, smaller than ever now that every sensational moment in every corner of the nation goes viral in minutes. America has a culture and a story that is beautiful, but now the Left, abetted by globalist corporations that want to erase all nations and control the world, has proclaimed that America is irredeemably ugly. The town has been taken over by outlaws, who hate the people who built it.

If Aldean’s song taps resentment that has exploded in recent years, it’s well founded resentment. Millions of us have ancestors who died for religious freedom when they crossed the oceans centuries ago to settle here. Millions of us are descended from patriots who died to make us a free and independent nation, or from soldiers who died to free the slaves. Millions of us have parents and grandparents who died to save the world from genocidal Nazism. Over the past few decades, we have literally given our nation away to the world, welcoming over 45 million Americans who are foreign born.

And as we have thrown the doors open wide, and offered our freedom and prosperity to people from every corner of the earth, our government is teaching them to hate us. At the same time, our government has decriminalized crime, turned a blind eye to rivers of fentanyl and opium killing 100,000 Americans per year, addressed homelessness as a business opportunity for subsidized developers instead of deregulating the housing industry, have committed to the destruction of cheap energy, and are providing elementary school children with graphic sexual indoctrination while suggesting they can change their “gender.”

Felix Lace, still hanging on by his fingernails to a YouTube account with over a half-million subscribers, in a video posted on July 21, asked questions that can provide insight into the mentality of those alienated Americans who feel abandoned by the country of their birth.

“What should be loved? Consumerism? Endless wars? Debt? Those that hold the reins of power quite clearly do not care one iota toward their fellow countrymen. The west has become a business run by global financial cartels that use big tech, controlled media, and system journalists to crush anyone that questions the constantly changing cultural and moral landscape. And if that doesn’t work, they actively try to destroy those who express dissident views. We live in a society whose moral compass shifts on a dime, depending on the current flavor of oppression or deconstructionism. There are no constants, there are no concrete moral taboos. So why should anyone feel patriotic love for a country they can barely recognize one year to the next?”

The hypocrisy that fertilized the ground for Aldean’s song to take root is endless. A few years ago, a talented young country western singer, Morgan Wallen, was caught on video using the “N-word.” He didn’t use it disparagingly, or in a public forum. He used it playfully, late one night, describing one of his inebriated friends as a “pussy assed n—–.” He didn’t mean anything remotely harmful, but that didn’t stop the American cancellation and demonization machine from turning their full firepower onto him, doing everything possible to destroy his career.

It didn’t work. This talented, innocent man is more popular than ever. Why not? Deeming one word to be so sacred that context and intent is irrelevant, but only if you’re white, while black cultural icons use it incessantly, is not credible, and sends a toxic message: rules are for you, but not for them. “Zero tolerance,” selectively applied. Watching it used across the entire gamut of trivialities or spontaneous gaffes magnified into racist abominations turns good people into cynics.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing for the National Review, said “we need songs about virtue, not violence.” She evoked John Mellencamp’s tributes to small towns, sang in the 1980s. But the 1980s were halcyon years. Jean Lopez may be commended for appealing to love instead of violence. But the “townfolk” Aldean connects with today are everywhere, and they see chaos and hatred and violence descending on their neighborhoods, enforced by a government they no longer trust.

The reason Jason Aldean’s song is destined to be a cultural landmark is because Americans have had enough. Crime is crime. Competence is competence. Offensiveness is offensiveness. And “colorblind meritocracy” or “law enforcement” are not code words for racism. They are the only equitable ways to organize a society that values freedom and justice.

“Try that in a small town” reminds us just how outraged we should be. It is a primal scream, uttered from the depths of a culture edging closer to the ultimate choice: fight or die. Expect more of them, and it’s about time.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Should America Dominate the World?

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Forty years ago, during the final decade of the Cold War, nobody had any illusions about America being perfect. Without wallowing in the topic, we all knew our nation had ongoing social and economic problems, and that our history was filled with examples of oppression. But for most Americans, understanding the grim reality of life for people living in the Soviet Union provided clarity. It was understood that no country is perfect, and compared to the USSR, living in America was paradise.

The argument that America, by a wide margin, is the lesser of two evils, does not get the traction today that it got during the Cold War. But there is no justification for its diminished relevance. Despite alarming new challenges to the rights and freedoms of American citizens, the gap between America and its contemporary rivals, Russia and China, is as wide as it’s ever been. And in the case of China, the magnitude of the threat they now pose to American global leadership is far more than anything the USSR could have once posed.

These considerations give rise to a pair of sobering questions: First, is China an expansionist nation, committed to growing powerful enough to dominate the world and impose its vision of human rights onto all of humanity? Second, before we level well deserved criticisms on American foreign and domestic policies, shouldn’t we compare these policies to those practiced by the Chinese government? Forty years ago, those questions mattered. Today, we need to revisit these questions.

Does China Intend to Dominate the World?

China is committed to an expansionist strategy. In just the last century, an era during which Western powers were relinquishing their claims to foreign colonies, China has annexed Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang. The Chinese have absorbed Hong Kong, cracking down on human rights they had pledged to uphold. They have lopped off chunks of Indian Kashmir as well as the northern portion of Indian state of Assam. The Chinese openly declare their intention to absorb the independent nation of Taiwan. They’re even claiming virtually all of the South China Sea, in defiance of every other bordering nation.

China’s expansionist tensions with neighboring nations and Borglike assimilation of the occupied nations within its borders should provide clues to how it treats all its citizens. China’s population is over 90 percent comprised of the Han ethnic group, and they are probably the most surveilled, micromanaged population on earth. Any dissent that deviates from the collective is immediately suppressed.

One may go on endlessly about allegedly parallel encroachments on the rights of Americans to express dissent, but it isn’t remotely comparable to what Chinese people go through. The regime of Xi Jinping has turned China into the world’s biggest prison camp, with nearly 1.4 billion inmates. Law enforcement extends well beyond criminal behavior to “social behavior,” where not just what you do, but what you say, what you think, and how you worship are all strictly regulated.

China’s economic aggression is well documented and points to an unavoidable conclusion; nations that do business with China are going to be systematically robbed of their technological edge and their financial stability. According to Fortune, one in five corporations say China has stolen their intellectual property in the past year. Estimates of how much this costs the U.S. economy range as high as $600 billion per year.

China’s economic war with the United States has been unrelenting. Over the past 25 years the cumulative U.S. trade deficit with China is nearly 6.0 trillion. China retains some of its trade surplus with the U.S. in the form of debt, currently an estimated $1.6 trillion.

Another way China is expanding its economic reach and influence in the world is through the “Belt and Road Initiative,” a modern version of the ancient Silk Road connecting East to West. In theory this is a laudable series of infrastructure projects linking China with trading partners across Asia, Europe, Africa and beyond with a series of highways, railroads, and modernized seaports. But participating nations are realizing that Chinese investment carries a high price.

The way China intends to control the railroads and seaports being built across this new Silk Road is by using the so-called debt trap. This is a practice whereby China lends billions of dollars to an economically weaker country for them to construct infrastructure. Chinese firms then pour in materials and labor to build the project, which means the Chinese loan funds are repatriated right back into Chinese hands. Then when the debtor nation can’t afford to pay back the loan, the Chinese seize ownership of the project as collateral.

An article published by the Washington Post provides an extensive list of nations already victimized by China’s infrastructure debt trap. They include Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Montenegro, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan. Some of these projects involve debt nearly equal to the entire GDP of the host nations. In many cases, Chinese-only gated communities are constructed, sometimes entire cities, swarming with Chinese security forces.

China’s economic imperialism is also reflected in its global buying binge. Using the savings generated from their huge trade surplus, China is buying companies and real estate all over the world. The United States is one of the only nations in the world that allows foreign companies to purchase controlling interests in U.S. companies, and China has taken full advantage of that. Michele Nash-Hoff, writing for Industry Week, posed this question: “Did we let the USSR buy our companies during the Cold War? No, we didn’t! We realized we would be helping our enemy. This was pretty simple, common sense, but we don’t seem to have this same common sense when dealing with China.”

American Globalism – The Alternative to China

The evidence that China is an expansionist nation is overwhelming. In addition to China’s territorial aggression and predatory economic policies, there are the precedents of history. Throughout recorded history, expansionist empires have risen and fallen. Across all continents and through the millennia, regardless of geography or ethnicity, empires have fought wars of conquest. Today is no different. America will rise to the challenge of China, or China will dominate the world. And this gives rise to the second question: How do America’s foreign and domestic policies compare to China’s, and how can they be better calibrated to unite Americans and set an attractive example for people in the rest of the world?

Only in this context can the American government’s current cultural priorities and globalist ambitions be fairly evaluated. Most American conservatives will agree that a month-long display of gay pride flags in front of every government building in America and every embassy America has in foreign nations, is pushing the woke narrative to ridiculous extremes. But compared to what? Compared to the Iranian regime hanging homosexuals from construction cranes? The Ugandans making homosexual acts subject to the death penalty?

Conservative Americans have ample reason to criticize the way establishment institutions, certainly including the federal government, have pandered to the extremist wing of the LGBTQ+ lobby. That the cultural pendulum will swing back to some more universally tolerable position is quite likely, and soon would be better. But which is worse? Nations where homosexuals are executed, or nations where activist gender extremists are overly indulged?

America’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, meeting with Chinese diplomats in Alaska two years ago, was criticized for acknowledging American imperfections, saying “we have the humility to know that we are a country eternally striving to become a more perfect union.”

Blinken, and his boss, Joe Biden, may be leading America down a perilous path. But Blinken was right to acknowledge that America is “eternally striving to become a more perfect union.” The debates we are having in America over identity and equity may be tedious and threatening, and with good reason, but it’s a process at work in American society today that is unthinkable in China. America’s rival in the world is a fascist police state. For all of its flaws, and for all of its dangerous drift into decadence, America is a better place to live than China. The existential importance of that fact should not be lost on anyone, whether they are woke malcontents or appalled conservatives.

Moving towards a more perfect union will not be easy. Restoring colorblind meritocracy and reestablishing reasonable gender norms will take time, but is probably inevitable. The woke have simply gone too far. An even greater threat to a desirable Pax Americana, however, concerns how America’s establishment is responding to the “climate crisis.” Current policies, designed to stifle development of hydroelectric, nuclear, and natural gas sources of energy, are guaranteed to weaken America and alienate the world. They will impose a tyranny of surveillance and rationing in developed nations, and they will cause chaos, poverty and endless war in developing nations. They are outrageous, and will drive nonaligned nations into alliances with China.

It may be that the greatest test of American democracy in the 21st century will be whether or not the cabal of oligarchs that have hijacked America’s energy policy can be overcome by a media that has finally come to its senses and a population that awakens from its brainwashed stupor. Without adequate supplies of energy, civilization will falter and individual freedom will die. Claiming that adequate energy can be delivered worldwide exclusively via wind and solar power, without also relying on hydro, nuclear, and natural gas is a blatant, misanthropic, opportunistic lie. This lie, unchallenged, will fatally undermine the credibility of American leadership in the world.

Answering the question “should America dominate the world” requires recognition of an immutable prerequisite: If America does not, someone else will. And for all of its many flaws, some of them horrifically and even murderously misguided, when compared to empires of the past and rivals in the present, America’s empire is remarkably benevolent. That fact used to matter, and it still does. We would do well to embrace it, even as we work towards something better.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.