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.

The Trump Distraction

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Whether it’s due to actual incriminating words and actions, or due to endless assaults without merit, or some combination of both, there are millions of Americans for whom Donald Trump has no credibility. Beyond the damage this has wrought on Trump’s personal and political life, this has dire consequences for the nation. It has enabled the special interests who oppose policies that Trump supports to fatally stigmatize those policies by associating them with Trump.

It’s a dirty trick, but politics is a dirty business. Every political sentiment that special interests who run the country find objectionable is labeled “Trumpism,” and hence becomes toxic.

This game of distraction is bigger than Trump. Americans are beginning to realize that they’ve been betrayed by their elites. The globalist agenda of open borders, unfettered movement of capital, the rejection of traditional values, the rejection of meritocracy, the deliberate overreaction to “climate change,” and the heedless accumulation of debt to fund the development of foreign economies—including the Chinese military—has been accepted and promoted by virtually every major institution in America: unions, corporations, academia, K-12 public education, the media and entertainment industry, Democrats, and most Republicans. They profit by this agenda, and in so doing elevate the cost-of-living at the same time as Americans are deprived of good jobs.

When Trump entered politics in 2015, he exposed and rejected this agenda in its entirety. Within a few years, tens of millions of Americans who hadn’t considered these issues as part of a connected whole, if they’d even considered them at all, were awakened and voting for a politician that was committed to dismantling the entire globalist project.

Trump’s continued relevance promises to blur even further the conventional dividing lines in American politics. What is the significance of Left vs. Right, when communists and corporations in 21st-century America are working together to advance big government globalism; they both support an authoritarian, collectivist, micromanaged society. There is ample evidence for this seeming paradox.

On most of the big issues of our time, including the rejection of traditional moral values, the centrality of “climate change” as a transformative economic and political agenda, and the need for affirmative action, racial redress, and open borders, communists and corporatists share a surprisingly congruent agenda. Only on the issue of private property do they diverge, and even that may be illusory when considering the realistic prospect of publicly held corporations with activist directorates and activist shareholders owning and controlling virtually the entire economy.

Trump blew the lid off this whole artificial dichotomy, and from coast to coast, Americans are still digesting the implications. No wonder there is a coordinated, ongoing corporate obsession with race and gender disparities, paired with a constant effort to nurture tribalism. Because if you take away a polarizing perspective on race and gender, what can unite the grassroots on the Left with the grassroots on the Right may be bigger than what divides them.

The common thread in the globalist agenda is that it will disproportionately harm middle and low-income Americans regardless of their group identity. Children need a father and a mother. Climate change policies that enrich corporations and empower leftist bureaucrats will impoverish everyone not wealthy enough to be indifferent to the crushing cost. Abandoning meritocracy in favor of quotas will destroy America’s ability to compete and innovate at the same time as it will breed cynicism and alienation. Unregulated immigration drives down wages and bankrupts social services.

It is no wonder, then, that Democrats, establishment Republicans, and corporate globalists want to distract us by turning us all into alleged bigots and anti-bigots who consume one another in endless conflict. Without this massive distraction, how would globalists get away with destroying America’s standard of living while enriching themselves?

It is an opportunistic, debilitating lie to define everyone as either a victim or an oppressor in order to get everybody fighting. It is a devious, epic, diabolical fraud and hidden agenda that must be exposed at every opportunity. But there is also a positive message, promoting hopeful solutions, that is desperately necessary in order to avoid radicalization.

There are alternatives to every one of the pillars of corporate globalism that must be promoted without apology and unequivocally. The traditional family is the backbone of society. Fossil fuel, hydroelectric power, and nuclear energy are absolutely necessary to grow a healthy and prosperous economy, not only in America but even more so in the aspiring nations of the developing world. Domestic manufacturing to maintain self-sufficiency in essential products creates good jobs and is vital to national security. Immutable colorblind standards based on merit are the only fair and legitimate way to allocate opportunities in all aspects of society. Immigration must be strictly regulated to protect the interests of American citizens, even if that conflicts with the interests of global corporations.

With these principles forming an uncompromising foundation, opponents to globalism have an appealing, prosperity-oriented narrative that will attract wavering adherents of MAGA as well as reluctant globalists. These principles offer common sense and hope. They offer calm unity. They can reject extremism of all types, whether it’s classic racism or teaching transgender ideology to prepubescent students in the public schools. And they embody a love for America.

Apart from Trump and the MAGA movement, emphasizing all these policies—pro-family, pro-conventional energy, and pro-meritocracy—have not been the common currency of Republicans. Instead, with good reason, they’ve been stereotyped as waffling on immigration, lukewarm on climate realism, AWOL on expressing the problems with race and gender quotas, and, all too often, antagonistic to pro-family sentiments. No wonder they are barely relevant. And no wonder Trump’s enemies get away with accusing him of catering to ethnic-nationalists and conspiracy theorists. They claim nobody else is out there, and in one important respect, they’re right. The MAGA movement, despite its potential to become the center of gravity in American politics, lacks a critical mass of committed leaders with the voice and visibility to give it an undeniable presence.

This may sound inaccurate and harsh, but it isn’t. Those Republicans with access to major donors and establishment recognition use Never-Trump rhetoric as a smokescreen to obscure their commitment to the globalist agenda. At the same time, too many MAGA Republicans have either drifted into peripheral and often extreme territory, or they emulate Trump’s rhetoric while lacking any underlying sincerity. The focus of the MAGA movement, if it is to earn the massive tide of votes that realignment requires, needs to convert its unifying principles into a pragmatic agenda that thousands of candidates from the local to the national level articulate and fully intend to carry out. At the least, that agenda must embrace restoring quality and apolitical public education, dramatically reducing crime, and lowering the cost of living through managed immigration, deregulation of domestic industries, and realistic energy policies. Focusing on those priorities will win elections.

The one candidate who appears to agree with Trump on these critical and winning issues is Vivek Ramaswamy. Among all politicians on the national stage whose policies emulate Trump’s, he is the only candidate that has the brains, the youth, and what appears to be the uncompromising passion.

Ramaswamy also offers Americans an example, which he emphasizes in his campaign speeches, of how Americans can unify as a single, colorblind culture. There is no reason why any American citizen, of any color, cannot read the founding documents of America and be inspired by them. There is no reason why any American, regardless of ethnic background, cannot appreciate America’s unique commitment to individual rights and free enterprise and private property, and understand its transcendental value. There is no reason why Americans of all races cannot view America’s history not as “deeply flawed,” but instead as an illustrious story of evolution from an inspiring beginning to what it is today – through perpetual refinement—a nation of unparalleled opportunities for everyone willing to work hard.

America’s destiny can be to remain a leader and an example to the world, while caring for its own citizens in a way that doesn’t alienate the world, but inspires other nations to do the same. America’s destiny can be to invest in practical, prosperity-oriented projects at home and abroad, to maintain technological and military preeminence, and to blaze a trail into the solar system. This is a vision that every American needs to know they can share.

It will be a shame, and a national tragedy, if the allegedly toxic Trump and MAGA distraction, piled atop the race distraction, the gender distraction, the “trans” distraction, and as if that isn’t enough, the distraction of a horrific proxy war in Eastern Europe, prevents the American people from seeing the future being prepared for them. Globalism as it is being currently prosecuted is death to America. It can and must be rejected.

An edited version of this article originally appeared in American Greatness.

America and the Future of Globalism

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If globalization is the economic integration of nations in a world where technology has all but erased once formidable barriers to long-distance communication and transportation, globalism is its cultural and ideological counterpart. In theory, the same dynamics might apply. As economies merge, cultures merge as well. As we move deeper into the 21st century, a global melting pot blends everything and everyone together. A planetary civilization marches united into a future of peaceful coexistence, ecological restoration, human life extension, and galactic exploration.

If people were saints and reality utopia, this idealized version of globalism could be embraced without reservation. Globalism, like communism or neoliberalism, is beautiful when described in these abstract terms and not rooted in the real world. And there is a legitimate moral imperative for us to try to come to terms with what civilization will look like as technology continues to shrink the world. Technology makes globalization, in some ways, inevitable. But what ideology regulates globalization is a choice.

This is the lens through which to view the identity struggle that currently grips the United States and other Western nations. It clarifies what is at stake and points to the consequences of getting it wrong. Unfortunately, for reasons that are not hard to explain, people are not saints and reality is not utopian. Thus, the institutions currently defining policy in America are doing almost everything wrong. Their malpractice is pushing America into decline at the same time as it is alienating allies and empowering malevolent regimes. It must be corrected.

In two fundamental areas, the consensus of America’s elites, relentlessly escalated in policies imposed both by unelected administrators and elected officials, is horrifically wrong. The first of these concerns energy in particular, and more generally, environmentalism. These policies, which nations elsewhere on earth will not accept—to the point of being willing to go to war to stop them, if necessary—are going to strip Americans of freedom and prosperity if we continue to pursue them. That process is well underway.

In the name of saving the planet, Americans are being denied access to affordable energy, despite the fact that “renewables” are not only incapable of replacing oil, gas, coal, hydro, and nuclear power, but are even more destructive to the environment. In an attempt to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions, Americans are being driven out of rural areas and into cities. In turn, America’s cities are prevented from expanding outward in order to prevent “sprawl.” Instead, people evicted from rural areas, along with millions of migrants from foreign nations, are packed via “infill” into multifamily, high-density apartments.

To express the scope of this transformation would require volumes. It is designed to eliminate America’s middle class and destroy small businesses. It extends into every economic sector—energy, water, food, transportation, housing, media, medicine. It is regulatory tyranny that only billionaire individuals and multibillion-dollar corporations can navigate. It centralizes power and cannot be administered without monitoring and micromanaging individual behavior. It is a dystopian nightmare, and it is quietly and systematically smothering what remains of free and economically independent Americans.

The other fundamental mistake America’s elites are promoting is the destruction of the meritocracy that, perhaps more than anything else, made America great. In the name of eliminating racism, sexism, and disproportionate outcomes for people with other identifiable group characteristics, merit and qualifications are being replaced by identity quotas. This, too, is rolling its way through America’s institutions.

Meritocracy, in the broadest sense of the word, is closely related to normality. It is normal to want the best-qualified people to fill positions. It is normal for social organizations, including businesses and government agencies, to best cohere when everyone is not only chosen for their competence, but for their acceptance of shared values and behaviors. Replacing normality with a celebration of abnormality, and replacing competence with quotas, as America’s institutions are doing, undermines the efficiency and the happiness of everyone involved. What’s left are implacable bureaucracies, vast and empty organizations without souls.

These mistakes are going to kill America. Energy poverty, environmentalist tyranny, “equity” over competence; these choices are fatal. But these are merely surface phenomena. The bigger problem is that there is a collective soul that has defined western civilization, developed over millennia, and now warped and abandoned by America’s elites. It is dismissed as an anachronism and an impediment. But it is the source of America’s greatness and restoring it is the only solution to America’s current misdirection.

A recent essay by Cauf Skiviers—a provocative writer who was recently banned by Medium (you’ve been warned)—includes a paragraph that describes the foundations of Western civilization. For brevity, it’s as good as any. He writes:

The foundations of the West are anchored in the triad of Christianity, Greek philosophy, and Roman law. These pillars were not erected by a single, all-directing force, but rather were forged out of disagreement, wars, jealousy, and love. None of the elements necessitating any particular racial impetus. Much to the contrary. Christianity dispelled the notion of a ‘chosen people,’ extending salvation indiscriminately through faith. Rome, too, was built upon the bedrock of the Rule of Law, applicable to all. Greek philosophy was not concerned with the ‘lived experience’ of Athenians or the ‘spoken truth’ of Milesians, but rather with universal values.

The relevance of this paragraph is in its appeal to everyone, everywhere in the world. Salvation indiscriminately through faith. The rule of law applicable to all. Universal values. What this heritage gave rise to was a nation that even now remains an inspiration. A nation where individuals enjoy personal and economic freedom. A nation where the government does not intrude on where people live or how they develop their property. A nation where private enterprise and private ownership are respected and protected.

But our values—our piety, our idealism, our respect for individuality—have brought us to the present struggle to define our identity. We no longer agree on what’s normal. We no longer agree on what’s fair. Every right and every traditional value we cherish is threatened.

Fixing the surface phenomena—the orchestrated abolition of affordable energy and meritocracy—is conceptually easy. The most powerful coalition of special interests in American history must be opposed with equal resolve by an American people united against the tyranny that must govern a society that’s economically broken and indifferent to competence.

Fixing the foundations of the West, however, is a harder job. The goal, and the opposition, is harder to define. Will we settle on values that restore a healthy society? Can we overcome woke hysteria without overreacting our way into a version of repression that is just as dark as the tyranny it displaces? Can we recognize enough of the enlightened and evolving values of this century without succumbing to decadence and decay? If we can do this, we offer the foundations of a world civilization.

How America resolves its own identity struggle will largely determine what kind of culture we live in centuries from now. To say, probably accurately, that no nation on earth is trying with more integrity than America to figure out how we should live in a way that is sustainable and equitable while preserving individual freedom and economic independence is discouraging but also must be an inspiration. We have to get this right.

Whether nations eventually merge together or remain separate members of a community of sovereign states depends on how globalism is ultimately defined. America’s elites offer a future of green poverty and woke decadence. In doing so, they are squandering the greatness that other nations once admired and emulated. Instead of setting an attractive example, inviting other nations to join a global civilization, America’s elites are imposing a repugnant vision on the world. They must be stopped. There are alternatives. It is not too late.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Hate Industry

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“The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.”
– President Joe Biden, May 13, 2023, speaking at Howard University

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when establishment politicians started to make common use of the term “homeland,” they told us the most dangerous threat to Americans was foreign terrorists. But today, we are instructed to fear the enemy within. A new iconic date, January 6, 2021, is inscribed on our collective consciousness. From coast to coast, Americans are being herded into two camps. There are the “white supremacists,” those bad people who purportedly hate good people. And then there is everyone else, good people who are encouraged to hate the bad people.

The common thread, to state the obvious, is hate.

As Joe Biden’s would-be successor, doing his part to nurture and support the hate industry, California Governor Gavin Newsom on May 4 announced “the Launch of CA vs Hate, a New Statewide Hotline to Report Hate Acts in California.” Proclaiming that “hate will not be tolerated,” the governor said that Californians will have “another tool to ensure that not only justice is served, but that individuals have access to additional resources to help deal with the lingering wounds that remain after such a horrendous crime occurs.”

This is agenda-driven hype. The agenda, perfectly expressed by author Michael Shellenberger in a Substack post last week, is to “manufacture a fake ‘hate’ crisis as [a] pretext for mass spying, blacklists, and censorship.” The hype, also exposed by Shellenberger in his recent article, is underscored by the fact that over the past 10 years, hate crime convictions, as opposed to “criminal complaints of hate crimes,” have not increased at all. In a state with 40 million people, hate crime convictions were a minuscule 109 in 2021, and a negligible increase from 107 in 2012.

The hate industry is a vast agglomeration of lucrative hustles, now institutionalized and expanded into multiple and overlapping sectors. There is the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) sector; the equity, social, and governance (ESG) sector; the activist sector comprising countless groups, including Black Lives Matter and Antifa; the corporate, academic, and government sectors; the media sector; the politicians; and the pundits. All of these sectors have spawned scores of thousands of well-paying jobs.

If these institutions weren’t able to point to rising levels of hatred in America, then their specialty, the business of hate, would no longer be a growth industry. Where there is no hate, they must manufacture it. Where hatred has diminished, they must discover new forms of hate, often so subtle that we foolishly fail to recognize it without their assistance.

Peddling Hate Is a Dangerous Game

It’s a dangerous and divisive game. For hate to exist, you have to have a hater and a victim of hate. And who might they be? A list of Newsom’s “Community Specific Resources for People Targeted for Hate” might provide a clue. Virtually every imaginable group is listed as “people targeted for hate,” including “Communities living at the intersection of multiple identities (Coming Soon).” Isn’t that great? Resources for those who live “at the intersection of multiple identities” is “coming soon.” They’re awfully busy at the State of California’s Civil Rights Department. These, we are told, are the victims.

Not listed, of course, are heterosexual, “cisgender” white males who speak English, and lack learning disabilities, physical disabilities, mental health disabilities, or are elders, or students, and don’t belong to the “Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, and Jewish communities.” Got that? If someone is a member of this rapidly disappearing fraction of California’s population, there are no “community resources.” These, then, are the haters.

The problem for Newsom—and Biden, and every other hate-hyping demagogue in America—is that data doesn’t validate the hate narrative. To keep the industry supplied with the fuel of hatred, Newsom must differentiate between hate crimes, because hardly any of these occur, and “hate incidents,” which, like harvested ballots, appear in numbers proportional to the amount of money invested to procure them. Here is how Newsom’s Department of Civil Rights describes a hate incident: “A hostile expression or action that may be motivated by bias against another person’s actual or perceived identity(ies).”

If this seems vague, that’s on purpose. When trolling for hate incidents, cast as wide a net as possible. A “hostile expression,” that “may” be motivated by bias. That’s awfully broad and awfully subjective. And to ensure California’s epidemic of hate is fully documented, a “CA vs. Hate Portal” has been set up through the “Submit Hate Incident or Hate Crime Report” button, which is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week on your desktop or mobile device.

If you click through this online interface to the main screen, you will learn that the “Types of Crime or Incident” that qualify include “cyberbullying/internet harassment (text, email, or social media),” “verbal harassment,” “hate literature/flyers,” “hate mail,” and several other categories offering an almost unlimited latitude of qualifying criteria.

Exaggerating Hate, Marketing Hate

Anyone who thinks the number of reported “hate incidents” can’t be goosed upwards by marketing a site like this should reflect on just how trivial some of the alleged transgressions have been that attracted wide publicity and outrage.

California’s local television networks in the Sacramento area were agog a few years ago with a report that flyers stating “It’s OK to be White” were posted around the campus of the University of California at Davis. News reporters interviewed college officials who were shocked and terrified and anxious to assert their commitment to keeping UC Davis “safe” from these “triggering” flyers. The presumption was that this rather innocuous assertion was “hate literature.” Exactly why this was considered hate literature was not explained.

During the 2020 election season, the need for evidence of alarming “white supremacist” activity was so desperate that national television networks, for several days, ran a story about a white man who yelled anti-Asian slurs at some Asian diners in a restaurant in Carmel Valley, California. The point here isn’t to excuse the man’s comments. For all we know, maybe he deserved the dogpile that followed. But it wouldn’t have mattered. The hate machine needed to find a hater, so there was never any attempt to contextualize the incident. What made this man angry? How much had he been drinking? Were the diners he insulted being disruptive, noisy, or rude? Was there no provocation whatsoever?

But the answers are beside the point. This incident, while unpleasant and regrettable, did not merit national news coverage. It had no geopolitical significance. It was national “news” because it was the only example available that week, in a nation of 330 million people, during a time when it was important for the hate industry to foment a national terror of “white supremacy.”

Recognize any of that today? It’s bigger than ever, with the hate machine still focused on white racist hate crimes. And if a perpetrator isn’t white, such as the Latino man who just murdered five people in Texas, the hate machine makes sure to play down that fact, but is sure to mention he is a “suspected Nazi sympathizer.” What about another Latino, also in Texas, who recently ran his SUV into a crowd outside an immigrant center, killing eight? The media takeaway—he yelled “anti-immigrant insults” when he was detained. White supremacy, courtesy of Latinos.

If the story doesn’t fit the narrative, and you can’t find a story that does, then warp the story. Make it fit. Hugely disproportionate rates of black-on-black crime? What’s that? Blacks beating a white girl half to death? Crickets. A white person, with the assistance of black person, subdues a deranged black career criminal before he hurts somebody and, in the struggle, he unintentionally chokes him to death? The dead black criminal is a saint, the brave white hero is a “vigilante,” and the brave black hero is ignored because he doesn’t fit the narrative.

All of this warped coverage generates lucrative hate. White liberals and blacks are encouraged to hate white racists. White conservatives hate the lying media and resent the double standard. And as hate grows, money is made, and authoritarian bureaucracies expand.

This point cannot be emphasized enough: The “anti-hate” hate industry creates the tribalism it claims to fight, and the only beneficiary of all the hate it creates is the hate industry itself.

All Hate Matters, Hating Haters Is Still Hate

As is usual with so much in 21st-century America, the irony here is so thick you’d break a chainsaw trying to cut through.

Gavin Newsom, a man who checks almost every box in the “hater” category, is part of a hate machine that is fueled by ginning up hatred for the haters. There is irony everywhere. Walk into any classroom in California, and more often than not, you will encounter at least one poster stating “Everyone is welcome here,” against the backdrop of a gay/trans pride flag. You may rest assured that whoever puts up a sign like this is most definitely not going to welcome “everyone.” Whoever does not share their views is a “hater,” who deserves to be hated.

There are plenty of reasons for the growth of America’s hate industry. There have always been political incentives to marginalize opposition candidates and movements, but the modern hate industry was born when the internet democratized communication. All of a sudden, instead of three or four major broadcasting networks and newspapers competing for a huge national news audience, there were thousands of new online sources of information. The knockout blow came when social media and search giants came on the scene, within a few years co-opting over 50 percent of national advertising dollars by offering precision placements of advertising content. How did the national news media respond? By peddling hate.

In a recent interview, Elon Musk offered an insightful explanation of why hate sells better than love. As humans evolved, he said, we developed a much stronger response to fear than to attraction, because if we didn’t immediately and forcefully react, for example, to a charging lion, we would die, whereas if we took our time ambling over to a sweet berry bush, we would merely defer a bit of pleasure.

The fact that it takes less investment to retain viewers if you appeal to their negative emotions has become the business strategy of media companies struggling to compete in a market that has become infinitely fragmented and ruthlessly competitive. Hate sells.

Even if peddling hate weren’t the survival strategy of America’s beleaguered media companies, the modern era would still be spawning more than the usual amount of hate. Social media has granted every individual on earth access to billions of potential critics, every one of them with the ability to lob insults from a distance and anonymously. Humans aren’t wired to cope with an audience for their opinions that includes an infinite number of people who can insult them perpetually, without the desire to engage in reason, and without the slightest fear of consequences.

The Hate Industry’s Hidden Agenda

It’s obvious the “anti-hate” hate industry is a self-perpetuating, self-aggrandizing fraud. But behind all the hatred that is nurtured by a hate industry that grows when hate grows, and hence is doing everything it can to divide Americans, there is a deeper agenda. Whether in preparation for martial law to be imposed if there is a major war, or the reduction of our standard of living in order to achieve “sustainability,” or to pacify a population that might otherwise rebel against mass immigration with all the economic and social disruption it will entail, or to divide, diminish, incite, and then crush the populist rebellion against all three of these profiteering, globalist gambits, America is slowly being turned into a technology-driven police state. If we can be convinced that we must be terrified of the haters who are rampant among us, we will accept everything being done to stop them.

America’s hate industry employs a diabolical strategy, whereby everything they do to supposedly eliminate hate actually creates more hate. In the name of fighting hate, the hate industry demands tolerance if not actually promotes every abnormal, deviant, debauched, destructive, indolent, criminal, or bizarre behavior. It normalizes the strange, and then accuses anyone of questioning the health or the efficacy of mainstreaming the marginal of being haters. It continuously ups the ante, creating as much disruption as possible, while monetizing the controversy in the form of bigger DEI departments, more ESG criteria, more bureaucrats, more thought police, and bigger audiences for their salacious, indignant cable and online shows.

If there aren’t enough adverse reactions against the hate industry’s campaign to deconstruct American culture and traditions, they make them up. Increase the scale and scope of this deconstruction while at the same time lowering the level of reaction necessary to trigger accusations of hate. Eventually, declare a state of emergency. Game over.

Several years ago, a refugee from the Soviet Union said something to me that I didn’t immediately understand. “The only perfectly safe place,” he said, “is a prison.” As America drifts further towards the state of perfect safety, free of unsanctioned hate, yet saturated with hate masquerading as tolerance, it becomes obvious what he meant. So bravo, Joe Biden. And bravo, Gavin Newsom. You two are doing your part.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Other Hills to Die On

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Few on the American Right are unaware of Anheuser-Busch’s recent foray into woke politics. Taking their regular customers for granted, the once-great American company “partnered” with a transsexual person to become a new product spokesperson for Bud Light.

The imbroglio that followed is just one of the latest installments of the culture war over woke ideology, now working through its “trans” iteration, which is keeping the lights on in political consultancies across the nation and consuming huge percentages of conservative mind-share.

The encroachment of woke ideology threatens the American way of life. How it is resolved will define our national character and values for generations to come. But conservatives must recognize that the issues that either define woke ideology or fall under its umbrella—race, gender, and even abortion—are not the only battles in the war. Even if the Right defines what victory looks like on these issues, and somehow manages to win these battles, it will not matter if they lose the war.

As conservative troops and resources flood the zone to resist the woke agenda, bigger threats are neglected. Woke ideology is both a distraction from and a fraudulent justification for pushing toward the ultimate objective: gaining absolute, centralized control over the American economy. The method to accomplish this takeover is via two mutually reinforcing policy shifts that are already happening: the move to a central bank digital currency and enforcing increasingly restrictive rules governing energy.

One of the most fundamental expressions of freedom Americans take for granted is the ability to conduct transactions using cash. The fact that ordinary Americans can settle debts and sell goods using cash may not be fully appreciated until cash is taken away.

The privacy afforded by cash is irreplaceable. Bitcoin and other digital currencies may be difficult to track, but undisclosed Bitcoin accounts are already illegal, and it isn’t hard for authorities to identify who is using virtual servers and other methods of concealment.

The case for cash, however, isn’t that we want to encourage an underground economy. It’s that the existence of cash can at least prevent the arm of government from coming down to even the most petty transactions. Did you use cash to pay your gardener or an occasional babysitter or a handyman? If so, you might decide not to give them a 1099. Did you sell some old utensils, books, CDs, and furniture at a garage sale, and collect cash? If so, you might decide not to get a resale permit to collect sales tax. Once cash is eliminated, those choices will be made for you. Wasn’t that de minimis? It won’t matter.

The anonymity of cash offers some safeguard as well against a growing and even more serious problem, the ability of corporations and government agencies to stifle transactions by people deemed a “threat to democracy.” Confined at the moment to intemperate bloggers and other supposedly seditious conspiracy theorists, and restricted so far to canceled online financial services and frozen bank accounts, imagine what could be accomplished with central bank digital currency. Here’s JH Investments explaining the “risks” of CBDCs:

[blockquote]CBDCs may pose a threat to privacy. The central authority that will be responsible for collecting and distributing identification and transaction data will have access to all monetary transactions. In addition to the threat of central banks disallowing or curbing transactions between citizens, the data could be vulnerable to hacks or misuse, if leaked.[blockquote]

There’s the understatement of the century. If CBDC replaces cash, it will be possible to precisely target and control what and how much every individual is permitted to buy or sell. Not only government agencies but major corporations will have this control.

The implications are sickening. It will be possible to vary how much someone has to pay for goods based not only on their social credit score but also on their income. It will be possible to ration individual consumption of any commodity that might be deemed to endanger the planet. It will be possible to control movement by putting geographic restrictions on where any individual can spend their digital currency.

CBDCs will put every transaction, no matter how small, onto the grid. Small businesses and individuals will have to navigate nuisances such as issuing 1099s and collecting sales tax, along with countless other regulatory requirements, and these nuisances will multiply once CBDCs make all this micromanagement feasible. But it won’t be universally feasible. It will place a burden disproportionately on the small players that lack the scale to pay for the compliance overhead.

And, of course, never forget the whole system falls apart with one big cyberattack or electromagnetic pulse.

Cash is freedom. Don’t let the government take it away.

[pullquote quote=”The same factions that resist unification over how to address woke ideology can nonetheless unite in resistance to woke’s endgame, which is total monitoring and control over money and energy.”][/pullquote]

If making cash illegal is the path to total control over economic activity, the destruction of a fossil fuel-based economy is not only a parallel pathway to total control by government and corporations but also to the systematic reduction in our standard of living.

The facts are indisputable. Affordable energy is the foundation of economic prosperity. For everyone on Earth to consume just half as much energy per capita as Americans consume, global energy production must double. This is impossible without developing and consuming more fossil fuels.

Producing twice as much energy worldwide is necessary, among other things, to stop impoverished billions across the equatorial regions of the planet from stripping the forests for game meat and cooking fuel. It is necessary to preserve and expand the middle class everywhere. It is required to make extremely large families economically unnecessary in the developing world, and to make having children economically feasible again in the developed world. It is a prerequisite to global peace and prosperity.

The good news is there are enough known reserves of fossil fuel to sustain civilization at twice the current rate of consumption for at least the next few centuries.

Rather than take this enlightened path, the elites who run Western nations are determined to crack down on fossil fuel consumption. They have concluded that theories of climate catastrophe—and these are theories that should be subject to vigorous and public debate—require an immediate transition to “renewables.” In their embrace of the theory that carbon dioxide from fossil fuel is an existential threat, they ignore other facts: Renewables are more disruptive to the environment, there aren’t nearly enough raw materials to deploy them, failure to develop more fossil fuel will cause global energy starvation, and in so doing there will be war, famine, poverty, tyranny, and certain environmental destruction.

Yet they push forward with this madness, determined to create scarcity, high prices, rationing, and punitive measures to enforce environmentalist edicts.

Central bank digital currency and energy rationing must be challenged with the same passion and urgency that informs the resistance to woke ideology. And, crucially, resistance to woke ideology must recognize it is not merely a distraction from the CBDC and climate crisis agendas; it is also a phony moral cover for that agenda. We must submit to corporate and government micromanagement of money and energy because only in doing so can we save the planet and overcome race and gender inequity.

Woke ideology is the train. Total monitoring and control over money and energy is the destination.

When imagining a political overthrow of the prevailing agenda of corporations and government in America today, an accurate but discredited term for the necessary coalition-building process is “fusionism.” During the Reagan era, this was the “big tent” that united religious conservatives, anti-tax libertarians, and Cold Warriors in a coalition that gave Republicans 12 years of national dominance between 1980 and 1992.

The coalition that worked 40 years ago is obsolete. But fusionism isn’t obsolete. Envisioning a fusionist revival in America requires different electoral factions uniting over new issues. And to do that, resistance to woke ideology will not suffice. The same factions that resist unification over how to address woke ideology can nonetheless unite in resistance to woke’s endgame, which is total monitoring and control over money and energy.

American conservatives and moderates alike can join with independent voters and even large percentages of moderate and progressive Democrats in rejecting the expanding surveillance state, the abolition of private monetary transactions, the inevitable poverty attendant to rationed energy, and the endless wars required to enforce an international agenda that imposes crippling austerity on any nation willing to try for “net zero.”

These values, respecting privacy, investing in energy and practical infrastructure, and resisting wars of aggression, once defined the Democratic Party. They still define millions of Democratic voters, whose support America’s corporate and government establishment can only still depend on through relentless demonization of MAGA Republicans.

But they are treading on thin ice. If MAGA Republicans and moderate Republicans can unite on a platform that prioritizes preserving cash currency and restoring energy independence, they will attract the independents and Democrats that to-date are being taught to fear them.

Central bank digital currency and monitored, micromanaged access to all energy use are the means by which government and large corporations will achieve absolute control over the population.

Conservatives are correct to recognize woke ideology as an existential threat to the health of American civilization. But wokeism has no inherent strength. It is insanity, propped up by establishment billions merely because it is useful to them. If the ultimate destination, authoritarian government through CBDCs and rationed energy, is destroyed, the woke train will derail.

This is the fight that matters more. It is also a cause for which there is broader and more immediate potential for a consensus that translates into majority electoral support. These are the hills to die on. These are the hills we must win.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

A Grand Alliance to Overcome the Elite Betrayal of America

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For the first time in history, the ruling class of a powerful nation has abandoned its fellow citizens. What is happening in America today is more than a return to feudalism, although the new economic model into which we’re being herded is correctly compared to feudalism. The reality is actually much worse: America’s elites view ordinary citizens as no longer necessary. Because of globalism, they are replaceable. Because of automation, they are superfluous. Because of environmentalism, they are unsustainable.

These factors explain what is otherwise inexplicable: Constitutional conservatives and Christians, and the values they profess, are now stigmatized by establishment institutions as often, if not more often, than they are praised. Nationalism and religious faith empower individuals and communities to resist a ruling class that has abandoned them. That makes them a threat. They recognize that the ideology of America’s ruling elites is itself leading to disaster. They recognize that America’s elites have decided the nation’s middle class is disposable, and this is the real reason they are pushing an agenda of woke degeneracy and extreme environmentalism, designed to lower birthrates and reduce standards of living.

It’s hard to imagine how America’s elites could get things more wrong. Their transhuman and transnational vision is provoking a clash of civilizations at the same time as they are destroying the human foundation of their own civilization. Nations where nationalism or religion remains the prevailing ideology are not about to emasculate their populations and eviscerate their energy sectors.

If America’s elites attempt to impose this agenda worldwide, the world will fight back. Do they intend to win this clash with robots? Because if they reduce America to a geriatric, poverty-stricken nation, ruled by a handful of billionaires, robots are all they’re going to have left at the rate we’re going.

The Grand Alliance

The elites who have betrayed their own people are not invincible. America’s historical legacy has built a cultural unity and resiliency that should not be underestimated.

While America’s tradition of assimilation is under attack by an elite-driven obsession with multiculturalism, it remains the robust product of more than 200 years as a successful melting pot. Moreover, America’s Bill of Rights offers protection to people still fighting for the values of faith, family, and freedom—values that are not as easily undermined as they are in other Western nations with less explicit constitutional safeguards.

Winston Churchill titled the third volume of his World War II memoirs The Grand Alliance. It described an alliance against a threat more obvious and imminent than the one we face today, uniting partners more intrinsically opposed than those who need to join together today. Instead of Western democracies uniting with Communist Russia to fight the fascist dictatorships, we have merely to unite a critical mass of Americans who want to save their nation from an elite that has declared war on their way of life and their future.

This isn’t as hard as it seems for two reasons. First, because most Americans don’t want to live in a degenerate culture. They don’t want to live in a culture that has devolved to cater to society’s lowest, most abnormal, deviant, hedonistic, psychotic, sociopathic, dishonest, crooked, lazy, defiant, bizarre, militant cohorts of individuals, regardless of the fact they’ve become politically organized and demand equality of outcome in every imaginable context. Most Americans understand the inherent necessity and benefits of nuclear families, hard work, and immutable standards for achievement and recognition. There is a deep, latent unity among Americans. It needs only a few sparks to immolate the thin film of oil on the surface.

Second, what is the nature of this oil that smothers America’s ocean of common sense and unity? It is a fractious coalition of fanatics and lunatics, relatively small in number, who harbor an innate antipathy toward each other that is only held in check by rivers of money flowing to them from globalist billionaires, opportunistic corporations, environmentalist pressure groups, and government unions. Their resources are money and anger. They win elections because all that money, and all that anger, is used to brainwash voters into thinking that tolerating decadence and chaos is compassion, people who oppose extreme tolerance are bigots, and recognizing the indispensability of fossil fuel is, somehow, “fascist.” The brainwashing, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, is wearing thin.

The only thing normal Americans have to do in order to bring America’s swing voters back to the side of common sense is to promote an attractive vision. It is not enough to just explain how bad things have gotten. To begin that process they may start, they must start, by bringing the secular and religious wings of the common sense coalition together.

In his 2017 book, The Strange Death of Europe, British journalist Douglas Murray suggests those forces still extant in Western societies and still resisting the derangements of our time—the secular and the religious—put aside their differences and unite to save Western civilization.

Finding a new synthesis of Western culture capable of addressing the questions of the 21st century may be a topic of active debate in think tanks. Still, to date, it hasn’t filtered down to retail politics. On the street, politicians trying to overcome woke insanity have limited themselves, at most, to rolling back the insanity. They have not expressed a new vision for America that unites religious and secular conservatives.

This is regrettable, but it also presents a tremendous opportunity.

If religious and secular conservatives reached a consensus, the political agenda they would share would necessarily have attenuated the most extreme positions held by either side, which in turn would attract millions of independent voters. Although it would still be declared extremist by elites who would now see their plans endangered as never before, in reality, it would form a new political center. It would be an irresistible force.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who at the very least is the second most interesting Republican candidate currently running for U.S. president, has made a centerpiece of his campaign answering the question of what it means to be an American. His positions are unequivocal. For example, there need to be clear limits to what we tolerate as normal. The prerequisites for prosperity include clean fossil fuel, and that is nonnegotiable. Meritocracy is the only equitable way to deliver equal opportunity to everyone. Freedom in America, as embodied in the Bill of Rights, must be defended. These are unifying issues because they reject the establishment’s manipulative narrative of anger, resentment, fear, and perpetual crisis, and instead, envision a future of growth and greatness.

Consider the wondrous possibilities a healthy political coalition could express to an electorate desperate for hope. Imagine a political platform centered on deregulation and infrastructure investments to deliver abundant and affordable energy, the foundation of all prosperity. Imagine a foreign policy oriented to helping all nations achieve these gains, instead of being limited to “renewables” that condemn them to poverty, famine, tyranny, and war.

Optimism is contagious. Imagine a strong and united America beginning to harvest the resources of the moon and the asteroids. Imagine a culture that celebrates beauty and talent again. Imagine a generation of youth inspired to work hard so they can play a meaningful part in the brilliant unfolding story of a proud nation in a peaceful world. Imagine good things happening from now on, not out of naïveté, but as the product of practical investment and steadfast resolve.

The sooner we join together to save our civilization, the easier the path.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Here’s What You Can Do About Fentanyl, Gavin Newsom

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On April 19, during his excursion into one of California’s countless drug infested neighborhoods, a man on the street asked our governor a very explicit question.

Question: “Gavin, tell me what you’re going to do about the fentanyl epidemic?”

Newsom’s answer: “What should I do, JJ? What do you want me to do? You tell me what we need to do.”

There are plenty of answers that could have been offered, since what has been allowed to happen in San Francisco and almost everywhere else in California is one of the most appalling cases of political malpractice in the history of the world.

Two days later, on April 21, the governor announced that he “is directing California Highway Patrol and California National Guard to identify personnel and resources to assist the city in combatting fentanyl trafficking.”

That’s a start, but absent a more comprehensive strategy that involves every afflicted region and affects the consumers along with the distributors, it isn’t going to solve the related problems of addiction and homelessness.

So if you’re serious about handing California back to law abiding citizens, here’s what you can do next, Governor Newsom:

You should now announce that you will extend this “public safety partnership” throughout the state, and send the California National Guard into every remote county and overwhelmed rural municipality in California and root out the drug cartels. Flood the zone. Smoke them out. Lock them up.

Next, you can clean up the neighborhoods throughout California’s cities that are overran with the “unhoused.” It is in these lawless enclaves where drugs like fentanyl find their way to retail distributors and end users. To do this, begin by instructing your attorney general to identify and aggressively challenge every court ruling and misguided statute that prevents law enforcement from getting vagrants, addicts, drug dealers, thieves and violent thugs off the streets. Wage lawfare. Don’t quit.

Meanwhile, and remaining in compliance with existing law, construct low cost, minimum security detention facilities, and classify them as “permanent supportive housing.” Locate them on state owned land in rural areas with mild winters, and set up at least three types. One for criminals, one for drug addicts and alcoholics, and one for the mentally ill. The remaining small fraction of homeless individuals who are none of the above will be easily accommodated in already built shelters and already built supportive housing in urban areas.

By taking this approach, you will create a deterrent. A sizable percentage of the entire homeless population in California will melt away once this program is implemented. Once they aren’t permitted to sell drugs and consume drugs while having access to free social services including needles and “safe injection” sites, they’ll find family or friends to stay with. Once they can’t steal without facing certain incarceration, they’ll stop stealing.

There will be plenty of money to pay for these facilities, as well as to pay for supervision and counseling personnel. As it is, California’s taxpayers spend, on average, well over $500,000 for every unit of “permanent supportive housing.” This money, with the full complicity of politicians, goes into the hands of politically connected real estate developers, often to build on some of the most valuable coastal real estate on earth. The magnitude of this corruption defies description. End it. End it now.

Why, governor, does a methamphetamine addict from Tulsa have a “human right” to a free apartment in an expensive neighborhood on the California coast? Instead, give them free housing in a tent. Since a spacious, durable tent will cost under $1,000, that leaves $499,000 to pay for other amenities including supervision and counseling. If you did this, governor, even in a state as corrupt as California, most of that money could be given back to the taxpayers.

Consult with the UN Commission on Refugees to learn how to construct tent cities at minimal expense. The work they’ve done in Syria, for example, shows that semi-permanent encampments, providing all of life’s essentials, can be built and managed at a reasonable cost.

There is a fundamental moral imperative here that eludes almost every progressive politician and analyst. It is not compassionate to let people die on the street. If you accept this, there is only one solution: build low cost tent cities on inexpensive real estate and move the homeless off the streets and into these encampments. Force them to withdraw from drug and alcohol addiction. Compel them to take their anti-psychotic medication. Hold criminals accountable by making them pay their debt to society.

There is no way around this. Everything else costs too much, takes too long, and won’t work anyway.

The reason you don’t solve the problem of homelessness in California, Governor Newsom, is because you’re afraid to stand up to the Homeless Industrial Complex. And until you do, they are going to take all the money, corrupt all the laws, and California will remain a magnet for every junkie in America.

Housing without behavioral conditions creates unquenchable demand, whereas housing with behavioral conditions reduces demand. And to build publicly funded housing at a cost of $500,000 per unit, when that amount of money would pay for 500 tents (or more), is a scam. You don’t just give drug addicts housing units that are better than the housing units that working people scrap their lives away to pay for and can barely afford. When you do this, you turn society upside down. You reward indolence, and disrespect diligence.

The reason the fentanyl problem just keeps getting worse, governor, is because you haven’t been willing to prosecute and convict the people who manufacture, traffic, and sell hard drugs. Harsh penalties are a deterrent. You don’t have to lock everyone up. Once a few thousand of the hard core culprits are locked up and doing hard time, the rest will decide the risk outweighs the benefits.

This is how you attack the truly genocidal impact of fentanyl, and salvage the lives of countless victims of this epidemic. If you want to ever become U.S. President, Governor Newsom, you’d better quit using your Twitter account to incessantly complain about the phantom menace of MAGA, and actually fix something.

The fentanyl epidemic, and the homeless crisis, are fixable. Get busy.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

The “Bullet Train” Epitomizes the Corruption of California

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It sounded too good to be true, and it was. Travel from downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles in two hours via high-speed rail. California voters in 2008 approved Proposition 1A, authorizing $9.95 billion in general obligation bonds to build this so-called “bullet train.” They were told not only that the total cost would only be $33 billion but also that the entire 500-mile system would be running by 2030.

Fat chance.

In March of this year, the California High-Speed Rail Authority released its latest progress report. The project is now projected to cost $127 billion, and there is no longer a projected completion date. The initial stretch of track, a 171-mile segment across the sparsely populated, pancake-flat San Joaquin Valley, is projected to be done by 2030 at a cost of $35 billion.

These are staggering numbers, a testament to a staggering waste of financial and material resources. For this first segment of track, Californians are going to pay $206 million per mile, and that’s if there aren’t any more overruns. The financing alone—based on preposterously optimistic ridership projections for this segment of 6.6 million riders per year, and a 30-year-term at 5 percent annual interest—would work out to a cost of $348 per ticket. Not exactly an easily affordable means of travel.

California’s high-speed rail project, in short, is a disaster. Everything about it fails any rational cost-benefit analysis. It will be a permanent financial drain on Californians, because in order for anyone to be able to afford to use the train for a daily commute, ticket revenue won’t even pay operating costs, much less pay back the construction costs.

From an environmental perspective, the California High-Speed Rail Authority boasts that the initial segment will reduce total vehicle miles traveled in California by 183 million miles. That sounds like a lot until you take into account that Californians logged 340 billion vehicle miles traveled in 2022. High-speed rail by 2030 expects to reduce that total by 1/20th of one percent.

But the opportunity cost of blowing $127 billion, and counting, on a train that will not significantly alleviate either traffic congestion or “greenhouse gases” is perhaps the bitterest joke of all. For $127 billion, Californians could build infrastructure that would improve their quality of life for generations.

Even in absurdly expensive California, $127 billion goes a long way. That much money could pay to raise the height of the Shasta Dam, build the proposed Sites Reservoir to its original 2 million acre-feet storage capacity, restore every aqueduct in the state, build new systems to harvest and store storm runoff, upgrade every major treatment plant in the state to recycle and reuse wastewater, refurbish the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant to last till 2050 or longer, build two additional nuclear power plants of the same size, and resurface and add lanes to every major interstate freeway.

For $127 billion, even at ridiculously inflated California prices for public works, Californians could have abundant, affordable water and power, they could have a freeway system upgraded for the 21st century, and they would still have tens of billions left.

Corruption and Waste as a Way of Life

The problem with spending money on rational, practical solutions that lower the cost of living and improve the quality of life for millions of Californians is that this goal is inconvenient for the special interests that run California. On the other hand, pouring every spare bit of money, materials, and labor into a make-work megaproject serves several hidden agendas.

The rationale for high-speed rail is to help save the environment, as if adding a 500-mile scar to the landscape, consuming millions of tons of steel and concrete in the process, is somehow preferable to simply upgrading the capacity of existing road and rail assets in the state.

But the true motivation to fund useless megaprojects is a desire to neglect California’s essential water, power, and transportation infrastructure, because by creating scarcity and high prices for these resources, public utilities and private energy producers reap larger profits. This plays out across several economic sectors.

For example, public utilities collect regulated profits, fixed at a percent of revenue. If renewable electricity costs several times more than conventionally generated power—and it does and always will if you do honest cost accounting and factor out the punitive permitting costs—then utilities make more profit. Ten percent of $0.40 per kilowatt-hour of renewable electricity at peak is a much bigger number than 10 percent of $0.04 per kilowatt-hour for clean natural gas-generated electricity.

With water, the higher the price goes, the easier it is for big agricultural corporations to outlast and buy out small family farms, consolidating the industry. It’s also more lucrative for hedge funds that are buying land in California just for the water rights. The higher the price of water, the more valuable their investments.

One would think California’s powerful unions would recognize the benefit that practical infrastructure investments would have for all working families in California, but they don’t. As long as their construction workers have lucrative jobs on the high-speed rail project, there is no upside to them taking on the environmentalist lobby or the corporate and financial players that profit from scarcity and high prices. Nonetheless, California’s construction unions could be a political wild card. If they want to demand projects that would generate positive economic benefits and help all working families, they have the political power to make it happen.

The Ripple Effects of Scarcity Policies

Affordable and abundant water and energy form the foundation for broad-based prosperity. They make home ownership more affordable, because the supply of homes cannot be significantly increased unless there is adequate water. They make electricity and gasoline affordable, which benefits households and businesses. And scarcity of water and energy are not the only essential resources that California denies its citizens.

Building materials, lumber in particular, need to be imported from other states and nations since California’s state legislature has regulated in-state timber harvesting to less than 25 percent of what it was as recently as the 1990s. But rather than thin the forests with responsible revitalized logging, every year the firefighting industrial complex gears up to collect additional billions fighting cataclysmic fires in overgrown, mismanaged forests, and silences criticism with two words, “climate change.”

California’s overregulation of everything has led to its so-called housing crisis because it is now impossible for private developers to make a profit building homes that working families can afford. Instead, a host of special interests, collecting countless billions in money from taxpayers, have created a massively subsidized industry in low-income housing and “permanent supportive housing” for the homeless.

These projects waste stupefying amounts of money, but if regulations were loosened up to allow private development of homes people could afford, or if homeless people were humanely moved off the streets into supervised encampments where they could recover their sobriety and their dignity, the scams would come to a screeching halt.

Spending $200 million per track mile on high-speed rail and over $500,000 per unit of “permanent supportive housing” has nothing to do with saving the planet or helping the disadvantaged homeless. These insanely overpriced projects endure because spending that money wisely would create a competitive economic environment, threatening the margins and the market share of the special interests that run California.

Wasting billions on projects that will never yield the public benefits they promise but will nonetheless ensure permanent sources of profit and power for California’s public sector bureaucrats, its environmentalist pressure groups, its public utilities, its hedge funds and pension funds, its corporations, and its subsidized land developers is the business of California’s elite now. All of them are determined to keep things just the way they are. Because for all of them, ongoing public failure is ongoing special interest success.

California’s High-Speed Rail project is a failure. It is also a metaphor for a state that has turned its back on the ordinary, hardworking people who live there. The larger problem is that California is exporting this mentality into the rest of America, along with its propaganda, and its corrupt, punitive economic model.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Assemblyman Isaac Bryan’s Assault on Working Families

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It isn’t hard to figure out who controls everything Assemblyman Isaac Bryan does in the California State Legislature. In the November 2022 election, every single one of the first 29 of his biggest donors were unions, almost all of them public sector unions, according to campaign finance reports. No other special interest even came close.

Purchasing Bryan’s political agency comes fairly cheap, as does his willingness to ignore the interests of working families in California: the Democrat occupies one of the safest seats in the state, enjoying a registration advantage of 66 percent Democrat versus just 8 percent Republican in his Los Angeles area district.

How is Assemblyman Bryan destroying the aspirations of working families in California?

By adhering to junk science, promulgated by the billionaire-fueled “renewables” lobby and abetted by institutions filled with cowards who dare not touch the third rail of California politics – the “climate emergency.” Phony, futile but draconian measures to mitigate this concocted crisis are the main reason everything is unaffordable in California.

Bryan’s latest misanthropic blunder bent on destroying California’s working class is to oppose the referendum to repeal SB 1137, which will kill California’s oil and gas industry.

Senate Bill 1137 was introduced by former state senator turned California Labor Federation leader Lorena Gonzalez, and signed by Governor Newsom in September 2022. If it takes effect, it will ban new oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of any “sensitive receptor,” defined as any residence, educational establishment, health facility, prison, business open to the public, and much more.

Basically, anywhere.

For existing oil and gas wells, SB 1137 will add a new layer of compliance to be met, despite California’s oil and gas industry already operating under the most comprehensive environmental standards in the world, including the California Environmental Quality Act, rules for air quality management districts, and a huge body of law the industry is already satisfying.

SB 1137 is not going to help the environment. To illustrate how pointless the law is, consider the oil wells in Baldwin Hills, a part of Los Angeles that overlaps with Bryan’s district. These wells produce almost no pollution. They are equipped with vapor locks and strictly regulated. On the other hand, one of the largest sources of air pollution in Los Angeles is from ships transporting goods into the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. These ships burn bunker fuel, the dirtiest, cheapest fuel. These ships spew unfiltered filth into the air offshore and it blows straight into the Los Angeles Basin.

And here’s an inconvenient truth for Assemblyman Bryan: For every well that is shut down instead of upgraded in Baldwin Hills, more bunker fuel guzzling, unhealthy emissions belching tankers have to anchor offshore, delivering to California’s refineries oil sourced from some of the most despotic, despoiled places in the world.

No matter how much Gov. Gavin Newsom denies it for political gain, the reality is that fossil fuel still delivers over 70 percent of the total energy Californians use. The timetable California’s legislature has imposed for replacing fossil fuel will make energy something only the rich can afford. And when energy is unaffordable, everything becomes unaffordable.

That’s why a referendum to repeal SB 1137 is headed for California’s November 2024 ballot: to allow voters to decide whether or not to turn California into a state where only rich people can afford to live.

Bryan’s Retaliatory Attack on Direct Democracy

Assemblyman Bryan is opposing the referendum to repeal SB 1137, but that’s not all: He is also sponsoring Assembly Bill 421, designed to gut California’s 112-year-old initiative and referendum process so that voters no longer have veto power over California’s Democrat-controlled legislature.

The power of citizens to enact legislation or repeal legislation is one of the only remaining liberties where California sets a good example for other states. It acts as a much-needed check – the only check – on the state’s one-party-ruled legislature — and Democrats and the unions that fund their political campaigns don’t like that. They want to raise the bar to make it next to impossible for anybody except for California’s unions to get any measure on the ballot.

Already the process to qualify referendums, recalls or initiatives for the state ballot is an expensive and difficult process. Proponents must circulate petitions and gather hundreds of thousands of signatures from registered voters. It is an extremely difficult undertaking, with no guarantee that once the measure qualifies for the ballot, voters will approve it. Any group attempting to qualify initiatives must find partners in industry or wealthy donors to have any chance of success.

California’s unions have more than a leg up when it comes to qualifying an initiative for the ballot. In addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars in their political war chest, they have access to tens of thousands of organized union workers to circulate and sign petitions.

Bryan’s perfidy towards ordinary Californians has all the hallmarks of the special interests he claims he’s fighting against. It stacks the cards even further against citizen legislation, even while carving out loopholes for unions. Here are highlights:

1 – Require paid signature gatherers to register with and receive training from the state. Inevitably, this will severely limit the number of available signature gatherers. For signatures to count, every signed petition must include the circulator’s unique registration number.

2 – Would reduce from 180 days to 90 days the time allowable to gather signatures on petitions if the initiative measure proposes to repeal or amend, either directly or indirectly, a statute or portion of a statute enacted by the state legislature within the last two years.

3 – Require 10 percent of signatures to be obtained by volunteers rather than paid signature gatherers, unless the circulators are members of a union.

4 – Petitions circulated by volunteers must have, in bold, printed notification that a volunteer is circulating the petition, whereas petitions circulated by a person who is getting paid require a different notice, disclosing that a paid circulator is working. This creates a need for proponents to print and distribute at least two versions of the petitions. This adds expense, creates potential for errors, and introduces ambiguity – what if the petition is included in a direct mail appeal?

5 – Every petition must have a unique number to “facilitate administrative efficiency.” The practical impact of this is to eliminate the threat of a campaign whereby voters could download and print initiative petitions, and force centralized printing and shipping of petitions.

6 – Requires an “official top funders” sheet to accompany petitions, requiring anyone signing a petition to fill out an acknowledgement that they have read the funding disclosure. This and the other requirements make it much more likely some technicality will be violated, invalidating a higher percentage of signed petitions.

Isaac Bryan’s AB 421 is a Threat to Democracy

For those of us who still believe California’s voters might be willing to terminate some of the policies that are destroying their lives and livelihoods, the opportunity to fight to qualify a ballot initiative is our last hope in this machine ruled one-party state. Assemblyman Bryan’s AB 421 represents in a most personal way the “threat to democracy” that he and his Democrat colleagues obsessively warn us about.

Why Bryan and his public sector union donors are complicit in policies designed to make it impossible for California households to afford their essentials isn’t hard to figure out. As the viability of the private sector is taken away, the role of the public sector grows. That’s more public sector union members, more dues, more power. That they’ll eventually kill the host and we’ll all end up like the Venezuelans is an insight that eludes these apparatchiks.

The powerful State Building and Construction Trades Council, mostly representing private sector workers, has joined with the oil and gas industry to support the referendum. Their welcome break from the pack offers a reality check to Assemblyman Bryan, at the same time as it offers the merest glimmer of hope to the rest of us. Maybe the SBCTC will further prioritize demanding sensible energy, water, and infrastructure projects and policies in California. It could make a difference.

Isaac Bryan: You are not standing for the working people in California. You are reciting shibboleths, fed to you by donors who are bent on dismantling the foundations of our prosperity.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Reversing the Destruction of a Generation

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The March 14 issue of New York magazine featured an article with the catchy title, “Tate-Pilled: What a generation of boys have found in Andrew Tate’s extreme male gospel.” For anyone who enjoys the theater of forbidden, poke-the-woke content, much of the article is wildly entertaining. For example, describing Tate’s online fans, the author writes:

“But they stayed for the ostentatious, outrageous masculine display: the machetes and cigars, the diamond watches, the Bugattis and Lamborghinis, the obscene piles of banded cash like a scene out of Scarface.”

This is genuinely funny. The nerve of this man, not only to be a man but an exaggerated caricature of a man. Moreover, and unlike, say, Howard Stern back when he was funny, Tate can presumably back up his hyper-male braggadocio, given that he twice became kickboxing champion of the world.

It should surprise no one that Andrew Tate has attracted millions of young male fans. He is the antidote to the politically correct, vapid absurdities they are force fed by every institution in the Western world. A generation of American men are being systematically marginalized, demoralized, demotivated, abused and destroyed. The Tate phenomenon is an extreme reaction to an extreme problem.

In America today, if someone is a white, straight, biological male who “identifies as male,” he is condemned for his ethnicity, his masculinity, his “othering” cisgender normality, his heteronormativity, and for all of these undesirable “oppressor” traits, his privilege. If he’s not white but possesses any of these other so-called toxic traits, he is still a candidate to get on board the Tate train, where he will be welcome.

All of this vitriol directed at “heteronormative cisgender males” is concocted, hostile garbage. It is a lucrative, divisive hustle, peddled by mediocrities, adopted as the new marketing gospel by corporations, and pushed by politicians, the media, and every educational instructor and bureaucrat from kindergarten through graduate school. Anyone who speaks out against it is stigmatized as a Nazi, at the same time as anyone who falls for this garbage is indoctrinated to believe any sort of violence is justified, up to and including murder, if their motivation is to eliminate Nazis.

The point here isn’t to litigate the accusations that have been leveled at Tate and his associates, or to suggest everything he’s done is exemplary. The point is that when young men are disparaged and discriminated against merely because they’re biological men who identify as men, or because they’re white, or heterosexual, or, for that matter, Christian, and when young men are made to think that these qualities—which are objectively not bad, if not actually healthy and good —are things to be scorned and ashamed of, the monologues and admonitions of Andrew Tate begin to make a lot of sense by comparison.

What doesn’t make sense, to put it mildly, is today’s establishment understanding of race and gender. It is a narrative promoting a worldview that is almost a complete inversion of reality. For at least the last 50 years in America, the “lived experience” of white men has been exactly the opposite of what we’re told. They’re not privileged oppressors. As a matter of fact, they’re the targets of blatant discrimination. Thanks to affirmative action, institutionalized in academic admissions and scholarships, faculty appointments, hiring and promotions in corporations and government agencies, marketing campaigns, entertainment awards, SBA loans, and government contracts, white men are sent to the back of the line. The results are unequivocal.

Today, when adjusting for hours worked, consecutive years worked, and the market value of specific educational achievements (for example, “Dr.” Jill Biden does not possess credentials as marketable as someone with a doctorate in organic chemistry), men now make less than women in the United States workforce. You wouldn’t know that to hear the lies, repeated incessantly, that women only make 77 cents for every dollar that men make.

In recent years, male participation in higher education has crashed. In 2021-2022, women accounted for nearly 60 percent of all college students. And while men still outnumber women in technical fields, the woke brigades in recent years are determined to end this obvious evidence of male privilege. Never mind that a man is twice as likely as a woman to get a perfect score on the SAT math test or that, on average, men choose STEM fields more than women.

Choices don’t matter. Merit doesn’t matter.

Everyone Is a Target of Woke Nihilism

When merit doesn’t matter, it is no longer something for which to strive. This harms everyone, not just white males. America’s youth, regardless of sex or ethnicity, are all victims of the woke narrative. The alleged oppressors feel guilt and endure discrimination, the alleged oppressed feel resentment and are taught to perceive discrimination. And all of them, an entire generation, are being destroyed by what is the central plank of woke ideology—hopelessness.

This hopelessness is evident in the irrational sensationalizing of everything negative in America, almost always with complete disregard for the actual evidence. Police are committing “genocide” against blacks. There is  “war on women.” There is an “epidemic” of school shootings. The American nation is inherently racist and sexist, and American history is a blood-soaked abomination. Fascists are on the verge of overthrowing the government. The climate crisis is upon us and the planet is going to become uninhabitable within a decade or two, and we’re all going to die.

This unrelenting narrative of doom and hopelessness is exacerbated by an assortment of imposed lifestyle changes that would destroy a generation of youth even in an otherwise healthy, hope-oriented culture. Many boys today are forced to take prescription tranquilizers if they display spirited behavior that used to indicate someone who would grow up to become a fine and courageous man. They fall prey to the seductive lure of enervating online games, or are pigeonholed into participating in hyper-supervised group activities. They are denied the unstructured time that delivered adversity and uncertainty, conditions that in earlier generations helped turn children into resilient and adaptable adults.

There’s much more. There is the normalization of marijuana, which for millions of young Americans has lowered their IQs and destroyed whatever motivation and drive they might still possess. There is the shameful decline in the quality of public education and  Nearly two decades of ubiquitous, addictive smartphones and social media, with all the damage they do to the metabolism, mental health, and intellectual agility of young people. And as if all that is not enough, we have the ridiculous, disgusting imposition of complicated, half-baked gender ideology, robbing children of the innocent clarity they need in their early developmental years.

It is a small wonder that America’s youth are adrift. Every institution in America has succumbed to compassion run amok, perhaps willfully unaware that effective compassion comes with obligations, and healthy societies must embrace hard but simple truths. Competition builds courage and character. Punishment deters crime. Demanding tolerance for everything breeds intolerance. Enforcing immutable standards is the only equitable way to offer equal opportunity. When collecting benefits is easier than working, people will quit working. It is impossible for all identifiable groups to attain equal outcomes in all things, and every individual endures challenges, anxiety, insecurity, disadvantages, crushing disappointments, and capricious good fortune, regardless of their origins.

And, of course, this brutal truth: we need dangerous good men to protect everyone from dangerous bad men.

Which brings us back to Andrew Tate. In a world where young men are told from the day they were born they are toxic, racist, sexist oppressors, and the only acceptable path for them is to embark on a lifetime of apologizing and going to the back of the line, they will rebel. Becoming a fan of Andrew Tate may be an controversial choice, but it’s a predictable reaction to an unhealthy and hostile society.

Rejecting the narrative of doom, division, hedonism, perversion, resentment, intolerance, cowardice and utter madness that defines far too much of American culture today does not, however, require young men, or anyone else for that matter, to go to Andrew Tate’s extremes. America is blessed with tens of thousands of rebel influencers offering messages of sanity and hope—Jordan Peterson, Heather MacDonald, Chris Rufo, Candace Owens, Vivek Ramaswamy, Michael Shellenberger, and the redoubtable Thomas Sowell, to name just a few.

“One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do,” wrote C. S. Lewis in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, “is to shut their eyes to facts.” Embrace hard but simple truths, reject the lies, and make some noise. If the world is going mad, don’t accept it. Take away the accouterments of madness, one by one. Save your child, save yourself, save America.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.