By The Editors
By Donald J. Boudreaux
By Craig J. Cantoni
By Jeffrey Tucker
Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
This is the foreword to the new book by Douglas French: When Movements Become Rackets (2025):
Dante Alighieri, in his book Inferno, places those who betray benefactors in the deepest circle of hell. If that is true, the place is likely overpopulated with the managers and executives of nonprofit organizations.
In recent years, such organizations have been implicated in egregious schemes to launder money and influence for every sundry and malevolent cause and hundreds of billions in taxpayer money. But even those not on the take from taxpayers have vast problems, so much so it is a wonder why anyone donates to them at all.
The more you study this stuff, the more cynical you become. The pandemic period gave rise to hundreds of these things designed to plan for pandemics and end them. Many were funded by crypto scams born of stimulus payments provided so that people could work from home. Some had fancy philosophical cover such as “effective altruism,” about which the scandals never end. Tens of billions in fraudulent court judgments have come down.
Sometimes the racket benefits forever just from a name. Consider the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or ASPCA. My God, who doesn’t want to stop cruelty to animals? It was founded in 1866 and maybe did some good, I don’t know. But these days, it is a main force to stop working-class people from making money by breeding and selling dogs and cats, taking from people a lucrative business that also helps people have companions at a low price. This doesn’t stop cruelty; it bolsters an industrial cartel of professional breeders.
But then you look up the organization. Assets: $553,325,000; contributions: $338,217,130; programs: $25,068,713; investment income: $13,573,862; book royalties: $3,953,489; fundraising fees: $11,884,368. The CEO gets a million plus a year. The fundraiser alone makes $500,000. The 14 top executives earn more than $275,000 a year each. More than a thousand people work there. I cannot say with certainty, but this has all the earmarks of a racket, all in the name of not stopping but actually creating “puppy mills.”
With those kinds of assets, why doesn’t it just become a foundation? Because it has a massive organization to support and can raise $338M per year. Why leave that kind of money on the table? But being a nonprofit also requires them to raise money to keep up appearances, per rules via the IRS. So the fundraising letters arrive like a tsunami, every dime pouring in in order to keep up appearances.
For all I know, that might be among the best. No comment is necessary on the Southern Poverty Law Center (as ably exposed and surveyed by Doug French in Chapter 1), which depends foundationally on spreading the word that America has a massive problem with racism and Nazism that they alone can solve. Ex-employees have blown the whistle many times on this scam, but it never makes a dent in the organization, which everyone knows is a scam but it somehow keeps lasting.
As for Harvard University, another nonprofit but with assets of $53 billion, the less said the better. I would also put in this bucket countless fake libertarian organizations such as the Cato Institute, which somehow weighed in eight months after the start of the pandemic period to endorse lockdowns, masking, tax-funded medical interventions, and mandatory injections. There’s some liberty right there!
I looked up the 990s of an organization founded in the postwar period that has long since failed to pursue its mission, which was once about backing economic freedom; indeed now it does nothing at all except vamp for social media. What I found was a long list of legacy foundations, institutions that are forced to give a percentage of interest and dividends to other nonprofits. It’s a gravy train. Once you are on it, you stay there seemingly forever even if your nonprofit only pretends to operate and do what it claims to do.
And yet people still work there, if you can call it that. As a long-time employee of nonprofits, there are many stories I could tell: incompetence, waste, fake jobs, preening frauds, underhanded fundraising strategies, bullying bosses, surreptitious survival strategies, hapless donors pillaged, preposterous spending schemes, managerial and intellectual hoaxes, and internal politicking so vicious that it shocks to the core.
In his chapter on movements, my old friend Doug French riffs on a theme from Murray Rothbard in observing that what starts as a mission somehow and seemingly inevitably turns into a racket. True words. French isolates a main structural feature of the nonprofit world that makes it particularly vulnerable. The consumers of the product are different from the sources of the revenue. It’s a three-way exchange: donors, consumers, and producers. This creates a huge space for racketeering. This is unlike the for-profit sector in which the direct exchange between producer and consumer minimizes the persistence of scams.
That’s a solid technical explanation, but there is more going on still. It’s not as if the nonprofit designation is inherently corrupt. Most private schools are nonprofit. So are churches and many good charities. Great hospitals, orphanages, religious houses, and universities in history have been nonprofit organizations. They have done great good for the world at great sacrifice for donors and those who work for them. They could not have successfully reorganized as for-profit organizations simply because the service they provide goes mostly to nonpayers: that is, they have a mission that is inconsistent with a for-profit model.
If that is true, what mechanisms are in place to keep them from becoming a racket? There can only be good structure and a management system in place to keep them from falling into the pit. When I formed Brownstone Institute, this was my number one fear. I did not want to found an institution that would go the direction of most of them. Thinking it through carefully, I realized that a main feature of corruption comes down to institution building. In time, the managers care far more about their own operations and stability than the mission to which they publicly swear fealty. One sign of this is the construction of a fancy building for a headquarters.
How to stop that? My first step was simply to limit the number of personnel: only the best with high workload so that everyone was genuinely working a full-time job. No idle hands doing the devil’s work. I mapped out a structure of ten people and eventually reduced that to four. That is where it has stayed. Any other services we need that are outside the skill set of these four are contracted out on a temporary basis.
My second step was thinking through the mission itself to which we hope to devote 90 percent of the resources. Based on what I could see at the time, and continue to see, what the world needed more than anything else was sanctuary for dissident intellectuals—not a permanent home but a quick bridge to another path in the presence of cancel culture. I certainly could have used such an organization in the course of my career.
The key is that the unrestricted financial support is temporary, just one year, while their presence in the community is lasting. This model also becomes scalable: whether we have three Fellows or 300, we can scale up and down based on resources. Hence, if we gain or lose a million dollars, we are perfectly positioned to plough those resources into or out of a program that serves the mission primarily rather than simply builds the institution.
That’s the theory, and it has worked so far. It’s based largely on the structure that ended up saving Ludwig von Mises from doom when he was drummed out of Vienna in 1934. He landed in Geneva at an institute that saved him for six years (during which time he wrote Human Action) before he found another lifeline in the US thanks to some benefactors who helped him get an academic position.
Brownstone is designed to serve that role in our time. The hope that it doesn’t become a racket is built into the structure itself: no physical headquarters, a tiny staff, and a mission that is distinct and established as inherent in the protocol of our operations. That’s the idea in any case. I’m not so naive as to believe that this is an impenetrable edifice, however. I would rather it close its doors before it went the way of most nonprofits.
I’ve thrown around the word mission often here, and this deserves some elaboration. Missions are bound up with movements and groups, and each poses grave dangers on its own. One of the more revealing accounts of groups and movements I’ve seen is from one of Mises’s influences, Sigmund Freud and his powerful tract Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego. In his view, the group has no actual physical existence; it is purely a sociological fiction. As such, all its members are in a continuing state of existential fear: it could evaporate in an instant. Some measures are necessary to sustain the fiction of its existence.
He gives the examples of the church and the military. What do they have in common? They are enormously welcoming on the way in and viciously punishing on the way out. They promise grace, eternal life, peace and contentment, adventure, heroism, manliness, valor and recruit members based on this. But if any member leaves, the exiting person is met with cruelty: excommunication, shunning, disgrace, death, and burial outside favored plots. The only difference in the person is the direction of joining or leaving: depending on the direction you go, you are either showered with praise and promises or denounced or even shot.
This is the essence of the group: manipulative, lying, duplicitous, deceiving, and ultimately cruel. (It is one reason Hans-Hermann Hoppe refers to the state as “the great fiction.”) The reason traces to the ultimate fiction that there is such a thing as a group, which there is not, but we speak of them as if they do exist. Nonprofits often lead groups and are thus subject to all the pathologies Freud names. They can be warm and welcoming until they are not; then they can be vicious and horrible in contradistinction to all their professed missions and purposes.
Once you have a group, you form a movement, which is another fiction. Still, creating the appearance of a movement requires a guru leader and compliant followers who are making a dent in public opinion. It requires compliance with the leadership principle but the leaders are more often than not led to corruption, sometimes of unspeakable types. These mortals aspire to immortality in reputation as “great men” who lead others but such power corrupts.
That’s not to say leadership itself is a myth but there are two kinds. There are those leaders who seek to surround themselves by talent and intelligence and who see themselves as servants of a cause, always ready to praise and credit others. And there are those who beat back and eschew talent and intelligence, regarding them as a threat to their own valor. These are the insecure types who have minions do their writing and obsequious servants praise their glories nonstop. There is no end to the flattery they demand; far from being taken in by it, they revel in it.
Another feature deserves comment: the ubiquity of infighting among groups, movements, and nonprofits. As anyone who has worked in this sector, big or small, can affirm, infighting and factionalism are the true desiderata of nonprofit life. How to explain this? Hegel’s theory of self-identity is helpful. Most people involved in intellectual and mission pursuits want to believe that they are making a difference in the world but what constitutes the “world” for marginal movements is subject to relentless shrinkage.
As it turns out, people want to be heard and they want evidence that they matter. But given that the bigger world cares nothing about their stupid cause, they turn toward internal fighting to prove to themselves that they are making a difference. They fight, purge, denounce, refute, lobby, and break into ever smaller factions, with the perpetrators of such absurdities mainly seeking a sense of self-affirmation. These little fish flop around in ever smaller ponds and will do so forever so long as the donors are there to change their water.
In evaluating the importance of any particular group, movement, or nonprofit, I’ve come to use what we can call the Seventh Day Adventist test. This is a church started in 1863 with a few thousand members. Today it has 23.6 million members and some 20 different break-off sects in every country. Some of these breakoffs are large and some tiny. Most people think nothing of all about this revivalist offshoot. For its members, however, it is the most important thing in the world. The test: your group should always compare itself with this church, which is massive but without much of a cultural importance. Just remember: there is no reason to take yourself seriously until you approach the level of size and scope of some portion of the Seventh Day Adventists. Until then, it is likely that you are taking yourself too seriously.
French’s truth-telling essay was first delivered at the Property and Freedom Society as founded by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. The question came up in the Q&A: why is the PFS exempt from the logic of decline into scammery? The answer is similar to my own concerning Brownstone: we have a refined purpose and scale to meet that purpose. PFS holds one meeting a year. Its budget consists of fees paid to attend that meeting. It is not an attempt to build an empire or institution or employ as many people as possible. It is there to do a job that needs to be done: provide intellectual camaraderie among dissidents who accept the values of the organization.
That’s why there is little danger that it will become a racket. It puts mission and its value first with refined operational limits. That’s the test. With those parameters, it is also less subject to the pathologies of group psychology and factionalism that doom so many other nonprofits. It is also not robbing people, which means it is not only doing good work. It will also keep its members and managers out of the circle of hell into which Dante places those who betray their benefactors.
I worked for a time with Doug French as my boss. He did his best to make sure that the institution he served was on the up-and-up: efficient, functional, broad-minded, effective, and mission-driven. Not a cult, not a scam, not an excuse for self-aggrandizement and pillaging. That’s the ideal and he worked toward it until it became impossible. I too have experienced such frustrations. It’s a sad truth that once an organization becomes a racket, there is no turning back, no final reform efforts that work, no real path to redemption. In the for-profit world of endless institutional churning, scams come and go.
In the nonprofit world, they last and last. So long as the money is flowing, and the bills are being paid, the rest takes care of itself. The key lesson for donors: know the difference between an organization with a purpose and an obvious racket. Sadly, the latter far outnumber the former, in both this world and the next.
*****
This article was published by The Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.
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By Craig J. Cantoni
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy, by Christopher Leonard, 373 pp, softcover, $13.40, ISBN-13: 978-1982166649, Simon & Schuster, 2023.
This book is a brilliant but damning description of the economic havoc wreaked on America’s plebeians by the patricians at the Federal Reserve, at Wall Street banks, at hedge funds, and at government agencies, especially the U.S. Treasury.
The havoc took place, and is continuing to take place, while elected Members of Congress were fiddling and continue to fiddle.
It may not have been the intent, but the book shows that both capitalism and democracy are broken. And they were broken by men and women with advanced degrees, mostly from Ivy League universities.
Author Christopher Leonard is masterful in explaining in layman’s terms the inner workings of the Federal Reserve and how it creates money, controls interest rates, works hand-in-glove with Wall Street, and, in recent decades, developed such monetary “innovations” as quantitative easing (QE), zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP), and purchases of long-term debt (Operation Twist).
He describes with a reporter’s skill what these innovations wrought: the enrichment of Wall Street, inflated asset prices, bubbles in stocks and housing, mountains of debt, and the shifting of capital from productive uses to stock buybacks, financial engineering, and corporate buyouts, which in turn hollowed out companies, closed factories, and threw working stiffs on the street.
Admittedly, I found the voyeuristic parts of the book to be particularly interesting. The organizational politics, social norms, and even décor within the Federal Reserve’s Eccles building in Washington are described. Also described are the personalities, communication styles, and monetary philosophies of some of the key players, including past and present Fed chairpersons, governors, and regional presidents.
Reading like a novel, the book features protagonist Thomas Hoenig. The former President of the Kansas City Fed, Hoenig would go on to be vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC. Hoenig is a Midwesterner and not a coastal elite, with a Ph.D. in economics from Iowa State.
While at the Fed, Hoenig consistently warned about the folly of quantitative easing and was often the lone dissenting vote at the regular meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC. Among other anecdotes, the book describes a speech he gave in 2006 to bankers at a resort in Tucson, Arizona, where he warned the audience that their embrace of easy money would end badly for them and the country. No one applauded at the end. The Great Recession and the bursting of the housing bubble followed two years later.
Years after that, while at the FDIC, Hoenig gave speeches and lobbied Congress on the need to break up big banks into smaller ones and to increase banks’ capitalization. These actions would be much better fixes for what ails the banking system, he said, than the tens of thousands of pages of Dodd-Frank regulations and the Basil III accords. Naturally, the political power of the big banks kept that from happening.
In contrast, recent Fed Chairman Jerome “Jay” Powell grew up in Chevy Chase, one of the wealthiest towns in America and a suburb of Washington, D.C. He attended the exclusive Georgetown Prep, and his family belonged to the elite Chevy Chase Club, as well as to an exclusive dining club. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that I also grew up with country-club experience. I worked as a teen at an exclusive country club in St. Louis, Missouri—a club where Jews, blacks, and Italians were not welcome as members in those long-ago years. I was the only non-black in an otherwise all-black janitorial, kitchen, and wait staff in the club house. Thus, I might have a case of class envy.
Powell graduated from Princeton and earned a law degree from Georgetown University. After a stint as a legislative aide, he went into investment banking. Eventually, he ended up at the Carlyle Group, one of the richest and most prestigious private-equity firms at the time. It was a firm that was headquartered in D.C., unlike most private-equity firms, because that gave it a competitive advantage, due to specializing in the buying and selling of businesses that relied on government spending.
Carlyle was an example of the revolving door between government and the financial industry. Leonard names names and shows Carlyle helped these people monetize their granular knowledge and personal connections in the industries they once regulated.
The book details how Powell took the lead in Carlyle’s leveraged buyout of Rexnord, an industrial conglomerate headquartered in Milwaukee that made high-precision equipment used in heavy industry, such as specialty ball bearings and conveyor belts. He and Carlyle loaded the company with unsustainable debt and made millions from the deal.
At the time of the buyout, Rexnord’s headquarters was in a bare-boned, modest building near a company factory in an industrial area. After Powell became a member of the company’s board of directors and helped manage the company, the management team began holding meetings at hotels and country clubs instead of the headquarters building. In 2014, he made the class separation complete between company minions and fat cats. As companies across the land have done, the executives moved into a renovated downtown office building. The new offices were a self-contained environment, elevated above the middle layers of management and the thousands of employees who worked at Rexnord’s global network of factories.
Such downtowns are a modern version of a Potemkin village. They hide the economic distress in working-class neighborhoods and the hinterlands.
Tellingly, a new Rexnord chief executive was hired with a background in finance and not in engineering or manufacturing. Financial engineering was key to Carlyle’s strategy for the company. “The management team’s biggest maneuvers had to do with leveraged loans and rising stock prices, rather than conveyor belts or ball bearings.” Carlisle later sold the company to another private equity firm for more than twice what it had paid for the company four years earlier.
As has become a common tragedy in America, Rexnord workers were fired, factories were closed, and operations were offshored. The book tells the story of a machine operator who lost his job when a factory in Indiana was transplanted to Mexico. He was offered a severance bonus if he would train his Mexican replacement. He refused.
All this destructive financial engineering was facilitated by the easy money and cheap debt created by the Federal Reserve, where, ironically, Jay Powell would become chairman.
When Powell replaced Janet Yellen, he began normalizing the Fed’s monetary policy by winding down quantitative easing and raising interest rates. But the financial system had become so fragile that the stock market fell, and economic conditions became precarious. President Trump contradicted himself on his earlier position on monetary policy and began attacking Powell on Twitter and in the news media. Powell retreated from the normalization.
Author Christopher Leonard is better than most authors at being nonpartisan in laying blame, but he is not a perfect 50-50. He is about 53% left and 47% right. A sure giveaway is when he uses the adjective “far-right” in describing conservatives who railed against the Fed but doesn’t use “far-left” in describing liberals. This is in keeping with the convention of media and academia in using “right-wing” far more often than “left-wing.”
Leonard also unfairly criticizes the Tea Party for keeping Congress from addressing the nation’s problems, by the party’s focus on cutting taxes. That’s a curious criticism in a book that exposes the economic carnage from the Fed’s easy money, a regimen that enabled the government to live beyond its means. Tea Party members may not have known how all the gears of government work, but at least they knew that the gear shift is not in the hands of middle- and working-class Americans.
But these are minor flaws in an otherwise excellent book.
The Prickly Pear supports Patriot Mobile Cellular and its Four Pillars of Conservative Values: the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Right to Life, and significant support for our Veterans and First Responders. When you switch to Patriot Mobile, not only do you support these causes, but most customers will also save up to 50% on their monthly cellular phone bill.
Here at The Prickly Pear, we know that switching to a new cellular service can be challenging at times. Let’s face it, no one wants the hassle. But that hassle is necessary if Conservatives want to support those who support them.
By Ralph l. Defalco III
Written by Ralph l. Defalco III
Senator Tom Cotton’s book is a tacit admission that more than 50 years of American policies toward China have failed
In March, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment (ATA). For the first time, the ATA identified the People’s Republic of China as the most capable threat actor that now confronts the United States. The reasons for ranking China as the top threat—militarily, economically, diplomatically, and informationally—are made clear in Seven Things You Can’t Say About China, a crisply written new book by US Senator Tom Cotton.
Cotton’s slim volume is a very readable and clear-eyed look at China’s capabilities, actions, and intent to challenge the US. Intended for a general audience, the book reflects Cotton’s keen understanding of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) decades-long plan to undermine US global leadership and the insights about China’s leadership he has gained from serving as a member, and now chairman, of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
In Seven Things You Can’t Say About China, Cotton pulls no punches and calls out the media conventions, ideological leanings, commercial interests, and diplomatic niceties that preclude our leaders saying that China is an “evil empire,” waging economic war on the world, preparing for armed conflict, infiltrating US society and government, and targeting American children. He makes the case for each of these “unsaid” six things and concludes with the sobering assessment that Beijing could win the struggle for global supremacy—another unpleasant truth that goes unsaid.
Much of what Cotton has written in this book could be dismissed by some readers as hyperbole. But his sharp, short arguments—written clearly and succinctly—are well-reasoned and supported by salient facts. His claim that China is an evil empire, for example, is buttressed when he describes ways the CCP built a “dystopian police state to monitor, manipulate and master its people.” He cites forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations that were used to enforce the party’s One Child Policy; the suppression of religious freedom, and Christianity and the Falun Gong movement in particular; the genocidal campaigns against the people of Tibet and Chinese Uyghurs; and a social-credit score that measures the average Chinese citizen’s political reliability and determines access to everything from education to housing.
The author also argues that China is preparing for war by funding an unprecedented military build-up. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is now the largest ground force in the world; its navy is larger than the US Navy (and augmented with the world’s largest coast guard fleet and a militarized merchant fleet); and Beijing plans to have a stockpile of 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035. “This massive investment of national resources,” writes Cotton, “speaks volumes about the party’s intentions.”
Seven Things You Can’t Say About China also details the party’s infiltration of American cultural, economic, and academic institutions and government. The author describes, for example, how JP Morgan Chase created a “Sons and Daughters Program” to hire family members of the Chinese elite, which violated American anti-corruption laws, and coughed up a $264 million fine for so doing. Cotton also recounts the now-infamous Hunter Biden dealings with Chinese companies. But he has special ire for retired politicians who have become lobbyists for Chinese enterprises with close ties to the state, including former Senators David Vitner, Barbara Boxer, and Joe Lieberman.
In his eye-opening chapter “China is Coming for Our Kids,” Cotton moves far beyond the story of TikTok’s hold on American children (in 2023, more than 60 percent of American teens used the app) to describe the influence the CCP is exerting on schools. On college campuses and in primary and secondary schools, Beijing is promoting Chinese language and cultural programs. Innocent on their face, Cotton argues the programs are artfully contrived. He quotes a less than circumspect Chinese official who noted the programs “are an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” The Chinese government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these programs, supplementing them with billions of dollars in donations (most of which are underreported) to academic institutions.
The CCP cannot win its battle for global supremacy without Taiwan in hand, and Beijing is readying to take that island by force.
That kind of spending, Cotton acknowledges, buys influence not only on college campuses, but also in K-12 classrooms. Nearly all of the estimated 120 Confucius Institutes on American campuses were closed when they were designated as foreign missions, and Congress prohibited DoD funding to any university that played host to these fronts for the CCP’s notorious United Front Work Department. Many have re-emerged as rebranded programs or have been spun off into other schools.
From 2007 to 2020, a Chinese-funded guest-teacher program placed 1,650 Chinese nationals in Confucius Classrooms. These K-12 teachers taught Chinese language and cultural studies and sanitized versions of Chinese history and the party-line versions of geography and politics in more than 500 American classrooms. The teachers, according to the Department of Education professionals Cotton cites, are “trained to steer classroom discussions away from an ever-expanding list of issues: Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, the South China Sea and more. The problem isn’t what is being said; the problem is what is not being said.” The overarching teaching objective is to “normalize” the activities of the CCP and suppress any criticism of China.
The cost of criticizing China can be painfully steep. Cotton recounts the notorious story of how the NBA was forced to kowtow to China after losing an estimated $400 million when Beijing pulled all NBA games from state-run television and suspended sales of the league’s branded merchandise. The NBA’s affront was to permit one team’s general manager to tweet his support for the democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong. The CCP, Cotton explains, has “compromised American businessmen, academics, and celebrities,” and “uses fear and greed,” to influence them. The author notes that he has been “sanctioned” by China for his views on Hong Kong and sees that condemnation as a badge of honor.
Not so the business leaders, academics, celebrities, and influencers—like Disney’s Michael Eisner—who have issued self-abasing apologies after making any one of several statements deemed offensive by China. Cotton recounts actor John Cena’s mea culpa as one case in point. Cena referred to Tibet as a “country” when promoting the film Fast & Furious 9. At risk of losing access to the Chinese market of tens of millions of movie-goers, and millions in revenue, Cena groveled his apology in tutored Mandarin: “I made a mistake, I must say right now. It’s so so so so so so important, I love and respect Chinese people. I’m very sorry for my mistakes. Sorry. Sorry. I’m really sorry. You have to understand I love and respect China and the Chinese people.”
Throughout Seven Things You Can’t Say About China, Cotton builds a solid case for his claims. A Harvard Law graduate, the author assembles point-by-point arguments and usually avoids speculation that would open his arguments to criticism and counterargument. That objective and understandable approach to a complex topic gives way to informed speculation in the chapter, “China Could Win.” Here Cotton argues the CCP cannot win its battle for global supremacy without Taiwan in hand, and Beijing is readying to take that island by force. War for Taiwan would result in “a global depression, the fraying of US military alliances, nuclear proliferation, the decline of American influence, long term economic stagnation,” and “the sun finally setting on American power.”
Cotton handily explores these shocking claims in the same succinct style that characterizes the rest of his narrative—only to hedge by writing “no one can predict with certainty how a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would end up.” What is certain, however, is that Cotton has made the case here for the promulgation of an American strategy “to deter Chinese aggression in the first place.” But the author never hints at even a base outline of a deterrent strategy.
Seven Things You Can’t Say About China finishes on a weak note. The epilogue offers up seven things ordinary Americans can do to beat China, including boycotting Chinese-made products, buying American, and voting for candidates that will stand up to China. This is disappointing. Cotton could have provided a substantial call to action as he has been far more forthright with how to address the Chinese threat in other forums. For example, in his report, “Beat China: Targeted Decoupling and the Economic Long War,” Cotton called for severing most economic ties with China; reinvesting in scientific, technical and manufacturing fields where China has the lead; sanctioning China for the theft of intellectual property; and withholding visas for Chinese students. That report would have been a welcome appendix to this eye-opening book.
That’s a minor criticism of a well-crafted book that otherwise offers a savvy and startling assessment of the reasons why so many in academia, business, finance, stardom, and even government are reluctant to say what needs to be said about China. These things are left unsaid by so many lest they call forth an unwelcome reckoning and a galling confession. Seven Things You Can’t Say About China is, at bottom, a tacit admission that more than 50 years of American economic, military, diplomatic, and informational policies for China have failed.
It’s a silence now kept at our own peril.
*****
This article was published by Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.
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By Carrie Sheffield
Written by Carrie Sheffield
A new book exposes how California’s leftist political machine is unraveling the Golden State—and, sadly, how socialist policies could be exported nationwide if Americans aren’t vigilant.
The book is “Fool’s Gold: The Radicals, Con Artists, and Traitors Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All,” co-authored by investigative journalists Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics and Jedd McFatter at the Government Accountability Institute.
“Violent crime is surging in California. Illegal drug use is off the charts, and it is subject to a daily invasion of illegal migrants crossing its southern border,” the authors write, mincing no words.
“Homeless addicts in once beautiful San Francisco shoot up, sleep, and defecate on its streets when they’re not stealing from what shops are still open in the city. Its economy is struggling. Tent cities block the sidewalks of Los Angeles as businesses leave the state’s crushing regulations, extortionate taxes, and unchecked property crime. Its police force is demoralized by negligent ‘Soros prosecutors’ who turn repeat criminals loose. Its universities, always a source of foment and dissent, have metastasized into playthings and espionage targets for America’s greatest adversary—the communist regime of China.”
“Fool’s Gold” is timely, given that polling shows two of the top five potential 2028 Democratic presidential primary contenders hail from California—former Vice President Kamala Harris (a former San Francisco district attorney and state attorney general) and former San Francisco Mayor and current California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Newsom is currently running an image-rehabilitation podcast after botching the fatal wildfires that ravaged his state earlier this year.
McFatter and Crabtree, a California resident and my former colleague at The Hill newspaper, also dig into Newsom’s alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party and his involvement in corruption. The book describes a nonprofit organization initiative started by Newsom called ChinaSF, which the authors report served as a gateway for Chinese Communist Party officials and Chinese criminals to exploit California.
“Fool’s Gold” is already having an impact, with Newsom publicly denying the book’s claim that he secretly funded a controversial City Hall bronze statue of his own bust.
The statue commemorates Newsom’s stint as mayor of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011. Newsom used what’s known as “behested payments” to fund the monument, with a reported three private organizations donating to the nonprofit designated for “Mayoral Bust at San Francisco City Hall.”
“Fool’s Gold” reports two of the three reported companies are companies owned by Newsom: Balboa Cafe Partners and PlumpJack Management Group donated a combined $10,000 to the $97,000 bust fund.
“We 100% stand by our Gavin Newsom bronze-bust vanity project story,” Crabtree replied on X in response to Newsom’s claim that the donations were not secret. “Team Newsom is afraid of the shocking revelations in FOOL’S GOLD—which is backed by more than forty-five pages of endnotes containing more than 1,000 open-source, reputable, and verifiable citations with zero anonymous sources—and that is why they are trying to smear this book.”
Crabtree also said “Newsom’s team has thus far refused to answer whether his companies got a tax break for funding this ‘charitable’ statue.”
“Fool’s Gold” also explains how Newsom’s horrific release of thousands of prisoners during the COVID-19 pandemic created a huge spike in crime throughout the state. Its impact is still felt today as residents and businesses continue to flee California for better-managed red states, such as Texas and Florida.
It’s no wonder, in light of a new report from the United Ways of California finding that 35% of households across the state—more than 3.8 million—are struggling to cover basic living expenses.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity noted that a 2024 national survey found only 15% of respondents felt that California was a model for other states
The Public Policy Institute of California also found that only 1 in 3 Californians think the state is a good place to achieve the American dream.
McFatter and Crabtree pithily sum up the problem of exporting California’s policies nationwide: “If the fifty states are still America’s ‘laboratories of democracy,’ California is the Wuhan Institute.”
*****
This article was published by The Independent Women’s Institute and is reproduced with permission.
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By Itxu Díaz
Written by Itxu Díaz
For a long time, it has been commonly accepted that the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the end of the century of utopianism. Social experimentation seemed to have hit rock bottom with the collapse of the Soviet Union, sinking into blood and misery as it leapt from written theory to real life. Perhaps we were mistaken. Utopianism, the dream of a happy world, was merely shedding its skin in secret, much like what Nicolás Gómez Dávila said about stupidity: it “changes its subject in every era so it won’t be recognized.” Though the methods may have evolved, the victim remains the same today as it was three hundred years ago: individual freedom.
Much of this utopianism can be traced back to the Age of Enlightenment’s fantasies about perfecting society. Although largely unknown today, the French author Étienne-Gabriel Morelly is particularly representative of this tendency. Today he is forgotten partly because his utopian theories are now overshadowed by the more famous communist ideologues, and partly because his central work was anonymous and falsely attributed for centuries to Diderot, who, in any case, did nothing to deny the attribution and even tried to capitalize on it. The work in question is titled Code of Nature, Or, The True Spirit of Laws. Morelly, of whose biography we know almost nothing, had published Floating Islands, or the Basiliad (1753), an allegorical novel depicting a society founded on the precepts of communism. The backlash against Basiliad was so fierce and widespread that just two years later, the author responded to his critics with Code of Nature, an essay in which he dogmatically laid out the theoretical framework glimpsed in the fiction of his novel. In a way, it could be seen as a user manual for bringing the utopian vision of Basiliad to life.
Morelly thus became the first to codify the communist utopia into enthusiastic law, and the result, viewed through the lens of 2025, is chilling—not for its utopianism, but for the number of parallels we can draw between his totalitarian roadmap and the thinking and policies of our modern Western societies in the twenty-first century. I suspect we’ve also been underestimating Morelly’s importance in the gestation of the more radical strands of the Enlightenment.
Eighteenth-century authors who fought against private property broadly fall into two groups. Some, like Rousseau or Diderot, attacked the social order underpinning property but stopped short of fully rejecting it, while others, like Morelly or Mably, adhered blindly to communist principles. Morelly in particular believed in the natural goodness of man and attributed all evils and deviations to greed. And, as you might guess, for him, the sole cause of greed was the existence of private property.
What was novel about Morelly’s utopian Code of Nature was his determination to build the communist system from a moral theory, as well as his crafting of a pragmatic plan for the birth of a regenerated society where men could once again be happy as they were in their primitive origins, before private property. That plan consists of the “fundamental and sacred laws that uproot vices and all societal ills.”
Remarkably, his scheme for revolutionizing law bears a certain similarity to latter-day utopian plans, such as the United Nations’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Swap “sustainable development” for “collective happiness,” and you’ll see that three hundred years later, we’re more or less in the same place. And it’s not just the 2030 Agenda. What’s been called “wokeism” advocates for strong state intervention to correct historical injustices through laws, quotas, or policies aimed at repairing historical harm or restoring what was theoretically stolen from certain groups. The goal is the same: to march toward a happy world without inequalities.
Like the radical Enlightenment, contemporary woke ideology, whose seams have recently begun to fray, also originates from the notion that traditional structures—capitalism, the family, gender, individual freedom, or meritocracy—are the root of all ills, namely, artificial inequalities that must be eradicated. In both cases, the ideal is a happy society where differences, whether material, biological, identity-based, or even in talent, do not create hierarchies. In both cases, the only way out is repression or coercion, perhaps reminding us once again of Reagan’s words, 36 years after the fall of the Wall: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
The first of Morelly’s laws establishes the abolition of private property: “Nothing in society will belong particularly to anyone, except things of current use for the individual, for their needs, pleasures, or daily work.” Citizens are forbidden from accumulating; they can only take what they need at that moment. You could acquire your daily bread, as allotted, and the baker could acquire the grain needed based on the loaves he plans to bake. All acquisitions would be free because everything belongs to the state. The citizen owns nothing. It’s impossible not to recall here the controversial World Economic Forum video about the year 2030 and its slogan: “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”
The second law turns all citizens into state employees: “Every citizen will be a public man, maintained and supported at public expense.” While the United States still partially resists this invasion of public life into the private sphere, Europe’s political elites have been walking this path for years, seeking to control as much of citizens’ lives as possible—whether directly through public employment or indirectly through subsidies, endless bureaucracies, and other forms of public dependency. Elites, from the Davos Club to UN leaders, also push for state intervention to “free” the individual.
We can find something like Morelly’s ideology in nearly the entire framework hidden within what today’s utopian theorists call “social justice.”
Morelly’s third law, inevitably, mandates universal labor: “Every citizen will contribute to the public good according to their strength, talent, and age; their duties will be regulated accordingly by distributive laws.” The author of Code of Nature then decreed a kind of mandatory military service, but for agricultural production: farm work would be compulsory for all from ages 20 to 35, after which individuals could choose their profession. All products would belong to the state, which would distribute them, with bartering, exchange, or trade strictly forbidden. This law aligns with the 2030 Agenda’s goals on education, inequality reduction, decent work, peace, industry, innovation, infrastructure, justice, and strong institutions. But this is just the beginning of the laws. The true social engineering unfolds in subsequent decrees. The nation is divided into families, tribes, and provinces. All must live in cities, mandatorily distributed across identical neighborhoods and buildings, and even clothing is dictated by enforced equality: the state provides uniform attire.
The Code’s slightest hint of freedom appears in the matter of marriage: Morelly’s laws permit it, yes, but make it mandatory upon reaching adolescence, “according to conjugal laws that prevent all licentiousness.” Divorce is allowed, but only after ten years of marriage. Even love is rationed, in a typically utopian exercise of dehumanization.
Children are raised by their mothers until age five. At that point, they are separated from their parents and moved to a sort of gymnasium, where the state educates them equally. From age ten, children are assigned to workshops for vocational training.
The preservation of marriage is a mere illusion. For Morelly, the family structure is just another link in the chain of state control, expanding from the individual to the family, from the family to the tribe, and then to the city. The happiness he promises is, after all, the chimera of a new Sparta. Forced marriage and the state’s theft of children are nothing more than a ploy to dissolve the individual’s only hope of freedom: the privacy of the family and the home. Using different mechanisms, today’s left promotes the destruction of the family, dissolving the institution into a mere shapeless mass.
And what of God and religion? Before banning personal revelations and dreams of faith, Morelly decrees that children be taught only “that the author of the universe can be known solely through his works; that they proclaim him as an infinitely good and wise being”; “the youth will be made to understand that the innate feelings of sociability in man are the only oracles of divine intentions.” It’s striking how closely Morelly’s educational ideas align with those Rousseau would outline seven years later in Emile. This species of secularism, of course, lives on in the ideology of the left today.
Morelly believes freedom of thought must be eradicated in youth. Thus, he establishes “laws for studies that will prevent the wanderings of the human mind and any transcendental delirium.” “There shall be,” he adds, “absolutely no other moral philosophy than that founded on the plan and system of laws.” This may be the point where, in 2025, we feel most trapped by the same utopia. Cancel culture policies, the mandatory belief that climate change is humanity’s fault, or the impossibility of publicly questioning the virtues of multiculturalism are prime examples of how freedom of thought—and the ability to subscribe to any alternative moral philosophy—is mutilated. The consequences are harsh, though with some differences still between Europe and the United States: social and professional exclusion, legal persecution, and public shaming of dissenters.
In the height of his contradictions, the French thinker senses that his utopia of mandatory happiness might collapse on its own. Perhaps that’s why he concludes his work with penal laws: serious offenses lead to social exclusion and transfer to horrific prisons located in the most remote, barren, and gloomy outskirts of the city, surrounded by massive, impenetrable bars. Of all crimes, the one Morelly pursues most fiercely is that of anyone who attempts to “abolish the sacred laws to introduce detestable property.” Such a person “will be confined for life, like a raving madman, in a cave situated” in “the place of public graves,” and marked as an “enemy of Humanity.” Furthermore, “his name will be erased forever from the list of citizens: his children and entire family will abandon that name and be separately incorporated into other tribes, cities, or provinces.” It’s astonishing how he juxtaposes an idyllic description of the utopian society—claiming the community is the social state best suited to nature and the source of all good things—while simultaneously devising a plan of gruesome punishments to force citizens to uphold this supposedly sublime and pleasurable system.
Once again, whenever communism leaps from theory to practice, it must include an appendix to its happy, egalitarian fundamental laws, outlining every possible form of repression to sustain the utopian system—as the history of twentieth-century totalitarianism demonstrates.
Perhaps you’re thinking that Morelly’s description better fits today’s China, Soviet Russia, or even Cuba or Venezuela than the West. Yet what’s more immediate and novel is how, like Morelly, our century has sought to impose uniform thought through woke ideology. The penalties, as noted: cancellation and social exclusion. The mandatory beliefs: feminism, environmentalism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism. The state’s savage distributism: taxes, fines, and fees.
In short, we find Morelly—and those who followed him down the totalitarian communist path—in nearly the entire framework hidden within what today’s utopian theorists call “social justice.” The key difference is that the French author merely wrote it on paper, while today’s woke utopians are actively carrying out this experiment through planned social engineering to limit private property, outlaw capitalism (replaced by the circular economy), and muzzle individual freedom to an extreme degree. I can still hear Milton Friedman’s words echoing with stunning relevance: “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”
*****
This article was published by Law&Liberty, and is reproduced with permission.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons Henri Demare
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By Alex J. Pollock
Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
It makes sense that the 2008 bailouts inspired a lot of emotion, rhetoric, and hyperbole. Hundreds of billions of dollars had just been lost, the government was rescuing arguably undeserving institutions and their creditors, and the financial system seemed to be wavering on the edge of an abyss. Sixteen years after the panic, though, Todd Sheets manages to stay calm, analytical, and generally convincing in his new book discussing the Great Housing Bubble, its causes, its acceleration, its collapse, and the costly aftermath. 2008: What Really Happened dispassionately reviews the actions of key parts of the US government that were central to creating each stage of the bubble and bust over a decade.
In the early 2000s, Sheets tells us, he “had a growing concern that the Fed’s cheap-money policies were destined to end badly.” Then came the first financial crisis of the then-new twenty-first century. This disaster, we should remember, arrived shortly after we were assured by leading central bankers that we had landed safely in a new age of “The Great Moderation.” In fact, we landed in a great overleveraged price collapse.
In economics, the future is unknowable; we are usually confused by the present, and we can easily misinterpret the past. Sheets believes that “historical review reveals … a lengthy delay from an economic crisis to an understanding of what really happened.” He tells us that the book is a result of deciding, while reflecting on the crisis, that “I was confused about big-picture economic matters I had long taken for granted and realized it was time for a new self-study program … focused on financial history.”
Five Phases of the Bubble
Sheets’ study has resulted in an instructive historical framework for understanding the development from growing boom to colossal bust. He proposes five principal stages:
1. The pre-Bubble era, pre-1998: This era is now 26 years, or a whole generation, away from today. Sheets emphasizes the long historical period when average house price increases approximately tracked general inflation. “In the century preceding the housing bubble, house prices more or less tracked inflation,” he writes, “increases in real house prices were negligible.” He believes this is historical normalcy. One might argue that the average real increase in US house prices had been more like 1 percent per year (as I did at the time in graphing the Bubble’s departure from the trend), but that does not alter the fundamental shift involved.
2. Liftoff, 1998–2001: “Beginning in 1998, housing prices suddenly departed from these long-term historical trends,” Sheets notes. In other words, the Bubble starts inflating ten years before the final panic. “Real home prices suddenly begin to increase at an average annual rate of 4.7% during Liftoff.” Why did they? We will discuss below Sheets’ proposals for the principal cause of each phase.
3. Acceleration, 2002–2005: In this phase, “the rate of real home price appreciation began to accelerate even more rapidly”—it “shot up again, to an average annual rate of 8.3%, reaching a peak of 10.4% in 2005.” Remember that Sheets is always dealing always in real price increases—those on top of the general rate of inflation. At this point, it seemed to many people that buying houses with the maximum amount of mortgage debt was a sure-fire winning bet. From 1998 to 2006, Sheets calculates that in real terms, house prices “appreciated over 10 X the level of cumulative appreciation in the 100 years before the bubble.”
4. Deceleration, 2006: “The rate of increase in real house prices slowed dramatically” in the transition year of the inflation turning into deflation of the bubble.
5. Crash, 2007-2012: Home mortgage debt had by now become much more important to the US economy than before, surging strikingly, as Sheet’s table of mortgage debt as a percent of GDP shows:
A lot of people had made a lot of money on the way up, but any potential mortgage debt losses now had a much bigger potential negative impact than before. How much bigger? We were about to discover. Then, “beginning in 2007, real house prices declined … eventually falling about one-third.” Indeed, house prices fell for six years, until 2012. Between 1998 and 2012 we thus approximated the biblical seven fat years followed by seven lean years. There were vast losses to go around, defaults, failures, continuing bad surprises, and a constant cry for government bailouts, as inevitably happens in financial crises.
Sheets helpfully divides Phase 5, the Crash, into four component stages. For many of us, he reenergizes memories that may have been fading by now, and for those younger without the memories, provides a concise primer. Thus:
5(a) Awareness, June 2007-October 2007: “Hedge funds managed by Bear Stearns and BNP Paribas that were heavily concentrated in US home mortgages announced significant write-downs.” Oh-oh, but there was still much uncertainty about the implications for wider problems. “The markets still had no idea of just how precipitously housing prices would fall.” The Federal Reserve embarrassingly and mistakenly opined that the problems were “contained.” The stock market rose until October 2007. Showing some earlier awareness of looming problems, in March 2007 the American Enterprise Institute had a conference on “Implications of a Deflating Bubble,” which I chaired. We were pessimistic, but not pessimistic enough.
5(b) Stress, November 2007-August 2008: “A steady procession of substantial mortgage-related write-downs and losses were announced by a wide swath of financial institutions.” Two of my own favorite quotations from this time epitomize the growing chaos. “Hank,” the chairman of Goldman Sachs told the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, “it is worse than any of us imagined.” And as Paulson himself summed it up: “We had no choice but to fly by the seat of our pants, making it up as we went along.”
In July 2008, “the Fed invoked special emergency provisions that enabled it to supply bailout financing” to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the dominant mortgage companies. Fannie and Freddie are called “GSEs,” or government-sponsored enterprises. Their creditors believed, even though the government denied it, that “government-sponsored” really meant “government-guaranteed.” The creditors were correct. In the same July, “President Bush signed a bipartisan measure to provide additional funds” to Fannie and Freddie. These two former titans of the mortgage market, the global bond market, and US politics were tottering. But Sheets stresses a key idea: “Markets found additional reassurance in the idea that federal authorities would continue to intervene,” as they did when Fannie and Freddie went broke but were supported by the US Treasury in early September. In a financial crisis, the universal cry becomes “Give me a government guarantee!”
5(c) Panic, September 2008-February 2009: The Treasury and the Fed provided government guarantees and bailed out the creditors of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. But on September 15, 2008, “the authorities unexpectedly allowed Lehman Brothers to fail.” Whereupon “the money markets lurched into a state of panic,” their confidence in bailouts punctured. As Sheets relates, this was followed by a series of additional, giant government guarantees and bailouts to try to stem the panic.
5(d) Recovery, March 2009-forward: “What the [panicked] short-term financing markets were looking for,” Sheets concludes, “was unconditional assurance that none of the remaining critical institutions—Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, or Bank of America—would become the next ‘Lehman surprise.’ The final bailout package for these critical institutions was announced in mid-January of 2009.” In 2009 bank funding markets stabilized and the stock market recovered. That is where Sheets’ history concludes, but we should remember that house prices did not finally stop falling until 2012, and the Fed’s abnormally low interest rates resulting from the Crash continued for another decade—through the financial crisis of 2020 and until 2022. But that is another story.
Problems spread to leading, household-name financial institutions. The bust had arrived, just as it had so many times before in financial history, and it kept getting worse.
What were the fundamental causes of the ten-year drama of the housing bubble and its end in disaster? “A plausible theory of causation must explain the sudden onset and the distinct phases of the bubble,” Sheets sensibly argues, thus that different phases had different main causes. As he identifies the principal cause of each phase, it turns out that the US government, in various manifestations, is the prime culprit.
“The Liftoff phase of the bubble in 1998 was triggered by the rapid expansion undertaken by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” Sheets concludes. The timing fits: “The sudden acceleration of GSE growth coincided with the onset of the housing bubble.” And the magnitudes: “88% of the excess growth in mortgages outstanding relative to the Base Period originated from the GSEs.”
Fannie and Freddie could have so much impact because they were the dominant competitors, had key advantages granted by the Congress, had deep political influence and allies—but most importantly—operated with a government guarantee. This was only “perceived” and “implied” it was said, but it was nonetheless entirely real. That enabled their debt obligations to be sold readily around the world, as they set out to and did expand rapidly, notably in riskier types of mortgages, seeking political favor as well as more business.
Fannie and Freddie’s rapid expansion was linked to the push of the Clinton Administration to expand homeownership through “innovative” (i.e. risky) mortgages. This was a perfect combination of factors to launch a housing bubble. Sheets correctly observes that Fannie and Freddie’s role was “aided and abetted by federal housing policy.”
He sympathetically discusses Franklin Raines, Fannie’s CEO from 1999–2004, whose “move back to Fannie Mae coincided almost exactly with the onset of the housing bubble.” This section should also have considered James Johnson, CEO from 1991–1998, the real architect of Fannie’s risky, politicized expansion. Both of them combined politics at the highest level in the Democratic Party with housing finance, a combination which produced, as Sheets says, “just the opposite of what was intended.”
Sheets’ conclusions are consistent with those of Peter Wallison’s exhaustive study, Hidden in Plain Sight, which states, “There is compelling evidence that the financial crisis was the result of the government’s own housing policies.” So that no one misses the point, Sheets reiterates, “We can safely conclude that the Liftoff phase of the housing bubble was caused by the GSEs, with the support of the federal government.”
In the acceleration phase, Sheets writes that “the Federal Reserve became the driving force behind the further escalation of real housing price appreciation” by suppressing interest rates to extremely low levels, including negative real interest rates. This made mortgage borrowing seem much cheaper, especially as borrowers shifted to adjustable-rate mortgages.
“The Fed dramatically lowered short-term interest rates in order to deal with the collapse of the Internet stock bubble in 2000 and then held rates at historically low levels. … The Fed pushed the real fed funds rate down to an average of minus 0.6% during the Acceleration phase.” And “Where did the stimulus go? Into housing.”
Sheets notes that after the Internet stock bubble burst in 2000, the Fed lowered short-term interest rates and held them at historic lows. That stimulus, he says, went into housing. I call this the “Greenspan Gamble,” after the famous Fed chairman of the time, who was then admired as “the Maestro” for his timely monetary expansions. As Sheets says, the Fed ended up with the housing bubble instead—which cost Greenspan his “Maestro” title.
After the Fed started increasing rates again in 2005–2006, the housing bubble decelerated, and then collapsed in 2007. House prices started to go down instead of up, the start of the six-year fall. Subprime mortgage defaults went up. Specialized subprime mortgage lenders went broke. The problems spread to leading, household-name financial institutions. In the fourth quarter of 2007, “Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wachovia announced steep profit declines due to mortgage write-downs, … Merrill Lynch announced the largest quarterly loss in the firm’s history, … Citigroup revealed [huge] pending write-downs … [and there was] the steady drumbeat of massive mortgage write-downs, historic losses, and jettisoned CEOs”—all this showed the bust had arrived, just as it had so many times before in financial history, and it kept getting worse.
When Fannie and Freddie went down in September 2008, it provided an affirmative answer to the prescient question posed by Thomas Stanton way back in his 1991 book, A State of Risk: “Will government-sponsored enterprises be the next financial crisis?” That took the crash to the brink of its panic stage. As discussed above, the panic began when the funding market’s expectation that Lehman Brothers would be bailed out by the government was surprisingly disappointed. Peak fear with peak bailouts followed.
Sheets believes this no-bailout decision for Lehman was a colossal mistake, describing the date of Lehman’s bankruptcy as “a day that will forever live in financial infamy.” He provides a summary of internal government debates leading up to the failure, considers the argument that the Treasury and the Fed had no authority to provide a bailout, and finds it unconvincing: “I believe that they could have chosen to bail out Lehman if given sufficient political backing, and that such a step would have averted the Panic stage of the crisis.”
Wallison relates that the decision seems to have originated as a negotiating position of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen, who explained that he thought “we should emphasize publicly that there could be no government money … this was the only way to get the best price.” Paulsen also “declared that he didn’t want to be known as ‘Mr. Bailout.’” Wallison is a former general counsel of the Treasury Department and thinks, like Sheets, that authority to rescue Lehman was available: “Paulsen and [Fed chairman] Bernanke … telling the media and Congress that the government didn’t have the legal authority to rescue Lehman … was false.”
What would have followed if there had been a bailout of Lehman, since the deflation of the housing bubble would still have continued? That is a great counterfactual issue for speculation.
2008: What Really Happened ends a good read with two radical thoughts about politically privileged institutions:
Given the understanding of the bubble set forth here, the keys to preventing a similar crisis in the future are relatively straightforward: Eliminate the role of the GSEs in the national housing markets. Eliminate or dramatically curtail the ability of the Federal Reserve to inflate asset bubbles.
Great proposals, with which I fully agree. But Sheets, like the rest of us, does not expect them ever to happen, so he does expect, and so do I, that we will get more bubbles and busts.
*****
This article was published by Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.
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By Michael E. Hartmann
Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Carl Rhodes’ forthcoming book offers biting critiques of the ultra-wealthy and those stories they tell, to themselves and others, about how they became and stay that way.
Carl Rhodes’ forthcoming Stinking Rich: The Four Myths of the Good Billionaire is among the better of several recent aggressive, populist, progressive critiques of, well, billionairehood, in and of itself. More particularly, it argues well against those who anti-democratically exercise the power that can come with, if not outright be purchased by, being a billionaire.
Much has been said about the inequities in wealth and power that the growing horde of billionaires represent,” acknowledges Rhodes, dean of the UTS Business School at the University of Technology Sydney, in Stinking Rich. “This book joins and complements those discussions by seeking to understand how these inequalities are maintained through a cultural moralization of the ultra-rich.”
In that complementarity, Stinking Rich generally sets out to pierce “four myths of the good billionaire.” Billionaires have carefully constructed and continually cultivate these myths, repeating them to themselves, the people, and their elected policymakers. Too many willingly “buy” these myths, to ill effect, believes Rhodes—who previously authored 2021’s Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality is Sabotaging Democracy.
Specifically, the myths are of: the heroic billionaire, the generous billionaire, the meritorious billionaire, and the vigilante billionaire. The book’s covered billionaires are many, and they are from around the world. Those Americans among them include familiar ones like (merely alphabetically): Mark Benioff, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, Yvon Chouinard, Michael Dell, John Doerr, Larry Fink, Bill Gates, Kylie Jenner, Phil Knight, the Kochs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as “Davos Man” as a category. It is not complimentary.
Conversely and Perversely
The supposedly heroic billionaire, according to Rhodes, basically has expropriated the original, proper understanding of the American dream. “That billionaires are the poster children of the new American dream is less about the real possibilities for the advancement of ordinary citizens, instead ironically serving as justification of obscene inequality by heroizing the rich,” Rhodes writes, typically bitingly. “To believe the contemporary version of the American dream, where anybody can be rich if they just apply themselves, implies that those who are not rich deserve not to be. This dream reflects a merciless moral system.
“Following this cultural logic,” he continues, “being poor does not come about from structural inequalities, minority discrimination, class position, educational opportunities or family wealth, it is simply because the poor are losers.” Conversely, “billionaires are deserving of their wealth because they made it in the world while others did not. They are heroes.
“The original American dream may have reflected a democratic aspiration for a fairer society,” Rhodes rightly recognizes, “but perversely the new billionaire version of the American dream is a scam designed to provide a cloak of moral legitimacy over a political and economic system rigged for vast inequality.”
The meritorious-billionaire myth “reveals the reality of systematically generated inequality, the beneficiaries of which are unwilling to recognize or admit to its own privilege,” according to Rhodes. “The poorly kept secret is that the distribution of wealth across society is a rigged game. Central to the rigging is getting people not in the elite group to believe that the same principles of merit and reward apply to rich and poor alike.
“Accepting meritocracy,” he writes,
as the moral bedrock of democratic and capitalist societies provides billionaires with a perfect escape route from accusations that they are undeserving of their wealth. By claiming to have achieved their obscene wealth meritoriously as self-made men, billionaires specifically exploit the idea of meritocracy to provide a moral justification for their excess.
Overlaps and Pivots
Comparing and contrasting the two myths of the heroic and meritorious billionaire, as Rhodes puts them forward, shows considerable conceptual overlap between them. Perhaps understandably, this actually exists among all four of his presented myths. They are related.
The vigilante-billionaire myth is sometimes difficult to comprehend, which Rhodes seems to realize—at times seeming almost apologetic for having to (re-) define, describe, explain, and interpret it. The vigilante billionaire is a plutocrat that sees himself as above and beyond the law, I take it, which is fine to him because of the moral ends he pursues and is more qualified to achieve than legally bound lessers—us.
I’m not quite sure I fully get this one, honestly. Is this even really a myth per se? As articulated, it seems reliant on a higher level of philosophical abstraction, which does at least usefully for allowing for pivots to other, narrower critiques—maybe its purpose?—including a good extended one of “Davos Man,” complementary if not duplicative of others’.
Ownership and Associates
Introducing Stinking Rich’s myth of the generous billionaire, Rhodes accurately writes, “From the advent of 1980s globalization through to the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009, a new form of big philanthropy has developed as the world’s richest people hand over more and more of their fortunes to support charitable foundations, public causes and political activity.”
The industrialization of the Gilded Age that brought about what we might think of as the first mega-philanthropists has been succeeded by the globalized neoliberalism of our age that brought about even bigger givers, and larger inequality, Rhodes laments. His generous-billionaire chapter’s two principal examples of our latter time’s larger givers are Chouinard and Australia’s Gina Rinehart.
Chouinard, who founded the overwhelmingly successful recreational-clothing and -equipment company Patagonia, publicly announced in 2022 that he and his family were giving the company away to two entities. The first, the Patagonia Purpose Trust, received the family’s voting shares in Patagonia. It has effective control over the company and ensures that Chouinard’s values as a progressive businessman continue into the future. The second entity, The Holdfast Collective, is a tax-exempt, §501(c)(4) organization devoted to stopping climate change. Both the trust and the (c)(4), which can engage in political activity, have Chouinard’s family and close associates on their boards.
At the time, a Giving Review article by senior fellow Craig Kennedy wondered, “Where’s the outrage about Yvon Chouinard?” Well, admirably, Rhodes isn’t afraid to express some. “It would appear that while Chouinard was giving away the ownership of the company, he was not giving away any control,” according to Stinking Rich. “If anything, these changes would immortalize his life’s work by preserving the values and purpose he has long espoused and by providing a legal vehicle for political activity. In practical terms, it is unclear what exactly he was giving away” with the gift, if that’s what it was—which also “promised to be pretty good for business, too,” Rhodes passingly notes, “with Patagonia’s competitive advantage wrapped up in its climate activism.”
Part and Parcel: Politics and the People
As well, the “transaction” exemplifies “the relationship between billionaire power and political power that is key to understanding the myth of the generous billionaire,” Rhodes further notes. “Part and parcel of the changes that are afoot is that billionaire business owners are taking over as society’s moral agents and political actors, using their apparent generosity to address what they see as society’s greatest problems.” In the contemporary setup, “people’s lives and futures are increasingly dependent on the power and generosity of the self-elected rich elite rather than being ruled by the common will of the people.”
Rinehart is executive chairman of the also-overwhelmingly successful Australia-based mining and agriculture business Hancock Prospecting. Her philanthropy has included millions of dollars’ worth of support to the Australian women’s netball team. When a team member refused to wear Hancock’s logo her uniform because of many negative remarks Rinehart’s father made about indigenous Australians, including suggesting that eugenic measures be taken against them, high-profile controversy ensued.
Giving Review co-editor William Schambra has labeled eugenics the “original sin” of America’s progressive, “root-cause” big philanthropy, which was slow to apologize for its role. In Australia, amidst the controversy, Rinehart downright withdrew its major sponsorship of the netball team. To the further and strong chagrin of many in Australia, including Rhodes, Rinehart also met and publicly appeared with Donald Trump, including as he announced his 2024 candidacy for president at Mar-a-Lago.
“The cases of Chouinard and Rinehart are strikingly different examples of the myth of the generous billionaire,” Rhodes realizes. “The two cases do, however, share one key feature. For both, putative generosity is coupled with a desire for control.”
Power and Control, and Their Preservation
“When considering the apparent generosity of the ultra-wealthy in funding charitable foundations and causes of their choosing, it is naïve to assume that this is simply a matter of selfless do-gooding altruism,” according to Rhodes. “The question is, what do billionaire philanthropists expect in return for their economic largesse?”
In return for the transactional “exchange” of a gift, in Rhodes’ thinking, they expect political and social power and control over it. That’s what they’re “buying.” Essentially, they’re buying they’re way out of democracy—out of the healthy to’ing and fro’ing to which democratic processes would otherwise inconveniently subject the spending.
“Undermining the myth of the generous billionaire surfaces how billionaire giving is a ruse to secure the wealth, power and privilege of the billionaire class,” he writes. “Philanthropy is not designed to change the system but to preserve it,” he later adds. “Elite philanthropy is not something to be lauded, and the idea that it is the best way to solve the world’s problems is a myth that is both false and dangerous.”
Rhodes is on a roll here, though not a new one, for either the book or progressivism. “When billionaires make sizable gifts to charity, they are not channeling their money through a socially controlled process” of general taxation to fund projects for the common good and benefit society, “but rather through one that is largely privately controlled by them. The billionaires decide how much is spent and they decide what it’s spent on. The added sweetener is that, in most countries, charitable donations are tax deductible, serving to further impoverish the public purse.”
Increments, Allies, and Attitudes
In Rhodes’ Stinking Rich, it seems, pretty much almost everything billionaires do causes economic inequality and comes at the expense of democracy. He certainly doesn’t seem too worried about overstating it, actually—often with a little enjoyable academic bombast—but it’s an impressive case.
It could be both more nuanced and broader, one supposes. There aren’t many specific incremental policy solutions that are advanced, ones behind which a coalition could perhaps be built—thinking here of addressing the abused tax-incentivization of billionaire’s only arguably “charitable” giving. Since the book is borne of such laudable passion, maybe contemplation of those proposals and seeking that set of unorthodox allies is for others.
More largely, though—while Rhodes writes that “[t]he issue is broader than the spectrum of political differences drawn between right and left,” and maybe because of that belief—there isn’t much specific appeal to non-progressive populists. I think they would likely be receptive to his arguments against the myths of the good billionaire. That kind of directed appeal, too, may be for others.
In the democracies that Stinking Rich shows are being rigged, these citizens have a voice, too, however rarely exercised. In fact, recent electoral results in America and elsewhere arguably evidence wide agreement with his same healthy attitudes about those doing the rigging—including the mega-wealthy, moralized by myths, through their massive giving—and the deeper problems of which they are merely a symptom.
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This article was published by Capital Research and is reproduced with permission.
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By Neland Nobel
Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
Many commentators suggest the economy and the stock market are both exceptionally healthy and that Donald Trump is quite fortunate to have inherited economic conditions that are so favorable. A good example of this view from Marketplace.org :
“President-elect Donald Trump is poised to inherit a remarkably healthy economy when he takes office in January. By almost all measures, the U.S. economy is doing exceptionally well. Gross domestic product was up an annual 2.8% last quarter, inflation is just about down to the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2% and unemployment is low by historic standards. So what does that mean for the incoming president and his administration?”
Is it “remarkably healthy” to have much of the economic recovery financed by deficit spending on a wartime scale, the highest inflation in two generations, government employment leading job creation, most of the jobs going to illegal aliens, and the highest bankruptcy rate in 15 years? Well, maybe not.
President Biden recently also praised himself and touted the economy of Bidenomics, taking credit for the natural rebound that occurred after the world economy was virtually shut down because of the idiotic reaction to the man-made COVID pandemic.
Meanwhile, the jobs picture remains very murky, with some numbers showing jobs going up and some down, but the unemployment rate is up, and the number of new job openings is collapsing. Despite the administration’s boasting, real wages have actually fallen 1.3% under Biden.
Our concern is that this popular narrative suggests everything was great under Bidenomics and that if the economy and markets should falter, it will be Trump’s fault. In this way, Democrats are set up to “Hooverize” the Republicans if there is a downturn like they demonized them in the 1930s and subsequently gained 20 years of political control.
It seems lost on these folks that the chief reason people voted for Trump was precisely because the majority of Americans did not regard the economy as healthy. How can we explain this disconnect?
In addition, we repeat a warning we have uttered before. The connection between the economy and financial markets is loose, but it seems uncanny that they reconnect once again at the peak of major cycles.
To help us understand this predicament, we will turn to Professor Charles Kindleberger, who taught Economics at MIT for 33 years and wrote Manias, Panics, and Crashes in 1978.
It is considered a classic by many economic historians. To this, we will add our own experience as a financial advisor. We lived through the Crash of 1973-74 (50% drop), the Japanese boom and bust of 1988-90 (peaked in 1988 and only recovered in nominal, not inflation-adjusted terms this year), Black Monday, October of 1987 (35% drop in stocks in two days), the Dot-Com bust of 1999-2000 (50% drop), the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 (57% drop).
According to Kindleberger, each boom and bust cycle, while different in particular, has common elements. Among them are:
Displacement is a significant economic change, innovation, or regulation that captures the public’s fancy and presents colossal profit opportunities. A good example is the Dot-com bubble of 1999-2000 and the promise of the Internet. Notice that the Internet was real and went on to change the world fundamentally. It was not a fantasy. That did not stop markets from having a cycle.
Credit expansion: Easy access to cheap, low-interest-rate money fuels speculation in asset classes. This encourages the use of financial leverage by corporations and within investment vehicles, which in turn amplifies asset price appreciation. Stock market booms are often associated with new investment vehicles using leverage.
Euphoria and Crowd Behavior: The masses enter into financial speculation on the belief that prices will rise much higher, that risk is low, and that old rules do not apply because the world is entering a “new era.”
Asset Prices detach from underlying reality: Asset prices appreciate well above historical norms and well above their price range relative to other assets. This overvaluation is usually ignored because it appears assets can be sold to others, even if the price is excessive. This is sometimes referred to as “the greater fool theory” in that one can always sell to a greater fool when prices depart drastically from underlying fundamentals or past history. Price no longer matters; it is only momentum and the chance to sell at even higher prices that are important.
These are all the general characteristics of the environment of a boom that turns into a bubble.
What about when the bubble pops? What causes that?
Loss of confidence: Kindleberger says a triggering event or events usually cause investors to question their actions. This can come from negative news regarding war, interest rate increases, or sudden regulatory changes.
Liquidity problems: A series of events causes previously cheap credit to become restrictive. These may include tightening lending requirements, rising borrowing costs, financial institutions getting in trouble, new financial vehicles blowing up, financial institutions being weakened, or the inability of markets to absorb panic selling.
Market Saturation: An inflection point is reached when most of the maximum available money and number of investors become committed to a market idea. However, the available supply of funds and investors begins to fall off because new buyers have largely disappeared. Everyone is in; who can get in, and few new buyers are left.
Psychological shift: To commit money, the mind must first be convinced. But often, in speculative endeavors, attitudes become short-term and emotional, not logical. Contagion occurs when crowd behavior takes over and rational thinking is no longer operable. Euphoria and the dreams of riches grip the crowd and can be replaced relatively quickly by panic to cash in profits.
In his study of economic and investment cycles, Kindleberger sees a fairly reliable sequence. The shorthand sequence is displacement, mania, bubble, distress, crash, and panic.
Within this historical template is a high degree of repeatability because human nature appears not to change. While each period’s specifics may differ, people do not learn or remember previous boom and bust cycles.
Fair enough, you might say that history and analysis are fascinating, but is this history relevant to today? Yes, if you think history tends to repeat.
Several candidates could qualify in terms of displacement, ranging from the disruptive potential of a new Trump Administration, a social media landscape that has changed the way we get information and communicate, to the rapid changes wrought by artificial intelligence and robotics.
In terms of credit expansion, we can’t think of a time in history when the cost of money was kept at zero for much of a 20-year period. In inflation-adjusted terms, the cost was negative. If the price of beer were zero for much of 20 years, do you think it might change drinking habits? Zero-cost money has induced many to borrow who might otherwise not have. This includes individuals, corporations, and governments. Money supply, credit growth, and debt expansion have been very rapid, causing widespread price inflation, particularly asset price inflation. Government stimulus has been on par with significant wars or depressions, yet it has been applied to peacetime. The current period easily qualifies with the past in terms of credit expansion and may exceed any other period.
In terms of herd behavior, US families now hold a greater percentage of their wealth in stocks than at any other time in history. New financial products abound. Among these are leverage ETFs that allow buyers to magnify price movement. Currently, there are 13 times more leveraged longs than shorts. Deutsche Bank recently conducted a survey of investor expectations for next year and concluded that the retail public has rarely been this bullish. Yet, corporate insiders remain big sellers. That is worrisome. And it is not just expectations. The public is taking action, as seen by recent torrential monthly inflows of money into stocks. Chart courtesy Markets& Mayhem
New-era thinking is now evident. Black Rock, a giant and influential investment firm, believes we have entered a new period free from boom and bust cycles: “In its 2025 Global Outlook, Black Rock said it believes the world economy is currently in the process of being entirely “reshaped” by the emergence of five new “mega forces,” including the shift to net zero carbon emissions, geopolitical fragmentation, demographic trends, digitization of finance and AI. …The fund manager, which controls $11.5 trillion worth of assets, said it now believes this “economic transformation” has seen the global economy break away from “historical trends” that have seen markets go through cycles of boom and bust for centuries. “
What about valuation? Historical metrics show that valuation for most asset classes is very high. The price of residential homes is beyond what most middle-class people can afford. Stocks are selling at PE multiples near the top of the range, as well as price-to-book ratio, price-to-sales, and market cap versus GDP (we are at 209% of GDP, the highest ever recorded). The same is true of the CAPE ratio, which is the cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings multiple. It is currently at about 38, while the median average is just below 16. The US market has never been this expensive on a PE basis relative to global stocks in general. This raises the question: Does AI only apply to US companies?
Jason Geopfert runs an interesting site called Sentiment Trader, which is full of historical relationships. One that got our attention recently was a study of the long-term trend in stock prices. Current levels are about the highest in 90 years. “When we do those calculations…and it’s not a particularly pretty picture, as it suggests the S&P is so far above its long-term trajectory that only the 2000 and 1920s bubbles can compare.” Thus, it looks like price has departed from underlying fundamentals.
To be sure, expensive markets can continue to appreciate to ever-more extreme levels, but examining all previous historical relationships suggests that risks are rising now, perhaps even faster than prices.
When price no longer matters, we have a problem.
Without getting into the merits of cryptocurrencies, we can only say WOW, but such parabolic rises in the past have ended in very sharp corrections. However, it may be more of a display of speculative fervor that is dominating rather than a violation of fundamentals. After all, their price action is so erratic that they cannot qualify as currency even though we use the word currency in naming them. If they are not currencies, what the heck are they? They have no earnings and pay no dividends. And, unlike commodities, crypto is not used to make anything or feed anyone. Unlike bonds, they pay no interest. Moreover, some firms are now using their balance sheets and the ability to borrow to purchase Bitcoin. This is a troubling sign.
So, it would seem that much of today qualifies with the template laid down by Kindleberger. That is the bad news. The good news is that we are not seeing a loss of confidence, liquidity problems, or any major breakdown in price trends…yet.
Recently, though, the market reached new highs with declining volume and more shares declining in price than advancing in price. This has persisted for more than a week near all-time highs. That may be a sign that the market’s technical underpinnings are weakening. Usually, the period from Thanksgiving through Christmas into January is robust for stocks. If so, the market behavior by the end of January could give us a peek into what should be expected in the coming year.
And while we don’t see any immediate liquidity threat, we point out what we have previously. Namely, interest rates are defying the Fed and rising, even though they have pivoted to cutting rates. This behavior is abnormal, and academic interest aside, the rising rates can create a liquidity crisis for the highly indebted.
We will close by noting that many economic data points floated by the press, usually at the government’s behest, have been subject to frequent revision. In almost all cases, they have been downward revisions.
Most of the Biden era’s economic growth has been stimulated by deficit spending, government employment, or just a natural bounce back from lockdown. Reducing spending and government employment could make today’s soft numbers look much weaker. So much of our “growth” has been in government. The question is: how can one cut back on government without cutting “growth?”
We think the American people voted to cut the size and expense of government. It will be a painful but necessary process. But this historic shift is not occurring in a vacuum. It is happening within the context of an expensive market and overly leveraged economy, which displays most of the Kindleberger criteria for a bubble.
Contrary to public belief, Trump has been handed a struggling economy, not a robust one. Moreover, he has been given increasingly expensive and frothy markets, with extreme investor sentiments accented with “new era” thinking. He also has multiple foreign policy issues to handle, which we have no time to explore right now. Iran, Syria, Turkey, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, and the EU are all challenging in the best of times. Each has the possibility of adverse outcomes.
One of the hallmarks of mania thinking is the famous quote from Irving Fisher, perhaps the most famous economist of his era. He said 12 days before the Great Crash in 1929, “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
This is part of “New Era” thinking. This time, it is different. Sure, the market is overvalued, and all segments of society are too heavy in debt. But today, the conditions that have historically caused markets to cycle up and down have been repealed by new technology and new ways to manage men’s affairs. Therefore, stocks will stay where they are or go even higher because a new dawn is about to break for all of our benefit.
Black Rock’s statement comes very close to saying the same thing, and they have more influence than a single academic economist. As Mark Twain noted, history may not repeat itself, but it sure rhymes. Let’s all hope we have more than 12 days before the markets respond to such hubris.
I don’t know if Warren Buffet is a fan of Kindleberger, but he has been selling equities and accumulating a most impressive hoard of cash. Why is he doing that?
Maybe you should read a copy of Kindleberger? Buy the 7th edition, 2017.
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Image credits: Screenshot Amazon.com Bookcover and chart Financial Times.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
By Mary Grabar
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes
The reelection of Donald Trump is rightfully being seen as repudiation of “woke”—DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and CRT (Critical Race Theory). Trump is planning to root out the toxic, often deadly, ideology in federal departments.
First comes the abolishment of fake history, work Trump started toward the end of his hoax- and impeachment-beleaguered first term with the White House Conference on American History on Constitution Day 2020. Looking forward to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he said that radicals burning American flags “want to burn down the principles enshrined in our founding documents. . . . In order to radically transform America, they must first cause Americans to lose confidence in who we are, where we came from, and what we believe.”
The summer 2020 rioting, which included attacks on historical monuments, was “the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. . . . Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.” As one of the panelists, I drew upon my book, Debunking Howard Zinn.
As President Trump also said, the 1619 Project “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.” I was then writing Debunking The 1619 Project. I have monitored the creator, New York Times race reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, since the initial project came out in August 2019 as a special issue of the New York Times Magazine accompanied by a newspaper supplement. Hannah-Jones presented 1619, when the first Africans arrived in Virginia, as her own discovery and aims to replace 1776 with 1619 as the year of our founding—of a “slavocracy.”
Hannah-Jones and an interlinking network of nonprofits and for-profit companies have found a “cash cow” in the 1619 Project. By 2021, two spin-off books—a children’s book and an expanded collection of writings and art, had been published by Penguin Random House. Films were produced by Oprah Winfrey. Hannah-Jones was garnering speaking fees averaging $25,000 at universities on a twice-monthly basis. By January 2022, she was commanding $55,000 to appear at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
These are veritable lovefests. Hannah-Jones refuses to engage in scholarly debate. When I revealed that she had admitted on Twitter that slaves were not “kidnapped” by Europeans but were bought from African chiefs, she blocked me after accusing me of affirming “white supremacy.”
She applies the same racial interpretation to current events. On CNN, she justified the 2020 riots as necessary to make white Americans “confront” racial injustice and on MSNBC categorized them as part of black Americans’ historical push “further to democracy.” On public radio, she called the January 6, 2021, protest an “insurrection,” and to “hold onto white power,” as she elaborated, upon receiving an award from the Roosevelt Institute…..
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Continue reading this article at Real Clear History.
Image Credit: Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
By Craig J. Cantoni
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Editors’ Note: We agree that Edward Banfield was a first-rate intellect and a wise man. We reviewed one of his books, Government Project, previously “When Stalin Came To Casa Grande,” Part I and II.
Edward C. Banfield should’ve been a gambler or Wall Street investor instead of a political scientist, author, and Harvard professor. His prescience would’ve made him very wealthy.
Over a half-century ago, Banfield foresaw the failure of voguish attempts to remediate crime, poverty, unemployment, housing shortages, urban decay, racial and class disparities, and other socioeconomic problems. He famously wrote, “We cannot solve our serious problems by rational management. Indeed, by trying we are almost certain to make matters worse.”
Of his many books, the following three are the most notable—or the most notorious in some quarters, particularly among those whose livelihood depends on making things worse.
Government Project was published in 1951 and has recently been republished by the American Enterprise Institute. It is a book version of Banfield’s doctoral thesis and was based on his experience as a New Dealer working for the Farm Security Administration.
The book tells the story of the US Government’s attempt to turn around the lives of destitute migrants during the Great Depression. Government idealists established a cooperative farm in Pinal County, Arizona, about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. People who volunteered to work and live on the farm were provided good housing, generous pay, and job security—all of which were in short supply during those hard years.
After several years of success, the volunteers quit in anger and frustration, and the cooperative fell apart. What happened? Human nature happened. The cooperative was beset by infighting and conflicts over the pecking order, workloads, goals, and leadership.
The lesson is that well-intentioned societal interventions will fail if they are designed and run in a top-down manner by ivory-tower “experts” removed from reality and deluded into believing that everyone thinks as they do, shares their values, and responds to the same incentives.
The Moral Basis of a Backward Society was published in 1958. It details life in a small town in Southern Italy, a village that was marked by envy, distrust, nepotism, and general dysfunction. Self-interest and familial relationships were so strong that they overpowered the common good and kept villagers from working cooperatively with each other, for fear that their neighbors might take advantage of them. This lack of social capital resulted in widespread poverty.
Banfield was assisted on the book by his Italian-American wife, who had learned Italian as a child and thus was better able to communicate with the townsfolk.
The book shows the powerful role that culture plays in socioeconomic problems. Government interventions and programs are prone to fail if they don’t take this into consideration and, for political reasons or fear of being judged as racist, are not honest about cultural realities.
The Unheavenly City was first published in 1970 and is the focus of the rest of this commentary. It was re-published in 1974, with the title, The Unheavanly City Revisited, along with a new preface. It was reissued in 1990 by Waveland Press, Inc.
A recurring theme in The Unheavenly City is that time-orientation is a major determinant of social class.
Those with a short time-orientation tend to live for the moment, are impulsive, seek immediate gratification, and don’t invest in their future or their children’s future. Typically mired in poverty in the lowest social stratum, they tend to be slovenly in personal appearance and housekeeping, struggle with relationships, jump from job to job, are often in trouble with the law, and are disconnected from the larger community.
Those with the opposite traits, habits and values occupy the higher strata, and those with the longest time horizon are likely to be found in the highest stratum.
This isn’t to suggest that all poor people have a short time-orientation. Many are born into poverty and bad neighborhoods, face discrimination or other injustices, or have had a medical or financial setback. The industrious among them or their offspring will eventually climb out of poverty, especially if the government focuses on removing discriminatory barriers, protecting them from criminals, and providing targeted temporary assistance, when necessary, without making them wards of the welfare state.
Whether due to nature, nurture, culture, personality, time-orientation, politics, or other variables, one-size-fits-all policies and programs often backfire.
Take compulsory education. As Banfield wrote, some students aren’t suited for 12 years of schooling, for various reasons. They might have a dislike for academics, might be better at working with their hands, or might be too maladjusted socially to conform to classroom formalities and peer pressure. Forcing them to sit in a classroom for 12 years can result in rebelliousness, withdrawal, disruptive behavior that interferes with the learning of other students, and a loss of self-esteem and self-confidence due to always being behind their classmates.
A better option for them and the school system might be to reduce the years of formal education and replace that time with other opportunities, such as learning a trade while working as an apprentice.
But the conventional wisdom is stuck on 12 years, as if “12” is a magic number or scientifically determined, and as if there weren’t educated citizens before the advent of compulsory education in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Only about a third of K-12 students today are proficient in English and math, and it’s doubtful that even a third of high school graduates could comprehend the Federalist Papers, which were published in leading newspapers in 1787 and 1788, long before the public education movement.
President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” goal would inadvertently demonstrate Banfield’s point. Perhaps it was an admirable sentiment or smart politics to wish that every student would succeed in school, but it was a goal that was bound to fail, at great expense—in spite of, or because of, the US Department of Education being established years earlier by President Jimmy Carter. The department has grown into a sclerotic behemoth that has been captured by teacher unions and other interest groups.
A corresponding folly was the idea that every high school senior should graduate with the academic ability to go on to college. A corollary proposition was that those who didn’t go on to college would be consigned to a life of low wages and ignorance.
These notions led to high school grades being inflated, to colleges having to offer remedial courses to make up for what students didn’t learn in high school, to a movement to do away with SAT scores and other quantifiable measures of college readiness, to many students dropping out of college due to being ill-prepared academically, and to the student loan debacle (scam?).
Aided and abetted by the government, the debacle drove up the cost of college; left students mired in debt, oftentimes for degrees of dubious value; and was endorsed out of self-interest by college administrators and faculty, thus revealing the hypocrisy of their platitudinal teachings about social justice.
One is struck in reading The Unheavenly City that many of the same issues and follies that existed a half-century ago at its publication still exist today. For example:
Banfield debunked the notion that increases in the minimum wage would benefit the lowest social stratum, but the fallacy continues today with renewed vigor.
Banfield said that urban renewal and downtown revitalization would tend to benefit the upper strata and shift the poor to other parts of a city, but such top-down plans continue unabated today, under the guise of helping the disadvantaged.
Banfield predicted that government programs to increase homeownership and affordability would backfire, a prediction that the US Department of Housing and Urban Development seems determined to prove true, given that it has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to no avail while triggering two financial crises, the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and the mortgage crisis of 2008. In fairness, HUD didn’t accomplish this alone. It was assisted by Fannie Mae, the Federal Reserve, and other agencies.
There are many other examples of Banfield’s prescience, but we’ll end by focusing on just one more of them: his predictions about race relations.
Banfield has been accused of racism, especially relative to blacks. This is a complete falsehood. There is nothing in his writing to suggest that he believed that blacks—or any other race for that matter—are inherently or genetically inferior, or are naturally predisposed to crime, fatherless families, welfare dependency, poor grades, short-term thinking, or other negative characteristics and social norms. In fact, he frequently discussed and lamented the historic injustices borne by blacks, and he stressed that equal rights were a precondition for blacks rising out of poverty as a group.
The accusations of racism stem from his temerity in disagreeing with the conventional wisdom of other social scientists and with race activists on what should be done beyond equal rights to accelerate black achievement and income.
Banfield questioned the effectiveness of policies that ignored cultural impediments in black communities; thought that white guilt, virtue signaling, and paternalism were more harmful than helpful to blacks; and criticized race hucksters (my word) for imparting a self-defeating mindset of victimhood, which encouraged blacks to blame whites for their own failures.
In spite of all of this, Banfield saw that the attainment of equal rights had markedly and quickly improved black lives—improvement that would continue to advance naturally. He also saw a paradox: that as blacks closed the socioeconomic gap between themselves and whites, race hucksters and pseudo-intellectuals would become even more strident in their claims of victimhood and racism, as well as in their demands for government intervention.
He saw another paradox: The upper strata of white society—those with college degrees, high income, a long time-orientation, and a concern for the larger community—would join in the pseudo-intellectualism, as if wallowing in perceived guilt and groveling performatively would somehow further black advancement.
Banfield didn’t live to see how prophetic he was. He passed before the advent of such divisive nostrums as critical race theory, white fragility, white privilege, exclusionary versions of DEI, and the stereotype that all whites are guilty of oppression, colonialism, imperialism, and racism.
Fortunately, Banfield predated today’s cancel culture and thus can’t be canceled for being right.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
By Bruce Bialosky
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Some people go to work for the federal government to represent their country with the idea they are going to help their government provide the services that citizens are paying to obtain. Mark Moyar was one of those people. He is a highly qualified individual brought in during the first Trump Administration. He soon found out there was a deep state and it attempted to destroy his career and livelihood. He chronicles that in a riveting book, Masters of Corruption.
I received his book right before election day and started to read it, thinking it would be meaningful. His book became an important guide for Trump’s victory in ensuring career bureaucrats did not crush the efforts of the political appointees in the second Trump Administration.
Moyar is someone you would think would be on the road to a roaringly successful life based on his resume. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard with a degree in history. By the age of 26, he had published his first history book, which was on Viet Nam. He then headed to obtain his Ph.D. in history from Cambridge with his young wife and first child by his side. He returned to the U.S after receiving his degree in 2003. He had quite a pedigree except for one major “flaw” – he was a political conservative.
He started a postdoctoral fellowship at the Bush (George H.W.) School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M. He thought he would be welcomed there, but soon found out the professors chafed at the idea the school was named after the 41st president. When it came to getting on the tenure track, he was vetoed due to his political beliefs. He was likewise blackballed at 200 universities because of his politics despite having written another history book and having published numerous articles. He saw that the Duke University history department had a 32-0 Democrat to Republican ratio. The University of Iowa had a 27-0 ratio. He ended up at the U.S. Marine Corps University which few people knew existed.
Moyar decided to jump from the frying pan into the fire and take a job in the Trump Administration. He knew that the Obamas had stacked the professional bureaucracy with idealogues, but he had no clue how bad it would get.
He went to the USAID (United States Agency for International Development), an operation that most Americans would not recognize. “The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent federal government agency that receives overall policy guidance from the Secretary of State.” Moyar describes the agency as an “operational organization.” Moyar states, “Its main purpose is to design and fund development and humanitarian operations for implementation by for-profit and non-profit contractors. Otherwise, they hand out our money to foreign countries with a hands-on approach.” The current budget of the Agency is $32 billion. If you go to their website, the first thing they post in “about us’ is their DEI policy. That wasn’t in place when Moyar was there, but the elements existed.
On July 30, 2018, Moyar was officially promoted to be the Director of the USAID Office of Civilian-Military Cooperation. He had the goal of “fixing personnel and ethical problems and filling the void of strategic direction.” He had devised “a vision, a mission, and objectives for the office in line with the National Security Strategy based on White House and USAID leadership priorities.” Seems like the responsible thing to do. Except that was not the goal of the career staff.
Moyar told me, “Bureaucrats had mastered the art of bureaucratic sabotage quite well.” He had no preparation for the onslaught. He began to be confronted by a particular person who had been in the department for over 20 years. He was a member of the SES.
Experienced readers of my columns have become acquainted with the Senior Executive Service. There are about 8,000 of these people sprinkled throughout the government. They are basically untouchable. They cannot be fired. If you want to get rid of one of these people, you can only transfer them to Nome, Alaska, or Butte, Montana. And Moyar found out this SES thought he was in charge and there was nothing Moyar could do. On a typical workday, this person left work at 4 P.M. and went to a bar across the street from the Reagan Building where he held court with people throughout the national bureaucracy.
When this person found out that Moyar was eyeing another supervisory position the SES had in mind for himself, the sabotage went full throttle. Moyar came to work one day to find his computer in the process of being taken. He had official charges lodged against him. The charges centered on the fact that he had included classified material in one of his books. Moyar is absolutely positive that all the material he has included in his books is in the public domain, and he has been meticulous about that. No classified material. It did not matter, as an unnamed two-star general from a different part of the government (supposedly the Pentagon) had made the charges.
For the next couple of years, Moyar was thrown into a battle for survival. His security clearance was yanked, effectively making him unemployable by the federal government. Moyar told me that during the last year of the Obama Administration, not one person had their security clearance suspended throughout the government. In the four years of the Trump Administration, 34 people had theirs yanked — in USAID alone.
He found out there was no protection for whistleblowers who were political appointees. The PPO (Presidential Personnel Office) or White House Counsel cannot do anything to help political appointees, and they can be fired without due process. (My information tells me Trump is looking to remedy this on day one through an executive order.)
He was faced with either resigning or being fired and with legal advice decided to resign. The problem was he was now in a Catch-22 where he could not really apply to get his security clearance back. He was out of work with a wife and three children. To say the least, Moyar stated, “This caused a lot of turmoil and financial stress.”
Moyar finally landed on his feet, getting a professorship at Hillsdale College. He fought back the best way he could think of — by writing his book to tell the story of how the deep state can destroy anyone or anything in their path.
On the eve of a new Trump Administration, Moyar’s book is essential reading to understand how career bureaucrats think they run our government and not our duly elected officials. They believe we are just bystanders, and they are actually in charge. Trump and his team must break the back of this system, or they will be stalled on all fronts where the bureaucrats wish to stop them.
*****
This article was published by Flash Report and is reproduced with permission from the author.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
By Conlan Salgado
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
Tucker Carlson did a podcast with Darryl Copper. Since he is the most important historian (really??) of our times, I need not explain who he is. You already know. People such as other historians, journalists, and twitter emotes rushed to express their resentment, approval, and bemusement. The general sentiment from the mainstream right was: off with their heads.
I viewed this simply as Tucker’s first real attempt at retail punditry. If you’re not familiar with the phrase, it simply means a sort of cheap, persuasive packaging of ideas and thought, generally for the purpose of a mass audience which is fact-impoverished and poor in its ability to interrogate information. And no, I’m not an elitist. I’m an enthusiastic Walmart shopper.
Niall Ferguson wrote a fine article in response; Victor Davis Hanson wrote an even better one. But the best article of all on the topic was written by Mary Harrington, which she titled, “Darryl Cooper: Word War II Historian for the Woke Right.” The title gives you the idea of the thing; rather than shaming the historical sluttiness of Cooper’s assertions, she writes about the philosophy behind Cooper’s right-wing historical revisionism. I quote her at length:
“And where contemporary Right-wing WWII revisionists set out to challenge the more modern Manichean account, it’s because they see how powerfully it contributes to shaping the contemporary political landscape. No Right-wing victory today is complete without an op-ed lamenting how the moment resembles “1930s Germany”; no debate over the wisdom of international conflict can pass without someone alluding to “appeasement”. And, more importantly for such revisionists, WWII discourse functions overall as a powerful containment mechanism for the Right.”
There is powerful truth to this: the international Left has turned Nazism into a euphemism for “The Right”; one need only count the grains of sand in the world to know how many times Trump has been compared to Hitler, or MAGA voters to those dirty, racist, nazi, red-hat-wearing (probably) bastards who made up the Repub….., I mean, the Third Reich.
Darryl Cooper in fact admits as much; according to him, real right-wing values became impossible to support after the Nuremberg trials. That is to say, right-wingism itself, implies Cooper, was on trial in Nuremberg, and the International Left condemned it as guilty on all charges. The “manichean” version of WWII is the Left’s story of how the Right became fascist, genocidal, and altogether intolerable.
Needless to say, I do not view Nazism as the authentic right-wing. However, I am trying to point out that Cooper, as a right-winger, has judged the Left as using WWII for its great story, or “myth”, in which the Right is the great force for evil and Globalism is the great force for Good. In Cooper’s mind, this story has been used to assassinate the characters of populist leaders, nationalist movements, and “right wing” values for 80 years. Thus he is trying to rewrite WWII. In his story, “the Right” is not as bad as everybody says it is. That great figurehead of Globalism, Winston Churchill, patron saint of Neo-cons, (yes, isn’t it ridiculous?), was the real villain of the Second World War.
Harrington has the insight to see Cooper’s project as very much in line with left-wing
revisionism, insofar as it is philosophical. Take, for example, the 1619 project. After all, the great conservative myth is the American Founding. Conservative values are those values predicated, in large part, on the founding. If one successfully destroys a myth, one successfully destroys a religion.
Conservatism is culturally weak because its stories, in the popular imagination, are lies. The American Founding was not a great accomplishment for the rights tradition, nor popular government. It was a compromise which allowed the moral atrocity of slavery, says the Left- wing yarnist with a sly, Darryl Cooper-esque smile.
And there’s the rub: (Harrington took all my points before I could make them!). Cooper’s project is as postmodern as the revisionists of the left. “It’s also premised on broadly the same set of insights about the relation between historical narratives, ideology, and power as Left-wing “woke” revisionism, and particularly the crucial “woke” insight concerning the operation of power through language, narrative, and ideology.”
To reduce it to Nietzschean terminology, history is a function of power. That’s Cooper in a cracked nutshell. Of course, this says nothing explicit about the responsibility of Cooper’s project. I myself believe it a load of rubbish from the point of view of history, but found it to be primarily interesting as a piece of rhetoric.
I mean, consider this: Carlson and Cooper talked for two hours about terrorism in WWII without once mentioning the Holocaust. This is a strategy so bold, I cannot help but admire from a distance. It is indeed an advanced strategy, one exposited forthrightly in the Associated Press’ handbook for journalists: Elephant? What Elephant?
Consider the absurdity of this revisionist point: Tragic logistical circumstances forced the Nazis to kill 2 million soviet soldiers and tens of thousands of Jews and civilians. Cooper blames the Nazis for not having a plan “to take care” of, at the “end of the day”, these unfortunate millions, even if the Nazis had to invade and violate their non-aggression pact with Russia because of Romanian oil fields and Ukrainian neo-nazis and, like, really bad, bolshevik, crazy, zionist, sneaky, underhanded, jew-type stuff.
How to respond?
Together, let’s try an exercise from Elephant? What Elephant?. I’m going to quote from “Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia” issued by the German High Command, and you have to forget these words were ever written as quickly as you find possible:
“Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the National Socialist German people. Germany’s struggle is directed against this subversive ideology and its functionaries. . . .This struggle requires ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, guerillas, saboteurs, and Jews, and the total elimination of all active or passive resistance. . . .The members of the Red Army — including prisoners—must be treated with the most extreme reserve and the greatest caution since one must reckon with devious methods of combat. The Asiatic soldiers of the Red Army in particular are inscrutable, unpredictable, devious, and brutish.”
Or perhaps let’s try brief excerpts from “The Decree on Exercising Military Jurisdiction in the Area of Barbarossa and Special Measures by Troops”; you’re job is the same: wipe you’re mind without delay:
“Guerrillas are to be eliminated ruthlessly by the troops in combat or while escaping. . . . All other attacks by enemy civilians against the Armed Forces, its personnel and its retinue also will be suppressed on the spot by the troops with the most rigorous methods until the assailants are annihilated. . . .Where such measures were not taken or were not possible at first, suspect elements will be brought before an officer immediately. This officer is to decide whether they are to be shot. . .. Regarding actions committed by personnel of the Wehrmacht or its retinue against enemy civilians, there is no obligation to prosecute, even where the deed is at the same time a military crime or misdemeanor.”
Notice Cooper’s use of the phrase “take care of” the Soviet prisoners. Even if we grant fiction supremacy over fact and acknowledge Cooper’s version of events — that the Nazis were merely underprepared for the number of prisoners and even if we imagine a scenario in which millions of Soviets are not starved or shot, how would the Nazis have taken care of anybody? They Nazis were invading the Russians’ homeland, killing their relatives in uniform, raping them of their land, destroying crops, pillaging the wealth of the land. . . . and we’re supposed to believe that if the Soviets had only been well fed in the prison camps, the Nazis would have been justified for what they did in the East? This is not straight-faced, masculine lying. This is feminine insinuation of untruth. It makes Cooper worse than he would otherwise be in my own view. . . .
Oh well. Enough is enough. Falsehood is like a forest fire. It would be folly to try stamping it out; my one article cannot combat all the lies and half-truths. I can, however, observe elephants when I see them. Especially when they are on such a small table between two people doing a podcast.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
By Elizabeth Grace Matthew
Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice is an ambitious book that addresses arguably the most pressing questions of both our time and all time: Are people good? Is life worth living? What does it mean to be a parent? What is motherhood, what is fatherhood, and how are these roles similar and different?
In four lengthy chapters, bookended by personal essays that serve as the evocative introduction and conclusion, authors Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman methodically walk readers through the sociological and cultural factors that are, they argue, responsible not only for America’s marked decrease in the birth rate but also for the introduction of a new kind of widespread indecision around the philosophical idea and the practical matter of parenthood. Drawing on interviews with mostly 30-something prospective parents and non-parents—as well as on personal anecdote, feminist theory, literature, and philosophy—Berg and Wiseman ultimately make what amounts to a progressive, secular case for the goodness and worth of parenthood by way of a progressive, secular case for the goodness and worth of humanity itself.
The New Parenthood Ambivalence
This argument is unique and fresh, on multiple counts. To start, most arguments for having and raising children (my own included) are conservative in some sense, predicated on the religious understanding of children (and, by extension, of people) as “immortal beings.” In different ways and to different extents, other recent books endorsing (larger) families and (more) parenthood—most notably, Family Unfriendly by Timothy Carney and Hannah’s Children by Catherine Pakaluk—are premised on the belief that religious community and family prioritization are mutually reinforcing.
Berg and Wiseman are outliers in this regard. They also break from their own progressive milieu to argue that nearly everything about the way that today’s secular 20- and 30-somethings tend to approach (or not) love, marriage, and family formation is flawed and fouled on its own terms.
The authors challenge several tenets of what has become the conventional unwisdom of college-educated millennials and Gen Zers. First, they take issue with the popular assumption that “slow love”—as seen in today’s courtship rituals, in which one “must suppress the desire to have kids” if one wishes to “date authentically”—is the truest love. Dating divorced from any idea of household or family formation seems, to Berg and Wiseman, rather counterproductive. Second, they address the modern tendency to view parenthood (and motherhood especially) as a totalizing identity that razes any prior identity. This unnuanced perspective, they argue, currently presents a more significant impediment to parenthood than any economic obstacle. The authors acknowledge that this view of parenthood as a totalizing identity now transcends political identification and might in fact be strongest among the very secular progressives who view childbearing as just one more lifestyle choice. In other words, for young people who lean left today, unlike for older generations, parenthood is not inherently worthwhile in and of itself. In part, as a result, there is now an assumption that if one does choose to have children, motherhood is justified by its resemblance to self-imposed martyrdom.
Third and finally, Berg and Wiseman explain how moral, environmental, and political concerns give young people pause: they worry about human cruelty, violence, the environmental impact of family life, and also about women’s political and social inequality with men.
There are very real merits to the authors’ approach, but it is ultimately insufficient to quell the existential ambivalence about parenthood plaguing many of my fellow 30-somethings. In the end, Berg and Wiseman do persuade readers that many of the personal trends, political considerations, and philosophical arguments militating against parenthood fall short. They do not, however, provide any holistic or convincing answer to the provocative question posed by their title: What are children for?
Slow Love in the Fast Lane
Berg and Weissman offer an excellent window into the “slow love” that constitutes a new norm among the young (and not so young) people comprising today’s dating market. Apparently, “personal, romantic compatibility” is considered by many to be at odds with the “search for a co-parent.” Online dating helps to foster the illusion that there is a person out there who could offer “super compatibility” and assumes a landscape in which daters scoff at compromise and are unwilling, when it comes to romantic partners, to accept the truism that “people aren’t perfect.”
Egg freezing now provides women who can afford it—and even those who struggle to do so—with the equivalent of a requested extension in the search for a life partner. So, today, Berg and Wiseman explain, many young women will throw a “‘93rd percentile match’ back into the pool so that they could wait ‘just a little bit longer’ and find someone ‘that’s even just a little bit better.’”
Among those who are not so young, the question of motherhood becomes not so much about what one will take on—but about what one will give up.
Women might know better if they listened to psychologist Lori Gottlieb, who made the case for “settling for Mr. Good Enough” in 2011’s Marry Him. And young people of both sexes might benefit greatly from a read-through of Brad Wilcox’s 2024 Get Married (a thesis of a title if ever there was one).
This is to say that the argument for speeding up the mating and family formation game—especially for women—is not new.
What Berg and Wiseman offer more than anything else is permission: For young women to think about family formation in tandem with romantic compatibility, and for young men to think about family formation at all.
I was genuinely unaware that such a writ was needed (at 36, I have been married for nearly 12 years and a mom for 10, so I would not know). But if young people need a secular blessing in concert with a reproductive science lesson, then good for these authors for attempting to offer both. That said, I do not think that one can get at the root of this “slow love” problem without addressing a broader “slow adulthood” problem that seems to encompass far more than the search for a partner. This is outside the scope of Berg and Wiseman’s project, but it seems to me that ambivalence about all responsibility, of which marriage and parenthood are the gravest, amounts to a contagion among much of today’s youth—whose future ranks are dwindling due to a failure to differentiate themselves from children by having some.
Meanwhile, among those who are not so young, the question of motherhood becomes not so much about what one will take on—but about what one will give up.
What Kind of Mother Will You Be?
In season four of Sex and the City, law firm partner Miranda Hobbes gets unexpectedly pregnant with her bartender ex-boyfriend. It is well-established that Miranda was not prepared for motherhood, both in the specific sense that she wasn’t intending to conceive a child and in the broader sense that she is not what passes for “maternal.” The series’ original foil—women who get married, move to the suburbs, and dote on their children in a saccharine, darkly humorous, and self-abnegating way—are Miranda’s polar opposites. Well into her thirties, Miranda exemplifies the ambivalence about motherhood explored at such length by Berg and Wiseman.
As Miranda’s due date nears, the overworked attorney still has not prepared either her home or her heart for forthcoming responsibilities. In a revealing bit of dialogue, comparatively “normie” Charlotte, who is not ambivalent about motherhood at all, presses the mom-to-be: “There are a million questions to answer before the baby ever gets here! Do you have a birthing plan? Do you know what kind of a mother you want to be?” Miranda, taken aback by these questions, replies: “Yes! I plan to be … a good mother!” Charlotte counters: “But, a marsupial mom, or a stroller mom? Will you be breastfeeding or bottle feeding? And what about baby proofing?” She pushes on: “Because once you have that baby, it’s not just you anymore. You’re not going to be able to control everything.”
Of course, Charlotte wants to help. And Miranda’s deadpan reply to her friend’s detailed queries—“I plan to be a good mother!”—is funny. But it’s not so funny when this sort of third-degree interrogation happens not in conversation with a friend during the third trimester of pregnancy but within one’s own consciousness in a way that makes parenthood seem utterly overwhelming.
In other words, what Charlotte said was: “Once you have that baby, it’s not just you anymore. You’re not going to be able to control everything.” But what Miranda heard was: Once you have that baby, you’re not you anymore. You’re not going to be able to control anything.
When college-educated women increasingly view motherhood as a morally neutral lifestyle choice rather than an innately good vocational purpose, that choice becomes one that they must justify by excelling at it according to an often silly and pointless societal rubric. And if this means sacrificing everything else that they are, believe, and enjoy, so be it. “You made that toddler bed,” says a culture that simultaneously disdains and sanctifies motherhood. “Now lie beside it until your child falls asleep even if it means you can never do anything else ever again.”
Who would voluntarily sign up for that?
As Berg writes in a lovely reflection on mothering her daughter, which serves as the book’s conclusion: “The assumption of obligatory identity change can imply that our myriad other identities will necessarily be flattened, or even lost. For prospective mothers, this can make the decision of whether to have children that much more daunting.” Berg makes the case for parenthood among women like herself—the “Mirandas,” who will not and likely cannot subsume all of our other interests and concerns to a version of modern maternalism in which “good mother” becomes our identity. Berg admits that she “used to believe that the inability to enjoy one’s child, wholly and completely, was a sign of personal failure.” She no longer believes that. Yet, she is glad to be her daughter’s mother, even though she doesn’t enjoy mothering all the time and does not embroider, say, the mind-numbing constraint of sleep training with some new definition of liberty that renders parenthood counterintuitively freeing. Brava.
Any case for parenthood that does not involve purpose and vocation is really no case at all.
But there is a sacred cow of modern parenthood that goes unchallenged in Berg’s essay, even though challenging it would strengthen her argument: That having children must be “disordered” and endlessly accommodating. Here is how Berg describes time with her daughter: “Pajamas off! Pajamas on! New socks, night socks, no socks. Yes hat, no hat, always hat, not that hat. Slippers on, slippers off, slippers in bed, slippers in bath, slippers to daycare. … Bread, no bread, cheese, no cheese, milk in bottle, coffee in bottle, now we drink the bathwater.” And so on.
I have four children, three of whom have gone through the toddler and preschool years in which such matters can become sources of contention. Here’s what that sounds like in my house: Kid: “No hat!” Mom: “Yes hat.”
When the strongest willed of my sons was two and three, such an exchange might lead to an hour-long tantrum. That was okay. I marveled at his spirit—I still do. And I got AirPods.
It is much easier to enjoy one’s children if one recognizes that parents, not children, are in charge. Moreover, the kind of parental authority that makes children likable is good for children themselves. Indeed, “civilizing the feral” is an apt tagline for a “past conception” of “having children” grounded in Augustinian reality rather than in Rousseauian fantasy.
Contra Berg and Wiseman, we can indeed “recover” and “resuscitate” such past conceptions if we so choose. But they are right that it won’t be easy.
After all, it’s not just the retention of pre-parental identity that makes parenthood more appealing. It’s also the establishment of parental authority that makes it much easier to have and enjoy not just one child, but a bunch of them. This is what one would argue for if one was really invested in human life for its own sake, rather than in parenthood as a lifestyle choice.
To Life, to Life, L’Chaim?
Berg and Wiseman make a case for the essential goodness of humanity that ultimately relies on a sort of “gotcha” about the existence of people that I am not sure their progressive friends will readily accept. “If,” the authors contend in the book’s philosophically and literarily thick final chapter, “it is wrong for anyone to bring a child into the world in the present, it has been wrong for everyone to have brought a child into the world in the past. … Every single human being … was born out of a grave moral failure.”
Well, not necessarily. Many progressives who view human reproduction as wrong might contend in response that we know better now—both about how to prevent pregnancy and about humans’ adverse impact on the environment—than we did 100 years ago. In this light, it is entirely possible to view your grandmother’s birth as an unfortunate accident but your nonexistent child’s nonbirth as a mortal wrong averted.
Beyond this questionable argument, Berg and Wiseman more astutely point out that feelings of moral unease about human reproduction related to war, poverty, violence, suffering, and climate change typically exist alongside ambitions to better a world in which one already assumes the existence of future humans. This is true enough. Even truer is the realization that “however difficult the going gets, however much we complain and protest, most of us still treat our lives not only as valuable but as precious.” Therefore, “the answer to the question of whether life is good does not really await our decision to have children.”
Yet, Berg and Wiseman do not endorse parenthood broadly or unequivocally. “The decision to have children,” they contend, is “as personally consequential as it is philosophically profound. … Only you can determine whether it is the right one for you.” So, at bottom, for all their book’s sophistication and insight into the shortcomings of exactly this approach, Berg and Wiseman are talking about parenthood as a mere lifestyle choice after all. Ultimately, for them, it cannot be anything else because they have no transcendent conception of what either children or people are for.
Of course, some worthy purposes and vocations do not involve parenthood. But any case for parenthood that does not involve purpose and vocation is really no case at all.
Indeed, Berg and Wiseman’s secular argument in favor of having children is perhaps the best that can be made. And it amounts to: To life, to life—if it’s right for you.
Not quite the same ring to it. But better, I guess, than nothing.
*****
This article was published by Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
By Mark Wallace
Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Over the last half-century, the so-called “Progressive” Left has spread its tentacles throughout innumerable nongovernmental organizations, the federal, state, and local governments themselves, public and many private schools, the universities, the media, the corporate world . . . the list goes on and on. Whether we are looking at Yale University, ABC News, the Washington Post, the FBI, the CIA, the highest-ranking generals and admirals in the military, the Department of Education, the teachers’ unions, we find them all infested with far-left progressives. That’s not to say that each and every FBI agent is a leftist — far from it — but the leadership of the aforementioned organizations and in certain (but not all) instances the supporting staff are leftist Democrats.
It’s fashionable in Republican and conservative circles to call the Progressive Left “Marxist,” “communist” or “fascist,” but in truth, the Progressive Left is not any of these. Numerous billionaires are far left. A true Marxist would be dreaming up plans to strip them of their wealth, but the Progressive Left that exploded in power and influence beginning in the Obama Administration has absolutely no intention of doing that. That’s why the tycoon Governor Pritzker of Illinois can continue to be a Democrat and pretend he cares about the average guy. The Progressive Left is more oligarchic than it is Marxist or Communist.
Make no mistake about it, the Progressive Left is a huge danger to our liberty. Its principal goal is the permanent seizure of power. All of the Progressive Left’s major policies are pointed specifically in that direction. Packing the Supreme Court so the Left can seize total control of the Third Branch of government. Making Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. states so the Left can gain four more Senate seats and achieve a permanent majority in the Senate. Ending the Senate’s filibuster rule. Abolishing the Electoral College. Allowing millions of illegal aliens to vote. Giving the right to vote back to felons.
The Progressive Left’s other major (and highly disguised) policy is to impoverish America’s working and middle classes so that they are dependent on the government. A person who can make a good living without help from the government (think of Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmer and the present-day successful small businessman) is despised by the Left because they cannot control him or her. The Green New Deal is intended to replace fossil fuels with far less efficient sources of energy generation so that utility prices can be hugely increased, thereby making it more difficult for the average guy to keep his family housed and fed.
The Progressive Left is not Marxist, communist, or fascist. It is Orwellian. Its aims are best exemplified by the comments of Inner Party member O’Brien in George Orwell’s novel “1984”: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power . . . Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. . . . If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
Undoubtedly, in this late summer of 2024 the United States is still a long way from the absolute tyranny depicted in Orwell’s “1984” and his novel “Animal Farm.” But the Progressive Left is doing everything in its power to move the United States in that direction and has achieved notable successes, as shown below. Let’s review them one by one.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. In “Animal Farm,” the farm animals boot out the human owners and establish a kind of animal democracy where all animals are equal. Gradually, the pigs take over and begin to substitute a new rule that although all the animals are equal, some are more equal than others (namely, the pigs).
In the United States today, we have “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” in which members of certain identity groups are given special rights and privileges above and beyond those possessed by the rest of the populace. Using the word “diversity” in this context is a big lie because only certain identity groups count when it comes to “diversity.” Universities with DEI departments have faculties where Republicans or conservatives are either scarce or nowhere to be found. Where is the diversity there? To take another example, if you happen to be an Italian-American or an Irish American or a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, forget about “diversity” in your case — you don’t qualify. When was the last time the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division opened an investigation into the number of Italian-Americans or Polish-Americans (or Jews or Catholics or Presbyterians) in a police department or on corporate director boards? Clearly, in 21st century America some animals are more equal than others.
Newspeak. Oceania, the absolute dictatorship of Big Brother in Orwell’s “1984,” devotes resources to developing a new language named “Newspeak.” Newspeak is strongly related to standard English (known as “Oldspeak”) but has features designed to suppress dissent, advance Party causes and to generally force people into thinking the way the Party wants them to think. For example, the Newspeak word “thoughtcrime” brings to people’s attention that even thinking the wrong way is a crime.
The Progressive Left has begun taking baby steps in this direction. A prime example is the substitution of “enslaved people” for “slaves.” This substitution now abounds in academic journals and articles. I was taught in English class never to use two words when one word would do. So why are college professors and social justice warriors now using “enslaved people”? It’s obvious, isn’t it? “Enslaved people” emphasizes victimization, which is a key element of the Left’s narrative.
As another example of Newspeak in 21st century America, “gender-affirming care” has come to mean in many cases castration for males and radical mastectomies for women. Note how this paves the way for deluded parents to tell their confidantes that their psychologically-disturbed son received “gender-affirming care.” It’s so much easier to say that than to say, “my troubled son was castrated last week at the hospital.”
The Use of Opposite Meanings. In Orwell’s fictional state of Oceania, government ministries include the “Ministry of Love” and the “Ministry of Truth.” In point of fact, what goes on in these ministries is the diametrical opposite of what is implied by their names. The Ministry of Love is where political opponents of the regime are tortured. The Ministry of Truth is a giant propaganda machine where inconvenient facts from the past are made to disappear (“memory-holed”) and where lies about the current state of affairs are rampant and all-encompassing. The Party’s slogans are also heavily loaded with opposite meaning: “War is Peace.” “Freedom is Slavery.”
In 21st century America, we have “Planned Parenthood.” This organization has virtually nothing to do with parenthood. Its main mission is non-parenthood. A more accurate name for Planned Parenthood would be Planned Non-parenthood. It currently operates hundreds of Death Camps for the Unborn.
Memory-Holing the Past. The Party’s slogan in “1984” is “who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” This is the backdrop for a scene in the novel where Winston, the main character, is given the job of erasing for all eternity Big Brother’s past praise of a party functionary who later became persona non grata and was liquidated. We find a parallel in late summer 2024, where the mainstream media is now peddling the obvious lie that Kamala Harris was never really the “Border Czar” under Biden. (Note, however, that Donald Trump may have it right that she was really the “Invasion Czar” more than the “Border Czar.”). We find another parallel in the Left’s desperate efforts to prevent the public from learning about Kamala’s previous proposals to ban fracking, ban private health insurance, and replace it with Medicare-For-All, mandatory government repurchase of firearms, and other pet proposals of the Loony Left.
Forcing the Populace to Believe Obvious Lies. To really gain power over people, it’s essential to force them to renounce their true beliefs and to agree that obvious lies are actually the truth. We see this in “1984” where O’Brien holds up four fingers and asks Winston, who is tied up hand and foot to a torture machine, how many fingers he is holding up. Winston says “four” and is tortured. Suspecting that O’Brien wants him to say “five”, he says five and is tortured again. Finally, desperate to avoid any additional torture, Winston realizes that the correct answer is “whatever you want it to be.”
We see a similar, although less physically painful, pattern in 21st-century America when it comes to transgender issues. The Progressive Left wants us to believe that a biological man can actually become a woman and therefore must be treated by all of society as a woman. So does a man who decides to transition to a woman get all of his chromosomes to change from XY to XX? No. Does such a man acquire the ability to give birth to a child? No. Does such a man acquire a female pelvic and hip structure (for instance, wide hips and a uterus)? No. Can he change the pitch of his voice from lower to higher? No. Essentially, all that happens is that a biological man undergoing a surgical transition doesn’t become a woman but instead becomes a mutilated man. Yet we are supposed to believe the lie that he’s now a woman. And if we don’t, then we are characterized as “transphobic,” bigoted and cruel. Bonus Question: if a biological man decides to become a rhinoceros, does all of society have to treat him as a rhinoceros?
Thoughtcrime. In Oceania, to think even for a moment that Big Brother is a bad guy constitutes “thoughtcrime.” In 21st-century America, “hate crime” consists of (1) a criminal act such as murder or assault, and (2) certain kinds of thoughts internal to the perpetrator’s mind, such as a desire to hurt the victim on account of his race or other characteristics. Seen in this light, “hate crime” is, at least in part, thoughtcrime.
Persecution of Political Opponents. In “1984”, opponents of the Party were arrested, incarcerated in the Ministry of Love, and hideously tortured. In 21st-century America, opponents of the Progressive Left — ranging from Donald Trump to people praying outside abortion clinics— are arrested, subjected to political show trials and, if convicted, sentenced to fine or prison.
The Use of Intoxicants to Distract the Populace From Disastrous Government Policies. In “1984”, all or almost all goods and commodities are in short supply except one: Victory Gin. Victory Gin is plentiful, cheap, and most likely heavily subsidized. During the 2020-2022 Chinese coronavirus Plandemic, governors in Progressive Left states closed churches, synagogues, and gyms but kept the liquor stores open.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
By Jeremy Carl
Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
The Left’s persecution against the majority is rising.
Sometimes when you’re asked to give a talk, you find that it’s already been titled for you. I was informed when I got the program that the title of my talk was “On the Persecution of Whites in America.” And I thought, persecution—is that really accurate? I say a lot of edgy things in my book, but persecution is a very strong word. So, of course, like any good scholar, I went to the dictionary, and I found persecution defined as “hostility and ill treatment especially on the basis of ethnicity, religion, or political beliefs.” Okay—so maybe persecution is a fair description of what’s going on here.
In my new book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, I’ve talked a lot, particularly when I’ve given interviews about the book, about not wanting to create a new victim class. I’m not here to encourage white people to whine to the refs, because the refs don’t like you anyway. But I am encouraging us to work in concert with non-white allies who are interested in equal justice under the law and will stand up for our unalienable rights that are guaranteed to all Americans in the Declaration of Independence.
My book has been received very enthusiastically both by reviewers and the general public. More importantly, and I say this not to toot my own horn but because I think it indicates a shifting of the zeitgeist which we should all welcome, it’s received a lot of interest on the Hill. Just yesterday I was asked by a number of senior Hill staffers to give a presentation on the book. Afterwards, a staffer of a very mainstream, well-known member took me aside and said, “My boss would like to talk to you.” I spent an hour talking to him about my book, which is a clear indication that the Overton Window on this issue is shifting in some very interesting ways.
I asked myself when I decided to write the book, why write on such an unpleasant subject? Ultimately, I think it’s because we can’t really save the country without addressing this. It’s certainly not a sufficient condition, but it is, I argue, a necessary condition. What I found encouraging was talking to just about everyone on the genuine Right, and not just people who were kind enough to endorse the book like Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, Victor Davis Hanson, or Peter Kirsanow, who’s about to become the longest serving member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. But regular conservatives want to have this conversation. I think the Left is not ready to have this conversation, but if we’re only going to have the conversations the Left decides we’re going to have, we might as well just pack up and go home.
One question I get a lot from skeptics is, “What evidence do you have that white people are being treated badly by our current system? White people seem to be doing pretty well.” Well, first of all, that’s just wrong empirically. For those of you familiar with the work of Angus Deaton, the Nobel-prize winning economist at Princeton, and his wife Anne Case, also a distinguished economist, we find that white people in record numbers, particularly the white middle and working classes, are dying deaths of despair from alcohol, drug overdoses, and suicide.
Secondly, it depends on what you’re using as a comparison. Whites are obviously doing better in certain areas than some other groups. But if you compare whites to Asian Americans, a group the Left loves to erase in these comparisons, we’re worse off in every single category, whether it be health, wealth, or education. One of the things I talk about in my book is the average white incomes and social outcomes as compared to immigrants from Africa, South America, and Asia. Whites actually trail these immigrants pretty significantly. That’s one indication that whites are not doing well. Whites in Silicon Valley are doing well. But there’s almost nobody in America doing worse than Appalachian whites, the people who are the single most likely group to check off “American” on their census form.
Other evidence you can look at is what Steve Sailer has called “a flight from white,” or the explosion of non-white identification. We see this in a variety of different spheres. I’ll just give you one example: in 1960, there were about 550,000 self-identified Native Americans in the census. That was 0.3 percent of the population at the time. Now in 2020 we have 9.6 million, which is over 3 percent. This is not due to a Native American fertility explosion. It’s a bunch of white people with at least some traceable Native American ancestry who’ve decided that’s a much better horse to ride in 2024—and by the way, they’re not wrong to think that.
Ask any job applicant or college applicant, “Do you check the white box?” Not if you can avoid it. This is often called diversity, but as I show in my book, diverse is almost inevitably a synonym for less white. In fact, I point out a number of places where adding whites to a particular system would actually improve diversity, but nobody’s interested in doing that, because all they’re interested in is having less white people.
The Great…
The original title of my book was somewhat impish. It was going to be called It’s Okay to Be White, and I actually got that by my editors to my slight surprise. But a couple of months later, they came back to me and said, “Sorry the sales staff says that we’re not going to be able to sell that at Costco and Barnes & Noble with that title.” The trivial thing is that if I had a book that was titled It’s Okay to Be Hispanic or It’s Okay to Be Black or It’s Okay to Be Asian American, nobody would think twice. But if I say It’s Okay to Be White, I might as well just put on my KKK hood right now. I think that’s indicative of how whiteness is viewed by society.
There are some more serious questions that I think are raised by this trajectory. What happens when an ethnic community that is largely and historically responsible, just as a matter of pure numbers if nothing else, for building American society and its institutions goes from a dominant position to being one group among many—and a legally and culturally disfavored group at that? What does a post-white America look like, especially when a post-white America actively denigrates much of the cultural, political, and social legacy that built the country? Can America and its institutions survive that kind of transformation? How do we avoid the sort of civil strife and ethnic violence that has characterized a huge percentage of multiethnic societies in the past?
We’re in the midst of a vast demographic transformation, an uncontrolled social experiment. If you looked at the 1960 census, which was right before the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 that radically transformed America’s demographics, we were about 86 or 87 percent white non-Hispanic, 10 or 11 percent African American, and 3 percent everything else, which mostly was Hispanic. Eighty percent of the latter group were native born Americans at that point as opposed to about 60 percent now, and some of whom, the Californians and the Tejanos, actually had roots in what had been U.S. territories going back hundreds of years. Compare that to where we are today, 60 years after Hart-Celler: we are now a 57 percent white non-Hispanic country. For those 18 and under, we are now a white non-Hispanic minority. This has just been a huge demographic transformation—and dare I even say it, a great replacement of whites.
Speaking of the great replacement, what we saw—because this is not just a U.S. phenomenon—in France with the recent election of National Rally is the same sort of phenomenon just on a different substrate. It is fascinating to me intellectually, because other parties in France claim to be about a lot of other things. Whether they’re literal Communists or alleged free marketers, ultimately, when the chips were down, when a gun was put to their head and they had to make a choice, their choice was to be the party of replacement—to be the party that was going to replace the French people with foreigners was the underlying principle that they would not compromise on. The Communists were willing to get in bed with the capitalists. At the end of the day, their belief in globalism, their belief in being ruled by Brussels, and their belief in replacing the French population animates those parties. Every single French party besides National Rally revealed itself to be the party of the great replacement.
Michel Houellebecq, the famous French author, comments that the Left always screams when you say great replacement, which is why I was shocked when they called it a theory; it’s not a theory—it’s a fact. I thought Vivek Ramaswamy put it well in the U.S. presidential debates. He said this isn’t some grand right-wing conspiracy theory—it’s a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.
I’ve spent several years of my life living and traveling in the developing world. I was talking to an Indian gentleman here a little bit earlier in the conference, and he was telling me about what he was doing in Indian politics, and I sort of cut him short. I said, “Actually, I used to live in India, so I’m pretty familiar with the Indian political context.” I wrote for the Indian Express. (I think it’s sort of indicative that a lot of the so-called far-right people I know are actually some of the best-traveled and culturally knowledgeable people I know, and it’s because we understand and respect other cultures, which is why we want to guard the integrity of our own.) I can understand why Modi wants India to be a Hindu nation, because I want America to be a Christian nation, defined not in total but in part by its European historic identity.
I don’t think it’s possible to talk about any of this without talking about civil rights, and there are some questions on our side of the aisle as to whether we should use civil rights law or fundamentally reform it. I think the answer is both. We need to use it right now for aggressive lawfare—but we also need to fundamentally transform a set of laws that were designed for a world that no longer exists. We have a very different set of problems today, and I think that’s obviously going to be a big political lift, but I think it’s a necessary political lift.
Persecution Complex?
Finally, I want to conclude by talking about persecution. In fact, I realized that in my book I actually talk about something even perhaps more extreme. American whites are victims of a cultural genocide, and I’m suggesting this partially again to troll any leftist media who might be in the room and furiously scribbling my unforgivable hate speech in their notebooks. But I’m not saying it entirely for that purpose.
What’s the historical justification for saying such an outrageous thing? Raphael Lemkin, who’s the Polish Jewish lawyer who invented the term genocide in 1948, was working with the United Nations and formulated the Genocide Convention. He had a broader definition of genocide than what ultimately was agreed to, but his definition of cultural genocide has subsequently been picked up by a number of leftist scholars. For Lemkin, a cultural genocide consisted of the mass distribution of intoxicants, the re-education of children, forced relocation, and the destruction of important cultural symbols. I discuss in my book how each of these things could accurately describe what’s going on with whites in America right now….
Why is this all going on? It doesn’t just spring fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s head—that’s just not how social phenomena work. I think that, ultimately, this is a justification for resource distribution. The late sociologist C. Wright Mills talked a lot about the concept of a legitimating ideology. In 2024, you don’t just go up to a group and say, “Hey, I’m taking your stuff.” What you do is say, “White supremacy, white privilege, white fragility, and by the way, you’re so awful. That’s why I’m getting your stuff.” Again, I spell this out in quite some detail. In my book, affirmative action, racially punitive taxation, reparations, the Land Back movement—all sorts of re-education can be understood as ultimately being viewed through that lens.
We do have anti-white persecution in America. Of course, I’m not suggesting that somehow every white American’s life has become a dystopian hellscape out of 1984. Clearly, that’s not the case. However, one interesting first big media interview I did on the book was with Charlie Kirk. Charlie said, “Jeremy, whenever I talk to my older donors, they get a little freaked out about this. They’re like, ‘Can you say that? Is that allowed?’” Every time I go on a college campus, every white student comes up to me and says, “Thank you. This is the number one issue for me right now as a young white American.” So, I think there’s a generational divide that is happening now.
I gave an enthusiastic talk to the D.C. Young Republicans last night, and they all get it, but the good news is that we have tools to stop this persecution. We are thankfully not a 1 or 2 percent minority in this country. We’re still the majority. We still have huge numbers of Americans of every ethnic background who are interested in America’s founding ideals, principles, and the idea of equal justice under the law. I have number of folks who endorsed my book who are very obviously and visibly not white, so I think that we have potential allies in the country in the room.
We just need to be brave enough and have enough integrity to take our own side in this fight.
*****
This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
By Charles C.W. Cooke
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
In the course of my work examining the original meaning of the Second Amendment, I have often had cause to sift through some of the great legal textbooks of the past. Among these, I count such efforts as A View of the Constitution of the United States of America by William Rawle, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States by Joseph Story, and General Principles of Constitutional Law by Thomas Cooley. I have always enjoyed perusing these works, not only for their considerable explanatory value, but because, while reading them, I have gotten the unmistakable sense that their authors liked and revered their subject of choice. In our age, detailed descriptions of the Constitution are more often penned by its most aggressive critics. “Here is the system,” they say; “and here is why it shouldn’t be.” Or, even, worse: “Here is the law, and here is how my friends and I think it can be cleverly undermined.” I am happy to report that, at long last, we have an entry into the canon that fits the older, more celebratory model. That book is Yuval Levin’s American Covenant.
That Levin likes the Constitution—indeed, that he considers it to be a work of great and timeless genius—is not merely incidental to the argument he proffers. It is central to it. And yet this is no saccharine love letter. Levin believes that James Madison hit upon an extraordinarily appropriate and prescient set of rules—rules that, unlike those that would replace them, accurately account for the nature of the United States and the permanence of human nature—but he at no point allows this judgment to push him toward sentiment, boosterism, or myopia. On the contrary: Levin is worried about America, and about its Constitution. In his telling, we are unduly angry with one another, and, in almost every area of public life, we have forgotten how to use the system we were bequeathed. As a result, we are filling the presidency with men who lack the characteristics that make that office work, we are filling Congress with lawmakers who do not wish to make law, and we are fetishizing the finality of the judiciary at the expense of more democratic forms of debate. Or, to put it another way: We are not being failed by the Constitution; we are failing the Constitution.
Both practically and intellectually, this is a fraught argument to advance. Practically, it is awkward for any democratic society to accept that the people themselves are at fault. Intellectually, the charge that the people are not living up to the Constitution yields the obvious question, “Then shouldn’t we consider that Constitution to be unfit for purpose?” Levin acknowledges these problems, considers their ramifications, and then answers them in depth.
In Levin’s view, our present discontent is the product not of our constitutional order’s being intrinsically broken or hopelessly outdated, but of our having succumbed to a neither-here-nor-there arrangement that is simply incapable of making us virtuous or happy. Specifically, Levin charges that, over time, we have constructed a peculiar hybrid model of government, in which our expectations and the parties that channel them are Wilsonian in nature, but our institutions remain Madisonian. This amalgam, he suggests, does not work—and never will.
Nor, Levin argues persuasively, would giving up on our Constitution completely be likely to improve anything. Why? Well, because politics is division, and because the Madisonian system that he champions incorporates that fact into its design in a way that no other scheme can rival. It is here, in his assessment of human nature, that Levin is at his most conservative. He pushes back hard against the supposition that the political divisions that have animated Americans since the founding of the republic are shallow or fake, and that it is private corruption and architectural inertia, rather than earnest disagreement, that makes our politics fractious. Likewise, he rejects the claim that there is “a preexisting unity” in the country that is “waiting to be represented at last,” rather than “durable differences that need to be negotiated and assuaged” at all times. “An implicit premise of the Constitution,” he writes, is that “the diversity of interests and views in American society is a permanent reality” that cannot be stamped out by force or by expertise. Insofar as the Constitution is used in a manner that acknowledges that, it will work nicely.
The public is routinely presented with a peculiar bastard-child version of the Constitution that leads voters to precisely the opposite set of conclusions than the ones Levin submits.
By “used,” Levin is careful to stress that he does not solely mean by judges. Indeed, he records throughout that, while the Constitution is our highest law—and while it ought to be treated as such—its role in American life goes far beyond litigation. In this sense, Levin’s work represents an extended call for originalism in every area of our civic life. In his chapter on the courts, he acknowledges that originalism has prevailed within the judicial sphere—and that this development is salutary—but he worries that this has given those who affected that change a form of tunnel vision that has led them to focus exclusively on Article III. For the Constitution to be restored in toto, Levin insists, Americans need to understand what it is for in every area to which it applies. Accordingly, in addition to a correct understanding of the courts, they need a correct understanding of federalism, a correct understanding of the role of Congress, a correct understanding of the nature of the presidency, a correct understanding of the role of political parties, and, ultimately, a correct understanding of their rights and responsibilities as citizens. He treads lightly in this area, as is his style, but, clearly, he does not believe that enough citizens currently possess that understanding.
While he considers this regrettable, it does not necessarily surprise him. As a matter of fact, he notes that James Madison himself possessed “a kind of middle of view of the virtues of his fellow citizens,” which led him to conclude that there “was no escape from self-interest and ambition” but that “Americans, nonetheless, did take freedom, equality, and personal honor seriously.” On this, he and I agree. But I suspect that we differ a little in our estimation of how likely to come to fruition the restoration he seeks really is. I agree with basically everything Levin says. I agree with his description of where we are. I agree with the premise of his broader case: That the Constitution is the roadmap to renewal. And I agree with him on most of the particulars. With the exception of his briefly offered view that “Congress alone is empowered to decide” “how much of the federalist compromise of the Constitution should be abandoned”—I see no limiting principle there and would like to learn more about what he means—I am, in almost every way, a Levinite. Were he a sorcerer, able to instill his view of the Constitution into the hearts of the American people, I would happily acquiesce to the endeavor. Ultimately, though, I am not as optimistic as he is.
This is not dispositional. Like Levin, I am a flag-waving immigrant who, on balance, tends toward gratitude and buoyancy. Rather, it is because I seem to worry more than he does about two key drivers of constitutional illiteracy that Levin does not meaningfully address: the media, and the schools. Levin begins his book with the observation that people shape constitutions, and, in turn, constitutions return the favor and shape the people. This is correct, and there is no doubt in my mind that this process has kept America freer and better governed than any other democracy over the last 250 years. Nevertheless, that shaping process is only as good as the people doing the shaping, and it seems clear to me that the vast majority of our mediating institutions have decided in recent decades to promulgate a version of the US Constitution that simply does not exist. Were Levin’s vision to be the norm in our newspapers and universities, I’d expect to see a revival in two decades flat. Instead, the public is routinely presented with a peculiar bastard-child version of the document that leads voters to precisely the opposite set of conclusions than the ones Levin submits. That ersatz Constitution has Wilsonian assumptions about the role of each branch—but only when a Democrat is in charge; it is almost entirely driven by outcomes, rather than processes; and it allows no room for the sort of informed nuance that serves as a prerequisite to the proper understanding of our system. That being so, I would add a step to Levin’s plan. First, we must transform our elite culture; then, once the people have been given a fair chance to learn about the structure under which they live, we must prevail upon them to live up to their patrimony.
But that, ultimately, is a nitpick. Levin is an intellectual, not a sorcerer or a politician, and it is his job to describe the world as he sees it, irrespective of the political niceties. At this, he excels, and in a style that is unusual for our cynical, partisan age. Back in the 1780s and 1790s, during the debates over the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, James Madison liked to write letters to figures whom he believed had characterized his handiwork particularly well. One such missive, written to Tench Coxe in 1789, thanked him for his “explanatory strictures” on the first ten amendments, and suggested that the prospects for ratification were “indebted to the co-operation of your pen.” That I can imagine Madison sending an updated version of these words to Yuval Levin speaks volumes about the scale of his achievement.
We have a roadmap—if we want it.
*****
This article was published by Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
By Gabriel Gasave
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Friedrich August von Hayek
First released in 1944, Friedrich August von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom serves as a powerful cautionary tale against totalitarianism while also presenting a robust advocacy for individual freedom and market economics. Beyond being merely a political thesis, the book meticulously examines the practical ramifications a socialist economy would encounter in addressing economic and social obstacles.
It’s crucial to recognize that during that period, Hayek was formulating his intellectual ideas amidst the backdrop of two devastating World Wars, a rising enthusiasm for socialism within academic circles, and continual predictions proclaiming the imminent collapse of capitalism.
Like the saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” attributed to the French saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the book begins by analyzing how ideas that promote collectivism, while they may be laced with the noble intentions of creating a more just and equitable society, inevitably end up leading to tyranny and oppression by concentrating both economic and political power.
This is why Hayek emphasizes the indivisibility of freedom and the close relationship between economic freedom and political freedom, pointing out that any attempt to restrict the former eventually leads to the suppression of the latter.
Hayek imparts a crucial lesson on how centralized planning inevitably results in the inefficient allocation of scarce resources, leading to widespread hardship and a diminished standard of living. He warns that no one can possess omniscient awareness of all societal needs and preferences. With millions of individuals each holding only fragmented knowledge, Hayek underscores that a society built on principles of individual freedom, private property, and market economics—guided by the information conveyed through relative prices—is the true safeguard of prosperity and progress.
In his own words:
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these ‘data.’ It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
He continues that individuals respond to these price signals by making decisions in a dispersed manner. Thus, Hayek contrasts centralized planning with the concept of spontaneous order. Only, he tells us, free markets generate more efficient and adaptive outcomes than any well-intentioned decision by a mastermind.
In a 1977 interview with Thomas W. Hazlett for Reason Magazine, Hayek expands on this point 33 years later:
I’ve always doubted that the socialists had a leg to stand on intellectually. They have improved their argument somehow, but once you begin to understand that prices are an instrument of communication and guidance which embody more information than we directly have, the whole idea that you can bring about the same order based on the division of labor by simple direction falls to the ground.
As for competition, Hayek sees it as an efficient mechanism for allocating resources and stimulating innovation while understanding that state intervention in the economy distorts this process and generates inefficiencies. Hayek also analyzes the role of government and the purpose of laws in society, advocating the establishment of a limited government whose main function is to protect individual rights and enforce public order, that is, to impart justice, as opposed to one that seeks to direct the economic and social life of citizens in an authoritarian manner and opposed to a genuine rule of law.
In the interview where reference is made to his book, which Hayek genially dedicated “To Socialists of All Parties,” and his interlocutor questions him about whether Britain at that time was inevitably on the road to serfdom, Hayek responded, “No, not irrevocably. That’s one of the misunderstandings. The Road to Serfdom was meant to be a warning: ‘Unless you mend your ways, you’ll go to the devil.’ And you can always mend your ways.”
Eighty years later, The Road to Serfdom remains as relevant as ever. Its warnings about the dangers of centralized planning, the vital significance of individual freedom, and the advantages of the free market still resonate in discussions about the role of the state and the economy. Let us remember the cautionary message Hayek imparted and persist in our efforts to ensure that all paths lead to one destination: freedom.
*****
This article was published by The Beacon, a publication of the Independent Institute, and is reproduced with permission.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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