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Electric Vehicle Inanities, Insanities and Incoherence

By Craig J. Cantoni

The only green in the new Rivian truck is if it comes in that color.

For Americans in the upper percentiles of income, education, social awareness, and environmental awareness, electric vehicles (EVs) have become the latest status symbol, virtue signal, and silver bullet (green bullet?) for reducing global warming. This suggests that they might be just as susceptible to misleading advertising, emotionalism, and political manipulation as their fellow Americans in the lower percentiles—just as I have been snookered too many times in my life.

It’s not as easy to snooker me on environmental issues, however, because I once headed an influential environment group and dealt with the associated political game-playing, the media’s attention deficit disorder, and the public’s cognitive dissonance.

An example of dissonance is a new electric pickup truck made by Rivian, a company that has no vehicles in production but is already swamped with orders and is worth more than the entire planet, which is an exaggeration but not by much.

Speaking of the planet, vehicles like the Rivian truck will do more harm than good to the planet.

The car guy at the Wall Street Journal recently drove a test model of the truck. According to his review, the behemoth he tested has a target price of $76,865 and weighs “around” 7,000 lbs., which is about as much as the mammoth Ford Super Duty 250. Yet it has a payload of only 1,764 lbs., versus the Ford’s 4,500 lbs. This is a truck for show, not work, just as Land Rovers are for going to Whole Foods to buy gluten-free spaghetti, not for traversing the Serengeti.

The truck’s four electric motors generate 835 horsepower and rocket the 3.5 tons of aluminum, steel, plastic, glass and massive tires from 0 to 60 mph in three seconds. If someone on your block ends up owning one, expect the lights in the neighborhood to dim when its large batteries are recharged at night.

Of course, the truck’s carbon footprint will depend on what kind of power source it is plugged into; that is, whether the source is fossil fuels, windmills, solar panels, nuclear energy, or hydropower. Each of these has costs and benefits, but when all tradeoffs are considered, mini nuclear plants are the best option for producing the energy required by an industrial society and by poor countries that will need massive amounts of energy to industrialize to escape poverty.

The size of the truck’s carbon footprint goes beyond the energy expended to recharge its batteries. It includes the fossil fuels used to mine the natural resources that go into its parts, the fossil fuels used to manufacture those parts, and the fossil fuels used to assemble those parts. The bigger the vehicle, the more energy used to produce it. 

Having worked in the mining and manufacturing industries, I’m familiar with the huge amounts of energy that the industries consume, as well as other impacts on the environment. Take tires, or more specifically, take one of the main ingredients in tires: carbon black. Resembling furnace soot, carbon black is produced by the incomplete combustion of heavy petroleum products. If you were to tour a carbon black plant, as I have, you’d come out looking like a coal miner, with the stuff even getting into your underwear.

Most carbon black plants are staffed by lower-percentile workers (a.k.a. deplorables) in the Texas panhandle and along the Gulf coast near Houston, far away from the Hamptons and other upper-percentile places—places where Rivian trucks with big tires will be parked someday in front of 15,000 square-foot houses owned by people who pretend they’re green.

Studies show that over their life expectancy, EVs will emit less carbon per miles driven than cars with internal combustion engines, with the actual reduction in carbon dependent on the power source used to recharge EVs batteries.  However, it’s less clear that there are significant differences between the two in terms of the carbon emitted in their manufacturing and in the mining of necessary natural resources. EVs require fewer parts, because they lack the internal combustion engines, drive trains, radiators, water pumps, gas tanks, and fuel pumps of cars that run on gasoline; but the mining of lithium for their batteries takes a lot of energy and causes a lot of environmental harm.  

There are also geopolitical issues with lithium, given that China controls something like 80% of its processing. Because demand for lithium has skyrocketed, prices of the material are up 240% for the year.

Another geopolitical issue is Canada’s complaint that the U.S. is subsidizing EVs in violation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade pact, thus putting the Canadian auto industry at an unfair disadvantage. Canada’s complaint is in response to the EV tax credits in the Build Back Better legislation. EV buyers would get an $8,000 credit if the vehicle is made at a non-union U.S. plant, or $12,500 if made at a union plant. The credit drops to $500 if the vehicle’s battery isn’t made in the U.S.

Most of these political maneuvers and malinvestments would disappear if EV tax credits were eliminated and carbon taxes were instituted. Moreover, sales of land barges like the Rivian truck would fall, as would the hypocrisy of upper-percentile phonies.

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Ducey Quietly Bans All Public Worker Vaccination Mandates

By Cole Lauterbach

In an unannounced executive order regarding enhanced monitoring of COVID-19 metrics, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey banned public employers from requiring a COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of employment.

The order, signed Wednesday, primarily reactivates the state’s “enhanced surveillance advisory,” which requires most hospitals to provide consistent updates on ventilators, ICU beds, inpatient beds, ED beds, number of patients pending transfer out of hospitalization, as well as more detailed COVID-19 patient data.

One line stands out.

“No person shall be required by this state, or any city, town or county, to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine but a health care institution licensed pursuant to A.R.S. Title 36, Chapter 4 may require the institution’s employees to be vaccinated,” the order reads.

Ducey’s office commented on the measure Thursday evening, saying the governor has been clear and consistent — he’s pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine mandate.

“The executive order issued Wednesday is an extension of an order that has been in place throughout the pandemic. It is not new and its primary purpose is to allow the Arizona Department of Health Services to gather data essential to combating the public health challenges confronting our state,” a spokesperson said. “Critical information about hospital capacity, for example, would not be available without the collection of reliable real-time data.

“The section of the order concerning the banning of vaccine mandates has been in place since the vaccine became widely available in January. Again, this is not new.”

Ducey’s office said COVID mandates of any kind – whether they concern masks or vaccines – have proven to be divisive and counterproductive and that he believes Arizonans can and should make their own decisions about their healthcare, not an overreaching federal or city government.

Will Humble, director of the Arizona Public Health Association and former top doctor under Ducey, said the governor is misusing his executive powers.

“I would say ‘unbelievable’ but it’s totally believable,” he said Thursday.

Arizona House Democrats said Ducey is making the pandemic more severe.

“Tying the hands of local governments that want to take steps to prevent the spread of #COVID19 just deepens and prolongs the pandemic,” the caucus tweeted Thursday.

The order means the City of Tucson, which in August voted to require its 4,000 employees be vaccinated by Dec. 1, could be in for another court battle.

The city won various legal challenges from Republicans and even its police union to maintain its vaccination mandate. As of Dec. 1, Nearly 100% of employees are either vaccinated or have been granted an exemption.

*****

This article was published on December 17, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

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Potential Terrorist Caught Near Yuma

By Elizabeth Troutman

A Saudi Arabian man described by a U.S. Border Patrol chief as a “potential terrorist” was apprehended attempting to enter the U.S. illegally near Yuma, Arizona. He was apprehended wearing a New York county ambulance jacket.

Yuma Sector Chief Border Patrol Agent Chris Clem announced the apprehension on Twitter with an accompanying blurred photo of the man.

“Yuma Sector agents apprehended a potential terrorist who illegally entered the U.S. from Mexico Thursday night,” Clem wrote. “The 21-year-old migrant from Saudi Arabia is linked to several Yemeni subjects of interest.”

Border Patrol hasn’t released any more details about the “Yemeni subjects of interest.” The Saudi national will be processed for an expedited removal from the U.S., per federal immigration law.

The Saudi was apprehended wearing a jacket from the Central Oneida County Volunteer Ambulance Corps, an ambulance service near Syracuse, New York.

The group posted a statement on its Facebook page from EMS chief Thomas Meyers, along with an image of the man posted by Border Patrol saying he has no affiliation with the group.

“This individual is not, and has never been, affiliated with Central Oneida County Volunteer Ambulance Corps,” Meyers said in the Facebook post. “It is unknown to us how he obtained one of our discontinued jacket styles, and we are in the process of investigating this. We again assure the public that we have no affiliation or knowledge of this individual.”

The apprehension of the Saudi man comes two weeks after Gov. Doug Ducey directed a surge of resources to an area near Yuma, Arizona, where Border Patrol agents have been inundated with illegal immigration.

“It’s clear the Biden administration has created a December Disaster at our border,” the governor said. “As a result of piecemeal policy and a lack of federal involvement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been inundated. We simply cannot stand by and watch this catastrophe unfold. We are taking action at the state level to protect Arizonans and our communities.”

Ducey directed the Arizona National Guard to send an additional 24 personnel, six vehicles, four ATVs and one light utility helicopter to help law enforcement on the ground. The Department of Public Safety and the National Guard have also deployed tactical resources to the areas where U.S. Border Patrol and intelligence indicate the most threatening incursions are occurring.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich remarked on the arrest.

“While we are thankful that this potential terrorist was apprehended by our courageous border agents, we must remember that there are tens of thousands of migrants with unknown identities and intentions who regularly escape undetected into our communities,” Brnovich said.

“We need to take decisive action to secure our border and prevent terrorists, gang members, and hardened criminals from accessing our ports of entry. That’s why my office is fighting in court to hold the Biden Administration accountable to the rule of law.”

Brnovich wrote a letter to President Biden, expressing his concern over potential terrorists entering the U.S. illegally through the southern border. He invited Biden to visit the southern border to hear first-hand from law enforcement officials tasked with defending how “the situation is absolutely unsustainable.”

State troopers, Arizona Guardsmen and women, and the Arizona Department of Homeland Security say they’re working together to combat increased crime along the Southern Border. By adding resources, Border Patrol agents are better equipped to focus on criminal interdiction instead of being forced to primarily process the constant stream of mainly pouring through “the gap,” an opening in the border wall in the Yuma Sector.

In November, Customs and Border Protection agents apprehended more than 173,000 foreign nationals attempting to enter the U.S. illegally, a record for the month. In the Yuma Sector, agents reported 22,708 encounters with people entering the U.S. illegally, slightly more than Tucson Sector’s 21,485 encounters, according to Border Patrol data.

Yuma, Arizona, falls within the Yuma Sector of Border Patrol. It’s located in Arizona’s southeast corner, covering roughly 181,670 square miles of primarily desert terrain divided between California and Arizona. Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents are tasked with securing 126 miles of the Arizona-Mexico border stretching from the Imperial Sand Dunes in California to the Yuma-Pima County line.

The entire sector includes Yuma, La Paz, and Mojave Counties in Arizona, the Eastern-most areas of Imperial, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties in California and the entire state of Nevada.

In April, Ducey issued a Declaration of Emergency and deployed the Arizona National Guard to the Arizona-Mexico border to support local law enforcement efforts in response to the Biden administration’s open border policies. In August, he extended their mission at the border for another year.

In June, the Arizona legislature allocated $25 million in state funding for the National Guard’s border mission and $30 million to assist law enforcement with border security operations in the state’s 2022 budget.

Ducey has called on the Biden administration to shut down the border and follow federal immigration law. He’s also called for the resignation of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

He and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in June entered into an Emergency Management Assistance Compact, calling on other states to send resources to help secure the border. Despite their efforts, Arizona and Texas law enforcement officials continue to report an unprecedented number of foreign nationals entering their states illegally, stretching their resources and law enforcement personnel thin.

*****

This article was published on December 21, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

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Omicron: The Lockdowners’ Last Stand

By Ron Paul

Editors’ Note: We are not a scientific journal or institute so we don’t pretend expertise to comment on “science.” However, we certainly can comment on public policy and think we have some common sense. The obvious facts show that the Coronavirus and its variants are spreading, despite the emphasis placed by officials on preventative vaccines. With the obvious failure of the vaccines to stop the spread of the virus, how can enforcing mandates using vaccines that don’t work advance public health? We also don’t understand the reticence our national health and state officials have in determining the origins of the virus, their financial affiliation with pharmaceutical companies, the suppression of data about vaccine side effects,  and their constant food dragging as it pertains to therapeutics. It would seem that if vaccines fail, you would want to have a backup plan to treat the virus, which most people are going to get anyway. We have never supported lockdowns and don’t know why the government, and its partners in the giant social media companies, go out of their way to suppress dissenting opinions. Normally, when your doctor fails you and seems ineffective in treating you, you seek a second opinion. The patient is harmed when second opinions are put off-limits because the failing doctor either does not like the opinion or feels his turf has been invaded. Medicine should center on the patient’s needs, not the needs of politicians or unelected bureaucrats. Finally, while health concerns are important, they cannot and should not be the ONLY concern of officials and public policy. Our Constitution and our history of liberty are also very important. If we all will face the virus in one form or another, would you prefer to face it as a free man, or a slave?

Just as President Biden’s unconstitutional vaccination mandates were being ripped up by the courts, authoritarian politicians, public health bureaucrats, and the mainstream media announced a new Covid variant to justify another round of lockdowns and restrictions. The things that didn’t work last time would be a good idea to do again this time, they claim.

For these authoritarians, the timing of omicron’s emergence was perfect.

The variant was first discovered in South Africa, with the US and European media running endless scare stories. Authoritarian politicians used the manufactured fear to justify another attack on liberty. Europe shut down and became a virtual prison camp. In Austria, Germany, and elsewhere, citizens became non-persons without a vaccine passport.

South African health officials reported that the variant seemed to be more contagious but far milder than previous variants, as usually happens with such viruses. But the lockdowners would not hear of it. From Boris Johnson in the UK to DeBlasio in New York City, the variant was the perfect cover for them to put their boots back on the necks of terrorized citizens.

As to be expected, Fauci reveled in the emergence of the new variant, warning of “record deaths” for the unvaccinated. Similarly, President Biden warned that this would be a “winter of death” for the unvaccinated.

But here’s something the media isn’t reporting about the omicron outbreaks: they are taking place among the fully vaccinated. Cornell University, with 97 percent of the campus fully vaccinated and a mask mandate, has announced that it would return to online-only instruction after a massive Covid outbreak. Likewise, the National Football League has postponed several games this weekend due to Covid outbreaks, even though the League is virtually 100 percent vaccinated. And the National Basketball Association, which is above 95 percent fully vaccinated, has just announced that due to a surge in Covid cases it too will postpone games.

The vaccine is not working to prevent infection or transmission of the virus: cases are raging in states with the highest vaccine levels. Yet the “experts” continue to maintain that the only thing that can stop the spread of omicron is vaccines! More people are catching on that this makes no sense. If vaccines don’t stop the spread, how can vaccines stop the spread?

Meanwhile, South Africa, with one of the lowest rates of vaccination, has just announced that they are only seeing a tiny fraction of hospitalizations with omicron compared to previous variants. South Africa’s Covid response authority has written to the health minister recommending an end to containment efforts, contact tracing, and quarantines.

Unvaccinated South Africa is ending Covid restrictions while the hyper-vaccinated North is locking down. Something doesn’t add up.

Fauci loves to say that to question him is to question science, but this has nothing to do with science. It’s about power. Fauci, the political authoritarians, and the corrupt Big Pharma billionaires are trying to make a last stand, desperate to push omicron as a justification for further tyranny and profits. But actual science is not cooperating.

Omicron is spreading and vaccines are not stopping it. Thus far nearly half of the omicron infections are asymptomatic. Some experts are predicting that omicron will spell the end of Covid-19. But we know that as long as people like Fauci are around, Covid-19 will never end. Unless, of course, we repudiate the charlatans and profiteers and reclaim our liberty!

*****

This article was published on December 21, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.  Ron Paul is a medical doctor, a former U.S. Congressman, and has been a Presidential candidate both as a Republican and Libertarian.

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Why The Casual Attitude Towards Inflation?

By Randall Holcombe

The Federal Reserve and the Biden administration seem to have a very casual attitude toward inflation. When inflation started to draw some attention, the Federal Reserve’s official line was that it was transitory.

In June, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said it was temporary, and John Williams, President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, predicted inflation for 2021 to be around 3%. In response to this month’s inflation numbers, President Biden said this is the peak, and inflation should decline rapidly after this peak. He blames inflation on supply chain issues.

There is some truth to the claim that the current inflation is in part due to the economy’s recovery from the government’s COVID policies that shut down lots of businesses and put lots of people out of work. But, those factors also contributed to subdued demand and lower inflation in 2020.

The Federal Reserve claims to have an inflation target of 2%. Why the target should even be that high is another question, but let’s look at the inflation numbers in light of the Fed’s target.

Inflation, November 2020 to November 2021 was 6.8%, the highest it’s been since 1982. Inflation from November 2019 to November 2020 was 1.2%. So, the average over the past two years has been 4%, double the Fed’s target rate.

The experience of the 1970s showed that once inflation starts, stopping it is a slow and painful experience. The threat of inflation has been apparent for some time now (here’s what I said about it in May), but those who have the power to do something about it seem to have the attitude that it will go away on its own.

*****

This article was published on December 18, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from AIER, American Institute for Economic Research.

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Are We Near the End of the Road to Serfdom? Part 1

By Barry Brownstein

Recently I was drawn to reread Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Passages I previously overlooked leaped from the pages as if in bold print, signaling imminent danger to human progress. Hayek’s message never seemed more prescient and timeless: The descent into totalitarianism can happen anywhere.

Astonishing progress has been made in the past few centuries. A rich extended order has evolved, allowing human cooperation to lift billions out of dire poverty and bring a standard of living to the West that couldn’t have been imagined mere generations ago. Jonah Goldberg calls it “the Miracle of modernity,” yet few understand that the bounty we enjoy does not flow from politicians’ plans. Today, totalitarians are actively working to destroy the engine of human cooperation.

Let’s be clear: What Hayek saw as dangerous, what you see as dangerous, millions are now cheering for in the name of societal advancement.

Since 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has kept a Doomsday Clock as a metaphor for “how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies.” At the risk of mixing metaphors, surely the Road to Serfdom clock may be approaching midnight.

The Road to Serfdom was published in 1944, and naturally, Germany was on Hayek’s mind. Hayek clarifies that Nazism is not a function of “a peculiar wickedness” in the character of Germans, and false beliefs the Germans had taken on were not limited to Germany. At that time, Hayek observed in England, “There are few single features [of totalitarianism] which have not yet been advised by somebody.”

Of human nature, Hayek observed we are unwilling to look at our problems as they are rather than how we mentally made them up. “When,” he wrote, “the course of civilization takes an unexpected turn—when, instead of the continuous progress which we have come to expect, we find ourselves threatened by evils associated by us with past ages of barbarism—we naturally blame anything but ourselves.”

With Covid policies, civilization has traveled farther on the road to serfdom. We want to believe we can conquer Covid and return to normal. Beware. Politicians exploit our economic ignorance and our desire to find scapegoats. Consider this relatively mundane example: the Federal Trade Commission recently said “it is ordering Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, other large wholesalers and suppliers including Procter & Gamble Co., Tyson Foods and Kraft Heinz Co. ‘to turn over information to help study causes of empty shelves and sky-high prices.’” The FTC wants to see if “anticompetitive practices” are at work. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of economics or possessing pre-Covid memory would scoff at the idea that anti-competitive practices are causing the empty shelves. 

Hayek points out how we trick ourselves with the fallacy of good intentions. Looking at our actions we think, “Have we not all striven according to our best lights, and have not many of our finest minds incessantly worked to make this a better world? Have not all our efforts and hopes been directed toward greater freedom, justice, and prosperity?”

Believing our intentions are good, we conclude that bad results must mean we are victims. In Hayek’s words, “If the outcome is so different from our aims— if, instead of freedom and prosperity, bondage and misery stare us in the face—is it not clear that sinister forces must have foiled our intentions, that we are the victims of some evil power which must be conquered before we can resume the road to better things?”

Magical thinking abounds in a crisis. Hayek writes, “We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected.” In short, as the famous Pogo cartoon relates, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The Meta False Belief

Chapter 1 of The Road to Serfdom explains the meta mistaken idea. We no longer share a belief in this simple truth: “Wherever the barriers to the free exercise of human ingenuity were removed, man became rapidly able to satisfy ever widening ranges of desire.”

Instead of cherishing and preserving “the principles” that remove barriers to human flourishing, these principles come “to be regarded more as obstacles to speedier progress, impatiently to be brushed away.” Hayek clearly states the “fundamental principle” for the ordering of human affairs is to “make as much use as possible of the spontaneous forces of society, and resort as little as possible to coercion.” Human progress in an “infinite variety of applications” follows from this principle.

Today, few understand and value this principle. We are fearful of the unknown, and tyrants exploit our fears:

According to the views now dominant, the question is no longer how we can make the best use of the spontaneous forces found in a free society. We have in effect undertaken to dispense with the forces which produced unforeseen results and to replace the impersonal and anonymous mechanism of the market by collective and “conscious” direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals.

It is easy to apply Hayek to Covid policy. Tyrannical bureaucrats backed by their Big Tech enforcers suppress spontaneous forces generating effective treatments in favor of the blunt instrument of one-size-fits-all policies. Who would have suspected, for example, that the anti-depressant drug fluvoxamine may prevent Covid from progressing to the severe stage? Despite censorship, ridicule, and suppression, heroic medical researchers continue to develop treatment protocols. Those seeking treatment face barriers to finding and receiving treatment.

Redefining Freedom

What do you think freedom means? It may surprise you to learn that you don’t share a common understanding with family, friends, your professor, or the media. Hayek clarifies two types of “freedom”—freedom from coercion and freedom from necessity.

Classical liberalism is anchored on the principle of freedom from coercion. Hayek writes, “To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to whom he was attached.”

Freedom from necessity means something very different. Remember Hayek was writing The Road to Serfdom over 70 years ago. Already the word freedom was being redefined as socialists promised a “new freedom.”

The new freedom promised, however, was to be freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us, although for some very much more than for others. Before man could be truly free, the “despotism of physical want” had to be broken, the “restraints of the economic system” relaxed.

The liberalism that Hayek championed is being destroyed and, as Paul Kingsnorth wrote, in its place is being built a “technocratic state-corporate hybrid; a China-style social credit society, centralised, monitored, powered by algorithms, emphatically unnatural and unfree.”

Call it fascism, call it communism, the shackles of different flavors of totalitarianism differ slightly, but their essential characteristics are the same.

Hayek is clear, believing the idea that these two types of “freedom”—freedom from coercion and freedom from necessity—can be combined is delusional.

When we think of socialism, we may think of a salutary quest for greater equality. When we think of the excesses of totalitarianism, we think of the starving millions in Stalin’s Ukraine or today’s North Korea. We think of Nazi concentration camps or the killing fields of Cambodia. All genocides are fueled by accepting the idea that individuals don’t have the inherent right to be free from coercion. Principles, not good intentions, are the only safeguard of liberty.

There is No Common Good

Hayek explains, “The various kinds of collectivism, communism, fascism, etc., differ among themselves in the nature of the goal toward which they want to direct the efforts of society.” Yet here is where all these systems are the same. “They all differ from liberalism and individualism in wanting to organize the whole of society and all its resources for this unitary end and in refusing to recognize autonomous spheres in which the ends of the individuals are supreme.”

The delusion of collectivists is that their coercive plans will benefit all. Hayek observes that even well-meaning people ask, “If it be necessary to achieve important ends,” why shouldn’t the system “be run by decent people for the good of the community as a whole?”

In one of his most famous passages, Hayek succinctly explains why there is no such thing as the common good upon:

The “social goal,” or “common purpose,” for which society is to be organized is usually vaguely described as the “common good,” the “general welfare,” or the “general interest.” It does not need much reflection to see that these terms have no sufficiently definite meaning to determine a particular course of action. The welfare and the happiness of millions cannot be measured on a single scale of less and more. The welfare of a people, like the happiness of a man, depends on a great many things that can be provided in an infinite variety of combinations. It cannot be adequately expressed as a single end, but only as a hierarchy of ends, a comprehensive scale of values in which every need of every person is given its place. To direct all our activities according to a single plan presupposes that every one of our needs is given its rank in an order of values which must be complete enough to make it possible to decide among all the different courses which the planner has to choose. It presupposes, in short, the existence of a complete ethical code in which all the different human values are allotted their due place. [emphasis added]

Politicians invoke the common good to hide that they have no justification for imposing their values on others; their deception is effective. Well-meaning people adopt the belief that only an evil person would oppose the common good. To give a common example, the mayor or governor who insists that the new taxpayer-financed baseball stadium benefits all is hiding that the team’s owners, hotels near the stadium, and some fans benefit at the expense of those who pay taxes but have no interest in baseball.

Murray Gunn, an observer of interest rates recently wrote about the junk bond market: “The Fed has used its historic money counterfeiting scheme to effectively underwrite indebted corporates that would, under normal circumstances, have gone out of business.” Like all Fed interventions, those who drink from the punch bowl first are well-satiated, and the rest of us will pay for the cleanup.

We are told we are all in this together to fight Covid. Big Media censorship demands we deny harm from vaccines, thereby skewing decision-making. Medical professor Vinay Prasad warns of catastrophic harm from Covid vaccination programs aimed at teens. A professor recently told me he has never experienced so many students with mental health issues and students suffering from suicidal ideation. And now the Biden administration is recklessly considering joining China, Cuba, Argentina, and Venezuela as the only countries in the world to administer Covid vaccines to children under 5.

Weighing the subjective costs and benefits from vaccines does not mean you deny the menace of Covid. You may well benefit from your personal decision to receive the vaccine, but the data is clear: Since you can still transmit Covid your decision provides no benefits to others. The bottom line is that there is no such thing as a common good that is achieved by lockdowns and mandates. Lost jobs, lost lives via suicide, lost livelihoods due to vaccine injuries, growing mental health issues, and lives saved cannot be weighed on “a single scale of less and more.”

In short, as professor of psychiatry, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty writes, “Citizens are no longer viewed as persons with inherent dignity, but as fungible elements of an undifferentiated ‘mass’ to be shaped by supposedly benevolent health and safety experts.”

Consider how proud President Biden is of his son, Hunter. While Hunter was smoking crack and trading his family name for millions of dollars from foreign entities, millions of Americans were building real careers and raising families. Hunter will undoubtedly get all the boosters the CDC recommends while the President berates, demonizes, and imposes mandates that deprive others of their livelihood. Many of us do not share President Biden’s values. I deny the President’s power to impose his values on others.

There is no one “ethical code” we all share, yet politicians and bureaucrats use the coercive power of government to force compliance with their plans.

In the second part of this essay, I will explore how embracing the lowest common dominator leads us deep down the road to serfdom. In the meantime, let us remember that Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom to warn that the descent into totalitarianism can happen anywhere.

Before destructive ideas that lead to totalitarianism can command widespread acceptance, tyrants must unite the population around a common us vs. them enemy. You can make a stand against this tactic today. As you go about your day, strive to see the common humanity in all. With liberty, everyone is a potential friend. Today, make no friend an enemy.

*****

This article was published on December 18, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from AIER, American Institute for Economic Research.

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Fauci, Emails, and Some Alleged Science

By Phillip W. Magness

From October 2-4, 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research hosted a small conference for scientists to discuss the Covid-19 lockdowns. Just four days later, Dr. Francis Collins, the retiring Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), would call the three of the scientists in attendance “fringe epidemiologists,” in a directive he sent to Anthony Fauci and other senior staff of his agency. They were “fringe epidemiologists” because they had the temerity to ask whether the lockdowns of 2020 were effective. Those three, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford were simply doing what any good scientist would do: They were following the evidence.

They wrote the Great Barrington Declaration [GBD] as they parted company at AIER, posting it for all to see.

So why was Dr. Collins so intent on impugning these three scientists? It’s hard to know exactly, mostly because any scientist worth his salt should have been happy to see further research being done. That is, after all, how ignorance is replaced by knowledge. But Collins was clearly in no mood to replace his own possible ignorance with any kind of knowledge. He was pretty sure he knew all he had to know, and this is one of the most dangerous positions a scientist can take.

In an email obtained by AIER through a Freedom of Information Act request, Collins told Anthony Fauci, CCing Lawrence Tabak, Deputy Ethics Counselor at NIH, that he wanted “a quick and devastating published take down” of the Great Barrington Declaration’s premises.

One wonders why he would CC the Deputy Ethics Counselor on this, given the trouble these people seem to have with ethics, but here they were in October of 2020. Fauci wrote that same night to let Collins know that there was already a devastating take down of the Great Barrington Declaration…in that august scientific publication Wired.

“Francis,” Fauci wrote, “I am pasting in below a piece from Wired that debunks [the GBD].” There, science reporter Matt Reynolds told us there was no “scientific divide” over herd immunity, but that’s not the funny part. The funny part came when Reynolds declared quite confidently that we no longer had anything to worry about, as lockdowns were – as of October 2020 – a thing of the past.

“The problem [with the GBD] is that we aren’t in lockdown,” Reynolds explained. “[I]t’s hard to find people who are advocating for a return to the lockdown we saw in March. When the Great Barrington Declaration authors declare their opposition to lockdowns, they are quite literally arguing with the past.”

This Fauci-endorsed passage may be one of the worst takes of the entire pandemic. Less than a month later, lockdowns came roaring back with a vengeance during the winter’s second wave.

Fauci wrote to Collins again the next day, this time referencing a breathless op-ed by Gregg Gonsalves, a public health professor at Yale, in The Nation. And here we arrive at yet another funny part. Gonsalves’ article was not exactly a critique of the Great Barrington Declaration. Instead, Gonsalves went after Martin Kulldorff, who in an interview with the leftist magazine Jacobin quite reasonably pointed out that the lockdowns hurt the poor more than most talking heads were willing to admit. Gonsalves’s grievance was that by interviewing Kulldorff, Jacobin had broken the lockdown “solidarity” of other far-left websites including the Nation and the Boston Review.

By October 10, the lines were well-drawn, and Fauci thrust himself into the middle of the media hootenanny that was clearly emerging. Collins emailed again to boast about calling the three scientists “fringe” in the Washington Post, although he told Fauci that their ongoing campaign to take down the GBD “will not be appreciated in the W[hite] H[ouse}.” The White House, Fauci retorted, was “too busy with other things to worry about” the GBD. There was an election to deal with, after all.

As the bedfellows became more strange, Gregg Gonsalves wrote directly to Collins, thanking him for his undiplomatic approach. For his part, Gonsalves became ever more hostile and profane, in his remarks on the GBD. “This f****g Great Barrington Declaration is like a bad rash that won’t go away,” Gonsalves tweeted, shortly before reaching out to Collins. A day earlier, the Yale professor also began promoting unhinged conspiracy theories about the GBD and AIER that traced to the blog of a former 9/11 Truther movement activist.

Some of the emails between Collins and Fauci sent in response to AIER’s FOIA request have been redacted, but surrounding context makes it pretty clear that they were looking for a way to impugn the GBD further if it came up at the White House Covid Task Force meeting on October 16. That morning, Fauci emailed Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. He pressed the need for her to oppose the GBD, and set the stage for an attack on Scott Altas, who was the most friendly champion of the GBD on the Task Force.

Fauci, it turns out, had to miss the October 16 task force meeting, though he likely breathed a sigh of relief when Collins emailed him two days later. “Atlas did not take part in the [task force] meeting on Friday,” Collins wrote, “and the Great Barrington Declaration did not come up.” Another partially-redacted email hints that Fauci celebrated this outcome. Atlas’s opposition to the lockdown faction on the task force “is driving Deb [Birx] crazy,” he continued.

Fauci and Collins were not done, though, in their campaign to “take down” the GBD scientists.

Our story picks up again in earnest on November 2, when Fauci’s chief of staff Greg Folkers replied to an email that was not made public in pursuance to AIER’s FOIA request. It seems pretty clear, though, that Fauci asked Folkers for a list of sources that would allow him to argue effectively against the GBD. The email’s subject line references a previous correspondence from Fauci “as discussed,” noting that Folkers had “highlighted the three i found most useful” (sic).

Multiple sources, and particularly Scott Atlas’s recently-published account of his time on the task force, have noted that Fauci often relies on aides to curate lists of sources in advance of his many media appearances. He seldom reads the scientific literature on Covid-19 himself, and instead arrives at meetings with staff-prepared talking points. It appears that Folker’s email was an answer to one such request for talking points to attack the GBD scientists.

Note that Fauci frequently portrays himself as a staunch defender of science who stays above the political divide and remains outside of partisan debates. In light of that, you might expect that Folker’s response to Fauci’s request would yield a small sample of scientific analysis on the logic behind lockdowns, even if only in a format bullet-pointed by his staff. But you’d be wrong. Folkers sent Fauci a list of seven political op-eds and articles opposing the GBD from popular media outlets.

So yeah. Science.

*****

This article was published on December 19, 2021, and is reproduced with the permission of AIER, American Institute for Economic Research.

Find Out Which States Best, Worst for Honest Elections thumbnail

Find Out Which States Best, Worst for Honest Elections

By Fred Lucas

Georgia ranks at the top among states for the strongest laws in the nation to guarantee honest elections, while Hawaii ranks at the bottom, according to a new Election Integrity Scorecard from The Heritage Foundation.

Heritage’s scorecard, announced Tuesday, measures all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on a dozen election-related categories.

Categories in which scores may reach between 20 and 30 points are voter ID requirements, maintaining accurate voter registration lists, and rules governing absentee ballots.

A perfect overall score in providing for honest elections would be 100, meaning a top score in all 12 categories. Georgia had a total score of 83, while Hawaii’s score was 26.

“Americans need and deserve elections that they can trust,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in a press release, adding:

Heritage’s Election Integrity Scorecard gives states a better idea of how their state laws and regulations compare to best practices and where they need improvement. In the coming weeks and months, Heritage will work with our state partners to ensure policymakers and officeholders have this valuable information to make reforms. At a time when cynicism runs deep on both ends of the political spectrum, the need to protect the people’s elections, and to safeguard the value of every citizen’s vote, couldn’t be clearer.

Heritage’s scorecard comes at the end of a year in which at least 18 states enacted significant election reform legislation. Although Republican lawmakers led many of those state reforms, the best and worst states as determined by the scorecard didn’t break down entirely along partisan lines.

For example, liberal-leaning Wisconsin, where a Democrat is governor, made the Top 10 for best states, while the staunchly conservative states of Utah and Nebraska are ranked in the 40s. So are Massachusetts and Vermont, two liberal-leaning states with Republican governors.

Following Georgia in the Top 10 are Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.

Kansas and Missouri tie for 10th place overall. based on their total scores in all the categories.

Bringing up the rear just before Hawaii on Heritage’s scorecard are Utah, ranked at 41, followed by New York, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Washington, Vermont, Oregon, California, and Nevada.

“No matter one’s politics, every reasonable American agrees that our electoral process should make it easy to vote and harder to cheat,” John Malcolm, director of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, said in a formal statement on the scorecard, adding:

The right to vote is a sacred right that our leaders must protect. The Election Integrity Scorecard is the result of an intensive, in-depth review of state election laws and will provide voters, legislators, and election officials with a tool that can be used to compare their election system to a model system and that of other states. The model bills we provide can be used to improve their elections to guarantee both access and security. We strongly urge them to do so.

Other categories measured in the scorecard, with a maximum score of no more than 4 points each, are rules governing ballot harvesting and vote trafficking; access of election observers to ensure transparency; citizenship verification; rules on voter assistance procedures; vote-counting practices; election litigation procedures; rules governing voter registration; restriction of automatic registration; and rules surrounding the private funding of elections.

Currently, 35 states have some form of voter ID laws to ensure voters are who they say they are, but with varying degrees of implementation.

Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, and Tennessee received the highest score of 20 points for the implementation of voter ID laws. States with 0 points on this front are Hawaii, Maine, Nebraska, and Vermont.

“Heritage has been working for many years to protect the integrity of our elections in order to ensure that all eligible Americans are able to vote and that their votes are counted honestly [and] fairly, and are not diluted by fraud, errors, or mistakes,” Hans von Spakovsky, manager of The Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative and a former member of the Federal Election Commission, said in a formal statement. “Our new Election Integrity Scorecard, along with the Heritage Election Fraud Database, will help ensure that happens.”

The scorecard also ranks states on how up-to-date their voter registration lists are—and whether dead people or those who have moved out of the precinct or state are still listed.

Interestingly, states with a lower overall score and ranking in the bottom half of the list do relatively well in the category for accuracy of voter registration lists. 

Maryland (ranked 29 overall) gets 27 points out of a maximum of 30 in this category of accurate registration lists, while Colorado and Washington (34 and 45 overall, respectively) get 26 points.

Maine and Rhode Island (32 and 16 overall, respectively) get 25 points. At the bottom, North Dakota gets 9 points in this category, just below Hawaii, the scorecard’s overall worst, with 13 points.

Management of absentee ballots is a category with a maximum of 21 points that measures how well states authenticate absentee and mail-in voting. This category is tied closely with voter registration maintenance.

In 2005, the Carter-Baker Commission report stated that absentee voting was the aspect of elections most vulnerable to fraud.

Louisiana and Oklahoma got the strongest score on managing absentee ballots, with 19 points each. They are followed closely by Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri, and Rhode Island, with 18 points each.

Ranked at the bottom in managing absentee voting are California, with just 2 points, Nevada with 3, and Washington with 4.

“Americans need and deserve a transparent system in which fraud can be easily detected and false allegations of fraud can be easily dispelled,” Heritage’s Election Integrity Scorecard website says.

The website notes that the right to vote is sacred and has faced numerous challenges throughout history, with the biggest current challenge being the integrity of the vote:

The fight for the right to vote is a storied part of America’s heritage. From the revolutionary cry of ‘no taxation without representation,’ to the marches of the suffragettes, to the struggle against Jim Crow laws, America’s successful efforts to expand and defend the right to vote are some of our nation’s greatest triumphs. …

Thankfully, we now live in a time when no serious person would dare to claim that any group of people should be denied the right to vote based on their race, sex, or any other immutable characteristic. But celebrating that triumph does not mean that the fight to defend the vote is finished. Our fight today is to preserve the integrity of each vote against fraudulent attempts to erase it.

*****

This article was published on December 14, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

Left and Right: Both Mistaken on Inflation thumbnail

Left and Right: Both Mistaken on Inflation

By E. J. Antoni

With inflation hitting a 31-year high, commentators are now routinely giving their opinions on inflation. Unfortunately, most of them—on both the left and the right—are mistaken.

The left initially claimed there was no inflation before switching to its oft-repeated line that inflation is transitory, meaning not long-lasting. But inflation has proved to be quite resilient. More recently, many on the left have taken to extolling the apparent benefits of inflation, such as cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) increases for those on fixed incomes.

NBC correspondent Stephanie Ruhle recently tried to make the case that savings have risen faster than inflation, so people have the money to pay higher grocery bills, and those people are better off. But wages and savings have not kept up with inflation and consumers are worse off now than they were a year ago.

But some on the right have made the same misinformed arguments. Only days after criticizing a competitor’s misleading headline, Fox Business had an article citing record-setting COLA increases for Social Security recipients as a benefit from inflation.

This is no benefit at all. Those on fixed incomes are suffering through a year of rising prices to have their incomes raised some time in the future, and only as much as prices have increased. Meanwhile, anyone with a retirement account has seen its relative value decreased by the hidden tax of inflation.

And both the left and the right of late have ignored the reality of inflation when evaluating economic data.

The most recent retail trade report from the Census Bureau showed retail sales in October being significantly higher than expectations, but more than half of the increase was inflation. After accounting for this, the report was actually well below expectations.

Similarly, most people, regardless of political affiliation or philosophy, seem unaware of how inflation drives asset bubbles—which is contributing to the current growth in house and stock prices.

Those on the right also say deficit spending by the government will add to inflation. This is not exactly true either.

When pressed by a reporter, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, “No economist out there is projecting that this [more deficit spending] will have a negative impact on inflation.” While her claim is completely untrue, since many economists argue precisely that, those economists are also misguided.

Under President Ronald Reagan, the nation had record-setting deficits and amassed record levels of debt, all while inflation decreased. Conversely, in the 1920s, the federal government ran a surplus every year of the decade, but inflation towards the end of that period caused a bubble in the stock market, leading to the infamous crash in 1929.

History—and sound economic theory—tells us that federal deficits are not the primary catalyst for inflation. Excessive government spending certainly has negative consequences, but inflation only arises when the Federal Reserve (the Fed) purchases debt instruments, like government bonds. That has happened whenever the Fed tries to implement monetary “stimulus,” which often happens to occur when Congress borrows excessively. This coincidence has clouded the distinction of which agency is causing what.

President Abraham Lincoln, while ruminating on the Civil War and the perspectives of both the North and South, observed that one side must be and both may be morally in the wrong. Similarly, the popular takes on both the left and right regarding inflation are incorrect; neither side understands the fundamental principles behind inflation.

Only the Fed can cause inflation because only it controls the ability to create money, which it does chiefly by purchasing government debt with money created out of nothing. Likewise, only the Fed can rein in the beast that it set loose.

The one data point in favor of those on the right is the recent rise of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). It is a bit of a misnomer, as there is nothing modern about it and it focuses less on monetary theory and more on the fiscal policies of taxes and government spending.

Nevertheless, a key feature of the theory is that the Fed essentially acts as the principal financing arm of Congress’ deficit spending. With Lael Brainard as Vice Chair, the Fed will likely pursue MMT. That will make government deficit spending inherently inflationary. At that point, the political right will be genuinely right, but for the wrong reason.

As is often the case, the talking points of both the left and right on inflation are mistaken; it turns out their soundbites are not very sound.

*****

This article was published on December 1, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Texas Public Policy Foundation.

A Constitutional Cure for Covid-19 thumbnail

A Constitutional Cure for Covid-19

By Marilyn M. Singleton

Covid, Covid, Covid. Variant, variant, variant. Trust me, I’m the government’s highest paid employee, and “I represent science.” Show your papers, wear a mask, take a shot or lose your job. And the beat goes on for an infection where 99.95 percent of infected persons under age 70 years recover. It’s becoming clear that Covid-19 is not merely a disease but an excuse to concentrate power in the government.

It’s time for the political histrionics to stop. Multiple studies have shown that the consequences far outweigh any potential (and illusory) benefits of masks, lockdowns, and school closures. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director admitted that the current Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, while helpful in reducing deaths and hospitalizations, do not stop transmission of the virus. “Breakthrough” cases in vaccinated persons are on the rise. Moreover, the current vaccines likely are not effective for the new, likely less lethal Omicron variant. Public health experts opine that the SARS-CoV-2 virus (that causes Covid-19) and its multiple variants are becoming endemic. That means SARS-CoV-2 and its infinite number of variants will not be eliminated, but become a manageable part of the human-viral ecosystem.

Sadly, our government is not responding in accordance with the scientific facts. Instead, federal and some local governments are mandating more vaccines, culminating in proof of vaccination to engage in society and continue living as a normal human being. This is not science. This is nascent totalitarianism.

Two lines from the 1990 Cold War era spy film, The Hunt for Red October foreshadowed our government’s warp speed trajectory to authoritarianism. “Privacy is not of major concern in the Soviet Union, comrade. It’s often contrary to the collective good.” And a White House official casually boasted, “I’m a politician that means I’m a cheat and a liar.”

It didn’t take long for President Biden to tell the big lie. As president-elect, Mr. Biden said there would be no vaccine mandates. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (the third in line for the presidency) brilliantly illustrated the intersection of lying and privacy. As late as August 2021, Speaker Pelosi said, “We cannot require someone to be vaccinated. That’s just not what we can do. It is a matter of privacy to know who is or who isn’t.”

Without skipping a beat, the executive branch issued three separate vaccine mandates: all federal contractors (including remote workers), an Occupational Health & Safety Administration (OSHA) requirement for businesses with more than 100 employees, and a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) requirement for employees, volunteers and third-party contractors of health care providers certified by CMS.

The judicial branch is fighting back against the President’s attempt to jettison the Constitution’s separation of powers clauses, a large chunk of the Bill of Rights, and Supreme Court precedents on bodily autonomy with these mandates. On November 9th, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put the OSHA mandate on hold. The Court reasoned that the mandate “threatens to substantially burden the liberty interests of reluctant individual recipients put to a choice between their job(s) and their jab(s).” And “the loss of constitutional freedoms ‘for even minimal periods of time … unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”

Citing the lack of congressional authorization and harm to access to medical care, on November 29th a Missouri federal district court placed a temporary halt on the CMS health care workers “boundary-pushing” mandate. The government planned to enforce the mandate by imposing monetary penalties, denial of payment and termination from the Medicare and Medicaid program. The ruling covers providers in Kansas, Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.

On November 30th, a Louisiana federal district court blocked the CMS mandate issuing a nationwide injunction in a lawsuit brought by 14 states (Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia). “If the executive branch is allowed to usurp the power of the legislative branch to make laws, two of the three powers conferred by our Constitution would be in the same hands. … [C]ivil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.”

That same day, a Kentucky federal district court issued a hold on the federal government contractors mandate, citing lack of authority of the executive branch—“even for a good cause”. The court reasoned that if a procurement statute could be used to mandate vaccination, it “could be used to enact virtually any measure at the president’s whim under the guise of economy and efficiency.” The ruling covers Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

The mainstream media finally reported on the toxicity and poor results of Dr. Fauci’s “standard of care” treatment, remdesivir. This prompted families to use the courts rather than watch their relatives needlessly die. Victories for patients are growing. A Chicago area judge recently ordered a hospital to “step aside” and allow a physician to administer ivermectin in an effort to save a dying patient. It worked.

People are tired of lies. When Google employees are signing a “manifesto” to fight the mandates, you know the seeds of revolt have sprouted.

*****

Marilyn Singleton graduated from Stanford and went on to UCSF Medical School. Then she attended UC Berkely Law School. See her at marilynsingletonmdjd.com.

This article was written on December 7, 2021, and is reproduced by permission from AAPS, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

75% Don’t Trust Social Media to Make Fair Content Moderation Decisions thumbnail

75% Don’t Trust Social Media to Make Fair Content Moderation Decisions

By David Kemp and Emily Ekins

81% of Republicans think Facebook and Twitter’s Trump ban violated the First Amendment, strong liberals are three times more likely than conservatives to report users on social media, 58% of Americans support a First Amendment content moderation standard.

A new Cato Institute/​YouGov national survey of 2,000 Americans finds that three-fourths of Americans don’t trust social media companies to make fair content moderation decisions. The survey, conducted in collaboration with YouGov, finds that nearly two-thirds (60%) would prefer social media companies provide users with greater choice and control over the content they see in their newsfeeds rather than do more to reduce all users’ exposure to offensive content or misinformation (40%). It also finds that a majority (63%) believe social media companies have too much influence over the outcome of national elections.

81% of Republicans Think Facebook and Twitter’s Trump Ban Violated the First Amendment

Republicans (81%) believe that Facebook and Twitter violated the First Amendment when they elected to ban Trump, while Democrats (89%) say that the First Amendment was not violated. While Facebook and Twitter are private platforms and their decision to ban Trump did not violate the First Amendment, Republicans’ perception that they did highlights their strong emotional response to the banning.

Part of this emotional response may be explained by Republicans’ concerns that if Trump can be banned, then they themselves are also more likely to have their account suspended by these companies. Republicans (38%) are nearly four times more likely than Democrats (10%) to say that Trump’s suspension makes them feel like their social media accounts are more likely to be suspended. A quarter (25%) of independents agree.

On the other hand, most Americans (55%) agree with the decisions made by Facebook and Twitter to ban former President Donald Trump from their platforms following the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol. But there is a large partisan split: 93% of Democrats and 54% of independents agree with the decision, whereas 85% of Republicans disagree.

Liberals Are Much More Likely than Conservatives to Report Users on Social Media

Strong liberals are nearly three times more likely than strong conservatives to say that they have reported another user to a social media company for sharing offensive content or false information. This behavior is highly tied to political ideology. Among social media users, 65% of strong liberals, 44% of moderate liberals, 32% of moderates, 21% of moderate conservatives, and 24% of strong conservatives have done this.

This strong ideological trend continues even if the results are constrained among those who use social media several times a day. Among very frequent social media users: strong liberals (72%) are about 2.5 times more likely than strong conservatives (30%) to have reported another person because of what they posted. Similarly, when it comes to blocking people, strong liberals (83%) are 30 points more likely than strong conservatives (53%) to have done this.

58% of Americans Support a First Amendment Content Moderation Standard

A majority of Americans (58%) say that social media sites should use the First Amendment as the standard for their content moderation decisions. Partisans disagree, with 82% of Republicans and 60% of independents supporting the use of the First Amendment and 64% of Democrats saying companies should set their own rules.

*****

Continue reading this article at CATO INSTITUTE.

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One Feminist’s Perspective On How The Transgender Agenda Harms Women & Girls

By Beverly Hallberg & Kara Dansky

The following is the transcript for the She Thinks podcast:

And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg. And I’m so excited about today’s guest. Kara Dansky joins us to share why she is furious with her party, the Democrat party, for pushing gender identity or what she refers to as gender insanity. Her premise is that the redefining of the meaning of the word sex and gender victimizes women and children. In our conversation, we’ll discuss things that often aren’t allowed to be said in mainstream media. We’ll get into how gender identity has seeped into our laws and the resulting implications, how parental rights are being ignored, and what it has meant for her to speak out on such a controversial issue.

Now to Kara Dansky. Kara Dansky is a feminist, attorney, Democrat, and public speaker. She serves as the chair of the committee on law and legislation for the global human rights campaign, the WHRC, and is president of the WHRC’s U.S. chapter. She has a 21-year background in criminal law and criminal justice policy. Having worked at the mayor’s office of criminal justice in New York, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Stanford Criminal Justice Center at Stanford Law School and the Society of Council Representing Accused Persons in Seattle. She’s also the author of the new book, “The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” Kara, thank you so much for joining us on She Thinks.

Kara Dansky:

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Beverly Hallberg:

There’s so much I want to get into on this topic, but I’d first like to start with why you decided to spend your days fighting for women in an area that is so controversial? Many people don’t dare to touch it. What made you brave enough to not just deal with this issue but put yourself out there in the spotlight?

Kara Dansky:

Thanks for the question. It doesn’t really feel like bravery to me to just stand up and say that women are female and men are male. But the answer to the question is that in 2014, I was talking with a friend and I’ll say, I’ve always considered myself to be a feminist. And as you mentioned in my bio, my career trajectory took a little bit of a different turn. I went into criminal justice, but I still considered myself a feminist. And in 2014, a very good friend of mine brought my attention to the danger of the so-called transgender agenda or gender identity, as we like to say, and I started paying attention and I looked into it and in 2015, I joined the organization Women’s Liberation Front. And in 2016, I joined the board of that organization. That year, Women’s Liberation Front or WLF sued the Obama Administration over a policy memo that the administration had put out. And I’ve been doing the work ever since.

Beverly Hallberg:

Now you talk a lot about how the redefining of the words sex and gender makes victims of women and girls. First of all, explain to us why the words matter so much and what the implications have been?

Kara Dansky:

So the words are absolutely critical. And so I will never use the word transgender without putting it in quotes. And I make the case in my book or at least I try to make the case. I don’t know how well I do it but I make the case that the word transgender was simply invented. And the reason it was invented is that it comes from so-called queer theory, which is an academic theory that essentially obscures the meanings of words that point to material reality. But if the queer theorists had tried to sell Americans on the idea that sex isn’t real, it wouldn’t have worked. Americans know how babies are made. We all know the basic facts of biology. And so they had to make up a word. And the word that they made up is transgender.

Feminist Janice Raymond wrote a book in 1979 called “The Transsexual Empire,” which predicted all of this. And she re-produced it in 1994 with an introduction that talks about the invention of the word transgender and how it’s going to harm women and girls in particular, though we need to be clear, it harms everybody. The abolition of sex harms everybody. We can talk a little bit about that. But I just refuse to use the language of the opposition. And I think it’s really important that feminists and conservatives who are in this battle for material reality and of the right to privacy and safety of women and girls to not use the language of the opposition ever, I think that’s absolutely critical.

Beverly Hallberg:

And so let’s talk about what these words, where they have seeped into. So we may say, it’s fine if people want to use these words on their own, but we are talking about word choice. You were mentioning the Obama administration that has seeped into executive orders, how government agencies work, government departments, that is in pieces of legislation, especially under the Biden administration. Is there a concerted effort to try to change the meaning of words within legislation and bills that come to Capitol Hill?

Kara Dansky:

Literally yes. So, a little bit of history on this, in 2004, the United Kingdom enacted a new law called the Gender Recognition Act. And what that did was provide a legal mechanism for people who underwent a certain amount of hormone change and surgical change to get what in the UK is called a gender recognition certificate. Fast forward to today and we have the United States Congress inserting new language to literally redefine the word sex. So for example, in the Violence Against Women Act, I think it was 2013, Congress redefined the word sex to include the words “gender identity,” which are essentially just made-up words that have no coherent definition. They did it again this year in the Infrastructure Bill and they are seeking to do it in the so-called Equality Act, which would literally redefine the word sex in civil rights law to include things like gender identity, even though the definition of gender identity in the Equality Act is completely vague and incomprehensible.

So that’s what’s happening in Congress. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration for the first six months or so of this year, literally ordered federal agencies to redefine sex to include gender identity throughout federal administrative law. Those orders are the subject of a lawsuit that was filed by 20 states and in which my organization, the Women’s Human Rights Campaign’s U.S. chapter, has filed a brief arguing that in fact, the complete redefinition of the word sex to include gender identity violates numerous provisions of the U.S. Constitution, federal law and several provisions of state law.

Beverly Hallberg:

And what has really surprised me when I think about the women’s movement, feminism, often people think about the decades-long work to try to get women thought of as equal in the workplace. There are a lot of things that we could think of. I even know today, myself as a small business owner, I’m thankful for the strides that women made before me, so that I could be where I am today. And then when we see where it’s gone, it’s now to the point where people are saying somebody who is a biological man, that if he identifies as a woman, then he can break the glass ceiling for women. It’s really just shocking whether it’s in sports or in careers, how they lift up biological men as women and say that this is shattering the glass ceiling. I find that offensive, do most women find that offensive?

Kara Dansky:

I think so, certainly, feminists do. Literally, yesterday was the anniversary of a massacre of 14 women at a school in Montreal and a Canadian news program decided to acknowledge the anniversary of that massacre. And we need to be clear a man murdered 15 young women because they were women, several decades ago. And yesterday was the anniversary and a Canadian broadcasting corporation decided to acknowledge that anniversary by having a man who identifies as a woman speak on their behalf. And it’s just grotesque.

Beverly Hallberg:

Well, you talk about the abolition of sex, it’s the name of your book. When we hear people want to use the terminology “gender identity,” it’s usually under the auspices that they’re trying to prevent discrimination, that we don’t want to discriminate, we want everybody to feel welcome and we want to be inclusive. Tell us how dangerous it is to abolish sex.

Kara Dansky:

Well, part of the problem here is that really across the political aisle, it seems to have been generally accepted that the phrase “transgender people” or “transgender athletes” or “transgender students,” that all of these words describe a coherent category of people for whom sex is irrelevant. That’s not true. And if we’re going to win the battle to fight for the right to privacy and safety of women and girls, we have to be very clear about that. So one implication that I think is not well understood is the phenomenon that we are literally seeing playing out today in prisons in the United States is that convicted rapists and murderers who are men are being housed in women’s prisons. A lot of people know that this is happening in California thanks to the Women’s Liberation Front for filing a lawsuit, challenging the law that allows that, mandates that. It’s also happening in Washington State but it’s also happening across the country.

And most Americans are kept in the dark about this because the media will not talk about it. So again, thank you for allowing me to talk about it here. Something else that I think most Americans just don’t understand because they don’t have a way to know this, is that the FBI tracks crime statistics by sex. And to the best of my knowledge the latest data available is from 2020, and it tracks crime according to male and female. And of course, as we all know, the overwhelming majority of violent and sex crime is committed by men against women. If we’re not allowed to acknowledge the reality of biological sex, we can’t talk honestly about the phenomenon of male violence against women. And that’s really, really dangerous.

Beverly Hallberg:

What do you say then — let’s take a specific example or a hypothetical example about a young biological boy, let’s say 13, 14 years old, feels that he is a woman, is bullied in the men’s locker room and wants to be able to use the females’ locker room because that is how he identifies. What do you do with these individual cases where somebody does feel bullied? Because these are the stories we often hear as the reason we need to change. Even the way locker rooms and schools deal with their policies.

Kara Dansky:

This is not a girls’ problem. If boys are bullying stereotypically effeminate men, young men, if boys are bullying gay boys, if boys are bullying other boys who like to wear stereotypically feminine clothing, then that’s a problem for the boys to solve. They need to stop doing that. They need to stop bullying young homosexual boys. They need to stop bullying boys who adopt stereotypically feminine characteristics and just accept these boys for who they are. But the solution is not to subject girls to having boys in intimate spaces. We know, for example, in Loudoun County, Virginia, the school district adopted a policy of allowing young boys into girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

And a young girl was sexually assaulted in a bathroom in a high school in Loudoun County, Virginia. And there seems to have been a concerted effort on the part of the school district to cover that up in order to justify its policy of allowing boys, in this particular instance, the boy wore a skirt, and he was allowed access to the girls’ bathroom on that basis. And he has been convicted of sexually assaulting a girl. The answer is not to allow these young men into girls’ spaces. The answer is to persuade boys to stop bullying them.

Beverly Hallberg:

And when it comes to young people and we think about education, it’s also what they’re being taught, the curriculum, trying to encourage teachers. There have been reports of teachers or counselors at schools trying to encourage young people to embrace a gender identity that is different from their biological sex. And also leaving parents out. The parental rights are not part of even having this discussion with their children. There’s also the cult, as we have seen. Abigail Shrier has written about this, about young girls wanting to or identifying as the opposite sex. So there seems to be almost a way for young girls to become popular if they talk about themselves as being a boy versus their biological sex. So do you see that there is an agenda at schools within the schooling system, education system, to try to encourage young people to identify as something else?

Kara Dansky:

Absolutely. And it’s deliberate. And we know this because there’s documentation of the deliberate nature of this industry, as I describe in the book, to indoctrinate children, to confuse them into thinking that there’s some kind of identity that is unrelated to their actual sex. We need to understand that there is a tremendous amount of money behind this movement to persuade young people to disassociate from their bodies. This is all documented for example, in Jennifer Bilek’s blog, the 11th Hour Blog, she tracks the industry. She has done an incredible job of investigative journalism in understanding the power and the money behind this movement.

I want to get to your question about Abigail Shrier’s book but first I just want to make very clear, as you alluded to earlier, there seems to be an assumption that the movement to abolish sex is a bottom-up, grassroots movement to secure civil rights for a defined category of people. That is not what’s going on here. This is a very top down, top heavy, heavily funded industry that is pushing this into our schools, into our boardrooms, into our living rooms. It is capturing almost all aspects of American society. It’s extreme-

Beverly Hallberg:

Yeah, it’s damaging young people in the process. I just wanted to ask you this question about the fallout of this, there is a woman, 23 years old, who’s been very brave in talking about her story of taking hormone treatments, testosterone in her teens. It was encouraged by people in her school. And she’s now talking about the harms of that. Are we hearing more stories from young women talking about what the harms have been, whether it has been through different pills, medicines they took, or even those who did go as far as to have surgery?

Kara Dansky:

Just curious, are we talking about Keira Bell?

Beverly Hallberg:

We are not. It’s someone else, I’m trying to remember her name offhand, but she started to become outspoken on this.

Kara Dansky:

Yeah, we are definitely hearing more and more. To its credit, I want to give 60 Minutes credit for having a segment that did cover some stories of young people who did go through hormonal and surgical procedures and came to regret it. We’re hearing more and more stories about this. I have personally spoken with a young woman who contacted me for help because she was having trouble at her place of employment. And she had thought she was a boy. She had a double mastectomy and she regretted it. And we need to talk about how heartbreaking this is, especially for girls, and all credit to Abigail Shrier for writing about the phenomenon. It’s very difficult in many ways to be a teenage girl, to start developing, to feel the physical discomfort that comes with that, to feel the discomfort of all of a sudden men starting to pay more attention to our bodies.

It can be a very difficult adjustment and it’s especially hard now because it was hard when I was growing up but today with the total onslaught of pornography, we’re seeing boys watching pornography at younger and younger ages. Of course, it’s hard to be a girl. Of course it’s easier in many ways to be a boy. And it’s understandable why some young women would want to find their way out of being hypersexualized in a society that hypersexualizes young women. But we have to also understand that all of these children, girls and boys both, are receiving hormones that are highly likely to result in permanent sterilization and potential lethality. These are very dangerous drugs that children are being permitted to take and young people, there’s a reason that we don’t allow young people to buy cigarettes or alcohol or vote or drive.

And even though in our society, reasonable people can disagree about what age it’s appropriate to allow children to buy cigarettes or drive, we can have those policy conversations, but if we’re going to limit the choices that young people can make, why on earth would we allow children to make the decision to permanently sterilize themselves? It’s horrible. And yes, the answer to your question is more and more young people are coming to regret their decision. They are also coming to understand, the vast majority of them understand, that what they were dealing with was sexuality and that they were same-sex attracted. And they were struggling with realizing that they were same-sex attracted. And so they made decisions to identify out of their actual sex.

Beverly Hallberg:

I think so much as we start to uncover more and more, as you were saying, the money, the power behind this, the agenda behind this, we find that so much about this is to cover up what they’re really trying to do. So the less that people know, the better it is for them to be able to move forward with their agenda. One area where I think it’s been hard for the transgender movement to gain traction, or at least there has been pushback, has been in the area of women’s sports. For example, there is a recent story that was widely circulated this past week, where a biological boy who identifies as female, name is Lia Thomas, 22-year-old transgender swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, has been shattering women’s records, no surprise, because Lia is a biological man. Do you find in the area of women’s sports that this is where people can really look at what the agenda is and say, “Hey, this isn’t fair. This is absolutely not fair.” Do you find traction in this area for those who view this as we do?

Kara Dansky:

Yes, and shoutout to my friend Beth Stelzer at an organization that she founded called Save Women’s Sports. She’s done a tremendous amount of work in helping lawmakers, especially at the state level, but also at the federal level, succeed in getting legislation passed to protect women’s sports for women. I just want to pause for a second and ask what you mean in your question, you used the phrase, “transgender swimmer,” that’s the kind of language I’m trying to get away from.

Beverly Hallberg:

No, teach me, teach all of us. That’s helpful.

Kara Dansky:

Yeah, I really… So, as you said in the introduction, I’m a feminist, I’m a lifelong Democrat. And I have been spending a lot of time, or the past couple years, working across the political aisle because I think this is very important. I think that this should not be a partisan issue and the media has done a tremendous job of framing it as a partisan issue. And I’m very frustrated with most media outlets for doing that. But one of my frustrations is that the Republicans, that I am very happy to work with, often use phrases like transgender athletes or transgender swimmer or transgender students. That’s hurting us. It’s hurting the movement to push back against gender identity, using their language makes it much more difficult for us to gain ground in the movement to push back against the enshrinement of gender identity in the law. So I appreciate you letting me say that.

Beverly Hallberg:

Yeah. So out of curiosity then, is the correct thing that you would always encourage people to say in that specific example would be biological boy, just say a boy?

Kara Dansky:

Boy. Yeah.

Beverly Hallberg:

That makes sense. That makes sense. And so I’m glad you brought up the media. I wanted to ask you just a little bit about what it has been like for you as a Democrat, talking about these issues. I read your piece that you had published in the Federalist, it was entitled “Democrats Like Me are Furious with Our Party for Pushing Gender Insanity.” So first of all, can I ask you why as a Democrat, you chose to submit your piece to a conservative outlet, would more left-leaning outlets not publish your opinion?

Kara Dansky:

Absolutely not. So I mentioned the 2016 lawsuit that WLF filed against the Obama Administration, Tucker Carlson invited WLF to appear on his show. And I was happy to do it. That happened in early 2017. I’ve been on the show several times since. I was very grateful to the Federalist for publishing that piece. I was very grateful to the New York Post recently for publishing another piece. Feminists like me, who publish in conservative media, get a lot of pushback for it. We get in trouble with a lot of radical feminists who don’t think we ought to be doing that, but we have a story to tell.

And we’re grateful to the outlets such as yourself, who are willing to give us a platform to tell our story. What a lot of Republicans, I think, do not know because there’s no way for you to know this, is there are countless Democrats, rank and file Democrats all over the country who are furious at our party leadership for what they’re doing. You have a lot of allies in a lot of rank-and-file Democratic communities, but the reason you don’t know that is because the media won’t say it.

Beverly Hallberg:

Final question I have for you before, well, actually our final, final question will be about your book but the final question I have for you before we get to that, is something that we often hear. And this goes back to the language and the words that we use, we often hear people using different pronouns than the biological sex of a person. So if you, let’s take that athlete, the male athlete competing against women, do you ever use the pronoun “she” for a biological boy or even if one, let’s say, you could take Caitlyn Jenner, do you refer to Caitlyn Jenner as a he or a she?

Kara Dansky:

“He,” of course, because he is. But we should say there are efforts around the world to actually criminalize the use of accurate sex pronouns. And it’ll be very interesting to see whether our first amendment protects us in a way, for example, that Canadian law does not protect Canadians. There’s an effort right now to make the use of accurate sex pronouns a hate crime. And it’s also happening in the UK. It’s happening in Scotland. It’s happening in a lot of places. It may not happen here. Our first amendment may protect us from that but we’ll see. The district attorney of San Francisco has recently issued an order, all of the staff in his office are now required to use so-called preferred pronouns in court, which could potentially mean that a rape victim might be required to refer to a male alleged rapist as “she” on the witness stand, which I would argue would constitute perjury.

But we haven’t seen any of this play out quite yet in the legal system, but it’ll be very interesting to watch. There is one case in the Sixth Circuit coming out of Ohio, where a professor refused to use so-called preferred pronouns. He was disciplined by the public university, his employer, but he was vindicated in court at the appellate level. So that’s a good sign that our first amendment might protect us in a way that, for example, Canadians aren’t protected.

Beverly Hallberg:

Final question for you. You tell us about your book. I know we’ve talked about it here but who is the book for? What can people expect if they read it?

Kara Dansky:

So the book is called “The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” And I wrote it really for average rank and file, across-the-political-aisle Americans who either might be very confused about what is going on here. And it’s completely legitimate to be confused about what is going on, on topics of sex and gender because there’s a deliberate effort to confuse us or Americans who see what’s going on and want to speak out about it but may not quite feel comfortable doing so for the reasons you laid out in your introduction. These topics can be hard to talk about but it’s not impossible. And I really want Americans to have the tools to talk with one another. If you’re a Republican talk with other Republicans, embolden other Republicans to speak out about this using accurate language. If you’re a Democrat and you agree with me but you’re scared to speak out, I understand that, that’s very understandable but we’ve got to do it if we’re going to make headway here.

Beverly Hallberg:

Well, we thank you for your bravery. Kara Dansky, author of “The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” We so appreciate you joining us on She Thinks today.

Kara Dansky:

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

*****

This interview was conducted on December 10, 2021, and the transcript was reproduced with permission from  The Independent Women’s Forum.

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How Do the Feds Get Away with That?

By George Leef

The tentacles of federal power over the states, localities and private institutions have been reaching further and further. Consider, for example, a case involving a small Christian school, the College of the Ozarks.

The college adheres to a strict biblical code of morality and among its requirements is that men and women live in separate dorms. That would never have been a problem until recently, with the advent of the notion of “gender fluidity,” whereby a person who is biologically male might “identify” as female or vice versa. Once the idea that such individuals are entitled to compel others to accommodate their personal conceptions took hold among leftists, it was inevitable that the government would find ways to punish those who “discriminated” against them. College of the Ozarks did so with its housing policy.

Now, you can scrutinize the US Constitution all day long and you won’t find anything saying that Congress has the power to dictate to colleges what their housing policy must be. In fact, you won’t find any reference to education at all. Education was among a great many matters that the Tenth Amendment declared were “for the states or the people, respectively.”

Nevertheless, the federal Department of Education has told College of the Ozarks that it must drop its housing policy or else. Or else what? Lose eligibility for federal student aid money, that’s what. The school sued in federal court to have the Department’s order invalidated, but the judge ruled against it. (For the details, consult this piece that I wrote about the case.)

Where does the Constitution empower bureaucrats in Washington, DC to demand that every college must conform its housing policy to their ideas of what’s right? Can’t we have schools that are different on that?

We certainly should. A “gender fluid” student who doesn’t want to be treated according to traditional sexual binary concepts can attend a college that is accommodating. There is no harm at all in leaving colleges free to set their own rules—but officious federal bureaucrats like to throw their power around.

Back to the legalities. If the Constitution doesn’t give Congress authority over colleges, how can a bureaucracy use the threat of loss of federal money as a cudgel to make them obey it?

That is the point of a new book by Philip Hamburger, a professor at Columbia Law School, Purchasing Submission. He observes that to a greater and greater extent, federal bureaucrats use their money, benefits, and sheer power to force state and local governments as well as non-governmental entities like College of the Ozarks to submit to them.

Hamburger has written previously about the unconstitutional spread of federal power, in his book Is Administrative Law Unlawful? In it, he argued that the vast administrative state—the “fourth branch” of government—is inconsistent with the Framers’ concept of good governance. It harkens back to the kinds of star chamber proceedings in England that the drafters of our Constitution wanted to prevent. The people were only supposed to have to obey laws enacted by their elected representatives and face punishments by properly constituted courts of law, but “administrative law” violates both of those precepts.

In Purchasing Submission, Hamburger shows that the problem of unconstitutional control goes far beyond the visible administrative state, which has to comply with statutes and is at least somewhat subject to judicial oversight. When federal bureaucrats dangle money in front of state and local governments, or private entities, in exchange for their compliance with conditions that they would have no power to impose directly, they are subverting our constitutional order. Hamburger calls it a “transactional mode of control,” and declares, “It is a strange mode of governance, in which Americans sell their constitutional freedoms—including their self-governance, due process, and speech—for a mess of pottage.”

The book abounds in examples that show how far the disease of control by unelected bureaucrats has progressed.

Consider the way federal highway funding has been used to pressure the states into changing their legal drinking ages, clearly a matter for them under the Tenth Amendment. But federal bureaucrats thought it would be good if all states had a drinking age of 21, and threatened to withhold money from any that didn’t go along. South Dakota sued, arguing that the feds had no authority to demand that it comply. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court sided with the federal government, weakly saying that while the drinking age was properly a state concern, the condition imposed was germane.

The better argument was expressed by Justice O’Connor in dissent. She wrote that while the government is entitled to insist that the states build highways that are safe, it is not entitled to demand that they “change regulations in other areas of the state’s social and economic life.”

Returning to higher education, the feds have used eligibility for federal money to make college officials adopt speech restrictions and one-sided procedures for the adjudication of sexual harassment allegations. In K-12, receipt of federal No Child Left Behind funding was conditioned upon states adopting federally mandated curricula.

Nor is money always the bait when the government wants to make unconstitutional dictates. Licenses can accomplish the same thing. The FCC insists that broadcasters must comply with its edicts if they want to be able to continue to broadcast. And the tax code is also useful; churches and charities have to relinquish some of their First Amendment rights if they want donations to remain tax-deductible.

Furthermore, Hamburger points out, federal agencies often use their already constitutionally dubious power as leverage to expand their power into blatantly unconstitutional domains. They do so by threats, letting regulated parties know that if they should challenge agency actions, they’ll face retribution. It’s sheer extortion. They usually get away with it.

This new mode of governance not only means that Americans have to obey rules that were not made by their elected representatives, but also that they will be judged by administrative tribunals rather than proper courts. The Founders’ vision for the nation has been badly subverted. The problem is that the courts have been derelict in dealing with this, often permitting agencies to continue extending their power in ways that undermine freedom and federalism.

Purchasing Submission is a brilliant lawyerly attack on a grave and ongoing problem. Hamburger’s thoughtful analysis will no doubt help future litigants prepare their strongest cases against it. If we are ever to get back to constitutional government in the US, we must absorb the lessons of this book.

*****

This article was published on December 12, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from AIER,  American Institute for Economic Research.

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No Pain Free Way Out

By Ken Veit

The average person does not understand and could care less about Fed policy, Government budget deficits, and the National Debt. All he wants to know about “finance” is how much he earns and how much he has to spend to maintain his lifestyle.

Be that as it may, these big picture items have a major impact on our lives.

When the Government spends more money than it takes in, that requires the overspending to be financed by borrowing. When the Government borrows, it adds to the National Debt. The government borrows by issuing interest-paying bonds. Someone has to buy those bonds. As the National Debt grows, buying the Treasury’s bonds is seen as riskier for the investor. Would you rather borrow from someone heavily in debt or from someone with less debt?

In order to entice reluctant potential bond buyers, the seller has to raise interest rates.

However, the Government does not want to have to raise interest rates, because it means increasing its cash outlays, even more, compounding its deficit problems.

What has been happening is that the Federal Reserve (the Fed) has been buying government bonds that the public does not want. If this strikes you as just the left-hand selling to the right-hand, you are correct.

Most of the ever-increasing Government deficit is currently financed by the Fed buying the Treasury’s bonds. A lot of this was done under various crisis programs called “Q.E.” (Quantitative Easing), which were intended to be temporary in order to spur public spending and avert a recession. The Fed would now like to sell some of those bonds in the private market, but since those bonds were issued with low-interest rates, there is not much demand for them other than a discounted price. That means selling at a loss.

What happens to any losses suffered by the Fed? Answer: They are transferred to the Treasury. (Remember the part about the left hand and the right hand?). Losses transferred to the Treasury increase the National Debt still more.

The Fed also is involved with controlling interest rates. Although it does not set all interest rates, its actions have an enormous impact. At the moment, a 30-year Government bond pays an interest rate of less than 2%. With inflation running at over 6%, that means an investor buying these bonds gets a real rate of return of around minus 4%. It should not be hard to understand why investors don’t want to buy Government bonds currently.

To counter this reluctance, the Fed wants to restore interest rates to a normal level. They have kept interest rates low for a long time to counter various crises over more than a decade. It is time to get things back to some sort of “normalcy”. Otherwise, the problem of financing the Government’s enormous debt will only get worse, eventually causing inflation to spiral out of control. This happens because a Government bond is “money”, and when money loses value, that is the definition of inflation.

Wait a minute! There must be other solutions. Government spending could be reduced. Lots of luck on that one! Two-thirds of the economy is powered by consumer spending. A large amount of that spending is supported by “transfer payments”, which means Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment compensation, and other welfare payments. Transfer payments are part of Government spending.

Taxes could be raised. Unfortunately, it would take increases that are politically unacceptable. Even if virtually all of the wealth of the billionaire class were confiscated by taxation, it would only make a dent in the problem. Nearly half the population already pays no income tax, and Social Security and Medicare taxes are inarguably insufficient at current levels. To massively increase taxes on the “hard-working” middle class would cause a revolution.

We could default on the Debt, which is what many other countries have done in the past. They were not all poor countries. Countries like France and Spain, which were at one time the most powerful in the world, defaulted on their debts, costing them their pre-eminence.

Default is not an option for the United States. It would lead to the collapse of much of the world’s economy since economics is now a global issue.  We issue the “reserve” currency of the world, held globally in bond form.  A US default would trigger a worldwide financial panic.

The Fed is trying to navigate a fine line. They realize that they cannot permanently tolerate a bond market that offers negative returns. That means higher interest rates. They would like to reduce their bond holdings before they raise rates, in order to keep their value from plummeting. They also understand that raising interest rates too fast will crash the stock market since stock prices intrinsically reflect the discounted present value of future earnings. Discounting recognizes that the current value of profits earned in future years is not worth as much today as are current earnings.

More spending that is not properly funded (i.e., using the phony accounting employed by both Parties to sell their programs to an unsophisticated public) is only going to exacerbate the problems.

I was once told by my Congressman that the lack of financial understanding by members of Congress is appalling.

The hope is that the problems will disappear if the economy grows enough, and that justifies still more Government spending to stimulate growth. That would be fine if the evidence did not show that increased levels of government debt have diminishing returns. In other words, each level of new excess spending produces less and less growth over time. Wishing that was not the case does not make it so.

The Fed will likely adopt a gradual approach to reducing their bond-buying and the raising of interest rates in order to avoid spooking the financial markets. (Markets can handle anything except sudden changes in any direction of anything affecting them.) Their difficulty is doing it if inflation gets too high for too long. In that case, public and political pressure to “do something” will cause them to “go big” and in so doing crash the markets.

Of course, those on the Left would cut military spending in order to free up funds for their favorite projects. This would be a temporary solution until China attacks Taiwan, Russia attacks Ukraine, or Iran starts bombing Israel. The difficulty with being the world’s hegemon in a globally connected world is that we cannot simply sit back and say that whatever happens in the world is of no concern to us. Had we done that in WWII, might we all be speaking German today?

Another approach that might be employed that has not been suggested so far is to mandate that pension funds and insurance companies buy a certain percentage of Government bonds. That is not unusual in a number of countries. Of course, it means that returns on those assets are lower since Government bonds have lower percentage returns than private investments, but that disguises the problems from a politician’s point of view since the negative impact is spread over a much larger base. Of course, most pension funds are extremely underfunded today and are struggling to earn enough to enable them to meet their current obligations.

There are those who say, “To hell with financial markets. They only benefit the rich people.” However, that ignores the majority of people with 401(k) or other pension plans or savings that depend on investment performance for retirement security, as does Social Security itself. If financial markets plummet, the rich will find a way to protect themselves; the rest of us will suffer.

This budgetary conundrum sounds negative because there appear to be no pain-free choices.  There must be other solutions that shift the pain to someone else or make it disappear in a magical cloud.

Unfortunately, the only real solutions are a much more prosperous economy that generates the revenue and taxes to support what we want, or else we have to reduce our perceived needs to the level of our ability to pay.

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Radical Chic 52 Years Later

By Craig J. Cantoni

Yesteryear’s radical chic morphed into today’s wokeness and virtue signaling.

Fifty-two years ago New York Magazine published “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” by Tom Wolfe. With his outstanding satirical talent and observational skills, Wolfe described the bizarre scene at a cocktail party at a 13-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue, the home of Felicia and Leonard Bernstein, the famous symphony conductor.

It was a fundraising event to raise money for the defense of 21 Black Panthers who were arrested on a charge of conspiring to blow up five New York department stores, New Haven Railroad facilities, a police station, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. In attendance were 90 people, including the upper-crust of high society, celebrities, and a few media personalities, including Barbara Walters, the famous journalist of the time. Black Panthers were honored guests.

Radical chic was the ultimate in progressive hypocrisy, naiveté, foolishness, and self-immolation. It predated the term “limousine liberal,” which in turn predated today’s wokeness and virtue signaling. As with its later incarnations, radical chic did little if anything to solve root problems in African-American communities or society in general.

Wolfe’s essay was as long as a novella, about 25 pages. It can be found in its entirety here. If you don’t have the time or interest in reading it, this commentary gives the highlights and relates them to today’s fatuous displays of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and critical race theory.

The photos that accompany the essay are priceless. Rich, pampered, bejeweled white elites with perfectly coiffed hair and wearing haute couture can be seen posing and mingling with the Panthers.

Wolfe described the Panthers as wearing “tight pants, the tight black turtlenecks, the leather coats, Cuban shades, Afros. But real Afros, not the ones that have been shaped and trimmed like a topiary hedge and sprayed until they have a sheen like acrylic wall-to-wall—but like funky, natural, scraggly . . . wild . . .”

His description of the party’s hors d’oeuvres is delicious:

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice. Little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts. Very tasty. Very subtle. It’s the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the dour savor of the cheese that is so nice, so subtle. Wonder what the Black Panthers eat here on the hors d’oeuvre trail? Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels wrapped in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq hardi, all of which are at this moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons . . .

Recognizing that it would be a faux pas for the Panthers to be served by blacks, the Bernsteins had retained white Latins as servers (and servants).

Speaking about the contradictions between the Upper East Side denizens and the Panthers, Wolfe wrote, “It is like the delicious shudder you get when you try to force the prongs of two horseshoe magnets together . . . them and us . . .”

One of the lawyers for the Panther 21 spoke to the attendees about the injustices of the justice system, including the bail system, which had placed “a preposterous” bail of $100,000 on each of the 21, “which has in effect denied them the right to bail.”

Clamor for bail reform continues today and has been implemented in some jurisdictions. Some say it has resulted in an increase in crime.

As with the killing of George Floyd, the killing of a black man in 1969 had precipitated calls for police reform. The man was Fred Hampton, the leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, who was fatally shot in a pre-dawn raid at his apartment by the Chicago Police Department.

However, there weren’t calls for defunding the police back then, as there were after the killing of George Floyd, probably because Hampton’s death wasn’t captured on video.

Speaking of defunding the police, present-day students at Columbia University, across town from the locale of the Bernstein cocktail party, had called for cutbacks in campus police after the Floyd tragedy. Due to a subsequent rise in crime at the university, students are now demanding an increased police presence.

At the time of Wolfe’s essay in 1970, the opposite of defunding the police had occurred. Law and order had become the mantra, driven in part by the infamous 1969 shootout between cops and Black Panthers in L.A., a shootout that resulted in the militarization of the police, according to some historians. That shootout had followed a shootout between cops and Panthers in Oakland, as well as the Panthers targeting cops for execution. There were also shootouts between rival black revolutionary groups.

And so the political pendulum has gone, swinging as wildly and dangerously as the pendulum in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Many present-day politicians who called for defunding the police in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement had called for beefing up the police earlier in their careers. Joe Biden was one of them.

In a precursor to the teaching of critical race theory in schools today—a theory that says that whites and their institutions are inherently racist—the Panthers had opened Liberation Schools. While the schools taught students traditional courses in English, math, and science, their primary mission was to instill revolutionary consciousness by focusing on issues of class and institutional racism.

Anyway, back to the cocktail party.

A Panther leader named Cox addressed the attendees, explaining why the Panthers resort to violence: “As our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, says, ‘Any unarmed people are slaves or are slaves in the real meaning of the word’ . . . We recognize that this country is the most oppressive country in the world, maybe in the history of the world.”

At the same time, the Panther said that the group believes in Maoism. Wolfe didn’t remark on the contradiction of calling the U.S. oppressive but embracing an oppressive ideology that killed tens of millions of people. This is similar to today’s neo-Marxists who believe that the U.S. is an evil, oppressive empire, as if it would be the epitome of equality, social justice, and racial harmony if they ran things.

The Panther went on to say that there wasn’t anyone in the room who wouldn’t defend themselves and their family if someone broke into their house in the middle of the night to murder them. To which Wolfe wrote what must’ve gone through the minds of the white women in attendance:

. . . and every woman in the room thinks of her husband . . . with his cocoa-butter jowls and Dior Men’s Boutique pajamas . . . ducking into the bathroom and locking the door and turning the shower on, so he can say later that he didn’t hear a thing.

According to Wolfe, one Park Avenue matron was thrown into Radical Chic confusion by calls from the speaker for burning down buildings and other violence. She said, “He’s a magnificent man, but suppose some simple-minded schmucks take all that business about burning down buildings seriously?”

The Panther named Cox continued with a thinly-veiled anti-Semitic reference by mentioning that “the merchants in the black community who are the exploiters of the black community” should be giving donations. To which Wolfe wrote his reaction:

For God’s sake, Cox, don’t open that can of worms. Even in this bunch of upholstered skulls there are people who can figure out just who those merchants are, what group, and just how they are asked for donations, and we’ve been free of that little issue all evening, man—don’t bring out that ball-breaker.

Later in his essay, Wolfe wrote the following about the Panthers’ view of Jews:

The June, 1967, issue of another Panther publication, Black Power, had carried a poem entitled “Jew-Land,” which said:

Jew-Land, On a summer afternoon

Really, Couldn’t kill the Jews too soon,

Now dig. The Jews have stolen our bread

Their filthy women tricked our men into bed

So I won’t rest until the Jews are dead . . .

In Jew-Land, Don’t be a Tom on Israel’s side

Really, Cause that’s where Christ was crucified

One of the attendees, Otto Preminger, the famous Austro-Hungarian-born movie director, began disagreeing with the Panther speaker on his claim that the U.S. was oppressive. “You said zis is de most repressive country in de world. I don’t beleef zat . . . Do you mean dat zis government is more repressive zan de government of Nigeria?”

Lenny Bernstein then questioned the speaker on his threat that if white businessmen don’t give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from them and placed in the community, with the people. They had this exchange:

Lenny says: “How? I dig it! But How?

“You can’t blueprint the future,” says Cox [the Panther].

“You mean you’re just going to wing it?” says Lenny.

“Like . . . this is what we want, man,” says Cox, we want the same thing as you, we want peace. We want to come home at night and be with the family . . . and turn on the TV . . . and smoke a little weed . . . you know? . . . and get a little high . . . you dig? . . . and we’d like to get into that bag, like anybody else. But we can’t do that . . . see . . . because if they send in the pigs to rip us off and brutalize our families, then we have to fight.”

The journalist Barbara Walters later jumps in:

“I’m talking as a white woman who has a white husband, who is a capitalist, or an agent of capitalists, and I am, too, and I want to know if you are to have your freedom, does that mean we have to go?

Cox says, “. . . a lot of young white people are beginning to understand about oppression. They’re part of the petty bourgeoisie. It’s a different class from the black community, but there’s a common oppressor. They’re protesting about individual freedoms, to have their music and smoke weed and have sex. These are individual freedoms but they are beginning to understand.”

One of the Panther wives then says to Walters, “You sound like you’re afraid.” “

“I’m not afraid of you,” Barbara Walters says to her, “but maybe I am about the idea of the death of my children.”

Wolfe would go on to skewer the nouveau riche for their nostalgie de la boue, a nineteenth-century French term that means “nostalgia for the mud.” He explained that new arrivals to the upper class have always had two way of certifying their superiority over the hated middle class. “They can take on the trapping of aristocracy, such as grand architecture, servants, parterre boxes and high protocol; and they can indulge in the gauche thrill of taking on certain styles of the lower orders. The two are by no means mutually exclusive; in fact they are always used in combination.”

He continued:

During the 1960s in New York nostalgie de la boue took the form of the vogue of rock music, the twist-frug genre of dances, Pop Art, Camp, the courting of pet primitives such as the Rolling Stones and Jose Torres, and innumerable dress fashions summed up in the recurrent image of the wealthy young man with his turtleneck jersey meeting his muttonchops at mid-jowl, a la the 1962 Sixth Avenue Automat bohemian, bidding good night to the aging doorman dressed in the mode of an 1870 Austrian army colonel.

One can only imagine what he’d write today about not only the upper crust but also the highly paid knowledge workers and techies whose wannabe hipster image can be seen in their scraggly beards, tattoos, and hair that looks like a Medusa Head.

Wolfe explained why the upper-crust had weekend places away from the city: to get away in the summer from the hoi polloi:

When one thinks of being trapped in New York Saturday after Saturday in July or August, doomed to be part of those fantastically dowdy herds roaming past Bonwit’s and Tiffany’s at dead noon the sandstone sun-broil, 92 degrees, daddies from Long Island in balloon-seat Bermuda shorts bought at the Times Square Store in Oceanside and fat mommies with white belled pants stretching over their lower bellies and crinkling up in the crotch like some kind of Dacron-polyester labia—well, anyway, then one truly feels the need to obey at least the minimal rules of New York society. One really does.

According to Wolfe, one rule of nostalgie de la boue is that the “styles of romantic, raw-vital, Low Rent primitives” are good. Conversely, the “middle class, whether black or white, is bad.” To point out the hypocrisy of those who think this way, he spoke of their feigned affection for the Panthers, Latin grape workers, and Native Americans, using terms that would get him cancelled today and won’t be repeated by me. He then pointed out something that often applies today to those who claim solidarity with the disadvantaged but keep their distance from them:

At the outset, at least, all three groups had something else to recommend them as well: they were headquartered 3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan, in places like Delano (the grape workers), Oakland (the Panthers), and Arizona and New Mexico (the Indians). There weren’t likely to become too much . . . underfoot, as it were.

Near the end of his essay, Wolfe quoted an editorial that the New York Times ran after the party. An excerpt:

. . . the group therapy plus fund-raising soiree at the home of Leonard Bernstein, as reported in this newspaper yesterday, represent the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike. It might be dismissed as guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness, except for its impact on those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice. It mocked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday was solemnly observed throughout the nation yesterday.

Black Panthers on a Park Avenue pedestal create one more distortion of the Negro image. Responsible black leadership is not likely to cheer as the Beautiful People create a new myth that Black Panther is beautiful.

The same could be said about much of today’s wokeness, virtue signaling, and critical race theory, but the New York Times isn’t about to say it.

The Iran Nuclear Deal: Biden Administration’s Fatal Mistakes

By Majid Rafizadeh

The Biden administration, in an attempt to revive the nuclear deal, is continuing to forge ahead by negotiating with the government of Ebrahim Raisi, known — for his crimes against humanity and his involvement in a massacre of nearly 30,000 political prisoners — as the “Butcher of Tehran.”

First of all, the Biden administration’s objective is not to halt Iran’s deeply flawed nuclear program permanently — the biggest flaw being that in a few years, Iran is permitted in its “sunset period” to have as many nuclear weapons as it likes — but just to limit Iran’s program for a period of time while removing the sanctions that hurt it economically.

The Biden administration has suggested a new sunset period of 25 years — assuming the Iranian regime does not lower it to 10 or 5 years. This will allow the Islamic Republic to resume enriching uranium at any level they desire, spin as many advanced centrifuges as they want, make its reactors fully operational, build new heavy water reactors, produce as much fuel as they desire for the reactors, and maintain higher uranium enrichment capability with no restriction after the period of the agreement. All that is really needed is for Iran to stop enriching uranium. Totally. No enriched uranium, no nukes. But the realistic chances of Iran complying with anything even resembling that are less than zero.

In short, the sunset period terms will most likely ensure that after the pause detailed in any agreement, Iran will be a nuclear state. It is also pretty safe to assume, from Iran’s track record, that during any agreement, Iran will covertly violate the rules.

Technologically speaking, after Iran becomes a nuclear threshold state, it is just a matter of weeks to convert the materials into weapons-grade material.

In addition, after having lifted some of the sanctions, the Biden administration is also planning to lift the remaining sanctions against Iran’s regime on the first day of agreement –– before Iran has even complied with anything. Washington will then effectively have no actual leverage against the regime. Iran will immediately join the international community, increase its oil sales and trade, and the ruling clerics will ensure their hold on power, eliminating at least the economic danger that accompanies massive domestic unrest and threatens even further the mullahs’ repressive hold on power.

This is the same dangerous mistake that the Obama administration made. In 2015, the Iranian regime received an extremely favorable deal from the “P5+1“: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, plus Germany. All four rounds of UN sanctions that were putting pressure on Iran — which had taken decades and a significant amount of political capital to put in place — were lifted on day one.

If all sanctions again are lifted immediately upon the revival of the nuclear deal, and Iran later decides to breach the terms of the nuclear deal, the West will no longer find a consensus in the UN Security Council to reimpose sanctions on Iran: China and Russia will vote no. This scenario already took place in 2020. When the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that Iran was violating all restrictions of the nuclear pact, the US could not get the backing of Russia and China, or even the consent of the EU3 (France, the UK and Germany), to reimpose sanctions on Iran.

Finally, the Biden administration has not so much as mentioned curbing Iran’s intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program. Iran’s ICBM program is linked to the regime’s nuclear program. A report by Iran’s state-controlled Afkar News, with the headline “American soil is now within the range of Iranian bombs,” stated:

“The same type of ballistic missile technology used to launch the satellite could carry nuclear, chemical or even biological weapons to wipe Israel off the map, hit US bases and allies in the region and US facilities, and target NATO even in the far west of Europe.”

The report also boasted about the damage the Iranian regime could inflict on the US:

“By sending a military satellite into space, Iran now has shown that it can target all American territory; the Iranian parliament had previously warned that an electromagnetic nuclear attack on the United States would likely kill 90 percent of Americans.”

The international community also witnessed how the Iranian regime expanded and launched more ballistic missiles after the 2015 nuclear deal despite the UN Security Council resolution that states:

“Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using ballistic missile technology, and that States shall take all necessary measures to prevent the transfer of technology or technical assistance to Iran related to such activities.”

Why would the Biden administration want to propose a nuclear deal with the Iranian regime that will only empower and embolden the malign actions of the ruling mullahs.

*****

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US foreign policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu

I’m not a Racist – I Just Don’t Like Certain People thumbnail

I’m not a Racist – I Just Don’t Like Certain People

By Craig J. Cantoni

The real racists in America are those who judge people on their pigmentation.

Being white, or olive, or beige, or swarthy, or whatever color has been affixed to this Italian by woke affixers who care deeply about pigment but have no original thoughts about pigment and thus simply parrot prevailing pigment pabulum, it’s impermissible for me to claim that I’m not a racist.

Why? Because, according to critical race theory, anyone with the wrong pigmentation is ipso facto a racist if he denies being a racist. The right pigmentation is black or the pigmentation of so-called people of color, however, they and their color are defined.

Well, I’m going to say it anyway: I’m not a racist! However, I will admit that I don’t like certain people, as will be demonstrated herein.

Those who speak about racism should define the term, especially those who call others a racist, as well as those who claim not to be a racist.

New definitions of “racism” are in vogue, but let’s go with the old one:

racism: believing that a certain race is inherently, or genetically, inferior in some way, whether in intelligence, morals, industriousness, or some other trait or characteristic.

Now some science: As a matter of genetics, anthropology, and archeology, race is mostly a social construct with little basis in biology, especially where it really matters.  Moreover, the DNA that makes us human, at least where it really matters, came from one source in sub-Saharan Africa before spreading to the Fertile Crescent, where it turned east and west and eventually spread around the world.

That makes all of us African.

Sure, some of us, myself included, have 3% or so of Neanderthal DNA, but that’s not enough to make us genetically inferior, or at least I hope not unless we’re members of Congress or the CEO of Facebook

As DNA traveled around the world, facial features, skin color, hair color, and body type and size changed from one geographic area to another, in a Darwinian process that only geneticists and evolutionary biologists understand. Those superficial characteristics get confused with race.

It’s even more confusing in a multiracial country like the U.S., where tens of millions of people of different colors have mixed their chromosomes together, thus creating more shades of color than Sherwin-Williams carries. On the other hand, it’s less confusing in a country like Iceland, where there is little diversity.

Speaking of Iceland, I went there one time to teach management classes to just about every human resources manager in the country. I was a person of color compared to the attendees and the general population. It is a nation of high trust and low crime. In fact, it has averaged less than one homicide per year for the last 20 years. Maybe that’s because there aren’t many Italians, or, I should say, Sicilian mobsters, who, by the way, are some of the people that I dislike, as will be discussed momentarily.

First, to continue our story of the great migration of DNA: The idea of race became even more muddled as people divided into clans, tribes, ethnicities, cultures, classes, religions, and nationalities. And it became more muddled still as these subdivisions began attacking each other, subjugating each other, and killing each other. Those who were early adopters of cannons, warships, a central treasury, and an administrative state were more efficient at this than those who didn’t.

Sometimes, the victims and victimizers had the same color and features; sometimes different colors and features.

Those of the same color and features found some other way of distinguishing between friend and foe, such as religion, ideology, class, dress, customs, or even whether they had a bone through their nose versus one through their lips. Or take present-day America, where those with studs, rings, and tattoos all over their face are in a different tribe than those who drive a Tesla to Whole Foods and then go home to eat arugula, ride a Peloton, and virtue signal about social justice in order to rise in the social hierarchy of those who think as they do.

Naturally, people who have been victimized by people of a different color will tend to dislike all people of that color, even if a specific individual of that color had nothing to do with the injustice. And even when the victimization happened generations ago, the resentment and distrust can remain extant, especially when facts and folklore are embellished by those who benefit from divisiveness, such as race hucksters, bureaucrats at the EEOC, consultants on critical race theory, and directors of diversity and inclusion—all of whom have an incentive to perpetuate racism.

Incidentally, Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, determined that the university has nearly 100 diversity administrators.

It’s also natural for people who have victimized people of a different color to see the victim as less than human, in order to justify their actions. To take one example out of scores of examples from history, slave owners in the American South and throughout the Spanish Empire saw Africans that way. Then, to reinforce the bias, they kept their slaves from being educated and split their families apart, to keep them from improving their lot and from showing that the bias had no basis in fact.

The caste system in India is another example. aOr take Brazil, where blacks with lighter skin see themselves as superior to blacks of darker skin.

The poor schooling of African Americans continued in America in the Jim Crow era and continues to some extent today. At the same time, the very serious socioeconomic problem of fractured black families also continues today, aided and abetted by misguided welfare programs. The people responsible for the bad design of the programs portray themselves as being woke about social justice but are largely silent about the tragic consequences of the programs. Maybe they’re like the former slave owners who didn’t want blacks to prove that they could survive without them.

None of this is very profound, probably because I’m of average intelligence, perhaps due to those Neanderthal genes. So far, though, in spite of being average, this commentary is deeper and more honest than what passes for intellectual discourse on race today—which shows how awful the discourse is.

Continuing with the de minimus profundity, here’s another fact that is overlooked by the hate-whitey-woke crowd: that it’s hard to come up with a race or ethnocultural group that didn’t brutalize, oppress, and subjugate other groups. Certainly not the Hutus. Certainly not Northern Europeans. Certainly not Italians and Hispanics. Certainly not the Comanche, Sioux, and Apache. Certainly not the Japanese, Mongols, Chinese, and East Indians. Certainly not Arabs, Egyptians, Persians, and Israelites. Certainly not hundreds of other unique ethnocultural groups hidden under the contrived labels of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander.

Those without blood on their ancestral hands can throw the first racial stone.

Speaking of blood on their hands, it’s time to turn to Sicilian mobsters, as promised.

If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t want her to marry one. If I had a business, I wouldn’t want to hire one. Nor would I want to live next door to one. And if I were a prosecutor, I’d go after them with a vengeance, as Rudy Giuliani did, if for no other reason than they give other Italians a bad name.

It’s not just their criminality. It’s their culture of superstitions, vendettas, machoism, and crudity. Sure, both the culture and the Mafia came about because of Sicily being impoverished and conquered by so many different invaders over millennia, and because governments were so corrupt and incapable of protecting the population from predation. But in the end, so what? Knowing that history still doesn’t make me want to break bread with a Sicilian mobster, especially not at a New York Italian restaurant, where bullets might be the main course and I could end up in the trunk of a car in the long-term parking lot at Newark Airport.

Does that make me a racist?

If so, here is more evidence of my racism: I also don’t like white supremacists, communists, fascists, Antifa, religious zealots, partisan ideologues and dogmatists, and the naïve belligerents of both parties who squandered trillions of dollars in useless wars overseas for more than two decades instead of on the revitalization of America’s urban and rural slums.

In addition, I don’t like the Cuomo brothers, Nancy Pelosi, Sean Hannity, Don Lemon, Dick Cheney, and the guy who heads up Facebook. The same with gangbangers and celebrities whose faces are covered with tattoos, or the fellow Arizonan who wore animal skin and Viking horns at the Capitol riot.

No doubt, they don’t like me or my kind, either.

That doesn’t mean that I want to take their rights away, or treat them uncivilly, or cancel them, or subject their kids to reeducation, or exclude them from our Democratic, pluralistic, classical liberal society. Nor does it mean that I think they are genetically inferior. It just means that I don’t like their beliefs and behavior, including their propensity to want to infringe on other people’s rights, or to take other people’s stuff, or to implement half-baked notions for remedying complex social and economic problems, or to see people in terms of race instead of individuals. My dislike has nothing to do with race.

Maybe someday I’ll be as enlightened and open-minded as those who see themselves as woke and who embrace critical race theory. You know, the people who focus on someone’s race and pigmentation instead of the person’s individuality.

Trump Hysteria from Sullivan and Frum thumbnail

Trump Hysteria from Sullivan and Frum

By Bruce Bialosky

Since Joe Biden was declared the 2020 winner, I have only written once about Trump. I have not changed my mind in that his policies were wonderful (particularly as contrasted with the disastrous Biden), but I think we should move on – there are better choices than Trump to move those policies forward without all the noise. Then Andrew Sullivan wrote his Weekly Dish defending a David Frum column but coming to a different conclusion, entitled It Wasn’t a Hoax, It was Media Overkill.

This comes at a time when John Durham has begun to charge people for providing manipulated information to the FBI regarding the Steele Dossier. It has become clearer that the Clinton campaign was behind the Russia, Russia, Russia allegations.

Sullivan starts his piece by lauding Frum as a man of clarity and truth by pointing out many aspects upon which the two agree. Sullivan writes that Trump had many conflicts of interest when it came to Russia. One could believe that to be true if he had initiated his business dealings in Russia with the idea it would catapult him toward a run for the U.S. presidency. There is little if any evidence ever presented about that. One must also say then that Trump had conflicts with many countries (30) where he had business dealings. That is the argument that the establishment employs to only have “Joe Biden types” in elected office — people who have zero experience in the private sector then tell you how much they feel your pain when their policies go sideways.

Sullivan goes on to say that for years Trump has been laundering money for Russian oligarchs. I was wondering where this charge came from, so I referred to Frum’s column. The charge stems from this assertion: one-fifth of all condominiums Trump sold were purchased in all-cash transactions on behalf of shell companies.

Since these condominiums were bought (supposedly) by shell companies, there would be no way to identify the name of the end purchaser. This method of purchase is extremely common in Los Angeles and other major metropolitan areas in buildings or with other housing that has nothing to do with Trump.

Celebrities do not want snoops digging into their lives and paparazzi standing in front of their homes, so they try to hide their purchases. For example, Bruno Mars purchased a home in my neighborhood. Soon after, the tourist buses were there “ad nauseum” with folks angling for a photo even with the house hidden behind tall gates. Bruno soon relocated to a nearby home, but in a protected community (guard gates). My long-time neighbor is a musician known worldwide, having moved in long before he became famous. Along came Google maps and sites like Virtual Globetrotting, and he had people knocking on his front door. He was forced to put up high gates to protect himself and his family from these intrusions. I am sure he wished he owned the house in a shell company.

Many wealthy, hardworking Americans also use the same process – possibly someone like mega-businessman/philanthropist David Rubenstein (though we have no evidence he has) where the Biden family stayed for Thanksgiving. Not to mention people who came here from Hong Kong, Macau, China, Colombia, Venezuela, and on and on.

Many homes sold today in an overheated market have a winning bid in all cash. One might think Russian oligarchs are buying up properties all over the country if you accept Frum’s logic.

The charge that Trump has been money laundering for Russian oligarchs has zero, zilch, none, absolutely no evidence nor validity.

One of Trump’s biggest problems is being a New York guy whose second language is sarcasm. The recipient of sarcasm must have a level of intelligence and a sense of humor. A sense of humor is apparently sucked out of journalists in journalism school, even if they have a satisfactory level of intelligence. You combine that with their complete hatred of Trump, and he should have refrained from sarcastic comments. When the rest of us were getting the jokes, the press’s heads were exploding.

Sullivan writes Trump “was absolutely willing to accept Russia’s — or any country’s — illicit support, and no doubt he asked for it. I saw him do it on national television, in the campaign. We all did.” Let’s address this one.

First, Sullivan’s assertion Trump was willing to accept any country’s illicit support has zero, zilch, none, absolutely no evidence of validity. Let’s deal with Russia though.

Hillary Clinton had come out and stated 30,000 emails had been erased. Remember when she made the stupendously juvenile joke about wiping her computer with a cleaning cloth after she had it wiped professionally by tech-heads. The story was huge though not as large as it should have been because something like 95% of the press was in confederacy with her election.

Trump held an extended press conference on July 27, 2016. Instead of focusing on the missing emails, the press focused on Trump and the fallacious Russian collusion story. There were significant assertions that the Russians were using the internet to spy on and steal information from candidates and news sources.

Near the end of the conference Trump, made the throw-off line: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” This tied together with the two themes of the line of questioning. I too was watching and found the comment to be hilarious, a particularly brilliant sarcastic comment. Trump was saying he hoped the Russians had the 30,000 emails and would release them. If the charges against the Russians were accurate then why would they not already have them?

If you doubt this was a sarcastic comment, go back and read it. Trump says if they released the emails they would be rewarded mightily by our press. You would have to be a flat-out numbskull to believe Trump wasn’t joking. There is no way the press would have been delighted or would have properly treated the newly surfaced emails as a story. Trump and everyone else knew the press hated Trump and hated the Russians. Trump was never asking the Russians for help. The only mystery is how someone as smart as Andrew Sullivan could not get that. The only explanation is he is being blinded by his Trump hatred.

This is the exact reason that I believe we should move on and embrace some of the excellent candidates who support the policies Trump adopted, but without his baggage.

I could spend another day or more picking out the flaws of the two authors’ commentaries, but it would be more of the same — false charges, innuendos, and vile hatred of Trump.

*****

This article was published on December 12, 2021, in FlashReport and reproduced with the permission of the author.

Wrong again Biden: Tornadoes Are Weather, Not Climate thumbnail

Wrong again Biden: Tornadoes Are Weather, Not Climate

By Craig Rucker

Devastating tornadoes struck America’s heartland Friday night leaving death, destruction, and heartache in their trail.

When asked whether the tornadoes were due to climate change President Biden replied, “Everything is more intense when the climate is warming and obviously it has some impact here.”

CFACT’s Marc Morano reports at Climate Depot that weather and climate experts were shocked by the President’s misstatement. These tornadoes were tragic, but were natural weather, not climate. Marc is currently scheduled to appear tonight on Fox News Primetime at 7:00 PM EST.

  • Weather expert Chris Matz said, “this is utter bullsh*t… Here are the facts: No overall trend in U.S. tornado activity since 1954, but EF-3+ down 50.
  • Climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer said, “To claim ‘global warming’ as cause for tornadoes ‘is directly opposite to the clear observational evidence.’”
  • Extreme weather expert Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. noted that the UN IPCC report states, “Trends in tornadoes… associated w/ severe convective storms are not robustly detected … attribution of certain classes of extreme weather (e.g. tornadoes) is beyond current modeling and theoretical capabilities.”
  • Tony Heller who runs the Real Science blog said in a video: “History and science aren’t among Joe Biden’s strong points.”
  • Legendary forecaster Joe Bastardi posted at CFACT.org that if “that’s all Biden knows, the chart from  NOAA shows he knows next to nothing.”

When a natural disaster strikes it calls upon the best in all of us to help those in need.

Exploiting natural tragedy to push a political agenda is wrong.

*****

This article was published on December 13, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

Ducey Eases Commercial Driver’s License Requirements

By Elizabeth Troutman

It is now easier for Arizona drivers to obtain commercial driver’s licenses under a new order from Gov. Doug Ducey.

Ducey and the Arizona Department of Transportation hope to “alleviate stress” on the transportation system and address the nationwide supply chain crisis, the news release said.

“We are working to make sure commercial drivers and Arizona families have the support they need this holiday season,” Ducey said. “Prices are rising and commercial drivers are under an incredible amount of stress as they transport goods.”

The executive order extends the validity of the commercial learners’ permit from six months to one year to give students additional time to complete training requirements. It also temporarily allows commercial drivers to keep their CDLs past the date the person’s medical certification is required until Feb. 28, 2022, and moves toward opening commercial driver license services to authorized third-party providers.

“Arizona’s highways are critical for our economy, and the trucking industry is one of the key transportation modes for moving goods through our state and around the country,” ADOT Director John Halikowski said in Ducey’s Dec. 9 release. “We are pleased to take these steps to make processes easier, while enhancing safety for commercial drivers at this important time of the year.”

Ducey and ADOT also reopened two rest stops until Jan. 22 so commercial drivers have additional opportunities to rest. The state will launch the Arizona Transportation Consultancy Project to enable ADOT to help other states adopt similar improvements.

ADOT communications director Doug Nick said in a news release the executive order would help ADOT serve Arizona drivers.

“In this case, keeping vital economic corridors open and using safe and commonsense ideas to allow commercial drivers to do their jobs efficiently are ways we can be part of the solution,” he said.

*****

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