Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 44

The American Descent into Madness

I occasionally re-post commentaries by Victor Davis Hanson, who is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Hanson is always lucid and logical in his approach to the issues and problems facing America. Here he asks and then answers the following question: “America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021. How did that happen?” 

The American Descent into Madness

By Victor Davis Hanson

Nations have often gone mad in a matter of months. The French abandoned their supposedly idealistic revolutionary project and turned it into a monstrous hell for a year between July 1793 and 1794. After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Mao’s China went from a failed communist state to the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.

Citizenship as Mere Residency

Two million people are anticipated to cross the southern border, en masse and illegally, over a 12-month period. The new arrivals have three things in common: Their first act was to break U.S. law by entering the country. Their second was to break the law by residing here illegally. And their third will be to find false identification or other illegal means to continue breaking the law. One does not arrive as a guest in a foreign country and immediately violate the laws of his host—unless one holds those laws in contempt.

Richard Davis Hanson

Arrivals now cross a border that had been virtually closed to illegal immigration by January 2021. In the cynical and immoral logic of illegal immigration (that cares little for the concerns either of would-be legal immigrants or U.S. citizens), arrivals will be dependent upon the state and thus become constituents of progressives who engineered their arrival.

Yet the issue is not illegal immigration per se. If protests were to continue in Cuba, and 1 million Cubans boated to Miami, the Biden Administration would stop the influx, in terror that so many anti-Communists might tip Florida red forever.

How strange that the U.S. government is considering going door-to-door to bully the unvaccinated, even as it ignores the daily influx of thousands from Mexico and Latin America, without worrying whether they are carrying or vaccinated for COVID-19. Meanwhile, the progressive media shrilly warns that the new Delta Variant of the virus is exploding south of the border. Note how the administration applies standards to its own citizens that it does not apply to foreign nationals illegally entering the country.

Crime as Construct

Crime is another current absurdity. There exists a mini-industry of internet videos depicting young people, disproportionately African American males, stealing luxury goods from Nieman-Marcus in San Francisco, clearing a shelf from a Walgreens with impunity, or assaulting Asian Americans. These iconic moments may be unrepresentative of reality, but given the mass transfers and retirements of police, and the frightening statistics of large increases in violent crime in certain cities, the popular conception is now entrenched that it is dangerous to walk in our major metropolises, either by day or at night. Chicago has turned into Tombstone or Dodge City in the popular imagination.

Scarier still is the realization that if one is robbed, assaulted, or finds one’s car vandalized, it is near certain the miscreant will never be held to account. Either the police have pulled back and find arrests of criminals a lose-lose situation, or radical big-city district attorneys see the law as a critical legal theory construct, and thus will not enforce it. Or the criminal will be arrested and released within hours.

So a subculture has developed among Americans, of passing information about where in the country it is safe, where it is not, and where one can go, where one cannot. This is clearly not America, but something bizarre out of Sao Paulo, Durban, or Caracas.

The Campus Con

The universities over the past 40 years were intolerant, hard Left, and increasingly anti-constitutional. But they also fostered a golden-goose confidence scheme that administrators dared not injure, given the precious eggs of federally guaranteed student loans that ensured zero academic accountability and sent tuition costs into the stratosphere. There was an unquestioned supposition that a degree of any sort, of any major, was the ticket to American success. In cynical fashion, we shrugged that most prestigious institutions were little more than cattle branders that stamped graduates with imprints that gave them unearned privilege for life.

Yet universities now have both hands around their golden goose’s neck and are determined to strangle it. The public is becoming repulsed at the woke McCarthyite culture on campus, and will be more turned off when campuses open in the fall in 2019-style. At the Ivy League or major state university campuses, admissions are no longer based on proportional representation in the context of affirmative action, but are defined increasingly by a reparatory character.

Grades, test scores, and “activities” of the white and Asian male college applicants are growing less relevant. Only “privileged” white males with sports skills, connections, or families who give lots of money are exempt from the new racial reparation quotas. The new woke admission policy ironically is targeting the liberal suburban professional family, the Left’s constituency, whose lives are so fixated on whether children graduate from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, or like campuses.

Given the radical change in incoming student profiles, the faculty increasingly will have to choose between accusations of racism, or grading regardless of actual performance, given thousands of new enrollees do not meet the entrance standards of just two or three years ago. Remember that since wokeism was always a top-down elite industry, minority progressives still will fight it out with white leftists in intramural scraps over titles, salaries, and managerial posts.

The public has had enough. For the first time, people will ask why are we subsidizing student loans, why are multibillion-dollar endowments not taxed, and why do we think a B.A. in sociology or psychology or gender studies is an “investment” that prepares anyone for anything?

Commissars and Jacobins

The critical race theory craze is reaching peak woke, or is already on the downslope. No complex and sophisticated society is sustainable with a Maoist creed of cannibalizing citizens for thought crimes. Commissars do not produce anything or serve anybody, but only monitor thoughts and speech to ascertain the purity of diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are not just a drain on the productive sector but will insidiously destroy it, since their currency is to ensure a timid, obsequiousness and banal orthodoxy.

[image error]

 

We know from the failed Soviet system and from the French Revolution that the most mediocre in society became its most eager auditors of correct behavior. The arbiters of proper thought—the self-righteous paid toady, the perpetual victim employed in service to government payback, the freelancing snitch—were always the villains of freedom, productivity, and humanity, whether we read of the killing off of Alexander the Great’s inner circle, the forced suicides of the Neronian circle, the Jacobin murder spree, or the nightmarish world described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

That the Biden Administration has now joined with Silicon Valley to hunt down on social media any dissenters from this month’s official policy on vaccinations and mask-wearing was not so shocking as to be expected from a media that banned coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In Cuban fashion, millions of judge-jury-executioner online snitches, with government encouragement, will help root out incorrect thoughts at light speed.

Inflation Is a Mere Construct

We used to know what inflation was, its pernicious role in past civilizations, and how to combat it. The danger of worthless currency is a staple of classical literature from Aristophanes to Procopius. The scary fact is not just that we are destroying the value of our money—the exploding price of gas, food, appliances, lumber, power, and housing are overwhelming even Joe Biden’s entitlement machine—but that we are constructing pseudo economics to justify the nihilism.

Right now, we witness a multitrillion-dollar fight over borrowing beyond our $30 trillion debt to build “infrastructure,” a word that has been expanded to include almost anything but roads and bridges. What exactly is so liberal about the farmworker paying $5 a gallon for gas to commute to the fields, the small contractor doing a remodeling job with plywood at $80 a sheet, or the young couple whose loan qualification is always a month behind the soaring price of a new home?

Our People’s Military

Americans during this entire descent in madness sighed, “Well, at least there is the military left.” By that, I think they meant John Brennan had all but wrecked the CIA, while James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Kevin Clinesmith, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, et al. had weaponized the FBI. But the military was still a bastion of traditional, nonpartisan service, whose prime directive was to defend the country, win any war it was ordered to fight, and to maintain deterrence against opportunistic enemies. It was not envisioned as a “people’s army.” It was not a revolutionary Napoleonic “nation in arms.” And it was not a “liberation army.” The Constitution, 233 years of tradition, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice all reassured America of its wonderful defense forces.

And now? We are in the process of a massive reeducation and indoctrination campaign. The revamping not only draws scarce resources away from military readiness, but targets, without evidence, the white working class, and defames it as insurrectionary—the very same cohort that disproportionately died in Afghanistan and Iraq.

If only General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, had been as animated, as combative, and as fired up in congressional testimony about winning in Afghanistan or deterring the Chinese in the waters off Taiwan as they were in defense of their recommended lists of Marxist-inspired critical race theory texts!

One purpose of the Uniform Code of Military Justice was not to prevent retired top brass from attacking beloved presidents, or even blasé ones. Its aim was to remind the country that it is the business of civilians, not pensioned retired military subject to recall in times of crisis, to galvanize opinion against loudmouth unpopular presidents like Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, or Donald Trump.

The reason why the “revolving door” became a bipartisan worry was that four-star officers had mastered the navigation of Pentagon procurement. They possessed a rare skill easily—and hugely—monetized upon retirement, and thus its use was to be discouraged wholeheartedly.

And now?

The code is a mere construct. The revolving door is an advertisement for advancing to a high rank. Policing the thoughts of American soldiers is apparently more important than fathoming the minds of our enemies on the battlefield.

Keep Cuba Castroite?

What was so hard about understanding that Cuba since 1959 has been a Communist gulag, antithetical to human freedom and consensual government? What was so difficult about conceding that Cuba had been an ally of the nuclear Soviet Union, always egging it on to war against the United States?

Yet here we are with protestors against a failed, evil state in the streets of Havana, and our own government, media, and professional classes are worried that ossified Communism in Cuba may fall.

After opening the U.S. southern border to pseudo-political refugees, the Biden Administration is terrified that thousands of real ones might come to Miami in the fashion it invited millions to storm into Texas. The Biden Administration, and the Left in general, finally revealed what many of us have known: it had no real ideological view on illegal immigration. Its immigration policy was entirely utilitarian and hinged only on whether illegal immigration altered the demography of the electorate in the correct way.

The United Nations Über Alles

Finally, almost all Americans used to agree that the U.S. Constitution was unique and guaranteed personal freedom in a way the United Nations charter could not. Dozens of fascist, Communist, totalitarian, and authoritarian regimes, usually the majority of governments on earth, ensured that any General Assembly or U.N. committee ruling would parrot the views of its illiberal and corrupt members.

Not anymore. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has invited in the U.N. to assess whether the United States meets global standards of justice or, in fact, is racist and in need of global censure: “I urge all U.N. member states to join the United States in this effort, and confront the scourge of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia,” he said last week.

That is like asking Libya in 2001 to assess whether our airline pilot training met proper standards or having China adjudicate the conditions in U.S. prisons.

America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive, and frightening place by July 2021. It went not so much hard-Left, as stark-raving mad.

That abrupt descent, too, is not workable and millions will collectively decide they have no choice but to push back and conclude, “In the 233rd year of our republic, we tens of millions are not going to cede freedom of thought and expression to thousands of Maoists. Sorry, no can do.”

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.

 

 

Why are We Allowing American Marxists to Destroy Our Nation?

The other day I was thinking how alarming it is that so many Americans today are embracing socialism and even communism. As a result, more and more of our precious freedoms are being eroded by unprecedented government overreach and repression.

From vaccine and face mask mandates to the Marxist indoctrination of our children in public schools; from President Biden’s idiotic invitation for the world to stampede across our open borders to irresponsible and unprecedented spending of trillions of dollars we don’t have; to plans to give the IRS unparalleled access to our previously private banking information to the steady erosion of our First and Second Amendment rights.

This is what we are seeing under America’s first blatantly socialist government.

How can this be happening? Are Americans suddenly a nation of obedient and vulnerable sheep? How long will we allow ourselves to be herded hither and thither by Washington’s authoritarian sheepdogs?

And what of our rights that are guaranteed by America’s Constitution? Why are we allowing those rights to be devoured by packs of tyrannical wolves in Washington and elsewhere?

One of Ronald Reagan’s most prescient comments about this country came in a speech he made way back in 1961.

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” he said. “We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well-fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

It boggles the mind that so many of my fellow Americans don’t understand just how fragile the freedoms are that too many of us take for granted.

In his book, American Marxism, Mark Levin writes: “We have allowed the American Marxists to define who we are as a people. They defame us, slander our ancestors and history, and trash our founding documents and principles. They are mostly reprobates who hate the country in which they live, and have contributed nothing to its betterment.”

Levin continues: “The time has come to reclaim what is ours—the American Republic—from those who seek to destroy it. If we expect others to rescue our nation for us, as we go about our daily lives as mere observers to what is transpiring, or close our eyes and ears to current events, we will lose this struggle. And yes, it is a struggle.”

Levin couldn’t be more accurate in his appraisal. Too many of us have grown complacent or oblivious to what is happening in America.

More than two million illegal migrants are expected to overrun our nation in 2021 while Emperor Biden fiddles in the White House. If that continues year after year, that means we will be inundated with the illegitimate equivalent of a major American city every year. Meanwhile, the Democrats who rule Congress and the White House don’t care because they know those illegal aliens they are welcoming will someday be Democrat voters—either legal or illegal. For most Democrats in Congress, it’s all about the party, not the country. For Democrats in power, it’s all about maintaining their control at all costs–even at the expense of our Republic.

Migrants illegally crossing the Rio Grande River into the U.S. from Mexico

If the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has its way, this aberration will continue until we have a one-party socialist/communist government.

Unless Democrats are pushed out of power in 2022, the socialist wing of the party (AOC and the other “useful idiots” of her “squad”) will continue to inflict their Marxist agendas on us—things like anti-white and racist Critical Race Theory; Maoist-inspired “thought crimes” punishable by being summarily “canceled;” Marxist pseudo economics and rampant inflation; a “woke” and feeble military led by socialist generals; a duplicitous strategy to federalize and micromanage the election process currently administered by the states; and a scheme to surrender some of our hard-earned freedoms in the Bill of Rights to a corrupt, anti-American United Nations.

Meanwhile, crime in our nation continues to accelerate because of an irrational, socialist-inspired “defund the police” movement that debases the men and women who are paid to protect us from the now emboldened predators who prey on society.

Videos of young people, primarily African American males, assaulting Asian Americans, stealing luxury merchandise from stores in Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities, and clearing out shelves in stores such as Apple, Target, and Walgreens with impunity, are disgusting and are more applicable to a third-world backwater than to the most powerful nation in the world.

Thieves in black hoodies casually steal $27,000 of Mac Gear from an Apple Store in Chicago while employees and customers look on

Why do we allow this to happen? Why do we tolerate such lawlessness? Is it because Marxist groups like Black Lives Matter, ANTIFA, and AOC’s racist and anti-Semitic “squad” support and encourage such nihilist behavior as part of their effort to obliterate our nation?

Police appear paralyzed as these swaggering sociopaths and thieves are encouraged by our indifference and inaction.

On top of all of this are Marxist tactics and strategies designed to divide our nation racially, ethnically, socially, religiously, and politically. Groundless charges of “white supremacy,” “white fragility,” and “white privilege” are designed to convince us that we have somehow returned to 19th century America when some four million black men, women, and children were plantation slaves and a few thousand whites were their masters.

The facts tell a much different story. It’s a story of progress and equality, says the U.S. Congressional Joint Economic Committee in a 2020 report entitled: “The Economic State of Black America.”

“Over the past half-century, Black Americans have made substantial social and economic progress, gaining political rights that long had been denied to them, entering professions from which they had been blocked and largely overcoming centuries of overt racism and oppression,” the report by one of four standing joint committees of Congress, said.

“While there were only five Black Members of Congress when the Civil Rights Act became law in 1964, there currently are 56 Black Members of Congress, including 12% of the House of Representatives. Black activists, scholars, and social commentators have raised awareness about the importance of diversity and shaped the national conversation around race and inequality.

“There has been a proliferation of Black writers, screenwriters, artists, poets, athletes, and musicians who have become superstars in their respective fields. And the 21st century saw the election of the first Black American, Barack Obama, as president of the United States.”

Yet, the racist and Marxist rhetoric from the left continues to push the false narrative that America’s black population has made no progress since the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Hence, the racist rants directed at whites by BLM, Antifa, and other racist/Marxist organizations.

In schools that teach racist Critical Race Theory, white children as young as five and six years old are portrayed as “oppressors,” while minority children are told they are the “victims” of that oppression. Instead of teaching children to respect one another and get along, Critical Race Theory agitators and Marxists posing as teachers are driving wedges between impressionable children and thereby creating an atmosphere of hatred and distrust. 

                                                                              Critical Race Theory in Action in the Classroom

I find all of this appalling. But most of all, I see grave danger in it. Once the socialists and Marxists have segregated us into manageable tribes based on race, religion, ethnicity, social and economic status, they will have achieved their “divide and conquer” goal.

While that has not yet happened, this is nevertheless, NOT the country in which I was born and reared. This is an aberration, a grotesque deformity of the nation I proudly served in the U.S. Army. When I was in the Army, I was trained to battle and conquer communists and their socialist cousins.

Countries such as Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, the old Soviet Union, and the Warsaw Pact nations were our political and military enemies, and they were single-minded in their goal to destroy us.

Times have changed. Today, those enemies  are not just “over there.” They are here, inside our Republic, working to destroy us from within. They are in Congress, they are in charge of our boards of education, they are in our bureaucracies, in our military, our Big Tech companies, and in our corporations. They will not stop until they rip apart our Constitution, destroy our cherished, if neglected freedoms, and create a one-party oligarchy.

Look at how powerful Big Tech companies are censoring free and open speech that was once considered an inalienable right. Today speaking out against socialism, government overreach, and those in power will get you censored, banned from social media platforms, and, even worse, “canceled.”

That is the country the deceitful and treacherous Marxists and socialists in Washington want and as long as most Americans behave like flocks of submissive sheep, they will achieve their objectives.

God help us all if they do.

 

 

 

A “General” Embarrassment: ‘Lyin’ Biden’ does it again!

Do you remember this exchange last month between President Biden and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos? If you don’t, here’s how it went:

Stephanopoulos: “Your top military advisers warned against withdrawing on this timeline. They wanted you to keep 2,500 troops.”Biden: “No, they didn’t. That wasn’t true.”Stephanopoulos: “Your military advisers did not tell you that, ‘No, we should just keep 2,500 troops. It’s been a stable situation for the last several years. We can do that. We can continue to do that.’?”Biden: “No, no one said that to me that I can recall.” Stephanopoulos & Biden

When I heard Biden utter those words, I knew he was lying. I spent 3-1/2 years on active duty in the U.S. Army and I learned that even the most inept military commander knows that you never remove all of your troops from a city and THEN commence with an evacuation of civilians.

Biden’s lies were exposed again and again during Tuesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearings and then during yesterday’s House Armed Services Committee hearings.

During testimony before those committees Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley, and head of U.S. Central Command General Kenneth McKenzie, all said they had advised Biden to keep at least 2,500 troops in place in Afghanistan.

“I recommended that we maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan,” McKenzie testified. “I also have a view that the withdrawal of those forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and eventually the Afghan government.”

Gen. McKenzie

McKenzie was right and so was General Austin “Scott” Miller, our nation’s last commander in Afghanistan, and Biden ignored his expert advice as well.

Milley’s assessment was similar: “I said, we should keep a steady state of 2,500 and it could bounce up to 3,500, maybe, something like that, in order to move toward a negotiated solution.”

Secretary of Defense Austin made it clear that Biden got the message: “Their (the generals) input was received by the president and considered by the president, for sure.”

[image error] Sec. Defense Austin & Gen. Milley

So there you have it. The president ignored the advice of his senior military leaders. That’s his privilege, even if he wishes to lie about it.

But Biden is a habitual liar and plagiarist and has been for most of the 40-plus years he and his corrupt family have been gorging themselves at the public trough.

In 1987-88 he claimed:

He was the only one in his class to go to law school on a full scholarship.He graduated in the top half of his class.He was the outstanding student in his political science class.He graduated with three degrees, earning 165 credits when he only needed 123.

Sorry folks. Those are all lies. Here’s the truth as uncovered by the media:

He had a 1/2 scholarship that was needs-based.He ended up near the bottom of his class: 76th in a class of 85 at his law school.He was not the outstanding political science student.He graduated with only one degree, and barely at that.

Biden didn’t stop there. In various speeches, the media (once upon a time, they actually did their jobs) revealed that Biden had plagiarized British Labor Leader Neil Kinnock, Bobby Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey.

They also revealed that he cheated in law school, plagiarizing others’ work. Biden acknowledged that he plagiarized a law review journal for a paper during law school at Syracuse. He asked school administrators not to expel him, saying he “made a mistake in the citation process.”

When cornered about his lies, Biden said, “I’ve done some dumb things, and I’ll do dumb things again.”

Guess what? Biden was right. He has done dumb things and he continues to do dumb things.

And now that millions of Democrats with short memories or who are politically comatose have elected this compulsive liar and plagiarist to the nation’s highest office, all of us are suffering for it.

Just look at the humanitarian catastrophe on our Southern border, the inflation that is devastating our economy, and the calamity of our withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Then, there is his despotic management of the pandemic by ordering mandated vaccinations—a move that has created an enormous credibility gap because just eight months ago, he said he would never mandate Covid-19 vaccinations.

But, hey, that’s good ole Joe for ya. You believe this man at your own risk.

Me? I stopped believing this prevaricator decades ago.

Too bad we have millions of voters today who either don’t care if they elect a fraud and a cheat to the White House as long as he’s a Democrat, or who are too naïve to see how deceitful and devious Biden is.

I tend to think it is the former, not the latter.

 

 

 

 

 

Herding Haitians. Lies and More Lies about Our Mounted Border Patrol

Last week border patrol agents on horseback near Del Rio, Texas were seen using their long reins to control their horses as they drove migrants attempting to illegally cross the border back into the Rio Grande River.

What we saw WAS NOT a return to slavery, as fatuous California congresswoman Maxine Waters insisted during one of her typically hysterical rants.

Anybody who has ever ridden a horse—and clearly most of the oblivious leftist media and their Democrat masters in Congress fall into that category—know that those agents weren’t “whipping” Haitians with their long reins, but using them to keep their skittish horses under control as Haitians attempted to grab bridles and bits.

But hey, never let the facts get in the way of yet another sham narrative about racial intolerance.

Here’s what Waters and a flock of other misinformed useful idiots said after looking at photos and videos of mounted Border Patrol agents doing their jobs.

Useful Idiot “Mad” Maxine Waters

“We’re saying to the president and to everybody else, you’ve got to stop this madness,” Waters screamed to a compliant and obedient media outside Capitol Hill Wednesday. “And I want to know, in the first place, who’s paying these cowboys to do this work? They have got to be gotten rid of. They’ve got to be stopped. It cannot go on. They are trying to bring us back to slavery days and worse than that.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki repeatedly called the images “horrific.”

Dumb as a rock Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called agents’ actions a “stain on our country,” while Congress’s resident anti-Semitic Rep. Ilhan Omar, said it was “cruel, inhumane, and a violation of domestic and international law.”

What the mounted agents did was, in fact, standard operation procedure and well within the laws of the land.

Mounted border patrol agents pushing illegal migrants back into the Rio Grande

Maybe a little historical perspective and context is required here. Unlike the frenzied socialist media, agitated members of Congress, and our stumbling, bumbling president, who quickly piled on the border patrol agents, I have done some research into our mounted border patrol agents.

Horses have been used since 1904 when “Mounted Guards,” or inspectors of the now-defunct U.S. Immigration Service patrolled the southern border of the U.S.

The guards once operated out of El Paso, Texas, and patrolled as far west as California, on the lookout for migrants trying to illegally cross the border.

Horses were more valuable to the agents than uniforms – which would come four years later. New recruits furnished their own horse and saddle, while the government supplied oats and hay for the animals.

Mounted Border Patrol Agent Ca 1930

Then, in 1924 the U.S. Border Patrol was established after Congress passed the Labor Appropriation Act. Its mission was to secure the borders between inspection stations and patrol the seacoast. In 1935 the Border Patrol began using motorized vehicles, but to this day, agents use horses to traverse terrain inaccessible to other means of transit.

The fact is those mounted agents (not “cowboys,” as Waters insisted) were doing their jobs last week trying to keep Haitian and other migrants from entering our nation illegally. They have been doing that for more than 100 years.

It is interesting to note that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz both said last Monday that they did not see anything wrong with the images, and Mayorkas even pointed out agents use long reins to control their horses, not whips, in difficult terrain. Ortiz also noted that agents often can’t tell the difference between smugglers and migrants.

How quickly both Mayorkas and Ortiz changed their tunes when our somnolent President opened his mouth and let fly with this threat:

“It’s outrageous, I promise you, those people will pay,” Biden said.

What, me worry? I’m the President

Never mind that those “people” were just doing their jobs and following long-established and lawful practices.

But Biden, egged on by frenzied reporters, continued to disparage and threaten our mounted border patrol agents.

Here is his rambling, muddled comment to reporters last week:

“I’m president but it was horrible to see what you saw, to see people treat it like they did — horses nearly running over people being strapped. It’s outrageous, I promise you, those people will pay. They will be — there is investigation underway now, and there will be consequences. There will be consequences. It’s an embarrassment, beyond an embarrassment. It’s dangerous. It’s wrong, it sends the wrong message around the world, sends the wrong message at home. It’s simply not who we are.”

The Border Patrol agents’ union quickly disputed Biden’s characterization.

“Even though the White House acknowledged there is an ongoing investigation, saying that the agents “will pay” shows that they aren’t truly interested in the results. The photographer who took the photos said that nobody was whipped. Deciding they did something wrong without any form of due process — that should not be who we are,” Border Patrol Council Vice President Jon Anfinsen said.

Some Democrats and media outlets falsely described the agents’ long reins, which they use to control their horses, as “whips.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, yet another useful idiot condemned what she described as “the inappropriate use of what appear to be whips by Border Patrol officers on horseback to intimidate migrants.”

Haitian migrant attempting to grab horse’s bridle and bit

With a little basic knowledge and two brain cells, anyone knows those agents use split reins. They do use them as a whip, on their horse’s necks. This helps get a quicker response from the horse, especially when the horse may be hesitant with groups of people or other animals.

Here’s a fact. We have a president who is unconcerned about those crossing our border illegally—and has, in fact, invited them to do so by opening our borders. He seems oblivious to the fact that un-vetted illegal aliens are streaming by the hundreds of thousands into our country—many unvaccinated and infected with Covid-19.

The National Border Patrol Council, the union representing border patrol agents, issued a statement Tuesday condemning the “outrageous claims by the Biden administration.”

It said that Psaki, as well as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, “made outlandish and irrational claims about being horrified by images that show Border Patrol agents on horseback using authorized equipment and techniques to deter and prevent a large group of people from illegally entering the United States in Del Rio, Texas.”

The union slammed the Biden administration for having the privileged position to complain about the border crisis which it argued it largely enabled by relaxing border restrictions and exacerbated by not providing border patrol agencies the guidance and resources to deal with it.

“Again it is clear that those ‘in charge,’ a term that is disgusting to use, have no clue about our operations and frankly operate by ignorance and unhinged emotions,” the union said.

Rather than being punished those agents on horseback should be given medals for enforcing American immigration laws despite the Biden administration’s opposition and unwarranted attacks.

We all know what is going on here. It’s really quite simple. The Biden administration and the Democrat party see these hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants pouring across our borders month after month as potential Democrat voters. The more illegals the Biden administration allows to break our laws and cross our borders, the more voters—legal and illegal—the Democrat party gains and the longer socialists can remain in power.

The agents we saw on horseback doing their jobs have been suspended or relieved of their duties. That is outrageous. It’s Biden the confirmed plagiarist and habitual liar who should step down before he completely destroys our nation.

YIKES! My Mayor is getting the Hell out of California

I live in a place called Murrieta. It’s a city of about 100,000 in Southern California’s wine country, just about 50 miles north of San Diego.

Murrieta is a nice mid-sized town situated in rolling hills about 20 miles from the Pacific Ocean and maybe 30 miles from a couple of soaring mountain ranges.

Murrieta: A great place to live

We have access to the best of all worlds: wine, sandy beaches, pine trees, snow and skiing, the state’s largest Native-American casino, and a couple of well-appointed malls.

It’s a well-managed town with one of the nation’s lowest crime rates and plenty of affordable housing.

Well, I may be fibbing a bit there. Murrieta is well managed, and our crime rate is very low, but I’m stretching the truth when it comes to affordable housing. The median price of a single-family home in Riverside County, which is where Murrieta is located, is just a little south of $600,000.

Okay, so that’s almost three-fourths of the way to $1 million and that’s a negative.

But that doesn’t negate all of the positives, so why is our Mayor Scott Vinton resigning and hightailing it to Tennessee? After all, Vinton is a native Californian who has lived his entire life in the Golden State.

Murrieta Mayor Scott Vinton

So what gives, Mayor Vinton?

“It is with a heavy heart that I have made the personal choice to step down from my elected position,” Vinton wrote in his letter of resignation. “Although it was my full intention to serve my entire four-year term, my wife and I have made a life decision to relocate to Tennessee to build our forever home.”

Tennessee is one of the states that thousands of Californians are fleeing to, along with Texas, Florida, Idaho, and Nevada.

“Many circumstances over the last 18 months have led us to move our original date of spring 2023 to the end of 2021,” Vinton continued.

Ah-ha! “Many circumstances” have led to this decision to bail on Murrieta. Just what might some of those be?

“I’ve been a Southern Californian my whole life, and my wife and I are looking to go someplace new with no income taxes, a place where we feel at home,” he said. “California has changed a lot since I’ve grown up.”

And there you have it.

The Vinton’s no longer feel at home in California. In that respect, they speak for hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of other California residents.

California is driving people away with its array of high taxes. It has the highest state sales tax rate (7.25%) in the nation and California’s top tier income tax rate is the highest in the nation at 13.3 percent, according to the Tax Foundation and California Taxpayers Association.

Per capita, Californians pay about $2,000 annually in state income taxes, which ranks fourth highest in the country, according to the Tax Foundation. It has the 7th-highest corporation tax rate (flat tax of 8.84%) in the nation.

But reading between the lines, I can see that California’s onerous taxes are not the only reason Mayor Vinton is heading for the hills of Tennessee.

“California has changed a lot since I’ve grown up,” he said.

Ain’t THAT the truth?

I first came to California in 1976. The state was pretty well run back then and it was a thriving, positive place to live.

Today, 34% of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California but only 12% of the U.S. population resides here.

And here’s the real shocker.

California—not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia—has the highest poverty rate in the United States. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure—which accounts for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income—nearly one out of four Californians is living in poverty.

California’s Homeless: The most in America

In addition, California’s ruling elite enacted the first state-level cap-and-trade regime; established California as a “sanctuary state” for illegal immigrants; banned plastic bags, threatening the jobs of thousands of workers involved in their manufacture; and is consumed by its dedication to something called “California values” (read far left).

All this only reinforces the rest of America’s perception of an out-of-touch Left Coast that does a disservice to millions of Californians whose values are more traditional and conservative, including many of the state’s poor residents.

THAT was not the case in 1976. Back then, the state was fairly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives.

Today, California’s de facto status as a one-party (read Democrat) state lies at the heart of its poverty problem. With a permanent majority in the state senate and the assembly, a prolonged dominance in the executive branch, and a weak opposition, California Democrats have long been free to indulge blue-state ideology while paying little or no political price.

The state’s poverty problem is unlikely to improve while policymakers remain unwilling to unleash the engines of economic prosperity that drove California to its golden years and made it the fifth largest economy in the entire world.

Since then, overreaching counties and local governments have imposed restrictive land-use regulations that drove up the price of land and dwellings. Middle-income households have been forced to accept lower standards of living while the less fortunate have been driven into poverty by the high cost of housing.

Okay, now I get it, Mayor Vinton. Tennessee looks pretty damned good when contrasted with California.

According to new research by The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Tennessee is the second most popular destination for companies fleeing California. The top destination is Texas. Arizona and Nevada followed the Volunteer state in third and fourth place, respectively.

The study found that from January 1, 2018, through June 30, 2021, there were 25 companies with California headquarters that relocated to Tennessee, and 114 going to Texas.

Along with corporations, several prominent people have also evacuated California including Conservative talk show host Ben Shapiro who left Los Angeles for Nashville in 2020. “LA link” star Kat Von D relocated from California to Indiana, citing the Golden State’s “tyrannical government overreach, while Nicole Kidman and husband Keith Urban now call Nashville, Tennessee home.

Keith Urban & Nicole Kidman: “Gone to Tennessee!”

Actors James and Kimberly Van Der Beek announced they are relocating from Beverly Hills to Texas, Marvel star Josh Brolin and his wife Kathryn Boyd recently left L.A. for Georgia, and comedian Joe Rogan moved from Los Angeles to Texas in July.

“I just want to go somewhere where you have a little more freedom,” Rogan explained. “When you look at the economic despair, when you look at the homelessness problem that has accelerated radically over the last six, seven, ten years … I think there are too many people here. I think it’s not tenable.”

Data show that California’s overall general population is decreasing. California has gained population every year since it became a state in 1850, but in 2020, the state lost more than 80,000 people—the first time it has had a net loss since it became a state.

Eastward Ho! Getting the hell out of California

Many blamed the high taxes and restrictive policies on business, while others more recently have blamed Democratic Governor Gavin Newsome’s draconian COVID pandemic decree and authoritarian socialist policies of the state’s Democrat-controlled legislature.

So now I can understand why the mayor of Murrieta and thousands of others are scampering off to points east of L.A.

Texas and Tennessee are the big winners in the relocation sweepstakes, but I have one big question that may be on the minds of Tennesseans and Texans.

Will success “Californicate” Texas and Tennessee?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Washington’s Useful Idiots & the Obliteration of America’s Wealth

I recently received a few emails that dealt with America’s mounting debt crisis and other economic issues. I took a few of those emails and restructured and rewrote them a bit into the following post. It attempts to explain the financial mess our country is in and how it got there. I hope you will take a look at it.

We are hearing a lot these days about things like the debt ceiling, Treasury bond auctions, the growth of the Federal Reserve balance sheet, a decline in asset value, escalating capital gains taxes, and an upturn in the corporate tax rate.

For many people, it all sounds like a lot of economic mumbo-jumbo, and many folks believe it really has no impact on their lives.

Those people would be VERY WRONG!

The “useful idiots” in Washington DC are playing a dangerous shell game with our economy and in turn, the economic well-being of every working American.

For example, the useful idiots in Congress (mostly Democrats) are legislating more and more spending and paying for their vote-buying largess by having the U.S. Treasury sell Treasury bonds and notes in order to fund their rampant spending spree.

And who is buying those T-bills? The good old Federal Reserve, that’s who.

The Fed buys all of the bonds at each treasury auction that non-government investors are unwilling to buy in a quantity adequate to keep interest rates low. How is the Fed paying for those T-bills? Why, with dollars that are essentially created out of thin air, that’s how.

That bit of economic voodoo has resulted in the growth of the Federal Reserve balance sheet at a +15% rate in recent years with no slowdown in sight. This enfeebles the U.S. dollar and that means if our assets (real estate, equities, fixed assets, hard assets, etc.) are not appreciating at a rate above +15% – ALL OF US LOSE!

Not satisfied with that bit of sleight of hand, our government also pilfers a sizable portion of most asset gains by taxing all gains – WE LOSE AGAIN!

Japan has been playing this shell game for decades and with some success because more than 90% of Japan’s sovereign debt is held by its citizens. For some reason, Japanese citizens still trust their government and to a great extent, unfortunately, so do their American counterparts.

Hang on. I’m not finished yet. There’s more.

Because the American dollar is the world’s reserve currency, a lot of U.S. sovereign debt is held by foreign nations (see table below). That means the FED’s current financial shell game is placing the trillions of dollars back into the hands of ANYONE holding U.S. dollars or U.S. dollar-denominated assets.

This table is from the July 9, 2021 report of the Congressional Research Service and shows, even though the debt rose, the percentage of US Treasuries held by foreigners has declined.  The considerable slack has been taken up by the FED and the involvement of the FED has increased exponentially since these numbers in the report came out.

So what? you may ask. Why should any of that economic wheeling and dealing concern me?

How about this for a reason to be concerned. As the dollar weakens under the weight of unsustainable debt, the value of your house, your social security, your pensions, your annuities, your life insurance, your IRAs, etc. weaken right along with that limp and sagging dollar.

And that, my friends, means an uncertain financial future for all of us.

So here is the question of the day: Why are we willing to allow our devious and undependable political class (with very few exceptions) and their deep state masters to destroy our future at this exponential rate?

And here is another question. Is there anyone on the horizon who might alter this precarious economic trajectory before it’s too late?

Hmm. Let me see. Nope, I don’t see anybody out there

Okay, now here’s another way to look at what I just said. Please bear with me.

I will break it down into two lessons.

Lesson # 1:

* U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
* Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
* New debt: $1,650,000,000,000
* National debt: $19,271,000,000,000
* Recent budget cuts: $38,500,000,000

I know. All of those zeroes are daunting and frankly, they give me a headache.

So let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend those trillions and billions and millions are part of a household budget. That will make it all seem much more fathomable.

* Annual family income: $21,700
* Money the family spent: $38,200
* New debt on the credit card: $16,500
* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $192,710
* Total budget cuts so far: $385

Got It? Good. That’s how the useful idiots in Congress and the White House are spending our tax dollars, managing our budget, and escalating our exponentially increasing debt by raising the Debt Ceiling.

OK now for Lesson # 2 (The Debt Ceiling):

Here’s another way to look at the Debt Ceiling:

Let’s say, you come home from work and find there has been a sewer
backup in your neighborhood. Your home now has sewage all the way up
to your ceilings.

What will you do?

Raise the ceilings, or pump out the crap?

Your choice is coming in November 2022. I hope you make the right one!

 

 

“The Chair” is a Microcosm of America’s Woke Universities

I just binge-watched Netflix’s six-part mini-series entitled “The Chair,” and brother did it bring back memories of when I was a University of Illinois department head and later, the dean of a college.

Unlike my 13-years in academia, The Chair takes place at fictional ultra-liberal Pembroke University, which one faculty member snidely refers to as a “second-tier sub-Ivy.”

The series stars Sandra Oh as Ji-Yoon Kim, the school’s “first woman of color” to ascend to the chair of Pembroke’s staid and stodgy English department.

 Chairwoman Kim meeting her faculty

You would think that running a traditional English department in the normally sedate realm of the humanities would be easy for Professor Kim, whose twenty-some years in academia has been spent as an Emily Dickinson scholar.

But alas, that is not the case.

Instead, her English Department, which is populated by several aging, traditionalist professors—some with more than 30 years in academia—is a maelstrom of faculty and student discontent.

One of the “ancients” on the faculty of the English Dept.

First, the dean tells Chairwoman Kim that budget decreases are coming and she needs to make some cuts in her department, preferably convincing a few of the ancient faculty members to retire. (In academia, there is no established retirement age. Professors can conceivably rule the classroom until they drop).

Then, one of her senior professors is on the warpath because she has been moved to a dingy basement office in another building in order to accommodate the department’s newest hire. (God help any department chair or head who has to deal with THAT issue. And I speak from experience! Next to tenure, having prime office space is the most critical item on any professor’s agenda).

Chairwoman Kim discovers that the newest hire, a hip African-American woman named Yaz McKay, is a self-absorbed narcissist who will demand “special handling.”

Chairwoman Kim on the campus of Pembroke U.

Why? Because she has been assigned to team-teach an American literature survey course with stubborn old-school octogenarian Professor Elliot Rentz, whose classes students shun because they are uninspiring and mind-numbing.

Professor McKay is not happy about her teaching assignment, but she is an assistant or associate professor (it wasn’t clear which) on the tenure track and Rentz is the chair of her tenure committee—which gives him extraordinary leverage over her.

Rentz is a dull, inflexible traditionalist and that’s how he approaches his poorly attended classes. Professor McKay is his “woke” polar opposite, and it doesn’t take her long to demonstrate that fact.

To Rentz’s horror, Professor McKay decides to teach Herman Melville’s classic 19th Century book “Moby Dick” using a bevy of student rappers. In a jaw-dropping classroom performance, the rapping students turn Melville’s classic prose into an effervescent hip-hop chant. Professor Rentz is outraged by such literary impertinence.

While Professor McKay’s idea is hip and trendy, in the end, it simply panders to the students’ “wokeness” and fails to engage them intellectually. Eventually, Professor McKay feels undermined by Professor Rentz and threatens to leave Pembroke for Yale, where she has been offered both tenure and an endowed chair.

To top things off, Bill Dobson, one of Pembroke’s most popular literature professors, who is also a nationally recognized author, is caught on camera joking around in class wearing a Nazi SS uniform and giving the “Heil Hitler” salute.

Pembroke’s ultra-woke liberal students are not amused. In fact, they are outraged and demand that Professor Dobson be fired from his tenured position. Never mind that the besieged Professor Dobson was simply attempting to demonstrate the farcical connection between fascism and the absurd.

The Dean of the college caves and Dobson is dragged before a disciplinary committee where he is suspended.

And all of this is only a few weeks into Professor Kim’s tenure as department chair.

I found myself thinking: “God help her. She has just entered the malevolent academic dominion known as “administration hell.”

At this point, it might be well to mention the oft-repeated axiom that says: “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

Some attribute that axiom to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but others say it was first uttered by Wallace S. Sayre, a late Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.

No matter. The fact is that in Academia the intensity of feeling in any dispute is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue—and that is why academic politics are so bitter.

So is the Chair an accurate portrayal of academe?  The Chair has its authentic moments.

For example, its portrayal of the English department’s eclectic group of faculty, their attitudes, and their unremitting grievances, is on point.

So too are the rigid and some might say unconstitutional rules that govern behavior in the academy. They are accurately depicted. For example, poor Professor Dobson is granted only minimal due process before he is tossed onto the academic scrap heap. In the academy, you are always guilty until proven innocent–all rights guaranteed by the Consitution notwithstanding.

But where The Chair really hits its stride (whether intentionally or not) is its portrayal of today’s woke and hypersensitive students.

Pembroke University students seem more intent on preserving their malicious and intolerant mob mentality than in engaging in any kind of evocative debate that might require them to open their minds to new or diverse ideas.

The horde of vociferous brats screaming for the head of Professor Dobson and who eventually cause Chairwoman Kim to lose her position as department chair, are self-absorbed holy terrors seemingly bent on Pembroke’s destruction rather than acquiring a comprehensive education.

In their minds, Pembroke is too orthodox, too straight, and too white. It also tolerates too much conservative thought that conflicts with the students’ deeply entrenched liberal dogma and to many students, that is “threatening.”

In that respect “The Chair” has gotten it right. Universities should not be spineless places replete with “safe spaces” or wokeness zones.

They should be places where learning is rigorous, where students are exposed to a broad array of attitudes, philosophies, and viewpoints—no matter how unpleasant and objectionable they may seem to today’s squeamish brood of fragile progeny.

There is an old African proverb that says: “Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.”

Should there be a season two of “The Chair,” the doyens at Pembroke would do well to heed that aphorism and restore Professors Kim and Dobson to their previous positions.

I know I would if I were the dean.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All Authors Should be Appalled by This!

I posted this commentary a couple of years ago. Since then, nothing has changed. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books are still banned in many schools today and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name is still excised from the award once named in her honor. This is censorship in action. All authors should be appalled and the Association of Library Service to Children should be ashamed. To learn more about this literary suppression and bowdlerization, please read on.  

In yet another example of twenty-first-century political correctness invading and perverting the past, the Association of Library Service to Children voted unanimously recently to remove Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award and instead call it the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

Why, might you ask, would the ALSC, a division of the American Library Association do something like this to such a beloved author as Wilder? Because of her portrayal of minorities and Native Americans in her “Little House on the Prairie” novels, the ALSC says.

Nevermind that Wilder was the first to win the award in 1954 when she was in her late 80s and nearing the end of her life. Until her death in 1957 she was beloved for the semiautobiographical “Little House” children’s books, which are fictionalized versions of her family’s adventures traveling the western frontier in their covered wagon and its encounters with Native Americans.

“This decision was made in consideration of the fact that Wilder’s legacy, as represented by her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity, and respect, and responsiveness,” the Association for Library Service to Children said in a statement.

Laura Ingalls Wilder at a 1930s book signing

In its decision to remove Wilder’s name from the award, the library association cited “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work.”

What a bunch of hooey.

The reason is quite simply this: The ALSC has decided to apply 21st-century attitudes about race and minorities to literature that accurately portrays those attitudes as they existed in the 19th century.

Authors of historical fiction should be outraged by this kind of gratuitous censorship and suppression. I know I am.

While passages within Wilder’s work reflect many attitudes of the era, the section of literature most often cited in this debate is from the 1935 story “Going West,” about a pioneering family.

In the book, the character “Pa” explains that on the land his family is seeking, “there were no people. Only Indians lived there.”

In 1953, Wilder changed the passage to say, “there were no settlers there. Only Indians lived there.”

That change has not appeased the politically correct crowd, however. Never mind the fact that in her books Wilder correctly portrayed the pioneer environment in which she grew up. That apparently offends people who say she should have been “more inclusive” in her books and provided more examples of “diversity.”

Once again, what a bunch of hooey.

I belong to a lively Historical Novels online discussion group in which authors engage in discussions ranging from how one researches historical novels to selecting book titles. Most recently someone started a discussion about whether or not we authors should be politically correct when writing historical fiction. The result was a long thread of comments from authors of historical fiction.

Almost to a person, authors of historical novels say political correctness should NEVER influence how we write about the past. To do so is to be disingenuous to those who read our books.

Our job as authors of historical fiction is NOT to “clean up” or rewrite history, so the sins of the past are expunged from our consciousness. The fact is, overt racism, religious oppression, and other forms of discrimination have been part of life for several thousand years. They still are.

You can see how political correctness has distorted the literary landscape when writers of historical fiction attempt to cleanse offensive language in their books that once was used to describe certain races, classes, religions, and ethnic groups.

As one group member said: “Let’s not only get political correctness out of historical fiction, let’s get it out of society. If you wrote a Civil War story and had a character refer to a black person as an African-American, you ought to be horsewhipped.” 

Let me say it forthrightly and plainly: political correctness has no place in historical fiction or, for that matter, in any other form of literature.  If you are striving to create accurate characters and events in a novel about the past, you must create characters that think, speak, and act the way they did during the period in which the story is set. You cannot impose inclusiveness and diversity retroactively by substituting today’s anodyne language for the often provocative and offensive vernacular of the past.

To inflict today’s political correctness on literary art is to censor and suppress creativity. PC has already overrun and dampened free speech and innovative thought in our schools and on college campuses. God forbid that the thought police should be successful in invading the province of historical fiction too!

The PC thought police have been successful in getting American classics like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain and Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe removed from some school libraries because of their use of language and racial characterizations prevalent in 19th Century America. They have even convinced a few publishers to issue “cleansed” versions of Mark Twain’s work with some passages and descriptions rewritten and some offensive words removed.

That is nothing more than the desecration of art. As writers of historical fiction, it is incumbent upon us to be truthful in our depictions of times past–ugly warts and all.

For the PC thought police, it is not only the politically incorrect word or name that is the problem. It’s a person’s attitude, an individual’s mindset, his or her ability to think freely and express himself or herself in a particular way that the PC bullies want to control. If an individual’s opinions do not conform to their Weltanschauung, then those views should not be expressed. This is intolerance in the extreme.

The underlying question is this: are we really ‘free’ in what we choose to write and say? Do we indeed still have ‘freedom of speech’ as guaranteed by the First Amendment, or do we now SELF-CENSOR because we are afraid of ‘the backlash’?

For those who write or who create other forms of art, these are critical questions that need to be considered. I for one will not be bullied by the PC thought police in my historical novels. I want my work to accurately reflect the time in which my novels are set.

Politically correct speech and its offshoots of intolerance, censorship, and social intimidation are the greatest dangers to free speech since the First Amendment was inserted into our Constitution in 1791. If the PC thought police manage to eviscerate that critical component of our Constitution, freedom of speech will cease to exist.

Laura Ingalls Wilder does not deserve this kind of bowdlerization and maleficent treatment by the Association for Library Service to Children and its parent, the American Library Association.

Authors of historical novels should be sickened and disgusted by this treatment of one of America’s most treasured authors.

In the meantime, the Children’s Literature Legacy Award will remain a fraud because by cleansing the muck and ignominy from our collective history we are being dishonest and insincere with the children we are charged with educating.

 

Is the American Empire Collapsing? (Part 2)

Here is Part 2 of my original post on the collapse of the American Empire.

When former President Obama scrapped the U.S. Manned Space program via Presidential fiat back in 2011, he signaled to the world that the U.S. was ceding its leadership and expertise in space exploration to nations like China and India.

In one of the most arrogantly oblivious declarations, any president ever made he said he was ending the Constellation manned lunar landing program because “we’ve been there before.”

Instead of sending more Americans to the moon, he talked about possibly landing men on an asteroid in 2025 or perhaps Mars at some later date.

Our friends the Chinese were no doubt ecstatic at this announcement.

They have already embarked on a Lunar Exploration Program that will send both robots and men to the moon by 2025. In 2011, a Chinese rocket carried a boxcar-sized module into orbit, the first building block for a Chinese space station that was completed in 2020–the same year that the International Space Station, which is jointly operated by the U.S., Russia, Canada, Japan, and 11 European countries, was scheduled to be de-orbited.

China’s Space Station

 In early October a Long March 3C rocket with the Chang’e-2 probe took off from Xichang launch center. The Xinhua News Agency said Chang’e-2 would circle just nine miles above the Moon’s rocky terrain in order to take photographs of possible landing locations.

It is China’s second lunar probe – the first was launched in 2007. The craft stayed in space for 16 months before being intentionally crashed onto the Moon’s surface. This year the Chinese began mapping the entire surface of the moon with orbiting vehicles and in 2012 it will land lunar rovers that will begin prospecting for strategic materials.

Chinese scientists believe the moon is loaded with base metals and something called “lunar helium-3,” considered a perfect fuel for nuclear fusion power plants.

Robert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, the company he created over a decade ago to develop commercial space habitats using expandable (or inflatable) technology licensed from NASA, insists this is just the beginning of what he fears is an attempt by China to actually claim the moon as its own territory, locking out the United States and other nations.

One obvious obstacle is the Outer Space Treaty, of which China is a party. That treaty prohibits nations from making territorial claims to the Moon or other celestial bodies. Bigelow suggested, though, that China could work to amend the treaty through the support of countries in Africa and Latin America where China is making major investments and who routinely vote against the United States in international bodies such as the United Nations.

Alternatively, he said, China could simply decide to withdraw from the treaty. Public opinion, he said, won’t be a factor. “There isn’t going to be World War Three over this,” he said. “There isn’t going to be a single shot fired.”

China’s Lunar Lander on the Moon

 

Here is what the U.S. can expect, thanks to our myopic U.S. president: Soon, the only people walking around on the moon will be Chinese, and don’t expect them to share any significant base metal or lunar helium-3 finds. That is simply not the DNA of a hard-core Communist regime that controls China.

As Bigelow said in a recent talk to the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) in Las Cruces, New Mexico:

“China’s quest for prestige—to demonstrate that it is the most powerful country in the world—will inevitably drive the country to lay claim to the Moon. China already has a grand national vision. Their vision is that China wants to be indisputably number one in the world, measured any way you want to measure.”

One of the biggest advantages of the Chinese system is that they have five-year plans so they can develop well ahead, said Peter Bond, consultant editor for Jane’s Space Systems and Industry.

“They are taking a step-by-step approach, taking their time and gradually improving their capabilities,” Bond said. “They are putting all the pieces together for a very capable, advanced space industry.”

Meanwhile, NASA closed out its 30-year space shuttle era in 2012, leaving the U.S. dependent on hitching rides to the space station aboard Russian Soyuz capsules at a cost of $56 million per passenger, rising to $63 million or more today. The U.S. also hopes private companies will develop spacecraft to ferry cargo and crew to the space station.

China is not the only country aiming high in space. Russia has talked about building a base on the moon and a possible mission to Mars but hasn’t set a time frame. India, which has already achieved an unmanned orbit of the moon, is planning its first manned space flight in 2016.

To be sure, space exploration is expensive. But to intentionally abandon leadership in an area where the U.S. has been a leader is simply misguided.

When President Kennedy announced in 1961 that the U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade because “we choose to,” it was a statement dripping with optimism that instilled pride and confidence in the American people.

His words seem as relevant today as when President Kennedy spoke them 56 years ago. Take a look at this excerpt:

President Kenndy “We choose to go to the moon…”

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.

We choose to go to the Moon!  We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.

Fifty years later Obama chose to eliminate manned flights to the moon and concede lunar exploration to the Chinese. Not a move that instills pride and confidence, let alone optimism.

While the investment in space exploration alone does not signal the end of the American Empire, the fact that we are abandoning it says a lot about American leadership—or the lack thereof.

What made the American Empire remarkable was its refusal to accept defeat, to take a back seat amongst nations, to merely observe history instead of making it.

It is easy not to do something because it is difficult or expensive, but effective leadership requires that we not give up no matter how difficult or what the cost

If we do, then the American Empire is destined for the ash heap of history just as Rome and countless other empires were.

I hope I’m not around to see it.

 

 

 

Is the American Empire Collapsing? (Part I)

Now that the United States has slinked out of Afghanistan following yet another ignominious defeat reminiscent of its “lost crusade” in Vietnam, people are asking the question: Is this the end of the American Empire? Is the United States done for? Did we meet our match in the fundamentalist Muslim terrorists who now run Afghanistan?

And what of ascendent China? Will it replace the United States as the preeminent political and military power in the world? Some say it already has. I’m not so sure. But I have to admit, with yet another administration that seems content to “lead from behind” and that is obsessed with everything BUT projecting power and leadership in the world, America seems to have lost its way.

Feckless leadership in the White House is one reason, but there are many others. A couple of years ago I posted about the collapsing American Empire. I took a look at that post the other day, and guess what? Nothing much has changed, except for the fact that we were run out of Afghanistan, tail between our legs, by a ragtag collection of Taliban terrorists. 

Here is that post. I hope you will find it interesting.

In the late 1980s, most political pundits were writing off the United States as the preeminent economic power in the world.

Japan, they insisted, had supplanted the U.S. as #1, and Americans watched as Japanese, rife with cash, bought up trophy properties from New York’s Rockefeller Plaza to the fabled Pebble Beach Golf Course in Carmel, California. Japanese secretaries flush with a super-strong Japanese Yen were buying up condos overlooking New York’s Central Park and along the Malibu coastline.

The hysteria was palpable. America soon was going to be owned by the Japanese.

I was in the middle of this hysteria, living in Tokyo as the Chicago Tribune’s Chief Asia Correspondent. I have to admit as the plethora of books and news stories about the new Japanese Super State flooded the planet, it was difficult not to buy into the credence of these arguments.

America, the experts droned on, had lost its competitive edge. Its people were soft, lazy, and inept.  The American Empire was in decline–another Great Britain, losing its status and stature around the world.

Then along came 1990-91 and the over-inflated Japanese economic bubble, engendered by a grossly over-valued real estate market, burst. Within a few years, the U.S. regained its competitive edge, and its economy embarked on a decade of unprecedented growth. Meanwhile, the Japanese economy has yet to recover fully.

Of course, that is not the end of the story. Today the U.S. is once again teetering on the brink of economic catastrophe and this time China is perceived as the nation poised to supplant America as the world’s most powerful economy.

Now anybody who has been to China has to be impressed with the progress that country has made. New cities, new buildings, new roads, new industries—all of these things add up to a country on the rise. No argument there.

But travel out of the cities, and you see a different China. This is a nation in which some 150 million people are living below the United Nations poverty line of $1 (that’s “one” US dollar) a day and nearly 500 million Chinese live on less than $2 a day, according to the China Development Research Foundation.

The Foundation also reports that nearly 85% of China’s poor live in rural areas, with about 66% concentrated in the country’s west and they share less than 12% of the country’s wealth. Only about 55 million Chinese (out of a population of some 1.2 billion) are considered middle-class.

Meanwhile, the U.S. trade deficit with China has surged over the past three decades, as U.S. imports from China have grown much faster than U.S. exports to China. That imbalance rose from $10 billion in 1990 to $347 billion in 2016. For 2017 the U.S. trade deficit with China is already at $204 billion and is projected to surpass the 2016 figure.

According to the Congressional Research Service, during the past decade, China has been the fastest-growing market for U.S. exports. U.S. imports of low-cost goods from China significantly benefit U.S. consumers by increasing their purchasing power. U.S. firms that use China as the final point of assembly for their products, or use Chinese-made inputs for production in the United States, can lower costs and become more globally competitive.

China’s purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds (which stood at nearly $1.2 trillion at the end of 2016) help keep U.S. interest rates relatively low. Ditto Japan, which owns about $1.1 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities.

On the other hand, many analysts argue that growing economic ties with China have exposed U.S. manufacturing firms to greater, and what is often perceived to be “unfair” competition from low-cost Chinese companies. They argue that this has induced many U.S. production facilities to relocate to China, resulting in the loss of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs. Some policymakers have also raised concerns that China’s vast holdings of U.S. government debt may give it leverage over the United States.

These are all valid points, and they tend to mirror the same concerns that existed between the U.S. and Japan in the 1980s–but only up to a point.

Since the end of World War II, Japan has been an American ally–a bulwark for the projection of U.S. military might in Asia. China, on the other hand, has opposed the American military presence in the region and especially criticized U.S. support of Taiwan, which it considers a rogue province.

Unlike China, Japan is a nation built on post-war capitalism–albeit a more managed model than the type practiced in the U.S. The government in China is still a hard-core Communist regime that would like nothing more than to see the free market capitalist democracy in America fail.

Thus, the relationship between China and the U.S., while mostly friendly since diplomatic ties were re-established in the early 1970s, often has been strained.

Never was that more evident than after 1989 and the Tiananmen Square massacre–an event that I covered for the Tribune. After the Chinese government slaughtered some 2,000 to 3,000 students and pro-democracy protesters in the heart of Beijing in June of that year, Washington finally began to take the issue of human rights violations in China seriously.

It continues to do so, though the Chinese government sees any criticism of how it handles anti-government and anti-communist protesters as an internal issue with which the U.S. has no business interfering.

Give China points for creating a robust, semi-capitalist economy that has been built on enticing technology transfer from places like Europe, the U.S., Japan, and South Korea. Give it points for refusing to buckle under to demands that it revalue its currency, so its products are no longer dumped on international markets.

And finally, give it points for looking ahead while political leaders in the U.S. seem mired in the past, content to concede space exploration to minor nations and allow energy independence to languish while greedy Middle Eastern sheiks hold us hostage.

While we squabble about the direction of capitalism, the redistribution of wealth, and a plethora of questionable social re-engineering schemes in our military, our competitors (i.e., China) are innovating, moving forward, and prospering.

It makes you wonder.

NEXT: Is the American Empire Collapsing? (Part II)