Mar 9, 2023 | Politics
Here is the full text of the letter:
March 7, 2023
The Honorable Joseph R. Biden
President of the United States
The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Northwest Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Biden:
It has been reported that Novak Djokovic has formally applied and been denied permission from your administration to enter the United States so that he may compete at the upcoming Miami Open tennis tournament. This denial is unfair, unscientific and unacceptable. I urge you to reconsider. It’s time to put pandemic politics aside and give the American people what they want—let him play.
While Mr. Djokovic is surely a supreme competitive threat to his fellow tennis professionals, his presence in our country poses no meaningful health or public safety risk. I note that since the onset of COVID-19, Mr. Djokovic has visited the United States at least twice – including once during your presidency – without any apparent health incident. It is also not clear to me why, even by the terms of your own proclamation, Mr. Djokovic could not legally enter this country via boat.[1] Please confirm no later than Friday, March 10, 2023, that this method of travel into Florida would be permissible.
Furthermore, even as you enacted the Proclamation on air travel that remains in force to this day, your administration pointedly allowed thousands of unvaccinated migrants to enter our country through the southern border. In sum, the current “travel ban” as applied to Mr. Djokovic and presumably millions of other potential unvaccinated foreign visitors – seems completely ungrounded in logic, common sense, or any genuine concern for the health and welfare of the American people.
Affectionately known as “Tennis’ 5th Grand Slam,” the Miami Open is the second most popular tennis event in the United States and routinely attracts hundreds of thousands of fans as well as premier tennis professionals from around the world. Novak Djokovic, as you surely know, is the most accomplished tennis player in history and the reigning top-ranked player in his sport. As a result of his illustrious career and philanthropic efforts, he has a strong following of loyal fans in the United States. There can be no question that his inclusion in the Miami Open would be a tremendous boon both for this treasured tournament and the tennis community at large.
The only thing keeping Mr. Djokovic from participating in this tournament is your administration’s continued enforcement of a misguided, unscientific, and out-of-date COVID-19 vaccination requirement for foreign guests seeking to visit our great country. American tennis legend John McEnroe recently termed this restriction “absurd.” He was quite right to say so.
We are now three years since the onset of COVID-19, and we have learned many valuable – and often painful – lessons during that time. For one thing, it is now clear that the COVID-19 vaccines are not as effective as initially advertised. A new study in the Lancet has found that natural immunity is at least as effective as the COVID vaccines (“Our analysis of the available data suggests that the level of protection afforded by previous infection is at least as high, if not higher than that provided by two-dose vaccination using high-quality mRNA vaccines.”). Furthermore, data also suggests that exposure to COVID-19 is now significantly less likely to result in hospitalization or fatality. Finally, not only is the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine now in question, but recent scientific studies have identified serious potential health risks from the vaccine. Florida’s Surgeon General has issued guidance recommending against the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for males ages 18-39 years old – precisely the cohort of Mr. Djokovic.
Here in Florida, we took a leadership role in rejecting vaccination mandates. Since November 2021, it has been illegal for businesses to require their patrons to be vaccinated against COVID-19. I am proud of these efforts, which unquestionably promoted personal liberty and economic growth without exposing our citizens to any substantiated harm. Although it has taken some time, most of the rest of the world has now come to recognize COVID-19 vaccination requirements as obsolete. At present, it appears that the United States is one of only a handful of countries that requires foreign visitors to have received a COVID-19 vaccination. Indeed, in an interview on September 18, 2022, you personally declared that “the pandemic is over,” and your administration has already communicated to Congress that the COVID-19 emergency will formally end on May 11. The time has come to give up the fiction that COVID vaccines remain a necessary tool to promote public health.
Mr. Djokovic is an extraordinary tennis player who should have every right to compete in this year’s Miami Open, which will commence on March 20. I respectfully ask you to grant his requested exemption so that he may delight and inspire tennis fans in Florida and around the Nation.
Sincerely,
Ron DeSantis
Governor
[1] Your October 25, 2021 Proclamation “governs the entry into the United States of noncitizen nonimmigrants — that is, noncitizens who are visiting the United States or otherwise being admitted temporarily — traveling to the United States by air.” (emphasis added). Beginning in January 2022, your Department of Homeland Security announced similar restrictions for non-U.S. individuals seeking to enter the United States via land ports of entry and ferry terminals at the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders. But your administration does not appear to have issued analogous restrictions for non-U.S. individuals seeking to enter our country by boat.
Related:
Mar 9, 2023 | World
From “North Korea defector compares woke US ideology, education to regime tactics” (New York Post):
“They were in Manhattan, living in the freest country you can imagine, and they’re saying they’re oppressed? It doesn’t even compute,” Yeonmi Park told The Post of students at her alma mater, Columbia University. “I was sold for $200 as a sex slave in the 21st century under the same sky. And they say they’re oppressed because people can’t follow their pronouns they invent every day?”
The 29-year-old defected from North Korea as a young teen, only to be human-trafficked in China. In 2014, she became one of just 200 North Koreans to live in the United States — and, as of last year, is an American citizen.
Now, three years after she graduated from Columbia with a degree in human rights, Park is raising alarm bells about America’s cancel culture and woke ideology.
In her book “While Time Remains,” out February 14, Park writes how she made it all the way to the United States only to find some of the same encroachments on freedom that she thought she left behind in North Korea — from identity politics and victim mentality to elite hypocrisy.
[…]
In North Korea, Park said, the government divides citizens into 51 classes based on whether their blood is “tainted” because their ancestors were “oppressive” landowners.
“That’s how the regime divided people. What an individual does doesn’t matter. It’s all about your ancestors and the collective,” she explained.
Now, when she sees Americans indulging in race essentialism and identity politics, she said, it feels eerily familiar.
“They say white people are privileged and guilty and oppressors,” Park said. “This is the tactic the North Korean regime used to divide people. In America it’s the same idea of collective guilt. This is the ideology that drove North Korea to be what it is today — and we’re putting it into young American minds.”
[…]
“I really don’t think that we have that much time left,” she warned. “Already all our mainstream institutions have the same ideology that North Korea has: socialism, collectivism and equity. We are literally going through a cultural revolution in America. When we realize it, it might be too late.”
Mar 9, 2023 | Arts
In the summer of 2020, J.K. Rowling, author of the famed Harry Potter series tweeted the following:
and
As Megan Phelps-Roper writes in The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling “It’s hard to capture the breadth of the firestorm that followed”:
Rowling’s words led to a “revolt” among the staff at one of her publishers, an outcry from some of her most ardent fans, and a torrent of negative headlines in news outlets around the globe. Actors who had grown up on the “Harry Potter” film sets—people she had known since they were children—distanced themselves from her. Many of Rowling’s former fans began calling for boycotts. They removed photos of her from their websites and Potter tattoos from their bodies. TikTokers started a trend of covering her name on books and book jackets, and tore her books apart. Players of Quidditch—the fictional sport she invented—ultimately changed its name to dissociate themselves from her. The abhorrence of Rowling has at times been so intense that it’s led to the actual burning of her books. A recent novel even includes a scene where Rowling herself is killed in a fire.
In response to a flood of calls for her to apologize, Rowling refused to back down.
Instead, she published an essay on sex and gender issues, including an account of her violently abusive ex-husband. She said she was writing “out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.”
For many, Rowling’s clarifications didn’t help. They only further cemented her transformation from a progressive hero into a hateful reactionary. The head of the biggest Potter fansite in the world said she was “heartbroken” and shared a guide on “cancelling” Rowling, while others accused the author of “destroying her legacy.”
Writes Pamela Paul, “In Defense of J.K. Rowling” in the New York Times:
“This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.
So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think.
The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.
…But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people “in danger,” as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist.
Take it from one of her former critics. E.J. Rosetta, a journalist who once denounced Rowling for her supposed transphobia, was commissioned last year to write an article called “20 Transphobic J.K. Rowling Quotes We’re Done With.” After 12 weeks of reporting and reading, Rosetta wrote, “I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message.” On Twitter she declared, “You’re burning the wrong witch.”
Rowling could have just stayed in bed. She could have taken refuge in her wealth and fandom. In her “Harry Potter” universe, heroes are marked by courage and compassion. Her best characters learn to stand up to bullies and expose false accusations. And that even when it seems the world is set against you, you have to stand firm in your core beliefs in what’s right.
Defending those who have been scorned isn’t easy, especially for young people. It’s scary to stand up to bullies, as any “Harry Potter” reader knows. Let the grown-ups in the room lead the way. If more people stood up for J.K. Rowling, they would not only be doing right by her; they’d also be standing up for human rights, specifically women’s rights, gay rights and, yes, transgender rights. They’d also be standing up for the truth.
Mar 9, 2023 | Politics
Write Yaron Brook & Elan Journo on Why Nationalism Is Hostile to America:
Nationalism in the last century ravaged Europe. Nationalists today would have us believe their agenda will somehow lead to different results. Despite wrapping themselves in the Stars and Stripes, they push essentially the same destructive ideas.
They argue that to counter nationalism requires embracing “the Enlightenment ideals at the foundation of the American experiment.” Namely, reason and individual rights:
For most of human history, government was an instrument of domination over the individual. Individuals were duty bound to kneel before some authority, whether embodied in a tribe, throne, or church. The individual was literally a pawn at the disposal of the rulers. With the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, however, the ground began to shift. Thinkers such as John Locke advocated a fundamentally different view of the relation between individual citizens and the state. That political shift stemmed from a philosophical emphasis on reason. The individual, these thinkers believed, is capable of observing the world, understanding it, and discovering truths; and so, people could use their reason to guide their own lives. What emerged was a recognition of the individual as sovereign—in thought and in action.
Consequently, a new view came into focus regarding the individual’s relation to the state. The state’s purpose was not to dominate and exploit, but rather to protect the individual’s sovereignty. This view informed the Founders, and it reverberates in the words of the Declaration of Independence. The individual—every individual—has the rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and government exists “to secure these rights.” When government “becomes destructive of these ends,” it is the right of the governed to abolish it and institute a better system that “shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.” Thus, the state’s raison d’être is to protect individual rights, that is, to protect individuals’ freedom to pursue life and happiness based on their rational judgment.
From refrigerators to silicon chips, they go on to explain how such political freedom are responsible for America’s material success, concluding:
These material advances, coupled with a culture in which liberty is protected, have made the United States a beacon to the rest of the world, an inspiration to be emulated. That is why the brightest and most ambitious people from all over the world have sought and continue to seek to immigrate to America. What made America such a success story? Its foundational ideals of reason, individualism, and freedom—and the human spirit they unleash.
Nationalism is hostile to all of those.
They correctly note that, as a political ideology, “Nationalism is not synonymous with loyalty to one’s own country; it is a specific political-social doctrine. The essential feature of nationalism is the very un-American notion of elevating the group over the individual.”
Continue Brook & Journo:
“Because nationalism devalues the individual, it is at odds with the principle of protecting individual liberty. Indeed, nationalism is best understood as a species of collectivism. Fundamentally, writes the philosopher Leonard Peikoff, collectivism “holds that in human affairs, the collective—society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc.—is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it.” It is predicated, observed Ayn Rand, “on the view of man as a congenital incompetent, a helpless, mindless creature who must be fooled and ruled by a special elite with some unspecified claim to superior wisdom and a lust for power.”
[…]
Nationalism is a repudiation of the sovereign individual, the ideal central to a free society. Whatever semblance of credibility nationalism may have had in the last century, it lost that on Europe’s corpse-strewn battlefields and in the gas chambers. Today, at the forefront of the campaign to revive nationalism are the self-described “national conservatives.” What reason if any is there to believe that their ideas will lead to a different outcome?
As today’s “democratic socialists” and “woke progressives” rebuke the results of Stalin’s & Mao’s socialism, so do “national conservatives” of the 20th century nationalists, yet theirs is still an Anti-Enlightenment Crusade:
National conservatism fundamentally devalues the individual’s rational mind, and consequently, it repudiates the principle of individual rights. In his book, The Virtue of Nationalism, Hazony argues that—contrary to the evidence—human reason is incapable of arriving at universal truths. He writes that, “no human being, and no group of human beings, possesses the necessary powers of reason and the necessary knowledge to dictate the political constitution that is appropriate for all mankind.”[ix] Therefore, he believes, it is wrong to regard the principle of individual rights as a universal truth. Instead, he downgrades it to a “cultural inheritance of certain tribes and nations.” (And as we’ll see, despite pro-liberty rhetoric, this view empties the principle of individual rights of all meaning.)
[…]
Will a national conservative state protect your individual rights? To have even a semblance of freedom, in this view, you have to live in a tribe or nation where that is a “cultural inheritance.” (Tough luck if you’re born where “honor killings” and female genital mutilation are accepted cultural inheritances.) Whatever degree of freedom you may be afforded is not a matter of your moral right, but rather a permission granted by the collective, and hence a permission that it may withdraw. Essentially, your life and freedom actually belong to the nation. To echo Hegel, your life is “something subordinate,” and if the collective “claims life, the individual must surrender it.”
In the U.S. the inheritance “national conservatives” seek to implement is theocracy – the melding of chuch & state, or in the author’s words: “National conservatism is an ideology crusading for religious authoritarianism.”
To understand why read the entire article.
Feb 14, 2023 | Education
John Andreson speaks with Professor James Tooley, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Buckingham, for an insightful conversation about the role of education in the modern age, the relationship between parental and government oversight in education systems, the differences between public and private education, ideological uniformity in universities and more
. James Tooley is Professor of Educational Entrepreneurship and Policy at one of the UK’s only private universities, the University of Buckingham, where he was also appointed Vice Chancellor in 2020. In his previous role at Newcastle University, Tooley directed the E.G. West Centre which is dedicated to advancing choice, competition, and entrepreneurship in education. In the early 2000s, Tooley took 5 years of unpaid leave to foster entrepreneurial projects in education in developing countries, led by his research on how to provide high quality education for a lower cost. Tooley’s ground breaking research has demonstrated the benefits of low-cost private education, with his work winning numerous prestigious awards and international recognition. James has also written numerous critically-acclaimed books on the topic, including The Beautiful Tree, Reclaiming Education and most recently Really Good Schools: Global Lessons for High Caliber, Low Cost Education.
Jan 30, 2023 | Politics
Corporations as ‘creatures of the state’ is a socialist myth. Under capitalism, corporations are created by individual contract. The state’s role is to protect those contracts, not to create them.
As historian Robert Hessen remarks:
“To call incorporation a ‘privilege’ implies that individuals have no right to create a corporation. But why is government permission needed? Who would be wronged if businesses adopted corporate features by contract?”
Jan 14, 2023 | Politics
Issues covered with Adam Mossoff include the History of Property Rights, Attacks on Property Rights, Common Good Constitutionalism, Legal Positivism vs Natural Rights, Originalism, Textualism, Good Society, Protection of Property Rights in US Constitution, Debate among scholars, Administrative State, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Intellectual Property Rights, How did we get freedom and negation of property rights, Future of Intellectual Property Rights, China, and Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.
Jan 14, 2023 | Sci-Tech
Write Objectivists Amy Peikoff and Benjamin Chayes:
This week marks two years since Amazon Web Services, following closely behind Google and Apple, took burgeoning Twitter competitor Parler—which had been number one in Apple’s App Store—offline. The reason given was the platform’s alleged contribution to the January 6, 2021 riot on the Capitol, via a supposedly disproportionate prevalence of violent and inciting content. The facts that, for example, #HangMikePence was trending on Twitter at the time, and that Parler had been referring examples of violent and inciting content to law enforcement in the weeks leading up to the 6th, fell on deaf ears.
That Parler was unfairly scapegoated quickly became apparent to anyone who bothered to follow the story. But what has become incontrovertible only recently, thanks to Elon Musk’s release of the “Twitter Files,” is evidence pointing to the actual motivation behind Parler’s deplatforming: the desire to bury all the uncensored content that Parler allowed to be shared on the web. Remember Hunter Biden’s laptop? The Wuhan lab-leak? The Great Barrington Declaration? Or maybe you missed all of that back then, exactly as an amalgamation of not-yet-fully-identified crony tech “leaders” and government agents intended.
Read the rest.
Jan 4, 2023 | Politics
There have been quite a few virulent attacks against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for his establishing an independent committee to evaluate many of the claims by the Federal government and their partners in regard to the COVID-19 vaccine. Such an independent panel, court-administered proceeding under a rule of law should be welcomed by those who are concerned with the truth.
The petition can be found here. [Alt link: Vaccine-Grand-Jury-Petition]
Below is the news release:
Dec 5, 2022 | Business
Writes David Z. Morris in “FTX’s Collapse Was a Crime, Not an Accident” at CoinDesk:
FTX Crash was a result of a “conscious and intentional fraud intended to steal money”
It is now clear that what happened at the FTX crypto exchange and the hedge fund Alameda Research [hedge fund] involved a variety of conscious and intentional fraud intended to steal money from both users and investors. That’s why a recent New York Times interview was widely derided for seeming to frame FTX’s collapse as the result of mismanagement rather than malfeasance. A Wall Street Journal article bemoaned the loss of charitable donations from FTX, arguably propping up Bankman-Fried’s strategic philanthropic pose. Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, court chronicler of the neoliberal status quo, seemed to whitewash his own entanglements by crediting Bankman-Fried’s money with helping Democrats in the 2020 elections – sidestepping the likelihood that the money was effectively embezzled.
FTX crash was not the result of a bank run, but a massive act of theft
Perhaps most perniciously, many outlets have described what happened to FTX as a “bank run” or a “run on deposits,” while Bankman-Fried has repeatedly insisted the company was simply overleveraged and disorganized. Both of these attempts to frame the fallout obfuscate the core issue: the misuse of customer funds.
[…]
FTX and other crypto exchanges are not banks. They do not (or should not) do bank-style lending, so even a very acute surge of withdrawals should not create a liquidity strain. FTX had specifically promised customers it would never lend out or otherwise use the crypto they entrusted to the exchange.
In reality, the funds were sent to the intimately linked trading firm Alameda Research, where they were, it seems, simply gambled away. This is, in the simplest terms, theft at a nearly unprecedented scale. While the total losses have yet to be quantified, up to one million customers could be impacted, according to a bankruptcy document.
Bankman-Fried stole FTX exchange customers’ funds to bankroll the Alameda hedge fund
The author goes into the gory details and the magnitude of the theft by Bankman-Fried and how he stole FTX exchange customers’ funds to bankroll the Alameda hedge fund, amongst other crimes:
“While an exchange [like FTX] ultimately makes money from transaction fees on assets that belong to users, a hedge fund like Alameda seeks to profit from actively trading or investing funds it controls….the [FTX] exchange had been funneling customer assets to Alameda for use in trading, lending and investing activities. On Nov. 12, Reuters made the stunning report that as much as $10 billion in user funds had been sent from FTX to Alameda.”
Bankman-Fried is the Bernie Madoff of the 2020s
“Bankman-Fried has continued to muddy the waters with carefully disingenuous letters, statements, interviews and tweets. He has attempted to portray himself as a well-intentioned but naïve kid who got in over his head and made a few miscalculations. This is a softer but more pernicious version of the crisis management approach Donald Trump learned from the black-hat mob lawyer Roy Cohn: Instead of “deny, deny, deny,” Bankman-Fried has decided to “confuse, evade, distort.”
Morris covers other criminal behaviors that resulted from this “cardinal sin” concluding:
“The scale and complexity of Bankman-Fried’s fraud and theft appear to rival those of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff and Malaysian embezzler Jho Low. Whether consciously or through malign ineptitude, the fraud also echoes much larger corporate scandals such as Worldcom and, particularly, Enron.
“The principals in all of those scandals wound up either sentenced to prison or on the run from the law. Sam Bankman-Fried clearly deserves to share their fate.”
Must read.
Nov 28, 2022 | Quoteable
Writes James Bovard in the NY Post on ‘All-knowing’ Tony Fauci’s memory suddenly vanishes when he has to testify‘:
The transcript has not been released, but a few “pants on fire” snippets have come out. After Fauci championed lockdowns to vanquish COVID, top scientists from Oxford, Stanford and Harvard in October 2020 issued the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that “focused protection” for high-risk groups (such as the elderly) was vastly preferable to shutting down society. When asked about his role in assailing that Declaration, Fauci declared, “I have a very busy day job running a $6 billion institute. I don’t have time to worry about things like the Great Barrington Declaration.” But less than two weeks after the Declaration’s release, Fauci emailed Deborah Birx, the White House COVID chief, “I have come out very strongly publicly against the Great Barrington Declaration.” Fauci did multiple media interviews castigating any suggestion that lockdowns were unnecessary to save America.
Fauci apparently sees himself as part of a caste of politically favored scientists entitled to rule Americans’ lives. Schmitt tweeted that Fauci declared during the deposition that “the rest of us ‘don’t have the ability’ to determine what’s best for ourselves.”
Fauci has consistently behaved as if federal health officials deserve unchallengeable dictatorial powers. When a federal judge in April struck down the Biden administration mask mandate for airplane travelers, Fauci caterwauled, “This is a CDC issue, it should not have been a court issue.” Fauci neglected to reveal the secret provision of the Constitution that entitles political appointees to nullify the rest of the nation’s founding document.
Fauci has had more flip-flops than a Ringling Bros. trapeze artist. In early 2020, he scoffed at the notion that masks would prevent COVID transmission — and then jumped on the bandwagon to champion unreliable cloth masks. In May 2021, Fauci said the vaccinated would not transmit COVID — a claim he continued to repeat long after the evidence debunked that claim. He opposed vaccine mandates until he endorsed them.
Endless flattery convinced Fauci he is sacrosanct. When Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) suggested prosecuting Fauci for his false congressional testimony regarding his funding of the “gain of function” research in Chinese labs that may have unleashed COVID, Fauci huffed that his critics are “really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” But not as dangerous as a megalomaniacal political appointee secretly wielding power to undermine American freedom.
Fauci declared in August that the COVID lockdowns he championed had not “irreparably damaged anyone.” What about the 51% increase in suicide attempts by young girls during the first year of the lockdowns? Forced isolation made far more people depressed and contributed to the 25% increase in alcohol-related deaths in 2020 and record drug-abuse fatalities. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that Americans suffered “171,000 excess non-COVID deaths during 2020 and 2021.” Many of those fatalities were “collateral damage” from shutdowns and other COVID policies.
Nov 23, 2022 | Politics
Bill Barr has an excellent article that makes the case against Trump running in 2024, “Bill Barr: Trump Will Burn Down the GOP. Time for New Leadership.”
Why Barr supported Trump in 2016
Trump with his “frequently juvenile, bombastic, and petulant style” was not Barr’s “idea of a president”, but once he became the GOP’s nominee he supported him, as in Barr’s words:
Trump had accurately diagnosed, and given voice to, the deep frustration of many middle-class and working-class Americans who were fed up with the excesses of progressive Democrats; the shameless partisanship of the mainstream media; and the smug condescension of elites who had mismanaged the country, sold them out, and appeared content to preside over the decline of America.
Trump administration’s “substantive” achievements
[Trump administration’s] tax reform and deregulatory efforts generated the strongest and most resilient economy in American history—one that brought unprecedented progress to many marginalized Americans. He had begun to restore U.S. military strength by increasing spending on new-generation weapons, advanced technology, and force readiness. He correctly identified the economic, technological, and military threats to the United States posed by China’s aggressive policies. By brokering historic peace deals in the Mideast, he achieved what most thought impossible. He had the courage to pull us out of ill-advised and detrimental agreements with Iran and Russia. And he fulfilled America’s long-delayed promise to move its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem.
Trump lost in 2020 because energized those who wanted to vote against him
Trump succeeded in driving a record turnout of his own supporters. But he also generated a more massive turnout for Joe Biden. The millions of voters who flocked to the polls to pull the Democratic lever set historic records and swamped the Trump voters. They did not come to vote for Biden; they came to vote against Trump. Fraud did not prevent Trump’s second term. Trump himself was the reason.
Winning in 2024 for the GOP requires the “old Reagan coalition”
…I believe the defining feature of our political landscape continues to be the sharp leftward lurch of the Democratic party. That opens up a historic opportunity for the GOP—the opportunity to revive something like the old Reagan coalition: a combination of Republican-leaning, college-educated suburbanites; culturally conservative working-class voters; and even some classical liberals who are repulsed by the left’s authoritarianism.
Trump’s behavior since losing the 2020 election is detrimental to the GOP
[Trump] treacherously sabotaged GOP efforts to hold the Georgia Senate seats. The GOP’s poor performance in the recent midterms was due largely to Trump’s mischief. He fueled internal fights within state parties. He attacked popular Republican governors in Maryland, New Hampshire, and Arizona to dissuade them from running for Senate seats they could have won. He supported weak candidates for key Senate and House seats based solely on their agreeing with his “stolen election” claims…
The Trump threat based on his “supreme narcissism”
[Trump’s faction is] “probably no larger than a quarter of the GOP, but which allows Trump to use it as leverage to extort and bully the rest of the party into submission. The threat is simple: unless the rest of the party goes along with him, he will burn the whole house down by leading “his people” out of the GOP. Trump’s willingness to destroy the party if he does not get his way is not based on principle, but on his own supreme narcissism.
Read the full article at Common Sense News.
Nov 17, 2022 | Culture
Niall Ferguson on fatalism in history:
Contingency here means a relatively small event or decision. And it doesn’t need to be a decision. It can be something accidental, has very major consequences. And historical causations like that, something relatively small, can have tremendous ramifications. I’ll give you another illustration. This year, most people, including the US government, thought that if Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian government would quite quickly fold, and it was assumed that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, would bail. He didn’t. He gave his famous response, “I don’t want an air ticket. I want ammunition.” And Zelenskyy’s courage when they were closing in on Kyiv with a high probability that they would assassinate, the Russians turned the course of history in a way that I think is now quite widely understood.
People know Zelenskyy is an important historical figure. He gets a lot of attention because he is a charismatic figure who understands how to use modern media to communicate with an audience. That’s the benefit of having a very seasoned entertainer as your president. But I think what’s really important there is that his courage, particularly the famous video selfie video where he says, “I’m here. The defense minister is here. We’re here.” They’re standing in the streets of Kyiv. The Russians are closing in at that point on the capital. That was a tremendous act of courage. But it emboldened ordinary Ukrainians not to fold, and it also intimidated the collaborators who were ready to help the Russians, not to act. So the contingency there is if Zelenskyy had gone according to our expectation and taken the plane, then Putin would’ve had Kyiv within a matter of days or weeks, and the war would be over.
So I think one of the things that’s exciting about the study of history is you are trying to remind yourself again and again that what happened, that what we know happened, might have gone the other way. That the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in both sides essentially backing down was not predetermined. There was a moment when a Soviet submarine commander gave the order to fire a nuclear torpedo at US naval surface ships. So we came within a hair’s breadth of World War III. These alternate worlds, these histories that didn’t happen, have to be alive in your mind when you are writing history.
The fatal mistake is to write history as if it was bound to happen the way it happened. And this, of course, is the mistake that a great majority of historians make. Forgetting that, we don’t know at the time, at the moment, we didn’t know the morning of the 24th of February that Zelenskyy would stand his ground. Nobody knew that. I wonder if even Zelenskyy at that moment knew what it was that he was going to do.
So I say all this because I think it’s really important to convey to your listeners and viewers how exciting history is and how studying it makes you understand the course of events in your own life better removes that passivity that sometimes people succumb to. If you think great historical forces are going to have inevitable outcomes, if you have a deterministic view of the historical process, it’s very easy to lapse into fatalism. There’s the other trap, which is the conspiracy theories. “Well, the truth of the matter is that actually, Soros and the Rothschilds are orchestrating all this.” Again, you throw up your hands and you abandon the attempt to understand how the historical process works.
Listen to the rest on the Tim Ferris Podcast.
Nov 15, 2022 | Education
Before the midterm elections, in an attack on his critics President Biden writes that once one takes government money, they no longer can criticize him, implying hypocrisy of his critics.
Yet, the Payroll relief program was instituted because successful, prosperous businesses were put out of business by the government’s lockdown orders at the behest of the CDC.
So, Mr. Biden, you tax the hell out of productive people, shut down their jobs with mandates/lockdowns, loan them some of their money back, while taking a cut to pay off the people who got you elected, cry it’s a “democracy,” and then say people have no right to speak?
US college is expensive & wasteful because the govt subsidizes inefficiency with federally-backed student loans. Time to cancel that program too.
Nov 15, 2022 | Arts
Fantastic thriller.
“Gareth Jones, a British “stringer” journalist, traveled to the Soviet Union in 1933 and uncovered the appalling truth behind the Soviet “utopia” inspiring George Orwell’s Animal Farm.”
In Mr. Jones, Actor James Norton plays a heroic “stringer” (an independent journalist not affiliated with any news organization) who took on Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Walter Duranty, at the New York Times to reveal how Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians to prop up his communist regime. Jones, is a real-life Clark Kent, whose “superpower” is his unwavering dedication to the truth, no matter the cost, even if it means his own life. His nemesis Walter Duranty is brilliantly portrayed by Peter Sarsgaard.
Based on real events during the Holodomor where over six million died in 1933-4 by planned starvation. The film has ominous parallels to today as the Russian dictator Putin wages his unjust war against the people of Ukraine, and how establishment journalism seeks to distort the truth to promote government narratives on the tyrannical COVID lockdowns and mandates as brave independent journalists work to uncover the truth.
History does repeat itself, if not in concrete form, in abstract principle, for good or bad, if we do not induct the lessons it gives us.
