The Feudal Future Podcast, two Chapman University professors warning of California’s slide into feudalism, or, more accurately, manorialism.
Most historians of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West would admit of centuries of misrule and foreign pressures leading to its disappearance. The Fall was incremental with most people adjusting to the slowly deteriorating conditions. Then, on the heels of persistent and growing disorder, the Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD. The evidence of decline was visible on the ground in the depopulation of many urban centers – Rome’s population in the 5th century had fallen to 50,000 – and in overgrown and decaying infrastructure. A healthy middle class faded with the weakening of commerce and the spreading lawlessness, and people began to cluster around powerful land barons. Western Europe became feudal. And so is California.
Feudal California has been a consistent theme of mine for a number of years. I’m not alone in this assessment. Two Chapman University professors (Orange, Ca.), Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin, have been sounding the alarm in their “The Feudal Future” podcast at https://www.feudalfuturepodcast.com/home51396438. Check it out.
Professor Marshall Toplansky recently sat down for an interview with Siyamak Khorrami (see below) to explain what is happening to the socio-economic profile of California as it is sliding into feudalism. In sum, California is losing its middle class. A thriving middle class is a product of a vibrant commerce. Commerce is fading in the state’s broad system collapse. Sound familiar? As the middle class flees for opportunity elsewhere, the leftover population begins to take on the character of the wealthy in their walled manors and a growing mass of the poor to service their needs. How long will it be before we start calling California’s poor “peasants” or “serfs” and the state’s hyper-rich “Lord”?
This state of affairs wasn’t an accident. It is a willful consequence of elected choices. Decline and decay are popularly elected. It’s a one-party state with policy excesses never held to account. A chief target of the excess is commerce – or more simply, the economy. Doing business in California is like descending into Dante’s Inferno. A reputation for hostility is cemented; businesses leave for more welcoming states; air quality improves because the economy is systematically depressed; and the young in their peak family-formation and income years take flight. “Going green” (ev’s, solar panels, windmills, recycling galore, a war on fossil fuels, etc.) is going-going-gone for the middle class.
Please take time to watch the Toplansky interview. It should be enlightening for anyone in California or seeking to avoid its fate.
Much has been made of the divisions in the Democratic Party with the fringe left making life difficult for Joe Biden. But what of the dissatisfaction in Republican ranks with Donald Trump? The number of non-endorsements grew beyond Larry Hogan of Maryland and Nikki Haley’s refusal to fall in line, and now includes Mike Pence’s rejection of Trump (watch below). Biden and Trump must be some of the most detested candidates ever to be foisted on the American public. 2024 is proving to be an election of the abhorrent.
Biden is sliding off into senescence as he flails ever further left. Trump can’t help being repellent. Both parties and their candidates are pandering in ways that sacrifice the country’s fortunes. Biden attaches himself to a toxic cultural revolution, works to bury the country in greenie central planning, is busy driving the economy into the ditch in a flurry of tax/spend/regulate, and in a bumbling incoherence that strives to rescue Hamas in ceasefires as it calls for its defeat. Whew, what a cognitive mess.
Trump isn’t any more intelligible. He’s quite prepared to unleash Putin on Europe after stopping aid to Ukraine. He promises a “beautiful” settlement on abortion which can only mean more sanction of more death for the unborn. He complains of Biden’s contributions to the national debt while he guarantees an enlargement of it. He won’t touch entitlements; the two biggest – Social Security and Medicare – will soon be ballooning the debt to such an extent that servicing it, in times of high interest rates, will crowd out defense and most of the other normal functions of government. Of course, the payback for all the borrowing will fall most grievously on the young and yet-to-born. But who cares? Right? They don’t vote. The irresponsibility slaps you in the face.
He’s quite happy to trundle down the failed road of protectionism, corporate welfare, and coerced unionization. Welcome to the new “blue-collar” Republican Party, which is not much different from the “New Deal” Democratic Party, the party with the same combination of 1930’s policies that succeeded in turning a depression into The Great Depression. The thought of that prospect makes Trump seem appealing, as appealing as the next hit of methadone.
Mike Pence is a throwback to a time when the Republican Party made sense. Yep, some of that agenda didn’t cater to big business’s claim on the budgetary carcass, or big labor’s demand to rope workers to its chariot. Free market economics isn’t simpatico with featherbedding or the ladling of undeserved benefits to groups for no other reason than feeding their government-fueled bigness. Trump, though, is all-in with his tariffs and his groveling at union shops.
Pence represents the approach that gave us one of the longest, if not the longest, sustained period of economic growth. For decades after Reagan, subsequent presidents were surfers riding the big wave. Even a Democrat president, Bill Clinton, had to concede as much in his 1996 state of the union address, “The era of big government is over.”
Then, along comes the Obama and Biden Democrats to implement their hostility to success and resuscitate the cult of big government. Then, along comes Trump to hitch Republican fortunes to the cult. Big names in the Republican tent are keen to construct a welfare state for hopefully their newfound blue-collar constituency, and even to declare their conversion to unionization and dislike for right-to-work. The outspoken Sen. Josh Hawley (R, Mo.) burnished his about-face by joining striking UAW workers recently in Wentzville, Mo., and announcing his opposition to any federal right-to-work legislation. Heaven forbid that workers should not be forced into a self-serving, left-wing labor cartel. Nixon’s 1971 remark that “we’re all Keynesians now” could be updated to “we’re all for closed shops now” for the now “populist” GOP.
Funny thing, none of this big government agenda ever really worked. The illusion of success peaked in the 1950s when America’s foreign competitors were still clearing the rubble from WWII. America was never bombed or invaded so much excess was tolerated in a constricted market without economic rivals. Fat labor contracts and absurd work rules with much featherbedding larded American manufacturing and transportation. Hawley is happy to bring it back, with the stagflation of the 1970s tagging along.
Pence is a living reminder of what worked. There are a few people still breathing who don’t suffer from the amnesia. But amnesia is in vogue. Democrats remain hooked on the belief in a coterie of Harvard grads scattered in big government bureaus who will save us from ourselves, or, for some, Karl Marx’s scheme can be magically made to succeed. Come to think of it, it might be less amnesia than the sheer stubbornness that comes with ignorance.
For Trump partisans, amnesia remains as the lone explanatory contender. Either that or blatant opportunism of people who should know better. That’s the divide within the party: those with amnesia and those like Pence. Please watch Martha McCallum’s interview with Pence, about 5 minutes into it, for a reminder that there are people who remember Reaganomics.
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis speaks at a press conference next to prosecutor Nathan Wade after a Grand Jury brought back indictments against former president Donald Trump in Atlanta, Ga., August 14, 2023. (photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters)
* Populism, a common definition: a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.
***********
Other definitions exist, the term being so fuzzy and susceptible to gross generalization. Today, it’s all the talk among devotees of Donald Trump. Realistically, though, it also can be applied to deep blue jurisdictions who would like nothing better than to hang the aforementioned Donald Trump. In Georgia, and pertaining to Atlanta, DA’s and judges are elected, not appointed. Fani Willis and the judge ruling on a defense motion for her to be removed from the case must face an electorate in a far-left fever swamp. You can’t get any more populist than that, can you? Fever swamps and populism go together.
And we’ve got a circus going on. It’s what happens when popularly-elected demagoguery is confused with justice. Willis, and her love interest, Nathan Wade, her chosen special prosecutor targeting Donald Trump, may have committed perjury regarding their ongoing tryst. The judge, facing the same electorate, ruled on a defense disqualification motion to keep Willis but send Wade packing. As a layman who didn’t sleep at a Holiday Inn, the ruling seems puzzling. They both stink of graft. But, then again, that’s populism. Not much is bound to make sense.
Atlanta Judge McAfee
Trump’s populism is his particular form of political theater that appeals to a certain crowd. Fani Willis and the judge have to face voters – the ones that can be cajoled to the polls, that is – who prefer legal buffoonery and corruption to good governance. Both Trump and Atlanta’s crowd favorites in power have their “populisms”.
All the talk of RINO, establishment, elites from Trump fellow-travelers is their lingua franca for anyone who opposes their demigod, Trump. Atlanta’s carnival barkers in power know how to gin up their base in monotonous cries of “white racism” or “white privilege”, etc. Go for the rich white guy and you’re well on your way to a lucrative book deal, fame and fortune, elevation up the political greasy pole, maybe becoming the next Stacey Abrams and unlimited appearances on MSNBC. It’s all populism.
Let’s plow through the muck of Willis’s case against Trump – populism meets the legal system. Well, let’s not scour too deeply that septic tank. See #1 below if you have the sensory fortitude. Suffice it to say that a broad, ill-defined RICO case without an alleged major crime is reminiscent of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, or Beria’s fawning retort to Stalin, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Atlanta’s brand of populism is showing the way to banana republic, just add a jury that is drawn from the city’s mob to a DA and judge appealing and having to face the same mob.
Trump and Willis, with the judge playing along, deserve each other. Populism is a political rats’ nest. The less we see of it, the better off we’ll be.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Andrew C. McCarthy for his stellar work on Fani Willis’s case against Donald Trump. His columns on the subject can be found at:
* https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-and-georgia-defendants-be-careful-what-you-wish-for/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=first
* https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/09/11/the-trump-indictment-of-democrats-dreams/
* https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/why-the-fani-willis-case-is-ill-conceived/
* https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/fani-williss-flawed-rico-charge-against-trump/
* https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/09/fani-williss-monstrous-trump-case/
Cillian Murphy wins the Oscar for Best Actor for Oppenheimer at the 96th Academy Awards in Hollywood, Calif., March 10, 2024. (photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)
Not the history of Hollywood, but Hollywood’s version of history, a type of history which is staggeringly distilled from the lefty leanings of pop culture. Well, to no surprise, “Oppenheimer” won the Oscar for best picture. Good movie, bad history, especially if you want your history without the hackneyed left-wing bromides. It’s a history for today’s credentialed, degreed, but functional illiterates. It’s proof that today’s education is not educating, and thus Hollywood can get away with distorting history to an ill-informed public.
The film is filled with the now familiar leftist clichés. Cliché #1: Oppenheimer was persecuted. The pertinent question is, however, was he a significant security risk? A “security risk” does not require him to be a communist. As for the “risk” at America’s most top-secret war project, and one for which he is running, a simple examination of Oppenheimer’s background, activities, and associations should raise eye brows above the hair line. Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” obviously raises the subject – for it cannot be ignored, and is central to his plot – but paints the picture in gauzy hues of sympathy for him.
Oppenheimer can legitimately be an object of sympathy, like many people, but sympathy and ascertaining the danger to the country for having him at that post are different subjects. The latter is clearly more significant for us than the former. In this respect, context provides an important back story for events that would involve Robert Oppenheimer, and should have been part of Nolan’s story but are conspicuously absent.
At the time that the Manhattan Project was being organized, the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service at its operations center outside Washington, D.C., Arlington Hall, was ordered to begin collecting coded messages between Soviet operatives to their colleagues in the U.S. and superiors in Moscow. Stalin was an ally but many in our government were prudently dubious about his motives, intentions, and actions. Would he abandon us and/or undermine our efforts? After all, his connivance with Hitler in 1939 – the Nazi-Soviet Pact – helped trigger World War II. The activities of the Soviet Comintern (Communist Internationale) destabilized many countries in Europe throughout the 1920s and 30s. The Soviet takeover of the so-called Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, in tandem with Fascist support for Franco’s Nationalists, helped turn Spain into a bloodbath.
U.S. Army Signals Intelligence codebreakers, Arlington Hall, VA, 1943.
Simultaneously, the collection of the messages necessitated an intense effort to break the code which did not bear fruit till the end of the war and into the 1950s due to the complexity of the Soviet code. The program to collect and break the Soviet code was given the cover name, Venona.
Furthermore, step back to the 1930s and the preeminent trends of thought in college faculty lounges. If there was an observable sympathy in the U.S. during the 1930s, it was the warmth of our intellectual chattering classes for collectivism ranging from milder socialisms to communism, which is just an impatient socialism. For a good portion of the professoriate, the Great Depression condemned capitalism. The Soviet Union benefitted from much of that warmth and it showed in intellectual discussion groups, social affiliations and activities, which extended beyond the classrooms and laboratories. It’s into this milieu that people like Oppenheimer swam.
Many were attracted to FDR and the New Deal as only the beginning of the crusade to make the world right. Many would eventually fill FDR’s agencies and programs and brought their ideological affections with them. The extent of some of this cognitive kinship was uncovered in decrypted Soviet messages from 1946 on. The affection sometimes translated into espionage.
The effort gained new urgency in 1949 when the USSR successfully tested their first atomic bomb many years earlier than expected, which, as it turned out, was a carbon copy of our very first plutonium bomb, the one of the famous Trinity test at Los Alamos. What’s up? How’d they get it? Venona uncovered two moles at Los Alamos (Manhattan Project): nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs and mathematician Ted Hall. Confirmation was additionally provided from Soviet archives that were thrown open in 1991. From the evidence gleaned, others at the time would be suspected, including Oppenheimer.
Clockwise from top left: Los Alamos spies Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, Oscar Seborer, and David Greenglass. In 2019, Seborer’s story was unearthed by Harvey Klehr, a retired professor from Emory University, and John Earl Haynes, former historian for the Library of Congress.
As it turned out, the espionage reached deep into FDR’s administration. Adviser Laughlin Currie, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, the State Department’s Alger Hiss, and a host of Justice Department and other personnel were fingered in Venona.
Around Oppenheimer personally, his wife, brother, and mistress were known to be communists. Moving about educated and influential circles at the time could have, understandably, oriented a person to the lefty side of the spectrum, leaving aside the natural social self-selection process that normally occurs. All of these factors and facts were not part of Nolan’s script, and should have been if he was truly interested in a faithful rendition of the times and the man. Instead, we got historical schlock that distorted and hid much under the rug, and an Oscar-winning movie.
Once a subject enters movie mode, it falls into the drama of protagonist/antagonist, good/bad. There’s the incessant movieland trope of creating villains who in real life may not have been. Always lurking in the background is Hollywood’s deeply embedded anti-anti-communism. The aura of McCarthy and McCarthyism overshadows their modern brain. So, they invent McCarthy-like characters.
One such maligned person was Gordon Gray, portrayed in the movie as a conniving lawyer of sinister motives. He actually was a distinguished graduate of Yale University, award-winning newspaper publisher, president of the University of North Carolina, and widely respected at the time as secretary of the army and presidential national security adviser. He headed the panel reviewing Oppenheimer’s security clearance that voted two to one to revoke it. Now, Gray will be forever reverse black-listed by Hollywood.
Gordon Gray
The rescinding of it was actually a “dah” moment. There was enough on Oppenheimer to determine that he was too great a risk to our national security, given all that we know from Venona and subsequent FBI investigations. It’s fair to conclude that the FBI’s investigation of Oppenheimer was inconclusive, but being inconclusive could be enough to keep him away from critical research, the risk being too great. He will take a downstream hit to his employability prospects but those are pale when compared to the danger to everyone else’s safety and security.
The movie doesn’t stop there in maligning people. Another object of concocted derision in the movie was Lewis Straus, but he was hardly Robert Downey Jr.’s dark and malevolent denizen of DC. An esteemed Jewish American and president of New York’s Emanu-El congregation, he rose from the bottom to the rank of Rear Admiral, headed Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and was Eisenhower’s chief of staff and secretary of state. All this was washed away by Nolan to make Straus a demon to Oppenheimer’s saint. Let’s call it what it is: the Hollywood treatment for anybody of prominence on the right.
President Eisenhower receives a report from Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, on the hydrogen bomb tests (Operation Castle) in the Pacific, March 30, 1954.
Hollywood history becomes real history to people who don’t know history. There’s enough out there to know better. You just have to go from the theater to the library, or wherever honest, in-depth sources are available. They’re out there. But, best of all, be abundantly skeptical of what Hollywood is stylishly placing on the big screen. It’s nearly as much fantasy as Disney’s “Snow White”.
RogerG
Sources:
1. An excellent backgrounder on the times is Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, available on Amazon
2. Another excellent backgrounder is Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government by M. Stanton Evans, available on Amazon
3. Thanks to Neal Freeman’s piece in National Review, “Oppenheimer Provides Great Entertainment, Disfigured History”, 7/30/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/oppenheimer-provides-great-entertainment-disfigured-history/
4. Thanks to Armond White’s review of “Oppenheimer” at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/oppenheimer-the-first-nihilist-oscar-winner/
The House GOP clown car: Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene
It seems that treating the American people like adults is not in vogue, on the right or left. The Right is quickly shedding its classical liberal credentials, the ideas that animated our founding fathers, Coolidge and Reagan, and are embedded in our founding documents. The Left is on a march to establish government as the Promethean social engineer par excellence. Either outlook has us mired in a hell of a mess.
Take this interview with Kari Lake, Arizona Republican Senate candidate, as she panders to the mental adolescents in the Republican primary. Two issues stand out in this foreplay of mental immaturity: Ukraine and the debt/deficit.
Kari Lake at Turning Point Conference, July 24, 2021
The debt/deficit is something that, when prompted, people express deep concern, but to be honest, nobody seems willing to do anything about it. Republicans, led by Trump and others like Lake, are frightened away from doing anything to reform the biggest component of the federal budget, Social Security and Medicare, which by all measures is pushing the federal budget over the fiscal cliff. Surely, Democrats salivate at the prospect of demagoguing the issue. A reporter recently asked whether Lake agreed with Trump in opposing changes to the monster entitlements (see #1 below). Lake answered, “I do not think we should touch them.” Then, she goes on a hackneyed recitation of why we ought not do anything. The “Thema and Louise” scene of the two women driving their car off the cliff keeps coming to mind.
Thelma and Louise drive off the cliff
She proposes thinking “creative” (?) and meanders on over to onshoring manufacturing jobs in the U.S. without showing much cognizance of the reasons for the flight of businesses in the first place. Manufacturers, or anybody with a payroll for that matter, face the maw of our unions’ and politicians’ class war machine. They’ll encounter crushing taxation, with the promise of more to come (“wealth taxes”), regulations and mandates galore, and a greenie pummeling. What’s there not to like, eh?
We’re left mystified by the connection between a careening debt and this pandering to the AFL-CIO. Similar befuddlement will arise when she, like much of the Trump right, dumps Ukraine into the mixing bowl with the border crisis. What are we left to conclude? Let Putin have Ukraine as we grapple, or fail to grapple, with our southern border? Apparently, the world’s premiere superpower can’t simultaneously walk and chew gum, or rebuild our defense industrial base, while supporting a small country under a Putin invasion.
Okay, here’s a question for Kari Lake and her ilk: what are the consequences of a Putin conquest of Ukraine? Wargame it, think about it beyond the half-witted musings of Candace Owens. Don’t complain about Biden’s Kabul catastrophe when the Right is prepared to imitate him on the continent of Europe. The previous four-century history of European autocrats, dictators, and totalitarians rampaging across the continent is not encouraging. Of course, we could revert back to the 18th century and let the world go to hell in a handbasket, us locked away behind our oceans, and watch a chunk of our prosperity and security go down the drain as we do it. The logic is stuck in the age of sailing ships and far removed from this era of hypersonics.
This is an age of demagogues and panderers for we are treated as children. It is assumed that we can’t handle hard truths. One of the most fundamental and irritating truths is, as the philosopher Richard Weaver put it, “ideas have consequences”. He wrote an entire philosophical work on it (see #2 below). The upshot is that we are limited by realities; there can be no “year zero”, and remake ourselves into whatever we want to be. Misery is the result. Adults must know this to be true, or they’re not adults, despite the age on their driver’s license.
We actually believe that we can afford something we can’t (Social Security and Medicare as currently constructed for instance). Much of the nonsense frequently begins in the bubble of academia, or the broader chattering classes, and infects the downstream culture. A rationale is concocted that works to keep us in our childlike status.
Right now, a move is afoot to treat pregnancy as a disease (see #3 below) so young people can remain enslaved to their youthful desires with no consequences. Aldous Huxley wrote about it decades ago in Brave New World. No need for responsibilities or meeting social expectations in this agenda. The authors of a piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics lay out the suicidal logic:
“We can compare pregnancy with measles. Measles is uncontroversially regarded as a disease and treated as such by public health authorities and health professionals. Measles is harmful to nearly all of those who catch it. However, most patients will survive. Very few will die, and only a small proportion will go on to experience longer term impacts on their health. [Like pregnancy.]”
Does she have a disease?
Pregnancy – or ironically how the authors and everybody else got here to bag on it – is a parallel experience to measles, and should be treated like it. How does that work, unless you’re a complete nincompoop? All of us were a product of the “disease”. Nothing about the biological cycle of life to see here. It’s lunacy on stilts.
Personally, I think that the writers are retroactively justifying our current efforts to birth-control ourselves to death. No doubt about it, marriage and fertility rates are cratering (see #5 below). Fewer people are filling the pews at the same time as fewer are heading to the altar to take their vows. Religious observance appears to have a direct relationship with marriage and childbearing. They follow each other in tandem.
That’s no problem to a population reared on the doctrines of the Malthusian death cult (as in Thomas Malthus, the foolish late 19th century cleric and amateur futurist). It’s the chant of too many people, too many people, . . .. It only makes sense at an adolescent level. The great innovative productivity of our farms, factories, investments, and our dynamic brains, is beyond most people’s stunted comprehension, let alone a kid’s. We are what we’ve been told over and over again, the spiel of the Malthusian death cult. Underneath it all, though, is the blandishment to believe that marriage and children impinge on our desire to have more fun and stuff.
It’s no surprise that marriage is on the rocks; we’ve bastardized it so. Marriage has been turned into something as binding as a handshake, or the Boy Scout oath. What was once, by definition, a special institution for heterosexual couplings, the only kind capable of procreation, was elasticized to encompass pairings that can never, by definition, accomplish that feat. This is different from heterosexual infertility. Sorry, sodomy and oral sex can’t produce a child. Do we really need to be told that?
Instead, we shift from merely the impossible to the grotesque, and H.G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau. People with medical degrees can inject us with chemicals and mutilate our sexual organs in order to contradict the chromosomes throughout our body. Think about it: an ex-man – actually a man due to chromosomes – with an artificial womb. I’m back to Weaver’s thesis. Are there any limiting principles to our desires? Can reality be endlessly and radically bent with no adverse consequences?
Transgender girl allows cameras to document her/his sex reassignment surgery
What of the kids? What kids? Marriage is certainly no longer about the kids. It’s about the adults. Marriage of the kind that procreates is no longer a preferred component in life’s journey. It’s an option like color in an Amazon order. Those kids that managed to survive the gauntlet of the abortionist’s suction tube and made it to adulthood won the lottery of unending teenage wish fulfillment. They don’t have kids either.
It shows in the numbers. The current U.S. fertility rate hovers between 1.6 to 1.7, below the estimated 2.1 replacement rate. The birth rate measured per thousand collapsed from 51.8 in 2007 to 37.8 last year (see #5 below). All such numbers point in the same direction – down. It’s a calamity in waiting. Who’s going to be around to be taxed to bankroll the safety net? Who’s going to be around to change the bed pans and feeding tubes? Don’t expect the global poor to be your nursery. Importing them imports other problems. Chief among them, the taxation of the low wages of the imported global poor is a net negative when compared to the forgone potential of higher incomes of the homegrown, leaving aside the rising costs of subsidizing the imported poor. You just piled a fiscal problem onto a demographic one.
Reversing the trend is like stopping a descending 100-railcar freight train. It can be done but it’s going to take a long while. Government interventions in the realm of demography are not encouraging. Centrally planned demography doesn’t work any better than centrally planned economics. China’s CCP commanded a one-child policy in the late 1970s and 80s and set in motion the unintended: a lopsided population pyramid of males. Now, as China demands to be recognized among the ranks of the international big boys, it has fewer girls to be the mothers of the next generation. They’re in a demographic death spiral. It’s baked into the population cake unless they jump into the oven to rejigger the batter. Good luck with that, as they try to do it.
The CCP’s answer is more centrally-planned demography to replace the now failing centrally-planned demography. They’ve cashiered the population commissariat and abortion goon squads in every village and city and are wildly bribing the remaining female population into fertility. In the meantime, they’re stuck with a declining population, fewer workers, and too few mothers. How long will it be before China reverts back to its status of a failed state?
Europe is experiencing a similar demographic death spiral. Government policies in the form of goodies and subsidies (bribes) produce lackluster results at best. France for decades has tried through policies to reverse its death spiral (see #6 below). Still, its birthrates hover below replacement at between 1.7 to 1.9. The country’s fertility is better than most of Europe but they have yet to break the 2.1 threshold. Hungary has taken the same approach and only arrested its fall.
This is not a problem conducive to remediation by government ministries. Once attitudes and lifestyles become entrenched, the problem lies in the culture and is amazingly resistant to more spending in a few budgetary line items. Adults have to become adults, and come to find fulfillment in a marital union of sexual compatibility (heterosexual) and family. Today, it’s “he who dies with the most stuff wins”.
Of all people, Elon Musk may have set the record straight. At a Wall Street Journal event he said (see #8 below), “There are not enough people. I can’t emphasize this enough, there are not enough people.” He further added, “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words.”
Elon Musk with one of his children
Could a broad immaturity, now culturally rooted, be at the core of much of what ails us? Turning around the situation begins with the realization that there is no “something for nothing”, and that there are limits and consequences to our actions. At one time, we were helped along the way by the traditional institutions of church, family and marriage, and free markets. Until they are returned to their time-honored place, we are doomed to an endless cycle of failure and mediocrity, and Musk’s warning.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Kari Lake Talks ‘Difficult’ Deficit Math”, Audrey Fahlberg, National Review, 3/7/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kari-lake-talks-difficult-deficit-math/
2. Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver, 1948 edition, Expanded edition, Kindle edition, can be acquired on Amazon, et al.
3. “Is pregnancy a disease? A normative approach”, Anna Smajdor and Joona Rasanen, Journal of Medical Ethics, at https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2024/01/28/jme-2023-109651
4. Thanks to Wesley J. Smith for bringing the issue of pregnancy as a disease to my attention: “Bioethics Journal Article: Pregnancy Equivalent to Catching the Measles”, National Review, 2/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bioethics-journal-article-pregnancy-equivalent-to-catching-the-measles/
5. “Natalism Is Not Enough”, Partick T. Brown, Ethics and Public Policy Center, in National Review Magazine, 1/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/03/natalism-is-not-enough/
6. “Fertility and Family Policies in France”, Marie-Thérèse Letablier, Journal of Population and Social Security (Population), Supplement to Volume 1, at https://www.ipss.go.jp/webj-ad/WebJournal.files/population/2003_6/9.Letablier.pdf
7. “Number of children born per woman in France from 2005 to 2020”, statista, at https://www.statista.com/statistics/746549/fertility-rate-france/#:~:text=The%20fertility%20rate%20is%20the%20average%20number%20of,children.%20This%20value%20was%20the%20lowest%20since%202005.
8. “Elon Musk says ‘civilization is going to crumble’ if people don’t have more children”, Sam Shead, CNBC, 12/7/2021, at https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/07/elon-musk-civilization-will-crumble-if-we-dont-have-more-children.html
It won’t shock you that I’m not a Trump fan. Still, I’m trying to be dispassionate in looking at the state of our politics. Much of what we hear, read, and watch resembles the fog of war, a noisy racket that only clouds our perceptions. Much escapes our view, including how many voters will stay home or not even vote on the ballot’s presidential line, due to the prospect of a Trump-Biden rematch being too disheartening. We get the superficial horse race numbers, but what of this factor, one that could have a big impact on the race?
It’s important for a Republican to ask, how many Republican and Republican-leaning voters will disappear from the total presidential vote, leaving aside the question of the level of Democrat fealty to a doddering Joe Biden? How much of the Republican base and its normal allies are turned off by a Trump with a third bite at the apple? One can find very little in the media hubbub.
However, there are hints of trouble ahead for a Trump GOP. Elections are contests of coalitions of voters, of the party bases, independents, right-leaning Democrats for the GOP, and all sorts of demographic subgroups. Hopefully, your collection will outnumber the opposition in enough states. Now in this election cycle, add these groups: the stay-at-homes and the decline-to-states.
Dissatisfaction abounds regarding a second Trump-Biden face-off this time around. In a late January Reuters/Ipsos poll (see #1 below), half expressed a disappointment in the two-party system; only a quarter was satisfied. A third of Republicans said that Trump shouldn’t run. 59% of Biden supporters described theirs was a vote against Trump, not an endorsement for Biden. Conversely, the cult factor in the Trump coalition is reflected in the lesser number of 39% of Trump supporters who stated that their choice would be a vote against Biden. Trump swells the ranks of those who find him repulsive. On the Trump legal front, 20% of Republicans have serious doubts about his claims of innocence, and 55% of Republicans leave open the possibility of him deserving of conviction, something that could weigh heavy on his candidacy.
Then, what will Haley voters do if Trump is the nominee, which now seems to be a sure thing? Her following is a mixture of those who see her as the last remaining obstacle to Trump’s glide path to the nomination: a collection of primary fence-jumpers by Democrats and independents, Reaganite free-marketeers, and those who possess a strong distaste for Trump’s influence on the party. Ferreting out the getable votes for Trump in Haley’s coalition is difficult to discern. The big question is, what will voters do once the decks are cleared for the two towering nominees?
We get another hint in the NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll just before the Iowa caucuses. 43% of Haley backers said that they’ll vote for Biden in the fall. How many of that number were never really open to the GOP to begin with? It’s hard to say, but it does point to trouble for Trump and the GOP down the way.
Trump’s problem is unity because long ago he typecast himself as a sour provocateur. He will lower the level of bombast, and already has, in the runup to the general election, but the moderation will have less effect, this being his third time around the block. He’s a known quantity. He’s got a packed graveyard of friends and foes alike who were sullied in relationship to him. Hackneyed blarney like “establishment” that are mindlessly scatter-gunned at anyone in his way won’t hide the repellant nature of his stage persona. Humiliating subservience isn’t a path to party unity.
Sure, Biden has his own problems. The looney left, his senescence, and his own dreadful actions and policies will cause him fits. But Biden’s best political asset is Trump, and the Trump fever engulfing the GOP . . . again. This might be a race that was decided by who turned off the most voters. Trump could have the edge in the repugnancy factor.
I’m with voter Sean Van Anglen, a New Hampshire Republican who previously voted twice for Trump, when he stated his desire to leave the presidential line on the ballot unmarked if Trump is the party’s nominee. He said,
“I don’t think I can vote for Trump. I vote in every election. I’ve never left a box blank. And I might have to this time.” (see #2 below)
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Trump vs. Biden: The rematch many Americans don’t want”, Jason Lange, Reuters, 1/25/2024, at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-dismayed-by-biden-trump-2024-rematch-reutersipsos-poll-finds-2024-01-25/
2. “Donald Trump has a big problem ahead”, Sam Stein and Nataly Allison, Politico, 1/23/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/23/trump-moderate-republicans-problem-00137112
3. The Des Moines Register/NBC News. Mediacom poll, taken from Jan. 7-12, 2024, at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24360792-iowa-poll-trump-vote
We’re living in a nutty time. Alongside the Loch Ness monster, the second gunman on the grassy knoll, free healthcare, Elvis in the land of the living, people believe in the darndest things. Modern iterations of the same phenomena include a “two-state solution” in Palestine, a wildly popular Trump, “undocumented” immigrants, a successful Marxism, etc. How can this be? Do adults actually believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus?
In an aside, attaching “undocumented” to immigrant hides the reality. This person – “undocumented” – is a citizen of another nation who trespassed our border and our laws to plant themselves in our country. This person is illegally present in the country, period. “Undocumented” is synonymous with “illegal”. “Illegal immigrant” clears the air. The people who patronize us with “undocumented” are deceptive or they actually believe the unbelievable.
One guy, Robert Malone, MD, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, deposited his pet theory of “mass formation psychosis” (mfp) as an explanation for a broad belief in the unbelievable (see #1 below). I don’t know whether I accept the idea, but it certainly is intriguing. Malone used it to explain much of the mania during the pandemic. It could convincingly be applied beyond Covid and right into 2024 and our roiling election-year controversies.
So, what is it? Mfp is a psychotic condition on a mass scale in a time of deep divisions when events seem monumental yet poorly understood. Someone or some explanation arises, goes viral, and the impressionable group runs the danger of being detached from reality. The resulting behavior is often delusional to the point of derangement, or a state of mass hypnosis. As Malone says to Rogan,
“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.” (see #1 below)
Welcome to 2024. Are Republican primary voters in the grip of mfp? How else to explain the popularity of Donald Trump in the party, in spite of the clear evidence of his toxicity? He romped to a 20-point win in South Carolina after his other big wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. Nothing holds promise of derailing his rush to the nomination. It’s odd given the fact that, post-2016, Republicans appear lining up for a four-peat of the miserable performances in 2018, 2020, and 2022. A very powerful constant in the previous three election cycles is Donald Trump as the face of the party. No one scares suburban voters and women more than the prospect of Trump in the White House. Yet here we go again.
How did the party get to this juncture? Nothing provides more proof of the presence of mass psychosis formation in Republican ranks than an enduring faith in Trump’s electability. The previous losses didn’t penetrate the rational faculties of their brains, or the fact that a semi-functional nursing home patient is competitive with Trump. Clinging to the unreal, South Carolina GOP voters in exit polls believe Trump is more electable than Nikki Haley (87% to 57%), in spite of national polling showing Haley slaughtering Biden by double digits (see #2 below). Trump’s advantage over the senescent Biden is within the margin of error.
Trump needs but frightens suburban women
A record of repeated failures won’t shock these people into reality, and neither will foul behavior diminish their fervor, even among people who profess the need for moral rectitude. Trump recently went before religious broadcasters (Christian), laced his talk with the promiscuous use of “hell” before many pastors, and was met with laughs and cheers (see #4 below). No admonitions, not a lick.
His responses to rivals are not arguments but insults. We were reminded of his chronic incivility when he referred to Nikki Haley as “birdbrain” and tried to be derisive by ridiculing her ethnic name. This is par for the course for Trump.
At a rally in South Carolina, Trump mocked Haley’s husband for not being around to support his wife. He scoffed, “What happened to her husband? Where is he?”, and added, “He’s gone.” In fact, he’s deployed in service to his country. This isn’t the only time that he’s reached for the use of invective in an effort to be humorous, with the target being people in uniform, and a loved one of his opponent.
There’s more. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief staff, confirmed earlier reports of Trump bad-mouthing those who suffered in war defending our country (see #5 below). In the inner sanctum of the oval office according to Kelly, Trump referred to John McCain and H.W. Bush as “losers”. John Kelly again: “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’” More incidents will remain on the cutting room floor for lack of confirmation.
Before you dismiss Kelly, remember that he was a widely respected commander prior to his association with Trump. Suddenly, he’s on the outs with Trump and the object of abuse by Trumpkins, who just yesterday held their hats at their hearts when a soldier was laid to rest. Trumpkins are required to sacrifice their personal integrity in an allegiance to a lout. It’s another example of believing in the unbelievable, in the righteousness of a man who exploited five deferments to avoid military service in time of war.
The coarse disrespect from his mouth is a green light to churlishness in his supporters. It’s a pattern now common in all his campaigns from the beginning in 2016. For instance, during a 2016 New Hampshire rally, he was lambasting Ted Cruz, a rival for the nomination, when a woman in the audience yelled, “He’s [Cruz] a pussy”. Trump feigned a criticism and then happily repeated it to laughter and applause. This is unthinkingly dismissed as “Trump being Trump”, and the behavior rubs off on his followers.
Achieving laughter through invective is a recurring Trumpism of those seeking the brass ring in his wake, like Kerry Lake who has the ambition to be one of Arizona’s senators. Trump bashes McCain – “[McCain is] not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured” – so Lake piles on with, “Boy, Arizona has delivered some losers [McCain], haven’t they?” She prefaced that doozy with, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we?” She answered, “Well, get the hell out!” Out Trumping Trump is considered an asset in this twisted little eco-system. (see #6 below)
Believing that it is endearing and won’t cost you elections, by someone who’s already lost one, is an amazing feat of delusion. She’s the reason for an uptalking lefty occupying the governor’s mansion – in a state where the previous Republican governor won reelection by double digits – along with the Trump fealty claque in the party primary who put her on the general election ballot in the first place.
No wonder the party is plagued with over-the-top Trump worshippers in office in the likes of Lauren Boebert, Majorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, J.D. Vance, and others. They embrace flamboyance as a substitute for civility, good judgment, and seriousness. Clowns now rule the roost in the party.
The previous losses don’t seem to penetrate the fogged-up part of the logical brain. Cults of personality don’t have coattails; it’s in their nature. The down-ballot for Trump has been a disaster. He may win in a squeaker in November but expect a Democrat Congress to quickly impeach him. I don’t relish the sight of the bloody aftermath of that imbroglio. And to think that it is all due to people believing in that which ought not to be believed. The Democrats believe in a successful Marxism. Republicans believe in a popular Trumpism.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “What Is Mass Formation Psychosis? Robert Malone Makes Unfounded Covid-19 Vaccine Claims On Joe Rogan Show”, Bruce Y. Lee, Forbes, 1/2/2022, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/01/02/what-is-mass-formation-psychosis-robert-malone-makes-covid-19-vaccine-claims-on-joe-rogan-show/?sh=4077085d1d4c
2. “Exit Polls: Exit Poll Results for 2024 Presidential Primaries and Caucuses”, CNN, at https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/primaries-and-caucuses/exit-polls/south-carolina/republican-primary/0
3. Thanks to Philip Klein for his analysis regarding the electability question in “South Carolina Results Show Why It’s Hard to Run on Electability”, National Review, 2/24/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/south-carolina-results-show-why-its-hard-to-run-on-electability/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth
4. Trump’s speech at the convention of the National Religious Broadcasters can be viewed at https://youtu.be/x1xKn6LR5gY?si=8bAv8muBXKRwXpjI
5. “Exclusive: John Kelly goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump”, Jake Tapper, CNN, 10/3/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/02/politics/john-kelly-donald-trump-us-service-members-veterans/index.html4
6. “‘No Peace, B****,’ Meghan McCain Tells Kari Lake”, Haley Stack, National Review, 2/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-peace-b-meghan-mccain-tells-kari-lake/
2024 is proving the nation to be rudderless. Much of what is happening must seem befuddling to the mass of adults still in possession of their wits. Our upper crust has merged with the Left, aligning with neo-Marxists without necessarily realizing it. The reaction on the Right is a vulgar gesture in the person of Donald Trump. Much of the media is an accelerant to both sides alongside dominant cultural institutions – the schools in particular, which are groomers of the Left. Much of the media has become unwatchable and unlistenable. The year 2024 is a time of the vulgar gesture versus the Left’s scheme of national extinction.
The nation’s suicide begins in the culture, especially cultural curators in the media. It’s easy to write off much of the legacy media for their convergence with the progressive Left. But the media on the Right has its own problems. As stated before, I listen to Hugh Hewitt in podcast form more regularly than any other, but even he has become increasingly disappointing. He’s a Republican booster, no holds barred, and that means a near subservience to Donald Trump if he is the nominee. It leads to stunted conversation and information.
Let me explain. A party is deserving of loyalty only if it remains respectable. The vileness of Trump is beyond question; it’s part of his schtick (Trump being Trump). Trump is disgracing the Republican Party making Hewitt’s subservience disgraceful for a now disgraced GOP. So, this plays out on Hewitt’s show by his steering of interviews, conversations, and information away from criticism of Trump, even among guests who are well-known for blasting the mercurial man of Mar-a-Lago. Airtime is almost exclusively filled with the monotony of anti-Biden banter to the exclusion of everything else. Trump’s and the GOP’s complicity in many of these matters is absent.
The stance of right-leaning media is probably a commercial decision. The talk radio audience is Trumpy in the extreme. Speaking of suicide, it’s commercial self-murder to tick off an audience that’s mostly limited to spewing Hannity or Tucker Carlson talking points. This crowd dominates the talk radio listenership and the GOP. At this juncture, the party and its fellow-travelling talk radio base has made itself unrespectable and undeserving of Hewitt’s kid-gloves treatment, which only ends up soiling Hewitt as he does it.
Don’t think for a moment that the Democrats are a respectable alternative. It used to be said that America is alone in not having a viable socialist party like the Labor Party in the UK or the social democratic party clones throughout Europe. Wrong. We’ve got the Democratic Party. An American social democratic wannabe will remain a nonentity because that space is occupied by the sprawling donkey party. Socialism has a following in the muddled brains of adolescents and among the party’s base and leadership. Peddling an ideological poison pill isn’t a prescription for respectability.
Now, let’s take a look at the latest Marquette Law School Poll. What does it say about the state of the race? Trumpers are giddy about Trump being up by 4 over Biden nationally. But Haley sends Biden packing by 16 (see #1 below). There’s more to this race than the betting-line favorites, much more.
The poll-takers asked a push question to force more of the fence-sitters into a choice between the two leading contenders. From the poll summary:
“These results include voters who initially said they would vote for someone else or would not vote but were then asked their preference if they had to choose one of the two candidates. In the initial question, 13 percent said ‘someone else’ or that they would not vote.” (see #1 below)
Got it? 13% had to be cajoled into embracing one or the other. How much of the rest of the 52% for Trump or 48% for Biden actually were facing the same dilemma but made a choice just to send the polltakers packing? These guys, both of them, are castor oil to the public.
Age is one problem . . . for both. In an ABC News poll, 86% of respondents say that Biden is too old to be president. No surprise there. It also applies to Trump. At an age of 77 at the time of inauguration, 62% think that Trump is aged out. Octogenarians behind the Resolute Desk doesn’t present a pleasing prospect for most Americans (see #3 below).
The reason is obvious. Biden is going from infirmity to dementia before our eyes, while Trump is getting cruder and more caustic by the day. Both are exhibiting crotchety-old-man syndrome. Biden leaves the podium in a daze after regaling us in slurred and attenuated speech and mangled memories. Trump has mentally locked himself into a junior high locker room.
If either one gets elected, will they survive the full four years? Biden has already had one massive stroke. Given his current semi-functional status, another one wouldn’t be surprising. Then, we’ve got Kamala, polling worse than Biden. She could amaze us, but nothing in her years in the public eye is encouraging.
Trump is different. He may serve in leg irons, which will present an interesting conundrum for the Congressional Republican Caucus. The Democrats’ lawfare stable has 91 whacks at him from Jack Smith to DAs and AGs in New York and Georgia. Do you want to bet that at least one of them won’t be made to stick by some dim-witted jury? A mass of the charges is despicable, agreed. But it’s a reality.
Think of it: America not much different from Nicaragua, or taking a page from Putin’s playbook. But I digress.
Anyway, Trump could free himself of the evil Jack Smith with a pardon, unseemly as it will be. Federal charges are within the president’s purview. State and local actions are an entirely different matter. We are probably on untrodden ground here. Since legal actions began before the inauguration, or sentencing awaits, what will happen if a felonious and possibly convicted defendant were to win the Electoral College? The Republican Caucus may have to decide if they really want to shield a convicted defendant from impeachment and removal from office. As for the Democrats, they stand in the wings in glee.
Sir Walter Scott, 19th century Scottish author, said it best: “Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive”. Are Democrats and the Trump gaggle in the GOP deceiving us as they make a clown car of our politics? We may have to replace the eagle with Bozo as our national symbol.
Trump is slightly up, Haley trounces Biden, but so what. She won’t get the nomination; Trump may serve in an ankle bracelet; or Biden will have to serve from a chronic care facility. When you think about it, nobody is doing it to us. We are doing it to ourselves. It’s a democratic republic; we are responsible.
How responsible? Each Republican primary, including the recent one in South Carolina, is proving that the rot has deep roots beyond the muckety-mucks. The parties are marching toward a general election ballot that I will leave blank at the top, and maybe elsewhere. No neo-Marxists and no Trumpers.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “New Marquette Law School Poll national survey finds Trump at 51%, Biden at 49% in head-to-head matchup; each leads primary challenger by more than 50 points”, 2/21/24, at https://law.marquette.edu/poll/2024/02/21/new-marquette-law-school-poll-national-survey-finds-trump-at-51-biden-at-49-in-head-to-head-matchup-each-leads-primary-challenger-by-more-than-50-points/
2. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for bringing the poll to my attention, “Oh, No Big Deal, Just a Survey Showing Haley Beating Biden, 58 Percent to 42 Percent”, 2/22/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/oh-no-big-deal-just-a-survey-showing-haley-beating-biden-58-percent-to-42-percent/
3. “Overwhelming majority of Americans think Biden is too old for another term: POLL”, Meredith Deliso, ABC News, 2/11/24, at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/poll-americans-on-biden-age/story?id=107126589
4. Thanks to Christian Schneider for additional information in “America Is Running Two Presidential Elections at Once”, National Review, 2/22/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/02/america-is-running-two-presidential-elections-at-once/
Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda at news conference after their infamous visit to North Vietnam in 1972Jane Fonda in the seat of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, the ones that were killing American pilots.Tucker Carlson recently in Moscow to perform the same service for Putin
Tom Hayden, premiere anti-Vietnam War activist, who declared “We refuse to be anti-Communist”, made multiple trips to North Vietnam from 1965 to 1974, including a 1972 one with his future wife, Jane Fonda, whitewashing the communist Hanoi regime. Who elected him to conduct our country’s foreign relations? The nerve of the guy. The American people already elected other people to do it. He’s of the Left, and today on the Right we have Tucker Carlson. In the Hayden tradition of pasting happy face on brutal and totalitarian thuggeries, Carlson goes to Russia and Vladimir Putin to normalize his tyranny, whether intended or not.
Watch below Tucker’s piece about his tour of the Kiyevskaya metro station in Moscow, Russia. Watch him gush about its orderliness and cleanliness. In case you may have missed it, spotless public spaces are a common feature of totalitarianism from Der Fuhrer to the communist Kim dynasty of North Korea. Tucker, it’s hardly a selling point, unless you’re quick to sacrifice liberty for sanitized public spaces.
Throughout his interview with Putin, the despot betrayed his basic Marxist outlook, a product of indoctrination in the USSR from child to career KGB officer. The Soviet Union hasn’t gone away; it’s only gone through a name change. And you can see the shadow of the sinister past in the station.
The Kiyevskaya metro station is named after Kiyev, or the anglicized “Kiev”. Yes, that Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. As this station went up in the 1930s, Stalin was murdering and starving 10 million people or so, mostly in the Ukraine, in something called the Holodomor. The murals festooning the station’s wall are propaganda images of happy peasants at work on their government-imposed communes, or collective farms (kolkhozes). The reality was anything but joyous.
Stalin ordered industrialization, even the industrialization of agriculture, for the country. Of course, the farmers liked their land, farms, animals, and equipment, and resistance fomented as their property was seized and they were herded onto collective farms or work camps (gulags), losing everything. Even the seed for next year’s crop which, like all the grain, was sold to purchase factory equipment. No more crop next year. The communes were as great a disaster as the factories. Famine spread and was exploited by the big man and his politburo to suppress Ukrainian nationalism. The gulags proliferated and became an archipelago of gulags in Solzhenitsyn’s famous words. The murals in the metro were designed to hide the horrors. They were totalitarianism in art.
Spotlessness in public appearances, absolute hygienic orderliness, could be a similar sign of complete tyranny. To keep the spaces clear of rubbish and ugliness, the Putin claque utilizes an import from the CCP: AI facial recognition tech tied to thousands of cameras. But that’s not the only purpose of it. Putin’s henchmen use it to pick up dissenters, dissidents, and political opponents. Many a free thinker has been spirited away into Putin’s archipelago, many never to be heard from again.
Friday, another one of the greats of Russian free thought, Alexei Navalny, died in custody. He joins many others in the grave. Life imitates art, Orwell’s Big Brother. Yep, Tucker, the last vestiges of freedom are thrown into the trash bin along with the other refuse. But Russia has clean subways.
And cheaper food prices, cheaper for a fat and sassy westerner like Tucker as he was guided into a Moscow grocery store (see #4 below). Everything is cheaper in the country, including the labor, which explains the lower prices. Lower incomes depress prices. In 1930s America, during The Great Depression, the time was a buyer’s paradise . . . if you had a steady job. The average monthly income in Russia is $787, as opposed to the U.S. monthly median of $4,568 (see #2 and #3 below). That says volumes.
That’s not all. 60% of Russians spend half their income on just food. 22% of Russian households don’t have indoor plumbing, compared to the American .3% (see #3 below). With a consumer base like that, Tucker could buy out the store with just pocket change, if he could slip it by customs at JFK airport.
North Korea is similarly spotless. Over the years, we’ve seen many pictures of the pristine, purified places in Pyongyang, and thin, even emaciated people standing around. Compare Tucker’s Moscow metro station with this video of Pyongyang street scenes in the next post. Tucker, could we also learn a few things from the Kim dynasty?
I nominate Tucker Carlson for the 2024 Tom Hayden Memorial Emissary Award for his attempt at dignifying the indecent.
Please watch the Carlson tour below.
RogerG
Sources:
1. The full Tucker Carlson interview with Putin can be viewed at https://youtu.be/hYfByTcY49k?si=kxFsUvWJsbtKDUzl
2. “How Average Salary in Russia Compares to US”, Tom Norton, Newsweek, 2/16/24, at https://www.newsweek.com/how-average-salary-russia-compares-us-1870740#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20figures,was%20about%20%24787%20in%20November.
3. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for his comparison of Russia and the U.S. in “No, America Is Not ‘Ugly and Decayed’”, 2/19/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/no-america-is-not-ugly-and-decayed/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second
4. Tucker’s grocery store tour can be viewed at https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1758158808835125642
5. “We Need to Talk about Tucker”, Jeffrey Blehar, National Review, 2/20/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/we-need-to-talk-about-tucker/
6. “Tucker Carlson Claims Groceries Are Cheaper in Russia Despite a Russian Food Inflation Crisis”, Troy Matthews, MTN, 2/16/24, at https://www.meidastouch.com/news/tucker-carlson-claims-groceries-are-cheaper-in-russia-despite-a-russian-food-inflation-crisis#:~:text=In%20a%20survey%20of%205%2C000,more%20than%2020%25%20on%20food.
Are we off our rocker? Republicans sound like the 60s New Left and Democrats come across as Ronald Reagan (regarding Ukraine). Both Democrats and Republicans go off the cliff respectively into a crazy neo-Marxism and blind fealty in a cult of personality. I give you a few examples.
Right off the bat, Sen. J.D. Vance (R, Ohio) is clearly off his rocker. He took to the conservative American Spectator to burnish proof of his bonkers state of mind (see #1 below). In his mind, nearly everything goes down a conspiracy rat hole, particularly aid to Ukraine. The fact that the funding goes into next year is, in the twists and turns of his brain, proof of a Democrat plot to trap Donald Trump in impeachment if he should be elected this year. Here’s a shocker: it’s normal for funding to go beyond the fiscal year since it takes time to pass through the intestines of the federal Leviathan and make the stuff – in this case, munitions. It’s true for the aid to Israel in the bill which Vance incongruously, without a hint of embarrassing hypocrisy, supports (as do I).
The alleged trap assumes Trump will be elected and while in office turn the screws on Ukraine and by acts of omission assist Putin’s conquest of Russia’s “near abroad” – which, by the way, is strangely reminiscent of Lebensraum from another quarter of eight decades passed. Furthermore, it unwittingly presumes that Democrats will control the House and Senate to give us another impeachment parade, which might happen if Republicans continue to serve up candidate looniness and stage ugliness (Trump being Trump). For a good portion of the American public, who would want to check the Democrats’ neo-Marxism with the bestial and batty? Vance, without thinking and saying it, assumes that voters will prefer the neo-Marxists and thus they’ll be in position to oust Trump. Vance’s reasoning inadvertently slaps himself as he attempts to slap Ukraine.
What a strange way to quietly show affection for Putin and isolationism, albeit of the incoherent variety. What a strange way to make yourself unelectable as a party.
And in the Republican stable, more craziness awaits. Rep. Matt Rosendale (R, Montana), a stalwart of the House Republican suicide attempt in the toppling of Kevin McCarthy (R, Ca.) from the speakership, that didn’t make a lick of sense, announced that he’d like to bring the same looniness to the Senate chamber (see #3 below). Brandishing all the Trumpy jargon of the “establishment” drivel, he’s challenging Republican Tim Sheehy, who’s been running since summer last. So, the state Republican Party will be asked to place on the November ballot a man who lost to Montana Democrat Sen. John Tester in 2018 in a state Trump carried by 16 points in 2020. We’ll see if the state’s Republican voters are hungry to replicate 2022 when getable seats were lost by choosing the bestial and batty to carry the party flag. A sizeable chunk of Republican voters has proven to be the Democrats’ best allies.
Rep. Matt Rosendale (R, Montana)
In the end, ironically, after election 2024 passes from the scene, the Democrats might still be in a position to ruin the country, or make it look like the hellscapes of California and New York. Businesses and people are fleeing these bastions of insanity. When will we ever learn that lefty policy is a ticket to societal carnage? These states are governed by people who hate the Second Amendment and economic activity that isn’t directed by them. Lawbreaking, adolescent genital mutilation (“gender-affirming care” in the jargon of our time), eco-central planning, our schools as Marxist preparatory academies, the filth and crime, and the secessionist flouting of federal immigration law emanate from these metropolitan and bi-coastal enclaves. These places are a mess.
Their favorite whipping boys are people who bring us our energy and those who produce the means for us to protect ourselves from the miscreants coddled by them. Defund the police? The targets, especially the arms industry, are escaping a bevy of regulations, punishing taxation, and massive state-law sponsored lawsuits. Smith and Wesson fled Massachusetts for Tennessee. Now, Remington is abandoning New York for Georgia (see #4 below). Ilion, upstate NY, will shrink further.
Our newfound passion to make everyone whole (in legal eagle lingo) in the extreme is driving whole industries into bankruptcy, literally. The fact that a wacko used a Bushmaster to kill 20 kids and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School is the excuse to squeeze $73 million from Remington and, by extension, its employees. What of the car manufacturer of the vehicle that the killer drove? What of the gas station that the killer accessed to get him to the school? What of the fuel manufacturer? What of the maker of the shoes, clothes, and food that kept him alive and well to perform the heinous deed? What of all the hammers and steak knives that have been utilized to commit mayhem throughout history? In states like New York, we have a web of law and a jury pool, indeed a population, curated on hostility to certain industries. Remington became the target, less so the killer. Well, they are getting out. Masochism shouldn’t be expected to be a requirement for economic activity.
From the article:
“My mom worked there [Remington, Ilion]. My dad worked there. My wife works there with me now. My daughter works there with me now. My second daughter works there with me now. And my son-in-law works there,” said Brown, president of the United Mine Workers of America Local 717. “So it’s a double-hit for me and my wife: two of us out of a job.”
Do ya think?!
In statements to the press and employees, Remington cited New York’s threatening “legislative environment” and the fact that Georgia “supports and welcomes the firearms industry” (see #4 below). As a result, the State of New York is giving its residents much more than they ask for.
It’s much more than a shrinking tax base. It’s a clear field of play for criminals after non-prosecution, hostility to self-protection, and suppressed bail requirements under the puffery of “equity”. Where’s the “equity”? Right now, some people have greater rights to steal and destroy your property than you do in desiring to keep it. If the numbers don’t break down “equitably” by race, then hell is turned loose on the law-abiding, and good number of those are in so-called “protected classes” supposedly in need of “equity”. It’s laughable, if it wasn’t also so tragic.
There you have it. Current events are a chronicling of absolute lunacy. Are we off our rocker?
RogerG
Sources:
1. “The Republican Plot Against Donald Trump”, Sen. J.D. Vance, The American Spectator, 2/12/24, at https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-congress-is-pursuing-endless-war-in-ukraine-and-trying-to-stop-a-trump-election/
2. Thanks to Noah Rothman for the reportage and commentary on Vance’s claim in “J. D. Vance Thinks You’ll Believe Anything”, 2/12/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/02/j-d-vance-thinks-youll-believe-anything/
3. “Rosendale’s entry into Montana Senate primary sparks GOP furor”, Julia Mueller, The Hill, 2/11/24, at https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4459261-matt-rosendales-montana-senate-primary-donald-trump-tim-sheehy/
4. “Remington leaves the upstate New York village where it made guns for 200 years after a PE takeover and 2 bankruptcies”, Michael Hill and AP, Fortune, 2/11/24, at https://fortune.com/2024/02/11/is-remington-in-business-who-owns-leaving-new-york/
