France in Twilight

Watching France descend into darkness

An interesting update on Islam in France and how French leaders are dealing with the situation.  Or rather, not dealing with it.  The writer, Bruce Bawer, is an American who has long lived in Norway.  His article includes this extraordinary passage which includes a rather basic question from a retired French general, Roland Dubois:

The minds and hearts of these people are consecrated to a set of beliefs and practices that represent an existential menace to Western Civilization.  To pretend that these believers can be reined in by any lame law or charter or pact is sheer folly.  As one General Roland Dubois asked rhetorically in a recent commentary:  When faced with a choice between a sacred text, dictated by Allah himself, and therefore untouchable to the end of time and some newly concocted document, more or less imposed by the unbelievers, which text can you expect to win out?  Muslims have felt a sense of indomitability in France for some time now; can anyone honestly expect them to turn meek?  The bottom line, then, is this:  If Islam were harmless in the first place, there would be no need for any laws or charters to control its adherents; but since Islam is not harmless, such documents are useless – except perhaps as part of an effort by Macron to make it look to voters, in the run-up to the next election, as if he’s actually doing something about the issue.  [Emphasis added]

In an Open Letter to the President of France and Members of Parliament, General Dubois and nineteen of his fellow retired generals write:

As Cardinal Mercier, Primate of Belgium, once said:  When prudence is everywhere, courage is nowhere.  Ladies and Gentlemen, stop equivocating — the hour is late, the work ahead is immense.  Do not lose time, and know that we are ready to support political leaders who would undertake the rescue of the Nation.

However, if nothing is done, heedlessness will continue to spread its poison throughout society, inexorably.  In the end, there will be an explosion, and our comrades in active military service will be forced to step in and undertake the perilous mission of protecting our civilizational values and the lives of our fellow citizens.

It is easy to see that the time for hesitation is over.  Otherwise, tomorrow, civil war will put an end to this growing chaos, and there will be thousands of deaths, of which you will bear responsibility.

Editor's note:  Translation from The American Mind.  Read the full translated letter here:  Twilight in Paris (love the title).

Needless to say, the letter has not been received well by the French bien-pensants.  Left-wing politicians labeled it a thinly veiled call for insurrection, and called for legal action and prosecutions.  Here is an accounting of the episode from the Daily Mail.  The Mail updates the story here.  Here is the story in The Telegraph, also updated.

The Left offers no substantive alternatives.  They certainly dare not address Dubois' question above.  In this new millennium, the Left has only one playbook:  Label anyone who disagrees with their narrative a bigot, have them canceled or fired, and completely ignore the mayhem all around.

As Samuel Huntington wrote in The Clash of Civilizations, Islam has bloody borders.  And the European border is no longer the Mediterranean Sea.  Today, the border stretches through every major European city.  And the blood spilling has just begun.
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I Can No Longer Be a Patriot

I was once a patriot who loved my country as much as anyone.

I love the story of our founding and the men who made it happen.  Throughout history, can anyone point to a founding story more exemplary that ours?

And our founders gave us the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution.  We have the Bill of Rights; we have the First Amendment.

Yes, our history includes slavery, but it also includes great sacrifice to end slavery.  We have Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address.  We have Frederick Douglass.

Our history is first the story of survival, followed by western expansion, followed by our nation's rise to international preeminence.

Yes the United States has made some mistakes overseas.  But on balance, we have done more good than harm.  It is worth noting that, today, two of the world's strongest democracies are Germany and Japan.

We have rich Native American history, with names like Manhattan, Dakota, Cherokee, Seminole, Navajo, and Cheyenne.  We have not always treated our native brothers well, but my God, we are richer for their experience and contributions.  I know what all European descendants know:  We owe them so much.

Likewise, our history of civil rights is far from perfect, but we have led the world in advancing the civil rights of our people.  All of our people.  We have Susan B. Anthony and Booker T. Washington.  We have Martin Luther King, Jr.

We have a fair and impartial judicial system, based on common law and precedent, inherited from the British.

And how can one not love the natural beauty of our nation?  I grew up on the beaches of the Carolinas.  But we have the Smokey Mountains, the Everglades, the Grand Canyon, Denali, the list is endless.  Niagara Falls, right?  Hawaii!

Along with our nation's natural beauty, we have abundant natural resources.

And the world's most advanced and most productive agriculture.

And our history is not only geopolitical.  We have Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and Thomas Watson and Steve Jobs.  We have the Wright brothers.

We are the land of opportunity and free commerce.  It is a culture of opportunity.  We lead the world in business startups.  We have Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett.

We have Silicon Valley and the internet.  The British may have led the world into the Industrial Revolution, but we perfected it.  And then we led the world into the digital revolution.

We have Milton Friedman.

We have Hemingway and Steinbeck and Mark Twain and Edith Wharton.

We have Cole Porter and Frank Sinatra and Buddy Holly and Duke Ellington.  We have jazz, Louis Armstrong, and Gershwin.  We have Nashville.  We have Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein.  We have Nina Simone.  We have the New York Philharmonic.

We have George Michael Cohan and Tennessee Williams.

We have Hollywood and the greatest movies and television ever made.  We have William Powell and Myrna Loy.

We have Frank Lloyd Wright and I.M. Pei.

We have Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe and John Singer Sargent and Andrew Wyeth.

We have our rabble-rousers.  Cesar Chavez, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Upton Sinclair, Christopher Hitchens (who joined us late in life after many years of living in this country).  We are a better country for them.  Oh yes...we are.

We have the world's greatest cities.  New York, Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, Miami.

We have the world's greatest universities.  Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Caltech, and MIT.

We have the world's greatest medicine.  The Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, the Cleveland Clinic, Sloan Kettering.  We have the CDC and the NIH.

We have the world's most advanced military.  We have civilian control.  We have Grant and MacArthur and Patton.  We have West Point and Annapolis.  And eager young men and women who volunteer to serve.  That is no small thing.  We have drones.  And regardless of what you think of drones in the military, our pilots, our boys and girls, sit safely in the American desert.  Also no small thing.

We put men on the moon; we brought them back home.  Today even as I write this, we are exploring Mars with yet another drone.

We live in a wonderful neighborhood, with the ever friendly Canadians to our north and vibrant Mexico to our south, bounded by the world's great oceans to our east and west.  We love our Caribbean neighbors.  We love, mourn, and hope for our Cuban friends and family.

And oh yes, let us not forget, we have our immigrants.  Other than Native Americans, we are all immigrants.  Our people represent all of the world's religions, large and small.  And we come from every corner of the planet.  We used to call this the melting pot.  It is perhaps our greatest attribute.

And finally, we have the world's greatest people.  Individualistic and independent and confident and generous.  Americans believe in truth and justice and hard work and in a sense of fair play.  And I think it is worth noting that we have always believed in healthy debate.  Right from the First Amendment, Americans have always believed that free, unfettered speech will lead to the best outcomes.

Note this is largely a list of people and their accomplishments and all they represent.  Of course patriotism is partially about place, but it is more about people and ideas.  It is about history.  It is about culture.

What comes first?  History or culture.  They are clearly intertwined.  But it seems to me that history, like politics, is downstream from culture.  It is culture that determines how history is made.  Or even if history is made.  American culture meant we must bravely free far away Europe.  Swedish culture meant, they must stay cowardly neutral to the horrors right next door.  Just imagine that:  Neutral to Hitler.  Imagine a culture that allows for that.  Afterwards history does and must shape culture going forward.  Today Sweden is committing national suicide, largely I think, because they are ashamed of their past.  This is obviously true of Germany as well.

So we look at the Grand Canyon and we feel pride of place.  But when we think of our culture and all that it has given us, this is the wellspring of patriotism.

Culture.

And what of our culture today?

Many people no longer revere our history.  Let's face it, many Americans are ashamed of our history.  Some are angry.

They find fault with our founders and our Constitution as originally written.  To them, it is a charter of negative liberties.  And it allowed for the original sin of slavery.  No matter that we as a people later fought a bloody civil war and used the constitutionally provided mechanism, envisioned by those founders with great prescience, to add an amendment banning the abhorrent practice.  They focus on our slaveholding origins; they call for reparations.

These same people focus on all the mistakes that the United States has made overseas.  They don't point to Germany and Japan.  They point to Vietnam and Cuba and Central America, and throw around terms like colonial ambitions.

They focus on our failure to treat Native Americans properly.  They despise Columbus and his European pathogens, philosophical as well as epidemiological.  They point to the failure of our civil rights struggles.  They actually want to reverse course and re-segregate the races.  To justify this travesty they use terms like critical race theory and white privilege.  And woke, whatever the hell that means.

Martin Luther King Jr's dream about content of character has been drowned out by the likes of Ibram Kendi, and his call for equality of outcomes.  They redefine the word equity to suit their purposes.

These people believe that all cultures are relatively equal.  And because they truly believe this fiction, they cannot possibly understand why outcomes are not equal as well.  So they blame systemic racism.  Inequality of outcomes is prima facie evidence of systemic racism.  Of course it is.

They do not value the history and culture of Western Civilization and all that it has given us.  They believe that Africa is poor and despotic, not for cultural reasons, but because of guns, germs, and steel.  They do not recognize Islam as aggressively hostile, misogynistic, and homophobic; rather they label the rest of us Islamophobic.

Because they cynically believe that new immigrants will boost their voter rolls, they do not value the integrity of our borders.  Never mind that this hurts our poorest, working class citizens the most.

We have seen the breakdown of our court system.  We have activist judges who do not respect the Constitution as written, much less property rights (Kelo).

At one time big business was a fairly conservative affair.  Today big business is in bed with its partner and protector, big government.  Benjamin Graham is dead and Warren Buffett is 90.  Today our titans of industry pander to the political Left.  Our leading corporations, from the Fortune 500 to the Silicon Valley behemoths lean left and censor right.

They outsource to China.  To be fair, we are all responsible for this.  But even now that China has proven itself unworthy of our business and our partnership and our trust, the Left continues to shamefully pander to the CCP.  And if you point out that Wuhan is in China, you're a racist.

Small family farms have given way to more productive large agricultural enterprises (agribusiness).  Good in a way, but like all big business, they favor big government.

Sadly Milton Friedman is no longer with us.  Today we have Paul Krugman and his ilk.

As surprising as it may be for America, home of the First Amendment, today we have a culture of censorship.  And cancel culture is a form of censorship.  Many of us simply no longer believe that free speech leads to the best outcomes.  Some take it a step further, equating speech with violence.  These same people often overlook the actual violence taking place in our streets.

In fact these people throw around the term racist so much that it has lost all its meaning.  If you take issue with any bit of their narrative, you simply must be a racist.  Most people can't stomach the label, so today self-censorship is rife.

Cole Porter has been replaced with Cardi B.  Here I want to say:  But we have Andrea Bocelli.  Right?  But Bocelli is Italian.  And while the US may be a large market for his work, how many Americans know his name?  This is a relevant contemporary cultural divide:  Cardi B. versus Andrea Bocelli.  WAP versus Con Te Partirò.  It truly is time to say goodbye.

Of course it is unfair to use an Italian who barely speaks English as the standard.  So can John Legend and Diana Krall save us?  Oops, Krall is Canadian.  But look at today's Billboard:  Polo G, Lil Nas X, oh and Cardi B.  Cardi B. barely speaks English either.  How did we come to celebrate the inferior?

While I am no expert on architecture, I think the distinction between Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry speaks volumes about our cultural deterioration.  Have a look at examples of their respective work, and decide for yourself.  The difference stretches beyond form and function, and even beyond tastes and aesthetics.  As with contemporary music, surely our acceptance and appreciation and even celebration of the chaotic and the inferior is a moral failure.

Same with high art.  Today's most notable artists include Christopher Wool and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons.  Goodness.

Regarding literature, let me quote from a recent Bari Weiss piece:  "The curriculum no longer features classics such as The Scarlet Letter, Little Women, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lord of the Flies.  New books include:  Stamped, Dear Martin, Dear Justice, and Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass."

Could Hollywood make a movie like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) today?  Too racist.  Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)?  Too jingoistic.  Forget about it.

After generations of one party rule and corrupt government, our great cities are falling apart.  And falling into civil chaos.  As I noted recently, the people, the citizens, continually vote for the clowns running these cities.  They have the government that they voted for.  Not once, not twice...many times.

Our great universities have diversified themselves in every way conceivable, except for the only way that matters:  Diversity of thought.  Our academy has become a joke.

And do we really believe that our great institutions of medicine will stay preeminent with more and more government involvement in the field of medicine?  Yet most Americans want government involved in our healthcare.  As for the CDC and the NIH, their response to Covid has been a shameful exercise in Kabuki theater.

Today, frighteningly, even our military is going woke.  And they seem less concerned with our actual enemies and more concerned with media critics who point this out.  We might wonder how far they will take the whole equity bonanza?  Can they contain it to enlistment goals and promotions?  Or will we actually see it in failed missions and God forbid higher casualty counts?

So again, what of our culture today?

A full half of our population support this nonsense.  They condone or tolerate or outright support these new cultural aberrations.  Which sadly have become the new cultural norms.  And it is not an equal half.  We are talking about the half in charge of our bureaucracies, the academy and K12 education, the media, publishing houses, journalism, Hollywood, and big business.  And all of their supporters.

And have you noticed, the bien-pensants are so very self-righteous about all of it.  After all, how difficult is it to follow the narrative?  There is very little thought involved, but vast confidence in their beliefs.  Just ask any of them.  The true believers remind me of Bolsheviks; those who merely go along with it remind me of Soviets.  The rest of us are loathsome dissidents.

These are not my people.  They are not of my tribe.  I am not one of them.

This is not my culture.

It is not that I don't want to be a patriot.  It is rather...

I can no longer be a patriot.

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New York City is Begging Businesses to Leave

Louis Rossmann asks Why am I still here?

Make no mistake about it, government does not work for you.  You work for government.  NYC just does not care to hide it any longer.  Not that Bill de Blasio's city government cares, but this video has over 1.1 million views, making it one of Rossmann's most popular videos in a mere two weeks.

Good job New York City!

Anyone thinking of moving to New York City, or God forbid starting a business there, should watch some of his videos.

Michael Goodwin has more:  The possibility of permanent decline and the ultimate destruction of the New York we know is unmatched in modern memory.

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The Good People of the Left

Rob Hoogland is in jail for the crime of being a responsible parent

A couple of days ago, Bruce Bawer summarized this story in A Certain Madness Amok:

[Judge] Bowden placed remarkable restrictions on Hoogland [the father].  He was forbidden to try to persuade A.B. [the 14-year-old daughter] to stop treatment [sex-change therapy].  He was forbidden to address her by her birth name.  He was forbidden, in any conversation with anyone, to refer to her as a girl or to use female pronouns to describe her.  If he were to do any of these things, ordered Bowden, it would be “considered to be family violence” — yes, violence — under the Family Law Act.  That’s par for the course today, when certain words are viewed as acts of violence, while objective acts of violence — such as the use of chemicals to permanently alter developing bodies, and the use of scalpels to remove healthy organs — are regarded as purely benign.

This is an important article.  Leftist thinking on the whole trans issue is truly bizarre.  But hey, if they want to live in a fantasy world of their own making, so be it.

But it is not enough for them to believe it themselves.  They need all of us to believe it.  In fact, they require us to believe it.  It's bad enough that they indoctrinate credulous children.  Now they are outright abusing children; sacrificing children on the altar of their factitious ideology.  Emotionally damaging and even physically mutilating children, without parental knowledge or consent.  Hoogland refers to it as grooming.  But what we have here is state-sponsored child abuse, causing irreversible damage.

And even that is not enough.  If a parent tries to prevent such abuse?  Even if he merely speaks out against it?  Jail him.  He's not a parent, he is a dissident.

If the Left feels free and justified to act in this manner, on this issue, can there be any limit to their exploits?  And their power.  It should be noted that this is not some far-left fringe element.  This is the Canadian establishment.  The more moderate, center-left types either condone this totalitarian behavior or they tolerate it or they outright support it.

We simply must stop thinking of left-of-center types as good people.  They are anything but.

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Unforgotten, Series Four

Excellent television.  I had to upgrade my VPN to watch.  This is not to be missed.

But I don't understand the need...

Spoiler after the jump....

How to Deal with the Woke

In a couple of New York Post essays, Glenn Reynolds provides us with a road map.

First:

To defeat woke tyrants, the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are

If you look at what they do, rather than what they say about themselves, it quickly becomes obvious that the woke are horrible, awful people, and they should be treated as such and reminded of this whenever they raise their head.

Second:

How to beat the woke:  Never apologize, rally friends and punch back harder

University and corporate bosses give into the woke because it’s painless and easier than fighting them.  Make it painful and difficult instead, and they’ll change their ways.

Personally, I find the invertebrates who capitulate to the woke mob to be much worse, and more culpable, than the woke children themselves.  Peter Savodnik labels them gutless enablers.  We need to mock and ridicule the children and fire the groveling, cowardly bosses.

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The Substack Controversy

There are three political writers who I sometimes disagree with, but nonetheless enjoy reading.  All three would describe themselves as left of center.  I think what I enjoy most about these writers is that they are consistently honest.  And frankly, I just don't think that about many writers on the Left.

One other interesting note about these three:  Two are gay men and one is a bi woman.  Now I read and enjoy other gay writers who I mostly agree with.  For example, Douglas Murray and Bruce Bawer.  Murray is far and away my favorite political commentator today.

But here, I would like to call your attention to these three:

Glenn Greenwald

Andrew Sullivan

Bari Weiss

Why?  Well these three have each had run-ins with woke establishments seemingly controlled by a small minority of far-left children.  In the case of Greenwald, he left The Intercept, an outlet he founded.

So what did they do?

Well they fled to Substack.

You'd think that would be the end of it.  But no, the children continue to hound them.  They want Substack to deplatform writers they disagree with.  And short of that, they call for a boycott of Substack.  Of course they do.

I only point out that these writers are gay and bi to emphasize how ridiculous the children are.  These are not far-right extremists.  Rather they are center left and far from homophobic.  But the children demand lockstep adherence to their far-left wokeness.  Otherwise, banishment and cancellation.

Now I don't know much about Substack.  I certainly don't know whether the owners have backbones or whether they are invertebrates like Dean Baquet.

I for one hope they withstand the noise.  But either way, some good will come out of this.  Because they have proven their business model.  And others are copying it.  When the children chased Donald McNeil out of The New York Times, he re-emerged at Medium.

That is, today I can subscribe to individual writers I enjoy without having to support some larger institution that I find unworthy.  If Substack folds, surely someone like Ben Shapiro will happily step into the void.  In any case, as with book publishing, the gatekeepers are losing their hold over public content consumption.  We no longer have to rely on Dean Baquet and his woke newsroom kindergarten to read Bari Weiss.

No doubt there are writers on these platforms that I intensely disagree with.  But so what?  Speech is not violence no matter what the children believe.  Let everyone have their say; if we must, we can judge the winners by their readership and subscriber counts.  It is a rather old-fashioned and liberal viewpoint, but I believe that the most appropriate response to speech I disagree with, is more speech.

How is it that the Left lost its liberalism?

This morning I noticed yet another writer I like appear on Substack:

Mary Katharine Ham.

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Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

Lost in Wokeness

What?  Your middle-schooler did not read Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi?

Neither did mine.  Isn't that sad?  At one time, this charming story was included in the canon of every well-educated childhood.

But it is just about everything our woke educators hate.  It was written, of course, by a dead, white, male.  An Englishman and a colonialist.  Not only is the story colonialist, but like much of Kipling's work, it is set in India.  And perhaps worst of all, it is an unapologetic tale of good versus evil.  And of good vanquishing evil.

No doubt, our teachers have replaced it with something more appropriate.  

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is now in the public domain.  So I include it here.

If you are interested, here is a sample of how the story was once taught.

Also, I have added a Lost in Wokeness section to the sidebar.  That should be fun.

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On Teachers and Our Education System

An Existential Threat to Our Society

When I was in college in the mid to late eighties, my buddies and I had a game we would play.  We would meet coeds, chat them up a bit, and then one of us would guess chemistry or accounting or whatever.  So we'd ask them, okay what is your major?  Needless to say, we were always wrong.

That is, we were always wrong...for the smart gals.  But we kept at it because we had so much fun with the dumb gals.  See, we had noticed a pattern.  After that, when we encountered Mitzy and started our chat, one of us would ask:  Are you an Education major or a X major?  I am going to withhold X; we'll come back to this.

Anyway, after a while, we quit asking it that way.  We'd just look at each other and one of us would ask:  So Mitzy, what's your major?  Invariably it was Education or X.  We'd look at each other knowingly and crack up.

I can only speak anecdotally on this.  This was one college, thirty-odd years ago.  But it is undeniable that at that time and in that place, the absolute worst students on campus were education majors.

When I look at what's going on in the education establishment today, I fear that it was not just our campus, and I doubt there's been much improvement over the years in the average education student.

University Education Departments are typically ranked as the least rigorous programs on campus.  They attract the least intelligent and least ambitious students.  And if you plan to work in some K-12 education leviathan, you expect a secure, comfortable job, for life.  So education attracts the least serious, most conformist, and the most risk-averse students.  Then the education programs offer these same underperforming students master's degrees and even doctorates.

Couple a lack of academic rigor with a master's degree and what do you get?  Undeserved smugness and complacency.  And I can think of no other profession that takes itself so seriously.  Teachers develop an exaggerated sense of self-worth.

For Christ's sake, in this country high school math is almost always taught by someone without a degree in, you know, math.  Why?  Ask any teacher.  They will smugly inform you that the pedagogy of math is more important than, well, math.  This is the thinking that leads to new initiatives like Common Core.  Since pedagogy is more important than the actual subject, the university Education Departments are forever churning out new pedagogical concepts and tools.  Like Common Core and Whole Language, much of this is quite inane.

Let me ask, does anyone really believe that today's Common Core students have higher math skills and competency than say your grandparent's generation?  The idea is absurd.  Here's another question:  Could it be that the people teaching math were not smart enough or disciplined enough to actually bother to get a degree in math?

So when I read serious journalism on education in this country, I am never surprised at how bad things are.  The US education system is populated with sciolistic people with subpar educations.  Of course they are going to be susceptible to the latest bien pensant orthodoxy.  They don't have the intellectual rigor and fortitude to resist it.  And in any case, the idea that these people should be leading a moral crusade, however misguided, is laughable.

Is it any wonder how US educators have reacted to Covid?  Their response has been nothing short of shameful.  The average grocery clerk has demonstrated more integrity.  In fact, to even compare teachers with grocery clerks today, does an incredible disservice...to the clerks.  Look, this is not an outrageous statement.  Can anyone seriously take issue with it?

Okay, so what is X?  Well the X majors are not failing our children and society.  They may not be the smartest or most ambitious people, but they are in a profession that really does not require the smartest or most ambitious people.  So I am not going to deprecate them here.

I have no such compunction about teachers.  They have a vital role in our society and they are unworthy of it.  The Schools of Education are failing their students.  And in turn their students graduate and go on to fail ours.

It should be a national scandal.

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Ides of March (2021 Version)

The Ides of March is upon us.

Again.

Our government overlords betters elites are still carping about masks and social distancing.  That is bad enough, but even worse is how our fellow citizens, supposedly free Americans, are so willing to accept totalitarian measures.  And have been willing to accept these measures for a year now.

It has gotten to the point where I have stopped blaming the politicians.  It is not Joe Biden's fault for being Joe Biden and doing what Joe Biden does.  Here in North Carolina, it is not Roy Cooper's fault for being Roy Cooper and doing what Roy Cooper does.  I guess I would feel differently if these and other politicians were doing something other than what they said they were going to do, or abandoned their respective platforms.  But that is not the case.

No, it is time to admit where the actual fault lies.  The fault belongs to the people who voted for these idiots.  Yes, my neighbors, and friends, and family.  And yours.

Last week I had a conversation with a friend of mine about what is likely to happen in the coming months in Minneapolis.  And I told him that it is extremely difficult for me to muster sympathy for the people, the citizens, of Minneapolis, or Portland, or Seattle, when they continually vote for the idiots running these cities.  They have the government that they voted for.  Not once, not twice, many times.

As I have written before, because of our founding and our foundational documents, the United States has been late to this party.  And we can quibble about when exactly the change happened.  But it is unmistakable that today the United States has joined the rest of the world in that we have the government(s) that we deserve.

Clearly.

It reminds me of a piece I wrote back in 2019 complaining about my local city government.  Typical fare; you can read it here.  But I would encourage you to read the comments – one from a friend of mine and my response.  Here's the point:  She's a voter.  She voted for Joe Biden and she voted for Roy Cooper.  Of course she did.

So who is actually to blame for our mess?  She is.  And all of her co-religionists of the government faithful.

During the Covid crisis we have seen the largest transfer of wealth from small business to big business in the history of our country.  And that is perfectly okay with many people.  Don't fall for the old canard that big business is Republican or even conservative.  Big business has been drifting left since the sixties.  And today, they've fully arrived.  Big business loves big government.

We are going to get another big dose of this as the various eviction and foreclosure moratoriums come to an end.  It will not be pretty.  And again, more wealth will move to fewer hands.  This is a direct result of the lockdowns and the closing of our economy for a year.

If we want better government and better leaders, we simply have to demand better.  And vote better.  Otherwise, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

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