Last night’s impending impeachment compounds other recent lessons affirming my contention that America is dwindling, slipping into a culture of faith, not reason. I think it’s an insidious decline because America coasts on the Industrial Revolution’s aftereffects and its progressive byproduct, today’s technology with advancement in medicine, aeronautics, science, robotics and artificial intelligence.
Yet regression is real.
Two recent cases in point come from CBS News, press that I’ve praised (read my post here). The first instance involves two anchors for the CBS News streaming app, Vladimir Duthiers and Anne-Marie Green, both of whom thoroughly and feverishly endorsed the concept, if it can be called that, of divine intervention after reporting on a child’s brave attempt to survive her father’s suicide and attempted murder.
After the man jumped with his daughter in his arms in front of a New York City subway train, the girl survived, apparently by lying down between tracks. After the deadly leap, someone jumped down and assisted in rescuing the child by guiding her out of danger, instructing her not to look at the dead father and, instead, to “crawl like a puppy”, treating the child as a child, encouraging her to come out from underneath the train. Green and Duthiers raved instead about what Green calls “divine intervention”, trivializing the girl’s intelligence and the heroism. It’s an instance of irrelevant, inappropriate and improper editorializing, really proselytizing for faith, during what should have been a somber report on suicide and an act of heroism.
Also on CBS News, billionaire media titan Oprah and bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared with Gayle King, Tony Dokoupil and Anthony Mason on CBS This Morning to discuss a new novel being promoted by Oprah in partnership with Apple Books via Oprah’s book club. The hosts were interested in knowing whether Oprah’s running for president. There was one line during the entire segment about the novel. The author was reduced to fragments.
Here, faith lies in the cult of a woman’s personality, in this case Oprah. As I’ve written before, the cult of Oprah Winfrey is entirely based on Oprah Winfrey. She is the ultimate narcissist. Everything she does is centered upon herself in crass, vulgar and undignified ways and means. That most of her musings appear in superficial bursts on self-improvement makes her narcissism more insidious.
Consider her appearance on CBS This Morning. Rather than invite the author of a potential new bestseller to appear on the program to answer informed and intelligent questions about the plot, characters and theme, the trio, declining to disclose that one of the hosts maintains an intimate personal relationship with Oprah Winfrey, proceeded to defer to Oprah — strictly on the grounds that she’d bestowed attention upon a new novel, whose author sat silently and obediently by her side. Coates was asked to speak once or twice. Though this is presumably done for the sake of “diversity and inclusion”, note that the intellectual was sidelined and excluded.
The religion for this particular application of faith is multiculturalism. The audience learned next to nothing about the book; not the price, not the publisher, not the publication date, certainly not the characters, plot or meaning — really, nothing was learned in any substantial sense. However, the audience did learn that Oprah read the book twice and that her friend Gayle is in the middle of reading it, too, and that Gayle called Oprah to find out what’s going to happen next.
This is the culture of belief in the superficial; facts and analysis matter less than faith in personalities, small talk, impressions, what others think because others think it and trends.
Greta Thunberg is another example. I call this braided girl the anti-child. The teenaged environmentalist and activist is clearly disturbed. Her faith that the world will end in 12 years based on apocalyptic preachings is apparently encouraged by her environmentalist-activist parents. I can think of few transgressions worse than exploiting a child for religious purposes. The new religionists tout environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism, statism and total government control or totalitarianism and they are wildly irrational and overzealous. Propagandizing this delusional, hostile, wayward child became a media sensation.
That a child on an internationally sponsored press tour preaching alarmist rhetoric gets more press at the expense of examining the fact that millions of Americans suffer and struggle to pay for unaffordable health care after nearly 10 years of the monstrosity known as ObamaCare, enacted as the preposterously named Affordable Care Act, or that rebels launched a historic protest against Communism in Hong Kong or that the Islamic dictatorship of Iran escalates acts of war against the West is an unmistakable sign of regression.
I’ve encountered everyday signs, too. During a recent airport ride with a Lyft driver, I observed the danger of religious zealotry.
Upon activating the ride, I had pre-designated the destination airline. But the driver asked which airline when she arrived to give me a ride to the airport. I told her the airline. The driver would ask again — and again — which airline. The most disturbing part of the trip involved her explicit proclamations of belief that God is in control of life on earth. As the driver of the vehicle, she was in control of mine. Accordingly, I remained silent. Upon each mention of God, I diverted the conversation from her belief in a supernatural being. At one point, she explained that she believes God controls her every action. In that moment, she struck me as mentally unstable. As we came closer to the airport, and she asked again which airline, she slowed to five miles an hour — a rate of speed she maintained for the trip’s duration — as I sat in silence. She rambled about speed, God and what she called theneed to believe in obedience.
This calls to mind Starbucks’ new Sirens blend, another example of belief without evidence — in feminism.
Starbucks introduced the blend this week in an email professing the company’s commitment to women. I have never heard of a coffee blend being produced on the basis of discriminating on behalf of one’s sex. Starbucks, which claims it’ll donate some of the blend’s revenue to women’s groups, broke the mold by singling out a single sex, excluding the opposite sex, with charity toward women because they’re women. This act sanctions feminism’s premise that identity is based on sex. Early advocates of what was once called women’s liberation promoted feminism as a means of achieving equality with men. Today’s feminists have dropped this pretense. Big business takes this offshoot of egalitarianism, which at once segregates and blurs the two sexes, on faith.
Last night’s announcement that America’s Speaker of the House supports an inquiry into impeaching the American president over a telephone call with a foreign leader is the ultimate profession, however, of faith. She literally declared an inquiry into impeaching the president without evidence.
I was an early Trump critic long before it was considered acceptable, let alone hip or “trending”. I argued against Trump on my blog. I did so repeatedly and on principle. I did so after Trump was elected president. But Trump’s supporters, whatever their faults and errors, are right to dub the Democrats’ delusional opposition as Trump Derangement Syndrome. The opposition to this president is worse in its irrationalism than the opposition to the previous president (which includes mine).
Today, President Trump released a transcript of his conversation with the president of the Ukraine — the supposed flashpoint for the Democrats’ grounds for impeachment. If and when the Democrats pursue impeachment on these flimsy grounds, the contrast between a president who takes America and its interests seriously — and, whatever his vulgarity, stupidity and errors, Trump does — and the party that wants the government to control every aspect of every individual’s life will be inescapable to the most disinterested, apathetic and asinine American voter.
“The House must impeach,” 2020’s Democratic Party presidential frontrunner Sen. Elizabeth Warren posted yesterday on Twitter. “It must start today.”
In fact, in accordance with frontrunner Warren’s wishes, impeachment did. Senator Warren is the matriarch of a new Inquisition. With her radical environmentalism and feminism, vehement opposition to capitalism in favor of statism, attempts to rationalize explicitly fraudulent multiculturalism, redounding to her authoritarianism, Sen. Warren is the ideal preacher for today’s faith in the statist — and regressive — status quo. America’s been dwindling from decades of welfare statism. The United States is dimmer after 50 years of Earth Day and poorer after 10 years of ObamaCare. As Americans strive to live better, facing the scowl of an anti-child, the congregation of brash believers gathers, chants and peddles influence, preparing to strike in a grab for power.
Hong Kong’s rejection of Communist China’s extradition rule and the governance of Communist China puppet ruler Carrie Lam is an unsurprising recent development. With its British colonial history, Hong Kong has been an outpost of Western civilization in the Orient; an Occidentalist center for trading food, especially seafood, goods and services bridging east and west. Much of the city’s population went along with Britain’s adherence to a pre-Communist agreement to return Hong Kong to China in 1997, which Leonard Peikoff once observed may have been influenced by Reagan’s refusal to back Thatcher’s withdrawal or refusal to recognize the agreement on the grounds that its terms were voided by dictatorship.
Hong Kong’s cosmopolitanism and independence endures. From freedom fighter and activist Joshua Wong to millions waving American flags and uniting to sing “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from the Broadway musical version of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Hong Kong yearns to be free, not ruled by the government that cracks down as I write this.
Privately, I’ve supported China’s liberalization to make progress toward capitalism. But I am proud to have never endorsed, let alone romanticized, the People’s Republic of China. This is true from my newspaper commentary calling for Bush’s secretary of state, the utterly incompetent Colin Powell, who is one of America’s worst military leaders and statesmen, to resign over his appeasement of China’s refusal to return a U.S. military crew and plane to my denunciation of China’s sponsorship of sporting spectacles. I think too many, including businesses such as Apple, artists and Objectivist speakers, and, of course, elected politicians, coddle, appease or ignore Communist China. It is in this sense that I think President Trumpis right to oppose China.
I am not a foreign policy thinker, though I’ve covered China in my writing and journalism. I am not a war, military or other type of historian. I do not study Asian history or military strategy for a living. I am certainly not an economist. I’ve read some books about the relevant topics. I’ve taken some courses. And I study philosophy. So, I recognize the implications of China’s threat to the West. Currently, I follow a range of several thinkers, commentators and scholars, including, in the past, the late John David Lewis, the forementioned philosopher Dr. Peikoff and Gordon Chang, among others. Accordingly, with Trump’s tariffs and trade war and Hong Kong as a potential flashpoint, I think China is in some sort of internal turmoil and poses a serious danger to the West. China recently allied with North Korea, a Stalinist state threatening nuclear attack on the U.S. and invasion of South Korea, which is currently governed by an anti-American who recently reneged on an agreement to share intelligence with Japan.
The U.S. has tens of thousands of troops in South Korea and not merely to protect that country, which, like Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia, Australia and U.S. Pacific territories and states, is crucial to sustaining America. China’s militarism, coddled by Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama, including its advancement on the South China Sea, like its ally Islamic Iran, is dangerous. This is to say nothing of China’s constant attacks on Americans’ property. To his credit, and I am among the first to critique the nation’s president, before he was elected president and before bashing him became an American cultural fixation and leftist dogma, Donald Trump’s is the first American government to stand up to China. Whatever Trump’s motives, mistakes and complete lack of principles, and whatever the ominous signs of what his presidency and its often mindless following means, Trump on China is a step in the right direction.
For the first time in America’s modern history, and this goes to the issue of America’s future and retaining or reconstructing what makes America great, the United States acts primarily in the interest of the United States with regard to China. Mine is not an endorsement of tariffs in general or in specific. I disagree with most of what Trump thinks, including his positions on Snowden, the surveillance state and health care as a right, to name a few. I’ve said so and under my own name. But I think his standing up to China, if and to the degree he does, is important, possibly crucial, and good. If progress means advancement of civilized humankind with living on earth as the standard and I think it does, Trump on China in terms of demanding certain terms and conditions for trade and military policy, is progressive.
This brings me to Trump’s detractors, the so-called ‘progressives’ running for president.
The 2020 Democrats are a band of goons, thugs and loons. Democrats want to rob Americans for slavery reparations. Nearly every Democratic Party presidential candidate seeks to ban, control or dictate property, livelihoods, medicine, exercise of speech and cars. Many endorse socialism, socialized medicine and fascism. The frontrunner says he wants to dictate the automotive industry and force Americans to drive electrical cars. One candidate seeks to impose a national collective income. The same candidate plans to install gigantic mirrors in outer space to fight the sun’s rays in the name of opposing a change in earth’s climate, which Democrats believe is a kind of apocalypse caused by humanity. Every Democrat running for president seeks total government control of the medical profession. Even an otherwise reasonable candidate such as South Bend, Indiana’s mayor, Pete Buttigieg, has come out for slavery reparations.
This fact alone makes Trump’s re-election more plausible and, while I didn’t support Trump in 2016 and actively spoke out against and oppose his protectionism and other anti-capitalism, I am willing to consider voting for the ex-Democrat as against a candidate who supports socialism, opposes pure capitalism and pledges to violate my right to speech, association and life to ban my car and confiscate my property for slavery reparations, a national income and socialized medicine, college tuition and whatever other lunacy they have in mind.
The premise of the Democrats’ totalitarian environmentalism and socialism is altruism. Why would you trust one who explicitly opposes egoism to defend the United States of America? Trump is bad, terribly anti-intellectual, and it’s true that he’s an authoritarian at least in psychological terms. However vulgar, nationalistic and anti-capitalist his presidency, which is marginally better than I forecast, he’s looking better than the alternative, each of whom shares the same moral premise and economic ideal as China.
As the West watches the world’s danger zones — Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan, Yemen, Israel, Seoul, Kashmir, Kabul, Taiwan, the Sea of Japan, Straits of Hormuz and South China Sea — especially Hong Kong, which once not long ago granted refuge to an American who defied the Obama administration to challenge the status quo and cripple the surveillance state, whose citizens seek to live in liberty, I think it’s important to stand up to China. For the first time in my life, the American president (an anti-intellectual made possible by his thoroughly anti-American predecessor) does.
Twenty seventeen is the year of the purge. After binging for decades on the biting, flat and blank cynicism from The Honeymooners in the Fifties and Saturday Night Live in the Seventies to Seinfeld, The Simpsons and South Park in the Nineties, Americans hardened after Black Tuesday (September 11, 2001) and split apart following the vacant, divisive presidency of Barack Obama. This year, it’s as though some Americans sought to purge America of its founding ideals and proudest practices.
While it is true that the nation’s founding principle, individual rights, has been under attack since the Industrial Revolution, and the U.S. has been coasting on its sense of life ever since, this year in review demonstrates signs that a certain segment of Americans showed real contempt for rights. Whether support for state-run bureaucracies and programs which violate rights such as the TSA, ObamaCare or NSA, or hostility for freedom of speech, property rights and capitalism, these Americans proved eager to violate rights. What once might have been opposition to breaching man’s rights — the Constitutional right to travel unmolested by the state, the right to choose one’s health care and the right to life which is the right to be left alone — turned to silence, submission and explicit sanction. This year saw the regression of the freedom of speech in the executive branch, which threatened to silence the press, and on college campuses.
After this year’s attack on a protest in Charlottesville, one of several assaults including Islamic terrorist attacks and citizen assaults on government officials, came the silence of self-suppression. As foreign and domestic murder of Americans worsens, so does rational discourse between them.
Transitional Trump
Leading the purge of ideas from political discourse, President Trump failed this year to grasp how to salvage what is left of capitalism, failing to engage Congress and Americans in debate, let alone repeal, over the debacle ObamaCare. Instead, Trump conspired to keep ObamaCare’s worst parts, failing to galvanize support for repeal of the worst law in recent U.S. history (read my post on rational reform). With a barrage of insults, outbursts and vulgarities, Trump — acting as ringmaster distracting people and the press with an abundance of sideshows — also purged decency from the White House.
As deficient a president as Trump is, despite any partial and/or accidental success he’s managed, Trump’s vice-president, conservative Mike Pence, is worse. Pence is a religionist of the Roy Moore ilk who, like Trump, fraudulently claims to be for capitalism when the opposite is true. For instance, he claimed as a congressman to support Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) while, in fact, he refused to support expanding HSAs when it mattered most and would have advanced rational health care reform. Vice-President Pence, who agrees with Roy Moore about persecuting gays, would replace Trump if necessary, even as Pence reportedly schemed in 2017 to purge from Trump’s administration any who doubt or question the authoritarian president. These two politicians — both made possible by today’s cynical welfare state collapsing into faith-based authoritarianism — and their mixed band of government interventionists, such as Steve Bannon, seek to purge facts from the press and the press from reporting on matters of state.
If Washington’s a swamp, Trump-Pence are Swamp Things. They want to drag, not drain, the filth out of the swamp and spread the muck all around.
Harvey Weinstein depicted as predatory clown from “It”.
But Trump-Pence can be (and have been) stopped from implementing some of their worst plans. Another 2017 trend, which ignited this fall, similarly seeks to purge reason and render in its place prejudice: today’s incessant jumping to purge the individual from a livelihood because one is accused of wrongdoing. Whether, in fact, the publicly maligned person is accused in the judiciary or is named via unconfirmed claims is, in this alarming approach, beside the point.
I first noticed the trend with the demise of a TV host I find deplorable, Bill O’Reilly, a conservative whose show on Fox News was awful but whose takedown, based on unsubstantiated claims, was troubling. Then, a left-wing movie businessman, Harvey Weinstein, was suddenly accused of outrageous claims in a frenzy of public shaming and mob action. These two men of wealth, success and power thanks to hard work on extremely enduring and popular enterprises, had something besides accusations of sexual impropriety and worse in common: they were targeted for exposure with intent.
By whom and by what means? To what end? Why? O’Reilly’s demise was more coordinated than Weinstein’s but both were purged in swift and serious campaigns. In a year in which foreign infiltration of media — specifically, social media, though other media have in the past proven corruptible, too — is known and admitted, these questions about the press (which I alluded to here) ought to be examined and resolved. If it is legitimate to ask why NBC News rejected a pitch to broadcast a hit piece on Harvey Weinstein, it is legitimate to ask why The New Yorker accepted the pitch and why the New York Times decided to publish an article without a news peg with unsubstantiated charges against Weinstein. The media now routinely speaks of accused persons in disparaging terms and presumes the accused as guilty by insinuation, mimicking the gossip press. Discerning consumers should ask why. Indeed, NBC News reports that one of the gossip media, an operation called BuzzFeed, recently received a tip from Trump operatives about a Democrat who now stands accused of sexual impropriety.
Is it possible that some, many or all the sex-related claims are part of a proxy war between operatives seeking to influence, disrupt and distract Americans — and, if so, why and to what purpose? — with the press as proxy?
In any case, even if every sex claim is true, and I am not asserting whether I think they are or are not true, when accusation is regarded as a matter of fact, we’re likely to get everything but the truth. Besides Weinstein and O’Reilly, accused producers, artists and businessmen include:
This list of accused men is partial. Add to this list executives, directors and associated persons, agencies or companies branded as perverts or enablers, cast out and smeared, ruined or judged and, in any case, insidiously maligned, often without an opportunity to contemplate, let alone respond to, unsubstantiated charges against them.
Most of the men being swept into oblivion with their enterprises, endeavors, accounts, affiliates and partners are being maligned without the benefit of the doubt or closer scrutiny of allegations, many of which were posted on social media. Some of the men are on the left — David Corn, Russell Simmons, Charlie Rose, as well as persons at NPR and MSNBC. Some are on the right: the late Roger Ailes, who has since died, Bill O’Reilly and Eric Bolling, whose son was found dead within hours of his father’s termination from Fox News. Politicians also accused of sex crimes and impropriety such as Al Franken, John Conyers and Roy Moore, as current or aspiring government officials, ought to be held accountable to the people and taxpayers should not be forced to pay their settlements. But the people should decide elections based on political philosophy, not on rumor and lurid allegations.
The media magnifies the purge and prejudice which, in turn, ultimately harms the media. I think the issue of reporting unconfirmed claims is complicated by major changes in the media industry, changes caused or exacerbated by what I think is a disproportionate boom in technological advances which possibly would not have been brought to market in any but a mixed economy. This boom, in turn, may hasten the major shift in today’s media which, in turn, entices formerly and even currently credible sources, such as the Washington Post, to stop reporting essentially based on facts, the truth and what matters — such as nuclear, Islamic terrorist and domestic government control threats to America’s existence — and instead focus on sensational journalism equivocating on the truth of certain assertions.
The adage that if it bleeds, it leads, applies because sex claims against the famous get clicks and customers and, as actions pertaining to sex are denounced and regulated, the cycle spins faster.
Hollywood’s blackballing — sometimes, without as much as a workplace complaint — is driven, as I wrote here, by Puritanical tyrants allied to control people’s lives, from workplace conduct to moviegoing, through a belief system about sex — a set of sex commandments — which, in turn, becomes government control. As I wrote in the post about Weinstein, today’s priests and priestesses seeking sex commandments, ranging from an ex-beauty contestant and Fox News hostess to Hollywood’s most influential titans and institutions, propose rigid, new work rules and regulations concocted by college professors, activists and feminists prohibiting sex-related association, contracts and action.
Trump supports Saudi purge
Speaking of repressive religious regimes, nonstop coverage of unconfirmed sex claims obscures reporting on news that matters, such as Saudi Arabia purging itself of the closest such a dictatorship could have to freethinkers, such as Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. The now-imprisoned or detained prince’s wealth among many others’ has been confiscated by the fundamentalist Islamic state in a sweeping purge of what the dictatorship calls “corruption”, even as the kingdom claims it’s liberalizing dictates against women. The Trump administration — the president and his secretary of state participated in a Saudi Arabian sword ceremony this year in a distinctly un-American display — approves of the purge.
With Saudi Arabia in a proxy war with the world’s other Islamic totalitarian state, Iran, the Saudi purge, amid rising religious influence within the oil kingdom, further destabilizes the region and threatens the West. As historian John Lewis told me in our last interview, whichever Islamic dictatorship emerges from the war between these two jihadist states is an emboldened enemy of civilization; the victor, Dr. Lewis forewarned, poses a catastrophic threat to the United States.
Sen. John McCain infamously spoke at the turn of the century of a 100-year war against religious fundamentalists. Unfortunately, America is well into what appears to be a 100-year war for nothing, about nothing, accomplishing nothing but mass death of Americans — citizens and soldiers alike — as America appeases Islamic statism.
Neglecting the national defense and purging men from power based on sensationalized, unsubstantiated claims hastens America’s disintegration into an uninformed, distracted and unguarded nation in which every thought, expression and action is subject to the whims of a bureaucrat — leaving every American at the mercy of those who hate humanity, civilization and progress.
You see this moral submission to evil in the acceptance of mass death as a matter of course. You see this in every trending shooting, vehicular mowdown or stabbing. You see this in the subsequent lockdown, backslapping, praying and candlelighting and the calls for more of the same irrational laws, checkpoints and practices that fail to stop each attack. You see it in the people’s belief in a national leader, surveillance or other statism such as a transportation agency which fails 90 percent of the time, according to its own bureaucrats.
You see it, too, though, when there’s a car chase, a new wave of allegations or another presidential meltdown. Day by day, year by year, America is being purged of thoughtful discourse about what matters, sacrificing reason for gawking over, as against grappling with, unchecked half-truths. Jumping to conclusions to purge those in power comes at the expense of making judgments about defending the nation and achieving nothing less than victory.
The year’s greatest unsolved mystery — why Stephen Paddock opened fire on a musical concert in Las Vegas in an act of mass murder — is, in this sense, emblematic of the year 2017. The act got everyone’s attention for a few weeks. There were the knee-jerk expressions of belief, prayer and political commentary. Then, the unsolved mystery of why a mass murderer did what he did, including basic discrepancies in the timeline, faded into oblivion.
This evil, empty attack, apparently premeditated by Paddock simply to purge life on earth — including his own, reducing himself to zero as we’re told is the highest morality; selflessness — happened, passed and was, like ObamaCare, the surveillance state and the TSA, accepted as the new normal. Slaughter in Las Vegas was as forgotten as every other act of mass murder. In a year in which Americans showed greater outrage over unproven accusations than over unsolved motives for the mass murder of innocents, what is being purged from America is the sound of the voice of reason.
The deed is done and whim-worshipping Nationalist Donald Trump has been elected America’s president. So, Election Day 2016 bestows the inheritance of “hope and change” that Barack H. Obama spoke about eight years ago upon Donald J. Trump; he represents real, immediate and alarming change from bad to worse in terms of republican government based on individual rights—and leaves his followers and supporters to hope for better days. Transformational Obama, who did fundamental damage to the republic, met with transitional Trump on Thursday at the White House for 90 minutes and came away impressed. So says Obama.
Grasping the chance for mutual aggrandizement, Trump returned the compliment and added that he’s willing to back off his promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare after listening to President Obama. Trump promptly told 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl that he will keep at least two major dictates in ObamaCare including the provision forcing insurers to insure anyone who’s already sick. Trump’s vulgar “art” of dealmaking has begun.
This week of his historic upset victory provides a telling, leading indicator that Trump’s dealmaking is the path to crazymaking. Soon, the seething, volatile, malicious intents of this insecure president-elect shall erupt in a daily American meltdown that exacerbates the nation’s perilous problems.
I think it’s important to contemplate how Trump came to power. Sniveling, cynical media dilettantes (pseudo-intellectuals such as Bill Maher, Greg Gutfeld, Dennis Miller, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart and their brethren) made any type of vulgar, unprincipled sneering for or against the Obama administration acceptable. Despite the laughter and ratings, annoyance at the smugness accumulated and eventually, it rightly revolted decent Americans, whose anger was compounded by the day-to-day pain and suffering experienced in hidden inflation, unemployment, loss of free choice in medicine, loss of privacy and freedom to travel unmolested by the state and chronic attack by Islamic terrorists whose state sponsors and motivation the government refuses to name, identify and bring to an end.
Being subjected to today’s incessant snideness contrasts with the spreading poverty, despair and suffering of these post-crash years since Barack Obama was elected. Ostentatious, cavalier Obama was a constant and chronic reminder of this contrast, which Americans experience as a widening gap between the favored and the disfavored with persons of state and ivory tower determining the difference. Cavorting Obamas, Bushes and Clintons heightened the divide. The Hunger Gamesdramatized it. Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements crested around it. Americans need only examine the changes and loss of hopes in their own households to take stock of the undeniable failure of the Obama presidency. Despondent adults and deflated youths—not everyone, but many Americans—could no longer deny the sense that America as a surveillance-welfare state is going dark, as Leonard Peikoffhas observed and thoroughly, thoughtfully examined.
In short, Obama made Trump possible, as his predecessor made Obama possible, too. This—with the horrifying prospect of a President Pence ominously awaiting the nation—is why I regard the native New Yorker as a transitional figure. To paraphrase trader and Fox Business analyst Jonathan Hoenig, whose courageous crusade against Trump was foremost among capitalists, worry above all about what comes after President Trump. Strive to understand what got Trump elected.
Brace in the meantime for an onslaught of favor-trading (Ayn Rand, whose philosophy, Objectivism, is the salve for Trump’s politics, called it pull peddling in Atlas Shrugged), corruption, fear-mongering and cronyism, especially familialism. Now, Americans get to live under the uncertainty that comes from not thinking about what comes next—the momentary thrill of going by whim—the true meaning of taking matters on faith, having hope and being charitable without discrimination—as America comes apart. The left had their own brand of a hateful, hostile candidate of the past, Bernie Sanders, the socialist to Trump’s nationalist but essentially for total government control of the individual, with shrewd Hillary Clinton posing as the candidate of the future while representing the status quo. The right offered more of the same religionists, traditionalists and pragmatists and wound up with a shrewd strongman as the last candidate standing (Libertarian Gary Johnson abandoned all pretense to taking a presidential candidacy seriously early in the campaign). The media, led by Fox News celebrity Megyn Kellydespite appearances to the contrary, catered to Trump’s every whim and fed his rise to power.
Not knowing the extent of the damage to come while knowing that there will be damage and, likely deeper division and possible bloodshed, makes it impossible to prepare. Bracing for President Trump’s worst case scenario is like dealing with an overstimulated addict: you have to be on vigilant, guarded, nonstop defense and never let up on defending your rights and your life. The coming presidential term is likely to be disturbing, exhausting and shocking, like time spent with a jacked up addict who’s out of control. But it is an opportunity to learn, to resolve and make peace with the fact that you’re fighting for your life.
And to unite with others to save, not consent to destroy, what remains of the free republic.
The long Republican presidential campaign ended last night in Cleveland, Ohio, as the Grand Old Party (GOP) essentially ended itself as a political party for individual rights by nominating non-Republican nationalist Donald Trump for president of the United States.
The wreckage Trump leaves in his wake is real. The Republican Party is gone. I am inclined to agree with scholar Thomas Sowell, who writes that the best outcome is an unresolved election between Hillary Clinton and Trump that goes to the House of Representatives.
Trump is the result of decades of Big Government status quo; his reckless, anti-intellectual plan for whim-based authoritarianism is a solution to every major unsolved problem America faces, from our multi-trillion dollar debt and lousy economy to the West’s war with radical Islam. While Americans were scoffing at solving these urgent problems, insisting that they didn’t want to think about them, talk politics or do anything but snivel and sneer at satire by Simpsons, South Park and Jon Stewart, Trump was deluding himself into believing that he’s the one to fill the void.
Variations on the prototypical angry white male—Colbert, Matthews, Gutfeld, Stewart, Miller, O’Reilly, Olbermann—all superficial and deeply anti-intellectual, converged into a single TV personality: the bumbling, foaming, splaying, monstrous Donald Trump. Trump mixes most of the popular cultural points since the turn of the century—the attention deficit, instant gratification and roaming, raging thuggishness of a vicariously violent video game, the boorish, slobbering sloth of The Sopranos and blood-lust of Game of Thrones, the petty, vulgar and vacant humor of Seinfeld and everything it bred—Trump is the triumph of the anti-romantic; he provides the gushing, momentary thrill of going by the gut. He is an embodiment of the anti-ideal.
The presidential nominee says he “admires” states with socialized medicine, “loves” violating property rights via eminent domain and opposes free trade, free press and freedom of speech. Trump vows to build a wall along the American border. All of this comes under his banner to “make America great again”, a theme of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign.
Those were not the only words lifted without credit from someone else during the past four days. The speech Trump and his wife claimed she wrote, an assertion which was later revoked without serious media scrutiny, plagiarized an Obama convention speech. But Trump’s candidacy, which began on June 16, 2015, thrives on controversy. From his spat with Megyn Kelly, which put them both in the center of attention, to his accusations, smears and insinuations, everything he does is designed to make you look.
But not too closely, not for too long, and certainly not at his ideas. During the convention, Trump swore, for instance, that he will “make America work again”. Never mind what this phrase, which if taken literally could mean mandatory labor, actually means.
Vague on specific plans, though unmistakably clear in his anti-capitalist, authoritarian intent and purpose, Donald Trump’s convention was marked by screaming, ranting and a single voice of dissent in a speech by Ted Cruz, who refused to endorse the New York crony real estate developer (postscript: Cruz endorsed Trump). Trump was nominated after a motion over rules by Never Trump delegates was denied a roll call vote. Trump’s party platform adopted government controls such as a law targeting gays for prohibition from marriage and a restoration of the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s defunct Glass-Steagall Act controlling banks.
Trump Con is a swing to the left—toward a centralized government controlling economics, marital law and communication—erasing a party created by those seeking to abolish slavery. The leftist push came, too, from the candidate’s wife, Melania, who by her admission admiringly copied Michelle Obama, and his daughter, Ivanka, a non-Republican who introduced her father by emphasizing non-essential facts, such as the Trump corporation’s—Trumps call the entity an “organization”—hiring of “more women”, not men, as executives. Ivanka Trump, appearing as callous as Mrs. Obama and as blank as a mannequin or a model in a Robert Palmer music video, became momentarily expressive once during an otherwise Stepford-like address—when she praised laws granting favors to women based upon marriage and motherhood. Sounding like both a radical socialist such as Bernie Sanders and a staunch conservative such as Phyllis Schlafly, Trump’s child spoke of “wage discrepancy”, “wage equality” and “equal pay”, pledging to hold her father accountable as president to reclaiming “our heritage”, though, like her father, Ivanka Trump refused to explain the pronoun or the heritage.
Trump’s daughter, who is married to New York Observer owner Jared Kushner, dared Americans to “judge [Donald Trump’s] competency by the companies he’s built” and added that he “will call upon the best and brightest”. She did not say for what purpose the best and brightest would be called upon nor exactly what being “called upon” means, whether a voluntary draft or some form of servitude. Ivanka Trump, proponent of mandates for rewarding marriage and motherhood, told the audience that her father will seek and carry out “brave new solutions.”
Donald Trump’s speech was a spewing, shouting rant which CNN reports is the longest convention speech in 44 years. Trump railed against immigrants and the state of the union, citing statistics and promising “no lies…[only] the truth and nothing else”, a pledge he’s already broken and often. Trump ended his acceptance speech by blurting three indiscriminate words: “I love you!”
At the end of a convention dedicated to destroying the Republican Party and constructing a powerful family government bureaucracy, the audience was left mindlessly demanding imprisonment of Trump’s presumptive opponent, Hillary Clinton, and chanting a variation of Barack Obama’s 2008 theme, which Trump’s dishonest campaign extends. “YES YOU WILL!” is 2016’s corollary of 2008’s “YES WE CAN!” I contemplated the latter phrase in my post on Obama’s legacy and Trump’s motto, given his nationalist philosophy and threats to bring U.S. businesses such as Apple under the jackboot of the U.S. government, can only end in “…do as Trump commands!” Or worse.
“You can’t always get what you want,” the Rolling Stones sing on the record used without permission by Donald Trump. Short-sighted media pundits who powered his ominous rise mistake his featuring the song for a humbled check on Trump’s power-lusting intentions. But, as a voice of dissent to the supposed charisma of Melania, Ivanka and Donald Trump and this alarming mixture of familialism with fascism, I think media pundits got it wrong. Trump plays the tune as a taunt to Americans. Here comes my new autocratic administration, he’s transmitting to the nation and the world, and no one—especially not you, the individual—should expect to get what you deserve, because Trump’s time is coming and Trump will be in control. The anti-republican Trump Convention, the biggest con on the American people since Barack Obama, all but guarantees that, whether Clinton the statist or Trump the statist wins this election, unhappy days will soon be here.
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Two recent cases in point come from CBS News, press that I’ve praised (read my post here). The first instance involves two anchors for the CBS News streaming app, Vladimir Duthiers and Anne-Marie Green, both of whom thoroughly and feverishly endorsed the concept, if it can be called that, of divine intervention after reporting on a child’s brave attempt to survive her father’s suicide and attempted murder. 
Starbucks introduced the blend this week in an email professing the company’s commitment to women. I have never heard of a coffee blend being produced on the basis of discriminating on behalf of one’s sex. Starbucks, which claims it’ll donate some of the blend’s revenue to women’s groups, broke the mold by singling out a single sex, excluding the opposite sex, with charity toward women because they’re women. This act sanctions feminism’s premise that identity is based on sex. Early advocates of what was once called women’s liberation promoted feminism as a means of achieving equality with men. Today’s feminists have dropped this pretense. Big business takes this offshoot of egalitarianism, which at once segregates and blurs the two sexes, on faith.
Hong Kong’s rejection of Communist China’s extradition rule and the governance of Communist China puppet ruler Carrie Lam is an unsurprising recent development. With its British colonial history, Hong Kong has been an outpost of Western civilization in the Orient; an Occidentalist center for trading food, especially seafood, goods and services bridging east and west. Much of the city’s population went along with Britain’s adherence to a pre-Communist agreement to return Hong Kong to China in 1997, which Leonard Peikoff once observed may have been influenced by Reagan’s refusal to back Thatcher’s withdrawal or refusal to recognize the agreement on the grounds that its terms were voided by dictatorship.
While it is true that the nation’s founding principle, individual rights, has been under attack since the Industrial Revolution, and the U.S. has been coasting on its sense of life ever since, this year in review demonstrates signs that a certain segment of Americans showed real contempt for rights. Whether support for state-run bureaucracies and programs which violate rights such as the 
Grasping the chance for mutual aggrandizement, Trump returned the compliment and added that he’s willing to back off his promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare after listening to President Obama. Trump promptly told 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl that he will keep at least two major dictates in ObamaCare including the provision forcing insurers to insure anyone who’s already sick. Trump’s vulgar “art” of dealmaking has begun.
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The presidential nominee says he “admires” states with socialized medicine, “loves” violating property rights via eminent domain and opposes free trade, free press and