Most of the world would rather believe lies because most of the world cannot shake it's embrace of anti-Semitism: Why? Because it is easier to believe what you believe than to accept change. Why? Because facts no longer, and probably never did, matter.
I live about 20 minutes south of the Canadian border, which
used to be called the longest undefended frontier in the world. People moved
freely back and forth across it all day every day. But now it’s been closed for
over a year. At one point my daughter asked me to drive her up there, because
there was a 30-minute opportunity for people on one side to talk to their
friends on the other. “Sad!” as President Trump would say. It was like
Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the Cold War, except that both sides
are now like East Berlin.
I don’t know how this happened, but it is just one
indication that America, and the West in general, have become almost
unrecognizable from what they were not that long ago.
Look at just three things we have lost.
One is equality before the law, something absolutely
essential to a free society. In its place, we now have politicized law. If a
policeman fatally shoots someone, whether his name is released to the public
depends on whether the shooting is consistent with the preferred narrative of
the ruling class. A policeman recently took down a young woman who was
threatening the life of another young woman with a knife, and that policeman
was immediately identified—indeed, his photo was posted and he was threatened
by NBA superstar LeBron James on Twitter. On the other hand, we know nothing of
the policeman who shot dead an unarmed woman in the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
His name will apparently never be released to the public.
Second, border control. Functioning societies, at least since
the Peace of Westphalia three centuries ago, have borders. America has no
southern border and no plans to get one. The official position of our
government seems to be that any of the seven billion persons on this planet has
a right to come and stay in the U.S. for three years, until his or her assigned
court date comes up. As the number of people with pending cases continues to
grow, that three years will extend out to five or seven or 15 years. If we get
all seven billion people to come here, the court system will break down
entirely and maybe we can go back to having a functioning border.
And third, dare I bring up the fact that it is a real
question whether we can go back to agreeing to have open and honest elections?
And if we don’t have open and honest elections, control of our borders, and
equality before the law, then we don’t have the conditions for politics or free
government.
And here’s the thing. It is not at all clear to me that many
of America’s conservative politicians understand the seriousness of all this.
You can see it in the fact that they go around trying to scare people with the
specter of a “radical socialist agenda.” For well over a year now, we have been
living in a world in which it’s accepted as normal that the state has
essentially unlimited power—and in which our freedom to decide for ourselves
has been diminished almost to invisibility. Why do these conservative
politicians think the words “radical socialist agenda” still scare anyone in a
time when the state can tell us whether we can have Aunt Mabel over for
Christmas? They are completely out of touch.
Over the same period as the pandemic lockdowns, we have seen
an escalation of so-called wokeness. And if you look at one of the most
startling manifestations of this, transgender fanaticism—which involves, after
all, the abolition of biological sex and, I’m sorry to have to say it, the
physical mutilation of children—one notices that America is farther down this
road than any other country in the Western world. In other words, at this
moment of crisis for Western Civilization, or for what we used to call
Christendom, the leading country of the free world is pulling the wrong way.
Think of it. Your daughter has been training since she was a
little girl to run in school sports. Now at 17, she’s in the state high school
track championships, and you are forbidden even to notice that she’s competing
against a woman who is 6’2” with thighs like tugboats, a great touch of five
o’clock shadow on her face, and the most muscular bosom you’ve ever seen.
You’re not supposed to notice the craziness of this, and the craziness is at its
craziest right here in America.
We traditionally think of France as being a bit screwy, but
today there are French intellectuals who regard themselves as hardcore leftists
and yet who think America has gone bonkers on this transgender issue. President
Macron himself has said that American wokeness is an existential threat to the
French Republic, and he even found bureaucrats in France’s education
bureaucracy who agreed. There is not a single bureaucrat in the Department of
Education in Washington, D.C., who would agree, but there are apparently a few
in Paris.
If you look further east in Europe to the lands that were
once behind the Iron Curtain—to Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, which
still function as conventional nation-states calculating their best
interests—you find tremendous fear of the threat of wokeness that is being
exported, sometimes aggressively, from America. So it is here in the U.S. where
we have to put the stake through these ideas.
But again, even most of our conservative leaders and
institutions seem oblivious. School districts in America are talking about
revising their curricula to cover transgender issues from grade school on. Now,
I went to an English boys’ school, and we were expected to pick up sexuality on
our own time. In those days people would have looked puzzled if you had said,
“We’re going to have to cancel geography or Latin, because we need to put gay
studies in there.” These days, instead of going off behind the bike shed during
recess to learn about sex, kids need to sneak behind the bike shed to do a
little bit of closeted geography or closeted Latin. It’s completely backwards.
And yet what do we hear from most conservative politicians? That it would be
nice to offer people a tax cut!
We are way beyond tax cuts. We’re broke. We’re just a
smidgen away from $30 trillion in federal debt—something with no historical
precedent. Talking about tax cuts today is like talking about VAT tax refunds
on the Titanic. It’s not actually what’s necessary at the moment.
Another big issue that should take our minds off tax cuts is
China. I can’t get over the way we in the U.S. have been ordered by our
governors and the CDC to punish ourselves by living small, shrunken lives,
while the people in China who loosed this pandemic on the world have paid no
price for it.
Dr. Fauci has been a federal government bureaucrat since
1968. He’s the J. Edgar Hoover of public health. He talks about the COVID virus
as if we’re at war. But he seems to think a country wins a war by taking it out
on its own population rather than the enemy, which is what we’ve done.
Which do you think was the only major economy to grow in
2020? It’s not a hard question. America’s economy shrank 3.5 percent last year.
The economies of Germany and Japan shrank almost five percent. France’s,
Italy’s, and India’s economies all shrank over eight percent, and the economy
of the United Kingdom was down ten percent. China’s economy, on the other hand,
grew 2.3 percent in 2020, and first quarter growth for 2021 in China set a new
world record—it was up over 18.3 percent. The COVID pandemic has been hugely
profitable for China.
U.S. policy towards China since the 1990s represents perhaps
the biggest strategic miscalculation by any great power in human history. Just
as communism was wobbling and beginning to fall everywhere else, we helped
Beijing come up with the first economically viable form of communism.
At first we were told it was only our manufacturing that we
would ship to China. After all, we were told, it wasn’t economically viable for
Americans to make widgets. Remember the talk in the ’90s? We were going to be
the “knowledge economy.” All the clever people told us this. We weren’t going
to have mills and factories, but we were going to be the knowledge economy.
Well, in case you haven’t noticed, China’s got the entire knowledge economy for
itself now. It makes our laptops and our smartphones and it’s out front with
Huawei and 5G. It also makes the batteries that power our gizmos and the chips
that run our cars. When COVID struck, we found out fast that the Chinese not
only make our viruses, they also make the personal protective equipment that
protects us against the viruses—and all of our medicines to boot! Those wily
Chinese get you both coming and going.
China is now the number one global power. You can define
this militarily, where it now has the largest surface fleet on the planet. You
can define it economically. But the way I define it is to look at who gets its
way in the world. New Zealand has just effectively pulled out of the Five Eyes
intelligence-sharing arrangement—an arrangement between the U.S., the U.K.,
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the oldest such arrangement on the planet.
New Zealand has pulled out with respect to China because it doesn’t want to
offend China. I would think Canada might be the next to go. Or look at the
World Health Organization. America pays for it, but Chairman Xi in Beijing
calls the shots. China gets its way now, and the U.S. doesn’t.
We need politicians with a sense of urgency about these
problems, but all they seem to have is urgency about things that aren’t urgent.
Look at climate change. People say we need to take action over climate change
or else rising sea levels are going to overwhelm the Maldives in the Indian
Ocean in the 22nd century. That’s the century after this one, which is still
quite young. These same people say about the immediate crisis on the southern
border that it’s “a natural phenomenon beyond the control of politicians.” But
changing the weather in order to lower the sea levels that will threaten the
Maldives in the Indian Ocean in the next century is within the power of
politicians? In general, our leaders are urgent about nothing that matters and
not in the least bit urgent about things that matter very much.
The things our news media talks about incessantly, whether
it’s transgender bathrooms or Confederate statues being toppled or the totally
dishonest national conversation on race—nothing like this is heard in China as
it goes along steadily strengthening its position as the world’s leading power.
The Chinese don’t find themselves stuck in these sterile, drain-circling,
dishonest public conversations about identity politics. These conversations are
a waste of time. And one thing we should demand of our politicians is that they
talk about things that aren’t a waste of time.
At the root of our problems is that we have seen the
emergence of a true ruling class, like Grand Dukes in medieval Europe. Its
members intermarry. They send their kids to the same schools. They circulate
back and forth between government and the private sector. And over time it has
become increasingly easy to identify members of this class.
John Kerry gave a commencement address a couple of years ago
in which he told the students, “You are going to be the first generation to
live in a borderless world.” And for the elite, the idea of a borderless world
rings true. A typical member of the ruling class will get a job with a firm
like Goldman Sachs, work for a couple of years in Hong Kong, then move on for a
couple of years in Geneva, and then maybe come back to America. What are
borders to such a person? Meanwhile, for the common American, COVID has
literally ended, to a large degree, any freedom of movement. They live in the
farthest thing from a borderless world. Oftentimes they’re trapped in a town
that is dying because of the open-border, cheap-labor policies advocated by
people like John Kerry.
Our political division in America today is a class division,
and we need to expose it as such whenever we see it. The ruling class tries to
keep racial and other forms of division stirred up in our politics so that we
don’t notice the class protection racket they are running. Look at that guy
from Twitter, Jack Dorsey, who wears a beard like he’s playing the hobo in a
Charlie Chaplin silent film. I wouldn’t mind betting that when he’s called to
testify in Congress, he has his valet hook on the beard and lower him into the
clothes that make him look like he’s been sleeping in a dumpster. Then at night
after the cameras are off he’s like Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey,
spending an hour being dressed for dinner. Our elites have become incredibly
good at theater.
Getting back to the southern border, it perfectly symbolizes
the bifurcation of our society. We’re told there’s a health emergency. We’re
told we can’t open our businesses or attend weddings or funerals. Yet at the
same time, every day, thousands of people pour across the southern border, test
positive for COVID, and are then driven to a nice hotel and put up there at
taxpayers’ expense.
It’s also interesting to compare the southern border with
the northern. Prior to the pandemic, when the border with Canada was open, my
kids had their Kinder Eggs confiscated by the Department of Homeland Security
when we would cross the border going south into Vermont. Kinder Eggs are
chocolate eggs with a kid’s toy inside. They are sold in Canada, but they are
banned in the U.S. because the Food and Drug Administration calls the toy a
“non-nutritive embed”—and that’s good enough to send Homeland Security agents
swinging into action! There is always a big crackdown before Easter on Kinder
Eggs. So at the northern border there are lots of things, down to Kinder Eggs,
that are illegal. But at the southern border you can come in with pretty much anything
you want, including COVID. Why is that? It is because some groups serve the
needs of the ruling class and others don’t. License is extended to the former
and not the latter.
People ask me, “Why are you going on about Kinder Eggs?
They’re not important. It’s more important that so-and-so is up two
points in Iowa and three points in New Hampshire. That could be a real game
changer.” To which I answer no, that’s not how it works. If they take the small
freedoms away from you, whether it’s the freedom to eat Kinder Eggs or to enjoy
a high pressure shower, you will lose all the larger freedoms, which is the
world we’re in now.
I used to get occasional pushback when I’d talk about
rights. “Rights are abstract things,” people would say—“they don’t have anything
to do with our real lives.” Well, after the last year, we know they have
everything to do with our real lives. When you’re told you can’t open your hair
salon, when you’re told you can’t have family or friends over for dinner, when
you’re told you must wear a mask in your own garden, there’s nothing abstract
about it. This is where all the stupid Kinder Egg laws have been trending for
years. And it’s why we need to push back.
I made a little joke earlier about studying transgenderism
in grade school, but it’s not a laughing matter. Education is the biggest
structural defect in our society. We have an almost entirely corrupt and
abusive education establishment. And in one corner of Governor Whitmer’s
Michigan, of all places, Hillsdale College stands against this. Hillsdale’s
literature, I’ve noted through the years, talks a lot about the College’s 177
years of being rooted in the soil of Michigan. And this reminds me of the fact
that if you do not have roots, you are not a functioning society. You can’t just
be flotsam and jetsam, bobbing around on the currents of the age, wheresoever
they tend. If you do that, you’re cut off from your roots.
This is what’s so frightening about the trends in education
today. Cromwell told his portrait painter, “Paint me, warts and all.” That’s
not what is happening in America, where the trend in education is to paint only
America’s warts. So even the great Kate Smith, who sang “God Bless America” for
years, is having her statue taken down because she made a racially insensitive
record in 1931. Well you know who really had a racially insensitive record in
1931? The Democratic Party. But unlike Kate Smith’s statue, it’s still
around.
President Macron of France is not my favorite chap—he’s a
sinister globalist for one thing. But he made an admirable stand when he
announced that not one French statue would be taken down and not a single
French street name would be changed, because they are all part of French
history. And “Bingo!” as Peter Navarro likes to say, the statue toppling and
street-name changing in France went away. Why can’t American conservatives show
that kind of strength? The Senate Minority Leader says he personally would not
be bothered if the historical names of U.S. military bases are changed. The
editor of National Review says that he wouldn’t be bothered
about taking down Confederate statues. But of course it doesn’t stop there—now
they’re going for all the statues. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, McKinley,
and on and on. The point conservatives need to grasp is, unless you’re prepared
to surrender everything, don’t surrender anything.
I’ll end by pointing out that the Left wins because it
seizes language. Take the policy of letting people vote who are not U.S.
citizens and shouldn’t be voting. The Left calls this policy “counting every
vote.” Therefore someone who wants to make sure voters are citizens is opposed to
“counting every vote.” If we don’t take back the language, we will lose the
truth. Even on FOX News, I have noticed, news anchors now talk about “gender
assigned at birth,” as if that’s something different from one’s biological sex.
There may be 57 genders, but there are only two biological sexes.
Don’t surrender the language. Reclaim the language. It’s the
first step to recovering our civilization.
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