Glenn K. Beaton is a writer and columnist living in Colorado. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, Powerline, Instapundit, Citizen Free Press, American Thinker, Fox News, The Federalist, and numerous other print, radio and television outlets. His most recent book is "High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen"
For years, the legacy media (hereinafter the “Leg-Meds”) parroted the Democrats’ line that the population of immigrants can be divided into the “documented” ones and the “undocumented” ones.
The euphemism “undocumented” finally became a joke, and so the Leg-Meds and the other Democrats eventually surrendered to the word “illegal.”
However, within that category of “illegals,” they clung (bitterly) to the notion that about 99.9999999% were “law-abiding” and only the remaining 0.0000001% were criminals.
That lie was called out yesterday by President Trump’s new press secretary. This 27-year-old woman owned the Leg-Meds. Here’s the exchange:
REPORTER: Of the 3,500 arrests ICE has made so far since President Trump came back onto office, can you just tell me the numbers? How many have a criminal record versus those who are in the country illegally?
KAROLINE LEAVITT: All of them [have a criminal record] because they are criminals as far as this administration goes.
She’s right. Here’s the text of 18 U.S.Code Section 1325:
(a)Improper time or place; avoidance of examination or inspection; misrepresentation and concealment of facts
Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.
This quoted section clearly and unambiguously sets out criminal penalties including prison time for illegally entering the country. Imprisonment is only for crimes. You can’t be imprisoned for a mere civil violation of the law.
(If the entry was legal, but the ongoing presence in the country is not, as with a student overstaying his visa, the issue is more complicated. That’s probably why the next subsection sets out civil penalties — rather than criminal penalties — for that circumstance. But the vast majority of illegals are not students overstaying their visas; they are people who snuck across the border.)
Therefore, people who enter this country illegally are illegals – and criminals. It is accurate to refer to them as such. The most precise term for them would be “criminal immigrants.”
Pseudo-intellectual elites like to talk about the “arc of history.” Barack Obama loved that phrase almost as much as he loved the word “existential.” Things in Barack’s rhetorical world didn’t just exist. They were in the state of “existential” and forever bending along the “arc of history.”
The elites assured that this “arc of history” will take us inevitably to a world of equity, inclusion and diversity – a utopian world the elites have always imagined. They even have a theme song for the journey:
“Imagine there’s no heaven, above us only sky, Blah, blah, blah, blahhhh . . .”
Of course, the people in charge of this utopia of the elites will be the ones with the prescience to anticipate it, the skill to guide us to it, and the power to run it – namely, those elites.
Moses brought his people to the Promised Land but never entered it. Modern elites won’t make his mistake again. They’ll lead us there, herd us in, lock the gates, and run the show.
And in a notable exception to the abolition of merit (it’s sooo dystopian that some people get more just because they merit more!) these meritorious elites will be well compensated. Very well. In the precise amount they deem just.
But detours have recently frustrated the elites in their arc-y journey toward their utopianistic place. Moses detoured 40 years in the desert; today’s elites find themselves detoured four years into a similar wasteland – for the second time in the last decade.
And now their people (note the possessive plural pronoun) in this wasteland are sinning again. Golden calves, bitcoins, ungratefulness, orange hair, cutting taxes. You know – all the usual sins.
With alarm, the elites see that their people are getting beyond their command. What’s needed, they figure, is some of that old time religion.
That’s why a utilitarian epiphany of the elites is in the works.
Let me be clear. Religion is not a bad thing; it’s a good thing. Religion tends to discourage socially destructive behaviors. Nearly all religions have rules against murder and theft, for example.
But those rules are not what the elites like about religion. In fact, they’re a little skittish about those particular rules because the penalties for violating them tend to be imposed disproportionately on people they enjoy viewing as oppressed, blameless, and childlike.
Moreover, the elites historically saw religion as competition for power. The allegiance of the people was divided between the secular elites and the Church elites. The secular elites had the power of money, but the Church elites also had money – and God, too.
Eventually, the secular elites won the competition for power by running the table on money. But they remained at odds with religion until recently. They reasoned that a power like religion that inspires people willingly to burn themselves and others at the stake is one always to be wary of.
But it’s been a long time since religion burned anyone at the stake. Religion has dwindled to the status of a sheep in wolves’ clothing. Elites began to think of religion as a simple superstition that bitter, stupid people cling to – that they depend on – as comfort when things goes bump in the night.
Today, the elites still think that, but now they see religious dependency as a feature, not a flaw. On their road to Damascus, and Davos, they’ve envisioned and embraced Karl Marx’s observation that religion is “the opiate of the masses.”
How convenient. The elites have coincidentally decided that the people inhabiting the land recently laid waste, again, who are rebelling against their authority and inattentively and hyperactively sinning against them, need something opium-ish. And they deserve it, good and hard. For that, the elites have concluded, religion is at least as good as Adderall, and cheaper.
Religion no longer threatens the elites, much. Today, the mild threat that religion poses to secular power is more than offset by its usefulness in securing that power by sedating the masses. In particular, the elites like the rules of religion that call for deference to authority – “authority” being them, of course.
Honor they father, honor thy mother, honor thy priest, honor thy Environmental Protection Agency, honor thy right to choose, honor thy elites, and so on.
Never mind that Scripture doesn’t explicitly spell out every single one of those honor/submission rules. The elites contend that, like abortion, they’re implied in the penumbra.
And so, we have an Episcopal Bishop in gilded robe with bejeweled scepter scolding the man newly elected by the people to lead them, whom she spots worshipping respectfully in her congregation.
She thereupon transfigures the worship service into a public damning of that one man. Complying with his Constitutional duty to enforce the duly enacted Federal immigration laws is sinful, she warns, and honoring the God-created genders is immoral.
She would have the President and us believe that a kid struggling emotionally with sex issues doesn’t need help, he needs surgery. He is the victim of God’s mistake where He accidentally put a female soul into a male body. She proclaims that she’s the one to make that decision, by God, and the President is merely the one to enforce her decision by correcting what she has decided is God’s mistake.
Just don’t get carried away, Mr. President, and start enforcing the immigration laws decided by Congress, too. Who does Congress think they are anyway? Episcopal Bishops?
Elites’ new love for religion has all the passion of an old-style revival meeting. It lacks only one thing: God.
Here’s my advice, for what it’s worth. Don’t believe in religion because it’s a good thing for society – even though it often is, as even the elites are starting to realize.
Rather, believe in it because it’s the truth, and the truth will set you free.
But don’t take my word for it. Really, please don’t. This is a truth that each person must find in, and on, his own way.
God never existed in Barack’s world. But he wants him in yours. He wants you to hallow the elites; he wants you in their kingdom; he wants you to beg forgiveness.
For the Baracks of the world, God is a useful fiction. But they may someday be startled at what they’ve stirred.
Political candidates aren’t always seen by 19,000 people in big sexy arenas like Madison Square Garden.
They also play the rubber chicken circuit at little outdoor makeshift venues of a few hundred or a thousand people in rural America. These are places you would never visit unless you were looking for votes. Think “County Fair.”
So it was for Donald Trump one ordinary day last summer. He was on an outdoor plywood stage in rural Pennsylvania looking for votes from plain folk.
He was just a few minutes into his stump speech, or his stump speech du jour. Trump is not a polished speaker but he speaks from his heart and with his hands. He often strays from the strictures of his teleprompter, sometimes to the point where you wish he wouldn’t.
What happened next was initially trivialized by Associated Press, apparently to avoid martyring or heroizing the man. They reported:
“Loud noises rang through the crowd.”
One of those loud noises instantly kills a man standing behind Trump. Another loud noise wounds another person. And another wounds another. Altogether, eight loud noises come from the shooter and two from the Secret Service to neutralize him.
One loud noise goes through Trump’s ear, missing his cranium by half an inch. His hand instinctively goes to his shredded ear even before he is conscious of the pain there. He pulls his hand away to look at it, and sees the blood. It was only then that he knew he’d been shot.
Involuntarily, Trump does what anybody – and any body – would do. He falls to the floor behind the podium. The Secret Service keep him there for about two minutes as people around him are screaming and scrambling.
Imagine what goes through Trump’s mind in those chaotic two minutes. He’s not altogether sure what just happened. He doesn’t know if the ear wound is just the ear or the head too. He’s still not sure if he’s been shot anywhere else.
Agents try to assess his condition visually and verbally. They decide to get him to the relative safety of a nearby vehicle.
At the time, there was no way of knowing whether the shooter who’d been neutralized was a loner or one of many. Raising the President from the floor and out from behind the podium could make him a sitting duck. But leaving him there risked another barrage of bullets – and perhaps explosives as well.
Trump was smart enough to know all that.
Most men would have chosen to cower under the podium. It was a lousy shield against explosives and AR-15 bullets but at least it offered a bit of concealment.
But Donald Trump is not like most men.
The Secret Service agents wanted to carry him off in a stretcher, but he refused. Instead, with their help he got to his feet and came out from the podium, ear torn and face bloodied.
Then he did something unforgettable. Let him describe it:
I wanted to do something to let ’em know I was ok. I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousands of people that were breathlessly waiting and started shouting, Fight! Fight! Fight!
Since that day, Trump has said he believes God saved him, that he might save America.
Strong words. Presumptuous even. Some people would say arrogant. But those people have never had rifle bullets from a would-be assassin tear through their ear and kill a man right behind them.
Trump seems different now. Calmer. More thoughtful. Serene. Settled. Dedicated. Workmanlike. Mission-driven.
I don’t pretend to know if God saved Trump so that he could save America. Most of my communications with the Guy Upstairs are from me to Him, not the other way around.
But I know Trump himself believes that. Something happened to him in the eternity of those two bloody minutes as he wondered if they were his last.
In one of his very final acts as the putative President, literally minutes before Donald Trump was re-inaugurated, the Big Guy issued a pardon to all his siblings and their spouses.
Joe’s five pardons together with his earlier pardon of his son Hunter for tax evasion and gun-running convictions (and all other crimes known and unknown over a period of ten years) bring Joe’s pardons of family members to a total of six.
In case you’re wondering what crimes these six family members could possibly have committed that required a presidential pardon, let’s just say it was a family business. It was a lucrative one that raked in tens of millions of dollars in exchange for unidentified work. According to emails from Hunter, 10% was earmarked for the guy issuing the pardon – that very same Big Guy.
These Sordid Six thus join the 1,499 rapists, murderers and molesters whose sentences Joe commuted last week. It wouldn’t surprise me if the 1,499 feel insulted to be lumped in with these particular six.
Altogether, Joe issued 8,064 pardons and commutations – far more than any President in history and dwarfing the 237 by President Trump in his first term or even the 1927 by President Obama in two terms.
But I’m OK with the pardoning of the Sordid Six, despite the obvious self-dealing and miscarriage of justice. Here’s why.
Because it labels them guilty.
It’s true that, as a technical legal matter, a pardon does not necessarily mean a person is guilty. (On the other hand, an old Supreme court case suggests that accepting a pardon is, indeed, an admission of guilt.) And it’s true that Joe included some self-serving happy talk about how his fam’ is really, truly not guilty of the crimes for which he pardoned them.
Like Hunter, the other five did “nothing wrong,” Joe tells us. He’s just concerned that overzealous prosecutors might make their lives hell for political purposes. You see, using the justice system to make a person’s life hell is something Joe is familiar with.
(There is the possibility that the pardons open the door to Congress or enterprising prosecutors calling these people to testify under oath against Joe or others – testimony they would be obligated to give since they won’t be able to invoke the Fifth Amendment privilege against incriminating themselves of crimes for which they’ve been pardoned. On the other hand, they haven’t been pardoned for state crimes, since the presidential pardon power does not go that far. Therefore, there’s the possibility of being prosecuted for, say, criminally evading state income taxes, and so they might still have a Fifth Amendment privilege. I’ll let lawyers better than I sort this out.)
Leave aside the legalisms. At this stage, the court that matters most is the court of public opinion, and a subsidiary court that could be called the court of historians. In those courts, Joe’s pardon of all three of his siblings, their spouses, and his son, will be seen through common sense eyes, especially in view of highly incriminating hard evidence that has already been uncovered (such as the Big Guy emails mentioned above).
And so, common sense and public opinion says the seven Biden family members are guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, and guilty.
In a matter of weeks, Donald Trump and his fusillades were able to get guilty verdicts on Joe Biden’s entire family that Joe and his army of prosecutors were not able to get on Trump, alone, over the course of four years.
Remind me never to play poker – or geopolitics – against President Donald J. Trump.
From publications like The Wall Street Journal, you might conclude that tariffs as an economics practice is in the same category as piracy, slavery and child labor, but worse.
Economists’ main complaint with tariffs is not that they’re destructive and immoral. Economists don’t make moral judgments, after all. There’s a reason they call their profession “the dismal science.”
No, economists’ main complaint about tariffs is that they’re stupid. “Tariffs are stupid” is Economics 101. It’s a given. It’s econo-dogma. The Pope may or may not be Catholic, but popular business publications preach from their printed and pixeled pulpits that tariffs are indisputably, irrevocably, universally, invariably stupid.
In the spirit of Protestantism and economics contrarianism, let me offer a defense of this much-maligned practice. At the outset, I’ll stipulate to some things.
First, it’s true that tariffs are much like a sales tax. Adding a tariff to imported goods tends to raise the price of those goods, just as we saw a few years ago that adding a sales tax on Amazon goods adds to the check-out price of those goods.
If the U.S. government slaps a 10% tariff on, for example, imported steel, it’s logical to expect the price of imported steel to the U.S. consumer to rise about 10%.
But that’s not always the case, because, while tariffs are much like sales taxes, they aren’t exactly the same. A tariff applies not to all goods, but to specific goods – ones that are imported from overseas and specifically designated for the tariff.
Those tariffed goods compete with other goods such as domestic goods that are un-tariffed and other imported goods that are un-tariffed. A steel importer who simply passes his tariff along to the consumer will thereby put his goods at a competitive disadvantage, pricewise.
For that reason, the importers might absorb some of a tariff in their profit margins. Assume the importer has a profit margin of 30%. A 10% tariff could cut that to 20%. The importer might raise prices by the entire 10% in order to maintain his 30% profit margins, and thereby disadvantage his product pricewise, or he might raise prices only 7% and absorb the other 3% in his margins so that he winds up with margins of only 27%.
To the extent the foreign manufacturer absorbs the tariff in his profit structure, it’s he, not the consumer, who is paying the tax.
He would do this not because he’s a good guy, but because he wants to maintain market share vis a vis his un-tariffed competitors. The invisible hand works, even in an artificial market.
To the extent the tariff does get passed onto the America consumer, it’s worth considering what that consumer is currently paying. Apart from certain French wine and Italian sports cars, I’m always amazed how inexpensive foreign-made “stuff” is.
Consumer electronics are a good example. You can get a new, perfectly serviceable smart phone that puts the world at your fingertips – something you couldn’t buy for a billion dollars a generation ago – for $300. That’s about what a house-call by a plumber to fix a toilet cost you last week.
Americans are wealthy enough to pay a few dollars more for foreign-made “stuff.” Especially if that stuff is made under difficult conditions by exploited and sometimes underaged workers who deserve better pay and conditions.
Second, let’s stipulate that trade wars can be bad. If we impose a tariff on wine that Europeans export to us, we should expect the Europeans to impose a retaliatory tariff on something we export to them, such as American whiskey and Harley Davidson motorcycles.
That was exactly what happened in President Trump’s first term. And that was only one salvo in the trade war. It began with a squabble over long-standing European government subsidies to European aerospace companies which put American companies such as Boeing at an unfair disadvantage. Where that trade war will end depends on the mood of the governments and the power of lobbyists – two forces that are often both unpredictable and unconstructive.
The most famous trade war was launched by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Passed in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, the 40% American tariffs imposed by Smoot-Hawley and retaliatory tariffs imposed by our trading partners crippled world trade and slashed business profits, leading to bank failures worldwide, the Great Depression and, arguably, World War II.
Let’s not go there again.
That said, there are several legitimate uses of tariffs that even economists would approve of. One is to protect industries that are strategically important. If steel is a strategic industry (and it is) then protecting that industry from being decimated by cheap foreign imports is a legitimate use of tariffs. It’s entirely possible that America will someday need Pittsburg steel again, and I don’t mean the football team.
(This is not to say I approve of President Biden blocking the sale of U.S. Steel to Nippon. That’s a complicated question. After all, Nippon proposed not to end American steel production but to maintain it in America while improving efficiencies – which could lower prices and strengthen the industry here, not weaken it.)
Another legitimate use of tariffs is to protect an industry that is culturally important. In rural France, for example, winemaking is culturally important. The argument can be made that the French winemaking culture ought not be at the mercy of mass-produced wine from, say, Romania.
Or maybe it should be, to produce better wine and lower prices for all. But that’s a judgment for a culture to make. Tariff protections for isolated industries such as winemaking will not to cripple the world economy.
Another legitimate use for tariffs, most economists would agree, is to threaten them without imposing them. Threatening to impose a 25% tariff on French wine if the French don’t quit unfairly subsidizing their aerospace companies that compete unfairly with Boeing, is fine by me.
Of course, such threats are credible, and effective, only if they get carried out once in a while. The next thing you know, we’re punishing American whiskey makers for the French unfairly subsidizing their aerospace companies.
Those are my stipulations on the subject. Now back to tariffs as a sales tax.
In the world of economics, activities are either productive or consumptive. Productive things are good, because they produce resources. They grow the pie. The bigger the pie, the more for everyone at the table.
In fact, productive things are actually double-good because what they produce, in turn, is often productive in its own right. It’s a virtuous circle.
In contrast, consumptive things are viewed as bad in the world of economics. They don’t grow the pie; they eat the pie. They use up resources. It’s fine to eat a little of the pie, but recognize that then there’s a smaller pie. Eat too much of it, and there won’t be any for a hungry day.
Let’s contrast sales taxes in the form of tariffs with other taxes. Income taxes are thought to be bad because they punish people for a productive activity – working. That’s how you obtain income, after all. Punishing people for working is bad economics policy (even if – especially if – it helps certain class warfare politicians get elected).
Investment taxes like capital gains taxes are even worse. They punish people for making investments. If people don’t make investments, then new businesses are denied the capital they need to grow and innovate.
Apple Computer started in a garage. Without capital investments, it would still be there.
And so, economists generally favor sales taxes which discourage consumption, over both income taxes and investment taxes which discourage production and investment.
Crafting our sales taxes as tariffs might be an especially good approach because we can imbue them with some nuanced policy considerations. Much as liquor and gasoline get taxed extra-high because we want to discourage their consumption, we could extra-tariff such things as, well, Chinese steel if our desire is to avoid over-relying on it.
Ah but, you say, then the Chinese will retaliate by slapping tariffs (notice how tariffs always get “slapped”) on our imports to them, such as . . .
. . . um, I can’t think of any.
OK, but, you say, SMOOT-HAWLEY.
Fine, I agree that we should not slap, or even place, 40% tariffs on all our imports. We don’t want a trade war, global economic disruption, bank failures, a Great Depression, and World War III.
I submit that it’s not one or the other. I submit that we have a lesson to learn from Smoot-Hawley, sure enough, but perhaps we’ve learned it too well.
Commuting the duly imposed death sentences of convicted murderers and rapists
Setting oneself on fire
Surrendering Afghanistan to barbarians from the 11th century
Jumping Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle
Closing all the schools to prevent transmission of a disease that barely affects children.
Answer: What these have in common is that all are stunts. They are designed to attract attention, and they succeed in doing so. But that’s all they do.
If you tell me you’ve taught a poodle to mix a martini and serve it to a parakeet, I’ll probably watch. Then I’ll say, “Wow, that’s something!”
And it is indeed something, in the sense that it’s unusual. It gets attention. But it’s not consequential, other than to make a spectacle of two otherwise dignified animals.
If you tell me you plan to tie a bungee cord to your ankle and jump off a high bridge such that the bungee cord stretches almost to the breaking point as it catches you a few feet above the ground, I’ll probably watch. Then I’ll say, “Huh, that’s something you don’t see every day.”
But, as in stupid pet tricks, it’s inconsequential, other than to demonstrate a certain daredevilry. There are good reasons not to issue dares to the devil for the mere purpose of getting clicks on YouTube.
Third, there’s his relationship with his boss. Barack Obama was widely worshipped by liberals. Although Joe stood next in line for the presidency upon the completion of Barack’s papacy in 2016, Barack spurned him in favor of another candidate, was ambivalent about him running in 2020, and finally pushed him to the curb altogether in 2024 – for being too old and stupid.
Ouch. “Old” doesn’t hurt so much even though this is a guy who went to the trouble of hair plugs and tooth caps, but “stupid” hits close to home.
Joe has gone through life feeling that he had a lot to prove about himself. He was right about that. What he was wrong about was the way he went about that proof.
He decided to prove he was a greater leader than his intellectual superior, Barack. But why stop there? He then set his sights on proving he was the greatest Democrat since FDR, or since, I dunno, maybe Abraham Lincoln. (Half of Democrats think Lincoln was a Democrat. No joke!)
The problem is, Joe has never really thought enough about philosophy, government, religion, or the human condition (I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Joe hasn’t thought about) to have a coherent platform from which to govern.
He had no bold policies; he had only boldness.
Much like Evel Knievel. History has largely forgotten that Evel’s rocket-powered motorcycle jump of the Snake River Canyon landed not on the other side of the canyon, but at the canyon bottom. But they do remember the stunt and the name.
Early in Joe’s term, he decided to pull out of Afghanistan. Never mind that the pullout left a strategic crossroads utterly unguarded. Never mind that we squandered a 20-year investment of time and thousands of American lives. Never mind that we left behind billions in high-tech weaponry for the barbarians. Never mind that we could have instead pulled out in an organized manner, as Joe’s generals urged.
What was important to Joe was that he make a bold statement. And he did. Just like Evel Knievel.
It was a bold “Hold my beer, and watch this!” stunt.
The world did watch Joe’s bold stunt. They were impressed with his boldness. With his common sense, not so much.
But Joe didn’t care if they thought badly of his common sense. In the world of stuntmen and carnival barkers, all publicity is good publicity.
It’s like setting oneself on fire. It might not be productive, but it’ll get you plenty of clicks on YouTube. Probably more clicks than Barack gets, at least on that particular day.
That was the pattern of Joe Biden’s presidency. He didn’t so much try to destroy America. He’s too stupid to accomplish that, and too self-centered to try.
Joe’s defiance of the Supreme Court, his commuting of the death sentences of rightly convicted murderers, his transference of college loan debts onto the backs of blue-collar Americans, his takedown of the southern border, his inflation-inducing handouts – they were all designed not so much with policy in mind. Joe’s mind is too small for policy to live there.
No, Joe’s stunts were designed simply to draw attention to Joe. He succeeded. Joe’s stunts did draw attention to Joe.
But not in the way Joe expected. We’re now seeing his anger in learning that attention does not equal achievement, that infamy does not equal fame, that notoriety does not equal greatness.
Four young Congresswomen – not even Senators – accomplished something that eluded years of Democratic Presidents and their woes.
Jimmy Carter in his malaise, Bill with Monica and his cigar, Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam War – none of that was able to accomplish what these four young Congresswomen accomplished.
They destroyed the Democratic Party.
It was a perfect storm that began around the year 2020. China leaked a bioengineered virus from its biowarfare lab – probably accidentally – to produce worldwide mass hysteria and lockdowns of billions of people.
It gathered steam when a thug died in the hands of a white cop. Protests and riots ensued, weirdly exempted from the lockdowns.
At the time, the country was already weary of Donald Trump and his often productive but typically provocative antics.
These four Congresswomen seized the moment. Never great fans of America, they seized that time of weakness to destroy her, or at least act out their anger at her.
The death of the thug became emblematic of white police brutality. Never mind that this particular thug probably died of drugs, not a chokehold. Never mind that more Blacks die at the hands of Black police officers than at the hands of white ones. Never mind that the leading cause of death among young Black men is other young Black men. Never mind that the murder rate among Blacks is seven-times that of whites, and nearly all Black murders are at the hands of other Blacks.
Led by these Congresswomen, the Left decided that sticking to those inconvenient facts was . . .
RACIST!
The narrative was more important than any dumb facts. To disagree with their false narrative or their false charge of racism served only to prove you’re a . . .
RACIST!
Your only salvation was confession, and then they might let you off easy with just a few hundred hours of DEI training.
Oh yes, DEI. The Left’s long-standing reverse discrimination called “Affirmative Action” had failed, and their effort to sustain their failed discrimination was also failing.
So, the Left did what they do when their policies fail: They rebranded it. (See, e.g., communism rebranded as socialism, rebranded as liberalism, rebranded as wokeism, rebranded as progressivism.)
The new brand for “Affirmative Action” was “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” This new brand was the same as the old brand, except, this time, it was coupled with brainwashing.
You had to not only engage in reverse discrimination; you had to believe in it. You had to believe that the company (or college or whatever) was stronger if the guy down the hall had dark skin.
Painting the skin of employees a la Justin Trudeau blackface was not Kosher, but almost. You could hire into a company or admit into a college a privileged Black kid (or ¾ Black kid like Barack Obama’s daughters admitted to Harvard) and get full DEI credit.
The problem was that DEI, like Affirmative Action, tended to conflict with a meritocracy. But the DEI supremacists had a solution to that problem: Do away with merit. Merit became a code word for . . .
RACIST!
The only content of your character that mattered was the pigmentation of your skin. If that meant Boeing planes fall out of the sky because 2 + 2 = 4 regardless of the skin color of engineers who would like to say otherwise, well, that’s . . .
RACIST!
The planes are just . . .
RACIST!
While we’re at it, they thought, let’s do away with sex. A nominee for the Supreme Court announced rather proudly that she could not define “woman.”
That proved to be a slippery slope. Next thing we knew, people that everyone else defines as not women – you know, people with a Y chromosome, high testosterone levels, a penis and testicles – were calling themselves “women” and competing in women’s sports like swimming and even boxing. Unsurprisingly, in view of their testosterone levels and male musculature, they usually won. By a pool length or a knockout.
At which time they joined the women in the showers. If you complained, you were the sex equivalent of . . .
RACIST!
You were alphabet-people-phobic. For that, you get another few hundred hours of DEI training, and then you get cancelled. No soup for you, and no career either.
Two more things. Bear with me.
They spent taxpayer money like drunken sailor-ettes. The Orwellian-titled Inflation Reduction Act threw a trillion dollars in borrowed fuel onto an inflation inferno. That was after previous boondoggle bills literally paid people not to work.
So . . . you pay people not to work at producing goods, and then you wonder why demand seems to be outpacing supply to produce price inflation.
Ah, they knew that would be the effect. But it was worth a little inflation to get money out of the hands of people who earned it and into the hands of people who voted for them.
Speaking of people who vote for them, they opened the southern border. A gazillion people came. All were illegal, many were criminals, some were murderers.
But almost all had darkish skin. So, if you don’t like them illegally entering our country, and some of them committing criminal acts here, and many sponging off our welfare state, well, then you’re a . . .
RACIST!
It all worked for a little while. But reality has a way of intervening. Systems that disregard merit tend to become unmeritorious. They get reputations for that, and there are consequences. People get turned off by planes falling from the sky, applicants being evaluated on the basis of their skin, illegal immigrants whom we can’t call illegal, prices going through the roof, lockdowns keeping the kids in the damn house all day, teachers who won’t teach, and all the rest.
In the end, the Squad’s passion to destroy America failed because America is, even now, very powerful and basically sensible.
But they did destroy the Democratic Party. The people voted the bums out. Not the Squad – most of them are in safe Democrat districts – but their Democrat colleagues. Especially their senile President and his smiley, witless, joyless VP.
So far, the judgment of the people has been without regrets. My sense is that if the election were held today, the Democrats would lose even more resoundingly.
It won’t be easy for the Democrats to recover. In theory, they can change their policies, but it’s hard to abandon a position when you’ve already announced that to do so is . . .
RACIST!
It’s one thing to argue that your position is the better one on the merits. That argument allows for negotiation and compromise. It’s another thing to climb down from a moralistic perch where you shout that your opponent’s focus on merit simply proves he’s a . . .
RACIST!
We’ve never seen a political climate quite like the current one. The Democrats went way out on a race limb, sawed it off, and are now surprised that they and their limb – not the tree – have fallen.
Jesus turned water into wine. Modern-day abolitionists want to turn that wine into poison, and modern-day drinkers want to chase them out of town. We’re come a long way baby.
Not.
Let’s start with some facts:
As a long-time drinker, I can say with some authority that alcohol is a toxin. Half a quart of hard liquor in half an hour will probably leave you unconscious. More than that can kill you.
However, people rarely drink that much, that fast. Those who do are probably engaging in many other reckless behaviors, too, that will kill them long before the alcohol does.
The big question is, what about the millions of people who do not drink themselves into oblivion, but just into a mild buzz? And what about people who don’t drink for the buzz at all, but despite it – they’re drinking because they simply like the taste of a beverage, especially with dinner, that happens to contain a small amount of a nuisance toxin?
Most wine drinkers fall into this category, myself included.
As you might expect, the matter has been studied. Most recent studies suggest a strong link between heavy drinking and many different diseases – no surprise – but also a tenuous link between even moderate drinking and some cancers and vascular disease.
(Please don’t rebut these studies with a story about your long-living great aunt who drank every day.)
This link between alcohol and illness is, however, difficult to get a real fix on, because it is confounded by many variables. For example, people who drink moderately tend to be moderate in many of their other habits as well. And moderation is usually a healthy thing.
As for people who don’t drink at all, they tend to be moderate in all things including moderation. That’s why their alcohol consumption is not moderate, but is highly immoderate – it’s zero. These immoderate individuals very often engage in immoderate activities like ultra-marathons and are immoderately ultra-fit.
Comparing the health of a teetotaling ultra-marathoner with a moderate-drinking three-times-a-week treadmill exerciser will produce skewed and misleading results tending to show better health in the former that appears to be, but is not, a result of his teetotalling. Correlation very often does not equal causation.
Here’s another example of a confounding factor. Heavy drinkers tend to die young. People who die young are never included in studies of populations that are not young. Therefore, studies of not-young people will tend to show that drinkers are healthier than they really are, since the unhealthiest drinkers are dead and unincluded in the study.
The Surgeon General last week re-ignited this controversy-for-the-millennia by suggested that warning labels be put on alcohol, much as we’ve done on cigarettes for many years and as we already do on alcohol as it pertains to pregnant women.
As a sign of our times, the reaction was along party lines, but not in the way you might have expected. Strait-laced conservatives were outraged that anyone would dare warn them of the health hazards of getting intoxicated (even if the warning is only a warning and not a ban) while libertine liberals applauded the suggestion.
In reading the commentary, you might think the SG’s suggestion drove conservatives to drink, while it sent liberals onto their wagons.
That partisan reaction seems odd until you realize that the SG is a Democrat. In today’s charged political climate, that means many Democrats will reflexively like whatever he says, while many Republicans will dislike it.
In the mostly-conservative Wall Street Journal, for example, a member of the Editorial Board (with a BA in American Studies – owwwhh!!!) wrote an editorial unburdened by any supporting data announcing that the Surgeon General (a graduate of Yale Medical School) was simply wrong.
Other conservative commentators with similar “qualifications” weighed in with similar sentiments. The common theme was that the SG’s suggestion was yet another example of governmental overreach. It was Democrats trying yet again to control your life by warning you about things that might hurt you.
Well, maybe. But it seems to me that a fine-print warning that alcohol can be unhealthy is not exactly in the same category of, say, a warning that coffee can burn you or water can drown you. This is particularly true in view of widely published studies some years ago suggesting that moderate alcohol consumption is actually good for you – studies that were later debunked as having been confounded by the sort of lifestyle factors mentioned above.
And even if alcohol warnings are indeed in the same category as coffee-can-burn-you warnings and water-can-drown-you warnings, what’s the harm? It seems the protesters doth protest too much. A wee bit defensive, are we?
But that’s the current political world we live in. Messages are judged not by their content or other objective standards, but by the identity of the messenger. In my lifetime, America has never been so tribal. That’s bad.
By the way, I wonder about the position of our current tribal chief, for whom I’ve voted thrice now and whose performance as de facto president is great. (I especially like the idea of annexing Greenland, where we’ve had an early warning Air Force base for many years.) He is a known and admitted teetotaler. (Thank goodness – can you imagine Donald Trump intoxicated?) Wouldn’t the world be turned upside down if he were to side with the Democrat SG?
Along the same lines, I wonder how politically conservative, teetotaling Mormons reacted to the liberal SG’s suggestion.
As for me, from time to time I consider reducing my alcohol consumption, and maybe even ending it. It’s probably not the healthiest of my habits, nor the least expensive. But I hope I’m already knowledgeable enough that a silly new warning label won’t persuade me to stop, and I hope I’m mature enough that it won’t persuade me not to.
Jimmy Carter informed us back in 1976 that he had “looked on many women with lust” and “committed adultery many times in my heart.”
The fact that a man’s heart or other organs have lusted after many women is not exactly news. The reason men don’t go around broadcasting their lust is because it’s obvious. It would be like saying, I get horny on days that end in a “y.”
But Carter did tell us about his lust – in a formal interview with Playboy, perhaps fittingly. He evidently thought that a man’s lust was newsworthy, if the man was him.
It reminds me of the devil’s temptation of Christ, a story told in three of the four Gospels. The devil failed in his temptation of Christ, but the fact that it happened was Good News-worthy two millennia ago.
Carter was a born-again Christian. (Full disclosure: I am too.) In fact, Carter was a Sunday School teacher. In teaching the temptation of Christ on Sundays and advertising “the temptation of Carter” on Saturdays, he was aware of the parallel he was drawing.
Mind you, I don’t judge a person’s brand of Christianity. That’s beyond my paygrade.
But I do judge their politics. Carter seemed to believe that a New Testament approach could work in international affairs – as in forgiveness and love thy enemy – with the likes of Leonid Brezhnev and the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Ah, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
When Carter was elected in 1976, the country of Iran was run by a Shah – roughly the equivalent to a Western monarch. The Shah was hostile to communism and generally friendly to the West. Many Iranian students went to Western universities. Women’s rights and human rights steadily improved over the decades of rule by the Shah and his predecessor father.
Carter’s limited experience as the former governor of Georgia and his black and white view of good and evil left him unprepared for the nuances of international geopolitics. In his simplistic syllogism, democracy was good; monarchs were anti-democratic; the Shah was a monarch; and, therefore, the Shah was bad.
In contrast to pragmatists such as Henry Kissinger (whom he despised), Carter was uncomfortable with the notion of the lesser of evils.
And so, when the Shah was threatened, Carter did little to save him. The resulting revolution led to a bloody theocratic state called The Islamic Republic of Iran. Like the Shah’s regime, it was a monarchy except in name, and this time it was led by a monarch – the Ayatollah – who claimed a hotline to Allah (and actually had one to Brezhnev) together with a divine right to rule.
The Islamic theocrats naturally hated America. They taunted us by holding 53 hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran for 444 days until the day of the inauguration of the man who defeated Carter’s bid for a second term, Ronald Reagan. (Funny, that coincidence.)
Carter’s sanctimonious forgiveness and love failed to free any hostages. (To his credit, he did attempt a rescue, but it never got off the ground.)
Since the time of the Iranian hostage crisis, Iran has shuffled along in their seventh-century oxcart. They throw gay men off tall buildings, they chop off the hands of shoplifters, and they stone prostitutes to death. They threaten to annihilate Israel, and they are just weeks away from having a nuclear bomb with which to do so.
In this odd world of ours, I sometimes see a bumper sticker reading “What would Jesus do?” I’ve always assumed that the owners of the cars to which those stickers are stuck have no interest in Jesus. They’re instead just trolling Christians. They’re trying to contrast the typically conservative political leanings of Christians with what they regard (unburdened by any actual knowledge) as the liberal leanings of Jesus.
But some Christians are actually guided in their geopolitics by that bumper sticker question – What would Jesus do? Never mind that Jesus spent his entire life in a place without iPhones which could be walked in the long direction in a few weeks and the short direction in a day. These particular Christians believe that Christ taught not just the tools for a relationship with God, but also for a relationship with Taylor Swift, John Maynard Keynes, and the Ayatollahs.
The teachings of Christ are probably harmless in dealing with Taylor Swift. (I know nothing of Swift’s beliefs, and I don’t mean to pick on her.)
However, the teachings of Christ are probably less helpful in dealing with John Maynard Keynes. Can we honestly suppose that Christ had insights into economic questions like how to obtain the greatest good for the greatest number, and what the capital gains tax should be, and that those insights are revealed if only we read between the lines of, say, Corinthians?
As for the Ayatollahs, the teachings of Christ are wholly unhelpful in dealing with them. Or in dealing with their jihadi foot soldiers who seek to conquer, enslave, rape, take hostage, behead and eliminate people they regard as infidels by means of suicide bomb vests, airplanes in skyscrapers, and pickup trucks on sidewalks.
The what-would-Jesus-do Christians seem unaware that we already know the answer to their bumper sticker question, “What would Jesus do?”
What Jesus would do is what he did do. He taught love, forgiveness and pacifism. He surrendered and sacrificed himself. He was excruciatingly tortured – naked and humiliated on the cross – that he might rise again to show us The Way.
The madmen of Islam would very much like us, now, to try doing with them what Jesus did with his enemies two thousand years ago. The last Western leader to try that was Jimmy Carter. And here we are.
the Aspen beat 