Chickenhawk Down

Why a coherent anti-war movement has not formed to oppose U.S. involvement in the increasingly unpopular war in Ukraine.

by Ray McCoy for American Greatness

As American public support for the war in Ukraine begins to plummet, there is an organized effort rising to head off that opposition. The bipartisan insiders who support sending further aid and weaponry to Ukraine know they do not have any full-fledged opponents to their efforts, even as we ignore both the depletion of our current stocks and the enormous cost that is being passed on to American citizens—all without a real endgame. 

Nevertheless, as Americans are distracted from fighting in the Donbas by security breaches at home, environmental accidents, and economic malaise, the war hawks are doing all they can to prevent any obstruction to the flow of war aid. One such example comes via Daniel Fata, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO under President George W. Bush and was published  (naturally) at the marginal NeverTrump site funded by leftist billionaires, the Bulwark.

Fata’s article focuses on “Five Ways to Help Ukraine Win,” and couches those ideas as needing action before Joe Biden outlines “clear goals” for U.S. support to Ukraine. What he does not address are some pesky questions like “how many lives will this cost?” “can the United States and NATO continue to bear the economic burden of arming them?” and “at what point will Russia consider the United States to be a full belligerent to the conflict?” Fata’s suggestions represent a sales pitch for a risky investment with a hefty deposit. Let’s consider each of them alongside the practical objections and costs:

1. “Commit to a robust troop presence on the Eastern Flank [of NATO] for an indefinite period once the fighting ends.”

Fata later calls Russia’s western border with Europe the “Eastern Front,” signifying that he sees a permanent state of war developing. One problem with this is that our ability to maintain even the current troop presence is jeopardized by a widely reported recruitment crisis. This also neglects to account for another potential warzone for U.S. troops if China decides to invade Taiwan as many are predicting in the near future. Also, to many readers the proposition that the United States is duty-bound to secure the “eastern flank” of any foreign country before its own southern border is sure to lead to more groans of derision.

2. “Provide even more heavy weapons to Ukraine.”

Of course this takes for granted that a) such weapons are in stock and disposed for shipment and b) that the Ukrainians would be capable of training to use sophisticated technologies like the ATACMS that Fata includes on his wish list.

3. “Put U.S. trainers in Ukraine.”

The natural questions are how could their safety be guaranteed when the country is under constant Russian missile bombardment? And, would this be deemed a U.S. escalation of tensions? Fata’s answer is that Russia would not dare target U.S. trainers and risk a NATO intervention, but this is an unnecessary chicken-and-egg argument. As the United States is already gifting billions upon billions in military and financial aid to Ukraine and providing targeting guidance to the Ukrainian HIMARS artillery crews, the addition of training personnel would merely be one more overt intervention in the conflict without any explanation of how it would lead to a faster and more favorable resolution.

4. “Spend every dollar of appropriated security assistance to backfill allies.”

This is a solution to a problem we would not even have had we not, in the first place, over-committed U.S. resources to supplying Ukraine. Here Fata lets the mask slip for a moment: “We would also strengthen our own defense industrial base, which the war in Ukraine has shown to be in serious need of recapitalization and expansion not only to support Ukraine, but to deter other potential adversaries.” The best way to conceal shameless war profiteering is to label it a necessity.

5. “Commit $100 billion of reconstruction assistance to Ukraine.”

This is a rather conservative figure, as in April 2022, when the war was only two months old, former National Security Council “whistleblower” Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a key figure in the first impeachment effort, predicted that it would take roughly $750 billion to pay for Ukraine’s reconstruction. While that sum was not being floated as an exclusively American obligation, the implication was clear: America would shoulder the largest portion of that burden. 

Now, after 10 additional months of warfare, is it not more likely that the bill will exceed $1 trillion? According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the United States already allocated $113 billion to Ukraine in 2022, and the number goes up with dizzying regularity as Biden keeps topping off Ukraine with new aid packages, such as the $2 billion announced on February 24.

Completing the metamorphosis

For the uninitiated reader, these types of “five suggestions” articles are the bread and butter of Bulwark writers, who are nothing more than faux professional political consultant cast-offs. They left the Republican Party beginning in 2016, because they objected to the ascendency in the party of people who do not believe that conservatism should be defined by how many federal contracts can be rounded up to keep Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman in business. The Bulwark‘s editorial staff as a whole only has one veteran in its ranks, former Navy officer Theodore Johnson, and his public resumé only lists appointments to the Naval War College, as a speechwriter for the joint chiefs of staff, and a White House fellowship.

What is all the more astounding is how these articles can even be perceived as persuasive as they go unanswered by the Left. These are the types of characters that then-humourist Al Franken caricatured in 1996 when he imagined Republican politicians of that era engaged in combat rather than guilting President Clinton for dodging the draft. He wrote a chapter in his book Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot called “Operation Chicken Hawk (video)” in which he satirically imagines Newt Gingrich, Dan Quayle, George Will, and Pat Buchanan serving under Lt. Col. Oliver North in Vietnam. 

A modern day version of this could be perfectly recast with modern warmonger neo-conservatives with Alexander Vindman playing the role of North and any of the writers at the Bulwark replacing Gingrich, Quayle, and Buchanan. But this wouldn’t happen because the adventurist pro-war stance once seen as bullheaded and jingoistic when it was marketed as “conservatism” is now presented as “defending democracy” because populist Republicans have moved away from it and Democrats, once again, have found a use for it.

Aggravating the situation is the fact that although the traditional establishment pro-war wing of the GOP has seen some major setbacks since the 2016 humiliation of standard-bearers like Jeb Bush, many of them remain in key positions that are not easily vacated, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) who are both next due for reelection in 2026 or Representatives Michael McCaul and Dan Crenshaw of Texas. They remain vocal cheerleaders for continuing to ramp up the war in Ukraine, with Crenshaw even accusing colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) of angling for the role of Russian propagandist after voting against more military aid in May 2022. 

McCaul, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee even went so far as to lament that Biden was not dispatching F16s to Ukraine. The result is that there is a new partisan divide over Ukraine aid: “no” (the rare Republican in touch with the base), “yes” (Democrats) and “may I have some more, please” (most Republicans).

This is Not the Kent State Era

Antiwar sentiment is alive and well in the United States, but it is largely dormant and leaderless. It’s a mood, not a movement. In public opinion polls support is steadily fading for the war, with a plurality (40 percent) of Republican voters saying the United States is helping Ukraine “too much” and a growing minority of Democrats (15 percent) agreeing according to Pew Research. On February 19 antiwar protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial before the reflecting pool and attempted to show that a broad swathe of the American public across political divisions was opposed to continued or increasing involvement in Ukraine. The rally attendance, however, was underwhelming, with only former U.S. Representatives Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), Dennis Kucinich (R-Ohio) and Ron Paul (R-Ky.) speaking before the crowd. 

Sitting members of Congress who are or formerly were consistently antiwar voices like Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) or Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) did not make the short walk over to the rally, perhaps reluctant to be pictured with the small cohort among the demonstrators waving Russian and Soviet flags, sporting the pro-Russian “Z” prominently on their clothing, or belonging to eccentric political groups like the LaRouche movement. The presence of these few oddball supporters does undermine the credibility of the demonstration, of course, since every correct political opinion is bound to have people agree with it for the wrong reasons.

Most war opponents are inclined to remain quiet,  in my opinion, because of two factors: first, they have become disillusioned with politicians who decline to be responsive to this kind of pressure, and second, because of what I term the “Fruitcake Theory.” This is when a negative reaction from normies to radical heterodox groups scares them away for fear of being associated with them. The result is that the rally only attracts people with very pronounced political and activistic tendencies, and since they come from a hodgepodge of misfit beliefs and ideologies, they don’t present a cohesive message but instead constitute together a confused, mismatched, monstrosity—like an odd-tasting fruitcake. As an addendum to this, we can also  throw a fear of getting mislabeled as a Kremlin propagandist.

Another major obstacle for a true anti-war movement is the waning in social acceptability of the theme in popular American culture since Vietnam. There are several reasons for this. As GIs were first being shipped to Vietnam in 1965 there was still a draft and college enrollment had mushroomed to 5.9 million compared to 2.6 million only a decade before. Many young people, even if they had an exemption, at least knew someone that had been drafted. Others who did not have an exemption burned their draft cards, fled to Canada or overseas, or attempted to evade the draft by other means. The major musicians and filmmakers of the era turned against the war. But in 2023 the cultural element of the peace movement is just not there in the same way. The entertainment industry has been co-opted in order to support financing and supplying Ukraine by such overt tactics as inviting Ukrainian PresidentVolodymyr Zelenskyy to speak via video link at Hollywood awards shows. Moreover, casualty figures on the Ukrainian side are never disclosed, concealing the human cost of the war, while also seldom mentioning the American volunteer fighters in Ukraine who have died, like U.S. Army veteran Andrew Peters, who was killed on February 16 in combat.

A deficient peace movement is better than none at all, however, and rally organizers like Jimmy Dore didn’t have the luxury of approving who could attend based on ideological purity. Nevertheless, given the political realities, a different approach may be necessary going forward as today’s antiwar movement considers the detached and passive attitude of the American public. It may be disheartening, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

And we Know, On the Fringe, and more- March 6

 

Interviews that were given Friday night at the NCIS LA wrap party by ET and ET Canada have been trickling in today. Basically, everyone was understandably emotional and are saying that there will be a 'beautiful' ending for everyone.

Do I believe them? Well, I've gotten so used to being screwed over by this show when it comes to Hetty, I guess it's gotten a bit difficult for me to really believe anyone when it comes to Hetty positivity. But right now, I'm trying to be positive and hope for the best outcome until there's actual info!

#HettysHomecoming

Saudi Arabia’s Quandary: The End of the Petrodollar

Saudi Arabia’s Quandary: 

The End of the Petrodollar

J.R. MacLeod for Mises.org

Tags Cronyism and CorporatismMonetary PolicyWar and Foreign Policy

In 1971 Richard Nixon took the US off the last feeble vestiges of the gold standard, otherwise known as the Bretton Woods Agreement. That system had been a bizarre gold-dollar hybrid where the dollar was the world reserve currency but the US agreed to keep the dollar backed by gold. Henry Hazlitt’s book From Bretton Woods to World Inflation explains the consequences of this situation well.

The end of this system left a vacuum at the heart of world financial affairs, one that needed to be filled quickly. The dollar, now unmoored by gold, remained the default currency for international trade, but without the confidence derived from its former gold backing, the US needed to bolster its credibility lest other more enticing options appeared to displace the dollar’s hegemony.

During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had gained leverage by imposing an oil embargo, which caused serious disruptions in the global economy. In 1974 Henry Kissinger brokered a deal: Israel would back off its territorial ambitions, the Arab states would end the embargo, and oil would be traded in dollars. Thus, the petrodollar was born.

Every economy needs energy, and Saudi Arabia supplies plenty of oil, meaning that the dollar was backed up by a valuable commodity that would always be the recipient of demand. Everyone wants oil, and the Saudis would only trade it for dollars, so the dollar became unavoidable in international trade, reaffirming its status as the world reserve currency.

Even if others would have preferred a neutral, market-based currency not subject to manipulation, the opportunity cost of foregoing oil was far higher than the cost of having to use the dollar. A global medium of exchange selected by the market would have been more economically efficient, but given that the US and the Saudis possessed the ability to impose a politically motivated system, nobody was willing to bear the costs to create an alternative as long as the dollar was managed fairly sensibly.

Washington and the Gulf States benefit enormously from this situation. The petrodollar gives the Fed extreme license to print currency and export its inflation. If other countries are forced to use your currency, that gives you a lot more room to debase it. Imports are made cheaper with the high purchasing power of the dollar, and exports are propped up because the easiest way to spend dollars is to buy American products.

All this amounts to Washington essentially taxing world trade. The Gulf States benefit in the same ways by having enhanced access to the world reserve currency. Their oil is given priority in world markets compared to competitors opposed by Washington, such as Iran. They are also just simply given financial aid by Washington for participating in this scheme.

However, there are consequences for the countries involved. Even if the US has largely avoided extreme domestic consumer price inflation by circulating dollars around the world, the business cycle consequences of inflation are unavoidable. For example, the 2008 recession was severe yet unaccompanied by extreme inflation before or after. Holding the world reserve currency has also given the US a free ride with far less need to produce valuable goods and services. The dollar holds its value because there has always been global demand for it, so it has been possible to print money to prop up the US economy by consumer spending without an extreme loss of value in the dollar. But there is now very little worth in the underlying US economy.

The dollar is backed up as the world reserve currency by a series of secondary institutions: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, etc. On top of this, though unspoken, there exists a military and intelligence enforcement mechanism. Oppose the dollar and either Washington will invade you, or agents from the Central Intelligence Agency will appear and ask domestic radicals what color they would like their revolution.

Iraq persistently attempted to abandon the dollar, making a particularly assertive move in October 2000. Then they were invaded in 2003 without having attacked America or any other country. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi attempted to create an Africa-wide gold-backed dinar and was assassinated in 2011. Of course, US involvement in these countries is not monocausal, and other factors like security guarantees for Israel and progressive crusading play a role. But securing the hegemony of the dollar is a critical issue in Washington’s foreign policy.

The corollary of the power granted by possession of the world reserve currency is the ability to break the rules of your self-proclaimed rules-based order. Saudi Arabia funds radical mosques around the world, and we have already mentioned the recent American invasions. Other states must acquiesce to this behavior because ending up on the wrong side of the dollar would be disastrous for their economies, and it could potentially mark them as a target for invasion or subterfuge.

But it seems like recent actions have been too extreme for other world powers to accept. The printing of more dollars in 2020–21 than in the entirety of the currency’s history up to that point destabilized the global financial system by creating mass inflation. And the sanctions imposed on Russia exacerbated the situation even further.

In the past thirty years there have been many post-Communist wars involving many deaths and frequently involving Russia (not that I am necessarily blaming Russia for these wars). Think of Chechnya and Georgia: nothing like the current sanctions were imposed on Russia for what were essentially parallel conflicts to the current stramash in Ukraine. The West’s reaction against Russia in 2022 was unprecedented.

The fact the West has turned a regional conflict into a proxy war and destabilized the world economy, seemingly due to ideological frenzy and a desire for one world government, has disturbed many other powers. They have suffered from the economic chaos and may encounter similar regional conflicts in their own future. They are concerned the West could leap into these disputes in the same way they have attempted to crush the Russians.

Thus, in the long run, the dollar is doomed as other world powers realize that Washington has abrogated its responsibilities, and the second and third world cannot ever allow what has transpired with the covid inflation and the Russia sanctions to happen again.

Russia has already linked the ruble to a semi–gold standard. China has also made moves regarding gold and is far ahead of the US in the race for an all-important central bank digital currency. Previous solid allies like India are backing away from the increasingly deranged Washington establishment. As countries refuse to go along with the bizarre social agenda and utopian eschatology of Washington, they will also have to seek alternative economic arrangements.

For Washington both the political and economic systems are nonnegotiable. It has hardly been trumpeted by the Western press, but if you have been paying attention this past year, you will have noticed stories of major countries agreeing to trade in currencies other than the dollar.

Decoupling is a tricky proposition as these countries’ economies have been tied up with the dollar for decades. There is also the risk of Washington violently lashing out to maintain its hegemonic status. Thus, the transition away from the dollar is likely a medium- to long-term trend. But the first decisive moves have occurred, and there is no turning back short of serious self-reflection on the part of Washington (which I would bet against).

However, much hinges on Saudi Arabia’s actions. As we discussed earlier, they made the petrodollar, and they will be the ones to break it if that is what transpires. Since it is their oil that underpins the value of the dollar, the more they trade oil in other currencies, the less value the dollar possesses. And in a momentous story, the Saudi minister of finance stated that they are open to trading oil in currencies other than the dollar. The Chinese and Saudi leadership have discussed this issue, and securing bilateral trade without the involvement of the dollar appears to be a top Chinese priority.

A failing dollar will have disastrous consequences for the US as there are not enough manufacturing or nonfinancial services in its economy. Imports will suddenly be expensive, and the quality of life will drop. Much of the establishment isn’t as hardheaded as those who came before and doesn’t conceive of the possibility of Washington losing.

How could they? Russia is mildly antigay, and they don’t believe in climate change. They’re the bad guys, and the bad guys always lose. Other quarters of the establishment seem to have retained a dose of realism and appear to be looting the government and the economy while the dollar still has value (think Biden’s gigantic crony-laden spending bills).

The good news is that Washington’s plans for world domination are bound to fail as China and Russia have a revived alliance, which also appeals to and is open to other powers. The bad news is that this will lead to the drawn-out collapse of the dollar, which Washington will attempt to parlay into a new central bank digital currency to accompany an increased crackdown on opposition within the dwindling empire. But ultimately, with visibly successful alternative systems elsewhere and less material comfort at home, more people will begin to question the first principles, foreign policy, and economic doctrines of the post–World War II order.

Image source: Adobe Stock

Life Among the Ruins ~ VDH

The few sowed the wind, 

and the many reaped their whirlwind. 

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

American society is facing three existential crises not unlike those that overcame the late Roman, and a millennium later, terminal Byzantine, empires.

Premodern Barbarism

We are suffering an epidemic of premodern barbarism. The signs unfortunately appear everywhere. Over half a million homeless people crowd our big-city downtowns.

Most know the result of such Medieval street living is unhealthy, violent, and lethal for all concerned. Yet no one knows—or even seems to worry about—how to stop it.

So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection continue unabated. Progressive urban pedestrians pass by holding their noses, averting their gazes, and accelerating the pace of their walking. The greenest generation in history allows its sidewalks to become pre-civilizational sewers. In a very brief time, we all but have destroyed the downtowns of our major cities—which will increasingly become vacant in a manner like the 6th-century A.D. Roman forum.

All accept that defunding the police, no-cash bail, Soros-funded district attorneys, and radical changes in jurisprudence have destroyed deterrence. The only dividend is the unleashing of a criminal class to smash-and-grab, carjack, steal, burglarize, execute, and assault—with de factoimmunity. Instead we are sometimes lectured that looting is not a crime, but lengthy incarceration is criminally immoral.

We have redefined felonies as misdemeanors warranting no punishment. Misdemeanors are now infractions that are not criminal. Infractions we treat as lifestyle choices. Normality, not criminality, is deemed criminal. We all know this will not work, but still wonder why it continues.

Many among the middle classes of our cities who can flee or move, do so—like 5th-century equestrians who left Rome for rural fortified farms before the onslaught of the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. For most of our lives we were lectured that the old southern states—Florida, Tennessee, Texas—were backward and uninviting. Now even liberals often flee to them, leaving behind supposedly cosmopolitan Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, and New York. The more people leave the blue states, the more those states praise themselves as utopian.

The less well-off, without the means to leave, hope that their environs have hit bottom so things can only improve. The elite who caused this premodern catastrophe assumes they will always have the money and wherewithal to ensure that themselves and their own can navigate around or even profit from the barbarism they unleashed. For them the critic, not the target of criticism, is the greater threat.

The hard urban work of the 1990s and early 2000s—cleaner, safer subways, secure nightlife downtown, clean sidewalks, low vacancy rates, little vagrancy, and litter-free streets—so often has been undone, deliberately so. We are descending to the late 1960s and 1970s wild streets—if we are lucky the mayhem does not devolve even further.

A mere 10 years ago, if an American learned that a man was arrested for clubbing, robbing, or shooting innocents, and yet would be released from custody that day of his crime, he would have thought it an obscenity. Now he fears that often the criminal will not even be arrested.

A once secure border no longer exists. Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas simply demolished it and allowed 6-7 million foreign nationals to cross illegally into the United States without audits—to the delight of their apparent constituent, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

What would shame a Biden or Mayorkas? What would change their minds? Billions of dollars spent on social services for the lawbreaking at the expense of the American poor?

Would 100,000 annual lethal overdoses—12 times more than those who died over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined—from drugs that flow across the open border sway them? Or would it take 200,000, or 300,000 deaths before Joe Biden relented and ceased his chuckling?

What does a people do when its highest officials simply renounce their oaths of office and refuse to enforce laws they don’t like? Everyone knows the border will eventually have to become secure, but none have any idea whether it will take another 20, 30, or 50 million illegal entrants and 1 million more fentanyl deaths to close it.

Polls show race relations have hit historic lows. Much of the ecumenicalism of the post-Civil Rights movement seems squandered—almost deliberately so.

The Left now rarely mentions Martin Luther King, Jr. or even the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. Perhaps it knows it has violated the spirit and legacy of both.

Today, our identity politics leaders believe that the color of our skin, not the content of our character, certainly matters more. The practitioners of the new tribalism in some sense fear outlawing segregation and discrimination by race. They know to do so would end racially restricted houses and safe spaces, racially exclusive graduations, and race-based admissions, hiring, and promotion on campus.

Read Professor Ibram X. Kendi and his message is implicit. For him, the problem with a Jim Crow-like system was not segregation or racial chauvinism per se, but merely who was doing the victimizing and who were the victims: so the original racism was bad; but racism in reverse is good.

We abhor violence, racism, and misogyny—in the abstract. Yet the entire hip-hop industry would find no audience—or so we are told by its appeasers—if rappers refrained from “ho” misogyny, brags of violence against law enforcement, and self-described proprietary use of the N-word.

Most know that young black males under 30 commit violent crimes at well over 10 times their 3-4 percent demographic of the population—so often victimizing the nonwhite. All know that reality must remain unmentionable even as its causes need to be debated and discussed if lives are to be saved. Yet the greater crime seems not the crime itself, but even mentioning crime.

Postmodern Abyss

Postmodernism in our age is deadlier even than premodernism. Sexually explicit drag shows that allow the attendance of children 20 years ago would have been outlawed—by liberals worried over the trauma of the young watching performance-art simulated sex.

Now the children come last and the performers first—as ratified by the same liberals. But to fathom the new transitioning, simply learn from ancient transitioning and gender dysphoria, an unhappy classical theme from Catullus’ Attis poem (stimulatus ibi furenti rabie, vagus/ devolsit ili acuto sibi pondera silice/ itaque ut relicta sensit sibi membra sine viro) to Giton in Petronius’ Satyricon.

Current “science” is now synonymous with ideology, religion, or superstition. Lockdowns, mRNA vaccinations, masking, transgenderism, “climate change,” and green power brook no dissent. They are declared scientifically correct in the manner that the sun used to revolve around the earth, and any dissenting Galileo or Copernicus is cancel-cultured, doxxed, and deplatformed.

It is now verboten to cite the causes of the current upswing. We must remain silent about the classical exegeses that cults, pornography, and constructed sexual identities, when not biological, were the manifestations of a bored culture’s affluence (luxus), leisure (otium), and decadence (licentia/dissolutio).

The classical analyses of an elite collapse focus on a falling birth rate, a scarce labor force, ubiquitous abortion, an undermanned military, and a shrinking population. We suffer all that and perhaps more still.

Millions of young men are detached and ensconced in solitude, their indebted 20s too often consumed with video-gaming, internet surfing, or consumption of porn. Many  suffer from prolonged adolescence. Many assume that they are immune from criticism, given that the alternative of getting married, having children, finding a full-time job, and buying a house is society’s new abnormal.

Rarely has an elite society become so Victorian and yet so raunchy. A slip with an anachronistic “Gal” or “Honey” can get one fired. Meanwhile, grabbing one’s genitals while pregnant on stage before 120 million viewers is considered a successful Super Bowl extravaganza.

Our army is short of its annual recruitment by 25 percent. We all suspect but do not say out loud the cause. The stereotyping of poor and middle-class white males as both raging and biased, and yet expected yet to fight and die in misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, has finally convinced the parents of these 18-year-olds to say, “no more.”

Need we say anything about the lack of efficacy or morality of the Department of Justice, FBI, or CIA?

Or rather is there anything the FBI will not do?

Doctor court evidence? Hire Twitter to suppress the news? Monitor parents at school board meetings? Allow directors to lie under oath or “misremember” before Congress?

Swiping clean subpoenaed phones? Hiring fakers to compile dirt on a presidential candidate—and then using that known smear to hoodwink a judge to allow spying on Americans?

Suppressing evidence on a laptop to warp an election? Raiding an ex-president’s home with a SWAT-like team? Spying on Catholics in mass? Storming a home full of children of a man accused of a politically incorrect misdemeanor?

The more the military has been stalemated in Iraq, humiliated in Afghanistan, and dreading what China will soon do or what Iran will even sooner let off, the more it insists our priorities should be diversity, equity, and inclusion. Will that escapism ensure more lethal pilots, tank commanders, and Marine company commanders?

The mindsets of too many of our new generations of command are twofold: first to be promoted by virtue signaling woke policies that they must know eventually will hamper combat readiness, and then in the future to rotate at retirement into multimillionaire status by leveraging past expertise for defense contractors. Keep that in mind and almost every publicly uttered nonsense from our highest in the Pentagon makes perfect sense.

Them

There is a third challenge. Our enemies—illiberal, deadly, and vengeful—have concluded we are more effective critics of ourselves than are they. They enjoy our divided nation, torn apart by racial incivility, dysfunctional cities, and woke madness. (Notice how even the communists long ago dropped deadly Maoist wokeism, or how the Russians viewed the Soviet commissariat as antithetical to their military and economic agendas.)

Iran believes that this present generation of Americans would likely allow it to nuke Israel rather than stop its proliferation. China assumes that Taiwan is theirs and the only rub is how to destroy or absorb it without losing too many global markets and income. Russia  conjectures that the more we trumpet its impending defeat, the more it will destroy Eastern Ukraine and call such a desert peace.

Our “friends” can be as dangerous as our enemies.

A visitor from another world might conclude Mexico has done more damage to America than North Korea, Iran, and Russia combined. It has, by intent, flooded our border with 20 million illegal aliens. It has allowed cartels with Chinese help to conduct multibillion-dollar profiteering by killing 100,000 Americans per year (did the Kremlin ever match that tally in a half century of the Cold War?).

Mexico drains $60 billion from its expatriates on the expectation that American subsidies will free up their cash to be sent home. The more the cartels run wild, the more money trickles down—while their top drug enforcement official Genaro García Luna was found guilty in a New York courtroom  for collusion with the cartels.

How did all of this so quickly erode our great country? Our crisis was not the next generation of foreign Hitlers and Stalins. It was not earthquakes, floods, or even pandemics. It was not endemic poverty and want. It was not a meager inheritance from past generations of incompetents. Nor was it a dearth of natural resources or bounty.

Instead our catastrophe arose from our most highly educated, the wealthiest and most privileged in American history with the greatest sense of self-esteem and sanctimoniousness. Sometime around the millennium, they felt their genius could change human nature and bring an end to history—if only they had enough power to force hoi polloi to follow their abstract and bankrupt theories that they had no intention of abiding by themselves.

And then the few sowed the wind, and so the many now reap their whirlwind.

Digital Currency and You

Digital Currency and You

Max Dublin for Spectator.org

All these projects to digitize the world are also programs to digitize you, to turn you into a virtual rather than real human being.

The most egregious act that brought the world’s attention to the Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy was when Justin Trudeau orderedbanks to freeze the accounts not only of peaceful protesters but also of their financial supporters and even some people related only by association, such as ex-spouses. This move inspired so much outrage that, in a somewhat unprecedented fashion, this feckless prime minister was later excoriated to his face by some members of the European Parliament. In a blistering speech that went viral, MEP Mislav Kolakušić of Croatia declaimed, “You block the bank accounts of single parents so that they can’t even pay their children’s education and medicine, that they can’t pay utilities, mortgages for their homes,” and so forth.

Of course, Trudeau justified this move on the basis of the Emergencies Act, which he had invoked in response to the peaceful protest. But it must be remembered that, in our time, whatever is done on an emergency basis one year becomes permanent, part of the “new normal” and the modus operandi of the next. This pattern started with 9/11 and the passing of the Patriot Act, which has resulted in massive, ongoing, often-illegal surveillance of the public. Nor does it matter whether the crisis in question is real or imagined or manufactured; in the monkey-see-monkey-do world of political and bureaucratic decision making, whatever is instituted in one place is bound in fairly short order to be widely established all over the planet.

This process is now taking place with the introduction of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), one of the next big steps that if implemented will push us along the way toward dystopia. Pilot projects to introduce this innovation are now taking place in several wealthy countries, including the U.S., China, Sweden, and the U.K., as well as in less-developed countries, such as Jamaica and Nigeria. Under this system, everyone, including organizations, would have a so-called CBDC wallet of digitized currency, and all your money, both income and expenditures, would flow through it.

Today, despite having at their disposal bloated, highly credentialled bureaucracies, whenever nations undertake such projects, they inevitably hire a consulting firm to do the work for them. In the case of conversion to digital currency, the go-to firm is a rather large one called Accenture. With 738,000 employees and offices all over the world, it is prepared to do any job for you, but it specializes in what its website calls “accelerating change.” The ostensible idea behind accelerating change is that whatever the trend of the moment may be, one must not be left behind. Whatever is happening is said to be logical and inevitable, and you had better keep up or something bad will happen to you. In the words of the Accenture website, “For central banks to remain future-proof, central bank money must be modernized to meet the accessibility demands of the 21st century.” Accessibility, indeed, but the question this raises is accessible to whom. More on this in a moment.

But first a look at this idea of accelerating change. One might be forgiven for thinking that — what with the recent advent of a nasty pandemic accompanied by a fanatic, mindless, and destructive lockdown, which generated unnerving inflation and frustrating supply-chain disruptions and all of which has been topped off by a war in Europe — all of that would be more than enough change for most people’s taste. But these are not the changes that these enthusiastic change-makers really care about, except insofar as they create an excuse and the opportunity for implementing the ones that they do. Underlying the familiar pretext of wanting to make life easier and better for everyone lies the age-old tyrannical objective of centralizing power and control over everyone’s lives — and what better way to do this than by controlling your money?

Digital currency is not the only digitalization that Accenture is working on. The company has also been jointly commissioned by the World Economic Forum and the Canadian and Dutch governments to develop another digital instrument called the Known Traveller Digital Identity(KTDI), a super beefed-up version of the vaccine passports that were widely used during the COVID lockdowns. Likewise, KTDI is being billed as something that people want, something for the public good that will make life easier for travelers. For example, one good that is enumerated is to help prevent travelers from being inconvenienced if they forget their password. The part that is left out is why, on top of everything else, they would need another password in order to travel. And again, it is described as accelerating — there’s that key term again — the transition to digital credentials for travel.

The Accenture website also mentions that its idea is eventually to link the traveling database with others. Suppose, then, that the travel database was to be linked with the digital currency database. The coupling of digital travel passports with digital currency consists of almost everything the state would need to completely control you. In essence, all these projects to digitize the world are also programs to digitize you, to turn you into a virtual rather than real human being.

Picture this. You are at the airport expecting to take a plane somewhere. However, at the gate, the airline clerk informs you that for some reason or other you are not permitted to travel. It might be an error, she says; you can make inquiries and perhaps appeal, but at the present moment there is nothing you can do. You then might go to a snack bar to grab a coffee and sandwich to sit for a moment and think of what to do next, but when you try to pay, you are informed that for some reason or other your digital wallet has been frozen. It might be a mistake; you can make inquiries; it might be possible to appeal — but, for the moment, there is nothing you can do. Immediately you realize that you also can’t take an Uber home because you can’t pay for it. The only piece missing from this picture is that all of a sudden your phone has stopped working and so you can’t even call for help, and it’s rather easy to imagine that piece being put into place at some point in the future. In short, you have been arrested and imprisoned, but not physically, just virtually. You may not think of yourself as a virtual person — you are not one of the Sims in the computer game — but for all intents and purposes, that is exactly what you have become because you can be imprisoned in a virtual prison with no notice, no due process, and no immediate method to appeal.

The coupling of digital databases is already underway. In China, which is the apparent role model for all of this, digital currency is already being coupled with the social credit system, and this is the harbinger of what the world’s dystopic future might look like. In a consumer society, CBCD is an ideal and powerful tool for gaining total state control over almost every aspect of a citizen’s life. The state will be able to see not only your income but also your expenses and will be able to block the use of your CBDC wallet at any time. It will also be able to ration consumption and penalize you through sur-taxation for what it deems to be overconsumption. It will even be able to limit travel by capping the territory and duration of use of your digital wallet.

Digital currency is one of the most dangerous innovations coming down the pike. When the world’s central bankers decide to implement it worldwide, they will undoubtedly market it as merely some sort of housekeeping measure, a money saver and convenience. The government will save money by not having to print paper and mint coins. You will have the convenience of not having to carry around filthy lucre. It is easy to see why the movers and shakers are in such a hurry to make this happen, to “accelerate the change.” This will not sit well with the vast majority of people, and they know it and want to head off the inevitable public backlash. And the sooner the backlash begins the better because once it is in place it will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. The income tax was introduced as a temporary measure by various nations to pay for wars. England did so on and off for centuries. When it was reintroduced the last time to pay for World War I, the legislation stipulated that once the crisis was over the tax rolls were to be destroyed, but this did not happen because the bureaucrats who were supposed to do so quietly did not. Make no mistake about it — with respect to the digital currency that gives them so much power, the Deep State is not and definitely will not be on your side.

The digital world obliterates the analog world and the force of law that supports it. While the analog passport that you now possess confers upon you certain rights as a citizen, the digital passport, which is essentially a version of the vaccine passports on steroids, confers upon you only a privilege that may be withheld if certain conditions are not met. Likewise, the principle of legal tender that is attached to your analog money — the jingle in your jeans — will for all intents and purposes also be obliterated.

If you think that these dystopian scenarios are unthinkable, then perhaps you should think again. In the last few years, many things that just a few years before we could not have imagined happening, such as mandated injection of experimental vaccines and the unlimited detention in brutal conditions of the Jan. 6 protesters, have come to pass. The people who are pushing these “innovations” have diseased imaginations. Despite the fact — or perhaps because of the fact — that they are very powerful, their souls are broken and barren. Deep in their hearts they know this, and their revenge is to try to impose their sickness on the entire world.

Critical Race Theory Teaches Kids To Hate Each Other, And The Proof Is On The Playground

Critical race theory lessons are fostering anger and aggression instead of empathy among children. This is most obvious on the playground.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora for The Federalist

In mid-February 2023, administrators at an elementary school in Springfield, Ohio, called the police to intervene in a racially charged incident on the playground. According to the police report, a group of black students forced several white students to say “black lives matter” against their will.

Around the same time in Orlando, Florida, a teacher at Howard Middle School created and posted to his personal social media account a demeaning skit using students from his classroom. In it, white students bowed to their black classmates, feeding them snacks and fanning them. The teacher, now on administrative leave, captioned the video: “Black History Month. The shortest month of the Year.” Critical race theory is permeating public education across the country and aggravating racial hostilities, even among elementary school children.

At the end of February, sixth-grade teachers at Hunt Valley Elementary School in Fairfax County discussed heightened racial tensions with their students. There had been reports of racial slurs used on the playground. One teacher, in particular, told her students that the faculty instructs in detail about the living conditions of enslaved Africans to foster a sense of empathy among children. But it seems that the hyper-focus on racial differences in both primary and secondary education widens the racial chasm.

Across Fairfax County, elementary schools have replaced a standardized test for fourth-graders regarding Virginia’s colonial history with a critical race theory project. No longer are Fairfax County schools assessing students’ knowledge of Virginia’s settling and our nation’s founding. Rather, standards of learning have been reduced to intimate knowledge of the living conditions of different races. The project focuses in particular on the life of the white gentry versus enslaved Africans in the 1700s.

Aside from the critical race theory lessons at all levels in Fairfax County Public Schools, student groups work with the district’s several “equity officers” to present racially divisive material to their peers. On Jan. 30, 2023, students at West Springfield High School (WSHS) were forced to watch a disturbingly racist video on microaggressions, in the name of equity education. In the video, white people were illustrated as cartoon mosquitos taking bites out of nonwhite people with their microaggressions. In response, at the end of the video, the nonwhite people eventually exterminated them with flame throwers.

On Feb. 22, 2023, at the same high school, there was an assembly in honor of Black History Month. During the WSHS assembly, the black student association put on several skits, none of which were based on history. Rather, during the skits, the one white student member in the club repeatedly acted racist toward the black students, saying things such as, “All black people look alike.” These skits portrayed black students as victims of racism and the police, and the white student as the perpetrator.

Across Fairfax County, at Langley High School, students watched a Columbus Day PowerPoint presentation in October 2022 that mentioned the explorer only three times. Instead, activists seized the opportunity to make the day about “equity and inclusion.” One of the slides reads: “Take a moment to reflect independently on the ways in which Native Americans are subject to racial discrimination and/or insensitivity and why that is commonplace in American society.” This question might be a good one for the family dinner table, but it doesn’t belong in the classroom.

These lessons are not only in clear violation of Gov. Youngkin’s Executive Order 1 regarding teaching divisive concepts, but they are counterproductive for relationships among our children.

Consider Jane Elliot’s 1968 blue eye/brown eye experiment. She told her third-grade classroom that people with brown eyes are superior to those with blue eyes. Elliot then had the brown-eyed children place construction paper armbands on their blue-eyed classmates. The blue-eyed children weren’t allowed to drink directly from the water fountain, have second helpings at lunch, or play on the jungle gym or swings at recess. She also instructed the blue-eyed children to not do their homework, because they probably wouldn’t remember to bring it back to school even if they completed it. The brown-eyed children quickly internalized the message from their teacher and started to act aggressively toward their blue-eyed classmates. During her highly unethical experiment, Elliot switched the roles of the students, and the results were the same.

When people with authority, such as schoolteachers and administrators, tell children that one group is the oppressor and the other is oppressed, children tend to listen. These critical race theory lessons are fostering anger and aggression instead of empathy among children.

Teachers and administrators need to stick to the “three Rs” of education. Social and racial politics must be under the jurisdiction of families, not public education.