W³P Lives: 03/08/23

Wednesday, March 8, 2023

Prominent Democrat Think Tank Sounds Alarm About One Thing That Could Assure 2024 Trump Win

With the 2024 presidential election some 20 months away as I write, the speculation and behind-the-scenes machinations are at least as interesting as the public goings-on and political punditry.

That said, the two salient questions this far out are who might challenge Joe Biden for the Democrat nomination, and who might challenge presumed front-runner Donald Trump for the GOP nod.

While a majority of Democrat lawmakers have been careful not to throw the increasingly acuity-challenged Biden under the bus (not yet, that is), reports suggest that behind the scenes, Democrats are terrified by the thought of a Biden candidacy. Opposition (and support) within the Republican Party to a third Trump nomination is somewhat more public but polarized.

So again, the two biggest questions are if not Biden for the Dems, who? And whether and when Ron DeSantis will toss his hat into the ring, which smart money suggests will happen by early summer.

So that’s where things stand, as we speak. Or do they?

As reported by the Washington Examiner, a prominent Democratic-backed think tank is sounding the alarm about possible efforts to create a third-party presidential ticket in 2024, and warning that the effort could hand the election to Trump, irrespective of the eventual Democrat ticket.

The policy group Third Way warned on Tuesday that No Labels has been working behind the scenes for months to field a bipartisan “unity ticket” in 2024, which they call an “insurance policy,” claiming to fear that “both major political parties could nominate divisive presidential candidates that a majority of the country finds unacceptable.”

Here’s more, via Third Way:

For No Labels, the moderate President Biden falls into this “unacceptable” category. The bottom line: Their candidate cannot win the presidency—and, as Paul Begala noted, such a candidate “will succeed in electing Trump.”

To suggest Joe Biden is a “moderate” is to ignore his extreme turn to the left since Day One of his destructive presidency, with few exceptions. No Labels wants no way for either option to happen. Via a September op-ed in The New York Times, written by none other than pretend “conservative” New York Times columnist David Brooks:

The No Labels operation is a $70 million effort, of which $46 million has already been raised or pledged [as of early September, 2022]. It [seeks] to gain ballot access for a prospective third candidate in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. […]
The group’s research suggests there are 64.5 million voters who would support such an effort, including roughly a third of the people who supported Donald Trump in 2020 and 20 percent of the Democrats who supported Joe Biden in that year, as well as a slew of independents.
[No Labels seeks] to find a policy agenda that appeals to unity voters. The group has come up with a series of … positions on major issues: comprehensive immigration reform with stronger borders and a path to citizenship for DACA immigrants, American energy self-sufficiency while transitioning to cleaner sources, no guns for anyone under 21 and universal background checks, moderate abortion policies with abortion legal until about 15 weeks.
[It also seeks] to create an infrastructure to nominate and support a potential candidate. There’s already a network of state co-chairs and local volunteers.

No Labels claims it’s not interested in building an ongoing third party, but merely a one-off effort to deny both Biden and Trump the presidency. Or, presumably, any other Democrat or Republican nominees. Third Way, however, believes the so-called “insurance policy would only ensure a Trump win, which I believe will happen by early summer:

No Labels is arguing this is a unique historical moment that gives their “unity ticket” a real shot at winning the White House. But that is an illusion. The data and historical evidence are clear: no third-party candidate would come close to winning.

Third Way cited the historical failure of third-party candidates, what it called “the polling mirage” that while various third-party have initially polled well, they’ve plummeted back to earth as voters overwhelmingly gravitated to the major parties by election day. Here’s more:

No Labels casts Biden and Trump as equally extreme and frames their ticket as an antidote to a rematch. But this is a smokescreen. Joe Biden has governed as a mainstream moderate, passing more bipartisan legislation than anyone dreamed possible.
Meanwhile, No Labels has previously bestowed on Trump their “problem solver” award, given to elected officials who agree to work in a “bipartisan” manner.
Given the overwhelming odds against a third-party candidate and the mountain of evidence about who their ticket would hurt, the conclusion is inescapable:
No Labels is committed to fielding a candidate that will, intentionally or not, provide a crucial boost to Republicans – and a major obstacle to Biden. As a result, they’ll make it far more likely—if not certain—that Donald Trump returns to the White House.

“Moderate” Biden, no, machinations, indeed.

The Bottom Line.

So let’s boil this down a bit. Third Way is terrified of the prospects of a 2024 third-party candidate because it believes the election will be handed to Trump if it happens. Meanwhile, left-“leaning” No Labels, which also fears a Trump win, believes Biden can’t beat Trump, so it wants to elect a candidate it believes can take down Trump.

But what if neither Biden nor Trump — or either — wins their respective nominations? No Label claims it will “stand down” if “this path outside the two major party candidates is not needed.” Yet, the group has failed to define its “not needed” criteria.

2024 is likely to be a presidential election for the ages — one way or another.

X22, Christian Patriot News, and more- March 8

With today being International Women's Day, I found it to be quite nice to see not only ION TV's Twitter account including Hetty in their special post, but NCIS LA's FB also included her as well!

And to add to the very nice respect of the (to this living day) only actor to be an Oscar winner for playing the opposite gender, look what TCM aired tonight:

Today was a VERY good day to be a Hetty/Linda fan!

Here's tonight's news:

A pleasant-ish surprise from an ABC show on unborn babies

Source: https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/03/08/abcs-the-good-doctor-depicts-the-unborn-as-lives-worth-saving/

The ABC medical drama The Good Doctor has hit a pro-life note several times in the last few seasons and this week’s episode did so again, this time by seeming to admit that a fetus in the womb is a life worth trying to save.

In the March 6 episode, “Old Friends,” a pregnant patient in distress is told that her illness will likely compromise her health and the health of her unborn baby. And as her two attending physicians describe her options, she is told that her condition will likely lead to her death if she insists on trying to save her baby. However, one of the doctors admits that she would try to save the life of the fetus if she were in the patient’s shoes.

Dr. Morgan Reznick (Fiona Gubelmann) suggests abortion immediately and without hesitation. Her fellow attending, Dr. Jordan Allen (Bria Samone Henderson), is not quite as prepared to wave off the life of the child that the patient is carrying.

In one scene, stricken mother Sonja (Elyse Maloway) is being counseled on her options in consultation with Drs. Reznick and Allen during which Reznick says terminating the pregnancy is the safest option, but Allen suggests she would seek other options to save the baby:

Sonja: “What would you do…if it was your baby? ”
Reznick: “Termination is the safest. ”
Sonja: “I was talking to Dr. Allen.”
Allen: “I would…pray on it. ”
Sonja: “And then? I want to know what you would do. ”
Allen: “I think I…would try to save the baby. ”
Sonja: “We have to fight for our Esther.”

This pro-life stance for the Dr. Allen character is not a new theme. Allen has stood up for Christianity and pro-life ideals and against abortion in several past episodes over the previous few seasons. Indeed, just this season, Allen refused to resort to abortion in a high-risk pregnancy. In that episode the lives of the baby and mother were saved, Newsbusters noted.

In another scene on Monday’s episode, Reznick and Allen are discussing the case with their boss, Chief of Surgery Dr. Audrey Lim (Christina Chang), when Reznick states that Sonja has chorioamnionitis and the best treatment for that would harm the baby in the patient’s womb, but keep the mother alive.

Reznick: “It’s our only way to keep Sonja alive, and it buys us time to convince her to terminate. She’s being suicidal.”
Allen: “Risking your life for your child is usually considered admirable.”
Reznick: “Not if you’re both going to die…because of the false hope you gave her.”
Allen: “I answered a patient’s question.”
Reznick: “You gave her permission. We’re supposed to at least try to be objective.”
Lim: “Objectivity is a myth, especially on this subject.”

During that same conversation, Dr. Allen fights for the patient’s right to make her own choice about whether or not to try and save her baby’s life.

Despite these examples of pro-life sentiment, abortion is still presented as a mere “medical procedure” of convenience when Dr. Lim explains that she had an abortion as a young medical student because she was just “not ready” to be a mother.

Ultimately, the patient’s illness is portrayed as simply too insurmountable to save both her and her baby and the doctors agree on termination so that they can focus on the mother’s disease is their only option. Otherwise, both would die.

The patient, though, is still centered on saving her baby, even if she has to die in the process. At this point, it was up to Dr. Allen to explain why termination has finally become the only option. Allen wakes the patient, who is on a ventilator, to explain the situation and to get the patient to sign the consent form for termination. In so doing, Dr. Allen describes her personal struggle.

“When I was 18, I had an abortion. That child would have been 11 now — just starting middle school. Every time I see a kid that age, I think about who they would have become or what kind of mom I would have been,” Dr. Allen tells her patient.

“I believe God’s forgiven me. That’s kinda His thing. And I believe God picked you for motherhood. You are so strong, so brave, with such a deep capacity for love,” Dr. Allen continued. “But your Esther isn’t developed enough to survive outside of the womb. The infection will kill both of you. I told you if I were you, I would try to save the baby. I prayed for a miracle. And I don’t know why it didn’t come today. The only way for you to be the mom God wants you to be… …is to let Esther go.”

The segment ends with Sonja and her husband having a baptismal rite for their deceased infant after the surgery that saves the mother’s life.

While the episode is unusual for modern woke TV by even presenting the pro-life side of the argument in a positive light at all, it is also a not-so-subtle nod to the left’s favorite pro-abortion argument, the “life of the mother” point. Abortion supporters push this line as if it is a common occurrence. Still, even the liberal Guttmacher Institute notes that “life of the mother” abortions are so infrequent that stats on such abortions are not really compiled. But one study by the International Family Planning Perspectives journal found that only about 2.8 percent of abortions are performed to protect the life of the mother. And a 2013 study found that only about 6 percent of women who had an abortion said they did so to save their own lives. Both studies relied on claims, though, and neither were based on proven medical necessity.

Regardless, it is clear that abortion for the life of the mother occurs in but a very small percentage of abortions and the lion’s share of abortions are performed for the convenience of the mother, not out of medical necessity.

Do You know “Y”

Here we are at midweek.

It is time for your smile evening.

Do You know “Y”

The “Y” Chromosome...

People born before 1946 are called -

The Greatest Generation .

People born between 1946 and 1964 are called -

The Baby Boomers .

People born between 1965 and 1979 are called -

Generation X.

And people born between 1980 and 2010 are called -

Generation Y .

Why do we call the last group -- Generation Y ?

Y should I leave home and find my own place?

Y should I get a car when I can borrow yours?

Y should I get a job?

Y should I clean my room?

Y should I wash and iron my own clothes?

Y should I buy any food?

But perhaps a cartoonist explained

it most eloquently below...

Just thought you might want to know "Y"- - - -

The answer for the last pictorial is..

Our Most Essential Institution Is Also Our Most Dangerous

There’s a reason why freedom of speech and of the press are both in the First Amendment. Yet since 2016, no single institution has done more damage to our country than the media.

by Rod Thomson for American Greatness

The latest complete flip-flops regarding the underpinnings of the COVID regime should end any remaining debate: the media is the single biggest threat to America and Americans.

Virtually everything the media told us on the two seminal issues of the past six years—Trump-Russia collusion and the panoply of COVID-19 reactions—was wrong. This is well beyond frustrating. It has been a disaster for America as trust levels have cratered for the media and consequently for virtually every establishment institution. American’s barely even trust their fellow Americans. And all of this comes before we even consider the excess deaths that may have resulted from the suppression of alternatives to vaccines, the shutdowns of states, and the masking of children.

We are a nation riven in discord, and it could not have happened without the media playing the central connecting role in selling the disinformation scandals. It is the one constant.

Neither the FBI, the Department of Justice, nor the intelligence community composed of so many agencies and private interests could have pursued their Trump-Russia narrative with anything like the success they had without the aid and abetment of the media. The medical establishment could not have sold the destructive array of policies it did without the abetting role of the media.

The media acting as a guard dog rather than a watchdog over our most powerful institutions will always result in dangerous levels of corruption. Yet the persistent and problematic dynamic remains: too many Americans still open the digital pages of newspapers or turn on news shows and think they are getting good, third-party information. This tacit acceptance is the only way so many could be so deceived on the Russia collusion hoax and the novel ideas that masks stop viruses, natural immunity doesn’t work, and shutdowns stop the natural progression of viruses.

Simply put, we could not have arrived at this dire place of quasi civil war if we had a functioning media in the way we, at one point, at least aspired to have—not this almost Pravda-like incarnation that we have today.

How We Got Here

But neither can we simply do without the media. This is the painful truth. A free and functioning media is essential to America. The rights of the media are ensconced right there in the First Amendment’s free press clause, buttressed by the free speech clause for all of us. The founders understood that an informed citizenry was necessary to the operation of the constitutional republic they had established.

Newspapers were openly partisan at the time, supporting John Adams or Thomas Jefferson, and were used as openly partisan tools for their candidates and causes. But everyone knew that. If they were reading the Philadelphia paper, they knew it was a Jefferson instrument to savage Adams. The opposite was understood of the Boston paper. No one pretended otherwise. There was a refreshing honesty to the arrangement.

In the 20th century, however, and particularly during the second half, the media became “more professional”—with college degrees required and credentials established by the most powerful among the players. Thus it sought to play the role of a fair arbiter of information for Americans. This was a golden opportunity for the then-mainstream media to be the place where Left and Right and everyone in between could go for information, and then debate from a common base of knowledge.

The concept of an objective, fair and balanced media—represented in the popular imagination by the likes of Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, the New York Times, Washington Post and others—was a relatively novel concept that never really existed as much as we believed it might. But for a while, the media made attempts to hold the powerful accountable in government and in major corporations. Sure, it was always biased, but in my 25 years in daily newspapers, most reporters I worked with personally were making the effort. And it was a good thing for America.

That time is long behind us. Even conceptually it is not pursued. The odd reporter making an effort at something like old-school journalism—Bari Weiss, Alex Berenson, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jesse Singal and others—is hounded out of the media formerly known as mainstream to find homes on Substack or elsewhere.

Our hope for an honest media rapidly retreated from reality as captured leftist schools of journalism churned out endless streams of radicalized Nikole Hannah-Joneses rather than Bob Woodwards, and the media veered more sharply left. The eruption of Donald Trump on the scene and his shock election in 2016 ended the charade of the fake news entirely.

The media acted as a mouthpiece for the administrative state and the Democratic Party and rapidly separated Americans into their two silos—one silo getting their information from leftist, corporate media and the other silo getting theirs from conservative alternative media. Increasingly, we had no common language or basis for knowledge, civil discourse became rare if not impossible, and genuine debate unthinkable. Those on the other side were assumed to be ignoramuses immediately upon any interaction. This was the doing of the corporate media.

The Dangers Revealed

It’s worth painting a picture of just how dangerous the media has been since the mask has been ripped off “trusted” journalism to reveal an industry engulfed in leftist RightSpeak and partisan work rivaling some of the world’s best state media organs.

There is little need to revisit how thoroughly debunked the Trump-Russia collusion narrative is at this point. It is perhaps most evident in the fact that the media itself has completely stopped talking about it, albeit never correcting its horrific record of coverage. The hoax did what it was supposed to. But in true information silo fashion, millions of Americans still believe Trump got away with it and that he is and always was a Putin puppet. And that breakdown is almost entirely along party lines—a direct reflection of where each side is getting its news.

But this one-time champion story of egregious media behavior—undermining a duly elected American president—has now been dethroned now by the media-COVID-expert establishment coverage from March 2020 onward (which in all likelihood, dovetailed with the efforts to remove Trump via the Putin puppet narrative.)

The evidence of media malfeasance is indisputable. The media was wrong or corrupt over and over again on the COVID regime: They claimed for years that:

Media claim: The virus didn’t come from the Wuhan virus lab.

Truth: The U.S. Energy Department and the FBI are now saying it likely came from the lab in Wuhan. Not fringe. Not racist. Of course, even Jon Stewart understood this in 2021, although statist fanboy Stephen Colbert tried to shut him down.

Media claim: Natural immunity does not offer protection.

Truth: Natural immunity is effective against COVID—and always was—according to no less than the Lancet: “Our meta-analyses showed that protection from past infection and any symptomatic disease was high for ancestral, alpha, beta, and delta variants . . . ”

Media claim: Shutdowns were necessary to save lives.

Truth: Johns Hopkins researchers have concluded that shutdowns had no significant effect on COVID mortality. And apparently that was never the goal, anyway, as Dr. Anthony Fauci said in a recent interview: “You use lockdowns to get people vaccinated.”

Media claim: Masks were effective in stopping the spread.

Truth: The Cochrane Review, considered among the best at analyzing study results, concludes masks don’t work, and never did. Oxford’s Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane Review, summed up the real science on masks: “There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop.” Of course, the WHO and CDC knew this before March 2020. As did the media.

But all of these lies—it is difficult to consider them anything else by the summer of 2020—advanced an agenda of consolidating power in the hands of elites: health experts, government, and pharmaceuticals.

For instance, the brand new unsupported claim that natural immunity did not offer protection upended centuries of studies and proofs. But importantly, it paved the way for mandating vaccines. More than making some powerful corporations tens of billions of dollars in profits, this created the precedent for government, in league with corporations if need be, to have the authority to mandate all Americans be injected with whatever the government says. This unprecedented intrusion will come up again.

And once more, none of it could have happened without the active involvement of the media.

The damage done by this monolithic media failure on behalf of the American people may never be fully calculable, from an enormous loss of individual liberty to plummeting children’s academic achievement, to millions of the world’s poorest people thrown back into extreme poverty, to shutdowns killing innumerable small businesses and spiking teen depression and suicide rates.

The essential player in it all has been the media.

Whistleblower: FBI Targeted Innocent Rally-Goers Just For Being In D.C. On Jan. 6

The FBI’s D.C. field office treated Americans exercising their right to free speech as suspected criminals, with no evidence of it.

Margot Cleveland reporting for The Federalist

The FBI’s D.C. field office directed the Boston office to open investigations into more than 100 Americans who had attended the Jan. 6 rally despite having no evidence those individuals had committed any crime, according to whistleblower testimony reviewed by The Federalist. This represents the second attempt by the D.C. field office to sic the FBI on innocent Americans — in this case, people who were exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.

The D.C. field office pressured Boston’s FBI office to open criminal investigations into some 140 people who took buses from Massachusetts to D.C. on Jan. 6, according to testimony from George Hill, a whistleblower and recently retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, reviewed by The Federalist. The D.C. field office applied this pressure, Hill said, even though it had no evidence that any of those travelers had entered restricted areas of the Capitol.

Hill, a military veteran and former longtime FBI and NSA analyst, had previously identified himself as one of several whistleblowers cooperating with House Judiciary Committee investigators when he spoke with Just the News’ John Solomon last month. The Federalist’s review of Hill’s testimony confirmed the details he told Solomon and exposed more troubling information.

According to Hill’s testimony, after rioters entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the D.C. field office, which was leading the investigation, presented the Boston office “definitive evidence” that two individuals within its jurisdiction had entered restricted areas of the Capitol. Boston opened investigations into those two individuals.

In his deposition testimony to congressional investigators, Hill explained that because those two people had arranged for buses to take rally-goers to Washington, the D.C. field office told the Boston office to open investigations into all 140 of the passengers.

According to the whistleblower, a Boston supervisory special agent, or SSA, told the D.C. field office, “Happy to do it. Show us where they were inside the Capitol, and we’ll look into it.”

But the D.C. field office said it couldn’t do that unless it knew the exact time and location in the Capitol where the individuals were located, according to Hill’s testimony. Then when Boston asked for access to the 11,000 hours of video to allow its own agents to review the footage themselves to assess whether to launch an investigation into any of the rally-goers, the D.C. field office refused to share the video, Hill’s testimony revealed. The bureau claimed the footage might reveal undercover agents or confidential human sources, according to the whistleblower.

Yet the D.C. field office persisted in its demand for Boston to open investigations into everyone on the bus, threatening to call the special agent in charge of the field office if the lower-level agent refused. The supervisory special agent remained firm, however. As Hill explained, the SSA told the D.C. field office that those 140 people “were going to a political rally, which is First Amendment protected activity.”

This move by the bureau represents its second such attempt — just from Hill’s testimony — to target innocent Americans. As The Federalist reported on Monday, Hill also told the House Judiciary Committee that the D.C. field office pressured local FBI field offices to open investigations on innocent, gun-owning Americans based on data mining that Bank of America voluntarily provided to the bureau.

According to The Federalist’s review of the testimony, Hill said the Bank of America list included people who used its credit or debit cards in D.C., or the surrounding Maryland and Virginia areas, on Jan. 5, 6, or 7, 2021. Furthermore, people who had ever (through Jan. 6, 2021) used a Bank of America product to purchase a firearm were elevated to the top of the list.

In both instances, Boston’s special agent in charge, Joseph Bonavolonta, withstood the outside pressure — something Hill commended in his testimony.

While Bonavolonta and the Boston office refused to investigate Americans based solely on their First Amendment activities or credit card receipts placing them in the greater-D.C. area, it is unclear whether other field offices launched investigations based on the D.C. office’s pressure. A source familiar with Hill’s testimony confirmed that Hill did not know the answer to that question either.

Open-source reporting, however, reveals that in at least one instance, the FBI questioned an individual who organized buses for rally-goers — apparently without any evidence of potentially illegal conduct. In January of 2021, FBI agents appeared at Jim Worthington’s suburban Philadelphia home to quiz him about the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Worthington was not home at the time but later spoke with investigators over the course of two hours, confirming he had been in D.C. for the rally and had “helped bring busloads of people to the event,” but had “never went to the Capitol.”

Given that Worthington, who also led the People4Trump PAC, never entered the Capitol, one must wonder what legitimate basis the FBI claimed it had to target him.

Or had the D.C. field office pressured the Philadelphia field office to open an investigation into Worthington? And what about the some-200 people who traveled to D.C. on the buses Worthington arranged? Did the local field office open investigations into those people? And what about the other 50-plus field offices? Did they also target individuals based on their First Amendment-protected activities? With stories of buses from across America traveling to D.C. for the Jan. 6 rally, it is a definite possibility.

While it’s long been known that the House’s Jan. 6 Committee and the legacy media pushed a narrative that conflated the rally-goers and the rioters, the whistleblower’s allegations now suggest the FBI’s D.C. field office also treated Americans exercising their right to free speech as suspected criminals, without any evidentiary basis to do so.

Mollie Hemingway contributed to this report.

The "Meritocracy" Was Created by and for the Progressive Ruling Class

Ryan McMaken for Mises.org

The American Left has decided that the so-called meritocracy is a bad thing. In a typical example from the Los Angeles Times this week, Nicholas Goldberg points to a number of issues exploring how merit is not actually the key to power and riches in America:

The United States is supposed to be a meritocracy. The story goes that if you work hard and play by the rules, especially with regard to education, you can compete, rise and succeed here. . . . But Americans are realizing that’s not always the case. The playing field just isn’t level.

Goldberg claims that the much-lauded meritocracy is less about merit and more about controlling access to elite institutions. It’s hard to argue with some of this. It’s easy to see the lie behind the claims of meritocracy when we look to the very top of the artificial hierarchy. It’s likely not a mere coincidence people like George W. Bush and Al Gore—a son of a US president and a son of a US senator, respectively—went to elite Ivy League schools. All of Al Gore’s four children, and one of Bush’s, went to Harvard. To think that these seven people got into these schools because they had more “merit” than all the rejected applicants requires gargantuan levels of credulousness.

Much of the Left’s rhetoric against the meritocracy has been in the service of justifying racial preferences and standardized testing in university admissions. Defenders of the status quo have subsequently fallen all over themselves to support the supposed meritocracy of the government-university complex. For example, Victor Davis Hansen, in a meandering and unconvincing article, recently attempted to blame the United States’ repeated foreign policy failures on an alleged decline of meritocracy. Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz insists that today’s law schools are full of mediocrities—unlike when he and his friends filled elite universities with untrammeled brilliance.

Note that these examples from Hansen, Goldberg, and Dershowitz have nothing to do with the true meritocracy of the marketplace that made America a prosperous place where ordinary people could make comfortable lives for themselves. Rather, the pundits tend to focus on the fake meritocracy, which is all about government and quasi-government institutions: standardized tests, elite universities controlled by the ruling class, and what amounts to government-controlled professional licensing. In these cases, what constitutes merit is defined by technocrats. Most of what we now consider to be the official meritocracy was developed and popularized by the regime’s social reformers of the Progressive Era in the early twentieth century.

The Only Real Meritocracy Is the Market Meritocracy

The real meritocracy is something else entirely. The real meritocracy exists only in the marketplace, where there is no objective ideal of merit at all. Rather, in the marketplace, merit is determined by the extent to which a person provides value according to the subjective values of market actors. The value—i.e., “merit”—of a worker, an entrepreneur, or a business enterprise is determined by the client. Did an entrepreneur deliver a valued good or service? If so, he will be rewarded with both revenue and a good reputation. Did an attorney provide valued services to clients and defendants? If so, he or she will be richly rewarded in the marketplace. If markets were actually allowed to function in the areas of medicine, we’d find a similar relationship there between “merit” and value delivered to others. Those with the most merit are the most successful in the marketplace. But it’s the consuming public that determines what constitutes merit. In other words, true “merit”—which should be regarded as just another word for “market value”—is not at all determined by the ideals of government technocrats and their allies in academia.

Where Standardized Tests Come From

One prominent example of the reach of the official meritocracy is the bar exam. In a 2015 article, free-market advocate (and law professor) Allen Mendenhall pointed out that the exam is not really about merit, but is

a form of occupational licensure that restricts access to a particular vocation and reduces market competition. . . . The bar exam tests the ability to take tests, not the ability to practice law. The best way to learn the legal profession is through tried experience and practical training, which, under our current system, are delayed for years, first by the requirement that would-be lawyers graduate from accredited law schools and second by the bar exam and its accompanying exam for professional fitness.

Before the rise of official meritocracy, practitioners of law entered the profession through several paths, only one of which required law school. The marketplace was the ultimate referee in whether or not a lawyer added value. Similarly flexible standards characterized many fields, from barbering to medical schools. Over time, however, various professional cartels managed to convince governments to tightly control access to a variety of professions. New “objective” measures—which weren’t objective at all, but determined by government bureaucrats—were imposed on the public.

The bureaucrats themselves introduced an alleged meritocracy to protect their own jobs. In 1883, Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. This imposed mandatory standardized testing for potential government employees in return for job security provisions under which federal workers could not be terminated for political reasons. This replaced the old “spoils system” in which the federal bureaucracy was tied to public accountability through elections. The Pendleton reform has long been sold as a change that “professionalized” the federal bureaucracy. Murray Rothbard, however, saw through this ruse and noted that the supposed meritocracy created a new permanent government class “insulated” from the public: “With the advent of Civil Service reform, the once temporary set of bureaucrats are now converted into a permanent and self-conscious class or caste, set aside from, and in fundamental opposition to, the mass of the citizenry.”

We’re told this all made bureaucrats perform “better.” Yet there is no objective measure for “bureaucratic performance” other than the arbitrary goals and protocols set out by politicians. The only undeniable result of the bureaucratic meritocracy is that it helps federal policy makers cripple public skepticism and political opposition to federal agents, thus paving the way for immense growth in federal employment and spending.

Testing Spreads to the General Public

By the early twentieth century, social reformers wanted to spread the meritocracy to the entire population. Government planners saw the potential of testing as a means of helping them plan society and the economy. This eventually came in the guise of standardized testing for all students and its related phenomenon, the IQ test.

The idea itself was not new. Like so many other innovations in freedom-destroying bureaucratization and political centralization, this idea came from Prussia:

In the mid-1800s, Boston school reformers Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe, modeling their efforts on the centralized Prussian school system, introduced standardized testing to Boston schools. The new tests were devised to provide a “single standard by which to judge and compare the output of each school” and to gather objective information about teaching quality.

However, through the end of the nineteenth century, implementation remained haphazard. The US’s education system was very decentralized, and many school districts simply chose not to participate. Nonetheless, standardized testing was gaining ground in tandem with the new field known as psychology.

Adoption of standardized testing—like so many other trends in American society geared toward government planning—was accelerated by the First World War. With the war came a military draft on a scale that far surpassed any previous conscription efforts. This new draft turned millions of Americans into government employees, and governments sought ways to more “efficiently” manage them:

WWI provided the setting for the first large-scale application of psychology. The United States and the other countries on both sides faced the daunting task of processing millions of people to serve as soldiers. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson called upon psychologists to help in this endeavor and in May 1917, his administration formed the Psychological Examination of Recruits Committee consisting of the top people in psychological research on individual differences. . . . Within two months, they had constructed a written paper-and-pencil test, the Army Alpha test, to assess recruits.

Thus began the age of mass standardized testing. This paved the way for the application of mass testing in many other areas as well:

By the end of WWI, over two million army recruits had taken the [tests]. . . . these were the first practical tests administered to large groups of people. Within two decades of the development of the Army Alpha, cognitive ability testing became a major tool used in hiring and college admissions decisions.

Federal planners were also happy to work with psychologists to develop what have come to be known as IQ tests. These tests were first developed by French psychologist Alfred Binet. In 1904, the French state—long a world leader in political centralization and mandatory state schooling—asked Binet to help the Ministry of Education evaluate students. The “promise” of Binet’s invention was immediately seen by government planners elsewhere.

Binet’s methods were expanded during the war. Standardized tests thus became a new category of government data, along the lines of household income data, employment data, and gross domestic product data. And like all data collection schemes, it became a tool for government planning.

Enter Eugenicist Central Planners

The most notorious of the Progressive central planners who gravitated toward these tests were the eugenicists. Naturally, the new age of cognitive testing allowed the government to justify any number of new government plans to manage populations and government resources. One of the most prominent eugenicists was Lewis Terman, a psychologist who developed his own IQ test in 1916. The test

defined intelligence in purely quantitative terms and was used to justify the forced sterilization of minority groups in the United States. . . . Carl Brigham, a Princeton psychologist and fellow member of the American Eugenics Society, built on Terman’s work to develop the SAT [based heavily on the Army Alpha Test] with the College Board in 1926. The test became a ubiquitous tool in college admissions by the end of World War II.

A Key Tool in Federal-Corporate-Academic Partnerships

It is no accident that talk of the “meritocracy” tends to revolve around institutions that are tightly regulated by government agencies and enjoy close partnerships with the federal government. Major universities, heavily dependent on federal grants, have long worked with governments hand in hand to enforce the whims of powerful industrial interest groups and cartels. The public funding of higher education helps private industry transfer the costs of training and screening to taxpayers. Moreover, universities have long helped ensure that countless students have “correct” ideological views, in line with those of the regime. It is exactly the sort of outcome we should expect from schemes developed by and for reformers of the Progressive Era. This fact should also help us realize that the modern Left doesn’t really have a problem with the meritocracy overall. The Left merely wishes to control the meritocracy implemented by their ideological forebears so as to produce a different mix of “elites.” This plan is nothing more than a tweaking of the established system of “merit.”

On the other hand, if we really want to find the people who are the most productive, the most skilled, and the most beneficial to our daily lives, we must look far beyond the official meritocracy, which only tells us how well people have performed according to the regime’s standards. We must look to market competition instead.

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