Last week I discussed the issues that concern voters the most and will likely decide their choices––inflation, rampant crime, and our porous southern border, as well as cultural-war issues such as transgenderism and school curricula. But there are other concerns with the policies and actions of the Democrats over the last two years that also might figure in voters’ calculations.
Foreign policy typically is not as urgent for voters as the economy, crime, or border security. Yet our actions and policies abroad necessarily impact our national security, though not as immediately as inflation hits our budgets or crime disrupts our lives. But we need to pay attention, for the current administration has weakened our national security and compromised our national interests by resorting to tired foreign-policy nostrums, feckless actions, and sheer neglect.
Most obvious is the shameful, hasty abandonment of our allies and assets in Afghanistan. We stranded hundreds of Americans, left behind thousands of Afghanistan allies, and squandered billions in military hardware and infrastructure. Worse, we returned to power the brutal Taliban, who nurtured and sheltered the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocity. Now Iran, a genocidal theocrasy with 43 years of American blood on its hands, has filled the vacuum along with other jihadist outfits like ISIS and al Qaeda.
Speaking of Iran, the Biden administration is still pursuing a renewal of Obama’s flawed nuclear deal that transferred billions of dollars to the mullahs, lucre they have used to finance their terrorist adventurism in the Middle East. Meanwhile, their advanced centrifuges keep spinning enough enriched uranium to make nuclear bombs, at the same time they are developing ballistic missiles capable of delivering them. Biden exacerbated this blunder by alienating Iran’s enemies such as our allies like Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations in the region.
Despite Biden’s cringing, his negotiators have been treated contemptuously on the world stage by the mullahs, who emboldened by Biden’s desperate deference, continue to make impossible demands, as they buy more time to reach their goals. Finally, since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Iran has moved closer to Russia and China, forming a triumvirate of evil ambitions to challenge the U.S. and its allies as the guarantor of global order.
These blunders in part reflect the stale orthodoxy of the “rules-based international order” that prizes “soft power” and “diplomatic engagement,” no matter how often these fail in the face of ruthless aggressors. Donald Trump understood this obvious truth that weakness invites aggression. He pulled the U.S. out of the Iran deal, and punished the regime with kinetic retaliation, most spectacularly by executing the revered commander of Iran’s expeditionary Quds Force. But Biden’s actions squandered the prestige and deterrent power he inherited from Trump’s realist policies.
It was said of the Roman general Sulla that there was “no better friend, and no worse enemy” than he. In two years Biden has made America no worse friend, and no better enemy, a dangerous change given China’s ambitions to replace the U.S. and the West as the global hegemon.
In response to such criticism, many commentators trot out Biden’s alleged skill and vigor in uniting NATO members to resist Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine. But such praise ignores the real question: Why was Russia allowed to position unchallenged its invasion force on Ukraine’s border? The U.S. and NATO can thump their chest over its tough rhetoric, and the latter’s promises to finally start spending more on their militaries. We will see if this born-again militarism survives the winter without Russian natural gas.
But doing the right thing too late, when earlier action could’ve checked the slaughter before it began, should not earn congratulations. And remember, it was on Obama and Biden’s watch in 2014 that Putin annexed Crimea and made its first moves against eastern Ukraine. That was the moment to confront Putin, if indeed the same people now supporting more money and materiel for Ukraine really believed he was such dangerous threat that they’re willing to risk a nuclear war.
Finally, the Biden administration has neglected our defense budget, leaving our military the weakest it’s been in decades. The Navy and Airforce are woefully lagging in necessary expansion and upgrades of materiel, while all the services are failing to meet their recruitment quotas.
There are several reasons for the latter, including poor physical fitness and cognitive skills among eligible young people. But having the Pentagon kick out the unvaccinated and subject our armed forces to preposterous training in divisive “systemic racism” and transgenderism propaganda will not make military service attractive, particularly to those young men from families where military service is a long tradition.
Of course, the skimping on military budgets and spending on weapons is not solely the fault of Democrats. Democracies are notorious for preferring butter to guns, and being shortsighted when it comes to preparing for threats that are farther off than the next election.
But the current administration has reversed Donald Trump’s efforts to start correcting this neglect, policies which Biden and the Dems have abandoned in the last two years. And in some cases, as with subjecting military personnel to partisan “woke” ideology, they have reached new lows of degradation of our military’s foundational mission to defend our security and interests. As a result, our prestige has been weakened, and our militaries underfunded.
Another more insidious danger has been increased by the current leadership––the undermining of the bedrock principle of the 14th Amendment: the “equal protection of the laws.” Violating this precept is the essence of tyranny, and upholding it strengthens a bulwark of our freedom.
The unequal application of the laws, though nothing new, has accelerated dangerously over the last six years. The powerful police and investigative powers of federal agencies like the DOJ and FBI have been transformed into the Democrats’ political muscle. Such corruption has occurred in the past, but nothing like this level of arrogant and shameful openness, or with such brazen advocacy by the mainstream media.
The Russia collusion hoax is one of the most shameful scandals in our history. Millions of dollars and two years were wasted on a special prosecutor’s investigation that determined what most of us knew from the start. The so-called Steele dossier, with its lurid and preposterous rumors and hearsay, had been exposed long before Mueller publicized his grudging acknowledgement of Trump’s innocence.
But what made this partisan theater even more insulting is that the dossier was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Hillary, remember, had been exposed for violating laws governing the handling of top-secret documents, and using an unsecured server that was likely hacked by several foreign intelligence agencies. Her minions, moreover, destroyed evidence of her crimes, while she made jokes and the press showed a studied indifference to her criminal behavior. And of course she didn’t see the FBI show up at her home with heavily armed agents and CNN in tow.
Yet despite that glaring partisan double standard, that gross violation of equality under the law, the Dems and their media PR firms continue to hound Donald Trump over alleged crimes, the House twice voting articles of impeachment, and ginning up the January 6 “insurrection” that the desperate Dems have tried to pin on Trump––all culminating in the historically unprecedented FBI raid on an ex-president’s private home.
Despite the failure of two impeachments, the House has continued to spend months on Hollywood-produced “hearings” that have trafficked in hearsay and second-hand rumors, and excluded any Republican who would have cross-examined witnesses and exposed the hearings as a show-trial. The “bipartisan” label on the hearings amounted to two fifth-columnist Republicans suffering from terminal Trump-Derangement syndrome.
And don’t forget the glaring hypocrisy and inequality before the law exposed by the ongoing political incarceration and trials of January 6 protestors at the Capitol, where the only unnatural death was a petite, unarmed woman, a veteran, shot by an incompetent D.C. cop who is still unpunished. Compare that with the mere handful of antifa thugs prosecuted for the previous summer’s four months of arson, looting, vandalism, and assaults that left over two dozen citizens dead.
Then there’s the Hunter Biden laptop with its documented evidence of his family’s corruption, including the president. It was put in the deep-freeze by the FBI in order to protect Joe Biden and the Dems before the 2020 election. Since then, the FBI continues its slow-motion “investigation” that is highly unlikely to lead to the FBI raiding Hunter’s home, or even an indictment.
But the DOJ does have the FBI surveilling and investigating parents exercising their First Amendment rights to hold school boards accountable; and raiding with automatic weapons and body-armor the homes of pro-life activists, while ignoring pro-abortionists fire-bombing pro-life counseling offices. This disparity bespeaks an indifference to our unalienable rights these agencies have sworn to uphold––a disregard for the Constitution similar to that of the “woke” Stasi on social media who “cancel,” hound, libel, and silence dissidents.
Bob Dole famously asked, “Where’s the outrage?” Not just over rampant inequality before the law and a politicized DOJ and FBI, but also over the other bloated, unaccountable federal agencies and bureaus that usurp, Congress’s Article 1 powers. Why? To create laws and regulations that expand the Feds’ reach, threatening our freedom and burdening our economy with rules that benefit the federal Leviathan and its clients.
But we the people still have a Constitutional power––the right to vote in regularly scheduled elections. Soon those of us who cherish freedom and American exceptionalism will have an opportunity to slow down the dismantling of our Constitution and the degradation of our unalienable rights and freedom.
The outcome of this “time for choosing,” as Ronald Reagan put it in 1964, will decide the answer to the ancient question I raised last week: Do the people have the capacity to rule themselves?
Excuse me. Americans can’t read past a 4th grade level and their attention span won’t get them beyond the first two sentences without a picture and a video of hunky abs or big tits.
What a stupid thing to write.
Actually, he’s not too far off the mark with a large segment of Americans. Who knows better about the appetite of moviegoers than Hollywood and the tabloids.
Only good thing is Hollyweird is going broke, theaters closing Netflix in a nosedive so I wouldn’t worry about them as much as the commies in schools and academia !
How many American colonists could read and write beyond the fourth grade level in 1776? How many could afford even one book? How many had read any book beyond the Bible or the Almanac?
History, for good or evil, is made by intellectual minorities, the rest follow. Always has been, always will. How many Christians were there at first? How many Muslims at first? How many Marxists at first? How many Abolitionists at first? How many germ theorists at first? How many Heliocentric theorists at first? The answer is susally a minority of ONE.
“History [for good or evil] is made by minorities—or, more precisely, history is made by intellectual movements, which are created by minorities. Who belongs to these minorities? Anyone who is able and willing actively to concern himself with intellectual issues. Here, it is not quantity, but quality that counts (the quality—and consistency—of the ideas one is advocating).” – Ayn Rand
18th century Americans, even those who never attended school, were voracious readers and highly literate. Just because they did not have access to the world’s great libraries, or in most cases any libraries, doesn’t mean that they did not devour the pamphlets of Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin (writing under several pseudonyms), and many others, some written in what would today be considered a rather elevated style.
You are correct, I stand corrected, reading comprehension was much higher among the American colonists in 1776 than Americans today. But I do think my major point still stands. History is made by intellectual minorities, Thomas Paine was one of the titans of that intellectual minority that inspired and motivated the American Revolution.
“Were Colonial Americans More Literate than Americans Today?” – Stephen J. Dubner
Geez Larry! Take it easy man.
In time. As in, over the length of this comment, you’ll get that we do not give the faintest fuck.
Empowering government to legislate morality, then expecting it to exercise restraint when political power changes hands? Is a guillotine you rigged for yourself.
Just watch your Nick Fuentes streams and tell yourself you’re part of the solution while the big boys actually do things.
In time. As in, over the length of this comment, you’ll get that we do not give the faintest f***.
Empowering government to legislate morality, then expecting it to exercise restraint when political power changes hands? Is a guillotine you rigged for yourself.
Just watch your Nick Fuentes streams and tell yourself you’re part of the solution while the big boys actually do things.
If the margin is less than 10%, the dems will steal it. They always win the close elections, because they can manufacture the ballots needed to win, and cull the ones they don’t want(the military ballots). That’s where we’re at.
Notice how the left has changed all the rules, times, and laws so they can win and destroy the will of the people. They continuously plot ways of doing evil.
Thanks Bruce, I enjoy reading about Sulla.
“The outcome of this “time for choosing,” as Ronald Reagan put it in 1964, will decide the answer to the ancient question I raised last week: Do the people have the capacity to rule themselves?”
The answer is only if REASON is an ABSOLUTE means of knowledege for undertanding REALITY and reality is one, and only one, natural, logical, reality. This reality we live in. If reason is not an absolute and there is more than one reality then men have no absolute means of knowledge to establish the facts of absolute reality, to reason upon the facts of reality, and arrive at OBJECTIVE conclusions they can peacefully agree upon through the means of rational argument, rational discussion, and rational persuasion.
“I have said that faith and force are corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind—a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence.” – Ayn Rand
“But we the people still have a Constitutional power––the right to vote in regularly scheduled elections. Soon those of us who cherish freedom and American exceptionalism will have an opportunity to slow down the dismantling of our Constitution and the degradation of our unalienable rights and freedom.”
Some Americans have been voting to SLOW DOWN America’s up to now inexorable collapse into dictatorship for a very long time. Slowing down does not mean STOPPING and REVERSING America’s inexorable collapse.
So what is the answer, not to slowing down the collapse, but stopping and reversing the collapse? The value of slowing down is buying time, but buying time for what? Without a philosophy that validates and champions REASON you can not validate and defend RATIONAL SELFISHNESS (self-preservation and self-interest) and invalidate its antipode; altruism and self-sacrifice. Without a rational and moral validation of SELFISHNESS you can not validate and champion individualism, individual rights, and private property rights, i.e., you can not validate, defend, and champion individual freedom, individual liberty, and Capitalism.
“It is often asked: Why was capitalism destroyed in spite of its incomparably beneficent record? The answer lies in the fact that the lifeline feeding any social system is a culture’s dominant philosophy and that capitalism never had a philosophical base. It was the last and (theoretically) incomplete product of an Aristotelian influence. As a resurgent tide of mysticism engulfed philosophy in the nineteenth century, capitalism was left in an intellectual vacuum, its lifeline cut. Neither its moral nature [rational selfishness] nor even its political principles had ever been fully understood or defined….
Capitalism could not survive in a culture dominated by mysticism and altruism, by the soul-body dichotomy and the tribal premise. No social system (and no human institution or activity of any kind) can survive without a moral base. On the basis of the altruist morality, capitalism had to be—and was—damned from the start.” – Ayn Rand
They’re going to cheat, count on it.
200,000 plus voters were recently added to the PA rolls that have not been verified by identification. This is also the state that received tens of thousands of filled out ballots in 2020, picked up by independent trucker Jesse Morgan in BETH PAGE, LONG ISLAND, and then transported to Harrisburg, PA. He was told by the USPS there to park for the night. The next morning the trailer was GONE. He blew the whistle and the PA Attorney General’s office began an investigation which Bill Barr shut down.
Let’s hope they don’t cheat enough. What happened last week in Brazil is prophetic, but let’s hope that Bolsonaro is back soon.
Reagan had a different direction for America not a half-hearted mitigation of the existing status quo. Voters have only two options with the available party structures now which are speed or more speed in decline.
What RADICAL (which is the opposite of half-hearted mitigation) different direction did President Reagan have for America? NONE.
President Reagan for all his lip-service to Free Market Capitalism in his domestic policies pursued the status-quo mixture of the American welfare state. He even gave amnesty to illegal aliens. He could have done no differently since he was a Christian devoted to the Christian morality of altruism and self-sacrifice for others.
You can not fight for freedom, liberty, and Capitalism if you are fundamentally guided by a belief in altruism and self-sacrifice. You can not fight for Capitalism with Christianity — not when the religion is true to itself. You can not tie Capitalism to religion, it is impossible. If you do religion will win and Capitalism will lose.
“Did Ayn Rand ever speak of Ronald Reagan? What do you suppose she would have said about his time in office?”
[audio src="https://peikoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/2011-12-12.194_F.mp3" /]
Ayn Rand? She’s a very minor thinker in the scheme of things… our problems (and “capitalism” which is just free enterprise by free men) are written in God’s word, the Bible. Our problems are as well… America’s decline is cause by the rapid deterioration of human character. This is a global phenomenon. Corruption and the sin which causes it, and the remedy are clearly delineated in the holy Scripture… Get to know the God of the Bible and you will no longer constantly quote Ayn Rand, who has no answers. The only answer is a massive return to Godly morality, ethical and law respecting lives, empowered by Messiah (Christ).
The corrupt behaviors described by Mr. Thornton are indicative of the decline of our nation and indeed our national character… voting against tyranny is our duty. Is’ our heritage and privilege. There must be a red wave to slow down destruction by a thousand cuts and criminal acts committed by our own government.
Comprehensive-Complete-Total Christianity produced the one-thousand years of the Christian Dark Ages.
Karl Marx began as a Christian. Marxism consists of the essential, fundamental, morali code of Christianity, namely altruism and self-sacrifice for other, but secularizes that moral code. Marxism is Christianity stripped of the supernatural elements of Christianity. Marxism ejects God and the after-life from the equation but keeps the mystical moral code of altruism and self-sacrifice and replaces sacrifice for Almighty God with sacrifice for neighbor and Almighty Society.
“Christianity prepared the ground. It paved the way for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamentals in the Western mind: in metaphysics, the worship of the supernatural; in epistemology, the reliance on faith; as a consequence, in ethics, the reverence for self-sacrifice.” – Leonard Peikoff
Proverbs 31:24 (CJB)
ס 24 She makes linen garments and sells them; she supplies the merchants with sashes.
“To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money—and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase “to make money.” No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.” – Ayn Rand
Great article. I think we can do it.
If 50 million people wrote to their congressman and demanded they grow a back-bone…they would. They need our votes.
“Remember the Republican “Revolution” of 1994?” – Michael J. Hurd
“I remember the Republican “revolution” of 1994, probably a bigger electoral victory than Republicans will experience next week. D.C. was a little less corrupt back then (not saying much), and Newt Gingrich meant well, as evidenced by the massive spending cuts (including all out elimination of entire federal agencies) he tried to pass. Two years later, it was a heap of ashes, Gingrich was ousted (like Trump 25 years later) and the cancer of irrationality and unlimited government regressed to the breaking point we see today.”
If the Dems win ANY of the midterms it will be because of rampant election fraud like the kind they pulled off in 2020. And I am speaking as a Certified Public Accountant with audit experience and who has read extensively the details of what happened in that year. It is breathtaking in scope. We have Bill Barr to blame for the whole thing as he refused to investigate reams of evidence coming in because he was “mad” at Trump.
Recently I listened to Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing”. It is well worth hearing again and again by all patriots. Invest half an hour of your time hearing it and you will be well rewarded for it.
Apparently, ‘suburban white women’ AKA ‘soccer mommies’ don’t like high inflation. All other issues(war, abortion, crime) are secondary. I hope the GOP remembers this when/if they take control of both the House and Senate.
A loaf of bread costs $5.00 at the grocery store now. We are headed toward economic ruin, or perhaps another Great Depression
Lets see how many voters decide they don’t want to be part of this New World Order of the woke left where everything is upside down from where it should be, where insanity rules their minds,
UNJUST LAWS: ISAIAH 10:1 Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people.
ISAIAH 5:20 “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and bitter for sweet.
2 TIMOTHY 4:4. “And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned into fables.”
THE TRUTH MATTERS.
Cafeteria Christianity is certainly less dangerous to human life than Comprehensive Christianity.
But it is BECAUSE today in the modern, secular, West reason is dominant over faith that individual, eccentric, unorthodox, pick and choose out of context, free and personal interpretations of Holy Scripture is possible.
When Christian faith ruled the West during the one-thousand years of the Christian Dark Ages, REASON was the mere handmaiden of faith. To reason was permitted by the Almighty Theocracy only when reason could buttress the faith, but if reason contradicted the faith, it was crushed and persecuted.
One would hope that people remember what its like to have freedom, to enrich their lives, work in prosperity, and security, not be forced into tyranny and mandates to take a fatal vaccine, believe in God our creator, and do whats right in the eyes of the Lord. It is he who gave us our blessings, not the government.
Daniel Webster “It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”
Benjamin Franklin: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have need of more masters.”