Life, Liberty, Property #68: Something is wrong with America today. The United States has strayed far from the values of its founders.
IN THIS ISSUE:
- Something Is Wrong
- The Real Biden Dilemma
- House Votes for Election Integrity
- Tax Rates Matter
- Inflation Reports Spur Hope of Monetary Relief
- Cartoon
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Something Is Wrong
“I knew immediately something was wrong,” former president Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social shortly after the assassination attempt against him on Saturday night. Something is certainly wrong with America today. The United States has strayed far from the values of its founders, away from the faith that once held us together, and distant from the cultural commonalities that we once shared.
Thousands of people have turned their backs on the ethics of individual liberty, personal responsibility, and the pursuit of virtue that built this nation and sustained it for nearly a quarter-millennium—which was an astounding, unprecedented achievement. They work actively to undermine those values and punish the “bitter” people who stubbornly continue to “cling” to them. Government, businesses, and social and cultural institutions actively work to undermine those principles and punish those who hold them.
The accumulation of an enormous amount of power in the hands of a small number of people in the United States has made politics far too important, the stakes much too high. The rhetoric, tactics, and actions deployed in the pursuit of political power have devolved into increasingly dishonest and depraved social warfare. Demonization of political outsiders has become routine. With people calling a presidential candidate an “existential threat to American democracy,” assassination attempts are to be expected.
Last Monday, in a video call with top donors, the sitting president of the United States said of his opponent, “It’s time to put Trump in the bull’s-eye.” The very next day, first lady Jill Biden said of Trump, “He’s evil,” in a campaign rally speech. The Democratic National Committee planned to put up billboards in battleground states calling the Project 2025 effort by think tanks unaffiliated with Trump’s campaign “Trump’s plan to be a dictator on Day 1.” In a campaign speech on Friday night, Joe Biden said, “Most importantly, and I mean this sincerely, Trump is a threat to this nation.”
A continual torrent of similar statements has flowed from other politicians opposing the former president. Trump’s rhetoric has regularly been caustic and exceedingly low-class, and he has had a strong hand in the ongoing vulgarization of political discourse. Nonetheless, Trump’s mockery of Biden has generally centered on allegations of incompetence and incapacity. Trump’s barbs are nothing like the incendiary statements emanating from the White House calling Trump an “evil” “existential threat” and an aspiring “dictator” who belongs “in the bull’s-eye.”
President Biden’s expression of sympathy in the wake of the shootings at the Pennsylvania Trump rally was appropriate and appeared heartfelt. It was far too little, however, and much too late a gesture to have any real effect in restoring some basic decency to the political process.
Power has thoroughly corrupted the people who now rule over the United States. The greedy and increasingly brutal and unprincipled pursuit of power has unleashed previously unimaginable levels of public indecency. Yet, somehow, we are surprised by the outcome.
No one is blameless in this situation. We have all done wrong. Some, however, are far more to blame than others. It is incumbent upon us, as a people, to face up to that and stop ignoring or making excuses for those who speak words of death.
It seems clear to me that a reckoning is on the way and has just moved much closer to the present. Either we, as a people, will honestly conduct that process of national self-evaluation, repentance, change, and renewal ourselves, or it will be imposed on us from outside, with far worse and pitilessly indiscriminate consequences.
As has become the consensus talking point among the commentariat, President Joe Biden’s debate performance was something of a revelation for the nation’s public. It became obvious that the president is not in charge, and consequently that who really is making the decisions for this nation is entirely unknown.
Biden’s performance in Thursday night’s highly scripted softball press conference did nothing to change the situation. It was largely the Biden we have seen regularly during the past couple of years: a diminished mental capacity (which never was very high in his case), bizarre outbursts and weirdly obvious (and therefore ineffective) attempts at emotional manipulation (such as the whispering and shouting), extremely politicized and reality-denying opinions on all subjects, a diabolical hatred of his political opponents (even to the extent of pridefully alluding to his grotesque, fascism-emulating 2022 speech outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia), gaffes even more amazing than is usual for him (Vice President Trump, Ukraine President Putin), demonization of anyone who disagrees with him, sentences trailing off into oblivion followed by a blithe “Anyway … ,” and the like.
All of this was abetted by a White House press corps so servile as to make performing seals look rebellious by comparison.
This, we are expected to believe, is a person fit to be president of the United States.
I used the passive mode in the sentence immediately above, with purpose. People outside the president’s immediate circle do not know who is running things. The public is apparently not to be trusted with that information.
I have made no secret of my belief that Biden and the government he ostensibly leads have been incompetent (such as here, here, and here, where I use that exact word). The important knowledge to derive from this turn of events is that the trouble is not with a particular candidate but with our political system as it currently stands.
American politics has deteriorated into an oligarchical managerial regime in which an embedded and lavishly compensated political class holds (but does not dare to assert) formal control over a massive, entrenched bureaucracy that micromanages the nation through a complicated scheme of lengthy, elaborate, and unfathomable laws and regulations developed in concert with gigantic multinational business interests whose government-relations teams fashion those laws and regulations to their stockholders’ and managers’ advantage.
In this environment, no one is safe from government harassment and eventual destruction—including the nation’s notional commander in chief, as President Donald Trump found out to his dismay. Rule of law has become rule of lawyers, and those with the cleverest and most unscrupulous schemers on their legal teams win.
Trump was wrong to call this the “deep state.” It is the state, pure and simple. There will always be elites, in any social system, and they will generally grab as much power as they can. Armed with modern managerial tools, extremely sophisticated public-relations propaganda techniques, and an enormous military built on the pretext of multiple fearsome foreign adversaries, a small group of elites wields a lever big enough to move the Earth. And move it, it does.
Today’s American oligarchy is the inevitable destination of mass democracy.
Although the real authority of elected officials has been eroded to next to nothing, their formal authority is essential to the system’s credibility, its (absurd) claim to represent the will of the people.
That is what “Our Democracy” really is: a fig leaf for a destructive oligarchy entirely without meritocratic norms and run increasingly as a hereditary kleptocracy. Biden let that fig leaf fall to the ground and is now being kicked repeatedly as he fumbles around looking for it. As Fred Watson Jr. put it at The American Sun,
Our president sits atop a system. That system makes decisions and very few get to the president’s desk. Despite that, you still want someone who can think or just draw a clock to sit atop the system. The frightening thing for normal citizens is that yes, a dementia patient has the nuclear codes. They swim in propaganda and can buy the line he was okay. Seeing something on the tv screen makes it real for them, so this was a shock. If he cannot run for president, he should not be president. The greater problem is that it reveals that yes, Virginia, we do live under a managerial system. No one knows who is in charge, but a system is in charge. This lays it bare for them if they want to see it.
That is the great political crime for which Joe Biden faces ejection from “power”: he exposed the fundamental fakeness of the U.S. government. This exposure was inadvertent on Biden’s part, as he is clearly not capable of controlling himself, but it was nonetheless an unforgivable lapse on his part.
Now Biden’s party must choose whether to rally behind him or replace him. This is where “the, the, the thing—you know, the thing” was always heading. It is a result of the Democrats’ bad luck—and spectacularly bad judgment—that the bandwagon arrived at the fork in the road well after Biden secured the president nomination.
To reaffirm support for Biden would be an attempt to continue to play the game as the party has been doing. It is possible that it would work, yet it seems decidedly unlikely. Biden is now so obviously past it that keeping him on the Democrat ticket would be an open declaration that the United States is ruled by a shadowy oligarchy, the motives of which seem to be dubious at best and in fact almost certainly sinister and grossly destructive. That is precisely what the party wants to avoid.
Jettisoning Biden in favor of any candidate other than the sitting vice president would jeopardize the party’s immense campaign war chest and infuriate the Democrats’ increasingly restive leftist base while intensifying the political visibility of the latter’s antisemitism. This, too, would tend to bring out the fact that the party stands for an oligarchy not apparently answerable to the people in any way.
Replacing Biden with Harris seems the safest course. With little evident intellectual ability or even a normal human curiosity about how things work, plus no sign of strong moral principles, Harris would be exceedingly unlikely to try to use the formal authority of the presidency to challenge the real powers behind the fake government. Moreover, it appears that the current election laws would allow Harris to inherit the Biden campaign’s money.
Choosing Harris as candidate for president would surely anger the “Squad” and Bernie Sanders’s army of democratic socialists. It is possible, however, that these factions could be bought off with a vice president candidacy plus a promise to pack the cabinet, courts, and bureaucracy with others of their ilk—and of course money. It worked when they tried it with Biden.
A Harris plus democrat socialist ticket could restore some credibility to the party, indicating that its leaders listen to their constituency and respond accordingly. That is hooey, of course, but some people love nonsense. In addition, it would be an obvious decision to concede the November elections. However, there is no guarantee that the party’s real masters would ever let Trump take office again, so it might not matter much anyway.
The real goal for the Democrat Party must be to restore the fig leaf and keep up the lie. To do otherwise means bringing on a war with the American people by refusing to accept the election results, one way or another. As Watson writes,
Win or lose, the Democrats face many issues. They are the proverbial bosses who run our show. No one believes it is a republic or a democracy now. The President Biden lie destroys that. The selected candidates doing nothing in office further prove that it is an unaccountable system. The Democrats are creeping towards a point where Biden’s decay forces them to finally admit that we live in a managed democracy and shut up, you get what we serve. This tip toes closer to an openly commie authoritarian regime. Those last when you don’t know who makes decisions and there is no class of individuals to target for removal. It becomes more precarious and requires much more force to maintain when everyone knows who is making their life miserable for no other reason than a suicidal ideology.
Obviously, nobody wants to go there unless there is no other course.
In Britain, thoughts seem to be turning in that direction, as the British independent political commentator Morgoth wrote gloomily at his Morgoth’s Review Substack page on the first day of the new Labour party government in the U.K.:
[I]t appalls me that the democratic system allows people to sabotage a great country and face no consequences beyond being “voted-out”. British people are routinely raped and murdered by foreigners allowed in by politicians, and all we can hope for is to get them out of office. Accountability is supposed to take place at the ballot box; that’s where you’re allowed a little cathartic dopamine, a piss-poor substitute for a trial and gallows, but there we have it. Ephemeral catharsis for a superficial, childish system of governance. Oh, the rapes and murders are real, and the casual anti-white hatred on the streets is real, but any repercussions are wrapped up in soft padding like an infant’s playpen.
And so, as the scum of the Tory Party flies off to their new jobs within the NGO and Public Private Partnership networks, we’re staring down the barrel of ten years of hard Labour.
Is open conflict in the United States still as inconceivable as we have always taken it to be? I think of the founding of our nation and must acknowledge that the people who did that would have risen up in arms against our current regime long before the sham Biden presidency reached this stage.
Are we no longer Americans, or has the reigning oligarchy underestimated its chosen foe?
Sources: The American Sun; Morgoth’s Review
The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation last week to prevent states from allowing noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Some states currently allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, and proponents of the bill argued that the federal government should ensure these persons ineligible to vote in federal elections cannot do so.
The proposed law would require prospective voters to provide proof of citizenship to register for federal elections. Those include elections to the presidency, vice presidency, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House of Representatives. The legislation also directs the states to remove noncitizens from the voter registration rolls for federal elections.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act passed 221-198, with five Democrats voting yes. AP made sure to name all five Democrats. The “news” service did not publish their home addresses, though I am sure that the editors really wanted to.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity posted that list as well, but it also published “the shameful list of 198 Democrats who are opposed to proof of citizenship for voting in federal elections.” Not nearly as many people will see that list as will see the other, of course.
The media’s spin on this bill is that it is unneeded and is solely intended “as an election-year talking point even as research shows noncitizens illegally registering and casting ballots in federal elections is exceptionally rare” and “part of a broader and long-term Trump campaign strategy of casting doubt on the validity of an election should he lose,” as AP put it:
The majority of Democrats and voting rights advocates have said the legislation is unnecessary because it’s already a felony for noncitizens to register to vote in federal elections, punishable by fines, prison or deportation. Anyone registering must attest under penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen. Noncitizens also are not allowed to cast ballots at the state level. A handful of municipalities allow them to vote in some local elections.
The argument that the bill is superfluous because illegal voter registration is already illegal is an obvious sophistry. The bill is meant to make sure states enforce the law. Somehow the opponents of the legislation seem to have overlooked that.
“Even though it’s already illegal, this is happening,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said.
Republicans note that illegal votes reduce the value of legal ones, AP reported after providing the opposition arguments (which one might think a biased editorial decision; I’ll leave it to you to decide):
Republicans who support the bill contend the unprecedented surge of migrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border creates too large a risk of noncitizens slipping through the cracks and casting ballots that sway races in November.
“Every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a legal American citizen,” said Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, the Republican chair of the House Administration Committee.
The “mainstream” media outlets made sure to lead their stories with the claim that “research shows noncitizens illegally registering and casting ballots in federal elections is exceptionally rare,” as AP stated.
I have my doubts about the credibility of that research, as I think any reasonable person would. As this item I’m writing is a commentary and not a news story, I am free to add my opinion that the real reason for opposing this bill is a desire to protect every possible means of enabling the accumulation of phony votes in states across the country.
It is noteworthy that ease of voter registration and “harvesting” of ballots are the Left’s sole priority in managing “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections.” Making sure that only eligible individuals vote is no concern whatsoever.
Accordingly, the SAVE Act “would make it much harder for all eligible Americans to register to vote and increase the risk that eligible voters are purged from voter rolls,” the Biden administration stated.
“House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass., said in a ‘Whip Question’ sent to House Democrats that because of the act’s proof of citizenship requirement, it ‘would prevent Americans from registering to vote with their drivers’ license alone,” The Center Square accurately reported. Bill sponsor Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) “disputed that, arguing Democrats oppose it ‘because they WANT non-citizens, including illegals, to vote,’” the news organization added.
Making voter registration easier means making phony registration easier, too. One might suppose that this is mere coincidence or an unfortunate unintended consequence. I do not.
There have in fact been numerous reports of voter registration numbers exceeding the count of people eligible to vote in various places. In California, for example, the Election Integrity Project found that the state had 1.8 million more registered voters than the number of eligible citizens, with 23 counties showing “more registered voters than eligible,” and “there [were] almost 124,000 more votes counted in California’s November 3, 2020 election than voters recorded as voting in that election,” the California Globe reported in 2021. The number of ineligible voter registrations in California nearly doubled in just four years:
California is a one-party state, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans by more than three-to-one in the State Assembly and four-to-one in the state Senate. Perhaps that is mere happenstance.
Source: Wikipedia
In 2017, the United States had “3.5 million more registered voters than live adults,” commentator Deroy Murdock reported in National Review at the time. Murdock found “462 counties where the registration rate exceeded 100 percent,” by analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011-2015 American Community Survey and statistics from the federal Election Assistance Commission collected by Judicial Watch.
Some counties have startling numbers of falsely registered voters, Murdock noted:
These 462 counties (18.5 percent of the 2,500 studied) exhibit this ghost-voter problem. These range from 101 percent registration in Delaware’s New Castle County to New Mexico’s Harding County, where there are 62 percent more registered voters than living, breathing adult citizens—or a 162 percent registration rate.
Washington’s Clark County is worrisome, given its 154 percent registration rate. This includes 166,811 ghost voters. Georgia’s Fulton County seems less nettlesome at 108 percent registration, except for the number of Greater Atlantans, 53,172, who compose that figure.
But California’s San Diego County earns the enchilada grande. Its 138 percent registration translates into 810,966 ghost voters. Los Angeles County’s 112 percent rate equals 707,475 over-registrations. Beyond the official data that it received, Judicial Watch reports that LA County employees “informed us that the total number of registered voters now stands at a number that is a whopping 144 percent of the total number of resident citizens of voting age.”
All told, California is a veritable haunted house, teeming with 1,736,556 ghost voters.
Murdock found large amounts of falsely registered voters in what were then battleground states:
‐ Colorado: 159,373
‐ Florida: 100,782
‐ Iowa: 31,077
‐ Michigan: 225,235
‐ New Hampshire: 8,211
‐ North Carolina: 189,721
‐ Virginia: 89,979
In Virginia, a “James Madison University student was sentenced to prison Tuesday after pleading guilty to registering dead voters for the Democratic Party during the 2016 election,” the Washington Examiner reported in 2017. “Spieles worked as a Democratic campaign operative during its voter registration drive, and admitted that he prepared the false voter registration forms by obtaining the name, age, and address of individuals from ‘walk sheets’ provided to him by the Virginia Democratic Party,” the paper reported.
In Indiana that same year, AP reported, “Twelve employees of a Democrat-linked group focused on mobilizing black voters in Indiana are accused of submitting fake or fraudulent voter registration applications ahead of last year’s general election in order to meet quotas, according to charging documents filed Friday.” As in the Virginia case, a political party was behind the illegal scheme: “The Indiana Voter Registration Project’s effort to register primarily black voters was overseen by Patriot Majority USA, which has ties to the Democratic Party, including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and former President Bill Clinton.”
President Joe Biden, of course, has embraced voter registration with a passion, directing his entire administration to assist in packing the nation’s voter rolls. With that in mind, Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales (a Republican) “warned more than 120 federal agencies operating in Indiana against providing voter registration services described in a three-year-old presidential executive order without state approval” earlier this month, according to the Greenfield Daily Reporter.
On the other side of the political aisle, a Georgia GOP official was fined $5,000 for voting while on “extended probation in connection with a pair of felony convictions dating back nearly 30 years” in Pennsylvania, NBC News reported.
To explore the subject further and draw your own conclusions about the two major parties’ election fraud habits, the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database provides a highly useful “sampling of recent proven instances of election fraud from across the country,” each of which “ended in a finding that the individual had engaged in wrongdoing in connection with an election hoping to affect its outcome—or that the results of an election were sufficiently in question and had to be overturned.”
Many proponents of easier voter registration probably want nothing more than to help little old ladies cross the street to the voting booth. Many others, however, clearly want to use ease of voter registration to enable themselves to “find” enough votes to win every election. There is no logical reason to dismiss the existence of the latter or even to posit that their motives do not dominate that movement.
Of course, the SAVE Act will not make it through the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate, and Biden would veto it should it somehow land on his desk (which will not happen anyway, as I said). That does make the legislation rather forlorn.
It does not, however, make the legislation unnecessary.
Sources: AP; The Center Square; Greenfield Daily Reporter
In 2016, the corporate tax rate in the United States was the highest in the world, at an average of 40 percent (including state and local taxes), “while the rest of the world was closer to 20%, and some countries were at or below 15%,” the Committee to Unleash Prosperity notes.
Those high tax rates were causing U.S. companies to move overseas to enjoy lower taxes abroad, a process known as corporate inversion. Those corporate relocations moved U.S. factories and jobs overseas.
Cutting the tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent would encourage companies to remain in the United States, supply-side economic theory suggested. That policy was incorporated in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
It worked. Perfectly.
In the five years from 2018 through 2022, not a single U.S. corporation underwent inversion, the Committee’s newsletter reports former House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady as stating.
“The companies and the jobs stayed here. They’re likely to stay firmly planted here—unless Biden or Kamala is elected and raises the rate back up to 28%,” the newsletter reports.
The reversal of the corporate inversion trend is as direct a confirmation of an economic principle as you are ever likely to see. Tax rates matter.
Major provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expire at the end of this year. Other highly beneficial effects of that tax reform bill will go by the wayside unless both Congress and the next president approve an extension.
Tax rates matter. Votes matter.
Source: Committee to Unleash Prosperity
The most recent inflation report for the United States showed the consumer price index falling slightly, to a 3 percent annual rate. Core prices have risen 3.3 percent from a year earlier, after the mildest monthly increase since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.
The slowing of inflation is attributable to intense monetary tightening by the Federal Reserve since 2022 and the tacit agreement between the Biden administration and House Republicans to keep increases in federal spending at merely highly irresponsible levels as opposed to the disastrous binge of 2021-2022.
This fiscal and monetary pullback from the abyss has increased unemployment enough to make the Fed governors happy and will allow them to start lowering interest rates later this year. With the slowing of the increases in wages and prices, the Fed is finally nearing the point where it can claim that 3 percent inflation is close enough to its announced goal of 2 percent to allow a slight loosening of monetary policy. A 50 percent miss is as good as a hit, I guess.
Of course, the inflation numbers are inaccurate for a variety of reasons, as I have noted many times previously, but they are the Fed’s compass, so we’ll just have to follow along.
The lowering of interest rates is intended to help reduce the monetary restrictions on the economy that have created troubles in companies big and small across the country. Whether it will arrive in time to avert an overall economic slowdown is anybody’s guess.
When faced with inflation or recession, the Fed has generally adjusted the money supply too late, too much, too slowly, and for too long. We are now in the “too long” phase of the cycle.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Cartoon
via Comically Incorrect
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