By Carl Nelson

            Write about what you know.

The first thing to realize (though it took me awhile) is that life is a very competitive place. This was brought home to me while working with my wife selling copiers. Fellow salespeople were cordial enough, until we began to succeed. At first, I couldn’t understand the temperature drop. But it’s true enough everywhere. On the one hand success brings respect, while on the other, it spawns resentment. My nature is to value relationship over achievement, so that this has tended to skew my persona a bit towards the self-deferential, as a bit of self-deprecation makes people (appear to) like me – or at least, laugh. To wit, I am much more comfortable writing an essay about the lack of success than a surfeit of it. And happily enough, this scuffed shoe fits, so I wear it.

But I don’t necessarily live here. And I can flip it around, spin it for fun. Because,

“People will always treat you the way you allow them to.” – Jordan Peterson

For example, I quit medicine after receiving my M.D. But I joke that I’ve probably saved more lives by quitting medicine than a lot of doctors have by continuing. (Oddly enough, the Covid-19 experience came close to revoking the humor of that.)

On the Jungian Type test, I assay as an INFP. This is a person whose primary function is introverted feeling and whose secondary function is extroverted intuition. (Our conversation will jump around a lot.). We’re the flakes of the world: spacey, dreamy, impractical, artistic and prone to confabulate. (I hate reading about my type, and generally when I do I just shake my head and sigh.) Notions can infatuate me – for a week or so. Of the sixteen types INFPs peg the average yearly income bottom, and out of the sixteen types, we produce fully one third of all suicides. We lead the unsuccessful. We head the pack – and often right off the cliff.

Being an INFP is a little like being barefoot in a roomful of tacks. We take a lot of punching and give little back. Turning the other cheek (ignoring the slight) is our default. But we have insight, empathy, and within these strictures can strategize fairly well. This is an excellent type for a writer. We excel at words and yet are unassuming and nonthreatening. Strangers will often confide in me the most astonishing things. Crimes, rape, sodomy, hard time, felonies, arrests, relationship problems… we are people that troubled individuals will approach. I’m sort of like the stranger on the train who someone confesses to, knowing they’ll never see me again. 

All Along the Watchtower

Strangers tell me things, which later
were like a fart they’d not confess,
and me like a prostitute they’d deny. Though,
I’ve never taken money! like some.

Do I tilt my head while listening,
or raise an ear?
I share a lot with my dog
I’d rather keep private.

I have no degree, authority, scheme or plan to offer
– but my confusion, which they receive smugly.
(“You’re confused now?
Wait till you hear this…”)

Though I am only listening to one person,
yet the hardest problem is not taking sides.
Like one hand clapping…
is this listening to difficulties.

Success is a slippery creature, (at least for someone like me), and something like catching a big fish. It’ll flip around and need a lot of attention. The only real way to use it is to kill it; then you eat of its flesh. At least that’s how I’ve regarded it. “What would you do if you had a ten million dollar company?”

“Well, I’d sell it.”

Success is like riding a tiger. You may not want to be there, but you’re afraid to jump off. Often success will take you where you don’t want to go, and leave you in the middle of where you don’t belong, if it hasn’t gobbled you up.

For example, I was successful in school. This will solve a lot of life’s problems when you’re growing up. But it can also gobble up a quarter of your life. It gobbled up a quarter of mine and spit me out with an MD – which I didn’t want to use. Wandering about, I met a fellow out in the desert of New Mexico living in a cave, who had spent six years getting his metallurgical degree from Stanford University – only to decide, after six months in the workaday world, to quit. I gave him some of my food, and he instructed me in throwing the I Ching, while I overnighted there in his cave. (“A bite from the younger, green scorpions will hurt like hell, but won’t kill you.”)

In my scheme of things, one of life’s possible pitfalls is to realize, when doing something you enjoy, that “a person could make some money doing this!” It’s all money left on the table, it would seem. And all one has to do is claim it. Here’s Susan Sontag’s rehash of how easy it is to get sucked in:

“Most particularly I become frightened to realize how close I came to letting myself slide into the academic life. It would have been effortless … just keep on making good grades…stayed for a master’s and a teaching assistantship, wrote a couple of papers on obscure subjects that nobody cares about, and, at the age of sixty, be ugly and respected and a full professor. Why, I was looking through the English Dept. publications in the library today — long (hundreds of pages) monographs on such subjects as: The Use of ‘Tu’ and ‘Vous’ in Voltaire; The Social Criticism of Fenimore Cooper; A Bibliography of the Writings of Bret Harte in the Magazines + Newspapers of California (1859–1891) …Jesus Christ! What did I almost submit to?!?” – Susan Sontag

A little further on – and it often isn’t that much further along – one finds that they can make a living, possibly even a good one doing this! It’s as if one has found their life’s path and with a financial security which has been established. It’s a godsend! Then, marriage and a few kids, and suddenly one discovers that they must make money doing this. Stress and tension invades the pleasure. Am I really happier now, they ponder?

This sort of evolution can occur with about anything. For example, you finally find that certain woman you want to marry and build a life with. A little later it might come to you that she is now the only woman you may build a life with. This can come as a shock to some. What were they thinking? Life is full of twists and turns, tees and y’s. They’ll come upon you no matter what. And success seems to incentivize and then lock-in our choices.

“Studying history, Madison homed in on an immutable fact of human nature – as the authors put it, “people are naturally ambitious and tend to seek power over not just their own lives but others.” – Andrew C. McCarthy reviewing “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law” by Neil Gorsuch & Janie Nitze

This being so, a person of my characterization finds his best defense is the burrow. And online is a virtual labyrinth of them. No one can shout you down online. All caps is not persuasive, nor threatening. You are difficult to intimidate. Your thought is difficult to eliminate. Tellingly, one of the pat putdowns of those of us who frequent online is that we are a nest of pale, flabby, introverted “losers” or trolls. Well, yes and no. I’m neither pale nor particularly flabby, but my wife does tell me that I mumble.

But not online! (Because there’s Spell-check.)

Still, off-line, a little success is required, if only to survive. An actress/playwright I saw performing her travelling one-act, did a bit about how she kept bread on the table by being a care-giver. “No one wants the jobs, and they are always looking for a body” – “Yep. You’ve got one, let’s go.” Myself, I did bus driving and telemarketing. These are jobs where you’re off in an unmarked cubicle, and can make sufficient money working part time. The world leaves you alone driving bus, and you pester the world telemarketing. So I had it going both ways. These are not plush gigs. And they don’t necessarily attract women. But even the Zen Masters had to cut wood and haul water.

And it’s comfortable to think of yourself as a freelance Zen Master or a Yoda, while pushing that mop. Most of those like me, do, I suspect. We are quiet, little introverted geniuses, like elves who appear in the night to assist the shoemaker. We often find ourselves associated with a successful person. (Example: my wife.)

The thing is to know your limitations. For the successful, say perhaps President Trump, success is not a limitation; it’s a fuel. But for someone like me, it could be a real problem.

The thinking that it takes money to do things is common – especially among people who’d rather not exert the effort. But in many ways money is an impediment to creation. For example, in the theater world where I worked for at least a decade as a playwright, no money got a lot of theater produced. As more and more money was added, less and less art was produced. In the small theater group I belonged to they produced three or four shows a year with perhaps the work of ten playwrights contributing to each show. Receipts from past shows paid the theater rental on the next. A person could literally walk in off the street (and some street people did) with a scribbled script in hand and get a staged reading (actors cast from the attendees) – that evening!

“The most outre’ ideas are tried when little is at stake, both monetarily and critically. Money starts a lot of spoons stirring which aren’t artistic, and creative work under money’s influence will often harden prematurely around whatever is there, like concrete curing.”…

“The Yale Drama Series is an annual international competition for emerging playwrights. The winner receives the David Charles Horn prize of $10,000, publication of the their manuscript by Yale University Press and a professional staged reading. Aya Akhtar is the judge for the 2018-2019 competitions.”

Over 15,400 submissions have been received and read since the competition began in 2007. They have come from 103 countries.” – (Peristalsis / The Journey of a Poet magicbeanbooks.co)

Wow! One script reading per year. What a boon to artistic development!

Where do all of our star athletes come from? Are their spectacular skills purchased by million dollar contracts, or are they developed as kids and young athletes in sandlot games?

The biggest problem with it all is that success seems to nail you down, and the bigger the success, the more securely you might find yourself nailed. A good example might be the rabbi, Nicodemus, of New Testament fame as depicted in the Netflix serial, “The Chosen”.

Nicodemus is a high ranking, venerable Pharisee, who leads the comfortable, envied existence of someone risen to the top of his profession. He has a regal wife, and envied status. Nicodemus however is a seeker of God. And he is tired and feeling hidebound by the strictures of his duties, which ostensibly are encased in scholarly descriptions of the path to God, but which he suspects, actually restrain him spiritually. When, serendipitously, he crosses paths with Jesus, and he suffers a true spiritual recognition of God in the flesh – Nicodemus is torn between his loyalty to his profession, his family, with all of its trappings, and his loyalty to God. This is a thing far too nebulous to be explained to his very practical relations and rabbinical students. Sadly, he defers Jesus’ offer of a discipleship, and stunts his life. (Perhaps even his entry into heaven.)

It’s notable that Jesus fished the unsuccessful of this world when looking for disciples. A couple bankrupt fishermen, a taxman who had no friends among the people and whose parents rebuffed him and women with sketchy pasts come to mind.

Successful people are stuck too fast to this world. Or as Jesus put it: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.”

There’s a zillion of the unsuccessful, like seedlings sprinkled throughout the culture, plying our trades while living modestly, but all ready to go. We’re following our inspiration daily and heading wherever it’s brightest.

As in a Shakespearean court, it is only the Fool (the hapless) who is allowed to spout the truth. But he doesn’t try to monetize it, or to crusade about it. The Fool merely intends to charm with it. For if he can charm the court into enjoying a realization of the truth – who knows where this could trend? Christ created the Church on this rock.

Likewise, this is one of the perks of being unsuccessful. It’s expected of you to continually make ‘errors’, and to harbor illusions, spout non sequiturs and say silly things. And I love my harbored allusions. I record them in poems. And when a person enjoys the poem, I’ve opened another eyelid slightly. There’s another individual who will enjoy turning over a thought to examine the underside. There’s another lover of the hidden world. Just like anybody, I’m trying to convert others to my situation, and into a cheaper, humble, but more interesting way of living. At least that’s how I see it. It’s inexpensive work. And I’m fully prepared for you to not even notice, as I’m busy anyway.

I’ll still be here when you return.

By Victor Davis Hanson

April 3, President Donald Trump announced it as “Liberation Day.” And by that he meant we were going to be liberated from asymmetrical tariffs of the last 50 years. And it was going to inaugurate a new what he called “golden age” of trade parity, greater investment in the United States, but mostly, greater job opportunities and higher-paying jobs for Americans.

And yet, the world seemed to erupt in anger. It was very strange. Even people on the libertarian right and, of course, the left were very angry. The Wall Street Journal pilloried Donald Trump.

But here’s my question. China has prohibitive tariffs, so does Vietnam, so does Mexico, so does Europe. So do a lot of countries. So does India. But if tariffs are so destructive of their economies, why is China booming? How did India become an economic powerhouse when it has these exorbitant tariffs on American imports? How did Vietnam, of all places, become such a different country even though it has these prohibitive tariffs? Why isn’t Germany, before its energy problems, why wasn’t it a wreck? It’s got tariffs on almost everything that we send them. How is the EU even functioning with these tariffs?

I thought tariffs destroyed an economy, but they seem to like them. And they’re angry that they’re no longer asymmetrical. Apparently, people who are tariffing us think tariffs improve their economy. Maybe they’re right. I don’t know.

The second thing is, why would you get angry at the person who is reacting to the asymmetrical tariff and not the people who inaugurated the tariff?

Why is Canada mad at us when it’s running a $63 billion surplus and it has tariffs on some American products at 250%. Doesn’t it seem like the people who started this asymmetrical—if I could use the word—trade war should be the culpable people, not the people who are reluctantly reacting to it?

Sort of like Ukraine and Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine. Do we blame Ukraine for defending itself and trying to reciprocate? No, we don’t. We don’t blame America because it finally woke up and said, “Whatever they tariff us we’re gonna tariff them.” Which brings up another question: Are our tariffs really tariffs?

That is, were they preemptive? Were they leveled against countries that had no tariffs against us? Were they punitive? No. They’re almost leveled on autopilot. Whatever a particular country tariffs us, we reciprocate and just mirror image them. And they go off anytime that country says, “It was a mistake. We’re sorry. You’re an ally. You’re a neutral. We’re not going to tariff this American product.” And we say, “Fine.” Then the autopilot ceases and the automatic tariff ends. In other words, it’s their choice, not ours. We’re just reacting to what they did, not what we did.

Couple of other questions that I’ve had. We haven’t run a trade surplus since 1975—50 years. So, it wasn’t suddenly we woke up and said, “It’s unfair. We want commercial justice.” No. We’ve been watching this happen. For 50 years it’s been going on. And no president, no administration, no Congress in the past has done anything about it. Done anything about what? Leveling tariffs on our products that we don’t level on theirs.

It was all predicated in the postwar period. We were so affluent, so powerful—Europe, China, Russia were in shambles—that we had to take up the burdens of reviving the economy by taking great trade deficits. Fifty years later, we have been deindustrialized. And the countries who did this to us, by these unfair and asymmetrical tariffs, did not fall apart. They did not self-destruct. They apparently thought it was in their self-interest. And if anybody calibrates the recent gross domestic product growth of India or Taiwan or South Korea or Japan, they seem to have some logic to it.

There’s a final irony. The people who are warning us most vehemently about this tariff quote the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930. But remember something, that came after the onset of the Depression—after. The stock market crashed in 1929. That law was not passed until 1930. It was not really amplified until ’31.

And here’s the other thing that they were, conveniently, not reminded of: We were running a surplus. That was a preemptive punitive tariff, on our part, against other countries. We had a trade surplus. And it was not 10% or 20%. Some of the tariffs were 40% and 50%. And again, it happened after the collapse of the stock market.

In conclusion, don’t you find it very ironic that Wall Street is blaming the Trump tariffs for heading us into a recession, if not depression, when the only great depression we’ve ever had was not caused by tariffs but by Wall Street?

First published in the Daily Signal

By Glenn Harlan Reynolds

On Wednesday I did a panel, with three other colleagues, on the first ten weeks of the Trump Administration. I kind of wish it had been televised, as I think it would have been a boost for the Trump Administration’s policies.

As you might imagine, the other panelists were for the most part more negative on what’s going on than I am, given that I’m not really negative at all. But one of the presentations was just a long list of horrors brought on by the Trump administration in terms of defunding universities, NGOs, and big law firms, deporting illegals, and so on that made me want to exclaim, like the popular meme, I already voted for him, you don’t have to sell me!

That’s me on the left. We look a bit glum in this pic, but the panel was actually pretty cheery.

The awfulness of these steps wasn’t self-evident to me, although it was kind of assumed, and I doubt it would have been self-evident to an audience of the general public either.

As one of the other presenters noted, Trump is hardly alone in starting office with a flurry of executive orders; a lovely graphic of presidencies going back to FDR had Trump in the lead for most EOs in the first hundred days so far, but in his first term he was comfortably within the pack. And Trump has a lot to do, and not a lot of time to do it in. By November, we’ll be heading into midterms.

My talk was a pretty technical Administrative Law discussion of the Supreme Court and various cases pending and recent. In essence, much of what people are calling executive overreach is merely a case of Trump exercising powers already delegated to him by statutes like IEEPA (the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which lawyers in the field pronounce “I-yee-pa” to be cool), other trade laws, immigration laws, etc. People underestimate the extent of presidential power under these statutes: In the 1981 case of U.S. v. Spawr Optical, the Spawrs were convicted of violating the Export Administration Act. Their defense that the Act had expired when they exported their products sounded pretty good, but the expired statute had been re-enacted by executive order under the president’s powers via the Trading With The Enemy Act.

The D.C. Circuit held that the Act

delegated to the President broad and extensive powers; “it could not have been otherwise if the President were to have, within constitutional boundaries, the flexibility required to meet problems surrounding a national emergency with the success desired by Congress.” United States v. Yoshida International, Inc., 526 F.2d 560, 573 (Cust. & Pat.App.1975) (footnote omitted). Wary of impairing the flexibility necessary to such a broad delegation, courts have not normally reviewed “the essentially political questions surrounding the declaration or continuance of a national emergency.”

Courts – at least district courts – seem less deferential to the executive now that his last name is Trump. But if you can throw people in jail for violating an expired statute that the president has extended by fiat – and this was not the first time that extension had happened – it’s hard to argue that what Trump has been doing represents some sort of new power grab.

If you can fault Trump for anything, in fact, it’s for not doing enough on the legislative front, not for doing too much on the executive front. Admittedly, Congress is not his responsibility. But it kind of is. And it’s certainly true that if Congress doesn’t start pushing out legislation soon, the lost momentum will cost them – and him.

This week, for example, we got a House rule change to allow remote voting for new mothers in Congress, something that was trivial, but that to the extent it did anything was harmful. You can bet that the slippery slope will be extended to people with medical problems and that, just as a deceased Democratic Rep. was still tweeting after his death, some Representative – probably also a Democrat – will wind up voting after death. We already had a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency, we don’t need multiple Bernies in Congress. But then they went home.

What they didn’t do was pass any legislation relating to controlling rogue District Courts, or defunding and and eliminating federal agencies, or requiring photo ID to vote, or eliminating federal funds to states that interfere with immigration laws, or . . . well, lots of things, absolutely none of which got done.

Maybe they know what they’re doing. After Florida’s special elections, the majority is, for the moment, a bit bigger, so maybe it’s worth waiting. Maybe not, though. Faster, please has been my view on this stuff all along, and I think I’m right.

Members of Congress are home for the weekend. Maybe you should talk to yours.

First published in Glenn’s Substack

By Roger L Simon

My father was a doctor and when I was a kid in the 1950s I recall asking him why he didn’t advertise. Medicine was his business, wasn’t it? Normally responsive to my questions, he was taken aback, wondering how I would even countenance such a thing. The honorable medical profession was above that. They weren’t a bag of potato chips or the latest Chevrolet.

I think he said something about Hippocrates, but maybe I’m making that part up. He did at other times.

I don’t remember him advertising or anyone he was associated with doing so. And I don’t remember pharmaceutical ads for prescription drugs on radio and TV either, for the latest antibiotic or anything else. The exception was for over-the-counter drugs, usually analgesics in some form or cough medicine. “Alka Seltzer, Speedy Alka-Seltzer” is forever implanted in my brain.

That was then, as they say, and this is now. We have all sorts of advertisements for medical installations big and small competing for our attention (and money), but even worse we have virtually non-stop advertising for prescription drugs on television. Indeed they seem to dominate the medium appearing on cable and network alike to the degree that sometimes you wonder if there is anything else. I imagine my father would be appalled.

Seemingly most common of these ads are the semaglutide weight loss drugs (Ozempic, etc.) that feature chubby women dancing about gleefully among various food displays, supermarket and open air, in praise of the wonders of the drug until the narrator begins the required recitation of side effects at a speed approaching Mach 20. At that moment the visual explodes into a latter-day Busby Berkeley routine, triumphant music swelling, to distract viewers from the narration lest they might catch that the drug could inspire suicidal ideation or give you any of several dreaded, possibly terminal, diseases.

The audience for these extravaganzas are reassured that all will be well for life, they will find love, they can go to the beach this summer, as long as they take their injection.

This preys especially on young women promising them papa Big Pharma will remedy whatever bad habits they have developed since childhood throughout their lives. Thereby those same habits are as likely to be encouraged as much as mitigated. We see the results in our world-leading obesity rates. Of course that’s not the only cause, but it’s one of them.

Spookier and now apparently growing are adverts for drugs to cure mental disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar (Fanapt, etc.). They began as live action ads with twenty-somethings strolling in the park while a voice over explains their seemingly paranoid thoughts are not really abnormal but are what everybody has, and can be made to fade into the ether by the use of the drug. You will be able to walk off, happily ever after, with the significant other of your choice.

These ads have proliferated and are now in cartoon form, perhaps to reach a younger audience. Meanwhile, the drugs themselves are controversial and do not always work. Some think they should not be taken at all or are less effective than a walk around the block. These are questions that should not, to say the least, be resolved in fifty seconds of manipulative television. It’s hard enough in a medical office where the doctor is forever tinkering with dosages to find a solution to often intractable emotional problems.

The United States and New Zealand are the only countries where prescription drug ads are legal on television. Some would argue that this shows us standing up for freedom of speech, but I would submit there is something here eerily equivalent to that famous limitation on speech — “yelling fire in a crowded theatre.”

That theatre is of course our country where drug use of all sorts, legal and otherwise, proliferates. On multiple occasions, some have advocated making all drugs legal, but that supposed idealism ends up being a danger to public safety and is almost always rescinded.

Fentanyl is only the latest in a long parade of such nightmares going back to opium and beyond. While the Trump administration is justified in cracking down on the Mexican Cartels and China for importing Fentanyl, why do so many of our citizens feel a need for this hugely-destructive drug in the first place?

Some of the explanation for this cycle of addiction must be that our entire society is constantly bombarded from early childhood—on television most of all but virtually everywhere else—with propaganda that drugs in various forms are the salvation from life’s pain. Not only is this not true, it is most often absolutely the reverse, no matter who is selling the drugs. We saw this writ large during COVID-19. Fentanyl is the dark, or darker, side of all this, as are the use of various drugs for the young to alter their “gender” even before puberty.

We live in a society where pharmaceutical corporations hypnotize us into thinking there is a pill for everything. They are doing the same to the medical community on a daily basis for mutual gain. Too many doctors have become prisoners of both the pharmaceutical companies and themselves, leaning expectantly on lobbyists for the latest cure-alls. It’s a toxic syndrome that must be stopped.

In the midst of the monumental changes initiated by the Trump administration, arguably the most important, the most salubrious to all of us in the end, stems from the supposedly controversial appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. He has long been an opponent of this form of advertising, not to mention numerous other neglected aspects of public health, including but not limited to what we eat. That last is more than arguably the most significant of all.

Mr. Kennedy has been attacked in a variety of ways, most prominently because he is accused of not having the proper credentials for the job. Some of us, given what has occurred in recent years, might consider that a feature, not a bug, but nevertheless he is flanked by Jay Bhatturchaya as the new Director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Bhatturchaya is about as credentialed as anyone you could find with many accomplishments in the field, the greatest of which may have been to have led the way to sanity internationally during COVID as co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

Mr. Kennedy will undoubtedly make mistakes, as we all do, and many will be watching to correct them, but his overweening goal- to Make America Healthy Again—deserves the highest ;raise. With our embarrassingly low longevity numbers compared to other developed nations coupled with the fact we pay more for our healthcare than any, we are in clear need of a drastic course correction.

It’s going to be one difficult correction since an unholy percentage of our congresspeople suck at the teat of Big Pharma.

But bravo, Bobby. Go for it. We the People are behind you. MAHA!

First published in American Refugees

By Bruce Bawer

I dreamed the other night that I was wanted by the British police. And in the dream I wasn’t even in Britain. I was in New York, where I’d attracted the attention of British authorities by putting up a political poster, or something like that. But even though I was outside of their jurisdiction, the British police were after me. They were going to arrest me, put me on trial, and have me jailed for my opinions. I was apparently facing two to three years in the hoosegow. Such, in my dream, was the reach of British “justice.”

It was a nice dream to wake up from.

The reason for my dream is obvious. These days, even if you’re not living in Britain, you’ve got to be terrified by the speed with which British liberty is going down the tubes.

And it’s not just liberty, of course. Pretty much everything British is being dismantled – in many cases by the very people who are responsible for preserving it.

In Shakespeare’s hometown, Stratford-upon–Avon, the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust has decided that it’s necessary to “decolonize” the museum devoted to the Bard’s life and work. The museum experience, they’ve said, needs to be more “inclusive.” Shakespeare’s plays, you see, promote “white European supremacy,” and something  needs to be done about that.

This announcement comes two years after the Globe theater in London, modeled on the playhouse in which many of Shakespeare’s works were first performed, warned patrons that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is awash in “misogyny and racism.” Several theatergoers have written articles complaining that the texts of the Shakespeare plays performed at the Globe these days have been radically revised to avoid offending and to make politically correct points.

Then there’s the National Trust, which is charged with maintaining hundreds of historic properties in the UK. In recent years, it’s been laboring overtime to destroy Britain’s good name. You’ve heard of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which sought to depict American history as being irredeemably tainted by the evil of slavery? Well, the National Trust has tried to do exactly the same thing for Britain, commissioning a report which concluded that the trafficking of black slaves by evil white men was central to the formation of today’s Britain.

Never mind that it was Britain whose Royal Navy, staffed by white men, put an end to the Atlantic slave trade – a noble and selfless pursuit that they carried out at great physical risk to themselves and great economic expense to their country. Two centuries later, slavery continues to exist in many majority non-white countries – a fact that organizations like the National Trust refuse to acknowledge.

So dishonest is the National Trust about these and other matters that a group called Restore Trust was founded some time ago to address its systematic denigration of everything that those stately country houses and gardens stand for.

But it’s the loss of British liberty that is most striking to an outsider. Some of us have known about it for quite a while. Others were unaware of it until Vice President J.D. Vance delivered his now famous Munich speech on February 14. He cited worrying examples of clampdowns on free speech in several European countries, but, quite rightly – given the special ties between the U.S. and UK and the speed with which our Mother Country is destroying itself – he saved the UK for last, and dwelled on it the longest.

In Britain, warned Vance, “the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.” He discussed the case of an Army veteran named Adam Smith-Connor, who’d been fined thousands of pounds for “standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes.”

Vance could have mentioned hundreds of similar cases. Actor-turned-activist Laurence Fox highlighted one of them just the other day. In a video, a Times Radio producer named Maxie Allen told about how he and his partner, Rosalind, had been arrested in front of their three-year-old daughter on grounds of “harassment and malicious communications” and hauled off to jail. The supposed grounds for the arrests: critical comments about the child’s school that they’d both posted on a private online group for the school’s parents. The whole experience, Allen said, was “Kafkaesque,” “surreal,” “bizarre.”

Fox’s comment on the video was blunt: Britain’s police, he wrote, “are gangsters and thugs” who are “drunk on their own pathetic sense of importance” and who “use intimidation and harassment as their weapons.” This from a man who, in better days, played a cop – a good cop – on the TV series Inspector Lewis. “Do not allow yourself to be bullied,” Fox urged. Alas, most Brits seem, even now, to be able to live with the knowledge that their fellow citizens are being bullied by their government.

Which brings us back to my dream. The proximate reason for it, I realize, was a March 28 report by GB News. It concerned Prime Minister Keith Starmer, who since assuming office last July has repeatedly denied claims that he presides over a system of “two-tier” policing – i.e., policing that lets Muslim rapists off lightly but that punishes non-Muslims severely for publicly acknowledging the reality of Muslim rape. In a recent article for FrontPage, Daniel Greenfield provided several examples showing that the British police and courts now routinely treat sane criticism of Islam “as a vicious hate crime” but regard statements like “curse the Jews” as inoffensive.

Now, it appeared that Starmer had decided to own up to this approach.

Here’s what happened. The Sentencing Council, one of the notorious “quangos” that operate independently from the British government but that wield extraordinary power when it comes to establishing official rules and policies, recently set new guidelines that would make “two-tier” policing the explicit law of the land, with white men, in the words of a GB News reporter, being “treated a lot tougher” than other demographic groups in courts of law.

Starmer has the authority to close down the Sentencing Council – which would be a cause for celebration – but instead he made it clear to an interviewer the other day that he might well allow the council’s guidelines to be put into place.

Yes, “two-tier” policing in Britain is already standard practice. But to make it obligatory – to put it in writing – would be a chilling step away from equality under the law.

And it’s a step that’s been a long time coming. It was way back in 2013 that FrontPage’s Robert Spencer, a world-class expert on Islam, who’d been scheduled to speak on that topic in London, was banned from Britain because Home Secretary Theresa May decided that his entry into the country would not be “conducive to the public good.”

Meanwhile, who isn’t banned from the UK? Meet Hamid Patel. He’s a mufti (a sharia jurist) who until recently was the headmaster of a school in Blackpool where, as Giulio Meotti reported, he was “the first in the country to ask pupils to wear the hijab outside of school, to ‘recite the Koran at least once a week’ and to ‘not carry stationery containing non-Islamic images.’ And while he was at it, Patel also invited a Saudi imam to speak badly of Jews, which never hurts.”

Patel is not only free to live in the UK –  he’s just been named the head of Ofsted, Britain’s powerful Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills. Meotti quoted a French imam, Hassen Chalghoumi, who is famous for having supported Nicolas Sarkozy’s burqa ban, as saying that Patel is so far out there ideologically that you’d “never see such an appointment in the Arab and Muslim world, except in Afghanistan and Iran.”

Patel isn’t alone. As the British writer Ian Andrew-Patrick lamented recently: “Our political parties, law courts and councils are almost completely controlled by first or second-generation foreigners.” This is unquestionably truer of the UK than of any country in Europe.

Beside Starmer’s statement, there’s another likely reason for that dream of mine. On March 21, England’s High Court refused to allow Tommy Robinson to lodge a protest against the conditions of his imprisonment at HMP Woodhill, where he’s serving an 18-month sentence for contempt of court after a transfer from HMP Belmarsh. Tommy wanted to challenge the fact that he’s been kept in solitary confinement since last November – a situation that has resulted in a worrying decline in his physical and mental health. But the judge had no mercy.

Friends and supporters of Tommy who’ve visited him are seriously concerned that he may not survive his current term of imprisonment. In fact, Tommy dying behind bars seems to be the plan. The British establishment recognizes Tommy as a symbol and spokesman for all British citizens who don’t approve of their country’s Islamization. The establishment, for its part, seems to be divided among cowards whose goal is to make the transfer of power as painless as possible, fools who still don’t see where their country is headed, and Muslims who will be the country’s new top dogs when the transfer of power is completed.

As things get progressively worse in Britain, I keep returning to the same question: Why? Yes, all of Western Europe is headed down the same road. But in other countries, there are significant numbers of people who are trying desperately to put on the brakes. Even established political parties on the Continent have recognized that their countries are in trouble. (It was fifteen years ago that Angela Merkel publicly admitted that multiculturalism had failed.) But in Britain the madness continues unabated.

Decades ago I studied English at both the undergraduate and graduate level, which involved reading both British and American literature – and becoming even more steeped than I already was in the history of both countries. I was intensely aware of the many differences between the U.S. and the UK. But on some level I thought of us as all being fundamentally the same, with (among other things) a shared devotion to Magna Carta and common law and a shared popular culture, from the Beatles to Monty Python to James Bond.

But oh, how wide the Atlantic really is! Recently I’ve been poking through Becoming a Londoner (2013), which is the American novelist David Plante’s diary of his life in 1960s London, during which he learned a good deal about the changes he’d have to make in himself in order to fit in.

“Dear boy,” the poet Stephen Spender chided him, “you do have an American way of asking questions that are too personal. If you are to become truly British, you must understand that we British do not indulge in the personal.” Spender granted that Plante was well-mannered, but added that when it came to British manners, he had “more to learn” – for example, about the proper placement on dinner tables of silverware, placement cards, and finger bowls. Later in the book, Plante laments that he’s “incapable of that utter distancing of feeling from death, even from grief, which I think of as English.”

Needless to say, these generalizations are more true of Britain’s elites than of its working class. Still, it’s fair to say the following. First, manners are big in the UK, and also in places like Italy and France (where you’re expected to initiate even the most trivial transaction by saying “Bonjour, madame…”), but not in the Low Countries and Scandinavia (where there’s barely a word for “please”). Second, emotional distance is big in the UK and northern Europe, where next-door neighbors can remain strangers for years, but not in the Mediterranean countries, where, over drinks, strangers can become friends in a moment.

Which raises the question: could it be that the uniquely British combination of these two things, manners and emotional distance, is partly responsible for the uniquely colossal failure of the British to deal with the unpleasant reality of Islamization? In other words, does that unpleasant reality at once demand of them that they be more unmannerly than their own standards would permit, and at the same time require of them more emotional engagement than they’re capable of? Just a thought.

First published in Front Page Magazine

By Victor Davis Hanson

Now that we’ve seen, in the first eight weeks of the Trump administration, a 96% reduction in illegal entries across the southern border—and this was done, remember, without the supposed need for comprehensive “immigration reform”—it’s logical to ask what the last four years were about.

Why did we have a completely open border? Why did 12 million people come into the United States from all over the world under illegal auspices? What was the reason? Why would people do that?

And remember, right now, the United States has somewhere between 50 and 60 million residents that were not born in the United States. Twenty-seven percent of the population of California is foreign-born, of all statuses—citizen, legal, illegal.

That’s an enormous challenge in assimilation, acculturation, integration. And we’re not doing that, of course. But why would we do that? Why would we have 16%, now, of the population of the United States as foreign-born? What was the rationale behind that, especially in the context of illegal entries?

Looking back, what were the Democrats, what was then-President Joe Biden, what were the handlers of Biden thinking? I suppose they thought that maybe people who were coming in without English, without high school diplomas—for the most part—without capital, and without skills would be dependent on federal largess.

I know you’re gonna say people who are not here legally cannot get Medicaid. Well, they can get Medicaid in an emergency. In California, anybody can get Medicaid, which we here call Medi-Cal.

So many people came in illegally and got on Medi-Cal that the system is broke. It’s $6.7 billion in the hole. Fifty percent of the population, of all births, are on Medi-Cal. And 40% of the California resident population are on Medi-Cal.

So, was the idea to get people dependent on the government? And then that would make government grow and more redistribution and more higher taxes. A way of, what? Having equity? Taking from the small, supposed, greedy elite and making them pay higher taxes to fund this social welfare?

Or was it utopianism, globalism, 21st century-ism, end of the worldism? In which you think that borders are a 19th-century construct. We’re all people of the same planet, as we see in Europe. So, let’s just get rid of borders. Let’s make it everything from Yucatan to the Arctic Circle, we can just go anywhere we want in this utopian dream. There’s no difference.

Why is somebody who was born in Chiapas or Oaxaca or Michoacan to dire poverty and cartels and corruption, why doesn’t he get the chance of somebody who’s born in Malibu? Well, as social architects, maybe the Left thought he should have the chance. So, we’ll just destroy the border.

Or a third reason why—was it more sinister? Did they think that after 2020, when the majority of states changed the balloting laws to such a degree that earlier mail-in and early voting had only constituted 30% of those who voted, 70% voted on Election Day—now 70% of all American voters do not vote on Election Day. They don’t go before somebody and show a driver’s license. Did they think, under this system, they could bring in 12 million people and, in some cases, they could vote?

Now, that’s a very controversial topic. The Left says that they never do vote. I’m not suggesting that they do in numbers, although, I will suggest that although it’s illegal at the state level, in most states, it’s absolutely illegal at the federal level.

Sixteen local jurisdictions allow illegal aliens to vote in city council, school board elections, local referendums. It’s a trend that the Left is trying to cultivate and mine. So, do they think that, eventually, the more people you bring in—so you have 50 or 60 million people who were not born in the United States—they’re going to be a constituency? And equity being what it is and parity being—they deserve to vote.

Was that the long-term goal? Or was it a fourth reason, just simple nihilism, chaos? People were angry at the Trump years. Or they were angry at traditional America. They think it’s racist and sexist. It doesn’t provide diversity or equity and inclusion. So, what we’re going to do is just flood the zone. Twelve million people. And we’ll see how you like it. We’re gonna put them in hotels in New York. We’re gonna send them to the inner city. And we’re not gonna send them to Malibu or Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket. But we’re just gonna flood the zone and just make so much chaos that you’ll have to deal with it, sort of like California. Deal with it.

I don’t have the answer. I don’t know what was behind it. But I do know that never in the history of the United States, within four years, did the government, by intent, destroy the border, welcome in 12 million people, during the first year of a COVID-19 lockdown, where all of us had to be very careful, wear masks, and have proof of vaccination, with no audit at all of the people who were not here.

It’s inexplicable. And it’s so inexplicable that I’m gonna end today with I don’t have any answers other than providing the possible choices and alternatives I outlined.

First published in the Daily Signal

By William Corden

By Victor Davis Hanson

Aside from the rhetoric, there is a growing consensus among Western diplomats, military analysts, military officers, heads of state, and even much of the media about how to end the endless Ukrainian war.

A proposed peace will see a DMZ established somewhere along an adjusted 1,200-mile Ukraine-Russia border. Tough negotiations will adjudicate how far east toward its original borders Russian forces will be leveraged to backstep.

Publicly in the U.S. and covertly in Europe, all accept that a depleted Ukraine will not have the military strength to retake Crimea and the Donbas.

In 2014, both were absorbed by Russia during the Obama administration. Neither that administration nor any since has advocated a military effort to reclaim them.

Loudly, the U.S.—and again quietly Europe—concedes that Ukraine will not be in NATO—a confirmation that Russia will use to justify to its people its disastrous invasion, and even many Ukrainians will accept.

How will the West deter Putin from his inevitable agenda of reclaiming lost Soviet territory and Russian-speaking peoples? For now, his army is exhausted, its arsenals depleted, and its reputation shattered.

In the future, a commercial corridor, anchored by concessions to American and international mining concerns, will supposedly serve as a tripwire to deter Putin from attacking in-the-way noncombatant Americans.

More practically, Ukrainian forces will be kept fully armed. They have already inflicted perhaps a million causalities on Putin’s forces—possibly five times the dead, wounded, and missing that the Russians lost to the Taliban over that entire decade-long misadventure in Afghanistan.

If Trump can coax even a ceasefire, the oddly bellicose left will still rail about “Munich” and Trump as “Putin’s puppet.”

But after perhaps 1.5 million total Ukrainian and Russian dead, wounded, sick, and missing, transatlantic leftists will quietly admit they never had any realistic plan to win by fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.

And they certainly were not willing—despite what they claimed in their spasms of braggadocio—to send U.S., U.K., European, or NATO ground troops into Eastern Ukraine.

Trump has faced criticism for his volatile, art-of-the-deal approach to Ukrainian diplomacy over the last 10 weeks.

Lost in such criticism is that the Biden administration did not even try to end the war. Instead, in the LBJ-style of “light at the end of the tunnel,” it parroted the great “spring offensive” to come. And when that gambit disastrously failed, it resorted to the banal blank check of “as long as it takes.”

Western leaders simplistically thought that sending more arms, money, and Ukrainians into the cauldron would eventually break Russia—30 times larger than Ukraine, 10 times richer, over four times more populous, and far less bothered by the mounting toll of its greater losses.

In addition, we even know the likely course of negotiations to end the slaughter.

As soon as Trump pressures Zelenskyy for a ceasefire and a rare minerals mining concession, Putin smells an advantage. So, he digs in and orders his generals to double down on terror strikes for advantage.

And then, once Trump sees that scolding Zelensky empowers Putin to back off from a ceasefire, he turns on Putin and puts far greater pressure on him: a secondary embargo on all who buy Russian oil that even the “on to Moscow” crowd had never envisioned.

Once Putin seems to agree, then Zelenskyy thinks he was had and wants a better mining deal or reconsideration of NATO or more sophisticated weapons—until Trump reminds him that the despised U.S., not his beloved Europeans, is his only route to a shaky peace.

So, we know the negotiations will have a yin and yang until there is no solution other than a ceasefire leading to a Korean-peninsula-like hot peace.

Putin always preferred to exploit the Obamas and Bidens of the world. And he did so in 2014 and 2022, rather than the mercurial, unpredictable, and ultimately dangerous Trump, during whose tenure he stayed put within his borders.

He also knows that for all the talk of his puppet Trump, the latter killed hundreds of the Wagner group, pulled out of an asymmetrical missile deal, first sent offensive weapons to Ukraine, sanctioned Russian oil and oligarchs, warned the Germans not to deal with Putin on the Nord Stream II pipeline, and bombed into extinction ISIS of Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Qasem Soleimani.

So, Putin knows that India, China, and others who buy his oil will not if he reneges on his willingness for a ceasefire.

If and when peace comes, we can already foresee the misinformation that will follow: Trump deserves no credit. Zelenskyy remains the true hero. A now hollowed-out Russia was the real winner.

The only mystery?

Since when did the anti-war left prefer an endless and horrific war to a difficult, messy peace?

First published in American Greatness

By Theodore Dalrymple

A French criminal court’s disqualification of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French populist party, the Rassemblement National, from running for office for five years, along with a sentence of four years’ imprisonment—meaning two years under effective house arrest—and a fine of $110,000 has, not surprisingly, acted like a stick poked into a hornet’s nest. The disqualification means that Le Pen will not be able to run for the presidency, which she had a reasonable chance of winning, in 2027.

Opinions range from the complacent to the apocalyptic—from “She got what she deserved” to “This is the end of democracy in France.” The one thing that nobody said, not even the accused herself, was that Le Pen was not guilty of what she was charged with: namely, the fraudulent misuse of European Parliament funds, to the tune of about $5 million, to support her political party at home. Not even she made innocence the grounds for outrage.

It might seem surprising that the French far-Left condemned the disqualification. Its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, said that the ballot box was the proper way to defeat Le Pen, not a ban on candidates like her from running. This, of course, raises the question of what impunity those running for office should enjoy: should it apply only to presidential candidates, or to candidates for any public office? And should it be for any and all crimes?

Mélenchon may not have been entirely disinterested in his seeming support for Marine Le Pen. She is the only candidate against whom he, or the Left, could conceivably win the presidency, and he himself faces investigations of a not dissimilar kind, though of a smaller scale, from those that led to Le Pen’s inculpation.

According to polls, more than half the French population believes that Le Pen was dealt with fairly, her punishment being appropriate to her crime and not different from what anyone else would have received. They found in her conviction and punishment reassurance that France remained a country of the rule of law.

A substantial minority, however, believes that she is the victim of an unequal and politicized justice. France’s judicial system is widely thought, not without reason, to be left leaning. The fact that Marine Le Pen is the second presidential candidate of the political Right to be destroyed by legal process shortly before a possible electoral victory lends credence to a perceived trend of political persecution. (The first was François Fillon, conveniently discovered to have created fictitious employment for his wife and children shortly before his electoral bid, though his wrongdoing had continued for 20 years and was widely believed to be so prevalent as to be almost normal.)

If there is an element of unequal justice in the punishment imposed on Le Pen, it lies in the fact that her disqualification from seeking public office takes immediate effect, while the prison sentence and fine are suspended pending appeal. As in many legal systems, appeals in France take time to move through the courts. Had the disqualification also been delayed, she might still have been able to run in 2027.

Will her conviction have a practical political effect? Possibly—but it may be the opposite of what was intended. If framed cleverly, in a way that encourages the public to forget or overlook her actual guilt, it could cast her as a martyr. And martyrs make good candidates. In any case, her deputy and likely successor—Jordan Bardella, a young man with a silver tongue and no real experience—is at least as popular as she is, and perhaps more so.

As Oliver Hardy put it: here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into—“you” being, in this case, France’s juridical-political class.

First published in City Journal

By Victor Davis Hanson

I’d like to talk today about China. It seems to be on everybody’s mind, but explicitly on President Donald Trump’s mind.

That’s the one common denominator that explains his interest in Panama and not to turn over our key transit from East to West Coast to China. China has no business there. And same thing with Greenland.

He’s worried about the Chinese having access to the Arctic Circle. He’s worried about their trade surplus. He’s worried about circumventing unfair trade by assembling their products in Mexico. He’s worried about them sending raw product of fentanyl.

He’s worried about their surrogates, the sort of mad pit bulls, like North Korea and, increasingly, Iran, that he cuts the leash every once in a while and says—he being China—”Go to it. Cause chaos.”

He’s worried that China is intimidating countries in the Pacific and in Asia. Some of our strongest friends—Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam. Saying things like, “The United States is in decline. You better cut a deal.”

Essentially, they’re like Japan in 1940 and they’re trying to re-fashion something like the Japanese East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. That was a mercantile system aimed at the West, which soon they were to be at war at.

So, is it all depression? No. What Trump is saying is, for us to stop this, we’ve got to balance our budget. We can’t spend $3 billion a day on interest. If we’re gonna do this, we have to have trade parity. We can’t keep running up a trillion, a trillion and a half dollars in trade surplus.

And when he looks at us at home, he says, the ESG, this environmental, social, governance, that we don’t look at productivity in stocks but whether they’re politically correct or DEI and woke, that’s anti-merit—it doesn’t work. The Chinese love it. We will not be competitive.

If we look at the border, you can’t have an open border with 30 million illegal aliens. That is a drag on productivity. You have to have security.

So, what he’s doing is, in all these areas, is identifying the threat that China poses and why we, with an open, transparent, and capital society, can achieve our preeminence or guarantee our preeminence, if we make changes.

And it’s not necessarily a pessimistic picture. I’ll just give you some statistics.

Yes, China has 2,000 fighters. We have 1,500. But fighters aren’t the only story. There are bombers, there are logistic planes, there are intelligence planes. When you look at all of the U.S. Air Force, we have about 1,500 more planes. And we have over 500 fifth-generation fighters. I think they only have about 60.

Yes, they are building 200 times more ships than we are.

Remember, we built the largest navy in World War II that turned out, by 1945, larger than all the navies in the world. We were building a liberty or freedom mercantile vessel, big 10,000-, 12,000-ton vessels, every five days. We built 3,000 of them. We built 120 carriers of different classifications.

So, we were the shipbuilder and now China is. But when you actually look at our fleets, we still have 11 fleet carriers and Navy groups around them. They are over 100,000 tons. They’re all nuclear. China has two and it’s building a third. We have about 85 to 87 submarines. They have about 60. But every one of ours is nuclear. Not theirs. They only have about six or seven.

If you look at all of these statistics on economics, they have 1.4 billion people. We have about 335-340 million people, but we produce one and a half times of nominal gross domestic product as China. So, one American produces one and a half times more goods and services than his four Chinese counterparts.

If you look at per capita income, we’re still ranked sixth in the world. China’s 73. Americans have a lot more purchasing power per capita than Chinese.

So, what Trump—let me put this all together in conclusion. China is ascendant and we are static. Trump comes in and he’s looking at things at home that will restore our global preeminence—fiscal discipline, secure borders, merit-based education, energy development. And he says, “Right now we still have the lead. And we will maintain this lead. But if we continue down the trajectory we’re on, we’re gonna be in big trouble.”

Final note. We have 5,500 deliverable nuclear weapons. China has about 500. But they’re billing six or seven a month. And they want to get up to 1,000 in five years and then keep going.

So, what Trump is doing, again, is he’s saying, “Right now our system is much superior—energy, agriculture, productivity, GDP, per capita income. But the trends in the future are not good. And if we don’t change, our rival will dominate the world. And I’m not gonna let that happen on my watch.”

And I think that explains a lot of his, otherwise, sometimes, inexplicable worries, from Greenland to Panama, to the border, to our universities.

First published in the Daily Signal