I don’t know about you, but the first time I heard the slogan “Black Lives Matter” I thought it was, well…curious. Whoever said otherwise these days? Wasn’t that obvious?
I soon discovered the depths of my naïveté. The tip-off was realizing that “All Lives Matter” was not a more inclusive iteration of the same concept, but its opposite—racist fighting words. People were vilified and fired for saying them.
It turned out that BLM was a “social justice” organization focused primarily on “intervening in violence inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes,” i.e. police.
But this wasn’t your typical well-intentioned social advocacy group. Its founders were Marxist activists. BLM’s goals included not only stirring racial violence, but destruction of the nuclear family and eliminating capitalism.
BLM started as a loose confederation of underfunded organizers. But their fortunes changed after George Floyd’s death in 2020. Suddenly, radical racism became a lucrative business. Over $90 million came pouring in, even though BLM did no solicitation and was not even IRS qualified to receive it.
BLM became wildly popular. Its tenets became influential in crafting Democratic party policy. Corporate executives, ever vigilant to burnish their woke credentials, praised it and donated lavishly. Sports teams stitched BLM onto their uniforms.
BLM initially parked the money with sister organizations who had IRS certification. After BLM’s nonprofit status was established, $66.5 million was immediately transferred into its account.
Here’s where the story gets murky. BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors issued an “impact report” in February 2021, claiming operating expenses of $8.4 million and $21.7 million in grants to local affiliates, but no further detail was provided. The rest of the funding was unaccounted for. Moreover, BLM has yet to file their IRS annual report required last November.
Meanwhile, Cullors resigned last May amid reports that, absent any other known sources of income, she had purchased millions of dollars in prime real estate. The two activists she appointed to assume the helm of BLM declined the offer.
The worm had turned. Charity Watch described BLM as a “ghost ship full of treasure with no captain, no crew no and no clear direction.” Other philanthropy watchdogs also withdrew their endorsements.
Washington and California ordered BLM to cease fundraising and Amazon kicked BLM off its charity platform. Antagonizing California, Washington, and Amazon had to be unprecedented for a radical leftist outfit!
The BLM scam, wasting the funds, was actually a good thing. According to the website Candid, nonprofits devoted to “racial equity” raised $25 billion total post-George Floyd. Yet the “accomplishments” of these groups have been demonstrably harmful to blacks.
Their main policy goal was to “defund the police,” the prime cause of the everyday genocide purportedly inflicted on young black men. That didn’t turn out well.
In 2019, 7,777 Blacks were murdered, 53% of all homicide victims. After the “defund the police” movement succeeded in jurisdictions across the country, 9,941 blacks were murdered the next year, indicating 2,000 lives were lost due to a failed ideology.
Blacks are repeatedly informed that thousands of unarmed black victims are killed by police each year, but the numbers tell a different story. As Heather Mac Donald points out, in 2019, the year 7,777 blacks were killed, police accidentally shot a total of nine unarmed blacks, one for each of the 800 murder victims. Decimating and denigrating the thin blue line was a tragic mistake, especially for Blacks themselves.
BLM can’t be reformed because it is based on the concept that there is social good in driving the races apart, since one is inherently predisposed to oppressing the other. Media and academic elites, playing upon the historical realities of black victimhood and white guilt, insist racism is deeply ingrained in American culture, the core influence in our history.
Americans must decide. Do we concede the future of permanent tribalism advanced by BLM, the 1619 Project, and Critical Race Theory?
Or do we still believe in the vision of Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and MLK that Americans can achieve another historic first. We can establish a multi-racial society where race really doesn’t matter and we all share the Dream of living united as Americans.
Let’s face it. America botched its response to the COVID pandemic.
Traditionally, as in the Spanish flu and polio pandemics, authorities have recommended common sense public health measures and protected the vulnerable. This time, they ordered sweeping lockdowns of the economy and closed schools, churches, and businesses.
The results were economic devastation, educational stagnation, greater income inequality, and loss of civic life.
Sweden, even though it has a reputation for a more collectivist mindset than our “land of the free” got it right. Their health officials adopted a live-and-let-live strategy, mostly rejecting lockdowns and letting normal life go on.
Initially, health outcomes suffered some, partly because Swedes neglected to adequately protect their nursing homes. But today, probably because of herd immunity, Sweden’s death rate is just over 1614 per million, compared to 2335 in Britain and 2836 in the US.
Even better, Sweden avoided the multiple consequences Americans now face. GDP growth is projected to be 5% larger than pre-pandemic, and they don’t face a mountain of future debt. Since schools stayed open without face masks, there were no lost years of education and test scores are up.
Unfortunately, America’s response to the self-inflicted wounds caused by our COVID panic caused yet more harm. When confronted with the results of their mismanagement, America’s governing leftists reverted to their universal solution for all ills: spend more money.
So last March, President Biden triumphantly announced “help is here” as he signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. We were assured that the truly massive spending would help defeat the pandemic, reopen schools, and revitalize the economy, creating at least 4 million additional jobs.
We now know the bill was a colossal failure. We didn’t get more jobs, but we did get ominous inflation even though Biden had insisted that “no serious economist” predicted inflation as a result of the spending surge.
The inflation was totally predictable. At least 1.8 million people declined to reenter the workforce when the $300 per week unemployment benefit supplement was extended. That’s understandable since one study indicated that in 19 states, a family of four with two “unemployed” adults could receive $100,000 in total government benefits.
Meanwhile, trillions more were pumped into the economy. This excess demand, combined with fewer goods and services being produced, was the perfect recipe for inflation, which “serious economists” now acknowledge is probably here to stay.
Why did the plan have no effect on COVID? Answer: it didn’t really try. PolitiFact concluded only 10% of the bill addressed COVID health impacts and 1% went to advancing vaccines, the most effective way to impact serious disease.
Instead, the ever-vigilant spenders saw their chance to enact a wish list and took it. Their dreams that came true included $20 million for “preservation of Native American languages,” raising Obamacare subsidies, and a massive expansion of the child tax credit.
Since the feds are sitting on so much surplus funding (sarcasm alert), $350 billion went to state and local governments to help them weather the pandemic. But even when the bill was being considered, it was already clear that state-local tax revenues were growing, and their budget crisis never materialized. It was simply an excuse for feds to shovel out money, mostly to their friends in Democrat states.
Public schools were also showered with $120 billion to help them reopen safely. But the funds came with no requirements attached. By the end of FYI 2022, only $40 billion will have been spent, leaving education administrators with an $80 billion slush fund. Thanks, COVID.
So, another $1.9 trillion accumulates onto our debt load, and we have precious little to show for it. We have fewer jobs than were predicted in the “baseline” without the bill, and there was minimal or no effect on the course of the pandemic.
Lesson learned? Nah. Biden preposterously proposes spending yet more on Build Back Better, an even larger collection of handouts, as an inflation cure. Yet our debt is not only higher than ever ($30 trillion) but rising interest rates now will make our debt service more expensive and hasten the Day of Reckoning.
When Joe Biden assumed the presidency one year ago, America had finally achieved energy independence. Iran was in chaos, fearing that its nuclear ambitions had been dashed. A year later, it’s America’s interests that have been dashed.
Biden campaigned on a pledge to rejoin the Iran nuclear accord and work on its weaknesses later. He seemed to believe that reinstituting deference and tacit assurances of eventual nuclear power status to Shiite Muslims would win concessions from the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. It didn’t work out.
Monitoring for compliance allowed under the treaty was notably lax. Still, at the end of 2020, the United Nations watchdog agency was investigating Iran for cheating on nuclear materials and production with a pending referral to the UN Security Council. Economic sanctions under the treaty had produced an economic crisis with mass protests throughout the country. Iran was reeling.
Biden came to the rescue. Instead of cracking down on Iran’s noncompliance with the treaty, he pressured America’s allies to pull back a censure resolution, sending a clear message to Iran that the US no longer minded that they were hiding nuclear sites and materials, in violation of the treaty and global nonproliferation agreements.
Iran immediately began investigating the new limits of America’s tolerance. The regime refused UN access to nuclear sites and increased uranium enrichment to 60%, far beyond the level required for peaceful nuclear power production.
Meanwhile, Iranians stepped up their violence in the region, including drone and rocket attacks on American forces. Biden not only refused to respond militarily to the terrorist attacks, but he ended support for a Saudi-led campaign against the Iran-backed Houthis and removed America’s defense missiles from Saudi Arabia.
As Iran accelerated its nuclear program and regional military aggression, Biden inexplicably helped avoid a financial crisis too. He suspended sanctions, giving Iran accessibility to frozen funds and to Chinese oil imports.
Iran is up and running. We better hope that the mullah are just kidding with their “Death to America” chants.
Biden’s response to America’s energy needs has been similarly woke and pathetic. At the conclusion of the Trump presidency, America had achieved energy independence for the first time in 50 years.
Trump encouraged the shale oil and gas revolution. He lifted restrictions on drilling, especially in remote areas. He permitted vitally needed pipelines. He blocked extreme environmental regulations that intentionally reduced our gas and oil supplies. As a result, America had surplus fuel supplies and no longer had to import oil from Arabs, Russians, Iranians, or Mexicans.
Biden promptly, inexplicably (simple Trump hatred?) reversed all the Trump policies when in office. We’re importing again. The economic cost of losing our energy independence is about $50 billion annually.
Now Biden has to grovel, unsuccessfully, with OPEC to increase production. Once again, we have to be mindful of our energy needs when dealing with foreign actors.
Moreover, even if you believe only massive carbon reduction mandates can keep the planet from burning, none of this affects climate change. The Biden reforms don’t affect which fuels we consume, only whether we buy them from our own producers or overseas, where power plants are often more polluting than ours.
America’s worst enemy could hardly have inflicted more damage than has our own president. In thrall to a tiny faction of far-left ideologues, Biden has suffered multiple other failures, too, including immigration, inflation, urban crime, and school closures.
Unfortunately, here’s where it gets partisan and divisive. The solemn duty of the Republican party is to remove this person and his ilk from office before they do more irreversible harm to the republic. That duty includes nominating the quality candidates most likely to win elections, which may not always be the ones most popular with Republicans.
In 2020, Trump lost an election to an exceptionally weak candidate who hardly campaigned and who was uninspiring even to his own supporters. Considering historical precedent and his record in office, Trump deserved to win in a landslide.
Instead he lost. Hard as it may be to accept, many voters wanted somebody, anybody who “wasn’t Trump.”
In service to their country and posterity, Republicans need to be more strategic, starting now. It’s important.
On Fox News recently, the leader of an “anti-work subreddit” with over 100,000 followers, caused a stir by claiming that “laziness” was a virtuous lifestyle choice, which should be freely available. She depicted work as a form of oppression that the woke are justified in resisting in principle. The guest was a part-time dog walker who hoped to someday “teach philosophy.”
Shrug this off at your peril. Like many other threads now coursing their way through our culture (CRT, BLM, MMT, etc.), anti-work has deep roots in Marxist ideology.
In “The Abolition of Work,” Marxist author Bob Black decades ago argued that the only way for humans to be free is to reclaim their time from jobs, the “source of most of the misery in the world.” “No one should ever work.”
Instead, they should indulge in voluntary free play. Only thus could they avoid the subordination and degradation of the workplace. Nietzsche argued that work “uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes away from reflection, brooding, dreaming…”
It’s not just goofy dog walkers or cranky proto-communists in the anti-work bandwagon today. Relief measures implemented when our response to COVID dried up the jobs markets are no longer necessary, yet a great many Americans are simply disdaining a lifestyle that includes working. 4.5 million people quit their jobs in November alone. There are currently 12 million jobs available. Services are becoming harder to obtain, and empty shelves are popping up.
But work from the beginning has been a cornerstone of American culture. America and Canada were settled by Europeans who came to stay and create a better life. Land and other resources were plentiful here, but labor was scarce. So work was necessary to survive and prosper.
In Europe, idleness was admired. Gentlemen were hereditary landowners who believed work was a humiliating sign of failure, best left to the masses.
In America, by contrast, work was honored and rewarded. Common people could become landowners simply by “working” the land. Small farmers, shopkeepers and artisans, workers…all were the backbone of the economy.
DeTocqueville in the 1830s noted the astonishing industriousness of Americans. “An honest day’s work for a day’s pay” was the prevailing code of conduct.
With a productive private sector and a modest, non-intrusive government, America prospered unimaginably, transforming itself from just another British colony to a worldwide beacon of opportunity and prosperity.
But work provided more than material comforts. It endowed each worker with dignity, a sense of self-worth and personal agency. Each citizen could take justifiable pride in providing for and protecting their family.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, many Americans dreaded material poverty less than the loss of dignity from not working. Written materials from that time confirm that severe economic hardship was considered temporary and survivable, but loss of dignity crippled the human spirit.
We now know that both economic prosperity and dignity eventually survived. But today the connection between work and dignity seems to be diminished. Dignity itself seems to have fallen out of style. Our leaders emphasize made-up rights, inequality, and income guarantees, but dignity is mostly ignored.
In the 1990s, the Contract with America implicitly established the notion that the Great Society welfare programs of 30 years previous had been a colossal failure. By disconnecting beneficiaries from work, they had consigned generations of Americans to lives of dependency and poverty of spirit.
The reforms enacted by the states consisted mostly of work requirements for able-bodied adults on welfare. Despite their success, over time the requirements have gradually been eroded by the hostile bureaucracy that administers welfare programs.
Now Democrats, once the party of work and workers, are seeking to eliminate work requirements altogether. Work is seen as an injustice that particularly minorities and poor people shouldn’t have to endure.
Unless workers work, there are no goods and services produced and the standard of living falls for all. A society where citizens vie to avoid work and live off the productivity of others, and where politicians scramble to accommodate them, is in danger. Ahead lies chronic economic weakness and vulnerability to tyranny.
Democrats may have messed up on inflation, immigration, and Afghanistan, not to mention China, Russia, Covid, and crime, but they are determined to have a win over “voting rights.”
President Biden has declared it his number one issue, surpassing even climate change! With Americans becoming fed up with the Democrat governance, they see “voting rights” as their lifeline to future viability as a party.
So, President Biden echoes many of them when condemning voter ID. “There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today – an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in free and fair elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are as Americans.”
He further alleged that “bullies and merchants of fear and peddlers of lies are threatening the very foundations of our country.” He suggested that requiring ID is the moral equivalent of returning people to slavery.
The mantra is picked up and repeated millions of times. Outraged students conduct a hunger strike. Labor unions protest the loss of the franchise. Letters to the editor are filled with indignant condemnations of the Republican attack. Woke corporations punish Georgia for passing legislation threatening “voting rights” by moving baseball’s All-Star game to Minnesota.
But there’s one thing missing in all the heated rhetoric: any indication of what in the world they are specifically talking about, any evidence that one, even one, eligible voter would be unable to vote or be unduly inconvenienced by the election integrity legislation.
Their claims are belied by our own history and international comparisons. With 34 states involved in election integrity reforms, there are a lot of moving parts, but the sticking points are bulk mail voting and voter ID.
HR 1, the Right to Vote Act before Congress, which the Democrats and their Greek chorus in the media insist is critical to the preservation of democracy, mandates all states to allow bulk mail voting and categorically prohibits photo ID requirements.
But in 2005, the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform examined these very issues. The bipartisan commission was headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, a moderate Republican. They sensibly pointed out that absentee voting makes fraud more likely. Absentee voters are more likely to experience pressure and undue influence.
The Commission also concluded that vote buying schemes are far easier when citizens vote by mail. The commission proposed a uniform system requiring all voters to present ID as a condition of voting, like when entering the courthouse, flying in an airplane, or buying beer.
If the election integrity proposals are such a flagrant attack on democracy, then other democracies would not tolerate them, right? But the fact is the US is a distinct outlier among the world’s democracies in not requiring voter ID. Of the 47 European countries, 46 require government issued photo ID to vote, and the UK seems poised to follow suit.
By international standards, we also have shockingly loose rules for voting by mail. 35 of those 47 European countries don’t allow mail-in voting at all for citizens living in-country. 10 other countries allow absentee voting but require voters to appear in person with a photo ID to obtain their ballot. The practice of mailing out ballots in bulk either to all voters or those on a permanent list (Arizona’s practice) is unheard of.
In the US, ballots are typically mailed in bulk without requesting photo ID, no chain of evidence, no safeguards against improper influence or even selling, and then “harvested” for return to authorities.
This is tantamount to begging for fraud, even more so because perps know it would be largely undetectable. Entry-level reform, backed by 80% of voters, would require an ID to obtain any ballot, mail-in or otherwise
The wild charges about returning to Jim Crow and our democracy in peril are blatant scare tactics. Never in our history or anywhere else has there been more open access to voting.
This isn’t about stealing elections or justifying January 6. It’s about strengthening our democracy by assuring Americans they can have confidence in our elections and that their vote will count.
