Netflix and the Erasure of History

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“Trust should not be doled out easily to anyone, especially white people.”
– Excerpt from “Leave the World Behind,” released on Netflix December 8, 2023

If anyone thinks Netflix has abandoned the so-called woke programming that earned them sustained criticism back in the spring of 2022 and may have played a role in their cratering stock price at the time, their new movie should put that thought to rest. Woke, for lack of a better term, is alive and well at Netflix. Their cozy relationship with nouveau plutocrat power couple and White House alumni, Barack and Michelle Obama, and the blockbuster bomb of a movie they’ve produced together, epitomizes the culture of Netflix today. Such casual racism. “Don’t trust white people.” It’s ok when they do it. But don’t you dare.

To truly appreciate where Netflix is today, one must recall how they began. During the golden age of movie DVDs, in the late 1990s, Netflix arose as the mail-order alternative to renting videos from walk-in stores. But creative destruction never ends. Just as Netflix movies by mail drove corner movie rental stores out of business, streaming made DVDs delivered by mail obsolete.

On September 29, Netflix shipped their last DVD to subscribers and cancelled the service. And with that, one of the last, best windows into nearly a century of American culture was closed forever. At its peak around 2019, more than 100,000 movie titles were available on DVD, arriving in the familiar red envelopes. But as the subscriber base for DVDs shrank and competition from other streaming services grew, Netflix management decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

This is a rational business decision. Netflix, a content behemoth with an enterprise value that has soared to more than $170 billion, doesn’t need the headache of managing 17 DVD distribution centers tasked with shipping and receiving actual physical media. Netflix owns server farms that dispatch movies electronically, and their investment in physical assets must now prioritize production studios where the company invests literally billions in generating original content. With more than 50 percent of all video consumption in the U.S. now consisting of user generated content at zero cost to platforms like YouTube and TikTok, Netflix’s challenge is keeping their 240 million streaming subscribers, not hanging on to a dwindling cadre of 1.2 million DVD clients.

Nonetheless, losing public access to what was, by far, the greatest collection of movies ever compiled is a tragedy. Netflix streaming services currently offer around 3,600 movies, barely 3 percent of what could be found in their DVD archives. It’s easy to miss the significance of this loss for any American under 30 (or 40?). When it comes to mass entertainment, late millennials and members of Gen Z have spent their entire lives exposed to almost nothing but garbage – stylized violence, mandatory diversity, movies without plots; nothing but action, special effects, and political indoctrination. Why would anyone who hasn’t sampled the rich legacy of American film before the age of woke have any idea what they’re missing – not only what movies once were, but how they depict what life was once like?

For 25 years, Netflix gave us all a chance to touch the memories that defined us, the world we knew. Movies are an incomparable window into American history and culture, good and bad. They incorporate bits of everything, not merely the stories we told but the fashion, the music, the technology of the time. They show us what our nation looked like in each decade, who we were and how we lived.

The average American now spends two hours and 24 minutes every day on social media, typically either blowing out their emotional equilibrium in pointless, endless acrimony, or flipping through addictive, useless videos. The average American between the ages of 15 and 24 spends over an hour every day playing video games, equally addictive and equally useless.

Netflix, until September 29, offered something more. It not only offered a boundless oeuvre of cinematic drama, a glimpse into America’s soul, it offered long-form content devoid of cheap tricks and vacuous, agenda driven narratives. These old movies delivered intricate plots that required sustained attention.

With old movies we can see clearly how each decade brought a new way of looking at the past. What was dramatic and authentic then is often seen now as ham-handed and corny. In the early American Westerns, our portrayals of Indians were arguably toxic but also naive. A white actress would play the part of an Indian squaw, with incongruous blue eyes and red greasepaint on her face that the makeup artist didn’t even bother to extend to her hairline. White men would act the parts of Indians by wearing dark wigs with ponytails and neglecting to conjugate their verbs. And the music: a brass section ominously blasting pentatonic melodies in parallel fifth harmony every time an Indian appeared on the horizon or galloped up on horseback. There is value in seeing these tropes today. It reminds us how far we’ve come.

Old movies also remind us how far we’ve fallen. Movies show us what life was like before, for example, oligarchs started using “green” building codes to turn the U.S. into a rentier economy. Ward Cleaver today would not be strolling up a path surrounded by lawn to greet his wife and sons in a detached home with a yard. That man today would come home to a condo, his “owned” square footage part of a building with sixteen units per acre and no yard. He and his wife would both work full time to pay a mortgage that would consume every spare dime they could earn. Children, if they had any, would be holed up in a dark bedroom, glued to their screens.

Movies remind us of what we faced in more difficult times, and how we coped with challenges that dwarf – at least so far – the problems of today. Watch a young Sterling Hayden, a commander in the classic 1952 World War 2 drama “Flat Top,” whip his recruits into shape for air combat. Watch Henry Fonda try to keep his family together in “The Grapes of Wrath,” as they are displaced during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Watch Jimmy Stuart’s character in “It’s a Wonderful Life” fall into despair, then recover his optimism with the support of his small community, or watch the entire City of New York rally behind Edmund Gwenn’s character in “Miracle on 34th Street.” These and countless others were inspiring, sobering movies that have lasting relevance, produced by people who loved this country and wanted to encourage values of unity and selflessness. Movies made by people whose social consciousness expressed itself by presenting and upholding inspiring role models, traditional values, and patriotism, and by rejecting decadence. Try to find these classics on Netflix streaming. You might find a few dozen of the biggest hits. The rest, which are nowhere to be found, will fade further into obscurity, along with the culture that made them.

Movies from decades long past show what life was like in America before the nation simultaneously drowned itself in debt while its suddenly disenfranchised youth disappeared into an online stupor. They show us what life was like before, without anyone being consulted, and within just a few decades, we overturned our entire national ethnic composition at the same time as our ruling class decided to teach all of America’s new arrivals to view those of us who were already here as privileged racists living on stolen land. Movies made before this historic betrayal depicted a high trust society, flawed to be sure, but committed to a shared culture and shared heritage.

All of that is gone now. Without the ability to see our history, dramatized and made accessible through old movies, will enough of us tomorrow recognize the revolutionary intent of movies like Leave the World Behind? Its part in the movement to Fundamentally Transform America? Or will our history and our people have melted into an undifferentiated, timeless, Pavlovian, algorithmically curated now?

Netflix gave us something beautiful, then took it away. It was good while it lasted.

This article originally appeared on American Greatness.

The Role of Unions in a Perfect World

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The optimal public policy regarding unions may not be realistic in states like California, but that shouldn’t prevent us from performing an occasional what-if. For anyone even slightly right-of-center, what unions have done to this state is a catastrophe. And even for those to the left-of-center, many are realizing, for example, that California’s failing system of public education is not because of inadequate funding, or due to the demographics of the students, but can be blamed primarily on a teachers union that has prioritized its political and economic agenda to the detriment of quality education.

It’s important, even if impossible to actually do anything today, to explore what might be the role of unions in California if the state legislature were ready to enact serious reform. Because not all unions are the same, and what has happened in California might happen elsewhere in the United States. We believe that preventing this is a nonpartisan imperative, and clarifying our intent may help prevent California’s plight from becoming America’s plight, and might even pave the way for eventual changes here.

This report is split into two parts, mostly to emphasize one main point, which is that public sector unions, representing government employees, are completely different from private sector unions, representing employees of private companies. It is necessary to expose once again how public sector unions, which should be illegal, have successfully pretended to face the same challenges and operate under the same constraints as private sector unions. Separately, it is necessary to explain how private sector unions have been corrupted, and have betrayed their own ideals and the aspirations of their members. We will begin with public sector unions.

Part One: Outlaw Public Sector Unions 

Money doesn’t guarantee victory in political campaigns. For proof, look no further than Meg Whitman, the California billionaire who in 2010 squandered $179 million in her futile campaign to beat Jerry Brown and become that state’s next governor.

When money is married to institutional power, however, it makes all the difference. This is why, 10 years after the Whitman debacle, Mark Zuckerberg was able to influence the presidential election outcome in an unprecedented way by spending $419 million on “get out the vote” efforts via left-leaning nonprofit organizations that go far beyond “traditional campaign finance, lobbying or other expenses.” Whitman’s money paid consultants and bought ads on television. Zuckerberg’s money went to supplement the activities of election offices in swing states – election offices that employed workers represented by unions that overwhelmingly favor Democrats over Republicans.

This is a critical distinction. Imagine if a pro-Republican billionaire had, like Zuckerberg, poured hundreds of billions of dollars into “nonpartisan” nonprofit organizations that in-turn used that money to launch get-out-the-vote campaigns in areas heavy with Republican voters. What are the chances the election offices in these cities would have cooperated?

Consider Maricopa County in Arizona, the City of Philadelphia, or the City of Detroit. Election office workers in these cities, and many others around the country, are represented by AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. In 2020, according to Open Secrets, 99.7 percent of AFSCME’s political contributions to federal election campaigns went to Democrats. Nationally, labor unions in 2020 spent a reported $1.8 billion on political campaign contributions, and of the public sector union share of that spending, 89 percent was spent to support Democrats.

Public sector unions don’t merely engage in political spending, their members occupy the bureaucracies that manage our elections. There are only five states that prohibit collective bargaining by public employees: Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The situation in Georgia exemplifies the power of these unions, because even there, while unions are not able to bargain, they are still permitted to recruit members and collect dues.

There is an inherent conflict of interest between the employees of government agencies and the interests of the general taxpaying public. When government programs fail, the natural inclination of a government employee is to protect their job security, which means they will claim not enough people were hired, not enough money was spent, and if more taxpayer dollars can get thrown at the problem, results will improve. This may or may not be true, but a taxpayer is much more likely to support programs that succeed, and to cancel programs that fail. From the perspective of a government bureaucracy, and the ambitions of the career bureaucrats that staff it, failure is an opportunity for growth and advancement.

This alone is reason enough to outlaw public sector unions. When a union agenda overlays onto what is already a built-in bias towards more government as reflected in the sentiments of government employees, that sentiment is buttressed with financial and political power, at the same time as it is corrupted further by the traditional union rhetoric that foments an adversarial relationship between employees and management. Which brings us to the next fatal flaw afflicting government unions: the fact that they elect their own bosses.

Political spending by government unions inevitably favors the candidates who will advocate for bigger government: more laws, rules, regulations, fines, fees, and taxes. That fulfills the ambitions of the union and its members: more money, more staff, more programs, translating into growth in membership dues and public employee compensation. When government unions negotiate for better pay and benefits, the politician sitting across the table knows that if they resist, they will be targeted for defeat in the next election. In any close race, and even in races where the incumbent would ordinarily have an advantage, the injection of union money will make the difference. There is no comparison in the private sector, where management is appointed by shareholders, and is retained or dismissed based on the success of the company, not the preferences of the unions representing its employees.

Unions in the public sector differ from private sector unions in another critical respect, which is that in their negotiations for better pay and benefits, they are not constrained by market realities. In the private sector, unions know that if they ask for too much, it will leave the company unable to compete, and this has a self-limiting effect on what they ask for. There is no such constraint on public sector unions. When they ask for increased pay and benefits, they know that the politicians they have elected will either raise taxes to grant these demands, or face defeat in the next election.

The consequences of allowing public sector unions to completely dominate a state can be seen in California, where public sector unions now collect and spend nearly one billion dollars per year in membership dues. The control this brings is easily verified. To fund the 2020 campaign to elect the Speaker of the California State Senate, Toni Atkins, every one of the top 10 contributors was a public sector union. For the Speaker of the California State Assembly, Robert Rivas, every one of the top 20 contributors was a public sector union. This dominance is seen across every elected office in the state.

In California, public sector union money is used either explicitly to fund political campaigns all the way from the governor and U.S. Senators down to every local elected position including school boards, city councils, county supervisors, water agencies, public utility commissions, transit districts, judgeships, etc., or is used to fund “nonpolitical” public education campaigns and “nonpartisan” get-out-the-vote campaigns. The result? California has the highest taxes, the highest cost-of-living, and the highest rate of poverty and homelessness in the nation. But for government unions, failure is success.

California is also the epicenter of high tech, and the ability of Google and Facebook to manipulate public opinion and voter turnout in elections is well documented, as is the propensity of these companies to support Democrats. But this behavior, decisive as it may be, would not be a match for the power of union-controlled government if it were out of alignment. Just as the unionized, overwhelmingly Democrat federal bureaucrats during the Trump administration actively thwarted his policy agenda and executive actions, if big tech were using its power to promote Republican candidates and causes, agencies, regulators, judges and politicians would swiftly find a way to stop them cold.

There is an innate incentive for government employees to want to grow government. This makes any political party or politician that is devoted to the principle of limited government automatically their enemy. To add to that inevitable and perennial conflict, the power of organized unions tilts the balance and rigs the game.

Public sector unions are one of the root causes of government overreach and inefficiency in America today. As long as these unions can use their financial and political power to serve the interests of government bureaucrats, proponents of limited government are fighting a nearly impossible battle. They should be outlawed.

Part Two: Reform Private Sector Unions

Unlike public sector unions, private sector unions have a vital role to play in American society. But these unions have become coopted by the same special interests they were originally formed to oppose. The political agenda of America’s unions is almost exclusively leftist, and being part of America’s institutional “Left” is not what it used to be.

For this reason, pressure from the outside, for example to require right-to-work protection for those workers who don’t want to be compelled to join a union, is not sufficient. Private sector union reform has to also come from within, and most likely from the grassroots members themselves demanding changes at the top. These members must recognize that the politics of unions in America today are not in their best interests.

The biggest misconception in American politics today is that the political Left is fighting corporate power. Leftists may still attack corporate profits and demand corporations pay their “fair share,” but on every major issue affecting the economic freedom and prosperity of working families in America, these presumed antagonists are actually in perfect alignment.

Labor unions, originally formed to defend the interests of workers, are no exception. Their decades of de-facto support for unrestricted immigration is a prime example. From the SEIU, “Stay strong against Trump’s wall!;” from the AFL-CIO, “oppose H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act of 2023.” Rather than protect the interests of American workers by controlling the borders, unions demand something that is impossible to achieve when borders are overrun with millions of immigrants, a “universal social insurance safety net and strong worker protections that bolster the health, welfare and economic security of all working families.”

America’s unions deny one of the most basic of economic truths, that increasing the supply of workers will result in lower wages.

There’s another basic economic truth that eludes America’s union leadership, which is that there are two ways to secure the “economic security of all working families.” The first is to collectively bargain and when necessary strike for higher wages and benefits. But the other, which truly will benefit all workers, is to support policies that lower the cost-of-living. Towards this second goal, unions have been actively hostile, because they have accepted the “climate crisis” narrative.

There is irony in the SEIU’s official position, which states that “climate change is real and poses significant threats to people’s health and livelihood, and disproportionately affects working people, the poor and people of color.” They’re sort of right. But it isn’t climate change, but the policies implemented to supposedly mitigate it, which disproportionately harm working people and the poor.

The position taken by the AFL-CIO on climate change exemplifies how opportunism has replaced a concern for the welfare of all workers. A June 2022 convention resolution states, “In every forum, we will demand that clean energy technologies be mined, produced, constructed and operated under union contracts.” Just a month earlier, in May 2022, the AFL-CIO announced, “We’re here for the signing of the Project Labor Agreement between NABTU and Ørsted—the culmination of years of hard work on a game-changing partnership that will change the trajectory of the entire offshore wind industry.”

The trajectory, overall, goes something like this: We will negotiate project labor agreements that guarantee our members well paying jobs working on projects that will greatly increase the cost of energy in America. In the case of offshore wind, that cost became prohibitive, when in November 2023, Orsted, the largest offshore wind farm company in the world, ditched its two planned offshore wind projects along the south coast of New Jersey.

Earlier this year, in August, another giant wind farm company, Equinor, pulled out of the Trollvind project in the North Sea because of unforeseen challenges including “technology availability, time constraints, and rising costs that made the project commercially unsustainable.” Also in August, Equinor sought “a 54 percent increase for the price of power produced at three planned U.S. wind farms” off the coast of New York. In the face of a likely denial, Equinor announced it could cancel U.S. offshore wind projects. In November 2021, Equinor abandoned a 1.4 GW floating wind farm off the shores of Ireland.

Wind farm developments, costing hundreds of billions to build at scale, only make financial sense to developers if they’re awarded massive government subsidies. But for big labor interests, fleecing taxpayers and punishing ratepayers so multinational corporations can make billions in profits on offshore wind is of secondary concern, as long as union jobs are created. Offshore wind projects typify the synergy between government subsidies, mega-corporations, and big labor that is the true motivating force behind climate crisis policies.

In California, a state that has completely succumbed to climate crisis panic, the High Speed Rail project fulfills all these criteria. The state is well on the way to spending over $130 billion on a system with ridership projections that aren’t more than a rounding error in total air and vehicle miles traveled each year by Californians, but it delivers thousands of high paying jobs to unions and lucrative contracts to the corporations they work for.

If unions don’t start fighting for practical infrastructure projects that lower the cost-of-living, expect more of these boondoggles. Another union supported project that will squander hundreds of billions in subsidies and raise prices to consumers is “carbon capture.” In a nation where production of natural gas and hydraulic fracking are under relentless assault, and nuclear waste is the boogeyman of the century, the consensus between government, corporations, and big labor is that we need to pump literally gigatons of CO2 exhaust into underground caverns every year. Go figure.

The only explanation for what is an otherwise inexplicable alliance between big labor and big corporations is a shared preference for economic centralization. Corporations in America stopped believing in competition a long time ago, if they ever did. But the innate corporate drive to expand and monopolize markets was challenged and limited by the power of the American Left. Today that balance has been lost. After the anti-globalization marches of 2000, and the Occupy Movement starting in 2011, corporations realized they could coopt the Left by assimilating their agenda on the broad issues of diversity and the climate crisis. And as they must have known, this has actually worked to their advantage.

In both cases, new barriers have been erected to exclude emerging smaller competitors. In every industry, the burden of hiring based on race and gender quotas instead of competence, and the expense of operating an expanded human resources department to enforce these quotas and fulfill the new reporting requirements, has given very large companies a decisive advantage. Unlike smaller companies, they can spread the expense over a much larger base of revenue.

This is equally true with environmental regulations, where the overhead and investment and additional operating costs necessary to comply will destroy the financial viability of smaller companies, at the same time as the big corporations easily have the resources not only to comply, but to buy up the smaller companies and further grow their market share. As for “renewables,” the more they cost and the more access to conventional energy is restricted, the more money pours into the industry from customers forced to pay the higher prices. The idea that major energy companies oppose renewables is ridiculous. It is in their economic interests to see the price of energy go as high as possible.

Unions support corporate consolidation and centralization of economic power because higher wages and benefits for their members become part of the overhead that drives smaller, non-union companies out of business. Big companies with captive markets are able to offer the highest compensation packages to union workers, because they have eliminated their competitors and can therefore pass the increased costs to their customers.

For unions in the United States to once again fight for the interests of all American workers, they will have to recognize hard economic realities. An unlimited supply of new residents in America will either drive down wages or overwhelm the welfare state; both of these outcomes are undesirable. Current environmentalist policies are too extreme, and while they benefit corporations, government, and labor unions representing workers in certain heavily subsidized industries, they are driving the cost-of-living out of reach for the vast majority of American workers.

Delivering an optimal standard of living to all Americans is only possible with controlled immigration, practical infrastructure investments, merit-based hiring, a regulatory environment that doesn’t wipe out competition between corporations, and policies with respect to energy and the environment that don’t inflict economic harm on working families. Unions might also recognize that most “renewables,” certainly including wind energy, biofuel, and battery manufacturing, are devastating to the environment.

These are facts that unions must face, and the agenda that unions should adopt. Such a reform is unlikely, but possible if they return to their founding principles. If unions were to adopt these principles, it would not only benefit all Americans. It would also restore America’s strength and enhance America’s standing as an example and an inspiration to the rest of the world, and offer again a model for other nations to follow.

This article was originally published by the California Policy Center.

What Motivates American Globalism?

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It is too easy, and dangerously misleading, to examine the most controversial globalist policies combined with America’s most obvious weaknesses and conclude that American power, and the future of globalism is in jeopardy. In both there is nuance and hidden strength. Understanding this ambiguity offers both hope for the future and a clearer sense of what choices face Americans today.

It is important to recognize that while other Western Nations from New Zealand to Sweden are participants in globalist policies, and that globalist theories may have originated from Europe, the influencers and institutions turning them into policy and pushing them onto the rest of the world are almost all American.

This distinction matters, because it frames the entire question of globalism in a manner that contradicts the term. Globalism is less about the dissolution of nations, and more about the extension of American global hegemony. Globalism, in this sense, isn’t global. It’s the latest iteration of American imperialism. This is expressed in every “globalist” imperative, from rapid and mandatory sacrifices to cope with a “climate crisis” to “equity” and racial redress, to trans ideology, gay rights, and mass immigration.

The motivation for American globalists demanding action to prevent “global boiling” is almost transparently imperialistic. By denying financing to nations in the Global South to develop economically viable energy solutions, they are condemned to become dependent on “renewables” which require a level of technological sophistication that only America and the West can offer. At the same time, of course, the elites in these nations are seduced by the promise of massive foreign aid to compensate for the “climate crimes” allegedly committed by Western oil companies, and bribed by the royalties attendant to massive new mines to extract the minerals necessary to build more resource intensive renewable energy technologies.

When pondering what could possibly motivate America’s globalist elites to push mass immigration, it is difficult to dismiss the possibility that it may stem from outright malevolence towards the legacy population descended from European settlers. After all, these new immigrants arrive almost exclusively from failed states, all too often bringing conflict and trauma with them. They receive what are by their standards exceedingly generous government support that burdens taxpayers and stretches public services. And they are constantly exposed to a narrative that blames colonialism for the problems in the nations they came from, and blames institutional racism for whatever challenges they may face here in America.

There is another reason, however, that also might explain the motivation for a policy of mass immigration. American birthrates are nowhere near sufficient to maintain a healthy balance between old retirees and young workers. While automation might solve the productivity challenge that comes with an aging population, automation cannot replace the dynamism that comes with a young population.

This argument – healthy nations need to have a young population and a growing population – has become a truism among neoliberal economists. And if the only place to find young people is in the few but still teeming pockets of fecundity left on earth – Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America – then that’s where they’ll be found. By the tens of millions. And since these new residents have linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and religious characteristics that diverge more profoundly from America’s legacy citizens than at any point during America’s prior waves of immigration, “equity” and multiculturalism must become the new establishment doctrine.

One still must ask, however, why assimilation can’t be tried with the same vigor with which it was successfully applied in previous centuries. And again, the answer is nuanced. Partly, again of course, because the leftist liberal mentality in America requires an excess of abashed regret and repentance on the part of all conscientious white people for their racist history.

But there may be more at work here. What better way for American globalists to extend American global hegemony than by making America a nation that overwhelms its own population by inviting in millions of migrants and catering to them in every possible way, economically and culturally? Do any of the impoverished multitudes eking out a life in Nigeria, or Honduras, dream of going to China? Russia? Or to they long to come to America, where they will have an apartment that is palatial by their standards, a car instead of a scooter, and free public education?

Perhaps, therefore, mass immigration and multiculturalism are part of the American globalist strategy to woo the world. Forget about Russia and China. They’re unwelcoming and racist, and we’re the good guys. Your future is with us.

The economics of America’s globalist strategy is deceptively effective. We may have trade deficits because we outsourced manufacturing, but there’s a sly but profound upside to these deficits. They help preserve the global appetite for dollars. We flood exporting nations with dollars when we buy their products. Then we balance our trade deficit by accepting foreign held dollars to purchase American assets, and as our swelling population creates demand driven price increases for everything from farmland to residential real estate, this domestic collateral for our otherwise fiat currency is worth more.

So it is as well with dollars we blithely print and ship overseas in the form of foreign aid, climate reparations, remittances sent by immigrants to their families overseas, Venezuelan oil, and ransoms to the Mullahs of Iran. With all these schemes, dollars pour into overseas accounts, our currency continues to circulate around the world, and so long as that’s true, we can print as many dollars as we want.

All of this, however, requires an expansionist, increasingly authoritarian government in America. Enforcing environmentalist restrictions – which also drive up prices for American assets as collateral for the dollar – diminishes America’s middle class. Hence the story must be tightly controlled. The climate catastrophe is happening now, and to cope we must accept that our middle class lifestyle is unsustainable. The foundation of American prosperity is racist exploitation and to atone requires reciprocal abuse and demographic replacement. White privilege and toxic masculinity are oppressive and must be broken.

You can’t sell this story to hard working families unless you censor news and social media and successfully divide the population by race instead of by class. And that is exactly what America’s institutions are trying to do.

On every level, geopolitical, demographic, cultural, corporate, and economic, a logic can be found in the American establishment’s choice of globalist policies. They may well succeed, erasing any possibility of an eventual multi-polar community of sovereign nations. But why? Why are they making these choices?

Why have American institutions promoted censorship to quash open debate over the policies they’ve chosen, policies destined to dramatically reduce America’s middle class and erase economic and political freedoms that have been taken for granted since the nation’s founding? Why have American institutions nurtured every cultural variant that might collapse birth rates; encouraging the sterilization of “trans” youth, encouraging homosexuality, stigmatizing women who prioritize motherhood over careers, and attacking traditional families as patriarchal anachronisms? Why have they chosen mass immigration as the demographic alternative to encouraging people to have more children? Or why not encourage immigration, but restrict it to applicants who speak English, have valuable skills, and a preexisting desire to assimilate? Why not allow everyone – including Americans – to develop natural gas and nuclear power, to lower the cost-of-living and more rapidly spread prosperity everywhere?

Are these choices merely the latest expression of the perennial human urge to build empires, the corruption of power? Or are they a product of genuine but misguided altruism, an elitist belief that only by wielding absolute power can they successfully cope with the climate crisis and the scourge of racism? Maybe all of this is merely a combination of megalomaniacal greed and megalomaniacal altruism. If so, there is still hope that an enlightened population can resist and overcome the incipient tyranny. But not so fast.

At this point the reader may howl with laughter, but what if the reasons for America’s current globalist strategy are not of this earth? In a recent X video, and with his usual lack of inhibition, Tucker Carlson raised the possibility that extraterrestrial visitors have negotiated agreements with the American deep state. That would explain a lot. Someone coming from another planet, visiting Earth and imbued with a dispassionate disregard for individual human life, might urge the global hegemon to cull the herd. It’s a nice planet you’ve got here, but there are too many of you. Clean it up, or we will.

That’s as good an explanation as any.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

California’s 2023 Legislative War on Affordability and Democracy

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As we move into the final month of 2023, it is appropriate to review recent legislative actions that will have a significant impact on California’s ability to deliver abundant and affordable energy and water to its residents. 

There isn’t much good news. Almost without exception, the California Legislature is making energy and water scarce and expensive, the opposite of what ought to be an obligation of government policy. And to make it harder for voters to take matters into their own hands, our lawmakers have also targeted the initiative process. Here are some of the year’s biggest bloopers, courtesy of our green saviors in Sacramento. 

In April 2022 the California Natural Resources Agency issued a report titled “Pathways to 30×30 California. It provided a plan to “preserve” 30 percent of California’s land and 30 percent of California’s coastal waters by 2030. Following the recommendations made in this report, earlier this year Senate Bill 337 was signed into law. Because the state can’t afford to purchase so much land, through this law it empowers state agencies to enact what are in effect zoning restrictions and to support private investments in conservancies. 

But will turning 30 percent of all land and coastal waters in the state over to government bureaucrats and environmentalist nonprofits actually help nature? The most mismanaged land in California is our 20 million acres of National Forests, and the healthiest and most biodiverse forests are the roughly 4 million acres of industrially managed private timberlands. This land (and sea) grab by the government is no guarantee that biodiversity will be preserved, but it will take away the ability for people to live there or benefit from its resources.

In moves that ought to be viewed as anathema to the goals of wildlife and wilderness preservation, the Newsom administration, in coordination with the Biden administration, has declared a goal for California to install 25 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2045. Doing this would require a minimum of 2,500 wind turbines (10 megawatts each, which is probably bigger than they’ll end up using), each one over 1,000 feet in height and 20 miles offshore, each one dangling a high voltage power line and at least three tethering cables anchored to the sea floor 4,000 feet down. 

But never mind the details. The California Offshore Wind Energy & Jobs Act, signed by Governor Newsom last month, will require the State Energy Resources Conservation and Development Commission, to recommend a “seaport readiness strategy,” and “to conduct a study on the feasibility of achieving 50% and 65% in-state assembly and manufacturing of offshore wind energy projects.”

Offshore wind developments, at the gigawatt scale proposed, will be an environmental and financial catastrophe. There’s a reason developers have already pulled out of projects in the North Sea and off the East Coast of the U.S. But they’re confident California will hand over sufficient billions in subsidies to make it happen.

And then there’s the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, also signed last month by Governor Newsom. Any corporation with worldwide revenue in excess of $1 billion, from now on, will need to report their greenhouse gas emissions to the State Air Resources Board if they want to continue to do business in California. 

This legislation is a gift to the burgeoning carbon accounting industry. Imagine having to come up with a report, every year, on all this: “emissions activities that include, but are not limited to, company operations, supply chain activities, employee and consumer transportation, goods production and movement, construction, land use, and natural resource extraction.” Also in the bill, annual independent audits of these reports and emissions reduction plans. How many more businesses will leave the state rather than perform this costly, intrusive, and very subjective exercise? And how long before this law applies to smaller companies?

In another strike at “emissions,” and heedless of any reasonable cost/benefit analysis, last year California’s state legislature passed Senate Bill 1137, which would have taken effect in January 2023. It poses an existential threat to California’s oil and gas industry. It defines “health protection zones” as any area within 3,200 feet of an inhabited dwelling or business open to the public. It then prohibits new drilling for oil or gas in these designated areas, and imposes punitive regulations on any existing wells. 

Again, never mind the facts. Arriving on emissions spewing tankers from half a world away, California now imports 75 percent of its oil, and 90 percent of its natural gas. Rather than encourage clean drilling to set an example for other nations, SB 1137 is just the latest attempt by California’s state legislature to eliminate in-state production of oil and gas. The industry is fighting back, with a must-win referendum to repeal SB 1137 that they’ve qualified for the November 2024 ballot. And that, of course, cannot be tolerated.

To prepare for the day when a majority of Californians recognize that the state legislature has done everything in its power to make life unaffordable for hard working families, AB 421, which proponents call “Referendum Reform,” is now in force. 

The inspiration for AB 421 and the motivation for its passage is direct retaliation to the oil industry’s pending referendum, but its impact is much broader. It takes aim at a right enshrined in the California constitution, the ability to pass citizen initiated legislation. It will make it nearly impossible for anyone, including grassroots groups, to ever successfully qualify a referendum, or an initiative, ever again. 

Moreover, in a display of stunning hypocrisy, it waves its essentially prohibitive requirements if the “grassroots” group of volunteers gathering signatures happen to be members of a labor union. No bias there. No double standard. Right? The significance of AB 421, its naked, power grabbing betrayal of democratic principles, cannot be overstated.

Here are highlights of AB 421, the bill that killed direct democracy in California.

1 – Would reduce from 180 days to 90 days the time allowable to gather signatures on petitions if the initiative measure proposes to repeal or amend, either directly or indirectly, a statute or portion of a statute enacted by the state legislature within the last two years. This means that any initiative that the Attorney General deems to indirectly affect enforcement of existing legislation will be treated as a referendum, cutting in half the days allowable to gather signatures.

2 – Require paid signature gatherers to register with and receive training from the state. Inevitably, this will severely limit the number of available signature gatherers. For signatures to count, every signed petition must include the circulator’s unique registration number.

3 – Require 10 percent of signatures to be obtained by volunteers rather than paid signature gatherers, unless the circulators are members of a union.

4 – Petitions circulated by volunteers must have, in bold, printed notification that a volunteer is circulating the petition, whereas petitions circulated by a person who is getting paid require a different notice, disclosing that a paid circulator is working. This creates a need for proponents to print and distribute at least two versions of the petitions. This adds expense, creates almost unavoidable potential for inadvertent errors, and introduces ambiguity – what if the petition is included in a direct mail appeal?

5 – Every petition must have a unique number to “facilitate administrative efficiency.” The practical impact of this is to eliminate the threat of a campaign whereby voters could download and print initiative petitions, and force centralized printing and shipping of petitions.

6 – Requires an “official top funders” sheet to accompany petitions, requiring anyone signing a petition to fill out an acknowledgement that they have read the funding disclosure. This and the other requirements make it much more likely some technicality will be violated, invalidating a higher percentage of signed petitions.

California’s Democratic lawmakers, wielding their mega-majority in both houses of the state legislature, claim to care about the health of the environment and the welfare of working families. Judging from their actions, however, they don’t care about either. 

Some of their politically favored projects, in particular offshore wind and biofuel, are environmental catastrophes. The mere fact this is up for debate is a travesty. All renewable technologies, for that matter, are resource guzzling hogs that still have a long way to go before we can call them sustainable. 

But in obeisance to the special interests that collect billions in state subsidies to profit off these scams, California’s legislature has made the state unaffordable, and undermined one of its most cherished democratic institutions.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Reform Private Sector Unions

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Unlike public sector unions, which are inherently corrupt and need to be outlawed, private sector unions have a vital role to play in American society. But these unions have become coopted by the same special interests they were originally formed to oppose. The political agenda of America’s unions is almost exclusively leftist, and being part of America’s institutional “Left” is not what it used to be.

The biggest misconception in American politics today is that the political Left is fighting corporate power. Leftists may still attack corporate profits and demand corporations pay their “fair share,” but on every major issue affecting the economic freedom and prosperity of working families in America, these presumed antagonists are actually in perfect alignment.

Labor unions, originally formed to defend the interests of workers, are no exception. Their decades of de-facto support for unrestricted immigration is a prime example. From the SEIU, “Stay strong against Trump’s wall!,” from the AFL-CIO “oppose H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act of 2023.” Rather than protect the interests of American workers by controlling the borders, unions demand something that is impossible to achieve when borders are overrun with millions of immigrants, a “universal social insurance safety net and strong worker protections that bolster the health, welfare and economic security of all working families.”

America’s unions deny one of the most basic of economic truths, that increasing the supply of workers will result in lower wages.

There’s another basic economic truth that eludes America’s union leadership, which is that there are two ways to secure the “economic security of all working families.” The first is to collectively bargain and when necessary strike for higher wages and benefits. But the other, which truly will benefit all workers, is to support policies that lower the cost-of-living. Towards this second goal, unions have been actively hostile, because they have accepted the “climate crisis” narrative.

There is irony in the SEIU’s official position, which states that “climate change is real and poses significant threats to people’s health and livelihood, and disproportionately affects working people, the poor and people of color.” They’re sort of right. But it isn’t climate change, but the policies implemented to supposedly mitigate it, which disproportionately harm working people and the poor.

The position taken by the AFL-CIO on climate change exemplifies how opportunism has replaced a concern for the welfare of all workers. A June 2022 convention resolution states “In every forum, we will demand that clean energy technologies be mined, produced, constructed and operated under union contracts.” Just a month earlier, in May 2022, the AFL-CIO announced “We’re here for the signing of the Project Labor Agreement between NABTU and Ørsted—the culmination of years of hard work on a game-changing partnership that will change the trajectory of the entire offshore wind industry.”

The trajectory, overall, goes something like this: We will negotiate project labor agreements that guarantee our members well paying jobs working on projects that will greatly increase the cost of energy in America. In the case of offshore wind, that cost became prohibitive, when in November 2023, Orsted, the largest offshore wind farm company in the world, ditched its two planned offshore wind projects along the south coast of New Jersey.

Earlier this year, in August, another giant wind farm company, Equinor, pulled out of the Trollvind project in the North Sea because of unforeseen challenges including “technology availability, time constraints, and rising costs that made the project commercially unsustainable.” Also in August, Equinor sought “a 54 percent increase for the price of power produced at three planned U.S. wind farms” off the coast of New York. In the face of a likely denial, Equinor announced it could cancel U.S. offshore wind projects. In November 2021, Equinor abandoned a 1.4 GW floating wind farm off the shores of Ireland.

Wind farm developments, costing hundreds of billions to build at scale, only make financial sense to developers if they’re awarded massive government subsidies. But for big labor interests, fleecing taxpayers and punishing ratepayers so multinational corporations can make billions in profits on offshore wind is of secondary concern, as long as union jobs are created. Offshore wind projects typify the synergy between government subsidies, mega-corporations, and big labor that is the true motivating force behind climate crisis policies.

In California, a state that has completely succumbed to climate crisis panic, the High Speed Rail project fulfills all these criteria. The state is well on the way to spending over $130 billion on a system with ridership projections that aren’t more than a rounding error in total air and vehicle miles traveled each year by Californians, but it delivers thousands of high paying jobs to unions and lucrative contracts to the corporations they work for.

If unions don’t start fighting for practical infrastructure projects that lower the cost-of-living, expect more of these boondoggles. Another union supported project that will squander hundreds of billions in subsidies and raise prices to consumers is “carbon capture.” In a nation where production of natural gas and hydraulic fracking are under relentless assault, and nuclear waste is the boogeyman of the century, the consensus between government, corporations, and big labor is that we need to pump literally gigatons of CO2 exhaust into underground caverns every year. Go figure.

The only explanation for what is an otherwise inexplicable alliance between big labor and big corporations is a shared preference for economic centralization. Corporations in America stopped believing in competition a long time ago, if they ever did. But the innate corporate drive to expand and monopolize markets was challenged and limited by the power of the American Left. Today that balance has been lost. After the anti-globalization marches of 2000, and the Occupy Movement starting in 2011, corporations realized they could coopt the Left by assimilating their agenda on the broad issues of diversity and the climate crisis. And as they must have known, this has actually worked to their advantage.

In both cases, new barriers have been erected to exclude emerging smaller competitors. In every industry, the burden of hiring based on race and gender quotas instead of competence, and the expense of operating an expanded human resources department to enforce these quotas and fulfill the new reporting requirements, has given very large companies a decisive advantage. Unlike smaller companies, they can spread the expense over a much larger base of revenue.

This is equally true with environmental regulations, where the overhead and investment and additional operating costs necessary to comply will destroy the financial viability of smaller companies, at the same time as the big corporations easily have the resources not only to comply, but to buy up the smaller companies and further grow their market share. As for “renewables,” the more they cost and the more access to conventional energy is restricted, the more money pours into the industry from customers forced to pay the higher prices. The idea that major energy companies oppose renewables is ridiculous. It is in their economic interests to see the price of energy go as high as possible.

Unions support corporate consolidation and centralization of economic power because higher wages and benefits for their members become part of the overhead that drives smaller, non-union companies out of business. Big companies with captive markets are able to offer the highest compensation packages to union workers, because they have eliminated their competitors and can therefore pass the increased costs to their customers.

For unions in the United States to once again fight for the interests of all American workers, they will have to recognize hard economic realities. An unlimited supply of new residents in America will either drive down wages or overwhelm the welfare state; both of these outcomes are undesirable. Current environmentalist policies are too extreme, and while they benefit corporations, government, and labor unions representing workers in certain heavily subsidized industries, they are driving the cost-of-living out of reach for the vast majority of American workers.

Delivering an optimal standard of living to all Americans is only possible with controlled immigration, practical infrastructure investments, merit-based hiring, a regulatory environment that doesn’t wipe out competition between corporations, and policies with respect to energy and the environment that don’t inflict economic harm on working families. Unions might also recognize that most “renewables,” certainly including wind energy, biofuel, and battery manufacturing, are devastating to the environment.

These are facts that unions must face, and the agenda that unions should adopt. Such a reform is unlikely, but possible if they return to their founding principles. If unions were to adopt these principles, it would not only benefit all Americans. It would also restore America’s strength and enhance America’s standing as an example and an inspiration to the rest of the world, and offer again a model for other nations to follow.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Outlaw Public Sector Unions

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Money doesn’t guarantee victory in political campaigns. For proof, look no further than Meg Whitman, the California billionaire who in 2010 squandered $179 million in her futile campaign to beat Jerry Brown and become that state’s next governor.

When money is married to institutional power, however, it makes all the difference. This is why, 10 years after the Whitman debacle, Mark Zuckerberg was able to purchase the presidential election outcome in 2020 for $419 million. Whitman’s money paid consultants and bought ads on television. Zuckerberg’s money went to supplement the activities of election offices in swing states – election offices that employed workers represented by unions that overwhelmingly favor Democrats over Republicans.

This is a critical distinction. Imagine if a pro-Republican billionaire had, like Zuckerberg, poured hundreds of billions of dollars into “nonpartisan” nonprofit organizations that in-turn used that money to launch get-out-the-vote campaigns in areas heavy with Republican voters. What are the chances the election offices in these cities would have cooperated?

Consider Maricopa County in Arizona, the City of Philadelphia, or the City of Detroit. Election office workers in these cities, and many others around the country, are represented by AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. In 2020, according to Open Secrets, 99.7 percent of AFSCME’s political contributions to federal election campaigns went to Democrats. Nationally, labor unions in 2020 spent a reported $1.8 billion on political campaign contributions, and of the public sector union share of that spending, 89 percent was spent to support Democrats.

Public sector unions don’t merely engage in political spending, their members occupy the bureaucracies that manage our elections. There are only five states that prohibit collective bargaining by public employees, Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The situation in Georgia exemplifies the power of these unions, because even there, while unions are not able to bargain, they still are still permitted to recruit members and collect dues.

There is an inherent conflict of interest between the employees of government agencies and the interests of the general taxpaying public. When government programs fail, the natural inclination of a government employee is to protect their job security, which means they will claim not enough people were hired, not enough money was spent, and if more taxpayer dollars can get thrown at the problem, results will improve. This may or may not be true, but a taxpayer is much more likely to support programs that succeed, and to cancel programs that fail. From the perspective of a government bureaucracy, and the ambitions of the career bureaucrats that staff it, failure is an opportunity for growth and advancement.

This alone is reason enough to outlaw public sector unions. When a union agenda overlays onto what is already a built-in bias towards more government as reflected in the sentiments of government employees, that sentiment is buttressed with financial and political power, at the same time as it is corrupted further by the traditional union rhetoric that foments an adversarial relationship between employees and management. Which brings us to the next fatal flaw afflicting government unions, the fact that they elect their own bosses.

Political spending by government unions inevitably favors the candidates who will advocate for bigger government: more laws, rules, regulations, fines, fees, and taxes. That fulfills the ambitions of the union and its members: more money, more staff, more programs, translating into growth in membership dues and public employee compensation. When government unions negotiate for better pay and benefits, the politician sitting across the table knows that if they resist, they will be targeted for defeat in the next election. In any close race, and even in races where the incumbent would ordinarily have an advantage, the injection of union money will make the difference. There is no comparison in the private sector, where management is appointed by shareholders, and is retained or dismissed based on the success of the company, not the preferences of the unions representing its employees.

Unions in the public sector differ from private sector unions in another critical respect, which is that in their negotiations for better pay and benefits, they are not constrained by market realities. In the private sector, unions know that if they ask for too much, it will leave the company unable to compete, and this has a self-limiting effect on what they ask for. There is no such constraint on public sector unions. When they ask for increased pay and benefits, they know that the politicians they have elected will either raise taxes to grant these demands, or face defeat in the next election.

The consequences of allowing public sector unions to completely dominate a state can be seen in California, where public sector unions now collect and spend nearly one billion dollars per year in membership dues. The control this brings is easily verified. To fund the 2020 campaign to elect the Speaker of the California State Senate, Toni Atkins, every one of the top 10 contributors was a public sector union. For the Speaker of the California State Assembly, Robert Rivas, every one of the top 20 contributors was a public sector union. This dominance is seen across every elected office in the state.

In California, public sector union money is used either explicitly to fund political campaigns all the way from the governor and U.S. Senators down to every local elected position including school boards, city councils, county supervisors, water agencies, public utility commissions, transit districts, judgeships, etc., or is used to fund “nonpolitical” public education campaigns and “nonpartisan” get-out-the-vote campaigns. The result? California has the highest taxes, the highest cost-of-living, and the highest rate of poverty and homelessness in the nation. But for government unions, failure is success.

California is also the epicenter of high tech, and the ability of Google and Facebook to manipulate public opinion and voter turnout in elections is well documented, as is the propensity of these companies to support Democrats. But this behavior, decisive as it may be, would not be a match for the power of union-controlled government if it were out of alignment. Just as the unionized, overwhelmingly Democrat federal bureaucrats during the Trump administration actively thwarted his policy agenda and executive actions, if big tech were using its power to promote Republican candidates and causes, agencies, regulators, judges and politicians would swiftly find a way to stop them cold.

There is an innate incentive for government employees to want to grow government. This makes any political party or politician that is devoted to the principle of limited government automatically their enemy. To add to that inevitable and perennial conflict the power of organized unions tilts the balance and rigs the game.

Public sector unions are one of the root causes of government overreach and inefficiency in America today. As long as these unions can use their financial and political power to serve the interests of government bureaucrats, proponents of limited government are fighting a nearly impossible battle. They should be outlawed.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Meaning of Thanksgiving Can Save America

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Thanksgiving, according to Britannica.com, has come to “has come to symbolize intercultural peace, America’s opportunity for newcomers, and the sanctity of home and family.” This definition captures the ideals, more relevant than ever, of one of America’s favorite holidays. But these ideals are threatened, because America’s mainstream institutions have either rejected them, or have created an environment where they are no longer possible.

This is immediately obvious with the “woke” doctrine of race based oppressor and oppressed, now promoted by academia, the media, entertainers, politicians, and corporations. Maybe the fellowship of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians is mostly fable, cruelly debunked by history.

Or maybe, fable or not, it is an inspiring message of unity for a nation of settlers and immigrants who have created a place where everyone, including descendants of the Indians, have enjoyed the more freedom and opportunity than anywhere else in the history of the world. That’s a debate we have to wage, and one we cannot lose. Like all nations and tribes, America has had dark moments. But the good overwhelms the bad. It’s not even close.

The attempted destruction of America’s self-confidence and unity by its own institutions, however, which must be challenged and overcome, must not distract from an even bigger problem. America’s institutions have also launched a propaganda campaign, growing in intensity every year, that claims we face an existential climate crisis, and massive sacrifices are necessary to cope. This is a lie.

It’s particularly relevant to reflect on this fraud during Thanksgiving, because our nation of settlers and immigrants would not exist if the types of rules and restrictions being imposed on Americans today were in effect 400 years ago. And it gives rise to a fundamental conflict: We continue to invite immigrants from around the world to move here, but thanks to extreme environmentalist restrictions, we are unable to build the necessary infrastructure to support them.

This violates the second essential value of Thanksgiving as defined by Britannica.com, the celebration of how America provides opportunity for newcomers. That opportunity has been hijacked and destroyed by corporate special interests, hiding behind woke ideologues and environmentalists. The woke say let them come, and they’re coming these days by the millions. Then the environmentalists say we have to lower our “footprint,” hence we can’t make room for the newcomers. Environmentalist restrictions have made it nearly impossible to expand existing cities or build new cities.

The consequences of this are a dismal diminishing of quality of life for immigrants as well as for the people already here. Migrants are arriving by the tens of thousands to New York City, where the average apartment rents for over $5,000 per month. On the opposite coast, in sprawling Los Angeles, the average rent is nearly $3,000 per month for an 800 square foot apartment.

This engineered shortage of housing, resulting in demand driven prices rising to unaffordable levels, is unprecedented. It is caused by a perfect storm of public corruption and corporate greed exploiting the primal fear of “global boiling” to silence dissent. This breeds intercultural disharmony, as aspiring low income communities including massive waves of immigrants are denied amenities enjoyed by all who purchased homes before the storm hit the shore.

The climate scam is simple, but it is a betrayal of everything that made America a great and welcoming place. Instead of using public money to build roads and enabling infrastructure to encourage more home construction, increase pay and benefits for public employees, and hire more public employees to dole out welfare to the people who can’t afford homes. Instead of competing to provide homes at affordable prices, developers collect subsidies to build “affordable housing.” It’s all to save the planet, and the scam translates into every industry, and elevates the cost for every one of life’s essentials.

Which brings us to the sanctity of home and family. It’s difficult to imagine how America’s institutions could be more committed to destroying home and family. It is financially impossible for most young couples to afford a home close to their jobs. The average home in New York City is $733,000, in Los Angeles it’s $926,000. Try to pay that monthly mortgage, while also covering property taxes and insurance, along with utilities and maintenance. And if mom works? Expect to pay $20,000 per year, per child, for childcare, at the same time as mom’s income pops you into a higher tax bracket. The cards are stacked.

Economic war against the family is only part of the problem, however, the moral assault on home and family is much worse. American women are trained to reject motherhood. Apart from traditional churches, every cultural influence in America tells women it’s not worth it. From the Atlantic, “having children is terrible for quality of life.” Fortune writes “millennials break from tradition and embrace being child-free.” Time, “Having It All Without Having Children.” And as for Christianity? “It “prevents women from being free from male oppression.”

No children. No Christianity. But if you buck the trend and have children? What does American society teach these children about home and family? These two articles from America’s “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, provides an indication. “Let’s Quit Fetishizing the Single-Family Home,” and “The Nuclear Family Is No Longer the Norm. Good.” No home with a yard and a garden. No mom and dad. Despite overwhelming evidence that people prefer detached homes and children of two parent households do better in life. According to America’s mainstream institutions, those things are bad.

Make a single family home unaffordable, and stigmatize it as an environmental abomination. Cordon off the cities and stack everyone together via infill and densification. And just in case the rising generation still wants to have a traditional family, marinate them in climate terror so they’ll join the The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or neuter them with transgender affirmation.

Such is the betrayal of America by what were once our trusted institutions. Everything that Thanksgiving represents – cultural harmony, opportunity, and family – is under attack. It must be stopped. Not slowed down. Stopped cold, eradicated, and replaced with the traditions and values that built this country.

For Americans who still embrace the Thanksgiving holiday for all of its historic promise, it can remind us that unity is still possible, that opportunities in this nation can still be available to everyone, and that more than anything else, our homes and our families are the cherished foundation of our health and happiness. When we fight the nihilistic Left and their opportunistic corporate enablers, we must never forget what tremendous upside our American traditions provide, or the joy and optimism and sense of possibility that has always defined our people.

This is a fight for the soul of the nation. There is no reason why the spirit of Thanksgiving cannot inform a resurgent America, and endure for another 400 years and beyond.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Demographics of Polarization

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Women around the world are having fewer than two children. But while population decline is well underway in most nations, there are a handful of nations that are still experiencing a population explosion. The implications of this challenge the foundations of cultural and national independence, most particularly in nations whose populations have stopped reproducing. The nations still experiencing rapid population growth have cultural traditions that stand in stark contrast to the nations with stable and declining populations. These profound demographic and cultural differences, when combined with a massive and ongoing transfer of people from high birth-rate nations into low birth-rate nations, introduces the potential for polarization on an almost unimaginable scale.

It isn’t as if the demographic trends haven’t been obvious for a very long time. In 1986, Ben Wattenberg published “The Birth Dearth,” where he pointed out that while America’s population was increasing in that decade, it was because the huge numbers of babies born during the post-WW2 baby boom were all grown up and having children. Population growth was not because young women were having lots of children. It was because a lot of mothers, born during the baby boom, had reached peak childbearing age. Per mother, children were not being born at replacement rates.

What Wattenberg was getting at can be visualized using what demographers refer to as population pyramids. Depicted below is a 2023 population pyramid for Europe. Women of prime childbearing years are shown in the 3rd and 4th rows from the bottom, where their percentage of the population is represented by the stacked red bars on the horizontal axis.

As can be seen, women aged 20-24 represent 2.5 percent of Europe’s population, and women aged 25-29 are 2.7 percent of the population. But men and women who are beyond the age when families are typically started represent larger percentages of the population. European men and women between the ages of 35 and 65, as counted in five year age groups, each represent around 3.5 of the population. The difference between Europeans aged 0-5 and those aged 60-64 is dramatic. There are nearly 60 percent more women aged 60-64 than girls aged 0-5. This is a population in rapid decline.

While overall, the population pyramid for the world indicates below replacement birthrates are already here, with an absolute population decline only one or two decades away, it would be a grave mistake to assume these demographic shifts are uniform across nations. The next population pyramid, depicted for the African continent, makes this dramatically clear. The population of Africa, already twice that of Europe, has quintupled since 1960, and continues to rapidly increase.

As shown on the chart below, the number of African women currently of child bearing age, about 4 percent of the population, is twice that of their mothers, who represent around 2 percent of the population, yet is only about half that of the babies, representing 7 percent of the population. Africa’s population is exploding, while in most of the rest of the world the population is imploding.

Even Elon Musk, a zillionaire whose fortune, at least that portion represented by his Tesla shares, would benefit from spreading climate alarm, has said that population collapse is a bigger challenge. In August 2022 he tweeted “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”

Demographers who ought to know better have ridiculed Musk for his concerns over a population implosion. From the Stanford academic journal MAHB, “Elon Musk is wrong about population growth.” From Wired, a slightly more emphatic “Elon Musk Is Totally Wrong About Population Collapse.” The general thrust of these articles is Elon Musk should stick to rockets and cars (and tunnel boring machines and AI and social media, but never mind), because there is the “joy of smaller, older populations,” and “pronatalist” policies never work.

These demographers have no credibility. For example, South Korea’s current fertility per woman is a dismal 0.78, and those are extinction-level numbers. At that rate of reproduction, for every 1 million Koreans of childbearing age today, there will only be 51,000 great-grandchildren. South Korea is on track to disappear in less than a century.

The Demographics of Polarization

There are two problems where mainstream demographers are in apparent denial. The first problem – how can the economy get bigger, or even just stay healthy, when the population is getting smaller – is easier to solve, which isn’t saying much because it compounds a perennial question that has ignited countless wars. The perennial question is what constitutes a just and equitable political economy that optimizes freedom and prosperity for all individuals.

The bloody legacy of that debate is written across the centuries, but through it all, there was a reliable assumption: every new generation will be more numerous than the one that came before it, which meant there was always growing opportunities to start businesses, find more customers, and generate wealth. And there were always more young people available to care for old people. It’s almost as if economic growth required a demographic pyramid scheme. And now that’s ending.

But there is a second, bigger problem with global demographics in this era, which is the uneven pace at which populations are shifting from growth to decline. And small wonder that Elon Musk’s warnings on this topic are dismissed as uninformed rants, because the fact that Africa’s population is exploding at the same time as the rest of the world’s population is collapsing is a phenomenon that will make any cautiously inoffensive analyst squirm. Here is a link to a map of the nations of the world, color coded according to each nation’s rate of population growth:

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination, much less formal training in demographics, to understand what this map documents. Apart from a few nations in South and Central America, and Papua New Guinea, every nation on earth has a below replacement birth-rate. That is, until you examine the nations in Africa and parts of the Middle East and Central Asia.

It is disingenuous for demographers to suggest that slow population decline is manageable, and leave it at that. After all, maybe it is. Maybe we need to discover how to maintain economic health in a world with slow population decline. But to say it’s going to take a century before the population of the world begins to significantly drop ignores two Elephants in the room. First, as things currently stand, within a century, if not sooner, the majority of people on earth will be African, and that reality will be exacerbated by the fact that by then the overwhelming majority of people under 25 will be African, and the only segment of the global population pyramid where there might remain a majority of people who are not African will be among the very elderly.

Clearly, this is an extrapolation, and extrapolations aren’t always predictive. But they’re also not based on imaginary data. These trends are playing out at breathtaking speed around the world. In Germany, where the nation-extinguishing low birth rate has risen slightly in recent years, the recent waves of immigrants are the reason why. Fully 27 percent of Germany’s newborns in 2022 were from mothers who were born somewhere else – primarily Africa and the Middle East. This percentage understates the impact of immigration is already having on Germany’s ethnic and cultural demography, because millions of mothers born in Germany are themselves children of recent immigrants.

In Western nations, the solution to population decline is to import millions of young and fecund Africans, Middle Easterners, and Central Americans. People are being transferred, en masse, from nations with rapidly growing populations into nations with declining populations. That seems logical, although it only defers the ultimate question, which is what happens when even people from these nations stop having children. Asian nations have chosen to restrict immigration, and instead are learning to cope with declining populations through, among other things, robotics and AI. What they are not doing is replacing themselves via mass immigration.

Which brings us to the hundred trillion dollar question. Is it desirable to replace the population of Europe with the population of Africa? Is it desirable to replace the population of the United States with refugees from the swelling populations of failed, chaotic, destitute nations? And if so, is it prudent to abandon the melting pot ideal of assimilation which worked so well for the first two centuries of America’s existence as a nation, and replace it with a multicultural ideal that in has devolved into something extremists use to deliberately nurture mutual resentment between immigrants and the host population? Or if assimilation is reestablished as a universally shared national priority, can it still work? Can Americans, more diverse than ever, rediscover and embrace common values and national unity?

Over the past few weeks we have seen literally millions of Leftists join forces with millions of Middle Eastern immigrants to flood the streets of American and European cities in support of Palestine. Underlying the anti-Zionist passion of these mobs is a related but deeper shared understanding: The privileged whites of Western nations are oppressors. They are culpable for the travails of the world, from devastated ecosystems to desperately poor nations. Their culture, their capitalism, their colonialism, and their Christianity are all engines of oppression. All of it must be utterly destroyed.

At what point do tribal hatreds, or just an unprecedented level of differences in tradition and culture between immigrant and host populations, erase the potential for reconciliation and unity? What brand of charismatic leadership can motivate millions of bitter rivals to abandon ages of murderous feuds and choose to unify, and how rare is that? Can debates over what constitutes an optimal political and economic system, inherent in any democracy but enough by itself to periodically engulf nations in civil conflict, withstand in addition to that historic instability the added challenge of tribal conflicts?

This is the modern face of multiculturalism. Perhaps diversity should be a strength to be celebrated, but in practice it has become polarizing. Even 20 years ago, such demonstrations of anti-Western power in the heartlands of Western nations would have been unthinkable. But demographic shifts, propelled by a plummeting population of Americans and Europeans and a burgeoning population of Africans and Middle Easterners, enabled by corporate and political special interests in the West who believe their economic survival depends on mass migration, have turned the unthinkable into reality. And it has only just begun.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Trump’s Popularity is not Inexplicable

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In a routine that has become familiar of late, CNN’s Jim Acosta reports the ongoing ascendancy of Donald Trump in the polls with a mixture of dismay and disbelief. With these emotions front and center on his November 5 cable show, Acosta grimly reported the latest polling on the 2024 presidential candidates, noting that Trump is now ahead of Biden in five out of six crucial swing states. In Nevada, where Trump lost by 2 percentage points in 2020, Trump is now up by 11 points over Biden.

As Acosta proceeded to interview experts in an attempt to make sense out of this, the prevailing message was Biden is too old, and that has voters worried. David Frum, a reliable uniparty stalwart, reassured Acosta that “Trump is only three years younger than Biden,” and that Trump is so weak and elderly that he “can’t even open a jar of pickles.” The men then proceeded to applaud Biden as physically hale and hearty, dismissing concerns about his age as unwarranted.

Is that the best they can do? On November 5, during Acosta’s predictable series of questions with a predictably anti-Trump assortment of guests, nobody cared to acknowledge that people age at different rates. Once the conversation pivoted to rote condemnation of Trump for his many legal challenges, nor was there any acknowledgement that whatever wrongs Trump may have committed, they are easily matched by the Clintons and the Bidens.

Every voter in America who isn’t perpetually marinated in online and offline uniparty newspeak will consider these things to be objective fact: Trump is physically robust, Biden is not. Trump is a victim of politicized lawfare, Biden is not. But denying these facts is not only the compulsory position of America’s housebroken, government-approved influencers like Acosta and Frum, they are the entire basis of their case for Biden.

What one almost never sees from these purportedly balanced sources of news and information is the case for Trump. But on November 4, in an article published by BBC, there appeared a surprisingly fair summary of many of Trump’s goals if he is reelected. Entitled “What a Donald Trump second term would look like,” and contrary to what was probably the author’s intent (another example of how the establishment really doesn’t get just how out of touch it is), every one of the policies described came across as perfectly reasonable and badly needed.

To Trump’s supporters, the policies he’ll implement are well known. Secure the border. End birthright citizenship. Restore, as Trump has himself said over and over, a requirement that people migrating to America bring skills and sentiments that will enable them to easily assimilate and immediately become productive citizens.

The principle at work with these immigration policy reforms ought never to have slipped away. Americans have realized the disaster of the past three years violates every aspect of a sane immigration policy. There is no border security, and no criteria for legal entry that respects the interests of Americans already living here. And yet America’s government-approved media is in blithe denial of the harm caused by 10 million people who in just three years have swarmed across the border to overwhelm social services, break big city budgets, catalyze the spread of fentanyl, enable the infiltration of terrorist cells and cartel gangs, while driving prices up and wages down.

America’s broken immigration system, for whom the only beneficiaries are government bureaucrats and corporate financiers who simply want a bigger population in order for them to grow, respectively, their fiefdoms and their profits, has infuriated ordinary Americans. They’re done. And the only politician in the United States who unequivocally intends to fix it is Donald Trump.

Other policies the BBC report characterizes as “controversial” are, to the less tone deaf majority of Americans, nothing of the sort. “Opening the spigots” to permanently lower energy prices is a perfect example. If mass immigration of unskilled people creates opportunities to grow government while assaulting the middle class with new taxes to pay for it, lowering energy prices creates opportunities for the private sector to grow and create new jobs and enables working families to afford upward mobility and expand the middle class.

Trump’s common sense policies on energy extend to environmentalist issues in general. Instead of issuing executive orders that mandate extreme, bleeding edge “green” appliances and automobiles, or regulate new single family homes out of existence, Trump will restore sanity to America’s environmentalist policies and keep a middle class lifestyle affordable. Here too, Americans have realized the environmentalist movement, and the oligarchs who profit from it, have declared war on their way of life. They’ve had enough, and Trump is the only politician who thoroughly understands what’s happened and intends to fix it.

With respect to law and order, Trump also offends the status quo. He proposes to “round up the homeless and move them to tent camps outside US cities,” and of course, to the politically connected, heavily subsidized developers who are getting filthy rich building “supportive housing” at $500,000 per unit, or the social workers giving away food and free syringes, that’s an outrageous idea. But it’s the only idea that’s going to work. As it is, America’s homeless population is only incentivized to grow, spreading crime, addiction, chaos, disease and danger.

Control immigration in a manner that strengthens America instead of weakening and dividing it. Lower the cost of living by adopting a realistic all-of-the-above energy policy and rolling back extreme environmentalist regulations. Take away the incentives for people to give up and join America’s burgeoning homeless population. Enforce property and drug crimes not only to administer justice, but to deter would-be offenders. Require state school teachers to “embrace patriotic values.”

What heresy.

Biden’s message, and by extension the message of every institutional power that supports Biden and opposes Trump is easy to understand: You don’t matter. Hard work doesn’t matter. American traditions and values don’t matter. Nothing matters, actually, except to what extent you can present yourself as a victim of the people who built America because they worked hard, embracing American traditions and values.

The Trump alternative, proven during his first term, has terrified the opposition. They called Trump a warmonger and accused him of trying to “break up NATO.” Yet he negotiated peace agreements in the Balkans and the Middle East, and pressured NATO members to honor their funding commitments. They accuse Trump of trying to “destroy democracy,” at the same time as they wage unrelenting political persecution against Trump, dozens of his associates, and thousands of his followers.

According to the BBC and other terrified organs of the establishment, Trump’s team is working with conservative organizations to minimize the opportunity, if he is elected again, for a hostile federal bureaucracy to thwart his policy initiatives and executive orders. This is characterized by establishment apparatchiks as a threat to democracy. It is not. It is a long overdue repudiation of a politicized and biased bureaucracy that has usurped the authority that is constitutionally vested in a U.S. President.

What is a threat to democracy, however, are the plans to deny Trump victory in 2024, using tactics that worked in 2020. Regardless of whatever else may have been done against him in 2020 that constitutes voter fraud, the plain fact remains that there was an organized “Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” for Biden, obscenely well funded. And as John Eastman testified in his disbarment trial – excellent, honest coverage by Rachel Alexander – there is ample evidence that laws were broken in order to affect the election outcome in crucial swing states.

If that’s not enough, as described by Dr. Robert Epstein in a series of recent Tim Pool video interviews, just manipulation of search results and targeted messages by social media platforms to encourage Democrats – and only Democrats – to go vote, has a dramatic impact on actual results, turning landslides into cliffhangers, and close races into easy Democratic wins.

Anyone who bothers to view alternative media, which is hard but not impossible to find, already knows all of this. Knowing the game is rigged, and it is, further explains Trump’s rise in the polls. He is the underdog, unfairly maligned, with policies that would help the American people. Standing in opposition to Trump is Joe Biden, who offers America and the world a future of war and poverty.

It isn’t the growing support for Trump that is inexplicable. It’s his apoplectic opposition.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Tribalism and Democracy

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This latest war between Israelis and Palestinians, growing worse by the day, has its origins in the horrific slaughter of civilians by Hamas terrorists on October 7. It’s accurate to condemn this atrocity and blame Hamas for starting the war. It’s also completely reasonable to make a value judgement. Islamofascism is the greater evil and must not prevail. It terrifies not only Israelis but also countless millions of Arabs throughout the Middle East and beyond.

What’s much harder, however, if not impossible, is visualizing a solution to the underlying problem, which is two distinct peoples claiming the right to live in the same place.

And in this case, the powerful sentiments aroused on both sides point to bigger issues affecting everyone in the world. What defines a nation? What are the prerequisites for a functioning democracy? What is a legitimate justification for a population to live in a particular place?

According to Palestinians, at least those who want Jews expelled from Palestine, Jewish Zionists are colonial oppressors who over the past century have flooded into their land by the millions and stolen it from them. According to the Israelis, especially the right-wing faction, this land is their land and it has belonged to them for thousands of years.

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is an extreme version of similar conflicts occurring around the world. In nations settled by Europeans, a growing number of activists are now claiming they are living on “stolen land.”

There is an obvious problem with using the stolen land argument to delegitimize the presence of an entire people living somewhere, which is that with rare exceptions, no land of any value, anywhere on earth, is not currently occupied by people who did not themselves displace previous occupants, who in most cases had in-turn also displaced previous occupants. For example, native tribes in the Americas fought each other for land long before Europeans arrived.

Even the fact that in antiquity Israelis lived in what is present day Israel cannot escape a stolen land accusation. Before the Jews entered what they referred to as the promised land, others already lived there. The first three verses of the Old Testament’s Deuteronomy Chapter 7 offers a vivid description of that moment:

“When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons.”

Conquest, like slavery, is a fact of human history, common to almost every culture and found in every century. Before Christian crusaders fought to conquer Jerusalem in 1099, it was conquered by Islamic armies in 635. What’s changed is that in modern times we have evolved to the point where the consolidating finale to conquest in earlier centuries – to destroy the vanquished totally and show them no mercy – is condemned as genocide. That’s progress. Let’s not go backwards. But is democracy up to the task of reconciling antagonistic tribes, both intact, living on the same land

Where do you draw the line when making the stolen land argument? Does the establishment of a Jewish state in 1407 BC lend it more legitimacy than the preexisting ownership of land by Palestinians in 1948? If you’re talking to a Palestinian, that’s a hard argument to make with a straight face.

In the face of such unyielding passion and baffling complexity, what can an American, trying to be true to our finest ideals, make of the latest, horrifying events unfolding in the Middle East? As a nation committed to human rights, striving for moral worth in its foreign policy choices, is there any solution that can finally find universal appeal?

The so-called “two state solution” may have had a chance at one time, but rather than look for blame at the failure of a two-state solution to have ever worked despite many serious attempts, consider where we stand today. The four maps shown on this link are reasonably accurate representations of how Palestinian ownership has shrunk over the past 75 years. The West Bank, which was part of Jordan until 1967, might have been a Palestinian state, but today, the areas still occupied by Palestinians has been cut into dozens of pieces, following decades of relentless expulsions by Jewish settlers. This is still going on.

This reality bespeaks a difficult question: Is it realistic to think Palestinians would be willing to accept a two-state solution that offers them a territory that is cut into dozens of small pieces, surrounded by Jewish settlers occupying land that was not taken 75 years ago, but in some cases only months ago? And if the answer is no, as it is likely to be, is it realistic to think Jewish settlers are going to be willing to vacate enough land on the West Bank to give back a viable, contiguous territory to the Palestinians? Also, probably not.

Which brings up an even bigger question: Why aren’t Jews in Israel willing to accept a unitary state, a democracy where everyone living in the territory “from the river to the sea” gets one vote? And here we must ask, what defines a nation? It clearly isn’t just borders, because the borders of Israel, inclusive of Gaza and the West Bank, constitute a more viable geographic and economic unit than the fragmented jigsaw puzzle proposed as a “two state solution.” But nations aren’t merely defined by logical economic geography.

Israelis, regardless of whether or not you consider their territorial claims to be valid, are concerned that in a unitary state, their identity as a Jewish nation would be imperiled. Is it valid for Israelis to reject the prospect of living in a territory where a majority Muslim population, through the democratic process, determines their destiny? Is anyone surprised that Palestinians resent being disenfranchised in land that, at least in modern times, they used to call their own?

Asking who has the ultimate right to live in Israel, or Palestine, is an impossible question to answer to everyone’s satisfaction. But the larger question remains. What defines a nation? If the right to “self-determination” doesn’t apply to tribes of people unified by their language, culture, and heritage, does it still have any meaning? Most people would agree that at some point, it is not fair to suggest nations, and the people who live in them, don’t have the right to protect their culture from being overwhelmed by a new democratic majority that cannot or will not assimilate.

If you are not in favor of a unitary state in Israel/Palestine, where there is only one nation, and only one electorate, then you must question the alleged virtues of multiculturalism everywhere. You must question the wisdom of mass migration into Europe and the United States. And you’d better pay close attention to the relative birth rates of migrants  versus people with native ancestry.

If Israel, as a nation, welcomes Jewish immigrants, but admits non-Jewish immigrants sparingly, what might Germany require, or the United States? Can the United States at least begin wielding its immigration policy in its own national interest, requiring from every one of its new residents a productive combination of skills, health, wealth, and cultural compatibility? Shall the United States be willing to define “cultural compatibility” and incorporate that as a fundamental element of its immigration policy? And if not willing to do that, at least to some degree, can the United States call itself a nation?

The battles between Israel and the Palestinians who believe themselves to have been displaced by Israelis very likely cannot be resolved. Two peoples are determined to live in one land. This is not unique in history. What is unique is only our hope, in this post-modern, allegedly enlightened age, that somehow eventually they can live together in peace. That may prove to be wishful thinking.

In nations where competing tribes with distinct cultures vie for political control, democracy is the engine of empowerment for the majority, and the engine of destruction for the minority. As war rages again in the Middle East, it only requires a glance at the collateral turmoil on the streets from Chicago to Berlin to see what’s at stake. We are all settlers. We are all illegitimate. And just like the Israelis, we have nowhere else to go.

Shall Israelis consent to live in a nation where they are a hated minority? Shall Americans or Europeans choose this fate? While they still can, in the nations they still call their own, it would be wise for Americans and Europeans to avoid a similar intractable reality.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.