"Abundance" and "affordability" are demoralized doublespeak for socialism. Democrat policies of higher taxes and fraud will not help anyone except their cronies. Spanberger is a case study faking moderation and focus on economics, then unleashing woke after getting elected. The only way to Make America Affordable Again is mass deportations: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/make-america-affordable-again
The Normies in the middle who traditionally voted on the left opened their eyes (Took the Red Pill) and voted for Trump. They mostly saw the lunacy of the far left. What should not happen is for those millions of Americans to stay home for the midterms, to let the far right weirdos divide them and have them vote for another deranged democrat or not vote for anyone on the normal right. The Socialists will NEVER stop and we should not let them get an edge.
100%. Our education system has failed to teach economics and history. Class envy is the germ of communism/socialism which has resulted in abject misery wherever tried. See Cuba and Venezuela as prime examples in this hemisphere.
Sorry, Chris, the radical "free trade" globalists that Friedman, et al, spawned in the 1980s, are largely responsible for the collapse of the American middle class.. All of those "low prices" we were promised came at a shockingly high cost to working Americans, i.e., the loss of good jobs, the collapse of our manufacturing base, and the creation of thousands of post-industrial ghost towns across America. Not good. We cannot counter the Dems current demagoguery on "affordability" by returning to the obviously failed "free trade" policies of the past.
China policy seems to be at this point a bipartisan consensus. Biden kept and raised trump’s tariffs on China. Also China is already a developed economy, and lots of manufacturing is now in places like Thailand and Indonesia, so how exactly do China tariffs fix problems with American manufacturing?
The populist right is making strides to fix the country’s outsourcing of manufacturing jobs and importing of cheap labor. The left and the right both screwed that up, and either side could have championed the revitalization of our ability to manufacture and construct real things. It’s astonishing that the right has chosen this as a major issue and it’s a winner politically. JD is well positioned in ‘28 if Trump stays focused on domestic issues and lays off the weird foreign military dramas.
Of the 3, I think you should have made the case that class warfare is the most dangerous and the easiest to wage when you have a large underclass and a wildly rich and powerful elite. We are at that stage. It is a very dangerous time in my opinion.
Another thing that conservatives need to keep in mind is that egalitarian crusading has rarely been driven by the downtrodden but by a malcontent middle class. So “Conservatives should celebrate the defeat of BLM and trans ideology”? Not so fast!
These things might have been defeated amongst the political pundity but not amongst large sections of the voting public. They are a kind of competitive mind game amongst millions of “more-virtuous-than-thou” public sector laptop classes. And this isn’t going to go away anytime soon. The whole two hundred year history of Progressivism could be viewed as one long purity spiral up ‘Social Justice’ Mountain. Yes we’re currently back to “What about the workers?” but there’s still plenty of “What about my new ‘gender’?” too amongst Democrats in the coastal metropolises. [from: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/stairway-to-equiheaven ]
Graham, 4 Hospitals including Rady Children's have just announced no more "Gender Care". I thank people like you(intellectuals) and Harmeet Dhillon and Chris for exposing this travesty. Chris should have got a medal last night for his many months of hard work exposing this evil.
I disagree about the free market. We cannot have a global free market and local tax systems. Every country taxes its citizens and uses those taxes to provide services to their citizens. That only works if countries are able to control the influx of external workers and goods.
Both immigration and imports should be used as a tool to improve the quality of life of citizens, not that of other countries.
We can all sympathize with people on the other side of the world making a living by cheaply manufacturing goods that will be sold in the USA, but the focus of our government should be our citizens, not those from China, India, Taiwan or any other place.
So, I think that if we still want to have countries, borders and sovereignty, we cannot have a global free market.
Very interesting thesis. Could not agree more with the need to counter the class warfare pillar. Hopefully we will be aided by visible failures in NY and CA by Mandami and Newsome respectively.
Our country has so many problems, many caused by Democrats, rhino Republicans. Everything you mentioned is true. Can you write about what they are doing to Christians? Our education is destroyed, the financial system is hanging on by a thread, so the next thing to be attacked is faith. Islam is here.
Free trade vs protectionism is not an either/or proposition. Just as all governments involve some elements of socialism, all governments restrict trade, whether through tax regimes, regulatory frameworks, or tariffs. The US is finally coming out of its orgiastic WW II hangover and recognizing that it needs to level the international playing field to some degree. We are still a long way from shutting down the US markets.
In 1999 John Ellis sounded the trumpet on this movement with LITERATURE LOST: SOCIAL AGENDAS AND THE CORRUPTION OF THE HIMANITIES…. It all rapidly went to hell at least a decade before this book came out… Ellis got panned as a reactionary by the Maoists and Leninists that had already made the long March through the institutions. Ellis was lighting fires on the mountaintops
Yes … at the time we thought the English depts were just driving themselves into a weird oblivion cultivating ever increasing irrelevance…. I recall a colleague at the time gleefully bloviating that by destroying the canon, dead white males, and any arguments for high vs low culture or better vs worse aesthetic performance they were changing the world… I of course did my thing and jumped in on poststructural analysis etc (to survive) thinking it was an odd side show with some interesting intellectual challenges…. But the boast that this was attacking logos and pulling down the pillars of western civilization seemed over the top…. This guppie jumped the bowl and became a leviathan
I'm not sure conservatives realize what an ace the class issue is for liberals in that it speaks beyond external identity markers and shoots directly at the power structures that favor the rich -- this is a point which people of all stripes and backgrounds can get revved up about. And they will.
The great irony is this message will be championed by idiots like pelosi who've benefitted in a surreal manner from these very power structures. Careful what you wish for congresspeople.
Hi Christopher, well said as always. I sit here considering what you said and what others have said and what my own thoughts repeatedly tell me after many, many trips around the sun. The left always seems to be able to move the needle in any direction they want. Because they are activists and they are willing to put the sweat equity into what they want to do to ruin the world. They seem oblivious to the fact that what they want would ruin the world, or maybe they’re just that diabolical and they actually do want to ruin it, even for themselves. That being said, those of us here on the conservative (not Republican or Libertarian) side of things sit and read the news. I just read the news you wrote, and I don’t disagree with you. But I wonder why we can’t organize. I wonder why we can’t unify and agree together on a path to take towards the freedom and liberty that we wish and hope would continue. I wonder why we can’t move the needle in any direction we really want to go most of the time. When the left wants to move they move and we sit and watch them, then later when it’s harder, we try to put them in check. When we want to move, the left is right there in our face checking us at full court press. What this means is, We seem to be able to check the left sometimes, kind of sorta. And sometimes we check them for a while, and we’re able to sort of do what we want ,as long as we can continue to sit and read the news. But I don’t see the right as some group of people who feels motivated or activated to really conquer this and make it stop completely. you know, the dog needs to be in the fight, but where is the fight in the dog? I think of myself as a constitutionalist and these days probably even more of a declarationist because it is that freedom and liberty that I desire. and in spite of the constitution, nobody follows it. Except for when they can use it as a club to beat the other side with, as a matter of perfunctory rules of order. I do want my business to be minded by me, and I want everybody else’s business to be minded by them, a minimal government to supply me the things that I don’t have time for, like civil infrastructure, and defense, and then the rest I want left to us to do or not do as we see fit. Kind of like the founders did envision it. But unfortunately our constitution however unfollowed that it may be, did not spell out succinctly enough that it was meant to be read as a document of what you must do and if it’s not written in there, you must not do that. In other words, as Justice Scalia once said, “it says what it says and it does not say what it does not say,” and even in as much as that makes sense it does not stop those who want power to pick it up and weild it inappropriately, anyway. This may sound defeatist but I don’t think that we have one country here, I think we have two. We may only have 20-30 years left to find that out if we don’t find it out sooner. As a Cold War veteran, I never thought in my young years that the manifesto would come all the way to my front door. As it turns out, the hippies were more powerful than Khrushchev. I’m sure we will find out as we all sit back and read the news.
You may be reading the news but we GOP women are out there fighting hard. We will also get help from Turning Point youth and Scott Pressler who are knocking on doors and setting up booths to Register Voters. We are looking for lists of Congressional Candidates who have a good chance to replace Dems. We will work for them and give money to them. So, yes, you sound like a defeatest.
I understand you, and I also understand what you’re saying. I am also quite active I just didn’t mention it. It was not pertinent to the point I was making. It’s still not. I’m just one person. Even though I may team up with others, it’s still not enough of us yet. Conservatives would prefer to be left alone, it’s one of those values of liberty you know, but sometimes you have to fight for that liberty. And being a veteran I understand that all too well. But I do know a lot of people who would prefer to sit on their hands and read the news, and if you’re honest with me, you do too.
I don't think the BLM stuff really is in hibernation. Just go watch some Netflix. It just became normalized. The left can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Until we understand the root psychological causes of leftism everyone will be in a constant state of reacting to whatever random dark age they're trying to create next. It wasn't neat Sowellian arguments about supply side economics that killed off the left's fascination with trying to liquidate the rich in the 1980s, it was the comprehensive demolition of the USSR and China's abandonment of leftist economics in favor of state-controlled capitalism. The two biggest most visible examples of collectivist economics simply gave up on it.
Everyone saw, and everyone saw that everyone saw. But now we have a new generation that didn't see. So the bad ideas come back.
The right have to focus WAY more aggressively on reforming education between 12-18. The curriculum and textbooks need a radical overhaul to focus much more on 20th century history, in particular stressing:
We can't sacrifice a major country every generation to teach people why leftist economics results in mass famines, this HAS to be addressed through comprehensive education programs. The left has totally captured education to the extent that kids are taught all about colonialism (centuries ago) and nearly nothing about communism (still exists). The right has to get smarter about this.
Its interesting that the firs social programs specifically designed to provide security for the elderly and the sick across the working classes was in Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck even though he was a staunch conservative and wanted to stave off Socialism. Many philosophers like Thomas Paine have examined ways to prevent class warfare especially when there is real or perceived wealth inequality. I think the United States is do for a good study of history to determine the path forward. The easiest place to start is using AI to find Medicare, Medicaid, tax etc. fraud.
Democrats cannot make life affordable through increased taxation. And taxation will not fall only on the wealthy. The money Democrats want ALWAYS comes from the middle class.
"Abundance" and "affordability" are demoralized doublespeak for socialism. Democrat policies of higher taxes and fraud will not help anyone except their cronies. Spanberger is a case study faking moderation and focus on economics, then unleashing woke after getting elected. The only way to Make America Affordable Again is mass deportations: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/make-america-affordable-again
The Normies in the middle who traditionally voted on the left opened their eyes (Took the Red Pill) and voted for Trump. They mostly saw the lunacy of the far left. What should not happen is for those millions of Americans to stay home for the midterms, to let the far right weirdos divide them and have them vote for another deranged democrat or not vote for anyone on the normal right. The Socialists will NEVER stop and we should not let them get an edge.
100%. Our education system has failed to teach economics and history. Class envy is the germ of communism/socialism which has resulted in abject misery wherever tried. See Cuba and Venezuela as prime examples in this hemisphere.
Sorry, Chris, the radical "free trade" globalists that Friedman, et al, spawned in the 1980s, are largely responsible for the collapse of the American middle class.. All of those "low prices" we were promised came at a shockingly high cost to working Americans, i.e., the loss of good jobs, the collapse of our manufacturing base, and the creation of thousands of post-industrial ghost towns across America. Not good. We cannot counter the Dems current demagoguery on "affordability" by returning to the obviously failed "free trade" policies of the past.
As I mention in passing in the piece, I think this has mostly to do with China policy, which Trump is rightfully trying to correct
China policy seems to be at this point a bipartisan consensus. Biden kept and raised trump’s tariffs on China. Also China is already a developed economy, and lots of manufacturing is now in places like Thailand and Indonesia, so how exactly do China tariffs fix problems with American manufacturing?
The populist right is making strides to fix the country’s outsourcing of manufacturing jobs and importing of cheap labor. The left and the right both screwed that up, and either side could have championed the revitalization of our ability to manufacture and construct real things. It’s astonishing that the right has chosen this as a major issue and it’s a winner politically. JD is well positioned in ‘28 if Trump stays focused on domestic issues and lays off the weird foreign military dramas.
Yep. Not going to get fooled......again!
Of the 3, I think you should have made the case that class warfare is the most dangerous and the easiest to wage when you have a large underclass and a wildly rich and powerful elite. We are at that stage. It is a very dangerous time in my opinion.
Excellent point. But Chris is correct that there is this constant pivot/rotation between these 3 arguments, which will be revived in time.
Another thing that conservatives need to keep in mind is that egalitarian crusading has rarely been driven by the downtrodden but by a malcontent middle class. So “Conservatives should celebrate the defeat of BLM and trans ideology”? Not so fast!
These things might have been defeated amongst the political pundity but not amongst large sections of the voting public. They are a kind of competitive mind game amongst millions of “more-virtuous-than-thou” public sector laptop classes. And this isn’t going to go away anytime soon. The whole two hundred year history of Progressivism could be viewed as one long purity spiral up ‘Social Justice’ Mountain. Yes we’re currently back to “What about the workers?” but there’s still plenty of “What about my new ‘gender’?” too amongst Democrats in the coastal metropolises. [from: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/stairway-to-equiheaven ]
Graham, 4 Hospitals including Rady Children's have just announced no more "Gender Care". I thank people like you(intellectuals) and Harmeet Dhillon and Chris for exposing this travesty. Chris should have got a medal last night for his many months of hard work exposing this evil.
I disagree about the free market. We cannot have a global free market and local tax systems. Every country taxes its citizens and uses those taxes to provide services to their citizens. That only works if countries are able to control the influx of external workers and goods.
Both immigration and imports should be used as a tool to improve the quality of life of citizens, not that of other countries.
We can all sympathize with people on the other side of the world making a living by cheaply manufacturing goods that will be sold in the USA, but the focus of our government should be our citizens, not those from China, India, Taiwan or any other place.
So, I think that if we still want to have countries, borders and sovereignty, we cannot have a global free market.
Very interesting thesis. Could not agree more with the need to counter the class warfare pillar. Hopefully we will be aided by visible failures in NY and CA by Mandami and Newsome respectively.
Our country has so many problems, many caused by Democrats, rhino Republicans. Everything you mentioned is true. Can you write about what they are doing to Christians? Our education is destroyed, the financial system is hanging on by a thread, so the next thing to be attacked is faith. Islam is here.
Free trade vs protectionism is not an either/or proposition. Just as all governments involve some elements of socialism, all governments restrict trade, whether through tax regimes, regulatory frameworks, or tariffs. The US is finally coming out of its orgiastic WW II hangover and recognizing that it needs to level the international playing field to some degree. We are still a long way from shutting down the US markets.
In 1999 John Ellis sounded the trumpet on this movement with LITERATURE LOST: SOCIAL AGENDAS AND THE CORRUPTION OF THE HIMANITIES…. It all rapidly went to hell at least a decade before this book came out… Ellis got panned as a reactionary by the Maoists and Leninists that had already made the long March through the institutions. Ellis was lighting fires on the mountaintops
and too few heeded the warning…
https://a.co/d/08K3PVFw
And now with an additional 2.5 decades of transmission, we can see how this has spread into practically every aspect of our civilization. 😞
Yes … at the time we thought the English depts were just driving themselves into a weird oblivion cultivating ever increasing irrelevance…. I recall a colleague at the time gleefully bloviating that by destroying the canon, dead white males, and any arguments for high vs low culture or better vs worse aesthetic performance they were changing the world… I of course did my thing and jumped in on poststructural analysis etc (to survive) thinking it was an odd side show with some interesting intellectual challenges…. But the boast that this was attacking logos and pulling down the pillars of western civilization seemed over the top…. This guppie jumped the bowl and became a leviathan
I'm not sure conservatives realize what an ace the class issue is for liberals in that it speaks beyond external identity markers and shoots directly at the power structures that favor the rich -- this is a point which people of all stripes and backgrounds can get revved up about. And they will.
The great irony is this message will be championed by idiots like pelosi who've benefitted in a surreal manner from these very power structures. Careful what you wish for congresspeople.
Hi Christopher, well said as always. I sit here considering what you said and what others have said and what my own thoughts repeatedly tell me after many, many trips around the sun. The left always seems to be able to move the needle in any direction they want. Because they are activists and they are willing to put the sweat equity into what they want to do to ruin the world. They seem oblivious to the fact that what they want would ruin the world, or maybe they’re just that diabolical and they actually do want to ruin it, even for themselves. That being said, those of us here on the conservative (not Republican or Libertarian) side of things sit and read the news. I just read the news you wrote, and I don’t disagree with you. But I wonder why we can’t organize. I wonder why we can’t unify and agree together on a path to take towards the freedom and liberty that we wish and hope would continue. I wonder why we can’t move the needle in any direction we really want to go most of the time. When the left wants to move they move and we sit and watch them, then later when it’s harder, we try to put them in check. When we want to move, the left is right there in our face checking us at full court press. What this means is, We seem to be able to check the left sometimes, kind of sorta. And sometimes we check them for a while, and we’re able to sort of do what we want ,as long as we can continue to sit and read the news. But I don’t see the right as some group of people who feels motivated or activated to really conquer this and make it stop completely. you know, the dog needs to be in the fight, but where is the fight in the dog? I think of myself as a constitutionalist and these days probably even more of a declarationist because it is that freedom and liberty that I desire. and in spite of the constitution, nobody follows it. Except for when they can use it as a club to beat the other side with, as a matter of perfunctory rules of order. I do want my business to be minded by me, and I want everybody else’s business to be minded by them, a minimal government to supply me the things that I don’t have time for, like civil infrastructure, and defense, and then the rest I want left to us to do or not do as we see fit. Kind of like the founders did envision it. But unfortunately our constitution however unfollowed that it may be, did not spell out succinctly enough that it was meant to be read as a document of what you must do and if it’s not written in there, you must not do that. In other words, as Justice Scalia once said, “it says what it says and it does not say what it does not say,” and even in as much as that makes sense it does not stop those who want power to pick it up and weild it inappropriately, anyway. This may sound defeatist but I don’t think that we have one country here, I think we have two. We may only have 20-30 years left to find that out if we don’t find it out sooner. As a Cold War veteran, I never thought in my young years that the manifesto would come all the way to my front door. As it turns out, the hippies were more powerful than Khrushchev. I’m sure we will find out as we all sit back and read the news.
You may be reading the news but we GOP women are out there fighting hard. We will also get help from Turning Point youth and Scott Pressler who are knocking on doors and setting up booths to Register Voters. We are looking for lists of Congressional Candidates who have a good chance to replace Dems. We will work for them and give money to them. So, yes, you sound like a defeatest.
I understand you, and I also understand what you’re saying. I am also quite active I just didn’t mention it. It was not pertinent to the point I was making. It’s still not. I’m just one person. Even though I may team up with others, it’s still not enough of us yet. Conservatives would prefer to be left alone, it’s one of those values of liberty you know, but sometimes you have to fight for that liberty. And being a veteran I understand that all too well. But I do know a lot of people who would prefer to sit on their hands and read the news, and if you’re honest with me, you do too.
I don't think the BLM stuff really is in hibernation. Just go watch some Netflix. It just became normalized. The left can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Until we understand the root psychological causes of leftism everyone will be in a constant state of reacting to whatever random dark age they're trying to create next. It wasn't neat Sowellian arguments about supply side economics that killed off the left's fascination with trying to liquidate the rich in the 1980s, it was the comprehensive demolition of the USSR and China's abandonment of leftist economics in favor of state-controlled capitalism. The two biggest most visible examples of collectivist economics simply gave up on it.
Everyone saw, and everyone saw that everyone saw. But now we have a new generation that didn't see. So the bad ideas come back.
The right have to focus WAY more aggressively on reforming education between 12-18. The curriculum and textbooks need a radical overhaul to focus much more on 20th century history, in particular stressing:
- The disastrous results of socialism
- The reasons it failed
- That the Nazis were far left socialists, not "far right": https://penbroke.substack.com/p/the-nazis-were-a-far-left-party
We can't sacrifice a major country every generation to teach people why leftist economics results in mass famines, this HAS to be addressed through comprehensive education programs. The left has totally captured education to the extent that kids are taught all about colonialism (centuries ago) and nearly nothing about communism (still exists). The right has to get smarter about this.
Its interesting that the firs social programs specifically designed to provide security for the elderly and the sick across the working classes was in Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck even though he was a staunch conservative and wanted to stave off Socialism. Many philosophers like Thomas Paine have examined ways to prevent class warfare especially when there is real or perceived wealth inequality. I think the United States is do for a good study of history to determine the path forward. The easiest place to start is using AI to find Medicare, Medicaid, tax etc. fraud.
Democrats cannot make life affordable through increased taxation. And taxation will not fall only on the wealthy. The money Democrats want ALWAYS comes from the middle class.