A Modest Proposal

 

A Modest Proposal 

Don Jaffa, LCMB member

Who can forget the ‘hanging Chad’ of the ‘Bush-Gore’ election cycle? Or, the news media deleted references to the Antrim County Superior Court ordered Forensic examination of the voting machines, and the finding that they were vulnerable to hacking. Or the Maricopa County pause at 11pm when Trump was ahead by 9,000 votes to 8am resumption where Biden was ahead by 9,000 votes. And affirmed by the County. 

As Ronald Reagan said to Gorbachev, “Trust but Verify!” So we are faced with the brick wall of paper ballots and paper absentee ballots. Both of which are set in stone by progressive “woke” politicians because (despite their claims otherwise) they can be manipulated in different ways. They will not surrender any opportunity to steal elections.  

In 1946, in ‘The Battle of Athens,” WW II veterans refused to accept a rigged local election, and took action to seize the ballots and report the true election results, that threw out a corrupt sherif. It was the veterans who took the initiative in face of corruption.  

At present, our national media has become challenged as the presenter of ‘Fake News,’ and therefore completely untrustworthy. It is time to put Ronald Reagan’s “Verify” in place.  So how, one might ask, can our electoral process be secured, and foster integrity and respect in that process. 

Biannual and quadrennial elections for the House, Senate and the Presidency are the purpose of federal elections. They are also concurrent with local and state elections as well. There is only one organization with the technical competence and ability, to do this task. It is the National Security Agency. It may require a constitutional amendment to set the process under the NSA. 

The NSA, using super computing, can set up a national voter registration data base. The data base is set up using ZIP+4, State DMV driver/ID registration, and the social security number. Each federal and state agency will provide an update every 30 days so the data base remains current.  

For any registration, in every state, with DMV, for either a driver’s license, or personal identification, an applicant will have to provide an American birth certificate, and provide a thumbprint.  

Each state will be provided with USB memory sticks, loaded with an access to the ballot. At 60 days prior to an election those who request absentee ballots can be sent one of these USB memory sticks to cast their ballot. Every polling station will be provided with voting booths equipped with an access to the internet using one of these USB memory sticks.  

When a voter clicks on ‘Open Ballot’ the software opens an NSA generated VPN using either 128 or 256 byte encryption VPN that connects only with the NSA electoral data base. The voter has to type in his or her ZIP+4, their Driver license number, and then their SSN. That opens the ballot for them to vote. When the ballot is voted, it activates the attached thumbprint reader. When the thumbprint is scanned and the light turns from red to green, the vote is cast.   

So what protects the integrity of this electoral process? First of all, the use of the thumbprint reader secures the requirement that only the thumb of the voter insures the veracity of the identity of the voter. Now, the issuance of the social security number takes place at birth, in the hospital. Much earlier it was obtained when one first wanted to work. 

The current VPN encryption uses 128 bytes, which is the AES standard. With current technology, experts believe it is ‘unhackable’ through the rest of this century. It can be upgraded to 256 byte encryption AES standard. That upgrade makes it even more difficult to ‘hack.’  

But that ‘hack’ would only afford access to a ‘ballot’ on election day, or the early voting period. A ‘Hacker’ would not be able to cast a vote. During setup of the system each state DMV would upload their DL/ID data base, and every 30 days upload new registrations or renewals, and deaths, invalidating a registration. The same process takes place with the social security system, i.e., a complete upload during setup, and every 30 days upload new registrations, or deaths. NSA would also report dual registration of social security numbers as a felony violation of the federal law enacting the security and integrity of the federal electoral process.  

The federal and state criminal justice systems would also have to report those incarcerated for felony convictions and the end date for incarceration, as their right to vote is suspended during incarceration and during probation. At the completion of probation or incarceration they would only have to submit a writ of restoration with the nearest federal district court. The tech nerds argue that Quantum computing can easily hack any of these systems using VPN, or into state DMV or the federal social security system. We already have to worry about either the Russian or Communist Chinese governments. They are the only ones that can acquire the Quantum computing assets and the interest to interfere in US federal elections. On the other hand, the US government can set up a separate internet only for federal elections, with no access to the regular internet, with only terminals at US post offices, or polling stations. 

A Media Beyond Caricature

A Media Beyond Caricature

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

CBS’s iconic 60 Minutes has had plenty of scandals and embarrassments in its long 57-year history, most notably the fake-but-accurate Dan Rather mess. Yet never has it found itself in greater disrepute than in 2024.

Donald Trump, for good reason, recently declined to join 60 Minutes for its traditional election-year in-depth interviews of the two presidential candidates. Why?More

Last time he consented in 2020, anchor and interviewer Leslie Stahl attacked Trump’s accurate assertion that the Hunter Biden laptop (then in the possession of the FBI) was authentic—and authentically damning to Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy.

Stahl falsely claimed the laptop “can’t be verified.” She further incorrectly asserted, “So this story about Hunter and his laptop, some repair shop found it; the source is Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.” The New York Post, in fact, reported the story. The FBI did not deny it.

Yet old Twitter and Facebook, under collaborating FBI tutelage and pressure, suppressed dissemination of the truth. Joe Biden’s then-advisor and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in conjunction with former interim CIA Director Michael Morrel, helped round up “51 former intelligence authorities” (among them Leon Panetta and both John Brennan and James Clapper, who had admitted previously of lying under oath to Congress) to claim falsely that the laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian information gambit to warp the election.

Joe Biden used the “expert” consensus to further lie in the last Biden-Trump debate that the laptop was cooked up by the Russians. And neither CBS, the “intelligence authorities,” nor any of the Bidens have ever since apologized.

More recently, CBS got caught selectively editing the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, cutting and pasting an incoherent Harris response to lessen her embarrassing word salad. And in a subsequent interview with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the network once again edited and pruned his answers, but in contrast, on this occasion, to make him seem far less persuasive.

In yet another current CBS interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, network host Tony Dokoupil honestly questioned Coates about his new, one-sided, anti-Israeli book The Message. The result was that the left-wing icon Coates was almost immediately revealed to be abjectly ignorant of the Middle East, unapologetically biased, and completely uninterested in any viewpoint other than his own partisan prejudices.

Yet what followed proved yet another network embarrassment. An internal CBS division with the eerie Orwellian title of “CBS News Race and Culture Unit” attacked Dokoupil for not providing “context” for Coates’s self-condemnatory and embarrassing interview. The subtext was that CBS, under pressure from woke zealots, simply disowned Dokoupil and sought to subject him to correct thought training. His apparent crime was not insisting on different—softball—journalistic standards for woke black authors like Coates. In other words, CBS blamed Dokoupil for revealing Coates to be a fool on the air.

The network further diminished its eroding reputation yet again through the unprofessional conduct of recent moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan during the J.D. Vance/Tim Walz vice presidential debate.

After the earlier ABC-sponsored debate between presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, in which the moderators became partisan fact-checkers (and often wrongly so) of Trump alone and drilled him on follow-up questions in a way not accorded Harris, CBS promised not to repeat such a network embarrassment. So, it pledged not to fact-check the two vice presidential candidates and instead to present a “fair” moderation of the event.

Instead, the CBS moderators were even more patently one-sided than the prior disastrous ABC performance. The two broke their own pre-debate rules by indeed fact-checking. But, even worse, they fact-checked Vance alone. And, once again, did so erroneously in a way that only exposed their unprofessional partiality.

Given the prior ABC debate sham, CBS was supposedly determined not to turn off the public with more moderator partisan distortions. Instead, the network proved that if it was a question of further eroding its professional brand or helping elect the Harris/Walz progressive ticket, then CBS would predictably choose to jettison its reputation to further the progressive cause.

Just as CBS is no longer the network television standard, so too has the current generation of partisans done their best to sully the New York Times. Within just a few days, the Times embarrassed itself in ways similar to the partisanship so toxic at CBS.

The Times just published an op-ed, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza.” What followed were testimonials from medical officials and doctors in Gaza with truly harrowing stories of Israel’s collateral damage and the shooting of civilians, accompanied by X-ray photos of small children with IDF bullets allegedly lodged in their bodies and heads.

But even if one was not aware of the fables promulgated by Hamas and the history of propagandistic attacks on Israel, and even if there was no corroboration of how the victims died and under what conditions, a novice might have sensed that something was not quite right with the evidentiary X-rays.

Experts pointed out that the embedded bullets in the scans appeared pristine, without any fragmentation after entering skulls or midriff sections. There were no apparent entry and exit wounds on the images—suggesting either that it was unlikely the bullets came from IDF-issued high-velocity weapons or that the X-rays might simply have been rephotographed with IDF bullets placed beneath them. In any case, the New York Times did not cite any expert outside reviewer to authenticate the scans.

Recently, the New York Times again rushed to partisan judgment to persuade the public that current charges of abject plagiarism by presidential candidate Vice President Harris were baseless. Accusations arose that Harris and her coauthor in a past book on crime had plagiarized a number of sources multiple times.

Yet the Times claimed the copying was minor and did not rise to the level of actionable plagiarism. It “proved” this by quoting a plagiarism “expert,” Jonathan Bailey, who, it implied, had consulted all the alleged plagiarism passages.

But once the public saw just a few of the passages in question, almost immediately it concluded otherwise: that Harris and her co-author were indeed plagiarists. That forced Bailey, the original Times expert, to reconsider his initial opinion: “At the time, I was unaware of a full dossier with additional allegations, which led some to accuse the New York Times of withholding that information from me. However, the article clearly stated that it was my ‘initial reaction’ to those allegations, not a complete analysis.”

Bailey then concluded that Harris had indeed committed plagiarism but not “maliciously” so. Once again, the Times had not verified its assertions before publication, and once again it had erred on the side of its known partisanship.

The Times and CBS are just a small example of current once-prestige outlets—such as ABC (cf. its moderators during the Harris-Trump presidential debate) and NPR (that just retracted its scurrilous charges against journalist Rich Lowry)—who have consistently abused the public’s trust for the partisan benefit of progressives or their causes.

In sum, the trust and prestige that took prior generations of journalists decades to earn have been thrown away in just a few years by incompetents and partisans—on the ancient, flawed principle that the supposedly superior moral ends justify any means necessary to achieve them.

We Are in Need of Renaissance People

 We Are in Need of Renaissance People

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, The Blade of Perseus 

The songwriter, actor, country/western singer, musician, U.S. Army veteran, helicopter pilot, accomplished rugby player and boxer, Rhodes scholar, Pomona College and University of Oxford degreed, and summa cum laude literature graduate, Kris Kristofferson, recently died at 88.

Americans may have known him best for writing smash hits like “Me and Bobby McGee” and “For the Good Times,” his wide-ranging, star-acting roles in A Star is Born and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, his numerous solo albums, especially with then-spouse and singer Rita Coolidge, and the country group super-quartet he formed with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson.

In other words, Kristofferson was a rare Renaissance man who could do it all in an age of increasingly narrow specialization and expertise.

At certain times throughout history at particular locales, we have seen such singular people from all walks of life.

Classical Athens produced polymaths like Aristotle—tutor to Alexander the Great, logician, student of music, art, and literature, educator, think-tank founder, biologist, philosopher, and scientist. Later Greeks like Archimedes and Ptolemy, as men of action, mastered six or seven disciplines and applied their abstract knowledge in ways that made life easier for those around them.

The late Roman Republic was another cauldron of multitalented geniuses. It produced the brilliant stylist, historian, politician, and consummate general Julius Caesar, as well as his republican archrival Cicero—politician, philosopher, orator, master stylist, lawyer, and provincial governor.

Turn-of-the-century Victorian Great Britain produced giants like Winston Churchill—prime minister, statesman, essayist, historian, orator, strategist, and wartime veteran. As Britain’s war leader, between May 10, 1940, and June 22, 1941, he, almost alone, resisted the Axis powers and prevented Adolf Hitler from winning the war.

But we associate the idea of a “Renaissance man” mostly with Florence, Italy, between the 15th and 16thcenturies. In that brief 100 years, the Florentine Republic hosted multi-talented geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci—master painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, engineer, and inventor—best known for the Mona Lisa and Last Supper.

The multifaceted talents of his younger contemporary Michelangelo were as astounding, whether defined by his iconic sculptures David and Pietà, his stunning painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or as the master architect of the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica.

The American Revolution was a similar embryo of Renaissance men. Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the most famous example of unchecked abstract and pragmatic genius displayed in almost every facet of late 18th– and early 19th-century life—main author of the Declaration of Independence, third U.S. President, founder of the University of Virginia, inventor, agronomist, architect, and diplomat.

But Benjamin Franklin may best approximate the model of the Florentine Renaissance holistic brilliance—journalist, publisher, printer, author, politician, diplomat, inventor, scientist, and philosopher.

Franklin’s life was one of perpetual motion and achievement. In one lifetime, he helped to draft the Constitution, invented everything from the lightning rod to bifocals, founded the American postal service, and successfully won over European countries to the nascent American cause. Theodore Roosevelt—president, historian, essayist, conservationist, naturalist combat veteran, battle leader, explorer, and cowboy—exemplified the idea of an American president as the master at almost everything else.

The history of our own contemporary Renaissance people often suggests that they are not fully appreciated until after their deaths—especially in the post-World War II era.

Why?

We have created a sophisticated modern society that is so compartmentalized by “professionals” and the credentialed that those who excel simultaneously in several disciplines are often castigated for “amateurism,” “spreading themselves too thinly,” “not staying in their lanes,” or not being degreed with the proper prerequisite letters—BA, BS, MA, PhD, MD, JD, or MBA—in the various fields that they master.

But specialization is the enemy of genius, as is the tyranny of credentialism.

Because the Renaissance figure is not perfect in every discipline he masters, we damn him for too much breadth and not enough depth—a dabbler rather than an expert—failing to realize that his successes in most genres he masters and redefines is precisely because he brings a vast corpus of unique insights and experience to his work that narrower specialists lack. The Greek poet Archilochus first delineated the contrast between the fox who “knows many things” and the hedgehog who “knows one—one big thing.” We have become a nation of elite hedgehogs, whose narrow expertise is not enriched by awareness of or interest in the wider human experience.

Renaissance people often live controversial lives and receive 360-degree incoming criticism, not surprising given the many fields in which they upstage specialists and question experts—and the sometimes overweening nature of their personalities that feel no reason to place boundaries and lanes on their geniuses and behavior or to temper their exuberances.

The best American example of the current age is the controversial Elon Musk, a truly Renaissance figure who has revolutionized at least half a dozen entire fields.

No one prior had broken the Big Three auto monopoly of GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

Musk did just that. He exploded all three companies’ dominance with his successful creation of the first viable electric vehicle, Tesla, whose comfort, drivability, reliability, safety, and power rivaled or exceeded the models of all his competitors.

His spin-off battery storage and solar panel companies allowed thousands of families to go off the grid and stay self-sufficient in power usage.

Musk’s revolutionary Starlink internet system—a mere five years old—provides global online service to over 100 countries. Through its some 7,000 satellites, Starlink brings internet service to remote residents far more effectively and cheaply than do their own governments. When natural disasters overwhelm utilities or war disrupts the normality of peace, all look to Musk to restore online reconnections to the outside world.

Musk, almost singlehandedly, transformed the U.S. space program from a NASA 60-year-old government monopoly to an arena of fervent private-public competition. His Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) created a rocket and spacecraft program that has kept the U.S. preeminent in space exploration and reliable satellite launches. When NASA and old aerospace companies falter, the government looks to Musk to bail them out.

Musk, at great personal cost, radically transformed the old Twitter—poorly managed, censorious of ideas and expressions not deemed progressive, and mired in scandal for partnering with the FBI to silence news deemed possibly injurious to Democratic candidates and left-wing campaigns.

His new X replacement is an unfettered platform for free expression. And the more the left abhors their loss of the monopolistic old Twitter’s ideological clearing house, and vows to flee X and start their own new left-wing, censorious Twitters, the more they stay on X.

Musk’s newest companies have now entered the convoluted, little-understood, radically competitive, and dangerous field of artificial intelligence (OpenAI) and the emerging discipline of bonding the natural brain to the electronic online world (Neuralink). To the degree Musk is successful, America will lead these areas of intense international rivalry that involve the gravest issues of national security and survival.

Overspecialization has helped make vulnerable and sometimes doomed complex top-down societies from the Mycenaeans to the Aztecs to the Soviets. A tiny credentialed and often incestuous elite manages the lives of a vast underclass whose daily lives are scripted by top-down master planners—as an autonomous and skeptical middle class disappears.

America is increasingly becoming a bifurcated, two-tiered society of a specialized government-corporate-media-political-credentialed class of degreed overseers and managers who attempt to micromanage an increasingly less well-educated, dependent underclass.

The overclass cult lacks sufficient common sense and pragmatic expertise outside their narrow areas of specialization to direct society, and the masses are often without the education, money, and power to challenge them or the esoteric complexity of their modern society. And the result is often disastrous, as we see everywhere, from the trivial to the existential—from our currently paralyzed state space station program and inability to build a floating pier in Gaza, to ineffectual and insensitive state responses to natural disasters like Hurricane Helene and an increasingly dangerously incompetent Secret Service.

Renaissance people provide a link to the proverbial people, as they master almost anything they attempt while keeping themselves attuned to the practical effect of their achievement among the people.

The Renaissance physicist Richard Feynman once explained to the entire nation why the Space Shuttle 1986 Challenger catastrophically imploded shortly after launch. A polymath Albert Einstein explained to America why it had to begin the Manhattan Project and beat Nazi Germany to the acquisition of an atomic bomb. Theodore Roosevelt used his expertise as a politician, conservationist, outdoorsman, explorer, and writer to help establish and preserve 230 million acres of public lands.

So, we should occasionally pause and reflect on the Kristoffersons and Musks in our midst. They play a vital role in enriching culture and civilization for the many without becoming part of the narrow few. And we owe these people, who belong to a rare and hallowed caste of the ages, for making our lives richer, more enjoyable, easier, and safer.

 

We Lose Total Control

 

“We Lose Total Control”

Clinton Continues Her Censorship Campaign on CNN

Jonathan Turley, jonathantruley,org

Hillary Clinton is continuing her global efforts to get countries, including the United States, to crackdown on opposing views. Clinton went on CNN to lament the continued resistance to censorship and to call upon Congress to limit free speech. In pushing her latest book, “Something Lost and Something Gained,” Clinton amplified on her warnings about the dangers of free speech. What is clear is that the gain of greater power for leaders like Clinton would be the loss of free speech for ordinary citizens. 

Clinton heralded the growing anti-free speech movement and noted that “there are people who are championing it, but it’s been a long and difficult road to getting anything done.” She is right, of course. As I discuss in my book, the challenge for anti-free speech champions like Clinton is that it is not easy to convince a free people to give up their freedom.

That is why figures like Clinton are going “old school” and turning to government or corporations to simply crackdown on citizens. One of the lowest moments came after Elon Musk bought Twitter on a pledge to restore free speech protections, Clinton called upon European officials to force Elon Musk to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). This is a former democratic presidential nominee calling upon Europeans to force the censorship of Americans.

She was joined recently by another former democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, who called for government crackdowns on free speech.

Other democrats have praised Brazil for banning X. For her part, Clinton praised the anti-free speech efforts in California and New York and called for the rest of the country to replicate the approach of those states.

Clinton added a particularly illuminating line that said the quiet part out loud. This is all about power and the fear that she and others will “lose control” over speech:

“Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control and it’s not just the social and psychological effects it’s real harm, it’s child porn and threats of violence, things that are terribly dangerous.”

Clinton continues to offer a textbook example of the anti-free speech narrative. While seeking sweeping censorship for anything deemed disinformation, Clinton cites specific examples that are already barred under federal law like child porn.

Despite the amplified message on sites like CNN, most citizens may not be as aggrieved as Clinton that she and her allies could “lose total control” over the Internet. The greater fear is that she and her allies could regain control of social media. The Internet is the single greatest invention for free speech since the printing press. That is precisely why figures like Clinton are panicked over the inability to control it.

If citizens remain true to their values and this indispensable right, Clinton will hopefully continue to face “a long and difficult road to getting anything done” in limiting the free speech of her fellow citizens.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

Blow Up the Middle East War

 

How To Blow Up the Middle East War in Five Easy Steps

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

When Joe Biden became president, the Middle East was calm. Now it is in the midst of a multifront war.

So quiet was the inheritance from the prior Trump administration that nearly three years later, on September 29, 2023—and just eight days before the October 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis—Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan could still brag that “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

So, what exactly happened to the inherited calm that led to the current nonstop chaos of the present?

In a word, theocratic Iran—the nexus of almost all current Middle East terrorism and conflict—was unleashed by Team Biden after having been neutered by the Trump administration.

The Biden-Harris administration adopted a 5-step revisionist protocol that appeased and encouraged Iran and its terrorist surrogates Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

The result was a near guarantee that something akin to the October 7 massacres would inevitably follow—along with a subsequent year of violence that has now engulfed the Middle East.

First, on the 2020 campaign trail, Biden damned long-time American ally Saudi Arabia as a “pariah.”

He overturned the policies of both the previous Obama and Trump administrations by siding with the Iranian-supplied terrorist Houthis in their war on Saudi Arabia.

Biden accused the kingdom of war crimes, warning it would “be held accountable” for its actions in Yemen. Biden-Harris took the murderous Houthis off the U.S. terrorist list.

Almost immediately followed continuous Houthi attacks on international shipping, Israel, and U.S. warships—rendering the Red Sea, the entryway to the Suez Canal, de facto closed to international maritime transit.

Worse still, by the time of the 2022 midterms, when spiraling gas prices threatened Democratic congressional majorities, Biden opportunistically flipped and implored Saudi Arabia to pump more oil to lower world prices before the November election. Appearing obnoxious and then obsequious to an old Middle East ally is a prescription for regional chaos.

Second, Biden-Harris nihilistically killed off the Trump administration’s “Abraham Accords.” That diplomatic breakthrough had proven a successful blueprint for moderate Arab nations to seek détente with Israel, ending decades of hostilities to unite against the common Middle East threat of Iran.

Third, Biden begged Iran to reenter the appeasing, so-called Iran Deal that virtually had ensured that Iran would eventually get the bomb.

Worse yet, it dropped oil sanctions against the theocracy, allowing a near-destitute Iran to recoup $100 billion in profits. And it greenlighted $6 billion in hostage ransoms to Tehran.

An enriched Tehran immediately sent billions of dollars in support and weapons to the anti-Western terrorists of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis to attack Israel, Americans, and international shipping. Iran soon began partnering with China and Russia to form a new anti-American axis.

Biden-Harris also fled abruptly from Afghanistan, abandoning billions in weapons and American contractors. The humiliation thus virtually destroyed American deterrence in the Middle East, inciting enemies and endangering friends.

Fourth, Biden-Harris restored hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the West Bank and Gaza, but without any guarantees that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas would desist from their past serial terrorist acts.

In the case of Hamas, U.S. and Western “humanitarian aid” simply freed up more fungible dollars in Gaza to arm Hamas and to expand its subterranean tunnel complex essential to its October 7 massacres and hostage-taking.

Fifth, from the outset of the ensuing increased tensions, Biden-Harris began pressuring the Israelis to act “proportionally” in responding to the massacre of some 1,200 Israelis and nearly 20,000 missiles, rockets, and drones launched at their homeland from Iran, the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

Such straitjacketing of our closest Middle East friend further signaled the Iranian-backed terrorists that there was now “daylight” between the U.S. and its closest regional ally. That opportunity provided still further incentives for Iran to test just how far it could safely go in attacking Israel.

But why did Biden-Harris so foolishly ignite the Middle East?

In part, the administration naively tried to resurrect the old, discredited Obama administration notion of ‘creative tension’—of empowering a rogue Iran and its terrorists to play off Israel and the moderate Arab regimes, as a new sort of balance of power in the region.

In part, Biden-Harris was caving to increased anti-Semitism at home and the rise of powerful, pro-Palestinian groups on U.S. campuses and in critical swing Electoral College states.

In part, Biden-Harris was naïve and gullible. The two bought into the anti-Americanism and anti-Israel boilerplate of our enemies. So, they thought to make amends by seeing Iran and its terrorists as the moral equivalent of democratic, pro-American Israel.

Their malignant legacy is the current Middle East disaster.

Lawless Border Catastrophe by Kamala Harris

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Machiavelli’s Lessons for America

 

Machiavelli’s Lessons for America

David Lewis Schaefer, The American Mind 

Advice from Old Nick on how to strengthen our republic.

While Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is commonly dismissed as a guidebook that teaches how purely self-interested rulers can attain or secure power through amoral means, such an interpretation is difficult to reconcile with a statement Machiavelli makes in his other major political work, the Discourses on Livy. There, he writes of his “natural desire to work” for the “common benefit”—not merely that of the rulers. And although the Discourses are explicitly devoted to the advancement of republicanism as distinguished from princely government, the modern philosopher most fully identified with the cause of democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, called The Prince “the book of republicans.” As Machiavelli explains in Chapter 15 of The Prince, his intent is “to write something useful to whoever understands it”—which means his advice is not solely, or perhaps primarily, for princes.

An attentive reading of The Prince will confirm not only Rousseau’s general claim, but the work’s relevance to understanding and remedying some of the major problems that confront the American republic today.

In the first paragraph of Chapter 3, Machiavelli identifies a fundamental problem rooted in human nature: the people’s natural utopianism, or their incapacity or unwillingness to accept the harsh facts of political life. In Chapter 2, he had maintained that unless a hereditary prince possesses “extraordinary vices” that make him hateful, a “reasonable” people should support him. Since they would be accustomed to his family’s rule, he would have less need to “offend” than a usurper would to maintain their obedience.

But at the start of Chapter 3, Machiavelli observes that contrary to this counsel of reason, the people are always disposed to “change their masters in the belief that they will fare better”—even though in this belief “they are deceived, because they see later by experience that they have done worse.” This is so because a prince who overthrows the existing order by violent means will find himself compelled to deal harshly with his subjects—even including his erstwhile supporters—in order to secure his power. But Machiavelli implies that the people never learn from this experience, since there are always aspects of being governed (no less under republics than principalities) such as paying taxes, enduring wars, or having freedoms restricted that the people will resent. Hence, they will continue to blame their problems on the folly or vice of whoever rules them at a given time, rather than seeing the prince as the product of the inherent necessities of political life.

This is by no means to say that Machiavelli is an archconservative who denies that any political changes can be for the better. But he points to the need for government to be founded explicitly on recognizing the harsh realities of political life, and making the people aware of these realities, lest they continue to be deceived by would-be rulers (republicans no less than monarchs) who take advantage of their gullibility. James Madison echoes this point in Federalist 51, where he explains why the Founders instituted a system of checks and balances in the Constitution, despite the claim of some Anti-Federalists that they amount to a needless complication, based on an unfairly low view of popular behavior.

Central to Machiavelli’s argument, and its contemporary relevance, is the distinction he draws between “nominal” virtue—that is, actions that appear on the surface to be good—and its “effectual” form, that is, those that are genuinely beneficial. After introducing this distinction at the end of Chapter 16, he illustrates it in the following chapter by distinguishing between the nominal “mercy” practiced by the people of Florence (then a republic) toward a city they ruled, Pistoia, and the nominal “cruelty” practiced by the notorious prince Cesare Borgia over the province of Romagna. In order “to escape a name for cruelty,” Machiavelli observes, the Florentines avoided cracking down harshly on the city’s factional disputes, crime, and riots, with the result that Pistoia was “destroyed.” Thus, their nominal mercy toward lawbreakers was really effectual cruelty. (The parallel to the de-policing movement of recent years in the United States is obvious.)

By contrast, the cruel tyrant Cesare Borgia (in Machiavelli’s highly fictionalized portrait) “restored the Romagna, united it, and reduced it to peace and to faith.” He did so, as Machiavelli explains in Chapter 7, by hiring Remirro d’Orco, a “cruel and efficient” governor, to terrify the populace into law-abidingness through meting out harsh punishments for criminals. In other words, Cesare’s nominal cruelty was really effectual mercy.

Given the people’s natural aversion to the appearance of cruelty, Cesare had to mitigate any resultant hatred by blaming d’Orco for the nominal cruelty in a manner that might be difficult to replicate. Machiavelli thus recommends establishing an independent judiciary in Chapter 19, as was done by an unnamed founder of the French kingdom, as a “third judge” to resolve disputes between the aristocrats and the multitude by “favor[ing] the lesser side” without the king himself being blamed. Here one finds another anticipation of The Federalist’s account of the Constitution, specifically that the independent federal judiciary as outlined in Federalist 78 is a potential arbiter between the legislative and executive branches, as well as between the federal and state governments.

In the chapter preceding his treatment of nominal versus effectual mercy, Machiavelli makes another important distinction—this time between nominal and effectual “liberality,” or generosity on a prince’s part. As Aristotle had already observed in the Nicomachean Ethics, liberality is the most beloved of all the moral virtues because of the benefits that the donor’s recipients derive from it.

Pretending, however, that a ruler should practice this virtue in its literal or nominal sense is another matter. Machiavelli observes that while “it would be good to be held liberal,” nonetheless a ruler who practices liberality may not only fail to be recognized for it, but will ultimately incur “the infamy of its contrary.” The reason is that for a prince to acquire “a name for liberality,” he must ultimately “consume all his resources” and “burden the people extraordinarily” with taxes of all sorts. That will cause his subjects to hate him, offending the many who will have to pay higher taxes while “the few” benefit from his largesse. But when the prince finally recognizes this problem “and wants to draw back” from it, he immediately “incurs the infamy” of being a miser.

Machiavelli recommends a “solution” to this problem: a prince who wants to procure a popular reputation for liberality while avoiding its downside should rely on foreign conquests to finance it, as was done by rulers like “Cyrus, Caesar, and Alexander.” In other words, the “effectual truth” of liberality turns out, as political theorist Clifford Orwin has pointed out, to be a kind of collective theft.

Machiavelli’s warning about the danger of government seeking a reputation for liberality has an obvious resonance in America today, beset by ever-growing deficits as the result of ever-growing government spending, especially in the form of the outrageously misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act.”

Indeed, during the current presidential campaign, both candidates have been competing to win votes through further costly government giveaways, ranging from the forgiveness of student loans and mortgage interest payments to subsidies for child care and home purchases and eliminating taxes on tips. While the Democratic candidate promises, unrealistically, to finance all her increased spending from taxes imposed only on people earning over $400,000 or on corporations, it is noteworthy that neither she nor her opponent mention America’s desperate need, in the face of growing threats from China, Iran, and Russia, for a substantial increase in the defense budget, another harsh reality that few voters are willing to face. Additionally, true reform of the country’s budget-busting entitlement programs remains an untouchable “third rail” of American politics, as President George W. Bush learned during his second term in office.

Even as the deficit increases due to the ever-growing gap between domestic spending and tax revenues, the real value of people’s earnings and savings continues to be taxed away, less visibly or “nominally,” but no less “effectually,” through inflation. But here it is relevant to consider the alternative that political philosophers inspired by Machiavelli—most notably, Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith—proposed as a way to enable people to enjoy a continually increasing standard of living that does not depend on either foreign conquest or endless government handouts: emancipate the economy from governmental restrictions on people’s opportunity to improve their standard of living by abolishing regulations of prices, wages, and interest rates, along with high tariffs, as well as eliminating unnecessary regulations that obstruct business startups and erect high barriers to entry for various professions (such as what some states have imposed on hair braiding and interior decorating). With the liberation of peaceful, honest labor and investment motivated by acquisitiveness that’s not cabined by undue legal restraint and moral and religious opprobrium or envy—in other words, free enterprise—politics is no longer a zero-sum game, as it would be if based on conquest.

As economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has documented in the remarkable Bourgeois trilogy, the system of economic freedom indirectly encouraged by Machiavelli has engendered a monumental improvement in ordinary people’s standard of living in much of the world beginning in the early nineteenth century. Its benefits were made manifest more recently in the United States thanks to the economic booms that the country enjoyed under the tax reductions and reforms that Presidents Reagan and Trump enacted with the support of Congress.

Alas, there are growing signs of a retreat from the policies of economic freedom in both parties: advocacy of tariff increases, taxing non-realized assets as “capital gains,” and government guarantees of “fair” prices and prosecution of “price gougers”—the latter two particularly reminiscent of the policies that kept medieval Europe poor (with the exception of kings and aristocrats) and added to the oppressive power of governments. As has often been observed, in modern-day politics the extremes tend to meet—witness the growing agreement between “NatCons” like J.D. Vance and admirers of socialism like his Democratic counterpart Tim Walz as well as Bernie Sanders.

Machiavelli is the rarely-recognized originator of the revolution in political philosophy that brought about the modern liberal, commercial republic, as Harvey Mansfield argues in Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World. But the sometimes harsh lessons he taught—for example, reducing crime requires effective law enforcement rather than de-policing; preserving a nation’s freedom requires making military preparedness its top priority; excessive governmental “liberality” ultimately impoverishes a country (except for “the few” insiders); understanding that the “morality” of a policy goes beyond outward appearances (soaking the rich out of envy)—are ones that continually need to be relearned, since they sometimes go against people’s “instinctive” feelings, as well as the ambitions of demagogic leaders. The authors of the Constitution well understood these lessons, albeit through the medium of the Florentine’s more rhetorically restrained successors.

David Lewis Schaefer is Professor of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross

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