ETHNIC CLEANSING REDUX

ETHNIC CLEANSING REDUX

Don Jaffa, LCMB Member Opinion

While serving in Germany in 1995, a neighbor told us about members of his family that had ‘disappeared’ during a Serbian incursion into Kosovo. Of course it was assumed that they would eventually turn up in a mass grave somewhere in the aftermath. Because of the egregious character of the Serbians involved, it resulted in President Clinton declaring an ‘Air War’ against the Serbs, which forced a resolution during a ‘Peace’ conference held at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, resulting in the ‘Dayton’ Accords, and the deployment of the US Army’s 1st Armored Division into Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Since I was serving as ‘Emergency Essential’ civilian Chief, Force Modernization, with 1st Armored Division, I too ended up serving in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The first mission of the Commanding General was to disarm the combatants. A subsidiary mission was to locate mass graves and provide support to the forensic effort to identify the dead. The Serbs were an Army with logistic support, and the victims, the Kosovars, were lucky to have knuckle-dusters and baseball bats, resulting in the mass murder of 7,000 – 9,000 unarmed civilians.

Despite the presence of NATO peacekeepers, and the set up of UNMIK, the ethnic strife continued on with outbreaks of violence and warfare. Camp Bondsteel was set up as the location of US Peacekeeping Forces and US aid to Kosovo is enormous. But the ethnic strife is now cooling off. On the other hand, the Arab-Israeli conflict as it is called, has a long and resolute history.

Apart from the long suffering patience of the Zionist movement, there were two factions within British Imperialism that marched forward with ‘what to do with the Jews!’ One faction decided that there was a home for the Jews, in what we now call ‘Uganda.’ The second faction, on religious grounds, established in 1809, the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, in the belief that if the Jews were converted to Christianity, it would be the entre to ‘The End of Time.’ In neither case, did it deflect the Zionist goal of return to ‘Palestine’ as the Holy Land, Jerusalem. From the arrival of the 20th Century until the 1922 Cairo Conference, it was clear that Jews, especially Chaim Weizman, were instrumental in aiding and achieving Arab sovereignty over Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates.

The 1922 Cairo Conference was the victor’s dissolution of the German Imperial empire in the Near East, along with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The key representative at the Cairo Conference was Winston Churchill. T. E. Lawrence, and King Faisal, were the heroes of the War in the Near East against the Turks (who were allied with the Germans). King Faisal, using T.E. Lawrence to write in English, wrote to Felix Frankfurter, to assure him that the Arabs were in accordance with the Zionist cause for a home for the Jewish People in Palestine, in March of 1919. But even earlier, Emir Faisal was quoted in the London Times:

“The two main branches of the Semitic family, Arabs and Jews, understand one another, and I hope that as a result of interchange of ideas at the Peace Conference, which will be guided by ideals of self-determination and nationality, each nation will make definite progress towards the realization of its aspirations. Arabs are not jealous of Zionist Jews, and intend to give them fair play and the Zionist Jews have assured the Nationalist Arabs of their intention to see that they too have fair play in their respective areas. Turkish intrigue in Palestine has raised jealousy between the Jewish colonists and the local peasants, but the mutual understanding of the aims of the Arabs and Jews will at once clear away the last trace of the former bitterness, which indeed, had already practically disappeared before the war by the work of the Arab Secret Revolutionary Committee, which in Syria and elsewhere laid the foundation of the Arab military successes of the past two years.” (Jews and Arabs in Syria: ‘The Emir Faisal looks to a Bright Future,’ The Times, Thursday, 12 December 1918; pg. 7.)

Despite the success of the Cairo Conference and the birth of Arab sovereignty over their homelands, the British Foreign Office kept a firm grip on the British Mandate over Palestine, and their control over Egypt. In the waning days of the 19th Century the British Navy converted to the use of oil to fuel its ships, based on the enormous oil fields obtained under the Anglo-Persian oil company’s leases in Persia. But with the closure of the Suez canal, and oil tankers having to travel around the Cape of Good Hope, at a crucial point in the war, the British Navy at Scapa Flow, ran out of oil.

The British Ambassador, hat in hand, went to see the President of Standard Oil of New Jersey. The next day some 90 oil tankers sailed for Scapa Flow. Strategic reserves of oil became a National Security issue thereafter. British presence in the Near East, in the Mandate over Palestine, remained because of the exploration for oil resources. American efforts to explore for oil in the Mandate were quickly discouraged. And such efforts came to end quickly as enormous discoveries in Texas and Oklahoma kept American Oil companies at home. Legendary photos of Indians in full bonnet regalia driving Rolls Royce Limousines became signals that competition from American oil was being left behind. Anglo-Persian Oil company began pumping oil to fuel the British Fleet and sales funded much of British Naval Construction.

British and French Imperial concerns, Palestinian Mandate and Egypt to the British, Syrian and Algeria to the French, left the leadership of the new Arab Nations to conduct their own relations with the Jewish community in Palestine. So in 1924 they allowed the Fourth Aliyah to bring Jews to Palestine with few if any restrictions until its’ end in 1928. The only complaints, as indicated by King Faisal, were from Arab ‘peasants.’ This came from the Aliyah arrivals who went to work reclaiming the land from the Desert. This was recognized in the collective settlements (kibbutzim) and villages (moshavot) that continued to grow everywhere. At the end of the Fourth Aliyah the city of Tel Aviv was a Jewish city of 40,000. The Jewish community in Palestine, the ‘yishuv,’ was a shadow government that operated separately from the British Colonial structure.

Where, one might inquire did such a massive schism between Arab and Jew emerge. Then even with a British Imperial Mandate over Persia, and their oil interests, as a national security requirement, there was little or no enmity noticed by the British in Persia between Farsi speakers and the Jews that lived in Persia.  There was none of that for the most part anywhere in the near east and middle east. The old enmity of the Moors in Spain, and then the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Catholic Inquisition with mandated conversion of Jews, or being burned at the stake, were matters of historical fact.

Historical fact is here the source of revelation. In the early 1930s a very wealthy businessman from Beirut, Lebanon, who traveled regularly between Beirut and Berlin, and who was fluent in German, became enamored of the Nazi Party, and was frequently gifted with German editions of ‘Mein Kampf.’ On his own initiative he had portions of ‘Mein Kampf’ translated into Arabic and published in a Beirut newspaper.

The immediate result in Beirut struck such an impression that the German Propaganda Minister, Dr. Goebbels, ordered the immediate translation into Arabic of the entire volume, and arranged for an immediate printing of 100,000 copies for immediate export to Lebanon, which was accomplished in 1934. A subsequent edition and printing was done for Turkey as well. And in 1938 an edition in Farsi was completed, printed and shipped to Tehran.

What effect did the publication in Arabic of ‘Mein Kampf’ have in the Arab world? It became the ‘bible’ of the nationalist movement in Arab military though out the middle east. In 1934, among the thousands of Arab military officers, like young Captain Gamel Abdel Nasser Hussein, and his friend Lieutenant Anwar Sadat, it shaped their view of Colonial Imperialism, and the rabid anti-Semitism within ‘Mein Kampf’ as their own.  As the Arab nations created in 1922 succumbed to generational transfer, the original sentiments were replace by those in ‘Mein Kampf.”

Even here in America the original ‘Nation of Islam’ espoused the teachings in “Mein Kampf,” and allowed no heresy. In the autobiographies of Redd Foxx and Malcom X, there was no disparity between the Jew and the Gentile, they were both the ‘Devil.’  But when Malcom X made his Haj to Mecca, he converted to the truth and broke from the ‘Nation of Islam,’ and was murdered for his heresy. In the same vein, young Lieutenant Anwar Sadat won the 1935 Al-Ahram (Cairo Newspaper) essay contest on “Who is the Greatest Influence in your Life?”  

In that essay he espoused the cause of “Mein Kampf.” And because he engaged Israel in a Peace Treaty, he too was assassinated. But Sadat was nuanced in his political message. While he addressed the Knesset in the Peace Treaty process, it was noted by Professor Paul Eidelberg (now at Bar-Ilan University) in a lecture on Sadat in the 1970s at the Claremont Colleges, that no one noticed that his tie was a pattern of interconnected Swastikas!

During my many years serving in Germany an annual event of great interest was the Frankfurt Book fair. There were hundreds of publishers from all over the world, with many interesting displays. However, the one fact of interest was publishing houses in Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose display both had a note saying that display and sale of new editions of Mein Kampf, in Arabic, are forbidden here in Germany. Only today there was a photo on Yahoo showing an annotated edition of Mein Kampf in the window of a bookstore in Berlin.

The historical fact is that those publishing houses in Riyadh and Teheran, publish millions of copies of Arabic Mein Kampf (and now the 2nd Volume of Mein Kampf) every single year. More copies of Mein Kampf have been printed than the Koran, in the Arab world. In Saudi Arabia there are high school textbooks that feature “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” as historical fact.  The Saudi Arabian Imams fund Madrassahs throughout Islam that provide three hots and a cot for Koran study and on Friday Imam lectures from Mein Kampf. For more than sixty years, to quote a TV series, “This is the WAY!”

To their credit, the many Arab and Persian leaders who espouse the Nazi creed, do so under the banner of “Western Culture is Anathema to Islam!”  But the ‘culture war’ is a façade they hide behind. Between 1900 and 1947 there was no question that eventually that quietus of the question of a homeland for the Jews would occur. When it did, with the United Nations granting the sovereignty of Israel, in 19478, the immediate reaction from the succeeding generation of Arab leaders, now Arab Nazis, was to declare war. But the Arabs living within the borders of the new nation, had to choose. And their choice was mandated by the Arab Nazis. Leave and escape to refugee camps, or claim citizenship as Israelis.

For over seventy five years the refugee camps, and the refugees, have been a cancer. In Jordan they overthrew the government, and tried to depose the Hashemite King of Jordan. In Lebanon the refugees and the Lebanese have been under the tyranny of the Syrian regime and the Iranian funded terrorists, resulting in thousands of deaths and assassinations. Neither Egypt, Jordan, nor Syria want the Palestinian Arabs in their borders under a mass exodus from Gaza.

For the moment, like here in the USA, no one is willing to admit that it is merely a border and immigration problem. But one occasioned by a Palestinian Arab attempt to begin “ethnic cleansing” of Jews from an occupied Palestine. The massive slaughter of non-combatant women and children, with many beheaded, terminates any consideration of imposition of Geneva Conventions. Any Palestinian Arab who surrenders voluntarily would be immediately deported for mandatory resettlement in either Libya or Algeria. The Palestinian Red Crescent would be sanctioned and removed, from everywhere in the Middle East, to set up and run those resettlement camps in Libya and Algeria.

Every single asset owned, operated, by any of the terrorist organizations, including those of the Red Crescent, PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc., would be seized, sold and converted into cash, and provided to the Red Crescent through Libyan and Algerian governments to build and operate the resettlement camps, by monthly allocation. Every building in Gaza would have to be destroyed and bulldozed into rubble and every tunnel filled with propane, injected with napalm and then sealed by explosive charge. It will take a long time, but the process will ensure the sanctity of Israeli sovereignty.

The same process will have to take place in the West Bank, and an eventual process for East Jerusalem. The US State Department policy wonks, who demanded of the Defense Mapping Agency, that the ‘new’ borders obtained by Israel in the ’67 war be retained under the sobriquet of ‘Occupied Territories,’ and a US position that these ‘occupied territories’ belonged to ‘Palestine.’ The ‘Deep State’ policy wonks were obviously as anti-Semitic as the Arab Nazis. The problem is that the American Progressive left, which supports the Palestinian Arab, as Arab Nazis, considers the position as ‘Politically Correct.’ SO much so, that Senator Hilary Clinton, was a speaker, and fund raiser, for Palestinian Women’s groups in NYC and its Boroughs. Yahoo is filled with reports of her appearances and efforts for the Palestinians.

 

The massive problem here, is that so many Americans support the Arab Nazis, as political correctness.

A New Beachhead for Western Civilization

A New Beachhead for Western Civilization

Joseph Loconte, Law & Liberty

This fall I joined the faculty at New College of Florida, where educators are engaged in a radical experiment: to transmit the story of Western civilization—its achievements as well as its failings—as an essential requirement of citizenship. That this proposition is considered radical speaks to the moral rot in our national life.

New College, the state’s honors college, has received international attention because of the role of Governor Ron DeSantis in appointing conservatives to its board of trustees. Earlier this year, the board voted to close the school’s office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and eliminate courses in gender studies, the first public college in the nation to do so.

The partisan nature of the debate over the intended reforms at New College obscures a profoundly important question: Is liberal democracy—and the civilization from which it emerged—worth defending? Ironically, many conservatives are as desperately confused about the answer to this question as is the progressive Left. 

The historical narrative of the Left is that Western civilization is a conceit. It has produced a toxic mix of imperialism, militarism, and racism. Our democratic ideals and institutions, we are told, are tools of the oppressor against the oppressed. The United States, as the lead nation in the West, is largely a force for evil in the world.

The storyline of the new Right, however, can be equally damning of our liberal, democratic tradition. A growing cohort has become disillusioned with the American Founding. For them, the United States was conceived in a state of sin—not primarily the sin of slavery, but rather the devilish Enlightenment ideas about human freedom, equality, and natural rights. The inevitable result was a society awash in materialism and radical individualism.

Both of these ideological tribes share the same vice: the blinkered outlook of the cynic. Largely ignorant of our civilizational history, they cling to distorted notions of our past and thus plot utopian visions for our future—either militantly secular or semi-theocratic. But a liberal arts education, firmly grounded in the humanities, offers a better path.

It begins with the knowledge that Western civilization is the centuries-long interaction of Greek and Roman culture, adopted and transformed by the Jewish and Christian traditions, and then transformed again by the scientific, democratic, and intellectual revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and the United States. Over the course of the twentieth century, through two world wars and a Cold War, our civilization—indeed, all of human civilization—barely survived the prospect of extinction.

This should give us pause. What we call the Western tradition is a story of exploitation, slavery, inquisitions, and war—as well as a story of exploration, freedom, enlightenment, and redemption. Our civilization is something far less than heaven on earth, yet far better than most of the historical alternatives.

Why devote attention to the West? What about Asia, Africa, and the civilization of Islam? They all have influenced Western civilization.

Consider some of the features of modern life that we take for granted: universal education; access to quality health care; clean, running water in abundance; the application of science to harness resources that enrich our lives in countless ways; economic systems that make creative and meaningful work possible; and political societies based on the concepts of government by consent, freedom of speech, assembly, and the freedom to worship God, or no God, according to individual conscience.

All of these accomplishments, though embraced in many parts of the world, were pioneered by inventors and thinkers in the West. These are the fruits of one civilization, in particular, our own.

In his book Civilization: The West and the Rest, British historian Niall Ferguson observes that the dominance of Western culture during the last 500 years is a stunning historical development that demands an explanation. “It is the story at the very heart of modern history,” Ferguson writes. “It is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve.”

The task of the educator in relation to his student, Locke wrote, is “not so much to teach him all that is knowable, as to raise in him a love and esteem of knowledge and to put him in the right way of knowing, and improving himself, when he has a mind to it.”

In a healthy academic environment, young minds will be encouraged to grapple with this riddle. Rather than arguing over the merits of programs to support diversity, equity, and inclusion, a wiser approach would be to grasp how and why the West has placed such a supreme value on pluralism, fairness, and equal justice under the law. Like no other civilization in history, the West has attempted—haltingly, to be sure—to apply the Golden Rule to its political culture.

This was one of the signal contributions of English philosopher John Locke, considered the father of political liberalism. More compellingly than any other thinker, Locke anchored his arguments for freedom and equality in a biblical view of the human person: man as “God’s workmanship,” as he put it in his Second Treatise of Government (1689). Equally important, he understood that these ideas must be transmitted to the next generation. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke insisted that “the welfare and prosperity of the nation” depended on the proper education of young people.

At New College, this education will involve a robust commitment to a liberal arts curriculum rooted in the humanities: the disciplines of literature, politics, philosophy, history, and the arts, as they have developed in the Western tradition. Americans are in the throes of a national argument over what kind of education is essential for our modern democracy. There is less debate, however, over the appalling deficit of decency and civility in our political and civic lives. The precipitous decline of the liberal arts in education is surely part of the reason.

Locke’s contemporaries, too, complained bitterly about the degraded levels of both civic virtue and personal piety. The task of the educator in relation to his student, Locke wrote, is “not so much to teach him all that is knowable, as to raise in him a love and esteem of knowledge and to put him in the right way of knowing, and improving himself, when he has a mind to it.” To cultivate a love for knowledge, not only for its own sake, but for the improvement of our souls: This has been the defining contribution of the classical liberal tradition in the West, a deep source of its cultural health and vigor.

It can become so again—if we have a mind to do it.

Joseph Loconte is a presidential scholar in residence at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis scholar for public life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.

The Disenfranchised Rural Voter

While reading this, think of California and it's vast ruralness, controlled by the coast.

The Disenfranchised Rural Voter

David Setliff, UNCOVERDC 

Do you ever wonder why rural voters complain about the coastal elites running our federal government? With Congress in upheaval, I decided to find out, and the more people I talk to here in rural Colorado, the more I find that my neighbors are aware of what’s going on in DC and don’t care because they have been isolated from the democratic process. Some of my neighbors are just plain mad. They are not mad at the latest dysfunction in Congress as much as they are mad at their representatives because their reps refuse to make the effort to engage with their constituency.  

At our local diner, I spoke with two elderly residents who don’t know the name of our congressional rep. They are so disenfranchised that one said he didn’t know who he voted for; he just saw the “R “and checked the box.

To illustrate the issue, I will discuss my Congressional District, which Ken Buck represents in Colorado Congressional District 4 in Prowers County, Colorado.

As you can see by the map, District 4 covers a lot of territory, with a population of 858,938 as of 2021 and over 38,000 square miles; since 2022, that has changed somewhat as the district’s size was reduced, and some counties were moved to district 3. That’s still a lot of territory to cover. Our representative, Ken Buck, has two office locations: one is in Windsor, and the other is in Castle Rock. Both offices are just outside Denver. To visit with Rep. Buck, I have to drive well over 3 hours through farm and ranch land dotted by occasional and very rural population centers.

Why do we feel left out of the democratic process? Because everyone I speak to in my county cannot remember Rep. Buck visiting the area. However, looking through his previous schedule, he visited our main town (Lamar, CO) to hold a town hall session in 2018. That was the last local event that he attended. There was very little notice of the event, and few locals attended. As a citizen journalist, I try to stay informed about this sort of event, and I had no idea it happened.

While looking for his previous visits out here, I started looking through Rep. Buck’s social media feeds. Since January, most of the events he attended have been central to the Denver area: a Colorado Bankers Association meeting in Denver in March, a Taiwanese Chamber of Commerce dinner in Denver in May, a Public Service Leadership Awards ceremony in Englewood, CO, in July, and this month, a National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA) Filipiniana Gala held (go ahead and guess) in Denver. Notice a pattern?

With these events and his appearances on MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN, our representative has very little time for his rural district, and his biggest concerns have shifted away from the voters who put him in office. My neighbors see him on TV with the other talking heads, addressing national problems while we suffer neglect and disinterest because our needs do not land us on the prime-time news shows.

A challenger to Rep. Buck announced his campaign recently. Trent Leisy of Weld County decided that enough was enough and threw his hat in the ring. I mentioned online that “It would be nice if Ken Buck had an office central to his constituents. But I guess he doesn’t really represent us.” Mr. Leisy responded to that, “Sad, but true!”. With those words ringing in my ears, I decided to volunteer for his campaign. I’ve never worked for a campaign before and learned some interesting things about enfranchising rural voters.

Here are the meat and potatoes of what works and what doesn’t in rural campaigns for state and federal office—first, some statistics to better understand the demographics of rural Colorado. The median age in my county is 38.5 years, as opposed to Denver County, where Denver is located, and the median age is 34.6 years. Another rural county, Baca County, is at 45.9 years, while Kiowa County is 39.8 years. El Paso County, where Colorado Springs is located, is at 34.4 years of age.

The rural areas are aging. My county is covered with farm and ranch land; most people working there don’t spend time on social media. Those who do get online browse the county buy and sell site, join a canning group for ideas and recipes, or use social media to keep in touch with family and friends. But they are too busy working the land to be on social media all day. They are too busy feeding America.

Where does rural politics get off the rails? Let’s start with the new thing in campaigning: memes. Memes have been recently coined as modern-day political cartoons. Searching for the word “meme” online will give you a plethora of results, some for, some against, and opinions vary widely on their effectiveness. But the one interesting thing about memes is you must be online to see them. The aging demographic is not likely to see these because they are not obsessively online like the younger generation. Do memes work? Like any tool, they have their uses; to be fair, I enjoy them. But they don’t really work out here in rural America.

So, what does work? It’s time to go old school, and here is the perfect meme to get us started.

If candidates want to get noticed and garner votes in my neck of the woods, they must return to tried-and-true grassroots campaigns. Utilizing collective volunteer efforts focusing on face-to-face engagement and being willing to drive, knock on doors, talk to people, and place yard signs. It shows that the candidate cares about rural voters. The key is spending time at the rural community centers to meet people, listen to their concerns, and get airtime on a local radio station. More than anything else, ruralites appreciate the face-to-face and eye-to-eye approach. They will take you more seriously and appreciate the words from their candidate of choice more if it is in person. That’s only half the battle, though.

A candidate can spend all the money in the world to place radio, TV, and even YouTube ads, but at the end of the day, it’s the face-to-face that matters most out here. My word is that my bond and a handshake go a long way, especially right now, because our current representative appears to have forgotten about us. Most people out here feel forgotten and, in some cases, outright disowned. Some of the disenfranchised simply no longer vote. In the last Colorado primary held in 2020 here in Prowers County, out of 11,996 residents, there were 7,393 registered voters. Of those 7,393, only 6,391 were considered active. Out of those 6,391, only 2,448 participated, which is 38.30%. That’s an abysmal 20.40% of the total county population.

To sum things up, for the rural vote, it will take a formidable ground game to get noticed and obtain those votes. Mailers and memes will only get you so far. Getting in front of people, talking to them about their concerns, discussing your platform, recruiting volunteers, asking for them to help knock on doors with you, registering new voters, and asking them to participate in the elections is a winning strategy in Flyover Country. To bring rural voters back into the process, they must know that urban politicians care about them.




David Setliff is a writer who "delivers a worldview from the rural perspective." He is the author of The Flyover Chronicles on Substack. 

Affirmative Action Made New

 

Affirmative Action Made New

George Liebmann, Law & Liberty

 About a year ago, a major newspaper, mingling its editorial and news pages as is now usual, published charts showing flat Black enrollment at a number of major universities in an effort to influence the then-pending Supreme Court affirmative action litigation. There was no qualitative assessment including such matters as dropouts, remedial programs, or school discipline. The approach was reminiscent of that once voiced by former Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano: that since Harvard PhDs do well, American Blacks would be aided if more of them were to receive Harvard PhDs.

This approach is now seen to have failed. The Black population is now equaled or eclipsed in many places by the numbers of Hispanics and Asians. Intermarriage, which Tocqueville regarded as the index of equality in society, has increased, requiring something in the nature of a Nuremberg law to accurately bestow racial preferences, which in any case flowed disproportionately to the professional classes and West Indian and other immigrants. A visibly failed and arbitrary program continued to be fueled by virtue-signaling among lawyers and journalists.

Colleges were burdened with large remedial programs. Legal departments and admissions and discipline offices consumed funds that once would have been devoted to core subjects. Administrators grew to out-number professors. The introduction of a lump of under-prepared and hence unhappy students, as at Columbia and Yale in 1968, even contributed to riots, and academic freedom has been endangered since.

Moreover, unfashionable disadvantaged groups have not benefitted at all. Appalachian high schools, Catholic schools in the Rust Belt, and Christian schools in the South have not been favored by Ivy League admissions officers.

Interest-group liberalism does not provide an impulse to academic excellence. As observed by Judge Learned Hand, “The herd is regaining its ancient and evil primacy; civilization is being reversed, for it has consisted of exactly the opposite process of individualization.” Hand made himself unpopular in 1958 by declaring that the only tenable basis for the desegregation decisions was a ban on racial classifications. After 65 years of travail and tribulations, the Supreme Court has taken his point.

Administrators of the vanishing affirmative action dispensation have overlooked the admonitions of George Kennan that schools exist to serve intellectual and not social purposes, those of Edward Levi that universities cannot become microcosms of society, and those of Bertrand Russell that society as a whole benefits from academic elitism.

Recent and proposed admissions policies promote a focus on everything but the knowledge that ought to be possessed by high school graduates, an approach not duplicated in Great Britain and France, with their A-levels and baccalaureate examinations. This has absolved colleges from taking any interest in the curricula of high schools or the education and qualifications of teachers in them. As a result, American high schools and colleges produce too few science graduates, and scientific jobs are either bestowed on recent, frequently short-term, immigrants or are outsourced to foreign countries.

Nevertheless, there are certainly underprivileged people in our society—some of them racial or ethnic minorities, others not—who could greatly benefit from policies designed to elevate their educational and economic attainment without abandoning merit. What would an action program renouncing ethnic categories and embracing individualistic liberalism look like?

First, like the National Merit Scholarship program and the one-time New York State Regents’ Scholarships, it would reward demonstrated achievement in high school. The British and French A-Level and Baccalaureate examinations do this. Once upon a time, American universities set their own entrance examinations. Now that few require submission of the College Board achievement tests in subject matter, and a reduced number require SAT tests (really tests of elementary school skills), the only incentive to subject matter excellence left is the College Board Advanced Placement examinations. As the recent controversy in Florida indicates, even some of these have been corrupted and politicized. Any college that wants to be thought of as a serious institution preparing graduates for teaching, public life, or the sciences should use these as the principal criteria for admission.

Second, it would provide paths to residential higher education for those performing well in post-high-school distance learning programs, like MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) programs offered by MIT and other American universities, the courses offered by the University of Maryland-University College once limited to Americans abroad, and the similar programs of the Open University in Great Britain and UNISA in South Africa. The Open University was rightly regarded by the otherwise lackluster Prime Minister Harold Wilson as his most notable achievement in office. UNISA educated most of the Robben Island prisoners who made up Nelson Mandela’s first cabinet. Distance learning is useful not only for prisoners but also for housewives and career-changers who are thereby spared the need to devote many hours a week commuting to and from community colleges. Successful programs include a week or two a year of intensive residential study to motivate and discipline students and give them a sense of fellow-feeling. Yet, as a recent study in Maryland demonstrated, teachers’ unions fought tooth and nail against the facilitation of distance learning, by requiring cumbersome approval of each local course by union-controlled state agencies, leaving American schools totally unprepared for the COVID epidemic.

These opportunities, if well publicized, should produce minority enrollments similar to those elicited by the present corrupt system, with lower dropout rates, no costs for remediation, and fewer discipline problems.

Third, a reasonable action plan should reserve substantial parts of upper-level classes for students doing well at community colleges and the military. These sources of recruitment have been almost totally neglected by Ivy League and other admissions officers, an exception being a small program for the military instituted by the late Dartmouth President James Wright. Since today’s military is significantly recruited from high school dropouts and others lacking higher education, such programs would be an important source of social mobility. The generation of post-World War II students admitted under the G.I. Bill brought an atmosphere of greater maturity to American colleges, which has been lost as the adequacy of military educational stipends has been allowed to wither.

Fourth, universities should provide facilities, including child care facilities, for mature female undergraduates, as at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge in recognition of the fact that such students are apt to be highly motivated, and provide a good example of academic commitment to other students. The “sexual revolution” brought on an unexpected explosion in unwed motherhood, to the point where 40% of new births and 70% of births among Blacks involve fatherless families. What was once an exceptional circumstance involving 4% of births is now a more usual one, yet colleges have done little or nothing to assist those damaged by the new dispensation, who are not members of the academic and professional classes visible to them.

Finally, a merit-based plan should encourage early career or mid-career enrollment to persons without a college background who have proven themselves in business, government, or the military, on the pattern of the Nieman Fellowships for journalists at Harvard and the Pew and Press Fellowships in England. Mid-career education has been neglected in the United States. Even the military “war colleges” have been allowed to wither; the Foreign Service Institute offers only rudimentary and short-term language programs. Senator Robert Taft’s proposal for an Intelligence Reserve Corps based on something like the World War II Navy School for Oriental Languages has not found favor. In consequence, American businesses are disadvantaged in competing for new markets in Brazil and ex-Portuguese Africa, in the Far East, and in Central Asia.

These opportunities, if well publicized, should produce minority enrollments similar to those elicited by the present corrupt system, with lower dropout rates, no costs for remediation, and fewer discipline problems. They reward the deserving rather than the undeserving, the mature rather than the immature, and aspire not to a perfectly equal society, but to an open one.

The emotional fuel for “affirmative action” was the plight of a Black underclass in our large cities, who benefitted not at all from it. What they need are work programs like the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps, uncontroversial when it was ended by wartime labor demands. Also needed is a larger and more incentivized army so as to avoid the repeated re-deployments into war zones that have produced a massive suicide rate among recent veterans. An inner-city generation needs to be shown portions of the nation far removed from the two or three blocks into which they have been confined while growing up, and needs to be introduced to the disciplines provided by regular hours, exercise, showers, and alarm clocks.

Inner-city and other high school dropouts deserve help through government-sponsored work programs like the CCC and short-term residential vocational courses like those once offered by Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute (which have since become conventional four-year colleges). The last two measures are not within the means of higher education institutions, however committed. They should stick to their proper business.

None would call it 'controversial'

None would call it 'controversial'

Joe Sullivan, GAB,  Harbinger Sentinel 

MOST AMERICANS live their lives with general indifference about the “burning world” out beyond our shores…. They have been conditioned to believe that “all of that” is “so far away” and that it will never come here… Our current government and our “mainstream media” conduct their communications dependent upon the general “cluelessness” of most of the American people. The “open border policies” of the United States government under “Slow Joe” Biden are nothing less than a TREASONOUS omission of his sworn duty as President of the United States to protect the American people from potential enemies “foreign and domestic”. And yet, Congress and the Senate FAIL MISERABLY to hold Biden accountable for his OVERT REFUSAL to ENFORCE IMMIGRATION LAW and BORDER SECURITY. Meanwhile, MILLIONS of INVADERS infiltrate our borders and effectively disappear into the country. They are actually transported all over the country by the federal government at taxpayer expense…

AND STILL, CONGRESS FAILS TO ACT…. Instead, they have proven to be officially INDIFFERENT to the BIDEN CRIME FAMILY beyond their endless inconsequential hearings, individual public pronouncements, and TV appearances. They apparently believe that showing up on TV and making allegations will placate the American voters… Months and years are slipping by until now we all find ourselves in another national election cycle.

IN TOO MANY WAYS, American politics has devolved into the equivalent of a modern soap opera - where chatter and drama keep the viewer's interest while nothing ever really changes.

SO EFFECTIVELY (AND IN FACT) our entire federal government is a DYSFUNCTIONAL EXERCISE where the PRESIDENT is a TRAITOR to our people for CRIMES that he will never be held accountable for because our LEGISLATIVE BRANCH (House and Senate) is itself populated by elected officials who themselves FAIL to honor their own Oath of Office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” by providing effective “oversight” of the Executive Branch (POTUS and “Administration”)…

PRESIDENT TRUMP has exposed this GROTESQUE FRAUD of a government for what it is which has made him a pariah within the halls of the “ESTABLISHMENT”. Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the Senate FAILED BY OMISSION to investigate the 2020 STOLEN ELECTION because it removed Trump from power and ended his pressure upon them to actually do their sworn duty on behalf of the American people.

CONGRESS continues to spend irresponsibly and the current battle for the Speakership demonstrates the “civil war” within the Republican Party between the Trump allies (MAGA Insurgents) vs the Establishment (RINO “Deep State”). What we’re seeing play out is the struggle to take back the control of the United States government and secure ACCOUNTABILITY from those elected to the LEGISLATIVE BRANCH. If the “MAGA Insurgents” succeed - or if their influence grows - then this will reflect Trump’s own growing influence. If Trump wins in 2024 - and if the Legislative Branch is made to become RESPONSIVE and ACCOUNTABLE to the American people’s interests once again, then we might be able to SAVE OUR COUNTRY…

And if the DYSFUNCTIONAL STATUS QUO prevails, then the United States is doomed…

AND SO - I remind everyone that while the world beyond our borders burns - our own country is crumbling beneath our feet - and there is a clandestine “civil war” already underway to take back our government and return it to being a CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC. If this process fails between NOW and Election Day in 2024, then the prospect of much more serious conflicts could result.

Does Iran Realize Its Own Growing Danger?

 

Does Iran Realize Its Own Growing Danger?

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, victorhanson.com 

Iran understandably believes it is riding quite high.

It is flush with cash. It hints it almost has the bomb—and might use it soon.

The Iranians are bragging about their new tyrannical allies like Russia and China.

Iran boasts of now being the self-proclaimed leader of jihad on behalf of all Muslims. It gloats that it is feeding the Russian war-machine by exporting its own drones.

Tehran proudly supplied and funded Hamas’s savage murdering of Jewish children in Israel.

It eggs on its other pawn Hezbollah to launch a reputed 100,000-Iranian-supplied missiles into Israel.

It constantly provokes the U.S.—mostly by veiled threats to unleash anti-American terrorists in the Middle East and perhaps inside America itself.

But above all, Iran is giddy over the appeasing Biden administration.

Biden resurrected the unhinged Obama administration plan of empowering a “Shiite crescent”—of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, including Hamas.

This American idea of a radical bloc would supposedly birth “creative tension” and thus on autopilot balance the dominance of our friends in Israel and the Gulf regimes with our new Iranian clients. Yet the logical result of such madness was the massacre we saw in Israel.

Biden put pro-Iranian envoy Robert Malley—now under FBI investigation—in charge of begging Iran to restart the disastrous Iran Deal.

The anemic Biden administration has reportedly replied only four times to some 83 Iranian attacks on Americans.

Biden lifted sanctions allowing Iran to garner tens of billions of dollars in new oil sales—to be routed to all of Israel’s terrorist enemies.

He sought to pay ransom to Iran to get back five American hostages—at a cost of $1.2 billion per captive and a green-light for Tehran to take more.

The Biden administration restored in aggregate $1 billion in aid to the West Bank and Gaza, despite the long history of radical Palestinian terrorism.

This mollification of Iran also led its appendages Hamas and Hezbollah to believe that if any of them started a war against Israel, then Iran would guarantee their victory, the U.S. would do nothing— and likely force Israel to do the same nothing.

Yet a delusional Iran still is not fully aware how its loud bragging about and support for its client Hamas’s barbaric killing of Jewish civilians have put it into an unprecedented dangerous predicament.

For the first time in decades, there is no nation that can restrain Israel from destroying Iran’s pawn Hamas—not after it butchered 1,000 Jewish citizens while radical Palestinians in Gaza keep celebrating the slaughter and promising more such savage mass murdering.

Iran’s other proxy Hezbollah still issues blood-curdling threats to launch missiles. But it privately knows if it hits Israel with them, Beirut will resemble something far worse than its rubble of 2006 during the last Middle East war.

The world despises Iran, and now finally accepts it cannot be appeased. Arab nations neither want Gazan refugees anywhere near them nor their terrorists whom Gazans one-time voted into power.

Even Europe abhors Hamas’s precivilizational butchery of Israeli civilians.

Russia, Iran’s new patron, will be of little help to it—bogged down in Ukraine and hemorrhaging under sanctions and global ostracism. Nor has Moscow forgotten its own long violent history with Islam.

China cares only about the delivery of Middle East oil, calm seas lanes—and injuring the U.S.

Otherwise Beijing has no desire to risk its economy by pushing an Iranian theater war—especially when China has jailed a million Uyghur Muslims in forced labor camps.

If the two huge American carrier groups parked in the Eastern Mediterranean are attacked by either Iranian or Hezbollah missiles, public opinion will force even Biden to retaliate. And the response will not be street-fighting block to block in Tehran or Beirut.

Instead, it will be a medieval rain of destruction on either or both from the air.

After the Afghanistan humiliation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese flagrant spy balloon mission over the American heartland, eight-million illegal aliens waved in across the southern border, and woke hysterias, Americans may have finally woken up that they dangerously—almost fatally—have squandered prior hard-won deterrence and must reboot.

To play its global jihadist role, Iran must always keep upping its terrorist ante and constantly louder threats.

It assumes the Middle East is business as usual—when it is insidiously becoming just the opposite. An appeasing Biden is not driving events but being driven by them, whether he knows it or not.

The Iranians have little clue that that they and their vassals are one stupid missile volley, or one reckless intervention away from a devastating Western response that would not necessarily be “proportionate.”

And such a retaliation would be welcomed by Iran’s numerous enemies, privately applauded by its small number of supposed “friends,” and largely shrugged off by its even fewer allies.

A 1,000-Day Bidenomics March to Strategic Energy Subservience

A 1,000-Day Bidenomics March to Strategic Energy Subservience

Peter Navarro

In just 1,000 days, Green New Dealer in Chief Joe Biden has turned America’s strategic energy dominance into a strategic energy subservience that now gravely threatens our economic and national security.  We now run the very real risks of a prolonged stagflation and being drawn into hot wars from Ukraine, Israel, and Iran to the Taiwan Strait. 

When I was a doctoral student in economics at Harvard University in the 1970s focused on reducing America’s dangerous oil import dependence, I never dreamed of that day which would come during my service in the Trump White House in which the United States became the world’s largest petroleum producer and a net exporter. 

Once strategic energy dominant, America became the de facto policeman of the OPEC oil cartel and world price setter.  If OPEC tried to gouge us by restricting supply, America could further increase production.  That leverage, coupled with President Trump’s jawboning of the Saudis, kept oil prices substantially below what they have been throughout the Biden regime.

From Day One, Joe Biden declared war on  fossil fuels.  He canceled pipelines, curtailed drilling, discouraged fracking, and turned this nation into the oil supplicant that it is today.

Now, 1,000 days in, it is Saudi Arabia and Russia – the world’s two largest oil producers outside the US –setting world oil prices.  Saudi princes need at least $85 per barrel to fund the government programs it uses to pacify an increasingly restive population.  Putin’s Russia needs at least $100 a barrel oil to fund its Ukrainian adventure. 

The resultant oil price shocks are increasing our inflation rate at a time when the U.S. is already facing significant inflationary pressures.  Higher oil prices also act as a tax on consumers and thereby reduce purchasing power, with collateral negative demand and growth effects.  Higher oil prices likewise increase the cost of production and transportation for businesses and thereby reduce output and growth through negative supply effects.  Together, these negative growth effects represent the “stag” part of the oil price shock stagflation equation.

Normally, the Federal Reserve can treat oil price shocks as transitory, which is to say cyclical, and leave them out of the core inflation metric the Fed relies upon to set short term interest rates.  If, however, higher oil prices represent a secular, long-term trend because of a Bidenomics-driven tectonic shift, sustained oil price hikes have to be factored into the Fed calculus.  That will surely mean higher interest rates for a far more extended period.

These economic risks pale in comparison to the national security risks from America’s increasing oil important dependence and strategic energy subservience. 

Take Russia: Even as American taxpayers are funding the Ukrainian war effort to the tune of tens of billions of dollars (while draining the American arsenal), American consumers and businesses, through a pure wealth transfer, are funding the Russian war machine as more and more Russian oil creeps into world markets and trickles down to American gas pumps.  The more oil revenue Russia captures, the less likely there will be peace, and the more likely the United States will be dragged into a hot war on the European continent.

A Joe Biden desperate for cheaper oil has similarly relaxed sanctions on the sale of Iranian oil.  Iranian oil production has climbed from about 2.7 million barrels a day at the end of the Trump administration to almost 3.5 million today.

With the price of oil now bouncing between $80 to $90, that’s an additional $2 billion a month Iran has to both keep its regime afloat and finance attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia through proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthi movement, Muslim Brotherhood, and Al-Mukhtar Brigades.

There is also the new Cuba in our South American midst in Venezuela.  It, too, is now being allowed by the Biden regime to increase its oil production, sell its oil in international markets to keep its toxic regime afloat, and export both its socialism to the rest of Latin America and its illegal aliens to American cities. 

Finally, as a rising Communist China eyes an invasion of Taiwan after successfully taking Hong Kong without a whimper from the West, its dictator Xi Jinping has leveraged the war in Ukraine and tensions in the Middle East to establish a yuan-denominated oil-trading bloc with Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.  Xi now believes he has distanced China enough from the US dollar and any collateral threats of sanctions, making war over Taiwan ever more likely.

The only way out now will be a quick return to strategic energy dominance.  Here, “Green New Deal” Democrats must acknowledge that forcing the American people to reduce their demand for fossil fuels is a form of economic and national security suicide. 

The math is simple: Whatever CO2 reductions the American people might achieve through their sacrifices, massive subsidies, and destruction of our economy will be more than offset by the emissions from the new powerplants and automobiles and factories of Communist China, India, and a whole host of developing nations – and their leaders will laugh at us all the way to the climate change bank.

Peter Navarro served in the Trump White House as the Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.  His White House memoirs include In Trump Time (All Seasons Press) and Taking Back Trump’s America (Post Hill Press).   Follow him at 

Peter Navarro's Taking Back Trump's America The blueprint and battle cry for the modern MAGA movement with a mission to restore MAGA principles to both Congress and the White House. From President Trump's Chief China Hawk and trade czar.

where this article originally appeared.

Thoughts About Our World Before it all Hits The Fan

Thoughts About Our World Before it All Hits The Fan

Joseph Sullivan, Harbinger Sentinel, GAB

 I wrote and posted this on GAB today… preface to my essay.

As the days pass, I feel my toes “crowding the line”…  As I discuss in the essay, I no longer believe that we can solve the problems of our country through “free and fair elections” (now a myth from a by-gone age as far as I’m concerned)…

When I pray these days - I pray that I am wrong about my pessimism…. Now I’m focussed on the future of the next generation.  I simply can’t remain silent as “things” get worse and worse…. If speaking out is dangerous - then so be it…

I also pray that God will awaken the sleeping American people and cause courageous leaders to step-up and take charge of this country which is now in a free-fall toward Armageddon.

Deo Vindici…. May God Bless and Save America From The Traitors Among Us…

My essay: Our World Before it All Hits The Fan

Now is an EXCELLENT TIME to put those hard lessons we’ve learned over the past 20 years to good use…

But first we need to take-stock and define them:

The NEWS MEDIA (“Mainstream” and “Legacy”) is the servant of the “Deep State” government. It no longer fulfills it’s traditional mission to hold our government and our officials accountable to the American people. The manipulation of the American people by the media during the “COVID FRAUD” was crystal-clear and (in my view) it was defining and unforgivable.

Our TWO PARTY SYSTEM of American politics has essentially merged (“UNIPARTY”) into a charade which conducts it’s public business with pointless hearings while it’s leaders make back-room deals that benefit multi-national interests paid for by constantly rising taxes levied upon American taxpayers. The World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Israeli lobby control the American government thru their control of our Congress and Senate. Our elected leaders enrich themselves through life-long positions as elected politicians.

Our federal government is in-fact the “Deep State” - where it’s workers are all “unionized drones” led by life-time, career non-elected bureaucrats…. ALL of these “employees” are committed to job and self-preservation, growth of government and lack of transparency. They know that elected politicians come and go but that they can outlast anyone who comes to Washington through elections. Strong, principled politicians do rise up but never get support from their peers - and are treated as “crack-pots” by the media.

Our national borders are WIDE OPEN…. BIDEN has violated his Oath of Office by removing physical and legal obstructions that SHOULD prevent ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION and DRUG SMUGGLING. If we had a functioning Congress and Senate - the safety of the American people would have forced Biden to close the border to illegals and drugs. For all of Biden’s apparent crimes, his MISCONDUCT ON REFUSAL TO ENFORCE IMMIGRATION AND CONTROL OUR BORDER is reason enough for him to be IMPEACHED. It is TREASONOUS!

THE 2020 ELECTION WAS STOLEN… PRESIDENT TRUMP WAS REMOVED FROM OFFICE BY FRAUD AND MANIPULATION…. But this was actually a crime against the AMERICAN PEOPLE! Trump has been PERSECUTED and PROSECUTED by prosecutors, judges and Deep State operatives and all of this goes on to this day - even as Trump is the strongest candidate running for POTUS in 2024! (Think about THAT and then tell me that our government isn’t TOTALLY CORRUPTED!). And yet our Congress and our Courts allow this to go on because IF they did their duty - it would reveal the extent of the TREASON that has taken place but none of our so-called “leaders” have the stomach to HANG THE TRAITORS involved.

So… We live in a bitterly divided country - and yet we go about our daily business believing that “all is well”…. ALL IN NOT WELL! The “divisions” are not only ideological - but they are also defined by “the informed and aware” vs. “the uninformed and unconcerned”. The “illusions of normalcy” around us keep our people from seeking the truth about the full extent of the treachery that is really going on. For those of us who DO WANT TO AWAKEN OUR PEERS - it is frustrating to try to get them to FOCUS because the AMERICAN MEDIA conspires to keep them UNINFORMED. “FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS” are a MYTH. Many of us believe that we cannot recover our government through elections alone.

Meanwhile, the world teeters and the GLOBALISTS pull the strings…. They drain the hard-earned resources of the middle class to support the growing population of poverty stricken minorities…. But the super-rich just get richer…

CONCLUSIONS: We are in a serious “BAD SMELL SITUATION” and we (as “Average Americans”) cannot trust our MEDIA or the BIDEN ADMINISTRATION to suddenly reverse course and start to “DO THE RIGHT THING” on behalf of our own American people… We’ve seen “Biden et al” for the gangsters that they really are. They “DON’T WORK FOR YOU”! They serve EVIL MASTERS… 

And it breaks my heart to have to question our government’s motives and capabilities… AFTER ALL, THE UNITED STATES USED TO STAND UP FOR WHAT IS “RIGHT” AND “JUST” IN OUR WORLD…

Please REPOST (because we MUST AWAKEN THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!)

AND… Please Pray For Our Country and Our World…. 

DEO VINDICI… GOD BLESS AMERICA! 

California, the Great Destroyer

 

California, the Great Destroyer

Victor Davis Hanson, victorhanson.com 

In 1996, the California legislature created the high speed rail authority.

In 2008, voters passed a $33 billion bond to build an envisioned 800 mile project eventually to link Sacramento with San Diego.

Fifteen years later, a scaled-down plan from Bakersfield to Merced remains not even half finished. Yet the envisioned costs will exceed that of the original estimate for the entire project.

The rail authority now estimates that just the modest 178 mile route—only about a fifth of the authorized distance—will not be completed at least until 2030. Past high speed estimates of both time and cost targets have been widely wrong and perhaps deliberately misleading.

Total costs for the entire project are now estimated at nearly $130 billion. Many expect that figure to double in the next quarter-century. Planners also concede there will likely not be much high speed rider demand from San Joaquin Valley residents willing to pay $86 to travel at a supposed 200 mph from Bakersfield to Merced.

Nine years ago voters amid drought and water shortages also passed a state water bond, authorizing $7.5 billion in new water projects and initiatives.

Some $2.7 billion was targeted for new dams and reservoirs. The current water storage system had not been enlarged since the early 1980s, when the state population was 15 million fewer residents.

So far not a single dam or new reservoir has been built. And Californians expect more water rationing statewide anytime the state experiences a modest drought.

In 2017, a $15 billion bond authorized a complete remodeling of Los Angeles International Airport—recognized as one of the more congested, disorganized, and unpleasant airports in America.

Now the cost to complete the project has grown to an estimated $30 billion, with a proposed finish date of 2028—11 years after the project was authorized.

And the ongoing LAX remake is considered one of California’s more successful public construction projects.

In 2002, California began construction on the eastern span replacement of the iconic San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge—less than half of the bridge’s total length.

It was scheduled to be finished in five years at a cost of $250 million.

The job in fact took 11 years. And it cost $6.5 billion—a 2,500 percent increase over the estimate.

In contrast, original construction of the entire Bay Bridge began in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression. Yet the job was completed in a little  more than three years.

The list of such delayed, canceled, or prolonged projects could be expanded, from the proposed widening of the state’s overcrowded, antiquated, and dangerous north-to-south “freeways” to the now inert Peripheral Canal project that would have allowed the California aqueduct to transfer needed water southward by precluding the present inefficient pumping into and out of the San Francisco delta.

So what happened to the can-do California of former governors Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, and Pete Wilson? They had bequeathed to the Baby Boomer generation a well-run state, renowned for its state-of-the-art infrastructure.

All four governors, a Democrat and Republicans, had ensured the nation’s most sophisticated higher education system, iconic freeways, and model water transference systems.

The current disaster has many parents.

A coastal culture of globally rich elites began passing some of the most stringent environmental and zoning regulations in the nation. Such Byzantine roadblocks deliberately stalled construction and skyrocketed costs—all of little concern to the “not-in-my-backyard” wealthy in their secluded coastal enclaves who had ensured the virtual end of infrastructure investments.

The state’s public unions and bloated bureaucracies guaranteed Soviet-style overhead, incompetence, and unaccountability. The more California raised its income taxes—currently the nation’s highest topping out at 13.3 percent—the more it borrowed, spent, and ran up huge annual budget deficits.

The nation’s highest gasoline taxes along with steep sales and property taxes—coupled with unaffordable fuel and housing, a homeless epidemic, dismal public schools, out-of-control crime, and mass, illegal immigration—soon all led to a bifurcated state of rich and poor.

The middle class either became poor or fled.

Indeed, businesses and millions of the middle class hightailed it out of California over the last three decades in one of the greatest state population exoduses in our nation’s history. But they also took with them the very prior experience, expertise, and capital that had once made California the nation’s envy.

In contrast, millions of impoverished illegal immigrants arrived over the last 30 years without legality, English, or high school diplomas.

And thus millions were immediately in dire need of costly state-supplied health, education, housing, and food subsidies. Currently well over half of all California births are paid for by Medi-Cal. Well over a third of the resident population depends on the state to provide all their health care needs.

Twenty-seven percent of California’s resident population was not born in the United States. That reality created a vast challenge of civic education to ensure assimilation and integration. Unfortunately, millions entered California at precisely the time of a new tribalism and racial essentialism that has taken hold of the state’s government, media, schools, and universities. Tribalism, not the melting-pot, is California’s paradigm.

California is a one-party state. There are no statewide Republican elected officeholders. Progressive Democrats also enjoy a supermajority in both houses of the legislature. Only 12 of 52 congressional seats are held by Republicans. And almost all of California leftwing politicians are funded or influenced by Silicon Valley—the richest corridor in civilizational history, with $9 trillion in market capitalization.

In sum, a now broke California became a medieval society of Leftwing ultra-rich and Leftwing ultra-poor. On one end, there was no longer the skill or expertise to modernize the state. And on the other, an elite became more interested in dreaming of heaven on earth for itself as it ensured a veritable hell for others.

There is one thing, however, that California does quite well: demolition.

Currently it is destroying four dams on the Klamath River that had provided clean hydroelectrical power, water storage, flood control, and recreation. The media, the bureaucracy, and the politicians acted with unaccustomed dispatch to obliterate the dams and thus supposedly to liberate salmon to swim better upstream.

And the state is blowing up these dams partly by directing hundreds of millions of dollars voters had allotted for reservoir construction—adding insult to the injury of state voters.

A haughty green California also regulated timber companies out of business. It ceased traditional selective logging and clearing of brush from its forests.

It also limited cattle grazing of grasses and shrubs. And it embraced  new “natural” forestry initiatives that postulated that rotting dead trees, dense brush, and tall summer grasses—dry kindling for devastating forest fires—created a rich “sustainable” ecosystem for wildlife. Letting nature be would prompt occasional “natural” corrective fires as in the nineteenth-century past.

The predictable results were massive, destructive—and once preventable—forest fires in the Sierra Nevada mountains and foothills. During California summers, their vast plumes of soot and smoke have polluted the skies for months and sickened residents, destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses, and wiped out billions of dollars in valuable timber even as lumber prices soared.

And California’s lesson for the nation?

If you want to topple a statue, re-label an historically named street, burn up millions of pine and fir trees, blow up a dam, turn parks and the public square into dangerous and toxic squatter cities, then the state can do all of that and in record time.

But try building something to ensure Californians can travel quickly and in safety, or have affordable power, homes, and fuel, and assured water?

All that is simply beyond the current state’s comprehension, ability, and desire. So like modern Vandals or Goths, contemporary Californians are far better destroying the work of others than creating anything of their own.

And what is next? We await the 2024 national elections, when a few California politicians may run for our highest offices, no doubt with the campaign promise, “I can do to America what I did to California.”