Shapiro, who is currently state Attorney General, will likely keep many of the policies Wolf has championed such as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade program that consumers are starting to notice through their higher energy bills.
In the Senate races, the closely watched contest in Pennsylvania has been called by the Associated Press for Democrat John Fetterman, though Republican Mehmet Oz hasn’t conceded. Due to several election rule controversies in the state, the results may still get challenged in court.
Tomorrow is election day and polls suggest that Americans are going to overturn Democratic Party control of the House and Senate. Politicians and the media always say that this is the most important election ever, but all too often once the voting is over and the smoke has cleared, not much changes. The Washington uni-party takes over and makes sure the status quo is maintained.
It doesn’t have to be this way. An incoming Republican House and Senate, for example, could take early steps to reassure their supporters that their votes weren’t wasted on Tweedledee vs. Tweedledum in Washington. Here are three suggestions to get things off to a good start.
First, Republican Party Leadership must vow to end the massive money spigot opened by the last Congress for Ukraine. By some estimates some $60 billion dollars have been authorized for Ukraine to fight a proxy war between the US/NATO and Russia.
This would be a move strongly supported by the Republican base. A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed that only 37 percent of Republicans support sending more US aid to Ukraine. Republican firebrand Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene said recently that under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine. While I am skeptical that her party leadership would support such a move, it’s clear Republican voters would.
Plus, ending this proxy war would carry with it the benefit of reducing the dangerously high possibility of global nuclear war. That’s not a bad trade-off.
Second, Republicans can signal that they will de-fund the Department of Homeland Security. At the time this monstrosity was created, I said this on the House Floor:
“The list of dangerous and unconstitutional powers granted to the new Homeland Security department is lengthy. Warrantless searches, forced vaccinations of whole communities, federal neighborhood snitch programs, federal information databases, and a sinister new ‘Information Awareness Office’ at the Pentagon that uses military intelligence to spy on domestic citizens are just a few of the troubling aspects of the new legislation.”
Unfortunately all of these things came to pass…and more. As we recently learned, the DHS has been colluding with social media companies to try and prevent Americans from being able to say or post opinions the government doesn’t want others to hear.
They promised that a Department of Homeland Security would keep us safer, but there is nothing that makes us less safe than the destruction of our Constitution.
Finally, the third task an incoming Republican House and Senate can take is maybe the easiest one: pass the Audit the Fed bill. Ten years ago the US House voted in a bipartisan manner to pass my Audit the Fed legislation only to see it stall in the Senate. With Republican control of both houses of Congress there is no reason a broadly-supported bill to open the books at the Federal Reserve cannot find its way to President Biden’s desk. We all support transparency, right?
Inflation is out of control and causing real harm to the American middle class. The Biden Administration seems determined to lead us to a potentially life-ending war with Russia. The Department of Homeland Security has turned into a weapon mobilized against the American people and our Constitution.
A Republican-controlled House and Senate can actually do something to fix these problems and thus make us more safe and more free. Will they?
There’s going to be a lot of candidates and a lot parties on the ballot—Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, etc.
Someday, when I enter the booth in my local polling station to pull that lever of democracy, I hope to see the words Peace Party next to a candidate’s name.
That’s the label Daniel Webster campaigned under in 1814.
His country was in a war he thought was senseless. His neighbors felt unheard in Washington DC, and his home was becoming impoverished under the heavy costs of war.
So when he ran for re-election to the U.S. House, he wanted everyone to know where he stood, fixed and immovable: Peace Party!
You can soak up a lot of wisdom studying Daniel Webster’s forty year career in U.S. politics.
This man of New England served as a congressman, a U.S. senator, and as Secretary of State under three presidents.
He believed in the United States Constitution as he understood it, and when he would argue in its defense on the Senate floor, audience members in the gallery would weep at the beauty of his words.
Odds are you’ve heard me quote Webster before, when he advised just after that 1814 election that, “It will be the solemn duty of the state governments to protect their own authority over their own militia, and to interpose between their citizens and arbitrary power [by the federal government].”
That’s the logic behind our cornerstone piece of legislation, Defend the Guard.
After twenty years of the Global War on Terror, where multiple presidents have deployed our soldiers into more than half a dozen unconstitutional wars, it’s time for state governments to defend the integrity of their National Guard.
“It must be admitted to be the clear intent of the Constitution, that no foreign war should exist without the assent of Congress. This was meant as a restraint on the executive power,” Webster articulated in 1847.
He knew that no president of any party had a right “to go out of our limits, and declare war for a foreign occupation of what does not belong to us.”
When such action is committed by the executive, it’s done out of malice, ego, and the aggrandizement of personal power, because “no man is ignorant that the Constitution of the United States confers on Congress the power of making war.”
And the day that a president does foment war for his own agenda, involves his country in a permanent foreign occupation of lands not our own, and Congress proves unable or unwilling to stop this illegal war making, “then the whole balance of the Constitution is overthrown, and all just restraint on the executive power, in a matter of the highest concern to the peace and happiness of the country, entirely destroyed.”
“Self-Government is the independent, voluntarily-coordinated action of peaceful, self-controlled individuals to address social problems, resolve conflicts, protect others, and make victims whole.”
It’s difficult to know exactly when it happened, but not long ago many Americans suddenly looked around and discovered that they and their neighbors inhabited completely different moral universes.
Whether it’s Black Lives Matter, or teaching gender theory to children, or the usefulness or otherwise of the COVID restrictions, or a wide variety of other subjects, people on one side of the divide have exerted a moral imperialism over the other, refusing even to acknowledge that there can be another side on issues like these, and have instead tried to drive their opponents from polite society through intense social pressure and the outright suppression of dissident voices.
The same people who lecture us day and night about how we shouldn’t “impose our morality” on other people think absolutely nothing of demonizing half of America and imposing their ideas on other people’s children.
Scarcely anyone stops to ask: is this arrangement making us happy? Is it contributing to human flourishing?
To the contrary, it’s causing conflict, suspicion, anger, and frustration – and everyone knows it.
Yet for some reason we carry on, as if continuing down this path will somehow lead to a different result, even though any fool can see that things are only going to get worse.
The media, meanwhile, are happy to fan the flames of social conflict, but never urge us to consider the humane possibility of a world in which we simply don’t do this anymore.
My new eBook National Divorce, which I am giving away for free, offers a radical proposal: how about we just stop?
As I show in the book, there is nothing unconstitutional or “extremist” or unthinkable about national divorce.
What holds people back from considering it is a combination of status-quo bias and the superstitious reverence we’ve all been taught to have for “the Union.”
But as Thomas Jefferson correctly conceived of it, the Union is merely a means to an end. It is not an end in itself. Much less should it be treated as an object of religious reverence. If it does not promote liberty, then we should discard it and try something else.
Now, fair warning: the ideas you will encounter in this book are not to be found on the three-by-five card of allowable opinion. We are not even supposed to discuss the subject matter of this book, dear reader. Why, the New York Times hasn’t approved it for us!
But I’d say the time has come to steel our resolve and be willing to consider – radical though this may sound – ideas that the New York Times tells us are not allowed.
The very nature of totalitarianism involves the intoxicating temptation to create the perfect society through a combination of propaganda, centralized power, and the demonization of dissidents.
Against such a project we ought to set that couplet with which Michael Oakeshott concluded his essay on the Tower of Babel:
Who in fields Elysian would dwell Do but extend the boundaries of Hell.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, along with rising tensions between NATO and Russia, have drawn comparisons to the outbreak of World War I.
In 2014, back when the open hostilities in Ukraine really began, the journalist Eric Margolis said “We can stumble into a war with Russia. This reminds me of 1914 all over again.”
This “stumbling” of course refers to the “sleepwalking thesis of war” that is part of both popular and scholarly narratives of World War I.
Unfortunately, it’s much worse than that. The United States is marching wide awake toward general nuclear war.
Princeton University historian Stephen Kotkin has criticized the sleepwalking thesis of war as a comforting myth that remains “close to people’s hearts” to this day.
“Nobody ever sleepwalks into war,” he says.
Kotkin points out that the government and military archives of the Great Powers contain thousands of orders to move horses, hay, and weapons systems into place to prosecute the war years before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. The Great Powers also imposed military conscription to ensure they would have a wealth of young men to feed into the slaughter.
Kotkin says:
You go into the archives, and you see nothing but decisions being made towards war. And somehow this is known as sleepwalking towards war. There was no sleepwalking to World War I. There was only preparation for war. There was nothing but incessant preparation to war.
Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton agrees; “You call it sleepwalking but everybody’s wide awake. It’s just, they’re stupid.”
The students’ demand that Paglia be fired fell on deaf ears. Fortunately, there are a few college presidents with guts and common sense. President David Yager is one of them. He wrote in an open letter to students: “Artists over the centuries have suffered censorship, and even persecution, for the expression of their beliefs through their work. My answer is simple: not now, not at UArts.”
Camille Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has been a faculty member since 1984. Paglia describes herself as transgender, but unlike so many other transgender people, she is pro-capitalism and hostile to those who’d restrict free speech. She’s a libertarian. As to modern ideas that include “gender-inclusive pronouns” such as zie, sie and zim, Paglia says it is lunacy. In a 2017 interview, Paglia was especially irritated by the thought police running college campuses today. In defending University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, who has become a pariah for his refusal to cave in to nonsensical gender-inclusive pronouns, Paglia said that the English language was created by great artists such as Chaucer and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Joyce. She added: “How dare you, you sniveling little maniac, tell us how we’re gonna use pronouns! Go take a hike.”
On feminism, Paglia criticizes what she calls the “antisex and repressively doctrinaire side of feminism.” She calls it “victim feminism” and complains that “everything we’d won in the 1990s has been totally swept away. Now we have this endless privileging of victimhood, with a pathological vulnerability seen as the default human mode.” Everyone must yield to it “in the workplace, in universities, in the demand for safe spaces.” Paglia adds, “What I am saying throughout my work is that girls who are indoctrinated to see men not as equals but as oppressors and rapists are condemned to remain in a permanently juvenile condition for life.”
Paglia’s bold statements got her in a bit of hot water last April. University of the Arts students demanded that she be fired over public comments she’d made that were not wholly sympathetic to the #MeToo movement, as well as for an interview with the Weekly Standard that they called “transphobic.” That latter denunciation is particularly slapstick, since Paglia describes herself as “transgender,” writes Tunku Varadarajan, Hoover Institution’s institutional editor, in his Aug. 30 Wall Street Journal article “A Feminist Capitalist Professor Under Fire.”
The students’ demand that Paglia be fired fell on deaf ears. Fortunately, there are a few college presidents with guts and common sense. President David Yager is one of them. He wrote in an open letter to students: “Artists over the centuries have suffered censorship, and even persecution, for the expression of their beliefs through their work. My answer is simple: not now, not at UArts.”
There’s another part of this story that’s particularly interesting considering today’s young peoples’ love of socialism. Paglia says that children now “are raised in a far more affluent period. Even people without much money have cellphones, televisions, and access to cars. They’re raised in an air-conditioned environment. I can still remember when there was no air-conditioning.”
Paglia says: “Everything is so easy now. The stores are so plentifully supplied. You just go in and buy fruits and vegetables from all over the world.” Young people ignorant of history and economics “have a sense that this is the way life has always been. Because they’ve never been exposed to history, they have no idea that these are recent attainments that come from a very specific economic system.” Young people led by the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fail to realize that capitalism has “produced this cornucopia around us. But the young seem to believe in having the government run everything, and that the private companies that are doing things for profit around them, and supplying them with goods, will somehow exist forever.” For the feminists, Paglia says, “I insist that capitalism has produced the glorious emancipation of women.” Today, they can “support themselves and live on their own, and no longer must humiliatingly depend on father or husband.”
Reading Varadarajan’s article made my day knowing that there’s at least one intelligent radical feminist. But what else is to be expected from anyone who’s a libertarian capitalist?
Among the components of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset are a drastically reduced population and the replacement of human labor with robots and artificial intelligence (AI). The question immediately comes to mind: can robots and AI really make all the stuff for the elites after they have gotten rid of the people?
Because a plan has been formulated and described does not mean that it is possible to realize. The plan may contradict laws of logic or reality, or assume the existence of resources that do not exist.
Podcaster and journalist James Delingpole, speaking to investigative journalist Whitney Webb on October 23, 2021, discussed this topic with his guest. I have transcribed several minutes from their conversation, edited for concision:
Webb: The fourth industrial revolution. One of the main pillars of that is automation and artificial intelligence. We’ve already seen that with corporate behemoths, like Amazon’s efforts to replace human workers with robots. Starbucks is piloting their AI barista with plans to have at least one in most if not all locations…. How long until humans are gone entirely? That’s in a retail setting.
In the UK Tesco recently joined the cashier less checkout. It’s all done on your phone. You scan when you enter the store. Everything is tied to you, your unique digital identifier with the corporation. You can just walk out of the store. How convenient that you didn’t have to walk by a cashier at all.
We’re going to see this happen in big ways in manufacturing. Chile is one of the biggest producers of copper in the world. In the northern part of Chile, the economy is driven by mining…. They are automating the mining here [in Chile]. Most of Chile’s middle class in the north work in the mining industry. They are about to all be cut out….
It’s infinitely more profitable for a corporation to make an initial investment in a robot or an AI algorithm than to continuously pay a worker. Not have to deal with sick pay. There are efforts all over the world to demand better worker benefits. Better hours. Robots are the ultimate worker for a lot of these people because they are not interested in the human equation of things. There is a move to a human-free future coupled with anti-human rhetoric.
The substitution of machines for human labor is a process that has been going on since the first industrial revolution. A considerable amount of manufacturing is already done by robots. But does it matter if a machine is a robot or not? Telecommunications switches connect calls that used to be done by telephone operators. We do not identify these machines as robots (perhaps because they do not have a recognizable torso and limbs or perhaps because they perform their work on data rather than physical objects) but the impact on the demand for labor to perform those tasks is the same.
Contrary to Webb, it is not “infinitely more profitable” for a corporation to use an AI-powered robot in place of a person. Profitability is a calculation that depends on the price of the robot, the productivity of the robot, the wages of the person and the productivity of the human worker.
The substitution of capital for labor makes economic sense when the cost of the capital goods per unit value of output—including paying for the entire supply chain—is less than the wages of the person that is replaced.
Yes, workers are paid wages. However, robots and other machines are themselves not free goods. They must be designed, tested, and maintained. They are made of many parts which must be manufactured and transported. The manufacturing process is performed by some combination of people and other machines. The parts are ultimately made from materials that are mostly mined or extracted from the earth, also by men and machines.
A large group of students want me fired from my faculty position. The main charge they make against me is that I believe slavery is wrong for the wrong reasons—“because it goes against Libertarianism, not because it is morally wrong.”
In truth, I repudiate slavery on both grounds. I even favor reparations, but not from all whites to all blacks. Many whites came to the U.S. long after 1865 and owe nothing to anyone. Many blacks, too, are, or are descended from, recent arrivals, and are thus entitled to no compensation. Slavery should have been declared a crime, ex post facto. The guilty should have been imprisoned and their property given to their victims, the new ex-slaves. “Forty acres and a mule” is a rough approximation of the compensation that was due. Nowadays if a great-grandchild of slaves can demonstrate this connection, he should be able to obtain acreage from the great-grandchildren of slave holders who improperly held onto their plantations.
It’s true I have argued “there is nothing inherently wrong with slavery”—an eccentric and provocative view. To understand it, consider a thought experiment: Suppose my son has a dread disease. Its cure costs $10 million, which I don’t have. You do, so we make a deal: You give me the funds. I come to your farm to harvest crops or to your home to give you economics lessons. If you don’t like the way I perform these duties, you may physically assault or kill me.
Is this a legitimate contract in the free society? I say yes. We both benefit from it, at least in theory, as in all voluntary transactions. Hence there is nothing inherently wrong with slavery; it is illicit if it is imposed by one person over another, but not if both parties agree. (I have similarly argued in these pages that socialism is unobjectionable if it is voluntary.)
The petition authors are not the first to misrepresent my views.
I feel like we haven’t been talking enough about the fact that US government agencies were just caught intimately collaborating with massive online platforms to censor content in the name of regulating the “cognitive infrastructure” of society. The only way you could be okay with the US government appointing itself this authority would be if you believed the US government is an honest and beneficent entity that works toward the benefit of the common man. Which would of course be an unacceptable thing for a grown adult to believe.
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It’s still astonishing that we live in a world where our rulers will openly imprison a journalist for telling the truth and then self-righteously bloviate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting journalists.
Look at him. Can you believe this piece of shit? The gall. The absolute gall.
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There is no such thing as unbiased journalism. If someone tells you they are unbiased they are either knowingly lying, or they are so lacking in self-awareness that you should not listen to them anyway.
The divide is not between biased journalists and unbiased journalists, it’s between journalists who are honest and transparent about their biases and journalists who are not. There are no unbiased journalists. There are no unbiased people. You’re either honest about this or you’re not.
MCViewPoint 