When some future Edward Gibbon constructs a history of the decline of the American experiment, he may well point to the summer of 2015 as a turning point in this decline and as a time representative of the hubris and madness of the nation’s rulers, particularly its politicians and their lackeys in the media.
Let’s review a few of this summer’s events to evaluate just how demented our elites have become:
*The Supreme Court once again ignored the language in the Affordable Care Act, allowing the act to stand and the federal government to administer health care exchanges in place of the states.
*That same week, the Court declared that gay marriage to be legal in every state. This time the attack on state’s rights as guaranteed by the Constitution was even more marked. In the wake of this decision, just as some commentators had predicted, there were calls for the legalization of polygamy. Some may wonder where this mayhem will end. Suppose Bob wants to marry his sister? Suppose Mustafa wishes to marry his thirteen-year-old first cousin? Suppose Uncle Charlie wishes to marry Lady, his beloved Golden Retriever?
*In Charleston, South Carolina, a young crazy murdered nine African-Americans during a Bible study at their church. This act of vicious insanity led to an attack by the left on the Confederate Battle Flag and on Confederate monuments around the country. National battlefield parks have apparently banned the flag, and idiots with no sense of history have desecrated Confederate monuments and graves all around the country. The party of Jefferson and Jackson is now attempting to efface the memories of those two men from its own history.
*“Black Lives Matter” became the rallying cry of those protesting police shootings of black men. Like Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley, some of us would like to believe that all lives matter. Besides, if sloganeers really believed that black lives matter, they would be protesting in force in cities like Chicago and Baltimore, where the black on black murder rate staggers the imagination. Meanwhile, the media ignores the enormous number of incidents of black on white violence. (Google black mob violence).
*The morale and well being of American military personnel have reached a low point not seen since the post-Vietnam era of the 1970s. Cuts in manpower and budgets, accompanied by the clear contempt for the military exhibited by our president and his administration, have weakened American military power at a time when the world is becoming ever more dangerous.
*Illegal immigrants continue to pour a across our southern border. These immigrants, who constitute about 3.5% of the population, eat up billions of dollars in taxes. A disproportionate number of them are criminals. The border fence promised by politicians for thirty years remains unfinished. At the same time, cities across the United States have declared themselves sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, violating federal laws.
*This issue of immigration shot Donald Trump into the lead for the Republican nomination for the presidency. If the polls announcing his ascendancy are in fact accurate, then many Americans are as bughouse nuts as the Donald.
*President Obama issued The Clean Power Act, sidestepping Congress and declaring strict measures regarding fuel emissions. This is not the move of a president, but of a dictator. These new regulatory laws will abet the already declining status and earning power of the American middle class. Meanwhile, countries like China, Vietnam, and India continue spewing toxic wastes into the atmosphere.
*Activists secretly videotaped high-ranking officials of Planned Parenthood discussing the trafficking and sale of tissue and body parts taken from aborted fetuses. Many politicians and nearly all the elite of the mainstream media ignored these atrocities, which violate federal law, but did give enormous media play to a dentist on an African safari who killed a beloved lion.
*Under Obama’s leadership, the United States established full diplomatic ties with Cuba. American negotiators asked for no concessions in this arrangement, thereby allowing the Cuban government to continue jailing dissidents.
*President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry concluded a nuclear deal with Iran. Putting aside the nuclear issues, this deal will bring billions in frozen assets to the Iranians, who already support many of the terrorist groups in the Middle East, including the Shite Hezbollah. Four days after the Iran and the world’s major powers signed this agreement, the supreme Iranian leader, another bughouse lunatic named Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced that this agreement would in no way thwart his intention to destroy the United States. The crowd listening to this speech responded by chanting, as usual, “Death to America.”
*President Obama traveled to Africa, where he promised Kenyans a billion dollars in aid. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of black teenagers living in American cities remain unemployed. What if we’d taken that billion dollars, opened a program like the Youth Corps from the 1960s, and paid inner-city teens a wage for cleaning the streets, clearing lots, and light construction? I did some quick figures and estimate employment for 100,000 young people.
Suppose, as historians are wont to do, our future Gibbon examined alternatives that might have prevented, or at least slowed, the breakdown of American institutions and living standards. What, he would ask, might America have done differently?
Perhaps Mr. Gibbon might mention that Americans, particularly their political leaders, needed to alter their approach to foreign affairs. As admirably stated by Chilton Williamson, Jr. in his article “Reversion to Balance,” found in the July 2015 issue of Chronicles, the United States is no longer the big boy on the block. Several other big boys are jostling for power—China, Japan, Britain and the European Union, Russia. “American government in the 21st century,” Williamson tells us, “finds almost everything it sets its hand to beyond the powers of its accomplishment, while wreaking massive damage in the process: the inevitable result of trying to play God in the world and at home.” Mr. Gibbon might even declare Mr. Williamson a prophet.
Mr. Gibbon might point out, as did his predecessor, that immigration helped bring about the collapse of what was left of the American republic. The continual influx of illegals into the United States diminished the meaning of citizenship, took jobs away from the native population, heightened racial tensions, and eventually led to the breakup of the country.
He might direct the reader’s attention to the swollen bureaucracy that so ineptly regulated the life of a citizen from birth to death. Like the Ancient Romans, Americans more and more looked to the government for handouts of all kinds, for security against the natural travails of life, and even for the definition of basic concepts like citizenship, marriage, and the beginning of life.
This future historian might conclude that American leaders failed the citizenry, that they lost their nerve, that they caved again and again to political correctness and expediency. He might point out that the Supreme Court began ignoring the Constitution and interpreting law as each justice saw fit. He might reveal that presidents for the past century, Republicans and Democrats, had seized more and more power. He might investigate the weak resistance of the Congress to that power, the weak resistance of the states to the domination of the federal government, and the weak resistance of American citizens to the sapping of their liberties by all governments.
Our Mr. Gibbon might demonstrate that the American Republic died the death of a thousand cuts by knives wielded by academics and media elites. For one hundred years, progressives had punched away at America. By 2015, the nation was like a boxer on his last legs, pummeled and pounded into a corner, awaiting only a last hook to bring him to his knees. There were no icons left, no heroes to be admired, no sense of American values. This was the year that the AP U.S. History test became a creature of leftist historians. This was the year many leftists declared that the soldiers of the Confederacy, few of whom owned slaves but all of whom were fighting for hearth and kin, were equivalent to Nazis. This was the year in which students taking history and civics subject tests from the National Assessment in Educational Progress once again displayed their dismal lack of knowledge regarding their nation’s history and government.
Finally, Mr. Gibbon might turn his attention to the idea of “national interest.” He might look at the United States in the summer of 2015 and ask in what ways these various decrees and actions furthered the national interests of the country. How, he might ask, did it enhance the national interest to allow brigades of foreigners, most of them Mexicans with little education, into the country, where their education and welfare cost the natives billions of dollars a year? How did it add to the health of the nation and its national security to ignore old allies while shacking up with nations like Iran and Cuba? How had abortions performed horrifically at all stages of growth, despite drugstores filled with contraceptives, made America a better country?
Better yet, our historian might ask: Did the American elites by this point even understand the concept of national interest? Were there still politicians who, recommending some measure as law, sincerely thought that their programs were designed to help the country rather than some special interest group? Did the mainstream commentators ever address American values except in derogatory terms? What had happened to cause the leaders of a country to despise so openly their own heritage and the values of the ordinary citizen?
Now let us leave Mr. Gibbon to his ruminations and turn to our own present catastrophes.
Given the events of this summer, and given the near-certainty that government will continue its efforts to enslave its citizens, abetted by a fawning media, our first impulse may be to throw up our hands and surrender to the armies marching against us. Unfortunately, the white flag is a luxury most of us cannot afford. If nothing else, many of us have children and grandchildren whom we love, and to surrender, to give up the fight, is to consign them to a lifetime of servitude and politically correct conformity.
So what can we do?
In By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, Charles Murray advocates a social and judicial revolution. He explains what many Americans already know: the Constitution is broken, and the courts and regulatory agencies have run rampant over our liberties. Yet Murray is not without hope. Our technology, he points out, is a great vehicle for spreading and defending the idea of liberty. Moreover, he makes a case for the creation of an independent legal agency whose sole task would be to sue the federal government and its regulators whenever some citizen broached one of the regulations contained in the 180,000 pages of federal regulations.
Certainly this is one viable means for preserving our liberties. But the rest of us can pitch into the fight as well. As many readers know, our impaired Constitution and the continued impingements upon our liberties are the result of a “long march through the institutions,” Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s idea for capturing the culture. Like Gramsci, we must kick back against the cultural forces now predominant in our nation. We must recognize that culture shapes politics, and not vice-versa.
We can engage in battle in a myriad of ways. We can refuse to support the trash thrown at us by Hollywood and television. We can support magazines, publishers, writers, filmmakers, and artists who aim at truth rather than lies. We can keep our children out of failing schools or universities whose values are antithetical to all that we believe. We can prepare ourselves mentally and spiritually for the attacks on churches and synagogues that will occur in the next few decades. We can organize taxpayer unions, groups of citizens who enthusiastically battle higher taxes and greater regulations.
Most importantly, we can educate those around us. Every time we teach a young person about the glories of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, we are striking a blow for liberty. Every time we explain to a fellow citizen the value of freedom and commerce, we are striking a blow for freedom. Every time we make the case for pushing back against an overbearing government, we are striking a blow for the rights of future generations.
Giving way to despair in the face of the events recounted above is the natural instinct. So many freedoms have been lost; even the Constitution seems beyond repair. But we must not allow ourselves to be broken. We have lost an America that once lived and breathed the ideals of the Founding Fathers. That America has been dying for decades. But a resistance movement—a movement composed of millions of people from all races and classes—exists. Evidence of its existence appears daily on the Internet, in conversations with our fellow citizens, in a throng of people who are tired of the bullying, thievery, corruption, and lies of our government. This struggle may be long—decades, perhaps—and harrowing, but keeping liberty alive was never an easy task.
Besides, what other choice do we really have?
*The Supreme Court once again ignored the language in the Affordable Care Act, allowing the act to stand and the federal government to administer health care exchanges in place of the states.
*That same week, the Court declared that gay marriage to be legal in every state. This time the attack on state’s rights as guaranteed by the Constitution was even more marked. In the wake of this decision, just as some commentators had predicted, there were calls for the legalization of polygamy. Some may wonder where this mayhem will end. Suppose Bob wants to marry his sister? Suppose Mustafa wishes to marry his thirteen-year-old first cousin? Suppose Uncle Charlie wishes to marry Lady, his beloved Golden Retriever?
*In Charleston, South Carolina, a young crazy murdered nine African-Americans during a Bible study at their church. This act of vicious insanity led to an attack by the left on the Confederate Battle Flag and on Confederate monuments around the country. National battlefield parks have apparently banned the flag, and idiots with no sense of history have desecrated Confederate monuments and graves all around the country. The party of Jefferson and Jackson is now attempting to efface the memories of those two men from its own history.
*“Black Lives Matter” became the rallying cry of those protesting police shootings of black men. Like Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley, some of us would like to believe that all lives matter. Besides, if sloganeers really believed that black lives matter, they would be protesting in force in cities like Chicago and Baltimore, where the black on black murder rate staggers the imagination. Meanwhile, the media ignores the enormous number of incidents of black on white violence. (Google black mob violence).
*The morale and well being of American military personnel have reached a low point not seen since the post-Vietnam era of the 1970s. Cuts in manpower and budgets, accompanied by the clear contempt for the military exhibited by our president and his administration, have weakened American military power at a time when the world is becoming ever more dangerous.
*Illegal immigrants continue to pour a across our southern border. These immigrants, who constitute about 3.5% of the population, eat up billions of dollars in taxes. A disproportionate number of them are criminals. The border fence promised by politicians for thirty years remains unfinished. At the same time, cities across the United States have declared themselves sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, violating federal laws.
*This issue of immigration shot Donald Trump into the lead for the Republican nomination for the presidency. If the polls announcing his ascendancy are in fact accurate, then many Americans are as bughouse nuts as the Donald.
*President Obama issued The Clean Power Act, sidestepping Congress and declaring strict measures regarding fuel emissions. This is not the move of a president, but of a dictator. These new regulatory laws will abet the already declining status and earning power of the American middle class. Meanwhile, countries like China, Vietnam, and India continue spewing toxic wastes into the atmosphere.
*Activists secretly videotaped high-ranking officials of Planned Parenthood discussing the trafficking and sale of tissue and body parts taken from aborted fetuses. Many politicians and nearly all the elite of the mainstream media ignored these atrocities, which violate federal law, but did give enormous media play to a dentist on an African safari who killed a beloved lion.
*Under Obama’s leadership, the United States established full diplomatic ties with Cuba. American negotiators asked for no concessions in this arrangement, thereby allowing the Cuban government to continue jailing dissidents.
*President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry concluded a nuclear deal with Iran. Putting aside the nuclear issues, this deal will bring billions in frozen assets to the Iranians, who already support many of the terrorist groups in the Middle East, including the Shite Hezbollah. Four days after the Iran and the world’s major powers signed this agreement, the supreme Iranian leader, another bughouse lunatic named Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced that this agreement would in no way thwart his intention to destroy the United States. The crowd listening to this speech responded by chanting, as usual, “Death to America.”
*President Obama traveled to Africa, where he promised Kenyans a billion dollars in aid. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of black teenagers living in American cities remain unemployed. What if we’d taken that billion dollars, opened a program like the Youth Corps from the 1960s, and paid inner-city teens a wage for cleaning the streets, clearing lots, and light construction? I did some quick figures and estimate employment for 100,000 young people.
Suppose, as historians are wont to do, our future Gibbon examined alternatives that might have prevented, or at least slowed, the breakdown of American institutions and living standards. What, he would ask, might America have done differently?
Perhaps Mr. Gibbon might mention that Americans, particularly their political leaders, needed to alter their approach to foreign affairs. As admirably stated by Chilton Williamson, Jr. in his article “Reversion to Balance,” found in the July 2015 issue of Chronicles, the United States is no longer the big boy on the block. Several other big boys are jostling for power—China, Japan, Britain and the European Union, Russia. “American government in the 21st century,” Williamson tells us, “finds almost everything it sets its hand to beyond the powers of its accomplishment, while wreaking massive damage in the process: the inevitable result of trying to play God in the world and at home.” Mr. Gibbon might even declare Mr. Williamson a prophet.
Mr. Gibbon might point out, as did his predecessor, that immigration helped bring about the collapse of what was left of the American republic. The continual influx of illegals into the United States diminished the meaning of citizenship, took jobs away from the native population, heightened racial tensions, and eventually led to the breakup of the country.
He might direct the reader’s attention to the swollen bureaucracy that so ineptly regulated the life of a citizen from birth to death. Like the Ancient Romans, Americans more and more looked to the government for handouts of all kinds, for security against the natural travails of life, and even for the definition of basic concepts like citizenship, marriage, and the beginning of life.
This future historian might conclude that American leaders failed the citizenry, that they lost their nerve, that they caved again and again to political correctness and expediency. He might point out that the Supreme Court began ignoring the Constitution and interpreting law as each justice saw fit. He might reveal that presidents for the past century, Republicans and Democrats, had seized more and more power. He might investigate the weak resistance of the Congress to that power, the weak resistance of the states to the domination of the federal government, and the weak resistance of American citizens to the sapping of their liberties by all governments.
Our Mr. Gibbon might demonstrate that the American Republic died the death of a thousand cuts by knives wielded by academics and media elites. For one hundred years, progressives had punched away at America. By 2015, the nation was like a boxer on his last legs, pummeled and pounded into a corner, awaiting only a last hook to bring him to his knees. There were no icons left, no heroes to be admired, no sense of American values. This was the year that the AP U.S. History test became a creature of leftist historians. This was the year many leftists declared that the soldiers of the Confederacy, few of whom owned slaves but all of whom were fighting for hearth and kin, were equivalent to Nazis. This was the year in which students taking history and civics subject tests from the National Assessment in Educational Progress once again displayed their dismal lack of knowledge regarding their nation’s history and government.
Finally, Mr. Gibbon might turn his attention to the idea of “national interest.” He might look at the United States in the summer of 2015 and ask in what ways these various decrees and actions furthered the national interests of the country. How, he might ask, did it enhance the national interest to allow brigades of foreigners, most of them Mexicans with little education, into the country, where their education and welfare cost the natives billions of dollars a year? How did it add to the health of the nation and its national security to ignore old allies while shacking up with nations like Iran and Cuba? How had abortions performed horrifically at all stages of growth, despite drugstores filled with contraceptives, made America a better country?
Better yet, our historian might ask: Did the American elites by this point even understand the concept of national interest? Were there still politicians who, recommending some measure as law, sincerely thought that their programs were designed to help the country rather than some special interest group? Did the mainstream commentators ever address American values except in derogatory terms? What had happened to cause the leaders of a country to despise so openly their own heritage and the values of the ordinary citizen?
Now let us leave Mr. Gibbon to his ruminations and turn to our own present catastrophes.
Given the events of this summer, and given the near-certainty that government will continue its efforts to enslave its citizens, abetted by a fawning media, our first impulse may be to throw up our hands and surrender to the armies marching against us. Unfortunately, the white flag is a luxury most of us cannot afford. If nothing else, many of us have children and grandchildren whom we love, and to surrender, to give up the fight, is to consign them to a lifetime of servitude and politically correct conformity.
So what can we do?
In By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, Charles Murray advocates a social and judicial revolution. He explains what many Americans already know: the Constitution is broken, and the courts and regulatory agencies have run rampant over our liberties. Yet Murray is not without hope. Our technology, he points out, is a great vehicle for spreading and defending the idea of liberty. Moreover, he makes a case for the creation of an independent legal agency whose sole task would be to sue the federal government and its regulators whenever some citizen broached one of the regulations contained in the 180,000 pages of federal regulations.
Certainly this is one viable means for preserving our liberties. But the rest of us can pitch into the fight as well. As many readers know, our impaired Constitution and the continued impingements upon our liberties are the result of a “long march through the institutions,” Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s idea for capturing the culture. Like Gramsci, we must kick back against the cultural forces now predominant in our nation. We must recognize that culture shapes politics, and not vice-versa.
We can engage in battle in a myriad of ways. We can refuse to support the trash thrown at us by Hollywood and television. We can support magazines, publishers, writers, filmmakers, and artists who aim at truth rather than lies. We can keep our children out of failing schools or universities whose values are antithetical to all that we believe. We can prepare ourselves mentally and spiritually for the attacks on churches and synagogues that will occur in the next few decades. We can organize taxpayer unions, groups of citizens who enthusiastically battle higher taxes and greater regulations.
Most importantly, we can educate those around us. Every time we teach a young person about the glories of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, we are striking a blow for liberty. Every time we explain to a fellow citizen the value of freedom and commerce, we are striking a blow for freedom. Every time we make the case for pushing back against an overbearing government, we are striking a blow for the rights of future generations.
Giving way to despair in the face of the events recounted above is the natural instinct. So many freedoms have been lost; even the Constitution seems beyond repair. But we must not allow ourselves to be broken. We have lost an America that once lived and breathed the ideals of the Founding Fathers. That America has been dying for decades. But a resistance movement—a movement composed of millions of people from all races and classes—exists. Evidence of its existence appears daily on the Internet, in conversations with our fellow citizens, in a throng of people who are tired of the bullying, thievery, corruption, and lies of our government. This struggle may be long—decades, perhaps—and harrowing, but keeping liberty alive was never an easy task.
Besides, what other choice do we really have?