by Scott McKay
It wasn’t the last column in this space — that one took a detour because somebody had to address the manifest awfulness of Nikki Haley — but the one before that introduced you, dear reader, to what might become an ongoing series.
Because the Left in America is now built on the failed proposition that magical thinking, the imagination of a human race that acts nothing like the current one does, can reflect reality if only enough time, money, and effort (and blood, because it always comes down to blood) are poured into the mix.
There are stupid things they want you to believe. They will do everything they can to force you to believe them. And many who don’t believe will simply accept the stupid things because, after all, who wants to be constantly fighting?
Except surrender doesn’t bring peace. It brings submission, dishonor, misery, and danger. And the people attempting to foist their lies atop your reality don’t have your best interests at heart.
So, as I said in Tuesday’s column, to truly know a thing you must name a thing. Let’s name five more of these stupid things.
1. Cow Farts and SUVs Will Make the Planet Burn Up, and the Only Remedies Are Socialism and Misery
The Left has installed global warming/climate change mythology in place as its primary mechanism for credibility and capability. Put differently, socialists around the world have chosen to make stoking fear that human commercial activity will make Earth uninhabitable their new angle now that world communism lies in a smoking, putrid heap of failure.
It isn’t a coincidence that you started hearing about global warming as soon as the Soviet Union fell. At that point, the Chinese were dumping communist economics for something akin to the corporatist fascism that Barack Obama installed as the current American economic model, and, when the Iron Curtain fell, communist economics was more or less revealed as a colossal joke.
But communists were far too invested in the ideological constructs to which they’d dedicated their lives to just admit they were wrong. Marxism is a virus that is near to impossible to cure, at least in some of its hosts.
This is childish thinking, of course. Earth’s temperatures are, above all, governed by the intensity of radiation bombing the planet from that giant ball of nuclear fusion explosions in the sky. And surprisingly enough, that intensity varies a bit — strangely, a giant ball of nuclear explosions will sometimes cook off more intensely than at other times.
Yes, it’s hot this year. As this column has explained, that’s much more a function of a South Pacific volcano than cow farts or your Chevy Tahoe. But the Left will demand that you submit to confiscatory taxation and punitive restrictions on your lifestyle, including eating insects instead of steak, while they fly on private planes and build mansions on the water.
2. Bidenomics Is Awesome. Look at That GDP Growth!
You do know that government spending is one of the factors used in calculating gross domestic product, right? You can make your GDP rise by spending more money.
What’s interesting about that, though, is that (1) it doesn’t last, and (2) government spending will ultimately strangle private-sector spending. So GDP numbers like, for example, the ones we have now, can get a little bit of a bump as billions or trillions of dollars are shoveled out of helicopters. The problem is that money doesn’t fuel economic growth. It’s generally just spent, and usually not on things that produce a return.
Which is why you’re looking at a series of dead-cat bounces with respect to our economy. Unemployment is low because labor force participation is low — and that’s a function of the government paying people not to work. And the dole mostly just pays for people to subsist on fattening processed foods, which creates the need for more government spending on health care and a whole lot less entrepreneurship or economic production.
Bidenomics is about redistributing wealth, not creating it. That always collapses. People understand this, which is why Team Biden can’t sell their economic performance to a country full of people who can’t afford houses, cars, vacations, or even savings. You simply can’t run an economy on a lie.
As noted about one of the items in the first set of Stupid Things, this isn’t a lie they’ll stop telling. It is a lie they might regret eventually.
3. (Related to #2) Deficits Don’t Matter
This one was more prevalent before COVID, and, to be fair, it’s a lie that too many Republicans go along with.
But contrary to the fantasies foisted upon us by the proponents of “modern monetary theory,” deficits do matter. They matter a lot. Because a lack of fiscal discipline on the part of government leads to debt levels that can’t be managed.
And we are there.
Trillion-dollar deficits are inflationary because they pump more money into an economy than there are goods and services available for that economy to purchase. Debasing the currency is an especially regressive tax that crushes the poor, and it leads to personal debt levels that mirror that of the fiscally incontinent government.
And interest rates must rise to strangle inflation — especially if the government won’t stop spending and if the private sector isn’t incentivized to produce more goods and services to meet demand. Those interest rates will kill demand, but they’ll also pile up on the deficit-spending government.
We’re now spending well over a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the federal debt. Soon, we’ll be paying half of the government’s revenue on debt service alone.
At that point, drastic measures will be taken, and, historically speaking, it’s not unforeseeable that those measures might include hanging the people who said deficits don’t matter.
4. Racism Is America’s Worst Sin
The American fetish over racism, which has spread worldwide, is a rather new thing. Up until six or seven decades ago, nobody on Planet Earth really gave a fig about that as one of the deadliest sins.
Which is not to say it didn’t exist. Racism will always exist because as the old saying goes, birds of a feather flock together. Humans seek clans and tribes to belong to, and the easiest way to find such collectives is to look for other people who look like you.
It wasn’t until the cultural Marxists in America settled on race as their wedge of choice to split open American society that our fetish began, and with it the yearning to atone for the national sins of slavery and segregation.
But slavery isn’t just a societal sin. It’s an economic system, one that exists when there is insufficient capital to service the demand for productive labor. Societies that can’t afford to pay people to do work then enslave them. And until the Industrial Revolution, this was an endemic problem in human society. But nobody really wants to enslave their friends and relatives, so you do it to people you capture in war, or tribesmen from somewhere else. Somebody you don’t care about.
Every society on Earth enslaved people from other societies. The Industrial Revolution, and the American Civil War, were what proved that there was a better way. The fact that most slaves in America came from Africa wasn’t so much the product of racism as economics — there was a large supply available at a low price because West African kings were big into the slave trade and willing to sell, not to mention the trade winds blew very well to the New World from the West African coast.
Nobody is defending slavery or racism here. I’m just making the obvious point that until Americans — and it was chiefly Americans, plus the British — made slavery obsolete, everybody did it. And every single society on earth is guilty of racism. In fact, this is the least racist country on Earth. By the way, the people who scream “racism!” the loudest? Those are almost always the biggest racists in the room.
5. America Is Unworthy of Its Superpower Status
This is related to #4, and it tells you everything about where we are as a country right now.
Remember Barack Obama’s Apology Tour? Where he went around genuflecting for our supposed foreign-policy sins and our “arrogance” in front of people for whom war, genocide, injustice, poverty, and tyranny are art forms and spectator sports?
Nothing much has changed. We’re still more or less apologizing to Iran. Obama, in fact, is still dumping on the “racist” country that made him its president despite meager — at best — qualifications other than his penchant for trading on our racial goodwill. Obama demanded that America take stock of our own responsibility for the Israel–Gaza conflict a week or so ago, a bizarre statement of apology insinuating that America’s actions could exacerbate an eons-old vendetta going back to Old Testament days.
The narrative Obama — and the idiots who surrounded him, like Irish-born Samantha Power — has pushed is that somehow we’re guilty of fomenting tyranny and injustice around the world. This, it ought to be remembered, comes from people who were actively rooting against us in the Cold War because they liked the USSR’s ideological foundations better than our own. So the Contras or the Salvadoran death squads, or Augusto Pinochet, are special horrors for which we should wear a hair shirt.
Except the horrors inflicted on those same people by the Soviets and their minions were far more systematic and intense than anything we did. The Cold War was a dirty war, and we had to do dirty things to win it.
We haven’t been perfect. But just look around, and you can see what the receding tide of Pax Americana is bringing to the world.
It’s funny that the people across the globe suffering from our decline seem to appreciate this country a whole lot more than the Left does.
Of course, it’s understandable if you don’t feel like laughing.
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
