RUTHFULLY YOURS

Three years and many beheadings after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate, Americans are rejoicing in its demise. “With the liberation of ISIS’s capital and the vast majority of its territory,” President Trump said in a statement, “the end of the ISIS caliphate is in sight.”

But does the fall of Raqqa really mean the fall of Islamic State? One needs merely a sharp object—or as we saw last week, a rented truck—and a nearby group of “infidels” to be an ISIS soldier.

After the Oct. 31 New York attack, Mr. Trump tweeted: “We must not allow ISIS to return, or enter, our country after defeating them in the Middle East and elsewhere. Enough!” But ISIS’ most important battlefield is not in the Levant; it is online, in hearts and minds. ISIS’ power comes from ideas, not territory.

The threat is from within as well as without. Sayfullo Saipov, the Uber driver who allegedly murdered eight in ISIS’ name, had been living an unremarkable life in the U.S. for seven years. Thousands of young Muslims have left Europe and the U.S. for Syria and Iraq to answer Mr. Baghdadi’s call. Seduced via social media, young men and women, some of them converts, are also taking up arms in the West, or leaving their homes in Chicago, London and Paris, to live, and perhaps die, for a cause.

The Obama administration argued that young people join ISIS because of poor economic prospects. “We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said in 2015. “We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.” That’s myopic. Physicians, computer scientists and star high-school students have been radicalized, too. People are motivated by meaning more than money.

While Western states do (or used to) provide good social services, economic opportunity and consumer goods, they are increasingly indifferent to questions of meaning—to principles worth living, and perhaps dying, for. In the U.S. we are proud of our freedom—but freedom to do and care for what? For a small but not negligible number of young people, answering a call to build a caliphate, allegedly based on the dictums of a holy book, will seem a more genuine choice than ambition or consumerism.

Mr. Trump should know this. His campaign was a kind of call for meaning. Whatever the merits of Mr. Trump’s positions, he framed his views on trade, immigration and foreign policy in terms of America’s national identity: “Make America Great Again.” Hillary Clinton emphasized technical solutions. Can anyone remember her slogans, her rallying cries? There was “breaking down barriers” and “fighting for us” and “I’m with her.” None stuck. She ended on “stronger together.” Together with what or whom?

You know the old saw “ignorance is bliss.” When it comes to the history of the Middle East I prefer the blissfully ignorant to the “scholars” who teach fake history parroting the biased fiction that passes for Middle East studies to gullible students.

Take the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) that feeds faculty to the departments of Middle East history in most American Universities.

“The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is a private, non-profit learned society that brings together scholars, educators and those interested in the study of the region from all over the world.” This is their claim, which sounds innocent enough.

In fact, students will “learn” that Jews usurped ancient Arab lands, colonized them, instituted harsh repression and liquidated basic rights in their illegal occupation. They will be taught that Arab wars and terrorism were a reaction to Jewish invasion of Arab lands. They will unlearn, if they ever knew, anything about the Jews’ historic ties to Palestine, the Balfour Declaration or the deception that deeded 80% of Palestine to the Hashemites who had absolutely no historic ties to the area.

The current president of MESA, Beth Baron, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Center of City University (CUNY), is an outspoken supporter of the morally lopsided Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. She has published dozens of letters to the Israeli government condemning its actions and defending terrorists. She refers to the Israel Defense Forces as the “Israeli Occupation Authorities.” In August 2017 CUNY gave her a thirty thousand dollar raise and named her a “Distinguished Scholar.” Imagine what she teaches her students.

Judith Tucker, a professor of History at Georgetown University, is the President-elect of MESA, and (no surprise) a leader in the BDS movement. Back in 2014 she co-authored a resolution that defended scholarly associations’ right to endorse and participate in BDS. In January of 2016, Tucker sponsored a resolution titled “Protecting the Right to Education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” that was presented at the annual American Historical Association (AHA) convention. While that fortunately failed to pass, at the convention Tucker chaired a “Roundtable on Violations of Academic Freedom in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

Lisa Hajjar, a professor of “Law and Society” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a member of the board of MESA whose term expires this month. As the late and greatly lamented Professor Steven Plaut wrote in Frontpage in June 2005: “Lisa Hajjar has made an entire academic career out of bashing the United States and Israel for their supposed use of ‘torture’ against Arabs. She spouts off these baseless accusations from her academic home at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she teaches in its ‘Law and Society’ program. In fact she has no credentials at all in law. (She also teaches “Middle East Studies” at UCSB, with even fewer qualifications in that field.) Instead she holds a PhD in sociology from American University. The one in Washington, not Cairo.“

At Columbia University, past president of MESA Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies. He is fiercely anti-Israel and in his latest screed bemoaned: “Israel advocates will ‘infest’ the Trump administration and impose a new ‘vision’ of the Middle East disproportionately favoring the Israeli government….. they have a vision whereby the occupied territories aren’t occupied, they have a vision whereby there is no such thing as the Palestinians, they have a vision whereby international law doesn’t exist, they have a vision whereby the United States can unilaterally cancel a decision in the United Nations.” His entire department of fake history shares his views.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a “play in which nothing happens, twice,” in Vivian Mercier’s bon mot. Less known to English-speaking audiences is another work in which nothing happens twice, namely Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, The Exterminating Angel. The great Spanish auteur attacked the subject as surrealist social farce rather than as Existentialist absurdity, as with Beckett. Buñuel’s nihilism makes no pretense at portraying the human condition in general. It is as distinctively Spanish as Gilbert and Sullivan are distinctively British, which explains why Spanish theater troupes do not perform HMS Pinafore and American audiences largely ignored The Exterminating Angel. As a narrative of cultural suicide, though, it has no peer in postwar art.

Buñuel was a lifelong Communist and concluded his film with a revolutionary statement. But he brought to the screen a profoundly biblical sensibility, most of all in the matter of retribution. The film’s title may be a reference to the 19th-century Spanish Society of the Exterminating Angel, a death squad that hunted Spanish liberals. But it is more immediately a citation of I Chronicles 21:15, “And God sent an angel unto Jerusalem to destroy it” after King David ordered a census in contravention of biblical law. The subject of the film is divine vengeance against a corrupt elite that is incapable of extricating itself from its torpor.

The British composer Thomas Adès, the son of Syrian-Jewish immigrants to the United Kingdom, debuted an operatic adaption of Buñuel’s Angel at the Salzburg Festival last year. The Metropolitan Opera features it prominently in its fall season. With a few telling exceptions, Adès and his librettist, Tom Cairns, stick close to Buñuel’s screenplay. Their endeavor raises a question: How do you write music about nothing? The question is not as silly as it sounds. Adès solves it by injecting extraneous material into the comedy, which supports the music but disturbs the joke.

Adès has no limitations as a composer, by which I mean that he has a sure grip on the whole battery of compositional styles and musical devices. He can do with a score whatever he thinks best, and his use of tonal devices, as well as atonal gestures and sound effects, is canny and deliberate. The question is whether he has provided Buñuel’s comedy with the music it requires. The film has no score at all; the only music is performed by one of the characters in the course of the action.

In the film, guests arrive for dinner at a Mexico City mansion (on “Providence Street”), and find that they cannot leave the living room. The servants have had a strange compulsion to flee. There is no explanation for their paralysis of will. They do not understand it themselves. Days go by, and the aristocratic company begins to stink and starve. They obtain water by breaking open a pipe in the wall and food by butchering a pet lamb. A crowd gathers outside but cannot enter, either. The entrapped guests descend by turns into madness and violence, until one of them observes that they have returned by random motion to the precise positions they occupied just before the spell descended on them. They repeat verbatim the party banter that preceded their imprisonment, and the survivors stumble out of their hell.

The host promises to sponsor a solemn mass if the group escapes, but the partygoers’ Christianity cracks and peels under stress. One lady in the party, who carries chicken feet in her purse, applies practical Kabbalah without success; it is not clear whether she is meant to be a covert Jew or just dotty. Chicken feet pertain to voodoo, not Kabbalah. A Freemason in the group shouts “Adonai!” a masonic call for help, but no one appears.

Repetition, it turns out, is not the counter-spell, but a nasty divine joke. Buñuel warns us that something is awry by repeating the entrance of the guests into the mansion. The master of the house offers a toast to the prima donna of the opera they have just heard. He starts to repeat the scene, but this time the partygoers ignore him, as Buñuel winks to the audience.

After stumbling out of the house, the partygoers appear shortly afterward for a Mass of thanks-giving, but this time no one is able to leave the church. The priests halt at the exit and the parishioners mill about unable to pass the threshold. In case we were unclear about what Buñuel had in mind, the last scene shows machine guns firing at an uprising outside the church, and a herd of sheep entering the church. The relevant repetition was not the reenactment of the banal events that preceded the guests’ entrapment, but rather the repetition of the entrapment itself, this time in the church. Nothing has happened twice. These are people who are doomed to repeat themselves. That is why they are trapped.

The foreign policy establishment underestimated China for years. Now it is panicking at China’s growing power. Not since British contempt for the Japanese turned into defeatism at Singapore in 1942 has Western opinion of an Asian rival turned around so quickly. In the Fall 2017 Claremont Review of Books, I review Graham Allison’s influential new book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Allison makes the case for appeasement. If you want peace, I counter, prepare for war. That means restoring America’s technological supremacy. Excerpts from my review are below. The complete review can be found at Claremont Review of Books.

Graham Allison’s much-heralded new book warns that China’s challenge to American strategic dominance sets us on a path to war. He calls this peril the “Thucydides Trap,” because he claims that it is similar to other great-power conflicts in history, above all Athens’ challenge to Sparta before the Peloponnesian War in 431-404 B.C. Expanding on a 2015 Atlantic essay admonishing American planners to avert a looming war with China, Destined for War urges Americans to accept China as a great power.

A professor and outgoing director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School, Allison can’t be faulted for timing. In July and August of this year, North Korea’s tests of nuclear-capable missiles with range sufficient to strike American territory put the China problem at the top of our strategic agenda: apart from a military confrontation no one wants, America seems to have no alternative but to ask China to use its good offices to restrain North Korea. As a result, China has more influence in matters that bear on vital American interests. In an August 2017 Wall Street Journal essay that drew public praise from National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Henry Kissinger argued for strategic cooperation with China in the Korean peninsula. McMaster distributed a dozen copies of Allison’s book to senior National Security Council staff earlier this year.

The Thucydides Trap thus demarcates a crucial turn in the thinking of America’s foreign policy Establishment. Through most of the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, conventional thinking held that America would promulgate the liberal international order in the Middle East and elsewhere, while China would struggle with the internal weaknesses inherent in a dictatorial regime. Allison’s book offers a different and darker vision: He argues, correctly in my view, that China’s economy will continue to grow in breadth and depth to challenge America, and concludes, wrongly in my view, that America can do nothing except to accommodate the rising Asian superpower.

America can make reasonable concessions to certain Chinese security concerns, to be sure. But China and the United States compete in a global economy where digital technology has digital outcomes. China now dominates high-tech electrical manufacturing, while America’s manufacturing sector is imploding. Not too long from now this trend will have grave national security implications for the United States, and become a source of strategic instability. The issue is not whether America allows China more power in the South China Sea, for example, but whether the migration of manufacturing out of the United States will lead to a fundamental change in the great power relationship—comparable, perhaps, to America’s technological superiority over the Soviet Union during the last years of communism.

Allison emphasizes China’s achievements, rejecting the common prejudice that China has grown simply by stealing technology from the West.

Repetition of lies produces factoids, a technique in which the Left is well practised and relentless in its application. This business of kneeling in protest at US football games is the latest example. How refreshing to see a president uncowed by myth and political correctness.

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired! He’s fired!’ ”

Down camme the Trump haters from great heights of sanctimony. Trump is a racist and white supremacist, charged the Democrats and their cheerleaders; to wit, the hopelessly-corrupted fake-news media. No other conclusion could be drawn, they intoned over and over again.

Repetition of lies makes factoids. Leftists know that and are well practised in mythmaking. ‘The stolen generations’ is an exemplar in Australia. Talk to almost anyone you like and that myth has become a ‘truth’.

As most of the highly paid NFL players are black – they must have some physiological edge, but we are probably not allowed to say that — Trump must be a racist. And he is dog-whistling to white supremacists. His use of the word ‘bitch’ proves that to those who are prepared to go through any tendentious contortions to arrive at the answer they want.

The never-Trump Republicans get on board; if in a less colourful way. Karl Rove disproves of Trump’s language and his impugning of the parenthood of the NFL players. I was reminded of NSW Premier Robert Askin vocalising his thought “run over the bastards” to Lydon Johnson when anti-Vietnam War protesters were attempting to block his motorcade. Askin was criticised for this in some quarters, but I don’t seem to recall part of that criticism being related to the archaic literal meaning of ‘bastards’.

Memo to leftists and Karl Rove and company: Trump was using a common or garden expression, as was Askin. Moreover, in using the expression “he’s fired” he was parodying himself. The humour of the children’s literature character Amelia Bedelia, who took everything literally, would be entirely lost on today’s adult wallies. We are clearly living through a dumb age in which common sense has become a much rarer commodity.

Mark Steyn says that common sense presupposes a common understanding of the world, which is now absent. He’s right, which is why Q&A panels and audiences, for example, appear to me to be mostly populated by aliens; and particularly dumb and nasty ones. Witness, as another example, an elementary school librarian, Ms Liz Phipps Soeiro, who scolded Melania Trump for gifting her library “racist” Dr Seuss books. This lady can spot racist undertones in The Cat in the Hat. Imagine how young children will turn out under this dumb leftist tutelage. It is a growing curse on our children and on mankind.

Back to taking a knee for the flag and anthem. Though it has taken on an anti-Trump complexion, the initial protest by Colin Kaepernick was against (imagined) police brutality towards black men. Disconcertingly, even those who oppose the form of the protest; nevertheless, implicitly accept its premise, if only by their silence about it. The premise being that black men are disproportionately targeted and shot by cops. Quite simply, this is not supported by the evidence.

I wrote about this using publicly available data (The Truth in Black and White,) but Heather MacDonald (The War on Cops) is the person to go to. She has completely exposed the myth. For example, when set against black crime rates, blacks are by a long way less likely to be killed by cops than are whites. Don’t worry, the myth will live on. Black rabblerousers and the fake-news media will see to that.

Facts aside about police brutality, there is a lot of injustice in the world. I am pretty sure many young black people in America suffer injustices. Others do too but that doesn’t mean black sportsmen can’t highlight the injustices that they feel most acutely. How they do it is the issue.

A national anthem and flag transcend politics. Me, standing for Advance Australia Fair does not mean that I support Malcolm Turnbull. Nor does it mean that I am happy about the inevitable enactment of SSM or about impoverishing renewable-energy targets. Equally, kneeling when the anthem is played would not be a constructive or remotely comprehensible way of voicing my political objections.

There has to be one point where those making up a nation come together. That point is patriotism; wanting the best for the nation as a whole. Standing for the anthem and flag is simply an expression of that point of common cause, even among those who may be bitterly divided on particular political and social issues.

Apologists for the NFL players claim that they are not intending to disrespect the flag. This is pure sophistry. If you don’t mean to be disrespectful, it is odd indeed to take a knee precisely when the American flag is flying and the Star-Spangled Banner playing. To someone with common sense (there’s the problem I suppose) it is plainly disrespectful. And it is unmistakeably directed at the unifying symbols of the nation.

This past weekend I visited West Point Military Academy and United States Army Base. The foliage was brilliant and the setting on the Hudson River is magnificent. Security is very tight on the grounds, independent meandering is forbidden and photography limited. Nonetheless, we took a splendid bus tour with an excellent guide who detailed the history, biographies of renowned alumni, and the discipline, the intellectual and physical rigors,and the subsequent obligations of a West Point education. Two Generals- Omar Bradley and Douglas MacArthur were not only first in their respective classes but never received any disciplinary sanctions.

Read General MacArthur’s Farewell Address to West Point delivered on My 12, 1962. http://www.nationalcenter.org/MacArthurFarewell.html which ends with the following:

“In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country. Today marks my final roll call with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of the Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps.I bid you farewell.”

While I am dazzled with gratitude for the graduates and service of West Point alumni, one should also remember those soldiers buried in local cemeteries throughout the nation, who were not officers or alumni of military academies who fought and died in all our wars. I think of wounded survivors who participate and enrich our society. I think of those who enlist. Their guiding principle is also “Duty, Honor, Country.”

Objective reality exists.

The ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy is an essential survival skill. If a man believes he can fly and jumps off a twenty story ledge he falls to his death because gravity is an objective fact and force of nature. Birdman’s fantasy (subjective reality) cannot compete with the fact of gravity (objective reality).

Let’s break down the process of thinking and doing. Thinking is a private matter and human beings are free to think their thoughts at any time in any place. Birdman is free to think he can fly without consequence to himself or others. It is the moment he steps off the ledge that his subjective reality collides with objective reality.

Civil society and the laws that govern it are based on the acceptance of objective reality by its citizens. Adults and children are evaluated differently in society. The fantasies of children are an accepted part of the growth process but adults who are out of touch with reality are deemed insane. In our example Birdman would be considered insane.

The safety lessons we teach our children are rooted in the acceptance of objective reality. Do not touch a hot stove. Do not run in the street. Do not jump out of a window or off a ledge. We teach our children the difference between fantasy and reality to keep them safe.

What would happen if there was a movement that deliberately rejected the teaching of objective reality and taught subjective reality instead? What is the purpose of driving a society insane?

Remember that the ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy is a survival skill. Thought precedes behavior. Birdman thought he could fly and jumped to his death. Critical thinking is the objective analysis of facts to form a judgment and is the foundation of rational thought. Critical thinking is necessarily judgy because one must evaluate the facts (objective reality) to form a judgment.

Feelings are not facts. Feelings are the foundation of beliefs. Birdman’s feelings that he was a bird that could fly could not compete with the fact that he was a human and could not fly. Critical thinking is encouraged in an adult society. An insistence upon objective reality is what made America great, powerful, and undefeatable in WWII.

At the end of the war America’s enemies did not go quietly into the night. They reconstituted themselves to fight another day another way. How?

They simply put down their guns, picked up their books, and took aim at the children. They studied the human mind and decided to exploit the existence of the unconscious to bring America down psychologically. The goal was to move Americans out of the adult world of critical thinking (objective reality) and into the child’s world of feelings (subjective reality). They targeted education and decided to drive society insane. Regression was the goal.

Thought precedes behavior. A chronological adult who thinks like a child behaves like a child. Birdman thought like a child believing he could fly. Feelings are the metric of children, facts are the metric of adults.

Vladimir Lenin infamously said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

The progressives (regressives) have taken a page out of Lenin’s communist playbook and have indoctrinated two generations of Americans toward collectivism through public/private education and the media including television programming and movies. There are many ways to fight a war. The Leftist war against America is a sinister effort to shatter objective reality and destroy critical thinking skills. When critical thinking is destroyed and a society is reduced to childish emotional thinking it is easily exploited.

Revolutions are fought to effect seismic social change and to restructure society from one form of government to another. Historically revolution involves the forcible overthrow of a government or social order in favor of a new system. The Leftist war against America is psychological in nature and a Reality Revolution is necessary to stop them.

The Leftist offensive to drive society into subjective reality is a sinister attempt to infantilize society in preparation for socialism. What the young people of America need to understand is that the promise of socialism is not the reality of socialism. Cradle-to-grave government care exacts an exorbitant price. The government happily extracts your freedom and liberty when you accept the powerless position of childhood for the rest of your life. In socialism/communism you become permanent wards of the state.

http://politicalmavens.com/

Here are some complaints we’ve seen in the press from women who have endured workplace harassment. One woman who worked as a fact checker at The New Republic asserted that editor Leon Wieseltier had “forced her to look at a photograph of a nude sculpture in an art book, asking if she had ever seen a more erotic picture. She wrote that she was shaken and afraid during the incident.” (NYT 10/25) The words “forced” and “afraid” make us wonder how old this person was and whether she had ever been on a subway during rush hour or at a campus fraternity party at any college in the United States. Gretchen Carlson, a Stanford graduate and former Miss America who successfully collected 20 million dollars in a settlement with Fox News over her harassment, recounted the time she got into a car with a public relations man with whom she had just had a meeting. He pushed her head into his crotch after which she immediately fled the car but confesses now that she suffers PTSD because of this incident. Obviously Gretchen didn’t spend much time with veterans during her reign as beauty queen or with battered women who were victims of torture and abuse.

Concomitant with such hyperbole is the magnification of the term “courage” to include women who pour their recovered memories of past harassment into hashtag/metoo. It takes little courage to join a group that offers unqualified approval for anything they say. At the beginning of the feminist movement in the sixties, young women were encouraged to speak out and not be intimidated by boys at school. Single-sex schools bragged that girls did better at science and math when boys were not around but the goal was for women to strengthen their own voices, assert themselves and enter the same careers that men traditionally owned. Although this goal has been enormously successful with more women becoming doctors, lawyers, professors, executives and politicians, the hesitance to defend oneself against improper behavior until years later still lingers. But the tendency to conflate someone’s boorish personality trait with a threatening sexual assault weakens the cause of strong and independent women. Having your boss show you a picture of something you’d rather not see is not a women’s issue – it’s a reality of the hierarchal structure of most workplaces and affects men as well as women. There is always a question of whether the benefits you get from a desirable job outweigh the negative aspects of working with certain people, many of whom have risen to their status by virtue of being aggressive, self-promoting personalities. This doesn’t argue for compliance with unwanted sexual demands; it suggests that there’s a world of difference between looking at a picture in an art book and being threatened physically or economically – for which we have existing prohibitive workplace regulations.

Actresses who endured Harvey Weinstein’s lewd behavior for years were unwilling to jeopardize their opportunities for advancement and success by challenging him in accordance with these regulations. In a profession which has many gay men, this is not solely a women’s issue either nor will regulations ever be able to counteract all aberrant behavior. We live in a society that has been inundated with readily available pornography and extremely heightened sexuality throughout advertising, the media and music and entertainment industries. Ironically, Harvey Weinstein was not one of the shlock-meisters who populate these fields but more accusations will keep coming now that confessionals are both in style and sufficient to ruin reputations. Let’s distinguish between the necessary ability to tolerate compromises in the workplace which often include moral and ethical issues as well as sexual remarks, with unrelenting harassment that cannot be handled without regulatory interference. The current climate of regurgitating grievances from years past re-inforces the image of women too weak to stand up for themselves at the appropriate time – hardly a role model for feminists.

BACK IN MONDAY OCTOBER 30

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.” John Maynard Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936

In universities, we were exposed – at times through the lens of prejudicial teachers, but ones with less bias than today – to the writings of political philosophers, from Socrates to Locke to Marx. We glimpsed the ancient Greeks and Romans. We read history and surveyed the Bible. We grazed on the works of economists, like Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. While most of us did not study these philosophers and economists in detail, they were, at least, unmasked for our inspection. We were taught to think – to reason for ourselves – to determine what principles would help guide us past the Scyllas and the Charybdis’ we were bound to encounter. Today, too much focus in our universities is on issue-specific, special studies that pass as education.

It is the ability to think independently that is critical for democracy. Today, that is at risk. STEM programs help with jobs, but a vibrant democracy depends on a broadly educated electorate. For most older American, the concepts of personal liberty and economic freedom, along with a legacy of democracy and respect for institutions, are deeply ingrained. These beliefs have kept us free and democratic. Yet, youth today seems less critical, less challenging of their teachers. They believe what they hear and read in the mainstream media and on social media. The threat to democracy comes not from coarse, loud-mouthed people like Mr. Trump, but from subtle, cavalier politicians who surreptitiously insinuate themselves into our minds under the guise of doing good. To me, the biggest risk to our country is from within – elitists on both coasts, in the media, academia and in Washington, who use the threat of populism as justification for plutocracy.

Politics is an empirical process. Ours has changed over the past two hundred plus years, adapting to differing conditions and mores. The President is more isolated and more powerful. Congress has not expanded in line with the population growth, and has ceded responsibility to the Executive. Today, the judiciary (at least, those who are not activists) and local government most closely resemble what the Founders envisioned. Politicians, regardless of Party, exude an arrogance that sets them above those they represent. Many are hypocrites, spouting promises, with no intention of upholding them; passing laws, while exempting themselves; beholden to lobbyists and special interests, rather than the people; pledging prudence, but practicing profligacy. They use identity politics, which are counter-productive to assimilation and unity, leading, as they do, toward pluralism – a salad bowl instead of a melting pot.

Beware dogmatism born of ignorance. Like all self-respecting pundits, I see things I like and things I don’t. I have beliefs, and I have doubts. I do not believe climate skeptics are deniers, or that extremists come only from the Right, or that Francis Fukuyama was correct in proclaiming that the fall of the Soviet Union represented the end of history. I do not want to be lectured to by a supercilious Al Gore on climate – a man who made millions, while frightening gullible innocents. I do not want to be instructed on morality by cocky, ethically-challenged late-night hosts, like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. I do not want to be preached to by Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton on civility in politics, when they look upon conservatives as gun-toting, Bible-thumping “deplorables.” I do not want to listen to anti-Trump rants from sanctimonious Ivy League professors, hiding behind ivory towers. I don’t like duplicity or hypocrisy. I don’t like those who invoke identity politics, and I don’t respect those who use public fame to generate private wealth. I do not believe that any country, government, system or political party is perfect, but I do believe ours comes closest. I do like a sense of humor, civility and respect. I also believe that citizens have the responsibility to be conversant on matters of public policy, or, at least within reason, and that they should always exercise their right to vote. While unions have served a useful purpose, in recent times public sector ones have become more interested in preserving jobs and benefits, regardless of the costs to taxpayers. As well, in impeding progress by delaying or denying innovation, they have become advocates for the status quo.