RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://victorhanson.com/ossified-americana-part-four/

The FBI

How, then, do we alter the FBI to save it from itself?

1. Choice One: Move the entire headquarters to Kansas City or Laramie or Oklahoma City. There would be far less incestuous media/political/bureaucratic marriages, lobbying, and consulting, and far less opportunity for cocktail-hour networking, plotting, profiting, and cajoling. And, of course, a different sort of FBI agent would prefer to live far from DC.

2. Choice Two: Farm out the agency’s divisions among the cabinencies. The Departments of the Treasury, Homeland Security, Justice, and Interior could inherit various orphaned FBI sects from counterterrorism to counterfeiting to drugs. A division head would not have the power of a Comey or Wray and be a bit humbler and more reasonable under congressional testimony.

3. Choice Three: Reform the FBI. Put a 5-year limit on the Directorship. Create a permanent oversight committee in Congress. Require special permission to conduct swat-style arrest raids. Advise all FBI personnel that lying to Congress or to federal investigators results in automatic dismissal and loss of pensions, with criminal proceedings to follow.

The Pentagon

The U.S. military’s last draw in a major war was some 70 years ago in South Korea. We won the First Gulf War of 1991, but lost the brief peace by insanely allowing Saddam Hussein, in defeat and humiliation, to slaughter the Kurds and Shias. A decade of no-fly-zones and Iraq 2.0 followed.

The Iraq War (2003-2010) was finally won in 2008. But then Obama yanked out U.S. troops, ISIS absorbed much of the country, and Trump really did have to “bomb the sh*t out of ISIS” to restore the country to whatever it is now.

Our Clinton/Rice/Power Libyan bombing misadventure ruined that country.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/04/the-strange-pandemic-of-white-disparagement/

One of the tenets of the early civil rights movement some 65 years ago was ending racial stereotyping.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. called for emphasizing the “content of our character” over “the color of our skin,” the subtext was “stop judging people as a faceless collective on the basis of their superficial appearance and instead look to them as individuals with unique characters.”

It is tragic that King’s plea for an integrated, assimilated society, in which race became incidental, not essential to our personas, has mostly been abandoned by the Left in favor of racial stereotyping, collective guilting, and scapegoating by race and gender.

Indeed, many of the old Confederate pathologies—fixation on racial essence, obsession with genealogy, nullification of federal laws, states’ rights, and segregated spaces and ceremonies—are now rehabilitated by woke activists.

In that larger landscape, the collective adjective and noun “white” now has also been redefined and mainstreamed as a pejorative to the point of banality.

“White” followed by a string of subsequent oppressive nouns—“rage,” “supremacy,” “privilege”—has become a twitch on campus. Diversity, equity, and inclusion deans and provosts cannot write a memo, issue a communique, or sign a directive without a reference to “white” something or other.

Like the mysterious omnipresence of transgenderism in popular culture, all of a sudden, the obsession with whites as a Satanic collective has become a national fad—a pet-rock or hula-hoop-like collective madness.

Yet such an addiction remains bizarre in a variety of ways. Millions in the present are now to be libeled as oppressors by the contemporary self-described oppressed—supposedly for what some whites who are mostly now dead once did to now mostly dead others.

Yet what does “white” really mean anymore? Is it an adjective or noun indicating color? Culture? Race? Ethnicity? Is white defined as three-quarters, one-half, or one-quarter paleness? Is it an overarching state of mind that encompasses both “Duck Dynasty” and “The West Wing”?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/06/those-who-oppose-capitalism-are-the-enemies-of-freedom/

By now, much of the country has heard or read about the City University of New York law school graduate who was allowed to unspool a spiteful tirade as the school’s commencement speaker. She made a number of vile statements, but her call to “fight against capitalism” stood out to us. She and her fellow travelers know what few casual observers are aware of, that is, an attack on capitalism is an attack on liberty.

Condemning capitalism is nothing new in this country. We’ve heard the angry criticisms all of our lives, and they weren’t novel when we were young. It’s tragic, really, that so many in the West see the tension between “capitalists” and their ideological opponents as merely a conflict between ideas about which economic system we should have.

But it’s more than that. It’s a battle between freedom and subjugation.

Capitalism is not an economic system imposed by government in the way socialism or communism or any form of Marxism or planned economy is imposed on people against their will. Capitalism is merely the economic activity that men will engage in when left alone, when they are free to act as they wish. It is spontaneous, ordered and entirely organic. 

When men are free to trade with each other without government intrusion, they will inevitably seek and sell capital. And why wouldn’t they? It is their nature. Innovators and entrepreneurs hungry to make their ideas flesh need capital to fund their ventures. Those who have capital see opportunities to reap profits, so they trade their capital in an open market for profits to be realized later.

This is not exploitation but the manifestation of liberty. Ludwig von Mises wrote in his 1952 “Planning for Freedom” essay that “planning and capitalism are utterly incompatible.” The former is “conducted according to the government’s orders” while the latter follows the plans of entrepreneurs “eager to profit by best filling the wants of consumers.”

Von Mises also noted in the same essay that “the idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/02/left-wing-authoritarianism/

The daily issue of Lisa DePasquale’s “Bright” political newsletter never disappoints. Her May 31 edition was quite an eye opener. To wit, via the New York Post, DePasquale highlights the findings of a study titled, “Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment”:

The study published in Current Psychology suggests that left-wing extremism is associated with toxic, psychopathic tendencies and narcissism [and] found a link between higher levels of left-wing authoritarianism and higher levels of narcissism. The authors coined the term ‘dark-ego-vehicle principle’ to describe the phenomenon where individuals with dark personality traits are attracted to political and social activism as a means to satisfy their ego-focused needs rather than working towards social justice and equality. The study also noted that some activists use social justice as a guise for unhinged behavior and prioritize self-presentation, moral superiority, and social status over genuine social causes.

This makes sense. After all, one need only think of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and other left-wing monsters to see the “dark-ego-vehicle-principle” at work in the capture of organizations and movements, and their subsequent implementation of purges and democides. Yet, even on a smaller scale, one can see numerous instances of organizations of all political and apolitical stripes being captured to varying degrees by their most narcissistic and aggressive left-wing members, leading to the group’s increasing left-wing authoritarianism and, in some instances, embrace of violence, at the expense and/or eclipse of its original goals. 

This study of left-wing authoritarianism constitutes a validation of John O’Sullivan’s “First Law”:

All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don’t like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point [Robert] Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over—and the rest follows.