College Student: My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us
The title describes the author, Alyssa Ahlgren, who’s in grad school for her MBA. It’s a short article but definitely worth a read.
I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of Democratic candidates calling for policies to “fix” the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around. I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook’s, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it. Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose. These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought.
…
Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity.”
Never saw American prosperity. Let that sink in. When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Now, I’m not attributing Miss Ocasio-Cortez’s words to outright dishonesty. I do think she whole-heartedly believes the words she said to be true. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided. My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but I digress.
“Never saw American Prosperity”. It’s stunning when you think of it in those terms, but the attitude that AOC voices is obvious all around us. The US has roughly 5% of the world’s population but contributes about 25% of world GDP; global prosperity, if you will. Producing that quarter of the world’s GDP gets us derided by those same college students for using more than 5% of the world’s energy to generate that outsize contribution! Instead, they should be asking why the other major economic powers aren’t contributing as much. The US has lifted more people out of abject poverty, spread more freedom and democracy, and has created more innovation in technology and medicine than any other nation in human history. When a disaster happens somewhere in the world, US citizens routinely donate more out of their own pockets than any other country’s citizens, and generally giving more than entire nations do with tax money (that is, not voluntary charity).
Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country. People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they’ve never seen prosperity, and as a result, elect politicians dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism. Why? The answer is this, my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, or see the rise and fall of socialism and communism. We don’t know what it’s like not to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it’s spreading like a plague.
Churchill spoke of socialism as the “Gospel of Envy” and the daily media spew reeks of that envy taken all the way to resentment. In the US we have people living in the top 10% of incomes in the country resenting the small percentage making more than they do. Society stratified so that everyone resents the next higher level of income, with most of those people thinking how bad they have it instead of how good.
(The following is the speech delivered by Daniel Greenfield at the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention in Myrtle Beach. My appreciation to Joe Dugan and everyone involved in organizing it and making it a reality once again. And to Don Neuen and Donna Fiducia of Cowboy Logic Radio for the introduction. And to anyone and everyone still fighting the good fight.)
This is a civil war.
There aren’t any soldiers marching on Charleston… or Myrtle Beach. Nobody’s getting shot in the streets. Except in Chicago… and Baltimore, Detroit and Washington D.C.
But that’s not a civil war. It’s just what happens when Democrats run a city into the ground. And then they dig a hole in the ground so they can bury it even deeper.
If you look deep enough into that great big Democrat hole, you might even see where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.
But it’s not guns that make a civil war. It’s politics.
Guns are how a civil war ends. Politics is how it begins.
How do civil wars happen?
Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge.
That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.
I know you’re all thinking about President Trump.
He won and the establishment, the media, the democrats, rejected the results. They came up with a whole bunch of conspiracy theories to explain why he didn’t really win. It was the Russians. And the FBI. And sexism, Obama, Bernie Sanders and white people.
It’s easier to make a list of the things that Hillary Clinton doesn’t blame for losing the election. It’s going to be a short list.
A really short list. Herself.
The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. But it’s not the first time they’ve done this.
The first time a Republican president was elected this century, they said he didn’t really win. The Supreme Court gave him the election. There’s a pattern here.
Trump didn’t really win the election. Bush didn’t really win the election. Every time a Republican president won an election this century, the Democrats insist he didn’t really win.
Now say a third Republican president wins an election in say, 2024.
What are the odds that they’ll say that he didn’t really win? Right now, it looks like 100 percent.
What do sure odds of the Dems rejecting the next Republican president really mean? It means they don’t accept the results of any election that they don’t win.
It means they don’t believe that transfers of power in this country are determined by elections.
That’s a civil war.
There’s no shooting. At least not unless you count the attempt to kill a bunch of Republicans at a charity baseball game practice. But the Democrats have rejected our system of government.
This isn’t dissent. It’s not disagreement.
You can hate the other party. You can think they’re the worst thing that ever happened to the country. But then you work harder to win the next election. When you consistently reject the results of elections that you don’t win, what you want is a dictatorship.
Your very own dictatorship.
The only legitimate exercise of power in this country, according to the left, is its own. Whenever Republicans exercise power, it’s inherently illegitimate.
The attacks on Trump show that elections don’t matter to the left.
Republicans can win an election, but they have a major flaw. They’re not leftists.
That’s what the leftist dictatorship looks like.
The left lost Congress. They lost the White House. So what did they do? They began trying to run the country through Federal judges and bureaucrats.
Every time that a Federal judge issues an order saying that the President of the United States can’t scratch his own back without his say so, that’s the civil war.
Our system of government is based on the constitution, but that’s not the system that runs this country.
The left’s system is that any part of government that it runs gets total and unlimited power over the country.
If it’s in the White House, then the president can do anything. And I mean anything. He can have his own amnesty for illegal aliens. He can fine you for not having health insurance. His power is unlimited.
He’s a dictator.
But when Republicans get into the White House, suddenly the President can’t do anything. He isn’t even allowed to undo the illegal alien amnesty that his predecessor illegally invented.
A Democrat in the White House has “discretion” to completely decide every aspect of immigration policy. A Republican doesn’t even have the “discretion” to reverse him.
That’s how the game is played. That’s how our country is run.
When Democrats control the Senate, then Harry Reid and his boys and girls are the sane, wise heads that keep the crazy guys in the House in check.
But when Republicans control the Senate, then it’s an outmoded body inspired by racism.
When Democrats run the Supreme Court, then it has the power to decide everything in the country. But when Republicans control the Supreme Court, it’s a dangerous body that no one should pay attention to.
When a Democrat is in the White House, states aren’t even allowed to enforce immigration law. But when a Republican is in the White House, states can create their own immigration laws.
Under Obama, a state wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom without asking permission. But under Trump, Jerry Brown can go around saying that California is an independent republic and sign treaties with other countries.
The Constitution has something to say about that.
Whether it’s Federal or State, Executive, Legislative or Judiciary, the left moves power around to run the country. If it controls an institution, then that institution is suddenly the supreme power in the land.
This is what I call a moving dictatorship.
There isn’t one guy in a room somewhere issuing the orders. Instead there’s a network of them. And the network moves around.
If the guys and girls in the network win elections, they can do it from the White House. If they lose the White House, they’ll do it from Congress. If they don’t have either one, they’ll use the Supreme Court.
If they don’t have either the White House, Congress or the Supreme Court, they’re screwed. Right?
Nope.
They just go on issuing them through circuit courts and the bureaucracy. State governments announce that they’re independent republics. Corporations begin threatening and suing the government.
There’s no consistent legal standard. Only a political one.
Under Obama, states weren’t allowed to enforce immigration laws. That was the job of the Federal government. And the states weren’t allowed to interfere with the job that the Feds weren’t doing.
Okay.
Now Trump comes into office and starts enforcing immigration laws again. And California announces it’s a sanctuary state and passes a law punishing businesses that cooperate with Federal immigration enforcement.
So what do we have here?
It’s illegal for states to enforce immigration law because that’s the province of the Federal government. But it’s legal for states to ban the Federal government from enforcing immigration law.
The only consistent pattern here is that the left decided to make it illegal to enforce immigration law.
It may do that sometimes under the guise of Federal power or states rights. But those are just fronts. The only consistent thing is that leftist policies are mandatory and opposing them is illegal.
Everything else is just a song and dance routine.
That’s how it works. It’s the moving dictatorship. It’s the tyranny of the network.
You can’t pin it down. There’s no one office or one guy. It’s a network of them. It’s an ideological dictatorship. Some people call it the deep state. But that doesn’t even begin to capture what it is.
To understand it, you have to think about things like the Cold War and Communist infiltration.
A better term than Deep State is Shadow Government.
Parts of the Shadow Government aren’t even in the government. They are wherever the left holds power. It can be in the non-profit sector and among major corporations. Power gets moved around like a New York City shell game. Where’s the quarter? Nope, it’s not there anymore.
The shadow government is an ideological network. These days it calls itself by a hashtag #Resistance. Under any name, it runs the country. Most of the time we don’t realize that. When things are normal, when there’s a Democrat in the White House or a bunch of Democrats in Congress, it’s business as usual.
Even with most Republican presidents, you didn’t notice anything too out of the ordinary. Sure, the Democrats got their way most of the time. But that’s how the game is usually played.
It’s only when someone came on the scene who didn’t play the game by the same rules, that the network exposed itself. The shadow government emerged out of hiding and came for Trump.
And that’s the civil war.
This is a war over who runs the country. Do the people who vote run the country or does this network that can lose an election, but still get its agenda through, run the country?
We’ve been having this fight for a while. But this century things have escalated.
They escalated a whole lot after Trump’s win because the network isn’t pretending anymore. It sees the opportunity to delegitimize the whole idea of elections.
Now the network isn’t running the country from cover. It’s actually out here trying to overturn the results of an election and remove the president from office.
It’s rejected the victories of two Republican presidents this century.
And if we don’t stand up and confront it, and expose it for what it is, it’s going to go on doing it in every election. And eventually Federal judges are going to gain enough power that they really will overturn elections.
It happens in other countries. If you think it can’t happen here, you haven’t been paying attention to the left.
Right now, Federal judges are declaring that President Trump isn’t allowed to govern because his Tweets show he’s a racist. How long until they say that a president isn’t even allowed to take office because they don’t like his views?
That’s where we’re headed.
Civil wars swing around a very basic question. The most basic question of them all. Who runs the country?
Is it me? Is it you? Is it Grandma? Or is it bunch of people who made running the government into their career?
America was founded on getting away from professional government. The British monarchy was a professional government. Like all professional governments, it was hereditary. Professional classes eventually decide to pass down their privileges to their kids.
America was different. We had a volunteer government. That’s what the Founding Fathers built.
This is a civil war between volunteer governments elected by the people and professional governments elected by… well… uh… themselves.
Of the establishment, by the establishment and for the establishment.
You know, the people who always say they know better, no matter how many times they screw up, because they’re the professionals. They’ve been in Washington D.C. politics since they were in diapers.
Freedom can only exist under a volunteer government. Because everyone is in charge. Power belongs to the people.
A professional government is going to have to stamp out freedom sooner or later. Freedom under a professional government can only be a fiction. Whenever the people disagree with the professionals, they’re going to have to get put down. That’s just how it is. No matter how it’s disguised, a professional government is tyranny.
Ours is really well disguised, but if it walks like a duck and locks you up like a duck, it’s a tyranny.
Now what’s the left.
Forget all the deep answers. The left is a professional government.
It’s whole idea is that everything needs to be controlled by a big central government to make society just. That means everything from your soda sizes to whether you can mow your lawn needs to be decided in Washington D.C.
Volunteer governments are unjust. Professional governments are fair. That’s the credo of the left.
Its network, the one we were just discussing, it takes over professional governments because it shares their basic ideas. Professional governments, no matter who runs them, are convinced that everything should run through the professionals. And the professionals are usually lefties. If they aren’t, they will be.
Just ask Mueller and establishment guys like him.
What infuriates professional government more than anything else? An amateur, someone like President Trump who didn’t spend his entire adult life practicing to be president, taking over the job.
President Trump is what volunteer government is all about.
When you’re a government professional, you’re invested in keeping the system going. But when you’re a volunteer, you can do all the things that the experts tell you can’t be done. You can look at the mess we’re in with fresh eyes and do the common sense things that President Trump is doing.
And common sense is the enemy of government professionals. It’s why Trump is such a threat.
A Republican government professional would be bad enough. But a Republican government volunteer does that thing you’re not supposed to do in government… think differently.
Professional government is a guild. Like medieval guilds. You can’t serve in if you’re not a member. If you haven’t been indoctrinated into its arcane rituals. If you aren’t in the club.
And Trump isn’t in the club. He brought in a bunch of people who aren’t in the club with him.
Now we’re seeing what the pros do when amateurs try to walk in on them. They spy on them, they investigate them and they send them to jail. They use the tools of power to bring them down.
That’s not a free country.
It’s not a free country when FBI agents who support Hillary take out an “insurance policy” against Trump winning the election. It’s not a free country when Obama officials engage in massive unmasking of the opposition. It’s not a free country when the media responds to the other guy winning by trying to ban the conservative media that supported him from social media. It’s not a free country when all of the above collude together to overturn an election because the guy who wasn’t supposed to win, won.
We’re in a civil war between conservative volunteer government and leftist professional government.
The pros have made it clear that they’re not going to accept election results anymore. They’re just going to make us do whatever they want. They’re in charge and we better do what they say.
That’s the war we’re in. And it’s important that we understand that.
Because this isn’t a shooting war yet. And I don’t want to see it become one.
And before the shooting starts, civil wars are fought with arguments. To win, you have to understand what the big picture argument is. It’s easy to get bogged down in arguments that don’t matter or won’t really change anything.
This is the argument that changes everything.
Do we have a government of the people and by the people? Or do we have a tyranny of the professionals?
The Democrats try to dress up this argument in leftist social justice babble. Those fights are worth having. But sometimes we need to pull back the curtain on what this is really about.
They’ve tried to rig the system. They’ve done it by gerrymandering, by changing the demographics of entire states through immigration, by abusing the judiciary and by a thousand different tricks.
But civil wars come down to an easy question. Who runs the country?
They’ve given us their answer and we need to give them our answer.
Both sides talk about taking back the country. But who are they taking it back for?
The left uses identity politics. It puts supposed representatives of entire identity groups up front. We’re taking the country back for women and for black people, and so on and so forth…
But nobody elected their representatives.
Identity groups don’t vote for leaders. All the black people in the country never voted to make Shaun King al Al Sharpton their representative. And women sure as hell didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton.
What we have in America is a representative government. A representative government makes freedom possible because it actually represents people, instead of representing ideas.
The left’s identity politics only represents ideas. Nobody gets to vote on them.
Instead the left puts out representatives from different identity politics groups, there’s your gay guy, there’s three women, there’s a black man, as fronts for their professional government system.
When they’re taking back the country, it’s always for professional government. It’s never for the people.
When conservatives fight to take back the country, it’s for the people. It’s for volunteer government the way that the Founding Fathers wanted it to be.
This is a civil war over whether the American people are going to govern themselves. Or are they going to be governed.
Are we going to have a government of the people, by the people and for the people… or are we going to have a government.
The kind of government that most countries have where a few special people decide what’s best for everyone.
We tried that kind of government under the British monarchy. And we had a revolution because we didn’t like it.
But that revolution was met with a counterrevolution by the left. The left wants a monarchy. It wants King Obama or Queen Oprah.
It wants to end government of the people, by the people and for the people. That’s what they’re fighting for. That’s what we’re fighting against. The stakes are as big as they’re ever going to get. Do elections matter anymore?
I live in the state of Ronald Reagan. I can go visit the Ronald Reagan Library any time I want to. But today California has one party elections. There are lots of elections and propositions. There’s all the theater of democracy, but none of the substance. Its political system is as free and open as the Soviet Union.
And that can be America.
The Trump years are going to decide if America survives. When his time in office is done, we’re either going to be California or a free nation once again.
The civil war is out in the open now and we need to fight the good fight. And we must fight to win.
Listening to the twenty-four candidates for president I hear the same proposals from most off them, free everything for all.
I have a couple of ideas for them.
1.) Send Social Security, Medicare, and food stamp payments to all residents of Mexico, and Central America. Why not? Think of all the problems we would head off by leaving these people in their own countries.
2.) Annex each of these countries to the USA. They will get everything we get without moving from their utopian dictatorships. The biggest problem we would have is how to add that many new stars to the flag.
The more I think about the second one the better I like it. It solves the open border policy since they are merely state borders. We eliminate the cost of maintaining border patrol, immigration, ICE, and we get to tax the drug cartels out of business. All of these new people will be qualified for the draft thus allowing an expansion of the military. Since all of these folks screw daily and bear children freely, it solves our population problem. The elite of the populations that have jobs or other sources of income will add to the tax base and help reduce the deficit. The positives are endless.
The biggest benefit we will get from so many problems solved by annexation is we won’t need Congress for anything, and we can send them all home. The money saved by not having any more stupid expensive laws and regulations passed will put the country into the black. Free trade agreements will be null since we are all the same. Canada be glad to disband the existing treaties since they don’t benefit that much from it.
Last week we had a beautiful day here in the tiny town of Frankfort. The birds woke me up early and I actually went out to the garden to plant a Castor Bean seedling a friend gave me. I got the fever. The pond needed another dredging before the water lilies over take it. I got my trusty fifty year old lawn rake out of the garage and began scraping the bottom of the pond of organic mush, mostly decayed leaves. It took me about forty-five minutes to get around the perimeter. While doing that I kept my eyes open for fish survivors. In that whole time I spotted only one lonely Koi. Last Father’s Day my son-in-law surprised me by stocking the pond with two four inch koi and a couple dozen comet goldfish about on inch long. By the end of summer the koi grew to six inches and the gold fish to four inches.
At the beginning of fall I always shut down the pump which makes the water flow from the pond into a waterfall. That action keeps the water aerated. When the pump is off I usually install three aerators to keep air moving into the water. For three years in a row all the fish went belly up by mid November, that is, until last fall. I kept the pump going all winter long. The electric company kept sending me letters that my electricity consumption was thirty percent higher than any of my neighbors. Such is the cost of saving fish lives. At the end of winter when all the ice had melted on a nice sunny but cold day the two koi sunned themselves, and a beautiful black and orange comet joined them. Success! I saved the fish. I figured I better clear the skimmer of scum and lifted the lid. There sitting on the edge of the skimmer basket was a giant leopard frog. He took one look at me and jumped into deep water. Here we are nearly three months later and I am finally doing maintenance on my water-garden-fish-pond. I didn’t see the big frog, but I did scare up one tiny beeper. Throughout the dredging only the larger white koi revealed himself. I never saw a minnow nor the koi’s partner.
Today, I took a closer look at the pond. The water lillies have tripled in size and have covered over fifty percent of the water surface, by the end of next week they will be giant beautiful deep green round pads and the flowers will begin to bud. I stared at the beauty of it when I spotted a slight movement beneath the foliage. Ah! There between the pads was the second koi, and then his partner appeared. I am a proud daddy of two koi. But where are all of the comets? Then I remembered the now missing big frog. I’m sure he had a very large grin on his face as he departed the pond for the wetland behind the house. Still, there should be some comet minnows hiding somewhere, but I have yet to spot a single one.
Oh yeah, I finally limped back into the house after four hours. I haven’t been able to move my legs since. My quads and glutes are just burning and keeping me from bending, sitting, walking, or anything. The best first day of gardening ever!
The news is filled with so many interesting topics to write about. I have opinions on all of it, but lack the drive to report on any of it. Writing a blog post is high on my list of things to do today so I have to get it done regardless of my energy level.
The first topic is the democrat attempt to get the president’s tax returns, business files, and general records from the time he was born. (I know that is wrong, but I have to get this out of my system). My solution is to offer to give the dems everything they ask for in return for President Obama’s locked and sealed records. His education records, his student finances, his birth certificate (the real one not a phony one) etc. The danger of exposing him as a fraudulent and illegal president would put the matter to rest.
Perhaps you can tell by my tone that I am not an Obama fan, never was, and never will be one. I feel for the president because the democrats are giving him the same crap I extended towards Obama. Obama lovers, however, outnumber Trump lovers and Obama the communist that he is, will prevail in a socialist leaning populace.
Next, I watched a Fox News Town Hall broadcast of Mayor Pete Buttagieg. I was impressed with his fluidity in responses. Either he is a genius fast thinking brain, or he has been rehearsing his answers since he was born. I liken him to a white Obama; Mr Smooth, likable, but unbelievable. Actually he outshines Obama. Obama talked smooth, but never made sense or committed himself to specifics. Mayor Pete is not afraid of specifics. His policies are one hundred percent socialist. He is thirty seven years old which would make him among the youngest of presidents. Youth often lacks wisdom and Mayor Pete would fail miserably against the likes of the Ayatollah, Vladimir Putin, and other more wiser leaders. If Nancy Pelosi were a republican she would have him for breakfast. Instead she coddles him like a baby grandson. He is openly homosexual, and tauts his husband at his side. Surely, that will earn him a bullet in that fast thinking brain by one of the homo-haters amongst us.
Impeach, impeach, impeach is all I ever kept yelling at the TV during the Obama years. Yet nothing ever came of it. That is because the republicans knew the democrat senate would never pass it. I can’t say the same for the democrats, they own both houses and would pass anything that said impeachment on it regardless if it held water or not. I can’t see the value of impeaching a president for political purposes. In Obamas’ case he was in my mind a totally illegitimate president not technically qualified for the position but elected none the less. The Trump situation is all about the dem’s not winning an election by vote so they must try any other means possible to remove him from office.
Lastly, fire the entire upper echelon of the FBI, and the old Justice Department employees. We need a fresh start with the new Attorney General hand picking his team. Jail everyone of the traitors who actively engaged in an attempt to overthrow the government. Actually, jail would be too big a drain on the system. I would personally pay for the bullets needed to exterminate the vermin.
