Unlicensed Punditry

Andrew Breitbart famously said that politics is downstream from culture. If that is true, the more interesting question is not what is happening to American politics, it is what is happening to American culture that produces the politics we see. For all the talk about revolutionary social change, much of what we are watching is not revolutionary at all. We have seen versions of it before.

For a nation supposedly in irreversible decline, America produces a remarkable number of critics who are among the most prosperous, educated, and comfortable people in human history. Many are wealthy themselves or the children of wealth, yet they speak as though they are victims of a uniquely unjust society that has somehow denied them an imagined state of perfection.

I’ve said it, but I try not to say it. I do struggle with calling some event “the most important” of our lifetime, because as sure as sunrise, something happens immediately after the sun come up to ratchet the stakes up another few clicks. The truth is that we are all descendants of King Sisyphus and our lives and times are the boulder we push up the mountain, only to have it roll back down overnight.

Look, I opine on a lot of things for which I have no real answer. Most of the time, the problem, issue or situation involves people, and I have no idea how to fix people any more than your average screaming socialist does. What I do have is logic, reason, history and reality on my side, and I think people who try to approach problems with those tools have a better chance of finding real solutions than those who don’t.

If you think the contemporary ideological left has a screw or two loose, I’m not going to argue with you. Their reflexive and flexible opposition to everything they don’t like is only equaled by their willing acceptance of anything or anyone who fits their needs of the moment, including kooks and loons (who should not be roaming free society without adult supervision) and frauds (the backstories of whom are just too damn good to check).

Today, we generally see the political world as a competition between capitalism and communism, but it hasn’t always been that way. We should look at the world as it existed at the time of America’s founding, and what the competing ideological or political systems were. In truth, the American Revolution was not fundamentally a contest between competing economic systems.

A dual-use technology, product, or piece of infrastructure is one that serves both legitimate civilian purposes and military or national security functions. Many of the technologies that define modern life—such as GPS, drones, artificial intelligence, satellite communications, semiconductors, and biotechnology—also have applications in warfare, intelligence gathering, or defense.

The police shooting of Corey Ruiz in Madison, Wisconsin has given rise once again to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of left-wing clairvoyant savants posting on social media about their visions of how every police interaction with a violent perpetrator, an offender resisting arrest, or a suspect who has a rap sheet as long as your leg, should go.

I’m seeing an increase in Democrat messaging across social media that basically goes “We’re not communists, we are just the ‘sharing and caring’ party. We pay taxes, too and we just want to see our money go to help the people and the planet instead of going to oligarchs and corporations. We want fair taxes, to help the poor, and provide healthcare for all.” Emotional appeals work. “We are the good people”, they say. “The people who oppose us are the baddies.” It is all a lie.

I went to bed last night bearing a high degree of frustration—and not about one specific thing, but just a general feeling like I get when I’m pulling thigh-deep Mississippi muck in waders trying to reach a great duck hunting spot. Even when you have a great, positive destination, sometimes the trip getting there is awful.