Hendrickson’s View

Mark W. Hendrickson

Mark Hendrickson is an economist who recently retired from the faculty of Grove City College, where he remains a Fellow for Economic & Social Policy for the college’s The Institute for Faith and Freedom. These essays are republished from The Institute for Faith and Freedom, The American Spectator, and The Epoch Times.

“Climate: The Movie” — Review

Earlier this month, English writer, director, and producer Martin Durkin released “Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth).” Mr. Durkin’s 80-minute film presents what is known as the “skeptic” side of the climate change debate, as opposed to the “alarmist” camp. (Full disclosure: I have been firmly on the skeptic side for decades, having written multiple commentaries on the topic for The Epoch Times.)

One commendable feature of “Climate: The Movie” is how well organized it is. Mr. Durkin discusses various aspects of climate change one at a time, starting with the science of climate change, warm and cold periods in Earth’s history, the role of carbon dioxide and other factors (e.g., solar activity and cloud cover) in affecting temperatures, the political corruption of scientific research through the control of vast amounts of federal funding dispensed to various scientists, and the bullying that led to the establishment of a mythical “consensus” on climate change, and closing with sections titled “Climate versus Freedom” and “Climate versus the Poor.”

The value of his organization of the film into a series of related but distinct issues is immense.

Let’s say a viewer disagrees with the descriptions of temperature change as benign and nonthreatening or with the assertion that carbon dioxide (CO₂) is not the “knob” controlling the world’s temperatures. (Here I wish he had included more information about how beneficial the increased concentration of CO₂ in Earth’s atmosphere has been — specifically, how much land has been greened and how much agricultural productivity has been enhanced by the CO₂ enrichment of the past century or so.)

Perhaps a viewer is skeptical about the movie’s argument that the temperature records cited by alarmists suffer from significant distortions. (Here I regret that Mr. Durkin failed to show the extent to which government agencies falsify — what they euphemistically call “adjust”—historical data or how a majority of U.S. thermometers may be skewed by being placed near heat sources).

Maybe a viewer isn’t ready to admit that the government has played such a massive role in commandeering scientific research that the so-called settled science is nothing but government propaganda. Even then, a viewer who is genuinely concerned about human well-being should be willing to ponder the movie’s points that the alarmists’ alleged remedy involves a massive loss of individual liberty and that they are advocating anti-human policies that would oppress the world’s poor and retard, if not thwart completely, their attempts to climb out of poverty.

The movie is well-paced. This is no easy accomplishment, since any discussion of the science of climate change inevitably involves the depiction of graphs and a series of talking heads to explain the significance of various data. At times — particularly when going deep into our planet’s history — the director resorts to using cheesy film clips from the 1950s or earlier. This actually helps counter any tendency toward monotony that can come from overexposure to talking heads.

Speaking of talking heads, the ones in this movie are noteworthy. They include a Nobel Prize winner in physics, a founder of the environmentalist group Greenpeace, and scientists and professors at the top of their professions, some of whom have served as science advisers to both Republican and Democratic presidents.

One thing a viewer may notice is that most of the talking heads are senior citizens. The reason for this seeming imbalance is explained in the narrative: Younger scientists seeking funding for their research and job security have to keep quiet about any doubts they have about the alarmist scenario or else they endanger their livelihoods and careers. The movie raises the crucial point: If scientists aren’t free to tell the truth, how can the rest of society remain free?

The concluding segments of “Climate: The Movie” focus on the most important dimension of the climate alarmist issue — that it is a pretext for an aggressive political agenda. As discredited as socialism has been by the wretched experience of countries unfortunate enough to have fallen under its sway, if you pull back the curtain from the alarmist scenario, what you find is a gaggle of elitists who still cling to the socialistic idea that a relatively small number of people can devise a better society and world by centralized, top-down planning. This is the cabal or cult that seeks to tell us what kind of cars to drive; what kind of water heaters, air conditioners, and stoves our rulers will permit us to use; and to force a transition to intermittent sources of power generation that could lead to catastrophic failures of our country’s electricity grid.

Millions of Americans should watch this movie. It sounds a timely warning about the political regimentation into which the climate alarmists in government wish to herd us. “Climate: The Movie” has the potential to cure younger viewers of the needless anxiety that millions of them reportedly feel after being subjected to alarmist propaganda in schools.

Prediction: You will hear alarmists trash this movie ferociously. Who can blame them? After all, we all know that the truth hurts.

The Destructive Corporation-Bashing of the Left

The left’s constant corporation-bashing manifests gross ignorance of a salient economic truth: Corporations are the major economic benefactors of our country.

One of my cousins has been bombarding me in recent months with a steady stream of corporation-bashing emails from various left-wing and Democratic organizations. The animus against corporations is vehement, to say the least. And that animus will be a feature of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, as was made clear in his State of the Union (SOTU) Address on March 7.

By the way, compliments to those who wrote President Biden’s SOTU speech. (Full disclosure: I didn’t watch it, so I am basing my comments on the transcript that I read.) Democratic spin doctors did yeoman work, using the SOTU to sweep President Biden’s policy failures under the rug and paint a beguiling picture of an imaginary Santa Claus government in which Team Biden will take care of our economic needs.

One major problem with President Biden’s saying he wants a future in which the “biggest corporations no longer get all the tax breaks” is that he himself has given corporations massive breaks. President Biden glibly ignored the massive subsidies that his administration has handed out to politically connected (i.e., crony) businesses carrying out the president’s so-called green agenda. As is so often the case with politicians, President Biden’s deeds don’t match his rhetoric.

Later in his address, the president trotted out that tired line about “making big corporations . . . finally [begin] to pay their fair share” of taxes. In progressive lingo, “fair share” is code for “more.” Actually, however, I agree with President Biden and the anti-corporation left that it seems unfair when a corporation (according to one of the emails my cousin sent to me) earns an annual profit of $7 billion and has a tax rate of minus 6 percent, and another corporation pays a 1.5 percent tax rate on earnings of $3 billion, while other businesses pay significantly higher rates. Such disparities are due to various deductions, credits, and so forth (i.e., “loopholes”) that Congress has written into the tax laws.

There is, however, an effective way to eliminate the unequal taxation of corporations. There is only one indisputably “fair” corporate tax rate (“fair” being defined as applying impartially the same to all): zero percent.

Yes, it would be better if we would abolish the corporate profits tax entirely. Not only does the corporate income tax introduce economic inefficiencies, impose enormous compliance costs, and induce an over-reliance on debt, but it also is the least efficient form of taxation. Some years back, a study by the decidedly pro-tax Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concluded that “corporate taxes are found to be most harmful for growth, followed by personal income taxes and then consumption taxes.”

Abolishing the corporate profits tax (along with all their related credits, exemptions, and so forth) would eliminate the present unfairness of corporations’ paying different rates and such absurdities as a negative tax rate for some corporations.

First, for those of you concerned that Uncle Sam will lose revenues to fund ever-bigger government, that loss could be offset in two ways: (1) by eliminating the massive subsidies that government bestows on favored businesses, and (2), by supply-side effects. Domestic businesses would be more able to expand, and more foreign corporations would set up operations here — both resulting in an employment boom that would result in increased government revenues from personal income taxes.

Second, for those of you thinking that the rich would get richer if corporate profits were not taxed, reams of economic research show that the lion’s share of the costs of the corporate profits tax falls on workers. (Read the Tax Foundation’s article “Labor Bears Much of the Cost of the Corporate Tax” if you are interested in investigating.) Two years after the adoption of the Trump tax reform that lowered the corporate profits tax, as even The Washington Post acknowledged, the U.S. workforce was enjoying the lowest overall unemployment in half a century, all-time highs in employment for black and Hispanic workers, and strongly rising wages.

Returning now from the economics to the ethics of tax reform, in addition to the dubious ethics of taxing corporations at different rates, there is a second major ethical problem inherent in taxing corporate profits. Corporations are not technically the owners, so much as the custodians, of the financial assets sitting in their accounts. Moreover, the corporation is a fictitious person, and one of the oldest truisms in public finance is that real human beings actually pay all taxes. Corporate salaries and bonuses, dividend and interest payments, and capital gains realized when stockholders sell shares at a profit represent real income to real people, and it is at that point that they should be taxed.

Just as unrealized capital gains shouldn’t be taxed, neither should unspent corporate profits. Both represent potential wealth to individuals, not actual present income. Corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to deploy the monies that remain in corporate accounts above their expenses for the benefit of the legal owners of the corporation. As is sadly habitual on the left, they have an insatiable appetite to get their hands on other people’s money, and they don’t want to wait until money becomes realized personal income before making a grab for it.

The left’s constant corporation-bashing manifests gross ignorance of a salient economic truth — namely that corporations, although not without faults (the most egregious of which are those businesses that form crony relationships with government), are the major economic benefactors of our country. They employ millions of Americans while producing goods or providing services that have given us a standard of living that greatly exceeds what our grandparents had.

There is something perverse, if not morally repugnant, about stirring up envy and resentment against the very enterprises that are responsible for American prosperity. But as long as voters remain economically ignorant, they will fall for the anti-business canards of the left. That is the political reality.

Lessons from History: Some Enlighten, Some Confuse

Let’s keep our minds fixed on two of the most important lessons of history: Peace is far better than war, and the present is far better than the past.

Possibly the most famous quote about history is the philosopher George Santayana’s pithy, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” There is much wisdom in that statement. Still, it also seems true, in some cases, that those who do remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Think of hereditary hostilities, the multi-generational conflicts, and centuries-long feuds. One of the most prominent and long-lived examples of this phenomenon is the perennial animosity between Jews and Muslims with its current iteration in Gaza. Here, blind hatred for or mistrust of “the other” — the permanent historical enemy — stretches back over a thousand years.

Millions of children have been raised to hate all those who belong to the other group. They are taught that those others are mortal foes, guilty of the alleged sin of having been born into (and in rarer cases, converted to) the religion of “the other.” They are taught that it is good and right to try to annihilate “the other” — that a noble goal in life is to kill people whom they have never met, people with whom they might share common goals in life, such as living in peace, worshiping God in the manner of their choosing, raising families, and leading a productive life. Why should such strangers be killed? Because history says so. History says that A’s grandfather killed B’s aunt and uncle, and earlier generations perpetrated similar deeds, so that’s the way it is supposed to be. That kind of history amounts to fatalistic resignation. The past is prologue; history is destiny.

Countering the grim mindset that holds violence and conflict to be inevitable, an observer can take heart in the example of Jewish and Muslim individuals in countries around the world who, even while hostilities are ongoing, are striving to break the long chain of hereditary hatred and historical habits. These are often noble individuals who have suffered personal losses from this ancient rivalry — brave people daring to defy groupthink and ask the vital question: Do we really want our children to live in the same toxic atmosphere of hatred and violence that has caused the tragic deaths of so many of our relatives, both recent and ancient?

There is another lesson that history offers to teach us — what I would call a “mega-lesson”: That peace is better than war for human well-being and societal flourishing. Look at it from an economic point of view: If one surveys the entire span of human history, there is one overriding economic mega-trend that stands out above all others: The expansion of the division of labor.

Early human families and clans learned that they could have more wealth (i.e., food, shelter, clothing) if each member of the society specialized in supplying what they were relatively skilled at providing. They then shared or traded their surplus with each other rather than trying to provide for all their needs by themselves. As humans gradually learned that a more extensive social division of labor raised their standard of living, clans formed tribes, tribes formed villages, villages developed into cities, etc. Along the way, enterprising individuals further expanded the division of labor by trading with strangers across town, across valleys and plains, across continents, and eventually across oceans.

The more people who are included in the social division of labor, the greater the resulting productivity and the higher the standard of living. The division of labor performs its wealth-creating wonders to the degree that peace and freedom prevail. War is a great crippler of the division of labor. War destroys wealth (various forms of property) and wealth-producers (i.e., human beings).

Ask the Germans and French today if they prefer living and trading in peace rather than trying to conquer or destroy each other like their predecessors did. Those peoples warred for generations. Eventually, though, they grew to understand that life would be far better for far more Germans and French through peaceful cooperation rather than war and destruction. How long will it take the combatants in the Middle East to arrive at this understanding? Who knows? Hopefully the wisdom of those now working for peaceful coexistence will someday lead to an end of heretofore-endless wars.

Shifting gears, there is another important mega-lesson that history can teach us if we are willing to learn it. This is particularly timely during Black History Month. I am thinking of the “1619 Project” — the effort to slant the history of the United States to see everything in racialist terms by asserting that the driving force for the settlement of North America by Europeans was to establish slavery. Here is a simple fact of history that is beyond dispute: The past was dreadful — and not just for Africans brought to the New World as slaves, as abominable as that was. If Americans of European descent were interested, willing, and able to go back in time and observe their ancestors, I’m sure that almost all of them would find abuses, injustices, and a long list of grievances, too.

The wretchedness of human history is no revelation or radical theory. The plain fact is that for most of human history, up until just a few centuries ago, human life was, in the memorable phraseology of Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish and short.” The vast majority of the human population suffered from chronic poverty, precarious health, and various forms of injustice and oppression. The vile institution of slavery was practiced on every inhabited continent. You don’t have to dig hard at all to find historical examples of how awful human life was and how horribly some people treated their fellow human beings.

So, what is the lesson here? Simply this: Human life is enormously, incalculably better today than it was for most of human history. Let’s acknowledge the gigantic strides of progress that have been made. It is cruelly ironic that the more progress humans have made in rising above the grimness of our shared history, the more people tend to criticize us for not having achieved perfection.

The past was grim and harsh. The good news is, the past is past. Rather than dredge up ugly historical practices to make us miserable today, let’s be glad that we live today. Let’s be grateful that we are free to strive for additional progress. What a great opportunity we have! Let’s not squander that opportunity by dragging the sufferings of bygone generations into the present. That is an egregious abuse of history. Let’s keep our minds fixed on two of the most important lessons of history: peace is far better than war, and the present is far better than the past.

The Might and Majesty of the Risen Savior

At Eastertime, Christians rejoice and give praise for the resurrection of mankind’s Savior.

Words often fall short of communicating the full magnificence of the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me try by offering that he was the most complete package ever to grace this earth. He was the supreme example of both meekness and might — widely different qualities that often are mutually exclusive in a typical human being, but were a divinely natural and necessary combination in the Savior. Indeed, as both Son of God and Son of Man — as both divine and human united in one individuality — Christ Jesus was perfection incarnate, a majestic and unique wonder, the contemplation of which should inspire, awe, and humble us.

The meekness and humility of the Lord are unmistakable in word and deed. He declared, “I can of mine own self do nothing. . . . I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me” (John 5:30) and when he was addressed as “Good Master,” he replied, “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God” (Mark 10:17-18). In vivid and sublime demonstration of his meekness, he knelt and washed his disciples’ feet (John 13:1-15).

This humblest and most selfless of men was also a man of great courage, power, and dominion.

Jesus’ courage was manifest by the way he repeatedly defied the Pharisees who were looking for a pretext to destroy him, calling them “hypocrites” and “vipers” (Matt. 23) and boldly healing a withered hand in the synagogue on the Sabbath (Luke 6:6-11). He showed magnificent courage by steadfastly insisting on going to Jerusalem, even though he knew that he would be betrayed and condemned to death (Matt. 20:18), going so far as to deliver a stinging rebuke to Peter — “Get thee behind me, Satan!” (Matt. 16:23) — when Peter spoke of protecting the Lord from meeting his destiny.

God’s anointed one repeatedly did things believed to be impossible. The spiritual power he demonstrated exceeds even the most marvelous accomplishments of modern technology. He overcame the laws of physiology, as when he restored sight to the man born blind (John 9:1-7, 32) or instantly healed ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19). He trumped the laws of biology and medicine, when he raised Lazarus from the tomb four days after his death (John 11:1-44). He nullified the laws of physics and meteorology, walking on the water (Matt.14:22-33) and stilling the tempest (Mark 4:35-41). He overruled the laws of botany and agronomy, feeding multitudes on at least two occasions with a few loaves of bread and a few fish (Mark 6:30-44 and 8:1-9).

The Savior proved with irrevocable finality his everlasting dominion through the sequence of events that we commemorate during Holy Week. Throughout the awful drama of his betrayal, arrest, torture, condemnation and hideous execution, he proved that God always reigns supreme. When the men sent by the high priests and Pharisees came to Gethsemane, an invisible force knocked them backward onto the ground (John 18:6). His disciples should have taken that as a sign: God was in control, no matter how bleak the picture looked. And so it proved. Jesus permitted the crucifixion to take place. Basically, he challenged his enemies to take their best shot at trying to obliterate his life. They failed; it was beyond their power. On the following Sunday morning — that first Easter — the Savior proved his dominion over death and the tomb. He reappeared in resurrection glory, thereby comforting, strengthening, and redeeming humanity with the priceless promise and gift of eternal life.

What was the key to Jesus’ resurrection? Was it not revealed in his prayer in Gethsemane? There he subdued human will and submitted to the Divine Plan: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). What a great lesson for us all: In meekness there is might.

Let us celebrate the might and majesty of our Lord Jesus Christ, not just at Easter, but every day. Praise be to the risen Savior!

Happy Easter, everyone.     *

The mission of The St. Croix Review is to end the destruction of America by reestablishing the family as the center of American life, restoring economic prosperity to an independent middle class, and reviving a culture of tradition.

COVID-19 Deceit

Barry MacDonald — Editorial

Tragically, deceit is a common technique of government. American politics is poisoned by the purposeful saturation of news with blatant falsehoods. Politicians, bureaucrats, and news people deliberately lie to the American public. Politicos disguised as scientists, doctors, bureaucrats, pundits, and statesmen are active in the suppression of the truth.

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) are heroes of courage and integrity. If we had an army of investigators of their quality, we could defeat the mendacity of the Left with alacrity.

Senator Paul wrote an essay on Fox News’ website on April 9, entitled “The Great COVID Cover-up: Shocking Truth about Wuhan and 15 Federal Agencies.” Paul shamed the federal agents who were deceitful and complicit in the worldwide calamity of COVID-19. His investigation found that U.S. government officials from 15 federal agencies were aware in 2018 that the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology intended to create a coronavirus similar to COVID-19.

According to Paul, not one person from these agencies made this dangerous Chinese research public before the pandemic. After the emergence of COVID-19, these agencies kept their silence, and they refuse to divulge information on their knowledge, or participation, in the research.

British zoologist Peter Daszak briefed 15 U.S. agencies in 2018. The name of the Wuhan proposed research project was DEFUSE. Daszak briefed the U.S. agencies to obtain U.S. federal funding — taxpayer money — for the Chinese project. Paul writes that the purpose of the Wuhan project was:

“. . . to insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus to create a novel chimeric virus that would have been shockingly similar to the COVID-19 virus.”

Daszak is president of the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance. EcoHealth Alliance is a non-governmental organization with the stated mission of protecting people, animals, and the environment from emerging infectious diseases.

A “chimeric virus” contains genetic material derived from two or more distinct viruses. The proposed DEFUSE project was to activate a genetic modification, or, in scientific terms, “insert a furin cleavage site” to make a new virus. The DEFUSE project, pitched to 15 federal agencies to be done in the Wuhan lab, is termed “gain-of-function” research.

Senator Paul cites a disclosure from U.S. Marine Corps Major Joseph Murphy as a source of his investigation. Murphy’s disclosure was obtained by James O’Keefe and Project Veritas in August 2021.

Senator Johnson also cites Murphy’s disclosure. Johnson is the ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the U.S. Senate.

Johnson writes on his official website that Murphy’s disclosure was sent to the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Office of the Inspector General (OIG), and that office referred it to DoD’s Office of Research and Engineering for investigation.

In January 2022, Senator Johnson sent a letter to DoD Secretary Lloyd Austin, and Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu, demanding information on Major Murphy’s disclosure.

Johnson wrote:

“According to the Major’s disclosure, EcoHealth Alliance (EcoHealth), in conjunction with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), submitted a proposal in March 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) regarding SARS-CoVs. The proposal included a program, called DEFUSE, that sought to use a novel chimeric SARS-CoV spike protein to inoculate bats against SARS-CoVs. Although DARPA rejected the proposal, the disclosure alleges that EcoHealth ultimately carried out the DEFUSE proposal until April 2020 through the National Institutes of Health and National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The disclosure highlights several potential treatments, such as ivermectin, and specifically alleges that the EcoHealth DEFUSE proposal identified chloroquine phosphate (Hydroxychloriquine) and interferon as SARS-CoV inhibitors.”

Apparently, information on the DEFUSE proposal is classified, and cannot be released to the public.

Senator Paul writes that the evidence suggests that COVID-19 was a laboratory-enhanced virus purposefully adapted for human transmission. The virus was created to be transmissible between humans. The virus spread globally from China. It killed more than 3.4 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

On the Fox News website Senator Paul writes:

“I have been fighting to obtain records from dozens of federal agencies relating to the origins of COVID-19 and the DEFUSE project. Under duress, the administration finally released documents that show that the DEFUSE project was pitched to at least 15 agencies in January 2018.”

“. . . Disturbingly, not one of these 15 agencies spoke up to warn us that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been pitching this research. Not one of these agencies warned anyone that this Chinese lab had already put together plans to create such a virus.”

Not only was Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) briefed on the Wuhan project, NIAID was listed as a “participant” in the DEFUSE pitch. According to Paul, “Fauci’s Rocky Mountain Lab was named as a partner alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the proposal.”

Ralph Baric was a named collaborator of the DEFUSE project, according to Paul. He did not reveal the proposed research at the Wuhan lab. Baric is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, and professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Baric spent 40 years studying coronaviruses, according to Time Magazine.

Ian Lipkin did not reveal the 2018 DEFUSE proposal. Lipkin was part of the original plan to create a coronavirus, according to Paul. Paul reveals that Lipkin’s lab received millions of dollars from EcoHealth. Lipkin is the John Snow Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University. He is a professor of Neurology, Pathology, and Cell Biology. He is the Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity. He was one of the authors of “Proximal Origins,” a paper commissioned to discourage the idea that the virus might have come from a lab.

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Fauci, director of NIAID, commissioned Ian Lipkin to write “Proximal Origins.”

Murphy’s disclosure asserts that both NIH and NIAID did “carry out” the DEFUSE proposal. Murphy’s disclosure implies that these agencies helped to finance the project.

According to Senator Paul, Peter Daszak, Anthony Fauci, Ralph Baric, Ian Lipkin, Francis Collins, and scientists at the NIAID’s Rocky Mountain Lab all knew of the Chinese lab’s desire to create a coronavirus that was adapted for human transmission. None of them spoke up. Paul said:

“Likely, hundreds of people in the government knew of this proposal to create a COVID-19-like virus and virtually every one of these people chose to keep quiet, to obscure, and ultimately to conceal information that might have saved lives by letting the world know this was no sleepy animal virus with poor transmission.”

Without the efforts of Senators Paul and Johnson, and without Major Murphy’s disclosure, Daszak’s Wuhan proposal might never have been exposed.

It appears that the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China succeeded. They made the virus.

Questions arise about the conduct of our elite bureaucrats:

• Why is a virus purposefully manufactured to infect humans? If gain-of-function research is designed to create a dangerous virus in order to develop a vaccine — well, this idea backfired.
• Do U.S. government scientists continue to do gain-of-function research on dangerous viruses?
• Why did U.S. government scientists work hand-in-glove with Chinese Communist totalitarians?
• Do U.S. scientists do research on dangerous viruses with the Communist Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, or the North Koreans?
• If U.S. government scientists are in partnership with a hostile nation, would they inform Congress?
• If questioned by Congress about their odd association with hostile nations, would U.S. government scientists tell the truth?
• Do our elite U.S. government scientists serve the American people, or, a secret agenda?

A question about COVID-19 must be asked, because the question is of weighty historical significance: Was the release of the Wuhan virus — by the Chinese — accidental or purposeful?

Rand Paul and Ron Johnson have shown that the prestigious scientists and medical doctors who lead our government response to pandemic viruses cannot be trusted.

Peter Daszak, Anthony Fauci, Ralph Baric, Ian Lipkin, and Francis Collins are Dr. Frankensteins. COVID is their monster.   *

The mission of The St. Croix Review is to end the destruction of America by reestablishing the family as the center of American life, restoring economic prosperity to an independent middle class, and reviving a culture of tradition.

Parents and Children Are Cannon Fodder in America

Barry MacDonald — Editorial

It is a common experience nowadays to talk to an acquaintance for minutes, thus to discover chasms in knowledge and understanding. How people who live in the same country can come to such divergent views is a shock. We are not divided on peripheral issues but over basic values of decency and propriety. Parenthood is devalued in America today in favor of woke policies.

On the way to our cars upon leaving church I talked to a fellow I know and respect. He is genial and accomplished. He is a surgeon. His family has “strong Democratic roots” he told me. He was surprised that I admire Ron Desantis. He thinks Governor Desantis is an “extremist.” He doesn’t understand why Desantis fought against the Disney Corporation. I replied it wasn’t good for kindergartners to be exposed to story hours with drag queens. He agreed with me, but, I recognized a divide between he and I. The use of the word “extremist” is a clue that points toward an adamant attitude. The best I could do was to make my point and move on. His views were set in concrete.

There was the Parental Rights in Education bill successfully passed by the Florida legislature, and signed by Governor Desantis two years ago. The bill prohibits gender ideology in Florida schools from kindergarten to the third grade. To have protected all of the grade school children would have been better, but apparently the pressure from the educational bureaucracy was too formidable to overcome.

The Parent’s Right bill prevents instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity. It requires Florida school districts to notify parents if there is a change in policy. The bill prioritizes the mental, emotional, and physical health, and the well-being of children. The bill establishes a respectful partnership with parents. Parents are honored in Florida.

The 2022 law was dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by activists and media. It was slammed by leaders of global corporations, including Disney. NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” attacked it. ABC’s talk show “The View” smeared it. The editorial boards of major newspapers wrote of its “disturbing” quality. Across America news reporters labeled the bill “controversial.” President Biden rebuked it. The bill was subjected to sustained and pervasive mischaracterization.

Is the sage and worthy Joy Behar of “The View” informed, or even interested, in the facts of the Florida law? The word “gay” appears nowhere in the bill.

It is astounding that so much cultural firepower is directed against the well-being of children and parents. Prepubescent children should not be experiments in woke politics. Yet progressive elites have made gender fluidity a national priority in education, beginning from kindergarten.

The continuous slant of media commentary on the Florida Parental Rights bill was a national brainwashing of public opinion.

• Why are parents who love their children so disfavored neglected and shamed?
• Why is sexual identity such a priority for Democrats and education bureaucrats?
• Why are the transitions of schoolchildren from one gender to the other a secret not to be shared with parents?
• Why does the Democratic party foster animosity between educators and parents?
• Since when have teachers assumed preeminent authority over parents in the raising of America’s children?
• Isn’t gender ideology in primary education a perversion of our schools?
• Five years ago, gender dysphoria was a non-issue in America. What has changed between then and now?

I refrained from an argument with my surgeon friend in a parking lot. The polarization and animosity of dividing views is a predicament, a burden, and a danger.

Informed and civilized discussion on politics is an essential but difficult art in America. One wonders how to bridge the gaps between us. What national events will follow if we cannot?      *

The mission of The St. Croix Review is to end the destruction of America by reestablishing the family as the center of American life, restoring economic prosperity to an independent middle class, and reviving a culture of tradition.

The Big Lie

Barry MacDonald — Editorial

There is so much distortion, deception, and perversion in the American media that cynicism toward the news is justified. It is sensible to be skeptical and suspicious of most corporate reporters, media personalities, activists, and government officials.

Americans know we are being lied to and misled. The problem is that we are polarized and bitterly divided against each other. There is little common ground upon which we can agree, once we become committed to ideologies that are designed to foment hatred for opposing views. We are set in our opinions, and closed off from each other. The tragedy is that too few of us recognize what is true and false.

Jake Tapper of CNN recently interviewed Rep. Ayanna Pressley, (D) Massachusetts, about a looming government shutdown. The controversy of the southern border came up. Pressley claimed that the “southern border is secure.” Tapper, to his credit as a journalist, repeatedly challenged Pressley, citing the millions of illegal immigrants who have come into America since Joe Biden became president. Pressley repeatedly reaffirmed that “the border is secure.” She was finally pushed into the position of saying “. . . that is a subject for another day.”

Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s stance is a blatant lie. On Fox News, Americans see illegal migrants streaming into America at the southern border. We hear Mayor Adams of New York City and Governor Hochul of New York State (among many other officials nationwide) complain about being inundated and overwhelmed with the burden of housing and caring for people who are here illegally.

There have been a million deaths of Americans by drug overdoses since the year 1999, according to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics (NCDAS). It is commonly reported that since Biden became president there have been about 100,000 deaths per year due to fentanyl poisoning. According to the NCDAS, drug overdose deaths were three times that of the number of homicides since January 2021. Fentanyl is entering America through the porous southern border.

During the entirety of the Vietnam War, more than 58,000 U.S. soldiers perished. Since Biden became president many more Americans are dying of drug overdoses each year than the sum total of soldiers who died in Vietnam. The war in Vietnam tore American society apart, and the divisions created then have yet to heal. Yet the loss of American life due to Fentanyl is ongoing, and is hardly acknowledged by the American media.

According to the House Judiciary Committee and data from the Department of Homeland Security, there have been between 5 to 7 million illegal immigrants encountered at the southern border — the number reported is constantly changing. Nobody knows how many “gotaways” entered the country. Ninety-nine percent of the migrants encountered are released into the U.S., according to the Department of Homeland Security.

It is shameful that Ayanna Pressley on a national broadcast would blatantly lie about the true state of the southern border — because millions of Americans will believe her, while millions will recognize the truth. This is how we Americans become bitterly divided. The animosity created by the Big Lie is discouraging and disheartening. One overarching lie creates suspicion that transfers to the entire spectrum of political issues. One colossal lie is demoralizing, because it is a hammer blow to truth and integrity — and the cohesion of American society is severely wounded.

Another topic that recently divided America is the Bud Light Beer fiasco, involving the transgender activist/influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Bud Light chose to put Dylan Mulvaney’s image on cans of Bud Light beer, thus alienating its customers who are normal people who don’t want transgenderism imposed on them.

The UK-based, LGBTQ+ publication Attitude magazine declared Dylan Mulvaney “Woman of the Year.” This is another blatant lie because, presumably, Dylan Mulvaney retains his penis, and is in fact a man. Dylan Mulvaney is a symbol of the disparagement of genuine femininity. The American feminist movement is turned upside down to satisfy the dictates of a radical agenda. Biological fact, which five years ago was not an issue, has been undermined. Across the nation public schools from kindergarten onward are imposing gender ideology on children, against the will of parents. Americans are polarized as to the difference between biology and “gender identity.” When pressed during her confirmation hearings, our newest Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, could not define what a woman is — which is an absurdity.

Many Americans can no longer distinguish with confidence the difference between men and women. This new confusion is a pathology that threatens the well-being of who knows how many American school children and young adults. How many children will come to regret digesting hormone blockers and undergoing irreversible gender surgery because of the Big Lie that they were born with the “wrong gender”?

There are some Big Lies that are ancient, that have poisoned generations of world history. One of my most harrowing memories of junior high school was of watching a film. A machine using large reels of film that projected grainy grayscale images onto a screen. We watched the scenes of Nazi concentration camps. We saw the bones inside crematory ovens, heaps of dead skeletons wearing skin, piles of human hair, gold-capped teeth, shoes, lampshades made of human skin, and emaciated survivors. We saw the rooms where the people were gassed. I had seen nothing in my life to compare with those images. There was a moral clarity of the presence of evil about them. I remember that Dwight Eisenhower decided to film the camps because he believed some day people would deny that the Holocaust happened.

The moral clarity among Americans about the presence of evil has significantly dissipated between the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, and the October 7 assault on Israel. Hamas terrorists murdered 1,400 Israelis, and injured 3,400 more on October 7. Hamas now holds 222 hostages.

Between 9/11 and October 7, we have witnessed the emergence of the apologists for terrorism, and the condemnation of Western nations and Israel. We saw Reverend Jeremiah Wright deliver his “God Damn America” sermons after 9/11. After October 7, we saw more than two dozen student organizations at Harvard university sign a letter declaring that Israel was “entirely responsible” for the Hamas attacks. On university campuses throughout America, and in big cities such as New York City, there have been rallies in support of the depravity of the massacre of Israelis. In reporter interviews, the people at the rallies denied that babies and children were murdered in the most gruesome manner. There was raw hatred spewed — unabashed, vile vitriol was expressed toward innocent Jewish people.

Our universities have become breeding grounds of a one-sided history that focuses hatred on Western Culture, free speech, competency, meritocracy, decency, civil rights, and pursuit of the truth. The idea that the Gaza Strip is an “open air prison” created by Israel is a blatant lie. Hamas created the prison. Palestinians elected and brought into power Hamas to be their prison guards.

A significant number of Americans now believe the Israelis are guilty of being too powerful, aggressive, and competent. Some Americans believe that Israel should submit to coexistence with a people who want all of them dead. People who hate Israel are blind to the fanatical, genocidal intentions of Hamas.

This is the blatant lie: That the Israelis deserved to be murdered, and that the nation of Israel should be obliterated. The thought that we would live to see the day when the palpable presence of evil, in the form of the Nazi Holocaust, would be supplanted in some Americans by a determined antisemitism and a hatred for Western culture, is horrible and dispiriting.

I have depicted only several Big Lies that are afflicting American culture. One could make an exhaustive list of colossal falsehoods from any single day of media commentary. Integrity, honesty, love of country, respect for the dignity of human rights, the law, and simple, good-hearted decency are vanishing from public discourse. We easily note how Donald Trump and his supporters are persecuted with novel and harsh interpretations of law enforcement, while at the same time Hunter Biden and the Biden family are given the most passive treatment possible by the justice system. The corruption is obvious for informed Americans of unclouded vision. When Attorney General Merrick Garland goes before a congressional committee under oath and asserts that there is one standard of justice for all Americans, he is perpetrating the Big Lie. Government officials who purport to be honorable, when in fact they have no integrity, do grave damage to America.

The rot of Marxist ideology, in the guise of Progressivism, has enflamed America. We decent Americans are burdened with the task of seeking the truth and of persevering in the fight to save our nation. Each American who is decent, good-hearted, and truth-seeking is a warrior in the battle to save America. *

Ramblings

Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld is the author of five books, the latest of which is The Revolution Lobby (Council for Inter-American Security). He has been a staff aide to a U.S. Vice President, members of Congress, and the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. He is associate editor of The Lincoln Review and a contributing editor to Human Events, The St. Croix Review, and The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Let’s Teach About Slavery, But Let’s Get It Right

On both the Left and the Right we have seen irresponsible partisan rhetoric about how the history of slavery is taught in our schools. Some on the Left refer to slavery as America’s “original sin.” The authors of The New York Times 1619 Project argue that the American Revolution was fought in large measure to maintain slavery. This is clearly untrue, since the advocates of revolution were strongest in New England, where opposition to slavery was also strongest.

Some on the Right seek to downplay the evils of slavery. Florida’s new standards on the teaching of black history include a statement that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The idea that slavery somehow benefited its victims has come under widespread criticism. Another of the new Florida “guidelines” includes one that cites examples of “violence perpetrated against and by African Americans after the Civil War,” arguably suggesting an equivalency despite the overwhelming prevalence of lynchings, terror, and mob violence against black Americans in those years.

It was not so long ago that segregation was the law in large parts of the country. When I was in law school, interracial marriage was illegal throughout the South. I lived in Virginia, where segregation was strictly enforced. I wrote a law review article about Virginia’s law against interracial marriage, a law which was favorably cited by Hitler when the Nuremburg laws were being written. It was not until 1967, in the case of Loving v. Virginia, that the Supreme Court unanimously found laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional.

Those who downplay the evils of racism in our history do the teaching of our history a disservice. Consider the experience of singer Tony Bennett, who recently died at the age of 96. It was Thanksgiving Day 1945 in Mannheim, Germany, when Bennett was part of an occupation force in a conquered city that had been leveled by Allied bombing during World War II. Bennett unexpectedly met a fellow student and old friend with whom he had sung together a few years earlier in a music group at their high school in New York City. They spent the day together and attended a church service. They then planned to have a turkey dinner together with other U.S. troops. The problem was that Bennett’s old high school friend was black.

A U.S. Army officer blasted the two soldiers with a hate-filled rant for being together in public. In the segregated military of the day, the two men were not allowed to socialize. The punishment for black and white soldiers associating with one another was more severe than for fraternizing with civilians in occupied Germany. In his 1998 autobiography, The Good Life, Bennett wrote:

“I couldn’t get over the fact that they condemned us for just being friends, and especially while we served our country in wartime. There we were, just two kids happy to see each other, trying to forget for the moment the horror of the war, but for the brass it just came down to the color of our skin.”

Later, Tony Bennett would march with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama.

We misunderstand the evil of slavery if we view it as America’s “original sin,” as so many now proclaim. Sadly, it has been the way of the world until the 19th century. When the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, slavery was legal throughout the world, and had been throughout history. The Greco-Roman world, the Old Testament, the teachings of the Apostle Paul, and the Theology of the Patristic Fathers all supported the idea of slavery — and called it a just institution.

Our teaching of history, sadly, is so limited that those who proclaim that slavery is, somehow, a uniquely American evil are rarely challenged. But even a brief look at history shows that this is not the case.

Slavery played an important part in almost all ancient civilizations. Most people of the ancient world regarded slavery as the natural condition of life, one which could befall anyone at any time. It had no racial component. It has existed almost universally through history among peoples of every level of material culture — it existed among the nomadic pastoralists of Asia, hunting societies of North American Indians, and sea people such as the Vikings. The legal codes of Sumer provide documentary evidence that slavery existed there as early as the 4th millennium B.C.

Aristotle, in Politics (Book 1, Chapter 5) writes: “The lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them, as for all inferiors, that they should be under the rule of a master.” None of the Greek schools of philosophy called for the emancipation of slaves. The respected British historian of classical slavery, Moses I. Findlay, writes that, “The cities in which individual freedom reached its highest expression — most obviously Athens — were cities in which slavery flourished.” At the time of its cultural peak, Athens may have had 115,000 slaves to 43,000 citizens. The same is true of Ancient Rome. Plutarch notes that on a single day in the year 167 B.C., 150,000 slaves were sold in a single market.

Race was not necessarily an element in slavery, even when different peoples were involved. The Romans enslaved other Caucasian peoples, and some black Africans enslaved other black peoples. Racial differences became closely connected with slavery only when European colonial powers were expanding into world areas whose inhabitants were of different racial groups.

Both the Old and New Testaments endorse slavery. In Leviticus (XXV: 39-55) God instructs the Children of Israel to “enslave the heathen and their progeny forever.” In the New Testament, St. Paul urges slaves to obey their masters with full hearts and without equivocation. He wrote, “Slaves, give entire obedience to your earthly masters.” St. Peter orders slaves to obey even unjust orders of their masters:

“What credit is there in fortitude when you have done wrong and are beaten for it? But when you have behaved well and suffer for it, your fortitude is a fine thing in the sight of God.”

If we taught history properly, it would be understood that slavery was a continuous reality in Western life throughout the entire history which preceded the American Revolution. In England, 10 percent of the persons enumerated in the Domesday Book (A.D. 1086) were slaves, and these could be put to death by their owners with impunity. During the Viking age, Norse merchant sailors sold Russian slaves in Constantinople. Venice grew to prosperity and power partly as a slave-trading republic, which took its human cargo from the Byzantine Empire and sold some of the females for harems of the Moslem world. The Italians organized joint stock companies and a highly organized slave trade. In the colony of Cyprus, they established plantations; by year 1300 there were black slaves engaged in working them. By the middle of the 16th century, Lisbon, Portugal, had more black slaves than whites people.

The complex history of slavery seems not to have interested the authors of The New York Times 1619 Project, and seems to be of little interest to those designing our school curriculums, as in Florida. Slavery was not an American creation, even in colonial America. From the 1500s to the 1800s, Europeans — from France, Great Britain, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands — shipped 10 million slaves from Africa to the Western Hemisphere.

Slavery was an extraordinary evil, as were the years of segregation which followed. Let’s teach all of our history, the negative as well as the positive. But let’s get it right!

Moving Toward a Genuinely Color-Blind Society

The U.S. Supreme Court held in June that race-conscious affirmative action admission programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

The decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, declared that:

“The student must be treated based on his or her experience as an individual — not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

Roberts noted that the rules called for by the Court’s decision are already the norm in the majority of American universities:

“Three out of every five American universities do not consider race in their admissions decisions. And several states, including some of the most populous (California, Florida and Michigan) have prohibited race-based admissions outright.”

Beyond this, Roberts wrote that:

“Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, or otherwise.”

As a member of President Ronald Reagan’s transition team at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 1980-81, which was headed by my good friend and longtime colleague, J. A. Parker, one of the earliest black conservatives, I believe that the Supreme Court has moved us in the direction of a genuinely colorblind society. This is what the civil rights movement always endorsed. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that men and women should be judged on the “content of their character,” not “the color of their skin.”

If minority students are lagging behind academically, we must improve the quality of the elementary and high school education they receive, not lower the academic standards of our colleges and universities. In our report about the future of the EEOC, our transition team, which included Clarence Thomas, who was later appointed to the Supreme Court, advocated an end to race-based programs. Civil rights leaders like Thurgood Marshall always advocated for a genuinely colorblind society. Now, let us hope that our society will move in this direction.

What is not well known to many Americans is that there has always been a significant group of respected black opponents to race-based affirmative action programs. Clarence Pendleton, Jr., for example, was chairman of the Civil Rights Commission under President Reagan. He called affirmative action “divisive, unpopular, and immoral,” and opposed federal set-aside contracts for minority-owned businesses. He argued that all Americans, white and black, must succeed on the merits of their own abilities, without any special preference. It was, he believed, the height of racism to think that an individual’s political philosophy should be based on the color of his skin rather than his study of history, his concept of right and wrong, and his notion of what constituted a just society.

Legalized quotas on the job market, Pendleton argued, form a crutch on which minorities must not lean.

“Would Hank Aaron be the home run king if they had moved the fences in 10 feet every time he came to bat? Would Walter Payton have all those 100-yard games if they changed the rules when he carried the ball? . . . I don’t want my progress demeaned any more. Let me be free . . . free to achieve.”

In 1978, my old friend Anne Wortham, a leading black academic at Illinois State University, wrote an important article in The Freeman discussing a Supreme Court decision at that time upholding the California Supreme Court ruling that Allan P. Bakke, who was white, should be admitted to medical school at the University of California, Davis, on the basis that ethnic and racial quotas are unconstitutional according to the 14th Amendment.

Wortham, author of the widely praised book The Other Side of Racism, noted that:

“It seems that the Justices hold the widespread opinion that one is demeaned or insulted only when he is discriminated against because of race; but there are those of us who are insulted, if not demeaned, when we are discriminated in favor of because of race or other equally irrelevant classifications. As a member of both the racial and gender groups so favored, I reject the opinion that preferential treatment of racial minorities should be allowed if it serves a social good. There is nothing humanitarian in a policy that uses racial classifications to ‘further a compelling government purpose,’ as the Justices put it. Any government purpose which must be served in such a manner may be suspect as having sinister motives.”

In the view of black economist Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University:

“What affirmative action has done is destroy the legitimacy of what had already been achieved, by making all black achievements look like questionable accomplishments, or even outright gifts.”

Anne Wortham recalls seeing her father work long hours, sacrificing to provide for the education of his children, determined:

“. . . that he would do so despite Jim Crow and without outside assistance. I hear this self-educated man telling us that our education was his investment in the future. . . . The society he was preparing me for was one in which merit was the basis of achievement. It was also one in which racial discrimination was prevalent. But in addressing this issue, black fathers like mine taught their children a rule of thumb taken from the words of Booker T. Washington: ‘Any individual who learns to do something better than anybody else — learns to do a common thing in an uncommon manner — has solved his problem, regardless of the color of his skin.’”

Some years ago, the widely read black journalist Juan Williams wrote a book entitled, Enough, with the subtitle, The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America — And What We Can Do About It. Those who proclaim themselves leaders in the black community, Williams argues, refuse to articulate established truths about what it takes to get ahead: strong families, education, and hard work.

Williams declares:

“Where is strong black leadership to speak hard truth to those looking for direction. . . . The strong focus on self-determination has faded, at a moment when its impact could have been the most powerful. In its place is a tired rant by civil rights leaders about the power of white people — what white people have done wrong, what white people didn’t do, and what white people should do. This rant puts black people in the role of hapless victims waiting for only one thing — white guilt to bail them out. The roots of this blacks-as-beggars approach from black leaders are planted in an old debate that is now too often distorted.”

The most prominent voice for black liberation after the Civil War, Williams points out, belonged to Frederick Douglass, a former slave who secretly taught himself to read, then became a skilled worker in Baltimore’s shipyards before escaping to freedom in the North:

“It was Douglass who first called on black people to do for themselves when he wrote an editorial titled ‘Learn Trades or Starve.’ By the end of the 19th century, as the government’s many promises to help former slaves turned out to be mostly empty words, a new black leader emerged. Booker T. Washington picked up on Douglass’ legacy by proposing defiant black self-determination as the best strategy for black advancement. . . . His idea was that black people should capitalize on the skills and knowledge they had gained as slaves. People who had worked the land for others now had the chance to own that land and take the profits of their work for themselves.”

Black success in the future, Williams argues, does not lie in government race-based programs but, he states, in young people finishing high school and college, taking a job and holding it, marrying after finishing school and while holding a job, and having children only after you are 21 and married.

The Institute for American Values issued a report showing that in the past 50 years, after segregation came to an end, “the percentage of black families headed by married couples declined from 78 per cent to 34 percent.” In the 30 years from 1950 to 1980, households headed by black women who never married jumped from 3.8 per thousand to 69.7 per thousand. In 1940, 75 percent of black children lived with both parents. By 1990, only 33 percent of black children lived with a mother or father.

The path to a better life is to be found not in race-based affirmative action programs which, as the Supreme Court declared, violate our Constitutional rights, but in the lessons learned by such thoughtful black Americans as J. A. Parker, Clarence Pendleton, Thomas Sowell, Anne Wortham, Juan Williams, and so many more. Martin Luther King’s goal of a genuinely colorblind society is one toward which Americans of all races should work.

Can We Restore the Old Idea of Free Speech for a Variety of Ideas?

There was a time in living memory when Americans of all points of view believed in free speech — not only for ideas with which they agreed, but for those with which they disagreed, even strongly, as well.

When I was a student at the College of William and Mary, I was a member of the school’s debate team. We traveled around the country engaging in debates on a given subject. My memory is failing me when it comes to the subject college debate teams were debating in my freshman year, but what I remember very well is that we all had to be prepared to argue either side of the question. You never knew when a debate began which side you would be asked to defend.

A bit later, when I was teaching at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Alexandria, Virginia, I served as debate coach. Just as when I was in college, students had to prepare themselves to debate either side of the question. You never knew which side you would be asked to defend until the debate began. This gave students an understanding that many public issues were complex, and the right and wrong answer was not always clear. Most important questions are usually not so easily resolved.

Later, when I worked in the U.S. Senate during the Vietnam War, I engaged in many debates about the war. I was in support of the war, and my opponents were opposed to it. After our debates, we often went out for a drink and continued the discussion. In retrospect, I think many of the points my opponents made had a lot of validity. Many important issues are complicated. There is often a bit of truth on both sides. For a democracy to thrive, respect for divergent viewpoints is a necessity. Consider the debates at the Constitutional Convention. If the delegates did not have respect for the men and ideas with which they disagreed, and a willingness to compromise, our country would never have been established.

At the present time, sadly, there is growing intolerance of divergent viewpoints, particularly at some of our institutions of higher learning. A Princeton University alumni group in favor of free speech polled current students and found that 76 percent thought it was acceptable to shout at a speaker, and 16 percent supported the use of violence to stop a talk by an unpopular speaker. More than three-quarters of the Princeton students said it was sometimes acceptable to stop a campus speaker by shouting over them. Some 83 percent said it was acceptable to block other students from attending talks they deemed disturbing.

Princetonians For Free Speech was founded by Princeton alumnus, journalist, and lawyer Stuart Taylor, Jr., in 2020 “with the mission of promoting free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity.” In the 2022 College Free Speech Rankings, by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Princeton was the lowest-ranked school in the country.

In March, Stanford Law School made headlines after students berated Kyle Duncan, a federal appeals court judge, who had come to give a talk. Tirien Steinbach, the school’s Dean of Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity, intervened, ostensibly to instill calm, before launching into an impassioned six-minute speech, which she had written down, condemning the judge’s life work. She was accused of ambushing Judge Duncan, and put on leave.

Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez issued a 16-page open letter explaining why she and Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne rose above what many viewed as the judge’s own reaction, including profanity aimed at students. The letter went beyond university policy and the First Amendment to articulate values which underlay them, specifically, the relationship between reasoned discourse, on the one hand, and learning, civility, “and the special role of lawyers in our system of Justice,” on the other. She argued that there is no contradiction between free expression and diversity, equity, and inclusion. And she notified students that the school is planning a mandatory half-day training session to reinforce these concepts.

Dean Martinez wrote:

“There is a temptation in a system, in which people holding views perceived by some as harmful or offensive are not allowed to speak, but history teaches us that this is a temptation to be avoided.”

Throughout the country, we see efforts to stifle speech with which some disagree. After the campus newspaper at Wesleyan University published an article critical of Black Lives Matter, students tried to defund the newspaper for failing to create “safe places.” At Yale, 42 percent of students and 71 percent of conservatives say they feel uncomfortable giving their opinions on politics, race, religion, and gender. Self-censorship becomes more common as students progress through the university: 61 percent of freshmen feel comfortable speaking about their views, but the same is true of just 56 percent of sophomores, 49 percent of juniors and 30 percent of seniors.

According to The Economist:

“University administrators, whose job it is to promote harmony and diversity on campus, often find the easiest way to do so is to placate the intolerant. . . . The two groups form an odd alliance. Contentious campus politics have been a constant feature in American life for more than fifty years. But during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, students at Berkeley demonstrated to win the right to determine who could say what from administrators. Now the opposite is true. Student activists are demanding that administrators interfere with teaching, asking for mandatory ethnic-studies classes, the hiring non-white or gay faculty, and the ability to lodge complaints against professors for biased conduct in the classroom. This hands more power to administrators.”

At different times in our history, different groups have done their best to stifle free speech. When I was a college student, I was an officer in a campus group, the Political Science Club. In the years of segregation in the South — this was in 1958 — we decided to invite the first black speaker to the College of William and Mary. The president of the college called me into his office. At that time, I wrote a column in the campus newspaper, which took a generally conservative position. The president asked me, “You are a conservative, why are you doing this?” I responded that, “Racism is not one of the things I want to conserve.”

The speaker we invited was Alonzo Moron, the president of the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), who would later become president of the American Red Cross and Governor of the Virgin Islands. His talk proceeded with no difficulty — but our group was then thrown off campus. I asked the ministers of the various churches in Williamsburg if we could meet in their facilities. All expressed support for what we had done, but said their congregations would oppose such a move. Only one minister opened his doors to us. He was the minister of the United Methodist Church, a recent refugee from the Hungarian Revolution. I had promised the president of the college that our next speaker would be an advocate of segregation. He was James J. Kilpatrick, then editor of The Richmond News Leader. Even he later turned against segregation.

Given my own experience with free speech, it is sad to see its serious decline at the present time. Liberals and conservatives should join together to make sure that we continue to have a free marketplace of ideas, something which seems to be diminishing. And the political life in which I remember working in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives was one in which Republicans and Democrats did not view one another as “enemies” but as fellow Americans engaged in the common enterprise of government. Our free society cannot endure without it.     *

The mission of The St. Croix Review is to end the destruction of America by reestablishing the family as the center of American life, restoring economic prosperity to an independent middle class, and reviving a culture of tradition.

A Cornucopia of American Scandal

Barry MacDonald — Editorial

It has been the practice of this editorial to address one or two topics impacting America during the current two-month period. There is so much to write about today that the task seems overwhelming. The fabric of America is unraveling. The flash mobs that storm into high-end retail stores, like Nordstrom’s in California, to despoil and loot without negative consequence to themselves, are definitive symbols of social disintegration. The homeless encampments and street violence that plague the metro areas of California, Oregon, Washington, and elsewhere, are the destructive result of the negligence and dereliction of duty on the part of incompetent, progressive governance.

We are not living in merely “interesting” but rather “confounding” times. We faithful, good-hearted Americans, during these perplexing months, must seek and rely on the guidance and strength that only comes from a divine source. Let us gain as much strength from each other as we may.

• The wildfire on Hawaii’s Maui island has killed at least 106 people, and the death toll is certain to rise, as 1,000 people have not yet been found. The horrific and sudden blast of heat was such that some people were reportedly “melted,” and may never be found. Other people were forced into the ocean to avoid the flames and smoke, and many may have drowned — their bodies may never be recovered. During this ordeal, as he was entering his armored, suburban vehicle while he was on vacation again at his beachfront property, (for 40 percent of his presidency, he has been on vacation), President Biden received a shouted question from the press. It seems that the president is only partially available for shouted questions these days. He responded to a query about the Hawaiian disaster: “No Comment.” Later, the president was filmed lounging on the beach — disconnected and unconcerned about those Americans tragically afflicted. The president’s lethargy is a fitting image of current American leadership: There is no captain steering the ship of state. As more facts emerge, human factors appear to have contributed significantly to the magnitude of the disaster. There was neglect and mismanagement in the prevention of water being released in a timely manner to suppress the fire. Also, there is a broad cultural impact because politics is in play. White House spokesperson John Podesta has linked the fire to the climate change narrative. It is so easy for the Left to blame the inevitable occurrence of natural catastrophe on a prosperous economy. The Maui cataclysm was the result of a fire amid drought conditions and human error. The fire from a downed powerline was not successfully extinguished, and flames were spread by hurricane winds — the epitome of a perfect storm. Life on Earth is subject to periodic natural disasters. People are prone to fits of terror — the Left takes advantage of human frailty to weave narratives essential to their agenda.

• A young lady of my acquaintance hates former President Trump, and she rejoiced that Trump and 18 others were charged by Atlanta District Attorney Willis. My friend was not aware of the more than 100 nightly riots in Portland during the summer of 2020. Throughout the summer of 2020, the federal courthouse in Portland was assaulted by masked Antifa thugs using slingshots and lasers against local and federal police. The level of violence in Portland, Chicago, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Atlanta, Seattle, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and elsewhere during the summer of 2020 outstripped that of the January 6 riot at the Capitol. My friend is not aware of the lopsided context. In reference to the death of George Floyd, I asked whether she knows how many killings there are each year of unarmed black men by police. Of course, she was unaware of the average number, because the media is not reporting facts that complicate their narratives. The answer is between 14 to 20. According to Justice Department numbers, there are about 60 million interactions between police and citizens each year. There are about 10 million people arrested annually by police, writes Heather MacDonald, who is a wonderful source of statistical information related to policing. She wrote the book, The War on the Cops. Whites are more likely than blacks or Hispanics to experience police contact. Whites are more likely to be killed by police than are blacks, making due allowance for the relative proportions of the racial groups. My friend, who is a lovely person whom I like very much, is an example of the result of narrative news: She is poisoned with animus against people in a way that leverages the agenda of the Left. Seen in the context of nationwide facts, the George Floyd incident was an exceedingly rare event. The Marxist, propagandistic nature of the American news media continues to be a preeminent and malignant influence on American society.

• While President Biden is busy touting “Bidenomics,” the Fitch rating service downgraded the U.S. debt standing. The commentator Bill Bonner says of the Biden administration’s policy: “The signature element of Bidenomics, as near as we are able to determine, is simply Chiquita Finance. You enjoy the warm weather as long as possible — spend, spend, spend . . . borrow, borrow, borrow. And then, on a cold day, you pour gasoline over your head and set yourself on fire.” If a private company assumed too much debt, banks would stop lending them money. Businesses and households do go broke. But the federal government inflates the money supply with a printing press. The Bank of America strategist Michael Hartnett used Congressional Budget Office projections to conclude that U.S. debt will rise by $5.2 billion every day for the next decade. Establishment politicians of both parties have been profligate spenders for decades. Our borders have been opened to illegal aliens who will be a continual drain on our social services. The deceitfully named “Inflation Reduction Act” was a boondoggle of green energy policies that will cost too much and, in the case of electric vehicles, will burden our electrical power grids. We can look forward to higher energy bills and brownouts at the same time. There is no practical sense in the priorities and expenditures of the federal government, and it’s hard to see any corrective measure that doesn’t involve severe recession or depression at some point in the future. Even private banks — like the Silicon Valley Bank (which collapsed) — have replaced sound financial acumen with environmental, social, governance (ESG) schemes. American society is not immune to the ravages of inflation and profligacy.

• The lawfare against former President Trump, continues. He is facing 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions. Trump hatred is a Roman orgy of colossal dimensions. Establishment politicians; the leadership of the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies; the bureaucracies; the universities; the media; and many millions of media-addled Americans are ecstatic. Not since the resignation of President Richard Nixon has there been such glee at the peril of an American president. The powers that be in America fear him because he is a provocative populous leader who has exposed their incompetency, and their disdain for, in the words of Barack Obama, the “bitter clingers,” and of Hillary Clinton, the “deplorables.” If the prosecutors have their way, Trump will be in court instead of on the campaign trial in 2024. Each trial, and the commentary on each trial, will make for appointment TV, more sensational than the O. J. Simson trial. These blockbuster events will serve to subsume any wayward curiosity of the American public for the odiferous evidence of Biden family corruption. Various Republican House committees are successfully exposing bank records of money transfers through shell companies into the accounts of the Biden family. IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, as well as several FBI whistleblowers, have become paragons of integrity and courageous heroes, while the media turns a blind eye. Yet, the stench of Biden corruption may become too much to ignore.     *