This week, America celebrated her 247th birthday. We are only three years away from the nation’s quarter millennium.
How is the good old constitutional republic doing? Would the Founding Fathers be proud of what they created?
If they came back to visit today, I honestly doubt they would give us all a thumbs up. We have messed up quite a bit of what they left for us. However, with some hard work and good old American resiliency, we can make them proud again.
Before I get to the challenges, let me make clear that the United States of America is a remarkable country. We have had the same constitution since 1776, making it one of the oldest constitutions in the world. It has survived a civil war and incredible strife, both political, social, and economic. When other countries rush to rewrite their founding documents, Americans have exercised precisely the modesty and respect for their constitution that the Founding Fathers wanted.
Since the Constitution itself cannot be changed, Congress and the states have exercised the right to amend it. There are only 25 such modifications or amendments in effect (one of the current 27 amendments was used to reverse another); it is fair to say that the constitution provides a sturdy and resilient foundation for our country.
The men who drafted it have good reasons to be proud of their work.
There is much else to be proud of in America. As an immigrant turned American citizen, having lived here for over 20 years, I am still amazed at the freedom we have, especially in comparison to the rest of the world. Our freedom of speech, though constantly contested, remains unrestricted and vigorously protected by the Supreme Court. We still enjoy a good amount of economic freedom that Europeans have reasons to be envious of. Americans are still patriotic and charitable, and while we have far too much cultural relativism slushing around in our country, it still has not destroyed the core of what made America strong.
Faith, family, and freedom.
You can still find a lot of that uniquely American belief around the country that the future is brighter than the past. That spirit is still alive. It is bruised and battered, but not dead.
With all that said, our country faces monumental challenges and will need to show some true national resiliency in the coming years. The cultural war, which this Report has covered in the past, has become a threat to essential societal institutions, including our schools and our legal system. We also have to address the serious threat to our prosperity—our economy—that comes from the combination of our unsustainably high government debt and global efforts to de-dollarize central bank reserves and international trade.
The culturally Marxist madness is facing growing resistance, especially in local communities where it has tried to push destructive, sexually deviant agendas on school children. This has led the cultural Marxists to become increasingly desperate, as exemplified by the founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company. In some expression of self loathing and hatred for their own country, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield recently went on a tirade about how America needs to return “stolen Indigenous land.” They decided that a good place to start doing so would be Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, where the faces of four of America’s most prominent presidents have been carved into the sides of a mountain.
As it happens, Mount Rushmore is far away from Vermont where Ben & Jerry’s is located. For reasons unknown to this Report, Cohen and Greenfield have not returned their vast wealth, their private homes, and the land upon which their ice cream factory was built, to their “Indigenous” owners.
The return of their wealth is particularly important, since the two ice cream makers only became wealthy thanks to the existence of the United States of America.
Maybe Ben and Jerry like their wealth more than they like the Indigenous people. Maybe they will lose that wealth anyway if Congress fails to act to stop a U.S. debt crisis. If China, Russia, and other countries succeed in de-dollarizing central bank reserves and global trade, the American economy is going to take a bad beating. Everything will fall, from the stock price of ice cream makers to household spending on ice cream.
In fact, if I were Ben or Jerry, I would start preparing for just that. The current president’s administration is not going to do anything to stop the de-dollarization. On the contrary, those efforts have more or less explicit support from Biden’s Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen.
As if a looming fiscal and currency crisis was not bad enough, it has become painfully apparent that there is corruption in the inner circles of the U.S. government. President Biden is suspected of having made policy decisions based on money he and his family have allegedly received from abroad.
This corruption scandal is still growing. On June 30th, The Daily Signal reported that the IRS and federal prosecutors have deepened their investigation of Hunter Biden, the president’s son. There are also allegations that the U.S. Department of Justice has tried to stymie the Congressional investigation into the corruption scandal.
To make matters even worse for our government and its credibility, the Secret Service recently found cocaine inside the White House.
It is indisputable that Biden has lost whatever leadership credibility he had when he took office. While he continues to struggle to keep up a pretense of presidency, America’s culture war continue to tear at the nation’s fabric. Big corporations have become so deeply involved that it has now attracted the attention of the House Judiciary Committee. According to the Daily Caller, Committee Chair Jim Jordan has decided to take action:
House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan and two other House Republicans sent four letters to the heads of massive companies such as BlackRock and Vanguard, calling on them to explain corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) efforts that could violate federal antitrust laws.
The allegations of antitrust behavior are innovative:
In all of the letters, the lawmakers say the companies appear to have potentially violated U.S. antitrust law by coordinating and entering into collusive agreements to “decarbonize” assets under management and reduce emissions to net zero.
In short, the companies are accused of colluding to boycott corporations that they think produce too much carbon dioxide. However, that accusation is only the opening salvo in a conservative counter-punch to corporate cultural Marxism: the same antitrust tools can be used against them for colluding to boycott corporations on other ESG grounds (the transgender agenda comes to mind).
This, of course, gives hope that conservatism can put America back on a path to a dignified future. Another reason for hope is in the continuously poor sales numbers of the beer Bud Light. After the beer company spent the month of March advertising its (honestly not very good) beer with the help of a man dressed up as a girl, it has tried repeatedly to reignite buyer excitement. The failures have apparently cost the company quite a bit of money, so in an act of desperation the marketing team resorted to a very low-cost commercial with a hand pulling beers out of an ice cooler.
The Twitter crowd had a field day with the commercial. This one took the cake, alluding to a famous ‘tea party’ in Boston Harbor a while ago:
The conservative Congressional inquiry into the corporate exercise of cultural Marxism goes hand in hand with the grassroots activism against Bud Light. These are two very different, but morally connected reactions to the same culture war on traditional American values, and it is working. In addition to the problems for the Bud Light brand, Unilever is taking a beating from the aforementioned nonsense being spilled by the Ben & Jerry founders. According to the Daily Caller, the giant packaged-food company, which bought the ice cream maker in 2000, is feeling the heat:
Unilever, the parent company of Ben & Jerry’s, lost billions in market cap after the ice cream brand celebrated July 4th with an unpatriotic tweet about American history.
The total value of Unilever fell by $2.5 billion, as shareholders anticipated a boycott similar to that which has now removed Bud Light from the list of the ten most popular beers in America.
Unilever shareholder worries are unfounded. American ice cream consumers are already ideologically divided; conservatives know that Ben & Jerry’s is a left-leaning company, and therefore generally already avoid the brand. That leaves it to Subaru-driving Democrats to secure Ben’s and Jerry’s un-Marxist wealth.
The big question for America today is how much further the country will slide before it turns back up again. Some states are more indicative of the downslide than others, with California ahead of the pack. At some point, though, even the left in the Golden State will realize that their policies do not work anymore.
That point may not be far off. You would have to be tone deaf to the extreme not to hear the warnings in words of people like like actor Scott Baio, who has relocated from California to Florida:
I’ve watched Southern California devolve into a third world country … Between the homeless defecating on the sidewalk, doing drugs on the sidewalk in the middle of the day, illegal aliens all over the place, laws mean nothing, crime is out of control, graffiti on everything.
The situation is similar upstate, with San Francisco as the flagship of social and moral decay.
When people on the center-left of the political spectrum join conservatives in fighting for law and order, social stability and moral decency, then our country can turn around for real. That is beginning to happen, but there is still a lag to be overcome before people take the next step and start voting for politicians who share these basic values of human civilization.
In terms of elections, no office is more critical to the survival of America than the presidency. Who can best lead America back to strength and prosperity? Donald Trump remains the Republican frontrunner for 2024, but the field is rich with interesting candidates.
Whoever emerges as the party’s candidate next year, will likely face Joe Biden. In a traditional two-candidate race, given Biden’s deteriorating mental abilities, that should not even be a contest. However, a third-party candidate with lots of resources could make a decisive difference. As this Report recently explained, that third-party candidate may very well be Liz Cheney, the former Republican Congresswoman.
Given that she conspired to suppress massive evidence regarding the events on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, Cheney is not morally qualified to be president. She is also a one-trick pony: once she officially declares her candidacy, it will be to achieve one thing only: to make sure Trump does not become president.
Liz Cheney has positioned herself as a visionless anti-Trumper, and nothing more. She reinforced this impression recently in an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival. I fear that if she became president, she would be entirely preoccupied with her unabridged animosity toward Trump and his 75 million voters. It would consume her to the point where she would have no interest in leading the country to a better future.
She is not alone in lacking visions for the future: Biden appears incapable of even thinking in terms of visions. Donald Trump, who was a visionary president when he won the 2016 election, is drowning in his own desire for revenge for his 2020 loss.
The last thing America needs in 2024 is a three-way race between backward-looking candidates. We need a president who can spearhead the nation through the rebuilding of our moral foundation, the resurrection of a socially cohesive society, and the reinvigoration of a world-class economy.
That requires a president with visions and leadership.
I have good hopes for America. We are a tarnished nation, we sometimes stumble and grasp for a handle, but we haven’t lost our focus on the future. Much like Joe Grushecky sings in this classic,
At night we tuck our little babies in bed
We still pray to the red, white, and blue in Homestead
I look forward to celebrating America’s 250!
The America Report: A Future Brighter than the Past
This week, America celebrated her 247th birthday. We are only three years away from the nation’s quarter millennium.
How is the good old constitutional republic doing? Would the Founding Fathers be proud of what they created?
If they came back to visit today, I honestly doubt they would give us all a thumbs up. We have messed up quite a bit of what they left for us. However, with some hard work and good old American resiliency, we can make them proud again.
Before I get to the challenges, let me make clear that the United States of America is a remarkable country. We have had the same constitution since 1776, making it one of the oldest constitutions in the world. It has survived a civil war and incredible strife, both political, social, and economic. When other countries rush to rewrite their founding documents, Americans have exercised precisely the modesty and respect for their constitution that the Founding Fathers wanted.
Since the Constitution itself cannot be changed, Congress and the states have exercised the right to amend it. There are only 25 such modifications or amendments in effect (one of the current 27 amendments was used to reverse another); it is fair to say that the constitution provides a sturdy and resilient foundation for our country.
The men who drafted it have good reasons to be proud of their work.
There is much else to be proud of in America. As an immigrant turned American citizen, having lived here for over 20 years, I am still amazed at the freedom we have, especially in comparison to the rest of the world. Our freedom of speech, though constantly contested, remains unrestricted and vigorously protected by the Supreme Court. We still enjoy a good amount of economic freedom that Europeans have reasons to be envious of. Americans are still patriotic and charitable, and while we have far too much cultural relativism slushing around in our country, it still has not destroyed the core of what made America strong.
Faith, family, and freedom.
You can still find a lot of that uniquely American belief around the country that the future is brighter than the past. That spirit is still alive. It is bruised and battered, but not dead.
With all that said, our country faces monumental challenges and will need to show some true national resiliency in the coming years. The cultural war, which this Report has covered in the past, has become a threat to essential societal institutions, including our schools and our legal system. We also have to address the serious threat to our prosperity—our economy—that comes from the combination of our unsustainably high government debt and global efforts to de-dollarize central bank reserves and international trade.
The culturally Marxist madness is facing growing resistance, especially in local communities where it has tried to push destructive, sexually deviant agendas on school children. This has led the cultural Marxists to become increasingly desperate, as exemplified by the founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company. In some expression of self loathing and hatred for their own country, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield recently went on a tirade about how America needs to return “stolen Indigenous land.” They decided that a good place to start doing so would be Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, where the faces of four of America’s most prominent presidents have been carved into the sides of a mountain.
As it happens, Mount Rushmore is far away from Vermont where Ben & Jerry’s is located. For reasons unknown to this Report, Cohen and Greenfield have not returned their vast wealth, their private homes, and the land upon which their ice cream factory was built, to their “Indigenous” owners.
The return of their wealth is particularly important, since the two ice cream makers only became wealthy thanks to the existence of the United States of America.
Maybe Ben and Jerry like their wealth more than they like the Indigenous people. Maybe they will lose that wealth anyway if Congress fails to act to stop a U.S. debt crisis. If China, Russia, and other countries succeed in de-dollarizing central bank reserves and global trade, the American economy is going to take a bad beating. Everything will fall, from the stock price of ice cream makers to household spending on ice cream.
In fact, if I were Ben or Jerry, I would start preparing for just that. The current president’s administration is not going to do anything to stop the de-dollarization. On the contrary, those efforts have more or less explicit support from Biden’s Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen.
As if a looming fiscal and currency crisis was not bad enough, it has become painfully apparent that there is corruption in the inner circles of the U.S. government. President Biden is suspected of having made policy decisions based on money he and his family have allegedly received from abroad.
This corruption scandal is still growing. On June 30th, The Daily Signal reported that the IRS and federal prosecutors have deepened their investigation of Hunter Biden, the president’s son. There are also allegations that the U.S. Department of Justice has tried to stymie the Congressional investigation into the corruption scandal.
To make matters even worse for our government and its credibility, the Secret Service recently found cocaine inside the White House.
It is indisputable that Biden has lost whatever leadership credibility he had when he took office. While he continues to struggle to keep up a pretense of presidency, America’s culture war continue to tear at the nation’s fabric. Big corporations have become so deeply involved that it has now attracted the attention of the House Judiciary Committee. According to the Daily Caller, Committee Chair Jim Jordan has decided to take action:
The allegations of antitrust behavior are innovative:
In short, the companies are accused of colluding to boycott corporations that they think produce too much carbon dioxide. However, that accusation is only the opening salvo in a conservative counter-punch to corporate cultural Marxism: the same antitrust tools can be used against them for colluding to boycott corporations on other ESG grounds (the transgender agenda comes to mind).
This, of course, gives hope that conservatism can put America back on a path to a dignified future. Another reason for hope is in the continuously poor sales numbers of the beer Bud Light. After the beer company spent the month of March advertising its (honestly not very good) beer with the help of a man dressed up as a girl, it has tried repeatedly to reignite buyer excitement. The failures have apparently cost the company quite a bit of money, so in an act of desperation the marketing team resorted to a very low-cost commercial with a hand pulling beers out of an ice cooler.
The Twitter crowd had a field day with the commercial. This one took the cake, alluding to a famous ‘tea party’ in Boston Harbor a while ago:
The conservative Congressional inquiry into the corporate exercise of cultural Marxism goes hand in hand with the grassroots activism against Bud Light. These are two very different, but morally connected reactions to the same culture war on traditional American values, and it is working. In addition to the problems for the Bud Light brand, Unilever is taking a beating from the aforementioned nonsense being spilled by the Ben & Jerry founders. According to the Daily Caller, the giant packaged-food company, which bought the ice cream maker in 2000, is feeling the heat:
The total value of Unilever fell by $2.5 billion, as shareholders anticipated a boycott similar to that which has now removed Bud Light from the list of the ten most popular beers in America.
Unilever shareholder worries are unfounded. American ice cream consumers are already ideologically divided; conservatives know that Ben & Jerry’s is a left-leaning company, and therefore generally already avoid the brand. That leaves it to Subaru-driving Democrats to secure Ben’s and Jerry’s un-Marxist wealth.
The big question for America today is how much further the country will slide before it turns back up again. Some states are more indicative of the downslide than others, with California ahead of the pack. At some point, though, even the left in the Golden State will realize that their policies do not work anymore.
That point may not be far off. You would have to be tone deaf to the extreme not to hear the warnings in words of people like like actor Scott Baio, who has relocated from California to Florida:
The situation is similar upstate, with San Francisco as the flagship of social and moral decay.
When people on the center-left of the political spectrum join conservatives in fighting for law and order, social stability and moral decency, then our country can turn around for real. That is beginning to happen, but there is still a lag to be overcome before people take the next step and start voting for politicians who share these basic values of human civilization.
In terms of elections, no office is more critical to the survival of America than the presidency. Who can best lead America back to strength and prosperity? Donald Trump remains the Republican frontrunner for 2024, but the field is rich with interesting candidates.
Whoever emerges as the party’s candidate next year, will likely face Joe Biden. In a traditional two-candidate race, given Biden’s deteriorating mental abilities, that should not even be a contest. However, a third-party candidate with lots of resources could make a decisive difference. As this Report recently explained, that third-party candidate may very well be Liz Cheney, the former Republican Congresswoman.
Given that she conspired to suppress massive evidence regarding the events on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, Cheney is not morally qualified to be president. She is also a one-trick pony: once she officially declares her candidacy, it will be to achieve one thing only: to make sure Trump does not become president.
Liz Cheney has positioned herself as a visionless anti-Trumper, and nothing more. She reinforced this impression recently in an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival. I fear that if she became president, she would be entirely preoccupied with her unabridged animosity toward Trump and his 75 million voters. It would consume her to the point where she would have no interest in leading the country to a better future.
She is not alone in lacking visions for the future: Biden appears incapable of even thinking in terms of visions. Donald Trump, who was a visionary president when he won the 2016 election, is drowning in his own desire for revenge for his 2020 loss.
The last thing America needs in 2024 is a three-way race between backward-looking candidates. We need a president who can spearhead the nation through the rebuilding of our moral foundation, the resurrection of a socially cohesive society, and the reinvigoration of a world-class economy.
That requires a president with visions and leadership.
I have good hopes for America. We are a tarnished nation, we sometimes stumble and grasp for a handle, but we haven’t lost our focus on the future. Much like Joe Grushecky sings in this classic,
I look forward to celebrating America’s 250!
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