“Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates’ debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at it you lose”

– Paul Simon

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July 2, 2024—Yesterday, the Supreme Court released two rulings. Each, in its own way, contributed to the paroxysms of fear running through the spines of Biden loyalists and democratic surrogates who are pretending that this election is about “saving democracy” in America.

The first ruling reiterates (some say extends) a president’s immunity to “official” acts while in office.

The second preserves the right of social media companies to decide for themselves what is considered “free speech” independent of government regulators dictating their own editorial opinions.

Now prosecutors are going to have to figure out how to actually prosecute Donald Trump for his actions on January 6, 2021, rather than cajole the press into agreeing with their narrative of events.

Among other public displays of aghast, Alexandria Occasio-Cortez (AOC) promised to introduce articles of impeachment for a Supreme Court justice – but has yet to identify which one.

Where’s Biden?

Hiding behind “a revolving-door [of] Washington operatives who move back and forth between high-powered political jobs and lucrative corporate clients,” writes Reason. “The same people he has not changed for 40 years.”

In other words, the same Washington dingleberries are seizing with paroxysms of fear… for themselves. Reason:

Of course, it’s not uncommon for career politicians to have close advisers who have worked with them for decades, whose judgment they trust. What is confusing is that the president’s enablers seem unable to sound the alarms that Biden is a bad candidate to run, ill-suited to the job ahead, and that their inability to do so has seemingly sabotaged the Democratic party, leaving it without a nominee who can beat former President Donald Trump.

Who is the real threat to democracy?

The real truth is far easier to comprehend. And, without surprise, it is widespread across the West.

“This is white hot rage territory,” writes the Australian writer Ramek Takur. Analyzing the popular elections in France this week, and impending across the West for the Brownstone Institute, Takur summarizes:

The recent European elections represent a political earthquake. The European Parliament itself has limited powers. The elections’ real significance is that, as proxy referendums on national politics, they will shape national policies in Europe’s most consequential countries (France, Germany, Italy).

All ‘right-thinking’ people are assumed to subscribe to the consensus and be on ‘the right side of history.’ The prospect of the ‘wrong-thinking’ people from the ‘wrong side of history’ emerging victorious at the ballot box is provoking an epidemic of conniptions. For they are viewed as not just wrong, but positively evil. Thus all who opposed the Voice referendum in Australia last year were bigoted racists.

Critics of mass immigration from countries with cultures deeply hostile to Western values, who want to domesticate the Israel-Palestine conflict in local politics, are Islamophobes. Opponents of the jobs and growth-destroying Net Zero are climate-denialist Neanderthals. Advocacy for gender realism is hate speech.

You get the picture.

‘Reactionary’ views are firming on fossil fuels, gender wars, immigration, and, in an increasingly darkling world, national security. The scorn-spewing elites own the outcome of the European elections. History is full of examples where, when the elites lost touch with the people, they were pitchforked into oblivion.

That’s the fate of elites who end up on the wrong side of history. But of course, like all who are liberal until mugged by reality, liberals support revolutions in every place and time except their own.

My sincere apologies to the whiners out there. You know who you are.

This week we celebrate the day a rag-tag band of colonists bade farewell to the power-drunk, dementia-addled reclusive King George III and his sycophants lo those many years ago.

Despite your objections, that is democracy –  in all its rugged, independent shabbiness.

Today, we look again at The Idea of America: What It Was and How It Was Lost.

Pierre Lemieux explores the documents – the guidelines – we’ve inherited to help discover a world that’s actually diverse, equitable and inclusive rather than the one dictated by the pompous, arrogant fools we wouldn’t even want to have dinner with. Enjoy ~~ Addison

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Remember America?

Pierre Lemieux, from the Introduction to The Idea of America

Remember America?

In the 1950s, there was no political correctness, and Americans were proud of their culture. Despite the grip of religion, one could privately indulge pornographic tastes without much risk. One could quite safely entertain one’s vices on one’s private property. There was already much economic regulation, often inherited from the 1930s, but it only indirectly affected the average American. Men of business were not scared of the state. There was no public health insurance—no Medicare, no Medicaid. The owner of a restaurant or a bar could run it as he wished, and admit whom he wanted, including smokers. The rule of law was a means for citizens to protect themselves against the state. Except for the driver’s license, there were no interior ID papers, and even driver’s licenses did not always bear a photograph—thus providing no “government-issued photo ID.” Cops and border praetorians were still humble, at least when facing people who looked like sovereign individuals.

Let’s not idealize the past too much. The picture is still pretty clear.

Consider the first decade of the twentieth century. In general, anybody could start a business, find investors, and sell whatever he produced without any government license or oversight. There was no SEC, no IRS, no FCC, no FDA, no EPA, no Federal Reserve, and so forth. The absence of financial regulation (except on banks) did not prevent the development of vibrant capital markets, and New York was on its way to becoming the main financial place in the world. The right to keep and bear arms, so typically American in the twentieth century, had survived relatively unscathed—but for the significant exception of Southern states’ attempts to prevent freed blacks from keeping or carrying guns. There was no witch hunt, and in a legal fight between an individual and the government, it was the latter that felt handicapped. Writing in 1910, Lord Acton could confidently say that the American people were “more free than any other the world has seen.” In her celebration of American liberty in the early twentieth century, Rose Wilder Lane could exclaim: “That is what Europeans meant when, after a few days in this country, they exclaimed, ‘You are so free here!’” Liberty was everywhere palpable…

In the field of public finance, the idea of America also started to be lost in the late nineteenth century. A temporary federal income tax was created in 1862 to finance the Civil War. Extended twice, it died in 1872, but was re-adopted by Congress in 1894, only to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court two years later. In 1909, however, the Sixteenth Amendment legalized the income tax. Frank Chodorov later wrote: “As a result of income taxation, we now have a government with far more power than George III ever exercised.”

The 1910s and 1920s were periods of great increases in government intervention. Between 1913 (the year when the Federal Reserve System was created) and 1920, total government expenditures grew from 7.5% of GDP to 12.1%. The New Deal was another period of large increases in government power. Despite the optimism she exulted, Lane became very worried about the evolution of American politics after the New Deal. Total government expenditure in America reached 19.7% before World War II, 27% in 1960, and more than 30% from 1980 to the early 2000s. In the wake of the 2007–2009 economic crisis, it now stands over 40%. And there is a distinct possibility of a default on U.S. government debt, perhaps even during the current decade.

~~  Pierre Lemieux, The Idea of America

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Pierre wrote his introduction long before the pandemic-era spending led to yet another massive surge in debt levels. Long before the current “crisis” in democracy.

So it goes,


Addison Wiggin
Founder, The Wiggin Sessions

P.S.: How did we get here? An alternative view of the financial, economic, and political history of the United States from Demise of the Dollar through Financial Reckoning Day and on to Empire of Debt — all three books are available in their third post-pandemic editions.

Turn Your Images On

(Or… simply pre-order Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed, now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble or if you prefer one of these sites:Bookshop.org; Books-A-Million; or Target.)

Please send your comments, reactions, opprobrium, vitriol and praise to: addison@greyswanfraternity.com