It was about about nine years ago when consulting company BCG first suggested that in a time of out of control spending and soaring debt loads, the only fiscally sustainable “solution” was to implement a wealth tax (see “There May Be Only Painful Ways Out Of The Crisis“).

While the idea was well ahead of its time in 2011, and was quickly shut down in the court of public opinion, several years later none other than the IMF resurrected the idea of a wealth tax, which has only gained momentum in recent months, and despite widespread grassroots pushback, the concept of a “wealth tax” has moved front and center and most recently the chairman of Capital Economics, Roger Bootle, said that the world’s wealthiest could be subjected to higher tax rates as governments scramble to fund spending and repair their economies amid the coronavirus crisis.

Fast forward to today when the ultra-liberal state of California is now ready to take this “socialist” idea from concept to the implementation phase, with the SF Chronicle reporting that a group of CA state lawmakers on Thursday proposed a first-in-the-nation state wealth tax that would hit about 30,400 California residents and raise an estimated $7.5 billion for the general fund.

The proposed tax rate would be 0.4% of net worth (most likely ended up far higher), excluding directly held real estate, that exceeds $30 million for single and joint filers and $15 million for married filing separately.

Oakland Democrat Rob Bonta, who is the lead author of the wealth tax proposal AB2008, justified the wealth expropriation by saying that California is facing a big budget deficit because of the health and economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus, and “we can’t simply rely on austerity measures,” to close it. It wasn’t immediately clear why austerity doesn’t work considering that California has never actually tried it, but in any case the Democrat’s proposal was clear: “We must consider revenue generation.”

And in doing that, California will trigger an exodus of billionaires who will be the first to realize which way the wind is blowing, and end up hurting the state far more than helping it as hundreds of ultra wealthy taxpayers leave for places like Florida or – for that matter – any other place in the world.

Bonta said that the union-sponsored bill will not be heard before the Legislature adjourns Aug. 31, but “it can be reintroduced on day one of the next session.”

Now what most normal Americans (i.e. those not living in California) may not know, is that this would be the second wealth tax set to pass in California. Bonta said he would like to see a wealth tax passed in addition to the “millionaires tax” proposed in a bill introduced in late July. AB1253 would add surcharges of 1% to incomes (joint or single) between roughly $1 million and $2 million, 3% on income between $2 million and $5 million, and 3.5% on income greater than $5 million, bringing the top rate to 16.8%.

California’s top rate today, at 13.3%, is already the highest in the nation, and it’s only going higher.

The millionaires (and soon to be hundred thousandaires, then ten-thousandaires and so on) subject to the wealth tax would report it to the Franchise Tax Board along with their income taxes. They would have to report all assets including stock in publicly and privately traded corporations; interests in partnerships, private equity or hedge funds; cash, bonds and savings accounts; mutual funds, futures and options; art and collectibles; offshore financial assets, pension funds, non-mortgage debt, real property and mortgage debt. Which of course is idiotic because some of that wealth is extremely illiquid and evaluating it will not only take material time and effort, but also result in drastic costs. Furthermore, just how will the government confirm that whatever wealth is reported represents reality. But such is life in a half-baked socialist utopia where every idea is for lack of a better word, idiotic.

There was some good news: “Directly held real property, and mortgages and other liabilities secured by directly held real property,” must be reported, but would not be considered in calculating the taxpayer’s worldwide net worth, the bill said. How wonderful… oh wait, someone realized that this would simply be double taxing the same assets: “Real estate would be exempt from the wealth tax because it’s already subject to property tax, at a higher rate”, Bonta said.

Among those handful of rational voices who call out this sheer idiocy for what it is was Jared Walczak, a vice president with the Tax Foundation, a think tank, who said that “it is far easier to call for a state-level wealth tax than it is to actually design an enforceable one.” Maybe that’s why no state has imposed one.

However now that California is on the verge of passing a wealth tax, every other insolvent state will follow suit, staring with New York.

“Some New York legislators are floating the idea, but Governor Cuomo has poured cold water on the notion, rightly concerned that it would lead to an exodus of high net worth individuals from the state,” Walczak said via email. Somehow California believes it is exempt from such an exodus. Spoiler alert: it isn’t, and the state’s wealthiest residents won’t think twice to up root and move their tax residence to a state which treats their wealth with respect.

There is of course the possibility that this idiotic idea will somehow die before it is enacted. Walczak said that implementing a wealth tax at the state level “would be extremely complex, with questions of how to value illiquid assets and whether residents’ out-of-state wealth — including their investment holdings — can be taxed.” He added that “any tax that is actually effective at taxing wealth, however, would be equally effective at driving wealth out of state.”

Emmanuel Saez, a UC Berkeley economics professor, i.e., a socialist, said income tax is not an effective way to tax the ultra-wealthy, because they can avoid the income tax as long as they don’t cash in their investments. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could avoid the income tax as long as he doesn’t sell his Facebook stock, and if he moved to Florida before realizing his gains, he may never owe tax to California, Saez said during a call announcing the bill.

Saez, like any other socialist who has a terminal inability of grasping who the world really works and that every idiotic action by the state will have an appropriate reaction by the population, said the bill would not deter startups because it would let entrepreneurs defer the wealth tax for a period of time. Brilliant.

“Liquidity-constrained taxpayers with ownership interests in hard-to-value assets and business entities, such as startup businesses, shall be able to elect for an unliquidated and deferred tax liability to be attached to these assets instead of the net value of these assets being assessed at the end of a tax year.” The taxpayer would have to sign a contract with the state specifying when the tax would be paid.

Well, Emmanuel, instead of signing a “contract” with the state when the tax will be paid, all those entrepreneurs that keep the state afloat will simply… leave. And guess what happens to the already dismal tax collections then.

None of this matters to the Berkeley socialist, and instead he pointed to a paper he co-authored, saying that California has 12% of the U.S. population but 17% of all U.S. millionaires and 25% of its billionaires. In 2011, California had only 15.5% of the nation’s millionaires and 21% of billionaires. The wealth tax, he said, would hit about 0.15% of California tax filers.

We can’t wait for the paper’s second edition published in 2025 when the “professor” finds that California has none of the US’ billionaires.

Until then, the rare voices of reason such as that of Robert Gutierres, president of the California Taxpayers Association, will become increasingly rare:

“The state approved $9.2 billion in business tax increases in the new budget, but Sacramento politicians and special interests continue to seek income tax increases, property tax increases, a ‘headcount tax’ on in-state employees, and this new annual tax on money that was left over after all the other taxes were paid,” Gutierrez said, adding that “a very small number of Californians pay the vast majority of state income taxes. When the constant drumbeat for outrageous tax hikes drives them away, who will pick up the tab?”

Why, the Fed of course.

Here’s the good news for opponents of lockdowns and mask mandates: They don’t work. However, that is also the bad news. Because they don’t work, politicians who have seized power by executive fiat for months on end can continue promulgating even more life-altering rules, precisely because the original ones never worked!

Americans are now facing this predicament: The more the effectiveness of these executive policies is disproven, the more the politicians use that lack of results as a pretext for even more rules. Thus, if stay-at-home orders failed to work as promised, they demand mask-wearing. If mask-wearing was in place for months and still didn’t work, which has been the case in most hot spots, then they mandate mask-wearing in personal homes in Broward County, Florida, and for two-year-olds in Baltimore County, Maryland. Because you know, the only possible explanation for continued spread of a virus that is not deadly for most people is that two-year-olds weren’t wearing masks. Never mind studies from nearly every major European country showing kids, particularly young kids, do not contribute to community spread, even if masks did work.

Speaking of European countries, it’s time to dispel one of the more popular myths propagated by our new dictators. We are constantly being lectured to by the “experts” that America didn’t have enough of a lockdown and that is the reason why we are still seeing a spread of the virus while Europe seems to be done with it. A new eye-opening analysis from the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) shows that America had just as severe a lockdown as most European countries and in fact had a longer-lasting lockdown than every country except for England.

The accusation that America didn’t lock down enough is based on three premises – that we locked down later than Europe, didn’t lock down as hard, and reopened earlier. As Phillip Magness of AIER proves using the University of Oxford’s stringency index of lockdowns, all three are untrue.

Using a scale of 1-100, Oxford researchers gave one point to each country for a list of 17 policies that they implemented during the epidemic and tracked that aggregate score over time.

As you can see, after achieving a 72.69 score on March 21, we have essentially plateaued for months. The reality is that most of America, including many states with surges in cases, have been locked down the entire time and remain essentially locked down.

As Magness observes, the U.S. was well within the median of Europe’s score:

At its peak, the US stringency index reached comparable levels with Great Britain (75.93), Belgium (81.48), the Netherlands (79.63), Germany (73.15), Norway (79.63), Denmark (72.22) and Switzerland (73.15). Among comparable developed nations, only Italy, France, and Ireland topped the 90 point mark on the index.

What about the start time? Was America late to the party relative to the European countries?

Of these countries, almost all imposed their most stringent policies at exactly the same time – the week surrounding the March 16^th release of the Imperial College report, which also corresponded with the World Health Organization’s pandemic declaration on March 11^th. Only Italy – an early hotspot – preceded this wave of lockdowns, having imposed them in late February.

Thus, America started when everyone else did – except for Italy – and achieved essentially the same lockdown score within a week.

But here’s the real kicker: the myth of the great American reopening. Not only did the reopening in most places in the U.S. not begin before most European countries, but the reopening in Europe has been much more encompassing to this very day.

As of July 4^th and even with slow reopenings underway in most states, the stringency index shows that the United States (68.89) as a whole still remained under heavier restrictions than any country in Western Europe except for the comparably-shuttered United Kingdom (69.91).

Hence, after causing so much collateral damage, lockdowns don’t even work to stop the spread! America is locked down and has been the entire time.

Take Switzerland, for example. It opened up much earlier than the U.S. and is now at a 36.57 index, almost half that of the U.S.

Then, of course, there is Sweden, which never achieved more than a 46 index.

The results? Sweden is essentially done with the virus.

In America, the virus continues to spread, despite a much more severe lockdown than Sweden and a much longer one than nearly every European country.

Even the few states that opened up in late April or early May are clearly not responsible for the spread, because the virus did not spread during the key weeks following the reopening. The timing of the spread in southern states is much more in line with the rioting and protests, which would explain why we had a resurgence that Europe, thus far, has not seen on a large scale.

Also, let’s not forget that most states that reopened still had very strict rules in the urban areas that have seen most of the new cases, such as Miami-Dade County. Both Miami and Los Angeles have seen a surge in cases following long-standing mask requirements:

On the other hand, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, Belarus, Norway, and France never had compulsory mask rules, and yet they appear to be done with the epidemic, at least for now. Whereas countries in Asia with near universal mask-wearing, such as Hong Kong and the Philippines, are seeing new waves of the virus.

Governments around the world are testing citizens for coronavirus antibodies, to work out whether people have had the deadly Covid-19 disease.

Some countries are setting up so-called “immunity passports” and others may follow suit.

The idea is that a passport would certify that you have had coronavirus and will not carry or contract the disease again, opening up a way out of lockdown restrictions for the holder.

But is this theory correct? And will it create a group of antibody-carrying elite who can date, travel and work as they wish, while others are still limited by health precautions?

This article features interviews broadcast on Business Daily, on the BBC World Service:

They are photographing positive test results to use as a kind of improvised “Covid-immunity passport”.

If you have antibodies, the theory goes, you will not get the disease again.

Dating aside, what if we could decide who is safe to return to work or get on an aircraft? For those people. the Covid-19 lockdown could be over.

‘Immunity passports’

The idea behind immunity passports, is that of a certificate confirming that you have had Covid-19. It could be used to enter places that those people without one are barred from.

To get one, you’d have to test positive for antibodies created after exposure to the virus.

Amid a rising number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in Miami-Dade County, the mayor of Miami Beach announced Monday the city would begin issuing fines to those who ignore rules requiring the use of facial coverings indoors and outside if social distance cannot be observed.

The city’s new crackdown does not go as far as its neighbors across the bay in the city of Miami, which requires the use of masks at all times in public except for when exercising, eating or working outdoors or by very young or medically vulnerable groups.

You can still walk your dog along the street, for example, but you’ll need your mask on if you chat with a neighbor along the way.

Violating Miami Beach’s rule may earn you a verbal warning, and subsequent violations will lead to a $50 fine. That’s less than the announced fines in Miami, which start at $50 but can increase to $500 for a third offense.

The order remains in effect through Wednesday unless the City Commission votes to extend the manager’s emergency powers beyond July 1.

Mayor Dan Gelber said noncompliance with current mask rules, coupled with a troubling increase in the spread of the coronavirus, made further restrictions necessary.

“We don’t have too many tools left in our tool kit, and we don’t want to be forced to return to a shelter-in-place order that proved so economically devastating,” he said in a statement.

The city’s COVID-19 advisory panel, comprised of health experts in Florida and beyond, agreed that pushing for more mask use was one way the city could contain the spread of the virus outside of another lockdown.

Dr. Aileen Marty, an infectious diseases expert at Florida International University, said imposing fines would “get a lot of people’s attention” and make enforcement easier.

“Considering the current state of the pandemic in our community, our population, and enforcement issues, I favor requiring the proper use of facial coverings outdoors and indoors in all public places at all times, with the usual, reasonable exemptions,” Marty wrote in an email to City Manager Jimmy Morales on Saturday

Dr. Kenneth Ratzan, the chief of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai Medical Center, said in another email that “if the current surge isn’t halted we can expect our hospitals to be stressed, and deaths will increase.”

“I’m a firm believer that masks, social distancing and hand hygiene are the keys in preventing spread of infection, especially since asymptomatic persons play such an important role in the spread of infection,” he said. “I believe easing of restrictions would have worked if these practices had been universally followed.”

The first tenant for one of Frank Woodworth’s underground bunkers wasn’t a human, it was a seed. “A couple of hippies called me up and asked me to build them a vault for their heirloom seeds,” he said.

A reserved man with Downeast stoicism, Mr. Woodworth is the owner of Northeast Bunkers, a company in Pittsfield, Maine, that specializes in the design and construction of underground bunkers. It was 18 years ago that Mr. Woodworth outfitted that first steel vault while working as a general contractor, and he has since changed direction, pivoting his business model to focus solely on designing, installing and updating underground shelters.

He stresses that these are not “luxury bunkers” for the top 1 percent, and only a small part of the calls are coming from Doomsday preppers or Cold War-era holdovers. Rather, about two-thirds of his business comes from consumers who pay approximately $25,000 for an underground livable dwelling. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Woodworth said he has been unable to keep up with the demand.

Buyers of these kinds of underground dwellings say that they simply want to protect their families from an increasingly turbulent world. For many, the decision to build a bunker was made before the coronavirus pandemic surfaced, but they say that they now feel prepared for the next local or global crisis.

Aaron, who spoke on the condition that his full name not be used to protect his privacy, said he bought a bunker three years ago to keep his family in the Washington D.C. area safe in a variety of situations. “If something happens, I can put the family in there, or if I’m gone, my wife can lock the family in there,” he said. “Not just the coronavirus, or civil unrest. Even in environmental things” — like earthquakes and tornadoes — “my family is protected.”

Aaron, who has three teenagers and is in his mid-40s, said he is currently using his 1,100-square-foot bunker as an office. “Parts of the bunker are off-limits to all my children, like any of the security rooms, the weapons room, the food and storage room, the pantry,” he said.

Other amenities include a food and storage room, as well as an aboveground “safe room” which is used “if you need to quickly get away from something immediately. Basically, a panic room.”

He bought his bunker from a company called Hardened Structures based in Virginia Beach, Va., one of the many bunker builders across the country.

Some buyers go through a bunker broker to find a shelter that fits their needs. Jonathan Rawles is the owner and manager of Survival Realty Brokerage Services, a national company based in Idaho that works with agents and brokers specializing in remote, off-grid bunker-type property.

“There is continual demand for people that are looking to find more of a sustainable future for themselves, for their families,” Mr. Rawles said. “A lot of real estate markets only focus on housing in the urban areas, suburban areas, exurbs, and there is very much a missed opportunity for people who are looking to live off-grid, wanting to live remote, or actually looking to secure a property, whether that’s a bunker or a more secure and sustainable home.”

Mr. Rawles pairs his clients with bunker-building companies in the U.S. and says his company has a wide range of clients. “This market and desire for security cuts across all levels of society — social, political, racial, religious,” he said. “People are looking for the opportunity to secure the family’s future, to have a more sustainable future, and part of that may be having a bunker.”

Mr. Woodworth at Northeast Bunkers, said that recent inquiries have come from across the United States, and worldwide. The furthest installation he’s ever done? The Caribbean. “That one went by truck then by barge then by truck.”

The basic model at Northeast Bunkers is a cylindrical steel vessel eight feet in diameter, in 13- or 20-foot lengths, welded from quarter-inch plate steel and equipped with an entrance hatch on top. Standard features include rust-resistant exterior paint, cedar plank flooring, zero-VOC (volatile organic compounds) interior finishes, two vent ports, floor hatches for storage, and an emergency exit hatch.

Optional features include power connections (your choice of 12-volt or 120-volt), potable water system, septic system, bathroom, kitchen, bunks, and a blast door. “All depending on what you order, and all materials are made in America,” Mr. Woodworth said. “We try to get people as safe as possible within a reasonable budget.” The company’s bunkers range from $25,000 to $35,000.

In the 1950s and 60s, the threat of nuclear war and Cold War tensions sparked demand in home fallout shelters, with endorsements from both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, a proliferation of pamphlets (and coupons) for such structures scattered across America, as well as a vote in 1961 in Congress for $169 million with a big push to mark, locate and stock fallout shelters in existing public and private buildings.

Back then, bunkers were economical in construction and basic in design, consisting of rot-resistant plywood panels and concrete blocks, buried and backfilled with sand or gravel. Today, most shelters are fabricated from steel, like Northeast Bunkers’, or concrete, or cinder blocks. Others are made from airform — a highly engineered reusable and inflatable spray mold to be covered in concrete to create monolithic domes — or from renovated missile silos, and many are completely new high-end construction.

Today, some underground shelter companies market military-grade materials, such as Nuclear, Biological and Chemical (NBC) Air Filtration Systems, gas-tight and waterproof doors, and six-point locking systems. Others offer the option of home entertainment theaters, game rooms, wine cellars, gun racks, even underground swimming pools.

Atlas Survival Shelters, a fallout shelter company based in Sulphur Springs, Texas, specializes in safe rooms and bomb shelters, and advertises one modular unit that “feels as close to home as possible.”

The modular 8-by-12-foot (not including the entry corridor) mini model costs $49,000 and includes a mud room, a decontamination room, a gas-tight marine door, an air-filtration system, a blast valve and a generator pod. Products at Atlas start at about $400 a square foot, ranging from $9,000 for an inflatable shelter to $5 million for their “platinum series shelter.”

Ron Hubbard, president and owner of Atlas, makes, among other shelter products, monolithic domes that “meet FEMA standards for providing near-absolute protection.”

Atlas’s bunker building videos on YouTube signed up 47,000 new YouTube subscribers in April, and a video of a luxury bunker installation has gotten nearly 6 million views. Atlas has also seen a big uptick in calls and orders since the coronavirus pandemic began.

“But you do not need to go into a bunker to save yourself from the coronavirus,” Mr. Hubbard said. “No one has bought a shelter from me to hide during the pandemic, but many people have bought it because of the pandemic. They feel that this is the beginning of something a lot bigger, and they feel it in their gut.”

Another bunker owner, Roberta, who lives in New Mexico and who also asked that her full name not be used to protect her privacy, bought her off-grid bunker from Atlas Shelters four years ago. “I believe everyone deserves a better chance of survival, not just me.”

She calls her underground shelter her “woman cave,” and it’s equipped with a kitchen, entertainment center, toilet, shower, mud room and a place to sleep. Roberta, 59, married, and retired with grown children, wants to be able to provide a safe haven for her family at a moment’s notice.

She gets into her shelter by entering what looks like a rickety shed hidden in plain sight on a sandy, deserted plot of land that she owns. Inside the shed, she opens a hatch on the floor, and steps down a steep set of stairs to a steel submarine door. Inside, just past the bunker’s mud room is the living room, where a sign reads, “My husband needed more space, so I locked him outside.”

Aaron, the bunker buyer who lives in the Washington D.C. area, found Hardened Structures on Google, and said the company had a good reputation online. When the family was installing an in-ground pool, he decided to have Hardened Structures put in a bunker at the same time.

“So no one knew what we were building,” he said. “I’m not a prepper. My parents were ranchers who do old-school canning, deer hunting, that kind of thing. So I took little things from them.”

Brian V. Camden, principal of Hardened Structures, has been in business for 32 years. The majority of his projects are underground bunkers beneath fortified homes in locations ranging from Brooklyn to ranches out West, as well as contracted military work in the Middle East.

“I collaborate with architects, engineers, Navy Seals,” Mr. Camden said. “We have ex-military employees specializing in C.B.R.N. — chemical biological radio nuclear analysis.”

Hardened Structures also works with a company called Red Team Analysis, ex-Navy Seals who teach bunker breaching to officials from the National Security Agency.

When Hardened Structures is building a bunker, Mr. Camden said, Red Team Analysis supervises their work. Unlike Northeast Bunkers or Atlas, Hardened Structures does not design steel enclosures, but rather cast reinforced concrete, which he says would shield the interior of the bunker from an electromagnetic pulse or geomagnetic storm.

The company’s underground shelters are made from cast-in-place reinforced concrete. The prices range anywhere from $600 to $3,000 per square foot. Factors affecting the cost include blast overpressure (thickness of the concrete walls and structure) and whether it is designed to withstand chemical, biological and radiological dispersion, and conventional weapons — “also known as weapons of mass destruction,” Mr. Camden said. “Other factors include the client’s secrecy requirements, the site geotechnical makeup, and the extent of EMP shielding within the shelter itself,” he added, referring to electromagnetic shielding.

With new business booming, bunker installers are also keeping busy with their previous clients.

Recently, Mr. Woodworth, of Northeast Bunkers returned from an installation job on Chebeague Island, in Casco Bay, Maine, and said he was so busy that clients were being wait-listed. Bunker upgrades have also become much more popular among Mr. Woodworth’s clients, and people who were putting in just six months’ worth of food are now putting in two years’ worth.

“I’m just a businessman who deals with paranoid people,” he said, “and it seems like the parameters of paranoia are changing every day.”

America’s sin debt for slavery was paid for long ago.

“Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural, March 4, 1865

Delivered a scant forty-one days before Lincoln gave, as he himself put it in his address at Gettysburg, the “last full measure of devotion,” our sixteenth president’s language sings, it soars; it is high poetry. Somebody called Lincoln “that sad poet of a president,” words which capture pretty completely what in essence this great man was. The only other American public figure who has even arguably come close to wielding the English language so profoundly and effectively is Martin Luther King. And it is no coincidence that both men were animated by the same cause, in different iterations.

It was in his Second Inaugural that Lincoln spoke, not just as a skilled political actor, or a poet, but, in a sense, as a prophet. He seemed to have had a unique insight into the heart of the tragedy that was the American Civil War.

I’d been thinking about his ‘wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil’ observation, and wondering how close to the truth Lincoln had struck. It turns out, in fact, that he had struck very close to the truth.

The common accepted death toll for the American Civil war is 618,000. That figure was recently reliably revised upward to 750,000 . At any rate, I decided to compare that number with the total number of Africans imported as slaves to the continental US throughout her colonial and national history. I was wondering, frankly, whether the life of at least one American taken during the Civil War, of which its proximate cause was the existence and spread of slavery, was balanced out for every African brought here.

American historian Henry Louis Gates says the following:

“Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. And how many of these 10.7l milion Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That’s right: a tiny percentage.”

So, given the death rate of 14.4% of those who did not survive the Middle Passage, that raises the number of slaves destined for American ports to 443,000.

Now I have a rather grim question for you — is the death of 750,000 Americans, and the maiming of thousands more, as a direct consequence to the presence of slavery in this country, an approximately fair price to pay for the forced importation of 443,000 Africans to America, for two hundred fifty years of unrequited toil, plus another ninety or so years of Jim Crow laws?

Well, this is an issue only God can fairly adjudicate. But it puts things in an entirely new and interesting perspective- for me, at least.

You may be surprised, given recent events, that the condition of black Americans has actually been improving over the last decades. Here’s Kyle Smith writing recently in the New York Post:

“The Economic Policy Institute found that the difference in high school graduation rates between whites and blacks fell from 27 percent in 1962 to 5 percent in 2004. Last fall, the rate of black and Hispanic unemployment hit an all-time low. Since 1980, the percentage of black adults with college degrees has tripled. Life expectancy of white Americans exceeded that of black Americans by more than seven years as of 1970; that gap has been cut in half, to three and a half years. The percentage of black Americans earning more than $75,000 more than doubled (adjusting for inflation) between 1970 and 2014, according to Harvard professor William Julius Wilson, who studies upward mobility among black Americans.”

So what’s the problem, one might ask? With all this wonderful progress, why all this recent brouhaha? The answer can be distilled to a couple major factors: 1) the creation of a permanent black underclass thanks to the unintended consequences of civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s which have given economic incentives for fatherless households in the black community, and 2) the steadily advancing agenda of cultural Marxism, which has led to the tsunami of political correctness and the instant shaming and expulsion of liberals and conservatives of principle from positions of power and influence. Throw in the convulsive collective deliverance from three months of, as it turned out, mostly unnecessary lockdown, and you have a perfect blueprint for bad behavior.

Not all of this is bad, of course. Police tactics can always stand scrutiny, since they’re the only ones in a civilization entrusted with the threat of and the use of force to apply local laws effectively. Individuals who have an irrational distaste for people having a different paint job than they do need to do some serious self-reflection.

Is life more difficult for a black man? Well, yes, it is. Much of this is cultural, however, and not racial. It follows from the fact that 40% of violent crimes are committed by 6% of the population, i.e., black males. If that’s “institutional racism” in the view of a lot of rather shallow thinkers, then march until your shoes wear out; it won’t change until crime stats change. And crime stats won’t change until a revolution takes place in the black underclass.

The first rumblings of that revolution are happening even as we speak; there is very slow tectonic shift taking place in the African-American community as black Americans, by ones and twos, by dozens and hundreds, are slowly waking up to the fact that they’ve been had by the Democrats. That they’ve always been had by the Democrats, who were the fiercest opponents to emancipation, the staunchest supporters of Jim Crow, and the steely backbone of the KKK.

Democrats are scared stiff that they’ll lose their African-American constituents. They should be. If they don’t take their party back from the extreme Left and get their act together vis a vis their historic mistreatment of their most loyal demographic, they’ll be shunted off to the sidelines as a semi-permanent minority party. And that’s bad for the republic. One-party rule always is.

In the broad sweep of American history, certain years stand like grim mileposts. The year 1968, bathed in blood and drenched in sorrow, is one. The year 2020 may be another.

The nation is convulsed today in a way it has not been in more than half a century: stalked by a mysterious virus, burdened by soaring joblessness, wrestling — once again — with the twin plagues of racism and inequality that have poisoned the country from its outset.

As it happens, 1968 was a presidential election year. So, too, is 2020. It is the time when Americans take stock of what has been and look forward, with varying degrees of hope and resignation, to what may be.

So much has changed in 52 years. So much remains the same.

Every election amounts to a choice, between candidates but also between possibilities. Given these unnerving times, the vote on Nov. 3 could very well matter more than any election in a generation.

That’s what happened the last time the country cast its ballots for president amid such an air of foreboding.

In 1968, the country was torn apart by an ill-conceived war fought in the cities and jungles of far-off Vietnam. Americans came to realize the conflict was a lost cause and, worse, grew to understand their leaders had lied to cover up their own doubts about the war and ineptitude prosecuting it.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the nation’s leading apostle of nonviolent protest, was shot and killed at age 39 for dedicating himself to the proposition that all men, no matter the color of their skin, were created equal. Scores died as more than 100 cities around the country went up in flames.

Robert F. Kennedy, age 42, was shot and killed two months later after inveighing against the Vietnam War and taking up King’s torch.

In Chicago, rogue police smashed the heads of demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention after carefully removing their badges to avoid identification. Inside the hall, reporters were roughed up. When Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff objected to the police tactics, his speech was greeted with a stream of profanity and anti-Semitic invective from the city’s mayor, Richard J. Daley.

“It felt like the foundations of the country were trembling, which in fact they were,” said Allen Matusow, a fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, who has written extensively about the 1960s.

Today, our ground seems similarly shaky.

“We’re not stable in terms of our health,” said Peter D. Hart, who marked 1968 by quitting his career as a nonpartisan polling analyst to become a Democratic campaign strategist. “We’re not stable in terms of our society, and we’re not stable in terms of our economy.”

In November 1968, Republican Richard Nixon won the White House after promising to quell the country’s unrest and restore “law and order” to its sundered streets. The popular vote was close — Nixon just slipped past Democrat Hubert Humphrey — but the outcome wasn’t really. Nixon crushed Humphrey in the electoral college and probably would have won by a greater margin if Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, hadn’t carried five Southern states.

It’s been said that history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme, which suggests a set of recurring patterns. Indeed, there are through lines from 1968 to today.

One of Nixon’s campaign strategists, Roger Ailes, helped found Fox News and its high-octane formula of pugnacious conservatism. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign echoed Wallace’s bombastic populism and the governor’s thinly veiled appeals to racial prejudice and bigotry; lately, as Trump seeks reelection, he has begun to echo Nixon, calling himself “your president of law and order” and speaking of a “silent majority” cowed into quiescence.

Those old enough to remember may be experiencing 1960s flashbacks (of a nonpharmaceutical sort) for good reason. As historian Rick Perlstein noted, “The soft domestic civil war of the 1960s created the order of battle of our political discussion today.”

The conflict between conservatives and liberals, or progressive, as some prefer, is familiar enough. So, too, is the raging culture war, even if the terms of engagement have changed; we no longer fight over long hair and blue jeans but rather protective masks and hydroxychloroquine.

And yet this is not 1968.

America is a vastly different, if still troubled, place.

It was only in 1967, in the felicitously named Loving vs. Virginia, that the Supreme Court upheld the right of black and white Americans to marry. Today, that right has been extended to same-sex couples.

Whites are a shrinking portion of the population and, significantly, the electorate. There may still be cavernous differences in incomes and equality, but seeing black and brown faces in corporate boardrooms or seated at negotiating tables in Congress and statehouses around the country no longer prompts wonderment.

Today’s protests are smaller in scale and, thankfully so far, much less deadly. Strikingly, they are also vastly more integrated and greeted with much greater support and sympathy. In some instances, police officers have laid down their batons and marched with demonstrators, or dipped to one knee to show their solidarity.

The horrific death of George Floyd under the weight of a white policeman has been universally condemned, even by the agitprop commentators on Fox News. Compare that with attitudes at the time of King’s assassination, which occasioned the Chicago Tribune to editorialize against the perceived rending of the country’s social fabric.

“If you are white, feel guilty about it,” the editorial stated. “Yield the sidewalk to the migrants from the south who have descended on your cities. Honor their every want, because the ‘liberals’ tell you that it is your fault that they have not educated themselves, developed responsibility, trained themselves to hold jobs, or are shiftless and dependent on your taxes.”

The sentiment was hardly outside the norm.

California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who waged a brief unsuccessful 1968 challenge to Nixon for the GOP nomination, was among those who suggested King and his civil disobedience helped sow the seeds of his demise, calling the event “a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”

And yet here we are, again.

This coronavirus may be novel, but not the disproportionate effect it has had on black Americans, who are more likely to lose their jobs or get sick and die.

Once more the nation’s cities, and its affluent suburbs, are the scene of protest and looting because once again another black man has been killed by a white police officer meting out his twisted version of justice. Once more there are incidents of law enforcement officers, some with their badges covered or removed, indiscriminately cracking down on peaceful demonstrators.

There is something particularly resonant and insidious in the fact the latest spark was struck not in the Deep South, with its benighted racial history, but in Minnesota, where Humphrey emerged as an early and forceful advocate of civil rights and liberals cherish the legacies of Walter Mondale and Paul Wellstone.

America’s road toward that more perfect union is long and tortured, and anything but a straight line from injustice to remediation. And yet it moves forward.

Alan Shane Dillingham, 38, is an assistant professor of history at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala., and one of a new generation taking a fresh look at the legacy of the 1960s. “This isn’t just chaos,” he said of the upheaval arising from Floyd’s killing. “Certainly it’s concerning. But oftentimes in American history riot and rebellion have produced tangible changes to American society.”

Already, political lines are drawn.

Trump has hardened in his resolve to crack down on demonstrators, threatening to deploy the military if necessary. His Democratic rival, Joe Biden, has called for reforms, promising to create a police oversight board within his first 100 days in office and calling on Congress to immediately pass legislation outlawing the police use of chokeholds. There is virtually no overlap.

Rare is the election held in times as fraught as these. Rarer still is an election as significant as 1968 was and 2020 may prove to be.

In the epoch of COVID-19, many have willingly abdicated personal sovereignty and liberty to the State.  Many more, however, have led the continuing renaissance of constitutional nationalism that was ushered in with the election of Donald Trump.

It’s high time to apply nationalism to the issue that will most singularly determine whether we nationalists keep our republic: immigration.

The United States is overpopulated (or, if you prefer, has enough people here), and it’s time to seal the borders until further notice.  No, I’m not talking just The Wall at our southern border or our temporary groundings of flights or refugees and asylum-seekers — no more new bodies who are coming to live in the U.S. indefinitely until further notice.

To truly put America first, we need a moratorium on legal immigration for the next five to ten years.  Our national system imports one foreign national every minute of every day, 24/7, totaling 459,000 new arrivals in Fiscal Year 2019 (572,000 more obtained lawful permanent residency — green cards — in F.Y. 2019).

Because of COVID-19, our unemployment rate is nearly 15 percent — the highest in almost nine decades, since the Great Depression.  Our jobless population totals over 21 million Americans.

Please spare me the narrative that at least some of the tens of millions out of work couldn’t, with some training, fill at least some of the jobs of the 190,098 H-1B visa lottery recipients in FY 2019.  Even if you disagree with a full pause, shouldn’t we at least somewhat reduce the number of recipients, to make it even slightly easier for unemployed Americans and recent college graduates to work at the companies addicted to foreign labor (I’m looking at you, Democrat-run Big Tech)?  The balance of imported immigrants receive J-1 Visas (foreign exchange visitors) and H-2B visas for non-agricultural, blue-collar jobs.

There are also currently 13 million green card–holders nationwide.

Trump may restrict immigration visas for the next few months, but more (meaning longer) is needed.  The 2018 Trump v. Hawaii U.S. Supreme Court ruling affirmed a president’s broad constitutional powers to limit — or altogether cease — legal immigration.  Trump would be on strong legal footing if a moratorium were challenged in the courts.

The Bodies Politic

Need convincing beyond the economic benefits?  How about a moratorium for public health?

Unwittingly or not, The New York Times’ recent report, entitled “The Coronavirus Is Deadliest Where Democrats Live,” concurs with me.

It’s been grotesquely fascinating to watch all these Democrats — who pack themselves like sardines into these cities and suburbs, to politically outnumber everyone else — lament when there aren’t enough coronavirus testing kits, masks, or ventilators.  When Democrats are enjoying the benefits of outnumbering everyone else (registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 7 to 1 in New York City, for example), they’re pigs in mire, and they remind us that “there are more of us than you.”  But the Democrats’ overcrowded chickens came home to roost.

What cities have coped the worst with COVID-19?  Overpopulated, Democrat-majority cities: Detroit, New Orleans, and New York, among a few others.  Fifteen percent of the world’s population lives in a 90-mile radius around the island of Manhattan — making it the densest collection of bodies on the planet.  And while New York State’s overall population has been declining for years (higher taxes and redistribution of wealth!), New York City’s five boroughs have been increasing since 2000; 26,000 live in each square mile, and in Manhattan, 66,000 per square mile.  In San Francisco, the second most densely populated city in the U.S., 6,000 live in each square mile.  Even if officials in these cities had responded flawlessly to the pandemic, there were too many bodies to avoid chaos.

Pray tell, where do those hundreds of thousands of new immigrants annually move to?  Cheese farms in Wisconsin?  Coal mines in Pennsylvania or Ohio? No; they live in America’s big cities (more on this shortly).  Though there was no precedent for the COVID-19 outbreak, the high death counts in overwhelmingly Democrat-populated cities underscored that too many bodies living in too-small municipal spaces presents public health crises waiting to happen.

Political Self-Obsolesce

A long-term pressing of the immigration pause button would elicit scorn from the Democrats and the GOP, which is precisely why it’s the winning play.

The ceasing of a bodies influx into America is anathema to Democrats because large quantities of bodies are the primary reason they have monopolized control of most of America’s largest cities; the primary reason they always win the political youth war; and the primary reason why their influence never seems to wane, even when they lose electorally. As I write in my upcoming first book, 10 Warning Signs Your Child Is Becoming a Democrat: How to Make America Grown-Up Again, bodies are what enable the Democrats and the DMIC (Democrat Media Industrial Complex) to never stray from their mantra of “vote blue no matter who.”  They move in a singular direction, unified toward a singular goal — to protect and elect Democrats, no exceptions.

Conversely, it’s anathema to globalist and open-borders Republicans whose fetish is Third World–produced goods on the year 1381 minimum wage pay.  Furthermore, Republicans are utterly petrified to come within a parsec of what I’m proposing, for fear of the “xenophobic” branding by the editorial boards of The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Bipartisanship is overrated, and it usually means that both sides have been wrong rather than one side.

America has been the most generous nation in world history.  The time, though, has come for altruism to defer to science and the American workforce of small business and manufacturing.

Both of our major political parties are afraid to reform our immigration quagmire because with reform will be the revelation of how many illegal aliens live here.  Our federal government has little to no knowledge of how many illegals are here.  Are there “only” 11 million illegal aliens in the U.S.?  Doubtful; it’s been 11 million, since, well, forever, and it’s likely double to triple that figure.

It is neither my nor your responsibility to render ourselves politically obsolete.  Where do you think the vast majority of legal immigrants live?  In small towns inhabited by AR-15-carrying Jeffersonian and Adamsian constitutionalists whose book club members are currently reading The Federalist Papers?  Of course not; they predominantly live in cities that would vote for an Attila the Hun/Genghis Khan presidential ticket if it had a “D” attached to it.

Even though permanent legal residents cannot (legally) vote, they do influence (in the Democrats’ favor) Congressional apportionment and federal funding grabs.  And let’s be candid: when legal immigrants become naturalized citizens, they are far likelier to vote Democrat than for another party.

For those who believe that a crisis justifies the abridgment of, and infringement upon, our guaranteed constitutional rights: the Framers penned the Constitution in response to a crisis — a war against a foreign power, which didn’t recognize our independence until seven years after we declared it. The Founders would want us to be even more zealous in the application of these rights during a crisis.

We nationalists know dangerous freedom must always reign supreme over peaceful slavery; our Founders keenly understood that a tyranny of the majority would eventually euthanize the republic.

Ever since 1983 when the Supreme Court legalized the chokehold as a legitimate restraining technique by police, it has drawn controversy. The reason is simple: unless performed by someone who is well trained, it can kill. Even using a chokehold short of death, the results for the suspect can be debilitating as there may be “short-term memory loss, hemorrhage and harm to the retina, concussions from falling when unconscious, stroke, seizures, permanent brain damage, and coma.”

The knee on the head and neck of George Floyd led directly to his death. Another high-profile death from a chokehold was Eric Garner, who died at the hands of police in New York in 2014. Garner, however, had other health issues that contributed to his death.

That’s the real danger. If a suspect has underlying health problems, the chances of dying as a result of a “sleeper” hold are much greater.

For this and other reasons, there is a serious effort underway for Congress to pass a law that would ban police from using chokeholds nationwide. New York, Illinois, and several other states have banned the practice. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo endorses the effort.

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today proposed a positive reform agenda amidst the ongoing protests across the state and nation in response to the killing of George Floyd. The reform agenda includes a national ban on excessive force and chokeholds by law enforcement officers; independent investigations of police abuse conducted by independent, outside agencies – not by local prosecutors; and disclosure of disciplinary records of police officers being investigated.

Around the world, the controversy over police chokeholds in France and Hong Kong have already led to protests.

Time:

“We cannot say that the American situation is foreign to us,” said French lawmaker Francois Ruffin, who has pushed for a ban on the police use of face-down holds that are implicated in multiple deaths in France, a parliamentary effort put on hold by the coronavirus pandemic.

The muscular arrest on May 28 in Paris of a black man who was momentarily immobilized face-up with an officer’s knee and upper shin pressing down on his jaw, neck and upper chest is among those that have drawn angry comparisons with the killing of Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis.

The Paris arrest was filmed by bystanders and widely shared and viewed online. Police said the man was driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol and without a license and that he resisted arrest and insulted officers. His case was turned over to prosecutors.

While defending the use of the chokehold, police are very wary when it comes to employing them.

Policemag:

If you are going to use a chokehold, you need proper training and need to know if it is permitted by policy. Proper training includes recognizing unconsciousness, so that chokes are not applied any longer than necessary, especially the air choke. Further, it is vital that officers understand that certain members of the population are at higher risk of incurring injury or death as a result of a chokehold. Such individuals include those with cardiac disorders and younger people whose central nervous systems have not completely developed.

Continuing training is necessary in order to ensure that officers are up-to-date with the latest knowledge about chokeholds, and to help them maintain their familiarity with performing them. Such education needs to include the anatomy of the neck, medical issues, necessary precautions, and proper application. Also, it is essential that officers receive training on reviving an assailant who has fallen unconscious. Such skills should be learned from expert trainers, and not just from an article, as both practice and theory are necessary in order to master the safe use of a chokehold.

Police say that sometimes, putting a knee on the neck or torso of a suspect happens during the normal course of a struggle. Then what? Are cops supposed to get up and allow the suspect — armed or not — to have another go-around with them?

Deliberately applying a chokehold to a suspect in order to immobilize them should be illegal. There are other means to restrain a struggling or violent suspect without putting either the officer’s or the suspect’s life in danger. As long as those options are available. they should be used in preference to any kind of a chokehold.