Against the Great Reset: 'Socialism and the Great Reset'

Continuing today, and for the next 10 weeks, The Pipeline will present excerpts from each of the essays contained in Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, to be published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, and available now for pre-order at the links.

Part III: THE ECONOMIC

Excerpt from "Socialism and the Great Reset" by Michael Anton

It has become increasingly common to hear those on what we may call the conventional Right claim that the main threat facing the historic American nation and the American way of life is “socialism.” These warnings have grown with the rise of the so-called “Great Reset,” ostensibly a broad effort to reduce inequality, cool the planet (i.e., “address climate change”), and cure various social ills, all by decreasing alleged “overconsumption.” In other words, its mission is to persuade people, at least in the developed West, to accept lower standards of living in order to create a more just and “equitable” world. Since the conservative mind, not unreasonably, associates lower standards of living with “socialism,” many conservatives naturally intuit that the Great Reset must somehow be “socialist.”

I believe this fear is at least partly misplaced and that the warnings it gives rise to, however well-meaning, are counterproductive because they deflect attention from the truer, greater threat: specifically, the cabal of bankers, techies, corporate executives, politicians, senior bureaucrats, academics, and pundits who coalesce around the World Economic Forum and seek to change, reduce, restrict, and homogenize the Western way of life—but only for ordinary people. Their own way of life, along with the wealth and power that define it, they seek to entrench, augment, deepen, and extend.

This is why a strict or literal definition of “socialism”—public or government ownership and control of the means of production in order to equalize incomes and wealth across the population—is inapt to our situation. The Great Reset quietly but unmistakably redefines “socialism” to allow and even promote wealth and power concentration in certain hands. In the decisive sense, then, the West’s present economic system—really, its overarching regime—is the opposite of socialistic.

Yet there are ways in which this regime might still be tentatively described as “socialist,” at least as it operates for those not members in good standing of the Davoisie. If the Great Reset is allowed to proceed as planned, wealth for all but the global overclass will be equalized, or at least reduced for the middle and increased for the bottom. Many of the means used to accomplish this goal will be “socialistic,” broadly understood. But to understand both the similarities and the differences, we must go back to socialism’s source, which is the thought of Karl Marx and his colleague, financial backer, and junior partner, Friedrich Engels.

That thought is most accessible in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the jointly authored Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), and Engels’s pamphlet “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” (1880). Marxism’s detailed account of economics is fully developed in the monumental Capital (Das Kapital), published in three volumes between 1867 and 1894. Marx and Engels do not claim to be innovators. They insist rather that they merely discovered and explicate the “scientific” theory of socialism, whose true roots are to be found in the unfolding development of “history.”

Marxism
A word ought to be said about the difference between “communism” and “socialism.” The distinction is not always clear in Marx’s and Engels’s works. Often, they use both terms interchangeably. Engels, especially, seems to elide the two, particularly in “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.” But we may perhaps take as authoritative the distinction made in the Manifesto. There, the two authors contrast true communism with various forms of socialism—feudal, petty-bourgeois,
German, conservative, and critical-utopian—all of which they find wanting, at best milestones on the road to communism.

On sale Oct. 18: pre-order now at the links above.

It is unnecessary for our purposes here to recount Marx’s and Engels’s distinctions between the various forms of socialism. Suffice it to say that, in their account, all of those varieties constitute cynical or at any rate inconsequential concessions to the lower classes, intended to stave off the emergence of full communism and to preserve ruling class status and privileges. The “socialism” with which we are most familiar today—high and progressive taxation, a generous welfare state, nationalization of key services such as health care, an expansive list of state-guaranteed “rights,” combined with the retention of private property and private ownership of most means of production—Marx and Engels deride as “bourgeois socialism,” i.e., not only not the real thing but fundamentally closer to bourgeois capitalism than to true socialism, much less communism.

Marxism and “History”
For Marx and Engels, the ground of both socialism and communism is “history,” understood not as an account of past events, conditions, structures, and trends but as an inexorable movement toward a final, fully rational state, with “state” understood as both “state of being” and the formal machinery of government. The discovery of this notion of “history” is implicit in Rousseau’s account of man’s transition from the state of nature—man’s original and natural, in the sense of “default,” condition—to civil society. For Rousseau, that transition was both a decline and one-way: there is no going back. This change in man’s situation, which putatively changes his nature, is the core of what would come to be called “historicism”: the idea that human nature is not constant but variable according to the historical situation. In this understanding, “history,” and not any purported but nonexistent permanent human nature as posited by all prior philosophy, both determines the organization of society and supplies the standard by which man should live.

For Rousseau, man’s transition from the state of nature to civil society is caused by the discovery or development of his rationality, a latent quality always present in humanity but not active in the state of nature, in which men live more or less as beasts. What distinguishes man from the beasts is his freedom, his awareness of and ability to act on that freedom, and the potential to develop his rationality. The “unlocking” of that rationality is perhaps inevitable but at the same
time accidental or inadvertent. Once unlocked, human rationality inevitably leads to the invention of private property, which is the basis of all politics. “The first person who, having fenced off ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society,” Rousseau writes in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men.

Private property necessarily gives rise to institutions designed to protect and defend it, and these become not only the instruments of civil society but also sources of inequality and misery. Implicit in Rousseau’s thought is the unsettling notion that, once this historical process begins, it has no end or rational direction. History is driven by contradiction and conflict—though, he asserts, human beings can still live more or less happily if isolated from urban wealth and corruption. But such circumstances are rare and the products of chance. History in the main is the endless replacement of one set of standards and modes of life for new ones, one set of masters for another, ad infinitum.

Rousseau’s successors, principally Kant and Hegel, accept the notion that history is driven by conflict but posit that the process nonetheless has a rational direction. History’s inherent and inevitable conflicts point forward and upward toward a final state in which all of history’s contradictions are resolved. It is this alleged insight—popularized in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Francis Fukuyama—upon which Marx and Engels build their political and economic theory.

For Marxism, the fundamental fact of human life—what sets man apart from the other living beings—is conscious production and consumption. Marx partly follows Rousseau in believing that there was a period when man could, essentially, “live off the land,” on what he could find and gather. But whereas for Rousseau, man’s transition from the state of nature to civil society was an avoidable or at any rate accidental and unnecessary tragedy, for Marx it was inevitable and, eventually, will turn out all to the good.

Unlike producing animals (for instance, bees) man’s production is conscious. He knows what he does and why he does it. But this consciousness does not arise from any innate rationality but rather from necessity. Population increase forces man to produce—that is, to manipulate nature rather than simply living off its bounty—in order to survive. (The implication is that nature is barely bountiful enough to support a limited number of primitive men but must be “conquered” in order to support the inevitably larger numbers that will emerge absent some external force that consistently culls the population.) This turn to production represents a fundamental change in man’s being and is the first step in his historical development.

From this point forward, the character of man and of every society he inhabits is set by the mode(s) of production. Such modes not only determine but explain, literally, everything about human life: man’s past, present, and future; his theology, morality, and worldview; and the underlying metaphysics and ontology of reality. Thus can Marx claim that his theory is comprehensive...

Next week: an excerpt from "The Economic Consequences of the Great Reset" by David P. Goldman.

Against the Great Reset: 'The War on Capitalism'

Continuing today, and for the next 11 weeks, The Pipeline will present excerpts from each of the essays contained in Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, to be published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, and available now for pre-order at the links.

Part III: THE ECONOMIC

Excerpt from "The War on Capitalism" by Conrad Black

As other contributors have mentioned, if any place could be identified as the birthplace of the Great Reset, it must be the small, drab, German-Swiss Alpine town of Davos, a center of contemporary anticapitalism, or at least radically altered and almost deracinated capitalism, and site of an ever-expanding international conference. (It grew exponentially and has spawned regional versions.)

I attended there for many years by invitation in order to ascertain what my analogues in the media business around the world were doing. The hotels are spartan and the town is very inaccessible. When I first attended nearly forty years ago, the Davos founder, the earnest and amiable Klaus Schwab, had ingeniously roped in a number of contemporary heads of government and captains of industry and leaders in some other fields and had sold huge numbers of admissions to well-to-do courtiers and groupies from all over the world, attracted by the merits of “networking.”

Davos, and its regional outgrowths across the world gradually came to express a collective opinion of the virtues of universal supranationalism (the Davos variety of globalism): social democracy; environmental alarmism; the desirability of having a nonpolitical international bureaucracy; a public sector-reflected image of the Davos hierarchy itself (and in fact, in many cases, preferably the very same individuals); and gently enforcing a soft Orwellian conformity on everybody. It must be said that many of the sessions were interesting, and it was a unique experience being amid so many people capable in their fields, and this certainly includes almost all of those who were revenue-producing, “networking” spectators and not really participants.

Davos is for democracy, as long as everyone votes for increased public sector authority in pursuit of green egalitarianism and the homogenization of all peoples in a conformist world. It was the unfolding default page of the European view: capitalism was to be overborne by economic redistribution; all concepts of public policy were to be divorced from any sense of nationality, history, spirituality, or spontaneity and redirected to defined goals of imposed uniformity under the escutcheon of ecological survival and the reduction of abrasive distinctions between groups of people—such obsolescent concepts as nationality or sectarianism. (My hotel concierge stared at me as if I had two heads when I inquired where the nearest Roman Catholic Church was and was even more astonished when I trod two miles through the snow there and back to receive its moral succour; the parishioners appeared a sturdy group.)

The Covid-19 pandemic caused Davos Man to break out of his Alpine closet and reveal the secret but suspected plan: the whole world is to become a giant Davos—humorless, style-less, unspontaneous, unrelievedly materialistic, as long as the accumulation and application of capital is directed by the little Alpine gnomes of Davos and their underlings and disciples. This is a slight overstatement, and Klaus Schwab would earnestly dispute that the purpose of Davos is so comprehensive, anesthetizing, and uniform. His dissent would be sincere, but unjustified: the Great Reset, a Davos expression, is massively ambitious and is largely based on the seizure and hijacking of recognizable capitalism, in fact and in theory.

On sale Oct. 18: pre-order now at the links above.

There has indeed in the last thirty years been a war on capitalism conducted from the commanding heights of the academy and very broadly assisted by the Western media that has been gathering strength as part of the great comeback of the Left following their bone-crushing defeat in the Cold War. As international communism collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated, it was difficult to imagine that the Left could mount any sort of comeback anytime soon. We underestimated both the Left’s imperishability and its gift for improvisation, a talent that their many decades of predictable and robotic repetitiveness entirely concealed.

By some combination of intuition and tactical cunning, the hard Left crowded aboard the environmental bandwagon. Until the nineties, the environment was the concern of authentic if sometimes tedious conservationists such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, and despite their harassment of nuclear testing by the French around Tahiti and their demonstrations against goodwill visits of American aircraft carriers, they were sincere people making an arguable case.

Suddenly they were overwhelmed by the hard Left imposing a new agenda of strangulation of capitalism by coming through the rear windows and attacking practically every industry as a threat to human survival for ecological reasons. We can only salute their ingenuity and persistence as they co-opted susceptible members of the scientific community to produce asinine arguments like Dr. Michael E. Mann’s infamous conjuration of the “hockey stick,” which held that global warming proceeded horizontally for a long time and then suddenly shot upwards at a forty-five-degree angle as a hockey stick does when the stem reaches the blade. This and spurious calculations based on reading the rings on the trunks of trees and other superstitious opinations won the approval of a huge gallery of gullible, faddish, and cynical people. They made an unlikely coalition: Al Gore became a centimillionaire on this issue; the Prince of Wales mounted a great hobby horse that he still rides, and the most vocal airheads of Hollywood have ben howling like banshees on the issue for decades.

Aggressive green parties arose in many countries and harvested the naiveté and narcissistic ambition for attention of large numbers of people championing antipollution causes that in the abstract no reasonable person could oppose. They were allied or infested with the old left and skulked forward, ideological wolves in paradisiacal lambs’ clothing. Germany has no petroleum resources but had built an extensive and absolutely safe nuclear power capacity, but the aggressive German Green Party came snorting out of the Teutonic forests like a Wagnerian monster and bullied Angela Merkel’s government into abandoning the entire nuclear program. Germany in effect became an energy vassal state of Russia through the Nord Stream pipeline, the completion of which the Biden administration facilitated in withdrawing the Trump administration’s intervention to prevent the pipeline’s completion. With the Ukraine war, it is again suspended. Thus the second most important country in the Western Alliance is almost detached from it, all by the apparently innocuous and meliorist actions of Germany’s peppiest environmentalists, and with the ultimate complicity of the current U.S. president.

Even the outgoing prime minister, Boris Johnson, an authentic if idiosyncratic Tory, has bought into the global warming danger, though to those who know him, it is hard to imagine that he believes a word of it. The objective evidence is that to the extent that it can be measured at all, the overall temperature of the world has risen by one degree centigrade in the last hundred years and will rise by another centigrade degree this century. This is not in itself harmful, and it is not outside normal historic climate cycles. There has been no rise in the in the world’s temperature in this century, and the whole task of gauging the world’s temperature including thermometers at various depths of the oceans and all over the surface of the earth is quite imprecise.

In the future, historians will look with astonishment on the speed and zeal with which the post-Cold War world burdened itself with bone-cracking expenses and severe social costs radically altering its economy to avoid a rise in the world’s temperature that we have no reason to believe will occur on anything like the scale the alarmists have been wailing about. And if it does occur in any measure, we still have no scientifically serious evidence that it is anthropogenically caused. It will be seen as something like the alleged seventeenth-century Dutch tulip hysteria, which had people paying the equivalent of $25,000 for a single potted bulb.

Rarely in the Cold War did capitalism’s Marxist enemies do anything that earned the respect one gives a gallant or brilliant adversary. In these initiatives, our enemies leapt from the jaws of bitter and total defeat, hijacked the careening gadfly of esoteric conservationism, and transformed it surreptitiously into a well-camouflaged battering ram that has inflicted immense costs and opprobrium on the corporate world and great sadness and inconvenience on the laboring proletariat on whose behalf the Marxist Left has supposedly been crusading these past 150 years.

A companion unpleasant surprise to the ingenuity and resilience of the international Far Left in its environmental assault upon capitalism has been the venality, cowardice, and invertebrate tactical stupidity of much of the corporate world. We find oil companies putting up slick television advertising praising and purporting to be part of the heroic march to a fossil fuel-free world. As corporations fell over themselves agreeing that the U.S. state of Georgia’s eminently sensible voting reform statute, passed in the wake of the disputed presidential election of 2020, was a reversion to Jim Crow if not slavery itself and demanded that Georgia be punished by moving the Major League Baseball All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver (where restrictions to ensure verifiable voting are more severe than in Georgia), the leadership of corporate America was largely revealed, once again, at least in public policy terms, as contemptibly enfeebled and morally bankrupt...

Next week: an excerpt from "Socialism and the Great Reset" by Michael Anton.

The War on Cis-Normality

I avoided finding out what the term "cisgendered" meant for a long time, because I knew that it would annoy me. Unfortunately, I did find out eventually, and I wasn't wrong -- it did annoy me. If you're luckier than I am and you've managed to not know, well, you might want to stop reading here. But if you want to find out, there's no better definition than that of the late Norm Macdonald -- cisgendered is when, for instance, "You're born as a man, and you identify yourself as a man." Which is to say, Macdonald continued, "it's a way of marginalizing a normal person."

This is, of course, a pretty good encapsulation of modern ideological leftism. The leftist instinct is always to mock and belittle the interests and concerns of ordinary people, which they believe pale in comparison to their abstract utopian ideas. Worried about inflation making your food more expensive or the supply chain making it impossible to get your kids' new shoes? According to the White House, you're a fat cat suffering from "high class problems." Concerned about the increasingly racialized and sexualized content of your kids' education? Most likely you're a racist, and a domestic terrorist to boot. And on and on.

I thought of all of this while reading about Greta Thunberg's recent speech at the U.N.'s Youth4Climate summit. As Dan McTeague explains, in the course of her speech, Thunberg decided to crack a few jokes at the expense of those who aren't 100 percent on board with her proposed program of ending civilization as we know it:

Thunberg’s address.... mocked the concerns of older generations – concerns like whether people will have jobs. In a parody of a politician speaking on climate change Greta said, “When I say climate change what do you think of? I think of jobs.” And the room of youths laugh. Haha. Putting job security over climate change policies? What backward idiots those adults are, according to Greta.

McTeague goes on:

If Greta’s address at the Youth4Climate summit made one thing clear it is that no climate policy will ever be good enough for her. Indeed, it seems that Thunberg will only be content if all fossil fuel usage is immediately and completely eradicated. The climate kids want climate justice.

For Thunberg and her ilk, worrying about your job, about providing for your family, these are bourgeois concerns. And, like her French and Russian antecedents, she sees that the bourgeoisie -- normal people -- really do stand in the way of her utopia. Hopefully neither she nor her disciples ever acquire the kind of power that Citizen Robespierre or Comrade Stalin did to try to, you might say, overrule their concerns.

How Covid-19 Killed Academic Tenure

Academic tenure has long been controversial and imperfect—and now, in one fell swoop, it is dead, killed by progressives under the guise of Covid-19 safety. The manner of its killing tells us much about progressives’ respect for individual rights.

Defenders of tenure for university professors once claimed that it offered necessary protection against the combined forces of corporate funding and political correctness, a multi-headed hydra which if unchecked would prevent academics from conducting honest research into topics of their choosing.

Others argued that tenure was mainly harmful, making it costly to dismiss university faculty members who collected large salaries without fulfilling their teaching and research duties. In practice, as organizations such as the National Association of Scholars and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education warned, tenure repeatedly showed itself incapable of protecting those who needed it most. Dissident intellectuals often found themselves on the wrong side of disciplinary committees, dismissed from their positions for alleged harassment and/or vaguely defined “misconduct.” Many of these academics’ troubles began because they were ideological outliers in a punitively progressivist milieu.

Guilty!

Until now, however, there was at least a semblance of due process. Though they were often targeted unfairly, persecuted academics were at least notified well in advance of proceedings against them; allowed to attempt a fact-based self-defense; examined by a committee convened for the specific purpose of hearing the evidence; given the opportunity to hire a lawyer or enlist the assistance of their faculty association/union; and if terminated given written notice of their particular transgressions. Inadequate and biased as it often was, some formal fact-finding procedure was observed.

In the time of Covid, however, mass firings are in preparation at universities across North America without even a pretense of case-by-case consideration or rational weighing of evidence—tenure be damned.

The mere evocation of “safety” is now enough to authorize firings without investigation on grounds not covered by any faculty member’s Collective Agreement and notably without public protest from faculty associations, bodies which once existed solely to protect the working conditions and rights of faculty members. Outside of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, this is an unprecedented situation so far being greeted with stunning silence from the professoriate.

Under the new Covid dispensation, professors are simply notified that, if they do not produce proof of vaccination by a certain (arbitrarily chosen) date, a disciplinary process will be commenced with an end-point of termination.

The University of Waterloo, a large research university in southern Ontario, is one among many universities that began sending out the equivalent of pink slips on the Friday before Canadian Thanksgiving (Oct. 11 this year), informing what it called “non-compliant” employees that the deadline to provide proof of vaccination is October 17, 2021.

The letter, sent to me by a University of Waterloo employee, states that unless “alternative work options” (left conveniently vague) can be found, employees who do not provide the required proof of vaccination will be placed on a 42-day “unpaid suspension,” presumably in order to think over the prospect of the total wreckage of a once-secure and remunerative career. Then, “[i]f the individual remains non-compliant 14 days before the end of the 42-day suspension, they will receive a letter indicating that their pay and benefits will cease as at the end of the suspension.” No appeal procedure is mentioned.

Following up on this dire statement, the letter informs employees that “the vaccination form is quick and easy to complete”—as if mere cumbersome documentation were hindering compliance—and that “personal information will be kept confidential in compliance with statutory privacy requirements and will only be shared with individuals for the purpose of program administration.” It’s presumably a relief to know that, having been coerced to take an experimental medication in order to keep one’s position, the violation takes place under cover of confidentiality. The obvious fact that hundreds of people on campus will easily guess why “non-compliant” employees are being suspended—thus violating the privacy promised—is not acknowledged.

No science-based rationale is offered for the extraordinary statement of compulsion. The extremely low infection-fatality rate for Covid-19, particularly for healthy individuals under 65 (the super-majority of those studying and teaching on campus) is never mentioned. The now well-documented failure of vaccines to protect against infection and transmission is also left unmentioned; alas, the evidence reveals that vaccinated individuals are just as likely as the unvaccinated to transmit Covid-19, even in conditions where all are vaccinated. The unseemly haste reeks of a political desire to purge the non-conforming.

No attempt is made in the letter to explain why provisions in the Universal Declaration on Bio-Ethics and Human Rights are flagrantly violated by the measure. The Universal Declaration makes clear that medical treatments must never be coerced, must always be informed and entirely voluntary (not carried out under conditions of duress) and that the good of society or of science must never take precedence over the individual human right to choose.

No provisions are made in the letter for individuals with natural immunity, which scientific evidence shows to be at least as effective as, and likely far more effective than, vaccination. The humane alternative of enabling the unvaccinated to carry on their duties off campus—as had been done for well over a year before the advent of the vaccines—is gestured toward, but not in any way guaranteed.

Accommodation is offered only “for unique cases where individuals cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons or protected human rights grounds,” but it is not made clear how such accommodation decisions will be made or why university administrators are qualified to make them. One of the main grounds for a human rights accommodation would be an exemption for a sincerely-held religious belief, and it is far from self-evident that a group of secular leftists—with many avowed Marxists—can discern or appreciate the sincerity of any such beliefs.

No velvet glove needed any more.

In a final paragraph full of unintended irony, the letter informs the non-compliant that “If you are struggling with your mental health during these changing times, reach out for support […],” providing the names of various university agencies, none of which, of course, will provide any actual support in resisting the vaccination mandate, and none of which, given the demonizing tenor of communications regarding non-compliance, will likely even be able to express genuine empathy for an employee about to be terminated. If the termination of your employment leads to suicidal despair or health-damaging stress, you’re on your own.

This is the new university: fully collectivist and tyrannically indifferent to individual rights of conscience or choice. Over the past 30 years, the progressivists infiltrated and took over the academy. Their ruthless determination, always under cover of benign rhetoric about "inclusion" and "safety," should always have been evident; now its vaunting brutality is unmistakable.

Our Black Marxist Murder Spree

Only rarely do present circumstances so align themselves as to reveal the future with clarity. We are in such a period right now, and to those willing to open their eyes to it, the future staring back at them is bleak indeed.

I worked as a police officer in Los Angeles for more than 30 years, and people of my generation may recall with dread the crime wave of the late ‘80s and early '90s, when Los Angeles saw an average of three times the number of murders as have occurred in recent years. In 1992, the Los Angeles Police Department handled 1,092 homicides. Compare this figure with 2020’s total of 349 and you get an idea of how much safer the city became in 28 years, thanks largely to the efforts of the men and women of the LAPD. But even the 349 figure was a significant increase from 2019, when 253 people were killed in L.A. Will we soon look on 2020 as the good old days? All available evidence says yes.

I’ve been writing about the coming crime wave since 2014, when Michael Brown’s death in a Ferguson, Mo., police shooting gave rise to the widely circulated lie – still believed in some quarters – that he had been killed while trying to surrender. Brown’s death and the rioting the followed led to what Heather Mac Donald described as the Ferguson Effect, in which police officers shrink from proactive crime-fighting measures for fear of becoming involved in a controversial incident. The Ferguson Effect lives on, more destructively than ever.

Ferguson, Mo., 2014.

This fact is welcomed, even celebrated, by the Black Lives Matter organization and their myriad acolytes. BLM, formed in 2013 after the death of Trayvon Martin, became the leading voice in opposition to what had been the traditional responses to crime, i.e., arrests, prosecutions, and incarceration.

BLM’s influence has only grown in the years since, most especially after last year’s death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, and today it is the puppet master of the far left. The news media, academia, and the entertainment industry unquestioningly, even gleefully parrot its calumnies, most prominent among which is the claim that the American criminal justice system is irredeemably racist and must be torn out root and branch in order to achieve some utopian vision of “social justice.”

It is important to note that the appending of any modifier to the word “justice” inverts, even perverts, its very meaning, and in no arena has actual justice been more perverted than in “social justice,” which at it core subordinates the interests of crime victims and the law-abiding to those of the criminals who prey upon them, revealing the enduring truth in the Old Testament wisdom that those who are kind to the cruel will be cruel to the kind. How else to explain the unhinged reaction among American elites to the April 21 police shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio?

Police body camera footage clearly showed Bryant, 16, was armed with a knife and in the very act of trying to stab a girl at the time she was shot. Of course we are saddened by the sight of someone being killed, most especially someone so young, but how depraved must one be to sympathize more with Bryant than with the girl she was attacking? Yet we heard voices from across the American left, from politicians to media figures to professional athletes, denouncing the officer and calling for his arrest. Had that officer not arrived and acted when and as he did, the city of Columbus and the country overall most likely would have recorded another instance of a young black person dying at the hands of another, the type of incident that happens thousands of times every year yet results in no protests, no outrage, and no indignant commentary in the newspapers or on television.

The silence among our elites to this carnage is deafening. Last year brought an alarming rise in homicides across the country, with killings up by an average of 37 percent in America’s 57 largest cities. Some cities were hit harder than others: in New York City the increase was 39 percent, in Chicago it was 55 percent, and in Milwaukee murders nearly doubled over the previous year. All told, there were 7,101 homicides in these 57 cities, the great majority of whose victims were blacks or Latinos who fell to killers of their own ethnicity.

The Washington Post reports 1,021 people in the United States were shot and killed by the police in 2020, and even if one accepts the phantasmagoric proposition that not a single one of these killings was justified, one is still left with problems so different in scale as to question the motives of those who focus on the smaller number and not the larger.

And yet that is what Black Lives Matter and their cult of followers do. Certainly an injustice was done to George Floyd, whose death has been addressed to the extent the legal system is able, but is his death more lamentable than those of the 81 other people murdered in Minneapolis last year? What of the 261 victims in St. Louis, the 437 in New York, and the 769 in Chicago? Were their lives so meanly regarded as to be insignificant to those who lecture their fellow citizens on the value of black lives?

They will not answer this question, and they will impugn the motives of anyone who dares put it forward, for to question them is obstruct the revolution they make no secret of advocating. BLM is merely the latest iteration of Marxist radicals to win the adulation of our political, academic, and media elites, the latest band of misfits to wield “Critical Theory” as a hammer and chisel (hammer and sickle?) against the pillars of Western civilization, among the foundational of which is the rule of law.

Chronicle of deaths foretold.

In his 2017 book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, my friend Michael Walsh tells of the grim harvest brought by these purveyors of Critical Theory. “Look about your daily lives here in early twenty-first-century America and Western Europe,” he writes, “and see the shabbiness, hear the coarseness of speech and dialogue, witness the lowered standards not only of personal behavior but also of cultural norms, savor the shrunken horizons of the future.”

As it has in the past, America will one day repudiate the visions espoused by the neo-Marxists, but until it does, how many murdered corpses will litter our shrunken horizons?

'Climate Change' Marxists, Come Out of the Closet

Putting aside the fact that the entire “climate change” discussion is based on a long-disproven set of data abandoned even by its author, that it is physically impossible to create the electrical systems and capacity demanded by the Warming hypothesis, and that no uncorrupted global temperature data set supports “climate change,” we are left with the fact that a great many policymakers and voters in the West believe in it.

Policymakers must be expected by voters to get serious, or to acknowledge that the entire argument is, as the U.N. has stated, just a process to destroy capitalism, the most anti-poverty, wealth-creation system ever created.

That "climate change" policies will annihilate the middle class that is responsible for all progress since the Industrial Revolution is a given – and an unacknowledged goal of Progressives. The refusal to acknowledge this by the establishment is childish. If they believe in Marxism, why hide it? Tell the people the goal, why it is a beneficial goal and how to achieve it. Tell them the results of previous attempts at implementing Marxism, as well, of course.

Look who's back.

Can a policy framework be created to address function rather than form, what is seen by those who insist the Warming Emperor has clothes, but who disagree on the cut (oil or gas), the color (drilling or fracking) and the pattern (fossil, hydro or nuclear) of those clothes to meet their commitments?

The signatories to the Paris Accords believe emissions must be reduced in order to “save the planet,” and that they will meet the goals to which they agreed. Why, otherwise, would they have signed up? Are the signatories incentivized to make the changes for which they volunteered? Given their dismal performance to-date, the answer is, “No.”

People complain about President Trump having pulled-out of the Paris Accords, but remain silent about the view of the U.N.: “America Is Already Cutting So Much Carbon It Doesn’t Need The Paris Climate Accord.” As shown below, we already are reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) output faster than any signatory country. Being a Paris signatory seems primary, meeting one’s goal, secondary. These priorities are backward.

Is the point being a signatory… or reducing greenhouse gases?

In a flight of fancy in which we pretend that, yes, we can correct the global climate that has been set awry by too many American SUVs, why not formulate a policy with teeth to deal with GHG? Can we use positive and negative incentives to alter behavior in the way demanded by those who believe they are more powerful than the sun?

Yes, we can.

Let us suppose a nation “A” that has met and exceeded its GHG commitment to the Paris Accords, and a nation “B” that has not. What incentives can be used to resolve the discrepancy between commitment and performance?

A suggestion: If nation “A” has met 105% of commitment, and nation “B,” 88%, a metric to create a “Paris Transfer Payment,” or “PTP,” could be created. Nation “B” would pay annually to nation “A” a PTP on its failure of 12%, and another 5% to reward the success of “A,” for a total of 17% of this base metric, thus incentivizing both nations to continue to work toward GHG reduction. (Alternately, the 12% “stick” could be paid to a fund to help the non-industrialized world progress without despoiling the environment, but the 5% “carrot” still paid to the above-goal country.)

A sensible metric could be a percentage of GDP of each country. If we were to use, for example, 0.01% of GDP of the smaller economy as this metric, the PTP could be calculated with complete transparency. In this instance, country “B” (88% of commitment; GDP $500B), would pay a PTP to country “A” (105% of commitment; GDP $1,500B) of 17 times 0.01% of its GDP, or $850M, as a “stick,” and “A” would gain that PTP as a “carrot” for acting in the best interests of the global community of nations. This example is illustrated in Table 1.

Table One.

Those nations not having set a target for GHG reduction would have the applicable percent calculated by averaging their per-capita GHG output against the goals of nations of similar size. China and India (without which any global GHG reduction is chimerical), would be compared to countries above 200 million population (United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil), and have their GHG reduction goals set for them, and the PTP applied by the WTO via tariffs.

A nation’s choice of hydro, fracking, nuclear, oil, gas, coal, solar, wind would be theirs. The results are what matters. Form will not reduce the ocean’s rise; function will.

European nations keep telling America how backward we are; obviously they can use IP we – not they – invented, and manufacturing and distribution and energy exploitation systems we – not they – created to achieve the results we – not they – have achieved.

(This same calculation can be used in reverse to warm the planet if, as most uncorrupted temperature data sets now show, the globe is cooling. A “snowball earth” is far more of an existential threat than more food and a slightly-warmer climate.)

Who turned off the "warming"?

If meeting the Paris commitment is the goal of the signatories, how could this type of transparent, goal-oriented arrangement be rejected? A payment transfer system from those not meeting their commitments to the community of nations, to those who are is a win-win for the future and for countries taking the "climate change" issue seriously.

If nations agree to implement a carrot-and-stick PTP, we will know they are serious. If they are serious, and if they are correct in their anti-sun worship, we all will be better off. If they don’t agree to an agreement with teeth, we will know they are not serious, and can be ignored.