The Reality Behind Europe’s Rift With America

 person 2: Apparently, according to a Wall Street Journal article, they had a secret meeting in which they vented their frustration about [President Donald] Trump. They called it “Therapy Night.” But what the article said was they were discussing how to manage a breakup with the United States.

Do you think that—

person 1 Promises, promises.

Winc: I know. I was going to say, do you think that the Europeans would really break with the United States?

person 1: No, I know they won’t. Why do I know that? Because I’m not stupid. Spain was—I think his name is Gonzalez. Isn’t he the prime minister of Spain?

Winc: I think it’s [Pedro] Sanchez.

person 1: Yep. Sorry. He was bragging that he was not going to spend over 2%, and he was bragging to his own people after he let in 500,000 illegal people from Africa who were going to be able to go all through Europe, given they were given green cards from the Spanish government.

But he was also bragging that he denied U.S. access to a NATO joint base, that he wouldn’t let them use airspace, and that kind of influenced everybody wanting to tag along.

“Well, I’m [Emmanuel] Macron. We’ll do the same. We won’t let them.”

And then Germany said, “Well, you know, I’ve already called it. It’s not our war. We’ll just kind of keep our bases away.”

And then [Giorgia] Meloni said, “Oh, my defense minister said you can’t land much more in Sicily. It’s now closed.”

And then [Keir] Starmer said, “You can’t go to Diego Garcia unless it’s defensive.”

So, then they all kind of backed off. That’s what they do. So, when Trump said, “Well, Spain is the worst offender. We’re just not going to trade, and we don’t have any ill feeling with them. We’re not going to trade with them.”

What was it? Twenty-four hours later, he approached Trump and said, “Please, please.”

And then, when Trump told [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, “Yeah, [Joe] Biden wouldn’t let you hit anything. That’s kind of dangerous going in there. It’s a provocation, but go ahead. Go hit stuff like you’re doing with your drones.”

Biden never did that. That confused the Europeans.

“Hey, wait a minute. Trump is a neo-isolationist and he wants Russia to win, but he’s letting Zelenskyy do things that Biden didn’t do, that we cautioned him not to do? This is strange. But on the other hand, he killed the Wagner Group, and he raised sanctions on the oligarchs, and he gave them Javelin offensive weapons when [Barack] Obama didn’t. He got out of an asymmetrical missile deal, blah, blah, blah.”

So, they talk a great game, but they have 500 million people in Europe—450 million, I think, are NATO and combined EU countries.

And they have a social welfare program that has been overrun by 30 or 40 million people from Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere, and it’s not sustainable.

And it was paid for in the past because they were very, very smart economists, socialists though they were. But when you shut down the North Sea oil fields, you don’t let the French companies tap natural gas, and the Germans shut down their nuclear plants, and electricity costs in Britain or Germany are anywhere from twice to four times as high as here, you can’t afford it.

You cannot afford it. And then, when all this is predicated on a $200 billion trade surplus with us, it doesn’t work.

So, Trump’s message wasn’t to punish Europe. It was always, “Please, please be a partner because we have another common enemy, and it’s called China. And we have other countries just like you that depend on us, like South Korea and the Philippines and Taiwan and Japan and Australia.

“And we can’t give good attention when we’ve got 75,000 troops tied down here on the border with [Vladimir] Putin, and we’ve got all this aircraft, and you’ll still be on the nuclear deterrent. But if you can just go up to 5%, maybe we can protect you with 30,000 or 40,000.”

But instead it was crazy.

It was like, “Eighty-three years after World War II, you dare take troops out of our country? You can’t do that, America. You’re 7,000 miles away. You’re right next to us. You can’t do that. You have no business doing that. And of course, we don’t want you to use our bases when we feel that it might be inconvenient, and you can’t use our airspace. But how dare you say that 82 years after World War II you’re going to take out any troops?”

That’s Donald Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump. It doesn’t work anymore, Euros. We’re tired of it.

And if you look at all the criticism that Trump and [Vice President JD] Vance have leveled, and you wade through all the rhetoric and the therapy, it’s basically:

“We want Europe to be a partner. It’s a Western tradition. It birthed our culture. We honor it. We like Europe. We want more Europeans to come to America, and we want to nudge them, force them, cajole them, plead with them to spend money to protect themselves so Vladimir Putin is deterred and he doesn’t attack them and then divert all of our resources over to Europe while China, in conjunction with Putin, stages a simultaneous attack on Taiwan.

“But that’s what will happen if you don’t defend yourself.”

And they had a secret little meeting saying:

“Oh my gosh, we can’t have trade surpluses with the United States anymore? It’s going to be reciprocal? Zero? Oh, he’s telling us that China is taking advantage of us? He’s saying that his open borders, no more illegal immigration, and getting rid of DEI is a good formula for us? We should drill like he did? Oh my gosh, that’s an insult. We can’t take that.”

Well, what are you going to do about it? Nothing.

Nothing.

Get your Eurofighter. Get the Eurofighter and every—

Oh, I’m sorry, you canceled the Eurofighter.

Get Leopard tanks and every—

Oh, I’m sorry, you only had nine that worked at the beginning of the Ukraine war.

Let’s get your huge drone fleet.

Oh, I’m sorry, it’s Ukraine’s huge drone fleet, not yours.

So, they have a lot of problems.

I like Europe. I like the Europeans. I like the Germans, the French, the British. Americans like them all. But they will never like us if they’re dependent on us.

In other words, if they think it’s their birthright to be subsidized in their defense, subsidized in their trade, subsidized in their rhetoric, and that allows them to pursue their utopian socialist dreams.

I mean, basically the country is run by [Zohran] Mamdanis and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortezs and [Darializa Avila] Chevaliers. That’s who runs Europe—socialists.

While Europe Reminisces About the Good Old Days, It’s Being Destroyed From Within

person 1: I’m gonna bring up this Wall Street Journal, first of two major articles, are the United States and Europe divorcing or separating? And if so, is it a good thing or is it a bad thing?

So, this is written by a trio of people and it’s titled “There Is No Going Back: The Inside Story of Europe’s Rupture with the USA.”

I’ve written too many things here, but in its 250th year, has America, protector of Europe, now become a threat? In the months to come—this is after certain things happened, you know, when Donald Trump came into office again with Greenland and all sorts of things going on at that point—in the months to come, the January crisis meeting would be remembered by Europe’s most powerful figures as the moment that countries bound together by blood and a sense of shared destiny since the aftermath of World War II began to explore separate paths. Nobody has filed divorce papers, and important players on both sides are working hard to keep a loveless marriage going.

Untangling the ties between Europe and the U.S. would be a massive undertaking. Then there’s stuff in here about Canada. But, interesting article, Victor. Is there a divorce happening? And is it a good thing? And is it a hostile divorce?

person 2: Well, the subtext of all that is there’s about two or three realities that explain this estrangement.

No. 1, for 500 years, Europe was the fountainhead of Western civilization. It was since the Greeks, but I’m talking about the period, oh, 1500 into the 20th century. Major wars were fought there, Thirty Years’ War, Seven Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, the revolutions. That was where things happened. The capital, the financial capital of the world was London, and the cultural capital and scientific capital of the world was Paris.

And by the late 19th century, with the unification of Germany, the industrial capital of the world for a while, it had overtaken Britain. And then this United States comes up, and it has a completely different way of doing things. Its constitution is different, its attitude is different, and it welcomes mostly from Europe what Europeans would call the rejects.

These were the poor people, the people who had no land, the people who had no titles, and they expected us to fail. But it was actually a Darwinian process where the most bold, the most rugged, the most adventurous, the most gambling type of people from the English-speaking parts of Europe, from Germany, from Ireland, you name it, Italy, they all came over here, and from that period, from the Civil War to World War I, they just took over the world.

And in World War II, we were the powerhouse. We had a GDP by 1944 that was larger than Germany, Italy, Japan, Soviet Union, Britain, all put together. We had a fleet that was bigger than all the warships in the world. And that changed everything for them. They had committed suicide twice in 1914 to 1918, and they repeated it in ’39.

And in both cases, they got angry because we saved them, and they made a convincing argument. They said, “But we lost more people, and we fought from 1914 to April of 1917. You wouldn’t help us. And we fought from ’39 all the way to ’42, and you weren’t there.”

And then we said, “It wasn’t our fight, but when we did get in, we were the difference why you won.”

So, there was that tension.

And in the Cold War, they’d said, “Yes, you have two oceans. You’re 7,000 miles away from the Soviet Union, so when they’re gonna overrun Europe, we can’t defend ourselves.” So, we said, “OK, we’ll keep troops there.” At one point, 375,000. So, they have lost that prestige and that power, but they still want to act as if they have it.

So, Britain keeps talking about, “Well, we’re gonna do our part for the opening up the Strait [of Hormuz].” Well, what are you gonna do? Send the U.S. the HMS Dragon, one ship? You had one frigate that could sail or steam, and you couldn’t even get it to Cyprus for three weeks. And what’s the combined carrier force of the entire 450 million people in the EU?

It’s about three carriers, and most of them are in repair. It’s not 10 or 11 fleet carriers with whole fleet auxiliary ships like the United States Navy, which is now having to rebuild, get even bigger.

So, there’s such an imbalance in economy. The EU was supposed to overtake us in 20 years, we were told in 2001.

It’s 10 trillion smaller as far as GDP, 20 trillion to 31. Things didn’t work out. And then they adopted this utopian, arrogant, narcissistic agenda of green energy, shut down coal, shut down nuclear, shut down natural gas. They ruined the German economy, which anchored all of Europe. They opened their borders.

The single biggest villain, she’s gonna be the Europe’s version of Anthony Fauci, was Angela Merkel. She destroyed Europe. She said, yes, we can. We’re gonna open the borders. She demonized the Eastern Europeans who said we’re not gonna do it. And they flooded Europe with honest, unassimilated illegal aliens, 16% of the population in countries like Germany.

And then, in addition to that, they went socialist, and in addition to that, they went pacifist. And then, the world caught up with them, and they thought, “Well, we can buy natural gas from Russia, and we’ll tame Russia with Nord Stream pipelines.” No, you won’t. You’ll make yourself dependent upon an ex-communist thuggery, thuggocracy.

Well, we don’t need to be armed because the dull-witted, brutal United States will always come over when we philosophers tell it where to go. Go to Chad, help us in the Falklands, go to the Balkans, go to Libya, bring all those big jets and all that firepower, and then we’ll kind of sit in the back and have our cappuccino and tell you where to bomb and do all this.

And Trump came along and said, “Can’t afford it anymore. I’m sorry. What have you done?” So, all they had to do, it was not very hard to do.

They did have a $20 trillion GDP. All they had to do was about 10 years ago just make 2%. 2% of their GDP of each country in defense. And when Trump came in office in 2017, I think they only had six of the 31 NATO countries were doing it.

No. 2, all they had to do was keep quiet when the United States was acting unilaterally in their interest. I’m not saying and just keep quiet and just don’t even join the U.S. if you don’t want to but let them use your airspace and joint bases that we paid for in many cases.

So, Spain, France, U.K., Germany, Italy, all you had to do was just say, “This was a United States mission. We support the idea that we want a nuclear-free Iran, and we support Donald Trump trying, finally dealing with the problem. And to the extent that we are obligated to a NATO power, we, in our own way, and we’re not gonna disclose how, we will aid our [ally].”

That’s all I had to say one time.

They couldn’t do that. All they did was, “We are not going to let them use Diego Garcia.”

“Well, we’re gonna top that. We’re not gonna let you use our big base in Spain.”

“Well, we can top that. You can’t land in Sicily like you’d like to.”

“Well, we can top that. I’m Macron, France. Well, you can’t fly over our airspace.”

And, “This isn’t our war,” in Germany. Remember [Chancellor Friedrich] Merz? So, they went out of their way to antagonize Trump and the United States. And then, that’s where the situation is. It’s a country that used to rule the waves of the world, of continents. The Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French, the British, they ran the world.

And now it is being overrun by illegal aliens. It’s being destroyed by socialism and green ideology, and it’s getting weaker and weaker and weaker. And it’s getting more arrogant and more arrogant and more arrogant about this lost power and influence they used to enjoy.

And they know the medicine. They know the medicine. They have 450 million people. They’re very bright people. In some ways, they’re better educated than we are. And all they have to do is make about eight reforms, and they could get back on their feet and be a full equal partner with the United States, and they won’t do it.

The medicine is worse than the disease for them. 

Footage of Ro Khanna's 'Violent' West Bank Detention Released. Notice Anything Wrong?

 Last Wednesday, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) decided to take a page from Bowe Bergdahl’s book and get himself captured. It wasn’t the Taliban in this case, but Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Khanna went down a road that was closed to civilians, apparently with a camera crew and a New York Times reporter. It was the perfect setup for a political stunt, though one poorly executed that quickly fell apart like Swiss cheese. 

He refused to meet with survivors of the October 7 attacks or attend a briefing on Israel’s border situation. He wanted to be captured in what he called some violent event. The footage was released. This ‘hostage’ video was as calm as Hindu cows are. The intent was clear: gin up anti-Israel hatred at home and declare a 2028 presidential bid. It’s a circus:


🚨 Ro Khanna’s team has released the footage of their “violent detainment” pic.twitter.com/gGEwWuZEAU— DSA Watch (@DSA_Watch) July 13, 2026


In this video released by a man who was with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), there is no violence or detention that can be seen as he has claimed. https://t.co/5xK3b0fseP— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) July 13, 2026

“It’s an extremely irrelevant event… The congressman is a lying liar.”@HavivRettigGur says Ro Khanna grossly exaggerated what happened during his West Bank visit to advance his own political agenda back home. pic.twitter.com/jIDkXZTVQE— The Free Press (@TheFP) July 13, 2026

So you had a camera crew with you the whole time huh? https://t.co/QMgJrI4xqO— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) July 14, 2026

Even New Jersey Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer torched Khanna:


Let’s be honest, this was a publicity stunt. Channels exist to protect elected officials, and Khanna intentionally entered a restricted, unstable area without coordinating to provoke a response.

What’s appalling is that Ro ignored requests to meet 10/7 survivors and hostages, or…— Rep Josh Gottheimer (@RepJoshG) July 13, 2026


Also, Israeli Ambassador Michael Leiter mentioned on Face the Nation Sunday that Khanna didn’t really coordinate with Israeli officials about his visit, for obvious reasons: he wanted to put on a show:

WATCH: Margaret Brennan gets COOKED by Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Leiter over Ro Khanna's incursion in the West Bank

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, before I let you go, there were two high-profile incidents I want to quickly touch on here. One, a CNN crew attacked in the… pic.twitter.com/WUgo3w8zzT— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) July 12, 2026

    MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, before I let you go, there were two high-profile incidents I want to quickly touch on here. One, a CNN crew attacked in the West Bank by what they say were four settlers. There was also an incident with Ro Khanna, the congressman from California, who said he was his vehicles he was in were stopped by Israeli settlers, and then when the IDF showed up, they were on the side of the settlers, not him. He said "[i]t's not a good idea to detain longshot presidential candidates". It was a warning to your government. Do you think your government needs to apologize to both him and those CNN journalists?

    MICHAEL LEITER: Any violence is to be condemned. No excuses, no explanations. Okay. So if CNN crew was attacked, that needs to be condemned, and I'm doing so right now. And we need to do a better job.

    BRENNAN: You are condemning it [unint]--

    LEITER: --If- if- if it was- actually took place as they've reported it, absolutely condemning it. We need to rein in violence on all sides. Now, in terms of Ro Khanna, we reached out to him when we heard he was going to Israel, the Israeli embassy here in Washington. As all congressmen do, they coordinate their trip with the Israeli government. We suggested he visit with- with survivors of the October 7th massacre. That he visit the borders, so he understands the, the issues that we have in our borders and so on. He ignored that and he decided to coordinate his trip not with Israel, but with Palestinian activists and with J Street, which is a anti-government, anti-Israeli government advocacy group here in Washington. So you know he coordinated--

    BRENNAN: It's a Jewish lobby group…

    LEITER: Well, it's--

    BRENNAN: …that is supportive of a different path for Israel.

    LEITER: Yeah, yeah. I- I play tennis once a year. That doesn't make me a tennis player. The fact that they call themselves a Jewish organization is- is irrelevant. They're- they're- an advocacy group against the government of Israel. That has to be clear.

    BRENNAN: The current government, Netanyahu government.

    LEITER: Yes. Yes--

    BRENNAN: That's what you mean, the government you work for.

    LEITER: And Congressman Khanna, there has been no secret about his antipathy towards the government of Israel as well. So perhaps if he would have coordinated the trip- and then you know to have this incident on Wednesday and wait to release it on Saturday, maybe this had more something to do with his support of- of Graham Platner beforehand and the difficulties he had with that, and trying to shift the focus to something else. Perhaps I'm asking a question.

    BRENNAN: Well, we did hear from Congressman Khanna, who said that there was an alert to the embassy on his behalf, and that they asked for the news…

    LEITER: --There was not, there was not--

    BRENNAN: …to be held until he had left the country, as well.

    LEITER: There was a question. There was not an alert. There was a question about visas. That's all. But when we requested that he coordinate the trip with us, he rejected that by basically staying silent. So that's unfortunate. This whole incident is unfortunate. And if- if somebody, it's kind of interesting that somebody wants to declare a presidential run by running off to Israel? Not strange?

    BRENNAN: Well, we're going to have to leave it there, sir. There's so much more to talk about with you, but I'm out of time. Thank you for coming.

Absolutely cooked. 

On Monday, Khanna was pressed for details about his detention. It was not pretty. 

Why the American Republic Survived for 250 Years

 

person 2: So , I guess the first question maybe we could discuss is how have we made it in 250 years, this republic, a rare thing historically that a republic could go for so long?

person 1: Well, the secondary reasons are—we had not the primary, but I’ll get over very quickly review the secondary. We had a huge North American continent.

It was richly endowed with natural resources, farmland, etc. We didn’t fragment into European warring states, but we were the size of Europe, but we were one complete nation thanks to people like James K. Polk and [Thomas] Jefferson and other people who saw that we needed to have the whole continent or end up like Europe.

Number two, we had two oceans, so we were protected from what was going on in Asia and Europe. But that is secondary to the Constitution. So we took the Spartan, Cretan and then Roman idea of mixed constitution—a legislative, executive and judicial branch. But unlike some of the mixed constitutions, we put a number of checks and balances in.

So the whole point of it was to slow down radical changes through the president’s power to veto legislation, the Congress’s power to impeach him, the president’s power to pick judicial appointments, the Congress not to approve them, and the judiciary to strike down laws as unconstitutional. And they can impeach—the legislative body can impeach judges. The president cannot appoint people he thinks would be bad judges. There’s—it’s all intricate checks and balances.

Number two is we were the only country to really have a Bill of Rights, so there were certain issues in other countries that have never been up for—I mean, they’re nuances, and everybody reinterprets them, but they’re not up for discussion as far as eliminating them.

The Bill of Rights—the ability not to have your house searched and seized, the right to bear arms, the right not to have to testify against yourself, the right of habeas corpus—that’s all documented.

And then with the amendment system, we have further rights. The other things are more intangible, but that revolution was never a French Revolution.

person 2: One moment, though, just to clarify for the audience, that the Bill of Rights for the United States is the first 10 amendments, and then they flow after that.

person 1: There are 17 other ones that followed, and they’re very hard to pass. You need a two-thirds vote of Congress, and then you need three-quarters of the state legislatures. So unless it’s something like the 18-year-old vote or women’s suffrage or repealing prohibition, it’s very hard to do—to get an amendment.

person 2: And you were saying that it’s not like the French Revolution either.

person 1: No, it’s not like the French Revolution because it was limited. In other words, the colonists were not objecting to British free market capitalism. They were not objecting to the language. They were not objecting to the role of religion.

They were not rejecting—claiming that they wanted the poor to take over from the rich. They were not angry at both the British colonialists and the large landowners like Washington and Jefferson.

So it was basically a one-dimensional political revolution, and it said we want autonomy and to be self-governed.

We do not want to be a colony of Britain and have no say in taxation or representation, et cetera, et cetera. That was a much easier revolution.

But what I’m saying is it kept intact the strengths of the British system, the British Enlightenment. And so when we became a nation, there was Christianity, there was Anglicanism—there was all these religions.

They were all tolerated. Nobody had gone out in the countryside and lynched nuns or beheaded priests as had happened in the French Revolution. There was no year zero. There was no renaming the months, the days. There was no god called Ratio that everybody bowed down to.

There was nothing like—I mean, Thomas Paine was the most radical of the founders, but he was nothing like the Robespierre brothers.

He wasn’t even like [Georges] Danton. He was a much more reasonable person in comparison. So that was a big step—that we kept the traditions of the Anglosphere, except political.

And then there were cultural things that were embedded from the beginning. One of them was that there was no peasantry.

There was no serfdom. Those were European ideas. So Jefferson especially said the country was based on the nuclear family and the independent agrarian—the farm—and that person was self-sustained.

He was autonomous, self-supporting. He could feed his own family from his farm. He could control his own destiny, and these were the ideal citizens then to be entrusted with voting and making their own laws and directing their own affairs.

So it was a republic of virtue, and that stayed through—that in the United States, nobody—I’m not Sir Hanson. You’re not Lady Sami. And we have no class distinctions formally. We have a fluidity of classes. Wealthy people have children that are bad seeds, or they don’t want money, and they get poor. Poor people have children, and they become millionaires.

So there is fluidity, but we are not based on class. We’re not based on race. We champion the middle class, but we don’t institutionalize it. Nobody asks in America, “Where was your father born? How many acres does your grandfather have? What was your parents’ education?” Maybe the East Coast or West Coast elites do, but that’s not American tradition.

And then finally, we’re a nation of emulation, not envy. So we’re not like the British. I’ve said that before in this broadcast. It was the old maxim that if you go to Britain and somebody sees a Bentley, they want to kick it in.

And they come to America, they want to know how much a Cadillac—or maybe now it would be a BMW or something—costs and how you finance it.

And I can remember, when I was a young person, we had no money. We lived in a 1,100-square-foot home. My mom stayed home with us. My dad was a high school teacher initially, and then a junior college teacher, but he was a coach, and he tried to farm on the side.

But we would get in cars when we went to Disneyland or we went up to San Francisco, and my mom insisted we drive through wealthy neighborhoods and not say, “Oh my gosh, look at that. Look at how much money the Gettys have.”

She would say, “Oh wow, I love those cypress trees, the way they’ve done that. That’s a good idea. When we get home, let’s plant some. Or then she would say, I love those colors—that gray and white. I like that match.”

Or she’d say, “Wow, some of those Victorians are tacky. They’re overdone with that gingerbread cut. I don’t want that.” In other words, that was a very common thing.

That’s why the Wall Street Journal has one of its most popular features, Mansions USA, because people love to go in there and look at these beautiful lakes and tennis courts and gables. But then they look at the price—Montecito, 30 million.

It’s not that they can ever buy it, but they get little ideas. So say that they’re in Fresno with a 1,500- or 1,600-square-foot tract house, and then they go there and they look at these places and see how they park their car there. Maybe I can make a little version of it.

So in Europe, I don’t think that would be the reaction. That would be the aristocracy, and you’d say that we should burn those houses down.

And I’m kind of worried because that is sort of the attitude of Los Angeles to Pacific Palisades—not that this was a great asset to have these beautiful homes, but, “Oh, they lost their home. Too bad. Let’s not rebuild them.”

When we get to be an envious country, we won’t succeed.

And by the way, when we used to nation-build, or any country used to nation-build, they never said to Iraq or Afghanistan or South Korea or Vietnam or Europe itself after World War II, “We’ve got a really good system for you. It’s called a Senate, a lower house, a Supreme Court, a president and a Bill of Rights, and here’s how you do it with a two-party system.”

No. They have a parliamentary system because it’s much easier.

Ours is a very complicated system. It’s very hard to reproduce. It’s designed on one principle: people are no blank good.

And I think many of the founders said if we were angels, we wouldn’t need a constitution. But it assumes that unlike the French Revolution, Rousseau—you know, we’re all born into chains—that we’re not.

We’re all born evil, bad, fallen—the Christian notion—and we need to be redeemed. We need to curb our appetites and our excesses, and one of the things we have to curb is the desire to power and to tyrannize others.

So we’re going to make a constitution where you cannot have a dictator. And they can say all they want about Trump. The closest we’ve ever had was FDR. He had four terms, but he did things that are just unthinkable.

You know, go to The New York Times and say, “If you write another bad op-ed about me, I’m going to pass antitrust legislation or inheritance taxes that’ll ruin your family.”

So it’s a wonderful system, but it’s very intricate and complex, and it requires an educated populace, and we don’t seem to have that to the degree sufficient anymore.

So I’m kind of worried. That’s how we survived for 250 years.

Breaks Down the Decline of Race Relations in America

 

Recently, we’ve had a lot of discussion about racial relations, and the consensus from left to right seems constant and uniform that they’re getting much worse. 

There were two or three iconic events this last week that emphasized that pessimism. One was the Juneteenth celebration in Chicago, which commemorated the official end of slavery in the 1860s and is now our newest national holiday. 

It ended up with 39 people wounded, seven dead, semiautomatic gunfire. It was almost like a war zone. The mayor of Chicago, Mayor [Brandon] Johnson, did not comment on what was the cause of this or the pathologies that would lead people to slaughter. This was entirely 100% Black-on-Black crime, but he was talking about illiberality and discrimination against trans people when his city is under siege. 

At the same time, or prior to that, was the Karmelo Anthony murder, where Karmelo Anthony, a young Black teenager at a track meet, ventured over to the opposing side by intent, carrying a knife in his backpack, went into a tent where the entire group there was from the opposite team that he was playing, and then said he would not leave when asked 10, 12 times, and finally said, “Somebody,” he said, “push me out or try it and you’ll find out.” 

And a young man by the name of [Austin] Metcalf slightly touched him, and he stabbed him in the heart, killed him, ran away, and the result was the Black community has championed Karmelo Anthony. Not all of the Black community, but a sizable portion, and it’s gotten to the point where they believe that he was justified because the so-called white community doesn’t understand Black pride, and you don’t interfere with the space, et cetera. 

In other words, ignoring all the details that he deliberately ventured over to cause a confrontation which could have been settled peacefully if he just left. But the reaction was what was disturbing. 

And then in addition to that, there was the Caitlin Clark incident. She is, remember, the superstar of the Women’s National Basketball Association, and she came out of a fantastic college career. 

She’s very tall, kind of thin, not frail, but not muscular, but she’s a wonderful outside shooter. And somebody with that height and the ability, who’s quick, and the ability to pass has revolutionized the Women’s Basketball Association. And the result is she is gaining, not just for herself and her team, but for the entire league, enormous increases in revenue. 

Some people believe that she’s responsible for 25% in increased revenues. So all the players are getting raises. They have increased stature. They have bigger audiences. They have bigger ad opportunities. They fly not passenger class commercial anymore. It’s been a win-win. 

And yet systematically Black players, women have been trying to hurt her. 

And the most recent incident was that we had a Black player from the opposite team knock her down, and then when she tried to get up, another player may have tried to stop her, but one player took her fist and hit her in the neck or pressed her in the neck, and there were also a knee involved, and it was pretty clear that there was a deliberate attempt. 

And this is one of, according to a lot of news accounts, 10 or 12 incidents where there has been flagrant fouls issued because the players are trying to hurt her. 

So what was the commentary? The commentary was, well, the teams in the WNBA are mostly Black. They’re mostly, to be candid, lesbian, and Caitlin Clark is white and straight, and therefore, this supposedly racist audience has flocked to the WNBA to cheer her on in a divisive standard. 

There’s no evidence that that is true, but the reaction from the Black women and the majority of them, probably not so, but from a sizable minority of them, is to hurt her and damage her even though they know that that is not in their interest. 

I’m gonna talk about that a little bit later, but when you add up all of these incidents, you get the impression that something has gone wrong. 

And usually, the standard exegesis is given the traditions of slavery that have been gone for 160-plus years, Jim Crow in the South, and then this new term systematic racism, white privilege, etc., etc., then there’s a justified rage. 

But that rage and what I just outlined were way in the distant past. 

We’re talking about the present and how the Black community can flourish like every other community, given it has shocking crime statistics, shocking divorce statistics, shocking illegitimacy, single-family parenthood, etc. 

And how did we get here? How did we get to this mess? 

I think we were making pretty good progress in the ’80s and ’90s with a whole new generation of Black politicians, Black athletes, Black actors, Black everybody. 

And there was a growing sense that race was incidental, not essential to who we are. It was essential in a multiracial society. After all, we don’t want to end up like India or Indonesia or Brazil, where we’re racially obsessed, or we have caste, or we have classes. It doesn’t work in a democratic society. 

But Barack Obama came in and said he was going to heal all of us in 2009. He did just the opposite. 

Almost immediately with the Louis Henry Gates incident, the beer summit, he emphasized race. He said things that were not true, that the police systematically are more likely to shoot young Black men who are unarmed versus white men, given the incidence of who is arrested. 

Statistics do not bear that out. 

Pretty soon, affirmative action, which was a black/white solution of some 60 years to past discrimination, morphed into diversity, equity, inclusion. 

And under Obama, he had this vision that anybody who was not white… Of course, he was half white, but he never identified as white. 

He always identified sort of like the one-drop rule of the old Confederacy. If you had one drop of non-white blood, then you were non-white. 

But he identified as non-white, but he said that 30% of the country, that was the basis of DEI, these would be immigrants from India, immigrants from Mexico, people from China, Japan, had a sort of updated Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition, and they had legitimate grievances for past sins against the 70 or 65% white population. 

So in all of these cases, the universities and the political system and the bureaucracies institutionalized that anger and that binary. 

It comes out of Marxist ideology that there is no middle, no middle class. There are oppressed, oppressors, victimized, victimizers. 

But this was new because they substituted race for class. 

This is not sustainable because we are now in the seventh decade of the civil rights movement. 

We’ve had about $25 trillion invested in Great Society programs. We’ve had set-asides. We’ve had affirmative action. We’ve had theme houses, separate graduations, separate dorms, separate safe spaces. 

We’ve had a whole litany, and what’s happening now is there is an identifiable weariness, fatigue with all of this. 

It’s not just from so-called white people. It’s  not from racists. It’s from the Black middle class, and you can see the Black middle class is getting very angry because they are more prone to encounter Black youth, and they are the victims disproportionately of Black crime compared to other minority groups. 

And there’s conservatives in the Black community who are now looking at what Tom Sowell, Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury have warned us for years, and that is during the worst moments of segregation, the Black community had created paradigms of success, nuclear families, fathers present in the household, strict discipline for the children, like all other communities. 

And that was sort of wiped out or at least crippled during the Great Society where the government replaced the parents. 

So where are we now? 

If Black politicians of the left continue to not look at what’s causing these shootouts or this racism from Black people, then they’re only gonna further alienate the majority of Black people who want truth and they want change within the Black community. But more importantly, they’re gonna alienate 70% of the population who does not agree with them. 

Hispanics, Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, white Americans do not believe that society forces Black people to shoot each other or to commit crimes at higher rates than other communities. 

That solution has to come from the Black community, and it’s not any longer a result of historic transgressions or injustice more than a century and a half ago. 

That’s not the answer. The answer is here and now, and it’s a self-help, self-discipline within the Black community, and calls for such reform are coming from the Black community.