The American Left, to our joy, is dashing itself to pieces on the rocks of its own nonsense.

But the biggest strongest menace will continue to advance from the Left. From the farthest Left. From Communist China. 

In addition to its inimical trade practices – which President Trump is actively combating – China uses multifarious means against us.

The johnny-come-lately to the Democratic line-up of presidential candidates, former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg, shills for China. We wouldn’t be surprised to learn that his billions have been augmented by generous emoluments from the Chinese communist regime.

China indoctrinates Americans through our own educational institutions and undermines our scientific and technological superiority with our own inventions and discoveries.

Professor Walter Williams writes at Townhall:

Charles Lieber, former chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard, was arrested earlier this year on accusations that he made a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement about work he did for a program run by the Chinese government that seeks to lure American talent to China. He was paid $50,000 a month and up to $158,000 in living expenses for his work, which involved cultivating young teachers and students, according to court documents. According to the Department of Justice, Lieber helped China “cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security“.

It’s not just Harvard professors. Newly found court records reveal that Emory University neuroscientist Li Xiao-Jiang was fired in late 2019 after being charged with lying about his own ties to China. Li was part of the same Chinese program as Lieber. A jury found a University of California, Los Angeles, professor guilty of exporting stolen U.S. military technology to China. Newsweek reported that he was convicted June 26 on 18 federal charges. Meanwhile, NBC reported that federal prosecutors say that University of Texas professor Bo Mao attempted to steal U.S. technology by using his position as a professor to obtain access to protected circuitry and then handing it over to the Chinese telecommunications giant, Huawei.

China is steadily building up its military power.

And even that is not all or the worst of it. China harms the world without firing a single missile. Because it is a badly governed country, it can do nothing effective about epidemics of disease that break out among its own vast population and spread over every inhabited continent – as is happening now with the coronavirus.

Communist government – cruel and oppressive though it is – is not even efficient government. Marxism, collectivism, socialism, communism – call it what you will – is too often spoken of, written about, thought of as ensuring security. At the price of freedom, yes. Given that choice, many, it is said, would choose security over freedom.

Nothing could be plainer now than that Communism does not guarantee security.

To the contrary. All it guarantees is enslavement, poverty, sorrow, sickness and mass death.

I have been asked: If elite colleges do not create lower admission standards, how are they going to have enough black students? My response is: That’s their problem. Black people cannot afford to have our youngsters turned into failures in order to support the agendas of diversity race hustlers and to lessen the guilt of white liberals.

So writes Professor Walter Williams in an article against “affirmative action” – ie. discrimination on grounds of race – here.

Walter Williams

Derryck Green of Prager University makes it plain on which side of the political divide the racists are – and it isn’t the conservative side.

(Hat-tip for the video to our Facebook commenter Robert Nabors)

620,000 soldiers died in the American “Civil War”. For what did they die?

This is from Front Page, by Professor Walter Williams:

We call the war of 1861 the Civil War. But is that right? A civil war is a struggle between two or more entities trying to take over the central government. Confederate President Jefferson Davis no more sought to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington sought to take over London in 1776. Both wars, those of 1776 and 1861, were wars of independence. Such a recognition does not require one to sanction the horrors of slavery.

We might ask, How much of the war was about slavery?

Was President Abraham Lincoln really for outlawing slavery? Let’s look at his words.

In an 1858 letter, Lincoln said, “I have declared a thousand times, and now repeat that, in my opinion neither the General Government, nor any other power outside of the slave states, can constitutionally or rightfully interfere with slaves or slavery where it already exists.”

In a Springfield, Illinois, speech, he explained: “My declarations upon this subject of Negro slavery may be misrepresented but cannot be misunderstood. I have said that I do not understand the Declaration (of Independence) to mean that all men were created equal in all respects.”

Debating Sen. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes nor of qualifying them to hold office nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

What about Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation? Here are his words: “I view the matter (of slaves’ emancipation) as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion.” He also wrote: “I will also concede that emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition.” When Lincoln first drafted the proclamation, war was going badly for the Union.

London and Paris were considering recognizing the Confederacy and assisting it in its war against the Union.

The Emancipation Proclamation was not a universal declaration. It specifically detailed where slaves were to be freed: only in those states “in rebellion against the United States.” Slaves remained slaves in states not in rebellion — such as Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri. The hypocrisy of the Emancipation Proclamation came in for heavy criticism. Lincoln’s own secretary of state, William Seward, sarcastically said, “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

Lincoln did articulate a view of secession that would have been heartily endorsed by the Confederacy:

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. … Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.

Lincoln expressed that view in an 1848 speech in the U.S. House of Representatives, supporting the war with Mexico and the secession of Texas.

So why was the American “Civil War” fought at all, if Lincoln was not against slavery in principle, and was for the right of states to secede from the Union?

Why didn’t Lincoln share the same feelings about Southern secession? Following the money might help with an answer. Throughout most of our nation’s history, the only sources of federal revenue were excise taxes and tariffs. During the 1850s, tariffs amounted to 90 percent of federal revenue. Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859. What “responsible” politician would let that much revenue go?

The institution of marriage throughout the civilized (ie Western) world is on a steep decline from which there is probably no recovery.

“The custom of one man and one woman remaining faithful to each other all through their lives is called monotony.” So goes the schoolboy howler. And we suspect the boy was on to something.

Google “marriage in decline” and you’ll find a multitude of theories as to why fewer people are getting married these days than say fifty years ago. (None of them includes that kid’s sharp diagnosis.)

But is the decline a good or a bad thing for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Here is an article by Professor Walter Williams, who thinks the destruction of the black family has sad consequences. He blames the welfare state, not only for that but for the spoiling of black culture generally.

Criticism of the welfare state is music to our ears, so we quote him at length.

He writes:

People in the media and academia are mostly leftists hellbent on growing government and controlling our lives. Black people, their politicians and civil rights organizations have become unwitting accomplices. The leftist pretense of concern for the well-being of black people confers upon them an aura of moral superiority and, as such, gives more credibility to their calls for increasing government control over our lives.

Ordinary black people have been sold on the importance of electing blacks to high public office. After centuries of black people having been barred from high elected office, no decent American can have anything against their wider participation in our political system. For several decades, blacks have held significant political power, in the form of being mayors and dominant forces on city councils in major cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, Memphis, Tenn., Atlanta, Baltimore, New Orleans, Oakland, Calif., Newark, N.J., and Cincinnati. In these cities, blacks have held administrative offices such as school superintendent, school principal and chief of police. Plus, there’s the precedent-setting fact of there being 44 black members of Congress and a black president.

What has this political power meant for the significant socio-economic problems faced by a large segment of the black community? Clearly, it has done little or nothing for academic achievement; the number of black students scoring proficient is far below the national average. It is a disgrace — and ought to be a source of shame — to know that the average white seventh- or eighth-grader can run circles around the average black 12th-grader in most academic subjects. The political and education establishment tells us that the solution lies in higher budgets, but the fact of business is that some of the worst public school districts have the highest spending per student. Washington, D.C., for example, spends more than $29,000 per student and scores at nearly the bottom in academic achievement.

Each year, roughly 7,000 — and as high as 9,000 — blacks are murdered.

Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Contrast this with the fact that black fatalities during the Korean War (3,075), Vietnam War (7,243) and wars since 1980 (about 8,200) total about 18,500. Young black males have a greater chance of reaching maturity on the battlefields than on the streets of Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, Newark and other cities. Black political power and massive city budgets have done absolutely nothing to ameliorate this problem of black insecurity.

Most of the problems faced by the black community have their roots in a black culture that differs significantly from the black culture of yesteryear. Today only 35 percent of black children are raised in two-parent households, but as far back as 1880, in Philadelphia, 75 percent of black children were raised in two-parent households — and it was as high as 85 percent in other places. Even during slavery, in which marriage was forbidden, most black children were raised with two biological parents.

The black family managed to survive several centuries of slavery and generations of the harshest racism and Jim Crow, to ultimately become destroyed by the welfare state. The black family has fallen victim to the vision fostered by some intellectuals that, in the words of a sociology professor in the 1960s, “it has yet to be shown that the absence of a father was directly responsible for any of the supposed deficiencies of broken homes.” The real issue to these intellectuals “is not the lack of male presence but the lack of male income.” That suggests that fathers can be replaced by a welfare check. The weakened black family gives rise to problems such has high crime, predation and other forms of anti-social behavior.

The cultural problems that affect many black people are challenging and not pleasant to talk about, but incorrectly attributing those problems to racism and racial discrimination, a need for more political power, and a need for greater public spending condemns millions of blacks to the degradation and despair of the welfare state.