I know, I know. I’ve been absent lately. To those of you who look forward to my insights, I apologize.

I’ve got a couple of big projects going—life, work, life/work, work/life, etc.—and they’ve been my primary focus. Stay tuned! You never know when a big announcement might be coming.

In the meantime, I haven’t been completely out of the picture—at least in part because I do field requests for input when they arrive.

A couple of weeks ago I returned to my AI roots and my innovation economics roots to “out” myself as pro-Data Centers.

It’s not that I can’t see the potential problems (I can). It’s that I don’t think we have a choice. The rapidly accelerating tech-driven arms race is unavoidable. We can play to win, or we can lose.

My preference is that we win. And the best way to maximize our prospects for winning is to leverage our strengths. Our greatest competitve advantage? Innovation.

Of perhaps greater interest, in part because it contains more details, in part because you get to hear me speak, and in far larger part because it’s in conversation with the inestimable Ron Coleman, (many have tried to estimate him; all have failed), I discuss some of the many ways that higher education is collapsing.

Enjoy! And rest assured, I remain alive and well—if somewhat less prolific than I have been during other periods.

Share

Share American Restoration by Bruce D. Abramson

Subscribe now

Like this essay? Subscribe & visit me at: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening? The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024).

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please visit me at www.BruceDAbramson.com.

You may have noticed that the pace of my posts has slowed considerably. Two factors have driven my output lower. The first is that sometimes, other aspects of life take precedence. The second is that I’ve been working on a number of big-think pieces on topics as varied as faith, AI, world wars and world order.

One of those big thoughts has reached fruition after about a year’s worth of effort. Following up on my book on America’s spiritual crisis, I began to delve pretty deeply into the meaning of the American separation of church and state. Not from a legal perspective mind you, but from a philosophical one.

It’s important to understand the distinction. The philosophical perspective, described in the Declaration of Independence, the correspondence of our founding fathers, and an understanding of the historical moment of the late 18^th century, is what we tried to do, and why. The legal perspective—driven largely by Supreme Court opinions—is what we’ve done.

Personally, I think that what we tried to do was radical, brilliant, and essential to the survival of Western civilization. What we’ve done, primarily thanks to a series of mid-twentieth century SCOTUS opinions, is disappointing. If we don’t find ways to realign our church/state jurisprudence with the philosophical goals of our founders, we’re cooked.

Share

To pull my thoughts together, I dove deeply into the history of Western Civilization. I start with the position that the single most important decision any society can make is where to draw the line between the rule of God and the rule of man. That’s more important than republic vs. monarchy, authoritarianism vs. representative government, or capitalism vs. communism.

From a philosophical perspective, the American system drew a brilliant and novel line. God started the process, bestowing upon us individual rights and the moral code needed to put them into effect. A government instituted by man justifies its existence by securing those rights. Needless to say, that’s not the America we live in today. Thanks, SCOTUS!

With great effort, I was able to push my analysis under 5K words. That’s a tough article to place. Fortunately for me, the folks at Providence Magazine liked the piece enough to publish it in whole.

Please check out the essay. And while you’re there, peruse some of the other articles. Providence is a fine magazine publishing many interesting and thought-provoking analyses.

Share

Share American Restoration by Bruce D. Abramson

Subscribe now

Like this essay? Subscribe & visit me at: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening? The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024).

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please visit me at www.BruceDAbramson.com.

Subscribe now

A quick thought:

When it comes to American politics, I belong to a faction—not a Party.

My faction believes that America was founded as the embodiment of some wonderful, noble ideals. Those ideals may be divine—endowed by a Creator, and all—but the institutions we need to implement and secure them are designed by men.

All man-made institutions developed in the service of ideals are aspirational. They embody flaws, they’re subject to the whims of those working inside them, and they are corruptible.

My faction recognizes that, in America today, all of our major institutions have been corrupted. That doesn’t mean that everyone inside every institution, or every program or office of every institution, is corrupt. In fact, we recognize that there are marvelous people and pockets of excellence everywhere. But those people and pockets are rarely either in charge or influential. They’re the exceptions trying to stem the tide.

My faction believes that we need to reform every major American institution. We have no interest in destroying any of them. We need them, but we need them to function appropriately. Shattered institutions tend to create vacuums that very rarely represent improvements on the status quo ante.

I don’t know what to call my faction, and quite frankly I don’t much care. I first called it an American Restorationist movement. It works, but it’s hardly caught on. President Trump coined the slogan “Make America Great Again,” but it assumed a life of its own. Today, “MAGA Republican” can mean anything, including whatever Trump wants it to mean, whatever anyone claiming the mantle advocates, or whatever our enemies want to heap onto the label. So that’s probably not it.

My faction is defined by the goals it seeks—the restoration of functioning institutions that implement and secure America’s founding ideals—rather than by any specific label. And yes, we have significant internal debates about both priorities and execution.

Fortunately, President Trump and many of the senior people in his Administration belong to my faction. So good things are happening.

Share

But not enough good things are happening. Why? Because we are very, very far from representing an American majority. That’s hardly unusual. America rarely if ever boasts majority factions. To govern—to win elections—requires a coalition.

Today, my faction sits entirely within the GOP. Today’s Democrats are actively hostile to our goals. The Democratic Party has ejected, sidelined, or disempowered every member of their own coalition that would like to see a restorationist reform. There were plenty of such Democrats in the 1990s. There are none of any consequence today.

Plenty of other factions within the GOP aren’t really on board with the restorationist idea either. Some of those factions talk a good game, then undermine progress. Others are at least as offensive as many of the factions within the Democratic coalition.

That can make politics frustrating. Why support a GOP that shows so little interest in delivering even the simplest, most popular, restorationist legislation—like the SAVE America Act?

The answer is simple: The alternative is far worse.

If you’re part of my faction, you’ve got three tasks before you:

1. Work to grow our faction, both in size and in influence within the GOP;

2. Work to keep our coalition in power, because we’re far better off as an insufficiently powerful voice in the majority than we would be in the minority;

3. Do whatever you can to support restorationist institutional reform across the full range of public, private, and nonprofit institutions we need to secure our divine ideals.

Consider the above a PSA.

Share

Subscribe now

Share American Restoration by Bruce D. Abramson

Like this essay? Subscribe & visit me at: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening? The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024).

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please visit me at www.BruceDAbramson.com.

Subscribe now

It’s been a while, and to those of you who enjoy my analysis, I apologize. Sometimes life and a day job can slow you down.

Nevertheless, with all the new stories flowing out of the Middle East, I thought that the time was ripe for me to re-up my explainer. I’ve spent decades pushing the idea that the reason the region seems to make so little sense to so many people—particularly the so-called experts—is that they’ve framed their analysis inappropriately.

It’s been almost a decade since I pulled together my most comprehensive treatment in An American Vision for the Middle East. The folks who saw it recognized it for what it was—but as is all-too-often the case, few saw it.

Seemed like a good time to try again. So here it is, in simple terms:

- If you want to understand East Asia, focus on the Han Chinese, not the Laotians.

- If you want to understand Central Europe, focus on Germans, not Slovenians.

- If you want to understand the Middle East, focus on Sunni Arabs, not Jews.

That’s the key. The region’s largest (by far) ethnic group dominates events. The rest of the story involves the reactions of the region’s (many) other players.

Share

What’s the key story of the Sunni Arabs? An effort to recreate the imperial structure that governed the Levant for most of 2700 years. All claim to want it in theory.

In practice, you’ve got a split between those working towards it actively—The Muslim Brotherhood, its various offshoots, and its state sponsors (varied over time, currently Qatar & Turkey)—and those who claim to want it, but really prefer the perqs of their status as royals or elites in a modern state.

The Abraham Accords—in 2020—provided the first mechanism for Sunni Arabs eager to move away from that imperial quest explicitly. Leadership of the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco are really quite content to stick with their existing states and push for internal development and prosperity.

Everything else—including Zionism—is a reaction.

Yet though Zionism gets far more than its fair share of attention, it’s only the second most significant reaction. The most important was the Shiite Uprising pretending to be an Iranian regime. And that one may be about to fall.

So with that in mind, my friends at RealClearWorld were kind enough to bring my analysis forward in two parts.

I’d recommend reading Part I first, then Part II—but knock yourselves out.

Thanks for sticking with me. Enjoy. And if I’ve given you something new that rattles around in your brain and changes the way you see even a small part of the world, I’ve achieved all that I’ve set out to achieve.

Share

Subscribe now

Share American Restoration by Bruce D. Abramson

Like this essay? Subscribe & visit me at: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening? The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024).

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please visit me at www.BruceDAbramson.com.

It Started with the Abolition of the Caliphate

As with so much in the modern world, this story traces back to WWI, when the modern Middle East arose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. At its center, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk established the modern state of Turkey as a Eurocentric post-Islamic state—mirroring the way that France (for example) had become post-Catholic.

In 1924, Ataturk abolished the Caliphate, the preeminent religious authority of Sunni Islam. For the first time since Mohammed, Islam had neither an Empire nor a Caliphate. Without the two governing structures that had defined the entirety of Islamic history, the 10-15% of the global population comprising the ummah had to devise new approaches to its religion, culture, and governance while seeking to make sense of its new reality.

Not surprisingly to anyone of any faith, one contingent of Islamic thought discerned a divine message: The faithful had strayed too far from God’s will. The destruction of their institutions was punishment, warning, and redirection. To restore their glory and to elevate God’s will to its rightful position of dominance, they had to recommit to Islam as it had been (or as they believed it to have been) in Mohammed’s day.

In 1928, Hassan (Sani) al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikwhan) in Egypt in line with this basic belief—and began the modern movement that has become known as Islamism. Though drawing upon (and in some cases subsuming) earlier writers and movements—notably Ibn Taymmiyah (13th c.) and Ibn Wahhab (18^th c.)—today’s Islamism is a post-WWI innovation. The Muslim Brotherhood—an organization that has always availed itself of modern logistics, networking, and franchising—is and always has been its central font. Nearly every other radical, violent, Sunni Islamist organization is an offshoot founded by former Brothers.

Share

Islamism is Muslim Supremacism

The Muslim Brotherhood—and all of Islamism—is virulently supremacist. Not just Islam, but its particular interpretation of Islam, must reign supreme across the globe. Idolators and blasphemers must be killed or converted. Under proper circumstances dhimmis—those who acknowledge God but persist in following corrupted messages—may be allowed to survive as second-class citizens, strictly subservient to Muslims.

Al-Banna was no fool. He knew that he needed a long game. He found allies and inspiration—notably the Nazis—and by the early 1950s helped Nasser’s nationalists overthrow the Egyptian monarchy. The integration of Nazi ideology into Islamism took hold and shaped the movement; the tactical alliance with Pan-Arab nationalism did not.

Nasser soon cracked down on the Brotherhood, jailing many of its leaders and sending others into exile. While in an Egyptian jail—and awaiting his 1965 execution—Sayyid Qutb developed the radical strategy underpinning nearly all subsequent Islamic terror. His writings split the movement. While the Brotherhood’s mainstream leadership rejected it in favor of a long, slow game, it continued to inspire some of the most passionate, creative, younger Brothers—many of whom eventually broke away to form organizations focused on spectacular acts of violence.

Meanwhile, the Brotherhood’s exile from Egypt pushed its leaders to take up residence in Europe. Bankrolled by Saudi Wahhabi money, their strategic patience manifested as infiltration. Brothers dressed in the manner of those around them, studied the professions, and moved their people slowly into positions of influence in educational and professional societies. Pushed out of the Muslim-majority world, the Brothers focused on dominating the new and small communities forming across the West—ensuring that religious leadership taught only their Islamist message. By the end of the twentieth century, they had radicalized the children of the many Muslims who’d escaped to the West in the hopes of building better lives for those children.

As brilliant and as effective as that strategy may have been, not everyone had the necessary patience. The Egyptian-born Yaser Arafat, a former Brother, preferred Qutbist tactics. Allying himself with the Soviet Union, pitching himself as an anticolonial nationalist—in the mold of the Algerian revolution—and focusing his ire on the Jews, he became the world’s leading terrorist of the 1970s. In the 1980s, Osama bin Laden took his war to Afghanistan and emerged to form al Qaeda—along with several other impatient former Brothers. Hamas was founded in 1988 as the Brotherhood’s Gaza chapter. Equally impatient former Brothers founded ISIS and nearly all other Sunni Islamist terror movements.

For decades, the Brotherhood’s slow infiltration and the spectacular terror of its offshoots developed in parallel—often allowing the Brotherhood’s direct affiliates to cast themselves as “moderate.”And that’s pretty much where things stood at the end of the twentieth century.

Share

Western Intelligentsia Denied the Problem

Western “thinkers” paid little attention to such developments. In fact, when it came time to tally the most important developments of the twentieth century, almost none of their lists included the abolition of the Caliphate. Instead, following the fall of the Soviet Union, Western elites declared an end to history, proclaimed the conceit that “we all want the same things,” and decided to bring various terror movements in from the cold. Yaser Arafat was among those who accepted the invitation—or so these Western ideologs needed to believe.

In the Summer of 2000, America was experiencing a philosemitic moment. Sen. Joe Lieberman—a visible, open, observant Jew—received the Democratic nomination to be Vice President. Bill Clinton held a summit at Camp David, where Israeli PM Ehud Barak offered Arafat more than the international community insisted that he’d wanted. The stage was set for a full Arab/Israeli peace.

It never happened. Arafat returned to Ramallah to consider the offer. In September 2000, he gave his answer. Rather than ending hostilities to found a Palestinian State, he launched a terror war. The international community ignored all facts—as Clinton repeatedly emphasized—and blamed Israel.

Why was it so important to blame Israel for the failure? Because any objective reading of the facts would have eviscerated the entire philosophy in which they’d vested their prestige, careers, and claims to expertise. In reality, we don’t all want the same things. Supremacist Islamists seeking conquest, dominance, and martyrdom operate with a value system incompatible with those of America and the West.

Arafat’s terror war meant that one of two things had to be true: Either our foreign policy intelligentsia were self-aggrandizing frauds who had mismanaged the collapse of the Soviet Empire, or all observable evidence was wrong and irrelevant. It’s hardly surprising that they took the second route. Blaming the Jews and promoting antisemitism was far easier—and involved far less cognitive dissonance—than admitting their own devastating failures.

The greater the evidence of their fraud became, the deeper they buried themselves in denial and the faster they ran toward antisemitism. From August 31 to September 8, 2001, the UN convened a major Human Rights summit in Durban, South Africa. Radicals and Islamists took over the agenda, turning it into such an explicitly antisemitic hatefest that Secretary of State Colin Powell pulled American participation.

Durban launched the plan to label Israel—then facing a horrific campaign of suicide bombings—as an apartheid state, best addressed through Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). For good measure—and proving its bona fides as a movement opposed to the West as well as to the Jews—it also elevated reparations for slavery (not all slavery, of course, just one particular instance of slavery) as a centerpiece of international human rights.

Share

When Denial Became Impossible, American Leadership Made things Worse

Three days later—before anyone could truly digest what we’d just witnessed—al Qaeda took the jihad to America. On 9/11, al Qaeda committed the first truly spectacular, completely unambiguous act of Islamist terror on American soil. Bin Laden’s justifying manifesto cited three primary grievances: The American troops that had been based on the Holy Arabian Peninsula since the 1991 Gulf War; the existence of a Jewish State on lands that had been consecrated as Islamic; and something that had happened eighty years earlier that most Americans heard as some sort of garbled joke and thus unworthy of much attention.

President Bush, noting that the U.S. had become a victim of Islamist terror, declared a war on terror, proclaimed himself an authority on the true meaning of Islam, and cast about for “moderate” Muslim leaders who would back him up. His standards were low. He paid scant attention to what such leaders said, did, or believed. He sought temperamentally calm Muslims who looked good in business suits and spoke unaccented English.

Bush thus elevated Muslim Brotherhood fronts like CAIR, ISNA, and MSNA. Truly moderate Muslims—genuinely eager to develop an America-compatible Islam—were pushed to the sidelines. Obama took the matter further, explicitly preferring the authenticity and broad membership of the Brotherhood, elevating its leaders both domestically and abroad. Anti-Islamist Muslim voices were ignored as lacking representativeness within the community. Biden shot this strategy into the stratosphere. Meanwhile, under all three Presidents and their European counterparts, immigration from Muslim countries into the West surged.

Welcome to 2025, in which every major Islamic organization in the Western world is Islamist and linked to the Muslim Brotherhood—some more closely than others. Anti-Islamist Muslims face fewer and fewer choices; for the most part, they can secularize entirely or remain in mosques, schools, and communities that Islamists dominate. And they are now a major presence in nearly every important Western city.

Share

Have We Finally Turned the Corner?

Is it too late to undo the problem without major rounds of violence? I hope not—but I’m far from optimistic.

Last week’s Executive Order extending the terrorist designation to certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters and organizations is an important start. It will enable investigations and disruptions into their funding networks, then spill outwards to generate additional designations. Perhaps it will work with the many Muslim countries that have already banned the Muslim Brotherhood—including the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps it will eventually allow us to confront Qatar and Turkey, the two nominal U.S. allies that serve as the Brotherhood’s primary current sponsors.

For those paying close attention, the Trump Administration has come under fire for omitting any reference to Qatar and Turkey in the Executive Order. While I understand the discomfort, I appreciate the necessity of having done so. The Muslim Brotherhood has exhibited decades of strategic patience burrowing its way into host societies. We will need to match that strategic patience to defeat it—as we did when we defeated the comparably supremacist KKK.

I trust not only President Trump and Secretary Rubio, but our current counterterrorism team—led by Dr. Sebastian Gorka. We’ve got good people in place and what we’ve seen is a good start.

Is it enough? Not by itself. But we’re finally starting to do what we should have done a quarter-century ago. I only pray that we’re not too late.

So there you have it. A quick primer on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist war that’s been waged against us, how we’ve mangled our response, and why I believe we may finally have turned a corner—along with a prayer that we can not only succeed, but do so in a manner that minimizes carnage and collateral damage.

Share

Subscribe now

Share American Restoration by Bruce D. Abramson

Like this essay? Subscribe & visit me at: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening? The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024).

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please visit me at www.BruceDAbramson.com.

Anyone up for an untraditional Thanksgiving column?

Sometimes the best way to promote thankfulness is by reference to what we stand to lose. Why do I feel the need for such a curious focus? Because while we’re all looking in the wrong direction, we’re losing the greatest gift providence has ever bestowed upon a people: A cohesive, free, open American nation.

Today’s column runs about twice as long as usual, but please bear with me. I’m deeply thankful to have been born into this grand American experiment. I’d like us to bequeath it to future generations. Unless we reverse some trends that are becoming increasingly entrenched, I believe that we’re unlikely to do so.

Thanksgiving is the ideal time to reflect on what we were handed and what we’re letting it become.That makes it a fine time for my American Restoration column to make explicit its call for an American Restoration.

We’re Looking in the Wrong Places

American political commentators love to talk about the economy. Economics produces more data and more statistics than any other aspect of contemporary life. It encompasses issues as personal as your experience in the check-out line and as distant as international fights over the future of the global reserve currency. There’s always some indicator pointing towards a rosy future and some indicator flashing warning signs. Exit polls always show concern over some economic issues. James Carville summed it up beautifully in 1992 as “It’s the economy, stupid!” and no one has since argued with his formulation.

Think of it as the total victory of Karl Marx—especially among those who consider themselves our staunchest anti-Communists. After all, it was Marx and Engels who developed the notion of economic determinism. The idea that people will vote for you if their grocery bills are dropping while their 401(k) is rising adopts Marx’s analytic framework—even if it rejects his conclusions.

I reject economic determinism.

That’s not to say that such analyses are wrong or their predictions useless. It’s that they’re insufficient. Once again, with considerable irony, the folks most likely to grasp their insufficiency in today’s world are the Marxists; it’s why so many have moved on to cultural Marxism and identity politics.

Today’s hard left appreciates the power of values, culture, and mythology in ways that the center and right do not.

That’s a huge problem because, while economics shape the contours of day-to-day life and electoral coalitions, economics does not hold societies together. Societal cohesion requires one of two things:

The good glue is a shared culture, value set, and belief system capable of injecting societal welfare into individual decision-making.

The bad glue is overwhelming force and widespread fear that substitute compliance for individual decision-making.

In today’s debates, those pushing radical, new, values and myths are bold and confident. Those defending Biblical morality and the Western canon have been cowed into submission. Far safer to hind behind economic arguments.

Share

The Left Promotes Hate; the Right Counters with Economics

Consider, for example, New York’s recent Mayoral election. The overwhelming majority of the opposition to Zohran Mamdani focused on his economic promises, his identification with the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and his regurgitation of Communist slogans and policies.

Those critiques were all valid. They were also misplaced, doomed to fail, and entirely beside the point. In 2013 and 2017, NYC twice elected Bill DeBlasio, a man who’d taken his honeymoon with the Sandinista. In 2021, amidst a public safety crisis, Outerborough, minority, and working-class voters flocked to the one candidate speaking about public safety; the city’s elite enclaves preferred radicals by wide margins. Adams was the outlier.

So in a city that had already embraced the DSA, the Working Families Party, teachers unions, Bill DeBlasio, AOC, and many others like them, some geniuses thought that “Communist” would be disqualifier? Really?

The left last organized itself around economics with Occupy Wall Street—in 2011. Over the past fifteen years, its focus has shifted to values and culture.

At the intellectual level, it’s promoted things like the 1619 Project and Intersectionality to recast the entire cultural and mythological underpinnings of Western Civilization from positives to negatives.

At the emotional level, it’s cast the notion of American citizenship as selfishness, promoting open borders and human trafficking to make the world’s problems local—while condemning all efforts to fix the consequent problems.

On the streets, it’s promoted hate-filled mob action, from race riots (Ferguson through George Floyd), anarchic thuggery (Antifa), and bald-faced antisemitism (Free Palestine).

Enter Zohran Mamdani, a young man whose rise to the top was powered by hate, not by economics. Mamdani may ally with DeBlasio and AOC, but he is not cut from the same cloth. His entire history was animated by antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Westernism.

Noticing the obvious, however, makes too many decent people uncomfortable. So rather than calling it out, they prefer to note that the government-run grocery stores he advocates have been a proven loser.

The implicit message is that a vile hatemonger with decent economics would be fine. I’m deeply uncomfortable with that message.

Share

Any Force that Shapes the Left will also Shape the Right

For years, conventional wisdom among the center and much of the right has been that leftists suffer from derangement on a wide variety of issues. While they themselves may threaten us, we don’t have to worry about whatever it may be that’s causing their derangement.

Such beliefs violate any competent understanding of sociology and of history. A society riven by forces capable of pushing a large group of people into a broad rejection of rationality and decency must expect those forces to act upon other parts of the population.

Have you ever wondered why Europe produced Hitler and Stalin as the same time? Coincidence? Idiosyncrasies unique to Germany and Russia? Or a collapse of cultural glue that pointed different European sub-communities in subtly different, but equally extreme and toxic, directions?

If you don’t understand that their simultaneity was very far from coincidental, you might want to engage in a bit of introspection.

And so, as if on cue, we see the forces behind leftist derangement acting upon parts of the electorate who claim affiliation with “the right.”

For my money, the clearest articulation arose several months ago, when Tucker Carlson interviewed “historian” Darryl Cooper (a.k.a., MartyrMade). Together, they raised a question more appropriate for a seminar on moral philosophy than a political podcast: How do we know that, during WWII, Churchill was the good guy and Hitler was the bad guy?

It’s actually a deep question. After all, Hitler didn’t think of himself as the bad guy. Neither have any of history’s other villains. Who are we to proclaim Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Khomeini, bin Laden, and so many others as “evil?” What gives us that authority?

I can thing of only two possible answers:

The first one—which I believe personally and which has underpinned the entirety of Western Civilization—is that there is a God-given objective morality, specified in the Bible, against which we can measure actions to differentiate good from evil. Apply those standards, and it becomes clear that Churchill was the good guy and Hitler the bad guy.

The second—which Western thinkers have been rejecting at least since Plato’s Republic—is that might makes right. Under that theory, Churchill was the good guy only because the Allies won. Had the Axis won, Hitler would have been the good guy.

If there’s a third explanation, it eludes me.

Share

America Cannot Survive without the Bible

American society must make a cultural choice: Do we believe in the Bible’s divine objective morality? Or are all concepts of good and evil subjective, and thus up for grabs.

Every major trend in twenty-first century American (and Western) culture has represented an abandonment of objectivity. That’s true not just in the moral realm; it extends to a rejection of objective reality.

It’s objectively true, for example, that mammals come in two flavors: male and female. Is that “oppressive” to humans displeased with the hands they were dealt at birth? Perhaps—but that does nothing to alter objective reality. Yet the cultural trends against objectivity have become so strong that we find ourselves in serious discussions with serious people boasting serious credentials about the obviously binary nature of mammalian physiology.

Or take a man who’s emerged as an “influential” voice in discussions about the Middle East. “Comedian Dave Smith” repeatedly cites having seen photos of dead babies as evidence of Israeli genocide. Were the photos all from Gaza? Is he aware that, in war time, people of all age die? Has he considered whether the folks deploying babies as human shields might be culpable in their deaths? Does he understand the meaning of “genocide” and how it differs from war deaths?

Of course not. But such questions are relevant only in an environment that honors objective reality. If you can work outward from emotion to fabricate facts, then filter them through a wholly subjective ethical code, all things are possible.

The same cultural erosion that has pushed “the left” behind an unreconstructed antisemitic hatemonger, terror supporter, and anti-Westerner like Mamdani are wreaking havoc with the right. Set aside—for a moment—the puerile shock jocks like Nick Fuentes. Tucker Carlson, whose recent work has revealed that our government is hiding extraterrestrials and that he was personally attacked by a demon in his sleep, remains a respected part of the mainstream. Candace Owens—whose most recent conspiracy theory involves being personally targeted by the French PM, using a hit team comprised of the State’s internal police force plus (for undisclosed reasons) at least one Israeli—retains a huge following.

And their fans think the left is crazy!

Those who continue to follow such deranged lunatics because of good work they’ve done in the past differ little from those who trust the New York Times and the Washington Post because of their twentieth century reporting.

We Need an American Restoration

American society is crumbling. The “margins” at both sides are growing. The center is divided. None of our institutions are trustworthy. I’ve been following these trends since at least 2002—and I still feel like I was late to the game.

We’ve got a choice. We can engage in a major overhaul of our educational, cultural, and supporting legal systems to restore the primacy of the Bible, the Classics, and the Western canon, or we can dissolve into a continent of warring factions.

If you consider it “unimaginable” that the North America of the late twenty-first century might resemble the Europe of 1914-45 or the Levant since 1922, you need to broaden your imagination.

In an insight rivaling Carville’s, Andrew Breitbart noted that “politics is downstream of culture.” I agree. But culture is downstream of values.

A free culture lacking shared values is unsustainable.

In the not-too-distant future, we will either restore our founding values to primacy, cease being free, or dissolve into warring factions.

I’m pushing for a restoration.

Enjoy Thanksgiving—while we still have enough of a unified culture to celebrate it.

Subscribe now

Share

Share American Restoration by Bruce D. Abramson

Like this essay? Subscribe & visit me at: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening? The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024).

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please visit me at www.BruceDAbramson.com.

The American nation and the United States government were founded as experiments.

The Declaration of Independence makes it clear. “We,” the people who constitute the American nation, believe that a divine Creator endowed individuals with rights. Governments are instituted, by the people, for the explicit purpose of securing those rights. A government that’s not up to the task—or worse, that works to negate it—is illegitimate, and can be replaced. The first national government thus created, under the Articles of Confederation, failed. We replaced it with the Constitution.

In the late 18^th century, these concepts were radical and untested. We tested them. They worked. They worked so well, in fact, that variants became wildly popular around the globe.

They remain popular—among people and resistance movements. In 2025, however, there is not a single country on the planet governed according to these ideals—including our own. While their erosion has been evident for some time, the events of 2020 removed all doubt. When Covid hit, not a single government—or even a prominent opposition leader—stood for the inalienability of individual rights. Instead, we got a worldwide consensus that “rights” are government dispensations. In case of “emergency,” any and all individual rights may be suspended “for the common good.” Governments reserve for themselves the right to determine when we’ve entered an emergency, how long it lasts, and what constitutes the common good.

Five years later, amidst significant and growing recognition that the suspension of individual rights was misplaced or overextended, not a single world leader, government, or even political party asserts that the entire exercise was illegitimate. Yet if such suspensions might be legitimate under some circumstances, then individual rights are not truly inalienable.

Share

The great American experiment of the late 18^th century was buried in 2020. Resurrection is certainly possible, but if you were hoping for a three-day turnaround, that ship has long since sailed.

Meanwhile, the U.S is joining much of West in a new experiment, just as audacious, and equally lacking in historical precedent. It’s a question never before asked:

Is it possible to sustain a society without a widely shared set of values, mythology, or culture?

Today’s Americans (and Europeans) do not agree about the meanings of key ethical terms. Nor do they agree as to their application—though they like to pretend that they do. We do not agree about the definitions of “good” and “evil,” though we’re all quick to agree that good is good while evil is bad—because (at least since Nietzsche) we can no longer even agree that evil is evil.

Nor do we have a shared culture. Shocking numbers of children raised in 21^st century America do not know the stories of the Bible, the Gospels, the classics—or even the fairy tales. We have fewer and fewer shared references to allegories, fables, parables, metaphors, and morality tales.

Given that we no longer have shared values or cultural referents, the downside of importing those arriving with alien values and cultures evaporates; we can no longer even answer the question, “alien to what?”

And so we find ourselves with a navel-gazing “center” fighting over third-tier policy issues while we plunge headfirst into a societal-level existential crisis. Rather than uniting to preserve (or more accurately, to restore) foundational American values and culture, they scurry to the extremes looking for votes from the uninformed or the degenerate.

Share

Those leaning left made a conscious decision—more than twenty years ago—to welcome communists and Islamists as allies. And why not? They can bring votes, resources, and champions from abroad.

A disturbing number of those leaning right are now engaged in a similar calculus concerning conspiracists and fascists.

The first thing on which all of these radicals can agree is that the Old Testament—the basis of Western values—is degenerate. The second is that the interpretation of those values embodied in America’s founding is corrupt.

They thus seek to eradicate the Jews, redefine Christianity, destroy the American nation, and replace constitutional governance with something more to their liking.

Until “We the people” of the American nation are prepared to stand against them, united in a full-throated defense of Biblical morality and the Christian synthesis of Judaic and Greco-Roman culture that defines “Western Civilization,” we are easy prey for their depredations.

Never before in human history has a society stood for so little. We Americans never defined ourselves around blood and soil. We defined ourselves around a set of ideas and ideals—Biblical morality, individual rights, limited government, exploration, innovation, meritocracy.

Some of us still cling to those ideas, but to suggest that they’re defining features of modern American life is to live in denial. They aren’t.

Time is growing short. We cannot allow this new experiment to succeed. Common values and culture are the glue necessary to bind individuals to a society. In their absence, only overwhelming force can hold the multiplicity of factions together.

We’re heading towards a stark choice:

Hard-core authoritarianism;

Multilateral anarchic civil war; or

Recommitment to Biblical values and Western culture.

I’m a big fan of the third option. But as the years go by, my confidence in its eventual victory dwindles.

America requires a reconnection with its own, unique, Biblically-grounded concept of the divine. I’d like to say that there’s no alternative, but there are indeed many. I just wouldn’t want to live through any of them.

Subscribe now

Share

Share American Restoration by Bruce D. Abramson

Like this essay? Subscribe & visit me at: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening? The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024).

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please visit me at www.BruceDAbramson.com.

Scylla and Charybdis have nothing on Zohran Mamdani and Tucker Carlson.

I was working on a column about Mamdani when Tucker said “hold my beer.” He pushed his burgeoning conspiratorial antisemitism one step further and invited head-groyper Nick Fuentes into the mainstream.

Are we getting an early glimpse of the American political divide of the 2030s?

I hope not. But if we take too long to wake up to the genuine possibility, we may very well find ourselves forced to choose between the Islamist/Communist alliance and the Neo-Nazis.

Fortunately, a third choice remains open. It’s a choice that will make many unhappy, but the logic is inescapable.

The center-left must move toward Trump, and the GOP must find ways to onboard the center-left.

Share

I know. I know. But follow me here:

My aborted Mandami column was driving towards two points. First, unrestricted immigration from poor and largely Muslim countries has indeed replaced NYC’s voters. Second, our educational institutions are radicalizing our kids. That’s the Mamdani coalition: Groups who look at a candidate, see a rabidly antisemitic terror supporter and communist and say “he’s my guy.” It took the left 20+ years to reach this point, but here we are.

The Tucker Carlson story is more interesting. For the past few decades, various “watchdog” organizations—the SPLC, the ADL, Chris Wray’s FBI, Merrick Garland’s Justice Department—have been warning about the rise of white supremacism. Unfortunately, none of those alleged watchdogs had any credibility. If you can’t tell the difference between churches and concerned parents on the one hand, and Klan or Nazi rallies on the other, the hell with you. Aesop taught us long ago that partisan leftists crying “Wolf!” would guarantee that no serious person would address a rising wolf problem.

Young people—the counterparts of Mamdani’s backers—appear to have flocked towards dangerous, conspiratorial hatemongering. For those who understand systems theory, it’s hardly surprising. Keep the algorithm, alter the initial conditions, and voila! Toxic hatred spread broadly. DSA and Groypers are just two flavors of the same basic product. They’re equally conspiratorial, antisemitic, anarchic, and anti-American.

We’ve now reached the point in which once-respectable voices want to mainstream what had long been a fringe white supremacist movement. Tucker Carlson, the leading player in this game, may be the single most dangerous man in America. That serious, important organizations like Turning Point USA and the Heritage Foundation seem either unwilling or unable to take him on—and cast him out—speaks poorly for the future of the American right.

Share American Restoration by Bruce D. Abramson

I’ve seen this game before—back when I considered myself a part of the center-left, a good Clinton Democrat, living in Washington, DC, deeply engaged in discussions about the party’s post-9/11 future. What I saw was repulsive. Folks in leadership positions—hardly radicals themselves—ran the political calculus and abandoned all moral claims.

A political party that cannot stand on principle is nothing more than a power grab. For at least the past twenty years, the Democratic Party has sought power for power’s sake. Its leaders made a conscious and explicit choice to mainstream and empower radicals, reasoning that they could “control” them. That lasted a few years. Next came the power-sharing, in which the transactional old-guard held prominent positions while the radicals shaped the agenda. Now the radicals have come of age.

Don’t believe me? Just ask Andrew Cuomo.

Center-left pushback on this strategy—at any point—has been minimal. Most of us who tried realized that we’d lost and cast our lots elsewhere.

Now something similar is happening on the right. I can state two things about what I’ve seen to date: First, pushback from the right is orders of magnitude greater than anything I ever saw on the left. Second, it’s still not enough.

Share

Worse, the political logic is there. If the Groyper army Tucker is working so hard to mainstream means the difference between electoral success and defeat, it’s not hard to predict which side of this debate will win.

That’s the path toward the 2030s political choice that all decent people would like to avoid.

I’m thus directing this plea to every reader eager to preserve the American future.

The Democratic Party has lost its soul and its sense; it must go down in flames before it can recover either one. The Republican Party needs your help before it does the same.

If you already consider yourself part of the right, now is the time to speak up. Join the fight. Push to have whichever organizations you know disown this rising hate movement. Eliminate Carlson’s capability to serve as gatekeeper to the mainstream. Do it now!

If you consider yourself part of the left, it’s time to look in the mirror. Only you can overcome the political logic necessary to combat the haters. You are the potential difference between a winning coalition capable of keeping the Groypers at bay and a coalition that recognizes them as the only alternative to the Islamist/Communist alliance.

Your wolf-crying watchdogs failed you and wronged you. They’ve spent years insisting that Donald Trump is your worst nightmare. Nonsense. At his very worst, he’s a guy who rubs you the wrong way with policy preferences you consider misguided.

In reality, Trump is the center, the last hope for holding this great country together. If you don’t join the coalition to keep conspiratorial antisemitism out of the mainstream right, you help guarantee its inclusion.

We need you—and at least some of us will push to ensure that you get something in return for your support.

In closing—and wearing my other hat—we Jews wish for nothing more than to avoid being the center of the story. It’s not a wish we see fulfilled very often.

The soul of America is at stake. The litmus test is conspiratorial antisemitism. We’ve already lost the left. President Trump, his Justice Department, and large parts of his Administration stand strongly with us.

We need you to ensure that we don’t lose what we’ve got on the right.

America cannot survive two radicalized, hateful parties.

Subscribe now

Share

Share American Restoration by Bruce D. Abramson

Like this essay? Subscribe & visit me at: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening? The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024).

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please visit me at www.BruceDAbramson.com.

Quick note today to announce a major article I published this week. Rethinking Research appears in the Fall 2025 issue of National Affairs. It’s substantive, which means that it’s long, but it’s still only half of what I had to say on the topic. My original draft ran 10K words with about 50 footnotes. I had to cut it in half and drop the notes to get it published.

So what’s in this article? I tie together a number of issues I’ve discussed over the years (and in many of my books), including:

• The corruption of higher education & the need for reform;

• The nature of scientific proof;

• How to break the monopolistic “cult of expertise;”

• Innovation policy & why it’s time for reform;

• How a prior shift in innovation policy powered the American economic boom of the 1980s & 1990s;

• The predictable pattern that every industry goes through when it enters the information age;

• How the “scientific establishment” failed the public—and itself—during Covid;

• How data science & AI break open the frontiers of knowledge, democratize the process, and threaten the incumbents.

• Why Napster’s threat to the music industry parallels the DIY research movement during Covid—and what was really going on with the anti-misinformation campaigns.

…and more. So please, follow the link, read the article, share it with anyone you know who might be interested, and feel free to follow-up with questions, feedback, and insights.

Share

Share American Restoration by Bruce D. Abramson

Subscribe now

For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening? The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024).

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please e-mail me at bdabramson@pm.me.

American Restoration is not my first blog. I started The Informationist back in 2005, and ran it actively on-and-off for over 15 years. At one point, I included some legacy materials that were even older.

I've done my best to import all of its original materials to a new section of American Restoration, available to paid subscribers. You can find it here, or you can go to the American Restoration home page and select the section.

A couple of things you should know if you’re interested in checking it out:

Porting it over was an experience. The Informationist was written in TypePad. It seems that I found myself motivated to do the port at precisely the right moment, because TypePad is about to be retired. Seems no one much uses it anymore. Which also means—unsurprisingly—that there’s no easy way to port hundreds of articles from a TypePad blog into Substack.

I decided to see that shortcoming as an opportunity or an excuse to learn a new skill. Rather than porting things over manually, I had Grok write Python code to do it for me. Now, I haven’t done any serious coding in decades and my knowledge of Python is pretty rudimentary, so it was a challenge. And if you think that AI assistants like Grok have reached the point of taking instructions like: “Hey, Grok! Import my old blog into my new one!” you have clearly never attempted anything in that vein.

The current generation of AI tools are just that: Tools. In fact, they’re power tools. And like all power tools, if you don’t know what you’re doing you will hurt yourself.b

Share

So that’s my way of achieving three things at once: Telling a story, deriving a lesson, and issuing the following warning: There’s some funkiness in the archived materials. They’re not all reprinted in chronological order—though they do all have subtitles specifying date of original publication. They’ve also got potential formatting funkiness, including block quotes that are no longer set off as quotes, and possibly some missing text that had been formatted in the original.

Still, given that this exercise let me develop a new skill, learn some new tools, and accomplish a task all at the same time, I’m quite pleased with the results.

Now the question is whether I should be pleased with my 20-year history of analysis and prediction. I leave that up to you, my readers. If you want a teaser, here's a piece on anti-AMericanism from 2003. I’ve dropped the paywall. Let’s see if anyone is sufficiently intrigued to become a paid subscriber.

Share

Share American Restoration by Bruce D. Abramson

Subscribe now

For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening? The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024).

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please e-mail me at bdabramson@pm.me.

via online.wsj.com

This case could be a watershed in the ways that we motivate innovation.

Share

In the American patent system, inventors negotiate patents directly with the USPTO. Once that negotiation is complete and the government issues a patent, that patent is "presumed valid."

What does that presumption mean? Under longstanding precedent, it means that accused infringers who seek to challenge the patent must bring "clear and convincing evidence" that the PTO erred in granting it. That standard of evidence, however, is strictly a matter of precedent. Nothing in the Patent Act requires it. Suppose, instead, that the courts adopted a "more likely than not" standard. Massive power would flow from patentees to alleged infringers. This case thus addresses the appropriate allocation of power within the patent system.

Read more

via www.thedailybeast.com

I will always have a soft spot for new search engines, because search is where I got my start. Way back in the mid-80s, when I was but a poor grad student, I became quite enamored of heuristic search algorithms. So enamored, in fact, that I wrote my dissertation about them. Regrettably, the powers that be of the time (the powers that were?) had determined that there was nothing interesting to say about search, and that the topic was no longer suitable for consideration by AI researchers.

Share

Still, search did play a central role in my thinking and research for five years or so, and it showed up in my teaching assignments (my favorite term project assignment was a dating service--commonplace today, but still interesting back in '87). Which is precisely why I still perk up when I hear about--yet another--new search engine.

The entrance of search into the commercial realm raised some interesting questions. Back in the day, we used to assume that all users were at least reasonably sophisticated, educable to the point that they would devise reasonable sets of key words. In some cases, we actually made them learn query languages. In others, we just assumed that they knew what they were doing.

Read more

via online.wsj.com

Very disappointing, but a political football all around. The GOP won't let anything through until Congress clears up the tax mess. Reid keeps putting DADT forward in ways that he knows will fail, despite having the votes for a repeal. Even the military is begging for a statutory repeal to avoid getting caught in a judicial web.

Share

I stand by my suggestion of a few weeks ago. Get the tax bill through, then combine DADT repeal with a revised Solomon Amendment. That will end sexual-orientation discrimination in our Armed Forces, and end military-involvement discrimination on our campuses. Big win all around.

So stop playing political football, and JUST DO IT!

Read more

via online.wsj.com

So. Following the lead of his own deficit commission and various other high-profile reviews, President Obama is coming around to the notion of tax simplification.

Share

It's about time. I've long believed that the debates over tax rates were misguided; the real action in the tax system lies in the calculation of the base. Without knocking the value of low tax rates, the value of simple base calculations is even greater.

Several years ago, back when I was still active in Democratic circles, fighting for the soul of the party, I tried pushing tax simplification as something that Democrats should embrace. My pitch was simple:

Read more

via online.wsj.com

Aznar was one of the best leaders that any Western Country has seen in recent decades. He is passionate about the survival of freedom, and is clear thinker on both foreign and domestic issues. While it's hard to miss Spain's decline since his departure, his discussion of the role of specific government policies was new to me.

Read more

via online.wsj.com

The FCC announced a fairly mellow version of net neutrality rules today. How should we feel about them?

Share

So far, both opponents of net neutrality and advocates of strong net neutrality rules have criticized the FCC. Such an outcome is, of course, predictable.

But the true significance of today's ruling--particularly if it stands--is that it establishes the FCC's authority to oversee and to regulate the Internet. While some companies have long wished for such a declaration and others have long opposed it, the private sector's long-term allocation of winners and losers remains unclear. That the government, lobbyists, and telecommunication lawyers have won, on the other hand, is quite clear: Once a regulator gains the authority to make and to enforce rules, advocates for new rules and discretionary enforcement arise to "assist" the regulator.

Read more

via www.telegraph.co.uk

In the amazing international race to the bottom, UK researchers seem intent upon setting the new standard.

Share

In this bit of breaking news from the halls of academic science, some folks from University College London have concluded that "people with conservative views have brains with larger amygdalas, almond shaped areas in the centre of the brain often associated with anxiety and emotions."

This finding explains why people with conservative views are terrified by the thought of global warming, and are eager to take draconian steps to avoid it.

Read more

via online.wsj.com

The U.S. now endorses a transition government under the leadership of Omar Suleiman, long time intelligence chief and newly appointed Vice President of Egypt. Such a move represents both personnel change and regime stability. It might also provide a bit of a breather, time to achieve some actual good.

Share

Far too often, the U.S. responds to crises by trying to restore the status quo ante--and then ignoring the underlying problems. Also far too often, the U.S. errs in the other direction, pushing radical political change on unprepared populations. Neither idea works well--ever.

Egypt is not ready for free, fair, open elections. It has no real political parties, no free press, and weak civic organizations. Only the military and the mosque possess any sort of organizational structure. Any elections held in 2011 will necessary pit these two powers against each other. The result may be even bloodier anarchy than we have seen this past week, or it may be an uneasy truce giving the two sides time to marshal their forces for a still bloodier conflict several years down the road.

Read more

> "The position of the Europeans, especially the United States, towards Bahrain—really, this is something that is very scary, and it's not encouraging," he said.

via online.wsj.com

Share

So let's see. Qatar, which leans pro-Iran, is participating in the enforcement of the Libyan no fly zone. The UN resolution authorizing the no fly zone, of course, was written by Lebanon, now safely ensconced in the pro-Iran camp.

Meanwhile, the UAE, which leans towards the west (along with most but not all of the GCC) has clear differences with U.S. policy, particularly towards Bahrain.

Read more

via www.nytimes.com

Scott Turow published a lovely piece in yesterday's NYT, where he demonstrated why he is a novelist rather than an analyst of either law or technology.

Share

He begins with an uncontroversial observation: the idea of compensating creators and artists promoted artistic excellence and creativity, and copyright played a critical role in institutionalizing that idea. As far as I know, no serious analyst disputes this observation.

But Turow then makes one of those leaps of logic so common among true believers. He argues that because copyright worked well given previous generations of technology, its virtues are perpetual.

Read more