I’m working on a column about immigration for Monday, which has involved doing a little research on various immigration acts that the US passed starting in the 1870s, in a period of transition between our early nationhood and the 20th century world power that we became.
As soon as I noticed this idea cropping up in many different contexts, I thought of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which is a terrible great book. Or possibly a great terrible book, depending on how you look at it.
It’s terribleness comes from three primary flaws. Rand was a curmudgeon, and her grimly doctrinaire atheism makes large swaths of the book an irritating slog. Her moral worldview is cartoonishly black-and-white, which often makes her characters cardboard stand-ins for intellectual tropes. And the book is wildly overwritten; my copy comes in at 1168 pages, and it could easily be a tight, fast-moving 250-pager.
But its greatness lies in two strengths. Rand despised totalitarian leftism the way we all should: utterly and passionately. And the central conceit of the book was an answer to the fascinating question, “What would happen to a corrupt leftist society if its most productive citizens began purposefully disappearing?”
Written in the mid-1950s, it presciently (if exaggeratedly) predicts the flight of productive citizens from blue to red states that’s been going on over the last 30 years or more. As CA, NY, and IL get more greedy and socialist, talented people shrug, and vote with their feet, and take their skills and net worth to TN, TX and FL.
The most direct echoes from the book involve the kind of virtue-signaling social justice warriors who simultaneously look down on and criticize the successful people and inventors they depend on. The book is full of Bernie Sanders-es railing about how the rich don’t pay their fair share, and Musk-hating Tesla-vandalizer types – and the villains totally agree with so many in the “resistance” now. They’re all convinced that beggars have the absolute moral right to be choosers.
I’m seeing this phenomenon on many foreign policy fronts, now that we’re learning how much foreign aid we’ve been indiscriminatingly showering on the rest of the world. Apparently we’ve had a non-stop convoy of C-130 flights going 24-7, shoving giant pallets of cash out the rear cargo hold at 15-minute intervals, all over the world.
And yet the Europeans want to lecture us that we’re not paying enough for the UN, and NATO, and the “March of AK-47s” program to provide Russian small arms to jihadi toddlers in Gaza. (It’s like the March of Dimes, except that instead of collecting dimes, we’re disbursing rifles.)
Then, when Trump suggested that we might be shutting down the money flow to Ukraine, many Europeans lost it. In an earlier column, I referred to the six- or seven-nation poll showing that around 70% of Europeans want Zelensky to get a lot more support… but only around 20% of them want to give him any of that themselves.
Strange. Putin is an ocean away from us, but right on their doorstep, and they are very adamant that WE do whatever it takes to keep him within his own borders.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, Australian universities are freaking out after the Trump administration sent them a questionnaire asking whether they’ve got ties to commie or socialist parties, receive funding from China, or recognize genders other than the two real ones. The wrong answers could potentially jeopardize $386 million US dollars (over a third of what Australia spends on research each year) in research grants.
The Aussie profs have their lab coats over their heads, demanding an “emergency meeting” with their Prime Minister about this. One of them was “astounded” at the questions, saying that, “if this was any other country, it verges on foreign interference.”
Good lord! Am I going to have to break out my Sam Kinison filter to explain to that dolt how she could avoid such pesky “foreign interference?” (“Hey sweetie, you know what you might think about doing? PAYING FOR YOUR OWN FREAKING RESEARCH! OH!! OHHHHH!!!!!”)
Seriously, why are we paying for Aussie scientists to do research? Australia is a first-world, Anglophone nation. They’re not some struggling sub-Saharan country desperately battling a snake-borne diptheria strain (which Fauci probably paid to create in a crumbling lab in Mombasa) that is the leading cause of death among their citizens!
Also, are American scientists broken? If not, and if expensive research is worth doing, why don’t we do that here at home?
And it’s not just foreigners who are stamping their feet in their clunky foreign shoes, and cussing us out in their comically non-English languages. Lots of Americans are also threatening to hold their breath and give us the silent treatment if we don’t pony up the dough they’re used to getting.
Some of them are government workers in the crucial fields of grievance mongering, racial and gender bean-counting, and maintaining a minimal pulse rate while “working” from home. And some of them are actually doing legitimate work that we can’t afford anymore, now that we’re the brokest nation in the history of nations.
Woke universities are similarly out of sorts. They’ve been happily demonizing and excluding conservatives from their programs and campuses, and rhetorically (and for all I know, literally) fellating terrorist supporters and their cosplaying allies, while gorging themselves on grant money provided by the (despised) conservative majority in the country.
But when Trump said that the federal money flow will stop if they don’t change their ways, they became outraged, and then terrified. Just like the sanctuary state and city governors and mayors, when they found out that they’re going to have to face the natural consequences of their arrogant defiance of our immigration laws.
The purest distillation of this attitude appeared in the story of Trump’s proposed changes to the SNAP (i.e. food stamps) program. The GOP is proposing a bill to ban the use of SNAP benefits to buy junk food and sodas, and the people who rely on you and me to buy their food are not happy about it.
In a sane world, this wouldn’t require any debate. We know that the leading health problems among poor Americans – and many non-poor Americans! – are caused by unhealthy diet and obesity, and that taxpayers are already paying exorbitant costs for welfare recipients’ health care. So who could possibly argue that we need to buy junk food for the poor?
Big junk food companies, beggars who are surprisingly picky eaters, and the Democrats who need the sick-and-fat vote, that’s who!
A couple of their arguments are transparent dodges. They say it will be very hard to alter how the SNAP program works in this way. They also say that nobody can really define “junk food,” because hey man, one person’s junk food is another person’s healthy snack, isn’t it?
Nope. This argument is even easier to debunk than its older counterpart, “How do you define pornography?” Because you know both when you see them.
Show any reasonably intelligent adult Stormy Daniels in a g-string, washing down a plate of chocolate chip cookies with a Mountain Dew, and he’ll point and say, “Why is that porn star gorging herself on that junk food?”
But their other arguments are even worse. They say that the proposed bill limits personal choice, and infringes on the freedom to eat whatever you want. Which would be true, if you were paying for the food yourself.
But since you’re not paying for the food yourself, you should get the same offer my dad gave me when I was a kid and looking at a plate of meatloaf (again!) that he bought with his Northern Illinois Gas Company salary: “You’ve got two choices: take it, or leave it.”
They’re also worried that, and I quote, “The bill could stigmatize SNAP recipients, making them feel judged or shamed for their food choices.”
Hey kids, you know what else will make you feel shamed and stigmatized? Walking around looking like J.B. Pritzker, (D)irigible – IL, unable to feel your feet (which you also can’t see), and wondering if that means that the diabetes is almost to the point where the amputations will need to start.
So get yourself off the Mountain Dew, AND the government teat.
You’ll feel better. And we will too.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 