Jul
3
2026

This Should Be More of a Reminder Than a Wake-Up Call

And it's from Jim "Indispensible" Geraghty: No Politician Is Coming to Save You. More on that in a bit, but here's a reminder from Robby Soave that one politician is especially not coming to save you: J.D. Vance hates Milton Friedman. Illustrated with:

From the accompanying article:

At a time when the Democratic Party is being conquered from within by actual socialists—even outright communists—one might expect the Republican Party to capitalize on this strategic error and campaign against it. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump continues to espouse an economic policy that itself contains far too many concessions to socialism. Even worse, the most likely inheritor of Trump's throne is someone who is, if anything, considerably to the president's left on economics.

Vice President J.D. Vance rarely misses an opportunity to make crystal clear that his embrace of progressive economics is more ideological and deeply held than Trump's. In an interview this week with Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire, Vance took entirely unnecessary shots at the legendary economist Milton Friedman, whose laissez faire economic ideas were implemented by previous generations of conservatives to great success.

Vance begins by laughing at and defending Trump's previous comments about seizing the profits of AI companies. It seems clear that Vance is more committed to this idea than Trump is—even though it is well in keeping with proposals from democratic socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). Vance understands better than Trump that such a proposal contradicts long-held GOP economic dogma, and that's precisely what he likes about it. He likes that it's kind of socialist.

Going back to Jim Geraghty's point:

Mark Manson writes books that are a combination of self-help, philosophy, and a bit of history, and he tends to use the F-word in his book titles. Flying back from California, I ran across a passage in his 2019 book, Everything Is F***ed. Manson writes about a college-era run-in with the Lyndon LaRouche crowd:

They were an ideological religion: an antigovernment, anticapitalist, anti-old people, antiestablishment religion. They argued that the international world order, from top to bottom, was corrupt. They argued that the Iraq War had been instigated for no other reason than Bush’s friends wanted more money. They argued that terrorism and mass shootings didn’t exist, that such events were simply highly coordinated governmental efforts to control the population. Don’t worry, right-wing friends, years later they would draw the same Hitler mustaches and make the same claims about Obama — if that makes you feel any better. (It shouldn’t.)

What the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) does is pure genius. It finds disaffected and agitated college students (usually young men), kids who are both scared and angry (scared at the sudden responsibility they’ve been forced to take on, and angry at how uncompromising and disappointing it is to be an adult) and then preach one simple message to them: “It’s not your fault.”

Yes, young one, you thought it was Mom and Dad’s fault, but it’s not their fault. Nope. And I know you thought it was your s****y professors and overpriced college’s fault. Nope. Not theirs, either. You probably even thought it was the government’s fault. Close, but still no.

See, it’s the system’s fault, that grand, vague entity you’ve always heard about.

This was the faith that the LYM was selling: if we could just overthrow the system, then everything would be okay. No more war. No more suffering. No more injustice.

Does the description of a movement telling people that nothing that has gone wrong in their lives is their fault, and that everything is the fault of “the system,” sound familiar in today’s political landscape?

Well, it should. Jim's "Morning Jolt" contains a lot to dislike about both sides.

[For the record, I was unimpressed by the Mark Manson book I read last month.]

Also of note:

  • From the "Ackshually…" files. Stu Smith only needed a bit of researching to determine: Actually, a Lot of DSA Members Are Communists.

    At the Faith & Freedom Coalition gathering in Washington last week, President Trump warned that many Democratic Socialist candidates “are not social democrats. These are hardcore, godless Communists. . . . This is the most serious threat to our Country since its existence.” Trump’s remarks sparked a wave of condemnations, including from CNN chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, who said that “socialism, much less democratic socialism, is not communism.”

    Statements like Collins’s highlight how little attention the press has given to the Democratic Socialists of America and its national leadership. The majority of the DSA’s governing board, the National Political Committee (NPC), openly identifies with Communist ideology.

    It's refreshing to point out the rare occasions when Trump was right about something.

  • What they're teaching the kids. As James B. Meigs points out, it is too often Howard Zinn’s Horrible History. (WSJ gifted link)

    In the film “Good Will Hunting,” Matt Damon’s character looks with disdain at a U.S. history book he spots in the office of his therapist, played by Robin Williams. “You want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States,’ ” Mr. Damon’s character says. It will “knock you on your a—.”

    When that movie came out in 1997, Zinn’s ruthlessly negative alternative history was poorly regarded by professional historians but beloved by legions of left-leaning readers. First published in 1980, “A People’s History” became popular mostly by word of mouth. It was the sort of book that a cool Marxist social studies teacher, the kind who sat cross-legged on his desk and asked kids to call him by his first name, might’ve slipped to his brighter students.

    With periodic updates over the decades, Zinn’s opus ballooned to more than 700 pages. But its message could be summarized in two words: America stinks. The author believed most history textbooks offered only a whitewashed “nationalist glorification of country,” he told the New York Times. In response, he oversimplified the story in the opposite direction. America’s Founding Fathers? Just wealthy white men guarding their fortunes. Abraham Lincoln? A half-hearted abolitionist who was concerned about protecting “the interests of the very rich.” World War II? Sure, the Nazis were bad, Zinn concedes, but the U.S. and her allies didn’t really “represent something significantly different.”

    If you're interested, I reported on Mary Grabar's book Debunking Howard Zinn here.

    And to go along with the previous item, see Ronald Radosh on Zinn: Aside from That, He Was Also a Red.

  • A tough diagnosis. It's from unmerciful Bryan Caplan: Socialism: Better Never to Have Been.

    If I were a socialist, I’d be desperate to deny that the Nazis were socialists. Why? Well, it’s bad enough that:

    • The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics turned out to be a nightmarish totalitarian despotism, a dystopia of mass slavery and mass murder.

    • The USSR, by conquest and imitation, spawned dozens of additional nightmarish totalitarian despotisms.

    • These despotisms included the jaw-dropping hellscape of Maoist China, the world’s most populous country at the time.

    Yet as long as Nazi Germany was not socialist or even anti-socialist, the socialist can find solace in the fact that the Soviet Union was the primary agent in the defeat of an even more nightmarish totalitarian despotism. While there’s some dispute over whether the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany had the higher body count, Nazi Germany definitely had a higher annual murder rate for territory under its control. As long as you charitably interpret the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as “Stalin was just buying time to prepare for the inevitable war,” you can tell yourself that socialism saved civilization despite its Dorian Gray-level transmogrification.

    I'm currently reading a biography of Hayek, and it's describing the enthusiasm 1930's-40's enthusiasm in Britain and America for a scientific, rational, planned economy. Often accompanied by praise for Uncle Joe Stalin's socialist paradise. It's difficult not to see parallels with current events.

  • James Lileks is going through a rough patch. But today's Bleat contains his hilarious "AI end-of-billing-cycle credit use" videos, featuring "Betty Furness, for Westinghouse!"

    And there's other good stuff too. Check it out.

  • From the Archives. It's been twenty years since Alaska's Senator Ted Stevens described the Internet as a "series of tubes." And my post from back then linked to some of the commentary I found (variously) insightful, amusing, or mean-spirited. Some of the links have rotted away over the years, but some still work.

    But what really amused me about the archived post was the bit about the "62-year-old Rolling Stone" Keith Richards adding his guitar licks to My Soul is a Witness, a collection of African-American spirituals.

    Who would have thought, back then, that Keith would have made it to 82?

    And you can still get My Soul is a Witness at Amazon.