The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In The Mailbox: 04.28.26 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | April 29, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

We’ll see if I have the energy after driving back from Vegas to do the evening edition.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

“Hakeem Jeffries calls for unity” – Sky News

OVER THE TRANSOM
Doug Ross: With Eisenhower On D-day (1944), The Nuland Prophecy also, A Day With Pvt. John Steele of the 82nd Airborne (1944),
357 Magnum: The Direct Impact of Banning Fossil-Fuel Generated Electricity
EBL: Hamburg Fish Sandwich, Roman Puls (porridge), “Shoot To Kill”, Saturday Spot Prawns, and Why Hasn’t China Collapsed?
Twitchy: Elevenhan 0mar World War 11 Memes are Off The Charts Perfection, Richard Stengel Farts Out That Holding NerdProm In WH Ballroom Could Violate First Amendment, and Seashell Enthusiast James Comey Indicted A Second Time  
Louder With Crowder: Dog hospitalized after accidentally ingesting meth on the streets of Democrat run California, Joy Behar swears on God that Donald Trump is totally trying to kill everyone, Mother of teen who stomped a girl’s head on the streets of NYC claims her baby boy is the real victim here, Superintendent testifies it’s totally fine for kindergarteners to read book featuring two dude kissing in fetish gear, and Neighborhood that voted 70% for Mamdani isn’t happy he’s moving the homeless into THEIR neighborhood
Vox Popoli: Confirmed Oncogenic, UK Jets Attack Russian Targets, Round 4, The Warning Shot, and A Deep and Debilitating Dive
Cedar Sanderson: Cultivating Words, 
Stoic Observations: Remembering Charlottesville, also Assassins Creed
The Bugscuffle Gazette: White House Correspondents’ Dinner, also, On April 27 2006, 
Upstream Reviews: Mech War 3 – Dynamo
Ammo.com: States With The Highest Murder Rate
Weird Catholic: The Devil’s Mousetrap
Mazelit Airaksinen: Professor claims algebra & geometry perpetuate whiteness and “unearned Privilege” in society
Jim McCoy: Escaping Fate

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: Latin American Policy – On Midrats, also, I’ll take LCC 21 & 22, and 23 & 24 as well, thank you
Dana Loesch: Shots Fired At Nerd Prom, Motive & Targets Revealed In NerdProm Shooting, and SecWar’s Wife Criticized For Modest Cost of NerdProm Dress
Don Surber: Hail Caesar – A patriot’s statue returns
Elizabeth NIckson: James Howard Kunstler & I Discuss Globalism’s Dark Mysteries, also, The Gleaming City of the Future Will Rise From Gaza’s Blasted Plain
Glenn Reynolds: Our Self-Colonized Nation
Racket News: The Press Promotes Violence And Everyone Knows It

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Category: Linkagery

‘Pretending Not to Know’

Posted on | April 27, 2026 | No Comments

In 2011, explaining his abandonment of “brain-dead” liberalism, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet published The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. It was there that he expressed what has become known as The Mamet Principle: “In order to continue advancing their illogical arguments, modern liberals have to pretend not to know things.” We see this all the time in the make-believe play-acting of TV personalities like Jake Tapper, who did a perfect imitation of Claude Rains in Casablanca in describing how he was shocked — shocked! — by the revelation that Joe Biden was senile.

As a journalist, one of my biggest gripes is that TV news has given people a mistaken idea about what journalism actually is. Writing a 700-word news article is a full day’s work for the reporter who has to rely on his own notes of conversations with sources. To be an actual reporter — as opposed to a TV talking head — means spending a lot of time on the phone, trying to get people to tell the truth when it would better suit them to keep the truth out of the newspaper. By contrast, if you understand what TV news actually is, you realize that the anchorman is paid for his ability to convey the proper emotion about what he’s telling you.

As Mamet remarked, newscasters are hired “not for their probity or for their intelligence, but for their ‘believability,'” and that is how Barack Obama became president — he had that same kind of superficial “believability” that characterizes a successful TV news anchor.

This brings us to Obama’s disingenuous (unsolicited and unnecessary) comment about Cole Allen’s botched assassination attempt Saturday night at the annual White House Correspondents dinner. By the time he pushed the “publish” button on that tweet, we did indeed “have the details about the motives” of the gunman. Allen’s social-media archives and his written “manifesto” made clear that Allen was a Democrat, inspired by the same vicious lies about Trump that Democrats and their media allies have been promoting for the past decade.

“His beliefs mirrored mainstream Democrat talking points” — in other words, he was radicalized not by some obscure fringe website, but by what every Democrat with access to a microphone or a camera has been saying publicly ever since Trump beat Hillary nearly 10 years ago.

Barack Obama’s intent was to conceal and obscure this truth, to assert that Democrats are against political violence, no matter how often we have seen them incite, defend, justify and participate in such violence (e.g., the “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots of 2020). As David Mamet said, Obama must “pretend not to know things” (and encourage others to join him in that pretense) or else the very existence of the Democratic Party might be jeopardized, because everybody would realize what a colossal scam it is (as all honest and intelligent people already do).



 

Category: Barack Obama, Donald Trump

Rule 5 Sunday: It’s (Almost) That Time of Year Again

Posted on | April 27, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

We’ve featured Terann Hilow of Vengeance Bikinis before, but it’s been a while, and her hand-knit bikinis are kinda cool anyway.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

Terann Hilow in some fine lemon cake.

EBL: Saturday Spotted Prawns, Saturday Night Girls With Guns, “La Marseillaise“, Private Property, Jeannie Rousseau, Casting Calamities, He’s Just Not That Into You, MAGA Indictment of $PLC, Happy Birthday Rome, Logan’s Run at 50, Lucrezia Borgia, and Mae West. 

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Georgiana Rosas, Fish Pic Friday – Jean Billy, Thursday Tanlines, Offshore Power Goes Live in Virginia, The Wednesday Wetness, Lady’s On Fire, US Navy Fires On, Captures Iranian Blockade Runner, Random Celebrity News and Sunday Sunrise

BACON TIME: Rule Five Red Hot

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Down To The Wire

Posted on | April 27, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Will the Senators make the playoffs? It all depends on the Kansas City Royals and the Minnesota Twins. We took two of three from the A’s and then lost two of three to the Reds, our sole win coming from a ninth-inning rally against Dick Woodson and a solid relief inning from Diego Segui and Jim Shellenback. We’re playing the Twins in our last series, at home in RFK, and I’m hoping the home advantage allows us to take two games from the division-leading Twins, who we’re 5-6 against for the season. We’re 77-82 right now, ahead of the 75-81 Royals, but as you can see the Royals have yet to play their Friday games at Philadelphia (0-3) before they head west to play the A’s (6-3). So if they get swept by the Phillies again and take two of three from the A’s while we take 2 of 3 from the Twins, that leaves us at 79-83 and the Royals at 77-85. We’ll see if it actually works out that way.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved
EBL
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: Probably Not This Year
A View From The Beach
EBL

 

Guess Who Made an Interesting Point? UPDATE: Sarah Palin Explains Herself
EBL
357 Magnum

Aspiring Rapper Update
EBL
357 Magnum

Rule Five Sunday: More Hot Girls & Hot Cars
A View From The Beach
EBL

‘Several Young Individuals’: At Least Two Dead in North Carolina Mass Shooting UPDATE: Not the Expected Victims
EBL

 

VA’s 21Apr Vote: This Dog Don’t Hunt
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

IT’S ‘STOP THE LOBSTER’ DAY!
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 04.21.26 (Morning Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

VIRGINIA ELECTION RESULTS: Will Voters OK Spanberger’s Gerrymander? UPDATE: Network Declares ‘Yes’ Win
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 04.22.26
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

SPLC’s Clayton Bigsby Moment
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 04.23.26 (Morning Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 04.23.26 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved
EBL
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 04.24.26
EBL
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

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Category: FMJRA Award

Newly Released By Chris Cassone,
“The Art of the Stomp Box” Is A Treat

Posted on | April 26, 2026 | No Comments

by Smitty

Chris Cassone is an old and dear friend of the blog, having recorded arguably the best blues ever:

Thus, when word broke out about his new book, “ART OF THE STOMP BOX: Celebrating The Visual Artistry of Effects Pedals” I didn’t hesitate to order a copy. I have an equally old friend who is a guitarist and is getting married in June. When it arrived, I sent the book to Chris for an autograph. This volume will make a perfect wedding gift.

The book is a visually interesting snapshot of the state of the art, whether or not you are a guitarist. My personal favorite was the Shellfire Screamer, by Ulrich Dahlgren. But that’s just because I have both spent some time in Dahlgren, Virginia as an enlisted sailor and Dahlgren Hall while I was at Sing-Sing on the Severn.

Having grown up listening to rock-and-roll, I had questions. For a Wikipedia-deep review, the first stompbox to make a big impact was the 1962 Maestro Fuzz Tone in Ben Shapiro’s favorite, 1965’s (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. I recall the double-negative in the title setting Shapiro off regarding the question of whether Jagger ever did or did not obtain satisfaction. Feel free to opine in the comments.

Later effect pedals like the MXR M-117 flanger drove Unchained by the mighty Van Halen.

Anybody who knows how to get ahold of Rick Beato, please speak up. We need him to interview Cassone.

In a world increasingly awash in the fakery of Artificial Intelligence, this book is a breath of fresh air. Real human beings are still hand-crafting unique artifacts.
Consider getting this book and finding some of the vendors mentioned and musician using their wares. Then go take in some live music. Fight the power!

Category: Blogging, Chris Cassone

Yet Another Democrat Has Failed to Assassinate President Donald Trump

Posted on | April 26, 2026 | No Comments

Democrats are crazy and evil, but also utterly incompetent:

A man armed with guns and knives stormed the lobby outside the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner attended by President Donald Trump on Saturday night, charging toward the ballroom in a chaotic encounter with Secret Service agents as guests dived under tables at the sound of shots being fired.
The president was uninjured and was rushed off the stage. The armed man, who officials said was a guest at the Washington Hilton where the dinner was being held, was taken into custody and was expected in court Monday. Police believe he opened fire and acted alone but did not say who was his intended target or describe a motive.
“When you’re impactful, they go after you. When you’re not impactful, they leave you alone,” Trump, safe and uninjured and still in his tuxedo, said at the White House two hours later. “They seem to think he was a lone wolf.”
The shooting unfolded just outside the vast subterranean ballroom holding thousands of dinner guests, disrupting minutes after it began an annual event meant to honor journalism and the First Amendment that was being especially scrutinized this year because it was the first time since Trump became president that he had attended. . . .
Video posted by Trump showed the suspect running past security barricades as Secret Service agents ran toward him. One officer was shot in a bullet-resistant vest but was recovering, officials said. The gunman was tackled to the ground and was not injured, but was being evaluated at a hospital, police said.
The shooting suspect was identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. He is facing two firearm-related charges, including a count of assaulting an officer with a deadly weapon.

Notice something missing in that Associated Press story? “Assassination.” You could say, “an apparent assassination attempt,” or use the phrase “would-be assassin,” but the AP goes out of its way to avoid saying the obvious: THIS GUY WANTED TO KILL TRUMP.

Furthermore, despite cramming the story full of all kinds of irrelevancies — quotes from this or that politician in attendance — the AP doesn’t include important details about the suspect’s background: First, that Cole Allen donated to Kamala Harris’s campaign, and second, that there was a campaign sign for a Democratic candidate for a state judge position in the front lawn of Allen’s home in California. In other words, evidence clearly suggests the shooter is a Democrat with a political motive, but the Associated Press didn’t think that merited inclusion in the story.

Why is it that everything turns into a story about media bias?

This is what irritates me, after 40 years in the news business. There would be no need for conservative journalism, as such, if it were not for the pervasive bias of the industry. If journalists at the Associated Press, the New York Times, the major networks, etc., would just do their jobs without turning every story into some kind of Democratic Party propaganda message, guys like me would be out of work.

It is rather symbolic that a deranged Democrat decided that the best place to kill the president was at the most prestigious annual gathering of journalists in America. And I’m sure members of the White House Correspondents Association are disappointed that their fellow Democrat failed to murder the president they’ve demonized for years.



 

Category: Crime, Democrats, Donald Trump, Media Bias

In The Mailbox: 04.24.26

Posted on | April 25, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

You know what today is.
Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts.

Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Turns out Taqiyya Qatarlson may not be an heir of the Swanson family fortune, Normandy Salmon, Jeannie Rousseau, Casting Calamities, and The AI Bubble?
Twitchy: Falklands Fallout, From Human Traffickers To Terrorists – The Convict Parents Of The Left’s Loudest “Anti-Rich” Voices, and Rep. Brandon Gill Blows Up Spectrum’s Scooter Story
Louder With Crowder: DOJ announces it’s going to make firing squads great again, Dem congressional candidates had an anti-ICE struggle session, so let’s remind voters of the criminal illegals they fight for, Biden Admin sent the FBI after a pro-life American, who just received a million-dollar settlement over the lawfare, Commie Super Friends: Hasan Piker Teams Up With New Yorker Reporter In Dumbest Podcast of Year, and CA democrat running for governor claims requiring truck drivers to be able to read road signs is racist
Vox Popoli: Colorblind Morality, Can’t Hide the Cancers, and Nothing Left for Taiwan
According To Hoyt: We Need To Talk, We’re Not The Same, It’s Always Darkest Before Dawn, Witch’s Daughter, and Against Feffers [plus a whole bunch of posts about authors who don’t hate you]
Upstream Reviews: Battleborn Magazine
Cedar Sanderson: Tools in the Garden
Bugscuffle Gazette: Publisher Stuff – Squee!
Postcards From Barsoom: From A Concrete Pad In Nova Scotia To The Stars

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Greatness: Mother of Brute Who Head-Stomped Girl in Harlem Says Her Son is the Victim, Harvard Students Push Back Against New Stricter Grading Policy, Depopulation Fears Are Overblown, Why the US Must Deliver Full US Nuclear Propulsion and Fuel Cycle Technology to South Korea Now, and Remember the Alamo! The Indian Invasion of Texas
BattleSwarm: So When Are The “Punch A Nazi” Sorts Going To Punch $PLC Donors? also, LinkSwarm For April 24
Behind The Black: Blue Origin opens (secretly) its first foreign office, in Luxembourg, China launches another “set of test satellites promoting internet technology”,  and New data says interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas IS different from comets in our solar system
Cafe Hayek: What Does Dani Rodrik Think of Consumers? also, It’s a Floor Cleaner AND a Dessert Topping!
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Chicago Boyz: The Political Hall of Mirrors, also, What if Iran’s stalling doesn’t work?
Da Tech Guy:  Pintastic NE 2026 Videos of the Day: Pixels and Pinballs & EMP Pinball
Don Surber: American exceptionalism lives on
First Street Journal: A Philadelphia Inquirer sob story about a poor, poor, misunderstood murderer
Flopping Aces: The Week In Radical Leftism
Gates Of Vienna: Dead Spooks in Chihuahua, also, Targeting Beth Israel
The Geller Report: Mamdani will VETO NYC schools ‘buffer zone’ bill — he’s determined to protect anti-ICE, pro-Hamas student protesters, Maryland: Residents ‘fleeing in droves’ after ‘insane’ far-left takeover, East Village residents voted 70% for Mamdani, and now they’re suing him, Hamas-CAIR Official Repeats One of the Absurdest of All Antisemitic Charges, and One More Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Killed by the IDF
Hollywood In Toto: Burnt Offerings at 50 – The House That Haunted Us, Comic Skewers $PLC for Allegedly Funding Hate Groups, Animal Farm Targets Capitalism, Not Soviet-Style Repression, Left-Leaning NJ.com Shreds Bruce Springsteen’s Hypocrisy, and Podcast Bros Can’t Boost Busboys at Box Office
Legal Insurrection: Montana High Court Allows ‘Gender Identity’ Birth Certificates, Driver’s Licenses, $PLC False Flag Operations Reminiscent of Tactics Used Against Tea Party, Drexel U. Exhibit Downplays Lewis and Clark Discoveries in Favor of ‘Tribal Knowledge’, Cincinnati Fires Social Justice Obsessed Police Chief Terri Theetge, and VA Democrat Claims “I Know Rural America — I Watched The Waltons, Opie, Dukes of Hazzard”
Nebraska Energy Observer: Founders, also, Then Came Friday
Power Line: A real-life Somali pirate, Electing Communists, A tough week for Ilhan Omar, My country, right or wrong, and To the moon!
Racket News: Activism Uncensored – “No Queens!”, also, Twitter Files, $PLC Edition – Hate Inflation?, 
Shark Tank: Vern Buchanan Introduces Bipartisan Bill Protecting Animal Migration Routes
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday: Should Books like Little Black Sambo Be on Library Shelves?
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, also, “Seeking” – at DHS?
Transterrestrial Musings: The Real Reason Hegseth Is Targeted, The $PLC, Better Late Than Never, and The Current State Of Ethics In Government
Victory Girls: Shoplifting Socialists: Protesting Capitalism One Lemon At A Time, also, Zohran Mamdani Not Socialist Enough
Watts Up With That: Friday Funny: Net Zero Hits the Fan, The Chance of Blackouts, The Urban Heat Island and Urban Cool Island, Activist Yorkshire Councillor Demands the British Government make Fossil Fuel Extraction More Difficult, and Electrify Everything Policies in the Aussie State of Victoria are Breaking the Grid
The Federalist: How Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill Is Reversing Rampant State Waste And Fraud, VA Gerrymander Language Is So Dishonest, Dems Refuse To Defend It In Court, Calls Grow For House To End Tax Funding For Transing Kids After Collins, Murkowski Kill Senate Effort, Dobbs Lawyer Was Pressured To Avoid Taking On Roe. He Chose Courage Instead, and Mourning The Loss Of USAID, The New York Times Makes A Clear Case For Its Death
Mark Steyn: Live Around the Planet – Suing Me Back To Old Virginny, Blockade Busters, A Little Bit of Light, and The Crossroads of Europe

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Category: Linkagery

The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved

Posted on | April 24, 2026 | No Comments

Yale Law Professor Samuel Moyn

Very seldom do I use the same headline twice in one week, but seldom does an idea as monstrously bad as Samuel Monyn’s attract my attention. To summarize as succinctly as possible, Moyn’s argument is this: “Old people have too much stuff. We should kill them and steal their stuff.”

Have I exaggerated for the sake of brevity? Perhaps so, but the subtext of Moyn’s book-length argument (Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It) is pretty clear — everything wrong in America is because of old people, and therefore we should adopt policies to inflict harm on these elderly enemies. If you’re 65 or older, you are analogous to a Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 and Professor Moyn is Radio Hutu. This is simply hate propaganda, demonizing the elderly, and nothing good will come of it. Both Ed Morrissey and Matt Taibbi have taken stabs at explaining what’s wrong with Moyn’s idea, as expressed in the professor’s New York Times op-ed.

“Ageism” identifies an enduring phenomenon: the mistreatment of older people for no reason other than being older. Americans in middle age and beyond are routinely passed over for opportunities because of the irrelevant fact of a number on paper or how they act and look after getting older.
In today’s world, the unfair discrimination they cite coexists with a different kind of unfairness: a gerontocratic society in which the old control ever more power and wealth, leading to overrepresentation in political life and unequal power in social life.
It is not ageist to ask whether older people should be required to give more to younger Americans and national priorities — it is critical to the future of our democracy and society. America needs to confront gerontocracy before the system collapses under the weight of its inequality and injustice.
Older Americans deserve a say over the future even when they might not live to see it. But they do not deserve the stranglehold over it they currently enjoy through overrepresentation in elections, which produces too many regressive policies and too many seniors in the highest offices. . . .
The United States has one of the highest wage inequality by age of any country in the world, and the numbers keep getting worse: The pay gap between workers over 55 and those under 35 widened 61 percent between 1979 and 2018. The share of workers over 55 in the work force rose 88 percent in those same years.
Housing follows the same pattern. Older Americans own much of the most desirable real estate in the country’s best cities, and they are not moving. . . .

You can read the rest, but ask yourself how Professor Moyn would react to these arguments about “overrepresentation” and “unequal power,” etc., if we replaced the phrase “older people” with one word: Jews.

The headline “Jews Are Hoarding America’s Potential” would probably not be published by the New York Times, nor would the author of such a piece have a book deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, let alone a tenured faculty position at Yale Law School. What is offensive about crude anti-Semitism is the same thing that offends me about Professor Moyn’s argument, i.e., that such scapegoating involves collective blame, and that this invalid categorization of guilt simultaneously creates an invalid category of allegedly innocent victims. This blame game is a distraction. It’s like the Black Lives Matters movement yelping about “systemic racism” and “white privilege” when the problem is (checks notes) criminals getting killed by police while resisting arrest.

Because I am 66 years old — and thus, according to Professor Moyn, part of the gerontocracy that is oppressing younger Americans — let me ask a few questions: How do I, specifically, “control ever more power and wealth”? How much of “the most desirable real estate” do I own? How am I exercising a “stranglehold” and benefiting from a “pay gap”? My kids own more real estate than I do, and my lawyer son’s starting pay at his first job is more than I’m earning after 40 years in journalism.

Trying to scapegoat me because of a statistical trend — the “pay gap” that “widened 61 percent” in a 40-year period — would be offensive even if the underlying numbers were not demonstrably invalid, but in fact this alleged trend is an apples-and-oranges comparison which ignores the fact that the overall quality of young people has changed since the 1970s, and not in a good way. Whatever problems my generation had as teenagers back in the day, the vast majority of us at least came from two-parent married households. If my now-adult offspring are doing better than the average member of their own generation, it’s probably due in large measure to this factor — my wife and I got married and have stayed married, and at least tried to give our kids an old-fashioned wholesome sort of upbringing. Professor Moyn is obsessed with demonizing old people for “hoarding” wealth, but how much of the widening gap between young and old is actually due to declines in the average socioeconomic background of young people caused by rising rates of out-of-wedlock births and the prevalence of divorce? And what about the role of mass immigration in this generational trend? Professor Moyn doesn’t mention that at all, but let us just ask: What percentage of American 18-year-olds were the children of immigrants in 1978, versus today’s 18-year-olds? What would it look like if you charted the U.S. percentage of immigrant population over time, as one line, and the “pay gap” as another line?

Professor Moyn is certainly not alone in ignoring this factor. Twenty or 30 years ago, I recall seeing politicians and pundits bemoaning “the growing gap between rich and poor” in America, even while those same people had nothing to say about mass immigration. If you are importing tens of millions of impoverished Third World refugees — which has been our de facto policy for decades — it is hardly a surprise to see an increase in the “poor” side of this “growing gap” that you’re complaining about, no matter what your policy is toward the rich. But of course, the people doing the complaining were liberals, predictably arguing for economic redistribution, rather than actually trying to solve the problem (which their own policies have caused). Sic semper hoc — liberal policies fail, and then liberals tell us that the solution is more liberalism.

Because he has chosen the elderly as scapegoats, and because he is a liberal, Professor Moyn is oblivious to all of this. He has another long essay in Harper‘s magazine, with this interesting section:

At the core of the gerontocracy’s rise is a historical irony. The modern world— — and America above all –­ once stood for youth, novelty, and energy. And yet the same modernity that gave us democracy and other forms of progress also prompted scientific advances that prolonged life. Those advances drove a startling demographic transformation that has increased the proportion of elders in our society, unintentionally empowering a caste that has slowed progress. Call it the Great Aging.
The age pyramid — ­which decreed almost as a law across space and time that the younger the humans, the more of them there were — has been rebuilt. There is still a narrowing tip in the upper echelons, because people still die. But below it, the structure is a rectangle, with steady-­state survival of most cohorts, and some younger groups smaller than some older ones. The rectangle is slowly ascending in height, which means that, where there was once a smaller proportion of people over forty, now more than half the population in some countries, and just about half in America, are above that age. Our current median age is nearing forty, up from thirty in 1980 and from the mid-­teens early in our national history. And while the trends in life extension have been irresistible, the coincidence of a declining birth rate with the ongoing survival of the baby boomers is creating an especially lopsided upper age cohort. There were just under five million Americans aged sixty-­five or older in 1920, accounting for less than 5 percent of the population; now there are more than fifty-­five million, making up almost 17 percent of the total.

Wow, talk about bias — it’s like he’s looking through the wrong end of a telescope. The “startling demographic transformation” has far more to do with declining fertility than with “gerontocracy.”

U.S. total fertility rate (TFR), 1950-2023

Total fertility rate (TFR) “represents the number of children that would be born to a woman if she were to live to the end of her childbearing years and bear children in accordance with age-specific fertility rates of the specified year.” It is the standard metric of reproductive behavior used for all comparisons, whether between nations, or ethnic groups within nations, or between the same groups over time. While I have seen Census Bureau data that differs slightly from the numbers on this particular chart (i.e., with TFR peaking in 1957, rather than 1960), the overall trend is roughly the same. At the peak of the postwar “Baby Boom,” American women were having so many babies that it was more common for a family to have four children than to have “only” three.

However, once those children reached adulthood — the first Baby Boomers, born in 1946, turned 18 in 1964 — birth rates swiftly plummeted, and by 1973 were below “replacement rate” (2.1 TFR) needed to maintain population stability. For more than 15 years, TFR never reached replacement level and, when it finally (and just barely) did so in 1990, this was mainly due to higher birth rates among immigrant women, of whom there were a lot more than there had been 15 years earlier.

Every time I bring up this topic, two responses are typical — first, personal defensiveness, with people who have few children (or none) acting as if they have been accused of wrongdoing. Secondly, there is the economic excuse, the claim that young people “can’t afford” to have kids. Yet this excuse ignores the obvious fact that poor people are actually having more kids than rich people. The actual explanation, I would argue, involves what we may called lifestyle expectations. If you grow up in affluent circumstances, it is natural to believe you shouldn’t have kids until you can afford to give them a similarly affluent upbringing. And if both husband and wife are working full-time (as is the case for nearly all middle-class couples), childbearing almost unavoidably means taking a step down the economic ladder, however temporary it may be. Either (a) mom has to stay home to care for the children for a few years or (b) you have to pay someone else for childcare. Because I am the father of six children, I have extensive direct experience in the difficulties involved, and all I can say is what my dad told me when our oldest was just a wee baby: “Son, if you wait to have children until you can afford to have children, you’d never have children.” You just bite the bullet.

Having done my part, personally, to combat demographic decline, I disavow any blame for a trend caused by other people’s choices.

Some people choose to go to Yale University, for example, but I wouldn’t go near the place — full of dangerous degenerates like Samuel Moyn — and I’d urge others to heed my warning. Elite academic know-it-alls have been the architects of our societal disaster (e.g., Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich) and cannot be trusted to provide solutions to the problems they have themselves caused. And I’ve been saying this since long before I was old enough to join the “gerontocracy.”



 

Category: The Ivy League Is Depraved and Decadent
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