Category Archives: Ayn Rand

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Objectivism is important to sales professionals because it's the kind of philosophy that, if you believe in it, you're going to screw up your ability to sell effectively. As a profession, Sales has moved beyond the attempt to manipulate people selfishly for one's own ends, which is how Objectivism plays itself out in the real world.

Most successful sales professionals feel that they are in service to something greater than themselves. Unfortunately, that's not a belief that often shared by their top management, as pointed out in the BNET blog post "Why Do CEOs (Still) Love Ayn Rand." That post summarized Objectivism as:

As a bonus, we won't be forced any longer to listen to newly minted Rand fanboys drone on and on and on and on about how much more enlightened they are than the rest of us hoi-polloi. Puleeze! (eye roll)

NOTE: If you want an example of the kind of behavior you can expect from Rand-influenced CEOs (as well as other assorted follies) check out these posts:

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Top 10 Reasons Ayn Rand was Dead Wrong - CBS News

Many articles have been written about whats wrong with Ayn Rands philosophy. But, to my knowledge, none of them presents her ideas accurately. So I thought it would be helpful to write one that does.

Heres whats wrong with Rands ideas:

Rand held that existence exists, that reality is real, that there is a world out there, and that we are conscious of it. She held that everything in existence is something specific; everything has a nature; a thing is what it is. (A snake is a snake. A woman is a woman. A pillar of salt is a pillar of salt.) She held that a thing can act only in accordance with its nature. (A snake can slither; it cannot speak. A woman can speak; she cant become a pillar of salt.) And Rand held that there is only one reality: the one we perceive, the one we experience, the one in which we live.1

Where to start with all of the problems in just that one paragraph?

To begin with, the idea that existence exists excludes the idea that existence doesnt exist. It denies the subjectivist, pragmatist, postmodernist view that reality is an illusion, a mental construct, a social convention. Obviously, people who insist that reality is not real are not going to buy in to a philosophy that says it is real.

So thats one huge problem with Rands philosophy.

Now consider her view that only one reality exists. This excludes the notion that a second reality exists; it excludes the idea of a supernatural realm, the realm of God. Likewise, her view that everything has a specific nature, that a thing is what it is, excludes the possibility that some things are not what they are. For instance, it excludes the possibility that a dead person can be alive (life after death), the possibility that wine can be blood or that bread can be flesh (transubstantiation), and the possibility that the Earth came into existence hundreds of thousands of years after the first Homo sapiens roamed it. Similarly, the idea that things can act only in accordance with their nature excludes the possibility of miraclesso: no Immaculate Conception, no virgin birth (of Jesus), no living inside a whale for three days, no walking on water, no faith healing, and so on.

Needless to say, people who insist on the existence of God, life after death, creationism, and miracles will not buy in to a philosophy that leaves no room for such things.

The problems with Rands philosophy are mounting rapidlyand weve just begun.

Another major problem is Rands view that man acquires knowledge by means of reason, the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. According to Rand, insofar as a person observes reality via his senses; integrates his observations into concepts, generalizations, and principles; checks his thinking for contradictions; and checks his conclusions for consistency with his ever-expanding network of observation-based integrationshe can acquire knowledge. Indeed, according to Rand human beings have acquired massive amounts of knowledge, which is why science has advanced so far and man has accomplished so much.2

Well, that view will not go over well with skeptics, pragmatists, and postmodernists who argue that man cannot acquire knowledgeat least not knowledge of reality. Because mans sensory apparatuses process all incoming data before it reaches consciousness, these skeptics argue, man is conscious not of an external reality or a world out there, but rather of internal modifications or distortions.

No human being has ever experienced an objective world, or even a world at all, writes Sam Harris. The sights and sounds and pulsings that you experience are consequences of processed datadata that has been structured, edited, or amplified by the nervous system. Thus, The world that you see and hear is nothing more than a modification of your consciousness.3

This fashionable view is rooted in the ideas of Immanuel Kant, who wrote: What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility [i.e., perception], remains completely unknown to us. Once we understand this, Kant says, we realise that not only are the drops of rain mere appearances, but that even their round shape, nay even the space in which they fall, are nothing in themselves, but merely modifications within consciousness. In principle, Kant says, the actual objectthe object as it really isremains unknown to us.4

Indeed, says Kant, it is an error even to regard external objects as things-in-themselves, which exist independently of us and of our sensibility, and which are therefore outside us. The truth, he says, is that external objects are mere appearances or species of [internal] representations, and the things we perceive are something only through these representations. Apart from them they are nothing.5

When philosophers or intellectuals claim that we cannot know reality because our sensory apparatuses distort the data before it reaches consciousness, they may sound profound or impressive (at least to each other). But, then, along comes Ayn Rand, who points out that such claims amount to the view that man is blind, because he has eyesdeaf, because he has earsdeluded, because he has a mindand the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.6

As you might imagine, such straightforward clarifications, which abound in Rands works, can make skeptics feel as ignorant as they claim to be. So thats another problem with Rands philosophy.

Further, Rand holds that reason is mans only means of gaining knowledge.7 This excludes the possibility that revelation, faith, feelings, or extrasensory perception (ESP) is a means of knowledge. On her view, to embrace ideas not supported by evidence is to err. Thus Rand sees all forms of mysticismall claims to a non-sensory, non-rational means of knowledgeas baseless, arbitrary, illegitimate.

That, of course, will not fly with religionists, subjectivists, psychics, or others who claim to acquire knowledge through non-sensory, non-rational means.

And then there are the myriad problems posed by Rands conception of free will.

Rand holds that people do indeed possess free willand that it resides in a fundamental choice: to think or not to think, to focus ones mind or not to do so, to go by facts or to go by feelings.8 The problems with this idea manifest on several levels.

For starters, if people have free will, then not only are their choices their responsibility, so too are the consequences of their choices. If a person characteristically chooses to think, and if his thinking guides him to build a business and make a lot of money, then the business and the money are his achievements. Likewise, if a person characteristically chooses not to think, and if his non-thinking renders him poor and miserable, then his poverty and misery are his fault.

Well, egalitarians, socialists, communists, and the like are not going to accept that for a minute. People who want to organize society in a way that ignores or denies personal responsibility will not accept a philosophy that upholds the very principle that gives rise to and necessitates personal responsibility.

Nor will Rands conception of free will jibe with Jews, Christians, or Muslims who take their religion seriously. If people truly choose to think or not to think, then the notion of an omnipotent, omniscient God goes out the window. Think about it: If people are free to think or not to think, then whatever powers an alleged God is said to possess, he cant know in advance which alternative people are going to choose. If God existed and knew in advance how people were going to choose, then their choices would be preordainedthus they wouldnt be genuine choices. Likewise, if people are free to think or not to think, then God cant make them choose to think. Nor can he make them choose not to think. You see the problem.

In short, Rands view of free will leaves no room for the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful God. This will not sit well with anyone who insists that such a God exists.

And thats still just the tip of Rands free-will iceberg. Her view of volition leads to a whole host of additional problems. Consider a few more.

If people choose to think or not to think, then they choose all of their actions that are governed by that fundamental choice as well. For instance, on Rands view, a person can choose to be honest or dishonest. He can refuse to pretend that facts are other than they areor he can choose to engage in such pretense.9 Importantly, Rands views on honesty and dishonesty are not merely about telling the truth versus lying. Rand holds that if a person knows something to be true but pretends that he doesnt know it, then even if he doesnt lie about iteven if he maintains the pretense only in his own mindhe is being dishonest. For instance, on Rands view, if a person knows that a friend has acted unjustly but pretends that he doesnt know it, hes being dishonest. And if a person knows that he owes someone an apology but doesnt extend it, hes being dishonest. In such cases, although the person has not lied, he nevertheless is pretending that facts are other than they are.

Well, people who choose occasionally to pretend that they dont know what they do knowand who want to continue in this fashionwill not embrace a philosophy that says they are able to stop deluding themselves and morally corrupt if they dont. (Of course, they might pretend to embrace it, but thats another matter.)

Likewise, on Rands view, a person can choose to think for himself, or he can turn to others and expect them to think for him. In other words, he can engage in independent thinking or in what Rand termed second-handedness.10 (An example of independent thinking would be someone reading a philosophers works and deciding for himself whether they make sense. An example of second-handedness would be someone turning to others to see what they say he should think about the philosophers ideas.) Rands insistence that people should face reality and think for themselves as a matter of unwavering principle is a problembecause many people are afraid to think for themselves. Many people prefer to avoid that effort, to shirk that responsibility, and to passively accept the ideas of their group, their leader, their tribe. Such people will not embrace a philosophy that upholds independent thinking as a fundamental virtue.

This brings us to the mother lode of problems with Ayn Rands philosophyand to the point of the whole thing.

Rands aforementioned principles calling for people to uphold reason, to be honest, and to think for themselves are part and parcel of the moral code she called rational egoism or rational self-interest. This moral code holds that the objective standard of moral value is mans lifeby which Rand means the requirements of human life given the kind of being that humans are. On her view, because humans are rational beingsbeings whose basic means of survival is the use of reasonthat which sustains and furthers the life of a rational being is good (or moral), and that which harms or destroys the life of a rational being is bad (or evil).11

Further, because Rand sees human beings as individualseach with his own body, his own mind, his own lifeshe holds that each individuals own life is properly his own ultimate value. She holds that each individual should choose and pursue his own life-serving values, and that he should never surrender a greater value for the sake of a lesser valuehe should never commit a sacrifice. As she puts it:

Manevery manis an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.12

Well, such a moral code clearly will not fly with people who want to maintain the traditional notion that people have a moral duty to sacrifice themselves or their values for the sake of others (i.e., altruism). Nor will it fly with people who feel that they have a moral right to sacrifice other people as they see fit (predation).

Not only does Rand regard both self-sacrifice and the sacrifice of others as immoral; she also regards the use of any form or degree of initiatory physical force against human beings as properly illegal. In her words, the essential characteristics of a civilized society are that men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit; and that no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others.13

Needless to say, Rands staunch advocacy of voluntary exchange to mutual benefit and her moral opposition to the use of force as a means of obtaining values from people will not fly with people or governments that want to use force to obtain values from people. Criminals who want to steal peoples belongings, commit fraud, rape people, or violate rights in other ways will not embrace a moral code that forbids them to do so. Likewise, governments that want to force people to serve the common good or the community or the master race or some other master will not recognize or uphold a morality that forbids them to initiate physical force against people. And pull-peddling businessmen who want government to forcibly control, regulate, or cripple their competitors will not recognize or uphold a moral code that forbids such coercion either.

This problemRands moral opposition to the use of physical force against human beingslies at the very base of her political theory, where it serves as a bridge between her moral code and her political views. This is where Rands theory of rights comes into the picture. As she put it:

Rights are a moral conceptthe concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individuals actions to the principles guiding his relationship with othersthe concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social contextthe link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.14

Rand sees individual rights as the governing principle of a civilized society because she sees rights as deriving from mans nature and as requirements of his life in a social context. She elaborates:

A right is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a mans freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a mans right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated actionwhich means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)15

According to Rand, the only proper purpose of government is to protect individual rights by banning physical force from social relationshipsand by using force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.16

Clearly, no one who wants government to do more than that will embrace Rands philosophy. No one who wants government to forcibly redistribute wealth, or to forbid certain kinds of speech, or to forbid certain kinds of consensual adult sex, or to restrict freedom in any other way will embrace a philosophy that demands principled recognition and absolute protection of individual rights.

A final problem worth mentioning about Rand and her philosophy is that she wrote in plain, intelligible English and defined her terms clearly as a matter of course, so that anyone who wants to understand her ideas can do so with relative ease. Toward this end, in addition to presenting her ideas in various nonfiction works, she dramatized them in spellbinding fictionsuch as her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shruggedthus enabling people to see her ideas in practice. Well, this will not go over well with modern philosophers or academics who insist that philosophy must be written in academese, technical jargon, or impenetrable fog. Nor will it pass muster with anyone who feels that dramatizing or concretizing ideas in fiction somehow disqualifies them.

We could go on. Rands philosophy involves many additional problems. But the foregoing is a concise indication of the trouble it causes.

So, next time the subject of whats wrong with Ayn Rands ideas comes up, be sure to share this brief sketch of the kinds of problems involved. Its better for people to learn whats wrong with Rands actual ideas than to waste time contemplating takedowns of straw men.

Craig is cofounder and editor in chief of The Objective Standard, cofounder and director of education at Objective Standard Institute, and executive director of Prometheus Foundation. He is the author of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It; Rational Egoism: The Morality for Human Flourishing; and the forthcoming Moral Truths Your Parents, Preachers, and Teachers Dont Want You to Know. He is currently working on his fourth book, Thinking in Principles. For updates on his work, join his mailing list atCraigBiddle.com.

1 See Ayn Rand, This is John Galt Speaking, in Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (New York: Signet, 1961), esp. 12452.

2 See For the New Intellectual; Ayn Rand, This is John Galt Speaking, in For the New Intellectual; and Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd ed., edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff (New York: Penguin, 1990).

3 Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 41.

4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martins, 1965), 8285.

5 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 346.

6 Rand, For the New Intellectual, 32.

7 Ayn Rand, What Is Capitalism? in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967), 16.

8 See Rand, This is John Galt Speaking, 12027.

9 See Rand, This is John Galt Speaking, 129; Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Meridian, 1993), 267.

10 See Rand, The Nature of the Second-Hander, in For the New Intellectual, 6871; see also Ayn Rand, Journals of Ayn Rand, edited by David Harriman (New York: Dutton, 1997), esp. 9091, 293294, 416.

11 See Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Ethics, in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), esp. 2128.

12 Ayn Rand, Introducing Objectivism, in The Voice of Reason (New York: Meridian, 1989), 4.

13 Rand, Introducing Objectivism, 4.

14 Ayn Rand, Mans Rights, in Virtue of Selfishness, 10810.

15 Rand, Mans Rights, 110.

16 Ayn Rand, What Is Capitalism?, in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967), 19.

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Here's What's Wrong With Ayn Rand's Philosophy - The ...

The Atlas Societyis the leading nonprofit organizationengaging young people with Ayn Rands ideas.This 30-year-old think tank uses creative digital media to promote open Objectivism a philosophy of reason, achievement, individualism, and freedom.

The Atlas Society presents the empowering principles of Objectivism to a global audience, and offers those principles as a rational and moral alternative in the marketplace of philosophical ideas.

About the film:Mankind has entered a new Dark Age in this dystopian future imagined by Ayn Rand. The stark horror of a civilization destroyed by envy remains as relevant and arresting today as it did eight decades ago.

In this adaptation, award-winning artist Dan Parsons teams up with Jennifer Grossman, CEO of The Atlas Society to introduce the story to a new generation with a provocative, graphic presentation that captures the imagination and invites readers on a journey of self-discovery.

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Events - Heartland Movie Night | A screening of Ayn Rand's "Anthem: The Graphic Novel" - The Heartland Institute

On Wednesdays edition of The Majority Report, the chairman of the board of the Ayn Rand Institute said that the condo association of the collapsed Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida made a bad decision and that it is rightly suffering the consequences of it.

Yaron Brook told an incredulous Sam Seder that in a truly free market, the company that insured the now collapsed building would have hired its own inspector to ensure the building was structurally sound. Now, in the world we live in today, they dont, said Brook, Because they rely on the government inspector.

Seder responded by saying government and private inspectors had expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the building. The private owners of that building made the decision not to fix it.

Then why are we worried about it? asked Brook. They made a decision and they suffered the consequences.

Because theres a hundred and fifty dead people, Seder replied.

People who made a decision, said Brook, Who made a bad decision and suffer the consequences of it. Im not justifying the building collapsing. Im saying that people make decisions. If I make a decision to walk into the street without looking, should the driver be limited in his capacity to drive because I made a stupid decision?

Brook concluded, What you want is for the people who make the decision to suffer [or] to benefit from the consequences of their actions.

A 2018 inspection report warned of major structural damage to Champlain Towers South, and it suggested that concrete damage would only worsen with time. Less than three months before the collapse, the condo association president said the condition of the building had gotten significantly worse since the inspection in 2018.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 46 bodies have been recovered from the rubble, and 94 people remain unaccounted for.

Watch above via The Majority Report.

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Ayn Rand Think Tanker Says Florida Condo Collapse Happened Because People Made A Bad Decision and Now Suffer the Consequences of It - Mediaite

At a Westminster cinema club in 2015, Sajid Javid picked a film to be shown to fellow politicos that now seems instructive to the government's newfound approach to handling the pandemic.

The then culture secretary chose The Fountainhead; a 1949 adaptation of the novel by Ayn Rand - a doyenne of liberty-loving conservatives.

In a scene that Javid has said he reads multiple times a year, the novel's protagonist Howard Roark proclaims to a courtroom that "the 'common good' of a collective - a race, a class, a state - was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men".

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After 18 months of state-sanctioned restrictions designed to safeguard the common good, it now appears the individualistic sentiment contained in the pages of The Fountainhead is in the ascendency in government.

This week the prime minister will flesh out a broad policy shift in how the pandemic is dealt with in England.

Laws will be replaced by guidance. Telling replaced by asking. Fines replaced by an appeal to personal responsibility.

"We are going to have to learn to accept the existence of COVID and find ways to cope with it - just as we already do with flu," writes the new health secretary.

While the approach is already winning plaudits with Conservative MPs, it has set alarm bells ringing among scientists.

Many have criticised the comparison with flu and questioned whether individual common sense is a solid enough safety belt to prevent substantial further suffering.

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"It's like having a government that thinks road safety should be completely up to 'individual responsibility': no traffic lights, no highway code, no law about driving on the left, no crash barriers," tweeted health psychologist Robert West.

In reality, this is not a "one or the other" choice.

The meat and drink of most policy making is deciding what level of intrusion into all our lives is acceptable because of the benefits it brings to society more widely.

Most of us accept speed limits and traffic lights because the individual impact is massively outweighed by the damage a reckless driver can do to other motorists.

But we also exercise a degree of personal responsibility.

Whilst we are generally allowed to drive at 70mph on a motorway in heavy rain, many of us would choose not to.

We decide to behave differently off our own back to protect ourselves and those around us.

Transplant this balancing act into the pandemic and the question becomes: what level of death and serious disease are we prepared to subject a minority of people to before we force the majority to start making compromises again?

On one level this is a moral question for ministers to wrestle with and - on this front - the answer may well be clear cut.

But there's also a practical aspect to this.

The point of lockdown restrictions was primarily to safeguard the NHS. On that basis, the government should be asking itself a number of questions.

What level of COVID hospitalisations is acceptable? At what point does the damage to the NHS caused by COVID pressures- such as delayed and missed appointments and operations and staff exhaustion - begin to outweigh the damage and inconvenience of asking people and businesses to live with restrictions again?

Given the effectiveness of the vaccines, many will argue this balance should never tip in the direction of restrictions ever again.

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After all, the severe NHS pressures caused by winter flu come and go without calls for mask wearing and social distancing.

COVID may change this equation. But as yet, we have no idea how much change it will have to usher in before ministers reach for restrictions.

In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark rails against the cause of the collective saying: "I am an architect. I know what is to come by the principle on which it is built."

The government has sketched out the principle on which it wants to build post-pandemic England.

The coming months will tell us whether practicality will bend to the will of this principle.

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COVID-19: Sajid Javid's approach has party support - but scientists are getting worried - Sky News

Its no surprise that the new health secretary has balked at a gigantic new reorganisation bill before he had even got his feet under the NHS operating table. Five million people waiting for treatment, a workforce crisis and another Covid-19 tide already cancelling treatments is trouble enough. Sajid Javids anxiety is shared by many, Theresa May just one of those warning of the bills perils. But No 10 blasted ahead with the bill this week, impervious to this political dynamite.

Whatever their merits or follies, all new re-disorganisations are risky for Tory governments, who are never trusted with the NHS. How easy it is for Labour, backed by influential NHS figures, to arouse public suspicion of Tory intentions. Even Margaret Thatcher had to back off from her radical privatising impulse, to swear between gritted teeth that the NHS was safe in my hands. Voters might ignore the fiendishly complex history of NHS restructuring, but they will grasp one simple, sinister point: the government is seizing control of the everyday running of the NHS, in what the Health Service Journal calls an audacious power grab. Any local decision can fall under populist political whim from the top.

Tory MPs should recall how Andrew Lansleys disastrous 2012 Health and Social Care Act almost shipwrecked the David Cameron-led coalition, so loud were the voices of experts rightly warning against it. The then NHS CEO, David Nicholson, himself called that upheaval so colossal it can be seen from space as it broke the NHS into fragments, putting every service out to tender to anyone, public or private, enforced by competition law. Every part of the NHS had to bid and compete against others for any service: co-operation was illegally anti-competitive. This costly bureaucratic nightmare failed on every front while its privatising intent let Virgin Care and others eat into profitable community services.

Simon Stevens has spent his eight years in charge of NHS England struggling to reintegrate the fragments. This bill, the sum of his efforts, revokes the cursed Section 75 that forces tendering out NHS services. Instead, it sets into law Englands 42 integrated caresystems (ICS) designed to unite hospital, community, GP and mental services with local authority care and public health, to cooperate under one board with one budget for its local population.

But No 10 has added a nuclear ingredient: NHS England or any ICS can have its decision-making seized from it by the secretary of state or the prime minister on any pretext, and they will control appointments to those 42 boards. Expect politically obedient cronies.

This shifts the localising, accountable flavour of this bill. Where Stevens has reigned supreme, cleverly manoeuvring against the Treasury over funding, his successor will have no such creative independence, and will be subservient to political masters. The word is that Dido Harding, she of the 37bn test-and-trace failure, is out of the running, now that her riding friend, Matt Hancock, has gone. The front-runner should be the well-respected Amanda Pritchard, effectively NHS Englands deputy CEO. From outside the NHS, Leeds city council chief executive Tom Riordan is an interesting candidate, but can the job be done without deep NHS knowledge?

Thats something a contentious third contender has: Mark Britnell spent 20 years in the NHS, reaching a director-generalship. But since 2009 he has been KPMGs senior partner for global healthcare, from where he sat on the board advising Cameron on those disastrous 2012 reforms. He surfaced in public in 2011 when caught out telling a conference of private US healthcare executives that: In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider not a state deliverer, praising the competition element in the Lansley reforms that meant: The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.

He claimed those quotes did not properly reflect the discussion but has never denied the lethal words. Private consultants have been on a constant revolving door with the NHS: management consultant use trebled between 2016 and 2019, despite pledges to reduce the practice. To choose him would signal a defiant culture war confrontation, suggesting Sajid Javid really does lean toward the views of his favourite writer, Ayn Rand, from whose book The Fountainhead he reads the courtroom scene twice a year: the NHS is surely Rands perfect symbol of oppressive socialist statism.

The highly politicised selectors shortlisting applicants for the new head of the NHS are from No 10, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. Bizarrely, candidates get a full days psychometric testing. While experts say basic competences need testing some high-fliers turn out to be innumerate a full day means personality testing, which in such a senior job is as much use as phrenology, and far less use than the Harry Potter sorting hat. Under this level of political control, heres hoping the winner has the cunning to appease their political masters in interviews, but once in post will spring out as a Tiggerishly independent NHS defender.

This bill is a gift to Labour: Javids leaked letter asking for delay warned of significant areas of contention to be resolved. You bet. How can the bill legislate for joining up with cash-starved local authorities, without a social care plan? The bill gives ICSs 70 stern performance measures to meet, but the previous 18-week waiting limit has vanished, only measuring 52-week waits. Numbers of patients needlessly blocking NHS beds will be counted against each ICS, but what can they do when theres too little social care to release patients? Choice will be enforced from on high, but with 5 million waiting, where are the spare beds to allow it?

Labour in power effectively abolished waiting beyond 18 weeks, often by using the same terror and targets methods but heres the crucial difference: that was in return for an NHS budget rising by 7% a year. In the last decade, the NHS budget per capita fell in a rapidly ageing population. Dont expect fiscally tough Javid to demand enough from the Treasury to make these new ICSs flourish. Hes right to fear this bill is contentious: its packed with ammunition for Labour.

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The NHS bill is political dynamite and a gift to Labour - The Guardian

Welcome to my video presentation for Friday, July 9. My article below examines the videos themes in greater detail.

Inflation is the hot topic on Wall Street right now. For insights, lets ignore the loud, obnoxious hosts on financial television and turn instead to a genius I studied in college: British economist John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes is a giant in the field of economics. Simply put, Keynesianism is a demand side theory that calls for greater government expenditures to stimulate demand during times of economic distress. This stance is often referred to as priming the pump.

The Keynesian approach was considered mainstream thinking for decades, but its controversial nowadays (Ill probably get hate mail from the acolytes of Ayn Rand). However, during the coronavirus pandemic, weve seen how priming the pump can prevent an economic collapse.

Below, I look at another concept introduced by Keynes and apply it to current market conditions, particularly inflation.

In the meantime, worries that economic growth would sputter weighed on the stock market Thursday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 259.86 points (-0.75%), the S&P 500 declined 37.31 points (-0.86%), and the tech-heavy NASDAQ slipped 105.28 points (-0.72%). Asian and European stocks swooned as well. The CBOE Volatility Index (VIX), aka fear index, jumped more than 17%. Bonds saw their prices rise and yields fall. For anxious investors, risk off was the order of the day.

Another factor spooking investors is the rise of the COVID delta variant, which suggests that the pandemic is far from behind us.

The VIX rises during periods of extreme uncertainty. Notably, the VIX spiked in the fall of 2008, near the height of the global financial crisis.

In pre-market futures trading Friday, the three main U.S. stock market indices were bouncing back. Bond yields were rising again. Overseas equities were recovering in early trading.

The post-election stock market rally remains intact. Stocks probably will get a shot in the arm next week, as second-quarter corporate earnings start to come in. Operating results for Q2 are expected to be robust.

But inflation worries wont go away anytime soon. If you havent already, you need to adjust your portfolio to this prevailing sentiment, pronto.

The beauty contest

Back in 1936, when he was advising FDR during the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes evoked the metaphor of a beauty contest to describe the stock market. He described a newspaper contest in which 100 photographs of faces were displayed. The winner would be the reader whose list of six came closest to the most popular of the combined lists of all readers.

The shrewdest strategy, Keynes advised, isnt to pick the faces that are your personal favorites. Its to select those that you think others will think prettiest.

Accordingly, its a sophisticated understanding of crowd psychology that helps you pick stock market winners. Various 2021 outlook reports from some of the worlds biggest money managers tell us that inflation hedges will be the prettiest of all assets in the beauty contest for investing dollars.

Inflation also is the number one concern expressed in reader emails to me. You need to add inflation protection to your portfolio, while its still affordable.

Read This Story: Reader Forum: Is Inflation a Major Threat?

Higher inflation is indeed occurring, although I agree with the Federal Reserve that its transitory. Historically, inflation remains comparatively low and doesnt appear strong enough to compel the Fed to tighten the monetary spigot this year. The Feds Federal Open Market Committee currently forecasts that the U.S. inflation rate for 2021 will average at around 2.45% (see chart).

But remember our beauty contest metaphor. You should always remain aware of what large investment houses and asset managers are thinking, because they tend to set new trends given the sheer size of their trades. The major institutional investors are currently gobbling up inflation hedges, which means that independent investors who act too late may get crowded out of buying inflation-proof securities at reasonable values.

While each individual investment should always be evaluated using an objective method, such as price-to-earnings ratio, discounted cash flow and return on equity, its also wise to follow the macrotrends that are shaping the investment universe.

Higher energy costs, especially at the gasoline pump, are starting to worry investors that maybe the economic recovery is at risk. To be sure, soaring crude oil prices and a fast-mending economy are helping the energy sector post the stock markets biggest gains so far in 2021. An even stronger performance for energy equities probably lays ahead.

But it doesnt help market sentiment that in Bloombergs June inflation survey, the consensus of economists again called for higher inflation this year (see chart).

Burgeoning demand for Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) confirms that U.S. inflation expectations are rising, with central banks and investors seeking insurance against the prospect that a recovering American economy will stoke price pressures. The market for TIPS has grown to a whopping $1.6 trillion.

While the coupon rate attached to these securities is fixed, the principal is not. The principal is indexed to the consumer price index and appreciates in tandem with inflation. As the principal increases, so do your semi-annual interest payments.

At maturity, you receive either the original face value of the instrument or the inflation-adjusted principal, whichever is greater. Income and gains are exempt from state income taxes.

TIPS arent the only investment that is being targeted for inflation protection. Chief among these inflation hedges: commodities. Prices for commodities have been soaring this year and they probably have further to run.

To combat inflation, any given commodity should demonstrate two characteristics: 1) Its geared to global growth, and 2) demand exceeds supply.

Red metal rising

A vital commodity that fits these two criteria is copper.

The industrial world cant function without the red metal. Copper is vital for building construction, power generation and transmission, electronics, industrial machinery, and transportation vehicles. Copper wiring and plumbing are mainstays of heating and cooling systems, appliances, and telecommunications links. Renewable energy and electric vehicles consume vast amounts of copper.

This year and beyond, as the world economy speeds up and infrastructure spending explodes, so will demand for copper. For our favorite investment play on this crucial commodity, click here now.

John Persinos is the editorial director of Investing Daily. Send questions and comments to: mailbag@investingdaily.com. To subscribe to his video channel, follow this link.

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VIDEO: Inflation Hedges Are Gaining in Popularity - Investing Daily - Investing Daily

Books opened doors to whole new worlds

When I was growing up our family had no TV and movies were a rarity. Entertainment came from the public library, where my mother took us every two weeks.

The first book that really made an impression was The Story of My Life by Helen Keller. I was 11 years old. A year later I read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, a book to be reread over the years. These two books were like a door into a whole new world of human experience beyond our own little corner.

In ninth grade, I discovered The Good Earth and thereafter consumed most of Pearl S. Bucks stories about Chinese life in the 1800s and 1900s. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck became favorites for their beautiful writing and intriguing dilemmas, then I was on to the convoluted tomes of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky as I delved into the Russian experience. Romance novels were never my thing except for the tragic story of Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, a timeless tale set in our own North County of 150 years ago.

In recent years, some historical novels such as The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett have been memorable, and Im awed by the many excellent stories that have come out of World War II, each capturing a different facet. I particularly loved Mark Sullivans Beneath a Scarlet Sky, revealing how devastating the war was to the Italians, and Heather Morris The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

An authentic movie can condense an era or event and serve it up to entertain for a couple of hours. But a good book draws you in so you are not just an observer but fully engaged in the narrative through your mind.

Incredible what these little black squiggles on paper can accomplish. Its a miracle.

Louise Birket, San Marcos

The news didnt look good. It was mid-March 2020 and the stock market had had its worst day since the 1980s with a downturn of over 7 percent due to the spread of COVID-19, now declared a pandemic.

Im going to get something for soup, I called out to my husband as I grabbed my Subaru keys and headed for my local grocery store during its 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. senior shopping hours, a list of ingredients for Minestrone Milanese stuffed into my jacket pocket and an unfamiliar mask covering my nose and mouth.

The minestrone recipe was from The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking: A Year of Our Soups, a large paperback with a color photo of its smiling author, Brother Rick Curry, S.J., on its cover. I had picked up the book years before at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., after a morning spent admiring its breathtaking rose window and the open-air workshop where sculptors were restoring fierce-looking gargoyles.

The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking is a collection of recipes prepared by Brother Curry during his life as a Jesuit religious. Curry, who died in 2015, transformed a birth defect into a vocation brimming over with projects for wounded veterans, everything from a theatrical performance workshop to a commercial bakery. Born without a right forearm, he joined the Jesuit order, the order of the current Pope Francis, when he was 19.

Throughout the pandemic months, I often turned to Brother Currys book for its combination of spiritual enlightenment and brilliant but uncomplicated soup recipes. I wrote dozens of comments alongside the lists of ingredients: use Siesels (a local meat market) smoked shanks to Very tasty! Make again!

Brother Currys book follows the outline of the church year:

Advent. Christmas. Lent. Easter. The recipes in each section reflect tastes that complement those feasts. A beef flank and root vegetable Hungarian goulash is perfect for an Advent winter. A mix of fresh greens in a frothy potage aux fines herbes is a joyous welcome to the Easter season.

Along with the recipes, Brother Currys good-natured narrative weaves in the philosophies of his religious life: The Jesuits believe that one best learns by repeating something over and over and over again. You can add a wonderful element to any of these [soup] stocks by throwing a handful of roughly torn basil into the finished broth.

Brother Curry often collected recipes on his travels. While in Madrid at the invitation of Queen Sofa of Spain, who called on him to attend a conference for arts and people with disabilities, he returned to the states with a recipe for potato and kale soup.

The characteristics of any good stock are flavor, body and clarity. Of the three, flavor is paramount, Irma S. Rombauer wrote in The Joy of Cooking. One could say the same about any good soup cookbook, including The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking. Its charming blend of flavor, body and clarity was just the right remedy for a COVID-19 cure.

Regina Morin, Ocean Beach

I am an author with stories published in America, Mexico and France. What compelled me into this pursuit when I had no intention of doing so? The Italian writer Alberto Moravia. His writing was fluid, his style unaffected, his personages so human.

The book I have now read the most and which influenced me is Ernest Hemingways A Moveable Feast, his classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s when he was a struggling, young, poor writer living in an apartment with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and young son. After that I read writers from other countries, like Moravia: Gabriel Garca Mrquez from Mexico with his flowing style, the tightness of Georges Simenon and his Belgian detective series about Jules Maigret, Frances Marguerite Duras short The Lover, the long Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, and even the disdain for punctuation of the Texan Cormac McCarthy. But it was Hemingway who finally hooked me and influenced my life. He was tough, but vulnerable, strong, but weak in areas of relationships, and at the end, tragic in spite of his macho image. He considered himself a storyteller, not a writer per se. He once said that a writer should write for people, not critics or other writers. He dismissed the New York intellectual establishment, probably due to the fact that his books were often criticized when reviewed by them.

Even though he was sensitive to criticism, he dismissed the intellectual establishment probably due to the fact that his books, although loved by many readers, rarely were taken seriously by those critics. But Hemingway also said that if you need to have a dictionary or thesaurus near you every time you sit down to write, or read a book, pick another occupation. There is a special beauty in the simplicity of the language of his stories. I savored them over the years, and let the story itself do its magic.

In the beginning I did sometimes copy a writers style that I admired tremendously. But with time, I gave my own writing the freedom it deserves. Even if, like Cormac McCarthy, I do disdain punctuation all together. I remember one thing about Hemingway, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature, by writing stories about human beings in a very clear and simple language.

And I single out A Moveable Feast, which was published posthumously but remains one of his most beloved works, for inspiring me to write with unbridled creativity and exuberant mood, my own novels and short stories.

Ariel Morales, El Cajon

This summer I started reading Nobuko Miyamotos Not Yo Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution. Im not a big reader. However, this book hit home and made me cry. It was a rare moment when I felt, She understands.

Miyamoto, a Japanese American like me, also fell in love with a Black man in the 1970s. She consulted with Rev. Mas Kodani, a Buddhist, for guidance when she was pregnant. He told her Dont go against your feelings. I cried. I also followed my heart, only without guidance. The book brought out how alone I felt during that time period. There was no one who said, Follow your heart.

After almost 50 years, it was nice to read a fellow Japanese American traveler on the journey of life who understood love with no borders on a personal level, and going through the Asian Movement, and having a love of the arts. Thank you to Nobuko Miyamoto.

Shirley Omori, Normal Heights

As a youngster, I was taught to put others first, including their beliefs and their feelings. Anything else was being selfish. I grew up introverted and remained that way into my 30s or later. Ive always enjoyed reading, and I discovered books written by Ayn Rand. I first read The Fountainhead, then Atlas Shrugged, and then The Virtue of Selfishness.

My thought at seeing the title was, Virtue in being selfish? Thats not what my parents taught me. I loved the book, and over the years have read it several times. However, when reading it as a young adult, the theory still puzzled me.

Then I had the occasion to attend a sermon by a rabbi at a Friday night service. His topic? The virtue of selfishness. I perked up. He used the following as an example of unselfish selfishness.

Suppose your child and your neighbors child were swimming in a stream and they were both having trouble getting back to shore. They were both in danger of drowning. Would you feel obligated to save the neighbors child first and let your own child drown so you wouldnt be considered selfish, or would you save your own child and then do everything you could to save the neighbors child? Is saving your own child first considered selfish? No, said the rabbi. Thats where the virtue in selfishness comes in. Im now an older adult, but the moral of that book has remained with me.

Iris Price, Ramona

Folks in my Boomer generation, and others since, have studied history from the perspective of the great presidents, generals and heroes of years past. So my choice for most influential book is Boston Universitys Howard Zinns 2003 posthumous 20th anniversary edition of A Peoples History of the United States. It is a multi-million-copy bestseller that was nominated for the American Book Award. It authoritatively focused on the rest of the story that many history books have overlooked.

News icon Paul Harvey vividly captured our collective imagination via his news segments entitled The Rest of the Story. Each griping vignette was presented as little-known or forgotten facts, with some key element of the story usually the name of some well-known person held back until the end. Borrowing from that construct: A major contemporary figure has described Peoples History as evil and wicked, while undermining the virtues of Americas heroes and the nobility of the American character. The speaker was then President Donald Trump.

I embraced the power of Zinns narration of the rest of the story in his telling version of U.S. history. Per his definitive viewpoint: We must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The [written] history of any country conceals fierce conflicts of interest between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.

Peoples History presents a powerful alternative to the traditional historical narrative. That latter approach views history from the perspective of the great men (but little about great women), and the rote memory events we chanced upon in our educational years. Zinn, indeed, spanned the nations history from inception through 2000. But he reviewed our nation via a bottom-up approach. He did not shy away from presidents, generals and major events. He addressed those stories and countless others from the perspective of Americas women, factory workers, working poor, African Americans and immigrant laborers. Zinn therein focused, for example, on the other civil war, spanning generations of class warfare between labor and management.

One must acknowledge the riposte from the right to protagonist Howard Zinns leftist history that many of us read (or were assigned) in high school or college. The antagonist is Emory University instructor Mary Grabars 2019 Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation against America.

Grabars perspective quarterbacks a controversy that has not diminished, but instead has increased the popularity of Zinns seminal work. Reading this Zinn-Grabar dueling banjo couplet will illuminate a discrete rivalry that eclipses mere reliance on media simplifications about either tome.

Bill Slomanson, Hillcrest

When I was 22 or 23, I saw the word ubiquitous in the newspaper. It was part of an ad for the telephone company and its ubiquitous telephone. I had to look that thing up. Chalk up one more timber in the frame of my learning to the newspaper. A lifetime of reading the daily paper seems as good a route to education, entertainment and contentment you could ask.

Contentment? That part comes from settling in with the morning newspaper and a cup of coffee to see who won and whats the buzz. I admit it. The sports page is where it all starts. It really started in the 1940s at the dinner table. My brother and I would listen to the different opinions flowing from my Irish mom and my businessman dad. The paper, plus columnists like David Lawrence, the Alsops, Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell provided the spark.

A newspaper delivered to the home then, and ever since, of course presented a chance to be aware of the issues of the day. Just like a book, continually reading different stories in different styles helped one do the same. This is not to say that reading a newspaper is better than summer reading of a book. You can only snuggle up in bed with a handy book to see if the butler did it. But dont go to some cocktail party offering opinions on some authors work because youll be a bore. Better to stay with the current stuff from the paper and be careful with certain inflammable subjects, like Donald Trump. Just say you admire a guy who doesnt drink or smoke, but wish he would stay out of Washington, D.C.

Newspapers offer a more complete reading experience. Bookies may be able to name thousands of great authors, but dont forget William Buckley, Jr., Art Buchwald, Jimmy Breslin, Herb Caen, Mike Royko, Helen Gurley Brown, Ring Lardner, Drew Pearson and H.L. Mencken.

True, its only a handful of famous writers who make the big bucks. In a field that pays little (ransom notes excepted), there are thousands of dedicated journalists working in a newspaper industry that seems to be fading fast. Good luck to them, and thanks much.

Tom Dresselhuys, Carmel Valley

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Opinion: Your Say: Readers offer what books or writing influenced them - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Recently, on Twitter, Splice Todays proprietor suggested that Democrats will never trust converts from the Republican Party, like me and the atrocious Max Boot. Ive been giving that some thought.

Thought No. 1 is Why should I care? On a practical level, my popularity in the party I recently joined doesnt seem to matter much. Im unlikely to run for office or be appointed to a political post. Nor am I among the high-profile political commentatorssuch as Bootwhose success and livelihood can be measured by their capacity to draw and retain a mass-market audience. A good thing about not having something is you dont have to worry about losing it.

Such a utilitarian calculation, however, doesnt capture all thats involved. Humans thrive on relationships, including group affiliations. We want to feel a part of larger things, and want to be liked. In my teens and 20s, I affected a disdain for such needs; I was an individualist, a non-conformist; if you didnt like my libertarian-conservative politics, that was your problem, perhaps based on some shortfall of knowledge or rationality. I loved Ayn Rand.

From a mid-life perspective, such staunchness looks like youthful hubris. Ive changed my mind on various political issues, which doesnt prove Im right now and was wrong then, but suggests that the possibility of changing my mind is something I shouldve given greater weight. I mightve also appreciated group dynamics as more complex than Id realized. If youre a non-conformist vis--vis some group, that plausibly means youre conforming to some other groups ideas. Furthermore, groups change, political parties among them.

My foremost problem with the Democrats, for several decades beginning with my first real political interest circa 1980, was that I thought they were insufficiently vigilant against foreign threats to the United States. I saw a tough-minded Republican approach as vindicated by events: that Reagans defense buildup was vital in ending the Cold War; that G.H.W. Bush in 1990 held a crucial line against Saddam Husseins aggression and a breakdown of international order. All of this, it seemed to me, was in keeping with the tragic historical lesson of how appeasement and isolationism not only failed to prevent World War II but enabled the conflagration to happen. (Of course, the 1930s isolationism I decried had been primarily a Republican tendency, but that seemed safely in the past; the parties had changed since then.)

That picture strikes me, even now, as broadly correct. The trouble was that it was a template that would show its limitations in the 21st century. The Iraq War under George W. Bush dealt a massive blow to the assumption that tough-minded Republicans were to be trusted on when to fight wars or how to do so. The Democrats, divided between support and opposition for the war, increasingly seemed to merit a second look as to their national-security credentials. A President Gore wouldve never made the Iraq blunder; and a President Kerrys ability to wrap up the conflict, and with what consequences, will never be known.

My 20th-century template of vigilant Republicans versus lax Democrats fell apart further in the Trump years. Weve not yet attained, and maybe never will, a thorough understanding of Putins possible role in getting Trump elected or influence thereafter, but whats clear is that the recent Republican Party viewed those concerns with a languidness that the 1980s Republican Party wouldve found shocking. On China, the Trump GOP offers conspiracy theories and bellicose rhetoric but little coherent strategy to deal with a powerful peer competitor; the Democrats, with their emphasis on alliances, seem better prepared for the challenge.

At present, much political debate has little to do with national security, or with policy at all. A lot of it is just culture war, with much focus on the latest outrageous statement or anecdote. I find it hard to care about most of this. Insofar as Wokeism is supposed to be a reason why I should be wary of the Democrats, Ill need greater evidence that this implicates the Party broadly, as opposed to a phenomenon among activists and academics that has generated heightened attention in right-wing media as a deliberate distraction from issues of policy and governance.

Its plausible that therell be important policy matters where Ill have sharp disagreements with the Biden administration and congressional Democrats. Levels of spending and debt may be high on that list, though concerns about that will have to be weighed against the insouciant record the Republicans scored on those subjects in recent years. On climate and other environmental issues, Im strongly with the Democrats. On social issues including abortion, even in my Republican decades, I was generally at odds with the GOPs agenda, and remain so.

On matters of electoral governance, both parties have engaged in gerrymandering, but the Republicans have entered dangerous territory in seeking to limit voting rights and increase possibilities for electoral outcomes to be overturned through post-election maneuvers. The GOPs lack of interest in investigating the January 6 riot is of a piece with its lack of interest in investigating malfeasance in the Trump administration: partisanship over country.

As an ex-Republican, I may always be regarded as an outsider in the Democratic Party, though so far, I havent sensed any such attitude on a personal level or in reactions Ive gotten to my articles. In any case, fitting in has its limits, and parties, like individuals, change all the time. Politics isnt a place to make permanent attachments.

Kenneth Silber is author ofIn DeWitts Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canaland is on Twitter:@kennethsilber

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Will the Democrats Trust Me? - Splice Today

This article appears in the May/June 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

One of the hallmarks of an autocracy is to go after the teachers. Teachers. Seriously, the people who get crappy pay for trying to put information in your childs head. I dont know if youve met your kid, but hes an idiot. I cant even get him to stop kicking the back of my seat on an airplane. And yet some teacher takes that idiot child of yours and gets him to understand the themes in Huckleberry Finn. If I had to do that job, Id search for a quiet spot to commit suicide.

Teachers, whatever their flaws, have the nasty habit of letting facts slip out. Facts like the Jews dont have horns; Tibet is not legally part of China; Lord Xenu was not Galactic Emperor, nor does he command you to build a tax-exempt real estate empire. Teachers also introduce seditious ideas, like the scientific method (Do you have any actual data to back up your thesis that George Soros heads a vast global conspiracy? Then Im gonna have to say this is not a good science fair project.). Meanwhile, authoritarians are often doing some pretty heinous things, and justifying them with some pretty flimsy stories. The simplest of facts or the slightest bit of critical thinking can undermine an authoritarian narrative (President Erdogan, I think we actually did kill a million Armenians. Hey man, stop killing my buzz, Im trying to screw the Kurds over here!).

That takes us to Idahothe state you confuse with Iowa, but have never bothered to correct in your head because youve got better things to worry about. Idaho voted for Trump by more than 30 points in 2020. They drank the orange Kool-Aid and went back for seconds. For their next act, Idaho has drafted a boatload of ultra-Trumpy legislation. Things like a fetal heartbeat law; a law against mask mandates; and a law that authorizes the killing of 90 percent of the wolves in Idaho (because, among other things, Trump hates wolves, the sharks of the land!). Among this raft of bills is a law that prohibits the teaching of critical race theory in public universities and grade schools.

Generally, critical race theory (CRT) just means paying attention to racism in history. I know, shocking, right? Its more complicated than that, but not by much. Its really not a big deal, unless youre a white supremacist who wants to pretend George Washingtons slaves really appreciated him. CRT is an approach that really only affects undergraduate and graduate students majoring in history. It isnt indoctrinating Idaho State University students into the local chapter of the Black Panthers, which at ISU is the one Black student who happens to own a beret (his name is Carl). The MOST a nonhistory major might have to deal with CRT is:Student: The Civil War was about states rights.Professor: Really? What specific rights did these states want?Student: Um well, the right to own slaves Professor: Any others? Student: Damn you, critical race theory! Now I have to reconcile myself with the past!

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CRT is not being used in grade schools; Boise kindergarteners are mercifully safe. The closest to CRT one might hear in high school is a teacher saying, Hey, slaughtering Native Americans was some pretty immoral stuff, am I right? Its really not controversial material at all except in Trumpworld, where Republicans now make legislation based on Tucker Carlsons A-block rant.

Dont be fooled though. This isnt the Mr. Potato Head controversy (Theyve made Mr. Potato Head a gay Marxist! Now how am I supposed to teach my kid about gender norms and Ayn Rand?!). Trump Republicans are genuinely scared of critical race theory. Make America Great Again isnt just a hat that lets you know you shouldnt hire someone for that job in human resources. MAGA is a fable, and its an agenda. The fable is that the United States was best when white men had total control over everything; it was like an episode of Care Bears, but without that one sassy, darker bear. And the agenda is to get back to that mythical time, by any means necessary. Inconvenient facts like Hey, it wasnt totally awesome for Black people, women, or gay people tend to ruin the project. Especially when told by one of those meddling teachers.

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Nothing to See Here - The American Prospect