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Good Friday Morning! Somehow, it’s been a year since the meltdown of the “crazy plane lady” made waves on social media. Tiffany Gomas wanted off a plane after yelling that someone on the plane wasn’t real. She’s since become internet famous, with a ton of followers on X/Instagram, and rolling with the Barstool Sports guys. She commemorated that event by flying a plane this year (with some help).
The Horse Race is up and running this week on YouTube. I’m still hammering out a recording schedule for the week. But when that happens, you can get the notifications on YouTube by subscribing. The plan is to do livestreams for around 30 minutes, covering the latest news.
The name of the game on YouTube is subscriptions, likes on videos, and watch time. Please hit the subscribe button on the channel.
This week, I’m digging into an essay written by historian Niall Ferguson in The Free Press. In it, he asserts that America is becoming the new Soviet empire. I disagree with this—links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- We got the first Atlantic named storm of the season as Alberto made landfall in Mexico, with impacts being felt as far away as Louisiana. There’s a minor system headed towards the Florida/Georgia/South Carolina coast this week, and Alberto may stir up a second system in the Gulf of Mexico. After a quiet start to the season, the hurricane season is ramping up. As a reminder: “NOAA is forecasting a range of 17 to 25 total named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher). Of those, 8 to 13 are forecast to become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including 4 to 7 major hurricanes (category 3, 4 or 5; with winds of 111 mph or higher). Forecasters have a 70% confidence in these ranges.”
- The first debate between Trump/Biden is coming up this next week on the 27th. As I wrote when the news broke, the dynamics of this are bizarre. We haven’t had a single convention, primaries are ongoing, and Biden pushed the general election into the summer months. Somewhat predictably, we’re getting “Trump is sinking” in the polls narratives. Trump still leads in the RCP. Trump leads when RFK Jr. is in the polls. And Trump has a commanding lead across all the battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia. The race moved slightly 1-2 points in Biden’s favor post-conviction, and that’s it. That’s not a seismic shift. Traditional political thinking says Americans don’t tune into the election until after Labor Day. Biden wants Americans to pay attention a week before July 4th, when a record 71 million Americans are expected to travel for the holiday.
- The worst moment in Biden’s State of the Union was the impromptu moment where he questioned how many people were killed by illegal immigrants, essentially tossing it aside as an issue. That was over the death of Laken Riley. The death of Rachel Morin falls into a similar fact pattern: a 37-year-old mother of five who was raped and murdered by an illegal immigrant from El Salvador. Donald Trump called the family to express his condolences. The Biden White House refuses to answer whether Biden will address the family. The man charged was involved with other violent crimes, including murdering a young woman in El Salvador and assaulting a 9-year-old and her mother in Los Angeles. Biden asks how many people are killed… meanwhile, these stories are popping up.
- Do you recall the cyberattack against Change Health, which crippled UnitedHealthcare and any provider dependent on Change Health for processing? They’ve just started notifying healthcare providers impacted which had their information stolen. In related news, the company CDK Global was hacked this week, leading to car dealerships nationwide being shut down. Around 15,000 car dealerships nationwide can’t buy or sell cars because of this system shutdown. Cyber attackers are getting extremely smart about their targets, focusing on vulnerable hinge points in large industries.
Where you can find me this week
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The Horse Race Ep. 002: Biden FREEZES | Amnesty Orders | Inflation Roaring | Brutal Biden Iowa Poll
Democrats Are Rebuilding Deep-State Opposition To A Second Trump Term – Conservative Institute
Biden’s Video Blunders Are Getting Worse, As Are The White House Excuses – Conservative Institute
Leftist Lawfare Continues After Trump Prosecution – Conservative Institute
Niall Ferguson Loses The Plot
The historian Niall Ferguson is one of our time’s pre-eminent writers and thinkers. He’s one of the few people that, if he’s not behind a paywall (*cough*Bloomberg*cough*), I read everything he writes in the press. He’s one of those people you have to grapple with what he’s saying to because he’s that important.
The Free Press signed him on as a contributor, and his first piece went up, which is provocative. And possibly the first time I’ve disagreed with him. The piece is titled: “We’re All Soviets Now: A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?“
He argues that America is turning into the old Soviet empire and about to collapse. In this situation, China is on the other side and stands to benefit from the collapse of America and the West.
Ferguson asks of Americans, “Are we the baddies now?”
Ferguson’s Argument
Ferguson points out worrying similarities between today’s America and the Soviet Union before it fell. While America boasts a dynamic market economy, it faces persistent economic issues. Large deficits, wasteful public spending, and unfulfilled promises of technological growth, especially in A.I., remind Ferguson of the problems that plagued the Soviet economy. These issues suggest a deeper trouble that could be as damaging as the Soviet Union’s well-known economic problems.
In the military realm, Ferguson challenges the belief in American superiority. Despite a defense budget that surpasses the combined spending of other NATO members, the U.S. military is seen as both expensive and inadequate for modern challenges. This echoes the Soviet military’s facade of strength, which crumbled under real-world pressures like the war in Afghanistan.
America’s social and political landscape also shows unsettling similarities to the late Soviet era. Aging leaders like Joe Biden and Donald Trump reflect the stagnation seen under Soviet leaders like Brezhnev and Chernenko. Public trust in institutions has dropped to all-time lows, with confidence in the Supreme Court, banks, schools, and the presidency at rock bottom. This widespread disillusionment mirrors the cynicism that spread through Soviet society in its final years.
Ferguson highlights a grim health crisis in America, marked by a surge in deaths of despair—overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-related deaths—reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s health collapse. While the Soviet healthcare system was underfunded, the American system suffers from different problems: high costs with poor results, driven by vested interests and a bloated bureaucracy.
Culturally, the U.S. elite’s detachment from the broader population is stark. Policies aimed at promoting diversity and inclusion often fail to address the real needs of marginalized groups, much like Soviet-era propaganda that masked deep societal inequalities. Ferguson criticizes these initiatives for lowering educational standards and promoting harmful practices under the guise of progress.
Strategically, America’s focus on climate change appears inconsistent and ineffective compared to China’s “pragmatic approach.“ Despite high emissions, China has increased its production of electric vehicles and solar cells. This strategic confusion contrasts sharply with the Soviet Union’s aggressive but ultimately disastrous push to spread Marxism-Leninism.
Ferguson poses a haunting question: What if China has learned from Soviet mistakes and is maneuvering the U.S. into a similar path of decline? He warns that America’s internal crises and strategic blunders might make it vulnerable to such manipulation. The specter of a Taiwan Semiconductor Crisis, with roles reversed from the Cuban Missile Crisis, looms large in his analysis.
Ultimately, Ferguson urges America to look inward and fix its own problems—economic, military, social, and cultural—to avoid becoming like the Soviet Union in this new Cold War. He hopes that China’s flaws as a one-party state will lead to its downfall, but he is increasingly worried that America’s own systemic issues might speed up its decline.
Ferguson isn’t hopeful. He suggests America will fall first. On X/Twitter, after Jonah Goldberg wrote a response indicating that some of Ferguson’s points were hyperbole, Ferguson admitted to that point but held to his broader thesis.
The Counterpoint: China Is Actually Doomed, Not Metaphorically
Ultimately, I do not see the United States in the same light as the Soviet Union. At no point, as Ferguson suggests, will America start to be “the baddies“ when compared to China. In sheer moral terms, there’s no comparison between the U.S. and the communist regime running China.
Ferguson’s critiques of the West aren’t without merit, however. Like Jonah Goldberg, I’m sympathetic to many of those criticisms, and you’ve read them here many times.
Where I get off the Ferguson train is China, both in comparison to America and whether the Chinese vision has a viable path forward. Put another way, I’d be willing to take Ferguson’s argument at face value, namely that the United States faces a systemic threat from its internal issues. But China’s own pressures will doom it much sooner than America’s.
The doomsayers of America have held apocalyptic views of this country for its entire existence. However, Otto von Bismarck, who built modern Germany, once said, “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”
At every point, the United States was supposed to be doomed for one reason or another; a magical rabbit appeared to lift us higher, not take us lower. It’s one of the eternal truths that has driven Europeans crazy and destroyed the enemies of America.
The United States has another of those moments with China. At the peak of China’s power, it is facing a debilitating demographic crisis. As you might know, China enabled the “one child“ policy many decades ago to curb population growth. Only recently did they reverse that trend.
A recent BBC report noted: “Over the next decade, about 300 million people, who are currently aged 50 to 60, are set to leave the Chinese workforce. This is the country’s largest age group, nearly equivalent to the size of the U.S. population.”
You should really ponder that: imagine every single person in the United States retiring over the course of the next ten years. It’s an unfathomable number of people. And China doesn’t have the people to replace them. Also, there’s no one to care for China’s aging population. Some reports call this the next great humanitarian crisis.
Unlike the United States, China has no thriving immigration inflow, replenishing a declining childbearing population. Americans are having fewer and fewer children, but we’re continuing to grow through the surge of immigrants trying to make a living here.
China’s other problem is the sex imbalance of men and women. As a result of the one-child policy, families aborted millions of baby girls due to preferences for male children. The literature on China’s gendercide is appalling, but the end result means that for every 100 women, there are 115–130 men.
In 2023, India passed China as the most populous country in the world. India is also younger and more tech-savvy, which is why U.S. tech companies are eagerly shifting to that country. India is becoming what China can’t as it collapses. Scientific American estimates that China’s 1.4 billion population could drop by HALF by the end of this century.
A Brookings report estimates that China’s working-age population peaked in 2011 at 900 million and will drop to 700 million by mid-century and continue falling. America is rejuvenating itself via immigration and continuing to grow. While the U.S. population will not match China’s, it will maintain an edge on its capacity to build up. China does not.
George Kennan’s “X Telegram“ in 1946 predicted that the seeds of the destruction were already in the Soviet Union. As the spiritual successor to the Soviets, China feels the seeds of that same destruction. For China to take Taiwan like it wants, it’d have to move much sooner in the next decade than later. The longer China waits, the more complicated an invasion is to pull off.
Further complicating this narrative is China’s failure in the COVID-19 pandemic. China never reported its death toll from the pandemic. There are likely tens of millions of dead that we won’t know about for a hundred years. China was the only one to emerge from the pandemic that struggled with deflation, not inflation. Consumer demand cratered in China.
We won’t know if that’s because of all the deaths from COVID-19 or other issues. But the so-called “Chinese century“ is clearly on life support. China’s “military might“ is another excellent question. We know what the Americans, Russians, NATO, and other powers aligned with them can do. China’s military hasn’t been in a conflict in a long time.
Do they have working equipment? Russia didn’t. There are a lot of assumptions about China on several levels that struggle when exposed to any light.
China shouldn’t be ignored. But it’s unclear if the beast of the east is everything it seems. The Chinese Communist Party failed to respond to a pandemic. Why are we expecting competency if they take a drastic move, like starting a war?
Further, where’s the proof that China has an unassailable culture? The weaknesses there are more significant than here. America has its issues, but the greater threat of doom sits abroad, not the United States.
Links of the week
‘The Cartels Know This’: Biden’s Border Crisis Pushes Montana’s Indian Country to the Brink: ‘The Biden administration’s Bureau of Indian Affairs treats us worse than white people do,’ Indian leader says – The Washington Free Beacon
Yale Failed To Disclose Millions in Qatari Funding, Flouting Federal Law, Report Says: Qatari money has helped foment anti-Semitic campus protests at Ivy League school – The Washington Free Beacon
Yes, Republican women are OK – Kimberly Ross, The Washington Examiner
Argentina’s ‘Milei Miracle’ is exposing its failing socialist neighbors – NYPost
All eyes should be on Al Jazeera for being founded, funded — and directed — by terrorists – NYPost
Norcross indictment mutes Booker’s usual moral certainty – Politico
IRS says ‘vast majority’ of 1 million pandemic-era credit claims show a risk of being improper – Associated Press
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fails to qualify for CNN’s debate. It’ll be a showdown between Biden and Trump – Associated Press
TikTok says US ban is inevitable without a court order blocking law – Reuters
TikTok Argues Chinese Government Would Not Permit Divestment from Algorithm – National Review
‘I don’t believe in peace now,’ released Gaza hostage tells BBC – BBC
Wisconsin Supreme Court Rules Sidewalks are not “Pedestrian Ways”—thus Allowing Local Governments to Use Eminent Domain to Take Property to Build Them – Volokh Conspiracy
I lost 42 pounds with Ozempic, but was shaken by the drug’s psychological toll – Today
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Condoleezza Rice lays waste to anti-school choice arguments in 60 seconds.
Satire of the week
Elmer’s Unveils New Super Sticky Glue Park – Onion
Nation’s White Liberals Announce They Have Successfully Completed Listening – Onion
KJP Claims Video Where She Said Biden Video Was A Deepfake Was Also A Deepfake – Babylon Bee
‘It’s Just Basketball,’ Shrugs Decapitated Caitlin Clark – Babylon Bee
Woman Who Got in Wrong Uber Makes Mental Note to Never Tell Mom About This – Reductress
Pentagon launches ‘See Something Stupid, Say Something Stupid’ campaign – Duffel Blog
Health Kick Lasts Record-Breaking Two Meals In A Row – The Hard Times
Kendrick Lamar Completes Perfect No Hit Run Against Drake – The Hard Drive
“Rory’s Disappointment Is Nothing Compared To Mine” Says Local Man Who Had €5 Bet On Him To Win – Waterford Whispers News
Thanks for reading!