William Jennings Bryan: America’s Forgotten Political Titan

By Nick Deiuliis

The most prominent figures in American political history occupied the White House as president.  But there are a few exceptions, quite notable ones.

Two obvious ones are Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. Neither served as president but both left outsized impacts on the United States that endure to this day.  And there are a couple of other names with extensive legacies that are lesser known: Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. Neither were president but both exuded tremendous influence and power during their political primes.

Yet there is another, one who had just as much influence and impact on American politics and policies, perhaps arguably even more, than Hamilton, Clay, or Calhoun.  Most Americans outside of political history buffs don’t even know his name, let alone his story.

His name is William Jennings Bryan.  His story is fascinating.

The Beginning

William Jennings Bryan was born in southern Illinois in 1860, just before the Civil War exploded.  He attended law school at then Union Law College, which is now Northwestern University.  Early in his legal career, Bryan moved west to Lincoln, the capital of fast-growing Nebraska.

Left: a young William Jennings Bryan. Right: Bryan’s boyhood home in Salem, Illinois. Built in 1852, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Bryan built a successful practice and started to advise and campaign for local politicians.  Bryan was an exceptional public speaker, inspiring with vision and passionate delivery. 1

After a few speeches his raw potential as a politician was too great to ignore.  Bryan ran for Congress in 1890 as a Democrat.  His platform consisted of reducing tariff rates, supporting the coinage of silver at a ratio equal to that of gold, and breaking the power of business trusts.

Bryan was a prototypical populist from rural and small-town America. He had an inherent mistrust of big business and championed himself as a fighter for the common man.  His views early on were somewhat radical, but as time passed his views became more mainstream within both the Democratic and Republican parties.  Many of those views remain embedded in modern American policy.

He won his House seat, and his Democratic party was ascending and secured a majority in the House after the 1890 election.

Once in the House, Bryan began to evolve his views and platform.  This was the height of the Gilded Age, and the Democratic Party splintered into two groups. The conservative northern “Bourbon Democrats” sought to limit the size and power of the federal government. Another group of Democrats, largely farmers of the South and West, favored greater federal intervention to help farmers, regulate railroads, and limit the power of large corporations.2

Bryan became affiliated with the latter group of farmers and populists, and he advocated for the free coinage of silver, what was labeled as the Free Silver Movement, and the establishment of a progressive federal income tax. That endeared him to many reformers.

Winning By Losing

After the economy tanked during the Panic of 1893, Bryan became more appealing to many voters. Rather than running for re-election in the House in 1894, Bryan sought election to the United States Senate.  He lost.

But he gained wider notoriety and his national profile surged.  Everyone, it seemed, wanted to hear or see him.  Speaking fees allowed Bryan to give up his legal practice and devote himself full-time to public speaking and politics.

His defining moment that elevated his brand nationally tied back to the Free Silver Movement and populism.  Bryan called the gold standard “not only un-American but anti-American” and used the issue to emerge as the nation’s leading Democrat.  In his famous ‘Cross of Gold’ speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1896, Bryan argued that the debate over monetary policy was part of a broader struggle for democracy, political independence, and the welfare of the “common man”.

The Cross of Gold speech was a raging success.  Bryan was met with applause on the floor of the convention that lasted for over half an hour at the end of the speech.  Three excerpts display the power of his words:

A line from early in the speech: “The individual is but an atom; he is born, he acts, he dies; but principles are eternal, and this has been a contest over a principle.”

From the middle of the speech: “This was a struggle between the idle holders of idle capital and the struggling masses, who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country.”

Bryan campaigning for president in October 1896. Listen (here on YouTube) to Bryan reciting his “Cross of Gold” speech 25 years later in 1921.

Here’s the famous ending of the Cross of Gold speech, from which it got its name: “If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

Three-Time Presidential Candidate

The Cross of Gold speech secured Bryan the Democratic nomination for president.  And at the age of 36, Bryan became, and remains, the youngest presidential nominee of a major party in American history.

Bryan faced off against Republican candidate William McKinley in 1896.  McKinley campaigned from his porch and enjoyed a sizeable funding advantage.  But Bryan had his words; he went on the road and gave hundreds of speeches.  Twenty to thirty a day, many taking on an almost religious revival feel.

But McKinley won the election, taking the northeast and upper Midwest.  Bryan took the South and West, excluding California.

Despite the loss, Bryan’s support within his coalition grew stronger, and he easily won the Democratic nomination and ran again for president in 1900.  Once more he faced McKinley, this time as the incumbent president and with the charismatic Teddy Roosevelt as vice president.

Bryan focused his campaign on anti-imperialism and was opposed to the US assuming control of the Philippines. Bryan argued that the United States should refrain from imperialism and should seek to become the “supreme moral factor in the world’s progress and the accepted arbiter of the world’s disputes”.3  The American Anti-Imperialist League, which included Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, didn’t exactly love Bryan, but his strong stance against imperialism garnered their support.

The 1900 Democratic campaign once again relied on Bryan’s marathon of oratory.  In a typical day, Bryan gave four hour-long speeches and shorter talks that added up to six hours of speaking. At an average rate of 175 words a minute, he turned out 63,000 words a day, enough to fill 52 columns of a newspaper.  That put tremendous wear on his voice.

Yet he continued to move people with his words. One observer described it as “the poor, the weak, the humble, the aged, the infirm would rush forward by the hundreds holding up hard and wrinkled hands with crooked fingers and cracked knuckles to the young great orator, as if he were in very truth their promised redeemer from bondage.”

Yet McKinley won again, and by a wider margin than in 1896. Bryan even lost his home state of Nebraska.

After the 1900 election loss, Bryan turned to journalism and more public speaking.  He began publishing his weekly newspaper, The Commoner, which echoed his views.4 The newspaper became one of the most widely read of its era and boasted 145,000 subscribers.

President McKinley was assassinated, and Teddy Roosevelt became president.  Roosevelt moved to the left, favoring federal regulation of railroad rates and meatpacking plants.  And of course, he was an ardent trustbuster.  President Roosevelt adopted key policies as a Republican that looked much like what Bryan advocated for when he ran for president as a Democrat.

However, Bryan didn’t stand still on the ideological spectrum either.  He kept moving to more progressive policies.  He favored federal regulation of banks and securities, protections for union organizers, and federal spending on highway construction and education.  He demanded transparency in campaign contributions and advocated for government control of the currency.  All of which we have today on a massive scale.5

Bryan speaking at the 1908 Democratic National Convention.

For a third time, Bryan ran as the Democratic nominee for president, this time in 1908 against Taft. Bryan added to his policy platform requiring national banks to provide deposit insurance. And he unified the labor movement and secured the first presidential endorsement ever issued by the American Federation of Labor.

However, the third time did not end up being the charm for Bryan. Because the Republicans also moved left, there wasn’t much substantive difference between Bryan and Taft in 1908.  Taft won easily, taking almost everything outside the South.

Bryan was a three-time presidential election loser.  But the 493 cumulative electoral votes cast for Bryan across three separate elections are the most received by a presidential candidate who was never elected.

Wilson Era

After three losses, Bryan surrendered his presidential ambitions.  But he did not leave presidential politics, playing s crucial role in helping Woodrow Wilson secure the Democratic nomination in 1912.  Wilson won the presidency when he beat the split Republican candidates of Teddy Roosevelt and Taft.

President Wilson nominated Bryan as Secretary of State, an obvious and logical choice considering Bryan’s popularity and support.  Wilson explained that “this is only natural for the man who had led in the transformation of the national attitudes.”6

Bryan also helped Wilson reduce tariff rates, impose a progressive income tax, introduce new antitrust measures, and establish the Federal Reserve System.  The residual good and bad of these moves are present today.

But the honeymoon with President Wilson would not last.  Wilson was a globalist and viewed America as a leader in the world while Bryan at heart was a staunch isolationist. The fatal falling out between the two came with the First World War and navigating the European powers. Wilson was sympathetic to the Allies (the UK, France, Russia and Italy) while Bryan favored strict neutrality.  When the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat and American citizens perished, Bryan did not want to take Germany to task while Wilson viewed the event as a wanton act of war.  Before you knew it, Bryan resigned as secretary of state.

Challenging Times

After leaving public service, Bryan focused on advocating for the eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, the right of unions to strike, and women’s suffrage.  In the 1920s, Bryan became one of the most prominent religious figures in the country.  And that’s when his fortunes started to darken.

Bryan dedicated himself to two crusades: rabid support for prohibition and opposition to the teaching of evolution in schools. He saw alcohol as inherently evil and something that the state should prohibit.  He called for state and local laws banning public schools from teaching evolution because he saw Darwin’s scientific hypotheses conflict with the literal text of the Bible.

The religious, teetotalling, and anti-evolution rhetoric led to a famous (or for Bryan, infamous) event.  In July 1925, Bryan participated in the highly publicized Scopes Trial. The defendant, John T. Scopes, had violated a Tennessee law barring the teaching of evolution in public schools, while serving as a substitute biology teacher.

Scopes’ defense was funded by the American Civil Liberties Union and led in court by the famed lawyer Clarence Darrow.  Darrow argued that the Tennessee statute violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution.  Bryan defended the right of parents to choose what schools teach and argued that Darwinism was trying to invalidate “every moral standard that the Bible gives us”.  He wrote that “science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals.”7

Scopes was found in violation of the law and fined $100.  The national media intensely covered the trial, and many ridiculed Bryan as a symbol of ignorance and anti-intellectualism. Will Rodgers at the time said, “I like Bill Bryan, but he is making a fool out of himself and out of religion.”

Bryan passed away in the summer of 1925, days after the conclusion of the Scopes trial.  He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.  The back of his headstone reads: “He kept the faith.”

Greatness Comes With a Mixed Legacy

William Jennings Bryan was far from perfect, at least from the perspective of protecting individual rights, keeping government minimal, letting the free market function, and holding science supreme.

He was for big government, perhaps mainly because of his distrust of big business.  He trusted the government agency or bureaucrat more than the private sector capitalist.

He could, depending on the issue, be anti-individual rights, whether it was with African Americans’ rights or with denying individual choice through his support of prohibition. Ironically, despite being a great orator, he held positions that stifled free speech, primarily his opposition to the teaching of evolution theory.

Which meant he could too easily place ideology and religion above science, as evidenced by his role in the Scopes trial.

But the man exuded undeniable and substantial positives. Particularly as an advocate for the small town, the farmer, the industrial worker, and the middle class.  He earned the moniker of The Great Commoner.

He was a force to be reckoned with, and his fingerprints remain across American policy and society to this day.  Bryan was, if nothing else, a courageous voice for the commoner at a time when the little guy needed such a champion.

And few other American greats can lay claim to substantially changing both their political party as well as the opposing party; Bryan certainly can lay claim to doing so.  His playbook is borrowed by more than one prominent current American leader or candidate and is copied in more than one current major policy or political movement.

Ponder what Bryan’s views would be of America today.

  • The Federal Reserve: would he view it as a protector of the little guy or an out-of-control beast laying waste to the commoner to enrich the 1%?
  • Would big government still be desirable to him? Or would it now represent to Bryan a bigger threat than big business?
  • And the religion of climate alarmism muscling its way to becoming The Science, subsuming real science.  Would he see such as part of a moral crusade or instead as the suppression of the individual, middle class, and science itself?
  • Would Bryan’s support of private sector unions then translate to support of public sector unions and their political monopoly on power today?  Or would he instead view public sector unions as a very different and dangerous thing, much like FDR did after him?

Speaking of FDR, one could postulate that if there was no William Jennings Bryan, there would not have been FDR’s New Deal.  A byproduct of impressive legacies like Bryan’s is fascinating speculation over alternative history scenarios.

Bryan had great feel for the pulse of America, enjoyed innate great timing, and was able to masterfully package a message into compelling oratory.  As such, it is not surprising that his policies took root in American politics and society.  Yet those legacies grew out of control after Bryan’s time.  Indeed, the Frankenstein monster he jolted to life is now running wild and unchecked.

It is not just history repeating itself; it is testament to William Jennings Bryan’s impact on the United States of America. What he drove and what he represented, both the good and the bad, endures.

His legacy is…everywhere.  And more Americans need to know his story.

•

[1] You can hear Bryan’s speeches on platforms like YouTube.  Give him a listen; impressive in front of a mic.
[2] Read more about the history of American farmer political movements at: https://nickdeiuliis.com/news/harvesting-history/.
[3] As you read on, it will become difficult to assess whether Bryan was a staunch isolationist or a naïve globalist.  Perhaps the truth is he could be either, depending on timing and circumstance.
[4] Bryan’s nickname was The Great Commoner.
[5] With mediocre success, to be kind.
[6] Imagine this: the State Department at that time boasted 150 employees in Washington and an additional 400 in embassies abroad.  A staff of 550.
[7] America has a sad history of allowing ‘The Science’ to suppress the scientific method and of letting religion or ideology subsume rational thought.  It didn’t start with elites dictating pandemic policy or preaching climate alarmism.

Summer Contemplations: Four Graduations in Seven Days in May

By Nick Deiuliis

As I’m sitting in the sun, surveying a browning lawn while writing this reflection, most friends, neighbors, and coworkers have their thoughts on the upcoming 4th of July holiday. Depending on when you’re reading this, perhaps you’re similarly in flux preparing for, in the middle of, or returning from that highly anticipated vacation.

But my mind keeps thinking about four graduations from early May. Although each event was different, all shared a common purpose: celebrating achievements of young adults about to enter the next chapter in life and career.

This country has a lot riding on those next chapters being successes. And as Independence Day approaches, there’s an interesting connection to graduation season that has me still pondering May in the height of summer.

As recent graduates step into the next phase of their lives, they do so freely in a country where all individuals have the opportunity to succeed, free from tyranny and oppression, with the promise of contributing to the ongoing story of America.

A Dream Grows Up

The first graduation celebrated the students who successfully completed the 2023-2024 CNX Foundation Mentorship Academy program.

This was the third class in three years to do so, with the Mentorship Academy again delivering on its mission of presenting regional career paths that don’t require a four-year college degree to high school juniors and seniors from underserved rural and urban communities across western Pennsylvania.

The event was hosted at the ‘HQ at CNX’. Graduating students, families, Mentorship Academy mentors, and Mentorship Academy partners were all in attendance for a celebration of not just making it through the program but more importantly, of what is to come for promising career paths.

Mentorship Academy students left the program with a certificate, a resume, interview skills, business attire, a focused view of what career they are targeting, and most importantly, a support network of contacts willing to open doors across the region.

Two thoughts stick with me through this summer.

The obvious: the CNX Foundation Mentorship Academy has blossomed into a striking success. The first year was a voyage into the unknown; working with roughly thirty high school students, a handful of daring mentors, and a small group of willing partners. The past year’s enrollment exceeded eighty students, and the program enjoyed the focus and refinement that come with continuous improvement and dedication of a competent team. Next year’s class may exceed two hundred students. Hard to believe and inspiring to see.

Yet I also wonder what those recent graduates of the Academy are doing with their time this summer. Did they heed the advice to jump on the career plan immediately after graduation? Are they dedicating themselves to self-improvement and working toward goals? Do they understand this is their best shot at making a remarkable life for themselves? And that it is now entirely up to them?

I’m invested in the answers to those questions.

The Long and Winding Road

The next day I found myself sitting in a downtown Pittsburgh arena, attending a Catholic university undergraduate commencement for health sciences majors. Déjà vu was at hand since decades prior I participated in a similar commencement as a law school grad in the same facility and at the same institution. Now I was the spectator.

Earning a four-year degree is a huge accomplishment for any career path, but this is only another step in the long journey for these graduates. After undergraduate studies, these professions require two more years of academic and hospital residency work before earning doctorates and practicing their craft to provide patient therapy and care. So, after walking on stage, receiving their diploma, and shaking the hand of the dean, it is a short weekend of enjoyment followed by jumping headfirst back into classes Monday during summer semester. Not an endeavor for the meek.

Do those graduates have the stamina to keep going and not get distracted or exhausted from the journey? Do they understand how proud everyone around them must be?

Sitting here in summer, I hope the answers to both are in the affirmative. The graduates have much to gain by staying the course, and society needs their budding professional skills more than ever.

A Regional Crown Jewel

A few days later, it’s a sunny May evening. I am walking out to Pomp and Circumstance in a procession and onto a stage at the 50-yard line of the Steelers’ home field. Awaiting are hundreds of graduates from the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) along with thousands of their friends and families seated in the stadium.

The vibe is beyond celebratory; it is raucous. Everyone is excited, and not only because of the earning of associate degrees. But also because the degree came at a reasonable cost of tuition and thus will deliver a great rate-of-return on investment for the graduate; a rarity in today’s higher education system and the biggest reason why CCAC is one of the most critical assets in western Pennsylvania.

I had two jobs that evening.

First, as commencement guest speaker I must inspire the graduates. Which first requires not losing their attention. The pressure was on. So, I decided to be brief, direct, and to the point (after all, The Gettysburg Address was only three minutes long). I emphasized how staying true is crucial in life, that it’s how the graduates earned degrees. They were true to themselves, their values, their families, to CCAC, and to the region.

I urged them to think for themselves, show up every day and work hard, and always be learning and doing. All those attributes fit snugly with the legacy of CCAC and western Pennsylvania.

I closed with the famous Churchill quote, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Because I couldn’t help but think that evening wasn’t just the end of the graduates’ beginning, but more importantly the start of something great for them.

My second duty was to shake hands and congratulate each graduate when they ascended the stage and received their diploma. Much less stressful than the first duty. But it took much longer. Time well spent.

Weeks later I am thinking of the future greatness coming up on the stage that night to receive a degree. Who and how many? Can’t wait to see what unfolds in the coming years.

This Place Is Different

Last up was a drive down to the Virginia peninsula where a famous colonial town and college are nestled between the York and James Rivers.

The College of William & Mary was chartered in 1693 and is known as the Alma Mater of the Nation. A 17-year-old George Washington received his surveyor’s license there and Thomas Jefferson attended as an undergraduate. The first honorary degree was conferred upon Ben Franklin in 1765.

Not surprisingly, the College is a stickler for tradition, including commencement ceremonies. It was on full display in the packed campus stadium on a warm Friday evening. Everyone, especially the graduates, was bubbling with the excitement of ending a journey that will now make them part of a long, proud legacy.

Judge John Charles Thomas, the first African American and youngest appointee to the Supreme Court of Virginia, served as the ceremony’s keynote speaker. He is also a poet. Judge Thomas proceeded to give an incredibly impactful and heartfelt speech. He urged graduates to become builders and to keep focused during chaotic times. He left everyone energized and motivated.

Watch Judge Thomas’ speech here on YouTube. Twelve minutes well spent.

At the event’s conclusion, the crowd made their way down to the field to meet graduates and snap photos. I looked around and couldn’t help but wonder to what extent the individuals in the caps and gowns felt a responsibility to live up to the legacy of what they experienced and are now part of.

The more I think about it, that pressure of responsibility should be a big motivator for the graduate. As well as a vital ingredient for a well-functioning America. A few more Judge Thomases make a big difference.

Four Bright Lights of Optimism

Much of our education system is sadly in crisis these days. From plunging competencies in high school, to a void of effective career planning for students, to higher-ed being hijacked by an ideology that turned campus from the marketplace of ideas into a four-year indoctrination center.

Collectively, the problems risk assigning an entire generation to unrealized potential. Perhaps we reached the point of no return.

But experiencing four quite different graduations across seven days provided an injection of bold, fresh successes with preparing and equipping the next generation for both the needs and opportunities of America in the coming years.

The trick is to make today’s exceptional exceptions in our education system tomorrow’s norm. That will require more than one person’s summer contemplation; it will require the commitment and buy-in across the full spectrum of the willing.

The Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti: Tragic Failure of the American Ideal

By Nick Deiuliis

The summer of 1921 was a memorable time in America: Babe Ruth was having one of the greatest seasons in baseball history as he worked toward a new single-season home run record, America’s jazz age was getting ready for takeoff, heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey would defeat light heavyweight champion Georges Carpentier in a “battle of the century” before upwards of 90,000 in Jersey City, and striking West Virginia coal miners battled the US Army at Blair Mountain.

The summer of 1921 also brought one of the saddest and most lamentable chapters in American jurisprudence. A show trial that delivered tragic consequences and that stamped a reputational black eye on the United States.

Too few Americans today are aware of the event, yet in 1921 just about every American, along with millions across the globe, intensely followed the event’s proceedings.1

It was the trial, which led to the eventual wrongful execution, of two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Events Leading to Trial

During the spring of 1920, there was a robbery of the payroll cash for the employees of a shoe company just outside of Boston. Two individuals transporting the payroll cash were summarily executed by the bandits.

Violent robberies were not uncommon in the United States during the early 1920s. But this robbery and the homicides led to a gross miscarriage of justice.

Weeks after the killings, police were tipped off that two potential suspects were on a streetcar. Officers ran down and boarded the streetcar and detained two nervous-looking Italians: Sacco and Vanzetti. They were carrying loaded handguns and anarchist literature.

The anarchist literature instantly drew scrutiny. During the late 1910s and the 1920s, America was subjected to numerous bombings and terrorist acts by anarchists. Many a politician, judge, or businessperson were targeted with, and in some instances killed by, street or mail bombings.

Yet Sacco and Vanzetti had no prior arrests and no history of violence. Amazingly, there was no physical evidence, fingerprints or other, that placed either accused at the scene of the crime.

Sacco had a good job and was a dedicated family man. Vanzetti struggled when he first came to America, but after years of toiling he successfully built a fish cart business that became quite profitable.

The two suspects knew each other but weren’t particularly close friends. Sacco came across as apolitical and anything but an anarchist, while Vanzetti was more of a political thinker and clearly held anti-state views.

Law enforcement made a mockery of due process once Sacco and Vanzetti were taken in for questioning. When witnesses to the crime viewed lineups of potential suspects for identification, both Sacco and Vanzetti were presented alone and individually, without the benefit of a lineup. Unbelievably, the police informed witnesses that the two men were prime suspects before asking the witness whether they saw either at the scene of the crime.

Despite the absence of probable cause linking Sacco and Vanzetti to the murders and the lack of due process, both were charged with murder. Public opinion demanded it, as the nation and law enforcement were in near panic over the widespread bombing campaign by anarchists. The mood of the country steamrolled due process and the individual rights of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Now they were in a fight for their lives.

Kangaroo Court2

The bungling of due process before trial paled in comparison to the miscarriage of justice that was about to unfold in the courtroom that summer in 1921. The trial lasted nearly two months and produced thousands of pages of testimony.

It is noteworthy that neither defendant was fluent in English, having only a rudimentary ability to converse in it. But during police questioning and during trial, questions were proffered in English, and responses were delivered in broken English by Sacco and Vanzetti. The defendants struggled to understand the questions and the jury likely lost much in translation and misconstrued the defendants’ testimony.3

Bias was evident with both the judge and jury during the trial. Early in the proceedings, the jury foreman commented, “Damn them, they ought to hang anyway.” No action was taken by the court.

Judge Thayer presided over the trial and was a procedural nightmare. Toward the end of the proceedings, he lectured the jury on the concept of ‘consciousness of guilt’, which is the theory that innocent people do not need to fabricate answers or be evasive when answering questions from law enforcement or at trial. Which was a marginally indirect way of telling the jury that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty.

The jury went into deliberation and after a few hours returned guilty verdicts for both men. The sentence would be death by electrocution.

Years of Systemic Moral Cowardice

The extensive appeal process dragged on for several years. Request for retrials were submitted, drawing on the numerous procedural transgressions and flaws, from arrest through sentencing. And all the requests were denied, despite a growing cadre of influential Sacco and Vanzetti supporters.

Petitions in support of the condemned were signed by Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells.

Felix Frankfurter, the future legendary Supreme Court justice, was then a law professor at Harvard and publicly campaigned to denounce the stacked and biased legal system that Sacco and Vanzetti were subjected to.

Frankfurter stated, “I assert with deep regret, without the slightest fear of disproof, but certainly in modern times Judge Thayer’s opinion stands unmatched for discrepancies between what the record discloses and what the opinion conveys. His 25,000 word document cannot accurately be described otherwise than as a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions, and mutilations. The opinion is literally honeycombed with demonstrable errors, and a spirit alien to judicial utterance permeates the whole.”

The governor of Massachusetts, Alvin Fuller, who could grant a stay of execution, was an especially interesting situation. He took a genuine interest in the case after the trial by reading transcripts, talking to jurors, and interviewing witnesses. And the governor invested significant time getting to know Sacco and Vanzetti when they sat in jail. He came to like both, especially Vanzetti.

But the governor begrudgingly refused to grant a stay of execution. He did, however, create a slight delay of a week or two to allow the US Supreme Court to grant a retrial or hear new evidence. But the Supreme Court did not intervene.

It was as if everyone who had the power to do something was hoping that someone else would do something. And no one did anything.

Thus, on the evening of August 22nd, 1927, the system was preparing to execute the two men, about six years after their trial.

Sacco was executed first. Vanzetti followed and he had last words to offer, putting to work his better mastery of English that he developed by studying in prison while on death row. Vanzetti’s final words were, “I wish to tell you that I am innocent, and that I never committed any crime, but sometimes some sin. I thank you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime, not only of this, but all. I am an innocent man. I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.” Vanzetti was electrocuted to death.

By 12:30 in the morning of August 23rd, the sad journey of Sacco and Vanzetti came to a tragic end.

The coffins of Sacco and Vanzetti are carried out from the Langone Funeral Home in Boston’s North End on August 28, 1927.

Aftermath

Between 1921, when Sacco and Vanzetti were first put on trial, through 1927 at their execution, scores of protests, bombings, and attacks occurred in the United States and abroad. The world took an objective look at America’s supposed and self-described system of fair justice and didn’t like at all what it saw.

Once Sacco and Vanzetti were dead, tensions escalated further. Protests broke out in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Sydney, and Tokyo. In Cuba, the US embassy was bombed.

Europe expressed extreme anti-American sentiment after the executions. Many European demonstrations were violent. Hyde Park in London saw brawls between protesters and police, with dozens injured, some seriously. In Geneva, the League of Nations was attacked. In Paris, residents roamed the streets looking for Americans to assault. American hotels and theaters that played American films were attacked across the continent. The mayor of New York, on a goodwill tour of Germany when the executions occurred, was threatened with physical violence in Berlin.

In the summer of 1927, just after the Sacco and Vanzetti executions, it wasn’t safe to be an American beyond the borders of the United States.

The Hard Truth

Officially, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for the murders tied to the payroll robbery outside of Boston.

But the real reason that Sacco and Vanzetti were killed was that they were guilty of being Italian at a time in America when that’s all it took to be falsely accused and convicted of a crime. And to die for it.

The system, along with many Americans, during that era didn’t consider immigrants, particularly Italians, as deserving of the same individual rights that native-born citizens enjoyed. Most Italians in the 1910s in 1920s would be excluded from employment consideration and educational opportunities. Neighborhoods would put up restrictive covenants to keep Italians from living there. In the South, it wasn’t atypical where Italians would have the option of attending Black schools or no school at all.

For decades before the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, mainstream media in America openly expressed hostile racism toward Italians. The New York Times said in 1875 that it is “perhaps hopeless to think of civilizing the [Italians] or keeping them in order, except by the arm of the law.” Popular Science published in 1890 the article What Shall We Do With the “Dago”?

The unwillingness of America to integrate immigrants into society made it incredibly difficult for non-English-speaking immigrants to develop language fluency. It created a negative feedback loop, where the broken English was viewed by mainstream society either as an unwillingness to assimilate or as a sign of someone (or some race) not being intelligent.

Indeed, the Sacco and Vanzetti drama was one of the saddest moments in American history.

And it wasn’t because Sacco and Vanzetti were saints. Or that they were not anarchists; because there is sufficient evidence where a reasonable person could assume that they were indeed anarchists. And that they may have been guilty of not just sin, but perhaps crime.

A reasonable person could even conclude that the men played a role in the holdup murders, indirectly or directly. More than one expert in criminal law studying the case came to such a conclusion decades after the trial.

The critical failing of America was how the system went about treating Sacco and Vanzetti.

Neither accused received fair and equal treatment under the law. In fact, the system went out of its way to prejudice both men. The cumulative evidence presented during trial did not come close to approaching the standard of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ The state prosecution failed miserably to present a compelling case for conviction and the judge was far from unbiased.

The system went to painfully disturbing ends to justify a desired outcome. Any non-immigrant white American at the time would have had the case against them dismissed and thrown out of court.

But these defendants were immigrants, and the worst kind at the time, Italians. Bombings by anarchists were occurring all over the eastern United States and in major cities. Guilt by association. A different set of standards, rights, and protections than what the Constitution prescribed. All of it shamefully imposed and sanctioned by the system itself.

1921 America Informs 2024 America

The Sacco and Vanzetti debacle should guide Americans pondering present immigration and criminal justice policies and norms. There is no doubt that a civil society needs consistency and a sound rules-based system; open borders and refusing to prosecute (or selectively prosecuting) crime invite chaos and societal breakdown.

But Sacco and Vanzetti serve as a warning of the dangers of allowing knee-jerk public opinion to sway policy and process from the consistent and rational to the erratic and emotional.

Consider how the Sacco and Vanzetti debacle highlights the lurking dangers of the death penalty.

Even the best-designed legal systems can be corrupted or subjected to bias at times (or often). A civil society that respects the sanctity of the individual and where the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt cannot afford to make wrongful decision of guilt with a capital punishment case.

And the system can wrongly assign guilt in capital punishment cases three ways.

  • The first way is via the Sacco and Vanzetti route, where the system simply fails and chooses not to function in a consistent and fair manner. The system goal-seeks for a conviction and goes through the motions only to justify what it already predetermined to deliver.
  • The second way is where the guilt beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard still leaves a level of subjective judgment to jurors. If one thousand juries convict one thousand defendants of first-degree murder and the state executes all the convicted, what if the juries’ accuracy rate on actual guilt is as good as, say, 95%? That would mean society killed fifty innocent people.
  • The third way is making life-and-death decisions based on limited information. Consider how many of today’s wrongly accused would have been summarily put to death back in the day without the benefit of modern technology that exonerates (GPS, forensics, DNA, etc.) But if the system already executed the wrongly accused, then what?

The more rational route is life imprisonment without parole upon conviction for first-degree murder. Unless the accused confesses to the murder, in which case society can proceed with execution with a clear conscience. It’s not perfect and it would preserve the life of a criminal who indeed committed a heinous act. But it will protect the wrongly convicted from being murdered for a murder they didn’t commit.

On the 50th anniversary of the executions, Massachusetts Governor Dukakis issued a proclamation that Sacco and Vanzetti had been unfairly tried and convicted and that “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names.”

If America learned anything over the century since the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, let it be to think rationally instead of acting rashly.

•

1. It’s been labeled as the trial of the century, and no trial rivaled it for notoriety until a defendant named OJ Simpson went on trial for murder.
2. Kangaroo court: a court whose proceedings deviate so far from accepted legal norms that they can no longer be considered fair or just.
3. The Q&A transcripts at trial illustrate how the language barrier produced responses to the jury that were challenging to interpret and understand.

Address to the Jonathan Club, World Affairs Group

The following is a summary of Nick’s June 12, 2024, address to the World Affairs Group of the Jonathan Club.

Thank you for that too long but kind intro. Only a third is true, but I’m not going to tell you which third.

I am so happy to be here, with this wonderful group of what I reference as ‘doers’. I am honored to be the first speaker in the revived World Affairs Group of the Jonathan Club. I think you will be intrigued with the topic today; it is right down the power alley of world affairs.

You know I always feel a degree of pressure speaking to a group like this. It’s normal, I suppose. You are all smart and many of you are coming in with a very different view of what I am going to posit on policy. And some of you may still disagree with me by the end of the talk, but I bet you that I at least having you rethinking your premises. Rest assured I do welcome the feedback, it’s part of the wonder of civil public discourse, after all.

But now you heap tremendously higher pressure on me by putting me on a podium in the Reagan Room, surrounded by all these portraits of unbelievable achievers who were here before. And with a portrait of a prior Jonathan Club honoree and fellow Pittsburgher, David McCullough, literally looming just over my left shoulder. I am feeling the heat, friends.

I typically decline many of these invitations to speak and interact. It’s much more comfortable for me to publish thoughts on my website or discuss issues on my weekly Far Middle podcast than to take the much bolder step of interacting with fellow human beings. I love to create and express, but I struggle with that human interaction thing.

But I couldn’t resist coming today.

One reason is this place, or the idea of this place. Since you are from California or the LA area, you may take something for granted about the position this wonderful state holds within our nation. My family, like most of yours depending on how far you go back, were not from America. Our people came to America. More specifically, our people aspired to come to America. Because of what it represented and offered, which was in stark contrast to the places where our people left. People from all over the world dreamt of coming to America; don’t worry I’m not going to break into Neil Diamond’s America.

But within this great nation sits California. You see, people from all over America dreamt of…going to California, to borrow the title of a great Led Zeppelin song. California for decades was the dream within the dream. The next level of the American ideal.

I sure had that dream but never realized it. Since I was a kid. My favorite TV shows were centered in California, hello CHIPs. The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Earthquake, where my perceived ideal of a place was devastated by a natural disaster.

I love sports, or at least used to. As a kid I became obsessed with the late 70s/early 80s Dodgers. Vin’s voice and that shrine of a stadium. Lasorda, Garvey, Dusty, and my personal favorite, third baseman Ron Cey. The Dodgers perfectly mirrored my image of California and LA.

And today is a special day indeed in southern Cali sports history. On June 12, 1970 LA native Doc Ellis pitched a no-hitter down in San Diego, allegedly under the influence of LSD. And the crazy event started here in LA. You see, after the Pirates had flown to San Diego on Thursday, June 11, Ellis visited a friend in Los Angeles and used LSD “two or three times.” Thinking it was still Thursday, he took a hit of LSD on Friday at noon, and his friend’s girlfriend reminded him at 2:00 p.m. that it was Friday and that he was scheduled to pitch that night in San Diego. Ellis leaves LA and gets to San Diego at the stadium at 4:30 and the game started at around 6.

Ellis said that he threw the no-hitter despite being unable to feel the ball or see the batter or catcher clearly. As Ellis recounted: “I can only remember bits and pieces of the game. I was psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the [catcher’s] glove, but I didn’t hit the glove too much. I remember hitting a couple of batters, and the bases were loaded two or three times. The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes, I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. They say I had about three to four fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn’t hit hard and never reached me.”

Even without the uniqueness of Doc Ellis, there is nowhere in the world like here. Although I never left Pittsburgh and God willing never will, I remain fond of California and LA. And I am deeply troubled about both. And America. And my hometown as well. We’ve all got issues. Allow me to explain.

AN ENDANGERED AND VILIFIED COMPOSITION

Understand my makeup. Like most of us here today, I am a mosaic of things.

I am engineer by training, which means I am passionate about the scientific method and objectivity when setting policies. I am not a fan of, and am deeply troubled by, ‘The Science’.

I am a liberal, as in the endangered species of classic liberal, when it comes to individual rights. The Constitution and our republic were structured to protect the rights of the individual. From the tyranny of the majority and certainly from the state. The individual should be free to choose.

I am most definitely a fiscal conservative. I never spent more cash than I took in, including when I was young, starting out with basically nothing, and no car. So why should our government constantly grossly outspend what it takes in?

And philosophically, I am best defined as libertarian. But I’m not voting for RFK Jr. I recognize we need some level of government – to protect property rights, protect individual rights, and to defend from outside threats. But that level should be minimal so that the individual is optimal. PM Modi of India has that phrase ‘minimum government, maximum governance’; good summation of my desire.

And I am a proud capitalist. And an unapologetic domestic energy producer of natural gas. And a believer in meritocracy. And a free market advocate.

What’s interesting is how that mosaic makeup I just listed is outright vilified today by experts and elites as something in need of silencing and eradicating.

Think about it. The Science reigns over science. Individual rights are trampled by the official views set by the elite and expert classes. Fiscal responsibility in government has been obliterated and we pretend the bill will never come due. Government has become a monster, light years away from minimal. Socialism eats away at capitalism. Zero carbon myths are used to attack domestic energy. And equal outcomes destroy meritocracy.

Why are all these things coming to bear at the same time across our great land and this awesome state? It boils down to one culprit, friends: the Left. Indeed, if you take the opposite composite of the things that I love, that I associate with, that I just listed, you will come up with today’s Left.

AMERICA’S SHALE GAS MIRACLE

Learn how CNX Resources produces natural gas.

And there’s no better case study of how the Left attacks a culture of achievement, value creation, and doing than what is going on in the world of energy. My world, which I assure you, impacts your world. Everyone’s world.

I mean come on. Not only is the Left the antithesis of all that I hold near and dear, it also—quite astutely I might add when one considers the Left’s end game—attacks and vilifies the industry and region that are in my DNA. Those being the domestic natural gas industry and Appalachia, with Pittsburgh serving as its beating heart.

And there is much that we all stand to lose if the Left succeeds. Allow me to illustrate with my world, which seems far from here but in fact impacts everything here in Cali. It’s the greatest success story never told.

The U.S. went from being a net annual importer of natural gas as recently as 2016 to the largest global producer of natural gas and a net annual exporter today. The Appalachian basin is a big reason why; the Marcellus and Utica shale horizons underneath where I live represent cumulatively the second largest natural gas field in the world.

What catalyzed this stunning rapid transformation and dominant position? The free market bringing innovative and disruptive technology in the form of horizontal drilling and advanced completions techniques. American ingenuity allowed methane, aka natural gas, to be liberated from shale rock deposits at prolific rates and low cost.

Cumulatively, the benefits across this virtuous value chain total in the trillions of dollars. Because of capitalism and efficient market theory.

You see these benefits locally in places where the manufacturing of energy occurs, often in rural and underserved locales. Landowners have enjoyed a windfall from gas rights leasing that they’ve reinvested into family farms, homes, kids’ education, and local businesses. Communities ravaged economically now see improved employment in jobs that pay family-sustaining wages. Where no hope existed, attention has now turned to a future with promise.

You see the benefits regionally. Pennsylvania retooled its power grid to feed off domestic natural gas and the state’s carbon dioxide intensity declined nearly 40 percent in just 12 years while its manufacturing sector was revived and businesses and homes enjoy lower energy bills. Using PA DEP emissions data and EPA values for emission reductions, the increased use of nat gas in power generation delivered up to $1 trillion in public health benefits for PA residents. Old-line industries are resurrected across the Rust Belt by the jolt of cheap and reliable energy. Which means the building trades are booked solid.

Benefits are evident across America and North America. Canadian heavy industry in western Ontario is now fed by new pipeline infrastructure conveying Appalachian carbon-based molecules, making it more competitive. Mexico is the largest importer of U.S. natural gas.

The US shale industry and free market have done more for North American prosperity than the NAFTA and USMCA, combined.

America’s domestic energy industry is redrawing the geopolitical map.

We broke OPEC’s back. Domestic carbon manufacturing allows the U.S. to withdraw from endless conflicts in faraway lands since we now deliver our own energy security. U.S. natural gas is the biggest strategic lever against the growing threat of the ominous Chinese communist state and its global ambitions, as well as Russia and Putin.

There are basic underlying reasons why this miracle occurred in a very short time.

First, the free market was able to function without major government intervention. The industry innovated faster than bureaucrats and the Left could keep up to meddle. Second, the free market allocated capital across the value chain, and what were once fragmented pieces quickly become integrated and efficient.

And if left unmolested by the Left, we are just getting started. Two big opportunities are on the horizon.

First, another round of disruptive and innovative technology is coming to bear, much of it being developed and demonstrated by CNX in Appalachia, that will allow natural gas manufactured at the wellhead to be efficiently transformed from gaseous methane into compressed natural gas and liquified natural gas. Or CNG and LNG, respectively. That’s a game changer, because CNG and LNG will instantly displace massive volumes of foreign sourced oil used in the transportation sector.

When you utilize CNG or LNG into a truck, heavy equipment, bus, or airplane in place of gasoline or diesel, a few things happen. Costs go down because the natural gas derived BTUs are less than half the cost of gasoline or diesel BTUs. Huge savings.

Supply chains shrink drastically, from tens of thousands of miles with oil currently, down to as short as dozens of miles under this development chain.

Global CO2 and local emissions plummet, because you are now using the lowest methane intensive natural gas on the planet to displace higher emission pieces of the energy portfolio.

Employment and tax base go up as workers earn family-sustaining wages and pay taxes. Trade balance improves and trade deficit shrinks as energy imports drop. And our geopolitical leverage increases as we create not just improved energy security for ourselves, but also our allies.

Yeah, allowing doers to do their thing in domestic energy has the geopolitical reach of several aircraft carrier groups, when one thinks about it.

Second, once you displace the foreign sourced gasoline and diesel transportation markets, you can start to expand the exporting ability of domestically produced natural gas to other nations.

Liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals allow the product to be shipped to Poland, South Korea, Spain, Japan, and India. Our carbon-based molecules are being utilized globally to help spur improved quality of life for billions of people.

THE LEFT’S ENERGY BATTLE PLAN

But…the doers in domestic energy and Appalachia are not being left alone by the Left. Quite the contrary. It’s as if the success of the domestic energy industry drove the Left mad, to the point where their zealotry to destroy and appropriate the value of doers exponentially increased.

Code Red for humanity and climate alarmism serve as the overarching religion to destroy not just the domestic energy industry, but everything tied to it. Which is effectively the entire private sector economy and the freedom of the individual. There are three tactical prongs to the Left’s attack under the ideology of climate alarmism.

The first prong of attack is heightened regulatory standards on domestic energy production and reduced access to natural gas reserves. You see this attack every time an administrative state bureaucrat issues a new regulation on the industry. Often without the specific backing of a statute, I might add.

The second prong of the attack targets the industry’s access to capital and looks to cut off supply of the vital lubricant for any capitalistic endeavor. This attack will be evident when major banks bow to pressure from environmental groups to stop lending to the carbon economy (read that as the same as the real economy, since no carbon, no economy), when foundations or endowments of universities chest-thump about their divestment from carbon producing companies, or when credit ratings firms assign poor credit ratings to such companies not because of quantitative metrics but instead because of subjective views of the industry’s social worthiness. Starve a growing industry of capital and you can slowly strangle it to death.

The third and final prong of the attack is the most insidious of all: thwarting the future demand growth for natural gas. This attack manifests through the throwing of regulatory and legal roadblocks into the paths of new pipeline projects that would convey natural gas from the producing basins to the growing demand centers. And it includes direct and back-door regulatory attacks on gas stoves, gas lawnmowers, and internal combustion engine cars. The over-arching objective is to replace energy abundance with energy scarcity and to replace individual choice with state control.

The Left justifies the three-pronged attack with a few convenient energy myths.

The first myth: wind and solar and EVs are zero carbon. Nonsense; they have massive carbon and CO2 footprints on a life cycle basis, higher than natural gas power generation for sure. EVs require 600+% more metals and minerals than gasoline-powered cars. Mandating wind and solar power generation and EV adoption will increase atmospheric CO2 net-net, not decrease it.

The second myth: we can manufacture wind, solar, and EV batteries at scale here in the US. We can’t because the stuff you need sits largely in Africa and South America and China. And all the processing capacity to purify that stuff is controlled by China, who dominates the markets for nickel, graphite, copper, lithium, polysilicon, and magnets. A mad dash to wind, solar and EVs necessarily creates energy dependency on the CCP, as designed.

And the murky supply chain of wind, solar, and batteries brings epic human rights abuses, with little kids toiling in open pit cobalt mines in DR Congo and Muslim prisoners working in solar factories in Xinjiang. It’s a new form of brutal colonialism. Brought to you by the Left, the Church of Climate, and Code Red. Not sure if you are following what’s going on in New Caledonia, the French territory in the Pacific. France covets its nickel deposits for battery making mandated by climate policies and demands export of nickel back to France. New Caledonia pushes back and erupts in riots. Like I said, climate policies reimposing colonialism and economic servitude across the globe.

And the third and final myth: you can electrify everything with mandates, spiking demand for power, that you can force a reliance on unreliably intermittent solar and wind on the grid, and that the grid will function just fine. It won’t and increasingly, it isn’t. The DOE says wind is only reliable 33% of the year while solar is dependable for just 25% of the time. Get this: wind energy generation decreased last year, despite 6.2 GWs of new capacity. Why? Um, because the wind didn’t blow when we needed it to.

Yes, the consequences of the Left’s peddling of myths in energy are real. It creates energy scarcity, which creates energy inflation, which then stokes general inflation. It helps create energy insecurity in the West and a dependency on places like Russia and Iran, because when wind and solar inevitably fail to perform at scale, the energy needs to come from somewhere. Putin feels emboldened and decides he can take a nation or two because of his energy stranglehold over the EU that the Left gave him. Iran feels emboldened because we need its oil and it sees us pleading with EU nations to not censure Iran for violating rules and pursuing nukes.

The Left’s climate policies suppress individual freedoms. Did you see Cali is testing car tracking? Why? Officially because EVs don’t pay gas tax, so tracking allows state to tax EVs as heavy as gas cars. But the real reason: once driving is tracked, it’s easy to start assigning social/climate scores to individuals. Climate policies: nothing to do with CO2, everything to do with social engineering.

Climate change is not the problem. It’s been happening for millions of years. Climate change policies and the myths they embody are the problem.

President Coolidge once wrote: “Isn’t it a strange thing that…men have the notion that they can pass a law and suspend the operations of economic law?” Today it’s worse, as elites have the notion they can pass climate policies that defy the operations of physics, and scientific law.

THE DUTY OF LEADERSHIP

Nick speaking at the announcement of CNX Resources and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s “Radical Transparency” initiative.

Now you get my anxiety. The Left, everything I am not, is looking to eradicate my beloved industry and region out of existence, with serious consequences for a range of stakeholders, from the local to the global.

That realization built over time and changed me. I used to subscribe to what I referenced as ‘political quietism’. Keep your head down, ignore the babble, and do your job. But with everything I just discussed looming larger, I began to ponder if that is what good leaders do. Is it ethical to not speak in defense of the accurate, of the rational?
So I began to focus on policy advocacy. And here we are today.

A FEW ‘HARD TRUTHS’

I’d like to spend a few minutes highlighting some of the major themes that I discussed in my book Precipice, which are the major challenges for us reflecting the major tactical avenues of attack the Left has adroitly applied the past number of decades. Let’s call them ‘hard truths’ to add to the hard truth I discussed earlier of there being no zero carbon world awaiting us. I will tie many of these to national levels and back to where I started this speech: California and LA. Our wonderful nation, this epic state, and this great city once represented the ideal but now unfortunately are the playthings of the Left.

Hard truth #1: Government today is a voracious beast and the bureaucratic state has grossly overstepped its constitutional boundaries. I tag the administrative state as the Deep State in Precipice. Not ‘deep’ as in secret; I wish. No, ‘deep’ as in rooted and entrenched everywhere and with everything. There is a historical lineage of how it came to be, from Wilson to FDR to LBJ to Obama to what we have today. The individual can do nothing today without government approval. And California is in many ways ground zero of the Deep State movement. Everything you do today must be permitted and approved by a faceless and unelected bureaucrat. 25% of all jobs in this nation added since Covid are in government. And that diminishes our efficacy as an economy and society greatly.

Hard truth #2: The US government is guaranteed to default on its debts and commitments. Closing in on $35 trillion in debt, or 120+% of GDP. Haven’t seen that since WWII. $2 trillion annual deficits that add to the debt pile. Hundreds of trillions in entitlement promises that don’t get added to the official debt. Trustees say Social Security has $25+ trillion shortfall and Medicare has $52+ trillion shortfall, or $78 trillion combined. About $1 trillion of new debt is being added every 100 days. The fiscal plane is flying right into the mountain and there is not enough time or space to gain sufficient altitude. Default or devalue, pick your poison, and both are indeed poison. Same for Cali, where Governor Newsom was asked: “Can we explain to Californians how we moved from a $100 billion surplus to such a significant deficit in just a matter of a few years?” His answer: delay in tax collection due to “rain bombs” and “atmospheric rivers” proving “climate change has impacts”. Right. Don’t look there, look over here.

Hard truth #3: Our education system is broken, perhaps beyond repair. Student proficiency rates in English, math, and science declined sharply across all grade levels and across the nation. Including LAUSD. Student proficiency levels have not come close to recovering to where they were before pandemic. Many districts lower the passing score on high school exit exams so that the statistics will show that more seniors graduated. Form over substance. Ideology over reality. The new mottos of our nation’s public education system.

The demographic that pays the heaviest price are the poorest. As of 2019, 2/3 of African American 12th graders did not possess even partial mastery of basic 12th grade math. That’s defined as being able to do arithmetic and to read a graph. And the number who are advanced in math was so small it didn’t show up statistically in the national data. Pretty much the same story in reading competency. Half of African American 12th grade students did not possess even partial mastery of basic reading and only 4% were advanced.

These statistics infuriate. We are assigning a generation to unrealized potential. We are dooming them to a life unfulfilled. And for what? And why? We know the answers: to instead have the system serve the desires of special interests who could not care less about the quality of life and future prospects of millions of Americans. That’s why funding levels skyrocketed over decades as scores have declined. What happened here with education during pandemic and who called the shots? Who benefits and who pays the price says a lot. Do we care about our kids? Sometimes I wonder.

Not much better with higher ed. Academia went from the marketplace of ideas to an Iron Curtain of ideology. From where a student was challenged and expanded horizons to one where the student is coddled and comes out indoctrinated with narrower horizons. The most common grade gifted at Harvard these days is an A. The California state university system was once the envy of the world. Today it is a massive burden, fiscally and culturally, for state taxpayers and citizens.

Hard truth #4: Inflation is here to stay. On the business news networks today everyone was excited about the inflation rate being a tick lower than expected and how inflation is now tamed, and the Fed can start cutting rates again. Hogwash. Unabated growth in the regulatory state makes everything more expensive. Languishing worker productivity creates skills scarcity and means more cost per unit of output. Climate alarmism is making the kilowatt-hour and HP expensive and scarce, which everything relies upon. Hyper government spending creates private sector scarcity. Taxes are rising everywhere and for everything, and the tab will be passed on, through the stream of commerce. The Fed’s free money policies pump asset bubbles and motivate excessive outspending. Crime adds to costs. Geopolitics stress already brittle supply chains. This isn’t our parent’s inflation from the 1970s. This is driven by policy and stoked by ideology. Until those reverse, inflation is here for the duration, as the cost of living in LA attests.

Yes, John Adams was right with his famous line: “Facts are stubborn things.” They make for hard truths, indeed. Sadly, the rest of America is gravitating toward where Cali is. Because the Left never sleeps, it’s always growing by consuming the value of others. Day by day. Profession by profession. State by state. In the words of ZZ Top, it’s going ‘nationwide’.

FOLLOW ALONG AND SPEAK UP

To wrap, thank you for being kind. Consider giving Precipice a read. Or follow me if you use LinkedIn or Twitter or YouTube. The Far Middle, as in not far right or far left but far middle, podcast is always looking for new constant listeners. Join those growing ranks – we issue episodes weekly, and they run under half an hour. I think you will enjoy them. Prior episodes are archived and available as well.

And my website nickdeiuliis.com is the depository for all the advocacy content, from book to podcast to news. Check in regularly.

Last, please speak up in defense of free enterprise, capitalism, individual rights, fiscal responsibility, value creators, and the middle class. For LA, for California, and for America.

God bless and thanks!

For daily insights and commentary from Nick Deiuliis, follow Nick on Twitter at @NickDeiuliis and on LinkedIn.

 

 

Echoes from 1961: Ike’s Fear of Red Scare Consequences and Today’s Crisis of Code Red

By Nick Deiuliis

In January 1961, as President Eisenhower was preparing to move out of the White House and exit public office, he delivered a primetime radio and TV farewell address to the American people. It became known as the ‘military industrial complex’ speech. It has largely been forgotten and deserves a revisit.

That speech 60-plus years ago contains core themes that proved prescient. Ike was warning us back in 1961 of the current crisis facing not just America, but all Western republican democracies.

Read the full text of President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address here via the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library. Watch the address here on C-SPAN.

The Red Scare

The primary threat America was facing in 1961 was communism, what Ike referenced as a “hostile ideology” that was “global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.”

His descriptors demonstrate how communism and the Left were viewed as serious and legitimate threats to the West back then.
And both remain threats today.

The contemporary Left snugly fits Ike’s 1961 phraseology for communism. It is certainly atheistic in character, as it looks to subvert religions because it views religions as competition, with leftism becoming a religion unto itself. The Left is ruthless, patiently and methodically, in purpose. And it is insidious, working from within legacy and impactful institutions, coercing change, gradually and everywhere.

Negative Consequences of Extreme Policy

As worried as Ike was about the specter of communism, he dedicated much of the farewell speech to warning Americans about the negative, serious consequences of committing to poor policies that promised to combat the threat but that would end up doing more harm than good to Western society.

He pointed out that there are no silver bullets to pressing problems in life and in geopolitics: “Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”

Ike worried the military industrial complex would see the threat of communism as a convenient crisis; an opportunity to grab undue power and influence.

He pointed out that in the early 1960s, the nation’s spend on military security exceeded the net income of all US corporations. He saw the potential for substantial power being misplaced into the wrong hands and special interests, and viewed such as a very serious threat.

It could result in government subsidy and funding subsuming intellectual curiosity in academic and industrial research. Public policy might become captive to an elite class that ruled under a veneer of being scientifically and technologically omnipotent and infallible. Plunder for the benefit of the special interests today would ruin the potential of everyone tomorrow.

The Remedy

Ike saw a simple preventative remedy to avoid the military industrial complex threat taking root. He prescribed, in a word, balance. Between costs and benefits, the private sector and government, national interests and individual rights, and the present and the future.

And Ike saw as a prerequisite to finding good policy balance the nurturing of an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry.” Doing so would deliver equilibrium between liberty of the individual and protection from the threat when making policy.

The Left’s Gambit

Ike’s 1961 warnings about the danger of extreme policies when attempting to vanquish communism come with a modern irony.

The Left procured the risks and fears enumerated in the military industrial complex speech when America was deep in the Cold War battling the Left.

We thought the Left vanquished when the Iron Curtain fell. But while we slumbered, the Left successfully convinced the West to self-impose policy templates that embraced those risks and fears to ‘tackle’ climate change.

The crisis of communism back then was replaced with the crisis of Code Red today. Along with promised salvation through extreme environmental policies warranting to save the planet yet designed exclusively for the benefit of the Left. Genius.

Code Red Consequences Today

Today’s energy transition policies rooted in climate alarmism are extreme and violate the warnings Eisenhower provided in the military industrial complex speech.

A climate apocalypse is presented as an unavoidable certainty without drastic action prescribed by an expert class. It is a risk that supersedes all other risks, past and present. Thus, we are told that extreme policy is a must and is the only option.

Experts assure that extreme policy offers a silver bullet.

If we obediently follow the policy prescriptions and surrender personal freedoms and quality of life, the planet will magically cool to whatever temperature setting we desire, to within a tenth of a degree of accuracy. And it will rain when and where we want it to. Eco-nirvana awaits if we adhere to energy transition policy.

We are told that with a silver bullet solution at the ready to the Code Red existential threat, we must stop worrying about finding balance in our policies. This is no time to quibble, this is Code Red! Yes, the costs of the policies today are massive, but they pale next to the avoided costs in a century of unabated climate change. Surrendering personal freedoms is a small price to pay for saving the planet; especially when many of those freedoms are sinful excess and indulgence. The private sector must take a back seat to decision making and instead follow what is assigned by the state.

Yes, the energy transition will require the consumption of more national treasure, personal wealth, and taxpayer subsidy than anything in history. Avoiding the highway to climate hell is not going to be cheap; trillions of dollars is simply the price of salvation.

Yes, climate policies will place enormous power in monied special interests, the unelected government bureaucrat, and the chosen elite. But we must trust them, for they are the experts who hold the solution to our existential problem. Our future indeed rests in the hands of the Code Red complex illuminati.

Those who desire to be alert and knowledgeable on energy and climate policies, especially those who have the audacity to dissent and follow the scientific method, are threats to all of us. They must be silenced, censored, vilified, and labeled as ‘deniers.’ Investigate them. Blackball them. After all, this is an emergency that calls for drastic emergency measures.

Yes, government becomes all-powerful if we wish to successfully tackle climate change. It pushes out private sector endeavors and investment. It manipulates capital markets on an unprecedented, epic scale. It will incentivize business models and academic research that exist exclusively to rent-seek taxpayer subsidy. Innovation, disruptive technology, meritocracy, and the scientific method are suffocated. But we save the planet.

And soon enough a tipping point is achieved, whereby all policy is driven by a small cadre of elites and experts. We are not sure how they became credentialed as such, but nevertheless, we are told to blindly follow or face the consequences.

Ike Is Rolling Over In His Grave

President Eisenhower would have seen right through the scheming and exposed the associated danger of the Code Red complex. And he would be devastated to see how the Left today has used climate alarmism to inject the risks he warned about when combatting the Left then.

Toward the end of the speech, Eisenhower issued a warning that is sadly laughable today. He advised to “avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.”

The Code Red complex justifies its plundering in the name of future generations. Yet its policies bankrupt the future.

The US government has run a budget deficit every year since 2002. During boom and recession; during and after pandemic; whether at war or in peaceful times. In 2004, with troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the deficit was $400 billion. In 2009, during the Global Financial Crisis, the federal deficit was $1.4 trillion. Last year, with low unemployment and high economic growth, the deficit was $2 trillion. The level of deficit has exponentially increased.

Policies developed and justified by the Code Red complex are the root cause.

And the complex will make the numbers worse. The CBO projects the national debt is going to increase somewhere just shy of $120 trillion in the next 30 years, much of it squandered on energy transition mandates and subsidy. Perhaps the greatest plundering of future generations by a current generation in history.

Today our nation desperately needs leaders like Ike. Leaders who focus on pursuing policies that serve the best interests of America and its citizens.