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.

A Tribute to Mr. O and the Bonds of Western Pennsylvania

By Nick Deiuliis

Movie fans marvel how actors on the big screen are famously linked within six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.

Western Pennsylvania is far from Hollywood, both geographically and culturally. It’s been home all my life, a place where the connections and relationships run wide and deep. A place where everyone is connected not by six, but only by a degree or two of separation.

In western Pennsylvania communities, the good fortune of one is often enjoyed by many, and someone’s misfortune is willingly shouldered by many. We look after each other as extended family. A big, boisterous, dysfunctional, loving clan of yinzers.1

And no one epitomized the essence of these exceptional people more than “Mr. O.”

I first met Mr. O when I was 13 and his house sat at the beginning of my route that I tended as a paperboy. The street he and I lived on was a long line of modest ranch and split-level homes neatly kept by no-nonsense, middle class, blue-collar types. Real people living normal lives.

He was a good tipper, a trait this old paperboy never forgets. Mr. O was one of those rare adults who could put a teenager at ease while keeping it clear who was boss.

Mr. and Mrs. O had two daughters who I went to school with, the older a year ahead and the younger a few years behind. The girls and their friends would hang out with my friends and our brothers and sisters. When I traded the paper route for another job, and graduated high school to move onto college, I may have from time to time ended up in Mr. O’s backyard at night with friends, sipping adult beverages and playing music.

All that socializing through the years led to wonderful things. Before you knew it, one of my best friends ended up dating Mr. O’s younger daughter. Their wedding ended up being a reunion of the same group of people from decades earlier in that South Hills backyard on my old paper route; just older, better dressed, and less fit.

Mr. O sadly lost his wife too early, but never moved. His girls lived close by (that’s Pittsburgh for you). His home enjoyed a few updates to the exterior through the years, but it still looked much the same as it did in the mid-1980s: happy, neat, and reflecting pride.

A few years ago, I was back at the old childhood homestead working in the front yard when Mr. O drove up in his vintage 1960s-era Volkswagen Beetle. He stopped and as was his custom, started to chat. As I watched him drive away, I experienced an incredibly strong sense of déjà vu, back to 1986. And it felt good.

I continued to see Mr. O each summer at a July picnic party his daughter and my old friend would throw at their house. It was evident Mr. O was taking full advantage of the little things in life. He couldn’t be happier.

Then news came down about a month ago that Mr. O wasn’t doing well. His health took a turn for the worst, and it wasn’t looking good. Thankfully, he was resting comfortably at home.

I asked the family if it would be ok for me to stop by and visit, and one sunny spring afternoon I made that familiar drive of a few miles, parked the car on my old street, and walked up those steps to Mr. O’s front door that I traversed daily for years as a teen delivering newspapers.

‘C’mon in’ I heard after knocking on the screen door. In I went and there in the living room was Mr. O, reclined in a hospital bed. ‘Hey, Nick! Why aren’t you at work?’ That was classic Mr. O and so…Pittsburgh.

We talked. About everything. How he met his wife. His time in the army. All those clean-ups after storms when he worked as a utility lineman. I found out he and I both hailed from the Mount Washington neighborhood of Pittsburgh before we moved to the South Hills, albeit he made the move south as an adult about twenty years before I did as a kid.

Mr. O knew his time was short. But he was grateful for his long journey. He was happy his kids were married to good men. He was content with his eighty-five years of living a genuine life.

Two days after my visit, Mr. O passed away.

Reflecting on the man and his life, I think I stumbled on what he meant to me. He wasn’t a mentor I looked to for advice. He wasn’t a father figure or friend as much as a friend’s father.

Mr. O, when it is all said and done, was a role model.

He showed how to live a complete life. A life not measured by awards, scores, or account balances; but one measured by being comfortable within your own skin and being content with your decisions.

Next time I drive down my old street, as is often my habit, I will come to the house at the start of my old paper route. The old Beetle won’t be in the driveway, the house exterior might wear a different color, and the new owners will be strangers. But to this old paperboy, that house will always remain Mr. O’s home.

Whoever said you can’t go home again sure as hell wasn’t from western Pennsylvania.2

1. yinzer (noun) – a native or inhabitant of the US city of Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania. “I walked over to a table of yinzers and instantly felt at home.”
2. Apologies to one of my literary heroes, Thomas Wolfe.

Harvesting History: Farmer Activism is Democracy’s Early Warning System

By Nick Deiuliis

Elites have a long history of looking down on and patronizing the working classes. It’s a sad social truth that extends back to America’s founding. Europe’s history of confrontation between the two classes stretches back centuries.

Today’s elites labeling the working class as Deplorables, Flyover Country, and Bible-and-Gun-Clingers is nothing new. It seems the more things change in America and Europe the more they stay the same.

You see the self-perpetuating dynamic with perhaps the original working-class demographic: farmers.

One of America’s first confrontations between the working class and elites was western Pennsylvania farmers initiating the Whiskey Rebellion during George Washington’s presidency. Indeed, farmers have a proud history of being first within the working class to confront excessive government control and elites looking to disenfranchise citizens.

And true to form, farmers across Europe are once again raising the alarm for the rest of society when it comes to loss of individual rights and constriction of liberty. Because the Left, the radical environmental theocracy, and the bureaucrat just can’t stop messing with society’s doers.

With so much at stake, a refresh of farmers’ movements in the United States and a discussion of the current farmers’ uprising in Europe is warranted.

American Farmers: A History of Political Activism

The latter half of the 1800s saw American farmers achieve a new, higher level of political activism that had national implications lasting to this day.1 It all started with disruptive technology.

The 19th century brought unprecedented economic advancement and groundbreaking technology, combining to drastically affect industry and agriculture. Steamships and railroads were game changers.

Along with new, advanced machinery and growing foreign trade, they disrupted everything across the American economy, from the factory floor to the farm field.

But net-net, manufacturing and urban areas benefited much more from the innovation and economic revolution than agriculture and rural areas. The individual farmer and small town were especially hard hit. Cities got bigger, industry became more profitable, but individual farmers found themselves struggling more.

Despite the innovations, farming still lacked scale. And competition was global when it came to demand and pricing for crops. Farmers were affected by global developments out of their control for revenue but had costs set by an inefficient local or regional market. The worst of both worlds created a financial pinch of low, at-risk revenue and high cost.

Adding to the farmer’s difficulty was a reliance on credit and a run-up in debt. As well as having to carry the risks of crop storage and transportation, lease rents for land, and speculators preying on micro-markets.

Indeed, the American farmer was facing seemingly impenetrable headwinds in the latter half of the 1800s.

Farmers decided it was time to unite and become activists to support their cause. Initially they looked to the labor movement in larger cities as the model to follow. The industrial labor unions were posting some impressive successes, so why not copy the playbook?

But farming is not the same as, say, coal mining or steelmaking. Thus, farmers quickly realized they would need their own brand of activism.

Just after the Civil War, the Patrons of Husbandry, also known as the Grange, appeared in the rural South and West.

It was the first national political movement for farmers—focused on setting rate caps on rail rates, which were a key point of contention and major financial risk for farmers in the South and West. The organization is alive and well today, with a Washington, D.C. headquarters and roughly 1,700 local chapters across America’s farming communities.

I feed you all!” lithograph by American Oleograph Co., Milwaukee, 1875.
(Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

After the Grange came the Greenback Party, focusing on addressing the problems of currency and inflation that troubled farmers. The party advocated for a break from the gold standard, fiat money, and a cheaper dollar, reflecting aspects of today’s modern monetary theory, or MMT. It was hoped that such an approach would grow farm revenue while making debt more manageable.2

Although the Greenback Party ran presidential candidates over three national elections (1876, 1880, and 1884), it wasn’t very successful politically. But it was quite successful in calling attention to the shortcomings of the US monetary system.

Around the same time of the Greenback Party, the Farmers Alliances in the Northwest and South were created. The idea was to unite farmers, becoming a force in established party politics and taking on the Gilded Age. The Southern Alliance focused on commandeering the dominant Democratic Party by electing candidates to run for state offices and for Congress. While in the Northwest, the Farmers Alliance started to behave as a separate third party that was populist.

The fourth and most impactful farmers movement was the Populists, centered in the West and also having support in the South. It was known as the People’s Party, the Populists, or the Populist Party. Lack of rainfall got things moving as drought devastated farmers in the Plains in the late 1880s and farms began to fail.

Farmers felt that business interests of railroads and bankers were contributing to, and feeding off, their plight and wanted to do something about it. That started a passionate movement, with followers preaching populism. The People’s Party candidate for president, James Weaver, won 22 Electoral College votes in the 1892 election, winning four Western states outright and winning electoral votes in two others. The party eventually merged into the Democratic Party in the next presidential election of 1896.

Although the People’s Party ultimately died, many of its ideas lived on. Subsequent policies in the coming years affecting conservation, trusts, railroads, and banking trace roots back to the populism of the farmers in the late 1800s. Including the creation of the Federal Reserve and many of President Teddy Roosevelt’s positions and accomplishments.

Europe’s Farmers Rise Up in 2024

The American farmer acting up in the late 1800s shares a lineage to European farmers acting up in 2024. Despite over a century and an ocean between the two, the movements have much in common.

Indeed, history is once again rhyming. Because today’s European farmers find themselves under siege by the arrogant elites.

Farmers are protesting across Europe. Spain, UK, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Netherlands, France, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, and Poland; from Ireland to Romania. It’s become a truly pan-European movement.

Videos populate the internet of tractors and convoys of farming equipment blocking roads. Clips abound of farmers dumping wine and feed in front of government buildings.

And the protestors aren’t just the farmers in these nations, but also organizations that are affiliated with farmers and agriculture. These institutions have joined what was originally a grassroots protest and morphed it into something bigger and better organized. The movements are starting to win elections, from the local to the national, as seen in the Netherlands.

Typical of governments run by elites, the continent’s bureaucracy is making things worse and not listening.

For example, Spain issued thousands of sanctions or violations against citizens under its Orwellian Citizen Security Law (commonly referred to as the Gag Law). Yet Barcelona was still brought to a standstill by the protests. And Spanish farmers dumped wine in front of a municipal water authority to protest water restrictions.

Italy saw 1,600 tractors poised to enter Rome. A Milan protest saw a cow join in the march. Italian farmers were angered by the expiration of an income tax exemption. Italy’s Prime Minister ultimately relented and agreed to not let the exemption expire.

Greece is experiencing protests everywhere, with a major highway to Athens blocked. The Netherlands got things rolling on the continent with the Farmers Citizens Movement.

Germany is an especially interesting case. The government desired to camouflage the cost of climate policies by using pandemic emergency funds to fund its forced energy transition. Nice idea, but the courts deemed it unlawful, reasoning quite correctly that climate change is not Covid. So, the government decided that the climate policies would continue and that the cost would be offset by removing diesel fuel subsidies to German farmers.

Following the increased costs to farmers from all the other climate polices within the German net zero nightmare, the removal of the subsidy was the last straw. It stripped away the pretend veneer of the myth that net zero plans don’t hurt anyone. German farmers reacted; roads were blocked, from Munich to Berlin, and the world viewed images of farm tractors blocking the approach to the iconic Brandenberg Gate in Berlin.

Farmers protest at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Jan. 15, 2024.
AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi

European politicians are finally paying attention and assuring that they feel for the farmers being victimized by the EU bureaucracy and the elites who run it.

Enter the Spin of the Elites

With the farmer protests undisputedly in plain view for all to see, those looking to divert attention from the root cause jump into spin mode.

Mainstream media and politicians caught off guard by the agrarian working-class protests now blame five root causes for catalyzing these protests: climate policies, inflation, food imports, the urban-rural divide, and economic inequality.

Which is sort of true, but not entirely. Because only the first item, climate change policies, is the true root cause. The remaining four are symptoms of those climate policies. Much like the farmer protestors themselves.

Certainly, the European Green Deal is wreaking havoc on European farmers. One of the primary objectives of climate policies is to make it uneconomic to farm, to provide food, and to eat. At least without government support and approval.

A goal of climate policies is empowering the bureaucrat and the state to dictate what one eats and how much. Under the false flag of saving the planet and the pleasant-sounding optical cloak of ‘sustainable farming.’

Farmers understand climate policies will soon eradicate them, just as such policies initially targeted (and are on their way to eradicating) the fossil fuel industry, power grid, and gasoline-powered cars across Europe. But the farmers aren’t taking this lying down; they refuse to make the same mistakes the complacent domestic energy industry, autoworkers unions, and consumer advocates made when allowing the radical environmental movement to roll over their interests.

What about the other cause of the protests identified by the elites: inflation, food imports, the urban-rural divide, and economic inequality?

Of course, the cost of living and inflation are up. Natural gas costs are up and so is fertilizer cost, which requires natural gas as a feedstock. Farming requires carbon-based energy and products like just about everything else in a modern economy. Thus, if you create energy scarcity while inflating energy costs through climate policies, you do the same for the inputs of farming. Farming soon becomes uneconomic.

The European mainstream media point to inflation and pin it on Russia invading Ukraine, which increased energy costs. Or the media blames drought, caused by (you guessed it) climate change, as raising costs.

Climate policies enabled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and catalyzed general inflation. And yes, somewhere in Europe, right now, there will be drought. And somewhere in Europe, right now, there will be floods. It is a large continent, after all. But change in weather isn’t causing the existential plight of farmers or inflation. Despite media and academic experts wanting it to.

Farmers are hurt by food imports, but that is yet another symptom of climate change policies that dictate who makes and uses what on a global scale. Nations and the private sector within national economies ultimately lose autonomy under all variations of climate policies, from domestic energy industries to the domestic providers of food.

Climate policies are designed to make European-grown food too expensive. Which then has the desired effect of creating food scarcity. The food supply shifts from mostly European to mostly foreign providers, with Europeans now having to look to places like North Africa and Ukraine. Not exactly geopolitically stable places to get your dinner from.

Then there’s the popular elite excuse of the rural-urban divide stoking these protests. Which is ironic.

It’s not that urban elites don’t care about rural citizens. The government bureaucrat and the experts care greatly; the problem is they care about placing the rural, or what we call Flyover Country here in America, in economic chains and assigning them to a life of reliance on the state. Is it any wonder that rural Europeans tend to be more Euroskeptic? They are more astute than the urban elites give them credit for.

And when it comes to economic inequality, that fifth and final excuse proffered by the media as a cause of the farmer protests across Europe, one is hard pressed to think of anything that is a more regressive tax and regressive value appropriator than net zero plans and climate change policies.

Net zero plans radically catalyze income inequality. Like these other red-herring issues, the media wants to label economic inequality as a root cause of the farmer protests. Yet economic inequality is a symptom of the singular, true root cause: climate policies and their net zero scams.

Where Do Farmer Protests Go From Here?

One should be quite optimistic regarding the implications of European farmers standing up for themselves. Wider society stands to benefit three ways.

First, the farmer protests secured shorter-term successes when political leaders in nations such as France and Italy backed off planned moves that would’ve hit farmers disproportionately and that would have increased the cost of food. That’s created an incentive for farmers in other European nations to join the movement. Which is why the protests quickly spread across Europe, why they’ve extended into March and will likely continue. What’s good for the farmer is good for the consumer and the overall economy.

Second, the reaction of the farmers to climate change policies created a deterrent for European politicians and bureaucrats—forcing them to think twice before unleashing additional and similar draconian moves on other sectors of the European economy and society.

As they’ve done for centuries, the farmer has provided a great service to a host of others. This time their resistance and advocacy for common sense has stymied the consequences of climate policies for countless businesses and families.

Third, the farmer protest movement is winning elections, from the local to national level, as seen in the Netherlands. Candidates opposed to economy-killing climate policies trounced leftist parties obsessed about climate change, Code Red, and irreversible state control of the individual.

Despite these realities, a complicit media is still trying to cover for the bureaucrat in Europe. The overwhelming political upheaval and protest by farmers is precipitating a disingenuous discussion about who pays for climate change policies and net zero plans.

Which is nonsensical to debate, because everyone pays for climate change policies and net zero plans in a modern economy. It is not a question about who pays. Instead, it comes down to how transparent will the costs that are being borne by all be brought to light, and how soon.

Do people wake up before reaching the point of no return? Or do the policies become so embedded within an economy and society that it doesn’t matter what happens once society awakens?

European farmers have performed a noble duty for all Europeans. Following a rich history of American farmer movements. Let’s hope the current protests serve as both a moral and economic alarm clock to wake up society to the threat of climate change policies. Before it’s too late.

1. In the 1930s, historian John D. Hicks was a leading voice on populism and farmer movements.
2. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.
3. Climate change is nothing new; been happening for millions of years.