DAFFY OLD TROLL

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Why Some Wealthy Investors Are Sitting On Their Wallets

At a conference in Orlando I met older, wealthier people who are waiting for the second coming of Trump. They want to turn back the investment clock, too. Unless it's healthcare, there's not much of an appetite for technology funding--and not much funding for their kids, either. 

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@HOWARDTULLMAN1

 

It’s illuminating, and highly recommended, to take a step or two out of your own financial, educational, media and societal bubble and subject yourself (with as much of an open mind as you can muster) to a radically different environment for a couple of days. I just returned from speaking at The MoneyShow Orlando, a major annual financial conference, which is held a few miles from Disney, and which was just as insular, hyper-hygienic and self-referential as the Magic Kingdom itself. Hundreds of financial speakers, industry presenters, investment advisors, media personalities, and independent investors from dozens of states gathered for several days of lectures, pitches, seminars, and conversations about the state of the world, the economy, their own finances and portfolios, and the future.

Suffice it to say, the overwhelming vision of the current state of affairs is bleak. They long for the golden days of Trump when they believe the world was rosy. Universal could make a bundle showing screenings of Back to the Future all day long. More importantly, their views are set in concrete and utterly impervious to debate or even discussion. It was a whole lot of “my way or the highway” and most of these men and women were a long way down the road and unlikely to change direction.

TO ARGUE WITH A PERSON WHO HAS RENOUNCED THE USE OF REASON IS LIKE ADMINISTERING MEDICINE TO THE DEAD.

THOMAS PAINE

Meeting and chatting with all manner of industry and financial “experts,” watching dozens of presentations loaded with figures, charts, projections, and warnings, and witnessing surveys, and other polls which reflected astonishing levels of unanimity was an extreme, invaluable, and eye-opening experience as well as a bubble-burster.

 Until you get out into other parts of the world, you just have no idea of how deeply, sincerely, and unalterably certain ideas, beliefs and political positions are held. And, much more importantly, how they impact these folks’ lives and investment decisions. Plenty of gold hoarders, but nary a substantial bitcoin player in the bunch. My sense is that they remembered the dot.com debacles all too well and steered clear of crypto.00:000

 Talking to these audiences about the exciting prospects of innovation, new technologies, and the rapid onset of radical, unavoidable, change was a lot like offering them cancer. “Clean” anything is a dirty word; climate is the reason they live in the South, and, if it’s okay with you, they’d just as soon see things continue along as is - at least until they’re gone. It feels a lot like King Louis XV in France in the late 1700’s, who purportedly said “Après moi, le deluge.” After me, the flood.

 What’s especially clear and I think misunderstood by the media is that a substantial number of the actions these people take and the political ideas and individuals they choose to support are not driven by their current economic situation. They’re very happy with what they’ve got, they’re not that excited about sharing it, and they certainly don’t want it taken away. None of these attendees was in any kind of dire straits although there was persistent angst (not to say fear) about what may be coming down the pike. The vast majority of the conversations were about capital preservation rather than appreciation -- defensive in nature. The stink of statis could be matched only by the smell of the omnipresent hand sanitizer dispensers.

 What this means for entrepreneurs, new business builders, change agents and even venture capitalists isn’t totally clear, but it’s obviously not good news when millions of independent and formerly active investors - sitting on substantial accumulations of post-Covid capital - are also basically sitting on their hands. They’re out of the market, waiting for a savior to show up and turn the clock back a decade or two.

 Extrapolating my admittedly small sample size to the population is easier than you’d imagine when you see the amazing extent to which ALL of the channels, media and information directed at this crowd are aggressively supportive of a single dark vision of the economy, politics and the future in the absence of a pervasive political change. More than a third of the vendors in the exhibit space were hawking books, newsletters, subscriptions to podcasts, and other advisory resources and the messaging was remarkably uniform. A strong mix of Chicken Little and Armageddon.

 We’re going to need to revise and reform our storytelling and pitches if we want to have any chance at all of reaching and attracting these investors. Here are the areas of appetite and interest that seemed to get through to the crowd. As I often say, if they’re not listening, it doesn’t matter what you’re saying or selling.

1. Health care change is hot.

Not simply because they’re older or because it’s a growing part of their day-to-day lives, but because: (a) they know the system is broken; and (b) they are interested in taking a much more active role in managing their own health and health care. 2 out of every 5 adults in the U.S. are already using a health care app and/or device on a daily basis. I couldn’t say enough about the Apple watch and the idea of being proactive rather than reactive in respect of our health. Interestingly, there’s a perceived difference and a comfort here between innovation (fast and bad) and “long overdue” fixes (good and reassuringly slow).

2. Privacy is a prime concern.

Not because they’re overly concerned about their own privacy - most of them understood that that boat had already sailed. They just didn’t want to be scammed, hacked, or have their identities or funds stolen. The real concern about privacy is how it was going to impact their investments in Google and Facebook. Unlike Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, Google and Facebook continue to live on ad revenue based on invading our privacy, but the government (and 41 states especially) are finally waking up to the risks and the problem. In an upcoming hyper-political year, attacking the lowest hanging fruit in Big Tech as evildoers killing our kids is a no brainer for the lazy legislators in Washington. Can’t be good news for Zuck or Sundar or their stockholders.

 3. Time and Step Savers are Good Stories.

Time is the scarcest resource in our lives and far more valuable than money in many ways. Ease of use and access, convenience and simplicity, and increased productivity along with better decision making are all simple and well-understood stories to tell and sell. Make it easy for me and you own me.

 4. They Really Don’t Care about Junior.

Whether it’s entirely accurate or not, to a person, these folks believed that they worked hard and earned their good fortune and wealth. And they’re convinced that - by and large - their kids don’t get it, that they have a lousy work ethic, and that they’re way too entitled for their own good. I was struck by how many of the attendees literally used this rationale to explain why they were living it up now, enjoying their money while they could, and not really all that concerned about passing their fortunes on to their offspring. As Covid-19 finally recedes, expect a boom in experiences, services and adventures as opposed to hard goods and property.

They know that you can’t take it with you and that shrouds have no pockets.

GREAT SHOW AND TERRIFIC SPEAKERS - THE MONEY SHOW/TRADERS EXPO - ORLANDO

 

 

One-Sided Rules of War

By Steve Huntley

October 29, 2023

We’re hearing a lot of talk these days about the rules of war. All of it is aimed at Israel. No one is calling on Hamas to follow those rules.

There’s a simple reason for that.

No one — no one — thinks Hamas will do anything other than what it always does. And what it did on Oct. 7. The music concert massacre. The murders of civilians from babies in cradles to grandmothers. The rapes. The mutilation and burning of bodies. The beheadings. The hostage-taking of civilians, including 20 children, one of them in a wheelchair. The use of Palestinians as human shields.

No one expects Hamas to obey civilization’s standard for conducting warfare. No one even thinks of calling on Hamas to do so.

But it’s a different case with the Jewish state. Israel is getting a lot of, what’s the right word — advice, guidance, cautions, veiled warnings? — whatever the word, Israel is hearing from various corners about its conduct of the war against Hamas.

Make sure to avoid civilian casualties.

Don’t do anything that would be “disproportionate.”

Don’t let “rage” affect your decisions, as President Biden put it in talking about the need to adhere to the rules of civilized warfare.

Delay the ground invasion of Gaza in hopes of getting more hostages out now that four have been released, say some European nations and the U.S. government.

Others, such as the Democrat squad in the U.S. House of Representatives, aka the congressional antisemitic caucus, demand a cease-fire.

All this is coming from people who bear no responsibility for protecting the citizens of Israel.

I mean, who else is going to step up to make Hamas pay for the terrible war crimes, the pogrom of Oct. 7?

Will the International Court of Justice based at The Hague issue an indictment and send a posse of steely lawmen into the Gaza Strip to arrest the Hamas war criminals and bring them to justice?

Dream on.

Will the United Nations assemble an army, equip it and dispatch it to Gaza City to wage the unbelievably complex and dangerous mission of urban warfare necessary to bring retribution to these terrorists?

There’s a reason the UN is called the Useless Nations. Even worse, the UN secretary general tried to justify the Hamas savagery of Oct. 7

Will the European Union call up soldiers from its member nations to rout Hamas out of the Gaza Strip?

Hell, European countries can’t even handle backing the Ukraine war on their own without the spine-enforcing support of the United States.

And what about all the Arab nations that are so, so concerned about the fate of the innocent Palestinians in Gaza? Will they tell the Israelis to stand aside while their armies invade Gaza to protect civilians and capture the Hamas terrorists?

A fantasy beyond the imagination of any sane human being. This is true even though Hamas is funded, armed and advised by Shia Iran, the committed enemy of the Sunni Arab world.

No, Israel knows — as it has tragically learned time and again — that only it will step up to protect Jews, only it will fight to save Jewish lives, only it will endure the terrors of war to combat a wretched bestial organization that in its charter is dedicated to genocide and mass murder of Jews.

While Israel has assimilated the lessons of history, incredibly too many in the world have not — even after the horrors of the  Holocaust.

Worse, as we have seen, in some of our most esteemed institutions like Harvard, UPenn, Columbia and other elite universities ruled by extreme left thought, in some Muslim immigrant communities resistant to Western ideas of civilized warfare and even in the halls of Congress, the cancer of antisemitism is alive and well — and metastasizing.

No one but Israel is going to fight and bleed to protect Jews.

To his credit, Biden has committed America to providing military assistance to Israel and he has dispatched U.S. naval forces to Mideast waters with the goal of preventing Iran and other bad actors from widening the genocidal war against Israel.

Some have seen weakness on Biden’s part because the leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority canceled a summit with him during his recent visit to the region. I understand that argument.

But it masks a greater, more serious, more depressing truth. These Arab leaders have never even started preparing their populations for a real, lasting peace with Israel. Now they tremble in fear that anger in their streets from people fed lies for decades about Israel will threaten their rule.

That fear was intensified to the point of canceling the summit after Hamas falsely accused Israel of bombing a Gaza hospital. It should have been no surprise that intelligence and evidence quickly revealed it was an errant Islamic Jihad missile that fell into the hospital parking lot.

The news media should be engaging in serious soul searching after so many of our prestigious newspaper, broadcast and cable news outlets accepted uncritically and published/broadcast an accusation against Israel from an organization whose fundamental, essential, core belief is that the only good Jew is a dead Jew.

That’s the neighborhood that Israel must live in.

The Jewish state needs no sanctimonious advice, smug guidance or veiled warnings about how to defend its people.

And what does proportionality actually mean in war?

Hamas fired thousands of unguided missiles into Israel with the obvious intention of killing Israeli civilians. Would it be proportionate for Israel to fire the same number of unguided missiles into Gaza?

Would it be proportionate for Israeli troops to rape Palestinian women? To target babies for murder? Mutilate and burn bodies? Capture civilians as hostages?

That would be doing exactly the same thing as Hamas did. Isn’t that the very definition of a proportional response? Do exactly the same thing and in the same numbers as Hamas did?

Tit for tat, proportionality.

The Geneva Conventions adopted after World War II outlawed that kind of proportionality. Hamas has shown time and again it doesn’t care about those rules of war, its only standards of war are savagery, barbarism, cruelty and brutality.

But the Israelis are a civilized, moral people and they are not going to deliberately violate the conventions of warfare. They will do all that they can to minimize civilian casualties, to follow the civilized principles of conducting a necessary, just war.

They don’t need any moralizing advice or pious warnings about the battle they are fighting.

And when in history has any nation fought a war agreeing with recommendations to tie its hands behind its back?

Did anyone tell the Red Army to be sure to protect innocent German civilians when it unleashed its soldiers on a starving Berlin in 1945? An estimated almost 2 million German women in Berlin and elsewhere were raped by the Red Army. The Nazis had waged war on Russian civilians. The Soviets waged war on German civilians. Proportionality.

Despite the prospect of civilian deaths, America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan for the just, righteous reason of saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of GIs who faced the forbidding, bloody challenge of invading the home islands to end World War II. And don’t forget that Japan waged war on civilians. Exhibit No. 1: the Rape of Nanking.

And even after the terrible punishment of atomic bombs, fanatics within the Japanese military wanted to fight on.

That’s the kind of fanaticism Israel faces in its enemy Hamas, terrorists so maniacal that they use Palestinian civilians as human shields. So rabid they don’t care how high Palestinian bodies pile up. To them, Palestinian deaths are propaganda fodder in their war for Israel’s extinction.

Today’s reality is this: Hamas will keep flouting civilization’s rules of war, keep committing atrocities, keep sacrificing Palestinian lives as human shields. And the world will keep self-righteously wagging its finger at Israel. And worse — in academia, in far left political circles, in Muslim immigrant communities — apologists for Hamas will keep excusing and justifying its war crimes, its massacres, its rapes, its ritual of human sacrifice of Palestinian civilians.

War is hell, as Sherman said. It always has been and remains so.

Just ask the Ukrainians brutalized by Vladimir Putin’s armies. Just ask the people of Sudan, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and other nations that have suffered warfare in recent years. Just ask the people of Mosul where 10,000 civilians died in 2016 in a nine-month campaign by Iraqi troops, backed by U.S. air support ordered by President Barack Obama, to defeat Isis.

And just ask the survivors of the massacres, the pogroms of Oct. 7.

War is hell and no civilized nation enters one for any reason other than protecting its citizens.

That’s what Israel is doing. It didn’t seek this fight. It was attacked by the barbarians of Hamas. And it must exercise its best judgment on how to fight the genocidal fanatics of Hamas. It will conduct this fight by the rules of war as decreed by 21st century civilization.

It must fight this war to win and it doesn’t need lectures on how to do that.

HYPOCRITICAL MAGA THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS

 

EVEN TRUMP'S CONDIMENTS ARE CROOKED

 

GOP, MAGA AND THE NRA - BLOOD BROTHERS

 

HAMAS SCUM

 

 

HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO FOR A CHAT

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

 

RING AROUND THE ORANGE MONSTER TIGHTENS

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

  

Terrible Tech and Untrained Staff: For Customers, Is This the Worst of Both Worlds?

Too many companies are trying to automate customer service with technology that doesn't work; then they compound the problem with customer-facing workers who can't help the customer. 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@HOWARDTULLMAN1

I guess there was a time not too terribly long ago when we actually preferred doing business with people rather than machines.  When we believed that the human interaction somehow added value to the transaction and could, if necessary, address questions and issues that might arise. This was based in no small part on our prior impressions and experiences in terms of the individuals we were likely to encounter on these occasions. They might even recognize us; we trusted them, they trusted us. We thought of them as our neighbors and part of the community, and we believed that they were generally interested in being of service to us.

Those times are long gone. These days you can walk into a branch bank and the humans sitting behind desks in cubicles are happy to tell you that they can't even cash a check for you. You've got to wonder why they even bother to come to work?

Too many businesses today are replacing people with technology without understanding that the increasingly few customer-facing employees they still employ are their "front door" and most likely their prime point of customer contact. As a result, these firms, who are willing to insert just about anyone who can breathe into those sensitive positions, are really selling themselves short and cruising for a bruising. Especially post-pandemic, your front-line troops are the ones who are best suited to welcome back, reassure, and re-connect directly with your customers. If your entire consumer service experience is automated and abstract, you can bet that Amazon will be handling your customers' banking and other needs in no time at all. And if these folks have no real training, no authority, and not even cash on hand, they might just as well be replaced by ATMs. 

Today, for a variety of economic and social reasons, all bets are off in terms of what passes for an acceptable workforce as well as appropriate dress and behaviors. The net effect is that we're all, more or less, passively migrating or being actively pushed toward impersonal tech solutions (whether they work well or not) partly because the alternatives are so unfriendly, unappealing, or unappetizing. And, believe me, it's not just the banks that are a problem. Grocery stores, restaurants, bars, and bodegas all have similar issues. They may have massive and meaningless video displays and all kinds of Muzak, or a million different bottles of beer, but the overall retail experience just keeps getting worse and worse.

Maybe it's post-pandemic PTSD or longing for times long past, or the fact that it's flu season, but between the autumn's abundant allergies, winter's sniffles, and resurgent Covid issues, everyone seems to be walking around stressed and a little more sensitive to their surroundings than they might have in the past. Observant consumers are increasingly noticing the cutbacks and cost-saving efforts. But the biggest and most obvious changes are in the attitudes, abilities, and anger of the people staffing the stores. I get that there're a lot of folks unhappy with their work situations, but honestly, I don't think it's my fault, or that they should take it out on me.

A simple example. We're entering the runny nose season and I'd like to suggest that Whole Foods and the other food purveyors and restauranteurs that have staff handling my food to suggest to their esteemed team members that it's a good time to keep the studs and other jewelry hanging out of their noses away from my meals. It gives me the creeps even apart from any contagions. This stupid idea of letting their food handlers bring their whole selves to work needs to be cleaned up so they don't bring COVID, colds, and other germs to work with them. If you think I'm the only one disgusted by the drips, feel free to ask anyone standing in line or seated at a table and subjected to this snotty spectacle. Self-service checkout machines still basically suck, but they're looking better all the time compared with the bozos behind the registers and the brutal baggers.

Or how about the new restaurant kiosks where you're supposed to order your food as you enter and then wait for someone behind the counter to bring it to you? We're seeing more and more variations of this theme even in traditional restaurants (not just fast-food joints) as a way to cut back on wait staff. Needless to say, these displays have all the flexibility and warmth of an ice cube, and you end up feeling just like another cog in the system. They make you long for the crabby old servers who at least knew what you wanted and seemed slightly interested as well. It's hard to escape the subtle message of "eat and get out" that so many of these places give off. Not exactly comfort food. But don't forget to leave a generous tip as the display officiously reminds you.

Now's the time that smart business builders and owners need to take a step or two back and decide what business they're in and how they want that business to operate. Frankly, I think most of them-- if they could mystery shop their own places -- would be shocked and disappointed at how unpleasant the whole process has become. Every business is the same in at least one way-- whatever you're selling, it's your people who deliver the goods. Starbucks takes a lot of crap for a variety of reasons, but one thing that Howard Schultz said at the outset of the business was the truest observation ever.  He said "we're not in the coffee business, serving people.  We're in the people business, serving coffee."

Saving on staff, cutting back on training, trying to do things cheaply that you shouldn't do at all -- all send the same message to your customers. And not a happy one. Technology is a tool, not a savior in these situations. Care for your customers first and then worry about the costs.

HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TALKING ABOUT STARTUPS

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

 

The Day the Delusions Died

A lot of people woke up on October 7 as progressives and went to bed that night feeling like conservatives. What changed?

By Konstantin Kisin

October 22, 2023

When Hamas terrorists crossed over the border with Israel and murdered 1,400 innocent people, they destroyed families and entire communities. They also shattered long-held delusions in the West.

A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed?

The best way to answer that question is with the help of Thomas Sowell, one of the most brilliant public intellectuals alive today. In 1987, Sowell published A Conflict of Visions. In this now-classic, he offers a simple and powerful explanation of why people disagree about politics. We disagree about politics, Sowell argues, because we disagree about human nature. We see the world through one of two competing visions, each of which tells a radically different story about human nature.

Those with “unconstrained vision” think that humans are malleable and can be perfected. They believe that social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better. To subscribers of this view, poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable. Rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We need only to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money, and we will suffer these social ills no more. This worldview is the foundation of the progressive mindset.

By contrast, those who see the world through a “constrained vision” lens believe that human nature is a universal constant. No amount of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily scarce. People who see things this way believe that most political and social problems will never be “solved”; they can only be managed. This approach is the bedrock of the conservative worldview.

Hamas’s barbarism—and the explanations and celebrations throughout the West that followed their orgy of violence—have forced an overnight exodus from the “unconstrained” camp into the “constrained” one. 

The Reality of Woke Ideology

Many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists.

The reaction to the attacks—from outwardly pro-Hamas protests to the mealy-mouthed statements of college presidents, celebrities, and CEOs—has exploded the comforting stories many on the center-left have told themselves about progressive identity politics. For many years, they opted for the coping mechanism of pretending that the institutional capture of universities, corporations, and media organizations by the woke mind virus was no big deal. “Sure, students shutting down events they disagree with is annoying,” they would say, “but it’s just students doing what students do.”

October 8 was a wake-up call for those who didn’t appreciate that the ideology of the campus has spread to our cities, supercharged by social media.

We woke up on October 8 to the clamor of street protests in cities across the West condemning Israel even before any major Israeli response to the attacks. We watched celebratory crowds brandish swastikas and chant “gas the Jews” at events purporting to be about the loss of Palestinian lives. We saw Black Lives Matter chapters lionize terrorists. 

In London, where I live, we watched the mayor deliver glib assurances that “London’s diversity is our greatest strength” in the midst of a wave of antisemitic attacks, and as Jewish schools were forced to close because of safety concerns. 

Across the West, we noticed that our representatives refused to condemn Hamas’s kidnappings, and that the legacy media was all too eager to swallow and regurgitate Hamas propaganda.

Prior to the October 7 massacre, many students, alumni, and donors with the “unconstrained vision” trusted that the university—for all its many problems—remained the West’s best environment for civil discourse. 

But then they watched university presidents who were quick to issue statements condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the killing of George Floyd fall silent, or offer the most slippery, equivocal statements carefully crafted to avoid offending anti-Israel groups. They watched an Israeli at Columbia get beaten with a stick, and heard reports about the physical intimidation of students on campuses across the country. They read about dozens of student organizations at Harvard signing a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the massacre of Israelis. 

The events of the last two weeks have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power. And after the last two weeks, there can be no doubt about how these people will use any power they seize: they will seek to destroy, in any way they can, those who disagree.

This unpleasant conclusion is surprising only if you are still clinging to the unconstrained vision. But if there is any constant in human history, it is that revolutionaries always feel entitled to destroy those who stand in their way.

Just as hope about the possibility of peace with jihadists seems suicidally naive, reconciliation with citizens seized by the woke mindset seems a long way off.

Immigration

Nowhere is the shift from the unconstrained to constrained vision starkest than on immigration. 

For decades, both Europe and America basked in an “unconstrained vision” of immigration. In the U.S., the melting pot that could integrate the nineteenth-century Germans, Irish Catholics, or Japanese could surely absorb those crossing the southern border. And many of these new arrivals would do jobs Americans didn’t want to do. Europe needed immigration to deal with an aging population, with many European countries inviting people from their former colonies to fill labor shortages and skills gaps.

But over time, especially from the late 1990s onward, the unconstrained vision ran rampant through media and political elites, and immigration went from being a solution to specific problems to a moral good in its own right. (I am myself an immigrant. When I moved to Britain from Russia in 1996, net immigration into Britain ran at 55,000 people a year. Last year, net immigration stood at over 600,000 people.)

Over the past decade, more and more people in America and Europe have quietly shifted toward the “constrained” view of immigration. The Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump were early warning signs of this ongoing transformation. Today, we see New York, where nearly 60,000 newly arrived migrants are putting tremendous strain on shelters and city services like healthcare, education, and public transport. The city has already spent over $1 billion to address this crisis, and projections indicate that housing costs alone could exceed $4.3 billion by next summer. Lifelong Democrats in Manhattan tell The New York Times that “we have too many people coming in,” and that “Biden could do something more about putting our borders up a little stronger. I mean, we’re not here to take in the whole world. We can only do so much.”

Europeans have learned similar lessons from their own migrant crisis. In Britain, we spend approximately $10 million a day on hotels for people who have come here illegally. We refuse to deport foreign criminals over “human rights” concerns. Readers may recall seeing recent media reports about the small Italian island of Lampedusa, whose population quadrupled in a day as large numbers of illegal immigrants arrived. We have now learned that a man who shot two Swedish soccer fans dead in a terror attack in Brussels last week arrived there illegally via the island in 2011. The man was known to the authorities as a security risk due to his jihadi links, but when his asylum application was rejected in 2020, he was not deported. How many such people are allowed to come and stay in Europe is impossible to say, as hundreds of thousands of people make illegal crossings into Europe every year. 

But despite these shocking statistics, the issue of illegal immigration has been impossible to discuss in polite company for decades. No matter how bad the problem became, to raise concerns about it would almost always lead to accusations of bigotry and xenophobia.

What we have witnessed over the last two weeks—with enormous pro-Hamas rallies in cities like London, Paris, and Washington, D.C.—has the potential to change the immigration debate in a decisive way. It is much harder to pretend that allowing people to enter our country illegally is a moral good when you watch some of them celebrate mass murder in the streets of your capital cities.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has recently announced the intention to deport illegal immigrants “on a large scale” as his coalition hemorrhages votes to anti-immigration parties. France has banned pro-Palestine protests and warned that foreign nationals who take part will be removed from the country. Britain has also threatened to revoke the visas of foreigners who praise Hamas. Whether this represents a permanent realignment toward a more constrained view of immigration or merely a temporary blip on the path to progressive dystopia remains to be seen. 

Border Security

To express concern about border security has for many years been coded as “right-wing.” But how many people, after the horrors of October 7, believe that a secure border is anything other than the most basic test of national security?

I have just returned from a week in Los Angeles where, on recognizing my name, every single Armenian Lyft driver struck up a conversation in Russian. Once the inevitable complaints about the rising cost of living were out of the way, several shared with me their own journeys into the U.S. and those of their families. I was struck by the fact that those who came in the 1990s and 2000s had usually come legally, but more recent arrivals had made their way through Mexico. One man told me about smuggling his two brothers and 80-year-old father through the southern border: “It’s easy,” he told me.

I have no doubt he is correct: 2023 saw the highest number of illegal crossings since records began. And polling shows that the American people, who are otherwise uniquely welcoming of new arrivals, aren’t happy about it. The problem with illegal immigration isn’t just its scale; it’s that we have no idea whether the people coming are 80-year-old Armenian retirees or jihadi terrorists plotting another 9/11.

It is clearer now than ever before that borders aren’t about bigotry, they’re about security. In a sign of the times, Joe Biden is now continuing work on the border wall that Democrats spent years criticizing Donald Trump for erecting.

The West 

The reason the readjustment is necessary and, in my view, highly likely, is that proponents of the unconstrained vision have been allowed to ride roughshod over the concerns of ordinary citizens. They have used this window of opportunity to implement extraordinarily impractical and outright harmful ideas because they take the unbelievable levels of safety, plenty, and freedom we enjoy in the West for granted. The one form of privilege you will never hear them address is the first-world privilege that we all benefit from every day.

They have done this because the fundamental flaw in the unconstrained model of the world is a failure to understand Thomas Sowell’s greatest maxim: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. When you let your institutions be captured by an ideology of intolerance and illiberalism masquerading as progress, that has consequences. When you sow division at home and signal weakness abroad, that has consequences. When you debase the public’s faith in what they are told by the media and their government, that has consequences too. 

Western civilization has produced some of the most stunning scientific, technological, social, and cultural breakthroughs in human history. If you consider yourself “liberal” or even “progressive,” it must surely be clear by now that America and her allies are the only places in the world where your values are even considered values. If our civilization is allowed to collapse, it will not be replaced by a progressive utopia. It will be replaced by chaos and barbarism.

Will this waking-up moment persist? It depends, in large part, on our courage to look reality in the face. 

As Sowell explained, “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”

And the truth is that we have indulged in magical thinking for too long, choosing comforting myths over harsh realities. About terrorism. About immigration. And about a host of other issues. In our hunger for progress, we have forgotten that not all change is for the better. Now the world is paying the price for that self-indulgence. Let’s hope recent events are the wake-up call we so desperately need.

 

 

Konstantin Kisin is the co-host of the podcast Triggernometry. You can read all of Konstantin’s work on his Substack.