The weakness that Jan 6 showed is not that X number of people succeeded in breaking into the Capitol, its that Y number of legislators agreed with them and voted not to certify and that z% (of citizens not hugely less than 50%) agree with them.
Just as many people on the left think Trump stole the 2016 election. If you believe that the first Trump impeachment trial was largely a show trial intended to overturn the 2016 election, then 100% of democratic politicians voted to overturn it.
Hillary Clinton denied the legitimacy of Trumps election many times. Here is this from 2019.
“No, it doesn’t kill me because he knows he’s an illegitimate president,” she said. “I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that — there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”
---
In June, former president Jimmy Carter used similar language to diminish Trump’s presidency. Carter said that in his view Trump lost the 2016 election and was put in office by the Russians. Asked if he considered Trump to be illegitimate, Carter said, “Based on what I just said, which I can’t retract.”
---
Clinton compared her election loss to “applying for a job and getting 66 million letters of recommendation and losing to a corrupt human tornado. And so I know that he knows that this wasn’t on the level. I don’t know that we’ll ever know what happened.”
---
Clinton also predicted Trump would lose in 2020 because “there were many funny things that happened in my election that will not happen again.”
------------
Obviously, how elections get contested are going to differ. If you're the deep state, you don't need to storm the capital. But I see absolutely no difference as far as either side considering an election legitimate. If anything, I'd say it's worse on the left. Even in the realm of petty rioting and violence (what happened in the summer/fall of 2020 was a lot more widespread, violent, and destructive then one day at the capital).
I think it is quiet different to think that the quirky Electoral College made Trump and "illegitimate" president in 2016 and voting not to certify the results of 2020. And I do not believe that "just as many people believe Trump stole the election in 2016.
My recollection of the first impeachment was that it was about Trumps attempt to get the Ukraine government to interfere in the 2020 election. What a blessing that Zelensky stood up both to Trump and to Putin!
But even if that were true, it does not diminish the dangers I pointed out.
Because breaking in and being invited in is the difference between a crime and a visit. There is a big legal difference between someone breaking into your home and being invited inside, for example. You don't imprison people for going inside when actively invited for starters.
You know that, Thomas, come on. You can discuss things in good faith, I have seen you do it.
a) Not all the people who entered were "invited," but b) my point is not how the entered, but what they were trying to do. That is what is a danger to democracy is, that people wanted the election invalidated. That why I went on to say that the representatives that voted to do so and the citizens who wanted them to do so are also a danger. In the aggregate, the citizens are the greater danger even it the 6/1/21 insurrectionists were a greater danger on a per capita basis
Ok, so if you don't care about how they got in, why make a point about calling it "breaking in"? Presumably you don't care what they had for dinner either, yet that goes unmentioned :)
Also, note that there was a vote to validate the election. Those confirmation processes are part of rules. Generally an ignored one, true, but that doesn't mean they they are obligated to vote yes no matter what.
It is important in showing the passion with which they were intent in trying to overturn the election. Their degree of passion is an element in judging how dangerous they are. N people passionately wanting to overturn the election is worse than N people who are almost indifferent.
Yes, but plenty who were invited in (an open door to a public place is legally an invitation FFS) are being treated as insurrectionists (despite their being no evidence whatsoever that anyone had any intent to overturn the election).
Then they immediately erected a fence around the capitol building in textbook banana republic fashion., thus confirming that even THEY know they're illegitimate.
I'm trying to direct attention away from the strength of the legal case against any particular person (yes, Ms. X wandered in an open door out of curiosity abut the funny guy with the horns). The danger to democracy is that so many people went to the capitol to try to get Congress not to certify the election, that so many legislators went along with the idea, and many citizens approved of both. This has little to do with who should go to jail.
As is well understood, I think, degree requirements are what has replaced rigorous interview systems for job filling and promoting. You have to have something that correlates with mental and emotional competency, and we have chosen the Rube Goldberg process that is most expensive because it places multiple layers of people between the applicant and the person telling them they aren't getting the job because they are too stupid and dangerous to have around in the work place. This worked for a number of decades, but then the quality of the degree programs has gotten so bad that having acquired one is no longer much of a signal beyond noise.
My real fear for the future is that the people who keep a modern infrastructure working are less and less a fraction of the actual population. "Idiocracy" wasn't parody- it was a prediction for what the world is going to look like in about 25 years at the rate we are going.
The diversity agenda has created an entire parasitic industry that must, by law, be funded. Who will fill diversity jobs are the graduates of college diversity programs. And, of course, taxpayers will pay for students to study diversity at college.
The consequences of diversity parasites is they add no value to the production chain, but they impose considerable costs on the economy and promote significant malinvestment.
I also see the world, and the USA, getting increasingly stupid and self destructive.
Really the only answer is to get government out of funding academia in any case, but alas I doubt there is much political will for that. Maybe in a few generations there will be a majority of some political party elected that doesn't reflect on their schools with a warm glow and decide to jettison the whole project, but for now most older people I know still think colleges are rigorous and actually educate people well. I mean, if you graduated before what, 1990, that's probably true? Truth adjacent perhaps. I don't think the current gerontocracy is ready to say "academia produces nearly nothing of value, and certainly has such a poor cost benefit ratio that we shouldn't subsidize or fund it anymore."
After all, the Republican party can't bring themselves to go after teachers' unions in most states. You'd think it would be an easy decision to break up that sort of thing considering the resources those unions pour to the Democrats, but no, not yet.
I have a feeling larger forces, namely the USD empire collapse, and also the massive amount of fraud in academia that's going to be exposed over the next few years.
Why would you go deep into debt when the piece of paper you get is known to be handed to you by frauds who bribed people to publish their papers (and thus devalued in the eyes of employers)? You won't.
Internships out of high school and certifications will prove better metrics for employers (tech is already well into shifting to this).
I agree that the corruption and fraud in academia is going to be a contributor, I just don't know how much and how fast. Undergraduates tend not to know or care much about the research side of things, nor do companies much it seems. The signaling filter (such as it is) seems to be the only real driver of the credentialing machine.
That said, you are quite correct that the signaling filter is breaking down as graduates are increasingly being let through with no skills or even desirable traits other than ideological ones, and businesses are starting to notice. Unfortunately many of those businesses are also filled with useless graduates so it is hard to tell what will give first: the demand for poor signals or the economic productivity in general.
Empires collapse both outside in and inside out. A recent example of the latter is Russian Empire in 1917. And I don't mean just the European economies which belong to US empire, i.e. principally Germany, which, despite repeated warnings from Trump among other people, have allowed themselves to become overly dependent on cheap Russian hydrocarbons supplies as well as irrationally averse to nuclear energy. I also mean China.
I have translated two short posts made this week by a prominent Russian ultra-nationalist intellectual, which are a sort of mirror image of this post: https://candide3.substack.com/p/the-year-of-fukuyama-as-seen-through One is a grudging encomium to the hated Anglo-Saxons, the other is an assessment of Russian purported traditionalism in which certain right-wing thinkers like and want to believe. I have also reposted a couple of my 2014 posts about Russia which, if I may say so, have held up pretty well.
If Jan 6 was on the other foot, with Democratic supporters protesting a Trump election that involved unsecured ballot boxes and strange, after midnight, vote counts, we would have very different reporting. In particular, we would know all about FBI and DHS personnel at the rally and we would know what commands were given by whom to open doors.
And we would never have a Jan 6 political committee completely biased to deny presentation of alternative evidence.
Loosely related to Matt Goodwin's comments about Zoomers, Rob Henderson writes that Boomers let the Zoomers get away with everything because they don't want to be seen as old:
I find Shamplings argument that degree requirements be set at a legislative level a bad idea. Businesses fully can and do determine what credentials and requirements are appropriate for a job. I agree strongly with Caplans argument that higher ed is nearly all just signaling, but businesses have every incentive to not demand higher degree requirements for jobs (they almost always correlate with an automatic expectation of higher salary). Why then do companies use credentials as a requirement? Are they lazy and the lost cost isn't worth it worth the time of filtering candidates? Are they unable to use Cowens talent interview method? It just seems like if it really is all signaling then businesses should from a cost efficiency perspective pretty quickly say nah, your masters or PhD in whatever isn't worth it we will go with this highschool grad who is just as capable but cheaper (that being said...getting a job in a tech field has been harder with a PhD than a masters so maybe there is some level of this effect going on in some fields).
Unless the "under-credentialled" people you hire are also pretty consistently minority candidates, this will come across as blatant discrimination that will get you sued.
"You passed up 10 women with Masters degrees to hire this guy with only a high school diploma? Why?"
As Yancey notes from his experience, companies are virtually forbidden from doing talent based selection if it results in 'disparate impact' in hiring. The cost to even the largest firms of certifying an employment-specific testing regime is non-discriminatory, and then defending the same from the inevitable lawsuits, is prohibitive to implementing such a regime. The net result is that businesses have offloaded the effort of proving a candidate has a reasonable level of intelligence and competence to post-secondary education via degree requirements.
"Are they unable to use Cowens talent interview method?"
In my company that I worked for from 1995 until 2009- no- they couldn't use it (and Cowen's method is fairly non-threatening and useless in my opinion). To do so would eventually get HR to visit your office with stern warnings about discriminating against minorities and women.
Yes, that seems to be the main problem: any company that has an HR department has its hiring policies set by HR, and HR is the first filter. HR takes its marching orders from the state, albeit indirectly through the rules and regulations and lawsuit liabilities that put a company at risk. HR can overshoot those requirements via ideological zeal, but they can't undershoot them because the lawsuits and other penalties will get them in trouble. That process selects for zeal.
COVID de-legitimized all East Asians. It's worse in China, but it's not like Japan, Korea, or Taiwan are handling it well as societies. Combined with rock bottom birth rates, and I think its fair to just declare East Asians as being unfit for modernity regardless of political system.
Hanania has an an excellent podcast on the Ukraine war out as well. The jist is that western economic and military support is what is winning the war in Ukraine, not gay Ukrainian conscripts. When Russia had an artillery advantage, it was winning. When the US gave Ukraine artillery that outranged Russian artillery, it started winning. US satellite intelligence also allows for recent Ukrainian breakthroughs.
It's a lot like lend/lease and strategic bombing in WWII. Without it, Russia doesn't defeat Germany (I leave it to the reader that maybe both lose). Russia winning WWII didn't prove the superiority of the Communist model. Any more than Ukraine winning a proxy war would validate whatever Ukraine is supposed to represent in that narrative.
Cowen's performance during the COVID/Woke freakout was de-legitimizing as well.
No, there are only enough of them for media on both sides to make much of - offhand I'd say double digits in a crowd of hundreds of thousands. The rest are cursing Russians for "fucking f@ggots" - watch enough combat videos and you'll see for yourself - but you won't hear much about it from media on either side, because it doesn't look good for either side. The only well-known person I know who talks about it is Steve Sailer. And while Western support is indeed crucial, it is, first, not even remotely comparable to WWII Lend-Lease in volume. We're talking under two hundred 155mm guns and a dozen HIMARS with ammo, not a quarter million trucks and thousands of locomotives and planes and tanks and millions of tons of food and explosives and other commodities that USSR got. Ukrainians buy their own trucks for front-line supply used from Europe. Second, the Afghan experience shows that all this support wouldn't do a whit of good if there weren't a million men willing and able to literally put their lives on the line and use it. That's part of whatever Ukraine is supposed to represent in that narrative, I guess.
Respectfully, Hanania is given to just as much hyperbole as the people he's criticizing. What does America's stability at the start of the industrial revolution have to do with today? Nothing, that's what.
My observation is that If you go to Russia or China (obviously 'unfree' countries) daily life doesn't look too much different. People still go about their business and live their lives. What keeps a regime stable is maintaining a functioning economy and not starting wars (which are explicitly attempts at regime change in the grand scheme of things).
Russia started a major war. China flirts with it and has imposed so much COVID insanity that it's economy is in peril. The US... well, we flirt. with this kind of stuff, but I don't know that I think the big talkers on the left would like it very much or for very long if they actually pull the trigger.
The weakness that Jan 6 showed is not that X number of people succeeded in breaking into the Capitol, its that Y number of legislators agreed with them and voted not to certify and that z% (of citizens not hugely less than 50%) agree with them.
Just as many people on the left think Trump stole the 2016 election. If you believe that the first Trump impeachment trial was largely a show trial intended to overturn the 2016 election, then 100% of democratic politicians voted to overturn it.
Hillary Clinton denied the legitimacy of Trumps election many times. Here is this from 2019.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html
“No, it doesn’t kill me because he knows he’s an illegitimate president,” she said. “I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that — there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”
---
In June, former president Jimmy Carter used similar language to diminish Trump’s presidency. Carter said that in his view Trump lost the 2016 election and was put in office by the Russians. Asked if he considered Trump to be illegitimate, Carter said, “Based on what I just said, which I can’t retract.”
---
Clinton compared her election loss to “applying for a job and getting 66 million letters of recommendation and losing to a corrupt human tornado. And so I know that he knows that this wasn’t on the level. I don’t know that we’ll ever know what happened.”
---
Clinton also predicted Trump would lose in 2020 because “there were many funny things that happened in my election that will not happen again.”
------------
Obviously, how elections get contested are going to differ. If you're the deep state, you don't need to storm the capital. But I see absolutely no difference as far as either side considering an election legitimate. If anything, I'd say it's worse on the left. Even in the realm of petty rioting and violence (what happened in the summer/fall of 2020 was a lot more widespread, violent, and destructive then one day at the capital).
I think it is quiet different to think that the quirky Electoral College made Trump and "illegitimate" president in 2016 and voting not to certify the results of 2020. And I do not believe that "just as many people believe Trump stole the election in 2016.
My recollection of the first impeachment was that it was about Trumps attempt to get the Ukraine government to interfere in the 2020 election. What a blessing that Zelensky stood up both to Trump and to Putin!
But even if that were true, it does not diminish the dangers I pointed out.
Hillary Clinton didn't just say that the electoral college has a GOP bias. She said that:
1) He surpassed votes
2) He "purged" votes
3) He (via the Russians) "hacked" votes
...amongst other charges.
These are serious charges BTW, they would constitute felonies.
Good whatbout points
They didn't break in.
There's footage of police opening doors and waving them in.
Some did, but so what if some did not? The danger was the attempt to prevent the certification, not how they entered
Because breaking in and being invited in is the difference between a crime and a visit. There is a big legal difference between someone breaking into your home and being invited inside, for example. You don't imprison people for going inside when actively invited for starters.
You know that, Thomas, come on. You can discuss things in good faith, I have seen you do it.
a) Not all the people who entered were "invited," but b) my point is not how the entered, but what they were trying to do. That is what is a danger to democracy is, that people wanted the election invalidated. That why I went on to say that the representatives that voted to do so and the citizens who wanted them to do so are also a danger. In the aggregate, the citizens are the greater danger even it the 6/1/21 insurrectionists were a greater danger on a per capita basis
Ok, so if you don't care about how they got in, why make a point about calling it "breaking in"? Presumably you don't care what they had for dinner either, yet that goes unmentioned :)
Also, note that there was a vote to validate the election. Those confirmation processes are part of rules. Generally an ignored one, true, but that doesn't mean they they are obligated to vote yes no matter what.
It is important in showing the passion with which they were intent in trying to overturn the election. Their degree of passion is an element in judging how dangerous they are. N people passionately wanting to overturn the election is worse than N people who are almost indifferent.
Yes, but plenty who were invited in (an open door to a public place is legally an invitation FFS) are being treated as insurrectionists (despite their being no evidence whatsoever that anyone had any intent to overturn the election).
Then they immediately erected a fence around the capitol building in textbook banana republic fashion., thus confirming that even THEY know they're illegitimate.
I'm trying to direct attention away from the strength of the legal case against any particular person (yes, Ms. X wandered in an open door out of curiosity abut the funny guy with the horns). The danger to democracy is that so many people went to the capitol to try to get Congress not to certify the election, that so many legislators went along with the idea, and many citizens approved of both. This has little to do with who should go to jail.
As is well understood, I think, degree requirements are what has replaced rigorous interview systems for job filling and promoting. You have to have something that correlates with mental and emotional competency, and we have chosen the Rube Goldberg process that is most expensive because it places multiple layers of people between the applicant and the person telling them they aren't getting the job because they are too stupid and dangerous to have around in the work place. This worked for a number of decades, but then the quality of the degree programs has gotten so bad that having acquired one is no longer much of a signal beyond noise.
My real fear for the future is that the people who keep a modern infrastructure working are less and less a fraction of the actual population. "Idiocracy" wasn't parody- it was a prediction for what the world is going to look like in about 25 years at the rate we are going.
The diversity agenda has created an entire parasitic industry that must, by law, be funded. Who will fill diversity jobs are the graduates of college diversity programs. And, of course, taxpayers will pay for students to study diversity at college.
The consequences of diversity parasites is they add no value to the production chain, but they impose considerable costs on the economy and promote significant malinvestment.
I also see the world, and the USA, getting increasingly stupid and self destructive.
Thanks for linking to my column!
"It is a bracing essay, but I agree with a commenter who is skeptical about whether legislators are the ones to fix academia."
Ah, but they are.
They can reverse the Clinton policy of making student loan debt undischargeable in bankruptcy.
Woke BS only exists b/c there's too much money available for people who shouldn't be in higher education, both students and educators.
Really the only answer is to get government out of funding academia in any case, but alas I doubt there is much political will for that. Maybe in a few generations there will be a majority of some political party elected that doesn't reflect on their schools with a warm glow and decide to jettison the whole project, but for now most older people I know still think colleges are rigorous and actually educate people well. I mean, if you graduated before what, 1990, that's probably true? Truth adjacent perhaps. I don't think the current gerontocracy is ready to say "academia produces nearly nothing of value, and certainly has such a poor cost benefit ratio that we shouldn't subsidize or fund it anymore."
After all, the Republican party can't bring themselves to go after teachers' unions in most states. You'd think it would be an easy decision to break up that sort of thing considering the resources those unions pour to the Democrats, but no, not yet.
I have a feeling larger forces, namely the USD empire collapse, and also the massive amount of fraud in academia that's going to be exposed over the next few years.
Why would you go deep into debt when the piece of paper you get is known to be handed to you by frauds who bribed people to publish their papers (and thus devalued in the eyes of employers)? You won't.
Internships out of high school and certifications will prove better metrics for employers (tech is already well into shifting to this).
I agree that the corruption and fraud in academia is going to be a contributor, I just don't know how much and how fast. Undergraduates tend not to know or care much about the research side of things, nor do companies much it seems. The signaling filter (such as it is) seems to be the only real driver of the credentialing machine.
That said, you are quite correct that the signaling filter is breaking down as graduates are increasingly being let through with no skills or even desirable traits other than ideological ones, and businesses are starting to notice. Unfortunately many of those businesses are also filled with useless graduates so it is hard to tell what will give first: the demand for poor signals or the economic productivity in general.
It will probably take "too damn long". The overwhelming majority of people aren't proactive, they only change when they've felt enough pain.
> USD empire collapse
Lmao man have you looked at the other major economies and foreign exchange rates lately? USD empire is stronger than ever.
lmao indeed you stupid twat empires collapse from the OUTSIDE IN. Just because it's not here here doesn't mean it isn't happening.
Empires collapse both outside in and inside out. A recent example of the latter is Russian Empire in 1917. And I don't mean just the European economies which belong to US empire, i.e. principally Germany, which, despite repeated warnings from Trump among other people, have allowed themselves to become overly dependent on cheap Russian hydrocarbons supplies as well as irrationally averse to nuclear energy. I also mean China.
I have translated two short posts made this week by a prominent Russian ultra-nationalist intellectual, which are a sort of mirror image of this post: https://candide3.substack.com/p/the-year-of-fukuyama-as-seen-through One is a grudging encomium to the hated Anglo-Saxons, the other is an assessment of Russian purported traditionalism in which certain right-wing thinkers like and want to believe. I have also reposted a couple of my 2014 posts about Russia which, if I may say so, have held up pretty well.
If Jan 6 was on the other foot, with Democratic supporters protesting a Trump election that involved unsecured ballot boxes and strange, after midnight, vote counts, we would have very different reporting. In particular, we would know all about FBI and DHS personnel at the rally and we would know what commands were given by whom to open doors.
And we would never have a Jan 6 political committee completely biased to deny presentation of alternative evidence.
Hanania is wrong about the woke. He himself explains why:
> it [wokism] i a tax that we can afford to pay as long as we still have a stable government and a functioning market economy.
But wokism is a movement that attacks both capitalism constitutional government (and America ain't going to invent a stable alternative in a hurry).
It becomes an mere "tax" only if contained. That battle is underway and far from won.
Loosely related to Matt Goodwin's comments about Zoomers, Rob Henderson writes that Boomers let the Zoomers get away with everything because they don't want to be seen as old:
https://www.persuasion.community/p/adults-today-care-too-much-what-young
I find Shamplings argument that degree requirements be set at a legislative level a bad idea. Businesses fully can and do determine what credentials and requirements are appropriate for a job. I agree strongly with Caplans argument that higher ed is nearly all just signaling, but businesses have every incentive to not demand higher degree requirements for jobs (they almost always correlate with an automatic expectation of higher salary). Why then do companies use credentials as a requirement? Are they lazy and the lost cost isn't worth it worth the time of filtering candidates? Are they unable to use Cowens talent interview method? It just seems like if it really is all signaling then businesses should from a cost efficiency perspective pretty quickly say nah, your masters or PhD in whatever isn't worth it we will go with this highschool grad who is just as capable but cheaper (that being said...getting a job in a tech field has been harder with a PhD than a masters so maybe there is some level of this effect going on in some fields).
Unless the "under-credentialled" people you hire are also pretty consistently minority candidates, this will come across as blatant discrimination that will get you sued.
"You passed up 10 women with Masters degrees to hire this guy with only a high school diploma? Why?"
Look up Griggs v. Duke Power.
As Yancey notes from his experience, companies are virtually forbidden from doing talent based selection if it results in 'disparate impact' in hiring. The cost to even the largest firms of certifying an employment-specific testing regime is non-discriminatory, and then defending the same from the inevitable lawsuits, is prohibitive to implementing such a regime. The net result is that businesses have offloaded the effort of proving a candidate has a reasonable level of intelligence and competence to post-secondary education via degree requirements.
"Are they unable to use Cowens talent interview method?"
In my company that I worked for from 1995 until 2009- no- they couldn't use it (and Cowen's method is fairly non-threatening and useless in my opinion). To do so would eventually get HR to visit your office with stern warnings about discriminating against minorities and women.
Yes, that seems to be the main problem: any company that has an HR department has its hiring policies set by HR, and HR is the first filter. HR takes its marching orders from the state, albeit indirectly through the rules and regulations and lawsuit liabilities that put a company at risk. HR can overshoot those requirements via ideological zeal, but they can't undershoot them because the lawsuits and other penalties will get them in trouble. That process selects for zeal.
COVID de-legitimized all East Asians. It's worse in China, but it's not like Japan, Korea, or Taiwan are handling it well as societies. Combined with rock bottom birth rates, and I think its fair to just declare East Asians as being unfit for modernity regardless of political system.
Hanania has an an excellent podcast on the Ukraine war out as well. The jist is that western economic and military support is what is winning the war in Ukraine, not gay Ukrainian conscripts. When Russia had an artillery advantage, it was winning. When the US gave Ukraine artillery that outranged Russian artillery, it started winning. US satellite intelligence also allows for recent Ukrainian breakthroughs.
It's a lot like lend/lease and strategic bombing in WWII. Without it, Russia doesn't defeat Germany (I leave it to the reader that maybe both lose). Russia winning WWII didn't prove the superiority of the Communist model. Any more than Ukraine winning a proxy war would validate whatever Ukraine is supposed to represent in that narrative.
Cowen's performance during the COVID/Woke freakout was de-legitimizing as well.
> not gay Ukrainian conscripts
No, there are only enough of them for media on both sides to make much of - offhand I'd say double digits in a crowd of hundreds of thousands. The rest are cursing Russians for "fucking f@ggots" - watch enough combat videos and you'll see for yourself - but you won't hear much about it from media on either side, because it doesn't look good for either side. The only well-known person I know who talks about it is Steve Sailer. And while Western support is indeed crucial, it is, first, not even remotely comparable to WWII Lend-Lease in volume. We're talking under two hundred 155mm guns and a dozen HIMARS with ammo, not a quarter million trucks and thousands of locomotives and planes and tanks and millions of tons of food and explosives and other commodities that USSR got. Ukrainians buy their own trucks for front-line supply used from Europe. Second, the Afghan experience shows that all this support wouldn't do a whit of good if there weren't a million men willing and able to literally put their lives on the line and use it. That's part of whatever Ukraine is supposed to represent in that narrative, I guess.
Respectfully, Hanania is given to just as much hyperbole as the people he's criticizing. What does America's stability at the start of the industrial revolution have to do with today? Nothing, that's what.
My observation is that If you go to Russia or China (obviously 'unfree' countries) daily life doesn't look too much different. People still go about their business and live their lives. What keeps a regime stable is maintaining a functioning economy and not starting wars (which are explicitly attempts at regime change in the grand scheme of things).
Russia started a major war. China flirts with it and has imposed so much COVID insanity that it's economy is in peril. The US... well, we flirt. with this kind of stuff, but I don't know that I think the big talkers on the left would like it very much or for very long if they actually pull the trigger.