Letter to Google's Director of Litigation Concerning Removal of Material from This Blog

PO Box 130

West Shokan, NY 12494

July 21, 2020

Catherine Lacavera, Director

IP and Litigation

Google LLC
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Sent via Certified Mail

Dear Ms. Lacavera:

I have been using Google’s Blogger for more than ten years. On July 20, the posts  I wrote from January 31 to July 20 were removed from the blog. I would like an explanation as to whether Google removed the material; if so, why Google removed the material; and of Google’s position on its right to remove the material. 

On July 20, I posted the name and address of a New York Times editor whom Tucker Carlson had named as having revealed or having been about to reveal Carlson’s name and address.  I would like to know whether Google views publication of this information as a violation of its terms of service, why, and whether you see a distinction between the Times’s revealing Carlson’s information and my revealing a Times editor’s information.  Also, I would appreciate your comment on the Times’s policy and why you think Google’s is better.

As well, I would appreciate confirmation that Google rather than an outside hacker removed the material from my blog, which is at http://mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com/ .

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

 

Letters to Lexus and Samsung in Support of Tucker Carlson

PO Box 130

West Shokan, NY 12494

August 15, 2019

Jeffrey Bracken, General Manager

Lexus USA

P.O. BOX 259001 - MAIL DROP E3-2D
PLANO, TX 75025-9001 USA

Dear Mr. Bracken:

I am a Lexus owner, and I am pleased with my ES-350, which I bought at Prestige Lexus in New Jersey in 2008 and financed through Toyota Credit. Since I now live in upstate New York, I was thinking about my next Lexus, so I was just planning a trip up to Albany to visit the Lexus dealer there. That is, until I learned that you might be supporting the Antifa boycott of Tucker Carlson.

Let me ask two questions:  (1) Do you believe that the Antifa totalitarians--who oppose  automobiles and anyway cannot afford one—are likely to be your customers, or (2) do you believe that people who support Tucker Carlson and will be deterred from buying  a  new Lexus because Lexus supports left-wing, Antifa bigots are your customers?  

I know, buying a new Lexus once every ten or eleven years isn’t that big a customer, but blame that on great Lexus quality.  At the same time, if you are supporting Antifa, my next car can easily be an Audi, Lincoln, or Acura.

Sincerely, 

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Email Sent to Samsung USA CEO  Young Hoon Eom:

Dear Mr. Young Hoon Eom:

I am a fan of Tucker Carlson, and I am a college professor in New York State.  Like Mr. Carlson, I was subjected to an Antifa attack and outing, which received media attention. I am also a Samsung customer, and I was thinking about purchasing a new Galaxy Note 10.  However, I have become increasingly concerned about the totalitarian direction taken in the US in universities, in the media, and in partisan politics.  I would hate to have your participation in the Antifa political action interfere with my relationship with your firm.,

A couple of things I learned when I was attacked, just as Tucker Carlson is being attacked, are as follows:

 (1) The protestors are a small, inconsequential portion of the population. In my case, about 2% of the college joined the protest.  As a percentage of the general population, they are much less than one tenth of one percent.

(2) The protestors are not customers.  Following the media attention I received, I was afraid that my reputation might have been damaged and that students might not register for courses. The opposite was the case. My classes have filled to maximum capacity, just as they did before. Moreover, I have received several offers from publishers, a foundation, and media outlets.

(3) My fears were empty.  I found that few people care about the American media, which has become part of the far-left fringe, and many people consider it heroic to stand up to  Antifa bigots. Hence, ignoring them might actually be a win for Samsung, and you might even advertise your support for American individualism and freedom.

I urge you to ignore the tiny numbers of loud-mouthed left-wing protestors, who are unlikely to be good customers simply because most of them do not have jobs.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

Letter to Rupert Murdoch Re Tucker Carlson

PO Box 130

West Shokan, NY 12494

March 15, 2019

Mr. Rupert Murdoch, Chairman

Fox News

1211 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10036

Dear Mr. Murdoch:

I support Tucker Carlson, and by copy of this letter I am urging President Trump to award Carlson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  However, I have a criticism of Fox News that is related to the recent adverse publicity.

Antifa is a new kind of terrorist organization that uses erosion of privacy arising from the communication power of the Internet to uncover supposedly embarrassing information about people with whom it disagrees.  Of course, socialism is the greatest evil of the past millennium, yet Antifa and the media are untroubled by its advocacy.  What is embarrassing in the opinion of America’s failing media ain’t necessarily so, and I can attest to that because I easily survived one of their dumbed-down assaults.

Antifa has cultivated links with the media; many in the media are sympathetic to Antifa’s far-left aims; members of Antifa work in the media.  Many in Antifa have criminal records or associate with people with criminal records.  In other words, much of the American media, including some of your employees, have been willing to work with left-wing extremists, some of whom have criminal records, in order to boost ratings or further aims that the journalists share with Antifa.

I urge your organization to develop a data base, to work with the FBI, and to identify links among journalists, Antifa extremists, and criminals.  The same goes for professors with criminal affiliations and even convictions.  The relationships exist, and Fox has dropped the ball. Most of the media capable of investing time into investigating these claims are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

As far as Carlson, give him a raise and a promotion. I’ve read his book, and although I disagree with much of it, if you ask me whether I’d prefer a country dominated by a Tucker Carlson or an Arthur Sulzberger, I have little trouble answering.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

mlangbert@hvc.rr.com

Cc:
Tucker Carlson

The President

Decline in Media, American Culture

The New York Post   reported last week that employment in the media declined by 15,000 in 2018.  Much of the reason, according to the Post, is substitution of social networking advertising for traditional media advertising.  Technology available through Facebook and Instagram enables advertisers to directly go to consumers rather than rely on media to serve as intermediaries.  The decline in the economic stability of the media comes at a time when its credibility is questioned by conservatives and even by the president. Yet, news organizations hope to convince consumers that they offer unbiased news so that consumers will subscribe.

Perhaps there are opportunities for new forms of news.  I subscribe to two online newspapers, but I read them infequently.  I more often rely on subscription newsletters like Jim Rickards's Strategic Intelligence   and David Stockman's Deep State Unclassified  as well as specialized investment sites like Morningstar  and Kitco.

A Lockean or conservative alternative to the leading newswire services might energize individual conservatives to start their own newsletters and blogs.  The advantage the socialist-and-pro-Fed press has is its funding base, which enables it to obtain breaking news. A news service that is made available at low cost to conservatives might help break the left's monopoly on news and information.



I have been listening to the audio version of Tucker Carlson's Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. As I've previously reported, the book is well written.  I disagree with Carlson's take on economics, but his account of American culture upset me. Carlson seems to be making a case for New Deal-Roosevelt "liberalism" (I prefer the term "social democracy") to become the new conservatism, which is a mistake.  Many of today's core problems, such as income inequality, are the direct result of Progressivism and of New Deal centralization and subsidization of special interests. Also, immigration restrictions, which are central to Carlson's narrative, are not the solution, although I increasingly see immigration as a cultural threat, albeit one that could be eliminated by an education system that, unlike the current one, emphasizes a shared American culture.  

At the same time, Carlson eloquently tears apart militarists Max Boot and Bill Crystal, and his caricature of Chelsea Clinton, dumbed-down child of white privilege,  is hilarious.   His depiction of American elite ideology as a version of left-wing extremism mixed with militarism and some liberalism (as in immigration) suggests a convergence of Democratic and Republican elite ideology, and the elite's selfish indifference to the harm its money printing and confused economic policies have caused is why Trump won.  Unfortunately, while I like Trump, while I admire his courage in the face of media attacks, while I admire his contempt for both the media and policy elites, his emphasis on protectionism and immigration restrictions won’t change much, and protectionism will make things worse if not corrected down the road. 

Carlson's book scores many points when it comes to American culture, which is in disarray.  Unwed mothers have become a critical voting block, and the policies that they advocate will be corrosive to economic growth and progress.   On a social and cultural level,  I'm now convinced that immigration poses a serious threat to American culture and American freedom. The attacks on boys and men, the intolerance of feminist extremists, the absurd environmentalist religion—none of this is news, but put it all together, and it seems that the country is in serious moral trouble.

At the same time, Carlson's premise is ultimately elitist.  He concludes that elites need to do a better job of caring for the average American. In a free country without a Fed, big government, or the other Progressive paraphernalia of Progressivism and the New Deal, Americans would be able to care for themselves, as they did in the 19th century. 

America, Land of the Social Security Check, Home of the Welfare Dependent

I applied for Medicare on Friday.  I'm going to be 65 in roughly three months.  When I called the Social Security Agency (welcome to socialist America),  I had an hour-and-fifteen-minute wait before I could get through, and they told me that I had to apply online.  Mark Zuckerberg needs to know, and make no mistake, Facebook can know if it wants to.  The Social Security website froze me out because I had typed in the wrong password when I had checked it several months before, so I called the helpline, which involved an additional 50-minute wait.  The young government worker was helpful, and I eventually applied after a four-hour battle.

As I was waiting on voicemail, the SSA proudly announced that 50 million Americans are currently on Social Security.  The number of Americans on means-tested welfare is roughly the same, about 52 million.  If you add the number of government employees, about 22 million, that's 124 million.  In July 2017 there were 252 million Americans over age 18, the voting age.  That means that 124/252 = 49.2% of Americans are dependent on the state. If you add to that the people who work in zombie industries that would not exist without state support-- including Wall Street, the auto industry, and public partnership real estate--the percentage of voters who depend on government is well above 50%.

In other words, the productive sector in America is well below 50% of the economy.  So much for land of the free, home of the brave--or liberty and justice for all.  America is a socialist welfare state with a dependent population.

I recently finished Garrett C. Fagan's audio  Roman history series from the Great Courses, which was a wonderful experience. The Great Courses lectures are all wonderful, and Rome was one of my favorites, along with Vejas G. Liulevicius's World War I. Fagan teaches at Penn State and Liulevicius teaches at the University of Tennessee.  My next one will be William R. Cook's history of the Catholic Church.  

In between, though, I am listening to Tucker Carlson's audio book Ship of Fools. Carlson makes a number of excellent points, and I am finding the book to be educational. Also, his writing is sharp.  I'm only up to Chapter Three. (I listen to all this in my car, so it is slow going.)

Carlson blames much of the recent decline in the American economy on elite selfishness and immigration.   Some of  his arguments parallel Christopher Lasch's in his books The Revolt of the Elites and The Culture of Narcissism.  Like Lasch, Carlson notes that the segregation of elites in all-white, upper-income neighborhoods makes them insensitive to the effects of the policies they advocate.   

Carlson's pillorying of Democratic Party looters is awesome. His discussion of dumbed-down, overprivileged millennial Chelsea Clinton is hilarious, and his discussion of  Mark Zuckerberg and the ugly effects of Facebook are eye opening.  He accurately depicts the Southern Poverty Law Center as a one-time opponent of racism that has become a fraudulent partisan advocate for Democratic Party elitists.  

As well, Carlson accurately depicts the current economy as one of decline for the average American and one of subsidization and privilege for financial, political, and technology elites.  However, a point of disagreement is that Carlson places the blame on immigration. 

Real wages have stagnated for the past 50 years, since the early 1970s, when immigrants were less than five percent of the population. Immigration is not the reason for stagnant real wages. It is at most a contributory factor, but in the absence of regulation and subsidization, immigration flows would adjust to the market- clearing level.  Native Americans ought to enjoy an economic advantage over immigrants, who do not know the language and culture. Increasing the minimum wage is likely harming immigrants, whose labor is less valuable than native speakers.  I'm not convinced that immigration is the real problem, and Carlson does not offer much fact for his claim.  The real hourly wage began to stagnate in the 1970s, right after the abolition of the gold standard and less than 10 years after the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid. By 1980 immigrants were still only six percent of the population, but real wages hadn't grown in seven or eight years. 

At the same time, it may be time to put a moratorium on immigration because of the anger it has caused. I have heretofore been in favor of open immigration, but about ten years ago I remember thinking that perhaps a moratorium on immigration might be helpful to American workers, who have suffered grievously at the hands of the Fed, the Democratic Party, and big government.  In general, a free economy based on limited government will result in optimal economic outcomes, including rising real wages, modest income inequality, and a stock market, with six percent returns.  In the 19th century most of the returns from the stock market were in the form of dividends.   

Besides immigration, my chief point of disagreement with Carlson is that he seems to believe that old-fashioned state activist liberalism--New Deal liberalism,--ought to be the new conservatism.  The old-fashioned state activist liberalism of the 1930-1970s may still capture President Trump's supporters' imaginations, but it will not restore the economy; it will not restore real wage growth; it will not return the country to the rapid economic growth of the laissez faire, Progressive, and New Deal eras (which ended in the 1960s).  

It is true that much of America's elite--the Clintons, Buffetts, Goldman Sachses, Zuckerbergs, Soroses--are a cancer on the average wage. It is also true that New Deal policies led directly to their ascendancy, and the group that was in power before them was already taking the country down a primrose path. Replacing today's rapacious, politically correct, finance-and-technology elites with the military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower and C Wright Mills warned and included George HW Bush's dad, Prescott Bush,  will not change the underlying problem, which is the result of monetary and regulatory systems controlled by a centralized, special-interest dominated state. The federal government has squashed real wages and allocated credit to crappy technology like Facebook,  crooked Wall Streeters like George Soros, and crooked hacks like the Clintons and Bushes.

Franklin Roosevelt, copying the innovations of Gustav von Schmoller and Bismarck in Germany, implemented a system that has similarities to what brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus imagined for Republican Rome in the early phases of the Roman Revolution, which led to its becoming a dictatorship, then an empire, and ultimately a monarchy:  Their plan was to give the plebeians cheap grain. (Later in the empire Emperor Septimius Severus made grain free.)    The dislocations of World War I and Progressive eras paralleled the processes in the Roman Revolution, which lasted about 150 years.  Although the Progressive era was short, its system may last for as long as the early empire and the Pax Romana, which lasted 150-200 years.  It may be that in 2,000 years historians will view our era as an extension of the Progressive and World War I eras. This is already occurring as historians are beginning to view the two world wars as one war.   

It is sad to see an America with the beautiful ideals of Locke and Jefferson turned into a bread-and-circus, totalitarian state dominated by the nincompoops of today's state, technology, and finance elites and their dumbed-down propagandist-journalists.  Carlson's hilarious depiction of psychopath Max Boot is on the money.

Even if  President Trump follows the proscriptions of Carlson and slows the looting by state, technology, and Wall Street elites, there is little hope for improvement because Americans have been satisfied with a $16,000 Social Security benefit, a welfare check, and Medicare. The dynamics of public choice and special interest behavior guarantee that a large, centralized government will benefit the most corrupt and opportunistic, and  Carlson's debate with the Democrats ignores the underlying dynamic.