Queens VIllage Republican Club Invites Me to Participate in Higher Ed Panel

The Queens Village Republican Club, the country's oldest Republican club, has asked me to participate in a panel on higher education at their monthly meeting on January 2. As well, I wrote an op-ed for their newsletter, The Queens Village Eagle.   They have about 200 dues-paying members.  The meeting will be at the Holliswood Jewish Center, 86-25 Francis Lewis Boulevard, Holliswood, NY 11427.

Win-Win Gains from a Libertarian Party Cross-Nomination of President Trump

 Dear Mr. President:

Have you thought of negotiating a cross-nomination deal with the Libertarian National Committee?

I am a lifelong supporter of Libertarian Party candidates.  I have since concluded that you can do more to further the cause of freedom than the LP can, so I will support and have been supporting you and the NRCC over the past couple of years.  Why not negotiate the LP's cross nomination of you in 2020?

The following chart shows that the LP won 2.2% to 4.15% in the six battleground states, more than enough to put you well over the top.

Battleground States/ LP Percentage

Florida                    /          2.20%
Wisconsin               /          3.60%
Pennsylvania         /         2.40%
Michigan               /          3.60%
New Hampshire    /         4.15%
Nevada                 /             3.30%

Although I have not been active in the LP since 1983, I can imagine at least two bargaining chips that can result in mutual gains for both parties: first, an agreement to abolish a set of government agencies and programs that you don't mind abolishing (they want to abolish everything) and, second, an offer of placing Libertarians in powerful agency posts in which they can gut government programs.  In exchange, they would throw you the percentages that secure a win.

For example, if you offer to abolish the Department of Education and a list of fluff that Rand Paul or Citizens Against Government Waste provides in exchange for LP support and/or offer them a dozen positions in areas like the NLRB, and EPA, they may be willing to make a deal. You would likely have an additional benefit by having people in positions of power who are hostile to the deep state and have little to lose in attacking it.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Students Thank Me for Exceptional Teaching

The college has a formal evaluation system, and there are teacher-rating systems available online.  Often, however, I receive thank-yous from students who have benefited from my courses.  I received one last fall from a student who had taken my class six years earlier, and several years ago I received one from someone who had taken a my course at NYU thirteen years earlier.  Some of the letters I've received in the past year follow:

Dear Professor,

Thank you so much for your time to correct my essay, I have learned from your comments and the class.
--Student LZ

Dear Professor Langbert,

I would like to express my gratitude for being one of your students. Thank you for allowing me to learn from my mistakes.
--Student BA

Dear Professor Langbert:

That was fast, amazing class, I learnt A lot

Dear Professor Langbert:

Thanks for your very informative lessons, you know so much amazing, enjoyed your class very much. 

Have a great winter break.

P.S. I showed my husband a nice video of one of your presentations, he enjoyed your opinions, proud you can stand up strong about your opinions, even if others disagree. You are so calm cool & collected & brilliant.

--Student RH

Dear Professor Langbert: 

Also, thank you for such an amazing semester. My major is Business Admin: Leadership and Human Resource Management with a minor in Business Law. I think after this class, I may want to practice Employment Law. 

You class really made me realize this is the field I want to be in. Have a great holiday! Hopefully we cross paths again soon! 

--Student AB

Dear Professor Langbert:

Thank you for a great semester,
--BD

Good evening professor,

Thank you for being my professor and I really enjoyed the lessons that you taught this semester. The book for this extra credit was very helpful for me since i am a finance major, and the basis of this book practically touches upon everything i have learned in my other classes. Happy holidays and have a wonderful year.

--Student JP

Hi Professor Langbert,

Thank you very much! It was a pleasure learning from the best of the best!  Hope you have a wonderful and safe holidays
--Student AA

Dear Professor:

I wish I had paid sturdy attention in your class in 2012. I finally got finished reading Ragged Dick and realize how much I see myself in this character. An immensely inspiring underdog story!

On this Thanksgiving I want to say thank you for planting the seed for my development.

I don't if you remember me. I am a former student. You might recall I cried in your class in 2012. The truth is, I was going through a lot(Manic Depression and all the Jazz), and in retrospect- Your class was the single most important moment in all of my years at college. 

I remember like it was yesterday. You, critiquing all my work. The red ink all over papers. Talks of socialism, freedom, individualism, and self-esteem. During that time I didn't understand it all. I was young, and very naïve. I couldn't even read at a 12th grade level, but I tried my best. You gave me a C+ in that class, and in retrospect that was the most important grade I have ever had. 

The thing is, I have over the course of my years been torn between Capitalism vs Socialism, Individuality vs Collectivism, and having Freewill vs being guided through Determinism. I read, read, and read. I read many books, watched many lectures, and had many debates. It wasn't until I realize during all this debating that all this exploring I was doing and mass confusion was merely making me more aware. Yes, I said it. It was increasing my understanding of the world. Of the polarity which is associated with everything. 

I can't say I agree with you on everything. But I do want to formally thank you for "putting the battery in my back" as is often said.You are an amazing teacher, and at one point my arch enemy. I hated how you made me dislike Obamanomics, and found vested interest in Billionaire tycoons like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

Thanks for your inspiration!

Your former student,

--Student HF

Thank you for a great, informational semester Professor. Happy Holidays!  

--Student BC

Thanks for great course and happy holidays. 

--Student NS

Need for an Antitrust Action against Comcast, TimeWarner, and Disney

Dear Mr. President:

The deterioration of the American media and its open partisanship should be addressed through an antitrust action.  More than 75 percent of airwave and cable broadcasters are in practice affiliated with the Democratic Party.  This came about because in the 1930s the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration illegally required ideological litmus tests in its granting of airwave monopolies.  

When the country had something of a dominant, bipartisan consensus, perhaps from the candidacy of Wendell L. Wilke through the George W. Bush administration, partisan monopoly of the airwaves was unimportant, although conservatives have never been happy. When the cable monopolies were established by local governments in the 1970s and 1980s, the extension of the New Deal system seemed natural, although by then the media was increasingly at odds with moderate Republicans. Moreover, the major parties had not diverged ideologically to the degree that they have since Goldwater and McGovern--and to a greater degree since Obama. Conservatives have lived with an unresponsive, monopolistic media for the past ninety years.

The recent handling of the impeachment hoax and the legacy media’s deceitful coverage of your presidency has intensified the issue.  At present, the Democratic media monopoly is becoming  an embarrassment, a system at odds with the preferences of the majority of Americans. Given that the media lacks professionalism and intersects with state influence—via the Democratic Party---the current system makes a mockery of Constitutional protection of freedom of the press. The current system is a state-granted monopoly that favors one party and is much like a totalitarian system. This is especially so of the stations owned by Comcast, TimeWarner, and Disney.    

There needs to be an antitrust action and a divestiture of airwave and cable networks from the Democrats so that airwave and cable control are wrested from Comcast and Disney and  fairly distributed among Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, and others in rough proportion to their numbers in the population.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Cc: Robert Iger, The Walt Disney Co.

Brian L. Roberts, Chairman, Comcast Corporation
Joseph J. Simons, Chairman, Federal Trade Commission

Americans for Limited Government Calls for End to American Bar Association Accreditation of Law Schools

Americans for Limited Government has emailed a release that calls for the ending of American Bar Association accreditation of law schools.  ALG characterizes ABA accreditation as crony capitalism. They write: 

There is an inherent conflict of interest when lawyers are allowed to regulate the entrance of competitors into their field. Due, in part, to the ABA’s numerous requirements of law schools and its restrictions on the practice of law, millions of Americans are unable to afford legal services and are forced to represent themselves in the bewildering legal system. While it is hard to argue that the world needs more lawyers, the ABA accreditation system, by design, limits the number of opportunities to attend law school with the result being the capping new entrants into their field, a clear conflict of interest.  As such, the Department of Education should end the American Bar Association’s credentials to provide law school accreditation. 

As I have previously blogged, under Betsy DeVos the DOE has done too little to investigate left-wing influence on higher education.  The ALG's point is a little different: licensure is a market impediment, and a professional guild should not be permitted to limit access to a market. It is difficult to argue that the standards that apply to law schools raise the quality of lawyers to some minimum, below which malpractice would be the norm. Rather, the ABA standards are meant to restrict the supply of lawyers. 

The education system is not, on a number of levels, what it claims to be.  Yet, the DOE has done little in the way of investigation and research, much less reform.

Letter in Support of The First Lady

Ms. Melania Trump

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Ms. Trump:

I didn’t vote for your husband, but I support him now.  I wanted to voice special support in the face of the disgraceful treatment that the fake media has afforded you with respect to the White House Christmas decorations and Pamela Karlan’s mentioning of Baron. There are even uglier slanders online, which don’t need to be recited.

As a conservative professor, I have been attacked for my views in the past, most recently in the national media for remarks I put on my blog concerning my support for Justice Brett Kavanaugh. 

Putting myself in your place, I appreciate your toughness and resilience.  Upon consideration, you are the best First Lady of my 65-year lifetime.   Like you, Jackie Kennedy spoke five languages and was eminently graceful.  However, she had an easy time because of the media’s pro-Democratic Party bias.  No one has displayed more resilience, better taste, and more grace than you have.

Please keep up the great work. 

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

College Kids' Hard Turn Left Means Trouble Ahead for America

On Nov. 2, 2019 the New York Post ran an editorial on the lopsided, often delusional,  political beliefs of today's college students, and the editorial discusses my research on faculty political affiliation.  Unfortunately, the Republican Party has sat on its hands for decades as the radicalization of education has unfolded.  I'm not sure that the damage that left-wing control of both K-12 and higher education has done can be undone.

Letter to Betsy DeVos Re 1619 Initiative

The Honorable Betsy DeVos
Secretary of Education
U.S. Department of Education

Dear Madam Secretary:

Yesterday, the National Association of Scholars held a conference call to discuss its 1620 initiative, a response to the New York Times’s 1619 initiative, which is an effort to attack fact-based history and radicalize its teaching.  Today, I received an email from David Horowitz’s organization describing a radical-indoctrination boot camp in Minnesota, the Minnesota Educator Academy, in which teachers are subjected to offensive, far-left indoctrination. Whether or not federal monies are directly being used for this purpose, federal financial support to Minnesota subsidizes it. 

How federal policy needs to respond to improper use of public monies for far-left political purposes depends on how far gone K-12 education already is.  However, I don’t believe that the Department of Education has taken any steps to determine what the political biases in the states’ K-12 systems already are.    How far down the ideological-indoctrination road have K-12 state systems already travelled? How many high schools use the fake history of Howard Zinn?  What is the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among educators?  Are conservative teachers drummed out in states like Minnesota and New York?

One of my colleagues has done ample work on debunking some of the fake history currently used in high schools, but he cannot find outlets to publish his findings.  This suggests a lack of support from the DOE, which receives federal funding to set educational agendas. How much support has the DOE given to scholars who question the conversion of the American education system to far-left propaganda purposes or even to determine whether such conversion has occurred, and if so in what states it has occurred?

I do not believe that there are statistics available about state-by-state curricular and behavioral  differences with respect to use of the K-12 or even higher education system for political purposes.  I have suggested to the National Association of Scholars that a team be put together to evaluate state curricula to see how far gone the states already are and that behavioral research be done to determine how extreme biases have already become in the cultures of state educational systems. A coherent policy response needs to be developed to the 1619 initiative, and there needs to be a jujitsu effort to use it to  reinvent education along lines that support the search for truth and our common culture. 

How much is the Trump administration doing to assist or orchestrate a response to this deepest of deep state perversions?

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Cc: The President

My Lesson on How Big Government Creates Income Inequality

I teach classes in managerial skills and human resource management.  Both are linked to issues surrounding success, career progression, and wages.  My managerial skills teaching focuses on trying to get students from inner city backgrounds to think about how to modulate cognitive and interpersonal skills in order to achieve career success and how to manage themselves to become sufficiently wealthy to be financially independent. With respect to cognitive skills, I emphasize writing, which is one of several weaknesses of  the New York City schools. I cannot, unfortunately, remedy other weaknesses, such as mathematical and statistical skills. I cannot do everything, nor can I do more than show my students the way to learn to write competently.  In a sense I do what John Dewey claimed to be doing: giving them the tools to learn on their own.   

Understanding the Fed, its economic subsidization of asset owners, and its manipulation of wage earners is important to understanding how to invest and how to balance career effort with investing effort.

Another of the critical issues related to both skills building and human resource management is the effect central banking has had in generating income inequality and malinvestment.  Part of this involves overinvestment in financial and real estate markets and part involves overinvestment in technology and labor-saving and cost-reducing strategies like plant relocations. When capital costs are near zero, it costs little to invest in machinery to save labor costs. In the long run, big-government economics, whether it be monetarist or Keynesian, results in capital substitution for labor.  

I just sent an email to my two real time classes summarizing the class discussion, which of course is not covered in the textbooks.

Take a look at this chart, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, of the stock of M2 money supply (the broad definition of money) over time:  https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2

 Also, take a look at this chart of the gross federal debt since 1940, also courtesy of the St Louis Fed: 


https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYGFD

Also, take a look at the chart on this blog. The chart is of real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wages since 1964: 

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/

Also, take a look at this chart, which illustrates the rise of the valuation of the S&P 500: 

https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-data

Notice that real wages began stagnating around 1971, which is around when the money supply began increasing at an increasing rate. President Nixon ended the gold standard that year.

Part of the increase in money supply may be offset by the aging of the baby boomers.  An aging population is deflationary because older people spend less. More importantly, the dollar has served as the chief reserve currency since World War II, so the demand for dollars from foreign central banks and businesses absorbs about one-half of the money supply. 

At the same time, the creation of debt and the creation of money are directly in synch because the money-creation process is part of the debt-creation process.  Notice, though, that the debt-and-money-creation pattern parallels wage stagnation.  Asset values escalate, but wage bargains lag. Keynes calls that money illusion.  Income inequality increases as asset owners, who are wealthy in the first place, become more wealthy.  Keynesian monetary stimulation, based on monetary creation, becomes counterproductive as low interest rates encourage substitution of capital and technology for labor.  Plant relocations and overinvestment in labor-saving equipment follows from sustained low interest rates, further encouraging low wages and income inequality.

Moreover, the widespread dollar reserve holdings are under threat from China, Iran, and Russia, which do not want to do business in dollars.  All modern monetary regimes have collapsed.  The first paper money inflation occurred in China after the invention of paper money during the Song dynasty in the 11 and 12th centuries. The Yuan dynasty, headed by Kublai Khan, adopted the paper money not long after and soon created hyperinflation.

The first US hyperinflation occurred during and after the Revolutionary War, and the first US currency, the continental, became worthless by the end of the Revolutionary War.  There was also hyperinflation during the Civil War, when the US Treasury and the Confederate Treasury both printed money and experienced double-digit inflation rates. Again, this occurred after the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913 and World War I, after which there was a hyperinflation followed by the 1920-21 depression.

Some people become wealthy during monetary disorder; typically, they are debtors who own assets like real estate and hard assets. The precious metals, art, and similar kinds of assets retain value. Stocks may as well, depending on the particular stock and various circumstances.  Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may be additions to the list of hard assets.

Across the Board Cuts Needed to Drain the Swamp

The President

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

This is a letter of support in light of the unfair allegations that Democratic Party and fake media extremists have brought against you.  Fake journalists have made absurd claims about the significance of your conversation with Prime Minister Zelensky, including the fiction that you withheld aid or in some way functioned as a mafia boss.  Seeing the absurd spectacle of Neil Cavuto pretending to be an objective journalist while basing all of his questioning on false assumptions and outright lies isn’t surprising, but it is one more nail in the coffin of the credibility of television news.

The bigger question is how to move forward given that this series of events has revealed deep-seated corruption within the intelligence agencies.  When you were elected, I was skeptical of the expression “deep state.” As a libertarian, I was aware that the state is fundamentally corrupt.  However, I was unaware of the deep partisan infiltration of the intelligence agencies.

When you are elected to a second term, I urge you to follow the libertarian approach of across-the-board budget cuts to agencies.  This is an approach that will be a baby step toward curing the federal deficit but a leap toward draining the swamp.  The concept of corporate culture is that behavior patterns in organizations become ritualized. Cultures are collective mental programming that are next to impossible to change.  This insight was made in the 1950s by the sociologist Philip Selznick in his book Leadership in Administration.  Because you are primarily a real estate developer used to contractual relationships, you seem to have proceeded in your efforts to drain the swamp without addressing the deep cultural impediments.   

The solution that Selznick offers to change cultures is the same that libertarians have urged to cut costs:  sharply cut the staffing.  As well, shuffling personnel and hiring from without will be useful. Director Henry King’s 1949 film 12 O’Clock High depicts the reshuffling and firing approach to culture change.

As you know, the federal debt is at levels that may threaten economic growth in the short run and certainly will do so in the long run.  Across-the-board cuts in federal agencies of, say, 50% of staff in agencies like the CIA, NSA, DOL, and DOE along with reshuffling of assignments of existing staff will shake up the corrupt, deep-state culture if not end it entirely.  Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, the Squad, and the radical steps they are taking may make such a radical approach possible after 2020 because they are losing credibilty.  

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Cc: Neil Cavuto Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Mitch McConnell

Mr. Joseph Maguire

Director, National Intelligence
Office of the Director of National Intelligence,
Washington, DC 20511

Dear Mr. Maguire:

I have written to the president suggesting that radical culture change is needed in the intelligence community. The leaking of a presidential conversation is neither heroic nor legal, and it is not the work of a whistleblower. Rather, it is reflective of an intelligence community that has run amok with partisanship and corruption.

As I mention in the attached letter to the president, the antidote for a corrupt culture is across-the-board firing.  I suggest that half of all intelligence personnel be terminated. They are no longer serving the public, and the culture in the agencies is rotten.  Once half have been fired, the remaining personnel should be reshuffled. New personnel without the taint of the rotten culture that has evolved can then be hired.

This kind of step is unknown in government bureaucracies, but it is evident that it has become necessary.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

How Judge Napolitano Got It Wrong

I was listening to Judge Napolitano on Shepard Smith on Wednesday, Sept. 25.  (I have been using Fox as background while I'm entering data.)

There seems to be a confusion on the part of Judge Napolitano and other commentators about the recent Ukrainian issue. This has been caused by a familiar left-wing tactic of taking control of nomenclature, and Mr. Napolitano falls prey to this tactic, for his analysis presumes that there was, in the president's mind, concern for Biden qua candidate and not Biden qua criminal.

The president may have been seeking a quid pro quo only if he was attempting to find information about a political candidate to oppose him. He would not have been seeking a quid pro quo if he was attempting to investigate Joe Biden as a criminal.  

There is plenty of evidence that Biden has behaved criminally, and there is no justification for claiming that the president cannot enforce the nation's laws. Judge Napolitano assumes that the president was campaigning merely because the left has defined the conversation in this way and not  because the president was seeking to drain the swamp, which he has repeatedly stated he aims to do.  

In discussing this issue, the Democrats have staked out the claim that the president was seeking information about a political candidate.  However, there is zero evidence that that is the case. In discussing this issue, it is disingenuous to say "political candidate." It is honest to say that it may be that he was seeking to obtain information about a criminal, Biden, and it may be that he was seeking to obtain information about a political candidate.  Neither is clear.  

The Mystery of Low Income REITS

My sister and I inherited an apartment in western Queens, and after almost 10 years of co-owning it, we are going to sell it to her daughter. As a result, I will have a chunk of investment capital, and I will put most of it into real estate investment trusts, military stocks, and hard metals.  Western Queens--Astoria, Long Island City, and Sunnyside--is apparently on a tear. While I was walking to the apartment to meet the appraiser, I noticed multiple construction projects involving new apartment and retail structures.  Broadway in Astoria, which is near where I grew up, is a different place from what it was 20 years ago.  Even the famous Greek restaurant, Uncle George's, is gone.

The kicker is that New York State has passed a law  mandating green energy, and New York City has passed a law mandating retrofitting.  The green energy law will double real electric costs over the coming twenty years, and the retrofitting will increase costs as well. Perhaps it is a good time to escape from New York.

Gold has been on a tear, and I suspect a pullback; hence, I am going to limit the purchase and overweight silver, which hasn't gone up as much as gold yet.

I like 3M and Unilever, and I would like to put a little into defense stocks.  After a couple of setbacks in recent years, 3M is in value territory, but Unilever is somewhat overpriced.  Something tells me that drones are the weapon of the future, and firms like AeroVironment (AVAV), Boeing (BA), and Northrop Grumman are likely suspects. None of these is priced at a value level, and Boeing has had problems with tariffs and a crash investigation. Northrop Grumman (NOC) has been on a tear, and is up 48% this year. I already hold some General Dynamics and Raytheon, and I think I will add a little GD as well as AVAV and NOC.

VNQ is the Vanguard REIT index, and it is up this year, and I'm expecting to put most of the money there.  However, I would like to overweight low-income real estate, and that is a tough nut to crack because few REITs specialize in low-income real estate. This is another case of the Federal Reserve Bank economy artificially creating credit to  subsidize wealthy rather than middle class or poor Americans.

I could find three REITs and funds that focus on lower-income housing: Sun Communities (SUI), NexPoint Residential Communities (NXRT), and the Community Development Fund (CDCDX).  I already own SUI, which makes prefab housing, and it's been priced at nosebleed levels.  It's been going up 28% a year.  CDCDX is a public-private partnership that invests in low-income projects. It is a bond fund and is correlated with the bond market. Since bonds are still at historically high levels, I'll pass. I have moral concerns about public-private partnerships as well.  NXRT is is somewhat overvalued. According to NXRT's website:

The company pursues investments in class A and B multifamily real estate property, typically with a value-add component, where we can invest significant amounts of capital to provide “life style” amenities to “work force” housing. Our value-add strategy seeks to provide a nicer home to our residents, while maximizing returns for our shareholders.

The moderate-income housing market seems to be a victim of the banking cartel, the Federal Reserve Bank, which favors high-end real estate and labor-substitution investments like robotics, plant relocations, and technology.  While there is no shortage of high-income-oriented apartment REITs, there is only a handful of moderate-income-oriented ones. This may explain the overvaluation of SUI and NXRT.  As with gold, I'll buy a small amount of NXRT.  

President Trump: Investigate Google and Facebook

PO Box 130

West Shokan, NY 12494
September 18, 2019

The President

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC  20500

Dear Mr. President:

Recent allegations* concerning interference in American elections by Facebook and Google suggest that they may have violated and may plan to violate various sections of election law. For example, political advertisers are required to disclose the person or organization responsible for political advertising, yet Facebook does not disclose itself as a source of political advertising.  As well, Google's slanted search results are undisclosed political advertising.  Recently, editor-in-chief of Psychology Today  Dr. Robert Epstein  testified that Google and Facebook have manipulated elections.  This is more extreme than election advertising, but it can be subsumed under its rubric.  

I urge the Justice Department to investigate and if violations are found to criminally prosecute Facebook and Google management, including Messrs. Zuckerberg, Brin, and Page, if there is evidence of failure to comply with federal election law.

As well, because the two tech firms pose a threat to American democracy, shuttering and sequestering their sites prior to upcoming elections may be appropriate.  Facebook in general may have deleterious effects on American society. While Google's technology is better than its competitors', the harm from its ham-handed and possibly criminal actions exceeds the limited social benefits from its technology.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

*This letter also was sent via the Internet

Cc:  The Honorable William P. Barr, Attorney General

Ms. Ellen West,  Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs, Google
Ms. Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook

The Social Justice Warriors Came for My Head...Not Only Did I Survive, I'm Thriving

The College Fix asked me to write an op-ed on the repercussions of my having been outed last year by  Antifa and the fake media.  Mostly good stuff has ensued.  I have been working on research projects, have been doing podcasts for Jamie Glazov of Frontpagemag, did a small consulting project, and have had some favorable mentions in the media.  The good stuff has outweighed the bad stuff by a mile. As I say in the piece, you haven't lived until you've been burned in effigy--by dumbed down, urban, left-wing clowns.

President Trump: Bury the Fake Media

Dear Mr. President:
I recently spoke with a former employee of a conservative think tank, which was outed in the media. He lost his job, and he has since been having trouble finding work in your administration and in other foundations.  Part of the reason is that, in addition, he wrote posts on Facebook of which the left does not approve, and the inspector general’s office in your administration has interfered with his hiring.  They apparently went through all of his social media posts.   I have only heard one side of this story, but I have a few suggestions: 
1.        The IG’s office and all other executive-branch offices need to be investigated as to Antifa and far-left influence.  
2.       Your administration should encourage, not discourage, politically incorrect hiring;  postings of which the Deep State, the fake media, and Antifa do not approve should not interfere with hiring.  Totalitarian disapproval should not deter your administration from hiring conservatives.  
3.       Decisions like that of eliminating Stephen Moore and Herman Cain from consideration for the Fed need to be revisited. There are many other instances. The ongoing cowardice of conservatives and Republicans toward totalitarian bullying needs to end.  Your leadership can make that happen. Outing in the media is an honor, not a disgrace. Your administration should adopt a thoroughgoing political incorrectness.  Bury the fake media.

Best regards,

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

President Trump Should Say "No" to Federal Gun Legislation

I sent this message to the president. I was surprised to hear conservatives on Fox arguing for federal gun legislation that infringes the right to bear arms, which is unconstitutional.  Such legislation impedes citizens' abilities to form local defense units in the face of federal tyranny.

Dear President Trump:

I appreciate your response to the tragic shootings in El Paso and Dayton. Your response was appropriate, and a call for legislation may have been politically advisable.  Nevertheless, I urge you to back off from any federal legislation regarding guns.

The Constitution is clear on this issue: The right to bear arms shall not be infringed. Such rights are necessary to defend ourselves from federal tyrants, whose emergence we are witnessing in the Democratic Party.

Moreover, if you look at the statistics, more people are killed in two or three plane crashes than have been killed in mass shootings over the last 30 years.  Passing legislation after a horrific event is equivalent to selling in a stock market crash.

Only about 600-700 people have been killed in mass shootings over the past 30 years, but 35,000 a year are killed in car crashes. Death due to plane crash is more common than death due to mass killings. Yet, airline travel is federally regulated. Hence, federal regulation has been a complete failure, resulting in greater, not lesser, death rates.

The calls for legislation have been defined, as too much is, by left-wing ideology that calls for a centralized solution to all issues regardless of the long-term performance of  centralized solutions.

The death rate due to centralized control of guns needs to include the mass murders in Nazi German and communist Russia, where guns were illegal and where elite, centralized parties controlled by the equivalents of the Soroses, Rockefellers, and Clintons murdered at will.  It is not surprising that the party of elites, the Democrats, favors centralized gun control, just as such parties always have.

The psychological distortion process known as salience is that explosive events tend to be considered to be more prevalent than unobtrusive events. Hence, many people believe that it is more dangerous to fly in an airplane than to drive.  Likewise, the sensation America's dumbed-down media creates around the tragic mass shootings are directly intended to encourage legislation that favors their bosses, the Democrats.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

Michael Hansen: It Can Happen, and It Is Happening, Here

Filmmaker Michael Hansen describes how the pro-Antifa speech suppression prevalent in Scandinavia and Canada has spread to the US via Amazon, Youtube, and Google.  The question that is percolating in my mind is why alternative hosting sites aren't more popular.

The Pence Doctrine

I subscribe to Jim Rickards's Strategic Intelligence newsletter, which combines political with stock market intelligence. Rickards devotes the last issue to the Pence doctrine, based on the speech, embedded above, which the vice president gave at the Hudson Institute last October.  Rickards compares Vice President Pence's speech to George Kennan's Long Telegram, which set the stage for the Cold War containment policy of Truman and subsequent Cold War-era presidents.

Without revealing Rickards's proprietary stock advice, I conclude that investing in China is going to be a bumpier ride than most analysts have thought and that the rationales for the Trump trade war are  more complex and subtle than I had previously thought.   The arguments for free trade are correct, but they are entirely economic. Economics does not justify trade when trade creates a political or military threat. Chinese industrial espionage and its use of economic power to coerce trade secrets from American firms do create broad military threats whose costs are not borne by the firms that do business with China but who benefit from trade.

If economic actors are politically neutral and the Trump administration can wrangle concessions from Germany and China and then go back to free trade in short order, investors will be happy and economically the world will be better off. However,  Vice President Pence makes clear that there are intransigent political and military reasons to curtail trade with China, and these will not go away anytime soon even if the Chinese adopt a policy of reciprocity. (Economically, we are better off adopting a free trade stance even if a trading partner is protectionist. However, if we are selling ee cummings's nipponized "old sixth avenue el" to World War II Japan, it's a different matter.)

That American politicians and businesses have been willing to ignore China's history and ongoing practice of mass murder and political incarceration has been, until now, a moral disgrace. Americans, including me, have ignored torture and mass killing in the interest of a cheap sponge mop.  Pence states that one million Muslims are currently incarcerated in Chinese reeducation camps, where they are tortured and brainwashed.   Beijing continues to murder political dissidents; they continue to suppress minority religions, including  Tibetans and Christians as well as Muslims; they continue to attack free speech. Beijing's socialist state  has killed and continues to kill more human beings than almost any other in history--with a handful of similarly socialist exceptions.

Tech companies like Google and websites like Quora have long been apologists for China's mass murder regime. I was chastised and then I terminated my Quora account after a moderator insisted that my criticism of Chinese mass murder was outside Quora's speech parameters.  

As Vice President Pence points out, the Chinese state is taking control of  American newspapers and TV and radio stations. It runs cloaked newspaper advertisements on behalf of its political interests; it uses American airwaves as propaganda vehicles.  The Chinese mass murder state censors speech and scholarship in American universities.

The Chinese Scholars and Students Association functions as a spying organization against Chinese students here, and information it has gathered has been used to attack families of Chinese students.  It censors movie studies, and it has made direct changes to American-made films.  (Its power to do so comes from selective granting of access to its market.) In other words, Hollywood has been willing to sacrifice American security interests for access to the Chinese market.  It has attacked the New York Times and cyberattacked the Hudson Institute, where the vice president gave the speech.

President Trump, through the concerns enunciated by Vice President Pence, is the first president since Nixon's détente to identify the  threat that China poses. This has not been recognized in Democratic Party-dominated universities, Democratic Party-dominated newspapers, or Democratic Party-dominated media.  

If Rickards is right and the Pence doctrine is going to become foundational to American policy, the trade issue is going to become more complicated rather than less, and we may be in for a protracted cold war with China. 

How Many Students Major in Politically Correct Subjects?

Someone raised a point in a comment on an earlier post that large numbers of students do not major in the politically correct subjects such as the humanities and social sciences.  That is true, although the subjects that are relevant to politics are left dominated.  Also, in my "Homogeneous" study I found that  in liberal arts colleges biology has a partisan slant that is similar to the social sciences.  Subjects like business that do not seem likely to be left dominated may be so, at least in some segments of the field. In business the segments of management, human resources, and business ethics may be like the soft social sciences.  Health professions and biomedical fields may also have complex distributions of political affiliation.

I looked up on the NCES site the numbers of students who major in the eight leading fields.  They are as follows:

Majors            Numbers of Students

Business...…………... 364,000

Health professions..216,000
Social sciences...…..167,000
Psychology...………..118,000
Biomedical...…...…..110,000
Engineering...………...98,000
Arts............…...........96,000
Education......………..92,000

Social sciences, psychology, arts, and education are PC suspect while engineering is not.   Hence,  (167,000 + 118,000 + 96,000 + 92,000 =)  473,000 of 1.261 million, or 37.5%, are likely in the PC-major category; 98,000 of 1.261 million or 7.8% are in the non-PC-major (engineering) category;  business, health professions, and biomedical are unclear.  These total 690,000 or 54.7% of the 1.261 million students in the eight-most-popular majors.

More research needs to be done to learn how many students are in majors with different degrees of partisanship.  In leading universities the slant is more extreme than in all institutions.