Many people are worried about the looming TikTok ban, following yesterday’s Supreme Court decision.
Just for the record, I was never a fan of TikTok. I much prefer the long-form video format of YouTube. Also, as a 50-something adult, I never really “got” the Gen Z vibe of the platform.
Nevertheless, it has become all too easy for a single tech CEO to decide what opinions may be expressed on the Internet, and which may not. That’s why I want TikTok to continue to operate in the USA.
Since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War, YouTube has removed numerous channels that are based in Russia, or talk about Russia. Not just state media outlets like Russia Today, but also individual Russian bloggers.
I grew up during the Cold War. We wanted to hear information and viewpoints from the other side of the ramparts, even when we knew we would disagree. A willingness to listen to what an adversary is saying is not the same thing as taking the adversary’s side.
But Americans were, on the whole, more sophisticated in the 1980s, and grasped such distinctions. We were willing to let people hear all sides of an argument, and make up their minds for themselves. That troublesome concept of free speech.
I have no doubt that TikTok is influenced by the Chinese government, just as I know that Google (the owner of YouTube) was influenced by the corruptions of the Biden administration these past four years.
That said, I am rooting for TikTok in this particular instance. Why? Because I don’t fully trust any government (including, for that matter, the one that will take power in Washington on Monday).
And I tend to think that something will be worked out in the end. TikTok has a lot of investors and stakeholders who aren’t based in China. To be blunt about it: there is a lot of money on the line. And while freedom of speech doesn’t always triumph, moneyed interests almost always do.
During World War I, a wave of anti-German fervor swept the USA. German-language newspapers were shut down. The Kaiser was burned in effigy in American streets.
Things were renamed, too. Dachshunds were dubbed “liberty dogs”. Sauerkraut was called “liberty cabbage”.
Such actions, no doubt, really struck a blow against the detested Huns.
“Oh, but that was back in 1917!” you say. “More than a hundred years ago! People nowadays are so much more sophisticated!”
Really? In 2003, some Republican politicians and conservative commentators began calling French fries “freedom fries”, after the French government objected to the impending US invasion of Iraq.
And even more recently: between 2020 and 2023 we saw a wave of hysteria over Confederate names and statues. Americans who would struggle to name four major Civil War battles (or generals) suddenly claimed great offense at a previously unnoticed stone figure or place name.
The Biden administration was particularly amenable to such revisionism. Between 2022 and 2023, nine US military bases that were previously named after Confederate leaders were given new names.
Pete Hesgeth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, has announced that he wants to undo the name changes. This would require congressional approval, and perhaps a protracted political fight, as well.
BREAKING: Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth is pushing to restore the original names of military bases that were changed in response to recent “WOKE” initiatives.
He believes that honoring history is crucial and calls for a return to the legacies these names represent.… pic.twitter.com/vOYOVn9qY7
As suggested above, renaming things as a display of political outrage is, in my view,one of the best ways to display one’s idiocy. A Confederate statue, covered with pigeon droppings in a forgotten park in Somewhere, Alabama, oppresses no one. Nor do places bearing the names of Confederate generals, especially when so few Americans lack even basic historical knowledge.
But once the name has been changed, does it make sense to reopen the can of worms and change it back again? Or would Pete Hesgeth, assuming he’s confirmed, be better off spending his time on actual matters of national defense?
One of the bases that got a name change was Fort Bragg, named after Confederate General Braxton Bragg. Fort Bragg is now Fort Liberty.
Would it have been better to leave the name alone in the first place? Sure. But Fort Liberty, to me, seems like a perfectly serviceable name. It isn’t as if they renamed Fort Bragg “Fort Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” or “Fort LGBTQ Pride Month”.
Fort Benning, previously named after Confederate General Henry L. Benning, was renamed Fort Moore. The new name honors the late General Harold “Hal” Moore, who served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
Once again, I don’t find anything objectionable about the new name. And I’m practically allergic to political correctness.
Names of places and institutions do, moreover, change all the time. Such changes do not always occur for reasons of political correctness. Nor are they always met with unanimous applause.
In 1985, city officials here in Cincinnati decided to rename Second Street “Pete Rose Way”.
This was decades before Rose’s death. Rose was only in his early forties and in good health. Then, as now, Pete Rose was known to have a checkered past, and was not universally admired. But there were some ardent Reds fans on city council at the time.
“Name an entire street for a living baseball player?” a lot of people said, scratching their heads. “I don’t even like baseball.”
But the name change went through, nonetheless. And it was never overturned—not even after a 1989 gambling scandal that left Rose ineligible for the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
***
Starting in 1967, Cincinnati had its Convention-Exposition Center. In 1985, the building was renamed the Albert B. Sabin Convention and Exposition Center, to honor the scientist who developed the polio vaccine. Most folks were happy enough with that—or at least they didn’t complain.
Then in 2020, the convention center got yet another name: the Duke Energy Convention Center. This honored not a scientist or a statesman (or even a baseball player), but the massive, unfeeling corporation that purchased our local electric company, Cinergy, in a 2006 merger.
Since then, our energy supplies have been controlled not locally, but from Duke Energy’s corporate headquarters in North Carolina. I actually would prefer to see our convention center named after AOC or Pride Month, rather than Duke Energy.
***
What is most annoying about political correctness? Not so much the underlying political beliefs, but the insistence on making a big deal over the trivial. The contrived urgency and the sham outrage. Like all the silliness over Confederate names and statues.
I don’t want to see the Trump administration spend the next four years arguing about place names that are perfectly serviceable, even if they’re names that were assigned for the wrong reasons, and with flawed motivations.
After all, I never saw the point of renaming Cincinnati’s Second Street “Pete Rose Way”. But I’ve been driving on Pete Rose Way, without protest, for going on forty years now.
Anita Bryant (1940 – 2025) started out as a pop singer, beauty pageant winner, and brand ambassador for the Florida Citrus Commission. What she will be most remembered for, however, is her involvement in the Save Our Children campaign, beginning in 1977.
During the late 1970s, Save Our Children was a political movement that sought to repeal recently enacted Florida laws protecting (gay) sexual orientation. (This narrow definition is not a coded message on my part. In the 1970s, “gay” was the only portion of the currently defined LGBTQ spectrum that got much awareness, at least at the public policy level.)
I was just a kid in the late 1970s, and completely oblivious to the specific controversy in Florida. I do recall, however, that this was a period in which Americans were rethinking the changes and excesses of the recently concluded 1960s, both for good and for bad.
Conservatism was making a comeback, and gay rights were far from the only topic of debate. Abortion, pornography, the ERA, laissez-faire capitalism, the death penalty, gun control, the war on drugs…both sides of all of these issues were constantly being shouted in the public space.
Sounds a lot like the 2020s, doesn’t it? And yet that was almost 50 years ago. Americans will constantly debate what individual freedom means, and what the right to privacy means. Where does the individual right to pursue happiness (as defined by an individual) end, and where do the greater needs of society begin?
As at least one recent post should tell you, I personally come down on the side of maximum freedom for consenting adults, where matters of the bedroom are concerned. I don’t care who sleeps with whom, or if they exchange money beforehand, so long as only consenting adults are involved. The way I see it, such matters are none of the government’s business.
But then, I am left of center on some issues, and right of center on others. I was never in favor of the maximum legalization of weed, to the point where legal marijuana has now become an industry. I also favor more gun control than most of my fellow conservatives would agree with.
As for LGBTQ issues? In the 1970s, I probably would have been regarded as a relative liberal on such matters. In 2025, my views (while mixed) would land in the Venn diagram sphere of “somewhat conservative”. But what the LBGTQ lobby is asking for today is not what the gay lobby was asking for in 1977. The context is different.
Today I’ve seen a lot of mean-spirited progressive virtue-signaling on social media about the death of Anita Bryant, a woman who hasn’t been active in the public sphere since Jimmy Carter was POTUS. Most of the people decrying Bryant as the Second Coming of Hitler weren’t even born in 1977. (In fact: I poked around on some of the X and Bluesky profiles that weren’t pure sock puppets. Many of those folks wouldn’t be born for decades.)
Could Anita Bryant have used her considerable talents and influence in a better way? Could she have championed a conservative culture without zeroing in on the issue of sexual orientation? Did she do more harm than good?
We could certainly have a spirited debate about all of that. But given the revisionist political environment of post-1960s America, Bryant was articulating positions that millions of American adults (most of whom are deceased at the time of this writing!) were already taking. 1977 was not 2025. Beware the pitfalls of presentism.
When struck with a pie by a leftwing activist at a 1977 press conference, Bryant asked those around her to forgive the man, then—her face still covered in pie—said a prayer for his redemption. That is the Anita Bryant I will choose to remember, to the extent that I remember her at all.
For better or worse, President-elect Trump is not above trolling his opponents, cautious observers, and even his allies.
This is less a product of any real dictatorial tendencies, than his history as a showman. I remember Trump as a headline generator back in the 1980s. The outlandish public statement has long been one of his standard methods. Again, for better or worse.
Trump recently trolled the government of Panama about the terms by which American shippers utilize the Panama Canal. Now he’s talking about inviting Canada and Greenland to join the United States. (He apparently wants to buy Greenland outright.)
First of all, crazier things have been placed on the table in recent years. From a cultural and economic perspective, a union between the USA and Canada/Greenland makes a lot more sense than Puerto Rico as our 51st state. (Puerto Rican independence, once a cause for Puerto Rican patriots, is long overdue. But I digress.)
That said, neither one is likely to happen. I’ve been to Canada many times. Canadians are a wonderful people, but they have a strong sense of nationhood.
As Americans hoping for the best for Canada, our earnest desire should be that a sensible Conservative Party leader will replace the outgoing Justin Trudeau as prime minister of the Great White North. But Canada as the 51st state? Not going to happen. And besides, Canada has a great national anthem. We would all hate to see that go away.
Greenland is a slightly different situation. Greenland is an overseas North American territory of Denmark, with a population of only 56,000 people.
Greenland gained self-rule in 2009 for most internal matters, while its foreign policy and defense are still managed from Copenhagen. Greenland, through its affiliation with its mother country, has long been within the NATO umbrella.
This was true during the Cold War, too. I can recall meeting at least one American during the 1980s who had been stationed in Greenland as a member of the US military.
Greenland, with its Northern European culture, is still more assimilable to the USA than Puerto Rico. That doesn’t mean it would be a seamless match, or that the Greenlanders would necessarily want that. Greenlandic Prime Minister Múte Egede, who favors full independence from Denmark, has rebuffed Trump’s offers to buy the island nation.
The Prime Minister of Denmark, meanwhile, has issued a carefully worded objection to the US president-elect’s statement. Danish PM Mette Frederiksen wants to avoid antagonizing either Trump or Egede too much, as this could drive them into each other’s arms. But nor does she want to come across as a pushover.
Amid all of this, Donald Trump Jr. made an unofficial visit to Greenland yesterday. No government officials met with him.
The elder Trump wrote on Truth Social:
“Don Jr. and my Reps landing in Greenland. The reception has been great. They, and the Free World, need safety, security, strength, and PEACE! This is a deal that must happen. MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!”
As I did with the incoming Biden administration four years ago, I will maintain an open mind in the early days of Trump’s second term. I am not going to declare that the sky is falling before Trump even takes office. But I will articulate certain expectations.
What Americans are most eager for is a return to “normal”. Most of us aren’t asking for utopia. But we would like to believe that we can ignore the news for a few days, and be confident that the world hasn’t gone to hell in the meantime. That hasn’t really been possible since 2020.
The Biden administration promised us normalcy. Instead they brought us open borders, and third grade teachers telling kids they could change their gender. That wasn’t normal, for most of us.
But the idea of America somehow annexing Canada and Greenland? Well, that isn’t exactly normal, either.
If Trump ends the disastrous Russo-Ukrainian War, halts the most egregious examples of “wokeness” in public policy, secures our southern border, and restores our energy independence, he will be a successful president in most Americans’ eyes. He doesn’t need to give us Canada and Greenland, too. And besides, Canada and Greenland aren’t his for the giving.
President-elect Donald Trump has made some eyebrow-raising statements about the Panama Canal and its ownership. These are matters that no one has talked much about for almost fifty years.
Trump recently stated that the USA should negotiate a new treaty for its use of the Panama Canal. And of course, Trump had a scapegoat for the current “bad deal”. Former President Jimmy Carter, according to Trump, “foolishly gave away” the canal back in the 1970s.
(Note: The president-elect took this jab before Jimmy Carter’s recent passing.)
This has led to speculation on social media that the USA might be invading Panama sometime next year.
Don’t worry: that is unlikely to happen.
What’s the story behind the Panama Canal?
The Panama Canal is an extremely valuable piece of real estate because it permits sea passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the Isthmus of Panama. This obviates the need for a longer, more hazardous trip around the southern tip of South America.
The United States constructed the Panama Canal from 1904 to 1914, and administered the canal for decades after. No one thought too much about this arrangement in the pre-Cold War era. That was just the way things were done: the industrial north ran things for the developing south, with varying degrees of equity and heavy-handedness.
Yes, such arrangements are now called imperialism. But there was a time when many people (in the industrial north, anyway) saw imperialism as a win-win proposition, or at least a necessary evil.
By the middle of the 20th-century, though, imperialism had acquired a bad name. Nothing bolstered Soviet claims of Western imperialism like…unapologetic Western imperialism.
Plus, the war-ravaged countries of Europe could no longer afford their overseas empires. France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom were giving up their colonial possessions in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In such an environment, it was no longer copacetic for the United States to maintain control over the Panama Canal, a revenue-generating asset located on another country’s territory.
Did Jimmy Carter “give away” the Panama Canal?
Negotiations for the transfer of the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government began in 1974, under a Republican administration. Nevertheless, Democrat Jimmy Carter signed the resultant Torrijos–Carter Treaty in 1977, which began the official transfer process.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, this led to widespread charges that Jimmy Carter had “given back” or “given away” the Panama Canal. This wasn’t entirely accurate, but nor was it entirely inaccurate. Jimmy Carter didn’t simply wake up one morning and say, “Hey, I think I’ll give the Panama Canal back to Panama today!” The wheels were already set in motion. Carter, though, was the president who signed off on the transfer.
The narrative that “Carter gave away the Panama Canal” was part of a larger narrative: that Jimmy Carter was a weak and ineffectual president.
This was the same Jimmy Carter who tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to free the American hostages in Iran by force (Operation Eagle Claw, 1980).This was also the same Jimmy Carter who formulated what has come to be known as the Carter Doctrine. Promulgated in the wake of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Carter Doctrine declared that the USA would use military force, if necessary, to defend its legitimate interests in the Persian Gulf.
Nevertheless, I remember the narrative, and I was a kid at the time. Donald Trump, who was by then entering early middle age, remembers it, too. In 1977, not all Americans agreed with the transfer of the Panama Canal to an arguably unserious country like Panama.
(And maybe there was something to that. Let’s not forget that the US had to invade Panama in 1989 to oust its dictatorial, drug-dealing leader, Manuel Noriega.)
We can be reasonably certain that back in 1977, Trump was not on-board with Carter’s decision. Hence the recent statements from the president-elect.
What will Trump “do” about the Panama Canal, if anything?
Trump so far hasn’t challenged Panama’s basic ownership rights of the canal. He claims that he wants to see the US given fairer terms for the usage of a canal it built and paid for.
According to Trump, “it [the canal] was given to Panama and to the people of Panama, but it has provisions. You got to treat us fairly and they haven’t treated us fairly.”
In other words, these veiled statements about the Panama Canal are a negotiating tactic, as are (probably) Trump’s threats to impose new tariffs on all goods originating in a slew of countries, from China to Canada.
“Big stick diplomacy”, or boorish bluster?
I won’t lie to the reader. I’m a 20th-century man. There is a part of me that longs for the sober, measured communications of 20th-century presidents like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. But our Democratic alternative in 2024 was a long way from that 20th-century benchmark, too. This is simply the Brave New World in which we’re living.
Here’s another interpretation. President-elect Trump has expressed admiration for Teddy Roosevelt, who articulated “big stick diplomacy”. TR famously said, “speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far”. Donald Trump does not always speak softly, of course. But neither did Teddy Roosevelt, by hypersensitive 21st-century standards.
A 1904 political cartoon, depicting US President Theodore Roosevelt carrying a “big stick”
Over the next four years, it will be necessary for us (and the rest of the world) to discern the US president’s real intentions from his opening statements, which will often be mere negotiating positions.
I can put one such position to rest…sort of.
We are not going to invade Panama (again, as we already invaded it in 1989) anytime in the foreseeable future. But the powers-that-be in Panama City have been officially put on notice. Changes are coming to the conditions by which the US and its shippers utilize the Panama Canal.
Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris to be his running mate for one reason: during his 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination, he had vowed to select a female of color for his vice president. Kamala Harris represented a plausible individual who fit those criteria, and so she became his running mate.
That was it: a cynical marriage of convenience. Not the first one in the history of American politics, certainly. But let’s not kid ourselves about what it was really all about. The two never worked particularly well together. Nor do we get the sense that Biden and Harris, separated by a wide gulf of age, ideology, regional affiliation, and lived experience, ever had much in the way of personal rapport.
Neither Trump nor Biden performed particularly well in their June 27 debate. But Trump at least remained coherent, while Joe Biden often appeared confused and disoriented onstage. That debate was an unmitigated disaster for Biden, who already faced concerns about senescence and cognitive decline.
Days later, the Democratic Party establishment, with the collusion of the mainstream media, pushed Biden aside in a coup-like process that was anything but Democratic. There were no primaries; Democratic voters did not get a say. The party’s elites anointed Kamala Harris, and told the unwashed rank-and-file to get in line with the [new] program.
Kamala Harris nevertheless lost on Election Day, despite a poor showing from Trump in their September 10 debate. Despite numerous public gaffes by Trump and his surrogates. Despite the best efforts of the celebrity class and the mainstream media.
And so now, with only a few weeks remaining in office, Joe Biden is reportedly expressing regrets about dropping out. In what must have been an authorized leak to the Washington Post, Biden has claimed that he could have beaten Trump in November—if only his party would have stuck with him.
Biden’s reported claims are difficult to square with the evidence. First there was Biden’s horrific showing in every poll. Kamala Harris, despite her many flaws as a candidate, did at least energize a portion of the electorate. (Just not as big a portion as her cheerleaders had hoped.) Had he continued to head the Democratic ticket through Election Day, Biden likely would have lost to Trump by an even wider margin.
The Democratic Party should have run a moderate centrist: someone like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. But therein lies the root of the Democratic Party’s actual problem. The Democratic Party did not lose the election on the outward visage of its standard-bearer, but on its basic sales pitch.
As recently as the Bill Clinton era, the Democratic Party was the party of the working class. Yes, there was always an element of social liberalism: abortion, gay rights, and protest culture. But Bill Clinton won the 1992 election primarily on kitchen-table issues. Hence the famous rallying cry of the Clinton-Gore ’92 campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Economic issues are barely mentioned in progressive circles nowadays. Gone are discussions about healthcare reform, to cite just one example.
Bernie Sanders once tackled CEO pay, a cause that brought him into line with conservatives like Lou Dobbs and old-line populists like Ross Perot. No Democrat in 2024 would have dared raise the issue of CEO pay. CEOs, after all, are at the core of the Democratic donor class, along with the millionaire celebrities: Lizzo, George Clooney, and Taylor Swift.
A progressive of 1994 would barely recognize a progressive of 2024. A “progressive” is now someone whose highest priority is championing the cause of pregnant men, and making sure that every pregnant man has a right to an abortion.
The Democratic Party has combined these positions with a stubborn refusal to address both crime and the breakdown of our southern border. That is simply not a platform with any broad appeal, as the results from Election Day proved.
That platform could not have been carried to victory by either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. But “Kamala or Joe?” is the wrong question. The Democratic Party has a more fundamental problem appealing to the American voter.
For quite some time now, we have known that Jimmy Carter’s passing was imminent and inevitable. But for some of us, it is nevertheless hard to believe.
I can still remember Jimmy Carter’s election to the White House in November 1976. I was in the third grade. I am 56 years old, and Jimmy Carter has been a part of the political landscape for basically my entire life. Almost 50 years.
My maternal grandparents, both lifelong FDR Democrats, were big fans of Jimmy Carter.
In 1980, or thereabouts, my grandmother wrote Carter a handwritten letter, assuring him that he had performed admirably as president during a difficult time. Carter sent my grandmother a signed reply. I don’t remember the exact wording of either letter, but I do recall that Carter’s missive was personalized, and reflected a reading of my grandmother’s letter.
Jimmy Carter’s time in office (1977 – 1980) was a good time for me. Those were the last of my elementary school years, and I had a notoriously happy childhood. I was a lucky kid.
Jimmy Carter addressing Congress in 1978
I realize that in the wider world, many problems occurred: inflation, the energy crisis, the Iranian Revolution (and the accompanying Tehran hostage crisis)…Oh, and also the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Jonestown, and urban decay in most large American cities.
The Jimmy Carter years were not a good time, in the big scheme of things.
But Jimmy Carter inherited a difficult, post-Vietnam world, characterized by stagflation, upheaval in the Middle East, and renewed Soviet aggressiveness. Some presidents (Bill Clinton comes to mind) have had it comparatively easy. Jimmy Carter did not have it easy.
Jimmy Carter was a man of conscience, of the kind that rarely enters politics at the national level anymore. He cared deeply about human rights—and not just in politically correct venues. Carter pushed back against the Soviets for their shabby treatment of the refuseniks. Carter was a Democrat who was personally and vocally pro-life, even though he toed his party’s line from a policy perspective. Carter was also a man of faith who was not afraid to talk about his faith. After losing the 1980 election in a landslide, he dedicated his long remaining years to charity and peacemaking. He became the face of Habitat for Humanity.
A saint? No, far from it. Carter was first and foremost a politician, let us not forget. The term “saintly politician” is an oxymoron. But he was probably the best all-around human being to occupy the Oval Office during my lifetime, even though his results in that office left something to be desired.
The H1-B is the program that large corporate employers use to recruit technical employees from lower-wage nations. These workers, most of whom are low- and mid-level programmers from India, work for a fraction of the wages paid to their American counterparts.
Indian programmers are not “better”. But most of them are “good enough”, and they are almost universally cheaper.
(I’ve actually worked with Indian programmers in a corporate IT setting, so I have firsthand insight on this one.)
Let’s be blunt here: the H1-B is a cost-saving program for big corporations.
Both Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have recently come out in favor of expanding the H1-B visa program. This comes amid an atmosphere of anti-immigration sentiment practically everywhere in the Western world, but especially in the United States. Trump won the 2024 presidential election for a handful of reasons, but dissatisfaction with the Democrats’ open-door immigration policies was near the top of the list.
And here are Musk and Ramaswamy, both nominated for positions within the incoming Trump administration, saying that we need to increase H1-B immigration. This presents a problem…or at least a contradiction.
If we clamp down on immigration, pretty much every business is going to have to pay more for labor. That is a fact of economics, supply-and-demand.
We seem prepared to tell restaurant owners and farmers that they must raise wages in order to employ Americans. Are we prepared, in the same breath, to declare that Intel, Microsoft, and Apple should get an increase in low-wage foreign labor, because they and their jobs are “special”?
And is there really no local talent available to fill these jobs? The United States isn’t Latvia (population: 1.8 million). We aren’t even Germany (population: 84 million). We are the third most-populous country on earth. The current population of the United States is 335 million. If an employer can’t find the person they need out of a pool that size, well, maybe something else is wrong (?)
Yes, plenty of young Americans are airheads, but I happen to know that many are quite intelligent and hardworking. They aren’t all majoring in gender studies and/or basket-weaving. We have computer science majors. And engineers. And chemists.
(Actually, the job market for computer science majors is a bit soft right now, with applicants exceeding jobs. So why the rush to bring in foreign talent?)
This seems to me a matter of fairness and consistency. I don’t know what the average family farmer or independent restauranteur makes, income-wise. But I would be willing to bet that it’s substantially less than the typical annual paycheck of a Fortune 500 tech CEO.
In 2024, the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, received $79 million in compensation. Microsoft could hire a lot of American-born computer science majors for a mere fraction of that.
If anyone should get a dispensation on cheap foreign labor in the Trump 2.0 era, it should be the mom-and-pop restaurants and the family farms, not the tech giants.
Thirty-three years ago today, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved.
I am not old enough to remember everything, but I remember this. I was 23 years old. Much hope was in the air. Optimists like Francis Fukuyama were trumpeting the End of History.
Based on subsequent events in the 1990s, and current events between Russia and Ukraine, those 33 years have not been happy ones, on balance.
With the possible exception of the Baltic republics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), the former Soviet republics have not become “normal”, prosperous European countries.
There is as much distrust between Moscow and the West today as there was during the darkest days of the old Cold War. We are just as close to nuclear armageddon in 2024 as we were in 1984. Perhaps more so.
Back then, not everyone was an optimist. In his then much derided “Chicken Kiev speech” of August 1991, US President George H.W. Bush warned the Soviet nationalities against “suicidal nationalism”. Bush was speaking to ultranationalist forces in Ukraine, but also in Russia, where Boris Yeltsin was already ascendent.
Bush clearly believed that it would be better for the USSR to devolve gradually rather than suddenly, with so many unresolved issues on the table. Like, for example, the future of Crimea, and the Russian-dominated oblasts in the eastern portion of Ukraine.
Oh, and then there was the question of NATO’s future in a post-Soviet world. Lots of people were wondering about that in 1991, too.
In August 1991, no one was much interested in heeding the cautionary words of George H.W. Bush, a member of the generation that had fought World War II, and thus knew firsthand the dangers of both extreme nationalism and utopianism.
After an abortive coup attempt by Soviet hardliners later that same month, the course for the abrupt, pell-mell dissolution of the USSR was set in stone. The Soviet Union ended that same year, with ill will between the constituent republics, and distrust between Russia and the West regarding the future of NATO.
And 33 years later, here we are. An authoritarian super-state like the Soviet Union was probably never going to dissolve without any bloodshed. But it might not have come to all this.
Maybe we should have been a bit less optimistic in 1991. Perhaps we should even have listened to the warnings of George H.W. Bush. In retrospect, Bush seemed to have a better handle on the future than Francis Fukuyama, or the impatient nationalists in the USSR.
I live near Cincinnati, Ohio. This past week, a 58-year-old retired police lieutenant was arrested in a prostitution sting carried out at a Cincinnati-area hotel. This was a major news item, as the reader can imagine.
The retired lawman paid $200 for a voluntary sexual encounter with a known sex worker. He was not caught with his pants down, but arrested after the act. No word on whether or not the arresting officers allowed the woman to keep the $200. She definitely lost a future client.
If you live in Ohio, you’ve seen scores of prostitution busts on your local news reports in recent months. Ohio’s attorney general, Dave Yost, has made the elimination of sex-for-hire his signature policy initiative. No greenbacks for hanky-panky in Ohio. The hotel rooms and private bedchambers of the Buckeye State will be free from such iniquities.
This is not something that the voters necessarily asked for as a priority. Most of us are far more concerned about our sky-high residential property taxes, and the violent crime in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus.
AG Yost claims that he is combatting a pandemic of human trafficking. But the attorney general’s results don’t square with his claims. Most of these busts involvefemale sex workers in their 30s, and even older male clients. Middle-aged people, in other words, engaging in consensual encounters. Yost has yet to provide hard, publicly available evidence of said trafficking. Certainly the taxpayers have been shown nothing that would justify such an outlay of public resources.
This is what happens when one political party becomes entrenched and complacent. Ohio used to be a “swing state”. In recent election cycles, however, Ohio has become aGOP stronghold, such that there is now very little competition between the two major political parties at the state level.
And Ohio’s GOP, now safely in control, has chosen to concentrate on sex, sex, and more sex, with AG Yost leading the charge.
The query “Ohio prostitution bust” yields many pages of results on Google News. Here’s a sample:
Yes, a college professor and a dentist! These reports always involve a lot of pearl-clutching on the part of the media and interviewed law enforcement officers. How could it be that “ordinary” men are drawn to the promise of illicit, no-strings sex? Quite shocking, isn’t it? As if any of this were a concept that hasn’t existed since the literal dawn of civilization.
But it isn’t only men who are getting in trouble over sex work. At the national level, we’ve all seen news stories about female public school teachers getting fired after they were discovered to be moonlighting on OnlyFans.The incidents of public school teachers engaging in OnlyFans side hustles have become so common in recent years that ABC News devoted an entire report to that sole topic last August.
I think we know what motivates the men. But why do women do this? At the end of the day, the incentive to engage in sex work would seem to come down to supply-and-demand. To be blunt about it: women can make a lot of money doing this.
A 2021 divorce case in NYC revealed that a surgeon’s (soon to be former) wife, who had won beauty pageants, made $700,000 as an “escort”—another name for acall girl.
In 2023, the New York Post interviewed an escort who sometimes made $34,000 per week, serving as a “professional girlfriend” to Wall Street bankers. The escort, Mia Lee, is a former accountant.
My gf: Are you going to do nothing again today?
Me: I wouldn’t say nothing… I’m trying to make a permanent imprint of my ass on this couch cushion. But wouldn’t ya know? West Elm furniture is surprisingly resilient 😆 pic.twitter.com/juUSEZCHGl
And then there are the women who have made six and seven figures on OnlyFans. Twenty-year-old OnlyFans model Sophie Rain claimed to have made $43 million in 2024.
Sophie Rain just revealed she made $43 million this year alone on 0nlyFans
There is a part of me that can understand a man paying to sleep with a beauty queen. I cannot understand why any man would spend money on OnlyFans. But gazillions of men obviously do. The sex business is a business with almost infinite demand, and there are many permutations of it.
I should also point out that while there are beauty queens in the business, a large number of the women interviewed in these articles (or exposed in news stories) are not beauty queens. In fact, the beauty queens seem to be relative outliers. The vast majority of these women are average looking, and many will never see the age of 35 again. (The aforementioned Mia Lee is 36 at the time of this writing.) In short, this is an economic opportunity that is available to almost any woman who is willing to partake.
The downsides, of course, are not insignificant. Ours is an era in which all forms of sex between consenting adults are on the table. But the minute one injects money into the equation, it’s back to Puritan times. Sex work side hustles can ruin women’s vanilla careers. Just ask the many teachers who have been fired for their OnlyFans accounts.
And, of course, not every woman relishes the idea of being the sex object of multiple, random men. In fact, we can safely assume that most women, when presented with the career options available in the male entertainment industry, are going to say, “No thanks.” (But then, not every woman wants to be a teacher.)
This is why Mia Lee, and the ex-wife of that NYC surgeon, can make such a killing. Demand for their services far outstrips (no pun intended) supply. In economic terms, that’s a recipe for high prices, and big payoffs to those who are willing to exploit market scarcity.
Does this mean that no women are being “trafficked” in sex work? Well, of course not. There are people being forced to work against their will in mining, the restaurant business, and textiles, too. In some parts of the world, children are regularly pressed into military service.
Yet somehow we manage to make a distinction between voluntary and involuntary labor in these industries and professions. No one claims that the textile industry should be outlawed, because textile workers have been exploited in specific situations. Instead we focus on eliminating those specific instances of abuse.
Why should sex work be any different? And how can a blanket human trafficking theory explain women like Mia Lee, who are obviously not trafficked (and who probably make more than some of their clients)?
***
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost seeks to change human nature, to eliminate demand by subjecting the noncompliant— both male and female—to legal penalties and public shame.
Yost is a conservative Republican. But in this regard, he has much in common with social engineers of any ideological stripe. Humankind will conform to his vision of how humankind should be…or else.
I’m not here to advocate that anyone participate in sex work, on either the demand or the supply side. I still don’t understand why any man would want to spend a dime on OnlyFans. Nor do I fully understand the mindset of those men who pay Mia Lee her princely $1,300 per hour fee (according to her website). I mean, jeez, you can get a laptop computer for $1,300. Or an airplane ticket.
But if you can give something away, you ought to be able to sell it. And if you can accept something gratis, then you ought to be able to pay money for it. Such transactions among consenting adults are none of the government’s business. Or so says the libertarian in me.
In this book, you’ll learn about the honey trap in which Alexander Hamilton was ensnared in 1797. Women and sex, it turns out, were among Hamilton’s principal weaknesses.
There are the requisite chapters about Warren G. Harding and the Nan Britton affair. Also Eisenhower’s unconsummated sexual liaisons with his wartime driver, Kay Summersby. (Apparently, Ike was impotent by the time he became involved with the much younger, statuesque Summersby.)
Needless to say, the chapter on John F. Kennedy is among the most lurid. There are the expected entries about Marilyn Monroe, and the two White House secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle. But there are also some surprises.
According to this book, JFK was into partner-swapping mini-orgies involving other men, too (Note: not with any male-male contact, though). And of course, threesomes with two women. (What man isn’t, after all?)
JFK
While most of JFK’s conquests were on the younger side, not all of them were. When German actress Marlene Dietrich visited the White House shortly before JFK’s death, Kennedy decided that he had to have her, too.
Dietrich, born in 1901, was sixteen years older than Kennedy. She was then already in her sixties. Dietrich quickly decided, though, that she would not turn down a chance to romp with America’s youthful, charismatic commander-in-chief.
But there was one caveat: “I was an old woman by then,” she later recounted, “and damn if I was going to be on top.”
Dietrich also reported that the encounter did not last long. JFK was fast out of the gate. That assessment conformed to other reports about our 35th president.
Marlene Dietrich
Speaking of age: JFK died at 46, when he was still in his prime. He is frozen in amber as a youngish, good-looking man.
For as long as he lived, JFK was largely attractive to women. But even during his lifetime, he showed signs of what would now be called predatory behavior. He often manipulated women into sex, and occasionally plied them with alcohol and drugs.
And speaking of age again: Some of his partners were far too young for a grown man in a position of power, even by the standards of that era.
What if JFK had not been martyred at the age of 46? What if he had served out a presumable second term and died of old age? A normal lifespan would have placed Kennedy’s death sometime in the 1990s or the early years of the twentieth century. (He would have turned 100 in 2017.)
We can assume that at a certain point—probably not far into the 1970s— the women would no longer have been quite so willing, and JFK would have met with more resistance. For JFK, sex was more than a mere biological drive. He was clearly compulsive about his conquests, and regarded sex as an extension of his power.
It is therefore not difficult to imagine JFK, had he lived, being embroiled in a sordid late-life sexual harassment scandal, not unlike those that befell both Trump and Biden. (Joe Biden was accused of sexual harassment, too, both by Senate staffer Tara Reade, and seven other women. But the mainstream media chose not to dwell on these accusations. Make of that what you will.)
Like many Americans who are too young to remember JFK in office (he died five years before I was born), I grew up thinking of Kennedy as a mythic figure. I attended Catholic schools, and a portrait of JFK hung in at least two of my K-12 classrooms, right beside portraits of the Pope and several of the saints.
But keep in mind: had he not been martyred in 1963, JFK would have been just another former president in his golden years.
I might also note that Donald Trump had no shortage of willing female partners in his 30s and 40s. In those days, Trump was not a controversial septuagenarian politician, but a glamorous tabloid billionaire. Many women wanted to be with him.
Time and age are the enemies of sex appeal. The difference between a celebrated ladies’ man and a reviled lecher is often a matter of a few years and a few wrong presumptions. Just ask Donald Trump.
