How The Great Society Doomed The United States

“Mention modern art, civil rights, or folk music, and you’re in like Flynn.” – Animal House

I didn’t go see Malcolm X in the theater because I hadn’t seen Malcolm I through IX.

Perhaps the worst seven years in the post-war history of the United States started in 1964.  I’d love to blame just one political party, but it’s clear that both are to blame.  This six-year period was devastating in the changes it caused in the United States, and we’re seeing the full and very negative effect of those GloboLeftElite initiatives as they blossom today.

Let’s start off with the worst one first.  That is, of course, the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Passed (like all of the laws in this post) over the still cooling corpse of John F. Kennedy, Johnson used that pity and sympathy to completely ride roughshod over the Constitution, people and economy of the nation.

The Civil Rights Act started as a governmental solution to a problem that was created by fundamental rights of individuals – the right to associate with whoever we wanted to – the old “We Refuse The Right To Serve Anyone”.  Would the worst of the reasons leading to the Act’s passage have been handled by lesser measures or public pressure?

Certainly, that would have happened.  But that’s not what happened.

I hear that quack was tearing apart the duck community.

To give a taste of the hypocrisy, surrounding the bill, talking about forced bussing of children because of race, ArchCommie Hubert Humphrey said, “ . . . if the bill were to compel it (bussing) it would be a violation of the Constitution, because it would handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race.”

How did that work out for us?

I guess it was worth it to ignore the Constitution and the rights of citizens because the relations between blacks and everyone else has been healed and there were no riots in the late 1960s or 1990s or 2010s or 2020s due to race.  And there is no anger and lingering resentment by the black community.

Oh, wait . . .

But, again, Humphrey was on to something – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 began to act as second Constitution.  And it has evolved to cover absolutely anything and everything, leading to lawsuits that noted that the bans on euthanasia violate the civil rights of patients who wanted to die.  Courts have ruled that companies have to hire people who can’t speak English, and the safety of employees who can’t understand instructions is no reason to not hire them.

I don’t know what the intent was of this Act, but that doesn’t matter.  The result of it even existing has been horrific beyond measure.  And it causes really stupid lawsuits because absolutely anything can be litigated:  black managers sued Walgreens™ because it they were placed in predominantly black neighborhoods under the theory that black customers might like black managers better.  Apparently black managers are traumatized by being forced to be around black customers?

I think Snoop was upset because his arthritis was acting up – he said, “My joints are on fire!”

This was a dream win for the GloboLeftElite – it gives them an infinite amount rules that they can make that don’t have to be consistent with themselves or even be logical.  Lewis Carroll nailed it in a phrase from Through the Looking Glass:  “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”  The law evolves and means whatever the moment requires, protecting boys pretending to be girls, and not protecting the girls because that’s what’s important in the current moment.

The law, in the end, does not provide for civil rights:  It simply strips Americans of the freedoms that the country was founded to create and creates a playground where the GloboLeftElite can change rules at a whim.

One example of particular note of how this made the world worse is the 1971 Supreme Court decision in the Griggs v. Duke Power Co. case.  In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that having to have job applicants possess a high school diploma (of which Duke would pay 2/3 the cost if the person didn’t have a degree) and have an acceptable I.Q. score was somehow wrong.

None of that is based on race.  Yet, Duke lost the case because it had a “disparate impact” on hiring – fewer blacks had a high school diploma and could pass an I.Q. test to get certain jobs.  Keep in mind that the same rules applied to everyone, not just black people.

From the objective standpoint of an employer, having an employee who had sufficient tenacity to complete a high school degree and enough intelligence to accomplish complicated tasks just might be required to run a power plant, regardless of what color the person is.

But no, even back in 1971, the rot was in.  And the downstream consequences of this have been huge – since employers could no longer hire by intelligence, they had to have a proxy.  That proxy?  A college degree.

But she did take the test three times and added up her scores.

Now, they could ask for that because GloboLeftists are the people that run colleges, and, *poof* the Griggs degree led to a nearly immediate increase in demand for college degrees as a requirement for a job.  On top of that, it has led to the mind-numbing numbers of certifications and certificates required for any job, when a simple high school degree and an I.Q. test could have solved it all.

How many billions of dollars has that cost the American people?

But it’s racist to even ask that question, right?

The next thing on the list for Johnson was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.  Here’s what Teddy Kennedy said, “It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.  It will not relax the standards of admission.  It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”

Whew, that’s a lot of lies in a row, even for a Kennedy.  This was one JFK actually was all on board for, as JFK’s staff wrote A Nation of Immigrants, at the request of the Anti-Defamation League™.  Hey, don’t blame me for bringing it up, it’s literally in the same sentence in the Wikipedia© entry.

I’d spend more describing the impact of this law, but, you’re soaking in it.

But there’s more.

In 1965 Johnson decided again to screw Americans, this time by removing silver from U.S. coins.  Here’s what Johnson said at the time:  “Our present silver coins won’t ever disappear and they won’t even become rarities… If anybody has any idea of hoarding our silver coins, let me say this. Treasury has a lot of silver on hand, and it can be, and it will be used to keep the price of silver in line with its value in our present silver coin. There will be no profit in holding them out of circulation for the value of their silver content.”

The Fed™ disagreed – whenever coins made their way, they were sorted by weight and they retained all the silver coins.  They even bought a special machine to do that.  Which is exactly the opposite of what you’d do if there was no profit in keeping silver coins.

Well, you know what happened:  $1 in silver coins from that time are now worth over $24.

It’s funny that humor and Schumer rhyme.  That’s the closest the Democrats will ever get to being funny.

Not content with only destroying race relations and sound money, the ethnic makeup of the country, and Johnson launched his Great Society program between 1964-1968.  Coming off of Johnson’s post-Kennedy Democrats holding two thirds of both houses, he had a GloboLeftist paradise.  Let’s have the government take control and regulate vast amounts of the economy.

This led to

• Food Stamps to encourage poor people to not work,
• The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 to further encourage poor people not to work,
• The Elementary and Secondary Amendments which pushed federal funding, and thus control, into schools that were supposed to be locally controlled, and
• The Civil Rights Act of 1968 which put federal tentacles into housing.

The Great Society had spent over $22 trillion dollars by 2014, so you can be certain that total is closer to $32 trillion today, and that doesn’t include the need to hire HR departments and compliance costs and wasted college degrees.

The national debt is $37 trillion.  If we hadn’t spent all that money on Johnson’s programs?

We’d be on Mars.  Or the income tax would be like $6 a year.  And a dollar wouldn’t have inflated away infinity times.  It’s a certainty that everyone in the United States would be wealthier.

I have heard that the restaurant on Mars has great food but not much atmosphere.

We are in a unique period – people are finally willing to look at these consequences, and have seen what is going on.  Thank police body cams, thank the George Floyd riots.  Thank the Internet, so people can see what’s going on without it being spun by GloboLeftElite media.

The impacts of just these rules, cumulatively has set up the place where collapse is the most likely outcome of the American Experiment.  As I’ve said, there is a small window to stop it, but that window is closing rapidly, and will certainly be shut by 2028, if not by 2027.

The situation cannot stand, and that’ okay – because what will come after, in time, will be better.

Let us hope we have learned sufficient lessons when we rebuild.