Elon Musk and Humor

 

I support Elon Musk’s idea that Twitter should allow free expression. Social media tends to suppress posts that are not in line with East and West coast progressive concepts. This is a lot different from restricting things like crying, “Fire!”  Musk is facing pressure from both the left and the right. The right is posting inflammatory texts about race and gender; the left is screaming at Musk for not blocking such posts.   

 

Kudos to SNL for allowing Dave Chappelle to host the show and tell jokes about anti-Semitism.  Today most Jews have no sense of humor, although some of the greatest 20^th Century comics were Jews. 

Money Is Still Free

Real interest rates are still negative, they are way below the rate of inflation.  The last Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation reading in August was about 8.3%. The current Fed funds rate is about 2.5%.  The current two- year Treasury bond rate is about 4.1%.  The ten-year rate is about 3.75%.  None of the interest rates is nearly as high as the inflation rate.  Many people think the inflation rate is dropping, but even if it has dropped to around 6%, it is still about 2% higher than interest rates.  So, money is still on sale.    

Interest rates have been about zero, and mortgages have been about 3%, but house prices were not going up fast until the pandemic, when they skyrocketed.  If house prices, or other asset prices, increased at a normal rate, the asset price would only go up by about the same amount as the interest rate, about 3%. Of course, the stock market was booming through much of this time, except for the beginning of the Covid pandemic.  In any case, the interest rate, almost zero for big borrowers or a few percent for normal people, was well below the rate of asset appreciation.  That continues today, despite the Fed’s rate increases. 

Now, instead of zero interest, we have 3% or 4% interest, but asset appreciation at 8% or 9% is well above that rate.  Real interest rates are still below zero, although nominal interest rates have gone up.  The economy is out of whack.  Real interest rates should be above zero. 

The Fed should keep increasing interest rates until they are higher than the rate of inflation.  They say they intend to, but Wall Street now thinks the Fed should stop periodically to check the inflation rate, so that interest rates do not get ahead of inflation.  If inflation rates do not slow down, this means that the Fed will continue to maintain a negative real interest rate, which is an enormous gift to investors. 

After the “great recession” of 2008, the Fed embarked on a plan of keeping rates low by buying up trillions of dollars’ worth of bonds, thus keeping interest rates low.  In essence it destroyed the bond market, because the Fed was always buying bonds.  In a normal economy, if there are not customers buying bonds, the interest rate goes up to encourage people to buy bonds.  If a company needs to raise money, they have to offer bonds with a rate that will make people buy them.  But if the Fed will buy anything and everything, there is no reason to offer higher interest.  This has been called quantitative easing, or QE. 

As part of the Fed’s new fight against inflation, it has introduced quantitative tightening, in which it will wind down or sell off its enormous bond holdings.  This will operate in tandem with its raising interest rates the old-fashioned way.  Since QE is relatively new, being used in earnest only after the 2008 recession, QT if even newer.  Janet Yellen tried it in 2017, when it appeared to contribute to a significant stock market fall and was discontinued.  So, we do not have a lot of data on what it likely to happen when the Fed tries it this year. 

The Fed held about $9 trillion of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities on June 1.  It planned to reduce its holdings by $47.5 billion per month for three months, and then to increase reductions to $95 billion per month.  It remains to be seen how interest rate increases and QT work together. 

The one recent example we have was in the UK, where the new government’s economic plan of reducing some taxes led to a run on bonds (“gilts” in Britain), which forced the Bank of England (the British Fed) to step in and buy bonds as it and the Fed had done under QE, in essence a reversal of QT.  QE has been used to increase liquidity, to grease the bond market, in times of economic difficulty.  Could QT create the reverse condition and create market difficulties by removing liquidity?  We may find out by trial and error.  QT might end up being a greater threat to market stability than interest rate increases. 

 

Polls Are Pretty Useless

 

TV news lives on polls, but I don’t think they are accurate.  They show to some extent what some people are thinking, but they don’t necessarily predict the outcome of elections unless there is a substantial spread between the responses.  I would not even trust a 10% differential. 

I think there are many people, like myself, who do not reaspond to poll questions, so the people polled are not representative, and many do not respond honestly.  Those who do respond may strongly favor a candidte and thus tend to respond in wsys they think will help their candidate, e.g. by saying what issues they think are important. 

One big problem is that most pollsters are elite Democrats from left-leaning media or academia.  Conservatives sense this and when these leftist pollsters call, Republicans are not going to cooperate with them, because they see them as the enemy. The pollsters have contempt for the conservatives they interview and the interviewees know that.   Thus, polls tend to confirm whatever the political elite thinks is a likely result.  Pollsters are unable to talk to those who don’t share their opinions. 

Politico has an article by Steven Shepard about the difficulties with polls.  It says:

Pollsters know they have a problem. But they aren’t sure they’ve fixed it in time for the November election.

Since Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory, pre-election polls have consistently understated support for Republican candidates, compared to the votes ultimately cast.

Once again, polls over the past two months are showing Democrats running stronger than once expected in a number of critical midterm races. It’s left some wondering whether the rosy results are setting the stage for another potential polling failure that dashes Democratic hopes of retaining control of Congress— and vindicates the GOP’s assertion that the polls are unfairly biased against them.

“There’s no question that the polling errors in [20]16 and [20]20 worry the polling profession, worry me as a pollster,” said Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll in Milwaukee and a longtime survey-taker in the battleground state of Wisconsin. “The troubling part is how much of that is unique to when Donald Trump is on the ballot, versus midterms when he is not on the ballot.”

After 2016, pollsters said the problem was their samples included too few voters without college degrees. The polls were better for the 2018 midterms, though they were still too Democratic on balance.

Then came 2020 — which was worse than 2016, and for which pollsters have yet to settle on a definitive explanation of what precisely went wrong. As a result, an easy fix has proven elusive. But pollsters have mostly agreed that, particularly in 2020, the surveys missed a chunk of Trump’s voters who refused to participate in polls.

And the New York Times noted that some of Democrats’ strongest numbers are coming in the states that have seen the greatest polling misses over the past few elections.

Partisan campaign pollsters in both parties suggested Trump voters are again difficult to capture in the run-up to this election.

“There is a good chance that a lot of the publicly released surveys are overstating Democratic strength,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster at the firm Public Opinion Strategies.

But some Democrats are daring not just to believe in the polls — but hoping that the party may actually overperform in November, pointing to two special congressional election wins last month in Alaska and New York, where polls showed Republicans ahead going into Election Day.

“You just saw the polls underestimate the victories in both Alaska and in Upstate New York,” Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview at a POLITICO Pro Premium Roundtable event earlier this month. “So, if anything, the polls may be showing a conservative bias right now.”

 

Stop Discriminating Against White Southerners

 

I resent the fact that Democrats revile Southerners who have positive feelings for the Confederacy.  Our ancestors fought for the Confederacy. It is normal to have positive feelings about your forebears, especially when they did brave things.  My great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy at Shiloh and at Mobile Bay.  I will not condemn him for that.  For me the Confederate battle flag is a symbol of respect for Southern bravery and devotion. 

The Confederate army did not fight against blacks.  They fought against other whites.  Slavery was an issue, but it was not part of the war; it was part of the politics.  White Confederates did not kill blacks unless they were on the battlefield as troops of the Yankee army.  Lincoln made a point of creating black military units, because there were none when the Civil War started. 

By and large the white veterans of the Confederate and Union armies reconciled after the war.  Blacks took no great interest in the Civil War battles that had been fought.  In the 1800s they did not see the war fought by Southerners as directed against them.  Of course, they wanted an end to slavery, but that came as a political decision, not from a military one. 

The fact that some bad people have appropriated the battle flag as their symbol does not mean that it is evil.  It is the people who are evil, not the flag.  For example, the swastika is viewed as an evil symbol in European culture because of its association with the Nazis, but is viewed positively in many Asian cultures, particularly in India.  If the swastika can be a positive religious symbol in India, then the Confederate flag can be a positive symbol for Southerners’ reverence for the bravery of their ancestors. 

I am tired of hearing Democrats like Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi condemn the South for Charlottesville.  Biden mentioned Charlottesville again in his speech at Independence Hall.  There was violence at the confrontation in Charlottesville, but it came from both sides.  The side that started the confrontation was the one that wanted to remove the Confederate statues which had been there for decades.  The initiative did not come from the Southerners, but from the anti-Southerners.  The Southern sympathizer who killed a woman with his car was more a crazy person than a protester.  We know there are many crazy people in the US who seem to be killing many people for many different reasons, often not understandable ones. 

Biden was elected mainly by the black vote, which was motivated by Congressman Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden.  Biden’s campaign was going nowhere until Clyburn’s endorsement. Biden knows that he owes a debt to the black community, and he is paying it in his current campaign speeches.  He thinks he is being moral, but his remarks are more politically than morally motivated.   

White Southerners are not born as immoral, evil human beings, as the Democrats and Critical Race Theory claim.  If, as the Declaration of Independence claims, “all men are crated equal,” then that applies to white Southerners as well. 

Immigration and Voting

It appears from the various bills and campaigns that the Democrats are pushing that their goal is to bring millions of Central American immigrants to the US and have them vote for Democrats.  The Democratic effort to bring more immigrants into the US has been going on for years.

It is likely that the Democratic drive to bring Latino immigrants into the US was one of the main reasons that Donald Trump was elected President.  His first campaign speech, when he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower, was about immigration.  Trump is white trash and he knows how white trash thinks.  He knows the Democrats despise white trash and believe that destroying its political power is their road to political victory.  That’s one reason they applaud and encourage the destruction of Confederate statues.  Not all Southerners are white trash, but Democrats think they are. 

By vilifying white trash and stuffing the country with immigrant blacks and Hispanics, the Democrats elected Donald Trump.  To offset the Republican votes for Trump that they are creating, the Democrats are working overtime to get the vote for the new immigrants they have brought into the country.  The latest effort is in New York, where they have said that you do not have to be an American citizen to vote in New York elections.  They are also working to speed up naturalization requirements, working to remove any residency time or knowledge of American history requirements, especially for preferred categories, such as DACA applicants.  It’s all part of a Democratic effort to make America less white, less European, more African, more Latino, and more Democratic (the party, not the political system). 

Sen. Fulbright on Vietnam

This post of an excerpt by the Abbeville Institute from William Fulbright’s book The Arrogance of Power reminds us that not all Southerners are idiots as the New York Times and Washington Post would have us believe.  The people who got us into Afghanistan and Iraq would have done well to read Fulbright’s book.  Fulbright wrote:

The attitude above all others which I feel sure is no longer valid is the arrogance of power, the tendency of great nations to equate power with virtue and major responsibilities with a universal mission. The dilemmas involved are preeminently American dilemmas, not because America has weaknesses that others do not have but because America is powerful as no nation has ever been before and the discrepancy between its power and the power of others appears to be increasing….

We are now engaged in a war to “defend freedom” in South Vietnam. Unlike the Republic of Korea, South Vietnam has an army which [is] without notable success and a weak, dictatorial government which does not command the loyalty of the South Vietnamese people. The official war aims of the United States Government, as I understand them, are to defeat what is regarded as North Vietnamese aggression, to demonstrate the futility of what the communists call “wars of national liberation,” and to create conditions under which the South Vietnamese people will be able freely to determine their own future. I have not the slightest doubt of the sincerity of the President and the Vice President and the Secretaries of State and Defense in propounding these aims. What I do doubt and doubt very much_is the ability of the United States to achieve these aims by the means being used. I do not question the power of our weapons and the efficiency of our logistics; I cannot say these things delight me as the y seem to delight some of our officials, but they are certainly impressive. What I do question is the ability of the United States, or France or any other Western nation, to go into a small, alien, undeveloped Asian nation and create stability where there is chaos, the will to fight where there is defeatism, democracy racy where there is no tradition of it and honest government where corruption is almost a way of life. Our handicap is well expressed in the pungent Chinese proverb: “In shallow waters dragons become the sport of shrimps.”

Early last month demonstrators in Saigon burned American jeeps, tried to assault American soldiers, and marched through the streets shouting “Down with the American imperialists,” while one of the Buddhist leaders made a speech equating the United States with the communists as a threat to South Vietnamese independence. Most Americans are understandably shocked ant angered to encounter such hostility from people who by now would be under the rule of the Viet Cong but for the sacrifice of American lives and money. Why, we may ask, are they so shockingly ungrateful? Surely they must know that their very right to parade and protest and demonstrate depends on the Americans who are defending them.

The answer, I think, is that “fatal impact” of the rich and strong on the poor and weak. Dependent on it though the Vietnamese are, our very strength is a reproach to their weakness, our wealth a mockery of their poverty, our success a reminder of their failures. What they resent is the disruptive effect of our strong culture upon their fragile one, an effect which we can no more avoid than a man can help being bigger than a child. What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact….

The cause of our difficulties in southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends. We are still acting like boy scouts dragging reluctant old ladies across the streets they do not want to cross. We are trying to remake Vietnamese society, a task which certainly cannot be accomplished by force and which probably cannot be accomplished by any means available to outsiders. The objective may b e desirable, but it is not feasible….

If America has a service to perform in the world_and I believe it has_it is in large part the service of its own example. In our excessive involvement in the affairs of other countries, we are not only living off our assets and denying our own people the proper enjoyment of their resources; we are also denying the world the example of a free society enjoying its freedom to the fullest. This is regrettable indeed for a nation that aspires to teach democracy to other nations, because, as Burke said!

“Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.” . . .

There are many respects in which America, if it can bring itself to act with the magnanimity and the empathy appropriate to its size and power, can be an intelligent example to the world. We have the opportunity to set an example of generous understanding in our relations with China, of practical cooperation for peace in our relations with Russia, of reliable and respectful partnership in our relations with Western Europe, of material helpfulness without moral presumption in our relations with the developing nations, of abstention from the temptations of hegemony in our relations with Latin America, and of the all- around advantages of minding one’s own business in our relations with everybody. Most of all, we have the opportunity to serve as an example o f democracy to the world by the way in which we run our own society; America, in the words of John Quincy Adams, should be “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” but “the champion and vindicator only of her own.” . …

If we can bring ourselves so to act, we will have overcome the dangers of the arrogance of power. It will involve, no doubt, the loss of certain glories, but that seems a price worth paying for the probable rewards, which are the happiness of America and the peace of the world.

From J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (Random House, 1967).

Polls Are Wprthless

 John Heilman looked like an out of touch idiot on “Morning Joe” this morning, as did most of his Democratic diehard colleagues sitting around the table.  The polls on the Virginia governor’s race were off, but the polls on the New Jersey governor’s race had no resemblance to reality.  Whether the Democrat Murphy wins or loses, the polls about the election that had him winning easily were wrong. 

Polling companies in America appear to be corrupt, bought by the Democrats who cite the fake polls everyday in the political punditry.  Based on polls, Hillary Clinton prepared a big fireworks display to mark her victory over Donald Trump in the 2018 presidential election.  Polling data seems to be strongly biased in favor of Democratic candidates, and the Democrats seem to cite polling more than Republicans, since the polling favors them. 

Unfortunately it makes the media and election campaigns look corrupt and undermines public faith in elections and democracy.  Joe Scarborough, John Heilman and the other Democrats are leading efforts against free and fair elections that are as damaging as Donald Trump’s.  America is becoming a third-world country, at least in part due to the Democrats plan to bring in as many third-world immigrants as possible to stuff the ballots for the Democrats. 

Youngkin’s victory, however, shows that there is hope for future elections, despite the Democratic pundits’ efforts to control them.  

Infrastructure Is Reparations

There are two components to the “infrastructure” plan being debated in Congress – a plan to do construction and a plan to distribute money to people. There is bipartisan support for the “hard” infrastructure bill to repair roads and bridges, expand internet access, and do other types of physical work. The “soft” distribution portion is actually a down payment on reparations for slavery. President Biden is committed to paying reparations because his election was totally dependent on the support of the black community, epitomized by his primary victory in South Carolina, which was engineered by black congressman Jim Clyburn, and which made him the Democratic nominee after losing badly in earlier primaries.

Although President Biden has traditionally been a moderate Democrat, his obligations to both the black electorate and the progressive wing of the Democratic party are pushing him strongly to the left. The gigantic portion of his infrastructure plan that is not for physical construction is a sop to the progressives and the blacks. Its goal is a transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor, especially to people of color. It addresses inequality and calls for reparations, although the funding is not explicitly called “reparations.”  Biden is paying his debts to those who elected him.

Since it is not called reparations, it will not end the calls for reparations, but it will temporarily appease blacks, who will benefit disproportionately from the soft money for childcare, paid leave, unemployment insurance, and other social safety net provisions.

First, the soft provisions bill must pass. If it does, we will see how much time it buys Biden to deal with the pressure from the people of color on the left. No matter how many trillion dollars it is, it will not be enough.

Lee on Slavery

 

The following is from a Christmas 1856 letter that Robert E. Lee wrote to his wife.  At the time he had never owned more than half a dozen slaves, and they had probably been inherited or given to him by his father-in-law, Mr. Custis. 

“In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any Country.  It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.  I think it however a greater evil to the white than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in hehalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former.  The blacks are immeasurable better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically.  The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things.  How long their subjection may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.  Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy.  This influence though slow, is sure.  The doctrines & miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years, to Convert but a small part of the human race, & even amont Christian nations, what gross errors still exist! While we see the Course of the final abolition of human Slavery is onward & we give it the aid of our prayers & all justifiable means in our power, we must leave the progress as well as the result in his hands who sees the end; who Chooses to work by slow influences & with whom two thousand years are but a Single day.  Although the Abolitionist must know this, & must See that he has neither the right or power of operating except by moral means & suasion, & if he means well to the slave, he must not Create angry feelings in the Master; that although he may not approve the mode by which it pleases Providence to accomplish its purpose, the result will nevertheless be the same; that the reasons he gives for interference in what he has no Concern, holds good for every kind of interference with our neighbors when we disapprove their Conduct; Still I fear he will persevere in his evil Course.  Is it not strange that the descendants of those pilgrim fathers who Crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion, have always proved themselves intolerant of the Spiritual liberty of others?”   

From Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman

Rise of Muslims after 9/11

 

Watching the analysis of the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, I was stuck by how many of the talking heads were Muslims.  It looked like 9/11 and Osama bin Laden were the best things that ever happened to American Muslims.  Twenty years ago, you seldom saw women wearing head scarfs; now you see them everywhere. 

It was a rough few years for Muslims immediately after 9/11 as suspicious minds tended to believe that all Muslims were terrorists.  But then the reaction set in.  American media and academia defended and supported Muslims as good, ordinary people.  As a result Muslims and Islamic ideas have become much more important to American politics and thinking.  America has become more Islamic and less Christian. 

Islamists not only won the war in Afghanistan, they won the war for minds in America.  Osama bin Laden did not “win,” but he should be proud of what he accomplished in terms of promoting Islam. 

In 2001, there were no Muslims in the American Congress; today there are three.  More and more Muslims are running for office and assuming more important positions around the country.  The Los Angeles Times reports that Muslims are becoming more politically active, particularly in Michigan which has a large Muslim community.  The PBS NewsHour, under Muslim Amna Nawaz’s leadership, has been particularly active in lobbying for and promoting Muslims and Islam in the US.   

Another View of Lee

The Abbeville Institute published a letter by L. Q. C. Lamar written on December 5, 1870, to commemorate Robert E. Lee’s death, which offers view of Lee very different from what we hear today.  Lamar wrote:

The day of his death will be the anniversary of the South’s great sorrow. But it was not his darkest day. I was at Appomattox when the flag which had been borne in triumph upon his many battlefields was torn from his loving and reluctant grasp. After the terms of capitulation had been arranged, chance brought him to the spot where my tent was pitched.

 

I had seen him often before. On one occasion, especially, I remember how he appeared in a consultation of leading men, where, amid the greatest perturbations, his mind seemed to repose in majestic poise and serenity. Again, I saw him immediately after one of his grand battles, while the light of victory shone upon his brow.

 

But never shall I forget how completely his wonted composure was overthrown in this last sad interview. Every lineament of his grand face writhed, and the big tears fell from his eyes as he spoke of the anguish of the scene he had just witnessed. And yet his whole presence breathed the hero still. A consciousness of a great calamity to be greatly endured gave to his face the grandeur of victory as well as the mournfulness of death; and when he exclaimed, “It is worse than death!” I could easily see how he would have welcomed the grave for himself and all that he loved, could it have only averted his country’s awful woe. Ah, my countrymen! well may you weep over his grave, for there lies one whose heart broke in the very tension of its love for you and your country….

 

To Lee self-assertion was a thing unknown. His growth into universal favor and honor was the result of a slowly dawning consciousness in the popular mind of his retiring merit and transcendent excellence, of that affinity which silently draws together great men and great places when a nation is convulsed.

  

Voting

Both the Democrats and the Republicans want to change American voting laws.  The Democrats want to make it easier to vote and make it more difficult to confirm that voters are legally eligible to vote.  The Republicans want to make it easier to confirm that voters are eligible to vote without denying any eligible voter the right to vote. 

I favor the old-fashioned method of having every voter to personally to a voting booth in his precinct.  He should have picture ID which would be inspected by poll workers to make sure that he is someone on their list of registered voters.  The precincts should be small enough that they do not have to handle thousands of voters trying to vote at once, creating unwieldy lines and long waits.  Americans voted like this for hundreds of years and can keep doing so.  Black voters were discriminated against and prevented from voting, but not because they had to vote in person; it was because of other requirements imposed specifically to keep blacks from voting.  Absentee ballots should be difficult, but not impossible to get for people who really need them.  They should be return by election day. 

The Democrats want to change the laws to make it easier for more and more black people to vote, because blacks vote on only one issue – race – which means they almost all vote automatically for Democrats.  In the last election, Democrats assumed that Hispanics would vote like blacks and vote overwhelmingly Democratic, but Hispanics vote because of their views on a number of issues and do not vote as a bloc as blacks do.  Many successful Hispanics are dug into the American free enterprise system and vote relatively conservatively.  However, new immigrants like those currently flooding in from Central America predictably vote Democratic, which is why the Democrats are so eager to get them in and naturalized as quickly as possible.  If they get more power, they will certainly shorten the wait time and reduce the requirements to become American citizens who can vote. 

The states that put Biden over top in the 2020 election changed their laws to make it easer to vote shortly before the election.  Now they complain that the Republicans are changing voting laws while there is much more time to discuss them publicly.  The Republicans are in part trying to undo the changes that the Democrats made in 2020 and go back to the way we have voted for a hundred years. 

1619 Was Not the Beginning of Slavery

4th of July Independence from Britain 1619 was not the beginning I was stuck that very little of the media coverage of the recent 4th of July mentioned that the day celebrates the American colonies’ independence from Britain. All the criticism of present-day America and its racism seemed to hypothesize that America emerged fully formed from some dark womb of non-history, when in fact it was many years old and had already formed much of its nature from its years of colonization before 1776. The hatred of the 1619 project should be directed at Britain, which ruled the colonies in 1619. The 4th of July marks the independence of the American colonies from the oppression of the British king and his rule. To ignore America’s colonial past is not just revisionist history, it is made-up history to justify hatred of the white race. Despite what blacks claim, the first slaves in North America probably did not come directly from Africa, but from trade with the existing Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and South America, which began in 1526, according to Wikipedia. Virginia Company records indicate that the 1619 slaves were taken by privateers from Portuguese or Spanish ships transporting them to Brazil or Mexico. Slavery did not start by American planters sending ships to Africa to bring back slaves. It was an unplanned spreading of what the Spanish and Portuguese had been doing for years. There may have been some slaves in the Spanish colony of Florida in the 1500s. Many of the slaves brought to the US in the 1700s were brought by British ships, until Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the same year that the US banned the importation of slaves in the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807, according to Wikipedia. The French also participated in the slave trade and allowed slaves in French colonies like Haiti. Slavery was not a uniquely American problem. It became an important aspect of the European colonization of the entire Western Hemisphere. To denote slavery as beginning in America in 1619 is misleading. There was no “America” in 1619, and slavery was endemic in all the other colonies surrounding those that eventually became the United States. The emphasis on slavery around the July 4, 2021, Independence Day celebrations was very misleading. It obscured the actual history of what happened on July 4, 1776, and was intended to foment anger and discontent in the United States. Mainstream and social media are selling black hatred of the US to the US population, just like they sold liberal hatred of Donald Trump to the US. Hatred sells, and the media will do anything for money.