1091 Vulture capitalism is Jewish Capitalism; Vulture Capitalism and the Donor Class

Vulture capitalism is Jewish Capitalism; Vulture Capitalism and the
Donor Class

(1) Vulture capitalism is Jewish Capitalism
(2) Vulture Capitalism and the Donor Class

(1) Vulture capitalism is Jewish Capitalism

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2019/12/18/vulture-capitalism-is-Jewish-capitalism/

https://www.unz.com/article/vulture-capitalism-is-Jewish-capitalism/

December 18, 2019

by Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.

"If man will strike, strike through the mask!" Ahab, Moby Dick

It was very gratifying to see Tucker Carlson’s recent attack on the
activities of Paul Singer’s vulture fund, Elliot Associates, a group I
first profiled four years ago. In many respects, it is truly remarkable
that vulture funds like Singer’s escaped major media attention prior to
this, especially when one considers how extraordinarily harmful and
exploitative they are. Many countries are now in very significant debt
to groups like Elliot Associates and, as Tucker’s segment very starkly
illustrated, their reach has now extended into the very heart of
small-town America. Shining a spotlight on the spread of this virus is
definitely welcome. I strongly believe, however, that the problem
presented by these cabals of exploitative financiers will only be solved
if their true nature is fully discerned. Thus far, the descriptive
terminology employed in discussing their activities has revolved only
around the scavenging and parasitic nature of their activities. Elliot
Associates have therefore been described as a quintessential example of
a "vulture fund" practicing "vulture capitalism." But these funds aren’t
run by carrion birds. They are operated almost exclusively by Jews. In
the following essay, I want us to examine the largest and most
influential "vulture funds," to assess their leadership, ethos,
financial practices, and how they disseminate their dubiously acquired
wealth. I want us to set aside colorful metaphors. I want us to strike
through the mask.

Who Are The Vultures?

It is commonly agreed that the most significant global vulture funds are
Elliot Management, Cerberus, FG Hemisphere, Autonomy Capital, Baupost
Group, Canyon Capital Advisors, Monarch Alternative Capital, GoldenTree
Asset Management, Aurelius Capital Management, OakTree Capital,
Fundamental Advisors, and Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP.

The names of these groups are very interesting, being either blankly
nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or rural/pastoral
origins (note the prevalence of oak, trees, parks, canyons, monarchs, or
the use of names like Aurelius and Elliot). This is the same tactic
employed by the Jew Jordan Belfort, the "Wolf of Wall Street," who
operated multiple major frauds under the business name Stratton Oakmont.

These names are masks. They are designed to cultivate trust and obscure
the real background of the various groupings of financiers. None of
these groups have Anglo-Saxon or venerable origins. None are based in
rural idylls. All of the vulture funds named above were founded by, and
continue to be operated by, ethnocentric, globalist, urban-dwelling
Jews. A quick review of each of their websites reveals their founders
and central figures to be:

Elliot Management — Paul Singer, Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn, Stephen Taub,
Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel

Cerberus — Stephen Feinberg, Lee Millstein, Jeffrey Lomasky, Seth
Plattus, Joshua Weintraub, Daniel Wolf, David Teitelbaum

FG Hemisphere — Peter Grossman

Autonomy Capital — Derek Goodman

Baupost Group — Seth Klarman, Jordan Baruch, Isaac Auerbach

Canyon Capital Advisors — Joshua Friedman, Mitchell Julis

Monarch Alternative Capital — Andrew Herenstein, Michael Weinstock

GoldenTree Asset Management — Steven Tananbaum, Steven Shapiro

Aurelius Capital Management — Mark Brodsky, Samuel Rubin, Eleazer Klein,
Jason Kaplan

OakTree Capital — Howard Marks, Bruce Karsh, Jay Wintrob, John Frank,
Sheldon Stone

Fundamental Advisors — Laurence Gottlieb, Jonathan Stern

Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP — Josh Birnbaum, Sam Alcoff

The fact that all of these vulture funds, widely acknowledged as the
most influential and predatory, are owned and operated by Jews is
remarkable in itself, especially in a contemporary context in which we
are constantly bombarded with the suggestion that Jews don’t have a
special relationship with money or usury, and that any such idea is an
example of ignorant prejudice. Equally remarkable, however, is the fact
that Jewish representation saturates the board level of these companies
also, suggesting that their beginnings and methods of internal promotion
and operation rely heavily on ethnic-communal origins, and religious and
social cohesion more generally. As such, these Jewish funds provide an
excellent opportunity to examine their financial and political
activities as expressions of Jewishness, and can thus be placed in the
broader framework of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy and the long
historical trajectory of Jewish-European relations.

How They Feed

In May 2018, Puerto Rico declared a form of municipal bankruptcy after
falling into more than $74.8 billion in debt, of which more than $34
billion is interest and fees. The debt was owed to all of the Jewish
capitalists named above, with the exception of Stephen Feinberg’s
Cerberus group. In order to commence payments, the government had
instituted a policy of fiscal austerity, closing schools and raising
utility bills, but when Hurricane Maria hit the island in September
2017, Puerto Rico was forced to stop transfers to their Jewish
creditors. This provoked an aggressive attempt by the Jewish funds to
seize assets from an island suffering from an 80% power outage, with the
addition of further interest and fees. Protests broke out in several US
cities calling for the debt to be forgiven. After a quick stop in Puerto
Rico in late 2018, Donald Trump pandered to this sentiment when he told
Fox News, "They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street, and
we’re going to have to wipe that out." But Trump’s statement, like all
of Trump’s statements, had no substance. The following day, the director
of the White House budget office, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters: "I
think what you heard the president say is that Puerto Rico is going to
have to figure out a way to solve its debt problem." In other words,
Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to pay its Jews.

Trump’s reversal is hardly surprising, given that the President is
considered extremely friendly to Jewish financial power. When he
referred to "your friends on Wall Street" he really meant his friends on
Wall Street. One of his closest allies is Stephen Feinberg, founder and
CEO of Cerberus, a war-profiteering vulture fund that has now
accumulated more than $1.5 billion in Irish debt, leaving the country
prone to a "wave of home repossessions" on a scale not seen since the
Jewish mortgage traders behind Quicken Loans (Daniel Gilbert) and
Ameriquest (Roland Arnall) made thousands of Americans homeless.
Feinberg has also been associated with mass evictions in Spain, causing
a collective of Barcelona anarchists to label him a "Jewish mega
parasite" in charge of the "world’s vilest vulture fund." In May 2018,
Trump made Feinberg chair of his Intelligence Advisory Board, and one of
the reasons for Trump’s sluggish retreat from Afghanistan has been the
fact Feinberg’s DynCorp has enjoyed years of lucrative government
defense contracts training Afghan police and providing ancillary
services to the military.

But Trump’s association with Jewish vultures goes far beyond Feinberg. A
recent piece in the New York Post declared "Orthodox Jews are opening up
their wallets for Trump in 2020." This is a predictable outcome of the
period 2016 to 2020, an era that could be neatly characterised as How
Jews learned to stop worrying and love the Don. Jewish financiers are
opening their wallets for Trump because it is now clear he utterly
failed to fulfil promises on mass immigration to White America, while
pledging his commitment to Zionism and to socially destructive Jewish
side projects like the promotion of homosexuality. These actions,
coupled with his commuting of Hasidic meatpacking boss Sholom
Rubashkin‘s 27-year-sentence for bank fraud and money laundering in
2017, have sent a message to Jewish finance that Trump is someone they
can do business with. Since these globalist exploiters are essentially
politically amorphous, knowing no loyalty but that to their own tribe
and its interests, there is significant drift of Jewish mega-money
between the Democratic and Republican parties. The New York Post
reports, for example, that when Trump attended a $25,000-per-couple
luncheon in November at a Midtown hotel, where 400 moneyed Jews raised
at least $4 million for the America First [!] SuperPAC, the luncheon
organiser Kelly Sadler, told reporters, "We screened all of the people
in attendance, and we were surprised to see how many have given before
to Democrats, but never a Republican. People were standing up on their
chairs chanting … eight more years." The reality, of course, is that
these people are not Democrats or Republicans, but Jews, willing to push
their money in whatever direction the wind of Jewish interests is blowing.

The collapse of Puerto Rico under Jewish debt and elite courting of
Jewish financial predators is certainly nothing new. Congo, Zambia,
Liberia, Argentina, Peru, Panama, Ecuador, Vietnam, Poland, and Ireland
are just some of the countries that have slipped fatefully into the
hands of the Jews listed above, and these same people are now closely
watching Greece and India. The methodology used to acquire such leverage
is as simple as it is ruthless. On its most basic level, "vulture
capitalism" is really just a combination of the continued intense
relationship between Jews and usury and Jewish involvement in medieval
tax farming. On the older practice, Salo Baron writes in Economic
History of the Jews that Jewish speculators would pay a lump sum to the
treasury before mercilessly turning on the peasantry to obtain
"considerable surpluses … if need be, by ruthless methods."[1] The
activities of the Jewish vulture funds are essentially the same
speculation in debt, except here the trade in usury is carried out on a
global scale with the feudal peasants of old now replaced with entire
nations. Wealthy Jews pool resources, purchase debts, add astronomical
fees and interests, and when the inevitable default occurs they engage
in aggressive legal activity to seize assets, bringing waves of jobs
losses and home repossessions.

This type of predation is so pernicious and morally perverse that both
the Belgian and UK governments have taken steps to ban these Jewish
firms from using their court systems to sue for distressed debt owed by
poor nations. Tucker Carlson, commenting on Paul Singer’s predation and
the ruin of the town of Sidney, Nebraska, has said:

It couldn’t be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in
the United States? The short answer: Because people like Paul Singer
have tremendous influence over our political process. Singer himself was
the second largest donor to the Republican Party in 2016. He’s given
millions to a super-PAC that supports Republican senators. You may never
have heard of Paul Singer — which tells you a lot in itself — but in
Washington, he’s rock-star famous. And that is why he is almost
certainly paying a lower effective tax rate than your average fireman,
just in case you were still wondering if our system is rigged. Oh yeah,
it is.

Aside from direct political donations, these Jewish financiers also
escape scrutiny by hiding behind a mask of simplistic anti-socialist
rhetoric that is common in the American Right, especially the older,
Christian, and pro-Zionist demographic. Rod Dreher, in a commentary on
Carlson’s piece at the American Conservative, points out that Singer
gave a speech in May 2019 attacking the "rising threat of socialism
within the Democratic Party." Singer continued, "They call it socialism,
but it is more accurately described as left-wing statism lubricated by
showers of free stuff promised by politicians who believe that money
comes from a printing press rather than the productive efforts of
businesspeople and workers." Dreher comments: "The productive efforts of
businesspeople and workers"? The gall of that man, after what he did to
the people of Sidney."

What Singer and the other Jewish vultures engage in is not productive,
and isn’t even any recognisable form of work or business. It is
greed-motivated parasitism carried out on a perversely extravagant and
highly nepotistic scale. In truth, it is Singer and his co-ethnics who
believe that money can be printed on the backs of productive workers,
and who ultimately believe they have a right to be "showered by free
stuff promised by politicians." Singer places himself in an infantile
paradigm meant to entertain the goyim, that of Free Enterprise vs
Socialism, but, as Carlson points out, "this is not the free enterprise
that we all learned about." That’s because it’s Jewish enterprise —
exploitative, inorganic, and attached to socio-political goals that have
nothing to do with individual freedom and private property. This might
not be the free enterprise Carlson learned about, but it’s clearly the
free enterprise Jews learn about — as illustrated in their extraordinary
over-representation in all forms of financial exploitation and white
collar crime. The Talmud, whether actively studied or culturally
absorbed, is their code of ethics and their curriculum in regards to
fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, embezzlement, usury, and financial
exploitation. Vulture capitalism is Jewish capitalism.

Whom They Feed

Singer’s duplicity is a perfect example of the way in which Jewish
finance postures as conservative while conserving nothing. Indeed,
Jewish capitalism may be regarded as the root cause of the rise of
Conservative Inc., a form or shadow of right wing politics reduced
solely to fiscal concerns that are ultimately, in themselves, harmful to
the interests of the majority of those who stupidly support them. The
spirit of Jewish capitalism, ultimately, can be discerned not in
insincere bleating about socialism and business, intended merely to
entertain semi-educated Zio-patriots, but in the manner in which the
Jewish vulture funds disseminate the proceeds of their parasitism. Real
vultures are weak, so will gorge at a carcass and regurgitate food to
feed their young. So then, who sits in the nests of the vulture funds,
awaiting the regurgitated remains of troubled nations?

Boston-based Seth Klarman (net worth $1.5 billion), who like Paul Singer
has declared "free enterprise has been good for me," is a rapacious debt
exploiter who was integral to the financial collapse of Puerto Rico,
where he hid much of activities behind a series of shell companies.
Investigative journalists eventually discovered that Klarman’s Baupost
group was behind much of the aggressive legal action intended to squeeze
the decimated island for bond payments. It’s clear that the Jews
involved in these companies are very much aware that what they are doing
is wrong, and they are careful to avoid too much reputational damage,
whether to themselves individually or to their ethnic group. Puerto
Rican journalists, investigating the debt trail to Klarman, recall
trying to follow one of the shell companies (Decagon) to Baupost via a
shell company lawyer (and yet another Jew) named Jeffrey Katz:

Returning to the Ropes & Gray thread, we identified several attorneys
who had worked with the Baupost Group, and one, Jeffrey Katz, who – in
addition to having worked directly with Baupost – seemed to describe a
particularly close and longstanding relationship with a firm fitting
Baupost’s profile on his experience page. … I called Katz and he picked
up, to my surprise. I identified myself, as well as my affiliation with
the Public Accountability Initiative, and asked if he was the right
person to talk to about Decagon Holdings and Baupost. He paused, started
to respond, and then evidently thought better of it and said that he was
actually in a meeting, and that I would need to call back (apparently,
this high-powered lawyer picks up calls from strange numbers when he is
in important meetings). As he was telling me to call back, I asked him
again if he was the right person to talk to about Decagon, and that I
wouldn’t call back if he wasn’t, and he seemed to get even more
flustered. At that point he started talking too much, about how he was a
lawyer and has clients, how I must think I’m onto some kind of big
scoop, and how there was a person standing right in front of him –
literally, standing right in front of him – while I rudely insisted on
keeping him on the line.

One of the reasons for such secrecy is the intensive Jewish philanthropy
engaged in by Klarman under his Klarman Family Foundation. While Puerto
Rican schools are being closed, and pensions and health provisions
slashed, Klarman is regurgitating the proceeds of massive debt
speculation to his "areas of focus" which prominently includes
"Supporting the global Jewish community and Israel." While plundering
the treasuries of the crippled nations of the goyim, Klarman and his
co-ethnic associates have committed themselves to "improving the quality
of life and access to opportunities for all Israeli citizens so that
they may benefit from the country’s prosperity." Among those in
Klarman’s nest, their beaks agape for Puerto Rican debt interest, are
the American Jewish Committee, Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies,
the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Honeymoon Israel Foundation,
Israel-America Academic Exchange, and the Israel Project. Klarman, like
Singer, has also been an enthusiastic proponent of liberalising
attitudes to homosexuality, donating $1 million to a Republican super
PAC aimed at supporting pro-gay marriage GOP candidates in 2014 (Singer
donated $1.75 million). Klarman, who also contributes to candidates who
support immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for
undocumented immigrants, has said "The right to gay marriage is the
largest remaining civil rights issue of our time. I work one-on-one with
individual Republicans to try to get them to realize they are being
Neanderthals on this issue."

Steven Tananbaum’s GoldenTree Asset Management has also fed well on
Puerto Rico, owning $2.5 billion of the island’s debt. The Centre for
Economic and Policy Research has commented:

Steven Tananbaum, GoldenTree’s chief investment officer, told a business
conference in September (after Hurricane Irma, but before Hurricane
Maria) that he continued to view Puerto Rican bonds as an attractive
investment. GoldenTree is spearheading a group of COFINA bondholders
that collectively holds about $3.3 billion in bonds. But with Puerto
Rico facing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, and lacking enough
funds to even begin to pay back its massive debt load, these vulture
funds are relying on their ability to convince politicians and the
courts to make them whole. The COFINA bondholder group has spent
$610,000 to lobby Congress over the last two years, while GoldenTree
itself made $64,000 in political contributions to federal candidates in
the 2016 cycle. For vulture funds like GoldenTree, the destruction of
Puerto Rico is yet another opportunity for exorbitant profits.

Whom does Tananbaum feed with these profits? A brief glance at the
spending of the Lisa and Steven Tananbaum Charitable Trust reveals a
relatively short list of beneficiaries including United Jewish Appeal
Foundation, American Friends of Israel Museum, Jewish Community Center,
to be among the most generously funded, with sizeable donations also
going to museums specialising in the display of degenerate and
demoralising art.

Following the collapse in Irish asset values in 2008, Jewish vulture
funds including OakTree Capital swooped on mortgagee debt to seize tens
of thousands of Irish homes, shopping malls, and utilities (Steve
Feinberg’s Cerberus took control of public waste disposal). In 2011,
Ireland emerged as a hotspot for distressed property assets, after its
bad banks began selling loans that had once been held by struggling
financial institutions. These loans were quickly purchased at knockdown
prices by Jewish fund managers, who then aggressively sought the
eviction of residents in order to sell them for a fast profit. Michael
Byrne, a researcher at the School of Social Policy at University College
Dublin, Ireland’s largest university, comments: "The aggressive
strategies used by vulture funds lead to human tragedies." One
homeowner, Anna Flynn recalls how her mortgage fell into the hands of
Mars Capital, an affiliate of Oaktree Capital, owned and operated by the
Los Angeles-based Jews Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. They were "very,
very difficult to deal with," said Flynn, a mother of four. "All [Mars]
wanted was for me to leave the house; they didn’t want a solution [to
ensure I could retain my home]."

When Bruce Karsh isn’t making Irish people homeless, whom does he feed
with his profits? A brief glance at the spending of the Karsh Family
Foundation reveals millions of dollars of donations to the Jewish
Federation, Jewish Community Center, and the United Jewish Fund.

Paul Singer, his son Gordin, and their Elliot Associates colleagues Zion
Shohet, Jesse Cohn, Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel,
have a foothold in almost every country, and have a stake in every
company you’re likely to be familiar with, from book stores to dollar
stores. With the profits of exploitation, they fund campaigns for
homosexuality and mass migration, boost Zionist politics, invest
millions in security for Jews, and promote wars for Israel. Singer is a
Republican, and is on the Board of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He
is a former board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs, has funded neoconservative research groups like the Middle East
Media Research Institute and the Center for Security Policy, and is
among the largest funders of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense
of Democracies. He was also connected to the pro-Iraq War advocacy group
Freedom’s Watch. Another key Singer project was the Foreign Policy
Initiative (FPI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that was
founded in 2009 by several high-profile Jewish neoconservative figures
to promote militaristic U.S. policies in the Middle East on behalf of
Israel and which received its seed money from Singer.

Although Singer was initially anti-Trump, and although Trump once
attacked Singer for his pro-immigration politics ("Paul Singer
represents amnesty and he represents illegal immigration pouring into
the country"), Trump is now essentially funded by three Jews—Singer,
Bernard Marcus, and Sheldon Adelson, together accounting for over $250
million in pro-Trump political money. In return, they want war with
Iran. Employees of Elliott Management were one of the main sources of
funding for the 2014 candidacy of the Senate’s most outspoken Iran hawk,
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who urged Trump to conduct a "retaliatory
strike" against Iran for purportedly attacking two commercial tankers.
These exploitative Jewish financiers have been clear that they expect a
war with Iran, and they are lobbying hard and preparing to call in their
pound of flesh. As one political commentator put it, "These donors have
made their policy preferences on Iran plainly known. They surely expect
a return on their investment in Trump’s GOP."

The same pattern is witnessed again and again, illustrating the stark
reality that the prosperity and influence of Zionist globalism rests to
an overwhelming degree on the predations of the most successful and
ruthless Jewish financial parasites. This is not conjecture,
exaggeration, or hyperbole. This is simply a matter of striking through
the mask, looking at the heads of the world’s most predatory financial
funds, and following the direction of regurgitated profits.

Make no mistake, these cabals are everywhere and growing. They could be
ignored when they preyed on distant small nations, but their intention
was always to come for you too. They are now on your doorstep. The
working people of Sidney, Nebraska probably had no idea what a vulture
fund was until their factories closed and their homes were taken. These
funds will move onto the next town. And the next. And another after
that. They won’t be stopped through blunt support of "free enterprise,"
and they won’t be stopped by simply calling them "vulture capitalists."

Strike through the mask!

Notes [1] S. Baron (ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1976), 46-7.

(2) Vulture Capitalism and the Donor Class

https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/05/tucker-carlsons-critique-of-paul-singer-is-part-of-the-reckoning-underway-in-america/

Tucker Carlson’s Critique Of Paul Singer Is Part Of The Reckoning
Underway In America

The Fox News host’s exposé on "vulture capitalism" goes to the heart of
a debate on the Right about the role of government.

By John Daniel Davidson

DECEMBER 5, 2019

Tucker Carlson is perhaps the only major media figure in America willing
to attack across party lines to make his point. On Tuesday night he went
after Republican mega-donor Paul Singer in a withering 10-minute special
segment on how Singer destroyed a small town in Nebraska in a hostile
takeover of the sporting goods retailer Cabela’s.

For those who don’t know, Singer is a New York hedge fund manager who
has made billions as a so-called "vulture capitalist," buying up the
sovereign debt of financially distressed countries at a discount and
then cashing in later, using lawsuits to pressure governments to pay up.
He’s done something similar with U.S. firms—buying up debt, shipping
jobs overseas, firing American workers and cashing out—in some cases at
taxpayer expense.

In addition to donating to the GOP and running his hedge fund, Elliott
Capital, Singer also funds a lot of conservative media, which is why you
won’t hear much criticism of him from right-leaning outlets or
Republican politicians. That of course makes Carlson’s segment on
Tuesday all the more remarkable.

Carlson’s report focused on the town of Sidney, Nebraska, population
6,282. Sidney was the longtime home of Cabela’s and once employed
thousands of local residents. It was the economic anchor of the town.
But Singer’s firm took an ownership stake in the company in 2015, when
the Cabela’s was making nearly $2 billion in annual profits, and
pressured the board to sell. A year later Bass Pro Shops purchased
Cabela’s, the company’s stock price surged, and Singer cashed out for at
least $90 million.

But Sidney was destroyed. As Carlson explained, "The town lost nearly
2,000 jobs. A heartbreakingly familiar cascade began: people left,
property values collapsed, and then people couldn’t leave. They were
trapped there. One of the last thriving small towns in America went under."

What Role Should Government Play In Our Civic Life?

The point of highlighting the fate of this one town and the role of
Singer in its demise isn’t to vilify capitalism or the free market in
general, but to point out how the system is engineered to benefit the
rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else. As Willis Krumholtz
explains nearby in greater detail, the story of Cabela’s and the people
of Sidney is an example of "financial engineering that paid a select few
off, while the whole suffered."

This critique goes to the heart of what the political right has been
grappling with in the age of Trump. What is the proper role of the
government and public policy in American society? Whose interests should
it serve?

Much of what’s behind Trump-era populism, not just in America but across
the West, is the dawning realization that the post-Cold War global
capitalist system doesn’t necessarily benefit working- and middle-class
Americans—or at least that free trade and global capitalism aren’t
unmitigated goods. They have costs, and those costs are borne
disproportionately by ordinary people, the kind of people who get laid
off from Cabela’s for no good reason other than it made Singer a pile of
money.

This isn’t just an economic question. The role of government is also at
the center of the ongoing Sohrab Amari-David French debate on the right
about whether the public sphere can really ever be neutral and what, if
anything, conservatives should do to advance what they see as the good.
Libertarian-minded conservatives like French look at drag queen story
hour and conclude, hey, this is just the price of liberty. We can no
more use government power to prohibit drag queens in public libraries
than we can use it to prohibit any other kind of free speech

Ahmari and others have challenged this way of thinking, positing that
liberty has an object, which is the good, and that government’s role is
not just to protect liberty but also to promote and defend the good.
Things like stable and intact families, prosperous communities, and
vibrant churches and schools aren’t merely what we hope might spring
forth from unfettered liberty secured by a neutral and indifferent
government; they’re the entire purpose of securing liberty in the first
place.

In the same way, champions of global capitalism might look at the
desolation of a town like Sidney and conclude, hey, this is just the
price of free markets. Carlson argues that no, this is the price of
maintaining a system designed to benefit people like Singer at the
expense of middle-class Americans.

All of this is part of a reckoning now underway in America about what
our government is for and whose interests it should serve. The status
quo of recent decades, in which both major political parties crafted
policies that served the interest of an established donor class, is
coming to an end.

The election of Donald Trump is a manifestation, not a cause, of this
reckoning. And while the left descends into a fever swamp of utopian
socialist fantasies carried over from the last century, the right is
grappling with these questions in earnest.

The questions concern far more than just drag queen story hour or
vulture capitalists like Singer. They cover almost everything we see
around us today. What do we do about big tech? What’s causing rising
mortality from deaths of despair? Why are so many once-thriving
communities hollowed out? What’s destroying rural America? Why are so
many young people struggling with depression and anxiety?

An aspect to all of these questions is what role, if any, should the
government play, and what policy changes would actually make things
better? To his credit, Carlson is probing these problems and looking for
answers—even if it means going after the likes of Paul Singer.

John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.


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