"America is Not a Happy Place"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“America is Not a Happy Place”

February 23, 2024

 

“…happiness depends more upon the internal frame of

a person’s mind than on the externals in the world.”

                                                                                                                George Washington (1732-1799)

                                                                                                                Letter to his mother, Mary Ball Washington

                                                                                                                February 15, 1787

 

“Last Sunday the rain was making a fair imitation of Noah’s flood, so I

stayed in to read the paper. After ten minutes I’d lost the will to live…”

                                                                                                                Tom Cunliffe (1947-)

                                                                                                                British yachting journalist

                                                                                                                Classic Boat, January 2024

 

I am an optimist who looks to the sunny side, no matter personal or national setbacks. However, that attitude has become more difficult when looking at the state of our nation, especially when listening to and reading the news. We are angry. As a white male conservative, I am labeled a white supremacist. We have been divided into victims and victimizers. The individual has been subsumed by his or her identity group. Laughter is hampered for fear of upsetting someone or some group. In colleges and schools, books are censored for fear of being offensive, and safe spaces are offered, including segregated college dorms. The idea of an American mixing bowl has become passé. While George Washington, rightly, warned against “the imposters of pretended patriotism,” love for America is now ridiculed as the refuge of scoundrels, or MAGA Republicans. 65% of Americans feel the country is headed in the wrong direction. 

 

A 2021 study in the medical journal The Lancet found that 59% of America’s youth, aged 16-25, were “extremely worried” about climate change. More than half reported feeling sad, angry, helpless, and guilty about the changing climate. Yet the International Disaster Database reports that the number of deaths around the world related to climate change have fallen 98% since 1920. There is no question that climate is changing, as it has for millions of years. Yet the media and climate fearmongers suggest that by altering people’s behavior climate change will cease or moderate. It has become an industry, enriching thousands. Swedish activst Greta Thunberg who has made climate her life’s work, now has an estimated net worth of $18 million – about half from speeches – and travels the world on a 60-foot yacht.

 

According to the CDC, and with the exceptions of 2019 and 2020, suicide rates among Americans have risen every year since 2012. A 2022 study found that 88% of U.S. college students believe there is a mental health crisis on America’s campuses. A recent CDC study found that 13.2% of Americans are on anti-depressants, a 65% increase in the past twenty years. With the death of George Floyd in 2020, “defund the police” became popular and crime increased, especially in Democrat-run cities. 

 

We are told our country was built on the backs of slaves and that European settlers exterminated indigenous populations. There is no denying that slavery existed and that native American tribes were decimated and/or displaced, a history we should not forget. But we should also remember that those early settlers left Europe’s farms, towns and cities, with their homes, stores, and streets, for a desolate wilderness. Most were religious refugees, almost all were poverty-stricken serfs. They left for opportunities and the ability to pray as they chose. As well, ignored is that the Founders created a unique form of government, which provided people with more freedom than was available anywhere else in the world, and which it still does. And disregarded is the fact that immigrants continue to come from almost every country in the world, and that, with the passage of time, they become Americans – not British, French, Germans, Chinese, Ecuadorians, Nigerians, Liberians, Swedes or Indians. They come for the opportunities and freedoms America offers. Over the years, the image of a mixing bowl accurately captured the American experience.

 

Political leaders on the progressive left offer the false assurance of equity – equal outcomes – rather than what America promises – equal rights and opportunity. We are all different. Outcomes rely on ability, aspiration, and diligence; they can never be guaranteed except in a totalitarian state. And none of those states have standards of living approaching that of ours. Guaranteed incomes, free healthcare, and free college tuition sound wonderful but are not possible in the real world, and certainly not in a country where success is based on individual initiative, the rule of law, the right to own property, and free markets. 

 

A recent survey of elites by pollster Scott Rasmussen, conducted by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and reported by Michael Barone in The New York Sun, had some surprising findings: 47% of elites and 55% of Ivy League college graduates say the U.S. provides the American people with too much freedom. 75% say that energy, meat, and gas should be rationed to fight climate change. Half those polled would like to ban gas stoves, SUVs and gas-powered cars, despite the high costs of alternatives. Not surprising to those who pay attention to the changing demographics of the political parties, 73% of those polled identify as Democrats. This class divide is a consequence of progressive policies. To put a twist on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line from The Great Gatsby: Today’s rich are different – they have what they don’t want you to have.

 

Optimistic people tend to look to the future, marry and have children. Yet the number of Americans over 18 who have never married rose from 17% in 1970 to 31% in 2021. Fertility rates have halved over the same time. The Pew Research Center, in September 2023, reported that only 4% of Americans believe our political system is working extremely or very well. When asked how they think about politics, 55% say they are angry. Our borders are over-run. Church attendance has plummeted. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Lance Morrow wrote that it is not history that is false, it is when “grievance gets stuck in permanent rage, a tradition of hate that forestalls essentials of flourishing life: goodwill, acknowledgement of the facts of progress, the grace of forgiveness and what ought to be the healing effects of time.”  

 

Why are we in this funk? Is there a way out? Each of us will have his or her own answer. In my opinion, the tentacles of octopus-like government have consumed our lives. Our individuality has been sapped. We are members of different groups, be they religious, racial, sexual, or national, yet we are each discrete with varying degrees of aptitude, abilities, aspiration, beliefs, and work ethics. We should not be molded by the group with which we identify. Politicians find it desirable to compartmentalize us into easily identified groups, one source of our funk. Another is the media, more interested in propagandizing than in reporting the news. And a third are elites, those well-educated, woke, and financially well-fixed men and women, who too often express anti-bourgeois behavior as a way to signal their virtue.

 

As for a way out, just because the exit is not obvious does not mean one does not exist. In 1980, after a decade and a half of scandal, war and inflation, a good-natured and humorous Ronald Reagan appeared, who focused on the Soviet Union as the enemy, not Democrats. With luck, such an individual will reappear.  

 

Our Declaration of Independence states that the pursuit of happiness is a self-evident truth, an unalienable right that has been granted us by our creator. But just as our Constitution emphasizes restraint, our happiness should not be considered boundless, but “bounded liberty, to make wise choices that help us best develop our capacities and talents over the course of our lives,” as Jeffrey Rosen put it in The Pursuit of Happiness.  

 

But America is not America when she is not a happy place.

Review - "The Book at War," Andrew Pettegree

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Book at War. Andrew Pettegree

February 19, 2024

 

“Books…played an essential role in maintaining civilian and troop morale.”

                                                                                                                                Andrew Pettegree (1957-)

                                                                                                                                The Book at War, 2023

 

This book will appeal to those with an interest in books and war, especially the Twentieth Century’s two world wars. Professor Pettegree, a professor of modern history at St. Andrews, mentions Carl von Clausewitz’ On War and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War; he touches on Herodotus and Caesar; and he spends some time on the American Civil War. He notes that it was ten years after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabinin 1852 that Lincoln allegedly asked: “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” He concludes with a mention that the war in Ukraine caused one resident “to use his personal library to block the window as blast protection.” 

 

Since the advent of the printing press, books in war time have been used in many ways: To instruct; to provide comfort to combatants and civilians (132 million copies of 1,322 titles were produced in Armed Services paperback editions during World War 2); as propaganda: Churchill, “We must add to…the power of ideas;” they have been censored and destroyed. “…in Smolensk the Germans burned down all the libraries and twenty-two schools before they abandoned the city with the loss of 646,000 books.” Less well known – at least to me – was that T.S. Eliot black-balled the publication of Animal Farm in 1944. In all, the author estimates that a total of 500 million books were destroyed during the World War 2. 

 

We read of a September 2, 1914 meeting at Wellington House in London attended by James Barrie, Arnold Bennett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells and twenty other prominent authors who committed “unambiguously” to assist the war effort. And we learn that three to four million books, many “read almost to destruction” were left behind in German POW camps in 1945. The Nazis, committed to genocide of Europe’s Jews, were intent on dismantling their culture, which included the destruction of entire libraries. After the war Allied forces were ordered to eradicate ideologies that had contributed to Nazi resilience: “This was an uneasy time for occupying forces that had gone into the war celebrating books as beacons of freedom, but ended as their destroyers.” In a humorous aside, Pettegree writes: “In 1952, comics were removed from on-board bookshops of the Pacific fleet, on the grounds they were too graphic for marines and sailors.”

 

Of personal interest were books mentioned by Professor Pettegree that my father had mentioned in letters to my mother when he was serving with the 10^th Mountain Division during World War 2: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith; Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit; Anne and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon, The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams, and the poems of A.E. Housman. 

 

The Book at War is divided into six main headings: “…building a fighting nation; libraries as munitions of war; books on the home front; providing books for troops; book plunder and destruction in wartime; reconstruction of book stocks, and the war for ideological supremacy in the Cold War.” Readers will not be disappointed with this unique perspective on war and literature.

"Mortality"

 Another beautiful wintery day, with light snow falling in this part of Connecticut. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Mortality”

February 17, 2024

 

“As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming

closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragility.”

                                                                                                                                Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)

                                                                                                                                Nuns and Soldiers, 1980

 

Perhaps it is because of a recent birthday and a growing consciousness of age, but I have been thinking of mortality. I scour obituaries each day, feeling a little like George Burns who allegedly once said: “I wake up each morning and read the obituary column. If my name is not there I eat breakfast.” Perhaps it is because death has been a more frequent visitor in the households of those I know and love. Living in a retirement community, where the average age is in the mid to late 80s, that is not a surprise. But I want to be clear – these thoughts on mortality are not morbid. Memories bring joy.

 

As Charlotte said to Wilbur about the life of a spider: “We are born, we live a little while, we die.” And, while people don’t trap and eat flies, life has a natural sequence. The other day I walked through the Residents’ Garden – a fenced-in half-acre holding a dozen or so small garden plots, now in winter slumber. The garden sits in the middle of a field, and as I meandered along I was reminded of “Sadie,” a Cockapoo owned by a neighbor and who died about two years ago. She was a delightful and friendly little dog who used to love to be rid of her leash and run around that field. As I stood on that cold but sunny field, I had the eerie sensation she was still there, running her heart out.

 

Walking back I passed a small nook, warmed by the sun where a friend, a victim of Polio but who lived into his 90s, would sit in his wheelchair on sun-filled chilly days, getting his dose of Vitamin ‘D.’ I thought of our conversations and remembered my maternal grandmother’s admonition that people don’t die as long as they are remembered, a sentiment George Eliot expressed in Adam Bede: “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.”

 

On my desk are family photographs: Caroline and me on our 50^th wedding anniversary in 2014; our ten grandchildren on the beach in Seabright, New Jersey; a photo taken from behind of me and our lab “Dakota” looking out on the Mystic River; one of my paternal grandfather with his ever-present pipe; another of my great grandmother Washington holding me, with my older sister sitting nearby; and a lovely one of Caroline in Bermuda on our 25^th wedding anniversary. There are photos and drawings on the walls and in albums of siblings, parents, grandparents, other family members and friends. Each recall a person, an incident, or a time. In Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That is true, so long as the past remains in our memory.

 

Whether walking alone through fields and woods, or lying in bed waiting for sleep, my thoughts often turn to those now gone whom I was fortunate to know. We are mortal; that cannot be denied, and there is no question of the truth in Ms. Murdoch’s quote about our fragility, but memories keep us from the void, and there is comfort in the thought that remembrances of us will stay with our children and grandchildren.

"Time for a Third Party?"

                                                                     Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Time for a Third Party?”

February 16, 2024

 

“Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.”

                                                                                                                                Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970)

                                                                                                                                The Age of Reform, 1955

 

As Professor Hofstadter wrote almost seventy years ago, third parties do not have an encouraging history in American politics. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive “Bull Moose” Party handed the election to Woodrow Wilson. In 1924, Robert LaFollette’s Progressive Party garnered 16.6% of the popular vote, but probably did not affect the election’s outcome. As well, Strom Thurmond in 1948 and George Wallace in 1968 ran effective campaigns but did not affect elections in those years. However, Ross Perot’s Independent Party in 1992 probably cost George H.W. Bush his re-election.

 

John Templeton once said that the four most dangerous words in investing are “this time it’s different.” Those words are ordinarily applicable to third party candidacies. However, this year does seem different. Assuming that the two lead candidates stay the course – not a sure bet – November’s election will be between two of the widely unliked (and least qualified) candidates in American history[1].

 

With Robert Kennedy, Jr. already in the race and with No Labels standing in the wings, perhaps the most comparable election would be that of 1860, which fielded four candidates: Lincoln was the Republican candidate, Stephen Douglas the Democrat, John Breckinridge ran as a Lecompton Democratic candidate, and John Bell from the Constitutional Union Party. When the smoke cleared on November 6, 1860, Lincoln had won just under 40% of the popular vote, Douglas 29.5%, Breckinridge 18.2% and Bell 12.6%. However, in terms of Electoral College votes, Lincoln was the clear winner, with 180 votes out of 303 cast.

 

Voters are often told that a vote for a third party means a vote for the opposition. In other words, Democrat leaders today tell voters that a vote for Robert Kennedy, Jr. is in fact a vote for Donald Trump. History suggests their warnings are justified, as no third party candidate has ever won the White House. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest Antonio speaks to Sebastian: “What’s past is prologue.” 

 

But the past is not always prologue? Humans have advanced, driven by those who dared to experiment, to try something new. Consider the telegraph, railroads, telephones, cars, airplanes, space travel, computers, the integrated circuit, and artificial intelligence. Our Founders, in 1789, chose a new form of government. They looked to the past but created something new – a representative, republican democracy, in which the individual was paramount and government limited. Three equal and independent branches were devised to help prevent any one person or branch from taking control. The government born in Philadelphia was, as Lincoln proclaimed at Gettysburg eighty-seven years later, a new concept in human history, a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

 

Today’s two political parties did not exist in 1789. It was not until 1828 that the Democratic Party was formed, as a vehicle to help elect Andrew Jackson. The Republican Party was formed in 1854 by forces opposed to the expansion of slavery. Today, neither party is what it was a generation or two ago. The country club crowd of the northeast, once solidly Republican, has become decidedly Democratic. Internationalists of the 1950s, once solidly Republican, have become, under Mr. Trump, anti-globalists. 

 

Today, two aging men (though younger than me) – one with obvious declining cognitive powers and the other a tactless, uncouth individual who threatens to dismantle NATO – head both parties. Is it not time to seek a third way? Or, if not a third way, is it not time for leaders of both parties to recognize their flawed choices and nominate someone who can move the country forward in a manner acceptable to the majority of voters? I recall once having lunch in the Senate dining room in the early 1970s. I remember the sense of camaraderie that permeated the room – Republicans and Democrats dining together. Famously, President Reagan and House Speaker Thomas (“Tip”) O’Neil, while poles apart politically, enjoyed a mutually respectful and affectionate relationship. And similarly, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich had a mutually beneficial meeting of the minds. But I cannot imagine President Biden enjoying a drink with Speaker Mike Johnson any more than I could have imagined former President Trump sitting down to exchange stories with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That loss of political camaraderie has become the people’s loss.

 

No Labels was launched ten years ago, initially among House members, as fault lines between the parties widened and deepened. Today, fifty House members, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, meet regularly. The House effort is led by Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA). Five years ago, No Labels began an effort to organize a similar group in the Senate. Today, their leaders include Joe Manchin (D-WV), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Krysten Sinema (I-AZ). Their goal is to find common ground, at a time when extremists from both sides dominate their parties, along with news and social media platforms. 

 

Will a Third Party, like the mythical Phoenix arise from the ashes of today’s political conflagration? I am unsure. My hope is that both parties recognize that their current preferences for President will lead to more division at home and to a more dangerous world abroad. Ironically, Democrats hope Trump is Republicans’ choice, just as Republicans hope Biden heads the Democratic slate. 

 

As I have written before, the Democratic Party, being more disciplined, is more likely to drop the Biden-Harris ticket than Republicans to dump Trump. However, as a conservative, it is my hope that Republicans recognize the futility of sticking with the flawed and (nationally) unelectable Donald Trump. They have an opportunity with Nikki Haley who polls well against Mr. Biden. But will she gain the necessary votes in the upcoming primaries? She does not generate the fanaticism of Trump followers, but she appeals to a broader array of voters. If both parties stick with today’s leaders, a Third Party candidate seems, to this observer, a likely alternative.  

 

 

 

 

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[1] To be clear, in my opinion, it is not age that is the problem; it is the mental condition of one and the character of the other. Both, in varying degrees, are corrupt and neither seems to appreciate history. As to who is most corrupt, I leave that for you to decide. There is no doubt that Mr. Biden is cognitively impaired and we, the public, have no idea who is the puppeteer pulling the strings in his administration.  There is no debate about Mr. Trump being a boorish, loose cannon in a complex and multi-cultural world when tolerance and grasp are needed. Worse, he has become an isolationist just as the world is turning more dangerous. However, Trump’s appeal, we should not forget, is to those millions of forgotten men and women ignored by identity politics, elitism, and political correctness.

"First Out, Next In"

 Why would Biden first warn and then give time to our enemies before retaliating for the deaths of three American soldiers? It makes no sense for a Country that has responsibility for maintaining world peace. It is as though we have let our faults govern our goodness and reflects a failure to understand the presence of evil, and that power is an aphrodisiac. From Napoleon to Hitler, from Stalin to Mao, from the Iranian Mullahs to Putin and Xi Jinping individuals have wanted to control the world. The United States and the West have stood in their way. We must stop contemplating our navels and apologizing for past sins, both real and imagined. We cannot hide from our responsibilities. The United States and the nations of the West are not perfect, but they are good and certainly better than the alternatives. 

 

…………………………………………………………………………………….

 

Yesterday would have been my paternal grandfather’s 151^st birthday. Tomorrow is my daughter’s birthday. Birthdays, especially of grandparents we knew well, remind us of the past and bring it forward into the present. They tell us of how life has changed and how young is our country. I loved talking to my grandfather about his youth in Boston. He grew up in a world without cars, at a time when most homes did not have electricity or phones. When he died on February 3, 1963, a day shy of ninety, 98% of homes in the U.S. had electricity and there were almost seventy million cars on American roads. He was thirty years old when the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. By the time he died, 58 million Americans were flying annually. Will the sixty years provide as much change? We cannot know, but with advances in technology, especially artificial intelligence, that cannot be ruled out. Medicine, communication, education, and entertainment should all benefit. And of course there will be other changes we cannot conceive. 

 

………………………………………………………………………………………….

 

Apologies for the long preamble. As for this essay, it is a look into the near future, so no more than a hope and a guess. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.bolgspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“First Out, Next In”

February 5, 2024

 

“It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards.

But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forward.”

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Danish theologian and philosopher

Journals, 1843

 

Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward showed the difficulty of getting the future right, especially when idealism co-opts reason. National socialism proved a disaster to Germany and Italy (and the world), and state ownership of industry deep-sixed the Soviet Union. Kierkegaard suggested in the rubric above, life is best lived with an understanding of history. And as George Santayana famously wrote in Life of Reason: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

 

Divisiveness characterizes our age, like the years leading to the Civil War, the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, or the late 1960s when the Country was divided by the Vietnam War. In last Friday’s The Wall Street Journal Lance Morrow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center wrote: “Exaggeration is the traditional style of American politics, but permanent culture wars, the global pandemic, the agitations of social media and the collapse of party discipline – and, not least, the role modeling of Joe Biden and Donald Trump – have left Americans discontent with mere exaggeration.” We have, he added, “gotten addicted to apocalypse…”

 

Is there a way out? Can reason subsume emotion? Is a middle ground achievable? I think there is, but I don’t believe that either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump will lead the way. The former is in cognizant decline and the latter has become detached from reality. There are big issues that separate the two parties, but democracy is about debate and compromise, not incoherent brawling, which is what our politics have become.

 

The title of this essay stems from my belief that the first of the two main contenders to drop out of the race for President (as unlikely as that now seems) will assure that his Party wins November’s Presidential election. At this point there is no sign that such a possibility is being considered. Neither candidate is widely admired, let alone respected, yet both appear likely to secure their Party’s nomination. In a head-to-head race, polls have them pretty much divided. As for losers, if either were to win, that would be the American public. The likelihood of a Biden-Trump rematch makes this an intractable problem for a majority of voters, as forever Trumpers battle imperious Progressives. 

 

As an amateur observer of the political scene, it seems to me that the first to drop out would likely be Mr. Biden. His lack of mental acuity becomes more visible every day, and Democrats are the more disciplined of the two Parties. Their leaders, no matter what they now say, know that Mr. Biden’s health will continue to deteriorate and that Vice President Kamala Harris is not a viable candidate to lead the world’s most powerful nation. Mainstream media, which serves as their propaganda arm, is beginning to suggest a change would be in the Party’s best interest. On the Republican side, M.A.G.A. Republicans remain vehement defenders of a man they feel has been treated badly. But the conservative media is mixed. While Fox News and Epoch Timesare all-in in their support for Mr. Trump, The Wall Street Journal takes a more muted approach, as do The New York Sun, National Review and The Spectator. And we have both the Biden and Trump nominations being supported by mainstream media. Biden’s support stems from his identity politics and his preference for Washington’s Woke bureaucracy. In contrast, mainstream media would prefer the “deplorable,” but nationally unelectable, Mr. Trump over the electable Nikki Haley.  

 

Will either man drop out of the race? I suspect not willingly. But control of the White House reaps enormous benefits – the coattail effect of elections, control over the political direction of the country and the world, and the direct appointment of thousands of jobs. Democrats, as mentioned above, are more methodical, more controlling than Republicans; they appeal to the group, not the individual. While they have extremists, like the “Squad,” the entire Party has moved left since the Obama Presidency. On the other hand, Republicans have always been a Party of individuals, of oners, where the group is less important than the person. However, “Forever Trumpers” have changed the calculus. Their backing of Trump is less about policies and more about anger as to how he and they have been belittled. To borrow an Obama line, they believe that having Trump in their corner is like bringing a gun to a knife fight. As Hoover Institute senior fellow John H. Cochrane wrote in Saturday’s The Wall Street Journal: “…there is no better way to stick it to the elites than to vote for the man who drives them most crazy.” 

 

For a conservative like me, these are sad days. This should be a Republican cycle given Mr. Biden’s low polling numbers, our moral decay, and our decline in the eyes of the world. Consider: the Country faces an out-of-control immigration crisis; a war in the Middle East that is spreading; a Russia intent on reclaiming its past empire; a China insistent on controlling the South China Sea and its trade routes; an Iran on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power; overwhelming debt and deficits; the lingering effects of inflation; and a focus on identity that has worsened race relations. There is no question of the fervor of Mr. Trump’s followers, but, as we saw in 2018, 2020, and 2020, he has no coattails. Control of the White House without control of Congress means we tread water. Difficult problems do not get resolved.

 

Predicting the future is a fool’s game, yet as the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote life must be lived forward. So, using the past as guide we make predictions. As I wrote earlier, I believe there is a chance Mr. Biden will be persuaded to give up his quest. But for Mr. Trump to do likewise is unlikely. If Republicans want a dog fight, they should go with Mr. Trump. But the best shot for Republicans to keep the House, take back the Senate and the White House is to support Nikki Haley in the upcoming primaries. She is Republicans’ best hope for victory, and for America to take back our values, families, schools, and cities.