I really tried to read David Leonhardt's book. Really, I gave it a fair chance.

All I've got is a an "introduction review." And then a suggestion for much better reading material - so stick in there!

I picked up David Leonhardt’s book, Ours Was the Shining Future; the Story of the American Deam at the library. It started out strong. He told about his grandfather coming to America to escape WWI - he failed and died here. His father came ahead of WWII - he also died but his family succeeded. So far, so good.

Then he wrote about the American Dream. He cited early authors who named it as a guiding phenomenon and force in our national life, and wrote about some others who had come after. David posed some interesting questions about the direction of the nation, and even dove into some IRS longitudinal data to see how each generation had fared in comparison to the previous ones.

Getting better. Anything grounded in data should be of value to read.

My first warning came when he mentioned he had been writing for the disgraceful Leftist rag New York Pravda for 25 years.

The Great American Stagnation is the problem that makes every other problem harder to solve. It makes us less willing to combat the gargantuan risks of climate change, though the costs of doing so are manageable, because so many people are anxious about their daily lives. The stagnation has fueled an alarming anti-democratic movement in this country, one that is disdainful of truth and unwilling to accept election defeat. This movement comprises a powerful segment of the Republican Party. The country’s economic troubles are certainly not the only cause of it. Racial and religious fears about a country that is becoming more diverse and secular play an important role, as does the growth of a right-wing media ecosystem that peddles falsehoods.¹

From his standpoint of believing all this Leftist nonsense, David is going to “LibSplain” to the hoi polloi why Americans are unhappy and the country is in turmoil.²

Where to begin? He is clearly a cult member of the Climate Church madness. He is one more echoing chorus for this non-stop whining lie about “Global cooling will kill us!,” wait… no, “Global warming will kill us!,” …until the data did not support the idea of the planet warming made it, “I’ve got it! Climate change will kill us! Yeah, that’s the ticket!” The climate has always and will always change, so the Climate Hysteria Apocalypse Church had finally landed on something the smarty-pants who understand statistics could no longer skewer them for.

Then election disputes. I don’t know what “anti-democratic movement” he is talking about, unless it is the Democrats’ trying to imprison the Republican candidate for President this year. It is not what the Left likes to call “what-about-ism” whenever we point out their hypocrisy. It is just plain true. Had he left it “party neutral,” and written about the “phenomenon of politicians losing races and refusing to admit their loss,” I might have kept going. But he ignored Stacey Abrams and Hillary Clinton - both of whom went on international speaking tours telling everyone they had “really won” their races.

Then the outright hilarity of pointing to a “right-wing media ecosystem that peddles falsehoods” made me shut the book. As everyone but Democrat politicians sees clearly, The Left spends all its time creating cancel culture, demanding silence from voices they disagree with and doing nothing but lie, lie, lie all day long. The Biden Administration created a damned Ministry of Truth with an eager partisan graduate of Bryn Mawr College to be in charge of telling Americans what was true or not, even as she peddled the lie about “Trump colluded with the Russians.”

Here are some of The Left’s whoppers David embraces wholeheartedly:

1. “Climate change” is an “emergency.” (David thinks it poses “gargantuan risks.”)

2. The Wuhan Fakedemic was actually really serious and their asinine masks, involuntary quarantines of healthy people, school closures, completely made-up social distancing rules and deadly non-vaccines were the only things that “saved us,” the objective evidence to the contrary of Florida and Sweden be damned.

3. The Massive Financial Collapse of 2007-2009 was not caused by Federal housing policy, but was instead caused by greedy bankers. They got the stupid, destructive Dodd-Frank Act out of that absurd lie.

4. The only way to “fix” healthcare is massive governmental interference, despite the fact that every other aspect of the economy produces better products at lower prices via the free market choices of millions of individuals, not government bureaucrats and insurance companies. That stupid lie gave us the deadly albatross of ObamaCare which is killing the country faster than almost anything else the Interfering Progressives do.

5. “White supremacy” is the gravest danger facing America, not the slew of real enemies out there, and now in here because of millions of unvetted illegal border jumpers who just wandered unhindered into our nation and are causing daily chaos and not - of course - the roughly $120 trillion in debt and accumulated unfunded liabilities these idiots have saddled us with. (David nods to this with his echoes of Barry Hussein Soetoro’s “white folks clinging to guns and religion” obnoxiousness - he just polishes it up with racial diversity noise.)

In short, David is going to spew the same nonsense in print I can get from that strident short-haired lying harridan on MSNBC.

That was all I could take. I can only assume the next 456 pages were going to be similarly baseless fantasies of The Left. You can read it if you want; life is too short and I am already aware of the myriad errors and lies emanating from the pages of Pravda. I read Marx in college; once was enough.

A random example of the type of reportage we can expect from David’s editorial board.

If you want to read a thoughtful, objective book about how we can end the Great American Stagnation by destroying its root cause - a cancerous, presumptive, centralizing, Progressive Administrative State - you’re in luck! My book came out earlier this month!

To enjoy your Enlightentaining Host's words of wisdom on fixing the US Federal Budget and thereby the nation, go to Amazon to buy a copy of Messina's Federal Budget: https://a.co/d/hnd8LMI

It is Amazon's #1 New Release in Cultural Policy! Who knew that was a thing?

Get a copy for yourself, a few dozen for your friends and set up some Discussion Groups which will be smarter and more useful than that hokey Lean In crap from a few years ago. Let’s yank the nation out of the Stagnation caused by Leftist interference in society and the economy.

1. David’s Introduction.

2. SLictionary - LibSplain