Before we start: Bloomberg has news about how Trump’s plan to restore domestic manufacturing is going:
US factory activity shrank in August for a sixth straight month, driven by a pullback in production that shows manufacturing remains bogged down by higher import duties tied to President Donald Trump’s trade war.
Don’t worry. It gets worse.
The 30-year bond market is closing in on 5 percent, which means that markets see risk everywhere. Which makes borrowing more expensive. Which curtails the ability of businesses to make investments. Which slows growth.
The Fed has signaled a rate cut of 25 basis points for two weeks from now, but they’re in a bind because we’ve got contraction and inflation. Never forget that this state of affairs was induced by choice.
Let’s get to the main event.
2. Fourteen Words
Andrew Egger went to the National Conservatism conference so you wouldn’t have to, and God bless him for it. But one NatCon speech that Andrew didn’t mention was from Eric Schmitt, a Republican senator from Missouri.
You can watch the whole thing here. It’s one of the most extraordinary orations I’ve seen from a high-ranking elected politician in my lifetime. We should all pay attention.
Let’s start with something Schmitt said while promoting his remarks:
Some questions:
Whose “ancestors”?
If Schmitt means the Founders, they were pretty clear that they were fighting for a proposition. This proposition was literally the casus belli they laid out, in print, near the start of the Revolution.
Who is the “us” Schmitt says America belongs to? People descended from the Mayflower passengers? Or from the Founding Fathers? Or descendants of those who arrived in America in 1840? Or 1920? Or 2000?
Everyone “disappears.” It’s called death. So when Schmitt predicates the continued existence of America on avoiding the “disappear[ance]” of a certain “we,” is he referring to actual people? Or to the blood that runs through the veins of specific people?
These are rhetorical questions, obviously. We all know Herr Schmitt’s answers and they make his position indistinguishable from the tiki-torch crowd. This is a U.S. senator doing the blood-and-soil, Great Replacement routine. What I want people to understand is that this is neither an accident nor a coincidence. This is a coherent worldview that is so mainstream that it has representation at the highest levels of our elected government.
