Edifice of Trust

Wang Qishan, Vice President of the People's Republic of China as well as the friend and mentor of Xi Jinping, has recommended the communist party cadres read the Ancien Regime and the Revolution by Alexis Tocqueville. The Chinese clearly believe that there are lessons in the collapse of the monarchy that China needs to heed. But there also lessons for America in de Tocqueville's book. In this podc...

At this moment, there is still no clear winner of the 2020 presidential election. And the court battles and accusations will continue for some time. The people have spoken. But what did they tell us? In this podcast, the Edifice of Trust host, Victor Bolles, takes a look at the election results and tries to determine what course we should take going forward.

New political parties on the fringes of the left and right have been growing around the globe and forcing traditional political parties out of power. In the United States, instead of new outlier parties rising, it is the traditional Republican and Democratic parties that have become radicalized. But these moves to the outlier extremes have abandoned many centrist and independent voters. In France,...

The confirmation process for President's Trump nominee for the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, begins this week and the Democrats are on the warpath. They have their own plans for the Supreme Court. Many powerful Democrats are urging presidential candidate Joe Biden to pack the Court with activist progressive justices if he is elected. They want an activist court so that the Court can reinterpre...

Negotiations between Donald Trump's White House and Nancy Pelosi's House of Representatives for another COVID-19 relief package have broken down and with them the hopes of many millions of Americans who are getting more desperate every day. Even Fed Chairman Jerome Powell says that the risks of spending too little money on relief are greater than the risks of spending too much. We are at war with...

The Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture asserts that self-reliance, hard work, deferred gratification, rational thought and a nuclear family are the essence of white culture in America. Immigrants from across the globe have come to America and have had great success by adopting these attributes, even black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. Is this cultural...

Covid-19 has thrown education into array. And the New York Times '1619 Project, that portrays America as an inherently racist country, is being promoted as a school curricula beginning in elementary school. With all this turmoil, E.D. Hirsch, professor emeritus in education and humanities at the University of Virginia, asserts that much of the turmoil is an outcome of the switch in the philosophy...

Identity politics plays to a powerful primal human instinct, tribalism. But the progress of civilization has been built by an expanding circle of trust that can overcome the divisiveness of tribalism. Democratic nation states like America rely on this common bond of trust. The only alternative is oppression and force. The purveyors of identity politics are unraveling the fabric that holds America...

As the long hot summer of 2020 winds its way into autumn, COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests seem unending. Crime and violence are spiking as police retreat back into their precincts. And the widespread calls to end systemic racism appear more and more focused, not on ending racism, but on ending the system that we call America. In this podcast, the Edifice of Trust host, Victor Bolles t...

The Nexstar Media Group believes that there is a thirst for fair, unbiased, non-partisan news across this country and is launching later this month a new cable news network, NewsNation, to take the middle ground away from Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and the mainstream media. But for NewsNation to be successful, there must be a large portion of this country that not only rejects all the partisan news cove...

Sheltering in place for fear of the COVID-19 pandemic, city workers have traded the deli around the corner from their office for the Chick-fil-A near their suburban home. But just as they were timorously beginning to think about venturing back into the city, protests, riots and looting are convincing them to stay put in their home office. And upscale city residents are beginning to join them. Smal...

The saying "the more things change, the more they stay the same" is a truism that is not true. Things have been changing in America and mostly for the better. This year, America has been wracked, not only by the COVID-19 pandemic, but by nationwide protests that systemic racism is the cause of the problems in the black community. But there has been change over the years, and much of it good. Legal...

Left-wing economists have hailed French economist Thomas Piketty's new book, Capital and Ideology, as "the economics book…of the decade", stating that its analysis is "breathtaking." But while the scope of his  analysis of "inequality regimes" is extensive, he fails to adequately explain why there are so few examples of "equality regimes" or why the few existing examples are all unmitigated disast...

Between the pandemic, Black Lives matter protests, antifa rioting and the most divisive election in US history (except perhaps the 1800 election), I have been wondering what kind of world my kids and grandkids will inherit after I am gone. The Democrats are veering far to the left, but socialism doesn't offer a better future, just an egalitarian future. In this podcast the Edifice of Trust host, v...

The State Department's draft Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights draws a clear distinction between unalienable rights and other so-called positive rights, prompting a New York Times editorial touting the supposed long standing belief that "all rights are created equal." Nonsense. In fact, like many other things in life, different rights have different values to different people. The cre...

French economist Thomas Piketty has recently published a new book, Capital and Ideology, to follow up on his previous best seller, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. The new book goes beyond socialism, where the state owns the means of production, to recommend the abolition of private property because private property creates inequality. The influence of Piketty's ideas is a threat to our way of...

For all you clueless ones out there, a Karen is a snooty white woman going off on innocent black folks for some minor transgression of the woman's "safe space," most recently of a woman yelling at a black man in Central Park and captured on the man's smartphone. Time Magazine calls these outbursts "shameless displays of entitlement, privilege and racism." But these Karens have a lot in common with...

In a recent video, Hoover Institute fellow Peter Robinson spoke with Wall Street Journal editor Jason Riley about his recent book, False Black Power. Mr. Riley explains that, after the Civil War, the black community made great strides by developing the human capital of the community in spite of the barriers of racism, Jim Crow laws and segregation. But in the 1960s, black leaders began to focus mo...

Republicans must begin to prepare for the post-Trump era, which polls indicate is coming faster than many anticipated. Between real crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests of the killing of George Floyd and the crises of his own making on Twitter, President Trump is sinking in the polls against Joe Biden who doesn't have to do anything but stay in his basement to move up in the polls. B...

There has been a lot of progress in reforming the police and lowering the levels of police violence. Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute has plenty of statistics to back up this point. But statistical evidence and civil discourse are impotent in the face of brutal killings of black men by white cops. Videos of these killings are caught on ever-present smartphones and blasted repeatedly on ou...

When I saw protestors at the recent marches in reaction to the murder of George Floyd carrying signs that read, "Defund the police," I just thought they were crazy. But when progressive governors, mayors and city council members began supporting the concept I was shocked. I think we can all agree that many police departments are in need of reform but defunding or dismantling the police will be a v...

The protests in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder by a Minneapolis cop have continued for many days and have often descended into looting, arson and murder. The peaceful protestors are demanding justice and the end to systemic racism in police departments across the country. But are the charges true? Is there systemic racism in our police force that has resulted in many killings of unarmed...

Increasingly, I am gaining more insight to our economic and political problems from science books than I do from books on economics or political theory. I was started on this journey by Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow that led to additional books on behavioral economics. I followed up by reading Jonathan Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind, that explores the psychological foundations...

Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham theorizes in his new book, the Goodness Paradox, that Homo sapiens (us) is a domesticated species and, lacking ancient aliens as seen on the History channel or divine intervention, that we are self-domesticated. He believes that the domestication process was accomplished by our egalitarian hunter/gatherer ancestors by killing off potential leaders that would...

The author of a book about how the physical brain creates consciousness was explaining how brain architecture strives to make the brain robust rather than efficient. The efficient brain can outperform the robust brain within certain parameters but cannot survive outside those narrow limits. Evolution favors systems that can survive. Many of the factors that make human brains robust are similar to...