Edifice of Trust

Progressive political activists and social justice warriors are attempting to capture competitive sports as another way to bludgeon us into accepting their left-wing agenda. But sports have always been a respite from daily cares and should not become another mechanism of political division. In this podcast, the Edifice of Trust host, Victor Bolles investigates the current state of sports and analy...

A recent Internet meme about Pablo Picasso prompted me to wonder about how many unsold paintings and other art objects he still had when he died. This thought came to me because Democrats are proposing all sorts of new taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and I wondered how Picasso's estate might have been affected had he been subject to these taxes. That led me to wonder why the Democrats were...

President Joe Biden has just returned from his first overseas diplomatic mission attempting to repair the damage wreaked by the Trump administration to our relationships with G-7 and NATO allies. But America's role as global leader had been in decline long before President Trump arrived on the scene and the world is not better off as a result. The United States must not only revamp its foreign pol...

Donald Trump's intervention in the 2020 Senate election in Georgia was a disaster that propelled two Democrats into the Senate, paving the way for the Biden administration and far-left progressives to attempt to make a generational change to transform America. Mr. Trump and his fervent base of supporters are conducting a purge of any Republican deemed insufficiently loyal to him personally to rema...

President Biden is proposing a $6 trillion budget in order to begin the implementation of his American Jobs Plan and his American Families Plan thinking, apparently, that attaching the word "American" to his progressive agenda will blind the American people to its true intent. But the process to make America more like Europe will make us more vulnerable at a time of rising authoritarianism and his...

Antiracism is like antimatter. It is the opposite of racism, but it is not better than racism, just opposite. And the combination of the opposing forces is explosive. Ibram X. Kendi's book, How to an Antiracist tries to make the case for antiracism and the success of the book and the incorporation of its ideas into diversity, equity and inclusion training indicate the influence of this ideology in...

Amazon recently stopped selling a book because it disputes the progressive vision of transgender theory. But transgender issues make up only one front in the battle of ideas that dominates political discourse in America. Free speech is under attack in this country. In this podcast, the Edifice of Trust host, Victor Bolles, looks more closely at the transgender controversy and its implications for...

President Joe Biden has given his first speech to a joint session of Congress recounting his accomplishments in the first 100 days as president and, in the speech, he promised to give trillions of dollars to just about everybody and make big corporations and greedy one-percenters pay for it all. Will it work? Is it a good idea? In this podcast, the Edifice of Trust host, Victor Bolles, examines so...

The Center for Disease Control has recently re-approved Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 vaccine after a brief pause stating that the benefits far outweigh the harmful side effects. Similarly, America's free market economic system (sometimes called capitalism) has been accused by the left of many harmful side effects including the exploitation of labor, income inequality and other social justice short...

Critical Race Theory is coming to a school near you. Soon! Very soon if it is not already there. Many people don't understand Critical Race Theory, just like they don't truly understand the Black Lives Matter organization or the 1619 Project. Most people see it as part of a good faith effort to improve diversity, equity and inclusion that will lead to the healing our nation's racial wounds. That i...

  Business school taught me that it is okay to finance long term assets like plant and equipment because those assets will be generating revenue for many years to service that debt. But President Joe Biden wants to finance long term infrastructure assets with current taxes. At the same time rapidly increasing non-discretionary spending (i.e., transfer payments to pay for immediate needs) are finan...

A recent book, The Politics Industry, describes American politics as a multibillion-dollar industry made up of not only politicians but also advisors, think tanks, pollsters, PACs and many others that functions as a duopoly that benefits those in the industry at the expense of its customers, the American people. The two parties have structured politics and government to exclude competition and inn...

The stock market is going crazy with Tesla trading at a price/earnings ratio of over a thousand and GameStop spiking to $269. But the craziness isn't limited to the stock market. Americans are doing a lot of loony inexplicable things. It's not the coronavirus that is causing everything from the banning of Dr. Seuss to the sale of a non-fungible token for $69.3 million. It is us. In this podcast, t...

In this era of outrage against inadvertent utterances and unknowing micro-aggressions, there is little tolerance of even the most minute human error. Ancient tweets and withdrawn Facebook posts come back to haunt, If not innocent, at least contrite people. The anger and outrage of the woke generation seems totally out of proportion to the alleged offenses. In this podcast, the Edifice of Trust hos...

The search for systemic racism continues. Anti-racist academics and progressive politicians know it exists because the black/white outcome gap in areas such as housing, health care, employment and criminal justice proves it exists. It is just that it is hard to find because, as Stokely Carmichael said, of its less overt, more subtle nature. It must exist, because if it doesn't there must be a diff...

A Gallup poll conducted in February 2020, well before the presidential elections, that 59% of the respondents said they did not trust US elections. If people who lose an election believe the process was trustworthy, they will regroup and try to a new strategy to woo voters. But if they believe they were cheated, they will burn with anger and harden their positions.  We can only hope to unify the c...

The Congressional Budget Office has come out with a study of a bill in Congress to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour that forecasts some good outcomes (reduced poverty) and some bad outcomes (increased unemployment). But forecasts are usually very inaccurate and when governments try to force free markets to generate politically determined outcomes, the unintended consequences are often worse t...

Three old black men, Walter Williams, Bob Woodson and Thomas Sowell, have a different perspective about the problems afflicting the black community than do many modern black economists that cite systemic racism and white oppression as the cause of what is holding the black community down. But these old men grew up before the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty and they know what it takes for b...

President Joe Biden has called for unity in his inaugural address and has backed up this call name a very diverse group of people to senior positions and in his cabinet. And there have been some recently published books about the current divisions of our country due to excessive individualism and making recommendations about how to reunite us back into "We the People." But how do we do it. In this...

A week after the attack on the Congress by hordes of fanatic Trump supporters, threats of even more violence by this mob roil the entire nation. The FBI has issued warnings to law enforcement officials in Washington, DC and all 50 state capitals that Trump zealots will try and disrupt the inauguration of Joe Biden as the next president of the United States. President Trump has said nothing to diss...

President Trump's obsession with overturning the results of the 2020 election have driven him to the edge of madness. But the riotous attack on the US Capitol that was incited by President Trump's words at a MAGA rally in Washington, DC may have freed the Republican Party from the grip of Trump and his fanatical followers. As a result of his rash actions and deranged behavior, his core supporters,...

After a week of chaos caused by his own actions, President Trump signed the COVID relief bill along with the omnibus spending bill passed by Congress with bipartisan support. But his rash actions only compounded the grief and anguish of millions caused by months of delays in congress. Georgetown University professor Jason Brennan asserts in his book, Against Democracy, that incompetent elected lea...

Now that we are beginning to see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel as vaccinations are set to begin before the end of the year, new cases of COVID-19 are spiking across the country. People are tired of wearing masks and not going to movies and bars. The Thanksgiving travel weekend saw the most passengers flying since before the pandemic struck. Pollster Frank Luntz believes that the war...

Argentina went from being the tenth wealthiest country in the world in 1913 to 69th now, and it all started with the rise of the populist Juan Perón. Argentina has vacillated between Perónism, dictatorships and democracy for most of the 20th century and the result has been nationalizations, confiscations and multiple debt defaults. America is entering a period of political and economic instability...

Progressive left notables are staking their claim to the administration of the Biden presidency, but do they have a valid claim to that stake? Joe Biden won the presidency by being the nice guy alternative to President Trump and promoting unity to attract centrist Democrats and independents, not by being a socialist revolutionary. There was no blue wave. Republicans did well down ballot. In this p...