Books Britain’s Decline and Fall A history of Britain’s interwar period, newly available in America, is a worthy successor to A.J.P. Taylor’s magisterial treatment. Credit: image via Getty Images Sing As We Go: Britain Between the Wars, by Simon Heffer. Penguin Random House, London, 2023, 948 pp. Sing As We Go (the title of a popular film by Gracie Fields, one of England’s most popular stars of the interwar period), is the fourth and final volume of Simon Heffer’s tetralogic history of England from the accession of Queen Victoria to the beginning of the Second World War. Like its predecessors, it is exhaustively researched, clearly written, and long—very long, 948 pages. There have been a number of histories of 20th-century England, the two best being Charles Loch Mowat’s Britain Between the Wars, published in 1955, and A.J.P. Taylor’s volume in the highly regarded Oxford History of England series, England 1914–1945. Both set the standard for up-to-date scholarship and a lively literary style. So Heffer has quite a challenge before him. While he does an excellent job of updating our understanding of the period, at times one longs for the succinctness of Mowat or the paradoxical flair of Taylor. Heffer’s basic thesis is that England emerged from the First World War to confront novel challenges. Despite her Empire, which peaked in size in 1919 as she took territory from Germany in Africa and the Pacific, and her glorious past, the nation suffered a physical and financial blow from which she would never really recover: Three quarters of a million of her best young men killed, her financial position as the world’s banking center passed to Wall Street, and her leading industries—ship building, coal mining, textiles—were overworked and exhausted. Heffer outlines how England first failed to recognize how dangerous the situation was and then how she ultimately sought to resurrect her pre-war position.  Another byproduct of the war that would shape the nation for the future, Heffer’s argues, was the loss of deference on the part of the working and middle classes toward their betters. The emergence of the Labour Party as the real party of the left after the Liberals lost the confidence of the working classes is another major theme of the period. Heffer connects this development with the character of Lloyd George, Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922, whom he describes as “unprincipled,” “unscrupulous,” and “maladroit” while presiding over the destruction of Liberal party. He credits George, however, with finally resolving Ireland’s relationship to England in one of the book’s finest chapters, in which he also discusses the character of the Irish leader Eamon de Valera, whose “deviousness” he argues was a match for George’s. The resolution of the Irish issue did Lloyd George no good, he notes, as his concession to de Valera angered the Conservatives in his government on whose votes he depended. They saw the Irish deal as another example of his “fast dealing,” and took it as an excuse for ending their support for his premiership.  The dominant political figures in the postwar period for Heffer were Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, who between them held the office of prime minister for 11 years. He has a low opinion of Baldwin, whom he describes as “entirely unideological,” as well as “incurious intellectually,” which perhaps explains his passivity and failure to react to the rise of Nazism. He was, however, a crafty politician. Churchill, no mean judge, said he was the best pure politician of his generation. Chamberlain once complained that you never knew what was in Baldwin’s mind because there was very little there in the first place.  Heffer has a much higher opinion of Chamberlain, following the trend of rehabilitation he has received from scholars in recent years. He had, as Heffer writes, by far the most impressive record of getting things done of any Cabinet minister in the 1920s and 1930s. In housing, health, and financial matters he was a reformer, molded in the manner of his father, Joseph Chamberlain.  After a brief burst of prosperity in the late 1920s, England entered what they called “the Slump,” the Depression years of the 1930s. Unemployment, a chronic problem even during the brief prosperity of the 1920s, reached 22 percent in 1931 and never dropped below 10 percent until the rearmament program of the late 1930s finally took hold. Heffer blames the government, especially Winston Churchill’s decision as chancellor of the Exchequer, to return England to the gold standard, thus overpricing English goods. Industries that had formed the backbone of the nation’s expansion in the Industrial Revolution were decrepit, and new ones in electricity and automobiles only began to take off as the Second World War approached. The General Strike of 1926 was a blow to what had been one of England’s backbone industries, coal mining; it never again recovered its dominance. Heffer’s view of key individuals who played a major role during the interwar period follows traditional lines, although he is kinder than is customary to Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first prime minister. MacDonald is regarded in left-wing circles as a traitor to the Labor party when he joined a Conservative-dominated National Government during the crisis of 1931, when the pound almost collapsed. Heffer argues that he “acted entirely sensibly.” In cultural matters Heffer devotes considerable attention to the role that the creation of the BBC radio system played in unifying the nation, crediting its first director, the often-arrogant Sir John Reith, with refusing to allow it to become politicized—something PBS and NPR might give some thought to. Heffer admires the singer and actress Gracie Fields as another unifying figure, especially for the working classes. She has 12 references in the index, while the contemporary Charlie Chaplin has just one. Taylor in his history of the period took a different view. Fields received a single reference, while Taylor describes Chaplin “as England’s gift to the world…as timeless as Shakespeare and as great.” Heffer’s treatment of the appeasement crisis, which ended with the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich in October 1938, follows traditional lines, portraying Chamberlain as vain and naïve. But he puts much of the blame on Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s key adviser, for misleading the prime minister. Heffer claims that Wilson convinced Chamberlain that the “best way to secure peace was to give Hitler as much as was feasible.” Heffer’s study of Britain in the interwar years will become the standard interpretation of the era for a long time. If over long, it is nevertheless nothing if not thorough. The post Britain’s Decline and Fall appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics World War II Revisionism Doesn’t Have to Be Dumb Revisionism, just like the war itself, is inevitable, but one can do it without sounding like a complete crank. Credit: image via Shutterstock An amateur historian—emphasis on “amateur”—made an assertion on a podcast that maybe Adolf Hitler wasn’t so bad after all, citing the Fuhrer’s stated desire for peace, and suggested that perhaps it was Winston Churchill who was the villain of the entire sorry episode.  That’s the story, and it should have ended there for me and my sanity, but it didn’t due to a combination of three factors: the fact that the episode occurred on Tucker Carlson’s show, the fact that we live in the age of midwit online amplification, and that unfortunate accident of being a historian and writer by trade, which compels me to listen and write about such things.  Historical revisionism is an intrinsic and necessary part of history; there have always been good revisionist historians offering a fresh lens on the past—as well as apologists and cranks with hairbrained theories based on cherry-picked anecdotes. It is indeed true that the Second World War has been mythologized into ahistorical nonsense; the myth serves the important purpose of policy-making, with “Hitler, Munich, and appeasement” used as a rhetorical cudgel to browbeat any proponent of a restrained foreign policy in particular and nationalism in general. So far, so good! Yet this “1619 project of the right” suffers from a minor but notable disadvantage. It is, and I use the term in a strictly clinical sense, retarded.   At the risk of oversimplification, there is basically one accepted consensus and three revisionist schools of Second World War historiography. The first is what we see: The war was the culmination of the greatest struggle of modernity, and was as simple as it comes. There was a clear evil side and a clear good side, and that’s that. The good side fought for liberty, and the evil side was tyrannical. The problem with that idea is that it is not quite true, and is an effort of years of mythmaking. There are various evidences to the contrary.  Churchill was indeed a warmonger. He was also an imperial reactionary through and through and was a connoisseur of grandeur and civilization. He wasn’t that a great strategic thinker, as evident from his performance at Gallipoli. He was somewhat of a marginal figure in the British debates of the 1920s and 1930s, purely because Anglo-America felt betrayed by the Great War and the subsequent changes in the character of Britain, Europe, and America. Anglophone isolationism wasn’t a conspiracy or design; it was a natural instinctive reaction to the futile conflict of the 1910s, the destruction of European empires, and the birth of the Soviet communism, which together destroyed European civilization as well as European relative power permanently.  Neville Chamberlain was much more attuned to the British public than Churchill was, and to that detached, sea-faring conservative realism of the old that ran through Castlereagh, Canning, and Curzon, and ended with him; Churchill in effect killed true realist conservatism in Britain. Per the metrics of his own words, he couldn’t save the empire, which dissolved quickly after the war. Nor was he able to save the old world from the “fires of industry and perverted science.” What he did was prudently choose British subservience in a humiliating but workable and malleable American-led order, rather than an unworkable German-led order. Kinship and geography dictated that, not ideology or race.  The main revisionist school argues (rightly) that the Second World War was unnecessary, although they don’t go as far to say that Hitler was the good guy or that the war itself did not become inevitable. The founder of this particular magazine, as well as Peter Hitchens in Britain, are the most prominent living members of that tribe.  The second revisionist school offers straightforward Nazi apologia and a concurrent strain of Holocaust-denial. The first part of that equation is a moral rather than historical question. The second part of that equation fails the standards of richness, rigor, and evidence, not to mention of peer review, and is relegated to crankdom. The Nazis were, more than anything else, modernists. They were, if not the same, similar to both liberals and communists—ideological cousins. The Second World War, above all, was primarily a war between three different and competing modes of modernity, all opposed to the old world of feudalism and faith. The older world and the older gods of localism, horse-drawn imperial carriages, and nature—Bilbo-Bagginsism—died in the industrial fires of Europe and the Pacific. The Nazis proposed euthanasia and not just eugenics. Runic and pagan symbolism wasn’t just an aesthetic affectation, nor was the Roman salute. It was the Nazis who experimented on human bodies without the consent of the victim. After the Nazis, the communists carried on all these lines of experimentation in their own sphere.  It was the old world of European Christendom that opposed both of those and took up arms against them. Guess who are the ones now bringing back both eugenics and euthanasia in civilized discourse under the garb of “science”? The one ideological cousin still standing as a victor over both communism and Nazism. It is the nature of things.  Historiography is always normative and never “objective.” The way we see Romans now, wasn’t how even Northern Europeans saw Romans in their heyday or immediately after. The Romans in turn considered anyone blond as unevolved barbarians. After the Reformation, however, Protestant Europe started looking at Catholic Rome as backward. The British imperials studied the governing philosophy and structure of the Christianized part of the Roman Empire, while the Euro-fascists glorified the brute force of the pagan Rome. Debates about the late British Empire or the Nazis are similarly a matter of time and narrative, given that the world is still living amid the smoking ruins of that empire, from parliamentary democracy to Palestine. With time and shifts in power, the normative lens will also shift. The world will also look at both the Nazis and the British Empire in very different ways in two, three, or five centuries’ time. That much is inevitable.  Thankfully, there is a smarter way of doing historical revisionism without sounding like a complete crank. A.J.P .Taylor’s Origin of the Second World War, as well as Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations, while attributing agency to the Nazis and imperial Japan, also argue that the war was an inevitable tragedy purely due to choices made after the First World War, from the Treaty of Versailles to the German reparations and the British choice to ditch Japan for the U.S.  One of the puzzles that they teach in any “good” undergraduate courses in international relations or history is why Britain waited till a German invasion of Poland to join the war. It had nothing to do with Nazi domestic politics. The British government knew what the Nazis truly were, just as the Americans knew what Japan was doing in China. The German annexation of other German-speaking territories in Austria and beyond made sense to Britain as a natural course-correction. But the two other major rationalist explanations of the delay were that Britain was buck-passing or buying time. Czechoslovakia was more liberal than Poland, but Britain refused the call to arms because, first, it wasn’t ready, but also, second, Poland and France still stood in the way of a German-dominated Europe. After Poland, the question was whether to support France, the last remaining major buffer power, or not. The choices, in short, were made for Britain. In Churchill’s own recollection, the fundamental aim of British foreign policy from the dawn of nationhood was to foster a disunited Europe and deter the possibility of a European hegemon. Hitler’s genocidal mania notwithstanding, war would have happened with any expansionist power in the heart of Europe. The life of European Jewry or freedom and liberty had little to do with it. Same for America. The U.S., per Hans Morgenthau, had supported England purely for the same reason Britain supported France. The fall of the British Empire would have meant the Kriegsmarine in Canada, Japan controlling Australia, and Nazis having the entire production capacity and manpower of India under the Swastika.  For what it mattered, America didn’t voluntarily join the European war even after Pearl Harbor; it was forced to by Germany declaring war on the U.S. Even after joining, both Britain and the U.S. delayed opening a second front for over a year, leaving Stalin and Hitler to butcher each other. Whatever the war was, it wasn’t a moral crusade defending liberty against organized tyranny. It was, however, prudent, realist, necessary and to some extent, inevitable. Hitler, for his part, demonstrated his irrational and imbecilic side by taking on three giants—the British Empire, the U.S., and the USSR—alone. He simply didn’t think the Slavs equal to the Aryans, just as the Japanese initially did not consider the Americans martial enough. Dumb racial dogmas can influence policy-making in ways that often prove to be fatal in the long run.  Ultimately, the lesson is this. Discussions about Churchill and the Second World War, like Ronald Reagan on the right, have become a kabuki of orthodoxy such that the real gray areas are considered beyond debate. It’s all a Manichean struggle, and every effort is ordered toward defining current conflicts through those lenses. Naturally, in the absence of genuine debate about the realism and prudence of both Churchill and Reagan, ahistorical midwits come and fill the gap with their dumbest possible takes.  Churchill was a great Briton. He was objectively better than Hitler. He bought the free world time. All of that is true. But was he the greatest conservative or British leader, statesman, or politician? In the country of Drake, Castlereagh, Canning, Nelson, and Curzon?  Likewise, both the world wars were unnecessary but ultimately inevitable given the structural forces at play. Together they were, more than anything, a tragedy. Attributing agency to either side is fine, but making a monocausal interpretation of the war out of that agency is a moronic endeavor. But so long as the memory or the war is cynically cited to influence current foreign policy and stifle all scholarly dissent and revisionism within the halls of academia and civilized society, we shall see more such unfortunate ahistoricism in half-literate contrarian spaces. The post World War II Revisionism Doesn’t Have to Be Dumb appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Trump Among the Zoomers The former president is making his case to the influencers. Credit: image via Shutterstock Donald Trump was listening intently as podcaster Lex Fridman pondered the “spiritual benefits” of psychedelic drugs. “I recently did ayahuasca,” admitted the ex-MIT researcher turned bigtime talker. “I think we’d probably have a better world if everybody in Congress took some mushrooms.” Trump, a lifelong and vocal teetotaler, rolled with the topic by broadly pivoting to his new policy position on cannabis. The former president signaled support this week for its legalization in Florida, where the 45th president is a resident and voter.  The hour-long interview with Fridman, one of YouTube’s top performers, was part of Trump’s new strategy to reach Gen Z voters in 2024: appearing in alternative media venues geared toward a younger, predominantly male audience. From star-studded appearances at UFC events to longform interviews with the who’s who of the podcasting universe, Trump is directly courting the votes of young American men like never before.  “This is going to be one of the greatest rounds of golf ever played,” Trump predicted as he hit the links with U.S. Open champion Bryson DeChambeau in July, only a week before surviving an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. The pair shot a -22 combined score in a scramble format that featured Trump sinking a tough putt on the 18th hole, leaving DeChambeau giddy and stunned. Trump’s putt was telling. The president squirmed as the ball snaked toward the hole. When it hit the cup, Trump dived away in celebration. Whatever his age, whatever his faults, Trump still has the competitor’s fire in his belly.  Indeed, some of Trump’s best moments on the 2024 campaign trail have come from these impromptu, unscripted situations. “I love Frank Sinatra,” Trump admitted while ferrying 30-year-old DeChambeau around in a golf cart at Bedminster. As the two men rumbled along the course, the former president turned the music dial to Andrea Bocelli’s “Con Te Partirò.” “Nice and soothing, right?” Trump remarked to DeChambeau. It was the sort of honest, revealing moment that the Trump campaign is hoping will broaden its appeal among new, male voters. And the strategy appears to be working.  A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that Gen Z male voters are more likely than ever to choose Trump and his GOP. “They’re drawn to his message, his persona, the unapologetic machismo he tries to exude,” suggests Daniel A. Cox of the American Enterprise Institute. Trump’s bravado, if nothing else, is steadily driving numbers on the internet. Fridman’s interview with Trump has already raked up nearly 4 million views in the few days since its release. Trump’s round of golf with DeChambeau has been watched more than 13 million times in less than two months.  And if the numbers from ? are to be believed, Trump’s interview in August with the platform’s CEO Elon Musk, although marred by technical difficulties, garnered more than 1 billion impressions worldwide. Even those who questioned the validity of that 1 billion number could not dispute the widespread earned coverage of Trump’s talk with Musk. There have been other excursions on Trump’s Zoomer tour. Earlier this summer, the former president appeared on the comedian Theo Von’s podcast, during which the former MTV reality star boldly admitted he’s a recovering drug addict.  “Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie,” Von explained to Trump. “You’ll be out on your porch, you’ll be your own street lamp.”  “And is that a good feeling?” Trump asked. Von shook his head in the negative.  Trump’s conversation with Von has been viewed more than 13 million times in the two weeks since it was published.  The high-profile YouTube interviews come amid a slew of buzzy media appearances that have linked the Trump campaign to a key demographic it must win significantly to have a shot in 2024. Between the Kid Rock–backed walkouts with the UFC chief Dana White and splashy photos with celebrity boxer Logan Paul, Trump has shown a commitment to reach a demographic he has historically struggled with—the youth.  In 2020, the Trump team wasn’t prepared for the declines it saw among America’s youngest voting bloc. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the dropoff was considerable. In Pennsylvania specifically, Biden cleared Trump by 20 points among young voters, while Hillary Clinton’s margin was only 9 points in 2016. In an election that came down to the wire, Trump had failed to cultivate and unleash the same memetic warfare that catapulted him into the White House in 2016.  Trump’s outreach to the Gen Z creator class marks a distinct contrast to his team’s 2020 approach when the campaign struggled to capture celebrity endorsements. In one particularly tone-deaf moment from that campaign, Trump brought meme rapper Lil Pump on stage at his final Michigan rally and mistakenly referred to the tattooed musician as “Little Pimp.” “There was a failure to connect with as many young people as we had the potential to,” stated an anonymous Trump ally in the aftermath of the 2020 loss. Something had to change in 2024—and that something has been Trump’s youngest son Barron. Trump credits his 18-year-old son and recent NYU enrollee as a “secret weapon” who has pushed the campaign to set up a string of interviews and appearances with Gen Z influencers. “[Barron] knows so much about it,” Trump told the Daily Mail this week. “Adin Ross, you know, some people I wasn’t so familiar with. A different generation. He knows every single one of them and we’ve had tremendous success.”  In August, Trump was given a Rolex by the 23-year-old streamer Adin Ross (an acolyte of Andrew Tate), who rolled up to Mar-a-Lago in a Cybertuck wrapped with a photo of Trump surviving the July 13th assassination attempt. (Trump got to keep the Cybertruck, of course.)  “It’s a different generation,” Trump said of his new approach. “They don’t grow up watching television the same way that we did. They grow up looking at the internet or watching a computer.” And so it is to Trump’s credit that the 78-year-old has earnestly adapted to the rapidly shifting landscape of politics and media of this decidedly 21st-century election. As much as the big TV ad buys in the fall matter, so too does connecting with a voter base that has historically propelled Democrats to victory.  If the November election does indeed come down to merely thousands of votes, Republicans may be thanking Barron, and Trump’s offbeat talk circuit, for a narrow victory.  The post Trump Among the Zoomers appeared first on The American Conservative.

Not apologising for following his heart. The post Bob Dylan, going electric and handling confusing criticism: “They certainly booed, I’ll tell you that” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

In a few weeks, autumn will begin. You know, that time when leaves, your hair, and just about everything falls. Apples, cider, and red-brown foliage. It’s time to say goodbye to summer and to these satirical summer columns with which I’ve been keeping you company these past few months on the beach. If you think the worst thing is going back to work, it’s because you haven’t yet thought about everything else you have to do when you get home. There are times when I wish I lived in a tent. It can house less junk. It gathers less dirt. There’s less room for the rotten food you forgot in a hallway cabinet before you went on vacation. Back to the Office The Moroccan geographer Ibn Battuta spent 30 years traveling. He traveled more than 120,000 kilometers and crossed 44 countries. And the amazing thing is that he wasn’t being chased by Kamala Harris. He was attacked by pirates, robbed by bandits, kidnapped, and had to hide for a week in a swamp with nothing to eat. (READ MORE from Itxu Díaz: Resolutions for the Return From Vacation) Pay attention: this was a walk in the countryside compared to what it will be like for you to go back to that damn office for the first time after vacation. Everyone will be tanned, energetic, eager to work, and in a good mood. What could be more irritating? Change of Wardrobe It’s time to ditch the Hawaiian shirts and break out the fall clothes. In fact, it’s time to shed those Hawaiian shirts for good. You’re not Tom Selleck in Magnum, P.I. Nothing Is Where It Should Be When you return home, nothing is in the right place. Most of the things you can’t find will turn up a year from now when you’re packing to go on vacation again. Don’t waste time searching. At most, if you can, if you’ve lost something very important, like a box of cigarettes, car keys, or a baby, ask mom for help. You know mothers have a superpower: x-ray vision. Sand Stays Until Christmas One of the big homecoming questions is when the heck will the sand disappear. It’s in your suitcase, in your shoes, in your car, in your cell phone earphones, and even inside a vacuum-sealed jam jar. Don’t wonder how it got there. While you sleep, the grains of sand dance, have secret parties, and sneak into every nook and cranny. When you wake up, they play dead. They won’t leave until you ignore them. The Return of the Cold  Soon it will start raining, the city will turn into hell, you will arrive at the office with soaked socks, and you will not stop sneezing all day. And, on the wettest day, some idiot who lives 15 hundred kilometers away from the nearest orchard will turn up saying joyfully: “Let it rain, it’s good for the countryside!” The Excitement of Sport In the hell of going back to work, we will be left only with sports for compensation. Buy pizza and beer and embrace that happiness with all your might. But, beware, not all women like this advice. Remember that terrifying assessment by Dave Barry: “If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant’s life, she will choose to save the infant’s life without even considering if there are men on base.” Back to the Gym Just kidding, right? Calling Friends One of the main hobbies of the returned vacationer is to call friends for a few beers and tell them all about every single minute of his 21-day vacation in China, French Polynesia, and the Norwegian fjords. If, on top of that, you are forced to watch 15-minute videos of him climbing some nondescript mountain on his cell phone, you have every right to take revenge. Always carry a video with a couple of hours of your dog sleeping in the garden, focused on the foreground. And spend an hour and 50 minutes saying, “Wait, wait, the best is yet to come.” When the video is over and nothing happens at all, tell him, “Shit, we must have missed it. Wait.” And play it again from the beginning. Setting the Alarm Clock The alarm clock is an invention of Satan to capture souls through despair or, failing that, anger. The most dreaded moment for a vacationer is when they have to set it for the first time. Psychologists recommend adjusting the hours of sleep little by little as the day approaches. Don’t listen to them. Make the most of every last minute of nighttime revelries. You can sleep when you’re dead. And you’ll be dead tomorrow — Monday — when the alarm clock goes off at six in the morning. I say this from experience. I’ve tried it and this column is posthumous. I loved you very much. READ MORE: Everything That Can Hurt You on the Beach Flirting With a Foreigner The post How to Get Home From Your Vacations (and Die Trying) appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In this episode of The Weekend Spectator, Paul Kengor tells the story of Yakob Ravin and his 12-year-old grandson, both Jewish Ukrainian Cold War survivors of communism who personally thanked President Reagan for their liberation. (READ: A Moment of Unity: Reagan United the Country Like No Other) The reaction to the Reagan film today is a lot like the country’s reaction to the man himself 40 years ago. Both now and in Reagan’s day, a handful of leftist elites who are completely out of touch with the American public bash Reagan. As reported by Newsweek and others, public reviews rate the movie at 98 percent approval while it was given 17 percent by film critics — a vast disproportion. Find a theater near you to see the film and watch the full episode of The Weekend Spectator below! READ Paul and Grace’s work here and here. Find every episode of The Weekend Spectator here. Read More: No Breaking Away From Dennis Quaid’s Reagan The Weekend Spectator Ep. 9: Reagan Hits Theaters INTERVIEW: Sam Sorbo on New Film Miracle in East Texas’s Fight Against Woke The post <i>The Weekend Spectator</i> Ep. 10: <i>Reagan</i> Critics Shut Down By Audience appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The push to “electrify” everything that rolls is turning out to be a lot like the push to “vaccinate” everyone; both have turned out to have adverse effects. Volkswagen (VW) hasn’t died suddenly — but it is dying. Chief Financial Officer Arno Antlitz, speaking to thousands of maybe soon-to-be ex-VW employees, said VW has “one, maybe two” years to turn things around else there may no longer be a VW. The company is reportedly considering shuttering its plants in Germany — a Hail Mary pass to reduce manufacturing and compliance costs. But moving manufacturing operations to places where it costs less won’t solve VW’s problems because that is not VW’s core problem. (READ MORE: Cars and the Repair Shop Oracle) Its core problem is that it bent the knee to “electrification.” VW Bent Over Backward to Make Amends. That Was the Wrong Move. Put more finely, it bent over backward when it was accused of “cheating” on federal-level emissions certification tests, which the government used to take away VW’s strongest selling point — affordable, high-mileage vehicles. That move crippled it financially by imposing unprecedented fines on the company for selling those vehicles. Specifically, VW’s range of affordable high-mileage diesel-powered vehicles. VW was the only car company selling a lineup of such vehicles, ranging from the $22k TDI Jetta — a family sedan that could travel more than 500 miles on a tank of fuel — to TDI-powered hatchbacks such as the Golf and Beetle as well as the larger Passat sedan. VW sold far more of these than Tesla sold of its $50k EVs, which go maybe 300 miles. (READ MORE: Dear Elon Musk, Cybertrucks Are Ugly) Hence the problem. The affordable, high-mileage cars VW was selling had to go, for much the same reason the safe and effective alternatives to the “vaccines” pushed in 2020 had to be pushed off the stage. Ivermectin was derided as “horse paste.” VW’s TDI diesel engines were derided as “dirty” — not because they polluted in any meaningful way, but because VW had programmed them to pass federal emissions-certification tests. Every car company does this, just as every kid in government schools who wants to pass a history test goes along with the lie that what happened in 1861-1865 was a “civil war” rather than an attempt by the Confederate states to secede from a union-at-gunpoint they no longer wished to be part of. What happened — as regards the federal emissions-certification tests — is that it was “discovered” that VW programmed the software that controlled the operation of its TDI engines to pass the tests. Oh, the humanity! Out in the world, when the driver of a TDI-powered VW floored the accelerator pedal, there was a slight and momentary increase in emissions that exceeded the federally allowable threshold. It was an angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin difference, and in normal times would have been No Big Deal because it wasn’t one. It became a Very Big Deal because it provided the excuse needed to get rid of the affordable, high-mileage alternatives to the battery-powered vehicles that were just then on the verge of being pushed as hard as the “vaccines” at the height of COVID Fever. VW has never recovered from this — and it is not likely it will ever recover from this. VW Is No Longer the ‘People’s Car’ VW’s brand name stands for people’s car — a kind of tautology for affordable cars — and that is what VW used to sell. It no longer does. Instead, it is trying to sell battery-powered devices such as the ID.4 — which has a base price just shy of $40,000 (and a standard range of just over 200 miles) that escalates from there to just shy of $60,000. On deck is an “electrified” Hippie Bus that only aged and wealthy hippies will be able to afford as it is expected to have a base price of just shy of $60k. (READ MORE: Biden’s Skeptics Will Halt the Next Transportation Revolution) These are not people’s cars. They are affluent people’s cars. And there are only so many of them and for that reason only so many can be sold to them. And that is why VW has “one, maybe two” years left. It is not a luxury car brand that can survive selling far fewer cars to far fewer people at far higher prices. Mercedes and other luxury car brands can do it that way because they are luxury car brands and so — ipso facto — don’t sell many vehicles. VW can’t afford to operate that way because people who have the $50k to spend want a luxury brand for their money. VW trying to sell luxury-priced devices is akin to McDonald’s trying to sell a $15 plant-based Quarter Pounder. Now, some news stories are spinning VW’s woes as arising from union/labor cost woes but this is — to put it bluntly — bullsh*t. The company’s management is bleeding the company to appease the greens. It continues to go along with “electrification,” much as some people continue to get their “boosters.” The company sluiced $5 billion to Rivian — the device manufacturer of $70k-plus electric trucks and SUVs that cost Rivian $30k each to sell — as part of a “partnership” to develop more devices. Hari meet Kari. The ‘State-Mandated’ Supply Chain The same, by the way, is happening to Stellantis, or at least to the Dodge and Chrysler brands owned by Stellantis. They no longer sell the models that Dodge and Chrysler buyers want to buy. They sell hardly anything at the moment. Chrysler is down to just one model — the Pacifica Minivan — and Dodge has nothing to offer other than the Hornet, a small crossover that’s a far cry from a Charger or a Challenger and the leftover Durango, which probably won’t be around for much longer, either. Carlos Tavares, the CEO of Stellantis, said the other day that there is no longer a market for cars; rather there is a “state-imposed supply chain.” The industry manufactures what the government demands, the market be damned. Exactly so. The disease process has entered its terminal stage. These companies haven’t got much time left. Just as was intended by the pushers of “electrification.” Of a piece with what was intended by the pushers of “vaccination.” Behold the results. The post The Imminent Death of VW appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

What In the World Is She Talking About?

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