What’s Going to Happen? 

Joe Biden has stepped aside, which I’ve been predicting (for various reasons) since forever. But what I did not expect was his endorsement of Kamala Harris. The announcement was generally applauded by Big Media, and she received endorsements from many of her Congressional colleagues and commitments from convention delegates before the day was over.

Big Media seems to think that Harris’s nomination is firmly in the bag. So do some of the alternative conservative media. But I’m not sure that matters. As definitive as her position seems to be, there is good reason to believe that things could change between now and the Democratic National Convention in Aug.

So I’m going to make another prediction: that the convention will not be, as it seems likely to be, a rubber stamp of what the delegates are saying now. It will turn into an open convention in which all of them are free to vote for whomever they want.

It’s all a bit complicated, but here’s how it goes…

In the first round of voting:

* Pledged delegates usually have to vote for the candidate they were “awarded to” at the start of the convention.

* Unpledged delegates can vote for any candidate.

* Superdelegates in the Democratic Party cannot vote in the first round of a contested convention. But they can vote in the first round of a convention in which a candidate already has enough delegates through primaries and caucuses to get the nomination.

* In the rare instance that no nominee wins in the first round, the convention is considered “brokered.” The pledged delegates may choose any candidate in later rounds of voting. Superdelegates can also vote in these later rounds.

* Balloting continues until one candidate receives the required majority to win the nomination.

Could this happen in August? I think it can. And I think that if the most powerful Democrats really want to maintain the executive branch for the next four years, they are going to do whatever they can to make it happen.

Here’s why…

Kamala Harris has very little chance of beating Trump on the national stage. Even if she makes a good choice in selecting her VP – a respected politician from a swing state – she has too many weaknesses to overcome Trump’s growing strength.

What are those weaknesses?

Well, for those of you who didn’t believe me when I told you months ago that Biden was too senile to beat Trump (let alone run the country for four more years), you are not going to believe this either.

Harris is just too dumb to compete with Trump. She is ignorant. She is incapable of standing against and defeating Trump – either in debates, on the campaign trail, or even in the Big Media-controlled news.

How do I know? Because ever since she assumed her role as VP, I’ve been watching her perform. Her deficits as a competent leader and a trusted public figure are just as great as Biden’s were. It’s possible that Big Media will try to hide these deficiencies, as they did with Biden, but I’m not sure they will. Despite her blue-ribbon qualifications on the DEI agenda, Big Media knows what the true DNC decision makers know: She doesn’t have what she needs to convincingly answer the questions she will be asked.

And that’s not to mention her public personality. Between the way she presents herself as an entitled soul sister, her embarrassing attempts to portray herself as “of the people,” the well-publicized trouble she has managing her staff, the nonsensical “deep thoughts” she seems insistent on repeating ad nauseam, her complete inability to answer tough questions thoughtfully, and her very unpredictable and inexplicable habit of breaking into cackling laughter at the oddest moments – I don’t see her making a positive impression on undecided voters.

In fact, if she does end up as the Democratic nominee, I think it’s likely she will lose a not insignificant portion of voters that were committed to Biden.

The COPs (Clinton, Obama, and Pelosi) are smart, seasoned politicians. They know that keeping Harris on the ballot is a loser’s hand. Not only is she unlikely to beat Trump on the national stage, it puts the Dems at risk of losing control of the Senate and falling farther behind in the House.

I believe they know that despite the success they had in getting Biden elected in 2020, there is no way they can repeat that success with Harris in 2024.

I first predicted that Biden would step down from the race in Jan. 2023, and I’m predicting now that Kamala Harris will not be the presidential nominee on Aug. 22, the final day of the Democratic National Convention.

This just seems so obvious to me. But maybe there is something I’m missing. Maybe the COPs have a different plan in mind. Maybe they have already given up all hope of maintaining the executive branch and are focusing on bolstering their power in the House and Senate in order to stifle Trump for the next four years and give Gavin Newsom an easy victory in 2028.

I’ve said that I thought Gavin Newsom could beat Trump (especially if he could persuade Michelle Obama to be his running mate). But he recently made a decision that would make it nearly impossible for him to win the country in 2024.

I’m talking about his signing into law a statute that grants the state control over the lives of its citizens’ children. It makes it a crime for any California grammar or high school, public or private, or any teacher in such a school, to notify the parents if their children have said that they are claiming a new gender.

The California school system will continue to mandate classes in gender fluidity for prepubescent children and teens, and will pay for in-school counseling of children who are wondering if the bodies they were “assigned at birth” are not really who they are. But now the state has mandated that all this will go on behind the backs of the parents, with legal consequences, including jail time, for any employee of the school that lets the parents know what sort of possibly life-altering process their child is going through.

If you get your news from the NYT, The Washington Post, or Corporate Media, you have probably heard nothing about this legislation. And if you are inclined to trust the information you get from those sources, you may be inclined to shrug it off as another example of conservatives making a scary mountain out of a perfectly nice little molehill. But most of the rest of the population doesn’t see it that way. A sizeable percentage of voters will see it as downright evil. And my guess is that many of those who are fully supportive of the right to identify one’s gender as one wishes will not support the idea that, when it comes to their own children, they should have nothing to say about it.

So this decision by Newsom was a serious political mistake that could take him out of the running now as a replacement for Kamala Harris. It makes him an easy target for Trump and the Republican Party. They would portray him convincingly as an ideological extremist. And if he tried to defend himself with obscurities and falsehoods, as he’s already been doing since the law was enacted, it wouldn’t help.

If it seems like I’m happy about Biden dropping out and Harris stepping in, you are mistaken. I would much rather see Trump take the victory in the 2024 election. But Trump is in several important ways just as bad as Biden has been. Another four years of Trump in office will result in trillions more dollars of debt for the US, which is already over $33 trillion – an amount that will eventually cause the US dollar to lose its position as the world’s most trusted currency and will make the US, and all its citizens, much, much poorer.

I’ll end with this clip from R.F. Kennedy Jr. – who is running for president too (with only 4% of the population behind him) – explaining what America needs, desperately right now, to get healthy again.

When the stock market hit an all-time high on May 16 – despite the instability in the financial markets and all the obvious problems with inflation – I wondered if that might be a signal that it may be in for a tumble. Since my domain is wealth building, not stock investing, I asked Sean for his take. Apparently, it was something he had been thinking a good deal about. His reply was lengthy and detailed and replete with facts and charts that not just impressed me by the range and depth of his thinking, but made me feel a little better about the outlook for the stock market for the rest of this year. This is good stuff. Some of it may be new to you, but do yourself a favor and spend some time with it. As always, if you have questions or comments after reading it, Sean and I welcome them. – MF

 

“Why Is the Market Still Going Up?” 
By Sean Macintyre

Whenever I start seeing this question start to surface, a part of me has to wonder: “Does that mean we’re going to have a crash soon?”

After all, one would only ask this question if there was a stark divergence between what we’re seeing in the markets and what we should expect to see.

And at the moment, stocks do seem to be defying gravity… just as they did in 2021, 2019, 2006, 1999, 1929, and so on and so forth.

The Dow just hit an all-time high of 40,000. And the S&P 500 as well as the Nasdaq have been brushing against all-time highs throughout the year.

But why?

After all, this is also happening at the same time declines in economic conditions signal that a broad slowdown may still lie ahead for the US.

According to Justyna Zabinska-La Monica, Senior Manager in charge of Business Cycle Indicators:

“Another decline in the US [Leading Economic Index] confirms that softer economic conditions lay ahead. Deterioration in consumers’ outlook on business conditions, weaker new orders, a negative yield spread, and a drop in new building permits fueled April’s decline. In addition, stock prices contributed negatively for the first time since October of last year. While the LEI’s six-month and annual growth rates no longer signal a forthcoming recession, they still point to serious headwinds to growth ahead. Indeed, elevated inflation, high interest rates, rising household debt, and depleted pandemic savings are all expected to continue weighing on the US economy in 2024.”

Basically, business conditions seem to be deteriorating, bond yield spreads are still negative, fewer business orders are coming in, less building is happening, inflation is still too high, and debt is getting out of control.

Citigroup’s chief US economist says that this gradual softening of economic conditions “tends to snowball” into a recession. He says that a hard landing – a recession that follows interest rate hikes – is inevitable.

And one of the investors who predicted the subprime-mortgage bubble, Gary Shilling, predicts a recession by the end of the year that could cause stocks to drop by as much as 30%.

Listen…

We know that stocks are not the economy, and the economy is not the stock market.

But with all the warning signs in the economy, with all the concern about an impending downturn, one must wonder why stocks keep creeping higher.

Well. I may have some answers.

I’ve actually been predicting that the market was going to go higher ever since late 2022. And in late 2023, I predicted again that stocks would climb higher in 2024. Despite and even because of some of the challenges facing the economy.

So let’s look at 7 of the plausible explanations I see for why stocks have been climbing higher over the last 18 months.

Reason No. 1: 
There was a ton of cash parked with nowhere else to go – now it’s going somewhere. 

In November 2023, I predicted markets would rise in 2024. This is the reasoning I gave in one of the newsletters I write for Investment College in Japan:

After the downturn of 2022, a lot of people sold their stocks. They’ve also been adding money to their retirement accounts since then.

You can see how retail investor cash has piled up in money market funds every time there’s been a drop in the S&P 500 in the chart below (recessions in gray)…

Whenever stocks turn down… the money that comes from people selling their stocks goes somewhere.

And recently, that “somewhere” has been assets like CDs, gold, and money market funds. There’s $1.6 trillion of investor money just sitting in money market funds.

Why is so much money pooling in an asset that historically had a terrible return?

Ever since interest rates have risen, many money market funds have been paying over 5% since about April 2023, up from near 0% in April 2022, and Americans are liking it.

A lot.

You can clearly see the relationship between interest rates and money market funds in the chart below. After every cycle of interest rate hikes, it’s just more sensible to get paid a high income for taking on less risk.

But those are just the money market funds with retail investor money. Regular people and retirees.

There’s actually an entirely other type of money market fund that’s sold to institutions.

And these funds have seen inflows never before seen in history.

If you add up all the money in all the money market funds owned by investors and institutions…

You quickly see that, right now, there’s a $5.9 trillion mountain of money just… waiting.

[In 2024,] you can expect just an enormous wave of money to exit money market funds and flood into stock and bond markets (and real estate, for that matter).

In other newsletter issues, I also pointed out that 2024 was an election year, and election years have been historically bullish (that is, a positive catalyst) for stocks, with 11.3% returns during election years on average – a bit above the market’s long-term average.

So here’s the plausible play-by-play of what has been happening:

1. In 2022, we saw a big market sell-off. This led to a surfeit of cash sitting in money market funds earning a decent rate of return due to higher interest rates.

2. Then mega-cap tech stocks like Nvidia and Amazon bounced back in 2023, leading markets higher even while other stocks lagged.

3. Inflation moderated faster than anyone expected (which I’ll explain in more detail later).

4. The returns in 2023 far outpaced what people were getting in money market funds.

5. The financial media has been pointing out that interest rates being lowered and election years (like 2024) typically coincide with stocks going up in value.

6. Everyone who was sitting in cash, waiting for markets to fall further, felt like a sucker for playing it safe. And now they’re buying even after the initial run-up of gains.

To put it even more simply…

There was a ton of cash sitting on the sidelines. We have seen it move back into stocks – mainly tech stocks. And it seems there is still more, trillions more, left to shift over.

But you may be wondering…

If all that cash has been sitting on the sidelines looking for places to go… why is it going into stocks?

Well, leaving aside for a moment that we’re also seeing gold and other commodities rise in price, and we’re seeing real estate appreciate in price, which means that some of this money is definitely finding its way into alternatives…

For the average American, it’s basically a choice between stocks and nothing.

Reason No. 2: 
Americans are forced to buy stocks and there are no easy alternatives. 

In 2023, 76% of private industry workers had access to “defined contribution retirement” benefits like a 401(k).

That means that, for participants, a small chunk of every paycheck goes into a retirement account, usually selected by employers.

And guess what assets a majority of 401(k)s permit people to invest in?

Stocks. Bonds. And mutual funds that hold some combo of stocks and bonds.

A huge number of working Americans have no choice but to buy stocks on a monthly or even bimonthly basis.

And if hundreds of millions of people are buying the same thing every few weeks for years and years…

What does one expect to happen? Prices are going to go up!

Well past anything resembling a reasonable valuation.

This is why the number of 401(k) millionaires surged 43% over the past year!

And what if a large number of people decide to avoid these plans and invest on their own?

Well, there are huge incentives not to do this.

They lose out on the tax benefits of these plans, for one.

And they have to face the choice of where else to save and invest their money.

And where is that going to be?

In the previous section, I showed how money market fund interest rates weren’t beating stocks.

If you look more broadly, there’s just no good alternative to stocks for most investors right now. 

Let’s take real estate, for example.

In 1981, when 30-year fixed mortgage rates exceeded 18%, the median price for a new home was $70,000.

A 20% down payment would cost about $14,000.

Considering the median family income was $22,390, it would take about 7 years of saving 10% of one’s income to buy a brand-new house. Not unreasonable!

In 2024, the median sales price for a new home is $430,700. A 20% down payment is $86,140.

The average salary in the US in 2024 is $63,795.

Saving 10% of one’s income, it’d take someone earning the median salary 13.5 years to save for a home.

And that leaves off the fact that home prices have been moving (generally) up while wages have not been keeping pace with inflation.

If you set out to become a real estate investor today, you’d end up living out the ironic plot of a Guy de Maupassant or O. Henry story…

By the time you had enough, it wouldn’t be enough anymore!

It’s the exact same story with gold.

The hourly pay for a median household in 1981 was $10.76.

One ounce of gold was worth around $400. So the cost for an ounce of gold was a little more than 37 hours of labor.

Now the median hourly earnings for a worker is about $30.67.

An ounce of gold is worth about $2,333 as I write this.

That means the straight-down-the-middle median-earning American would need to work 76 hours to buy one ounce of gold.

And these real estate and gold buying examples don’t even factor in other costs, time, dealing with brokers and dealers, etc.

We can do this for every even mildly illiquid asset. They’re all far more expensive than they used to be, and still have a high barrier to entry.

Compare that to stocks, though.

It takes 5 minutes to set up a Robinhood trading account. You can buy fractional shares of any stock – speculative or not – for as little as $1. And you can do it without any closing costs, fees, or other obstacles.

And for many workers with a 401(k), as I mentioned above, investment in stocks is completely automatic and regular.

At this particular point in history, what earthly reason does any new investor have to consider anything else? 

The barrier to buying stocks is insanely low and the historical returns are insanely high.

That’s why FINRA reports that there’s a “new generation of younger investors entering the market with substantially different investment behaviors and attitudes than older generations.”

Gen Z, folks born after the year 2000, are more invested in stocks right now than any previous generation.

A Vanguard analysis observed the savings behaviors of 250,000 employees based on their ages in 2006 and 2021 and found that, in 2006, 25% of employees ages 18 to 24 had no stocks in their 401(k) plan. In 2021, 97% of employees ages 18 to 24 had invested between 41% and 99% in stocks in their 401(k) plan.

There’s no historical precedent for this.

Never before has an asset class been so easily accessible by regular people.

And never before have alternatives, assets that have traditionally produced enormous wealth (like real estate), seemed so inaccessible in comparison.

This, by the way, also gives insight into the ability of cryptocurrencies to continue marching higher.

The fractional divisibility of a cryptocurrency token allows someone with only a few bucks to speculate.

I interviewed several people recently for a video. Everyone younger than 25? They’re trading crypto and stocks. They believe it’s the smartest thing they could be doing with their money, considering they don’t have very much capital to invest in traditional assets.

“I’ll invest in index funds or real estate when I have enough money to do so,” is the common thread.

Dumb, illogical, brilliant? I have my opinions, sure.

What matters, though, is that these people are buying.

And buying makes asset prices go up.

Reason No. 3: 
The economy might actually not be that bad. 

At the top of this report, I reprinted a quote from one of the folks working with NBER, the group in charge of deciding whether or not we’re in a recession.

They noted, in their recent reports, that leading indicators about the economy – the data they use to predict trouble ahead – are no longer portending doom.

Just a few months ago, economic indicators were screaming “recession ahead.” For two months now, the Conference Board’s economic indicators have no longer been signaling a recession.

And if we consider things from that perspective…

Economic conditions in the US have been gradually improving for months.

Effectively, economists are saying right now, “The patient still has a gunshot wound… but at least we’ve staunched the bleeding.”

And if we compare stock prices with an indicator like the Weekly Economic Index (a weekly snapshot of the US’s economic health), we see that stocks have been responding positively to this trend in the overall economy…

When the Weekly Economic Index hovers around its average… stock indices like the Dow trend up.

When the Economic Index trends below its average… stocks become volatile and trade sideways or down.

And since December 2022? Except for a few hiccups, the Weekly Economic Index has been stable and trending up. Same as stocks.

So is this a classic case of “Things feel worse than they actually are”?

Well, as the Conference Board says, there are some serious headwinds ahead that have people justifiably worried.

But people invest in stocks based on what they think is GOING to happen. Not the way things are.

And if enough people believe that we’ll emerge from this economic trouble unscathed? If enough people believe that interest rates and inflation are going to come down?

They’re going to invest now in the hopes of capturing those future tailwinds.

And that will drive prices up. Even before everything in the economy sorts itself out.

Reason No. 4: 
Market valuations and stability are still… fine. Not great. Fine. 

If we were to look at charts of US stock market valuations, we might think that we were sitting atop a precarious Jenga tower, primed to fall.

The Shiller CAPE Ratio is a Nobel-prize winning measure of how “expensive” or “cheap” the stock market is relative to corporate profits.

And by this measure, the US stock market has been bouncing around the second-most overvalued it has ever been.

The Shiller CAPE ratio gained popularity because, as a model, it is extremely predictive of stock returns looking 8 to 15 years in the future.

During periods when the CAPE ratio of the S&P 500 was high, returns over the next decade and more were quite poor.

And this is true regardless of the stock index and regardless of the country.

When you graph the CAPE on the X-axis of a chart and inflation-adjusted returns on the Y-axis, you can see a clear trend.

As you go to the right of the graph, towards a higher CAPE, you start to see poorer and poorer returns over the 15 years that follow:

But if you look quite closely, you’ll notice quite a few outliers.

For example, even when the global CAPE ratio has been worse than the US’s right now, in the 40 to 50 range…

Stocks in all equity markets still produced positive returns over the long term, when adjusted for inflation.

Worse returns than average, sure. But still positive.

In fact, based on what I said above in the section on Americans being effectively forced to buy stocks on a regular basis and there not being attractive alternatives, I strongly believe that “higher valuations” are the new normal for US stocks, at least at this point in history.

To put it bluntly, overvaluations in stocks are not really something to be afraid of.

They are something to encourage caution and diversification across different asset classes, sure.

Because think of it this way: High stock valuations create instability that makes markets vulnerable to crashes, but they do not, by themselves, cause stock market crashes.

And in the end, a market crash is not the only way stocks can move from “overvalued” to “fairly valued” in terms of the CAPE ratio.

The CAPE is ultimately still a ratio between stock prices and stock earnings.

And US corporate earnings have been trending steadily up after a small, worrisome hiccup in recent years.

If stock prices remained the same, or grew at a slower pace than corporate earnings, we will see stocks become fairly valued without ever seeing a market crash.

In truth, there’s only one number I pay attention to that tells me whether I should not buy stocks for the long term…

And that’s the Shiller Excess CAPE Yield: A measure of the returns we should expect from stocks in excess of the return you can expect from Treasury bonds.

Or to put that another way, when the CAPE Yield is positive? You’ll probably get better returns from stocks over the next decade. And when the CAPE Yield is negative? You’ll probably get better returns from bonds.

And right now? The CAPE Yield is still positive. Trending down, sure, but still positive.

By this measure, stocks and financial markets are just more attractive and appear more stable than alternatives right now.

And I say this as someone who is incredibly bullish on bonds and bond funds as we inch ever closer to interest rate cuts over the next few years.

One last point about the stability of the financial markets…

We can measure stability by looking at volatility, which is tracked by an index called the “VIX.”

Volatility is just a measure of how unpredictable, uncertain, or unstable the stock market is at any given moment.

The higher the VIX? The more stocks tend to move up or down in a surprising fashion.

The lower the VIX? The less fear, uncertainty, or doubt we see in the market.

And if we look at the VIX right now, we see something surprising…

The VIX is at its lowest level since 2019.

The market just isn’t unstable or predictable right now.

And when volatility declines, stocks tend to trend up, simply because uncertainty tends to scare investors into selling (and vice versa).

Reason No. 5: 
All the fear around high inflation might be entirely overblown. 

The legendary investor Warren Buffett once said, “Inflation swindles almost everybody.” And that’s true whether they are a stock investor, a bond investor, or a “cash-under-the-mattress person.”

And what we see, if we look at three different measures of inflation, is that while things have gotten better, we’re still not out of the woods yet.

Whether we’re looking at Consumer Price Index inflation, Personal Consumption Expenditure inflation, or Producer Price Index inflation…

We want them all to be around 2%, give or take.

At the moment, they’re all just a little too high for anyone’s comfort. This is why central banks around the world increased interest rates…

The hope is that slowing down economic growth will slow the growth of consumer prices, personal expenditures, or producer prices.

All of which, by the way, are a proxy for what we’re really trying to measure when we talk about inflation: The loss of a currency’s purchasing power.

Why does this matter?

Because when currencies lose their purchasing power, real corporate and economic growth becomes more and more difficult.

An economy with high inflation is like a long-time heroin addict.

An addict gets accustomed to the dose. And then they need more and more heroin to have the same effect.

It’s a similar story with high inflation: Money loses its potency, and so you need more and more of it to accomplish the same thing as before – whether that’s purchasing goods or investing to grow a business.

Now, about three years ago I built a model and have since successfully predicted future inflation to within a single percentage point.

I predicted the looming rise of inflation in mid-2021. I predicted the decline of inflation from its highs in 2022.

And in September 2023, I predicted that inflation was going to stay stubbornly high.

The reason why is not particularly hard to understand…

1. What is causing the recent round of inflation? Too much money in the economy and not enough stuff to satisfy demand.

2. What’s the solution? Less money and more stuff.

3. What is the Federal Reserve doing to lessen the amount of money? With quantitative tightening and higher interest rates, we’ve seen the US money supply declining and economic activity slow down.

4. What can the Fed do to help people get more stuff? Even though the Federal Reserve can print and destroy money… what it cannot do is print factories, apartment buildings, or mines.

So what will solve the inflation problem?

Simple: Businesses increasing capacity and producing more, which they are doing, or people going broke and losing their job and demanding less stuff, which might be starting to slowly happen.

Industrial capacity in the US has been recovering from 2022 lows (when inflation was highest) and recently reattained pre-pandemic levels.

There’s our stuff. If industrial capacity remains high or goes higher, it should help curb inflation.

Then there’s demand, which unemployment directly impacts.

And we see, too, that unemployment has been ticking very slowly higher since inflation was really bad in mid-2022.

To sum it up, what we might be seeing right now is the slow self-correction of the inflation problem.

We have plateaued in the fight against inflation, to be sure. But right now we’re seeing incremental changes month after month that seem to suggest we’ll see lower inflation in the future, with some minor setbacks along the way.

At least, that’s the case for now.

But the question remains… If inflation has remained high, why have stocks continued to go higher?

Well, here’s what academic research suggests:

Unexpected spikes in inflation cause stock prices to go down, which happened in 2022.

Unexpected decreases in inflation cause stock prices to go up, which happened in 2023.

That’s the short term. Long term, a lot of early hypotheses in the 1970s suggested that inflation was bad for stock prices.

But studies in the 1990s found that, while high inflation led to poor returns over about a one-year investment period, stocks can actually provide an excellent long-term hedge against inflation.

That’s because stock valuations depend on corporate profits. Corporate profits can increase in inflation because they can justifiably charge higher prices, which is what happened in 2022 and 2023.

The period from late 2021 to late 2022 was about one year. That’s when we saw inflation peak… and it’s also when we saw stocks decline the most.

Another recent study found that stock prices go up when interest rates go up. Which happened just before 2023, when stocks started to take off.

Based on these more recent studies, everything we’ve seen has lined up nicely with what we should expect from stocks in inflationary periods.

But here’s another interesting observation I found while researching this piece…

In 2020 and 2021, one of the major concerns about the market was the prevalence of what are called “zombie corporations.”

That is, companies that do not generate enough revenue to pay off their spiraling debts. These companies are effectively “dead” but still operating.

I wrote about this extensively in 2020.

But studies find that high inflation actually provides a lifeline to these highly indebted companies.

Why? Because a company’s debt is a fixed amount of money growing at a fixed rate.

Inflation can disproportionately increase a company’s revenue relative to its debt.

This gives us a good, plausible reason why we haven’t seen the huge waves of bankruptcies everyone expected over the last 5 years.

Highly indebted companies have actually benefited from high inflation… and this, of course, would bolster their stock prices.

Reason No. 6: 
All the concerns around dedollarization might be overblown and premature… plus it might actually turn out to be a positive catalyst for US stocks. 

The US dollar became the world’s reserve currency – that is, the currency most countries hold and use to settle international trade – in 1944, with the Bretton Woods conference.

The US dollar was pegged to gold (convertible at $35 an ounce) and other nations had fixed, but adjustable, exchange rates to the dollar.

The system ended in August 1971 when President Richard Nixon “temporarily” suspended the dollar’s convertibility to gold, which became permanent by 1973.

After that, major currencies around the world have not had some tangible thing that they represent.

Currencies are valued based on how they float against each other.

Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the end of the gold standard, there has been no international agreement in place to hold the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency…

Countries have simply done it because it has been the most convenient and prudent thing to do.

Dollars are commonplace, easy to get and sell, and relatively stable compared to other currencies.

There is a belief, however, that at some point the US dollar will not hold this position as the world’s reserve currency. Many believe that the US’s global supremacy is intrinsically tied to the dollar’s supremacy.

Here is what they believe will happen when dedollarization occurs:

If the dollar loses its status, debt will spiral out of control, some say, because the lower demand for US Treasury bonds will necessitate higher interest rates. 

Higher interest rates means higher borrowing costs, which puts the US into a debt spiral and at risk for default. 

On top of that, if the US dollar loses its reserve status, the dollar might lose value relative to other currencies. This would increase the cost of importing goods (which the US does a lot of), causing inflation to skyrocket. 

And finally, folks believe that the US dollar losing its reserve status will cause financial markets to become incredibly volatile. Investors and major institutions would adjust their portfolios to account for currency valuations. Additionally, US Treasury bonds are considered a “risk-free investment” right now, but would not be in this scenario.

Okay, now you know the context and you understand the fears around dedollarization.

These fears have reached a fever pitch ever since the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and others) have been discussing the possibility of creating a common currency to compete with the dollar.

There are three quibbles I have with this whole thesis. Especially when it comes to how this will affect stock prices.

The first quibble I have with the dedollarization argument is causal: 
Does the stock market’s returns depend on the US being the world’s reserve currency? 

This one is easy to answer. We just need to find a period of time when stocks did fine despite the US dollar not being the world’s reserve currency.

And that’s exactly what we see.

Even though the US suffered a severe depression in the 1930s…

The average 10-year returns for the stock market were still almost entirely positive. And within the same range we’ve seen over the last 120 years.

To put it another way: Markets behaved more or less the same whether the US was the reserve currency or not, whether the gold standard existed or not.

Returns in the market, like business cycles, go up and down over time. And these crests and troughs seem to have very little to do with the US dollar’s status.

So while there might be some short-term churn and volatility if the US dollar were to lose its status as the world’s reserve currency…

I don’t think there’s really any evidence to suggest that it will be cataclysmic. Or even anything other than part of the normal noise of the markets.

My second quibble is historical: 
In all this talk of alternative currencies taking over the status of the US dollar, or BRICS countries no longer using dollars in trade, I haven’t heard many people discuss the simple fact that we’ve already lived through a period where this was normal. 

The Soviet ruble was used for trade within the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War, and it was not convertible with US dollars.

The Soviet Union also established the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) to compete with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. It aimed to coordinate economic policies, facilitate trade, and improve industrial development between socialist countries.

COMECON helped facilitate ruble-denominated transactions between socialist countries.

To put it bluntly: Even when the US dollar was the de facto, agreed-upon world’s reserve currency… it wasn’t the reserve currency for the whole world.

The US economy and currency has already survived and thrived during a period of stark divisions and high competition.

Another thing…

When the euro emerged, people were talking, then, about dedollarization as well.

I found an article written in the Vancouver Sun back in 1999 that talked about how the euro was likely to unseat the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, shifting the balance of global power to Europe.

It has been 25 years. The euro has not replaced the dollar.

Let’s say there is a new BRICS currency…

Let’s ignore the fact that the BRICS countries do not even really get along with each other and are unlikely to ever succeed in this endeavor…

It’ll be just like the euro. Not the world’s reserve currency, but one of many reserve currencies.

And due to the interconnected nature of global economies and trade, if there is a BRICS currency, there will be a high likelihood that it will be convertible with US dollars…

Which means that central banks in BRICS nations will still probably need to hold US dollars in reserve!

Simply put, the future that people fear, with economic divisions and multiple reserve currencies…

It’s all something we’ve already lived through. And the US economy (and stock market) grew regardless.

My third quibble is practical: 
I wonder: “Is the US dollar losing its position in the world any time soon?” 

If we look at the data, I do not see a world on the cusp of dedollarization.

The US dollar’s role in international payments and foreign exchange transactions has been gaining over the last 10 years.

In July 2023, right around the time that the BRICS met to discuss an alternate world order…

International bank payments denominated in US dollars reached an all-time high.

For all the talk of dedollarization and settling international transactions in local currencies… the dollar still dominates. We have not yet seen this trend reverse course.

As recently as a year ago, Warren Buffett even stated, “I see no option for any other currency to be the reserve currency.”

Another investor I hold in high esteem, Seth Klarman, had this to say in 2022:

“The Euro is an experiment. There’s no adjustment mechanism. There not any real money clout behind it. Japan’s got severe problems, demographic in particular. So it’s not like the Yen seems like such a great place to be. The Swiss Franc is too small to be a global currency. So the US has had an enormous advantage being the world’s reserve currency for a very long time. It’s unlikely to change any time soon. It’s hard to imagine people accepting Chinese currency. It’s hard to imagine people accepting cryptocurrency. There’s just too many uncertainties. While the US isn’t perfect, it’s been an important player on the world stage and a protector of the liberal world order, and I don’t see that role changing.”

But we have to ask…

Will this go on? Will the US dollar remain the world’s reserve currency forever? Will the US continue to be a global economic superpower?

No. All empires fall. All cities will one day lie in dust.

But that is the long run. And as John Maynard Keynes once noted, “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.”

In the meantime, we’re talking about some really well-established, highly entrenched systems, here. Major changes to financial systems take a long time, lots of money, and a ton of international coordination.

I can see the US dollar losing its primacy in 40 to 50 years as other countries like China and India become larger and larger participants in global trade and GDP…

But as long as the US remains a global power in the top 5? Even the top 10?

Countries will need dollars and dollar-denominated assets, like treasury bills…

And they’ll need them for the same reason that the US Federal Reserve Bank holds about $12 billion in euro-denominated assets and about $6.6 billion in Japanese-yen denominated assets.

Heck, for all the talk of the United Kingdom suffering as a result of losing its status as the world’s reserve currency in the first half of the 20th century…

The pound sterling is still the fourth most commonly held reserve currency on the planet, behind the euro and yen.

Grand sweeping changes to the global economy and geopolitical power dynamics take decades to play out. Sometimes centuries. (The Roman Empire was in decline longer than it was ever in a position of power.)

And even when these changes happen? They rarely happen in absolute terms.

Things happen gradually and with nuance.

So “dedollarization” is just something I’m not worried about in my lifetime.

Nor does it seem like a major catalyst for stock returns, positive or negative.

Plus, there’s an easy way to defend against fear of a worst-case scenario: Hold some gold and silver, hold some savings in a few foreign currencies, hold some property, hold a diverse basket of stocks that generate revenues internationally, tell your family you love them, pet your dog, try to be happy, and only worry about what you can control.

Which takes me to the final reason I believe stocks are going up…

Reason No. 7: 
Stocks go up because stocks go up. 

There is almost a tautological relationship between stock prices and what drives them.

Stock prices go up because people make stock prices go up.

See, stocks are all sold at auction. That means stock prices only go up for one reason: People are willing to bid up prices.

That’s it. That’s the real reason.

The Dow hit 40,000 and all the other major indices are nearing all-time highs because people are paying higher prices for indices’ constituent stocks.

I wish there was a grander story or narrative here. I was as disappointed in the reality as you probably are.

“Surely,” I hear you cry, “it cannot be that simple.”

I wish there was more to it, believe me.

It would certainly make the thousands of hours I spent learning financial modeling feel more useful.

But this is why bubbles happen. It is also why incredibly underpriced markets happen. And it is the reason behind everything else in between.

As Yuval Harari said, “Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.”

This is true for investment analysis as well.

That’s not to say that any of it is made up or fake.

Au contraire. A story that motivates human behavior en masse is no different than reality.

If you own a stock and hundreds of thousands of people decide to sell that stock because they see a quadruple inverted unicorn horn pattern with a sparkling confetti Bollinger Band squeeze…

The value of your investment still goes down. Regardless of the quality of the story people are acting on.

So, ultimately, it makes no sense to ask why prices are going higher and higher.

What we really need to be asking about are the stories that motivate human (and institutional) behavior. We have to understand human psychology and how large groups of humans might be behaving based on their perceptions of the world.

All the reasons I’ve given you above?

They’re stories. Stories with plenty of counterexamples and alternative interpretations.

Doesn’t matter which story is true, or which interpretation is true.

We know that the aggregate of all the stories right now is motivating people to buy stocks.

That’s what matters. That’s the why.

So whether we look at the stability of the financial markets, inflation, or threats against the US dollar…

I do not see any reasons why stocks would not go up in the near term.

There’s the possibility that we might see near-corrections, like we did in April. There’s a possibility we might even see a recession and another bear market in the coming months or years.

If we do, it will be because the stories people are acting on have changed.

And none of these possibilities pose an existential threat to investors or the stock market overall.

And for well-positioned investors with a long-term mindset and good, diverse investments across asset classes…

They should be fine even in the event of a downturn, like we saw in 2020 or 2022.

In fact, such a downturn might even be an opportunity to buy more stocks to further compound your wealth.

That’s a story I firmly believe in.

And so far, it’s been working well for me and everyone else I know who believes it.

Antisemitism vs. Free Speech and Peaceful Assembly: 
How US Universities Mishandled the Recent “Occupations” 

Columbia University students participating in an ongoing pro-Palestinian encampment on their campus, April 25, 2024 

Although the worst of it is at least temporarily over, I have been deeply disturbed by the student protests and occupations that spread across university campuses in April.

I don’t see them, as some do, as simply demonstrations in support of the people of Palestine. And despite having the support of some Jews (including a few friends of mine), I believe they are rooted in antisemitism. Deeply ingrained, institutional, and nearly worldwide antisemitism.

It is not about Israel’s bombing of Palestine. Remember, the protests began on October 8, the day after more than a thousand Jewish civilians were brutally raped, beheaded, and otherwise murdered. Remember, too, that at that time and since that time, the polls that were taken indicated that at least 70% of Palestinians supported the invasion and slaughter.

The history of the Arab-Jewish conflict is older than Palestine itself. (The first clear historical reference to the area as “Palestine” dates to the 5th century BCE.) And although there were periods when Arabs and Jews lived together in relative peace, the relationship primarily consisted of Arabs attacking the Jews and attempting to drive them off the land and/or kill them.

Since 1948 and the establishment of Israel as a sovereign state, the animosity of Arabs towards Jews has only gotten worse. It is a history of unilateral attempts by Arab countries or Arab terrorist groups to destroy Israel and kill its citizens, followed by Israeli agreements to various Arab demands, followed immediately by more anti-Israel aggression.

And yet, judging from the recent protests, it looks like a large percentage of the brightest and most privileged college students in America don’t know anything about that. But it’s worse than ignorance. It’s that they have somehow been taught to believe in a version of this conflict that is fundamentally and provably false.

Just recently, a friend of mine, who says that he “identifies very strongly as a Jew,” told me that he had recently “discovered” that the Israelis were “colonialists and occupiers of Palestine.”

I addressed that claim, among others, in my first Special Issue on this conflict, and I will come back to it in a future issue. What scares me is how so many people, Jews and Christians alike, believe it.

The “Evil Empire” Story 

Recently, I watched a documentary that gave me some insight into how the occupation lie came into being.

From the age of five or six, Palestinian children are taught, at home and in school, that Israel is an evil empire that has occupied Palestine (which they claim was originally Arab) and has since done everything possible to keep the Palestinians in Gaza poor.

This despite the fact that there are two million Arabs living peacefully and prosperously in Israel. And that, until the current war began, approximately 200,000 Arabs would commute daily to Israel to work at jobs for which they could be paid multiples of what they would be paid in Palestine.

The lie goes back to 2005. In exchange for a Palestinian commitment to a permanent peace, Israel agreed to forcibly remove more than 10,000 Jews that had been living in Palestine for decades or even centuries. They even removed Jewish graves.

With Palestine finally “Jew Free,” Hamas, which had been voted into leadership, began indoctrinating Arab children and their parents to not only see Israel as an oppressor, but to hate all Jews and see “intifada” as the noble purpose of Islam.

They have been telling that lie for almost 20 years – more than enough time to indoctrinate an entire generation.

So, it is not surprising that there were no protests by “peaceful” Palestinians against Hamas after the October 7 slaughter. On the contrary, there were jubilant celebrations all over Gaza and in many Arab countries all over the world.

Think about it. Twenty years of indoctrination. With zero freedom to question or disagree. It’s not easy to persuade people to believe what is demonstrably false. It can be done, but it takes time. And the younger you begin, the better it works.

Then it hit me: This could also explain why, on October 8, when hundreds of dead Jewish bodies were still on the ground, thousands of university students all over the US (in Europe, too) were out there marching and chanting in support of the slaughter that had occurred the day before. It happened because, during the 20 years that Hamas and Hezbollah and other Arab terrorist groups were spreading the lies about Israel, hundreds of professors at American colleges and universities were doing the same thing.

When you think of it that way, it’s no wonder that the student protests and occupations were so quick and so widespread. Our prestigious universities had prepared their students for it for decades.

We Have Met the Enemy… and It Is Us

There is another issue that has emerged in recent weeks. The allegation that many, if not most, of the protesters were not students of the colleges where they were demonstrating. And many were not students at all.

For example, at the University of Texas at Austin, 45 of the 79 people arrested on campus weren’t associated with the school. Of the 282 people arrested by the NYPD when it broke up encampments at Columbia University and City College of New York, just over half were students, and the rest were not.

But this is secondary. The main question is why our university leaders were so tolerant of these blatantly antisemitic and indisputably illegal occupations of university property for so long.

I think one reason is that many of them are people of my generation that had protested the Vietnam War. They may have felt hypocritical in acting against students that were doing much the same thing as they did.

Another reason is surely that they have been at the heart of an academic culture that has been anti-Zionist for several decades. To stay employed and feel okay about the universities they were working for, even the Jewish professors and administrators have had to convince themselves that being anti-Israel was not antisemitic.

But the third and most concerning reason is that they see these student occupations and protests in terms of free speech. And they believe, correctly in my view, that free speech is a fundamental principle in preserving freedom and democracy in America and everywhere else.

And they are not the only ones. Many pro-Israel Libertarians, like me, are struggling with what seems to be a moral conflict between free speech and antisemitism. We believe that political speech – even when it is clearly hateful, as the pro-Palestinian chants clearly are – should still be allowed. Because the moment you try to regulate hate by criminalizing it, you open the door to fascism, which is the opposite of freedom and democracy.

First, You Define the Offense. Then You Criminalize It. 

This is why I’m troubled by the recent Congressional resolution to define “antisemitism.” On the face of it, it seems entirely unobjectionable. It is simply defining the term by providing examples of it, all of which seem antisemitic to me.

But the problem with definitions like this is that they can be used by the government to carry out repression of any sort of speech they object to. Once the definition of hate is codified in law, the legal assault on free speech begins. And this kills public statements of opinion that have a right to be heard.

A fellow book club friend of mine, exasperated by the coddling of the campus protesters, recently sent an email in which he noted that the protests are no longer anti-Israel, but pro-Hamas. And the slogans they are chanting are not about what to do with Palestine, but that Israel, as a country, should be obliterated and even, in some cases, that Jews should be wiped from the face of the Earth. He was outraged that, now that the protests have shown themselves to be not just antisemitic but genocidal, the students haven’t been arrested and put in jail.

He is correct about what is happening. Antisemitism is alive and strong in the US. It is not official. Nor is it expressed in polite company. But there has always been an undercurrent of antisemitism among Christians, and even atheists, that is real and potentially dangerous.

It is showing itself now in the response to the anti-Palestinian (now pro-Hamas) protests and occupations.

The demonstrators see them as legitimate anti-war protests equivalent to those that we Baby Boomers participated in during the late 60s and early 70s. And there are similarities. But having been an anti-war protester, I can say that the similarities are not positive or worthy of self-righteous pride, as so many of my peers feel they are. The protests against the Vietnam War were, like the pro-Palestinian protests, a movement against something that was going on halfway around the world. We saw the North Vietnamese much like the pro-Palestinian protesters today see the Palestinians – as defenseless, poor people that simply wanted to try out an economic and political ideology that we had been told, by many of our college professors, was just.

But the fact was that 90% of us knew nothing about the theory of Communism, much less the history of it in practice. We knew even less about what was going on in Vietnam or in the backrooms of Congress, the White House, and the various war departments.

This, as you can see here, is true for many of the anti-Israel protesters today.

Our ignorance back then did not mean we were wrong about the cause: getting out of Vietnam. Anyone who has studied the war understands why we never should have been there in the first place and were, in any case, doomed to lose.

I do believe that Israel is fully justified in its war against Hamas and its soon-to-be war against Hezbollah and other anti-Israel, antisemitic terrorist groups. But that is not an argument I want to make here.

Let’s assume that Israel’s position is unjust or, at least, ill-conceived and destined to fail, as it might be. That, again, has no bearing on the question of how universities should have handled the student protests and occupations.

As I said above, what university leaders did in allowing the occupations to flourish was wrongheaded from the start. Even if we gave them a pass for equating today’s protests and occupations to those against the Vietnam War. Even if we accept that they have unwittingly succumbed to the idea that being anti-Israel is not antisemitic. That still leaves their primary mistake in allowing the occupations to take place: They see them as legitimate expressions of free speech.

Free Speech: Is That the Issue?

Let’s talk about free speech.

In the US, free speech is guaranteed by our Constitution, because it is seen (rightly, I think) as one of the foundations of freedom and democracy.

There are a few categories of expression that are not protected by the First Amendment:

* Obscenity
* Fraud
* Child pornography
* Speech “integral” to illegal conduct
* Speech that causes imminent unlawful action
* Speech that violates intellectual property law
* Commercial speech (misleading advertising)
* Incitement to violence
* Defamation
* And in certain situations, threats and false statements of facts.

Hate speech is not an exemption, per the 1993 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Wisconsin v. Mitchell. It is allowed, again correctly in my opinion, because it can be so narrowly defined that it stifles the free expression of ideas. In other words, US citizens have the right to speak hatefully, and it is important for all of us to maintain this freedom.

But you don’t need hate-speech laws to prevent the sort of antisemitic, pro-Palestinian protests that have been going on all over the States.

The right to peaceful assembly is also guaranteed by the Constitution, but there are also limitations. The assemblers must have permission from the property owners. Which means “occupying” buildings and other spaces without permission is illegal.

The problem with what’s been happening on campuses is that some university faculty and administrators are viewing the protests as acts of free speech, which confuses the issue. Yes, people are allowed their antisemitic chants. But what they can’t do is occupy territory they do not themselves own or have permission to assemble on.

The universities should have recognized, the first time their campuses were “occupied,” that they were allowing for the possibility of significant and mass unlawfulness. They should have recognized the probability that the occupations would intimidate their Jewish students and the possibility that they would become violent.

They should have, therefore, closed the occupations on day one. Regardless of what sort of speech was being expressed.

Had they done that, they could have removed the protesters and, if they wanted, assigned them designated areas to demonstrate where they would not pose a threat.

That is what they should have done. And that is what they should do today. Protect free speech. Even hate speech. But prosecute the illegal occupations that are making it unsafe for Jewish students to attend class.

Taylor Swift: What’s the Big Deal? 

I’ve been trying to understand the Taylor Swift phenomenon – how she became perhaps the most successful pop star of all time.

Here are some of the facts:

* She is the “most-streamed artist of all time” on Spotify. (In 2023, her songs were streamed 29.1 billion times.)

* Her debut tour – “Fearless” (2009-2010) – at Madison Square Garden sold out in one minute.

* “Eras,” her most recent tour, is the first-ever to gross $1 billion in ticket sales.

* She was the first and only artist to have four albums sell over 1 million copies in the first week.

* “Speak Now” (2010), her third album, was the first album to have all its songs hit the Billboard charts.

* Her fifth album – “1989” (2014) – spent a full year in the top ten on the Billboard Top 200.

* With her seventh album – “Lover” (2019) – she was the first female artist to have six albums sell more than 500,000 copies in a single week.

* She has won the most American Music Awards (40), the most Billboard Music Awards (39), the most Grammys for “Album of the Year” (4), the most MTV Video Music Awards (4), and the most IFPI Awards for “Global Recording Artist of the Year” (4).

* She was TIME Magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year, and is the only female artist to have been featured on the cover of the magazine four times.

* At 26, with a net worth of $250 million, she was the youngest person to be included in Forbes’ “America’s Self-Made Women List” (2016). And she currently has a net worth of $1.1 billion.

And there’s more. Lots more. She has won more awards and been on more “best” lists than I have space for. Click here to see them all.

Now here’s the thing…

I don’t think I’ve ever listened to any of her songs. I listen to music as much as the next person. It seems there is also music playing in the background, whether I’m home or at work. And yet, I have never heard Taylor Swift. Or if I have, I did not realize that’s what I was listening to.

I formed an impression of her from snippets I came across in the mainstream media. She seemed to me a contemporary reincarnation of Madonna, but less challenging of mainstream conventions, more accepting of social norms, and less interesting as a musician and songwriter than Madonna was in her prime.

And I had a prejudice against her that was brilliantly articulated by Ben Shapiro, when, on one of his podcasts, he said something like: “I have nothing against her, but I find it odd that a 34-year-old woman is still writing songs about teenage romance.”

The photographs I had seen of Taylor Swift confirmed my prejudice. She looked tall, lanky thin, and pretty in a very ordinary way – a long-haired Midwestern Girl Next Door dressed up like a cheerleader. Her style, as a pop star, seemed surprisingly bland to me. And that was another puzzle. Perhaps the look was conscious – a homogenized, inoffensive blend of her audience. Not what you would expect from a member of the “Tortured Poets Department” (the title of her most recent album).

There was nothing about what I knew about Taylor Swift at that point that gave me a hint about why she is, by all objective standards, the most successful pop musician of all time.

Then, a week or so ago, I found myself in a conversation about her. I don’t remember how she came up, but I remember being surprised to learn that three of the adult women I was speaking with had a favorable impression of her. And one of those women was in her sixties!

Gee, I thought. There are things going on here that I don’t understand. Contrary to my superficial impressions, was Taylor Swift a much better lyricist and singer than I had presumed? And if she wasn’t, what kind of amazing marketing strategy did she use to propel herself to the very top of the mountain of pop music stardom? How did this seemingly white-toast pop singer get bigger than The Beatles?

The world certainly is not in need of another opinion of or about Taylor Swift’s success – and especially not from a 73-year-old White guy. Nevertheless, I set about to find answers to those questions for… for… In case I was asked to make a speech about her one day?

I read a half-dozen magazine stories about her, and even skimmed a book about her, sitting in the corner of a bookstore last week. (No, I didn’t buy the book. I hadn’t the nerve to hand it to the checkout clerk.) I also spent at least six solid hours listening to about 30 of her most popular songs.

And, like it or not, I have formed an opinion of Taylor Swift – about her fame and her talent – which, since I haven’t yet been invited to make a speech about her, I decided to publish as this “Special Issue” of my blog. (And “Special Issue,” as I’ve told you, means: “You may want to skip this.”)

First, a disclaimer: I have no expertise in music or musical talent. My sole credential is that I have listened to thousands of rock-and-roll, country, pop, soul, R&B, and even rap songs for about 60 years now. But as I say in the disclaimer at the bottom of every issue, I have no problem talking about things I know very little about.

So, let’s get to it. Here’s what I think:

Taylor Swift is a good and maybe even very good singer. But she is not by any means, a great singer.

She has an impressively wide vocal range. Not amazingly wide like, say, Mariah Carey, Prince, or Whitney Houston. But wider than I would have guessed. And more than sufficient to convincingly deliver the songs she writes.

She also has impressive control of the tonality of her voice, which she uses to add depth and emotion to her lyrics –the sort of depth and emotion that appeals, as Shapiro suggested, to teenage girls.

As a lyricist, I would rate her as good to very good. Her lyrics, and especially the way she puts her lines together, are much, much better than I expected. As I listened to different songs from different albums and times, I could see that she understood (and still understands) the importance of keeping her stories a bit obtuse, to give them at the same time a touch of mystery and the possibility of universality – i.e., allowing listeners to fill in the narrative blanks, or even reconstruct the stories and the meanings entirely for themselves.

As for her look, her style, and all that – the impression I have of her now hasn’t changed from my uninformed, earlier impression. It is, at best, unremarkable. Not too cold, but not too hot. Somewhere early in her career, she seems to have consciously decided to go neutral in the style department and do her work through her lyrics, her melodies, and her voice.

So, cheers to Taylor Swift for all of that. But it doesn’t explain all of her unparalleled accomplishments.

I won’t presume to have an answer for that, but I do think that her greatest strength as a pop star is that she is acutely aware of what her audience wants from her and equally aware of how she can deliver it to them.

She very well understands the image she projects. She also – and this may be more important – understands her audience, the millions of girls and young women that she writes and sings for. And because she is aware, she smartly limits her repertoire to melodies within her strongest vocal range that create the mood that she knows works so well for her them.

That mood, I think, is key. After listening to a couple dozen of her songs, I could recognize it, and even feel it to some extent. But I don’t have the technical vocabulary to describe it. The best I can do is say that it is a softish, almost melancholy, combination of anguish, longing, and hurt.

To her credit, from the little studying I’ve done, it seems fair to say that Taylor Swift has ventured beyond her early thematic, lyrical, and melodic boundaries. Like other enduring pop stars, she has been able to alter her music output over the years as the musical landscape of pop has changed, but in a way that continues to appeal to her older fans, while also attracting younger ones and thus ever widening her base.

She seems also to have been purposeful in the topics and themes she chooses, as well as the diction she employs. (She uses the F-word smartly in many of her softest songs.)

One thing I was particularly impressed by was the way she uses rhymes and near-rhymes. Many, if not most, of her songs are held together by rhyme, either end rhymes or internal rhymes. Rhyme is normally an obstacle to pop lyricists. Used carelessly, it banalizes the emotionality and dumbs down the thought content to the very elementary level we expect of pop music.

But she counters that by inserting secondary stories into her main stories, and secondary themes into her main themes, each one a logical unit to itself, but woven together almost randomly. In this respect, she is more Joni Mitchell than Bruce Springsteen, and more Bob Dylan than Judy Collins, if you know what I mean.

The through line to all this is that Taylor Swift has maintained in all her later music the tone and emotionality that made her successful at her start. And she has been able to do that because she is so self-aware as a musician and performer and so aware of what her fans want from her.

In short, Taylor Swift is a sensitive, intelligent, and skillful singer and songwriter whose enormous success comes from having accidentally or purposefully discovered a way to tap into a kind of girlish, teenage angst and yearning that is deep and universal among young women, but also something useful that women carry into adulthood to feed and soothe their inner girls.

Final Note: Taylor Swift’s main audience is, of course, girls and women. But I know that she has a big homosexual following, too. And I’ve read that she has a growing following among young men and even adult men. This doesn’t surprise me. I’ve come to “sort of” like listening to some of her songs.

Here are a few things to read, if you care to read more:

* “It’s OK to Critique the New Taylor Swift Album” (Amy Odell)

* “9 Times Taylor Swift Crushed 2023” (Forbes)

* “So what exactly makes Taylor Swift great?” (Harvard Gazette)

* “Lead Like Taylor Swift: 5 Top Secrets of Her Superstar Success” (Forbes)

* “9 Ways Taylor Swift Has Changed the Music Business” (Billboard)

 

The COVID-19 Cover-Up:
It Wasn’t Just That “They Got It Wrong” –
They Knew It Was Wrong and Lied Anyway, Part I

He is smart, well-educated, and generally open-minded. How could he be so ignorant of something as important as the facts about COVID-19?

He hadn’t, for example, heard or read about any of the reported side effects of the mRNA vaccines. He thought they had all been tested and were safe. And when I gave him some of the facts, he was visibly shocked. Not by what I was telling him, but that I, someone he thought of as smart, well-educated, and open-minded, could be spouting what to him were long-ago-disproven conspiracy theories.

He could not believe, he said, that prominent people in the NIH, AMA, CDC, or any other governmental or quasi-governmental health organization would promote ideas about COVID or the COVID vaccines that were untrue. He felt the same way about representatives of the pharmaceutical companies and the reporters and talking heads that covered the health beat for the major media.

It was not just this conversation, but several dozen with people I admire that prompted my first attempt to document the misinformation we were being fed about COVID and our government’s response to the pandemic – a series of essays that began with the Nov. 29, 2022 issue of this blog and continued through much of 2023. It covered all the major concerns and questions that were widely misunderstood back then and even today. Misconceptions that have since been all but admitted to by the people that promoted them, including the NIH, the AMA, the CDC, and the politicians and mainstream media that propagated them.

I planned to publish one final essay about COVID that would lay out all the facts and debunk all the myths. But as I plodded along, collecting, vetting, and cross-checking the new studies and essays and articles that continued to come in, I realized that it was turning into a book that would be, realistically speaking, published a year or two from now. And that, by then, my book would be competing with a half-dozen similar books written by better-known and more credentialed writers.

So, instead, I’m going to treat this effort as a multi-part project.

In each part, I’m going to focus on one “scientific fact” about COVID that we now know was false. I want to prove to you that, in some cases, the propagators of these falsehoods knew they were false when they said them. Perhaps worse, they knew that what they were doing could drive wrongheaded and even dangerous public mandates. And all of it was aided and abetted by the media, whose primary value to democracies is to courageously and consistently question the policies and practices of big government and big business.

I’m going to try to cover all the major issues – the misinformation and disinformation that began within days after it became known that a new strain of the coronavirus, COVID-19, had made its way into the US and was spreading quickly. And I’m going to start with the first piece of misinformation I came across when this whole craziness began: the claim that COVID-19 had a scarily high mortality rate – as high as 10% to 15%.

Why Did They Lie About the Mortality Rate? 

COVID was declared a pandemic by the WHO on March 11, 2020. At the beginning, there was scant reliable data about the virus. But there were some early estimates by a half-dozen or so researchers indicating that it could be at least 10 times more contagious than other coronaviruses. The number that popped for me concerned the virus’s lethality.

If those early estimates of a 10% to 15% mortality rate were correct, we were looking at a pandemic that would have been more deadly than AIDs, which killed about 40 million, and perhaps even rivaling the Black Death of the 15th century that killed somewhere between 75 million and 200 million.

No wonder Anthony Fauci and other virologists and infectious disease specialists were alarmed!

In the first essay I wrote on the subject, I said that it didn’t seem possible that the mortality rate was anywhere near as high as the estimates because of other things the scientific community knew at the time. Chief among them was the already established fact that a significant percentage of people that came down with COVID-19 had mild, flu-like symptoms or were entirely asymptomatic.

Remember, this was at the very beginning of the pandemic, when few people were aware of what symptoms to look for. And even if they knew what to look for, and had the symptoms, it was difficult to get tested. The availability of test kits and testing facilities was extremely limited. So, many people with mild or no symptoms weren’t getting tested.

For me, this was a red flag. Because to calculate the mortality rate of any disease, you must compare the number of people that have it to the number of people that die from it. And nobody back then had any idea what percentage of the population had actually contracted COVID-19.

So those early analysts were making a serious statistical mistake – one that should have been recognized immediately. (It’s so big and obvious, it has a name. It’s called the denominator error.) It should have been recognized by the analysts themselves that came up with that crazily high mortality rate in the first place. And then by scientists at the NIH and CDC that were working on the virus. And, finally, by any media person with a 100+ IQ who reported the numbers to the public.

I had guesstimated – based mostly on what I knew about how difficult it was to get a test and what I’d had heard about how many people had mild-to-no symptoms – that the denominator they were using was wrong by a factor of 10. Maybe more.

As it turned out, I was right.

As more and more people got tested (thus increasing the size of the denominator), the official mortality estimates dropped from 10% to 6%, and then to 3%, where they stayed for a while. But by the end of 2021, they were down to 1%, and then down to 0.5% by the end of 2022.

In other words, those earliest estimates were wrong by a multiple of 20!

Now, you could still argue (as many COVID Conspiracy Propogandists still do) that the 0.5% figure is still much higher than the mortality rate of the common flu (about 0.01%). But to do that, you would have to ignore another monstrous mistake. I’m talking about the fact that the CDC and many other governmental health organizations tracking COVID deaths had, at the beginning of the pandemic, mandated that hospitals designate any patient that died with COVID as having died from COVID.

This is so mind-bendingly stupid that, after three years of following the research and writing about it, I am astonished that the practice continues today.

Think about it. An obese, diabetic, 81-year-old man is hospitalized and diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. On admittance, he is given a COVID test (which is still required by the CDC), and he tests positive. While the doctors at the hospital perform lung surgery to try to extend his life, he dies. But in recording the cause of his death, the hospital must categorize it as due to COVID-19.

Even if a young man is rushed to the hospital after being shot in the heart, he is given a COVID test when he’s admitted. And if that test happens to be positive and he dies, his death will be officially attributed to COVID.

So now you must ask yourself: If hospitals were allowed to make reasonable diagnoses, what percentage of those that died with COVID had, in fact, died from other causes? Considering how widely spread COVID was in 2021 and 2022, my guess is that it was 20%, at most.

And if that proves to be true, the actual mortality rate of COVID is less than one-tenth of one percent. In other words, it might be about the same as or lower than the mortality rate of the common flu!

Those are the facts as I’ve come to understand them. If anything I’ve said above is wrong and you have the facts to prove it, please let me know so I can make a correction.

But please don’t write to say:

“Okay, the early scientists and the media that followed them got it wrong. But they did the best they could, given what they knew at the time. That was then and this is now. Let’s move on.”

That is, in fact, the narrative that the Medical-Industrial Complex has been trying out. And it may apply to some of what they told us that has since been proven false. But not in this case. The misinformation they handed out about the mortality rate of COVID-19 was based on logic and arithmetic that was so obviously wrong that those that issued and repeated it were guilty of either astonishing ignorance or purposeful deception.

And what makes it so much scarier is that the bogus numbers were accepted without so much as a second thought by the mainstream media and all but a tiny fraction of professionals, some of whom lost their licenses as a punishment for pointing out the obvious truth.

Finally, remember this: This was the first of a series of falsehoods about COVID perpetrated by the Medical-Industrial Complex and promoted by the mainstream media all over the world that did massive economic, educational, social, and psychological damage to millions of people. The economic cost alone may have amounted to nearly a trillion dollars!

And that’s to say nothing of the massive cost in terms of human life that is only beginning to be assessed. I’m talking, in particular, about the vaccines. Not just about the already proven correlations between the vaccines and their temporary side effects, but also about the growing evidence that they may have been the cause of many deaths.

That last claim is still being dismissed as a lunatic “conspiracy theory.” But before I’m finished with this series of Special Issues, it, too, might be proven to be true. A grim possibility.

Stay tuned.

 

 

The Hamas-Israel Conflict

This is a supplement to my regular weekly blog. I am publishing it separately because I know that the interest level of readers varies – from mild to intense – depending on the topic. So when I am especially interested in a particular topic, such as the Hamas-Israel conflict or COVID vaccines or global warming, etc., I will occasionally publish special issues that go into the subject at some length. By doing that, I’ll be able to devote more of my weekly issues to business, investing, entrepreneurship, and other topics that are traditionally in my bailiwick. 

Why I’m Studying Boxes Full of Research Papers and Rereading Exodus…

The United States has always been a country of competing political parties and correspondingly different views about everything from taxation and trade to foreign policy to domestic policing to education and welfare and just about every other important issue.

But in my life – which includes the Cold War with Russia, the Civil Rights Movement, the Equal Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the Gay Rights Movement, 9/11, and the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan – beneath the disagreements, which were sometimes very hateful, there were always a few ideas and principles, or at least rules of engagement, that both sides could agree on. That is, after all, how we managed to move through and beyond those disagreements. At least, that’s how it has always seemed to me.

It changed when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. The shock among most moderates, liberals, and leftists – and even many conservatives – ignited a pandemic of fear that was much less about the merits of Trump’s ideas or promises than it was about his character. And as Trump assumed the presidency, his evident enjoyment in belittling and name-calling those who opposed him only stoked the fires of fear into a chronic distrust and then into disgust and finally into an unmitigated and unapologetic loathing for the man and everything he said and did.

The Democrats in Congress, armed with a phony document ordered and paid for by the Hillary Clinton Election Committee, began a three-year campaign to impeach Trump for “Russian collusion.” At the same time, the liberal and left-wing media began its own campaign of supporting the Russian Collusion hoax, hiding the Hunter Biden scandal, and criticizing every Trump initiative, even those they had long argued for.

These unfounded and since-disproven political narratives, spread and amplified by mainstream media bias, were enormously successful in solidifying and raising the animosity of anti-Trump voters. But they also, unexpectedly, set off an equally strong surge of loyalty to Trump by his base, as well as by hundreds of thousands of new supporters, including old-school liberals and undecided voters.

Since then, we have become a country broken in two, heatedly arguing about everything from COVID-19 to the CRT and White Privilege and gender fluidity theories being taught in our schools.

It got to the point where friends and families couldn’t talk to one another anymore, for fear of triggering a fight. And I’d bet that most everyone was wishing we could just lower the emotional temperature and get back to normal standards of disagreement.

Then, on October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and brutally murdered more than 1,200 Israelis, almost all civilians. Their “acts of resistance” included raping and knife-killing women, burning children to death, shooting and hacking teenagers to death, and beheading infants. 

And the reason we know those things happened – despite claims by some Hamas supporters – is because a number of Hamas soldiers decided to videotape the slaughter. (One, for example, recorded a murder on his victim’s phone and then sent the clip to her family. Another called his parents in Gaza, bragging that he’d “just killed 10 Jews” with his “bare hands.”)

It was an act of the kind of barbarity that is relatively rare in human history. So I woke up the next day expecting to see the world united in horror and outrage. Instead, even while the bodies were lying there, butchered, thousands of Muslims all over the world were dancing in the streets. A day or two after that, I was astonished to see thousands of Americans in major cities and hundreds of students at prestigious universities marching in support of the horror Hamas had inflicted, some shouting “Kill the Jews!”

But what was, perhaps, most disturbing to me was the fact that I never heard a single word of criticism and/ or condemnation against Hamas or what its soldiers did that day from any of my highly educated, highly intelligent, highly successful, and proudly liberal and leftist friends. If I didn’t initiate a conversation about the atrocity, it did not come up. It was as if it didn’t happen.

I never considered myself to be a student of Middle Eastern history. Nor was I particularly knowledgeable about the conflagrations that have occurred between the Palestinian Arabs and Jews during my lifetime.

But I certainly did know, and I assumed everyone knew, that the Jews had been under siege for most of their history. Can you think of another ethnic, racial, or religious group that has been more oppressed, ostracized, exiled, unjustly incarcerated, attacked, and murdered en masse?

So there I was, stuck in the middle of a new and fast-growing global culture enraged and engaged over Institutional Racism, Colonialization, White Supremacy, Homophobia, Transphobia, and other ideological versions of oppressor-victim theology. And yet this primitive, tribal slaughter had just occurred… and there was no outpouring of rage from anyone.

On the contrary, as the days went by and Israel began its war against Hamas, I could see that the sentiment of Americans and citizens of other countries of the “civilized” world was rapidly moving against Israel.

Israel – the only inclusive, equitable, diverse, and democratic country in the Mideast – was being described as a “colonialist, repressive, and apartheid state” that was engaging in “genocide” against the poor, noble, and defenseless Arabs living in Gaza.

At the end of October, I attended the monthly meeting of The Mules (my book club), where we, as usual, discussed our book of the month with considerable enthusiasm. Our membership includes men whose political views range from moderately liberal to modestly conservative. And I was sure that the Hamas-Israel war would be brought up at some point. But not a word was mentioned.

After the meeting, three of us stayed to talk about what none of the other Mules seemed to want to talk about. We were flummoxed by the seeming lack of interest in this major piece of news. And we were confused and fearful of what that might mean.

We talked about it for more than an hour. And in the end, we decided that what we should do was educate ourselves about Israel and the Arab people that lived in Palestine. We needed to make sense of the world’s reaction to what had happened, and we hoped that if we knew the history of the conflict, we would arrive at some sort of understanding.

So we formed an informal little group. And the other night, we met for the first time to share what we had learned from the research we had done so far.

Based on that, the following essay is my current thinking.

The Hamas-Israel War: Let’s Get the Facts Straight 

On November 29, 1947, in an effort to resolve the continuing conflict between the Jews and the Arabs living in Palestine, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, calling for the partition of Palestine into two states – one for the Arabs and one for the Jews.

Prior to that, there had been many – more than a half-dozen – formal and informal proposals for the Arabs and the Jews to have their own sovereign states. Every single time, the Jews were willing to talk about it. And, on at least three occasions, they accepted the plan offered. But the Arabs never once even considered a “two-state solution.”

The UN’s 1947 Partition Plan gave the Arabs the lion’s share of Palestine (including all of its fertile land). The Jews were given a much smaller section that consisted mostly of swampland and desert.

Did the Jews object? Did they insist on negotiating a better deal? No. Depleted and exhausted by the Holocaust and WWII, they accepted the offer.

The Arabs, however, rejected it immediately and out of hand. They didn’t even suggest a counteroffer.

So the Jews took possession of the modest parcel of swamp and desert they had been offered, leaving two sections of Palestine – the city of Gaza and the West Bank – to the Arabs. And on May 14, 1948, they founded the State of Israel. They then went on to turn it into one of the richest and most productive economies in the Mideast.

And they did it without oil!

They also developed a democracy. A genuine democracy. Where the Arabs that lived within Israel’s borders had full and equal rights.

This did not, however, bring peace to the region.

Palestine‘s Arab population was always comprised of distinct tribes. They had been fighting with one another for hundreds of years, as well as occasionally attacking Palestine’s small Jewish communities.

With the formation of Israel in 1948, the Palestinian Arabs focused their attention – and most of the billions of dollars in aid they were getting not only from rich Arab states but also from Western democracies (including the US, England, and France) – on purchasing weapons, including missiles and missile launchers, to bomb the new state.

In response, the Israelis developed perhaps the most sophisticated defense system in history.

Over the next five decades, efforts continued to be made to resolve the conflict – each one summarily rejected by whatever group was representing the Arabs in Palestine.

Then, in 2005, with an increasing percentage of Israelis hoping that a more generous concession might finally bring peace, Israel unilaterally agreed to remove all of the Jews that were still living in Gaza – by force, if necessary – and bring them to Israel.

It was an astonishing offer at the time. And there were many that believed it would work. But it was, like every prior offer, immediately and totally rejected by the Arabs. To add insult to injury, in 2006, the Palestinian Arabs elected (by a huge margin) Hamas, a known anti-Israel terrorist group, to govern Gaza.

Israel took actions to protect itself by putting a wall between itself and Gaza and blockading the ports.

I’ve been trying to understand why the Arabs have rejected every offer of a two-state solution and have continued to attack Israel by land and sea, even though they are fully aware that Israel’s military and defense systems are infinitely superior to their own.

I have found only one answer that makes sense: Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO, and the Palestine Authority don’t want a compromise. Their position, from the beginning, was that they should occupy all of Palestine, “from the river to the sea.”

This is not an abstract conclusion that I came to by reading between the lines. It is the written policy of Hamas and Hezbollah (in their charters), and it has been the stated policies of the leaders of the PLO and the Palestine Authority for most of the last 70 years.

The actual text of the Hamas charter, which I’ve read in translation, states, in no uncertain terms, that its goal is to conquer the State of Israel – and then not only kill all its Jewish citizens, but kill every Jew on the face of the Earth. And after this Jewish genocide is completed, their next goal will be to convert or kill every infidel (non-Muslim) in the entire world, including Christians, Hindus, et al.

I swear. I’m not making this up!

Note: I’m not saying that all Muslims share this mission. What I am saying is that it is the mission of the terrorist Muslim/ Arab groups that occupy Palestine now – a mission that they have confirmed time and time again in their published charters and in their public statements.

It’s still early in my research. I’ve got plenty more work to do on this. Nevertheless, those are the facts.

So why is it that, even after the horrifying October 7 slaughter of Israeli civilians by Hamas, so many intelligent people in civilized countries around the world consider Israel to be the villain in this story?

How is it possible that they’ve bought into so many ideas that are not just wrong, but completely wrong?

Here are some of the charges the Pro-Hamas side has been making:
 
“Israel is an apartheid state.” 

Prior to October 7, I’d never heard anyone accuse Israel of being an “apartheid” state. Apartheid, to me, was South Africa prior to 1988 – where Black Africans were systematically and brutally kept in second-class citizenship. So, what do the anti-Israel protesters mean?

When I asked people who are sympathetic to “the cause,” here is a sampling of what I was told:

* In Israel, Arabs live in poor, walled-off neighborhoods.

* They are paid poverty wages to do menial and degrading work.

* They can’t vote. They don’t have free speech.

* They are victims of racism at every level of government, including the courts.

Essentially, they say, the Israeli Arabs have been relegated to second-class citizenship by depriving them of many or most of the human rights that the Jews in Israel enjoy.

When I looked into it, though, this is what I found:

* Arabs are free to live wherever they want in Israel.

* They earn the same pay as Jews earn for the same jobs.

* They can vote. They have free speech.

* They have every right that Israeli Jews have, and are represented at every level of business and government. They are CEOs, members of Parliament, and Supreme Court justices.

So, no. Israel is not an apartheid state.

“Israel is a colonialist occupier of Palestine.” 

Israel became a state in 1948 when it took up the UN on its “Partition Plan.” The Arabs didn’t. The Arab population that lived within Israel’s new borders was allowed to stay there, but it was a relatively small group.

In subsequent years, hundreds of thousands of Jews settled in Palestine.

During the same period, Arabs were moving to Palestine from Jordan and other neighboring Arab nations. Their primary motivation was financial – just as it was for the millions of Latin Americans that have crossed into the US via our southern border.

As I said, the land that was given to the Jews as part of the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan consisted mostly of patches of desert and swamp. Which, in the ensuing decades, they miraculously turned into highly productive farms and cities and industries. The Israelis were growing their economy by double-digits for many years and creating thousands of jobs. There weren’t enough Jews to fill those jobs, so they opened them up to Arabs living nearby in Gaza.

Israel now has hundreds of thousands of Arabs living and prospering within its borders. It also allows more than a hundred thousand Arabs to commute to Israel daily for work.

So, no. Israel is not occupying Arab lands. That is nonsense.

But there is another argument – one that has more merit, at least superficially – about Israel occupying Arab land that it seized after each of two wars it fought against its neighbors: the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom-Kippur War.

Seizing land is what countries often do after winning wars. And it is usually accepted as fair and reasonable. Israel did win vast stretches of land because of those two wars, including most of what is now called Jordan. But this is a complicated subject, one that I’m just getting into. So I’m going to come back to this “occupier” issue another time.

As for being “colonialist…” 

Colonialism is essentially when one country takes over the land of another country by force. But the Jews that emigrated to Palestine after 1948 and bought land in Gaza paid for every acre they settled on. They did not take it by force. If a bunch of Methodists from Minnesota moved into Brooklyn and bought up half of Brooklyn Heights, you couldn’t call them colonialists.

Well, you could, but you would be wrong. And anti-Methodist!

One of the problems with the colonialist argument is that different people point to different historical eras to establish their case.

“Israel is conducting “genocide” on the Palestinians.” 

One can only make this statement if (1) one doesn’t know what genocide means, or (2) one knows nothing about the history of this conflict.

In fact, the idea that Israel is engaged in genocide is so absurd that I won’t bother to say anything more than this: Since Israel was established in 1948, the Arab population in Palestine has grown six-fold.

The Civilian Deaths 

This is the trickiest issue to discuss.

Retaliating to the October 7 invasion and attack, Israel declared war on Hamas. And the IDF (Israel Defense Force) carried out a mission to destroy Hamas by, for starters, bombing the hell out of Gaza. Which has resulted in, if you trust Hamas’s numbers, something like 10,000 civilian deaths.

Israel has taken measures to reduce this sort of “collateral damage,” as it is called, with, among other things, phone and leaflet campaigns sent into Gaza, letting civilians know, ahead of time, that their neighborhoods are targets and they should take refuge elsewhere.

It would obviously be to Israel’s advantage, from a public perception point of view, for all of those civilians to evacuate the target zones. But that has been difficult. Not only for practical reasons (e.g., being able to pack up and travel and survive what came next), but also because, according to the IDF, Hamas was threatening to execute any civilians that did leave.

All civilian deaths in war are tragic. The number of Israeli civilians that were killed on October 7 – 1,200+ – seemed enormous when I first heard it. But now it feels, to some people, “small” compared to the thousands of Palestinian civilians that have been killed by the bombings.

One thousand. Ten thousand. As the death toll mounts, it seems inevitable that the anti-Israel sentiments expressed by the thousands of protesters will become hardened, while the political posturing by the Biden administration and other Israel allies will weaken.

One thing that needs to be understood in considering this tragedy: The Hamas-Israeli conflict is a war. A war that was started by Hamas. Wars are terrible. They always and inevitably result in massive economic destruction and the killing of countless civilians. But we do not judge the morality of a war by the number of citizens killed.

Did you know, for example, how many German and other Axis country civilians were killed by Allied bombings in WWII? More than 800,000.

And what about civilian Iraqis killed by US forces during the war against Iraq? It was somewhere between 280,000 and 320,000.

This War Can End Tomorrow 

Given the way the Hamas-Israeli conflict has been being reported on by the mainstream media, we should be forgiven for thinking that what happened on October 7 was a terrorist attack, like the blowing up of a café, and should, therefore, be treated by the Israelis as a one-off, domestic crime. A police matter.

But that is not how Israel sees it. And neither does Hamas.

The invasion and massacre of 1,200+ Jewish civilians on October 7 was a declaration of war. And Israel’s response was an acknowledgement of that.

Hamas started this war and Hamas can end it – and all the terrible killing that is taking place – in 24 hours… by surrendering to Israel.

But they won’t. They have said so repeatedly. So, the war goes on.

Additional Resources 

Recommended Books 

For insights into American attitudes toward Israel, you might want to read Leon Uris’s 1958 novel, Exodus (or watch the movie). Click here and here for some recent reviews.

I haven’t yet read any of the following. They were either recommended to me by friends or selected from dozens I found on Google whose capsule summaries sounded intriguing. Many are supportive of Israel, but not all of them.

* My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, by Ari Shavit – recommended by SL, a friend and fellow student of this subject. Ari Shavit is an Israeli journalist who was part of the peace movement in Israel and writes a lot about it.

* Rethinking the Holocaust, by Yehuda Bauer – a balanced perspective on the 1947 vote in the United Nations that approved the partition of British Mandate Palestine and the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states.

* Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, by Dan Señor and Saul Singer – explores the themes of persistence, order, chaos, immigration, and opportunity, giving a well-rounded view of the way Israel pulled itself upward into the high-tech stratosphere.

* Chances for Peace: Missed Opportunities in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Elie Podeh – lengthy, academic yet readable research on Israel’s potential to reach peace with its neighbors over the past century. Podeh explores episodes ranging from Arab-Zionist negotiations at the end of WWI and the Six-Day War up to the 2007 Annapolis Conference and the Abu Mazen-Olmert talks in 2008, giving a wide, comprehensive analysis of Israel’s relations with the region.

* Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929, by Hillel Cohen – investigates the 1929 violent riots during which Arabs killed 133 Jews in mandatory Palestine. Almost a century later, Cohen sifted through never-accessed documents and uniquely uncovered a trove of insights, interviewing elderly Israelis and Palestinians, descendants of those who were alive at that time.

* Israel: A History, by Anita Shapiro – examines the emergence of political Zionism in the late 19th century, immigration to Israel, and the wars, political events, and cultural shifts that brought the country to where it is today.

* No Room for Small Dreams: Courage, Imagination and the Making of Israel, by Shimon Peres – a detailed account of the decisions and events that shaped the country. An insider’s view of the way Israel became what it is, discussing topics such the country’s nuclear power, the famous Operation Entebbe, and the establishment of Start-Up Nation.

* The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Dov Waxman – explains key events, examines core issues, and presents competing claims and narratives of both sides. Waxman also offers a range of Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, showing readers that there is no one Israeli or Palestinian view of the conflict, and that this very diversity of views is one of the reasons this conflict has proven so intractable.

* Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine: 1917 to 2017, by Ian Black – a lengthy review of the complex, hundred-year-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, based on archival research, oral testimonies, and Black’s own experience as a reporter and editor.

Recommended Videos 

To get an idea of what people all over the world are thinking/ saying about the Hamas-Israel conflict, check out the following videos.

* This first one is a good introductory video about the current conflict that touches on the issues I made in the above essay. I like the way the speaker, an Israeli, makes a case for Israel with facts and logic. He’s also got a relaxed approach to the subject that I like. And I like how, at the end of all his videos on the subject (he’s done at least a dozen), he says, “If you disagree with anything I’ve said, please prove me wrong by sending facts.” Click here.

* Two more videos from him. Click here and here.

* A brief history of the conflict from Ben Shapiro.

* And here’s something specifically on why the Jews are indigenous to Palestine.

* What does the average Israeli think about all this? Click here.

* This is from four years ago. An interview with Robert Spencer, who explains why every Middle East peace plan has failed, why a two-state solution won’t work, and what must be done instead.

* A good example of the ignorance of college kids.

* A surprisingly rational conversation between a Zionist and a Palestinian about the history of Palestine.

* Conservative intellectual Douglas Murray is a strong supporter of Israel. Here is a video that captures some of what he’s been saying about the war.

* Douglas Murray vs. Norman Finkelstein, a Jew that is anti-Israel and bizarrely antisemitic, although his parents were victims of the Holocaust. Click here.

* Why do some Muslims hate Jews? An Arab scholar explains.

* Israel rejects charges of genocide at the UN. Click here.

* The UN is a joke. Apartheid? One man speaks the truth. Click here.

* Hillel Neuer testifies before the US Congress on UN Antisemitism. Click here.