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“The worse, the better”. Or in the original Russian, “Tzem huze, tzem lutze”. This simple phrase from the ashes of the Soviet takeover was polished into more sophisticated plans for targeted economic destruction and social change such as the infamous Cloward–Piven strategy.
What it really means is that the Left does not solve problems. Where they already exist, it worsens them, and where they do not exist, it creates them in order to make life worse.
Why is life getting worse? Because leftists believe that “the worse, the better.”
That’s also the premise of ‘Manufactured Crisis: The War to End America’, the latest book by James Simpson, who has spent decades writing about the Communist threat. As Simpson bluntly puts it in his introduction to his book, “we are experiencing the end stages of a Communist revolution that has been conducted against America for over one hundred years.”
(Also see Mark Tapson’s podcast interview with Simpson on episode 81 of The Right Take.)
‘Manufactured Crisis: The War to End America’ rejects the notion that our skyrocketing budgets, racial tensions, economic misery and social chaos are the results of unintended consequences, of incompetence, a failure to think things through or poor theorizing by the leftists who run our society, rather the worsening of our lives in every possible way is the whole point of the project.
The differences come from whether we think of the Left as a progressive movement or a revolutionary one. Leftists want us to think of them as progressives, when they are actually revolutionaries. And that is the argument that Simpson develops in ‘Manufactured Crisis’.
Simpson, an economist, former White House budget analyst, businessman, and investigative journalist, makes the straightforward case, bolstered by reams of data and analysis, that the Left, through its facades, cutouts and useful idiots, pursues unworkable programs like the war on poverty or net zero not because it genuinely seeks to achieve their goals, but because these programs waste huge amounts of money, redistribute wealth, divide up the country, foster grievances and their very unworkability ensures that we will be stuck with them forever.
The genius of the unsolvable problem is its very unsolvability.
“Since its inception, the War on Poverty has cost over $37 trillion after correcting for inflation,” Simpson writes in his section on welfare. “But have we made a dent in poverty? No, things just keep getting worse. That is deliberate. Keeping the poor on welfare, dependent and helpless, serves the Democrats’ purposes.”
Manufactured Crisis similarly exposes the unworkability of net zero. “To transition entirely away from fossil fuels, the US would need to build forty-seven solar farms, fifty-four wind farms, one nuclear power plant, three hydroelectric dams, and twenty geothermal, tidal, or biowaste
plants per month until 2050.”. And the nuclear plants would never even be allowed to operate.
Income inequality and climate change are both examples of manufactured crises whose solutions, social welfare and net zero, redistribute wealth under the guise of solving the crises while bringing on a much larger crisis that would crash our economy and destroy our country.
‘Manufactured Crisis: The War to End America’ delves into the various crises that we are experiencing to show that the solution is the real crisis being perpetrated by radicals who hope to use them to destroy everything we have in order to be able to implement their revolution.
Simpson quotes Karl Marx as saying that, “the Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” The difference between the old Communists and their new disguise as progressives is that the latter no longer openly declare that this is what they are doing.
At least not unless you look at their TikTok videos instead of their campaign ads.
But they are still bent on the “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” as even the briefest exposure to a DEI training seminar or modern college course catalog all too easily shows. The pretense lies in pretending that the overthrow of all existing social conditions inherent to the push for equity, net zero, income equality and other similar rebranding of the goals of Communism can be accomplished through a ‘non-forcible’ overthrow of society.
“We have repeatedly been outmaneuvered by our Communist enemies abroad, and tricked, misled, and subverted,” Simpson writes. The Democrat Party, liberalism and nearly every flavor of leftist politics now stand for the same regimen of open borders, redistribution, equity, riots and national destruction no matter how they may try to appear reasonable and even patriotic.
“In 1985, as a newly minted economist fresh out of grad school, I became fascinated with Communism. Why, I wondered, would so many people in so many nations be so totally entranced with the Communist idea,” James Simpson writes in the preface to ‘Manufactured Crisis:’ The Communist idea has been dressed up, dispersed and disguised so that it is everywhere and nowhere. To many, Communism seems like a relic from another era rather than something that we have to deal with today. And yet the return of Communism may be all around us because the worse things get for us, the better they get for those who seek to destroy us.
‘Manufactured Crisis: The War to End America’ makes the case that the crises facing America are not the result of human error, but human malice, and not random but revolutionary.