America Is Not NUMBER ONE Anymore
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gonna be upfront right now. If you’re faint of heart, this podcast can be a little bit difficult. I’ve said this again and again and again. This program, I don’t sugarcoat things by any stretch. And this one is going to be a bit of a jagged pill going down. That’s okay. And I’m going to say it right up front. USA, we’re not the greatest country in the world.
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anymore people. I’ve been talking about this for some time and I know, oh my god, I can’t wait to see the emails I’m going to get. How dare I say that? It’s almost blasphemous to be honest with people. The first step in recognizing and dealing with a problem is actually admitting that you have
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It’s the reality of the situation, people. We have to stop kidding ourselves. We really do. I wanna share with everybody some stories, some headlines, just over the past 24, 48 hours. First and foremost, annual, annual US excess deaths relative to other developed countries are growing at an alarming rate. Excess deaths.
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What is an excess deaths? The actual number of deaths that occur in any given year compared with expected deaths over that same period. Compare us to other countries around the world. It’s not even close. Develop countries around the world. Compare us to European countries out there. And we live in a country that, quite frankly, medical advances, hospitals, healthcare.
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We’ve got better talent, if you will. We’ve got better talent. You want me to give you a sports thing? Take a look at the New York Mets and the team that they put on the field and the talent that they have, but look at their performance. We’re not doing so well. Here’s a story from yesterday. This is the United States of America. Good morning America. They…
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We’re doing an on location in San Francisco and their chief national correspondent, guy by the name of Matt Gutman. He told viewers that his crew was instructed to film their 4 a.m. segment in a separate part of the city while reporting on the closure that we reported on as well of the Westfield Mall. It just wasn’t safe enough to record there. This is San Francisco.
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This is the United States of America. We have reporters on the ground that are reporting from Kiev, from hotspots around the globe, yet here in the United States, San Francisco is seemingly worse.
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There was this, and again, this is not being widely put out there. There’s a California state Senator by the name of Scott Wilk, God bless him. He’s one of two Republicans on California State Senate Judiciary Committee. He has served in the state legislature for 11 years. There’s a bill, there’s a bill there in California. It’s basically allowing
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the Democrats to rewrite the state’s family code to list gender affirmation alongside a child’s need for health, safety, and welfare. Basically, a parent now in California could lose custody, could lose custody of their child for not affirming their claims about gender identity.
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And he gave this, I mean, he was tearing up.
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He was tearing up and he was talking about the, you know, they were here to protect kids, we gotta start protecting parents. He was talking about the assault on charter schools, taking away parents’ choice and how their children are going to be educated. Recent years, we put government bureaucrats between parents, children and doctors when it comes to medical care. And now we have this bill where if a parent does not support the ideology of the government, children are going to be taken away from the home.
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And he says he was born and raised in the state. He loves the state, but he is not going to stay in the state. It’s too oppressive. I believe in freedom. So I’m going to move to America when he leaves the legislature. And, um, he actually, he actually encouraged people to move out of the state that he is a representative.
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This is yesterday. Then we go to Congress here where Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw is interviewing a Democratic witness. And again, more about gender nonsense and her inability to cite a single medical study that states the benefits of transgender surgeries for minors. They’re pushing this now. And…
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Basically, he, I’m not gonna go through the entire conversation, but he destroys this wizard of smart doctor from Yale. She’s got zero proof whatsoever. It’s all ideology. And I’m gonna share with you, I’m gonna share with you a column. I read all of this gentleman’s stuff, including his books. I’m a bit of a history buff.
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and Victor Davis Hanson’s one of my favorites. I’m a big fan of classical history. But one of my listeners, one of my listeners that loves to bust my cojones more often than not here, and it’s good, I love it when my listeners keep me honest, sent me this and I was taken back. I actually, I printed this out, I printed this out and I gave it to my wife.
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I gave it to my wife, you know I gave it to my wife, I gave it to my wife as a kick in the ass. To why? We’re in the process right now, being honest, being in the process right now of getting my kids dual citizenship. And I say, you gotta, we gotta, you know, we’re falling behind here on the paperwork. We gotta, you know, catch up with this. Getting a European being a Greek citizenship as well. Anyway, I’m gonna read this, and I may even go through the whole entire thing. It’s really…
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that good. That good in the sense that it better open up your damn eyes. All you, Murko, we’re number one. We’re not. We’re not number one. I remember before I get into the column, just popped into my head, there was a show on HBO called The Newsroom. And one of the opening episode, one of the anchors at the network. And I wasn’t, I mean, the show, I tried watching it and I got tired of it.
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tedious, Alan Sorkin tedious after a few episodes. But this one monologue that this anchor has that this anchor is known for being vanilla, not taking sides. And he goes off. And he talks about, you know, there’s only three things in the world. He lists, he lists all these things where America is in science, mortality, a myriad of things. And I remember he says there was three things, three things that America was number one at.
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Incarcerations, people who believe in angels, and defense spending. He says the only three things in the world that we lead in at this point in time, and he had the side of him, he had one liberal and one Democrat. They were asked what made America number one. He first tried to avoid the question. His first answer was why America is the greatest country in the world is the New York Jets. That was his first answer. They push him on it. But he, you know, the…
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conservative guy, freedom, freedom and freedom. And he’s like, what are you talking about? There’s plenty of countries in the world that have freedom. And I don’t, you know, we cover a lot of these things here on the program, on the radio show, our freedom is being constantly taken away on a regular basis. And we just smile. We smile, we bend over, okay? We bend over like Kevin Bacon in Animal House. Thank you, sir, may I have another. George freaking W. Bush in his flipping Patriot ass.
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You know that the government’s doing right now to get around your constitutional protections? Is they’re paying for your search data. That’s what they’re getting around to it. Remember that? We talked about this 2010, okay? When the whole Snowden, Julian Assange, all of the WikiLeaks stuff coming out. The government now is paying, paying private companies, data collectors, and they’re saying that their argument is because we’re paying for it, we didn’t get a warrant for it.
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It’s legal and they’re keeping this information on you. Merica! Yeah, whatever. Let’s get into the Victor Davis Hansen piece. We can calibrate the decline and the quality of American life by comparisons to both societies of the past and contemporary civilizations elsewhere. And the result is not encouraging for Americans. Now,
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I’m going to be, I’m going to, from time to time, I’m going to interrupt this column to give my two cents in. We live in a country right now that belittles intelligence. What do we value now? Influencers. Not, not, we, we have man caves in our houses. You know, we used to have libraries. How about picking up a fricking book?
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studying history, getting a bit of a clue in regards to how the world works and how it has worked and the mistakes of the past. Ken, sorry, and I don’t mean to lecture, but again…
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As you can tell, you know, again, I go over these things all the time and I try to be lighthearted when it comes to them People were getting to a point in time where you know that the thing where the point of no return We’re going past the point of no return. We’re right around there Right around there. And again, don’t believe me. Like I said start reading your history. Oh, it can’t happen here bullshit Anyway, I believe this is Victor Davis Hansen
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I believe I may have visited 80% of the so-called first world countries in Europe and the Middle East and in most of the major capitals in large cities – Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Rome, Warsaw – as well as first, second, and third world non-European cities of Algiers, Amman, Ankara, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kuwait City, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, and Tripoli.
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over the last 40 years. I have had major surgeries in these cities, stayed in bad areas, lived for nearly three years abroad, and traveled to the hinterlands. I’ve been a journalist who visited Iraq twice during the surge of 2006, 2007, was in Israel during the worst of the suicide bombings, lived in Athens during the 1973 coup and the 1974 war in Cyprus.
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and visited for two weeks Egypt just after the Yom Kippur war. I’ve seen firsthand the toxic work of dictators like Gaddafi, the violence of the PLO, the changes in Erdogan’s Turkey, and the incompetence of socialists in Europe. And yet, listen, I have never, I never saw in the slums of old Cairo,
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or the worst ignorance of Brussels and Naples, or amid the poverty of 1970s rural Turkey, anything like what I saw in San Francisco this year and last. The undressed on Market Street and near Union Square routinely smoking dope, injecting drugs, defecating, urinating, and in various states of pre-civilized behavior. The homeless enclaves of Los Angeles are worse.
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Were these scenes being filmed for the last of us? Kind of interject. I have to go into the city now for Fox News on a regular basis. And again, I talk.
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Fox News building, 6th Avenue, Manhattan. I get there, I get in at around five o’clock in the morning. Car, they send a car to pick me up, drop me off there. Security everywhere. Private security all around the building. Right, they, you know, good morning Mr. Markowski. All right, I can take a look right up there, the next rock and watch somebody shooting up.
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It wasn’t always like this. Okay, I lived there, but it is now. Shoot, I would have never even thought about it. I’m gonna go back in time to when I visited San Francisco for the first time was in 2012, went to California. Went to California, went to San Francisco, went out to Yosemite, spent some time, whatever, spent a week, week and a half out in Yosemite, absolutely loved it.
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absolutely loved the National Park. It was an absolute joy. Loved it. San Francisco, I swear, I never go back. It’s 2012. I can’t even imagine what it’s like right now. Leave in my hotel, my wife wasn’t feeling well, going to the West End, going to find a Walgreens around the corner, getting warned by people. You got to be careful. I’m like, what? This is a good area, isn’t it?
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Feeling like I was in the flipping walking dead. Being followed by drug addicts. I never had that experience in my entire life. I was like, leaving, this is 2012, leaving, we had to a ball game at the Pack Bell there, watch the Giants play, I mean, beautiful stadium, overlooking the Bay. Some vagrant coming out with people, knocks my kid over.
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and tries to steal his hat.
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Again, I’ve been to a million Yankee games. Here, I never, again, I said, I’m never coming back to this shithole because that’s what it is. Anyway, good shitholes everywhere now, okay? He goes back to Victor Davis Hanson, San Francisco. Beautiful office buildings, empty, former stores, shuttered. I don’t think.
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In the dark days of the Iraq surge, I saw routine smash and grab or carjacking to the extent of what routinely goes on in our major cities. I wore body armor in Iraq each day and evening when on patrols with soldiers and felt safer than I would after hours on the weekends in Chicago, Baltimore, Memphis, or Detroit. Okay, I was in Baltimore last year, last summer.
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And again, I wouldn’t really be paying much attention. We used to go there several years ago for lacrosse tournaments. I’d stay at this Marriott there at the inner harbor. We’d take the kids around, take an aquarium, go to Camden Yards, do stuff after the game. So I go there and I’m with my son and I couldn’t believe how awful what happened. I mean, what the hell happened here?
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I mean, garbage, it was disgusting. I was blown away.
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Anyway, back to the piece. I was operated on for a ruptured appendix and periodontitis on a wooden table with only an ether fix in a red crescent clinic in Gaddafi’s Libya. And yet I felt the third world clinic care in terms of the clientele and fellow patients was less scary than what I have witnessed in ER rooms in Central Valley of California or Tucson or Washington DC. I used to define
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America as a hypercivilized by the courtesy and professionalism of its drivers, not far behind those in Canada, the UK and Australia, especially in comparison to the road madness in Rome or Athens or Cairo. Yeah, they’re not big rule followers there in Athens and Cairo, but they’ve cleaned it up big time from the way it used to be. But anyway, no longer. The daily fare.
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of the Fresno Bee is a recitation of high-speed wrecks, carjackings, fatal DUIs, and hit-and-run smash-ups. When I drive rural roads in central California, I expect that one out of five cars coming in my direction will be drifting into my lane, either due to incompetence, unfamiliarity with U.S. traffic laws — 27% of Californians were not born in the United States — intoxication, or drug euphoria, or texting.
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walking in downtown or midtown New York or in Washington or Seattle stinks more than I remember. More than I remember of the of Beirut or the harbor promenade in Alexandria. Oh, it does people. It does. Subway is disgusting. I am. New York always had a smell to it, but
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I can’t even explain it. And the other thing you see too, rats. Rats, you always, you know, you see the occasional rat in the subway from time to time. Nah, they’re all over the streets now too. Anyway, I’m much more likely to be accosted by a an obnoxious stranger, homeless person, or would be criminal in downtown LA, San Francisco, or Portland than in Brussels or Naples. And that is saying something given the latter two disasters. I do not.
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think in Paris or Amman people walk into stores, rob them and walk out with impunity, with the knowledge that clerks will be fired for reporting their thefts. Yeah, that’s gonna be a long in California soon.
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Part two of this piece. When I drive in rural California and see shacks, trailers, and compounds of 30, 40 persons living in ad hoc shelters with Romics wire and water hoses attached to a small farmhouse, I conclude that this poverty is much more like a third world scene that I remember of Tunisia, Algeria, or Turkey. Or for that matter, the countryside of northern Mexico seems less impoverished than life outside.
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Mendoza, San Joaquin, Orange Cove, or Pellier, California. I would take my chances walking at night in Kuwait City or over Minneapolis and would likely find a public restroom on California’s I-5 or the 99 dirtier than its counterpart in rural Greece.
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Students that I have met in rural Greece were far better educated than their age counterparts in California. Spaniards in the countryside seem to know more about America than American teens in New York or Philadelphia. Oh, there’s no doubt.
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There’s no doubt about that. Japanese or Kuwaiti exchange students I had in college were far better educated than most of my own California State University students. When I taught at Pepperdine, I explained to Chinese students why they rightly seemed afraid to drive alone in most areas of Los Angeles after hours. My point. The basics of life, especially in our major cities, healthcare, safety, cleanliness, have reached.
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Medieval proportions.
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Ash, is he wrong? I don’t know if you’re still listening to what I’m saying here, because again, like I said, jagged little pill, is he wrong?
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Put it more accurately, they’re very different Americas. A sophisticated, successful, suburban America maintains more or less life is as unchanged from the 1970s or 1980s and remains comparable to or better than what is found in Europe. This is true, honest. I’ll give you an example, okay? I live in a bubble. I got to get this across to my kids all the time. I live in a freaking
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bubble. I do. Okay. The people that live around me, I mean, you take a look, I look at the, my daughter’s got graduation next week, where all of these kids are going to school, the type of grades, the excellence, why the parents care. We would not let these forces of evil come to our neighborhood. Why? Because we deal with it. We would take care of it. Yeah. And I’m, you know, I’ve said it before.
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You take the law into your own hands, fucking A I would. Damn straight. Not a second thought. Nor my friends. The same exact way. OK? Bubble. So guess what? Yeah. Life’s great here. You know, I love the way we shop for groceries, a fish market, butcher shop. Oh, I mean, it’s great. And that’s not the only place here. There are plenty of them around the country.
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but they’re bubbles. Make no bones about it. I can’t remember, I’m telling a story. I remember when I was a kid, when I was a kid, I remember my mother yelling and screaming. We would occasionally take a trip down from upstate New York, go down to New York City, and my father always made a point. Always made a point, made my mother, drive my mother crazy. He would take us, take us in the 1970s, take us to the Bowery. He’d take us to these awful areas.
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to see what was like, what life was like. We have friends, family, friends, police officer in New Jersey used to take us to these areas of Pasek and show us, show us, our, you know, this country used to have a lot more areas that were, let’s just say good areas, not a lot of bubbles. And I had this kind of getting off the beaten track right now, this is kind of one of the reasons why.
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I almost want Ron DeSantis not to run for the presidency. I want him to stay in the state of Florida because the state of Florida for the most part’s a bubble. Okay, and we, you know, we gotta have these places where we have to retreat to. Just like it was, it was an oasis during COVID.
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Anyway, and then there are red state, rural countryside and small towns that likewise are still civilized. But in a third of America, in parts of the suburbs surrounding the major cities and the cores of almost all major cities, life is truly third or fourth world. The ERs are dirty, broke.
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and mostly exists to attend to evening gunshot wounds and other sorts of inner city violence. Garbage piles up on sidewalks around stuffed cans and bins. It’s hard to judge whether the smell of marijuana or feces is the stronger odor. I lost my wallet once in Athens, and it was returned in two hours. I lost my wallet when I was a college student in Florence, Italy. It was returned to the school.
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I have lost glasses, wallet and cell phones in my hometown of Selma, and usually they were never returned, or within hours I had thefts show up on my credit cards. If my car broke down on the side of a freeway, I would prefer it happened in Israel, Germany, Portugal, than in California. There are more broken appliances and wet garbage toss along the roads of Fresno County than there are in supposedly ragtag Italy. None of this was true
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years ago, just 20 years ago. Again, I’ve said this on plenty of occasions here on the program, we’re talking about issues like this. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told my kids over the years, past several years, how many times I’ve said it wasn’t always like this. It wasn’t always like this. Yeah, I shouldn’t have to be comforting my kids. And these kids are…
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Tough physically, at least my youngest son. He’s a football player, okay? He’s a starting running back, linebacker, lacrosse player, tough.
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He’s a tough kid, but he’s a sensitive kid too. And then when he walks down the stairs in the morning, he’s getting ready for school and he sees another mass shooting somewhere. And the thing, I see it in his face and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart. But that’s where we live today. So don’t fricking tell me America’s number one because it ain’t. Oh, sure, we got the recipe.
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We got the fricking recipe for crying out loud. You got the United States Constitution. You’ve got, Constitution, you got the Declaration of Independence. Read these things, we’ve got the manual.
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We just decided not to pay attention to it anymore. When I meet a teen or 20 something person today, I assume he’s poorly educated and knows almost nothing about his country. Gettysburg, World War I, Supreme Court. I can be assured though, that he’s programmed to have the correct ideas about diversity, transgenderism, or the pathologies of his country. Ignorance and arrogance are a fatal combination.
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especially when combined with a therapeutic society that has abandoned meritocracy. How often do we talk about this? Checking boxes, checking boxes, schools. Oh, we’re not gonna have valedictorians anymore. That’s not right. Feels social acceptance and career advantage are found in trashing one’s own culture. What explains this decline? A decay.
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so rapid that it seems surreal, fantasy-like. How did slow erosion accelerate to produce an unrecognizable country in which nothing is secure, nothing reliable, nothing predictable anymore? Part three of his piece, he gets into some of the politics of the day, and we’ve covered that a lot. So I’m gonna skip over that right now. I’m gonna read you something from Menken. The most dangerous man to any government.
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is a man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable.
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Again, we’re getting close to Fourth of July in fireworks and celebrating USA.
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People, again, I go back to what I said here, we need to recognize the problem. We need to recognize that we’re has-beens.
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at this point in time were husbands. And I challenge anybody out there to debate me and tell me otherwise. You know what would be extraordinary is if you actually had a presidential candidate actually come out and say it. I don’t make America great again. No, no, no.
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go point by point, this is flipping unacceptable. Lay it out like I’m laying it out. Lay it out like Victor Davis Hansen lays it out. But we gotta stop kidding ourselves, people. Stop kidding ourselves. And if you think that this place can’t collapse, can’t happen here, like I said, put down the fucking Instagram, put down your social media and pick up a book.
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Read some world history, people. OK? There were republics around longer than us that fell. There’s no guarantee. I mean, Franklin said that. It’s a republic if you can keep it. How well are we keeping it right now? Are we doing a good job? No. We’re not.
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Again, it wasn’t always like this. God bless. Have a nice weekend. Watchdogonwallstreet.com.
