I Dissent. Again.

The White House Rose Garden is an iconic part of the White House. It has seen many an event. It was a nice green space at the White House. You might remember it from such iconic recent moments as the President announcing his “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Or Melania Trump’s address to the Republican National Convention in 2020.

The Rose Garden has been the backdrop for so much history.

For reasons, President Trump has decided to pave it over and turn it into a strip mall cigarette station.

It is not attractive. It looks like something you’d find outside a New York City building where people go for their smoke break.

But, naturally, many Trump fans are in awe of it because of Trump.

It is the weirdest thing in the politics of personality. People now subsume their own judgments and ideas and tastes for those of the leader. The gushing on social media over turning an iconic lawn into whatever this is makes me weep for humanity.

It all goes back to a very simple statement: if Obama or Biden had done the same thing, you’d think it was bad.

Let me offer up another quote from C. S. Lewis.

Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the “cause”, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience.

Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours — and the more “religious” (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here,

Your affectionate uncle,

SCREWTAPE

Once you’ve made the party the ideology or the idol, taste is subsumed. Ideas are subsumed. You think you are thinking for yourself, but you do so by outsourcing your judgment to shape your thinking to those whose tribal loyalties in the present are beyond question.

It is why dissent is so necessary.

We see such dangerous groupthink festering on the left as the hive mind of American political press, intelligentsia, the academy, pop culture, etc. all lead the left off the cliff of antisemitism, embracing resentment and the environmental death cult, etc. It is why they are headed towards violence.

On our side, we’ve abandoned a century of sound economic thinking to scratch an itch from the 1950’s Democratic Party, which had been thoroughly infiltrated by socialists and communists. We have abandoned the careful and reasoned judgment of voices from history for the voices of the here and now, telling us the ideas we long held no longer matter because… reasons.

Ford Motor Company makes more cars in the United States than any other automaker. Ford puts the “First” in “America First.” The result?

Ford is being penalized through tariffs.

Thanks to President Trump’s negotiated tariffs with Japan, South Korea, and Europe, it is now cheaper to make a car in Japan and import it into the United States than it is for Ford to make a car in the United States. Why? Because there is now a 15% tariff on imports from Japan, but Ford must pay a 50% tariff on aluminum and steel, plus tariffs on copper and other items. American industry does not produce enough aluminum for Ford, so it must be imported for Ford to build cars in the United States.

The company producing its cars domestically is now at a competitive disadvantage to the Japanese, South Korean, and European vehicle manufacturers.

But it is not just Ford.

A few months ago, Josh Smith of the Montana Knife Company put up a video bashing Amazon for considering adding a line on its website showing the costs of tariffs on imported goods. Smith said he would do the same on his company’s website, and the tariff line would show a zero. Why? “Because we’ve been preaching this all along. We’re American-made. Buy American [and] you don’t have to worry about this shit.”

I have heard that a lot — that it is a choice for you to buy an imported product. If you “buy American,” you can avoid the tariff.

Except that is not really how it works.

Josh Smith has found out the hard way now because the equipment he needs to make his products has gone up by over $100,000.00 in price. Smith argues that only finished products should be subject to a tariff, but that is not how tariffs work. The widget needed for the machine is a finished product for the company building the machine that needs the widget. Here is the latest from Josh Smith.

I do not fault Josh Smith at all, and it is not my intention to pick on him. It is just a very good example of people presuming you can buy American to avoid a tariff and not realizing that is not how tariffs work, nor can they readily be structured that way. By the way, Montana Knife Company makes gorgeous knives, and you should buy one.

Worse than the tariffs themselves is the byzantine system of rules for the tariffs. Many small businesses are already screaming that the regulatory structure of tariff compliance is actually costing them more than the tariffs themselves. That system is slowing the economy, causing businesses to slow hiring and investment, and causing the system to build up inefficiency.

A small beer brewer, for example, is now at a competitive disadvantage over bigger breweries because bigger breweries can buy unfinished aluminum to make beer cans themselves, while the little guy has to buy the aluminum beer cans already made. The unfinished versus finished distinction impacts the tariff and the price of your beer.