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Creative destruction is a school in economics, popularized by Joseph Schumpeter[2], that explains the process by which innovation obsoletes older processes, equipment and products. While disruptive in the short term, it is the driving force for long term economic growth and progress. In Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction (1973), Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “It is only through disruption and confusion that we grow, jarred by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own.” On November 5, 2011 in an op-ed in London’s The Guardian, Naomi Wolf noted: “Democracy is disruptive…there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption.”

Disruption is the antidote to complacency, the enemy of innovation, and it is challenging to those of the status quo – those whom we call the “establishment.” However, disruption is not always good. We can think of dozens of instances – a child throwing food at the table; protestors shutting down university classes; strikers blocking the entrance to a grocery store. But throughout history, progress has thrived on disruption. We see the beginnings of such positive disruption in Washington today: addressing the border crisis, eliminating fraud and waste embedded in federal bureaucracies and confronting anti-Semitism on college campuses. On the other hand, we are also witness to negative disruption: the, seemingly random, use of tariffs by President Trump and belittling comments about allies by Vice President Vance.

That President Trump is a disruptive force is a fact universally accepted. The question we and the world face: Is President Trump a disruptive force for good or bad? “There are times,” Karl Zinsmeister, White House chief domestic policy director 2006-2009, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, “when some messy political demolition and noisy rebuilding are necessary.” Is this such a time? I believe it is.

https://www.city-journal.org/multimedia/us-china-tariff-agreement-will-it-stick

Charles Fain Lehman, Ilya Shapiro, Daniel Di Martino, and Tal Fortgang discuss the deal between the U.S. and China to temporarily lower tariffs, Trump’s executive order on prescription drug prices, and Chicago-isms Pope Leo XIV should bring to the Vatican.

Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today, Ilya Shapiro, constitutional law guy at the Manhattan Institute, Daniel Di Martino, Argentinian policy expert, politics expert at the Manhattan Institute apparently, and Tal Fortgang, legal policy guy at the Manhattan Institute. Tal works for Ilya, so Tal, don’t mess this up. Otherwise, it’ll come back in your review.

Ilya Shapiro: But by works for me, that means he writes a bunch of stuff. I read a third of it and enjoy it. That’s our professional relationship.

Charles Fain Lehman: It’s a good review. Tal, quote that. We have this on record. I want to take us into the big news of the day. Earlier this morning, I think, I was asleep, but China and United States announced a 90-day temporary reduction in the mutual tariffs. So they’re down on the US side from 145 percent to 30 percent. It’s a major de-escalation as we’re recording this, the markets are up like a thousand points, although God knows what will be happening by the time it comes out. So don’t get mad at me listeners if it’s changed. Daniel, where are we on this front? You’re the econ guy on the panel. Is this a good development? Is this a bad development? What do you think?

Daniel Di Martino:  I think the Chinese negotiation team probably knows more about what the U.S. wants than we do. At this point, I don’t know what’s the goal of U.S. policy with the tariffs on China. If the goal was decoupling from China, then you should have wanted to keep the tariffs, not lift them. And if the goal was to get them to lower the tariffs, well, now we have a higher tariffs than we did before. So it seems like, at least by those two very different goals that are exclusionary from each other, we aren’t achieving anything.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/murder-ballads/

It didn’t start with Che Guevara, but Che, surely, is one of the major milestones along the way. By all accounts, he was a psychopath, delighting in the summary executions of purported ideological enemies, including children. But that one famous photograph of him wiped all the blood away. A picture cannot only speak a thousand words; it can erase a million crimes. For young people all over the West in the 1960s and thereafter, Che was a hero, period. In 2008, the top Hollywood director Stephen Soderbergh made a hagiographic movie about Che that ran just under four and a half hours (it was ultimately released in two parts); the title role was played by Benicio Del Toro, whose research for the part included a trip to Cuba, where, he later said, he met “tons of people who loved this man.” To be sure, it’s one thing to encounter Che fans in Castro’s Cuba, where the people have been propagandized to a fare-thee-well and where dissenting views are punished severely; it’s another thing to see free people strolling down the streets of Western cities in Che t-shirts – presumably ignorant of the true heroes who won them their freedom but enthralled by a man who fought to destroy it.

Six years after Che’s death, an infant was born in a manger – no, not really – in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He later lived in Houston, where he served nine jail terms for crimes involving drugs, trespass, theft, and aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. Still later he moved to Minneapolis, where he was detained for drug possession and suffered a drug overdose. On May 25, 2020, he was stopped by police on suspicion of passing counterfeit money at a grocery store, and died while resisting arrest by a police officer named Derek Chauvin. News of the death of George Floyd spread around the world like wildfire. Mass protests were held everywhere. Countless Floyd murals were created. Riots caused billions of dollars in damage. Leftists used Floyd’s death to spread the lie that hundreds if not thousands of innocent blacks die each year  at the hands of white American cops (the real number is in the double digits). As a result of this lie, the movement to defund the police won widespread support, and in many cities the police actually were defunded. The fact that Floyd had died not because of Chauvin’s actions but because of the drugs in his system didn’t matter to Chauvin’s judge, prosecutor, and jury, who knew that if they didn’t throw the book at Chauvin – who ended up being sentenced to twenty-two and a half years in prison – they’d be torn to bits by the mob. By the end of the summer, like Che, his fellow perpetrator of violence, Floyd had been canonized by the left, venerated as a martyr. Last May it was announced that, inevitably, Floyd would be the subject of a movie. Daddy Changed the World was being developed by Radar Pictures, with Floyd’s daughter as executive producer. I can’t wait.