Saturday, December 24, 2022

As America Transforms into Venezuela or Zimbabwe, Who will be Our IKE or Neo?

I was in 6th grade in 1976 during America’s Bicentennial.  I played Abraham Lincoln in the school’s celebration, my family parked next to the Pentagon to watch the fireworks above DC and our class visited the newly opened Air and Space Museum.  And of course TV commercials were chock full of patriotic themes from morning until stations signed off with the national anthem.  It was a good time to be an American. 

Looking back I lived in a cocoon of security that comes with knowing that the world was as it was supposed to be, as if God had our backs.  It seemed as if the America I knew was almost predestined, as if it was inevitable that our nation would grow from a scrappy upstart in 1776 to the leader of the world in 1976. America was Manifest Destiny writ large. 

It wasn’t until years later that I would discover that was an illusion.  Although 9/11 had given me a glimpse of the wrinkle in the matrix, it wasn’t until I saw Tom Selleck playing IKE in Countdown to D-Day in 2004 that I fully recognized and appreciated that things didn’t have to turn out the way they did. Embarrassingly, it wasn’t until watching that movie that I discovered Eisenhower had written a letter in case D-Day failed.  That fact was like a brick thrown through the plate glass window of my illusions.  I’d always known, like one accepts gravity without being told, that the US victory in WWII was preordained, but if the guy in charge of D-Day wasn’t certain of victory then certainty didn’t exist.   

You would think that awakening would shake my confidence in America, but it didn’t.  Just the opposite.  Suddenly America’s success was not the result of robots acting in a play written by God, but rather, the result of the actions of millions of normal Americans doing things, trying things, building things, failing and picking themselves up by their bootstraps and returning to the fight… Sure, there were other factors, such as advances of the 2,000 years of western civilization that preceded 1776, bad decisions on the part of other nations and of course good luck and the grace of God, but at the end of the day, in a worldwide competitive marketplace of ideas and ideologies America had prospered because of the efforts of her citizens.  

That puts American history in a completely different light.  Looking at it through that lens, it seems to me that we faced five crucial points where had things gone just a little differently the history of the world would have changed.  While there are literally countless little things that might have changed the course of history, these five stand out to me.

The first was the fight for independence.  In 1776 the British Empire was the largest and most powerful empire the world had ever seen.  The sun literally never set on an empire that included Australia, India, a quarter of Africa, half of North America and the British Isles themselves.  Had things gone slightly differently, America as we know it might never have existed.  Had the British ruled over the colonies with a tighter fist in the early 18th century, had Washington lost the Battle of Trenton or had a financially strapped King Louis XVI decided not to support the Americans against the British, the history of the world would likely have been dramatically different.  

The second was the writing of the Constitution and the launch of the Republic.  Had the 3/5th compromise never been made it’s likely the southern states would have formed their own country and North America would have grown into a fractured continent like Europe with all its attendant inefficiency, shifting alliances and wars.  Had anti-Federalists not pushed for a Bill of Rights, American freedom and prosperity would likely never taken root. Had Washington, Adams or Jefferson had tyrannical tendencies they could have smothered the new Republic in its bassinet.  Had America not emerged as a Republic from the chaos of the late 18th century the world would likely have been dramatically different.

The third point was the Civil War. Had Grant’s genius not brought victory at Vicksburg, the British not resisted calls to support the South or Sherman not taken Atlanta, the South may have been victorious or at least been able to negotiate a settlement rather than surrender.  In either case the history of America and that of the world would likely have been dramatically different.

The fourth point was WWII. Like me, many Americans take for granted that the US was going to win the war. That of course is not true at all.  Countless events could have changed the outcome.  Had American cryptographers not deciphered Japanese code revealing plans for an attack on Midway, had the British not persevered during the Battle of Britain, eventually giving the Allies a base from which to launch D-Day, or had Hitler not invaded Russia or micromanaged his generals, the world would likely look dramatically different than it does today.

Which brings us to the fifth critical point in American history.  Unlike the first four, this is not in the history books, but rather is being written today. There are essentially two directions the United States can go forward from 2022.  One is a course correction that puts the nation back on the path that created the greatest prosperity in human history.  The other seeks to destroy the very things that created the greatest prosperity in human history.

Most Americans assume that things will just work out. That marriage can be changed from a man and a woman to something else and we’ll all just get along.  That society can discriminate against white Americans in the name of diversity or equity and they’ll happily acquiesce.  That millions of uneducated, unskilled people from third world countries can invade our country and there will be no negative impact on society.  That trillions of dollars can be diverted to the fiction of prosperity powered by “green” energy and electricity will remain plentiful and gasoline will remain available.  That the media and education establishments can perpetually disparage America and her heroes and somehow patriots will continue to risk their lives to protect her. That criminals can be allowed to commit crimes with impunity and citizens will go on as if nothing had changed. And finally, the government can stifle free speech and rig elections and no one will do anything about it.  Most Americans will say that those things are just politics and everything will work out. It always has before…

But that’s simply not true.  Things never just work themselves out, particularly on the big things.  People pull together and work hard to make things work out.  But when a population is turned against itself, when a nation’s government sees half its population as the enemy, when children are taught their country is evil and is putting the future of humanity in danger, not only will things not work out, but that nation will eventually collapse.  Balkanization is literally the only outcome, and the side with the government on its team will likely crush their opponents. Then, after patting themselves on the backs, the victors will themselves become balkanized and the process will begin again. That never ending cycle results in prosperous nations becoming Venezuela or Zimbabwe, with a tiny cabal of elites controlling a vast population of serfs toiling away in search of scraps. 

That is America’s future if we remain on our current path. The question is, who will be our IKE or our Neo?

Wednesday, December 7, 2022

America 2022: Mutilating Children to Further a Leftist Narrative

I was about 15 the first time I fell in love. It wasn’t until 25 years later, that I finally got married. It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to get married before, because I had. I asked someone to marry me when I was 17. She said no. I asked 3 more girls over the next decade, same result! The funny thing is, in each of those torpedoed proposals, the girl was right. It would have been a disaster. Sure, I was in love, but it’s clear to me today that things would never have worked out.  

Every one of those relationships and others involved a roller coaster of emotions. The heart pounding that’s associated with anticipation or the satisfaction of landing that first date or the joy of that first kiss or the awkwardness of a rejection or the heartache of a break up.

Indeed, my hormones were racing ahead of me much of the time and once caused me to do something so out of character that I cringe about it today. To my great shame I once obliquely threatened to kill a man because my girlfriend lied and claimed he’d raped her. By the grace of God I discovered the truth long before anything terrible happened, but it’s a demonstration of how hormones and emotions can cause some of us to do things that we might later regret.

Most of this heart driven chaos happened when I was ostensibly an adult. Part of the reason I’m convinced that things would never have worked out with those other girls was that I had zero idea of what the hell I wanted to do in my life. Not in college. Not in the Army. Not even as an entrepreneur. I was all over the map, from managing at a superstore to bartending to moving boxes in a warehouse; I was a living embodiment of what today they call ADHD or what we called hyperactive when I was a kid.  

Eventually I smartened up and decided to jump, and thankfully the greatest woman I know was there to catch me when I did. But here’s the thing… it took me, a relatively average guy, almost four decades to make what is arguably the most important decision in my life. I had to go through the chaos of life’s ups and downs, its light and shadows before I figured out what I wanted. I had to go through chaos as it relates to my professional life, my friends, with the things I did for leisure and distraction and even faith before I figured things out. And even when I was finally ready to jump, I always knew in the back of my mind there was an escape hatch… If things somehow went sideways I could always get a divorce and start again.

One thing that was clear however, during all of this chaos that life throws at you, was that I was 100% straight. Never was there a single moment when I thought I might not be. I see a beautiful woman and there’s a physiological reaction that simply doesn’t happen when I see dudes. I can’t imagine what would have been going on in my head if I hadn’t had that anchor.

All of this to say, I was a mess at 25, nevermind at 15, or 12 or 17… I wasn’t ready to make what is supposed to be a lifelong commitment about who I wanted to be with, even though I was 100% certain about the sex to which was attracted and there was an escape hatch available if I blew it.

But in America today there are those who think that children are not only able to make life changing decisions, they are able to make body altering decisions from which there is no return.

Youth is a time of extraordinary angst. Not only are children being introduced to people and influences beyond their families, they’re learning real world application of concepts that are fundamental to the core of our society such as responsibility, choices and consequences as well things as varied as private property, cooperation, risk / reward and privacy. All of this while trying to how to learn to read, write and do multiplication as well as make the varsity team, get a learner’s permit and taking a phalanx of college prep classes.

And as if all of that was not enough, add into the mix peer pressure. Not the kind many adults experienced in the past, such as getting picked on at school then going home to lick your wounds and regroup for the next day. No, today’s peer pressure is unrelenting, from which there is virtually no sanctuary. Kids today live on their phones and there is simply no place or time to retreat to find peace. Unless a young person has the fortitude to turn off their phone, they never get a break.

It is in this caldron of chaos that children are trying to find their way. And below that caldron are the flames of hormones that send temperatures past boiling. It’s at this most confusing time, the most formative and malleable period in a human beings’ life that activists want to empower a child to make decisions about their bodies from which there will never, ever, be a return.

That is not only despicable, it’s criminal. The list of things kids can’t legally do is as long as receipt from CVS. Drink, drive, smoke, do drugs, get a tattoo, quit school, join the military, buy adult magazines and more. So we’ve decided that a heterosexual 14 year old boy can’t buy Playboy magazine but a “trans” 12 year old boy can get castrated or a 16 year old “trans” girl can have her breasts surgically removed! That is simply abominable, and any adults who approve of this are evil and any who participate in it should be thrown in jail. That includes parents of the kids to whom this butchery is happening.

There’s a reason the Founding Fathers put age requirements in the Constitution. Even 250 years ago, before teen drinking and driving, before kids were spending hours a day staring at screens and before kids were being plied with mind altering medicines, the Founding Fathers understood that having the country run by 20 year olds would be a disaster.

Kids who would eat pizza and drink Red Bull all day aren’t intellectually or emotionally mature enough to make medically unnecessary decisions they will be yoked with for the rest of their lives. Sure, some may be confused, but the reality is, lots of young people are confused about a lot of things. Adults should not empower them to mutilate themselves just because their two best friends have decided they are going to be “trans” this because the media elite tell them it’s cool.

Gender dysphoria is a serious condition and should not be considered trivial, but the reality is, most kids will grow out of it, and for those who don’t, they’re more than capable of making a decision about their bodies once they become adults. Cutting and poisoning children for no medical reason is no less barbaric than the genital mutilation of girls in Muslim countries the west so rightly decries. A society that allows this tragedy to occur has no business calling itself civilized. Evil just might be a better word.

Monday, November 28, 2022

Following a Donald Trump Forged in a Crucible of White Hot Fire

 I first started writing a blog in 2009, after Barack Obama’s election. My first post, America’s Original Sin, addressed the then-nascent movement to disparage and denigrate America because the Founding Fathers didn’t have the foresight in 1787 to write a constitution that would dovetail with the mores of 21st-century snowflakes.

The title of my blog, Imperfect America, is followed by a quote attributed to the French philosopher, Voltaire: “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” Our nation is a billboard-sized testament to that adage. Rarely have we seen perfect, but we frequently see good. And that’s the problem with leftists… They want to sacrifice good for the fiction of perfection.

While today it’s all the rage to dwell on America’s failures, it’s far less celebrated to talk about her triumphs. Although the left has been demonizing America since the sixties, it was after Bush won in 2000 that this tactic started to stick. The cancer of hate really took off once Obama became president. On college campuses, in elementary schools, on nightly newscasts, and in papers across the country, we were incessantly told that America was racist, sexist, homophobic and destroying the environment.

It was into this miasma that Donald Trump marched when he announced he was running for president. He saw the leftist cancer destroying the very foundations of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity while undermining America’s core civilization and setting the country up for a devastating collapse. And he willingly stepped into the breach to stop it.

The problem, however, was that rather than running as a Democrat, where all solutions come from an omnipotent central government, he was running as a Republican who sought to reduce government control and return power to Americans.

That was a bridge too far. From the second he announced, Trump found himself enduring a withering barrage of vitriol and venom unseen in American politics. The abuse came from Democrats, the media, social media and academia as well as the GOP establishment. What Trump endured was relentless. Yet somehow, he won.

(Full disclosure: I initially had concerns about Trump and wrote about them often, with one post titled: Sure, Donald Trump may shiv us... but the country can’t survive Hillary Clinton’s thugs.)

In the wee hours of November 9, 2016, it became clear that Trump would become the next president of the United States. It also became clear the Democrats were not going to take it lying down.

The Russia Collusion hoax started a drumbeat that would bedevil the president for the next four years, even after it was shown to be a Clinton crafted fiction the mainstream media parroted. Indeed, the New York Times and the Washington Post would win Pulitzer Prizes for their “reporting” on the fake story, and no, not because they exposed the lie but, instead, because of their vociferous and eloquent participation in it.

During his presidency Donald Trump endured extraordinary abuse and treachery, driven by the media and the Democrat party. The irony of the media’s hatred for Trump was that channels like CNN and MSNBC virtually owed their rescue from irrelevance to the Trump presidency, while newspapers slowed their decades-long declines with pages of anti-Trump rhetoric.

As bad as the media abuse was, it was nothing compared to the treachery of the apparatchiks in the government. When Trump tried to build his promised wall, he was blocked at every step. His efforts to make Bureau of Land Management employees live closer to the lands they regulated were pilloried for making the agency “less diverse.” Lt. Col Alexander Vindman, the NSC’s Ukraine expert, launched an impeachment when he lied about Trump trying to coerce Ukraine into investigating the Bidens.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, during the Covid “pandemic,” possibly the most economically destructive self-inflicted wound in human history, the two government-employed doctors Trump looked to for guidance lied to Trump and the country. Finally, in perhaps the greatest treachery of all, we learned that members of America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were actively working to undermine Trump in the election.

Worse, this orgy of Trump-directed destruction wasn’t just in Washington. The 2020 riots cost billions of dollars in damage, and brought chaos and bloodshed to cities across the country, all the while being spurred and supported by Democrats single-mindedly focused on defeating Donald Trump.

These attacks were relentless, every single hour of every single day and came from inside and outside of government. Yet somehow Trump managed to run the government well and campaign like the Energizer Bunny. In the end, it took a literal coup d’état to oust him from office.

And now he’s back—and the mainstream media, Democrats, the GOP establishment, bloggers, and erstwhile fans all insist that we’re supposed to abandon him.

Aside from the fact that the Democrats will demonize as a Nazi, racist, homophobe anyone who carries the GOP flag, the reality is that Donald Trump is a fighter for America unlike any president we’ve ever had. No one has ever had to endure the level of vitriol or withstand the relentless phalanx of persecution from every corner as Trump has.

And here’s the thing…he didn’t need to. Trump was a billionaire already. Trump was already feted by politicians and media around the world. He already had a beautiful family, spectacular homes, and his own plane! No politicians in American history had more to lose when they decided to fight for the American people than Trump did. Usually, politicians go to Washington as middle class and leave millionaires. Trump, however, had literally billions of dollars to lose, but he took on the Swamp anyway.

Now, after enduring seven years of abuse for his defense of American freedom, prosperity and farmers and truckers and little guys of all shapes and sizes, he’s once again stepping up to do battle.

You may not like Donald Trump, and there’s much to not like. He’s arrogant, he’s petty, he’s defensive, and he can be cruel. (Those attributes can just as much be applied to Barack Obama.)

Unlike Obama however, Trump doesn’t try and pretend he’s something he’s not. He’s a crude, brash New Yorker who speaks his mind and gets things done. He knows how to fix things and wants to fix America with strong borders, energy independence, limited government, a robust economy, and individual liberty… All of the things the Swamp fought him on and the very things Joe Biden has undermined.

Donald Trump circa 2022 is still imperfect, but he’s been forged in a crucible of white-hot fire and has emerged even more focused than before on making America great. So, yes, while there may be brilliant lights on the horizon, I think I’ll take a pass and stick with the guy who got out of his Bentley and ran through a gauntlet of machine gun fire into the burning mess of Democrat America in order to save the eagle stuck inside.

Trump may tell off-color jokes and may not always be the best judge of character, but he can take the heat, and his North Star has always been prosperity and security for the American people. Given the literal evil the Democrats are seeking to impose on America, I’ll happily follow him into the fire.

Saturday, November 12, 2022

2022: Democrats Brought a Gun to the Election Knife Fight While the GOP was Busy Deciding Which Loafers to Wear...

What was supposed to be a red tsunami last week turned out to be a ripple.  It didn’t take long for the GOP establishment place blame:  Donald Trump!

It couldn’t be because Mitch McConnell decided to spend $10 million supporting the treacherous Lisa Murkowski against the state’s GOP nominee, rather than in Arizona, Georgia or Michigan.  No, it was Trump.  It wasn’t Kevin McCarthy’s embarrassing attempt to recreate Newt Gingrich’s successful “Contract with America” that galvanized America and brought the GOP 54 seats in a year with 2.99% inflation, with his facile “Commitment to America”.  No, it was Donald Trump. It wasn’t that McConnell’s August derision of MAGA candidates claiming the party lacked “candidate quality” while his handpicked Colorado senatorial candidate Joe O’Dea went on to lose by 13 points, 3 times as much as Oz lost by in Pennsylvania.  No, it was Trump.

Despite the GOP establishment’s desire to pin their failure on 45 and his supporters, the truth is, this failure has numerous causes. 

Needless to say, the GOP establishment is at the top of the list.  They failed to embrace the candidates of their own party or execute a compelling national campaign that focused on the kitchen table issues of inflation, crime, immigration and parental rights.  In reality 2022 was the single best landscape for a GOP wave in modern times, but rather than focus America’s attention on those issues we had Lindsey Graham threatening Vladimir Putin and sending $50 billion to Ukraine while McConnell and John Cornyn were busy selling out the 2nd Amendment. The leaders of the GOP are grifters more interested in the perks of leadership than winning, and it showed on November 8th.

Beyond the incompetence of the GOP leadership there were two other issues that drove the election outcome.

Believe it or not, abortion, the third rail of American politics, was one.  The Wall Street Journal has a fascinatingly comprehensive analysis of voting patterns, looking at dozens of criteria.  One question asked “Which one of the following would you say is the most important issue facing the country?” and compared the voting patterns from 2018.  Of the nine issues listed: Economy, Healthcare, Immigration, Abortion, Crime, Climate change, Foreign policy, Covid and Guns, four had no change measured because the issues didn’t even show up in 2018.  Of the remaining five the Democrats lost support on four by an average of 6%.  One they didn’t:  Abortion.  Of the 9% of voters who said abortion was the most important issue, fully 78% of them voted for Democrats, a 57% increase over 2018. That essentially translates into about 7% of voters.  The GOP did an abysmal job addressing the issue of Abortion.  They allowed the media and Democrats to paint the GOP as extremists who wanted to force little girls who’d been raped into having babies. 

Whatever one’s opinion on abortion, the fact of the matter is that absolute bans on abortion are  unpopular virtually everywhere in America and even within the GOP fully 1/3 of the party disagrees with them.  This was probably a lost cause from the beginning, but in an extraordinarily contentious election the GOP leadership should have done a better job addressing the issue.  With the leak of the Dobbs the GOP should have known that the Democrats were going to come after them with lies like the one surrounding the little girl in Ohio raped by the illegal alien or the prospect of birth control being outlawed, and prepared. But they didn’t.  Indeed, you had the buffoon Lindsey Graham pitching the issue of passing a nationwide ban. Dobbs didn’t ban abortion or outlaw anything, but it didn’t matter because the GOP didn’t have a plan to address the issue, and it showed at the polls.

All of that however is incidental to the real reason the GOP failed:  Voting rules, starting with early voting and mail in balloting.  By the time Dr. Oz and John Fetterman met in their debate on October 25th 635,000 of the state’s 5 million voters had already voted, 460,000 of them were Democrats, 320,000 more than Republicans. That number is significant given that post debate fully 82% of viewers said that Oz won the contest and he lost by a only 225,000 votes.  That of course is before even considering the fraud potential inherent in mail in voting. Mail in balloting (and in particular universal mail in voting) and ballot harvesting essentially provides Democrats with a mechanism to fabricate votes as well as harvest hundreds of thousands of votes from nursing homes, college campuses and other high density locations. Then there’s the fact that Pennsylvania doesn’t require voter ID and officials seem to have been involved in electioneering on election day itself.

Oz was a less than perfect candidate to be sure, but the cards were stacked against him… indeed they were stacked against whoever the GOP nominee was. Democrats learned in 2020 that they could use voting laws to manipulate vote outcomes in their favor and it certainly worked in Pennsylvania. 

Out in Arizona Kari Lake and Blake Masters, both outstanding candidates are enduring an endless demonstration of Democrat guile hidden behind a façade of incompetence. Similarly, but not surprisingly, out in Nevada – a state with universal mail out balloting and no voter ID – Adam Laxalt is slowly watching his lead disappear as time drags on. As Tucker Carlson discussed on his show on Thursday, election decision delays equal Democrat victory 77% of the time, something Dino Rossi can attest to from his 2004 loss for governor in Washington, Norm Coleman after losing his Senate seat in Minnesota in 2008 and of course Donald Trump in 2020.

To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the election rules, stupid!” and that’s something the Democrats have mastered that the GOP has relatively ignored. The Democrats finding their perfect storm of opportunity in Covid, thwarted many GOP attempts to maintain Constitutional limits on voting impropriety. The Democrats used Covid to pass unconstitutional and easily manipulated voting rules and have fought attempts to rescind them. Democrats brought a gun to the election knife fight while the GOP was busy deciding which loafers to wear… But we’re told it was Donald Trump’s fault.

At the end of the day the reality is that the GOP failed.  The extraordinary thing is they did so in the worst economy in 40 years with a highly unpopular president and 75% of the population feeling the country is on the wrong track.  They did so despite winning the popular vote by 6% vs. losing it by 8.4% in 1988.  That’s a shift of 14%, yet still they floundered.  In addition, in looking at the WSJ chronicled Gender / Age / Race dynamic, the Democrats lost ground in every single demographic, bar none… EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. But somehow couldn’t live up to expectations and it’s Donald Trump’s fault.


Voting rules are set at the state level as dictated by the Constitution, which means Democrats can do what they want in states they control.  And why would they change a system that lets them cheat and win?  They won’t, unless forced, and the GOP needs to figure out how to do that.  My guess is the best solution lies in the courts focusing on the 14th Amendment and possibly the Voting Rights Act. Whatever the solution, Stalin’s adage holds true “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.” Until the GOP figures out how to fix the voting rules, they’ll be losing and eventually they won’t have Donald Trump to blame.

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

The Fundamental Transformation of a Nation - Barack Obama's "Gift" to America

Barack Obama promised to fundamentally transform America.  He tried…  We can look at the politicization of federal agencies under his watch, at victimization becoming a virtue, at the intrusion of government into American’s health decisions and we can look at the damage his Justice Department inflicted as they coerced cities around the country into “consent decrees” that neutered police forces.  There is of course much more, but in reality the most fundamental transformation for which Barack Obama is responsible has nothing to do with his time in office. 

The backlash against the leftist policies of Obama brought us the unabashed patriot, Donald Trump.  But by the time Trump was inaugurated the cancer of 8 years of Obama had done their damage and much of the federal government had become fully engaged members of the cult of progressivism.  From the fiction of widespread white supremacy, to environmental extremism to LBGTQXYZ fanaticism to the open borders lockstep, leftism was now baked into much of the government ruling America. 

Trump shocked the world and stepped into a Washington that more resembled a swamp of vipers than the seat of a functioning government.  The leftist cabal – including a wide swath of those government workers – spent 4 years seeking to derail the plans of the dually elected president of the United States.  This treachery culminated in November of 2020 when the government colluded with the media and social media to execute a coup against the sitting president under the guise of “The most secure election in American history”. 

And it is that coup with which Barack Obama achieved his greatest success in “transforming” the United States; it gave us Joe Biden.

As bad as everything Obama did while in office, nothing he did compares to Joe Biden. Since being installed as president, Biden has done an insane number of things that simply make no sense from a rational perspective.

Literally the first thing he did was reduce the amount of energy available to Americans. He cancelled completion of the Keystone XL Pipeline which would have brought more Canadian oil. Soon thereafter the administration threw up roadblocks to domestic oil production both offshore and on federal lands.  First they curtailed new leases and “reviewed” existing ones.  Later, when they backed off a complete ban, they instituted a virtual ban, which included increases in fees and other elements to make extraction more expensive for energy companies and everything more expensive for Americans.

Next his administration propelled mandates for the untested vaccine that swept across the country which saw Americans subjected to restrictions on travel, shopping, employment and more. Nationwide tens of thousands of firemen, police, teachers and even Navy Seals lost their jobs and incomes because of vaccine mandates for a virus with a survival rate of above 99.9% for almost everyone.  Building on that lunacy the Biden CDC recently issued a recommendation that states require Covid vaccinations for school children despite the fact that the survival rate for ages 0-19 is 99.9997%. So this administration would have seventy five million American children vaccinated with a medicine that has had no long term testing and where the long term effects are, by definition, unknown. This is part and parcel for an administration with so little regard for children that it supports the castration and mutilation of children who are not old enough to vote or to drive, often without the knowledge or consent of their parents

Then of course there is the economy. With the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act Biden poured trillions of dollars into the economy and drove inflation to levels not seen in 40 years. Everything, from energy to housing to food to clothing… virtually every single thing Americans use has gone up in price since Biden became president, often by giant leaps.  As a consequence Americans are fighting to stay afloat financially, with 60% worse off than they were a year ago and a staggering 40% of businesses missing their rent payments in October

As if making Americans less prosperous wasn’t enough, Joe Biden has made the world less safe. In August of last year the Pentagon exited Afghanistan in such haste that it left behind literally tens of billions of dollars of weapons for the terrorists now running the country to use as they please.  Not content to arm one just one terrorist government, the administration pushed to reopen negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal.  Then there is Russia and Ukraine. Early on in the conflict when the sides were close to an agreement to cease hostilities Biden sent his puppet Boris Johnson to scuttle the negotiations and as a result the world is the closest it has been to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

All of this has changed America, and not for the better. But while rising prices and forced vaccinations may change American behavior, they don’t rise to the level of transforming the country.

But changing the demographic makeup does.  And this is where Joe Biden is fulfilling Barack Obama’s goal.  He invited essentially anyone willing to make the trip to come to the United States by telling them that they would not be detained and they would be able to get healthcare.  Not surprisingly, millions of people from impoverished nations crossed the border into Club Biden.  Since Biden became president it’s estimated that more than 5.5 million illegal immigrants have crossed the southern border.  And that doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands or millions who crossed and were never seen by the Border Patrol in the first place. 

There is something called “replacement theory” which Democrats label as a conspiracy theory amongst racist whites. It’s not that.  As Tucker Carlson demonstrates in a piece from earlier this year, replacement theory isn’t a right wing conspiracy theory at all, but rather a plan Democrats have spoken about for years.  As they will tell you, the goal is to outnumber the mostly white, American born population with people who look and think differently.  Not surprisingly the way they accomplish that is by inviting in millions of people from countries that rarely share American mores and values. 

To put that 5.5 million plus people in perspective, that’s more people than live in 28 out of the 50 states, it’s more people than South Carolina, Oregon, Oklahoma and Connecticut individually or Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware and Washington DC combined!  It’s also more than the population of every single city in America other than New York.  Every single one… 

At this rate by the end of Joe Biden’s first term as many as 15 million new illegal aliens could be here, all of whom need healthcare, schooling, food, shelter and clothing, provided free of charge by American taxpayers already struggling to put food on the table, fuel in their cars and keep a roof over their heads.

That is a fundamental transformation.  Once those 15 million people get to vote Republicans will never win another election and America will become San Francisco.  But “they’re not citizens” you say, and they can’t vote.  Given the current state of affairs and the Democrat’s fading allure among actual Americans, how long do you think before that changes?  Remember, these are the people who told us that gay marriage was all they wanted but are now telling us men can have periods and allowing hospitals to do unnecessary mastectomies on girls without their parents’ knowledge. 

We are on the cusp of a real, fundamental transformation of America.  There are however those who want to move the country back in the direction of sanity.  Hopefully when all of the counting is done tonight - or tomorrow or next week or next month or whenever - they will have been elected and the Democrats will have been sent packing.  

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Collapse of Civilization: Lessons Voters Might Take From Roman Britain

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it,” said George Santayana. He could well be describing modern leftists, careening back into the dark ages of post-Roman Britain.

At the end of the 2nd century AD Britain was a fully developed province of the Roman Empire.  It was as Roman as any city in the Empire. While still largely rural, Roman Britain developed towns and cities that mirrored those found in Italy or North Africa and connected them with a spectacular roadway. They had majestic villas, sprawling estates, baths, plumbing and of course aqueducts.  The Romans brought industrial sophistication to mining, unprecedented architectural capabilities and improved agriculture.  The province was awash in imported goods from around the Empire: Wine from Gaul, olive oil from Hispania, pottery from North Africa, and philosophy teachers from Greece; all the while exporting precious metals, agricultural products, shellfish and salt across the Empire.

One of the extraordinary things about the Roman Empire was the unprecedented, widespread prosperity it created from the Pillars of Hercules to the Levant and virtually everywhere in between. While there had always been a market for fine goods such as silk and porcelain and exotic foods, the Romans brought those goods to the masses. By building roads, ports, transportation hubs and funding the trade necessary to support the Legions, the Romans drove economies of scale and created a mass market for goods that had formerly been available only to the rich but had become inexpensive across the Roman world.  In doing so they created a cosmopolitan empire so thoroughly Roman that people from what are today Morocco and Britain and Germany and Israel likely spoke some version of the same language and would have found familiar products available regardless of where they were in the Empire.

Back in Britain, three hundred years after Caesar first invaded the untamed island in 55 BC the province was a sophisticated, shining example of all of the Empire had to offer. It was not to last however… In less than a century after the Romans abandoned the island for good in 410 the population collapsed, the economy collapsed, cities became ghost towns or disappeared and chaos reigned. Londinium, whose population peaked at 60,000 in the 2nd century, dropped below 20,000 and saw more than 75% of its buildings dismantled with the materials carted off into the countryside.

In less than a century Roman Britain went from a rich, flourishing cosmopolitan province with bustling urban centers and goods from across the known world to an economic and cultural backwater where modern architectural, plumbing and farming techniques seemed to have disappeared along with most of the import of goods. 

Most of the people living on the island in the middle of the 4th century probably assumed, like much of America in 2022, that the advances of civilization move only in one direction, upward.  They expected to continue to enjoy inexpensive food and pottery and clothing from elsewhere in while selling their wares in return.  The government would continue to provide protection and would maintain the ports and roads that facilitated trade. 

When those things didn’t happen life in Britain became a far darker experience.  Cities disappeared, warlords set up fiefdoms and invaders came from seemingly everywhere. Farming techniques were lost, building techniques were lost, trade collapsed and citizens were forced to become self sufficient as numerous petty would be “kings” set up trade and travel barriers and goods from the Continent became scarce.  The opposite of economies of scale and free trade took hold and Britain became far less prosperous as goods became more expensive, countless products and varieties of products simply disappeared and staples had to be produced locally.

It’s here where Santayana’s missive becomes relevant. Given that the history of post Roman Britain so clearly demonstrates the fragility of civilization’s advances, we might want to pay attention.  The reality is, our world, far more tenuously than the Britain of 1700 years ago, is but X bad decisions away from an agrarian, subsistence economy with no electricity, no gas, little trade, few economies of scale and most certainly no security or safety. 

Go through a day and see how many things we rely on that we couldn’t replace if a disaster occurred.  Imagine a blackout.  How many things would that loss of electricity impact?  Not only the lighting in our homes, but the refrigerators, phone chargers, garage door openers as well.  Outside our homes there’s even more: Elevators.  Gas pumps. Plumbing.  Street lamps & stop lights. Virtually everything in a hospital. Cell phone towers. Police switchboards and dispatches. Train signals and countless other things.

Then there’s the social aspects of such a crisis.  Rules and laws would go out the window, and it wouldn’t take long. During the New York City blackout of 1977 crime surged, with looting, vandalism and arson rampant (over 1,000 fires were set) while police arrested 3,776 people in the largest mass arrest in the city’s history.  The chaos cost over $1 billion in today’s dollars, and the lights were off for less than 24 hours!  Now jump forward to the BLM / Antifa riots of 2020 and the defunding of police.  Not only was there chaos and mayhem, there were murders, assaults, and rapes nationwide and communities literally burned to the ground. Then there is the mass looting and random violence that has occurred since 2020 and seems to be growing worse every day… and through all of this we still had electricity!

Of course electricity is only one element of what keeps our society civilized.  There’s gasoline, there’s trade, there’s what used to be a widespread respect for the rule of law.  Imagine no diesel fuel.  Trucks wouldn’t be able to deliver food and store shelves will go bare.  You probably have enough food in your kitchen for your family to last a few days or maybe a week at most. Then what? Are you going to grow wheat on your windowsill or in your backyard?  Is the neighborhood stray cat going to be your family’s next meal? Do you have a cow for milk? Not to mention medicines, building materials, gasoline for your car… the list of goods delivered via diesel is endless. 

One of the downsides of trade, division of labor and economies of scale is that most of us are dependent on others to provide for us those things we don’t produce for ourselves… which is to say, almost everything.  Our society is based on a trade system where we get paid to do some things and we pay others to do the things we don’t. It’s a well oiled machine… until it’s not.    

And that’s the point.  The climate alarmists who want to do away with fossil fuels have no concept of the ramifications of that folly. The equity cultists who want to eliminate the police and “reform” the justice system don’t care about the consequences of that absurdity. 

Just as the razor thin layer of atmosphere surrounding the earth sustains life on earth, our modern society thrives thanks to plentiful, inexpensive energy and a respect for the rule of law.  Inexplicably, those are the two primary targets of the Democrats who are currently in charge of wide swaths of the United States.  Indeed Californians regularly endure the absurd manmade disaster of rolling blackouts while Illinois is about to essentially decriminalize crime.  Neither is necessary…

When Americans step into their well lit, safe and private voting booths on November 8th they’d do well to think of those 5th century Britons who were about to careen into a darkness from which it would take almost a millennia to emerge, and vote accordingly.

 

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

The Twisted Line from Broken Windows to a Broken Republic

Years ago I was writing about blacks and Democrats and looked at the impact Rudy Giuliani made in New York City.  Over the course of his tenure from 1994 – 2002 there were 3,440 fewer black murder victims in the city than there might have been had New York simply experienced the average nationwide crime decline between 1994 & 2002.  “That’s 3,440 families that did not lose a son, a father, a breadwinner, or a role model. 3,440 black men still alive to take care of and support their families…

Saving 3,400 black lives and keeping 3,400 families intact didn’t happen in a vacuum. Those lives were saved by better policing, or more accurately, actual policing, via a program “Broken Windows”.  The Broken Windows policing approach was developed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in 1982.  Broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes.”

And in the early 90’s the visible signs of crime in New York City were everywhere. Subways were covered with graffiti; Times Square was nothing but peep shows, liquor stores and vacant storefronts.  But there weren’t only signs of crime, there was actual crime, and a lot of it, with violent crime and murder rampant.  In 1993 there were 2,420 murders in NYC for a rate of 13.3 per 100,000, almost 50% above the national average of 9.51. 

With the advent of Broken Windows, the city started cleaning up graffiti, arresting the squeegee thugs who intimidated drivers stopped at red lights and started targeting petty criminals.  Giuliani knew what he was doing.  Before his election he said that “he cared about statistics, but the real measure would be whether people actually felt safer. That, he said, was the ultimate test of policing and political leadership.” By the time he left office in 2002 he had delivered both the statistics and a feeling of safety – at 960 the murder rate had plummeted by 64% or 4.75 per 100,000, 15% below the national average. As the crime rate plummeted the city and its citizens thrived.  Times Square transformed from a seedy denizen of hookers and pickpockets and drug dealers into a shining tourist Mecca filled with glistening theaters and hotels and restaurants.  SoHo and Chelsea and Greenwich Village transformed into vibrant, inviting places. New Yorkers and tourists alike felt like New York was once again a place they could enjoy without feeling like they were in a war zone…

The point of all of this is, small things matter.  Subways covered in graffiti, people urinating in the streets, homeless camping out on sidewalks and kids stealing beers and Nyquil from CVS… none of these things by themselves send a society into the abyss.  But when they’re tolerated they tell the perpetrators that laws don’t matter, and soon shoplifting turns to burglary turns to robbery which turns to assault and sometimes murder. And, as criminals and crime proliferate and violence becomes more common, those law abiding citizens who can, flee for safer pastures, and all that remain in cities are criminals and their next victims who don’t have the resources to escape or can afford their own personal protection militia.  That’s when dystopia goes from being the fiction of Hollywood blockbusters to reality.

None of this is particularly insightful requiring an above average IQ to see.  But just because something is common sense doesn’t mean it’s common.  The idiocy of the anti Broken Windows theory, if one might call it that, was demonstrated by the clearly low IQ mayor of Baltimore Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in 2015 in the wake of the death of Freddy Gray in police custody.  The mayor stated that “while we try to make sure that they (protestors) were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well”. So the chief law enforcement officer of the city of a major American city decided to give “protesters” space to destroy said city. What was important was not the right of private property owners to retain their property, not the desires of citizens to be safe in their communities, not the expectations of taxpayers that their leaders would enforce the law… no it was the wishes of those intent on destruction. 

Small things lead to big things and the results were predictable, although protesters destroying property are not exactly small things.  In 2014 there were 211 murders in Baltimore for a rate of 33.84 per 100,000 citizens. Already high compared to the national average of 4.44, things got a lot worse afterwards and every year since 2015 the city has had over 300 murders with 2021 coming in at 337 and a murder rate of 58.27 per 100,000.

And of course the thing about murder is that it is the most extreme crime possible.  It’s at the top of the crime pyramid if you will – as an example, out of a given set of criminals, 80% might be willing to commit robbery, 40% assault and perhaps 2% murder. We therefore can assume that if the tip of that crime pyramid is getting bigger, the lower part is growing in tandem, if not more.  And indeed it has. Additionally, murder is relatively easy to measure as you usually have a body to count.  With most other crimes it’s harder to know a crime has been committed as typically someone needs to report it, and increasingly people are simply not bothering as they feel like nothing is going to be done, particularly as it can take literally hours for just to get a response from a 911 call in the first place.

Although George Soros’ DAs are a BIG part of the problem, out on the streets the problem is clearly less policing, both in terms of actual police numbers and what laws are being enforced.  As such, the solution would seem obvious:  More police and more enforcement.  But there’s the rub. As woke cities and states reduced the enforcement of and penalties for crimes in the name of “equity” they simultaneously eviscerated their police forces.  Not only are cops retiring and “quitting in droves”, but across the country cities are finding it increasingly challenging to recruit new officers to fill the vacancies.  So now they find themselves in a situation where they have more crime and fewer officers to enforce the law. 

That’s a vicious societal death spiral that’s extraordinarily difficult to pull out of.  The increase in crime chases more taxpayers and tax generating employers out of the cities and states just at the time when those bodies have to spend more trying to recruit new officers.  Eventually other services suffer and more people decide to leave, further eroding the tax base and the community.  We see that taking place in real time as citizens are escaping crime ridden cesspools in droves. 

But the thing is, that vicious cycle doesn’t start out that way. It starts with words like “empathy” and “tolerance” and “equity” being used to turn a blind eye to those aforementioned small things.  While empathy and tolerance might be laudable as personal characteristics, they, along with the fiction of “equity”, are cancers as governing characteristics. Democrats leverage voters’ sympathies to push for policies that sound humane but in reality create needle and crime ridden homeless encampments, eviscerate the criminal justice system and make life worse for virtually every citizen in the country. 

Can America pull out of this societal death spiral?  That’s a good question.  It will take voters deciding that reality trumps emotion and that an imperfect Republican Party trumps a soulless Democrat Party.  We’ll see on November 9 whether Americans 0f 2022 have the courage New Yorkers exhibited in 1993. 

Sunday, October 2, 2022

81 Million Neville Chamberlains... Nuclear War, Maybe, But At Least No Mean Tweets

Vladimir Putin is a bad guy.  Vladimir Putin is a megalomaniac.  Vladimir Putin is a criminal.  All of those things are true.  Similarly, Adolph Hitler was a bad guy, a megalomaniac and a criminal. But Vladimir Putin is not Adolph Hitler and Russia in 2022 is not Germany in 1938/39.  But in both cases, the future of the world hung on / hangs in the balance.  But maybe not in the way you think…

Much of the world was already engaged in war in 1941 when the United States joined the fight.  Most of Europe and much of North Africa were under the boot of the Nazis while most of the Far East was controlled by the Japanese.  German U Boats were prowling the seas sinking ships around the world from belligerents and non belligerents alike.  There was a world war going on, we just weren’t active, frontline participants prior to Pearl Harbor. However one looks at that period, the world as we know it was under fierce attack and eventually would have enveloped the rest of the world, including the United States. 

In February 2022 none of that was true.  Sure, Russia invaded Ukraine after invading Georgia in 2008 (then leaving after six months) and annexing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.  And sure, Vladimir Putin has been saber rattling about reconstituting the lost parts of the USSR.  But the world in 2022 was not the world in 1938/39…

NATO didn’t exist then. The UN didn’t exist then.  More importantly, the economic integration of European nations to one another and the rest of the west didn’t exist to the extent it does today.  And finally, in the late 1930s the Nazis had the most powerful military on the planet, while today Russia’s troops are rightly seen as inferior to most they would face in the West.

All of that to say when Russia invaded Ukraine in February of this year, the world was not on the brink of anything resembling a world war.  

If you took a time machine and went back to February of 2022 and asked the American people would they be willing to spend in excess of $50 billion and send the world into an economic tailspin if Russia invaded Ukraine, my guess is they would have said no.  They might have talked about bulking up NATO forces, they might have talked about sanctions, but I doubt they would have supported propping up a corrupt regime in a notoriously corrupt nation with tens of billions of dollars that would have to paid for by taxpayers already struggling under the weight of inflation and economic malaise.  Nor would they have wanted to bring America and the world to the brink of a nuclear cataclysm. 

But here we are, six months later, exactly there, with Vladimir Putin opaquely threatening to use nuclear weapons and the leader of Ukraine goading the United States to strike first with its nuclear weapons.

What is most sad about all of this is that none of it had to happen. A new piece in Foreign Affairs states “in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”  So essentially, in April, less than two months after the beginning of the war, the parties involved were close to agreement with returning to the status quo of what existed the day before Russia invaded.  But the agreement collapsed.  Why? Joe Biden…

As soon as the Ukrainian negotiators and Abramovich/Medinsky, following the outcome of Istanbul, had agreed on the structure of a future possible agreement in general terms, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Kyiv almost without warning.

"Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. We can sign [an agreement] with you [Ukraine], but not with him. Anyway, he will screw everyone over” is how one of Zelenskyy's close associates summed up the essence of Johnson's visit.

Now that’s Pravda, a Russian mouthpiece, but its assertion dovetails with statements Johnson made publically two weeks later:  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said any peace talks over Ukraine are likely to fail, as he compared holding talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiating with a crocodile. Johnson said dealing with Putin was like "a crocodile when it's got your leg in its jaws" and said it was vital that the West continues arming Ukraine.” And “Johnson said world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, agreed on a call this week that they would continue to supply Ukraine with weapons, including artillery, as Russia intensified its attacks on Ukraine's East.

So, essentially, the combatants had come to a resolution to their conflict when the west shows up and decides they’d rather have more war. The “they” in Johnson’s statement about not being on board with a peace settlement is telling.  Johnson was no doubt acting on behalf of the man who “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”, Joe Biden.  There’s simply no way to believe that the UK was going to put the kibosh on what could be a peaceful settlement to a potential powder keg without Washington’s approval or encouragement.

At the very moment when a fragile peace could have been worked out and negotiators begun to solve the differences between Russia and the Ukraine, Joe Biden steps in and does what he does best, mess things up.  The timeline here is interesting… Despite the fact that on March 10th the US promised Ukraine $13 billion and on March 26th Biden told the world that Putin "cannot remain in power," the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators were still able to come to an agreement on a peace deal.  And staggeringly, Joe Biden scuttled it.

Here we are, in September and the much of the world is in recession, prices for everything are up dramatically, the US has provided Ukraine with upwards of $60 billion in aid and Europe is facing energy shortages and skyrocketing prices just as winter approaches.  And now nuclear war is in the air.

All of this because Joe Biden wants revenge on Russia for something they didn’t even do…

Most certainly Russia tried to influence the 2016 elections in the US, but many countries do so.  It’s called statecraft and most certainly the United States does an enormous amount of it.  Nonetheless, even the Washington Post, the Democrat mouthpiece, states that the Russian’s “efforts were small in scope, relative to homegrown media efforts,” instead blaming “Fox News and the insular right-wing media ecosystem it anchors.”

And there we have it. The world of 2022 is looking a bit more like Europe of the late 1930’s and on the brink of war because of Joe Biden’s Trump Derangement Syndrome. But rather than being some troll on Twitter reposting Democrat memes from his Mom’s basement, Joe Biden is the leader of the free world and is expressing his TDS by sending billions of taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, sending the world into a global recession and threatening Russia to the point where its leader threatens to use nuclear weapons. 

On literally every single issue of consequence today Joe Biden is wrong.  On the single biggest issue of today Joe Biden has not only been wrong, but catastrophically so.  At the moment the world should be finding ways to pick itself up from the economic body blow of the Covid lunacy, the world is watching Putin hover his shaky finger over the nuclear button and wondering how many Europeans will freeze to death this winter because they don’t have enough energy to heat their homes.

In 2022 if the world finds itself in a nuclear conflict, Vladimir Putin will bear some of the blame, but he will share that with the feckless Joe Biden.  Putin’s a thug and Biden’s a dunce and everyone knows it. Most of the blame however will sit squarely on the shoulders of the purported “81 million” Americans who were so angered by “mean tweets” that they put into the most powerful office in the world someone demonstrably not capable of running a lemonade stand.  But at least, like Neville Chamberlain they had good intentions. 


Sunday, September 25, 2022

Black Lives Apparently Don't Matter to Democrats Who Use Them As Cannon Fodder in Pursuit of Power

America is being destroyed from within.  The Republic is being demolished by the Swamp, the borg of pernicious politicians, entrenched, politicized bureaucrats, media elites and academics who wield environmentalism and equity as truncheons to obliterate individual freedom, economic opportunity and the rule of law.  The recent episode of hypocrisy onMartha’s Vineyard demonstrates with crystal clarity the universe the elites of the Swamp create as they make laws that apply to peasants but no to the aristocracy.

Columns documenting the machinations of the Swamp are legion, but this is not one of them.  No, this piece is specifically about the destruction of the rule of law that the those elites have unleashed on said peasants, specifically as it relates to violent crime.

This past week New Orleans reclaimed the title of America’s deadliest city after seeing murders jump 141% over the last couple of years.  In New Orleans the murder rate is a staggering 52 per 100,000 people.  That compares to the national average of 6.9, the highest it’s been in a quarter century and the 50 per 100,000 of Venezuela, the most dangerous country in the world.

If New Orleans were an outlier it would be a shame, the fact that it’s not is a tragedy:  New York, Chicago, Portland, LA, San Francisco, Philadelphia and more. Big cities and small, crime is up across the country over the last two years, in most cases, dramatically.

We’ve always had crime in America.  Such is the price of freedom.  But what we are experiencing today is something altogether different.  It’s not just crime.  America can sometimes be a dangerous place.  Everyone knows working the midnight shift at a convenience store carries more risk than working the 9 AM shift at your local library, just as common sense tells you the odds of getting into a fight in a bar on a Saturday night are far higher than they are at church on Sunday morning.   

And just to be clear, this is not Antifa thugs and BLM cultists burning down cities.  Protest, even violent protest has been part of American history since its founding and largely is event driven like Shay’s Rebellion, the Vietnam War protests, or the riots after the killing of MLK or the acquittal of the police in the Rodney King video.

No, this is something different.  It’s one thing to rage against the machine, it’s another to commit violence against citizens, particularly when they are unsuspecting innocents or compliant victims.  And this is the issue today and we see it taking place across the county, from urban jungles like New York City to Midwestern communities like Salt Lake City.

What America’s experiencing today is exponentially worse than the typical crime that America is used to, and the truth is, most of it – but far from all of it – is being perpetuated by young black men, although increasingly, by young black women as well. 

Violence is being taken not only to a new level in terms of its frequency, but in the application as well. It’s not taking place in dark corners or deserted parking lots, but rather right in the middle of regular hustle and bustle of American’s daily lives.  It’s taking place in broad daylight, in full view of video cameras – often with others videoing the carnage to share on social media.  Violent, brutal crime is taking place on main street USA, in schools, drugstores, fast food restaurants, subway platforms, high end retail stores, and of course homes. 

We see large groups of young people blitzing stores and grabbing merchandise off shelves and running out with smiles on their faces.  We see “shoplifters” methodically clear store shelves of merchandise and simply stroll out the door, unconcerned about getting stopped or arrested and often assaulting employees along the way. 

What’s more, there’s an element of violence that seems unprecedented in its scale.  Almost daily we see random innocent people on subways or on stairs or in restaurants getting shoved or kicked or punched. We see fast food workers attacked as customers come over or around counters and spark mayhem.  We see bus drivers attacked and shop owners beaten and cops spit on. Indeed we see countless instances where robbers beat or shoot victims even after they have taken whatever they were after.  We also read daily of innocents of all ages killed in the crossfire while sleeping in their beds, standing in a bar or sitting in their cars. 

There also seems to be a racial element to this new crime wave with black perpetrators targeting a disproportionate number of white or Asian victims… but make no mistake, the single largest group of victims of this crime wave are black citizens. 

The question is, why is all of this this happening?  What is it that has caused an increasing number of black Americans to believe that they can rob and beat and even kill their fellow citizens with impunity? There are no doubt countless contributing factors, from missing fathers to failing schools to social media, but those problems (at least the first two) have existed for quite some time. No, the reason for the sharp jump in violent crime and unhinged behavior on the part of large numbers of primarily young black Americans is the Democrat proposition that everything bad that happens to blacks is a consequence of racism and as such, they’re not responsible for their choices and therefore they should not be held accountable for their actions.

Ronald Reagan once said, “If you want more of something, subsidize it…” and that is exactly what the Democrats have been doing with violent crime.  While they are not yet directly paying criminals to attack their fellow citizens and rob local businesses, they are subsidizing crime nonetheless.   

On the one hand George Soros backed Democrat prosecutors from coast to coast are demonstrating their pro criminal empowerment bonafides by refusing to seek bail for most arrestees, refusing to prosecute countless misdemeanors and simultaneously undercharging countless violent crimes as said misdemeanors. While on the other hand you have Democrats effectively decriminalizing an entire swath of crimes or eliminating bail for almost every offense.  Indeed, the lunatics running Illinois have just passed a law that eliminates bail for virtually every offense below 1st degree murder and prohibits police from arresting or removing trespassers caught in the act of burglarizing a home or business.  That means that if someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night and you call the police, if you’re lucky enough given the Democrat “Defund the police movement” that they respond while the trespasser is still there, they are literally not allowed to remove them from your home

All of this is happening exactly when America’s cultural and political elites are telling young black Americans that the system is rigged against them, that they’re incapable of succeeding when playing by the rules, that most white people hate them and if they break the law there are no consequences to be had.  That is literally a recipe for the collapse of society. 

Today in Democrat run America, it’s only the rights of criminals that matter, never the victims… and the fact is that most of the victims of this American renaissance of violence are, in fact, black Americans, the very people Democrats pretend to care about.  Democrats have leveraged the fictions of “systemic racism” and millions of “white supremacists” running around to accumulate power, and Americans of all races are paying the price.  But this is exactly what happens when politicians pursue policies of balkanization and victimization, setting groups of Americans against one another for the purposes of gaining power.  The Democrats thrive, their grifter partners thrive and America’s citizens suffer. 

America was founded on the principle that all men were created equal in the eyes of God and in the laws of man. While the execution of those truths have been imperfect from the beginning, it has consistently improved for over 200 years, bringing Americans freedom and prosperity unmatched in human history, and that includes black Americans, who make up fully 8% of American millionaires.  Democrats, in half a generation have undone 200 years of progress and created a violent cage match between demographics in the public square, and the result has been a body blow to civil society, mayhem in cities, and blood on the streets, and most of it black.  But somehow black America continues to vote Democrat in Stalin like numbers. Perhaps they should reconsider…