Dear Donald Trump: Compassion Should Not Be A Suicide Pact...

America is a land of immigrants. We’re told that constantly, and it’s true. Of course it’s also true that immigration of one sort of another is a hallmark of almost all of human history.

Wherever humanity originated, at some point members of the species immigrated everywhere else. It is of course never a simple issue. Sometimes it’s the result of the peoples being chased from their homelands like the Vandals who were chased by the Huns from eastern Europe into the Roman Empire, eventually settling in Gaul then Iberia and finally North Africa. Other times it’s the result of a people who seek to expand their territory through conquest such as with the various Muslim caliphates that emerged from Mecca & Medina whose desire to encircle the Mediterranean was only stopped by Charles Martel in Tours in 732 and by John III Sobieski in Vienna in 1683.

History is full of examples of peoples immigrating from one place to another. We often think of the earliest peoples moving into an area that was previously uninhabited. That may possibly be true of North and South America, but for the most part it’s not true. When the earliest humans immigrated out of Africa and into Europe, Asia and Oceania, they encountered our cousins, the Neanderthals, and after 100 centuries of war eventually eradicated them.

All of this to say that immigration is nothing new in human history. And it’s not in American history either. The United States was built by immigrants from Europe from a land that was extraordinarily sparsely populated when they arrived. It’s estimated that there were 4.5 million inhabitants north of the Rio Grande in 1492, or about one half a person per square mile. That compares to approximately 32 in Mexico at the time, 33 in Spain, 60 in France and the 103 in India, the world’s densest nation at the time.  Today America stands at approximately 100 people per square mile. 

From its beginning, what became America experienced a series waves of immigration which included approximately 86 million people through 2019, a number that has increased to approximately 100 million over the last 5 years. Although Donald Trump stemmed the tide somewhat, Joe Biden has opened up the floodgates with more than 10 million illegal immigrants pouring over the nonexistent border since his installation. That’s fully 3% of the US population.  As significant numbers of those people are heading to New York, California and other blue states who roll out the red carpet and give them free money, the Democrats don’t fight to keep the border open because it helps their Congressional numbers.  

This is simply not sustainable. Particularly when the overwhelming majority of the people coming across the border are from countries that don’t share our values and have little experience with the freedoms that helped create history’s greatest nation & economy. 

Across the country we’re seeing sanctuary states and cities being overwhelmed by the events they supported in the first place. Citizens, veterans, children and more are being displaced to make room for illegals, and taxpayers are picking up the tab. Virtually every aspect of public services is being overwhelmed, from shelters to schools to hospitals to police.

The good thing is, Donald Trump has promised that on day 1 he will start the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. That, combined with a wall the likes of which we’ve never seen is a great start.

But there’s a problem, and Jesse Kelly hit it right on the head on Twitter…

“70% of Americans SAY they care about the border.

Run one video of little Pedro sobbing as he and mother Lupe get loaded into an ICE vehicle a they get deported back to Guatemala and that 70% number will drop to around 5%.

Country is too soft for mass deportation. No chance. 0.”

Kelly is right. America is simply too soft to do what’s necessary in order to deal with this disaster.

Americans are largely a compassionate people. The LBGTQXYZ travesty we’re experiencing today is at its core the result of Americans reacting to gay partners not being able to visit dying lovers in hospitals during the AIDS epidemic because they didn’t have rights and families of the dying kept them out of the hospital rooms.

Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of babies are aborted annually because Americans are angered at hearing that a victim of rape or the mother of a severely handicapped fetus are forced to give birth rather than get an abortion.

In wide swaths of the country policing and justice have been eviscerated because too many Americans believe that blacks are incapable of overcoming slavery that ended a century and a half ago or discrimination that was outlawed back in the 1960s.

Americans are indeed a compassionate people, but sometimes compassion can get you killed. Compassion has a role to play in a moral civilization, but when it becomes the driving force to the exclusion of rational thought, it ceases to be a virtue. (See Europe, which since 2015 at Angela Merkel’s direction during the war in Syria, imported tens of millions of military aged men from Africa and the Middle East who are bringing war to the streets, many of whom despise western culture and want to bring Sharia.) You cannot run a country based on teary anecdotes. They make for great media and heartfelt stories, but they make for terrible policy.

If Donald Trump is going to fix this situation, he’s going to have to be willing to endure the unprecedented level of vitriol that will be thrown at him. AOC crying at the side of cages will be child’s play compared to what the media will do with images of little Pedro and his pregnant mommy being pulled from the taxpayer provided hotel room and loaded up into a DHS van. He’s going to have to be willing to endure stories about the heartbreaking lives that face deportees back in Mexico, Guatemala and Venezuela and the rest of the countries from whence they came with him playing the role of Hitler. At the end of the day, if Donald Trump is going to lead the nation out of the morass that Democrats and the swamp have led us into, he’s going to have to be willing to be vilified, cursed, defamed, libeled, reviled and basically all of the other things he has been exposed to over the last 8 years, on steroids.

He wasn’t willing to endure that abuse last time and allowed random judges to throw roadblocks all along the way, and as a result his wall was never finished and now there are 10 million new illegals here as a result. If he’s going to be the leader Americans need right now, he’s going to have be a lot more George Patton and a lot less Mark Milley…

Leftists in the Justice System Should Pay For What They Unleash On Society...

When I was 12 years old we moved to the Navy base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  We moved in the summer and by the time school started I’d made friends and was feeling pretty comfortable.  One day during the first week of class I was sitting in the back of Mr. Scroch’s Social Studies classroom before he arrived.  While we waited some friends and I were messing around, throwing erasers at one another and calling each other names.  Then we noticed a man sitting in the front row.  We immediately settled down but I remember ducking my head and yelling something to the old guy about how he must have failed a lot to be there with us.

Moments later Mr. Scroch walked in the door. After he and settled his desk the man in front stood up, pointed out the three of us, and said “Mr. Scroch, would you please send these three gentlemen to my office at the end of the day.” As my eyes bugged Mr. Scroch said, “Students, I’d like to introduce our vice principle, Mr. Andrews.”

We dutifully went to Mr. Andrews’ office after school and somehow, inexplicably, I found myself laughing at him when he asked if we thought we were funny. I protested that class hadn’t started yet but he was having none of it.  He then called my dad to come pick me up.

And that’s when I learned something about the military, or at least how it was decades ago.  Apparently, when you’re a kid in a military family, particularly when living on a military base, your dad is held accountable for your actions.  Basically it’s his job to keep you in line, and if he can’t do that then his career can be impacted.

Although this is where things get a bit blurry as to my actual punishment, what’s not blurry is that I learned that having your dad called to pick you up from school was a bad thing… and I don’t think he ever had to again…From that point forward I knew that I was being held responsible for my actions, and I behaved accordingly.    

Clearly, forty some years later, that lesson stuck:  Actions have consequences.

Sadly however, that lesson doesn’t apply so much today.  At least not everywhere.

One place it often does is the private sector.  Doctors have to carry mountains of insurance in case they make a mistake and someone dies or is harmed by them.  Architects carry insurance in case one of their buildings collapses. Supermarkets carry insurance in case someone slips in the produce isle and breaks their arm.  And you and I and most Americans carry car insurance in case we run a red light and T-bone a Chevy Impala at the corner or First & Main.  Americans, eschewing Shakespeare’s advice to “Kill all the lawyers”, are a litigious people.  Why?  Basically because – other than a sizable army of grifters – most Americans think one should be held responsible for one’s actions.

But you know where that rule almost never applies?  Government.  From politicians making promises they break as soon as they take their oath to schools that fail to teach students to a Pentagon that can’t seem to account for $220 billion in gear, someone could write a book about all of the failures of government driven by incompetence and negligence. 

While there is no dearth of examples of government being unaccountable for its actions, there is perhaps one place where government accountability should be the rule more than any other:  the Judiciary.  In particular, District Attorneys, parole boards and judges as they relate to violent criminals. Unlike when the Pentagon loses a hammer or when a transportation department builds a road to nowhere, when criminals are let back out on the street to terrorize citizens, there are real consequences for real people. But regardless of the gravity of those consequences, the people who created that circumstance are never held accountable.

We see it almost every day across the country, where some career criminal with a rap sheet as long as your arm kills someone or rapes someone or pushes someone in front of a train and we soon discover they were let out early on parole or were sprung via a laughably low bail or walked out of a jailhouse after no bail was required. 

Invariably those failures result in blood on the streets or victims in a hospital or bodies in a morgue.  Those are real world consequences of decisions made by government employees who have no fear of themselves or their families suffering consequences for their bad decisions. And it happens all the time.  Prosecutors plea attempted murder down to assault and a judge sets a unconscionably low bail and suddenly a violent criminal is back out on the street.  And it happens from the other direction as well, when gullible parole boards believe professional liars when they promise they’re reformed and won’t reoffend and allow them out years early. 

Recently two members of an Illinois parole board resigned (not fired) after a convict to whom they granted parole murdered the young son of his ex-girlfriend the day after he was released. That’s news only because it almost never happens.

The solution to this problem is actually quite simple, although there is zero chance it ever gets implemented. What is it?  Accountability.  Judges and DAs should be held accountable for the crimes committed by the people they put back out on the street, at least for X number of years.  Same deal for parole board members.  They should be held accountable for the crimes of criminals they put out on the street for the duration of remainder of their original sentence. I’m not suggesting that they should face the chair if one of the thugs they put back on the street murders someone, but they should share some of the consequences of their bad decisions.  Perhaps getting fired with no pension, disbarment, some time in jail or something sufficiently painful so that they take their duties seriously.   

Now of course this won’t guarantee recidivism drops to zero. That’s impossible. But it might put “Fear of God” into the people in whom the public has put so much trust. 

No doubt there would be a great deal of pushback from “justice reform advocates”, defense attorneys and state and local treasurers, but regardless of the merits of their arguments, none outweighs the right of the public to be safe in their communities from known criminals. 

This may seem like a draconian solution, and like most hard fixes it would take some time to work itself out, but eventually judges, DAs and parole board members would hone their decision making skills so that they make decisions that are better balanced between the desires of the criminals for relief and the desire of the community for safety.  There is certainly a balance to be had between the rights of criminals and the safety of a community, but right now Democrats have put a bag of lead on the side of the criminals and citizens across the country are paying the price. This might just help bring the scale back into balance. 

America's Coming Race War, Courtesy of the Democrat Party...

Sometimes it’s hard to know what exactly to write.  I don’t mean in general staring off into space or watching the clouds in your coffee kind of stuff, I mean when you see something so extraordinarily evil that you’re left speechless.

That happened to me a few weeks ago when I saw the video of a white female student being brutally beaten by a black female student in Missouri.  As you’ve no doubt seen, the black girl beats the white girl into unconsciousness and repeatedly slams her head into the concrete.  The victim went into convulsions and as of this writing is in critical condition in the hospital.

There are two primary questions I had after watching this video.  The first was why does no one try and stop the attacker when there are a dozen people around the fight, including at least one person recording a video?  The second was what kind of an upbringing would someone have to have to make them act this way? These two unanswerable questions melded into a third, which was, why do we see so many videos of blacks acting violently?  Beating white people.  Beating other black people. Attacking restaurant employees.  Attacking cops. Pushing people in front of subway trains. And the list goes on. And on. And on.

On the day I saw this video I happened to be reading a book called Empire by Niall Ferguson.  I was at the point where he is comparing the actions of the British – which is the empire to which the title refers – and the Japanese in their early 20^th century empire. In particular he discusses the Rape of Nanking, one of the most brutal and disgusting displays of savagery ever chronicled. He doesn’t pretend the British were never brutal. In fact they were and he discusses it. But he makes the distinction between the British killing opponents during battles – sometimes including unarmed women and children while peacefully protesting – or the deaths of prisoners from incompetent logistics management and the brutal, intentional infliction of pain and torture on civilians and POWs alike.  There were literally contests to see who could kill more people or do so more quickly or brutally. 

Such abuse was never limited to the Japanese of course.  The Germans were equally as evil during WWII.  Like the Japanese, their killing beyond the battlefield, more often than not was a mix of cruelty, sadism, depravity, and systemized murder.  Such evil has been endemic through much of human history.  One of the reasons the Spanish were able to so easily subdue the great Aztec empire was because so many of its neighbors were enthusiastic about ridding themselves of the cruel, murderous empire where captured enemies would frequently die horrifying, brutal deaths. More recently the Rwandan genocide, the brutality by ISIS, the execution thousands of Nigerian Christians my Muslims and the October 7^th attacks by Hamas demonstrate that man can be a savage instrument of evil.

Since the moment Cain slew Able history is full of violence. But this seems to be different.  Not different in that it’s unique in history, but that it’s unique in American history.  What I mean by that is that it’s a perfect storm of Democrat malevolence.

That storm has three components.  The first is what seems to have become the primary plank of the Democrat party. White racism. Prior to Barack Obama America’s race relations had been largely improving for 40 years. With his the “police acted stupidly” comment things got off on the wrong foot, and after the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown things went south quickly.  Then the 2020 death of George Floyd sent race relations into a tailspin. With the riots and the shilling for BLM by everyone from the NFL to Microsoft to Congressional Democrats, things took a decidedly bad turn. Suddenly we were told systemic racism was to be found everywhere from law enforcement to math to punctuality to proper English. At the same time we had the Pentagon, the White House and practically every news organization in the country telling us that white nationalism is the single biggest threat to the country and that blacks were in constant danger. The left has done to whites what the Nazis did to the Jews, what the Japanese did to the Chinese and what the Hutu did to the Tutsi… dehumanize them, make them into the Other, the ones towards whom no humanity need be shown. Once that mindset is absorbed, there are no limitations on what can be done to members of the target group. 

The second is that black Americans have been told by Democrats that they cannot succeed.  That regardless of what they do they are incapable of success in America because of white oppression. As such, the rules need to be changed for them, most critically, the elimination of consequences for crimes. Essentially the argument is, given that blacks cannot find success when they behave properly, society can’t punish them for behaving improperly.    

The third is the collapse of the black family.  Today more than 70% of black babies are born to unwed mothers.  That leaves a single mother, often on welfare, to raise the children. And children in fatherless homes are far more likely to be criminals. 

The outcome of this perfect storm is significant proportion of the black population hate white people, have little belief they have a vested interest in civilized society and there’s no one at home to teach them right from wrong. With little reason to have self-respect and with even less reason to respect others, too many black Americans are simply acting out as a child would, with no filters, no self-control, no empathy and no real remorse.  That’s a recipe for disaster for society.

If America is coming apart at the seams, it’s not because of any “systemic racism”, but rather because Democrats have seen fit to weaponize blacks. And not just against whites, but against the very fabric of America. This plays itself out in major cities across the country where most black Americans live and dominate the politics. Indeed, black mayors (most of whom are Democrats) run almost every one of America’s largest and most important cities:  Washington, Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and New Orleans among others. Virtually every one of them is like living in a relative war zone compared to much of the rest of the country. The ironic thing about all of this is that the biggest victims of this black despondency and disconnect with civilized society are fellow blacks, because the animating factors of alienation and desolation know no bounds, color or otherwise. 

This is not a sustainable model. A nation divided by race cannot survive. Americans fought a war then passed civil rights laws a century later to stop that. But here we are with significant portion of America’s population looking into life’s kaleidoscope and seeing nothing but a fatalistic cacophony where they have no agency, nothing matters and thus nothing has any value, including their lives and those of others.

What we saw on that video is the epitome of the race war Charles Manson tried to launch but failed.  Sadly for Americans of all hues, a half a century later the Democrats are making his dream a reality.

Ghosts of Revolutions Past and Warnings of Futures to Come

 Have ever been listening to someone talk and have déjà vu, despite the fact that you’ve never seen or heard of the person speaking, and the interview you’re watching happened just a few hours ago?  I have. Once.  A couple of weeks ago.

I was listening to Tucker interview Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese native who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China.  She eventually immigrated to the United States and has lived here for 40 years.  As I’m listening to her talk about how the Cultural Revolution rolled out and how she was seeing many of the same things here I couldn’t help but think that I’d heard something close to this before.

And then it hit me, I had.  Exactly 40 years ago a defector from the Soviet Union, Yuri Bezmenov did an interview about how the KGB was using what they called Ideological Subversion to collapse the United States.

Now these two interviews weren’t remotely the same.  One was from an KGB operative, someone who was part of the suppression of the Russian people who became disillusioned and defected to the west while the other is from someone who experienced the suppression of the CCP and eventually immigrated to the US. 

Nonetheless, given exactly 40 years apart, the two interviews taken together paint a very stark picture of America today and going forward.  They reminded me of a technique that is often recommended for effective public speaking: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them.  Tell them.  Then tell them what you’ve just told them.”

Bezmenov lays out the KGB’s plan – Ideological subversion – for sowing the collapse of America – and western Europe as well.   It involved 4 elements. He lays each one out in detail, or at least three of them while 3# is obvious.

1)      1) Demoralization – 15-20 years.  Time to re-educate one generation.

This is done through uncritically introducing the Marxist ideology into schools without counterbalancing it with basic American values, patriotism, and morals. Eventually a significant segment of the population will become immune to accurate information. 

2)      2) Destabilization – 2 – 5 years to destabilize a nation.

The goal is to destabilize the nation via the economy, foreign relations, and defense policy. 

3)      3) Crisis – as short as 6 weeks to bring a nation to crisis. (George Floyd anyone…)

4)     4) Normalization – For this one I’ll let Bezmenov’s words speak for themselves:

“This is what will happen in the United States if you allow all the schumcks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kind of goodies and paradise on earth.  To destabilize your economy and illuminate the principle of free market competition and to put a big brother government in Washington DC with benevolent dictators like Walter Mondale. 

Your leftists in the United States, all the professors and the beautiful civil rights defenders, they are instrumental in the process of the subversion.  Only to destabilize the nation.  When their job is completed, they are not needed anymore.  They know too much.  Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxists / Leninists come power they get offended they think they will come to power.  That will never happen of course.  They will be lined up against the wall and shot.”

That last sentence is particularly interesting because it’s exactly what Xi Van Fleet says happened in China, twice.  The first was the peasants who put Mao in power in the first place.  They were repaid for their efforts by being chained to their farms and between 1958 and 1962 fifty million of them starved to death.  Then, in 1969 three years after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Mao turned on his Red Guards, the children, literally, who were his stormtroopers and had the military either kill them or send them to re-education camps. 

Her story is a tragic one, but as she walks through it you hear echoes of exactly what is happening in America today.  For Mao, after 16 years of brainwashing the children he sent them (the Red Guards) out to terrorize the nation.  Violence was used, but also the control of the language. Suddenly propaganda was everywhere.  Everything old had to be destroyed while law and order was dismantled and the police were told to stay out of the schools, which were the beating heart of the Revolution, and additionally, if any of the Red Guards struck them, the police were prohibited from reacting. 

All of this resembles the indoctrination of two generations of American students in the fiction of Climate Change, the gay and trans agendas, as well as the manipulation of language and discourse via the prohibition of words and ideas. The tearing down of statues. The defund the police movement, the violence after George Floyd and the lack of consequences for criminal behavior are exactly as Xi described.

Whether it’s climate activists, supporters of Palestine – AKA antisemites, LBTQXYZ123# harassers or Antifa & BLM rampaging through cities, they’re all playing their parts in the play written by the KGB and taken over by western Communists after the Berlin Wall collapsed.  What’s more, both of these refugees from tyranny discuss what America is becoming, he predicted it and she’s chronicling it. Whether it’s reporters being arrested or protesters being sent to the gulag, or rich / popular opponents of the regime being harassed via lawfare, the rules never apply to those in power.  It’s not that there are no rules, they just don’t matter.  The Soviets had a constitution that guaranteed a wide variety of civil liberties, and the Chinese constitution guarantees "citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession, and of demonstration." We have our Constitution which provides about as much of a limit on government as a spaghetti strainer does on water.    

The funny thing (as in not really funny) about all of this is that the leftists who think they’re going to be running things once the crisis blossoms into a full blown tyranny will likely be the first to go.  Whether Stalin’s erstwhile supporters who fell in the Great Purge or the Chinese Red Guards who fell to the guns of the military, those who are at the vanguard of leftist revolutions often find themselves victims of the very power they put in place. 

As we watch our great cities devolve into crime infested dystopian nightmares, as we watch George Soros impelled DAs and prosecutors smile as they demonstrate their two tiered legal system, as we watch as the federal government actively subverts efforts to secure the border and cities cut services to citizens and veterans in order to gift illegals billions, as we watch schools and hospitals and states empower the brainwashing and butchering of children, and a we watch powerlessly as the Uniparty in Washington runs up trillion dollar deficits and sends tens of billions to Ukraine, we begin to recognize what Bezmenov called Normalization.  A decade ago Americans of most stripes would have understood that all of this was a disaster in the making.  But now we’re told that all of it is not only normal, but you’re a racist, homophobic, transphobic white nationalist if you disagree with any of it. 

The outcome in November will decide which path we take.  The thing to remember when we walk into those voting booths is that Bezmenov and Xi had a place to escape to for freedom, America.  We don’t have that luxury.  Vote accordingly.

The Persecution of Donald Trump Means Turning Ordinary Activities Into Crimes

In December 2020 I had to put my home on the market and move 1,000 miles away.  Two months before I’d considered refinancing my mortgage and the bank gave me a valuation of $285,000. I thought it probably should have been higher but didn’t really feel like taking the time to look into it because I wasn’t really that worried about it. 

Suddenly in December I was forced to worry about it.  So I reached out to a realtor friend (an actual realtor, not a guy with a side gig) and asked him to give me an estimate. He thought it would probably sell for about $305,000, maybe $315,000 tops.  Again I was skeptical so I started doing my own research.  I looked at my community, what was available in my county, what comparable houses were selling for and taking note of the neighborhoods, roadways, schools etc. After all of that I estimated my house was worth about $400,000.  I thought it could possibly sell for $415,000 or even a bit more.

We put it on the market at $405,000 and ten days later it was sold with the buyers offering $395,000 and we eventually settled for $400,000. I was confident it could have sold for more but exigent circumstances made the logistics of waiting impossible, which is sad because had I waited 12 months to sell it I would likely have gone for $550,000, almost twice what I’d been originally offered.

All of this to say that in the world of real estate there are a million different factors that go into valuing something and based on those criteria, there are likely countless different values that can be set on a particular property. What’s more, values can be volatile particularly in the high end markets. 

Real estate, like most businesses, can be unpredictable, sometimes very much so. Which makes what NY AG Letitia James has done to Donald Trump so unconscionable. In the primary element of James’ indictment: “’Trump and his company used “false and misleading” financial statements, her lawsuit alleged, “repeatedly and persistently to induce banks to lend money to the Trump Organization on more favorable terms than would otherwise have been available to the company, to satisfy continuing loan covenants, and to induce insurers to provide insurance coverage for higher limits and at lower premiums.’”

One would imagine that some banks or insurance companies lost money because they loaned money to Trump or trump defaulted on them.  They did not. Indeed the loans were all paid back, with interest.  There were literally no victims and banks still wanted to lend to him!

But that didn’t matter.  The bottom line is that, according to James, Trump used one set of books for getting a loan and another set of books for taxes. But that’s not how this works. 

When I was selling my house the county tax collector assessed my home at around $200,000.  It had been that way for years.  Indeed, it’s very common, particularly in red states where they concern themselves with controlling taxes, for the government assessment of the value of a property to be substantially below what it might sell for.  That didn’t impact what I might refinance it for or what a buyer might pay for it.  In those cases the lender sends someone out to do an inspection and then comes to its own conclusion as to what value it would be willing to assign the property for the purposes of a loan. 

In the case of Trump, in 2011 the local property assessor in Palm Beach County had valued his Mar-a-Lago property at $18 million then $27.6 million in 2021.  AJ James indicted Trump because he valued the property at higher valuations during this time, up to $739 million for collateral purposes, and therefore using a fraudulent valuation to obtain loans he wouldn’t otherwise get.  But here’s the thing, according to a banker involved in the transaction, the bank followed its own guidelines to make the loans, stating “I think we expect clients-provided information to be accurate. At the same time, it’s not an industry standard that these statements be audited. They’re largely reliant on the use of estimates,” so bankers routinely “make some adjustments.” To highlight the disparity, this past December a high end Palm Beach real estate broker stated that in 2021 Mar-a-Lago would have been worth slightly more than $1 billion and likely would have valued it at $655 million in 2011. 

The point here is that Trump was simply doing the same thing that millions of homeowners and businesses do every single day across the country. They make the best case scenario for the value of their property of business while knowing that a banker or lender is going to make their own determinations before deciding how much they will lend.

That’s business. Valuations are just estimates and they can be all over the map in business.  In 2000 Spanish telephone company Terra bought the search engine Lycos for $12 billion.  They unloaded it three years later for $95 million at a loss of 99%! Alternatively, in 1999 founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered to sell Google to Alta Vista for $750,000.  George Bell the CEO demurred.  The company went public in 2004 with a valuation of $23 billion and today Google is worth almost $2 trillion. 

The point is, valuations are guesses, educated or otherwise and everyone has their own perspective.  But James has taken this ordinary element of business and twisted it to try and eviscerate the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

And she might succeed.  First Judge Arthur Engoron came back with a guilty verdict and last Friday he fined Trump almost half a billion dollars. And what’s worse, because of course it’s New York, he may have to put up the entire amount before he can appeal. 

America’s justice system has been twisted into a hammer with which to nail enemies of the swamp to the wall.  Not only have we seen the laughable election manipulation case in Georgia, the ludicrous defamation case in New York, and the on hold federal election interference case, but we now have the justice system being used to turn normal, everyday activities that millions of Americans partake in on a regular basis and turning them into crimes.  And what’s worse, the system is set up such that if someone is deemed guilty they essentially have to bankrupt themselves in order to be able to seek an appeal. That’s the definition of unjust. If this stands America as we know it is finished. You can’t unring a bell and precedent is precedent.  If this works and Trump loses as a result of this judicial interference onslaught then one would expect recriminations and counter recriminations. And it won’t just be billionaire ex presidents who’ll be in the crosshairs, it will be small businesses who don’t support local candidates, it will be big businesses who threaten the elites and it just might be you and me for having written something critical of some thin skinned politician somewhere or overestimated the value of our house… None of that is good for a free republic. 

 

The Downside of Prosperity - Too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious

I’ve always been a fan of the prosperity created by Western civilization in general and the United States in particular. Indeed, I even created a website called Gratitude for America, where I write about American entrepreneurs who invented things like barbed wire and standardized shipping containers. But maybe there’s a downside to this prosperity because we’ve created a class of people (especially in government) completely disconnected from how the world actually works.

Cyrus McCormick, who invented the mechanical reaper, is the most important entrepreneur in human history. He basically untethered mankind from farming, one of the most dangerous occupations on earth. In 1831, when he invented the mechanical reaper, approximately 80% of the American population was involved in agriculture, and, in most places in the world, it was higher—in some cases, 95%.

Back then, farming’s efficiency hadn’t changed much since the time of the pyramids. A man, using a scythe, could harvest approximately one acre of grain a day. Fifty years later, McCormick guaranteed that, by using his machine, a farmer could harvest 15 acres a day. With today’s machines, a farmer can harvest up to 100 acres in a day. Small wonder that only 3% of the US population today farms.

The reason McCormick is so important is not because of farming, per se, but because he freed up most of the population to go out and do other, less dangerous things. With that shift, work-life expectancies began to skyrocket in the latter half of the 19th century. In 1800, the average life expectancy was approximately 30 years, with Europe averaging 33 and the US close behind. By 1900, the world average had increased to 32, but in Europe it had jumped to 43 and in the US to 47.

Since they didn’t have to be on farms, people became inventors, entrepreneurs, and innovators. During the late 19th century, countless inventions (e.g., usable electricity, automobiles, and the telegraph) and innovations (e.g., drilling for oil, railroad expansion, and the widespread adoption of the assembly line) changed the Western world. Food became more abundant, transportation became easier and safer, housing became cheaper, and medicine began to improve.

In the 20th century, things really took off. Today, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, world life expectancy is 72 years, while in the US, it’s 78, and in Western Europe, it’s above 80.

Not only are we living longer, but we’re also prosperous beyond anything in human history. Our food is more varied, dependable, and plentiful than ever. We have transportation, hospitalization, housing, employment, clothing, education, sanitation, entertainment, and leisure opportunities exponentially beyond anything in all of human history.

Contrast all of that with what humanity endured through most of our history. Poverty and scarcity were the norm. Food availability was always an issue. War was almost constant. Work was dangerous. Slavery was everywhere. Many worked seven days a week, changing clothes was rare if at all, people rarely bathed, virtually everyone was illiterate, plumbing didn’t exist, disease was rampant, shelter was overcrowded, heating in the winter was from burning wood or dung if either could be found, infant mortality was stratospheric, and leisure was a luxury only the elites could afford.

The average Westerner’s life is far superior to any experienced by 99.999% of the people who ever lived, but, somehow, everyone today is a victim—and we know that everyone is a victim because the elites tell us so. Through schools, media, and government, we’re told that Western culture is racist, sexist, fascist, or somehow otherwise oppressive. Basically, the better things get, the worse they get.

America today reminds me of a Jetsons episode I saw as a child. George Jetson, the father of the “Space-aged family,” came home one day exhausted from working at Spacely Sprockets and said, “Jane, these one-hour-a-week workweeks are brutal.” No doubt we’d be told he’s still a victim.

The reason those elites, the ones who seek to manipulate the public, get away with it is because a significant portion of the population believes them. And they believe them because of the division of labor-driven prosperity that McCormick unleashed.

Virtually the entire left in this country has zero connection with anything having to do with creating anything, growing anything, building anything, or risking anything. They spend their days pushing paper in offices or selling cappuccinos, if they work at all. Not only are few of them farmers, but few are truckers, lumberjacks, steel workers, plumbers, electricians, or entrepreneurs. Few have ever had to balance paying a credit card bill versus making payroll. Few ever risked their money and invested sweat equity to start a business.

The left today is largely government employees, students, college-educated white women working inside large corporations, Wall Street, academia, the cabal of NGOs, the media, the 40 million who suckle on the government teat through programs like SNAP, and the 47% of the country who either pay no tax or get “refundable tax credits”.

Few of those people do anything remotely productive for the economy. Few understand that the government doesn’t have money beyond what it takes from taxpayers or prints via taxpayer IOUs. They have no appreciation for Capitalism, the thing that gave us our prosperity. They flush the toilets and expect them to work, flip the light switch and expect the room to illuminate, and go to the store to pick up a pound of beef without knowing how it gets there. Few of them have any real connection to the basic functionality of life.

The result of this societal bifurcation is that half of our population has little understanding of or vested interest in the country’s or the economy’s continued functioning. More regulations and higher taxes are always the answer because none of them are affected. Regulations make it harder to open a business or keep one running, but they’re easy promises for politicians to offer as the solution to every problem because their voters never pay the price for the consequences.

We’re living in the world Ayn Rand envisioned in Atlas Shrugged. Everything we see going on in our cities, on our streets, and on our border is so because the division of labor has allowed so many people to bask in prosperity without having a clue about how it’s actually created or what’s necessary to maintain it. Their checks come, their jobs are secure, and they don’t have to deal with the government’s suffocating regulations, so everything is good.

Of course, it’s not good, and things are getting worse. Thomas Jefferson understood the problem, saying in 1824: “I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” That is 2024 incarnate.

This needs to be fixed. How we do that, I’m not quite sure, but, at a minimum, we need to slash government spending and regulations at every level. Perhaps only those who pay taxes should vote. Perhaps government employees should not be allowed to vote. Maybe we make election day the day after Tax Day. Whatever the solution, until those voting have some vested interest in a well-run government and a functioning economy, things will only get worse, and they’re already pretty bad.  

 

Setting Good Money on Fire After Setting Bad Money on Fire in Gaza

I was walking down the street yesterday, and suddenly, I heard honking from a bunch of cars. Not sure what it was, I looked over to see a cavalcade of cars driving by, waving big Palestinian flags out their windows. This went on for about five minutes until, eventually, they had all disappeared.

This comes on the heels of seeing the Palestinian flag painted on the sides of buildings or on overpasses or stickers stuck to signs and the windows of various McDonald’s –and not put there by the store’s owners! Thankfully, there was no real disturbance other than a bit of annoyance.

They are, of course, protesting the alleged “genocide” that’s being carried out in Gaza by the IDF. We’ve been told that, in the slightly over 100 days since the beginning of this war, there have been more than 24,000 civilian casualties at the hands of the IDF. Given that that information is coming from Palestinian “authorities” which, in Gaza is Hamas, that number is likely highly exaggerated. Even so, if the actual number is 10% of that total, it’s a tragedy. One civilian death, never mind 2,400 or 24,000, is a tragedy. It’s not genocide, but it’s a tragedy nonetheless.

Simply, it’s war, and most wars include civilian deaths, many of them.

And how did we get to this war? As everyone knows, it started on October 7th when Hamas sent terrorists (“freedom fighters”) into Israel who raped, tortured, and murdered some 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, with victims ranging from 10-month-old babies to 80-plus-year-old men and women. And they kidnapped 200 more.

The depravity of the attacks was extraordinary, something along the lines of Dr. Mengele or the Rape of Nanking. We’re told, however, that while the events of Oct 7th were indeed despicable, the Israeli response has been disproportionate insofar as civilians have died. And as such, we’re also told that Israel needs to be stopped. And punished.

Solely for argument’s sake, let’s pretend that there is some moral equivalency here and agree that the terrorist attack by Hamas and the so-called disproportionate response from Israel are somehow equal.

Then the question becomes, how did we get to this place? In November, someone posted a TikTok video showcasing “Beautiful Gaza that you never saw before. Filmed just before Oct 7th, 2023.” The video shows bright Mediterranean colors, beautiful smiling faces, and everything from bustling stores to beach resorts to crowded restaurants and much more. It looks like a Madison Avenue marketing job seeking to induce the world to spend their next vacation in Gaza. (See also this tweet describing what soldiers saw: wealth and militarization.)

Nevertheless, we’ve repeatedly been told that Gaza is a modern concentration camp. That’s why, pro-Hamas factions insist, Hamas was forced to attack Israel in an attempt to break the Israeli chokehold on the Palestinians.

But, if indeed it is true that Israel was turning Gaza into a giant death camp, where was the rest of the world? Why weren’t they helping? Well, it turns out, the world was helping… A lot. And I mean a lot!

Over the decade-and-a-half since Hamas was elected, Gaza has received approximately $40 billion in support from around the world. That included $5 billion from the United Nations, almost $2 billion from Qatar, $20 billion from the Palestinian Authority (which itself receives billions annually from the world community), as well as over a billion dollars each from the US, Europe, and Iran.

The average works out to about $3 billion annually for a population of approximately 2.3 million people or about $1,300 per person living in Gaza. That $1,300 makes up a little less than half of the per capita income of the average citizen of Gaza. Other sources of income are primarily small businesses and agriculture.

We’re told that the citizens of Gaza live in poverty that Israel imposes upon them. The approximate $3,000 per capita income of the citizens of Gaza puts them at about 165 in the world rankings, ahead of 30 nations, most in Africa.

However, the reality is that, if Palestinians live in poverty, it’s the fault of Hamas. The leaders of Hamas have stolen at least $11 billion of the money that was supposed to go to the citizens of the Gaza Strip. They enjoy that fortune relaxing safely in their multimillion-dollar compounds in Qatar.

What’s more, and far more deadly, is that Hamas spends billions of dollars a year on things that have nothing to do with supporting Gazan citizens. Firstly, they have spent over $1 billion on a 350-mile-long network of tunnels under Gaza, a 141-square-mile strip of land. Every mile of those tunnels represents piping or concrete or steel that could have gone to building schools, shopping malls, hospitals or anything else that could have positively affected the lives of Gazans. But they didn’t.

Those tunnels had to be used for something, of course, and that something was and is preparing to attack and actually attacking Israel. Of course, to do that, they need weapons and Hamas has spent $5 billion on weapons over the last decade and a half. Everything from small arms to bombs to missiles.

Together, the total theft for the tunnels and the military spending equals $17 billion or 42% of the world’s contributions to Gaza over that 15-year period. But here’s the thing: As bad as it was that Hamas squandered at least 42% of Gaza’s donations, the reality is that the real damage isn’t the money. The real damage is that, instead of focusing the people on building a thriving, robust economy, Hamas instead focused on teaching children to hate Israel and launching tens of thousands of rockets into Israel.

So, Hamas pushed the hate narrative and launched missiles into Israel on a regular basis, actions that would, of course, prompt reprisals, which would, in turn, reinforce the hate. It was and is a never-ending cycle of victimization, hate, and poverty. Hamas, not the Gazans, profited from this. Yet, somehow, the money keeps coming... because most relevant actors don’t care about actual progress or peace.

Nonetheless, they say that hindsight is 20/20. That’s true, and so too is the reality that, had Hamas taken a different path and its leaders pushed for living in peace with Israel rather than cultivating a perpetual war footing, we wouldn’t be watching Gaza turned into a parking lot. But they didn’t, and we are.

This is simply another example of leaders using their citizens as cannon fodder so that they can accumulate fortune and power. When the dust settles, one can only hope the Gazan people look at the difference between their world and the luxury their leaders enjoy and decide to vote for a different path forward, one that doesn’t include perpetual war and tragedy. Sadly, I’m not holding my breath.

The Green Energy Cult is Killing the West

Years ago, I wrote a post about how cheap air travel to Europe was ruining America. My point was that the Americans visiting Europe were confusing what they experienced as a tourist with the reality of life in Europe. These progressive American fans of two-hour lunches and 6 months of maternal and paternal leave didn’t have a clue about how average Europeans lived. Indeed, a couple of years later, the Foundation For Economic Education came out with a study that showed the poorest 20% of Americans were better off than the average European. Basically, the average European suffers from high taxes, high prices, tiny homes and cars, and, increasingly, less freedom. But tourists sipping tea in London or shopping in Paris rarely, if ever, see this, or understand it if they do.

Nonetheless, with little understanding of economics or history, they decide that America must become Europe. Socialism, Obamacare, and gay marriage are just some of those European imports that Americans have to deal with today.

We are seeing something similar play out on a grander, global scale—or at least in the West, where prosperity has dulled the brains of much of the population.

Naturally, I’m talking about the green energy hoax. Here in the West, we have people so spoiled by prosperity that they have the luxury of pining for a time when we weren’t poisoning our earth with fossil fuels or risking apocalypse with nuclear power.

On both sides of the Atlantic, you have a perfect mix of brain-dead green energy cultists and fascist elites who seek to harness the power of that cult to control everyone. That’s a toxic combination because energy controls pretty much everything.

The reality is that inexpensive, reliable energy is the single biggest driver of prosperity in all human history. And it’s not even close. Inexpensive, reliable energy drives virtually everything that we Westerners enjoy: Our food, iPhones, transportation, heating and cooling of homes, televisions, hospitals, schools, movies, plumbing, video games, Starbucks, and the Zambonis at hockey games! Everything.

It’s not that energy didn’t exist previously. It did. But the difference is that it was inefficient, hard to get, and expensive. The first significant source of fuel for humans was wood. That lasted for tens of thousands of years. Although the first recorded use of coal was in China between the 4th and 3rd millennia BC, in Europe, for two thousand years, coal remained an insignificant source of energy. Change came in the 17th century because England had felled most of the easily accessible trees and was in need of energy. With the advent of large-scale mining, coal rapidly became the most significant source of energy in Europe.

This would be the status quo for the next 300 years until the first successful oil well, drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. Over the following decades, tens of thousands of wells would be drilled and, by 1900, the US alone would be producing 20 million barrels of oil a year. That oil was first used to produce kerosene for heating and lighting homes, then gasoline for automobiles and, eventually, powering electricity plants as well, although coal was the dominant fuel for powering electricity production well into the late 20th century.

In the latter half of the 20th century, nuclear power emerged as a viable vehicle for producing electricity and was joined by fracking-driven natural gas early in the early 21st century.

Of course, renewables had been around for centuries, first with windmills and watermills, then hydroelectricity and, eventually, solar. Renewables always remained a small sliver of the power generation, however, only becoming slightly material in recent years due to heavy regulation and subsidies.

But now, for the first time in human history, we have a segment of the population, largely Western liberals, who want to restrict the use of inexpensive and reliable energy.

For the last 400 years, mankind has been marching forward in the direction of increasing the amount of energy we consume. As a result, lifespans have increased dramatically, prosperity has flourished, technology and sciences have advanced dramatically, and lives have become exponentially more varied.

Believe it or not, all of that is held together by a tenuous electricity grid. Not sure? In 2019 the Air Force said the following about an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack:

A successful EMP attack on the U.S. could lead to a nationwide blackout of the electric power grid and a shutdown of critical infrastructure reliant on the grid, including, but not limited to, communications, transportation, food and water supply, and sanitation. Such a shutdown could last as long as a year, and without such critical infrastructure, a large fraction of the America could die from starvation, disease, or the effects of general societal collapse.

That gives some indication of how dependent Americans are on energy. But it’s probably not going to be an EMP that cripples America and the West. It’s going to be the fiction of green energy.

In 2011, Angela Merkel announced that Germany would shut down all 17 of its nuclear reactors. Last year, the last three were shuttered. In 1990 Germany generated 25% of its electricity from nuclear; now it’s finally zero. And it shows.

While harassing citizens to conserve energy, Germany has gone from a net exporter of energy to a net importer. In addition, in 2010, German GDP growth was ahead of every single nation in the EU and double the average. By 2022, it was half the EU average and, over the next six years, it’s predicted to be dead last in the EU and behind only Belarus and war torn Russia and Ukraine on the continent. This is all in pursuit of the goal of cutting CO2 emissions 65% below the 1990 level by 2030.

On this side of the pond, we have California banning the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035 and a wave of blue states lining up behind them. This at the same time the state is asking existing electric car owners not to charge their cars while leaning on fossil fuels to stave off the return of rolling blackouts.

The reality is that the green energy revolution is a fiction. Green energy is incapable of providing the energy requirements developed nations require and the green energy movement is a cult. In fealty to that cult, Western nations are wasting hundreds of billions of dollars every year on “green energy” programs—most of which fail. Between 2020 and June of 2023, Western nations spent $1.34 trillion on green energy “investments“ while private companies spent tens of billions more annually.

Basically, for no discernable benefit, and arguably with many negative consequences, Western nations are setting fire to 2% of their GDP annually and expect to burn even more going forward. That would essentially mean that GDP would have to grow at 2% annually just to tread water, an unlikely prospect in the face of tightening energy supplies and skyrocketing costs.

And this is all because people with no understanding of science, economics, or history operate under the illusion that civilization is a virus on the pristine earth. Western civilization as we know it will not survive the economic suicide of the green revolution.

Perhaps that’s why Western elites are inviting into their countries tens of millions of third-world “migrants” who aren’t familiar with inexpensive and reliable energy. At some point, those who do remember them will become the minority, and the elites can finally drop the fiction of concern.