Of Foxholes and Atheists and Donald Trump

 The leftist elites always hate Republicans, but there is something much deeper going on with their hatred for Donald Trump. The desire to destroy him has an almost religious element to it.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. The basic premise is that when facing an existential threat, particularly when lives are on the line, people will look for something stronger than themselves, often God, to pull them through.

The opposite might be when things are good. Then, atheism, or at least an indifference to God, grows.

Sadly, in this context, the last 75 years have been very good for the West. WWII was horrible, of course, but there were some good things that came from it.

The first good thing features two sides of the same coin, and that coin is the utter destruction of Germany and Japan. I don’t mean their defeat, but rather the utter destruction of their infrastructure and that of many of the nations fighting them. The result for the relatively unscathed United States was that its full wartime manufacturing footing put it in a position to provide pretty much of everything the war-torn world needed. The result was that by the middle of the 1950s, the American economy, with 5% of the world’s population, approached 40% of world GDP. Times were indeed good.

The other side of that coin was that because the German and Japanese infrastructures were so completely destroyed, they could leapfrog over many iterations of evolution and begin again with the latest technologies, machinery, and processes. The result was that by the 1980s, the Japanese and German economies were the most powerful in the world after the US.

The second positive outcome of WWII was the Cold War. Now the Cold War had many downsides, including the hot wars in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, but what it did was draw a clear line between who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. America and the West were far from perfect, but we knew that at the end of the day, the West was the land of freedom, while the communists were tyrannies constantly seeking to expand.

The result of that clarity was that, for the most part, Western nations understood there was real danger in the world and prepared for it. They focused on trading with one another, they took defense seriously, and while they sometimes tolerated communists in their midst, they rarely made heroes of them.

The consequence of that Cold War clarity, and the Soviet and Chinese understanding that the West was willing to fight to preserve freedom across the planet, was a relative peace. And that relative peace was the West’s undoing.

For the half-century from the end of World War II until 2000, the world experienced more economic growth than it had in the previous 2,000 years combined. Driven by relative peace, world trade took off both within the West and with the developing world.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to perpetual prosperity. The West, basking in its victory over the Soviets and its certainty that communist China would evolve into a modern Western democracy if only allowed to sell us tchotchkes, began to turn on itself.

The peace / communist parties, which had been funded by Moscow and had always been a fringe element of modern Western polity, suddenly morphed into environmentalists and cloaked their anticapitalist ideas in far more voter-friendly “Earth First” shibboleths. Now, just as the money spigot from Russia was coming to an end, a far larger resource was becoming viable…Western governments.

The result was the extraordinary growth in the power of the far left in Western politics. And it wasn’t just environmentalism that was driving the train. As the Cold War wound down, Western nations used their “peace dividends” to shower citizens with benefits while simultaneously seeking to regulate their economies into perfection. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t work!)

The perfect encapsulation of the West’s metastasizing can be seen in the form of the European Union. Imagined as a vehicle to foster peace and then trade between perpetually warring European states, it morphed into a leviathan that not only seeks to control virtually every aspect of citizens’ lives in its member states, but it seeks to control who can grow what and when, how states can control their borders and even whether sovereign states can conduct their own elections.

Like so much of the modern West, an idea that started out as something ostensibly good metastasized into cancer. Stopping the pouring of chemicals directly into rivers morphed into eviscerating farms. A temporary safety net for the downtrodden morphs into generational welfare. An empathetic desire to help victims of war morphs into an invasion by legions of military-aged men.

And it’s not just capitalism and freedom that have taken body blows. The third leg of the stool upon which western civilization stands is Christianity, and it has been brutalized by Western prosperity, as have the foundations of Christianity, namely, marriage and children.

As they say, idle hands are the Devil’s workshop. The West’s relative prosperity has caused citizens not focused on a common enemy to turn on their own history. From British universities dropping Shakespeare and Chaucer to the New York Museum of Natural History removing Teddy Roosevelt’s statue to the Spanish government’s vow to “decolonize“ the nation’s museums, to the cancer of DEI, across the West, nations are turning their backs on their own foundations, the things that set them apart from—and above, frankly—every other civilization in human history. From socialism to communism to Islam, Western intellectuals have led the charge, via schools and the media, to champion everything that is anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-masculine, and anti-white.

At the end of the day, the globalist elites co-opted the hard-won prosperity and peace by leveraging technology, Chinese tchotchkes, and social media algorithms to aim society’s guns at the very things that built success in the first place. They’ve created a Mexican standoff where everyone loses as the core elements of Western civilization are undermined by policies specifically formatted to destroy them, while the resulting “culture” is not equipped to support anything close to the same level of civilization.

All of this is why Donald Trump is for the left, a new Jesus Christ—not in the sense that he’s godlike, because I think we can all agree that he’s not, but because he embodies their eventual destruction. Thus, just as Christ was a heretic whose message of love and a gracious God had to be destroyed because it threatened the established order, Trump’s pro-America, pro-masculinity, and pro-Western civilization message must be destroyed because it threatens the New World Order.

The globalists argue that they are best equipped to structure the lives of citizens, organize world economies, and control everything from speech to cow farts to electricity generation. Any message that suggests that citizens should control their own lives, that capitalism makes for the most prosperous outcomes, and that free speech is a cornerstone of civilization must be quashed.

Western elites think Donald Trump is the common enemy they need to unify citizens under the banner of globalism. They’ve got it backwards. They’re more likely to discover exactly how many of their citizens feel like they’ve been crouching in a foxhole waiting for someone to inspire them to climb out, pick up their weapons, and charge into a battle of ideas to take back their lives. Imagine the sheer horror on the globalists’ faces when they realize that Donald Trump just might be that guy...

When Government Brutalizes Children

 Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny – Thomas Jefferson

With all due respect to Jefferson, sometimes that perversion happens quickly. Such is the case in America where half our governments have launched a war on a quarter million years of biology in what seem like two weeks…

Of course, sometimes biology sucks.  My wife and I never had children. We tried, but never could. Sometimes, God’s plan doesn’t go the way you hope. We had a dog, however, Lady, a beautiful pointer we got when she was a puppy. One day when she was about seven she suddenly stopped eating.  We took her to the vet and it turned out she had pancreatic cancer.  The next day he told us there was no hope. He said he could wake her up and send her home with us, but she’d only last a couple of weeks and be in pain the whole time. We obviously couldn’t do that and said goodbye as he gave her the shot.

 

It was excruciating.  We poured all of our parental love into a puppy whose whole life was about having fun and being around us. It was almost unbearable to lose her. We cried for days. It was, and remains, the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced, and I’m old! I loved that dog more than almost anything on the planet. I certainly liked her more than most people I know.

 

To most people, this probably sounds crazy, and maybe it is. But here’s the thing: At the end of the day, as much as we loved her, we knew Lady was a dog, not an actual person. We weren’t raising her to be a good person, to graduate from college, or to raise a family. But some people get that opportunity with actual children, and they abuse it…

 

In terms of people abusing their children, there are too many stories to tell, but here I’m addressing only one aspect of that abuse: government.

 

Government plays a role in the raising of children. I don’t mean they are or should be raising America’s children. No, just the opposite. But government does have a role to play in a functioning society, things such as enforcing laws, providing a framework for resolving disputes, protecting the rights of citizens, etc.

 

But that’s not the government I’m talking about. No, I’m talking about the government that not only facilitates parents abusing their children but actively participates in the abuse itself.

 

The whole point of biology is to perpetuate the species. The whole point of civilization is to strengthen and perpetuate culture. When government undermines those things, it becomes illegitimate. Case in point. Colorado.

Last month, the Colorado House gave initial approval to a bill that would classify “misgendering”—that is, referring to a person by their actual, biological sex—as a crime if that person pretends they’re something else. What’s more, “It would also consider misgendering by a parent ‘coercive control’ and require courts to consider it when deciding child custody cases.”

 

So, a Colorado father who recognizes that his son is actually male and refuses to refer to him as a girl just because his college-educated liberal Munchausen-by-proxy-addled wife wants to turn little Johnny into little Jane could actually lose custody. (It’s almost always college-educated liberal Munchausen-by-proxy-addled women who do this.)

 

A father actually lost his parental rights to his boys because the mother, who wanted to castrate one of them, left Texas and moved the boys to California. Once there, the state sided with her.

 

This is insanity. Humans have been on earth for 250,000 years, and for all that time, there were two sexes, male and female. While you have a tiny fraction of people who genetically didn’t fit in either camp, that doesn’t make it normal, just as the existence of Siamese twins doesn’t make having two heads normal for humans.

 

The reality is that the trans psychosis that has infected the United States is the result of grooming-obsessed LGBT activists seeking to normalize that which is not normal, politicians seeking to empower themselves by promoting victimization, and a hypocritical medical system, as opposed to a Hippocratic system (“first, do no harm”), that profits at the expense of children’s physical and mental health.

 

Biology tells us that humans are men or women. There’s nothing in between beyond genetic mutations. Throughout human history, across the planet, the dominant family structure was built around what we’d call a nuclear family, with a mother and a father and their biological children at the core. Throughout history, the household structure might change (such as including grandparents or servants) but the core of a nuclear family persisted. Why? Because it’s demonstrably the most reliable organization for the perpetuation of culture and the species.

 

But somehow, in the last twenty years, we’ve decided that not only is the millennia-long definition of marriage as something between one man and one woman no longer valid but also that the most basic element of human biology, the definition of men and women, is somehow fluid.

 

If that insanity only applied to adults, it might at least be arguable, but that’s not what’s happening. We’re seeing governments embrace mental illness on an epic scale and use their police powers to help parents butcher their children and often do so at the urging of hospitals that make money off of the blood of those victims.

 

Somehow, this grooming cabal has convinced enough voters that this travesty is sufficiently normal that governments are now enforcing it.

 

The thing I don’t understand is how some parents can be so disconnected from human nature that they’re willing to butcher their children or give them medicines with the potential to destroy their lives. Nor do I understand others who, even if they have straight kids, are willing to vote for a government that butchers other people’s children and allows tweens to make life-altering decisions before they can legally vote or drink beer. Hell, I hated clipping Lady’s nails because I was scared I’d hurt her!

 

If you’d have told me 20 years ago that almost every state would have transgender clinics where they mutilate children and that half of the population would live in states where the government is complicit in this madness, I would have said you’re crazy.

 

But that’s where we are. In the best of circumstances, when adults “transition” (which is, of course, a fantasy), they’re 12 times more likely to be suicidal than those who don’t get the operation. The consequences for children are likely far higher.

 

It’s bad enough that parents sometimes abuse their children for their sick fantasies. That half of state governments help them do so is disgraceful. A government that refuses to protect children and enables their mutilation has lost all legitimacy. Donald Trump should threaten to withhold money going to any state that supports this – education, transportation, Medicare, Social Security, and every single dollar if the state doesn’t outlaw this butchery. Sure, they’ll whine, but that’s a small price for saving the tens of thousands of children whose lives would be destroyed by this butchery every year.

War By Other Means: Demographics

I’ve heard enough about the Crusades, that America was built on stolen land or that Israel sits on occupied land. That’s life. Get over it. 

The reality is, for most of mankind’s and civilization’s history, the world has been ordered by the most physically powerful individuals and civilizations.  I mention the Crusades first because for the last quarter century we’ve been told that Muslim terrorism is somehow understandable because of the Crusades. We’re led to believe that the evil European Christians were invading the lands of the innocent peaceful Muslims and trying to steal the Holy Lands.  Well, that is partially true.  Beginning in 1095 and lasting to 1291 various Christian expeditions were indeed sent to the Holy Land in order to reconquer Jerusalem and its environs.  The First Crusade succeeded in in 1099 and established four Christian states in the area that would stand until the last was conquered in 1291.

It definitely sounds like the Christians were the aggressors… until one actually picks up a history book. In 600 AD the Eastern Roman Empire, what we today call the Byzantine Empire, stretched from the Strait of Gibraltar to the eastern most part of modern day Turkey and included half of Italy, all of Greece, all of Egypt, Israel, Syria and Jordan.  It was a Christian Empire and it had been built by the military power of the Roman legions over the previous 1200 years. By 640 the Byzantine Empire was a shadow of itself but would remain a regional power for the next 800 years.

The Islamic caliphate, which had its beginning in Medina in 622 would by 640 conquer all of the Arabian peninsula, by 661 take all of modern Iran, half of Turkey and much of Egypt and Libya.  By 750 the caliphate would include all of Spain, southern France in the west and much of the Caucasus’s in the east. Indeed, it was only the heroic stand in the Battle of Tours in 732 that kept the Muslims from taking all of France and potentially all of Europe. 

This is the actual backdrop upon which the Crusades were launched.  And just to be clear, that caliphate was not established, enlarged or maintained by peaceful acquiescence.  Muhammad alone fought 27 battles against “unbelievers” and the bloody conquest continued for centuries after his death. 

But here’s the thing… What the Muslims did is no different than what anyone else did.  The Mongols built the world’s largest land empire by conquering 25% of the planet’s land mass and killing 10% of the world’s population while doing it. 

The British killed millions building an empire upon which the sun never set.  The Americans killed hundreds of thousands of Indians during the establishment and growth of the United States. But they were no different than the Aztecs, the Māori, the Comanche, and most civilizations around the world. 

Indeed, right up until the middle of the 20^th century conquest was how much of the world ordered itself and violence was how it was decided who would be ruling a country.  In much of Africa it has remains so.  Violence, or the threat of it is how problems were solved in most interactions for most of human history around the world. The guy with the physical power to make others obey usually makes the rules.

While violence remains and sometimes breaks out in conflicts between or within nations, the truth is that the last 75 years has seen, admittedly largely midwifed by the United States power, an historic collapse in the number of deaths from war. Violence, at least in the west, has, for the most part, been abandoned in favor of other forms of decision making. Whether it’s economic trade, international bodies like the UN or diplomatic negotiations, when mortal conflict does break out, its typically the last of a long series of resolution attempts. 

Why is this relevant in 2025?  Because the civilization the west has developed has metastasized into idiocy on the part of much of the population, particularly among elites. Prosperity has, apparently, dulled their senses. They have zero understanding of actual history. They recline in their comfortable chairs and watch movies and TV shows and read social media posts that tell them that the world is oppressed because of western imperialism and that it was the violence of white Europeans that shattered humanity’s peaceful harmony.

The consequence of this historical ignorance and self-hatred is suicidal empathy.  Across the west leftist elites have indoctrinated much of the population to think that somehow the institutions and civilization Europeans built will exist forever.  That somehow – while simultaneously being evil – the building blocks of our relatively peaceful and prosperous civilization can and will survive regardless of who actually inhabits the west. They take Francis Fukuyama literally when he suggested history basically stopped because liberal democracies had won. 

The logical result of this delusion is, rather than strengthening the foundations of liberal democrat civilizations elites instead import millions of mostly military aged men who harken from a completely different worldview, Islam. With the expectation that they will assimilate and internalize those western values.

Anyone paying attention recognizes that’s not happening. Jordan Peterson articulates the reality:  Forty out of fifty Muslim majority countries in the world are authoritarian hell-holes. And only three are democracies: Morocco, Indonesia and Turkey. And I wouldn't put them in higher echelons of stellar states. Why is that? Is that a deviation from Islamic principles or is it the consequence of Islamism? Now nobody wants to have a discussion and it's no bloody wonder.

There are certainly doctrines in Islam that are very, very difficult to square with free, liberal, western Christian democracies. And those differences are not just apparent, they are deep!

Islam is a problem for the west and it’s growing. But the western elites, with their bodyguards, Swiss bank accounts and exclusive neighborhoods have no clue about the chaos they are inflicting on their nations. This is an invasion just as much as the 4^th and 5^th century barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire were. The difference is, the Romans at least fought until they were defeated whereas most western leaders are embracing those who will eventually subjugate them. 

To understand exactly how serious this ostrich like behavior is, one need only look at Britain’s latest attempt to address its violence problem. Deportation of criminal aliens?  No. Severe enforcement of laws?  Of course not. No, the Brits are now banning Samurai Swords and giving white men longer prison sentences for… checks notes… being white. 

Whether it’s the establishment of a Sharia compliant town in the heart of Texas, protests in Europe calling for a caliphate or the 50% higher birthrate among European Muslims compared to the general population, this is war by other means: Demographics. 

Western civilization has created more prosperity, freedom and technological advances than any civilization in human history.  The result of those advances has been to make westerners soft, fat and willingly ignorant of the nature of mankind and the history of civilizations. That’s unfortunate, because bondage has a way of clarifying reality, and that’s exactly where the west is headed if it doesn’t wake up soon. The world will once again become a violent place ruled by those with the most power and the least compunction about using it. That won’t work out well for anyone, but on the upside, at least the elites will finally have to face the consequences of their actions…

The Imperial Judiciary Of The United States

 "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s…"

When Jesus was alive, the religious leader of Rome was, in fact, both Caesar and the voice of God, for Emperor Augustus had taken the position of Pontifex Maximus, the chief high priest, for himself.

A separation between church and state would occur in the late 4th century when Saint Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, would cleave the two.

In 390 AD, in Thessalonica, a Macedonian city in the Roman Empire, the citizens murdered a Roman garrison commander for arresting the most popular Macedonian charioteer just before a major race. A seething Emperor Theodosius ordered his soldiers to slaughter the entire population. When the smoke cleared, 7,000 men, women, and children died in the Massacre of Thessalonica.

Ambrose, the most powerful man in Christianity at the time, banned the emperor from Mass. Theodosius I, an extremely devout man, would spend the next six months seeking Ambrose’s forgiveness and doing penance. Eventually, Ambrose decided the Emperor had shown sufficient contrition and allowed him back into the Church, but not before forcing him to make Christianity the official religion of the Empire and outlawing every other faith.

That was one of the first and most powerful checks on a monarch’s power in the history of Western civilization. Another would come in 1215 when English King John was forced by a group of rebellious barons to sign the Magna Carta, which provided protections for the church and guaranteed the barons a variety of liberties and rights.

Fast forward 562 years and another step towards a truly limited government would occur in Philadelphia in 1787. In an unprecedented advance for Western civilization and, frankly, humanity, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution of the United States. With a keen understanding of man’s nature, this document was sufficiently robust and prescient that it would last for centuries.

In a direct reaction to the English system, they wrote a constitution in which, while the primary power lay in the legislature, the power of all three branches was checked by the other two and ultimately by the citizens and the Bill of Rights.

To give some perspective on where the locus of power lay in the new constitution, compare the articles that define the powers of the three branches: Article I, the Legislature, has 2,268 words. Article II, the Executive, has 1,025 words, while Article III, the Judiciary, has a mere 377.

The Founding Fathers went to great lengths to divide the powers and put in place checks and balances so that mob rule and demagogues would not take hold of the government and bring about tyranny.

One of those checks was the Judicial Branch:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

Alexander Hamilton assured all and sundry that the judiciary would be the weakest branch, writing in Federalist 81:

It may in the last place be observed that the supposed danger of judiciary encroachments on the legislative authority, which has been upon many occasions reiterated, is in reality a phantom.

He stated that a judicial usurpation of the legislature could not happen:

This may be inferred with certainty, from the general nature of the judicial power, from the objects to which it relates, from the manner in which it is exercised, from its comparative weakness, and from its total incapacity to support its usurpations by force.

This, combined with Congress’s ability to impeach judges for judiciary encroachments, said Hamilton, would be sufficient to keep judicial usurpation from occurring. Hamilton was responding to the writings of Judge Robert Yates, who warned of a rapacious judiciary in Anti-Federalist No. 78.

Hamilton was wrong, and Yates was right. 

Within a very short time, Hamilton’s error and Yates’ prescience became clear. Marbury v. Madison established Judicial Review in 1803, taking for the Court the ability to invalidate a law it deemed in conflict with the Constitution. Although the court would use that power only twice over America’s first 70 years, it would do so 50 times over the subsequent 75 years and over 125 times in the last 90 years. That trajectory not only reflects the extraordinary growth in the areas of American life into which the leviathan of government has inserted itself, but it also reflects a far more activist judiciary.

And how can we tell? Look at nationwide injunctions. Judges issued six nationwide injunctions against George Bush over eight years—one per every sixteen months he was in office. Barack Obama was the subject of 12 or one every eight months. In Trump’s first term, judges issued 64 nationwide injunctions, or one every 22 days. After he left office, the courts retreated, with Joe Biden getting 14 or one every three months. Now, in his second term, Trump has received 12 in only six weeks; that is, one every four days. Meanwhile, in the single four-year period of his first term, he faced more of these injunctions than every president in the previous 60 years combined!

But the thing is, injunctions are found nowhere in the Constitution. Nonetheless, with almost 700 federal judges, activists can easily find fellow travelers who are more than willing to do their bidding. It’s no coincidence that the judges who have issued many of the injunctions against Trump’s executive actions have ties to hardcore leftists:

• The son of the judge who blocked deporting Khalil Mahmoud interned for Chuck Schumer.
• The daughter of the judge who blocked deporting Tren de Aragua gang members works for an NGO that provides legal advice to criminal illegal aliens.
• The wife of the Judge blocking the USAID shutdown worked for Joe Biden.
• The judge who blocked DOGE from cutting NGO funding was the Solicitor General of the District of Columbia, the office that filed a civil lawsuit against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

Using injunctions, a radical leftist cabal is attempting to thwart President Trump from doing the job he was elected to do, which is to enforce and execute the laws of the United States. He should not allow them to do so. Unfortunately, impeachment is not the answer because there is zero chance of getting a conviction, with half the Senate applauding the judge’s actions.

The first thing Trump should do is ignore the order. This will force SCOTUS and/or Congress to act.

The second thing he should do is strongly encourage Congress to act, regardless of what SCOTUS does. (Or doesn’t do given the Manchurians Roberts and ACB.) Congress has the ultimate constitutional power to define the courts’ jurisdiction, whether granting or restricting it. They should eliminate or restrict federal judges’ ability to issue injunctions in general or, at a minimum, prohibit nationwide injunctions.

The Founders created a system of checks and balances that has served America well for most of her history. But that system only works when the three branches remain true to their nature.

You can argue that Congress has given too much of its power to the regulatory state, but that’s a case of one branch willingly, if foolishly, ceding power to another. In the case of the Judicial Branch, we’re seeing something different. Activist judges across the country are asserting that they basically have the power to micromanage how the Executive Branch carries out its constitutional duties. They don’t, but that doesn’t matter if the Executive Branch allows it to become reality. And the reality is, they’re using Chief Justice Roberts’ treacherous “normal appellate review process” framework to run out the clock on President Trump’s term.  And Trump knows it.

In 1832, in reaction to Worcester v. Georgia, President Jackson is said to have announced: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” Donald Trump should state unequivocally that he will not allow activists masquerading as jurists to hijack the proper functions of the Executive Branch. Americans, like Jesus, Ambrose, and Jackson did, understand there are separate realms of governing, and for good or bad elected presidents execute the laws, not judges.

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The Borg of Uncle Sam...

I grew up in the shadow of World War II. It had been over for almost 30 years by the time I started school, but nonetheless WW II was probably the most talked about subject in my history classes throughout. But the funny thing is, as close as it was, it seemed like it was ancient history.  It was finished. The evil Nazis were vanquished and the world had moved on. America and her allies had won and there were new enemies to slay.

While too young to understand Vietnam when it was raging, by high school I had a better grasp of world events and we were living on Guantanamo Bay, down in Cuba.  Although today it’s more well known for its prison facilities, at the time it was a U.S. Navy training / support station and the enemy was the Soviets and Fidel Castro. 

In the late 80’s after college, I was stationed with the Army in West Germany and our biggest alerts were usually related to the East Germans and they killed an American officer while I was there.  I don’t remember all the details but the Americans said he was on an approved inspection mission and the East Germans said he was spying.

Throughout these decades, I always knew that America was on the right side of history.  It was not that I’d been brainwashed, but it always seemed to me that an objective analysis of the circumstances, from WW II to Korea to Vietnam to the Cold War, America was the good guy, trying to do what’s right.  It’s a funny thing about the “good guy” framework, however, that everybody, even the guys who we know are the bad guys, think they’re the good guys!

Nor is it that I never questioned anything.  In college (of course) I had professors who said the US was the bad guy in Vietnam and that the Soviets only built missiles to defend themselves against the imperialist Americans. I disagreed but my words fell on deaf ears.    

So now we are here 35 years since the collapse of our last superpower enemy and a quarter century from 9/11, and I’m starting to wonder if America’s still the good guy. 

Some time ago it dawned on me that for most of my life I had given the government the benefit of the doubt.  Indeed, while imperfect and often inefficient and ineffective on a wide variety of policies, my default position for most of my life had been that the government was, at the end of the day, working for the American people.

Today, sadly, my default position is literally the opposite. 

In college I read Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lindon Johnson and according to it LBJ was a deeply egotistical, power hungry son of a bitch who would sell his mother to get power. While I think that’s clearly true, it seems that once in office he was genuinely interested in helping people and solving America’s problems. While he was a feckless buffoon as it relates to Vietnam, in domestic matters he wanted to help solve long standing problems, and that intention is not diminished by the fact that his programs were stunning failures.

That’s the way it is sometimes, people in government make mistakes. We all know that. But what has happened over the last two decades is a much different animal. Beginning with Barack Obama using the IRS to shut down Tea Party groups and right up until the moment someone in the White House used Joe Biden’s autopen to give pardons to half the Democrat Party and their swamp comrades, the American government has transformed from a virtuous, if frequently stumbling, vehicle for safely navigating the country through the chaos of life into an autonomous borg that largely operates without effective constraint and almost solely for the purpose of perpetuating itself. 

Biologists frequently say that the fundamental nature of life is to propagate the species, and that seems to be the path the borg of American government has taken. In the 21^st century we’ve seen an amalgamation of the Democrat party and the bureaucratic state, with a bastardization of both.  Maybe no better example exists than the Department of Education.  The education of children is easily one of the most important things a society can do to help perpetuate its culture and civilization, and the DOE spends $280 billion a year on it. Sadly, of that number, less than $70 billion actually goes to educating children.  The rest goes to bureaucracy, consultants, NGOs and ultimately, back into the pockets of Democrat politicians. This would be a crime even if schools were properly educating children, but they’re not.  Across the country you have failing schools where kids can’t do simple math, easily the most basic skill one should take from school. But you know what they are learning?  How to be LGBT.

This, like so much of the rest of government is far beyond incompetence. It’s criminal. It’s ceased to be a vehicle for ensuring the freedom of American citizens and promoting the interests of the United States.  It’s literally become the opposite. From funding prosecutors who release violent criminals into American communities and funding leftist thefts of elections while quashing of free speech internationally, to funding the invasion of our country and undermining the Bill of Rights, the American government has become the enemy within. 

If nothing else, Donald Trump and DOGE should be applauded for exposing what so many of us felt for so long but could never quite put our fingers on. 

Somewhat like learning that there is no Santa Claus, in the back of my mind I’m a bit wistful for that feeling of inner peace I had when I used to think of the country and the government as a single inherently good entity. While I think the former still is good, the latter, not so much, and I was late to the party in internalizing the idea of a difference between the two. For me Uncle Sam was America and the government combined.  Sadly, the Democrats weren’t under that illusion, and their recognizing the dichotomy long ago gave them decades to brainwash their constituents and hide the inner workings of their machine in plain site, behind countless official looking government seals and compassionate sounding NGOs.

Despite what the Democrat / bureaucrat borg has wrought, I firmly believe America remains a great, if imperfect nation and I remain convinced that taken as a whole throughout most of her 250 years, the county and the government have been mostly on the right side of history.  To the degree that that’s no longer true for the government, I’m glad we’re at a point where much of its malfeasance and malevolence is being exposed. It will take a long time and a lot of courage on the part of Republican politicians to fix this situation, but at least it’s being exposed before it’s too late. We’ll see in the next two years if the GOP has the courage necessary to actually set a course for bringing government back under the control of the citizens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee & Thomas Massie have their work cut out for themselves… Hopefully they’ll get some help along the way. 

Britain, Which Birthed American Ideas About Liberty, Has Embraced Despotism

 “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction”—Ronald Reagan

When I grew up, Great Britain was exotic. There were the red telephone booths, Buckingham Palace, black cabs, and, of course, the Bobbies (police) and the Beefeaters. England was the land of Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I, and Henry IV. For me, Britain was history incarnate.

Obviously, part of that comes from the fact that, as Americans, we share a great deal of history with the British. Not only did we split from Britain in 1776, but our history continued to stay close until modern times…from the US joining Britain in the fight to end slavery to fighting two world wars together to the British Invasion in the 1960s that brought us the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks.

Modern England largely dates back to 1066, when William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel and put the finishing touches on a unification that had been evolving since the Romans abandoned the island in 410 AD. (For clarity, as the terms are often used interchangeably, the United Kingdom (UK) is a sovereign nation comprising England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. “Great Britain” is the largest island in the British Isles, containing England, Scotland, and Wales, but not Northern Ireland.)

The 1,000-year span since has seen Britain, like the rest of the world, evolve—always, however haltingly, in the direction of freedom. This journey began with the Magna Carta, agreed to by King John in 1215. A watershed event in Western culture, it limited the King’s powers and declared he was subject to the law, guaranteed church rights, access to an impartial system of justice, and limited taxes.

Although the Magna Carta would have a rough beginning, it was an enormous step in the drive towards liberty. The document would set the stage for Parliament to evolve from councils that advised the King into a representative body that began taking a more active and powerful role in governing.

It was just the first in a line of steps that would make Britain the freest nation on the planet for centuries. The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 would guarantee the right to trial and demand the state show cause for holding someone. A decade later, the English Bill of Rights would set out Parliamentary rights, the right to petition the king, and the freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Over subsequent centuries, the British commitment to freedom would expand, eventually including all her citizens, not just the barons who first held King John’s feet to the fire.

Over that march to freedom, England would produce an extraordinary array of freedom advocates, some of whom inspired our Founding Fathers. Men such as John Locke, Edmund Burke and, later, William Wilberforce, the man who led the fight against the slave trade.

It is this incessant march towards freedom that has always given England an aura of consequence that few other nations share. And that’s what makes today’s Britain so sad.

The genesis of today’s dystopia began almost three decades ago when immigration took off in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The number of non-EU immigrants averaged over 200,000 per year for a decade and then skyrocketed after 2020. A nation of 55 million in 2000 is today over 65 million, with almost all of that growth coming from immigration, a majority from non-EU nations, particularly from the Middle East and Africa, countries that don’t share British culture or, importantly, religion. (It’s also likely that many of the ostensibly EU immigrants originated in non-EU countries.)

As a consequence, London, home to 20% of England’s population, has gone from approximately 80% native white British in 1991 to approximately 36% in 2021. The native population has surely shrunk more since then.

The result of this transformation of Britain from a largely British nation to something else has been monstrous. Possibly the single most despicable example is the 20-plus-year Rotherham child rape scandal that saw hundreds of Pakistani Muslims rape over a thousand British girls right under the noses of police who did nothing for fear of being called racists. As if that wasn’t bad enough, those who dared report on the various trials—see, e.g., here and here—found themselves jailed for doing so.

At the same time, London has become a killing ground for knife attacks, the overwhelming number being committed by minorities. Indeed, the country has become beset with machete attacks, a crime that was historically unheard of in Britain but which is common in the third world.

In July, the 17-year-old son of Rwandan immigrants knifed ten little girls, killing three of them. With the government withholding information on the killer, online posts asserted he was an immigrant. Tensions rose, and, across the UK, Brits protested the unfettered invasion of immigrants, the violence being perpetrated by immigrants and Muslims, and the system’s seeming duplicitous, two-tiered approach to justice when it came to immigrants and Muslims vs. white Brits, all of whom the government and the state-run media invariably characterize as “far right.”

These protests drew the new Labour government’s ire, and it launched a wave of arrests and a propaganda campaign against the “far right” anti-immigration “racists.” People were sentenced to prison for chanting “who the f*** is Allah” (although they were neither violent nor making threats), shouting “You’re not English anymore” at the police, or selling stickers that say “It’s OK to be white.”

Seeking to curtail what it claims is misinformation and incitement, the government warned the British citizenry, “You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false, threatening, or stirs up racial / religious hatred.” They also warned potential anti-immigration protesters, “We’re watching you.”

So basically, the government decides what’s false, threatening, or hate speech, and if you post anything about it online, you could end up in jail. And if threatening Brits’ freedom of speech wasn’t enough, the government threatened online platforms (and Musk) if they allowed prohibited speech.

Nor did the government stop there. It promised to extradite citizens of other countries if they engage in such prohibited online speech, even if not in Britain at the time. And because there’s not enough room in British jails to hold all of these anti-immigration “racists,” the government plans to release 5,000 criminals from jail to make room for those guilty of “wrongthink.”

While the Tories are responsible for the unfettered immigration over the last one-and-a-half decades, July’s election, which put Labour in power, represented a leap in transforming Britain into a tyranny. A free Britain, which took over 1,000 years to evolve, essentially became a Stalinist police state in less than two months.

While Britain is not the United States, our shared history, language, and similar cultural and political trajectory over the last 20 years suggests that what is happening there could easily happen here. Contrast the kid glove treatment given the 2020 BLM / Antifa rioters with the draconian treatment J6ers received, recall Democrats’ ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board, and look at what’s been done to Donald Trump and you see the writing on the wall as we head down that dark authoritarian path.

Like Turkey and Venezuela before it, Britain demonstrates that a single election can make the difference between freedom and tyranny. As we approach November 5th, we just might want to take note…