The Terrorists’ Real Victory Wasn’t The Towers; It Was Much Worse

The year 2026 is an interesting one. It has both the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States and, simultaneously, the 25th anniversary of September 11.

The two events are inescapably intertwined. For me, 9/11 shattered much of what had come before it.

I was born twenty years after World War II ended. Growing up—and being educated—in the 1970s and 1980s, I knew America was good. Raised on military bases in Italy and Cuba, I was exposed to parades, marches, and military drills that bred patriotism.

We flew on military planes, we sang the National Anthem before every movie in the theater, and my friends and I would regularly eat lunch in the Gold Hill Barracks galley (cafeteria), with a table of Marines on one side of us and a table of Navy NCOs on the other.

While my specific experience was unique, the feeling of patriotism wasn’t. For the most part, Americans knew America was fundamentally good.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that I had imprinted on my soul that America was always destined to win WWII. Not because the Kaiser shipyards together delivered a new Liberty Ship every day for years, or because North American Aviation could produce 30 Mustang fighters per day, but rather because we were the good guys and the Nazis and the Japanese were the bad guys. Like Manifest Destiny before it, America was destined to triumph.

I carried that same framework long after college. Sure, you could look at Vietnam and make the argument that the United States was involved in something that it should not have been—an arguable, but far from convincing, point—but that didn’t change the fundamental nature of America. Nations, like humans, make mistakes, but ours was essentially good.

For me, that was the backdrop upon which everything else operated. Like gravity, it’s not something that you think about regularly; you just know it’s there. It’s true, and you go about your everyday life.

September 11 shattered that for me. Like most Americans alive on that day, I remember exactly where I was. I was in Atlanta, having gone back to bed after returning from the gym. My sister called me after the first plane hit the tower, and I turned on the TV and watched.

“What the hell!” I asked myself. “How the hell does that happen?” It was only a couple of minutes later when the second plane crashed into the South Tower. Suddenly, it was like Americans must have felt when they heard of Pearl Harbor. America was being attacked!

I spent the next seven days sitting in front of my TV, probably 20 hours a day. Other than going to the eerily empty Publix across the street for food, I was glued to my set. Of course, it didn’t take long to understand exactly what was going on. Osama bin Laden’s Muslim terrorists had attacked America.

I must confess, I knew very little about Islam or Muslims at the time, and what little I knew was from headlines: the ’72 Munich Olympics, Ayatollah Khomeini’s takeover of Iran, the 1993 WTC bombing, the twin embassy bombings in 1998, and a few other events.

So I did some reading… Things like Bernard Lewis’s The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years, Dore Gold’s Hatred’s Kingdom, Steven Emerson’s American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, as well as anything I could get my hands on from Robert Spencer and David Horowitz.

That reading, along with observing actual events, made it clear we were seeing the revival of a 1,400-year clash of civilizations that had largely waned for most of the last 400 years. A crystal-clear result of 9/11 for me was the realization that Islam is simply incompatible with the United States.

But 9/11 turned out to be a catalyst for much more. George Bush, against all observable facts, claiming “Islam is peace,” was just the beginning and the latest iteration of political correctness that was beginning to infect America.

Although Americans were united in a way not seen in decades in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it would not last. The media would showcase every American wartime mistake and lionize those calling for America to withdraw.

By 2003, rallies were common, with activists calling George Bush “Hitler”, and in 2004, the Democrats would nominate a globalist, John Kerry, for president. Four years later, America would send Mr. “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” to the White House.

The quarter-century following 9/11 would see “political correctness” meld the interests of Communists, environmentalists, gays, minorities, and Islam, and together they would morph into a largely anti-American party, i.e., Democrats. They were and are anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, and, fundamentally, anti-Western civilization. Their immediate need to protect the “religion of peace” started an avalanche of victimization that would pick up every minority or disgruntled group along the way.

Statues would come down, and not only those of Confederate Civil War generals, but men who built our history, men like Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and more. Language would change. Marriage, which had meant one man and one woman for more than 2,000 years of Western civilization, was suddenly something else.

Wearing a sombrero or dressing like an Indian for Halloween was suddenly cultural appropriation. The “Broken Windows” policing and “stop and frisk” approach to manifest criminals that had saved urban America from the devastating crime rates of the 1990s were replaced with “Defund the Police” and “community responders.”

Our borders were essentially eliminated, and blue states and cities decided that protecting invaders was more important than immigration law. Not to mention that millions of years of biology were erased by the sudden “reality” that men could become women and women could become men. And from that, children could be butchered without their parents’ consent.

For too many Americans, the legacy of September 11 is a nation that is something of a Bizarro world, where up is down, right is wrong, and anything pro-American is somehow bad.

I’m not one of them. For me, the legacy of September 11 is just the opposite. It reinforced much of what I already knew to be true and, regrettably, took for granted.

By forcing me to examine the history of America, of the world, and of civilization in general, I now understand that I was right to believe that America is the greatest nation in human history, but now I understand why. Our Founding Fathers, while imperfect, left us with the greatest document since the Bible.

The freedoms protected by it, the separation of powers dictated by it, the limited government established by it, and the entrepreneurial tsunami it unleashed combined to birth a people who created more prosperity for more people than any nation in human history and saved the world from fiery suicide twice along the way.

My blog is called Imperfect America, and the subtitle is Voltaire’s observation that “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” Nothing demonstrates that reality more than America. From her “Original Sin” to today, America is imperfect, but very much a force for good.

To the degree that September 11 set in motion the cleaving of too many Americans from the understanding of the things that make her the greatest of God’s creation, the terrorists succeeded far more than they ever imagined.

I, for one, try every single day to correct that, either by writing here and elsewhere or by suggesting that we might not want to take it all for granted. Because if history shows us anything, unappreciated and unprotected civilizations can collapse, and sometimes do very rapidly.

Follow me\ on X at: @ImperfectUSA

Cloward, Piven, And Zinn Told Us They Wanted To Bankrupt America

I remember when the National Debt Clock first went up.  I don’t remember the actual day, and honestly, I thought it had gone up during Reagan’s 2^nd term, but I was wrong. I looked it up and it actually went up on February 20^th 1989, exactly a month after Reagan left office. 

I’m certain my confusion was because, the entire time Reagan was in office, all the Democrats could talk about was the national debt.  And it was a big deal. The growth under Reagan was unprecedented, rising about 184% during his 8 years, more than double that of Nixon and Ford combined (as a percent), 4 times that of Carter in one term, not to mention 5 times Clinton, and more than double Bush and Obama combined.

Now of course we all know why the debt ballooned so much under Reagan.  Tax cuts and the military, especially Star Wars!  Well, all of that, but really the most important thing was: Democrats.  What did Democrats have to do with anything?  Pretty much everything.  Democrats, led by the liar / streetfighter / Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, never saw a government program outside of Defense that they wanted to cut. Well, technically, to be fair, there was something else they didn’t spend money on… the boarder wall they promised Reagan in 1986 in exchange for his granting amnesty for 2.7 million illegal aliens.  The illegals got amnesty, but Reagan never got the promised wall.

And so it goes. 

That first clock clocked in at $2.7 trillion. Boy, does that feel like a long time ago!  And it was.  Back then a trillion dollars actually meant something.  Today’s Debt Clock just recently crossed the $40 trillion mark.  At some point these numbers stop feeling real.  We hear things like if the government spent $1 million a second it would take them over a year to spend $40 trillion and other things we can’t quite wrap our heads around. 

An easier way to think about it is this:  In 1989 the $2.7 trillion National Debt worked out to be about $11,500 per American. Today, at $40 trillion that number has jumped to about $116,000 per person,

What’s worse is the pool of “Unfunded liabilities” that are mostly Social Security and Medicare.  In 1989 such liabilities sat at approximately $4 trillion, or about $17,000 per American.  Today, unfunded liabilities sit at approximately $130 trillion, or… about $250,000 per person.

To put this in perspective, forty years ago it would have taken the average American about a year and a half to work off all of their “share” of the nation’s public debt.  Today, it would take five years! I thought computers and the Internet were supposed to make things more efficient.    

Those numbers are simply insane.  One simply has to ask:  “How the hell did we end up here?”

Well… since you’ve asked, I can tell you.  We are largely here for three reasons, or more accurately, because of three people:  Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and Howard Zinn… and the tens of millions of useful idiots who believe their ideas. 

Cloward and Piven were the authors of the Cloward–Piven strategy. At its most fundamental level the 1966 strategy is a roadmap for destroying the United States as a free-market, capitalist society and turning it into a “socialist” nirvana. Specifically, the goal was to collapse the federal government by overwhelming it with welfare and redistribution obligations.  Doing so, in turn, would create a permanent dependency class that could be counted on to vote Democrat for basically forever:  “If organizers can deliver millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalty to their benefactors.” 

Given that their strategy was such a big departure from most of American history, they understood that they would need the media to help sell the idea: “As the crisis develops, it will be important to use the mass media to inform the broader liberal community about the inefficiencies and injustices of welfare.”

Basically Cloward & Piven wanted to drive poor people from across America into her major cities, access public services, spark anarchy and watch as the various levels of government became overwhelmed and dysfunctional and reached out to the federal government for help.  Eventually Capitalism would be obliterated and the central government would control everything and wealth would be distributed evenly. 

So, they had a blueprint (which Democrats have been following for 60 years) and a complicit media, but that wasn’t enough. It takes a lot of work and a long time to convince people who grew up in a free and prosperous nation that somehow the driver of that prosperity is evil…

It would be much easier to teach that lesson to young people and let them grow up knowing it.  Fortunately, a fellow traveler – and fellow professor at Boston University with Piven – Howard Zinn – stepped up to the plate.  In 1980 he published A People's History of the United States, possibly the most cancerous history of America that’s ever been written.  For him, America is a history driven by a tyranny of whites over everyone else, men over women and rich over poor.  Practically everything, from her founding documents up to the middle of the 20th century was designed to either subjugate minorities, women and the poor or maintain that reality. For him, America is a nation created by, controlled by and controlled for white elites, at the expense of everyone else.

His book has sold millions of copies commercially and its used by almost 200,000 teachers around the country and fully a quarter of high school history teachers!  It’s no surprise that less than half of young people are proud to be Americans. 

Between Cloward, Piven and Zinn, they created the victimization / government largesse ecosystem that we see playing itself out in America today. That has been the Democrat party for the last 60 years, and it worked exactly as they suggested it would, a mass of dependent voters who march to whatever tune the Democrat party is playing, and bankrupting America along the way.

At some point the bill comes due. America has third world levels of debt and the reality is, it can’t go on forever.  This year alone the federal government will spend in the ballpark of 25% more than it brings in… and it’s been going on like that for almost a decade.

Make no mistake, Communists like Mamdani, AOC and El-Sayed are simply executing the Cloward, Piven & Zinn playbook.  The mistake they make is that they think it will lead to some “socialist” nirvana.  It won’t. It will lead to Armageddon. And the sad part of it is, Cloward, Piven & Zinn told us what they were doing for decades… we should have listened.  

As an aside, if you want to refresh your American history or teach your kids what America is really all about, I recommend Paul Johnson’s History of the American People and Harold Evans’ They Made America.  Both written by Brits who were not poisoned by America’s leftist media and academia, they are easily two of the best books on American history you will ever read.  

The Yin and Yang of American Prosperity: Freedom and Entrepreneurship

Some people are born entrepreneurs. I have an ex-friend (we had a falling out over BLM) whom I’ve always imagined was selling washcloths to doctors when he came out of the womb. As a teenager, he started mowing lawns and was so busy he had to hire other kids to do the mowing for him. He ended up being a service provider who was too successful to actually provide the service himself.

From there, he started a company teaching entrepreneurship, took a stab at restaurants, and later bought an education company he eventually sold for eight figures. Honestly, the guy’s like Midas incarnate.

His story is far from remote. Although we all know about guys like Michael Dell and Daymond John, for every one of those guys, there are dozens more whose names we’ve never heard of. Guys like Jim Scott, a college dropout who started a ski-focused limo company, followed by a moving company, followed by a beverage company.

And if you think you’re not familiar with Scott’s success, think again. His Good2Grow licensed-character drinks are a staple in stores across America. As a matter of fact, your kids probably have some of their character-themed bottles on their shelves right now.

Sadly, I’m not one of those people. Although I traipsed through waist-high grass filled with raccoon-like creatures with giant teeth looking for lost golf balls in high school, the only thing I had to show for my efforts was stacks of ball-filled egg cartons I could never sell.

I most certainly have the entrepreneurial bug, but in my case, rather than being characterized by a beautiful butterfly that brings beauty to the world around it or a busy bee that pollinates and, as a result, feeds the world, I’m the moth that gets lost in the plastic of the lampshade, can’t find his way out, and the next morning is found trapped in a spider’s web. I’ll not bore you with the sad details….

But here’s the thing: My story, just as much as Dell’s, John’s, and Scott’s, is the story of America. What I mean by that is that America is the story of opportunity, the story of possibilities, and the story of empowerment. It’s not that you can’t have success without failure—some do—but the reality is that failure, and the resiliency it builds, is the fertilizer from which success eventually grows.

Human nature is such that not everyone will succeed. Although tens of millions of kids play ball in America, only a few thousand will ever make a living doing so. Contrast that with entrepreneurship. While a relatively small percentage of people have the physical skills to play pro sports, vastly more can look around, examine their lives and those of their friends and community, see what problems exist, and formulate a solution. They can do so understanding that, if they’re successful in solving problems, vast opportunities might exist for them that they otherwise might not have had.

So far, none of what I’m saying is particularly unique. Countless websites, university programs, and youth organizations seek to foster entrepreneurship. Which is good, because entrepreneurship is a key element of the prosperity that America enjoys. But the thing about entrepreneurship is that, while it’s necessary to build a society with widespread economic freedom and prosperity, it’s not sufficient.

And that matters because today we hear politicians and influencers tell us that capitalism is evil, that governments should basically provide everything, and that successful capitalists should be taxed to the hilt to pay for it. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Curiously, many successful entrepreneurs—guys like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Mark Cuban—have become billionaires many times over but somehow pour their support and money into un-American, leftist causes. It’s almost as if, while they’re pretending to care about the little guy, they fund programs and people whose leftist ideologies undermine the very things that allowed them to become successful in the first place….

And by that I mean the American system of individual freedom, free markets, private property, and, most of all, limited government. Without those things, America would never have become the most powerful and prosperous nation in history.

And all of that is under attack. From community supermarkets to public housing to “free” transportation, government “solutions” are making a comeback in the American political lexicon.

But the problem is, government doesn’t generate actual solutions. “For proof, look no farther than Samuel Langley, the university professor and establishment darling upon whom the American government heaped the equivalent of millions of today’s dollars in the pursuit of flight, only to see his full-scale aircraft fail while the Wright brothers, neither of whom had high school diplomas, achieved the first successful powered flight.

Government action—the cradle-to-grave kind being proffered (AKA Communism)—is finding new footing in America, and it’s generally hiding behind a Democrat or DSA mask. Make no mistake: “community this” or “government that” are the gateway drug to Communism, and its widespread application will be the end of the American experiment and, eventually, of America herself.

Well, I, for one, am not interested in seeing her disappear. While I spend a good deal of time writing about the evil of the left, I’ve created something that I hope will actually…help. It’s called Gratitude for America.

The reality is, countless efforts showcase entrepreneurship, but far fewer focus on the most important—and least recognized—part: the indispensable yin-and-yang relationship between the American system and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship cannot drive widespread prosperity in a tyranny. It can do so only when citizens understand that everyone is supposed to play by certain rules, that individual freedom and private property are protected, and that competition is the best way to define success.

GFA is an effort to showcase the American entrepreneurs who built so much of the world we live in. With America celebrating its 250th birthday, I’m putting that idea into practice through GFA’s 250 for 250 Initiative: 250 stories of the entrepreneurs, inventors, and innovators whose ideas helped create the world we live in today.

Whether it’s Joseph Glidden, whose barbed wire helped tame the West; Steve Jobs, who drew on Xerox PARC’s pioneering graphical user interface work to help bring computer accessibility to the masses; or Malcom McLean, whose shipping containers, which dropped cargo-loading costs by roughly 97%, dramatically reduced overall cargo-handling costs, most aspects of our modern lives were forged from the minds, sweat, and perseverance of American entrepreneurs.

My goal is to showcase that reality, inspire gratitude for it, and then spur Americans to turn away from the dark side as they recognize how essential individual freedom, private property, and free markets are to their prosperity. Not all of them will become entrepreneurs, but the more Americans who understand that it’s freedom that drives prosperity and not government, the less sway leftists championing a government-delivered “better” world will have.

I’m not the only one out there championing this reality, but I think I might be the only one doing so by inspiring gratitude. In a world where Instagram “influencers” use AI to sell a variety of fictions to millions of gullible and envious followers, I’d prefer to inspire with stories of actual people who did real things and, in the process, changed the world in ways we can see in our everyday lives.

Gratitude for America… showcasing the people and ideas that built a world too many of us take for granted.  Support GFA here!

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Communists in America: Abolish The Police, Seize The Corporations, Erase The Borders

From coast-to-coast, voters on the left are turning to the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) to lead them to the promised land. For them, of course, the promised land is communism.

Not surprisingly, the DSA candidates usually run under the Democrat banner. Democrats and communists have always been soul mates.

In 1948, Henry A. Wallace, who had been FDR’s vice president from 1941 to 1945, ran for president under the Progressive Party banner. The Progressive Party was hard left and strongly aligned with, and supported by, the Communist Party of America. Wallace received 2.4% of the vote. Unfortunately, today’s communists (costumed in DSA clothing behind the Democrat curtain) are getting ten times that.

But don’t call them communists! Ask Democrats or DSA members, and they’ll vehemently deny they’re communists. The DSA will assert, “We’re not communists, we’re socialists. BIG difference!” Really? And Democrats often won’t even agree that they’re socialists, despite having mirror image policies.

The one good aspect of the DSA getting so much traction is that it encourages patriots to investigate their ideas.

So, let’s explore some of these ideas, shall we? Go to the DSA website and literally the first thing you see is “A Day Without Capitalism.” This is going to be good…

Guarantee universal healthcare at no cost to individuals, including complete access to reproductive and gender-affirming care.

America will spend approximately $6 trillion on healthcare in 2026, half by government and half by companies and individuals. The US already spends almost 20% of GDP on healthcare, far more than any country on the planet. And for all that spending, we end up at #55 in the world in terms of lifespan. So clearly, we should shoot for 30%.

‎Housing is a human right. Build new, publicly-owned social housing, strictly regulate investment properties, establish universal rent control, and guarantee right to counsel for all tenants.

A human right? Publicly owned housing? Has anyone at the DSA ever visited government-owned housing communities or Section 8 housing? Or rented a car? Do they even understand the concept that people take care of things that are theirs and rarely take care of things that belong to others, particularly when they’re not paying for them?

Demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect funding to public services as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.

So basically, they want to eliminate police and open up the jails. Is there a single policy on any platform in American politics that screams insanity more than this?

Does anyone in the DSA remember the crime wave America experienced in the late 1980s and 1990s? Or at least read about it? Or even saw a movie about it? And all that was happening long before “Abolish the Police” became a thing, so no doubt getting rid of pigs and prisons is the recipe for improving life in America.

Establish paid family leave for all workers, a 32 hour work week with full pay and benefits, and a living minimum wage. Provide free, quality public education from pre-K to college and cancel all student debt.

The government already spends almost $1 trillion on K-12 education and yet somehow across the country we have places where few, if any, kids can read or do math at grade level. At the same time, students from high-spending states like California and New York are getting throttled by those from far poorer states like Mississippi and Louisiana. Certainly, the answer is more government in education.

Workers must lead our democratic transition to a green future. Pass a federal jobs guarantee. Implement massive investment in sustainable, publicly owned energy and transit infrastructure. Phase out the use of fossil fuels. Reclaim and repair our earth’s resources for all.

Aside from the whole “climate change” idea being a globalist anti-Capitalist hoax, there is no such thing as a green future...although there could be with nuclear, but we’re not allowed to have that. Fossil fuels may be dirty, but so too are the fictions of green energy, from the massive damage done to extracting minerals to the destruction of cropland to the unmitigated disasters associated with what to do with windmill arms and solar panels when their lifespans are over. At least fossil fuels have the benefit of being efficient, reliable, and easily transportable, none of which are characteristics of “green energy.”

End ICE detention and deportations and punish federal agents’ brutality. Legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provide a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end visa caps and quotas.

And there you have it. Literally, they want to erase America’s borders. They want everyone in India, Mexico, Syria, Haiti, Somalia, and every Third World country to come to the United States.

With more than 170 million people around the world expressing a desire to move to the United States, the DSA would increase our population by 50% by adding tens of millions of people with no connection to America, no shared values, and no culture. That’s worked out so well for America and Europe so far. We should definitely double down on it.

Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.

This is a knife into the heart of our Republic. Our government is dysfunctional, that’s true, but it’s so because our leaders have moved the country away from the original intent of the Founding Fathers. What little is left of Franklin’s “Republic (if we can keep it)” is held together by the Electoral College. A President and Supreme Court subservient to Congress is anathema to a free nation and limited government.

Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people. Enact aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations to spend on public goods and infrastructure.

Combined with eliminating the Electoral College and putting the President and SCOTUS under the boot of Congress, this gets to the heart of the cancer of the DSA, the Democrats and their communist ideology. They want to control industry, and they want to tax the successful and essentially plan every aspect of life in America. To do this, they want the full power of government.

And where is any of this any different from communism? Where is any of this different than mainstream Democrat party talking points? There is no light between these things. They are the same, regardless of how much they try to disguise it.

Invariably, when you call them out on the fact that their parties are doppelgangers for communism, they say they’re not, but even if they were, “real” communism is actually good; it just gets a bad rap because it’s never really been tried. Because Lenin and Stalin got it wrong. Because Mao got it wrong. Fidel and Che got it wrong. Pol Pot got it wrong. Because Hugo Chavez got it wrong.

Over 100 million dead and counting, but somehow none of that is the fault of the “real” communism. It’s never been tried...

So, absolutely, let’s try all of that here in America, because as we can see from New York City and California, communism lite has worked out so well that we should definitely try it just one more time on a national scale. It will work out perfectly this time...we promise.

 Follow me on X at: @ImperfectUSA

Ceuta: The Time-Lapse Photo Of the Collapse of Western Civilization

I find time-lapse photography fascinating.  One of my favorite examples is when someone in the far north points their camera at the North Star during winter and leaves it overnight. As a result you typically end up with an image of silhouettes of trees surrounding an array of circles made by the stars travelling across the sky as the earth spins. Although that picture captures reality, there’s no moment where you could ever actually see it by simply looking up.  It doesn’t actually exist, it’s only by seeing the time-lapse that you can see it.  

A more consequential example, although I’m not sure it technically meets the definition of time-lapse, is when a parent takes an image of their child every day or every Monday for a series of years and then puts them together so they run in sequence.  While each individual image might tell a story, “That was Janie at 12 when she first got her braces” or “That was Timothy at 8 when he decided to cut his own hair”, taken in aggregate the sequence tells a completely different story, when a daughter grows from a scared kindergartener to a smiling college graduate student. 

The funny thing about such time-lapses is that they often show us things that we simply don’t see in real time. Like the time in 11^th grade when, seeing your son every day you didn’t realize until your visiting mother-in-law pointed it out, that his hair had grown from a buzz cut to a mop-top in one semester. Sometimes it’s only when we step back and see things in a larger perspective that we can see the big picture or recognize what’s going on.

The point of time-lapse is that it gives a story in a relative blink of an eye. 

That same thing holds true for cultures.  Billy Joel did something of a cultural version of that with “We didn’t start the fire”. 

The time in time-lapse is relative of course.  It can chronicle the carving out of the Grand Canyon over millions of years or it can be the life cycle of a bacterium that lasts a few days…Or it can be the collapse of a civilization over a week.

That last one is a bit of an exaggeration.  But not by much.  A couple of weeks ago we had the bad fortune of watching something of the collapse of western society in the period of one week.  I am of course talking about Ceuta, the African outpost of Spain, population 80,000, that was overrun by 50,000 Moroccans recently.

The outpost’s officials called for the Spanish military to come to their aid, but at that point the damage had already been done.  The population increased by 75% in a matter of days.  67 people died trying to make their way into the enclave. And as soon as the invaders made their way in they wrought havoc.  They were looting stores, fighting with locals and leaving massive amounts of… chaos in their wake.  The Spanish government claimed most returned home.

No doubt some returned home, but the claim that most have is questionable, particularly as it came from Pedro Sánchez, the Communist who runs the Spanish government and who’s facing a political firestorm, both internally and externally.   This of course came on the heels of his legalizing half a million illegals earlier this year. 

That amnesty was likely the catalyst for the invasion, just as Ronald Reagan’s amnesty in 1986 led to 50 million illegals invading the United States over the next forty years.

But here’s the thing.  Even if all of those Moroccans eventually go back home willingly, or are sent back, either of which is unlikely, no doubt thousands of them will make asylum claims and seek to be sent to Europe at the first opportunity.  Whatever the number of Moroccans who stay in Ceuta, the outpost is likely changed forever.  Even if only 10,000 stay, you can’t increase your population by 15% overnight and not have it remake the face of your community. 

That week long invasion of Spain, along with the country’s globalist, Communist leadership, is like a time-lapse of Europe over the last 25 years.  Like a time-lapse of a daughter from the time she’s 3 until she’s 23, when you put the first and last images side by side you recognize the dramatic change you never see when going from one to the other by flipping through all of them. Ceuta, going from a quaint but robust western trading center to a dystopian nightmare in a matter of days is the west today.  The difference is, Ceuta was relatively easily rescued because Spain belatedly sent thousands of armed troops to try and eject the invaders. The west in general, and Europe in particular will not be so lucky. 

Why? Two reasons. The first is the fact that the United States cannot rescue the continent from another suicide as it did in WW I & WW II.  America, led by the Communists in Democrat clothing, have travelled a similar path over the last half century and is only now starting to address the cancer within. The second reason, which dovetails with the first, is that unlike during those previous wars, the enemy is not easily identified by different uniforms and front lines that can be drawn on a map.  No, today Europe’s leaders have forced its invaders right into the heart of its breast. From capital cities to fishing hamlets, European leaders have forced their citizens to accept millions of invaders into their communities, bringing with them violence, behaviors and cultures that are utterly foreign to Europe.  What’s worse, these globalist clowns are forcing their own citizens to pay to support those very invaders in their midst.  

Not surprisingly, over the course of this last quarter century, much of Europe has lost its understanding of who they are and what put them at the top of the mountain in terms of civilization, power and prosperity in the first place:  Christianity… on its last legs. Freedom of speech… a distant memory.  Capitalism… a smoking husk on the side of the road.  Equal application of the law… a joke with no punch line.  And, perhaps most of all, their national identities, trading them in for the laughably amorphous moniker “European” if not in word, most certainly in deed. 

Ceuta, even if it gets back to something resembling normal, has pulled the curtain back on the reality of the civilizational suicide the globalists are inflicting on their citizens. It exposed the chaos behind the Potemkin façade that globalist Western leaders have been maintaining for the last 25 years while pontificating about progress and unity, hoping we wouldn’t notice the incremental destruction of the greatest civilization in human history. Some of us have recognized the lie.  Most haven’t.  Perhaps Ceuta will be the wake up call they need… Only time will tell. 

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How the 1964 Civil Rights Act Eviscerated the American Constitution — James Madison Would Be Horrified

James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, was the driving force behind transforming what started out as a water navigation dispute between Maryland and Virginia into the Constitutional Convention, which produced our Constitution.  Madison was not only one of the primary influences during the Convention itself, but writing as Publius (along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) in the Federalist Papers, he advocated for its ratification. 

His Constitution, with its staggered terms, federal system, three branches of government and more, was written specifically to tamp down and limit the power of both mobs and government. He was, by any stretch, a brilliant man, a student of history and a man of extraordinary vision. 

All of that being said, there was one place where Madison was, rather astonishingly, blind:  A Bill of Rights. He thought one was unnecessary because 1) nothing in the Constitution gave government the power to oppress citizens and 2) by explicitly stating some rights had the potential of being seen as a limitation on citizens’ rights. For a man so aware of the nature of man, his initial position was curious.

Eventually he came around and history has proven that the Bill of Rights, which has been the cornerstone of American success for most of her history, was indeed necessary.

But it was not sufficient.

It was part of the Old Constitution. 

Today we’re living under a New Constitution where what’s written is archaic.  Christopher Caldwell, in his extraordinary book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, lays out what he calls the New Constitution, one which is utterly detached from the Old Constitution.  He argues that while the Old Constitution was based on individual liberties and freedoms from government intervention, the New Constitution is just the opposite, one characterized by group dynamics, demographic characteristics and a demand that government remediate all perceived inequities. 

The New Constitution went into effect on July 2, 1964 with LBJ’s signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 

Senator Barry Goldwater, voted against the bill, stating “The two portions of this bill to which I have constantly and consistently voiced objections, and which are of such overriding significance that they are determinative of my vote on the entire measure, are those which would embark the Federal Government on a regulatory course of action with regard to private enterprise in the area of so-called ‘public accommodations’ and in the area of employment—to be more specific, Titles II and VII of the bill.” So loud was the worry that those two Titles would give the government too much power that one of the bill’s primary drivers, Senator Hubert Humphry, felt compelled to state: Contrary to the allegations of some opponents of this title, there is nothing in it that will give any power to the Commission or to any court to require hiring, firing, or promotion of employees in order to meet a racial ‘quota’ or to achieve a certain racial balance. That bugaboo has been brought up a dozen times; but it is nonexistent. In fact, the very opposite is true. Title VII prohibits discrimination. In effect, it says that race, religion and national origin are not to be used as the basis for hiring and firing.

As we all know, that was 100% wrong.  In fact, as Caldwell points out, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened the door for fundamentally changing virtually every aspect of American life. From public accommodations to employment to housing to banking to college acceptance to healthcare, immigration enforcement and more.  Every single aspect of American life was now virtually controlled by the government. But it was not just government regulations that brought us this brave new world… rather, out of a fear of being sued under the various aspects the CRA, companies and schools and police forces and unions  and practically every organization in America adopted similar practices in an often futile effort to demonstrate their anti-discriminatory bona fides. 

And of course, despite the fact that the law came about specifically as an effort to eliminate Jim Crow laws targeting blacks in the south, in reality it opened up a Pandora’s box of “remedies” that “protected” almost every group in America except white heterosexual male Christians. Whether it was women in combat or bakers making cakes for gay marriages or dudes playing in girls’ sports, the courts – empowered by the CRA of 1964 – became the venue of choice for changing the face of American life.

Over the 60 years following the passage of the CRA, the New Constitution would take hold, giving us the most consequential change in American governance since the ratification of the Constitution:  An army of federal judges (and justices) who began to see themselves, not just as jurists, but as legislators.  Suddenly things that could never get passed by Congress became the law of the land:  Affirmative action.  Forced school busing. Abortion. Defense of Marriage Act.  Gay Marriage. And one of the most cancerous ideas ever to make it onto the American political stage, Disparate Impact, the insane idea that any group simply being underrepresented in any targeted organization was sufficient to prove discrimination. 

At the same time, things that legally passed by referendum were thrown out, such as California’s Proposition 187 in 1994.  Having passed by 59% to 41%, it denied state-funded non-emergency social services, public healthcare, and public education to illegal immigrants. A federal judge struck it down, saying that it intersected with federal immigration authority. 

The ultimate demonstration of the reality of the Democrat driven New Constitution came with the election of Donald Trump. Federal injunctions were virtually nonexistent in American history and grew only slightly after 1964.  Even during the Reagan in the White House they were rare, largely because, faced with an overwhelming Democrat controlled House, Reagan ultimately left most Democrat priorities in place. All of that comity changed in 2017 when Donald Trump was inaugurated.  Pushing back against the woke leftist bureaucracy and seeking to control the border, Trump ran into a buzzsaw of judicial activism. Why?  Because for the first time in history of the New Constitution, the one that no American voted for, someone was challenging it and its activists in black robes didn’t like it. 

Fundamentally, this New Constitution is a way of achieving objectives without ever having to convince a majority of your fellow citizens to vote for them. The foundation of law is no longer based on the words of a 240-year-old document, but rather on the coordinated machinations of community organizers, slimy lawyers, an endless array of professional victims and power-hungry jurists who legislate from the bench. It’s a tyranny of a tiny, mostly Ivy League educated leftist cabal, the intellectual progeny of the radicals who took over universities in the 1960s. 

For many Americans the ideas that undergird the Old Constitution such as individual freedom, free speech, limited government and private property no longer hold sway. They prefer the New Constitution, where the purpose of government is to redress any perceived inequity, redistribute away any inequality and ensure no minority’s (writ large) feelings are hurt by mean words.   

America prospered because Madison gave us the Old Constitution specifically written to reign in the worst excesses of human nature.  The New Constitution eviscerated that and empowered those worst excesses. That is a recipe for disaster. No nation has ever succeeded under such rules. It always ends in bloodshed and tyranny. 

 

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA