From Patriot to Sucker: Is the American Dream Dying Under the Weight of Government Waste and Widespread Fraud?

I grew up in a military family and lived on military bases most of my early life, five years of which were spent on Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.  Honestly, it was the most Americana place I’ve ever lived.  Think Mayberry surrounded by minefields.  Thankfully we didn’t often encounter the minefields, but we knew they were there. 

Fourth of July was always the biggest day of the year.  We had parades with tanks and marching bands and floats and classic convertibles with pretty girls waving from the back. The rest of the day would be filled with motocross races and boxing matches, track and field events and midway games and endless food. And everything was topped off with a concert and fireworks once the sun set. 

Never a great student, I went from one grade to the next holding on by my fingertips, except for history and social studies.  I was fascinated about history and loved reading about the Greeks and Romans and Egyptians, but mostly about America and WW II, which at that time had only been over for about 30 years. We of course studied the Constitution and what led to the Revolution, but we also read about slavery and the Trail of Tears and watched Roots. America was great, even if it was imperfect.

My joining the military after school was never a question. My parents never pushed me, but it was just what you did. And so after college I spent two years in the Army, stationed in what was then West Germany. One of the most interesting things I encountered while there was an old west town the local Germans had built. It looked like something straight out of Bonanza.  Inside each of the buildings was a wide collection of Americana, most of which was oddly anachronistic, like Mickey Mouse clocks and old pinball machines and lava lamps. The interesting thing was, these people loved everything American. Despite the war that was only a generation away, America was a place of dreams, a place of adventure, a place where anything was possible. 

That didn’t surprise me because my entire life I’d known that America was great.  It was imperfect, but I knew that it was fundamentally good, and that most Americans were fundamentally good.

After leaving the Army I went to grad school and earned my MBA and began my life as an entrepreneur, which I’ve done for the last 30 years.  In all honesty, I’m a terrible entrepreneur.  I’ve had some great ideas, but most came to naught. Aside from one minor success early on – a company teaching kids about investing and entrepreneurship, where I interviewed a young Elon Musk – every one of my entrepreneurial endeavors has been a bust.

But here’s the thing, I’ve always known that my life is better because of entrepreneurs and patriots who have come before me.  Our founding fathers gave us a constitution that created the foundation for the freest nation in human history, which in turn created unprecedented opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators to risk doing great things and then earn a reward for success.  For me, America was the land of opportunity, the place where anyone with a good idea and willing to put in the sweat and take some risks could find success. 

But sadly, I’ve started to question that… but not because of my own failings. Those I own. I was either in the wrong place at the wrong time or just didn’t do a good job selling my idea. No, it’s not my failures that have me questioning what America has become… It’s watching the millions and billions and trillions of dollars that get sent to grifters and thieves.    

I’m talking about the billions being funneled through fake or leftist NGOs that DOGE exposed.  I’m talking about the people who took PPP money during Covid and used it to live like rapper kings. I’m talking about the daycare fraud in Minnesota and the homeless grift in California and the home health fraud in Maine and elsewhere.  Not to mention the trillions wasted on countless green energy scams and the billions that go to support people who are here illegally. 

I’m talking about the people we see using EBT cards to buy lobster and steak while working people are living on Ramen noodles and hot dogs.  I’m talking about families who have been in Section 8 housing and on welfare for generations while working people are living like college students, sharing rooms and couch surfing among friends. I’m talking about colleges and companies dropping standards and accepting people not because of their hard work and merit, but because of a diversity thumb stuck on the scale.

The point of all of this is that over the last couple of years I’ve started to ask myself if I’m a sucker… and that maybe I have a lot of company.  I’ve worked hard my whole life and paid my taxes and aside from a college loan (non-forgiven) and a small PPP loan (forgiven) when Covid lockdowns hammered our business, I’ve never taken a penny from the government. Actually, my goal was always the opposite, to become sufficiently successful that I’d actually have to hire accountants to do my taxes.  And I wanted to do that by helping make other people’s lives easier or better.  That’s how fortunes have traditionally been made in America. Whether it was inventing the elevator or flash frozen food or selling Beanie Babies, you create a product or service that others are willing to voluntarily exchange their money for.  That’s America’s magic, a win-win exchange where everyone gets what they value most. 

But today I look around and I see companies laying off Americans while simultaneously bringing in millions of H1B visa workers.  I see grifting NGOs lining their pockets and using taxpayer dollars to keep Democrats in power – who then attack America at every turn.  I look at the fact that more than 50% of the money government spends is redistribution and half the country doesn’t pay income taxes.

And I wonder, why would anyone choose to follow the rules when it would be easier to simply run a scam or suckle at the government teat?  I understand that working hard and being honest is a part of one’s character, but at what point do conscientious people say “I’m done working my ass off just so everyone else can live like kings off my sweat”?

I love America and I always will, and I’m not giving up, but I have to wonder about the future. When someone like me who bleeds red, white & blue starts to question if it makes sense to do the right thing, I can’t imagine what the young people educated in the anti-American forges we call schools think.

From Athens and Rome to the Abbasid Caliphate and Song China, most of history’s greatest empires collapsed because they betrayed the very things that made them great in the first place.  For America that’s freedom and opportunity.  To the degree that grift, government corruption and “largesse” have replaced hard work, risk and merit as the primary avenues for “success” the Republic’s days are numbered. Sadly, I don’t see any signs in Washington that many of the people in charge of the system are much interested in fixing it.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Russian Roulette 2026: How “principled” GOP Senators are betraying Trump, MAGA and the American people.

Back in 2016, I, along with a lot of people, made the argument that that election was critical to the future of the country.  It was and America made the right choice.  I made the same argument in 2020 and while America made the right choice the Democrats ran a coup d'état and we suffered through four years of watching whoever was controlling Joe Biden basically run the country into the ground.  Then, two years ago I made the same argument, that basically, if America made the wrong choice the Republic was going to soon find its end.  Thankfully America made the correct choice again.

But, “Come on,” you’re probably saying, “America can’t be on the cusp of collapse at virtually every election. You’re just fearmongering…”  Well, that’s not technically true.  Just because you survive three pulls of the trigger in a game of Russian Roulette doesn’t mean the next one can’t kill you.

Of course 2028 is a long way off and a lot can happen between now and then.  But the truth is, 2026 is here and while we may be playing with a smaller caliber weapon, the potential damage is almost as great… as has been demonstrated by the last few weeks, and the last few days in particular.

As it relates to the last few weeks, I’m of course talking about Nick Shirley putting a spotlight on the Democrat enabled Somalian treachery in Minnesota.  I’m not actually talking about the money being stolen from taxpayers, per se.  No, as bad as that is on its face, what’s worse is what it communicates about the modus operandi of Democrats around the country: i.e. import 3^rd world immigrants and figure out ways to enrich them at the public trough. That same kind of model is happening across the country from Maine to Maryland to California and countless states in between.  Different groups, different scams, same result: public money that makes its way into the hands of immigrants and magically comes out the other side as votes for Democrats.

To put something of a fine point on it, Kevin Bass just did a great analysis looking at states Americans are moving into or out of, correlated by those who provide benefits to illegal aliens vs. those who don’t.  Not surprisingly, 9 out of the top 10 states from which Americans are fleeing provide benefits to illegals while 9 out of the top 10 states to which Americans are heading, don’t.  Not coincidentally, 9 out of 10 of the first group are Democrat states while 9 out of 10 of the second are Republican.  The bottom line is, Democrats increasingly don’t represent the values or interests of Americans and are systematically replacing American voters with immigrants, most of whom are illegal. 

And if there were any question as to whether this is really going on, we don’t have to wonder, courtesy of leftist CIA agent and new Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger.  What was her first official act as governor?  Why rescind ex-Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order that required Virginia law enforcement to cooperate with ICE, of course.  Literally the first thing she did was basically turn the once red state into a sanctuary state.  Democrats, who now control both houses and the governor’s office quickly introduced a phalanx of hard left policies such as guaranteeing illegal aliens free education, making it illegal to hand count ballots and requiring government award 42% of their programs based on DEI criteria.

So what does this have to do with 2026?  Everything.

As it stands right now, 2026 is going to be a bloodbath for the GOP.  Almost across the board you see Republican voters angry and upset with the GOP.  Have they cut spending?  No.  Have they shut down the federal grift mills that funnel money to leftists?  No.  But most importantly, have they done something, anything on election integrity?  No. 

If there is any one issue that animates Americans in 2026 it’s voter ID, AKA election integrity.  Why?  Because virtually everything about government funnels into or out of it.  From Democrats importing 3^rd world voters to trillions of dollars that goes to support illegals to the cancer of local Democrat rule, it’s all part of the election integrity ecosystem. 

But the Republicans in the Senate don’t care about that.  They, like elites everywhere sit back in their cushy offices with their guaranteed paychecks, armed security and safe neighborhoods and laugh at the hard working Americans who are paying taxes to support illegals, fighting to keep their homes and looking over their shoulders for criminals loosed on the world by Democrats.  How can we tell?  Because the blind squirrel GOP over in the House accidentally tripped over a nut and sent the SAVE act to the Senate last April.  And what has the Senate done with it? Nothing.

“But,” you might say, “almost every GOP Senator states that they are in favor of the SAVE act.”  Sure they do. Even Mr. Ethanol himself Chuck Grassley did a flip flop in less than 24 hours after he stated very clearly that he would not support it. 

So there we go. We should get it. But no, we don’t. We can’t.  Why, because Americans are being forced to play Russian Roulette, only instead of one round and five empty chambers, we’re playing with all six chambers loaded… and there are a bunch of backup rounds nearby in case one falls out.  And what are those chambers loaded with you might ask?  Senators! 

In order for the SAVE act to pass, currently the filibuster needs to be overcome. But the reality is, it doesn’t.  All we need are 50 Senators to vote to eliminate the filibuster and VP Vance would break the tie.  But we can’t get those 50 Senators because there are almost a dozen GOP traitors who would rather allow Democrats to destroy America so they can pat themselves on the back that they didn’t nuke the filibuster. 

These hypocrite GOP Senators pretend they are doing the people’s work, but in reality they’re doing anything but.  From stealing elections to funding fraud to basically legalizing crime across the country, Democrats are no longer representing Americans.  They are purposefully turning America into a failed 3^rd world dystopia.  And by not eliminating the filibuster (something Democrats will do the first opportunity they get…) these Senators are basically shrugging their shoulders and saying “I didn’t do that.” But in reality, they did.  It’s like watching a man drowning and standing on the dock with a life preserver but refusing to throw it to him.  Sure, you can technically say you didn’t drown him, but you’re responsible for his death nonetheless.

For anyone paying attention over the last decade, it’s crystal clear that the filibuster serves only to block Republicans.  From the moment Harry Reid changed the rules for presidential appointments in 2013 it’s been clear where that road leads.  But treacherous Senators like Mike Crapo, Tom Tillis, James Lankford and the other grifters pretend they’re being principled by not eliminating it.  They’re not, unless their principles include eviscerating the Trump agenda, sidelining the MAGA movement and betraying the American people. Because that’s what happens in January 2027 when the Democrats take the House and perhaps even the Senate this November. 

 

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Will Trump Be Julius Caesar or Augustus? 2026 Is His Last Chance to Crush the Deep State and Save America

It's not often life gives nations real second chances when it comes to the big things, but in America’s case it did. My only hope is that we don’t squander it… or to be more precise, I hope Donald Trump doesn’t squander it. The 2026 midterms are less than a year away, that makes what he does in the next six to eight months monumentally important. 

The bottom line is, does he want to be consequential or just well known?  Julius Caesar is easily one of the most well-known men in history, but was he really that consequential? The truth is, no. We know more about Caesar than any other Roman not because he changed the world, but because he was a genius of propaganda and wrote prodigiously – and well – about his exploits. The reality is, Caesar was just another Roman general – albeit a great one – caught up in a century of internecine wars between men seeking to control the Republic. Augustus, his adopted son – who is far less well known in history – was far more consequential, having transformed the Republic into an Empire that would arguably last another 1500 years. 

Is Donald Trump going to be Caesar or Augustus? Is he going to be a president who rearranges the deckchairs on the USS Titanic and simply slows down her eventual collision with the iceberg or is he going to steer her through the treacherous waters and bring her out safely on the other side?

When he won re-election last November I was certain that after enduring 8 years of what is easily the most vitriolic abuse any American politician had ever endured, he was going to return to Washington and metaphorical heads were going to roll.  Indeed, he ran on the idea of destroying the deep state.    

Now, a year after the election, I’m not so sure. While I applaud most of his moves on immigration, particularly his recent move to temporarily cease all immigration from 3^rd world countries, there are two elements that cause concern.  One is his support for the H1B visa program. If there are jobs that can’t be filled by Americans, then bringing in foreign workers who have the necessary skills makes sense for keeping American industry productive.  But that’s not what’s happening. Hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, primarily Indians, are being brought in to supplant American workers companies would generally have to pay more to keep or hire.  There is no shortage of American STEM workers, there are merely trillion dollar tech, consulting and other companies who simply want to bolster the bottom line by paying foreign workers lower wages. Sadly, Trump defends the program virtually every chance he gets.  Add to that his allowing half a million students / spies from Communist China to remain at American universities and one begins to wonder whose payrolls Trump’s advisors are on. 

Another area where Trump has not met expectations is taking on the leftist cabal that brought the nation to the brink of disaster over the last decade.  From Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton and the army of anti-American traitors who worked against Trump, his allies, and the American people, Trump should establish a task force with the specific purpose of investigating every single member of the government or NGO and every financier who had anything to do with Russiagate as well as the coup / coverup of 2020 and the resulting J6 persecutions.  Americans know what happened, we watched it in real time. Molly Ball crowed about it in TIME magazine, we read about it in Mollie Hemingway’s Rigged, and later we followed as Emerald Robinson pulled string after string… but what we don’t have, and need, is the entire case of the treachery laid out in black and white, and then see the guilty tried and punished.  As we all learned in the OJ trial, juries can’t always be trusted, but at a minimum the information should be laid out for the American people to see so that they can vote accordingly. The recent arrest of the DC pipe-bomb suspect and Kash Patel’s announcement that it was based on information the FBI sat on for 4 years tells us that the information is there, it just takes an administration with sufficient courage to expose it. 

Hand in hand with allowing that treachery to go unpunished is the fact that Trump has not put his shoulder into ensuring the passage of the SAVE act. Indeed, New England, which is about 40% Republican, has 21 House seats and 100% of them are Democrat. That’s not good.  Democrats win by cheating.  Period. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act would require Voter ID, proof of U.S. citizenship and outlaw most mail-in voting. Strong-arming Congress, which the GOP theoretically controls, into passing SAVE would do more for saving the Republic than almost any other thing he could do. If Trump wants to maintain GOP control over Congress and have any chance of fixing the country, he needs to fix the voting system now, because we know the second the SAVE act is passed there’s an army of treacherous federal judges who will seek to derail it.

Which brings us to the last critical issue, the Judiciary. Since 2015 federal judges across the country have acted as the rear guard for the Obama plan of “Fundamentally transforming the United States of America” into a leftist nirvana. From nationwide injunctions to throwing out cases to seeking to exercise Executive power, the federal judiciary has become untethered to the Constitution. The traditional way such overreach is addressed is that cases make their way through the appellate process where SCOTUS may or may not eventually rectify the problem. But that system breaks down as a viable solution when fast approaching elections that decide the direction of the government are concerned. Congress must act to address this judicial overreach. 

As such, Trump should work with Congress to utilize their Article III powers to fix this.  I’d suggest two possible avenues: 

1) Congress abolishes the entire judiciary below SCOTUS and remakes it with a far more limited and constitutional judiciary.

2) Congress sets up a separate parallel federal court channel that would deal exclusively with election and Executive power related issues so that they can be argued in a timely fashion and be resolved long before they become moot.

Decades from now Donald Trump is going to be remembered.  The question is, will he be remembered as a celebrity president who attracted a great deal of attention and simply slowed the collapse as the nation calcified into a failed dystopia driven by big government and big spending, or is he going to be remembered as an heroic, mythic figure who fought back the leftist tide and put America back on firm, limited government, Constitutional footing, giving her a real opportunity to survive another 250 years?  I guess we’ll see…

America Should Look to 19th Century Utah to Understand How to Deal with the Threat of Islam

In 1899 Winston Churchill wrote the following: “Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die: but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”

I find this quote to be quite compelling. The most prescient aspect of it is this: “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.” If Churchill is paying attention at all in Heaven, he’s banging on the podium saying “See, I told you so!”

The other, more troubling element of this quote is this: “and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall,” If anything characterizes western civilization in 2025 it is an almost complete absence of “the strong arms of science.”

Emotion has replaced science, rational thought and common sense as the guiding principle in the Christian dominated, i.e. western world.  No longer are chromosomes determinative of a person’s gender.  A series of ever evolving fictional climate emergencies are used to force western nations into handicapping their economies and reducing prosperity. Nations that took centuries or a millennium to coalesce are being shredded in a few years or decades as they import millions of third world immigrants who share neither their cultural norms nor values.

Even in areas where science is literally part of the function of the organization, science is sidelined for empathy.  Here in America we have doctors, pilots, air traffic control officers and myriad others who are regularly being hired because of the pigment of their skin or some other irrelevant demographic characteristic. 

It’s clear that the world Christianity built is no longer the bulwark against the invasion of Islam it once was.  Actually, it’s just the opposite. In 2001, the year of 9/11, there were 1.5 million Muslims in America.  Today there are four million, an increase of 150%, eight times what the population at large grew.  In Europe, over the same period the number of Muslims has gone from 15 million to more than 45 million, essentially tripling. This while Christianity declined from 78% to 63% of the population in the US and dropped by both a percentage of the population and absolute numbers in Europe.

What, if anything should the United States do about this?  The first question to ask if it’s a problem.  I’d suggest it is.  There are countless resources that track the impact on nations as Islam becomes more entrenched, and those impacts are never good. Not to mention the terrorist attacks or the ongoing threats of such. Or the violent campus (and beyond) protests after the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 to see that this is a problem.  And finally, at the end of the day, there’s the fact that Islam seeks to obliterate western civilization.

One might point out that Islamist terrorist attacks only killed a few thousand Americans over decades, out of a nation of 350 million people. That’s true, but that’s only because we have avoided another 9/11 thanks to the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people working hard to keep such an occurrence at bay.

Should something be done?  Yes.  Can something be done?  Yes. What?  Look to history. 

The first item of note is that for most of 20^th century Communism was rightfully seen as evil and anti-American.  And although the Communist Party was free to exist on free speech grounds, it was hindered in almost every way possible.  From not allowing Communists to work for the government and trying to root them out everywhere to the FBI surveilling them, Communism was anathema to American values and almost everyone agreed with that.  Islam is not Communism, but it has at its core the goal of eliminating all other religions, quashing free speech, relegating women to 2^nd class status and replacing secular government with Sharia law.  Those goals are equally as dangerous to the Republic as anything Communism ever dreamt of doing. The difference is, while the former was shunned or even denounced in the media, in academia and among most of the citizenry, the latter is celebrated by the media and the intelligentsia while being supported by NGOs and leftist government bodies across the country. 

Of course we have a 1^st Amendment that promises a freedom of religion... That’s true, we do, but it’s not an absolute. The latter half of the 19^th century saw the United States government essentially wage a 50 year war against the Mormon Church over polygamy, a core tenant of the faith. From outlawing the practice via law and arresting violators while Utah was just a Territory to refusing to allow it to become a state until the practice was officially expunged, the United States did everything within its power to eradicate the practice.  The Church finally relented and in 1890 banned the practice, thus clearing the way for Utah to be admitted as a state in 1896. 

Polygamy – a practice that is explicitly part of Islam – is indeed problematic, but certainly far less dangerous to the nation than the threats that Islam writ large poses for America.

So, what can be done? The first thing to do is explicitly recognizing that Sharia – the moral and religious law of Islam – is wholly incompatible with the Republic of the United States. From there a few things follow: 

1)      Explicitly outlaw Sharia law nationally and in every state.

2)      Monitor and close any mosque that hosts a speaker or features an imam who calls for Sharia law.

3)      Ban all funds to organizations in the US coming from nations that have Sharia law.

4)      Close any school that teaches or encourages Sharia law.

5)      Demand every mosque and Muslim affiliated organization affirm that the supreme law of the United States is the Constitution and they will not seek to undermine it, replace it with Sharia nor to engage in or support terrorism in any way. 

6)      After designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, do the same for organizations in the United States and beyond who support it or any other terrorist organizations.

Just as Mormons integrated into the United States after accepting the reality that the law of the land is founded on the Constitution, Muslims could do the same if America is really where they want to live.

Far from a mere mental exercise, this is a clarion call for the survival of the Republic. In little over a month, arguably America’s most important city is poised to elect as mayor an Islamist who also happens to be a Communist. In previous times those who advocated for overthrowing America were called traitors and were dealt with accordingly.  Doing so now will most certainly result in being called racists and Islamaphobes, but not doing so will be another step in bringing the Republic to an end.  Which is a better long-term outcome? 

 

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA