Donald Trump, Tiberius Gracchus and a Canary in a Coalmine...

Donald Trump’s indictment makes one wonder if the members of the Democrat party have ever picked up a history book, walked by one in a library, or accidentally heard an episode of the History of Rome podcast. I doubt it because if they had, they’d know that Rome didn’t transition from a republic to an empire overnight, and they’d be familiar with the modern iteration of the George Santayana adage: Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

By the time Caesar became dictator in 49 BC, the Republic was already gone in everything but name only. The Republic’s collapse had been put in motion 80 years before with the murder of Tiberius Gracchus.

Gracchus was a populist Plebeian tribune, essentially the equivalent of being a member of our House of Representatives. Citizens loved him, and the aristocratic Senate hated him. His assassination points the way to Caesar:

"[T]he oligarchy had introduced violence into the political system with the murder of Tiberius Gracchus and over the years the use of violence became increasingly acceptable as various political disputes in Rome led to more and more bloody discord."

With Gracchus’s death, violence became an increasingly common political weapon in Rome, with Sulla’s purges early in the 1st century BC as the clearest example. Sulla executed 9,000 rival Marian partisan supporters, without regard for age or sex.

Three decades later, Caesar would take control, only to lose his life at the hands of a cabal of his establishment rivals. This widespread political violence only came to an end (temporary as it might be) when his adopted son, Augustus, become emperor. Tellingly, however, Augustus achieved that peace only after executing thousands of his political enemies.

Rome devolved from a republic in which domestic politics were decided mostly by words and relatively objective laws, to a dictatorship where laws were anything but objective, and the emperor could take life and property on a whim.

The late Roman Republic had the equivalent of our “Swamp,” which it called the Senate. While ostensibly there were balancing powers of influence, such as the assemblies, two Consuls (a split executive office with a term of one year) and, occasionally, the appointment of a temporary Dictator, the reality is that the Senate, made up of the richest and most powerful citizens, ran the Republic. Even when one of the assemblies or one of the Consuls seemed to be ascendant, it was the senators calling most of the shots through their relationships with the state officials, familial connections to this or that general, and their control of the purse strings.

So, you have a body of rich and powerful citizens having ostensibly limited power through the visible levers of government, but actually exercising real power through the connections, relationships, and shared ideology of the apparatchiks in the bureaucracy, the opinion makers, and those who indoctrinate the youth who always act as the frontline shock troops. Sound familiar?

Things have changed a lot in 2,000 years, but the nature of man…not so much. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As with most things today, political changes happen faster than they did in the past.

It took 100 years—from Gracchus’s emergence on the Roman stage until Augustus’s ascendance—for Rome to transform from a republic to an empire. It has taken less than 20 years since Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” America for the country to change from a functioning but imperfect republic into a farce of a country characterized by a banana-republic-level tyranny.

With a complicit bureaucracy, Obama used the IRS to target political opponents, the Justice Department to coerce banks into blacklisting businesses he didn’t like, and Obamacare to give government unprecedented control over Americans’ health decisions while doubling the cost. He unconstitutionally opened the immigration spigot that has now become a torrent.

Within six months of taking office, Obama would set the tone for an administration that would set race relations back 50 years. His “evolution“ on gay marriage would give cover to the spineless Supreme Court to impose that travesty on the country and lay the ground for the fascist LBTQ hellscape America endures today. And finally, he weakened two of the most foundational elements of American society: The military and residential communities.

Obama set in motion a new set of rules in America, and Trump’s indictment, the Soviet style attack on J6 attendees, and the prosecution of Douglass Mackey combine to demonstrate exactly what those new rules are: Thou shalt not oppose the Democrat party, thou shalt not speak badly of or mock the Democrat party or its minions, thou shalt not push back against the regulatory state, and thou shalt not express traditional American values.

These sham “prosecutions” are really persecution. They are nothing more than the Democrats’ regulatory state wrapping itself around American citizens’ necks like the Burmese Pythons killing most native species in the Everglades. The indictment of a former president and current presidential candidate on such a weak and preposterous theory as this one puts the lie to the idea that the Constitution limits our government. This is nothing less than the established “swamp” inventing new legal theories while ignoring existing law to crush a political opponent. That foretells the end of the Republic.

Our Republic has survived for 230 years because most Americans believe in our Constitution and respect the laws that emanate from it. But the Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper… it’s not a gun, it’s not an army, it’s not police state stormtroopers. It’s a piece of paper that states how the government should operate, limits that government’s power, and guarantees the citizens’ various inherent liberties and freedoms.

For most of our history, the Constitution’s words guided how our nation operated. Citizens had two ways to change the way the country was governed: voting and amending the Constitution. Today, however, neither works. The former has been undermined by a Democrat party that steals elections under the cover of night and calls you a conspiracy nut when you notice. The latter isn’t even a consideration because the Democrat party and the apparatchiks running the regulatory and security states are no longer constrained by its words.

America has become a tyranny where the people in power no longer feel the need to seek validation from the citizens. They decide on the outcome and manipulate the numbers to produce the result without even a fig leaf hiding their disdain for citizens. Whether it was Bernie Sanders in 2016, Donald Trump in 2020, or Kari Lake in 2022, the Democrat party and its entrenched government comrades have decided they no longer need to subject themselves to the will of the citizenry and, if anyone objects, they use the judiciary to crush that person.

America has been loosed from the anchor of the Constitution and the rule of law that kept our citizens free for two centuries. While the blood of the regime’s enemies may not yet be flowing in the streets, history very clearly tells us that, unless we change what’s happening, it will be. The question is, are there enough Americans who are familiar with history and willing to pull us out of our national death spiral before that terrible end is upon us? How Americans respond to Donald Trump’s persecution is the canary in the coal mine that will likely answer that question.

Follow me on Twitter at:  ImperfectUSA

Crime, Black Males and the Democrat's Victim Industrial Complex

America has a problem: a subculture of black crime. We see it every day on YouTube or Twitter or your local newscast. Swarms of black teens emptying shelves of drugstores and high end retail shops and jewelry stores. More ominously however are the videos of blacks viscously brutalizing their fellow citizens at gas stations in restaurants or on the street. Every race has criminals, but when 6% of the population, black males, are responsible for over 50% of the murders and violent crimes one has to ask why, and the answer isn’t straightforward.

I’ve just finished the fascinating “Conquests and Cultures” by Thomas Sowell. He talks about the differences between the evolution of societies around the world. The primary take away is the fact that in the last 500 years the Europeans have far surpassed the rest of the planet while Africans have lagged farthest behind. Why? Because whites are genetically superior and blacks genetically inferior? Nope. Mostly because of water and geography.

Europe was graced with a large number of easily navigable rivers, numerous deep water harbors and at the same time almost every spot on the continent was within 500 miles of the sea. That water allowed most Europeans to economically trade with other Europeans and other civilizations around the world. That ability to easily trade foods, manufactured goods, people and most of all, ideas among one another and beyond allowed Europeans to harness inventions such as gunpowder from China and numbers from India to craft a civilization that far surpassed anything found anywhere else in the world. The inventiveness, efficiencies, freedoms and prosperity they developed allowed them to dominate the world for centuries.  

Africa on the other hand had few deep water harbors and few functionally navigable rivers. At the same time the continent’s rugged topography made the exchange of goods and people and ideas over large areas difficult at best and almost impossible at worst. As a result of those travel and transportation roadblocks, most of the civilizations in sub Saharan Africa remained relatively insular and isolated and thus didn’t benefit from the exchanges of ideas and goods with one another that would have allowed them to coalesce into powerful, advanced societies as the Europeans did. Demonstrating that this has nothing to do with race, Sowell points out that similar geographic hurdles impeded the development of robust trading mechanisms in a number of places in Europe, including the Scottish highlands, Russia and much of the Balkans, with a similar retardation of cultural development.

Sowell's lesson clear, America’s issue is not race, it’s culture. The subculture of black crime has to do primarily with victimhood and it shows itself most acutely in violence and a lack of respect for people and property.

What Sowell calls “Cultural capital” must be developed. It involves the ability and willingness to work to achieve desired goals. He contrasts the success of the Germans and Japanese after WWII with that of many of the newly independent states in Africa in the second half of the 20^th century. All received massive amounts of money from outside, but the outcomes were far from similar. While Germany and Japan became economic juggernauts, most newly independent African nations became economic basketcases where poverty and corruption reigned while freedom and security were almost nonexistent. He points out that while it was engineers and business leaders who took the lead in Germany and Japan after the war, in Africa it was usually members of the western educated intelligentsia, steeped in “social sciences” and largely lacking in knowledge or experience in demonstrably productive endeavors who took the lead.

Back here in the United States, the same leftist intelligentsia (read Democrats…) have led much of black America into similarly dire straits. Democrats have convinced a significant portion of black Americans that they are victims of systemic racism that cannot be overcome.

The catalyst was of course slavery. While slavery did exist, as did its progeny, Jim Crow, the reality is the problems that bedevil many black Americans today have little to do with either. Slavery has been gone for 170 years and Jim Crow for more than half a century. Since then the country has seen government mandated integration of schools, decades of affirmative action and government welfare programs, and perhaps most harmfully, programs that made it economically viable for women to have children without the father present, resulting in 70% of black babies being born out of wedlock and left to be raised by single mothers.

But America is systemically racist. Despite the fact that between 1947 & 2021 the median individual income for blacks rose 458% while for whites it rose only 297%. But we’re told racism is America’s biggest threat despite the fact that “hate crimes” are so few that there seems to be a cottage industry associated with fakes. Blacks, we’re told, can’t succeed in America despite the fact that the $35,000 median household income of the average black American family is higher than the median household income of every other country on the planet except for Luxemburg, Norway, Canada and Switzerland.

The carnage unleashed by Democrats brainwashing a significant number of black Americans into believing they’re victims of white racism plays itself out on video across the country on almost daily basis. The violence we see today seems to be on a different level than 20 years ago, both in terms of savagery and frequency. In 1998 Jessie Jackson said “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps... then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” Today, the danger Jackson alludes to exists not only when people are walking down the street, but while they are serving customers in restaurants, working in a drugstore or at the Apple Store or standing on a subway platform.

People ask how the Nazis could kill so many Jews with so little remorse. It was easy. A media campaign of dehumanization. A firehose pumping out propaganda that Jews were not human not surprisingly resulted in a significant percentage of the German people believing that Jews were indeed subhuman, and therefore could be abused and killed by the millions.

The campaign the Nazis used is not so different from what the Democrats are using today to convince black Americans that they are indeed victims of white racism. In just one week during the 2020 election campaign CNN and MSNBC used the term “racist” 4,100 times. The Democrat’s Victim Industrial Complex has been so successful that a recent Rasmussen poll found that 47% of blacks disagreed with or weren’t sure about the statement: “It’s OK to be white.” 

But it’s not only the whites we see being punched and kicked and stomped and shot who are on the receiving end of these nihilist attacks by blacks brainwashed to think the world is their enemy; it’s Asians, Hispanics and most of all, other blacks. In many black neighborhoods in American cities crime rates rival those of the deadliest cities in the world. If there’s any question about this, visit two websites and compare the data,  Bestneighborhood.org and Neighborhoodscout.com. The first shows the geographic population data for cities by race while the second shows precinct level crime rates. What you’ll discover is that in almost every big city there seems to be a direct correlation between the levels of crime and the percentage of black population within the area.

The violent dystopian reality that too much of black America exists in today is a direct result of the Democrat’s Victim Industrial Complex. They have told too many black people they have no opportunity for success, that negative outcomes in their lives are due to the racist system they were born into. They’ve taught them that math, coffee, physical fitness, and virtually everything else is racist. Simultaneously they’ve allowed many to terrorize their communities with impunity because of “equity”.

The Democrat’s Victim Industrial Complex has sadly destroyed Sowell’s “Cultural capital” for much of black America. And that’s a problem for everyone because as Abraham Lincoln said in 1858 "A house divided against itself, cannot stand."