You Should Listen To The Elites Because They're Smarter Than You... Obviously

I’m a pretty average guy. My SAT was 1010, I earned a 2.7 GPA as an undergraduate and 3.0 for my MBA. Since college I’ve launched half a dozen startups, none of which, made it very far… An objective assessment might suggest my intelligence is slightly above average and my entrepreneurial capabilities somewhat below. When all is said and done, I probably balance out as basically average.

That’s troubled me for years…but probably not in the way you think. I’m not troubled that I’m basically average, I’m troubled by what I must be getting wrong vis-à-vis the world around me.

I say wrong because there’s an entire universe out there of people who are by every objective measure exponentially smarter than I am, but who think exactly the opposite of the way I do on practically every single issue. Guys like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, Pierre Omidyar, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Craig Newmark and so many more.

These guys have more money than God. They all probably scored perfect or close to it on the SATs. They’ve created companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people and generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. They’re showcased in magazines like Forbes and Fortune, lionized on TV and are the subjects of books and movies and of course, success memes.

But somehow these guys and most like them are generally hardcore leftists. They’re animated by and put their money behind things like “Climate Change,” “DEI,” and open borders. Most supported the BLM scam and many of their companies regularly censor speech of conservatives. They support things like the Paris Climate Accords, the WHO, and were largely all in on the COVID scam. Most of all, they support Democrats who push for higher taxes, defunding the police and more government regulations, particularly on businesses.

This is where the trouble comes in. These guys are really smart. They’ve succeeded in ways few human beings ever have. They’ve become rich and powerful beyond belief. And they all did it in the United States…yet they support policies that are not only antithetical to traditional American values, but they also actively subvert the framework that allowed them to succeed in the first place.

America may be a flawed place, but it is the place where Microsoft, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, eBay, Craigslist and countless others were founded and found success. Interestingly, most of them employ large numbers of immigrants, despite their success being rooted in America, not in India, China, or Europe.

Their success was not because of government programs, regulations, or largesse. They succeeded in America because government regulation was relatively low for startups. They succeeded in America because that’s where capital came to find attractive returns. They succeeded in America because of well-trained STEM graduates who brought them a unique set of skills and experiences they couldn’t find elsewhere, because our market is the most dynamic on the planet and the most open to new ideas. And perhaps most of all, they succeeded in America because of our fundamental constitutional rights protecting private property—including intellectual property—and free speech, which foster the exchange of ideas, and because of our fundamental notion of entrepreneurship where anyone can start a business and succeed by creating something sufficiently compelling to entice consumers to freely to pay for it.

These factors don’t exist anywhere else in the world and, as a result, for 100 years, America has created more prosperity and increased the worldwide standard of living more than any nation in all of human history…and it’s not even close. And these mavens all pretend to support increasing prosperity and decreasing poverty.

However, now that they’ve found success beyond imagination thanks to the American system, they’ve decided that the fundamental rules that allowed them to prosper should no longer apply. So-called emergencies like “Climate Change,” “Institutional Racism,” “Gender Equity,” and “Global Inequality” supersede the 18th century anachronisms of the American Constitution and individual rights.

No longer can Americans be allowed to decide how to heat their homes, fuel their cars, or protect their property. No longer can they be allowed to enjoy an American-centric foreign policy or manage America’s economy in a way that empowers Americans. No longer will common miscreants be held responsible for their actions, even as those who challenge mandates are crushed. No longer will students learn objective facts or study the Western canon, but they’ll be taught to change their gender on a whim. Whether it’s algorithms controlling what Americans can say or see, regulations about what they can or must do, or what products or services they are allowed to purchase, these enlightened elites graciously inform us they are applying their intellectual brilliance to make our lives better, and so too the rest of the world. And they should know what’s best because look at how smart and successful they are.

However, these “One World” billionaires’ alleged compassion for the world’s less fortunate is pure fiction. How can you tell? Because their solutions for worldwide inequalities isn’t to encourage struggling nations to adopt the freedoms, protections, and systems that led to their success in America. Instead, they push to erase American borders while championing the policies of Communist China and the increasingly despotic EU while encouraging us to adopt edicts from tyrannical organizations like the UN and the WHO and proffered by Bond villains like Klaus Schwab at the WEF.

And thus my conundrum. If I, with my relatively limited intellectual capacity, can see as clear as day that it was America and her Constitution that drove prosperity’s march for a century and allowed these intellectual giants to succeed in spectacular fashion, how is it that most of them are hardcore leftists whose policies will kill the goose that laid the golden egg? What am I missing? Am I really that dense?

Maybe, but a better explanation might be that these guys believe themselves to be the self-anointed leaders of a new cult. This cult, which replaces traditional religion, has as its God the fiction of Nirvana on earth, which can only be accomplished through the policies of the enlightened elites from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington. They know more than you do, have done more than you have, and achieved more than you have and, therefore, are much better equipped to make important decisions for the “less fortunate.”

Naturally, they may not live by or be constrained by the commandments their new religion dictates, but that’s because, while they were smart enough to navigate and survive a world fraught with free-thinking individuals and potential catastrophic failures, you’re not. You’re too busy with your “God, guns and family” to be equipped to see the big picture. Individual freedom makes for bad collective decisions they’d say, but from the elevated perspectives their intelligence and success allows, they can help you people make better decisions and avoid mistakes…

Nevermind that it’s the lessons learned from failures that often lead men to success, or that it’s often after hitting rock bottom that individuals reach their highest peaks. No, none of that matters because they know best, just ask them.

At the end of the day my SAT scores and bank account may suggest that I’m not quite as smart as those guys, but at least now I understand why…I’m a mere mortal, they’re demigods.

Donald Trump’s Mugshot and the Berlin Wall of Democrat Propaganda

The Democrats are making a final push against Donald Trump, the culmination of their unrelenting efforts since 2016. But is their propaganda becoming so obvious that, rather than persuading voters, it finally opens their eyes to reality? The Soviet Union stands as an example of how “propaganda collapse” plays out and how that might happen here, too.

I went to college back in the 1980s, when Communism was still perceived by most Americans as a bad thing—although not one of my political philosophy professors. He proudly characterized himself as “Somewhere to the left of Lenin.” When professing his love and respect for the Soviets—but not enough to leave Florida and move to Moscow— he often tried to square the circle of their military prowess and the reports in American media about their economic failings.

Thus, he pointed out that the Soviets built rockets sending men into space, built weapon systems the Pentagon told us could obliterate the West, dominated Eastern Europe, and were the power behind the Vietnamese who defeated both the French and the Americans. Given all the Soviet’s demonstrated military and technological prowess, he asked, how was it even remotely possible that they could not build washing machines or cars on par with anything produced in the West? Given that they controlled one of the greatest breadbaskets in the world, Ukraine, how could it be true that there was rampant starvation?

The professor had a ready answer: The stories about the Soviet’s economic failures were lies—propaganda produced by the CIA and segments of the capitalist American media.

And it wasn’t just economics. It was politics as well. The Soviet Union had one of the most robust constitutions in the world, he insisted, with an array of guarantees that any citizen in the West would feel comfortable with: Freedom of speech, the press, right of assembly, worship etc. The gulags of Siberia were simply more Western propaganda.

Eventually the professor’s fiction about the communist nirvana could be sustained no longer, but by that time I had graduated and was stationed in West Germany. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reality of the desolation of the East started to become clear. Indeed, the juxtaposition of the abject economic failure of the East with the prosperity of the west put the lie to everything my communist championing professor and his favorite newspaper, the NY Times, had tried to drill into our heads for years.

The fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t the end of communism, nor even the Soviet Union, which would stand for an additional two years. But when it comes to discussing the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism in Eastern Europe, that fall is the thing that most people remember.

I’d posit that we witnessed a similarly epoch-defining event recently: Donald Trump’s mugshot. There’s nothing extraordinary about the mugshot itself, but sometimes an image is much more than just the pixels it’s made up of. What this particular image really depicts is the culmination of eight years of lies and propaganda from Democrats and the Swamp. In one picture, Americans understand exactly what has been going on for the last eight years.

With that mugshot, even people who hate Donald Trump will recognize that America is evolving into a tyranny, like Venezuela with Chavez or Turkey with Erdogan, a place where laws don’t matter other than as tools to crush opponents. They see that the apparatus of the state is simply a vehicle for distributing power among your friends and punishing your enemies.

And in an echo of the 1930s, when Stalin was starving millions of Ukrainians to death and the New York Times was telling us fairy tales, today’s media are telling us that Trump is indeed a criminal, the charges are damning, and that Americans are finally coming to recognize him as one.

The difference is that it took half a century for the truth about the evil of the Soviets to finally find the light of day, while the truth about the evil of the Democrats and their Swamp comrades has taken just a few years… Indeed, you could make the argument that it’s taken less than six months.

Trump’s first indictment, this past March, accuses him of using his own money, rather than donors’ money to pay hush money, suggesting that election law required him to use campaign contributions to keep hidden a sordid story about sex. His second indictment, in June, accuses him of mishandling documents, something every president has done, but no others were indicted for. (And, of course, Trump did not mishandle the documents.) His third indictment, on August 1st, was for attempting to overturn the 2020 election results, this after he’s on video telling his followers to “peacefully and patriotically” make their way to the Capitol. His last (so far) indictment was issued on August 14th, and accused him of seeking to interfere with the 2020 election by falsely claiming he wanted the Secretary of State to manufacture votes.

In less than six months, the Democrats have indicted Donald Trump four times, with the cases scheduled to run through at least the spring of 2024, right into the heart of primary season. Aside from the absurdity of the indictments themselves, this is easily the most blatant example of election interference the United States has ever seen. Indeed it’s so blatant that even a majority of Democrats who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 think it’s interference.

To make matters worse for Democrats, in his interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump looked and sounded as presidential as he ever has. While his outlandish personality serves him well at rallies filled with supporters, his presidential decorum, command of the facts, and his clear confidence while speaking with Tucker are exactly what appeals to those voters put off by doddering Joe Biden’s inability to put an intelligent thought into words or walk up a flight of stairs. While a good interview alone won’t get the job done, for those who are looking around wondering what the hell the Democrats are doing, it likely opens a door for him.

As with most things in life, timing is everything, and the Democrats may have hit the sweet spot…for Donald Trump. While Biden has been less than lucid for most of his presidency, today he more often looks like an escaped Alzheimer’s patient than he does a president. The longer Democrats allow Joe to run with the fiction that he is going to be on the ticket in November, the stronger the contrast becomes with the robust, energized, and cogent Trump. At the same time, every day seems to bring more proof to light that Biden is not only a liar, but he’s been on the take from America’s enemies for years.

Many Democrats would no doubt vote for a fence post so long as it was running against Donald Trump, but there are likely a significant number with functioning brains who recognize that regardless of how much they dislike Trump, he’s a far better choice than Joe Biden.

Of course, Democrats could ditch Biden for Harris, Newsom or, God forbid, Michelle Obama, but that doesn’t solve the problem they’ve created with the trials. Trump will be sitting in courtrooms during critical periods of the campaign, but that doesn’t mean he’ll lose support as a result. Indeed, just the opposite is likely to happen as he has countless surrogates who will use the fact that he couldn’t be there because of the Democrats’ treachery to excite a crowd and grow support.

In addition, the trials will offer daily opportunities to remind voters of the Democrats’ hypocrisy and mendacity as they manipulate the justice system to crucify Trump while the Bidens, Hillary, and virtually every swamp dweller gets off scot-free.

It would be the ultimate irony if the indictments that Democrats hoped to use to finally defeat Donald Trump were the vehicles through which America finally came to see their mendacity and propelled their worst nightmare back into office.

Can Democrats Constitutionally End Trump’s Campaign?

We all know what an October Surprise is. It’s when a rival campaign or supporter releases information about an opponent at a point in October. The idea is to release the skeleton or some other damaging information at a point when it’s too late for the opposing candidate to recover, giving the candidate whose team released the information a clear path to victory. Always feared, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

As the number of inane indictments of Trump demonstrates, the Democrats will do virtually anything to keep Donald Trump from ever again occupying the White House and threatening the Swamp’s grip on the throats of the American people.

I don’t, however, think a traditional October Surprise is much of a danger in this election. Why would Democrats wait until the last minute to release some exquisite horror that will send Trump packing? They wouldn’t. The fact that they haven’t released such a campaign-killing bit of information already means that they simply don’t have one.

As such, the Democrats are in trouble.  Between having a guy who electrifies crowds like no one in American history on the other side and their presumptive nominee being a doddering Alzheimer’s patient they really have two problems to solve, not one.

One wonders if there is not some constitutional answer to their quandary… I think there is.

Now, I can’t suggest this would be successful, but I can guarantee that it would set the political universe of the “Rich Men North of Richmond,” on their heads.

The solution for the Democrats lies in the 22nd Amendment. Here is the relevant language: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

This language offers Democrats the opportunity to eliminate both of their problems at the same time. Now, of course, it has risks, may be legally or constitutionally impossible, and has the potential to send the nation into chaos or a civil war, but as we’ve seen, none of those things is a barrier to Democrats doing anything, legal, illegal or unconscionable in order to win.

So how does the 22nd Amendment offer the Democrats a way out of the morass they find themselves in? Simple: Make Donald Trump president again. Essentially this would involve Democrats revealing (admitting, really) that, after an unprecedented national investigation of the 2020 election, it turns out that, shockingly, Donald Trump was right and the election was tainted. He did, in fact, win the 2020 election.

Check out the language of the Amendment. It says: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice…” It doesn’t require that the person has actually served as president for two terms. It literally only states that a person cannot be elected more than twice, without regard for whether he served in the position.

So, in one action, Democrats can eliminate both of their problems. The first and most consequential is to keep the feared Donald Trump from running again. The second is to send Brandon to the sidelines, having undermined the only reason he’s even thought of by a single American, which is that he sits in the Oval Office.

But, you say, “That’s crazy! That’s impossible. There’s nothing in the Constitution that would allow such a thing!” True, but then there’s nothing in it to prohibit it, either. And as we know, the Democrats are willing to do anything, constitutional or otherwise, if it will bring them power. This is particularly true with a Supreme Court led by the lion from the Wizard of Oz.

Proof of such is legion. Think how the IRS and DOJ eviscerated the First Amendment, the government obliterated Chrysler creditors’ contract rights during the last financial meltdown, and the DOJ being weaponized against private citizens.

There are cultural attacks, too. For more than 2,000 years of Western civilization, marriage was one man and one woman. Thanks to the Democrats, that’s no longer true. There’s dude in a dress, “Rachel” Levine, who’s the Assistant Secretary for Health. He insists that he’s a woman, and the government agrees with him, while anyone who points out the obvious is castigated. Today, governments across the country are not only allowing prepubescent children to be butchered by predatory doctors and rapacious hospitals, but some are paying for it and doing it without parental consent.

There’s literally nothing the Democrats wouldn’t do for power…

Now the question is, how and when would the Democrats put forward this innovative plan? Perhaps they’ll act as Americans are basking in the relative quiet of summer, when they can enjoy the last bit of peace before the cacophony of election propaganda ramps up its around-the-clock assault on their senses. Or they could wait until October to spring it on the American people…

The first approach would have the advantage of allowing them to find a suitable candidate for November and begin marketing him or her as the savior of “Democracy.” The downside of that timing would be that after swearing in Trump, he’d be in control of the bureaucracy for about half a year. But the truth is, given the resulting chaos of the move and the depth of the Swamp, what he might accomplish, even with an ostensible GOP majority in the House, would be very limited. The second approach has the benefit of having Trump in the White House for just a couple of months as a lame duck.

Now, both of these assume that Trump would acquiesce and allow himself to be sworn in… which he’d never do. But here’s where it gets interesting. If Trump saw the sham for what it was and refused to participate, then it would fall to Mike Pence to be sworn in and take over the Executive Office, and don’t for a second think that he wouldn’t do it, because he would.

This of course sounds absurd, and it is, but so too did the idea of gay marriage for all human history except for a nanosecond. That doesn’t mean that Democrats won’t consider it. Once they accept that their comical indictments of Trump are not only not scaring off his supporters, but are actually strengthening his position, they’ll begin to feel like cornered animals willing to do anything to escape.

Somewhere in the Democrat brain trust (sic) the people who decided that it was a good idea to put an Alzheimer’s patient in charge of the nuclear football are going to realize that Donald Trump, if he’s on the ballot in November, will win the election. So, whether it takes the form of an October Surprise or July Fireworks, don’t be surprised if the Democrats risk civil war to stay in power. After all, they did once before…