An 18th Century Scottish Historian Foretells 21st Century America

Our Constitution, perhaps the greatest document in human history behind the Bible, is not quite perfect. In 2025 we can see things that might have been added. Number one is probably term limits.  Another would be a prohibition on deficit spending outside of war.  And maybe they could have added something about judges being responsible for the crimes the criminals they release into society commit…

No doubt there are countless things we could sit here 250 years later and think of that the Founding Fathers could have added but didn’t because they couldn’t see into the future. One thing they could see clearly was that the nature of man is to accumulate power, use that power to take from others and that the most effective way of doing both is by harnessing the power of government. 

Alas, it wasn’t possible to put frameworks in place to control all of the base instincts of men as they are simply unending and evolve constantly. The Founders could not envision our world.  They could write about freedom of speech and the press, but they couldn’t have known about radio or mobile phones or the dark web or Bitcoin or shadowbanning. 

Nonetheless one of the greatest attributes of their Constitution was its staggered terms. The House, the place from which spending originates, is the closest to the people and is elected every two years. The President, who executes the laws, has a term of four years.  Then the Senate, originally the representatives of the state legislatures, serve staggered six-year terms.

The goal of these staggered terms was to tamp the passions of men such that if a majority wanted something they couldn’t easily command it and it would take years for them to take control over the government. The Founders understood that tempers run hot but cooler heads often prevail with time and therefore they wrote a document with built in cooling off periods.

What the Founding Fathers never envisioned however was a permanent government, in either the elected officials or the bureaucracy.  Sadly, today we have both. That wouldn’t be a significant problem if government was as small as it was initially.  Indeed, for America’s first 50 years we had a Department of State, Treasury, War, Attorney General and Postmaster General.  That was it.  Interior and Agriculture came in the middle of the 19^th century when the country was adding states and territories rapidly and farming was becoming a major point of conflict between cattle herders, sheep herders, farmers and miners, not to mention Indians.  Nothing more until the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903 – the two split in 1913.

The point is, for most of the first half of America’s history the federal government was essentially an afterthought in the minds of most Americans.  For the Founding Fathers government was part time.  Today it’s anything but. To put this in perspective, there have been almost 2,000 people who have served as a US Senator, and of the 25 who served the longest, all but one started his career in the 20^th century – 15 of them after 1960 – and two are still there!  Similarly, over in the House, where 12,000 people have served as Representatives, of the 33 longest serving, all but one began their service in the 20^th century and four are current members.  The Founding Fathers didn’t see a need for term limits because for them Congress was a service to the country, not a job, and certainly not a permanent career.

Today the federal government is anything but an afterthought in the lives of Americans. Not only does it seek to control almost every aspect of our lives, but it spends like a drunken sailor on liberty weekend.  Not surprisingly, most of the regulations that stifle productivity and innovation and the departments from which most spending emerges are those created in the last century. Seventy five percent of the federal government spending is on things that simply exist at the federal level for our first 150 years.  From healthcare spending to food stamps to Social Security to education, the limited government our Founding Fathers left us with has metastasized into a borg that grows year after year, regardless of who’s in control. 

This does not end well, particularly as the United States is $37 trillion in debt, with twice that in unfunded obligations.  The words of Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler explains why:  “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”

On our present course, that is America’s fate. Sadly we have few leaders willing to tell Americans the truth about that reality.  While we have men like Rand Paul and Thomas Massie, Americans writ large don’t seem to be interested in following them. 

There are solutions however.  The FairTax would be a giant step in the right direction as it would remove from politician’s hands the ability to manipulate the tax code to give donors goodies. We could sunset regulations.  As an example, every law on the books would sunset after 10 years unless it was renewed by Congress, and would face sunset every 10 years unless it was passed by 60% of each house. Then there’s zero based budgeting, where every department must justify its entire budget from scratch every two years.  At the same time, welfare and other wealth redistribution programs that were never part of the Constitution in the first place must be eliminated, perhaps phased out over a four year period.  And of course, not to be forgotten… term limits.

Implementing these steps would rein in government spending and regulation, but more importantly they would simultaneously unleash an economic juggernaut unlike anything the world has ever seen. 

But as Tytler suggested, that’s not how things usually work. In 1776 a group of extraordinary men risked their lives and livelihoods to give free men an opportunity to build a new nation based on individual liberty and limited government. But before they could do that they needed to inspire the colonies’ citizens, two thirds of whom either wanted to remain British or were undecided.  Against all odds they not only inspired a nation but led it to victory against the world’s most powerful empire. 

But then they did something even more amazing.  Building on the Declaration of Independence’s recognition that rights come from God, they wrote the world’s first constitution based on those individual rights and framed a limited government to allow men to exercise them. 

Today America needs a new group of would-be heroes, men willing to target the entrenched barnacles that have grown up around our Constitution and the leeches that feed off both. It will take wordsmiths like Payne and Jefferson, coalition builders like Madison and Marshall and a leader like Washington to have any chance at success. Let’s hope they emerge before Tytler’s warning comes true. 

The Mona Lisa and the Louvre demonstrate why when art imitates life, the west should pay attention.

Guest post by Martha Careful

A couple of months ago a “spontaneous strike erupted” among employees at the world’s most-visited museum, the Louvre. In protest over overwhelming crowds and chronic understaffing, employees refused to take their posts on Monday, forcing the iconic Paris museum to shut its doors. But the crowds and unmoving lines weren’t always this way, and to understand how bad they’ve gotten, one must understand how nice a visit to the Louvre used to be.

I first visited Paris 25 years ago. The Louvre was simply extraordinary, and even from the outside it is breathtaking. But on the inside, my personal favorite is the Marie de’ Medici cycle, a series of 24 giant paintings by Peter Paul Rubens chronicling the life of Marie de’ Medici, the widow of French King Henry IV. There is also Winged Victory, Venus de Milo, and paintings by everyone from Rembrandt to Jacques-Louis David to Raphael.

But, as everyone knows, the most famous and the most sought-after artwork in the Louvre is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. I remember walking into the room that held her. There were a lot of people, but it wasn’t crowded per se. You could easily walk around, and eventually you could get fairly close and try and examine her famous smile.

Since that first visit, I’ve been back to Paris many times, including a few visits to the Louvre itself. About a month ago I went once again, this time with my sister and brother-in-law. The first thing I have to say is that the throng of people in the museum was extraordinary. The line just to get through security was more than two hours!

Once inside, as the Mona Lisa was on the top of my sister’s must-see list, we headed there. The museum was as crowded as I’ve ever seen it, but you could mostly navigate around. But when we arrived at the room with da Vinci’s masterpiece, it was like something I’d never seen. It was simply insane. You were shuttled through ropes towards the masterpiece and then out on either side before actually getting within 10 feet of her. What’s worse, almost every single person was holding up their phones to take a picture or a selfie, so it was virtually impossible to get even a good glimpse of the presumed Italian beauty.

The experience was simply sad. The building I had experienced a quarter century before was the same. The works were largely the same. But the museum experience was … not. No, now there were so many people in the museum that the thing one remembers is not standing there pondering what was behind that enigmatic smile, but rather feeling like a steer in the middle of a cattle drive being prodded along with no focus on anything other than not getting trampled.

I’m no expert, but I don’t think that’s the goal of any museum. The goal of allowing ever more people in, while egalitarian, actually diminishes the experience for everyone.

So too with the West. By any measure, Western nations have built the most free, prosperous and advanced civilization in human history. Everything from cars to flight to nuclear power to advanced agriculture to television to computers to MRI machines and more, western culture has been almost exclusively behind the advances civilization has made over the last 500 years. The result has been the creation of nations that are largely more free, prosperous and functional than any in the world. Which is of course, why people want to come here.

But the problem is, like the Louvre and the Mona Lisa, too many people simply overwhelm the system and destroy the experience for everyone. But at least at the Louvre visitors buy tickets with money that is then used to maintain the museum and pay for its operations. Not so with nations.

Most of the illegal immigrants crossing rivers and seas and borders to move to the West are not paying to maintain them. In fact, not only do Western nations have to support them, but most bring with them values and cultures that are anathema to the very ideas that made Western civilization successful in the first place, i.e. Christianity, individual freedom, and capitalism.

It’s the equivalent of visitors being allowed to sneak in the back door of the Louvre then painting graffiti everywhere before starting barbecues in the rooms and using the artwork as kindling. Eventually, the museum would not only run out of masterpieces to burn, but once everything was gone, the building itself would be taken apart piece by piece and carted off. Thereafter, the progeny of the legitimate visitors and the vandals alike would be left standing by the River Seine looking at the ruins and wondering what used to stand there.

Would anyone say that such a scenario would be a good thing? That somehow the Louvre benefited from its new “undocumented” or “irregular” visitors? The answer is clearly “No.”

Just as is true on the small scale, it applies equally, if not more on a larger scale because while the Louvre’s works are generally displayed in the museum itself, the West has not only created a civilization that benefits itself, but it’s created one that has helped bring billions of people around the world out of abject poverty.

It’s understandable that Westerners have sympathy for the conditions others’ experience. The sad reality is that poverty, scarcity, war, and tyranny remain problems for many places, as they have for most of the world throughout human history. That’s troubling and most people who are relatively better off would feel some pull to try and help. But the question is, does allowing tens of millions of people from failed or war-torn or dysfunctional nations to enter the West make the world a better place? For those who escape to the West, it most certainly does. But for the West itself, not so much. Overwhelmed schools, hospitals, governments, communities, trillions of dollars of debt spending and increased rates of crime and social discord. Clearly not better.

The French national motto is “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” or Liberty, equality, fraternity. The West has taken the idea of equality and made it first among equals in terms of objectives over the last half century, and they’re well on their way of achieving it. But not in the way our leaders promised. No, rather than helping to bring freedom and prosperity to the rest of the world, they’re making the world equal by destroying those very things within their own countries, the outliers that escaped the history of man.

This should be obvious to anyone paying attention, but the elites, living in their gated communities, with their bodyguards and their Swiss bank accounts, never have to actually interact with the unwashed masses who live with the realities driven by their policies. No, they get private tours of the Louvre, fly on private jets, and enjoy private club memberships, all while making policies the consequences of which they never actually have to experience.

For anyone who loves art, the Louvre becoming a cattle drive is not a good thing. For anyone who loves liberty and prosperity, the West becoming a borderless society is a terrible thing.

Russiagate Was Treason; Will Trump Prove That No One Is Above the Law?

The esteemed Thomas Sowell, easily the most important economist of the last 50 years, turned 95 a couple of weeks ago. He has an extraordinary ability to take complex ideas about economics and culture and distill them down in prose that speaks to everyone from PhDs to those with a GED.

His ability and willingness to address issues from race to economics to history in compellingly readable books are unmatched. Indeed, his Cultures trilogy is one of the most robust weapons one might equip themselves with in any battle against the nonsensical wokeness that plagues America in the early 21st century.

As one would expect from a career spanning over six decades, Dr. Sowell has more than a few quotes that are perfect for our time. My favorite is easily:

“Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as racists.”

Another is:

“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”

As accurate as those quotes are, the following is perhaps the most insightful I’ve ever read:

“One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.”

While that quote seems like a reasonable observation in a normal political framework where politicians tell lies about one another and make promises they never intend to keep, today it’s something more. Its cutting accuracy seems to have been demonstrated every week since Donald Trump 47 took office, from USAID to intransigent bureaucrats to rogue judges. But now, finally, maybe, someone is starting to heed Dr. Sowell’s words.

I’m talking, of course, about the Russiagate hoax that Barack Obama and his national security team foisted on the American people. CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper essentially manipulated the Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] such that the impact of a Trump Russia collusion charge was devastating. And they had a bit of help from the beginning.

Essentially, they undermined the credibility of the incoming administration and saddled the country with two years of intrigue, corruption, and uncertainty in the form of an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. What’s more, Paul Ryan, the then-Speaker of the House who basically would have been just as happy with a President Hillary Clinton, would use the distraction to undermine Trump’s No. 1 issue: the border wall. He delayed the fight until after the 2018 midterms, which of course ended up being a bloodbath for the GOP.

Needless to say, Trump’s No. 1 issue was DOA when Congress reconvened.

By the time Mueller reluctantly admitted that there was nothing to the Russiagate hoax — six months after the midterms — the damage had already been done. Some coups take the form of military takeovers, others involve assassinations; this one involved a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Obama administration.

Things are not supposed to work like that. We have elections so the people can decide how they would like the nation to be governed. While there are always many people who are unhappy with the outcome, most Americans accept it because they believe in the system established by our Constitution.

John Adams said of that Constitution: "[It] was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." That is demonstrably true. It’s a piece of paper. Americans accept the outcomes of elections not because there are stormtroopers stationed on every corner ensuring acquiescence, but rather because they believe that, while flawed, our constitutional elections are a relatively honest and fair way to decide our paths forward.

Which brings us back to Sowell’s quote: “One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.” What the Obama cabal did to Donald Trump and the country was anything but moral. It was insidious, it was treacherous, and most of all, it was treasonous.

And now that the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has released documents and suggested they show that Barack Obama was behind it all, we’ll get an opportunity to see what the Trump administration is really made of. It’s one thing to tell the American people about the treason of a previous administration, but it’s something else altogether to do something about it. Will it be like the Jeffrey Epstein debacle, where Americans were told the hammer is coming, only to be later told there’s nothing there? Or will this be a ruthless, methodical, and intentional prosecution of the traitors who put the nation through so much?

I would suggest that at a moment in time when public trust in government is near all-time lows, if the Trump administration has any hope of being considered successful, it will take the latter course. For far too long, Americans have watched as elites like Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Barack Obama have not only gotten away with what many see as abject treason, but then they have the temerity to lecture us that “No one is above the law.”

Most Americans agree with that and believe criminals should pay for their deeds. The question is, does Donald Trump? Will he demonstrate to the American people that we are indeed a nation of laws and not men, or will he tell us once again that there’s no there there and that in modern America, the only people who face consequences for their actions are those who stand up to the swamp and the ruling elites?

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From Carthage To Berlin, A Modest Proposal

The First Punic War began in 264 BC, lasted 25 years, and was fought between the Romans and the Carthaginians, a civilization in what is today modern Tunisia. The Carthaginians were the most powerful and prosperous force in the Western Mediterranean and North Africa, while the Romans were a growing power on the Italian peninsula. After two decades, with both sides financially and demographically exhausted, Rome prevailed. Carthage ceded Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and paid substantial reparations.

The Second Punic War lasted from 218 to 201 BC. This is the war that saw Hannibal attack from the north, taking his war elephants across the Mediterranean, then down over the Alps, becoming the scourge of the Italian Peninsula for more than a decade. Across the Italian mainland, Hannibal would go from city to city, winning virtually every engagement, including Cannae, which almost ended Rome. Rome recovered, however, and pursued a cat-and-mouse strategy with the goal of tiring Hannibal’s army.

In one of history’s great mysteries, after a decade of winning almost every encounter and with virtual free rein over most of the Italian mainland, for some reason, Hannibal never attacked Rome to deliver the death blow that kept the Romans awake at night. Eventually, Publius Scipio, known to history as Scipio Africanus, would bring the war to Carthage itself, which would lead to Hannibal being recalled.

Unable to overcome the Roman cavalry advantage, Hannibal would be defeated, and Carthage would sue for peace. Again, Carthage would pay substantial reparations, concede wide swaths of land, and this time lose much of its autonomy.

The Third Punic War, begun in 149 BC, would be the shortest and the last. Using a Carthaginian response to an attack by the Numidian king and Roman ally Massinissa as a pretense, Rome declared war. Three years later, the city of Carthage lay in ruins as the Romans destroyed virtually every structure.

This would be final. Tired of having to fight the Carthaginians, Rome would obliterate them. They subsumed everything the Carthaginians had, declared it illegal to rebuild the city, and sold off its remaining population into slavery. As intended, Carthage would never again pose a problem for the Romans.

Fast forward two millennia, and you see echoes of one of the greatest conflicts in history. In 1914, the Germans launched Europe into World War I. For three years, the sides would largely battle over inches as soldiers looked at one another across the hundreds of miles of trenches dug on front lines that rarely moved. By 1918, the Germans were defeated and the allies—mainly France & the UK—imposed the draconian Treaty of Versailles, which included staggering reparations and strict military limitations.

Two decades later, Germany, once crippled by reparations and limitations on industry and its military, would launch a second world war. For the previous decade, it had slowly but consistently pushed the limits of what it was allowed to do under the Treaty of Versailles, and usually found little or no resistance. As such, Germany kept pushing until it was strong enough that the allies could do little to prevent its expansive designs. And thus began a true world war that would fully engulf half the planet, and it would take half a decade for victory to come.

Fast forward another eighty years, and the world once again finds itself in a crisis. A different crisis, to be sure, but one that threatens civilization every bit as much as the two world wars.

What crisis? Why the immigration crisis, of course. And why is it an existential threat to civilization? Because the West has been the primary driver of the advance of civilization around the world for the last 500 years.

The list of things Western civilization is responsible for that are central to the world today, while not endless, is very long. Flight, telephony, harnessing electricity, nuclear power, plastic, television, air conditioning, automobiles, the best of modern medicine, space travel, MRI machines, advanced agriculture, and much more, not the least of which was virtually ending slavery worldwide.

This Western civilization was built on Christianity, individual freedom, freedom of speech, religion, and the press, capitalism, liberal democracy, and relatively free markets. Other than that first foundation (Christianity), most of those elements developed into keystones over the last three centuries.

Today, all are at risk, and once again, the catalyst is Germany. In particular, German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In 2015, as the leader of what was then the most economically powerful nation in Europe, she essentially dictated that the continent open its borders to “migrants” from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. While ostensibly humanitarian, this policy was suicidal. Europe had been failing to integrate immigrants for decades, and now Merkel had opened the door to the entire Third World.

The consequences have been extraordinary. Thirty million, mostly undocumented male, military-aged “migrants” from the third world have inundated Europe over the last decade, overwhelming services, straining budgets, and committing crimes.

Today, across the West, there is a growing ideology that is anathema to free speech, freedom of religion, free press, women’s rights, and more. And it’s violently so. At the current rate of demographic change, native Europeans will be a minority in Europe soon after the middle of the century, and Western civilization will not be far behind, if it survives that long.

If it were just Angela Merkel, we might be able to give Germany a pass, but it’s not. The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen and the WEF’s Klaus Schwab are both also spawn of Germany and were Merkel’s fellow travelers when she was in power—and maintained her cancerous ideas once she left.

At the end of the day, from giving us Karl Marx to facilitating the Bolshevik revolution by returning Lenin to Russia, to beginning two world wars and shepherding the current collapse of the West, Germany has been the fount of more strife and more bloodshed over the last 200 years than any nation on the planet. And it’s not even close.

It’s likely too late for Europe to save itself, although it’s possible that Western civilization could survive the collapse of the place of its origin. Nonetheless, while the odds are against it, there is hope, but it will take drastic measures.

The West should do to Germany what the Romans did to Carthage. Not in the literal sense of razing it to the ground, of course. Instead, it should split it into a dozen or more autonomous nations. Separately, these tiny states would spend so much time trying to survive that they couldn’t lead the world off another cliff.

Sure, you can say this proposal is insane, and maybe it is, but so too is leading the charge to destroy the most successful civilization in history. In thrall to the climate change hoax, Germany recently shuttered the last of its nuclear power plants and is well on its way to collapsing its economy.

It’s a statecraft version of someone who wants to commit suicide and decides to take as many others with him as he can. The West should not allow it. We know what the collapse of Western civilization looks like: It’s somewhere between Afghanistan and Communist China. Both spell the end of freedom and prosperity. If the West wants to avoid that fate, the first step is to eliminate the führer / Pied Piper leading the way. Maybe then it will be possible to focus on saving what’s left...

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The Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Far Bigger Than Jeffrey Epstein

Last week President Trump took umbrage to a question about the Justice Department’s assertion that there are no Epstein tapes, there is no client list and there is nothing more to be released.  Yesterday he made some more inane comments on the subject.  The Twitterverse has been brutal towards AG Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and his #2 Dan Bongino.  Many people were saying they felt betrayed given the fact that before the election we were told that the files would be released and the criminals held to account.

The president has a point.  There is a lot going on in Washington. There are natural disasters with dozens dead across Texas.  There are continuing ICE protests across the country.  There are budgets that need to be attended to as well as rouge judges who need to be corralled and numerous conflicts outside our borders that need to be midwifed.  And all of that besides the basic blocking and tackling of running the government and trying to advance the administration’s rather ambitious agenda.  And taking the time to talk about some files from a guy who’s been dead for six years seems like it might distract from all of that.

But, you see, here’s the thing.  People want answers that seem logical, that provide rational explanations to obvious questions, that provide proof that the speculation is wrong.  This is particularly true when the people now saying there’s nothing there were the very people who promised answers, transparency and accountability would be coming when they won.  Well, they won, and we’re getting the same obfuscation.

The truth is, if this was just a matter of a senator cheating on his wife with a lobbyist for some industry he regulates, it wouldn’t really matter in the big picture. If this was some bureaucrat taking bribes to sign a service contract for some shipping company nobody would really care.  Sure, the first is an ethics question and the second is illegal, but beyond the participants themselves they aren’t very important in the grand scheme of things. 

The problem here is that this is all happening in an environment where Americans are coming to believe that no one is ever accountable for their actions.  We see city centers across the country imploding as stores and shops and hotels close because of the crime where hoodlums and thugs and drug addicts can basically take or destroy whatever they want with impunity. We see judges issue injunctions against the administration despite SCOTUS specifically ruling they can’t.  At the same time we have politicians, Antifa and activists undermining, and hindering and assaulting ICE agents who are trying to deport criminals, and the chances of them being held accountable for these crimes is almost nonexistent. Nobody seems accountable for anything.  It seems in 2025 in America it’s only the fools who actually obey the rules because everyone else seems to do whatever the hell they want. 

Now add to all of that the fact that we’ve just spent much of the last 15 years watching politicians and the politically connected do whatever the hell they wanted and never face a reckoning. Remember Lois Lerner targeting Tea Party groups? Prosecution?  Of course not.  How about Eric Holder being in Contempt of Congress?  Jail time? Nope.  Compare that to Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro.  How about Hillary wiping her computer or Hunter Biden breaking basically every law in the book and getting a pardon from his daddy. Or Lisa Page and Peter Strzok not only not getting charged, but getting millions of dollars from the Justice Department after conspiring to keep Donald Trump out of the White House? And the list goes on.  In modern America it seems as if no one is ever held accountable for their actions.

And so it is onto this backdrop the Trump administration tells us that 1) Jeffery Epstein killed himself, and 2) there was no client list and there are no videos. 

And when reporters ask about it the President gets indignant. 

The problem with that is the Epstein case no longer has much of anything to do with Jeffery Epstein, per se.  The guy’s dead and he’s not coming back. None of the crimes for which he was responsible can be undone. But Americans have heard rumors that rich and powerful men, from politicians to tech billionaires to justices to high priced lawyers and Hollywood stars were all clients of Epstein in his sex trade with minors, yet they remain free as birds. The one person who was clearly demonstrated to have a connection reportedly settled with his accuser for millions of dollars.

We were told Epstein had logs and tapes that chronicled all of it and used them to blackmail his powerful clients.  Indeed, in February AG Pam Bondi said she hoped to release a "lot of flight logs, a lot of names, a lot of information" on Epstein and said of the material "It's sitting on my desk right now to review." Then of course there’s the fact that Epstein’s “assistant” Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking of a minor as well as transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity. He himself was convicted of procuring underage prostitutes in 2008  Then the guy conveniently “committed suicide” in 2019 after being arrested on child trafficking charges, and the video of his cell was “accidentally erased” or the cameras “malfunctioned” or the video was inconclusive. His lawyers claimed that the particulars of his death were far more consistent with murder than suicide, and many Americans agreed.

And if all of that were not enough, Jeffery Epstein was once a money man for the CIA and Ghislaine Maxwell’s father was reported to be a Mossad agent and then killed by them. 

So here is where we are.  A high flying millionaire with connections to the CIA and possibly the Mossad and MI6, who owned an island in the Atlantic and who is reported to have used it as a honey trap for the rich and powerful ends up dead and suddenly the people who were telling us they were going to expose the entire thing when they were on the outside are now telling us that there’s nothing to tell now that they’re on the inside. 

The reality is the Jeffery Epstein case is far more important than Jeffery Epstein ever was. There is credible evidence that Epstein was an asset for one or more intelligence agencies who were very possibly blackmailing powerful men in government, finance and elsewhere and Americans feel like they have a right to know. There is a great deal of smoke around the Epstein case and Occam's razor suggests that it is likely to be exactly what it looks like: A honeypot operation set up by the CIA / Mossad / MI6 as a blackmail vehicle.

This case may not be as important as others on the President’s desk, but it’s a far bigger deal than I think he understands. He promised transparency and accountability.  We are getting neither and the more his administration obfuscates the less people are going to trust him on those bigger issues. Americans want to know we’re moving back towards no one being above the law.  This case exemplifies exactly that.  How the President chooses to handle it will tell us a lot. 

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

With Zohran Mamdani On The Cusp of Becoming Mayor, NYC Embraces Its Own Demise

As a child of the Cold War with the Soviets as America’s enemy, when the wall came down and the threat of Communism faded, I was under the illusion that the world had inexorably turned a corner and that history was on the march to bring freedom, Capitalism and prosperity to the whole world…

The events of September 11 exposed that illusion for what it really was, a delusion.  There were actually people out there who wanted to start a war with the United States.

With 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq Islam went from an almost nonexistent issue for most Americans to front and center.  Suddenly Islam and Muslims are in the news on a daily basis, doing unspeakable things to one another and others. 

Knowing nothing of this threat and wanting to know more I picked up books like Dore Gold’s Hatred’s Kingdom and Benny Morris’ Righteous Victims, and even a copy of the Koran, which honestly, I couldn’t get through. And I read a lot more online from guys like Steve Emerson, Robert Spencer and David Horowitz.

Over the following years you had everything from the Shoe Bomber to the Ft. Hood shooter to the San Bernardino attack and countless others.  And elsewhere in the west you had everything from the murder of Theo Van Gogh to the London 7/7 attacks, the Charlie Hebdo attacks and others.  It seemed like Islam was at war against the entire world.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the news, despite everything we were seeing with our own eyes, the blood, the carnage, the innocent victims, we were told that Islam wasn’t the problem, but rather the individual terrorists who just happened to be Muslim. “Islam isn’t violent” we were told despite the fact that most of the wars going on in the world involve Muslims and the Koran itself both directs and allows killing in Allah’s name.  Seemingly we see Muslim violence everywhere but we’re told that there’s no connection to Islam, despite the fact that most of the time the perpetrators actually invoke Allah’s name during their attacks.

So the west, seeking to demonstrate their lack of “Islamophobia” decides to open the floodgates to Muslims from around the world with blind expectation that they would integrate into their societies – despite decades of proof of the exact opposite. And that held for the United States as well. You visit places like Dearborn, Michigan or Minneapolis, Minnesota or increasingly even places as far afield as Texas and it sometimes feels like you’re not actually in America.    

But if one looks, it’s not hard to understand why.  For the west, for most of the last 500 years there have been two poles seeking to influence life, the state and the church. The result of that pull between the state and Christianity is a civilization with extraordinary scientific and economic advancement, unprecedented levels of individual freedom and the miraculous levels of prosperity that came with them.

But for Islam, there is no such separation.  There is one law and it covers everything.  Freedom of speech and religion don’t exist. Both are tolerated when the numbers of Muslims are small in a nation, but once the numbers grow, they’re strangled.  About 15 years ago Evangelist Peter Hammond demonstrated how this works:

1)         As long as the Muslim population remains around or under 2% in any given country, they will be for the most part be regarded as a peace-loving minority, and not as a threat to other citizens.

2)         At 2% to 5%, they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, often with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs.

3)         From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. For example, they will push for the introduction of halal food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarkets to feature halal on their shelves — along with threats for failure to comply.

4)         When Muslims approach 10% of the population, they tend to increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions.

There’s more, but you get the point. Couple that with the fact that Islam has basically been on a 1400 year quest to take over the world and one wonders why western leaders have not only opened up their countries to followers of an ideology that literally seeks their destruction, but funds them a well! 

Islam’s not a religion, it’s a supremist, expansionist and tyrannical ideology that is anathema to the very foundations of western civilization. Don’t take my word for it, take the words of Imams across the west.  They seek to use demographics to overwhelm natives politically then impose a caliphate.  Very soon western leaders are going to have to confront the fact that they have injected their polity with a virus that seeks to kill it. 

Europe successfully defended itself from the first Islamic invasion in 732 in behind the leadership of the French Duke Charles Martel at Tours.  It did so again in Vienna in 1683 following King John III Sobieski of Poland.  Those men were true leaders. Today, with few exceptions, the west is led by cowards and traitors to their civilizations, more interested in being feted by their fellow globalists than defend their heritage.  Indeed, today Europe isn’t even fighting for itself.  It’s invited the enemy into its bosom and allowed him to thrive.

Why?  White guilt, of course.  To the point that the west will literally sacrifice their daughters so as not to be called Islamophobic. Across the west we’ve seen Hammond’s observations play themselves out. Sweden, formerly one of the safest countries in the world is today overwhelmed with rapes and bombings, and native Swedes aren’t responsible. Is any western city better off for having invited in hundreds of thousands of Muslims?  London?  Paris?  Amsterdam? No. The story is the same across Europe, yet most “leaders” pretend otherwise. 

Winston Churchill, a son of Britain and America understood the threat.  While he admitted “Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities” he knew the score.  “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.”

And why does any of this matter? New York, of course. One need only to look at the dystopian nightmare that London has become to understand what lays ahead for New York. Once America’s greatest city, the disaster it already is has been driven by grievance, victimization and illegal immigration.  And now the guilt ridden college educated whites have essentially elected a terrorist supporting Communist as mayor. 

This does not bode well for freedom, prosperity, New York or for America. Freedom of speech and religion are literally written into our founding documents. They are fundamental to our nation.  Islam, tolerates neither.  At the end of the day, Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology that seeks to overthrow the west.  It’s well on its way in Europe.  We should not allow it to do so here.     

The Danger Of A Successful Society: Absurdity

I spend a lot of time talking about how western civilization – in particular as driven by the United States – is easily the greatest that mankind has yet created.  If one looks at it objectively, it’s not even close.  The list of things that are part of the everyday life of people around the world is basically a list of things that were invented or developed in the west.  From cars to planes to advanced agriculture to elevators to plastic and mobile phones and computers and DNA and much, much more. 

But every now and then something happens that makes me question that.  A couple of years ago I watched Matt Walsh’s “What is a Woman” where he spends most of the movie talking to leftists and doctors trying to get a definitive answer to the question of the title.  Most of the time he’s unsuccessful.  The most interesting part of the movie however didn’t take place at a feminist conference or in a studio, but rather in Africa when he was speaking with Maasai tribesmen.  When asked a simple question about whether a man can become a woman, he was quickly given a definitive “No”.  Straightforward, no debate, no hedging. Essentially 180 degrees from the insanity that Matt encountered in the United States.

This was brought back to me last week when reading about Justice Thomas’ destruction of the “expert class” in Skrmetti.  The Justice took direct aim at the notion that Americans must ignore their common sense, relinquish their lives and give up their Constitutional rights to those the elites have pronounced as “experts”.  As we all learned during COVID, with the Hunter Biden letter, and have been seeing with climate scares for decades, “experts” are rarely that, and often are simply shills for this or that monied interest. 

Justice Thomas stated clearly that the government can no longer use such “experts” to manipulate and control the lives of citizens.  Although the specific case had to do with the butchering or harming confused or coerced minors, it applies everywhere else as well.

Which is a very good thing. Because there’s a danger in success – as in a successful civilization.  It breeds complacency, entitlement and most importantly, the loss of a functional memory of how things work and how they became successful in the first place… which leads to an over reliance on “experts”. 

I frequently mention Cyrus McCormick as the man most responsible for the rapid advance of western civilization.  Of course people can argue that others, like Isaac Newton, Jethro Tull, James Watt, J.D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford or any number of others could wear that badge.  I choose to award it to McCormick because he almost single handedly helped 85% of Americans and substantial numbers of others around the world, escape the farm.  Not that there’s anything wrong with farming, obviously, but because of the efficiencies McCormick brought about, 95% of Americans work at something other than farming while in his day that number was in the mid-teens.

So basically he freed up 80% of the nation to go out and be everything from baseball players to scientists to doctors to entrepreneurs to inventors to, sadly, social media “influencers”.  It’s basically division of labor on steroids, where people focus on what they want to do, are good at, or can make a living at, while paying others do the things they can’t or don’t want to do.

That works well when the choices of options are shoemaker, baker, blacksmith, farmer, soldier, etc., i.e. things society actually needs.  It even works when options include things that society wants, like literature or sport or art.  Baseball may not be as critical to the continuation of society as say, electricity generation or infrastructure maintenance, but there’s a demand and people are willing to work for money to pay for it out of their own pockets.

Where it breaks down is when options include things that no one actually wants or needs, yet they get produced nonetheless, or get produced in quantities that make no sense. Things like gender studies graduates, therapists and lawyers. Shakespeare talked about lawyers (as a bulwark against the masses) so we don’t need to.

The fact that gender studies even exist in the first place tells you how far America has moved from the fundamentals of a successful society.  In a normal, functioning universe such things wouldn’t even exist.  While one can at least make an argument that being gay is at least theoretically natural – if still deviant – a universe where men are women, women are men and the difference between the two is “fluid” is a fiction created by people who have too much time on their hands and no connection to how the real world functions.  We’ve strayed so far from the time when 85% of the people worked on farms and did things that actually helped society that we now have people who create an illusion and then set about trying to force society to accept it as normal. 

Another example of this a disconnect between actual demand and supply is therapists. Before the late 19^th century therapists didn’t exist. (Well, they sort of did, but they were your friends.) Today tens of millions of Americans go to “therapists”, mostly women, and white women at that.   Essentially 40% of white women receive mental health treatment in the form of anti-depressants and or therapy.  If you look deeper you’ll see that the numbers skew towards college educated, as in liberal, white women.  Has our ostensibly successful society somehow become so bad that fully 40% of the women of the majority population are now sufficiently damaged that they need mental health treatment? Or are they suffering from a mass psychosis of grievance and guilt created by people being too prosperous and having too much time and money on their hands?  They say that idleness is the devil’s workshop and there is perhaps no better example of the truth than that. While there are certainly people who are in need of mental help, the fact that 40% of any ostensibly normal demographic needs either anti-depressants or therapy is absurd. 

But that’s what happens when society veers so far from the fundamentals of society and common sense that many see a future in pursuing nonsensical fields like gender studies, political science (my major…) and countless others where there is no real demand in society beyond that generated by government fiat. More importantly, without the individual feeling of accomplishment that goes with doing something that actually benefits society, not the least of which is raising good children, people create the absurd in order to fill the void, and then demand society congratulate them for their “courage”.   

Thankfully, we may slowly be coming to the point where the larger society recognizes that absurdity is no longer acceptable, or worse, compelled.  Justice Thomas and Matt Walsh are actually addressing the same thing. Common sense should have to be discarded just because “experts” say it must.

The world is a challenging place with dangers of all sorts around every corner, the sooner America gets back to being a place ruled by common sense rather than absurdity, the better we will be prepared to deal with them…