Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Baby Boomers, or thereabout... The Violent Spawn Of The Greatest Generation

Politics is a dirty business. It always has been. But today, politics is sometimes too often synonymous with violence.

While there were many catalysts that resulted in violence being seen as a “legitimate” form of political discourse, one stands out: Columbia University, 1968. That year, a combination of black and anti-war activists took over a building on the campus of New York’s premier university. They demanded that Columbia cancel a proposed nearby gymnasium that was claimed to be racist and end its relationship with a Department of Defense-affiliated think tank.

The NYPD eventually ejected the activists after a series of violent clashes. In a sane world, every one of those students would have been expelled, barred from campus, and sued for damages. But that’s not what happened.

No, the administration acquiesced to virtually every demand, and there were very few consequences. Suddenly, on TVs across America, activists were learning the lesson that violent takeovers can yield good results with minimal consequences, if any, even at one of the nation’s leading universities. The message having been received, it was suddenly gloves off for activists across the country. YaleHowardBrown, and others followed. The next year saw more of the same at Harvard and U Penn, too.

These students, these radicals, including terrorists, did not reflect most American people’s opinion. In that year’s election, the Democrat candidate, who was far more acceptable to the American people than the left’s activist wing, could still secure only 13 states and 42% of the popular vote. Four years later, Nixon would be reelected by a 49 to 1 Electoral College landslide. Not only that, but between 1968 and 1988, Democrats would win only one out of 6 elections and would lose 49 states twice.

In 1968 and many years after, the radicals in the Democrat party wouldn’t reflect majority opinion, but the die was cast. The lesson was learned: Violence wins. And so it grew.

The radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) launched violent protests against their closest mainstream ally, the Democrats, during the 1968 DNC convention in Chicago. The next year, terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn would launch the Weather Underground, which would bomb the US Capitol two years later. The pace accelerated: “During an eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.” That violence wasn’t coming from conservatives.

Over time, those Baby Boomers, the spoiled spawn of the Greatest Generation, would basically turn against and undermine everything their parents fought for. They would go on to become teachers and professors and writers and journalists, taking the lessons and the perspectives from 1968 with them. Nothing exemplifies this more than the fact that Communist Howard Zinn’s treacherous A People’s History of the United States became the textbook of choice for tens of thousands of teachers across the country.

It would take a while, but by the early 1990s, the radicals from ’68 were firmly in control of almost every educational and cultural institution in America. From schools and universities to NGOs and newsrooms, the radicals were in a position to brainwash America’s youth with their leftist poison. And they did.

America began to see the full fruit of the radicals’ poison during the Bush years, when he was regularly called a Nazi and compared to Hitler. In 2008, the radicals finally came into their own with the election of their fellow traveler, Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama launched his political career in the home of terrorists Ayers and Dohrn.

Under Obama, the racial divide would grow, the gay lobby would begin its evolution into the trans nightmare we have today, and the violent rhetoric against anyone who opposed the left would intensify. Obama would use the government apparatus, which was now fully stocked by acolytes of those 1960s radicals, to target conservatives. Simultaneously, the justice apparatus across the country—by design, typically one of the least radical elements of the government structure—from District Attorneys to parole boards to judges and justices, embraced the leftist victimization mentality where virtually no transgression, including violence, should be punished, unless the perpetrator is from an unapproved group.

What’s more, the universities had become indoctrination centers producing millions of illiberal and sometimes violent graduates taking to the streets in support of every leftist cause. They were found in Antifa, in BLM, in trans groups, in pro-illegal immigrant groups, and antisemitic groups from both the Islamic and progressive perspectives.

All of this culminated during the era of Donald Trump. His first term was bookended by violence. In January 2017, Washington went up in flames upon his inauguration, and in the summer of 2020, cities and towns around the country were engulfed in flames and violence as the death of George Floyd sparked the left’s decades-long propaganda kindling of white supremacy and institutional racism. Then, during the Biden administration, violent antisemitic protests were allowed to blossom on campuses across the country.

Which brings us to today. Charlie Kirk’s assassination has sparked discussions about the absurd notion of murder being a legitimate form of political interaction. Where America once was a place where ideas were debated and using violence to achieve political ends was fringe at best, today we have something different.

In a recent survey questioning the legitimacy of assassinating Donald Trump for political reasons, fully 55% of left-leaning respondents suggested that it was “somewhat justified.” The same survey showed similar support for killing Elon Musk, burning down Tesla dealerships, and worshipping Luigi Mangione.

These are the people who proffer the age-old hypothetical “Would you go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby to save 20 million lives” before calling Trump or his supporters Nazis and nodding at you knowingly. They are the same people who claim that saying men can’t have babies is violence.

That is insane. That fully a quarter of the American population thinks that killing a political rival might be a legitimate tactic, actual violence, is unbelievable...but sadly believable at the same time.

Now mix that mentality with a deluge of Democrat politicians and leftist podcasters saying that people who refuse to address a dude as Ma’am are Nazis, that those who support Christian values are bigots, and that those who want to treat everyone equally are racists, and you see what America has become.

Six decades on, we’re living the consequences of the cowardice and incompetence of the Columbia administration. Sadly, we cannot go back in time and give them either spines or brains, but we can do the next best thing.

The government—at both the federal and state level—can begin to force consequences on those who think that violence, political or otherwise, is an acceptable form of civic interaction. From the street crime in DC to the Antifa / Trantifa / antisemitic threats and riots across the country to the leftists who fund both, violence should be met with overwhelming force, and those responsible should be held accountable and jailed for significant periods.

Yes, the prison population will grow in the short term, but over the long term, the Republic will be far healthier for everyone. Charlie Kirk was exactly the kind of man our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution. If America doesn’t get back to where respectful dialogue is the accepted currency of exchange, things could go very badly, very quickly.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

 

Tuesday, September 23, 2025

Charlie Kirk’s Death And America Regaining Its Footing On The Righteous Path

I saw Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow speak at his memorial on Sunday.  She was magnificent.  She promised to keep Charlie’s mission going.  I pray that she is able to.  But those are some big shoes to fill…

One never knows for sure beforehand, but I think Charlie Kirk’s assassination may be something of a tipping point in American politics and culture, or, at a minimum, an inflection point. Why? Because Charlie wasn’t a radical, he wasn’t a firebrand, he wasn’t a bomb thrower… No, Charlie was—in a relative sense—a lamb. And now, that lamb has been slaughtered.

While Charlie was a brilliant speaker, his true genius was his willingness to engage almost anyone and do so on their terms, using their own words. We’ve all seen videos of Charlie sitting at a table or standing on a podium at some random college, engaging with students or activists. Typically, Charlie would allow the students to ask questions or make an argument and then respond accordingly. Usually quite brilliantly, always politely.

In all honesty, I sometimes felt bad for his interlocutors, who were often young and brainwashed and had to stand and have their arguments dismantled in front of their peers. While it may have done them some good in the long run, for that moment, it almost certainly didn’t feel like it.

Charlie was easily one of the bravest men on America’s political and cultural battlefield. Why? Because he made it his stock in trade regularly to go into the lion’s den, armed only with a microphone and a brilliant mind for defense. And when I say lion’s den, I mean academia, where the left has been minting young communists for half a century.

When I was in college in the ’80s and ’90s, when a sliver of normalcy still remained and the cancer of politics had not infected every element of life, there was no one doing what Charlie was doing. Thirty years later, when the left had transformed every aspect of American life, from sports to media to scouting to Halloween—and, especially, education—into a political minefield, Charlie went in and engaged with students and professors on their home turf. He usually came away the victor. He did so utilizing a combination of facts and the Socratic method that left the person with whom he was engaging wondering what had just happened, and often humbled.

Charlie was extraordinarily effective, both in engaging with the public and also, and perhaps more importantly, motivating young people on campuses across the country to follow his lead, to stand up and engage in debate from a conservative, patriotic, Christian perspective, something that had largely been erased from most universities by the early part of the 21st century.

The vehicle for Charlie’s evangelism of conservative principles was Turning Point USA, an organization he co-founded in 2012 at the age of eighteen. A little over a decade later, TPUSA is one of the most important organizations in the American political landscape, having over 800 college and university chapters across the country and running programs and summit events every year.

Over that time, Charlie and TPUSA have been responsible for inspiring millions of young people to throw off the radical leftist straitjackets that academia sought to keep them in. Indeed, looking at the shift of young people, particularly young men, to the right, it’s clear that he was one of the movement’s most important catalysts in propelling Donald Trump back to the White House in 2024.

Charlie Kirk was attractive, engaging, effective, and brave. And the left killed him for it because violence is all that the left has to offer. As Charlie demonstrated every time he took to a podium to speak or a table to debate, words, eloquently delivered, with passion and supported by facts, can be a powerful weapon in the battle of ideas and policy. The left had no good answer to Charlie. Sure, they have passion, and they sometimes have eloquence, but they rarely have facts or reality on their side, and even less often, common sense.

For the left, because Charlie was such a successful shepherd of young men and women, he had to be eliminated.

Whether it’s rioting and burning down cities across the country, using mob tactics to intimidate speakers and politicians, or literally killing their opponents, the left in America has lost its battle for the mind of the American man...and woman. In the world of ideas, the left has lost the debate and has nothing left to offer but violence, and the killing of Charlie Kirk is the ultimate example of exactly that.

Which is why the left might have finally gone too far. It’s not like they took out some fire-breathing conservative pugilist who used invective and intimidation as his tools of the trade. No, they took out a man who was polite, respectful, and fundamentally decent. And despite the left’s attempts to paint him as a radical purveyor of hate, it is clear to any objective observer that he was anything but.

They say that the margins drive politics, and that the hardcore of both sides are largely unmovable in the short term, leaving the 10%-15% in the middle as the targets of intense political messaging. Most of those people are persuadable, although what persuades them is sometimes unknown. But what is known is that the assassination of a decent family man, who welcomed polite discussions with everyone, gets people’s attention, particularly when it’s in full color video, in gruesome detail. Given that it comes on the heels of another vicious, bloody murder of an innocent at the hands of a man who was a product of a leftist-controlled criminal justice system, it will likely make many of those perennial fence sitters recognize that one side is about violence and the other about ideas.

Most Americans don’t want violence to be the driving force in their politics any more than they want it in their lives. President Trump will never convince people who want to allow murderers to walk among innocents to support stronger penalties for violent offenders—but then he doesn’t have to. Charlie’s murder will likely have a sufficient impact that a significant majority of Americans will recognize that violence cannot be allowed to become the coin of the realm.

When leftist violence is allowed to percolate, everyone loses, everywhere, all the time. That was true in the Soviet Union, in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, and is true today in Venezuela. Few Americans, other than those associated with Antifa, BLM, and Bluesky, want to see blood in the streets, political or otherwise. The shock of Charlie Kirk’s murder just might be the catalyst that lets America regain her footing on the righteous path that’s been blockaded by the violent thugs on the left.

That would be a fitting legacy for a man who spent most of his life trying to get Americans to recognize, appreciate, and protect the gifts that our Founding Fathers left us.


Thursday, September 11, 2025

The West is playing an international game of RISK with the Muslim world

In the boardgame RISK the goal is world domination.  You achieve that by battling other players within and across continents. The best strategy is to take and hold Australia.  Once secured you can build up your troops while defending the single point of access to keep your opponents at bay then attack in a methodical style and slowly expand.

This strategy doesn’t always work, but the notion of finding an easily defendable base where you can husband resources and use it as a launching pad to attack others is sound. 

We’re actually seeing that strategy play itself in real life competition that is anything but a game. 

I’m talking of course about Islam.

Islam began in second half of the 6th century in what is now Saudi Arabia.  By the time Muhammad died in 632 the peninsula was largely Muslim.  Over the next century Islam would grow rapidly, sweeping across north Africa, through Spain and into France.

In 732 Islam would meet its match in the person of Charles Martel, the de facto leader of the Franks. The Umayyad Caliphate had used its bases in North Africa and later Spain to advance on what is today France, behind the leadership of Abd Al-Rahman. Martel would appeal to the Pope for the funds necessary to defend Christendom.

When the forces met near Tours, the heavily outnumbered Frankish forces were victorious and at the end of the day the Muslim threat to Christendom was over.

While there would be other battles as the Caliphate retreated from France, Muslim control in western Europe would be limited to Iberia for the next 800 years where it would remain in slow decline until its final ouster from Granada in 1492.

Across the Mediterranean at about that same time the Ottomans conquered the unconquerable city, Constantinople, in 1453 and by 1653 would reach the gates of Vienna. 

By that point the Ottomans had control over much of south eastern Europe stretching from Greece up to central Hungary and east to what is now Ukraine. The Ottoman’s very much employed the Australia strategy, bringing resources from across its well defended Empire up through Istanbul and deployed them throughout the Balkans in preparation to support the siege.  Their efforts would be thwarted by Polish king John III Sobieski.

Much like the Battle of Tours, the assault on Vienna was seen as a threat to Christendom and would represent the high water mark of Muslim incursion into Europe.  The following centuries would see the Ottoman Empire slowly retreat until its ultimate demise in the early 20th century.

Not that the Muslim world was monolithic, because it wasn’t. There were often competing caliphates and competition within caliphates, but the Islamic world never experienced anything resembling the kind of balkanization that characterized Christian Europe for most of its post Roman history. Nor was Europe the only area that Islam sought to conquer, at points controlling all of India and much of western China and stretching south to Indonesia.

Today we live in a different world where caliphates in the traditional sense no longer exist. Instead of having one or multiple caliphates controlling large empires of Muslim lands, today there are over 50 countries where Muslims rule.

But just because we live in a different world doesn’t mean we’re living in a different world.  Just as Muhammad and his successors sought to expand Islam to the ends of the earth, today we have a similar push, albeit from a far more grassroots source. 

The leaders of most Muslim countries today are simply trying to survive the chaos of their 3rd world dystopias rather than trying to conquer the world in the traditional sense.  Sure, there are a few Muslim nations who have used the money from oil to climb into the relatively developed world, or create a Potemkin façade of such, but they’re a minority.  No, most are like Pakistan or Mali and often have challenges just keeping the lights on and their populations fed.

There are however hundreds of Islamic groups and terrorist organizations who seek to conquer the world and bring the entire planet (particularly western civilization) into a caliphate. Like in the game RISK, they depend on Muslim countries for support and sending new recruits. They are achieving results sultans could only have dreamed of as western countries welcome millions of Muslims. Western leaders always promise citizens the immigrants would assimilate and become productive members of their new nations.

But that didn’t happen. Muslims mostly congregated in Muslim areas, maintained their traditions, flew flags of their former countries and rallied to the cause of terrorist organizations. Indeed, many maintain allegiance to Islam rather than their adopted countries and commit a disproportionate amount of crime too.  Often natives are being pressured into changing the culture to accommodate them.  

What’s the difference between 732, 1653 and 2025?  Simple. In the former Christians understood they were in a battle for their very survival and were willing to fight to defend their way of life against powers that wanted to destroy it. They were more than just nominally Christian, they were actual Christians with faith, confidence and a belief that the civilization built by Christianity deserved to be defended. 

Today, none of those things apply.  Western civilization is largely ruled by globalists who believe the west is uniquely stained by the evils of slavery and colonization and contrition requires welcoming everyone, regardless of the country or culture from which they come. What’s worse, they tax their citizens to pay to support these newly arrived immigrants.  And citizens who complain because they liked their country the way it was are labeled far right racists and fascists and sometimes jailed.  But perhaps the single biggest difference is that western leftists and leaders today take for granted the world they were bequeathed.  They assume that because they enjoy freedom, prosperity, electricity, running water, etc. that they will naturally be there forever.  They have no understanding of history and have no interest in how successful civilizations are built, nor sustained.

The outcome of all of this will be that numerous western nations, particularly Europe, will be majority Muslim within a century.  But the reality is, the west will be part of the caliphate long before the end of this century. The reason the British could control India, a nation of 200 million people, with less than 100,000 troops (less than 1/10th of 1% of the population) was because the cooperation of millions of Indians in the army and the bureaucracy. 

Muslims already make up far more than that in Europe and it doesn’t take much for the impact to be felt, particularly with pandering politicians.

Islam is not compatible with western civilization. Freedom of speech, religion and thought are core to western civilization. Islam opposes all of them. But it doesn’t matter as long as the west’s globalist leaders act as if their constituents are cogs in a machine who can be replaced by anyone from anywhere, regardless of their culture.  In RISK, as in life, it’s the last one standing who wins. Unless something changes, western civilization will find itself swallowed up in a caliphate of its own making, and freedom, prosperity and actual civilization will be but distant memories.  

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Monday, September 8, 2025

Black America: Where the Tragedy of the Commons meets the Overton Window

The black community’s disengagement from ordinary acts of civic responsibility is harming America as a whole, but mostly, it’s harming blacks. To save their communities, blacks need to reengage with what was once normative polite conduct across American society. To appreciate this point, consider the tales told by abandoned shopping carts and litter.

Shopping carts were invented in Oklahoma in 1937 and changed the face of retailing. No longer were customers limited to what they could carry around the store, they could now leisurely stroll the store not having to worry about how much they could fit in their cloth bag or how tired their arms might grow.  Today we’re largely indifferent about carts because the idea of them is so ingrained in our shopping experience that we can’t imagine a time when they didn’t exist.

As functional as carts are for the shopping experience however, there’s a different function that they serve that is equally important, but in a completely different context. 

Shopping carts serve as a great proxy for observing conscientiousness. What one does with a shopping cart tells a lot about a person. Most stores that have shopping carts have a bin for you to return them so you don’t have to go all the way back to the actual store. But here’s the thing about shopping carts. You get no compensation for returning them. Nor do you (normally) suffer any consequences for not returning them. The only people impacted by your returning the cart to the bin are others. Returning it is just the right thing to do.

As such, most people return their carts to the bins as one would expect a normal person to do. But others simply leave them in the next spot or put them on the curb next to their car.  There are consequences of such behavior of course, but rarely for the person who left the cart.  The cart can take up a space so that someone else has to get out of their car and move it before they can park.  It can start rolling in the parking lot and hit a car or a person.  Employees have to go around and collect those stray carts and return them to the bin or the store.

Another such measure is littering.  Littering is one more of those little things where the cost of doing the right thing is usually minor, but the consequences for the individual not doing so are generally nonexistent. Litter does of course have negative consequences on the community however, from the cost of pickup to aesthetics to clogging up drains and polluting waters. 

Whether it’s leaving a shopping cart in the middle of a parking lot or throwing trash on the street, both are among the most basic measures one can have of citizenship.  Usually no one is harmed and doing what’s right typically takes but a few seconds of the person’s time.

It’s instructive when one notices that people aren’t taking those few seconds to do the right thing.  It’s like the old saying, “If you want to know someone’s character, watch how they treat people who can do nothing for them.”  We’ve all seen people who are rude to waiters or store clerks, and usually they’re self-centered assholes. Same thing with shopping carts and litter.

At the end of the day, across the country you see communities covered in litter and too many shopping carts that were not only not returned to the bin, but were outright stolen.  Here’s the thing: Shopping carts and litter are just the most benign signs of conscientiousness & citizenship.  The lack of such betrays itself in far more malignant ways as well, and we’re seeing that across the country particularly in videos. Spirit Airlines airport counters. Six Flags parks. Carnival Cruise line ships. Seemingly every restaurant chain in America. Malls. Schools. Subways. And of course, street takeovers. This bad behavior seems to be everywhere, and one segment of society is perpetuating most of it: Blacks. 

It appears to be the case that for a very large segment of black America the ideas of conscientiousness and good citizenship are simply nonexistent. 

This might sound like a peripheral issue, but in reality it’s anything but. It’s what’s called the Tragedy of the Commons, individuals acting in selfish ways that harm society as a whole. 

The perfect example of this is when individuals or packs of looters steal from stores. When it becomes expensive enough, either through having to implement security measures or replace damaged property or buying new inventory, eventually the stores close.  The result is that citizens of the community have fewer shopping options available to them.  Then, when store fronts remain vacant they become magnets for graffiti and vandalism.  More vacant properties scare off potential customers, attract the homeless, drug addicts and squatters, and eventually even more crime.  The final outcome usually being the driving down of property values, tax revenues and finally decay. 

This tragedy, which used to be largely confined to black or urban neighborhoods is today spreading into the suburbs and the rest of the country.  The consequence of this problem, and the fact that most of it is being done by blacks is shredding of civic order and, frankly, increasing the division of races. The meme Black Fatigue has taken hold for a reason and seems to be almost ubiquitous. Black sportscaster and commentator Jason Whitlock says of it:  “It is the antithesis, it is the yin to the yang of Black Lives Matter. It’s white people boldly expressing their fatigue with black people…This was inevitable.”  He’s right. 

As this anti-social behavior expands, it hits companies that are perceived to have significant black clienteles. Carnival Cruise lines has come under fire because recent rule changes that are said to target black customers, Spirit Airways has seen its stock collapse 85% in 5 years and Six Flags recently implemented chaperone requirements due to problems with “teens”, resulting in a decline in attendance and a $100 million loss. These companies are trying to survive and their black customers are making it difficult. 

But of course this uncivilized behavior shows signs closer to home as well. It’s results in schools in black neighborhoods where kids can neither read nor write which in turn results in half of black high school graduates being functionally illiterate, not to mention the third world level of murder and violence among blacks, regardless of their economic status. 

The bottom line is, a civilized society requires that citizens respect a certain level of behavior and decorum, and we’re seeing too many black Americans ignoring that basic responsibility.  When people on the edge of the Overton Window of the culture wars start saying things that significant numbers of people agree with, that suggests a tipping point might be near. If black Americans want to enjoy the full spectrum of the gifts of freedom America has to offer, they’re going to have to, both individually and en masse, recognize that violence, anti-social behavior and the trashing of communities, both literally and figuratively, will have to stop. In something of the opposite of the Tragedy of the Commons, by exhibiting better behavior, blacks will not only benefit themselves, but they will help improve the wider community as well. 

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Friday, September 5, 2025

A Counterintuitive Perspective on Deportations

Since Donald Trump has begun the push to deport illegal aliens, we’ve seen stories about families being broken up, and people losing their homes or being deported without having been arrested for crimes other than illegal entry. The stories are framed sympathetically to wring American hearts, but they don’t change the debate because you can’t run a country based on emotional anecdotal narratives.

Still, that’s exactly what Democrats want the country to do. They’re suggesting that most of the 40 million illegal aliens they invited into the country over the last quarter century are doctors, engineers, or saints, and, therefore, that each one must be given full due process hearings before being sent home.

It’s no doubt true that of the people being deported, there are some, perhaps many, who are fine upstanding members of their communities. But the problem is, it’s literally impossible to vet 40 million people with the immigration infrastructure we have now, or even one ten times as large. And that’s even more true when ICE has to search for and arrest most of them and literally battle supporters while doing so.

The only real solution to America’s immigration problem is to encourage as many as illegals as possible to return home and to arrest and deport those who don’t.

But how do you get them to self-deport? Here are some suggestions:

1.    Tax remittances at 50% or more.

2.    Eliminate all government funding for everything other than truly emergency medical care. After that care is rendered, deport them.

3.    Guarantee jail time for any employer caught employing illegals.

4.    Cut federal dollars going to any sanctuary city or state. Jail any government official who uses his / her office to assist illegals evade deportation.

5.    Prosecute any NGO or “church” seeking to assist illegals to evade deportation.

6.    Cut federal dollars to any state that uses public funds to support illegal. California, for example, allows illegals to participate in the state’s Medicaid program.

7.    Eliminate banks’ ability to give mortgage or auto loans to illegals.

These steps may sound draconian, but the reality is that our country is in the midst of a crisis, and illegals are a big part of it.

The United States is $37 trillion in debt. Housing is unaffordable because illegal aliens occupy millions of homes and apartments. Hospitals are overwhelmed with illegals, most of whom can’t or don’t pay for the care they receive, leaving the hospitals to eat the costs or pass them on to paying patients.

And of course, the hotel rooms, food, and phones that cities across the country are providing for the swarms of illegals that have shown up on their doorsteps cause cuts in critical local services for citizens. A flood of illegal aliens also lowers wages for Americans because of the competition from illegal labor and the overcapacity schools that have to educate their often non-English speaking children.

Given this crisis, the government simply doesn’t have the ability to take the time to interview each illegal, along with his or her friends, family, and lawyers, before deciding whether to send them back or not. As such, the goal should be to deport every single illegal. Once they’re in their home countries, they can be processed for return to America based on what’s good for America. Most will still not be allowed to return, but nations have to make choices, and the good of their citizens should come first.

The leftists and NGOs in the Illegals Industrial Complex™ tell us these illegals only want to work hard and make a better life for themselves. Maybe, but here’s the thing these hypocrites never bother to tell you: Most can work hard and make a better life for themselves in their own countries.

Imagine that the 16 million illegal Mexicans in the United States go back to Mexico with years or decades of experience gained while working in the United States. That’s 10% of the population, all of whom would bring with them a wide variety of work experiences and skills that they could put to work helping to improve Mexico, a nation with an embarrassment of natural resources. Now imagine the same thing in Haiti, Nigeria, Colombia, and the rest of the countries from which illegals have come to the United States.

In reality, deporting the tens of millions of illegals in the country is probably the single best foreign aid program the United States could ever embark on. We already know that USAID was a colossal grift by NGOs where the funds rarely reached the intended recipients, that “aid” from the West rarely generates the promised results, and that even when Westerners build things in poverty-stricken areas they sometimes find themselves accused of perpetuating stereotypes. Deportations would be a far better way to bring American business knowledge and work skills to a struggling country than most of what we’ve been doing for years.

Add to that the fact that the people who actually made it to the United States were likely some of the most motivated and resourceful people in their home countries to begin with, and one realizes that deportations would reverse a trend of draining struggling countries of the very people best equipped to help them improve. Indeed, that “brain drain” of the most motivated people only functions to widen the gap between the developed and developing world by siphoning off those most likely to change the system in their home countries. Deportations would reverse that trend.

None of this would be easy, of course. Additionally, just because someone with skills or work experience returns to a dysfunctional country doesn’t mean that they can fix everything—but they have a much better opportunity to help their homeland (the ones they love so much they keep waving those flags) when they are in the country than they do from the United States.

The United States has spent trillions of dollars over the last half century trying to improve the conditions of much of the third world, usually with abysmal results. In 2025, we cannot continue to waste money like that anymore.

Donald Trump’s deportation push creates an opportunity to do something that counterintuitively can benefit both the United States and the countries from which the illegals came. It’s a policy that should animate all Americans.

But history tells us that there are a legion of grifters in the Illegals Industrial Complex™ who will stand in the way because they care more about their pocketbooks and power than they do about the country or the countries from which the illegals came, or often the illegals themselves… Trump should not allow them to derail him.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Tuesday, September 2, 2025

Maybe what we need in America is a dictator, or maybe a few of them...

The word “dictator” gets a bad rap. It’s kind of easy to understand why, given some of the people who fall under that title. Stalin was a dictator, as were Mao, Hitler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Hugo Chavez, and Robert Mugabe, among others. Well over 100 million people lost their lives because of those guys over the last century, so there’s that.

Dictators take power, sometimes legally, sometimes illegally and then refuse to give it up. They rule by force of violence or the threat of such, and citizens can rarely do anything to protect themselves.

But that’s today. The original Roman dictators were different, and not like Julius Caesar, perhaps the most famous dictator in history. Caesar took power and basically intended to keep it for life, and that’s the model most dictators through history have taken.

But that’s not how the dictatorship was originally supposed to work. According to Wikipedia, in the early days of the Roman Republic,

"The dictatorship seems to have been conceived as a way to bypass normal Roman politics and create a short-term magistrate with special powers, serving to defend the Republic in war, or otherwise to cow internal civil unrest, especially if such unrest imperiled the conduct of war."

In other words, a dictator was needed when the normal bureaucracy failed to fix a problem. A dictator’s power was not unlimited, although for the specific purpose for which he was appointed, it was close.

Additionally, the appointment lasted only until the problem to be addressed was actually solved. In practice, a dictator’s term generally lasted six months or less, and, once completed, he would return to his previous position or, as Cincinnatus famously did, to retirement. (Notably, George Washington was hailed as a “New Cincinnatus” for his willingness to leave power after two terms.)

But here is the most important thing: A dictator never stopped being accountable for his actions. While dictators were in office they were virtually untouchable, but once their term expired they could be charged for any unlawful conduct they engaged in during that period. That was rare, however, and there is debate today as to whether a dictator being charged for acts during office was an actual rule.

But what does any of that have to do with America in 2025? Potentially a lot, actually.

We see stories across the country (and frankly throughout the West) almost every day of violent criminals being let out of jail on bond, on laughably low bonds, or sometimes without bond at all. Other times, we hear about hardened criminals being let out of prison on parole only to go right back to crime. And of course, we hear about judges who sentence violent criminals to infuriatingly short sentences.

Across the country, we have leftist District Attorneys and prosecutors who regularly see fit to put the desires of criminals above those of the communities they are sworn to defend. Our system is failing.

And while the American practice of electing DAs would seem to mean that they are close to voters and reflect their desires, the reality is that such offices, perhaps more so than any other in our nation, are susceptible to outside influence. This can be seen by how successfully that hardcore leftist, George Soros, spent just $40 million to saddle communities around the country with cancerous DAs who are responsible for rivers of blood flowing down the streets in some of America’s biggest cities.

The Romans’ solution for an intractable problem they couldn’t solve via business as usual? Dictatorship. We should consider the same.

Not a dictator in the sense of Stalin or Hitler, but rather in the style of the traditional Roman Republic, where an office is created to deal with a problem that the normal bureaucracy can’t seem to fix.

In any city or municipality across the country where the violent crime rate is X or above, the federal government should impose a dictator.

I’d call them Justice Dictators, and their specific role would be to decide on bail / release for criminals accused of any violent crimes within a given jurisdiction. What would make this role interesting would be that these Dictators would also be liable if the people they allow out on bail commit crimes while waiting for their cases to be adjudicated.

But, you say, why would anyone be crazy enough to take such a job? Well, the incentive, of course. And in this case, the incentive would be that, beyond their salary, they’d get to keep the government’s fees / costs of whatever bail the accused pays. These vary by jurisdiction and are often deducted from what the accused is refunded if they don’t violate the terms of their agreement. If they do violate them however they lose the bail and the dictator would lose those accessed fees.

This combination of personal liability—up to and including potentially jail time—and the opportunity to earn money should make the position sufficiently compelling to see someone who can live with risk agree to take it. Essentially, this position would, by definition, force someone to actually balance what’s best for society and what’s best for themselves, something that is woefully missing in today’s system.

Today, DAs, parole board members, and judges essentially exist in the ether above their communities. They make their emperor-like pronouncements and go on with their lives, largely immune to the consequences of those decisions, while the members of the community must bear the full brunt of them. A dictatorship would change that equation.

The consequence, of course, would be far fewer criminals out on the street as they await trial, and you would expect those who were out to be better behaved. Another consequence would be higher costs due to having to keep more prisoners locked up for longer, but that should be offset by a drop in crime and associated costs, given that a minority of criminals commit a majority of America’s crime. And best of all, with fewer recidivist criminals on the street, the police can improve their abysmal success rate in solving crimes. That failure is due in significant part to the fact that cops, knowing that criminals will immediately be back on the streets, sometimes before they’re even done filling out the paperwork, are unwilling even to bother arresting criminals.

Now, you might say this is a bridge too far, or maybe it’s a Rube Goldberg contraption that won’t work. Both may be true, but at the end of the day, the American system of justice is broken and must be fixed.

A key element of an effective criminal justice system is that citizens are confident that the system exists to protect them from criminals (even as due process exists to protect criminals from the system). Today, when ordinary people routinely see known and convicted criminals walking the streets among them it shakes that confidence. And the single biggest driver of that is the potentates of the judicial system who make their decisions from on high but never have to suffer the consequences of them.

One of the basic truths of economics, humanity, and civilization is that men respond to incentives. The current judicial system has few incentives for those in charge to take into consideration the safety of the citizens and communities they ostensibly serve. Until that is rectified, we should expect to see continued erosion of the basic elements of our neighborhoods, communities, and frankly, our country.

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