The Next Two Months Will Define Donald Trump's Legacy... Let's Pray He Uses That Time Well

A few days ago I wrote about why I thought the Republicans lost on Election Day.  I stated that it was because they basically shivved their voters.  I stand by that.  They betrayed them in pretty much every way possible, and frankly deserved to lose.

But in good political form I always reserve the right to revise and extend my remarks… And I’m doing that now.  I no longer think the Republicans actually lost.  I think they, and America have been the victims of another coup, exactly as happened in 2020, the only difference is, Trump was not at the top of the ticket.

If you’re not sure about 2020, pick up Mollie Hemingway’s Rigged.  It’s pretty much all there.  Recognize that the odds of Biden losing 18 of 19 bellwether counties and losing Florida, Ohio & Iowa while winning only 538 counties and still winning is somewhere past the odds of winning the lottery, despite the media telling us that it’s totally normal.

But the difference between 2020 and 2026 is that in 2020 we heard Democrats, who had for years before been telling anyone who would listen that our voting system was broken, tell us that 2020 was suddenly the “Most secure election in history” and that questioning the outcome made one an “election denier” and crazy person.  In 2026 however, we’ve had almost six years for people to start to figure out how to recognize the fraud, and do it much more quickly than was done in 2020. And most importantly, in 2026 we have a platform where we can disseminate the information.

Some of the data that we’re seeing simply doesn’t add up.  Kevin Bass and others have started looking into the numbers… and they just don’t seem kosher. 

I had Gemini extend Bass’ chart showing midterm turnouts going back to 1960 and included the numbers from presidential years.

The chart is simply staggering.  The average decline for Democrats for midterm elections from the prior presidential election over the last 66 years was a 22.8% while for Republicans it was 23.1%.

In 2018 the Democrat decline from 2016 was 1.8% while for the GOP it was 19.3%.

In 2026, if the numbers hold, the Democrat decline will be .6% while the GOP will be 25.5%.

So basically, Republicans voted normally in 2018 and 2016 while Democrats turned out in numbers literally never seen before, and it’s not even close.

That simply doesn’t hold water.  Sure, Democrats hate Trump, but they hated Nixon even more, but in 1970, with Vietnam and raging and the Weather Underground leftists carrying out bombings from Berkeley to New York to Chicago the Democrat decline was 18% from 1968.

Our clown vice president said that it was the Iran war that caused this bloodbath, but Vietnam was an actual bloodbath and young people were being drafted and Democrats didn’t show up in numbers like we’re told they did on Tuesday. Where were the millions of Americans in the streets calling for the end of the war, you know, the one without the draft, without the daily casualty counts and thousands of body bags shown on the nightly news?

They weren’t there because, while Americans may not like the higher gas prices, the reality is they aren’t picking up the pitchforks. But that’s exactly what we would expect if we are to believe the numbers like those we see coming out of Texas and elsewhere.

And in Texas some strange things are going on.  In what was up until Tuesday one of the reddest and most prosperous states in the Union, suddenly the Democrats increased their off-year election total by almost two million, or 47% (3.55M to 5.23M) in a state where the population grew by less than 2 million American citizens between 2022 & 2026.  What’s more, of that 2M population growth at least 30% were children – who can’t legally vote.

That’s about 1.4 million new potential voters. And generally 65% of American adults vote in any given election so you’re looking at about 1 million new voters in Texas. But we’re supposed to believe in one of America’s reddest states Democrats not only took 100% of the new voters, but drew an additional million voters from the GOP or elsewhere?  All while the Republicans showed up in exactly the expected numbers?

And somehow, the Democrat Gubernatorial candidate, Gina Hinojosa, someone who practically no one knew, who had been down by 2 points going into Tuesday magically ends up winning by 8 points. 

None of that flies.

And it’s not just Texas. North Carolina, a decidedly smaller state with a mere 11 million citizens, added 1.4 million new voters to the rolls between 2022 & 2024 without proof of citizenship. So, we’re told that in a state that grew by approximately 400,000 between 2022 & 2024 that not only did they sign up 1.4 million new voters in that period, but in 2026 the Democrats won every statewide election and flipped control of the state.

On the national level, in 2010 Barack Obama lost 63 seats in the house. That year GOP turnout was up 25% from the 2006 midterms and down 14% from 2008. This year the GOP lost approximately 40 seats, but the Democrat turnout was up 37% from 2022 and down just 0.6% from the presidential election of 2024. The numbers simply don’t make sense. 

But of course we’re being told that the reason the Dems had so many votes was because Republicans, unhappy with the GOP, defected.  On its face that’s nonsensical.  GOP voters are unlikely to flip to supporting a leftist party filled with Communists, Islamists and trans cult supporters simply because gas prices are too high.  The truth is, GOP turnout was exactly in line where it would be given historical trends. 

Virtually every one of these elections is done via voting machines. We know that Silicon Valley is filled with some of the biggest leftists on the planet who also happen to be the most skilled in tech in the world – and most of whom hate Trump.  Add to that AI that we already know has the ability to hack into pretty much anything and half the time we only know it because the AI companies themselves tell us because the victims don’t even know.

It doesn’t take a great leap to think that the machines and the rolls have been manipulated, particularly when some jurisdictions have more registered voters than adult citizens and the the claims seem absurd on their face… like the fact that we’re told that 91% of counties (available data) moved toward the Democrats while 8% moved towards the GOP. (raw data here)

And to add to all of that, because of the Herculean efforts of @DataRepublican, we know for a fact that a coup has been in the works for years and includes flag level retired military, federal and state officials, Democrat lawfare experts and billionaire moneymen. 

The reality is, America does not have secure elections. Nothing even close. Sadly, of all the failures of the GOP over the last two years, none has been more destructive to the Republic than their failure to pass the SAVE America Act. When combined with the lack of prosecutions of those involved in the coup of 2020, the GOP has been nothing short of derelict.

The President has two months until Congress changes hands. He should spend that time doing two things simultaneously. 1) Use every tool, anvil and shotgun in his arsenal to get the Senate to pass the Save America Act. 2) Investigate the election that’s just taken place. Hire the DOGE team to use every tool available to ferret out what really happened on Tuesday, and if they identify the smoking guns, indict the traitors and work with the existing Congress to have special elections to fill the affected seats.  

He may fail at both, but he must try. The alternative is basically saying that crooks can keep the money they stole from the bank if they manage to make it out the door without anyone seeing them.  That flies in the face of the rule of law.  There is literally nothing President Trump could do that would be more beneficial for the American people and the Republic. This will be his legacy.  Nothing else matters…

You Tell ’Em I’m Coming—and I’m Bringing Hell With Me: Will We Get The Donald Trump We Deserve After Tuesday's Bloodbath?

Tuesday was an effing bloodbath.  Texas, of all places, basically flipped from blood red to sky blue. They elected to the Senate a dude who has a favorite drag queen!  But it wasn’t just Texas.  Donalds barely won his Governor race in the reddest state in the union. Georgia picked a woman for Governor who had to quit her race for mayor because she couldn’t win. And Michigan elected an Islamist to the Senate.  Not to mention losing over 40 seats in the House and probably 9 in the Senate. 

This is, any way you look at it, a disaster of epic proportions.  Not necessarily historic though.  Obama lost 63 seats in the House in 2010 and 9 in the Senate in 2014.  And overall Grover Cleveland lost 125 seats in the House in 1894 and Ike lost 13 in the Senate in 1958. So, not necessarily historic, but ungodly bad for certain. 

Everyone has their two cents about why this happened.  Mine is pretty simple.  The Republicans betrayed their voters. They were given control of the White House, Senate & House, with an actual mandate: 1) Secure our borders and deport tens of millions of illegals.  2) Secure our elections. 3) Cut spending. 4) Don’t fuck up the economy.

Sadly, the GOP clowns managed to blow all four, or at least in the case of the border and the economy, they lost the messaging.

On the first point, while Trump most certainly has been a vast improvement on Biden, the reality is, he allowed treasonous judges to hamstring him almost every step of the way.  And Congress, which has complete control over the lower courts, did nothing to help him. Nothing. 

On the second point, Thune was nothing short of a disaster. At first he claimed he couldn’t get the SAVE America Act past the filibuster, but then said even if he could, he wouldn’t have had the votes to pass it. That’s the excuse of a manager, not a leader. Can you imagine Pelosi not getting a bill that 85% of Americans wanted passed because of a few recalcitrant Members?  No chance.  Leadership has power and she would have used it… and she did, often. Thune was never a leader, he never inspired anyone… except animosity from people like me who think he’s a traitor. Had he accomplished that one task, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.  But he didn’t and we are.

On the third point, Trump, Thune and Johnson basically played go along to get along. They cut virtually nothing. DOGE handed them hundreds of billions of fraud they could have cut, but they did practically nothing and Nick Shirley, among others, showed them billions in grift and they’ve done nothing. All in all, they not only didn’t cut spending, they increased it and added $3 trillion to the national debt in less than two years. Trump and virtually every Republican on Capitol Hill just went along as if spending growth was some otherworldly force that has a life of its own and they have no control over.

On the last point, the reality is the economy isn’t nearly as bad as the media tells people.  The one place it is, is gasoline prices. Gas prices are almost as much of a third rail in American politics as Social Security. No other item do Americans pay so close attention to. Why?  Because no other consumer item in the American economy has 140,000 signs advertising its price right in front of us, every single day. And we drive more and use more gas, more frequently than anyone in the world.  Because of all that, gas prices have a psychological effect on Americans that no other product does.  And today gas prices are 30% higher than they were two years ago. Inflation sitting at 3.7% is not great, but it’s not historically bad either. Combine that with tepid GDP figures and slightly higher unemployment rates and the economy’s not great, but it’s not bloodbath terrible. But the media told us it was. 

The reality is that Americans handed the GOP a mandate two years ago and they squandered it. Americans didn’t want a lot, but what they did want was pretty clear, and the GOP decided that they would rather muddle through rather than actually lead.  That includes, Speaker Johnson, Leader Thune, and sadly, President Trump.  Even Iran would not have been an issue, despite Trump’s No new wars pledge had it been swift and eliminated the leadership and the Revolutionary Guard.  But it wasn’t and it didn’t, and Americans are paying the price for it, literally. And so too did the Republicans.

The question is, what’s next?  We know the Democrats are going to go on an impeachment and contempt joyride.  We can’t worry about that.

The only question that matters right now is, what will Trump do? Will he spend the next two years saying the bloodbath wasn’t his fault and play footsies with the Democrats, or will he swallow his pride and do what’s right for America?  Sadly my guess is the former, but if he decides that his legacy should be that of the man who saves the Republic rather than the guy who built a new ballroom, he needs to watch Tombstone and take a cue from Kurt Russel “Tell ‘em I’m coming, and I’m bringing Hell with me.” 

1) Finish the Iran war.  Eliminate the IRGC and eliminate Iran’s ability to strike America or her allies, either directly or through proxies. (An incidental regime change would be a bonus.)

2)     Ramp up dramatically the deportations of illegals. He needs to ignore the treasonous federal judges who have been handcuffing his every move. Today federal judges act as if they have jurisdiction over every single element of American life. They don’t, and there’s nothing in the Constitution that gives it to them. Trump should not allow them to exercise the Executive powers they assert they have. Let Congress try and do something about it.

3)      Resurrect DOGE and use presidential prerogative to defund every fraudulent program out there.  

4)      Go to the mattresses with Congress over government spending, particularly redistribution programs that are so rife with fraud. Refuse to sign anything that adds a single penny to the deficit. Shut the government down and use his Article II, Section 3 powers to Congress in Washington until they come up with something he will sign. No vacation.  No holidays. No trips home. Every single day if necessary.

5)      Finally, and most importantly, build a Republican party that will actually govern as America First after 2028. Endorse candidates because they’re conservative, not because they kiss his ass. Endorse candidates because they can be counted on to do what he promised to do and which got him elected in the first place. 

The reality is, no one is coming to save America. It’s up to patriots to fix what the GOP establishment effed up. Primary every RINO in Congress. Nominate patriots who love small government, individual freedom, Christianity, Capitalism, and, most of all, America. If someone doesn’t check off every one of those boxes, keep moving until you find someone who does.  The establishment did this to themselves.  But sadly they did it to us as well. It’s up to us to fix it. That is the only way. 

Rome Took Centuries to Fall. It May Take the West but Decades

In the movie Gladiator, Djimon Hounsou’s character looks up at the Roman Coliseum and says “I didn’t know man could build such things.”

I’ve felt exactly that way countless times in my life.  Probably the first time was when I was in Normandy, France staring at Mount St. Michel, built on an outcrop half a mile from shore.  When the tide’s out, you can walk there but when in it’s surrounded by water. 

The 13^th century Gothic cathedral sits on the foundation of a Romanesque church begun in the 11^th century.  The spire reaches 500 ft. above sea level and the cathedral is surrounded by a village that looks every bit the 1,000 years old that it is.

I’ve always been amazed at what they could build such a thing with the technology of 800 years ago. The logistics of reaching it were so complex that it was the only place in northern France the British could not conquer during the Hundred Years' War. 

My awe of what those men could build was driven home the first time I visited France where I spent a week seeing glorious buildings that had been standing for half a millennium or more. Prior to my leaving home, Atlanta had just unveiled a new skyscraper.  The week I returned we had a windstorm and that brand new building had to be closed because part of the façade sheared off. 

The juxtaposition of what they were able to do back then with relatively little technology and what we were building with exponentially more was simply staggering. It makes me think of the 1400 ft Billionaires' Row building completed in 2015 that’s now crumbling.

But this is not a piece about how great the old days were and how much they suck today.  No, it’s about how great the old days were and how much it will suck if we don’t protect their legacy.

This piece was inspired by a YouTube video, 25 Famous Classical Pieces You've Heard but Don't Know the Name.  It’s one of those classical music videos to listen to when you need to focus.

But it wasn’t just the music. It was the visuals too. The AI video is filled with figures in 17th- and 18th-century dress performing in front of buildings inspired by Chambord in the Loire Valley, the Doge’s Palace in Venice and the Vienna State Opera among others. 

My mind started racing to many of the grand structures I’ve been fortunate enough to visit:  St. Peter's Basilica and the Coliseum in Rome, Westminster Abbey in London, Neuschwanstein Castle outside Munich and Fontainebleau outside Paris. On this side of the pond I’ve visited the Empire State Building, Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam, not to mention Washington’s Library of Congress, maybe the most beautiful building in America. 

There are many places in the world that I’ve not been, and there are certainly structures that are as grand as those I’ve mentioned.  But here’s the thing…  Those structures are merely the physical manifestation of western civilization.  Western civilization is so much more.  The music, the science, the medicine, the art, the fundamental notions of freedom, of equality, of private property, democratic government.  Not to mention the extraordinary economic advances. Other civilizations may share some of those elements, but none has the combination the west does. 

Why does this matter?  Because right now the entire thing is under attack, mostly from within, and unlike the collapse of Rome, which took centuries, this collapse will take decades.

How does that happen? Arrogant elites take advantage of the ups and downs of markets and economies to convince citizens that some magical universe exists where all their needs will be taken care of. But of course no such universe actually exists. Indeed, it’s been tried many times.  USSR. Cuba. Venezuela. Cambodia. North Korea. China.

There’s not a single instance in history where leftists can point to where their Communist / socialist / utopian fantasies have worked at scale for any period of time.  None. Not one.

But that’s the beauty of the left, you never have to prove your theories, you can simply make claims and dismiss anything that contradicts them with some version of “It wasn’t real socialism.” And somehow more than half of Europe and almost half of America are aligning themselves with this demonstrably failed ideology.

The real question is, how were people convinced of such?  Easy.  Academia and the media run point for Communism. They have changed the debate. The debate is no longer about objective reality or facts, but rather “Equity”, essentially equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity or measured by merit. 

And the beauty of the new “Equity” paradigm is that there’s always an endless supply of victims, either citizens unhappy about the success of others, or, if there aren’t enough citizens drinking at the trough of victimization, they import millions from dysfunctional nations around the world and ply them with “compassion” – read more money than they likely ever saw in their lives – who are then trained to demand even more. 

But at some point, there is no more. Whether it’s budget breaking social programs or support for millions of “migrants”, leftist arguments cannot stand up to the reality of math.  The sad fact is that most large western nations are already “socialist” in that they spend unsustainable amounts on social programs, all propped up by borrowing.  Greece, Italy, France, Belgium, Spain and the United States all have Debt to GDP ratios above 100% and the UK is at 95%. 

To the degree that western governments can convince markets to lend, it’s only because a sufficient number of capitalist endeavors still exist that the government can shear. But few of them listened to Tiberius: 'It is the duty of a good shepherd to shear his sheep, not to skin them.' France recently learned the cost of ignoring that advice, having to pay the highest rate in a quarter century for its 10-year bonds.  That’s what happens when government spending accounts for so much of your GDP.

At the end of the day, the convulsions we see in Europe are a result of the perfect storm of “compassion”.  Coddled western leftists have driven their nations to the brink of bankruptcy while at the same time they’ve invited into their midst millions of people who have nothing but contempt for western civilization. 

This leftist cabal has one objective: The destruction of western civilization. The left wants Communism and the Muslims want a Caliphate.  The two are largely incompatible but will team up to destroy the west before turning on one another. 

That’s where we are, with black clad thugs wearing their keffiyehs and carrying Communist flags.  This is not the riots of 1968 that shook Europe and America. This is 1968 on steroids with a Molotov Cocktail in its hand. If governments do not eviscerate this movement, it will bring about the collapse of western civilization. 

That civilization was forged over 2,000 years by men who believed in themselves, were proud of their heritage and constantly reached for new heights in every possible endeavor.  It will be destroyed in a single generation by men incapable of building anything but expert at destroying everything.

Many in Congress Aren't Qualified to be Dog Catchers...

 It’s amazing how little some of our leaders understand about how wealth and prosperity are actually created in America.

AOC: 'No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars' | Fox Business

Republicans Are a Cancer. Democrats Are The Grim Reaper. The Difference Matters…

 

My uncle was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer back in the 1990s. An Army veteran, he was a black belt in Karate and was in good shape all of his life. When the diagnosis came he was taken aback because pancreatic cancer is one of the worst you can have because typically, by the time a diagnosis is made, the end is quite close. 

Against all odds, my uncle fought against it for almost twenty years. To put that in perspective, the average length of time one survives after diagnosis is counted in months, and 83% die within 5 years.  My uncle was a very fortunate man, in more ways than one. Sixty-five was too young, but his life was a materially different one than had it ended at forty-five. 

The reality is, cancer is something one can, both theoretically and actually, survive.  That is in stark contrast to something one cannot survive… death.

That contrast matters, whether in life or politics…

And it matters now.  Why?  Because one of our parties is a cancer and the other is death.

The Republicans are the cancer.  They have refused to pass the SAVE America act or rein in a rogue judiciary, they have indicted exactly zero people for the theft of the 2020 election, for the Russian Collusion hoax, for the COVID travesty, for ActBlue illegally funneling billions into Democrat coffers, for the persecution of the J6ers, and all the while spending like drunken sailors. And their greatest failure is not nuking the filibuster, something that will have a half-life of about one millisecond once the Democrats need it gone. 

A party that puts that traitor John Thune in a leadership position deserves nothing but scorn.  Congressional Republicans are basically a cancer that will kill the Republic slowly.

But they are infinitely better than the Democrats, who will kill it the first chance they get.

So, what do Democrats want to do that would end the Republic? 

Let us count the ways.

They want to abolish the Electoral College. They want to allow the 50 million illegal aliens here to stay, become citizens, vote and send America down a leftist rathole. They want to pack the Supreme Court so that they can basically eviscerate the Bill of Rights, particularly the 2^nd Amendment.  With 5 ½ women (Roberts and Kavanaugh) already on the court, they may have lost Dobbs, but they win far more than they should… Birthright citizenship, Mail in voting, Texas v. Pennsylvania… Nonetheless, their goal is to make Supreme Court decisions about as objective / honest as Soviet elections were and California elections are.  And they want to make Puerto Rico and Washington DC into states, giving them four permanent Democrat votes in the Senate.

They would once again partner with social media companies to censor Americans’ speech, they would turn America into Germany by shutting down oil and gas and yoking the American economy to the anvils of solar and wind.  They would chase billionaires out of the country, they would make DEI the national religion and they would unleash the LBGTQXYZ mafia on kids in every school in America.  They would give us the disaster of Medicare for All.

Plus, they would literally weaponize the government. Remember the Disinformation Governance Board?  How about the Tea Party scandal? That was child’s play compared to the OCC report on debanking that shows that nine of America’s biggest banks debanked countless individuals and companies for political reasons. Like the Tea Party scandal, there was no smoking gun from Democrats cited, but almost all those debanked were MAGA or conservative entities. Banking is kind of an important aspect for Americans and getting debanked because of your political beliefs can be lifechanging, and not in a good way.

And as all of that were not enough, we have a sitting senator and former CIA spook, Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who suggested Democrats should pursue prosecutions of Trump administration officials specifically to create a “deterrence” effect to dissuade young people from working in future Republican administrations. That is the literal definition of a police state, and a sitting senator is calling for it. 

Now imagine all of the above with Democrats at the wheel, empowered by AI, drones and a million Flock cameras…

The reality is, the American Republic is hanging by a thread.  Not that everything is bad, because it’s not.  The economy is pretty good, despite what the media will tell you. Trump has done some very good things.  He’s closed the border and attempted to start deporting the millions of illegals who are plaguing the country and costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year. He has sought to eliminate DEI and focus the Pentagon on winning wars rather than being a social experiment. 

There are those who rightfully suggest Republicans have been given too many chances and don’t deserve another. They’re right and in a perfect world we’d throw the cancerous RINO infested GOP into the woodchipper and elect actual patriots who care about American citizens, prosperity and respect the Constitution.  But we don’t live in a perfect world, we live in the real world, and in this one there are only two viable choices, one of which is a cancer on the Republic and the other that is a death sentence for it.

I get it, the GOP deserves nothing but scorn. That’s true. They’ve sacrificed the American people for the Georgetown cocktail party circuit, the Sunday morning talk shows, and their insider trading advantages, all while pretending to care about the American people and the Constitution.  But the reality is, the party is slowly being cleaned up. That treacherous Mitch McConnell is finally going to exit stage left, followed by his mini-me Thom Tillis while down in Texas, despite the establishment’s best efforts, that weasel Cornyn will not be returning.

That’s way too slow, but it’s at least a start in terms of moving in the right direction. 

On the other side, they’re moving too, but as extraordinary as it sounds for a party that’s been wrong about everything for the last century, they’re moving even farther in the wrong direction.  Aside from having Communists AOC & Sanders already serving, a year ago they elected an Islamist supporting, anti-American Communist as mayor of New York and in Michigan they’ve nominated a guy who spends his life palling around with jihad supporters and socialists. 

America can theoretically survive a few more years of the cancer of Republican clowns refusing to do what voters want until we can clean out the ranks. But the Republic can’t survive Democrats who seek to use the power of government to fatally eviscerate free speech and eliminate an American’s ability to support his family. America can’t survive as a free nation if Democrats are allowed to bastardize the Supreme Court and the Senate so they never lose another election. 

The GOP is largely a despicable, cancerous party full of vipers. But they won’t finish off our Republic any time soon. Democrats will. I think enough Americans have the fighting spirit my uncle showed to defeat the odds and pull the country back from the brink. Hopefully they will show two weeks from now and then again in two years.  Living with a GOP, like living with cancer, is a constant battle, but one well worth fighting. Vote accordingly. 

A 6-Year-Old Black Boy Shot His Teacher. The Bodycam Video Is Worse

I think I’m a pretty good person.  I don’t steal.  I don’t cut in line. I pick up after my dog.  I open the door for ladies. I don’t talk loudly in movie theaters. I work hard. I’ve never cheated on my wife.  I try to be polite.  I put my shopping cart back, I don’t litter and I pay my taxes.

All in all, I sound like a pretty good guy. But here’s the thing… All that stuff… it’s a pretty low bar for a person to be considered good in a civilized society.  None of that stuff is anything I should be patting myself on the back for.

Actually, I’m not. I, like many people, gauge myself more by my failures than by my successes.  Despite all the above, I’ve failed at numerous businesses, sent out seemingly millions of resumes and mostly got crickets in return and I’ve been in debt for most of my life. 

Those things are not good.  They are terrible as a matter of fact.  But they are what they are.

All of that being said, I hope, when I leave this mortal realm, I find St. Peter welcoming me at the pearly gates. But hey, who knows?

Why the introspection?  Because I recently watched a video of a very troubling interaction.

Before I get into that, I have to admit that I kinda feel like I’m the way I am because of osmosis.  Other than my parents telling me to respect my elders and not to lie or steal – particularly after an incident with a candy bar when I was about five - I don’t remember getting a bunch of explicit moral lessons while growing up.  I’m sure they were there, but I just don’t remember them. No doubt there were teachers and priests (I was an Altar Boy) and coaches who helped form me into who I am along the way.  I appear to be the product of my own agency and the people around me, but I can’t say for sure what the ratio is, nor when I became the biggest driver of my character.

And now, that troubling interaction.

There was a story recently of a little six-year-old boy who brought a gun to school and shot his teacher.  That by itself is very troubling, but it’s not the most troubling part of the story.  That starts when the police bodycam video picks up the little boy sitting on the lap of a different teacher. Over the course of a two-minute video we hear that little boy say “Fuck you, Bitch” to the teacher and about someone to whom the police referred “That nigger retired last year”.  He continues, saying to the police “You wanna piece of me, come and get it, bitch.” and “I don’t care if you call backup, I don’t care if I go to jail, bitch.”

That was the catalyst for the above introspection.  I wondered, how does a six-year-old boy become such a menace?  He didn’t come out of the womb already knowing that language or how to shoot a gun.  Somewhere over the first six years of his life he learned such, either by explicit intent or osmosis.

What kind of family life must that child have been raised in?  What kind of community? What kind of socialization was he exposed to? 

I immediately wondered what the reactions from the parents might be.  I’ve not seen their reactions, but I’ve seen many videos of black family / friends saying about black criminals some version of “He was a really a good boy” or  “He just fell in with the wrong crowd”.  And in one memorable case where a homeowner shot an intruder dead, someone asked how else someone raised in the hood was supposed to get money for school clothes.

All of this got me thinking about not only that little boy, but black America and America writ large. 

America is a nation like no other.  We’ve existed for 250 years guided by a piece of paper. Seriously… a piece of paper. Unlike most nations in history, we’re not controlled by a heredity dynasty or military regime where fear of violence keeps our union together. What’s more, we’re not a democracy where the mob or majority rules at the expense of the minority. No, we’re a republic where individuals have their own rights that the majority can’t, ideally, trample upon.

A nation such as ours only survives if the vast majority of the citizens share roughly the same values and mores.  The big values are right there in the Constitution, things like freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to trial by jury, etc.

But a nation needs more than that to survive for a quarter of a millennium. Religious hegemony isn’t a requirement, but something close to it has helped.  A belief in hard work and merit being a key element of success was a bedrock principle from early on, whether on the part of frontiersmen, farmers or factory workers.

Closer to home, things like doing chores, respecting other’s property, and supporting the community were traditionally common throughout most of America’s history. 

Together, those things and more created something of a social contract that allowed Americans to thrive like no people ever had.  America was never perfect nor were any Americans, but most were fundamentally good and lived by that implied contract. 

But 60 years ago LBJ destroyed that contract. His Great Society programs weakened the family structure for far too many and sent America down the path that led to that little six-year-old boy bellowing “Fuck you, Bitch” after shooting a teacher. Virtually everything in the story of American success is based on individual responsibility. To the degree that LBJ eviscerated that core principle, he opened the door to where we are today, a point in time where a staggering number of blacks feel no respect for anyone, no affinity to America and no respect for the mores and values that made America great in the first place. 

Forty years ago activists pushed for dashcams and later police bodycams because they were expected to show large numbers of police abusing minorities. They didn’t.  What they showed instead was the disdain and contempt many blacks have for police and a willingness to use violence. We see it regularly.  One doesn’t have to imagine very hard that without a drastic change, that little six-year-old boy is going to grow up to be the next Decarlos Brown or one of those “teens” we see so often trashing stores or otherwise causing mayhem.

This 6-year-old should be a wakeup call.  When we see a little boy who, through either instruction or osmosis, has such anti-social behavior problems, we need to recognize that he wasn’t born that way.  He was indoctrinated by a culture that no longer even pretends to conform to the norms that made America so successful.  That’s a problem.  Not only for the child, the family and the community, but for America as well.  Until that is dealt with, we’ll likely end up seeing more heartbreakingly maddening bodycam videos…

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

France's Slow Motion Collapse

Guest post by Martha Careful

We’ve all seen reports about the riots in France. I live in Paris, not far from the town where all this started. Yesterday, I walked by two of the best high schools in the country, and the kids were blocking the doors with trash cans (but you could walk around them). Everyone was smiling and laughing; it was more like a tailgate party than a protest—but these places are in the heart of Paris.

 

Next week, I have to go down south for a few days to be with family, and we stay in one of those banlieue neighborhoods. It’s funny—the building is where my wife grew up. I’ve been going there for 25 years. It used to be 100% French, like a French version of a nice American suburb.

 

Today... not so much. In the last five years, it’s changed completely. I’ve watched the neighborhood go from bucolic to ghetto in a relatively short period of time. On the one hand, it doesn’t look like the Bronx or East LA, with drug dealers and hookers on the corners and gunshots every day—yet—but, on the other, the signs are right there, like the car that was immolated in the building parking lot, rocks through lobby windows, and ever-increasing trash everywhere. The city’s not quite Marseilles yet, but it’s not far from it either.

 

As for the protests themselves, the funny, or not-so-funny, thing is that the kids have a valid point. A friend of mine who lives in one of the nicest areas of Paris has kids in elementary school and says that one of them (along with the other 35 kids in the class) spends probably one day a week or more sitting in the library for eight hours a day because the teacher never showed up and they have no substitutes. Add to that a shortage of books and basic supplies, plus behaviorally challenged students, and things are less than optimal.

 

One of the key issues is actually HVAC, or the lack thereof. Stone and brick buildings often have minimal, or sometimes no, heat in the winter, forcing students to dress like Eskimos IN class. Similarly, most have no AC, and many have no ventilation, which can make years like this one, with 90+ degrees in early May, simply unbearable.

 

Many are talking about the protests being taken over by radicals. That’s mostly wrong. The young Muslim students ARE the radicals. That doesn’t mean there are no radicals with traditional French backgrounds, but they are a minority. (During “protests” in 2023, Mohammed was by far the most popular name among those arrested.)

 

Nor does that mean the left isn’t trying to take advantage; they are—they’re calling for a third wave this week—but thus far, they have not had much luck widening the protests/violence in terms of getting other groups to join, although there was a general strike last Monday that included trash pickup but not transportation. And now the teachers have joined the fray.

 

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the left and likely presidential candidate, posted on X that members of his party “call for non-violence in methods of struggle” so he can pretend he’s calling for peace, knowing his followers do just the opposite. Just the day before, he stated, “violence can be legitimate,” though he qualified this statement by saying it was “better to avoid it.”

 

There have been calls for the government to crack down on... the police for being too rough on the protesters! What’s more, the mayor of St. Denis, one of the most important suburbs in France, has been accused by the police of “incitement to commit a crime” after joining arms with and encouraging the protests, as well as presenting the protests as legitimate.

 

The government is having a hard time responding. I’m not suggesting there’s going to be a giant cataclysm right around the corner, although there might be, but the reality is that the economic struggle is real. I see it every day as I walk around my neighborhood and see homeless people and closed stores—and again, I’m in the center of Paris, one of the nicest places in the city, if not the country.

 

Much of the problem, I would suggest, aside from the immigration problem, is the fact that 60% of the GDP comes from government spending, and more than half of the remaining 40% is made up of big companies. Entrepreneurship, the magic elixir that created so much prosperity in the world, is almost anathema in France.

 

It honestly breaks my heart every time I walk by one of the many, many boarded-up buildings in so many places in the city, including many tourist spots. Every one of them is someone’s broken dream. Sure, some of them were bad ideas, bad operators, or bad timing, but just as many, if not more, are the result of government regulations that choke the life out of that entrepreneurial spark.

 

How do we know this? Because if it were just the necessity of entrepreneurial spark, we’d see those boarded-up storefronts going through a series of stores until one sticks. But that’s not what’s happening.

 

Storefronts on main boulevards and on heavily trafficked tourist paths—despite having plenty of people living in the neighborhoods—find themselves boarded up for years on end. In any given month, one new shop will open just to see two more close.

 

Even in the area of government spending, things aren’t working. In areas that are arguably the most important in a person’s life, education and healthcare, failure is setting in. Results in the vaunted education system are rapidly declining, and getting appointments can take months in Paris and far longer in many other places. They can’t find enough teachers or doctors, as both professions are bleeding practitioners.

 

Unfortunately for France, all of that spells a fiscal train wreck heading their way. While these “protests” may have taken a violent leftist turn, the reality is that the problems that sparked them are completely valid. As the fiscal challenges that bedevil education spread to other parts of the economy and the demographics change, such violent “protests” will likely become more frequent.

 

I don’t see that the government has an answer for this, and, from what I can tell, most of the French people don’t either. Sadly, it doesn’t seem as if many people recognize that the problem is the government—and I don’t mean the left or right in this case—I mean the government writ large. Too big. Too inefficient. Too much inertia. Too much cowardice to tackle the problems of immigration and benefits.

 

We can only hope that one of these days, these tinderboxes that keep catching fire alert the French that it’s just not possible to wait out the problems. Because they’re not going anywhere on their own. It will take a leader of courage and vision to do what needs to be done, and an army of French patriots to put him or her into the Élysée (the French White House).

 

Say what you will of Napoleon, he brought an end to a decade of upheaval, chaos, and violence and brought order to a nation very much in need of it. France in the 21st century certainly doesn’t need someone to lead it on invasions across the continent, but it does need someone with the willingness to take on the entrenched bureaucrats, politicians, and activists who suckle at the teat of the state while French citizens watch their country collapse around them... metaphorically, at least for now.

What Good Are Billionaires Anyway?

A couple of years ago there was a story of a woman from Texas had a $60 million wedding in Paris.  She flew in her guests, everyone stayed in the best hotels and had the finest food France had to offer while everyone left with spectacular gifts.

Likewise another money-to-burn story was about Jeff Bezos spending half a billion on a yacht.  It was so big required another boat for support and had its own helicopter and landing pad! Needless to say, that boat is slightly larger than the barrel boat we used to fish off of when I was a kid.

Then there’s the story from a few years ago where some genius with more money than brains paid $6.2 million for a banana held onto the wall with a piece of duct tape.  As an artist I’d have taped a watermelon to the wall for half that!

Of course one doesn’t need to be embarrassingly rich in order to go overboard.  I saw an Instagram post recently of a woman planning a birthday party for a one-year-old. It was insane. There were all kinds of happy birthday signs, balloons, cakes (yes, plural) and a stack of presents halfway to the ceiling.  I was thinking to myself, this is insane. The baby’s one year old! He’s never going to remember!

There are countless other things like this that never make the news or someone’s Instagram feed.  The reality is, the amount of money these people spend on things like this is simply insane, by almost any measure. Some people would even say it’s obscene, and maybe it is. But the truth is, it’s their money.  If they wanted to set it on fire, it’s theirs to do what they wish. But most don’t do that… Although maybe they should, given that a record number of Americans support Socialism and the Communists in Democrat and DSA clothing think there should be no billionaires! Of course taxing them out of existence does sound kinda appealing when we see so many of them or their progeny donate fortunes to leftist causes that hinder others from finding the same success… but I digress. 

How many times have you heard some leftist say “Do you know how much poverty could be relieved for the amount he spent on XXX?” or “How many poor children could be fed for what she spent on XXX?” Blah, blah, blah… They are, by and large, broken records.

But could the money that these billionaires waste really solve world poverty? 

No. 

NGOs spend billions annually “fighting” poverty and the government has spent more than $50 trillion over the last half century, and the results are less than spectacular. But on the upside, we did get a giant, permanent poverty bureaucracy and massive amounts of fraud enriching grifters from sea to shining sea.  If spending billions or trillions cured poverty, it would have been accomplished decades ago.

Nonetheless, aren’t we getting to a point where the rich simply have too much and the poor don’t have enough? Shouldn’t they be forced to share?  As a guy whose bank account is more often red than green, and as much as I could use the infusion of cash, the answer is no. 

The hard truth is, we’re far better off with a bunch of obscenely rich Americans living among us. Why?  Because, unlike command economies, in America most people who get rich did so by providing goods and services that other people value enough to exchange their hard-earned money for.

What’s more, rich people’s money works for everyone else. Unlike Scrooge McDuck, most rich people don’t keep their money in a vault and go in and swim around in it. They usually buy stocks, buy companies, invest in startups, make donations, and probably keep some in banks. Whatever they choose to do with their money, it usually makes its way back into the economy by helping firms hire staff or buy inventory or invest in machinery.  It helps get startups off the ground, funds lending by banks and pays the salaries of NGOs – and sometimes accidentally does some good in the process. 

Take Jeff Bezos’ 417-foot yacht. The Koru, which costs over $25 million a year to operate, cost $500 million to build and has a $75 million boat that follows it to carry all the stuff it can’t hold! 

But that half billion dollars didn’t magically make that boat appear.  It went to pay thousands of dockworkers, steel makers, artisans, woodworkers, not to mention lumberjacks, oil riggers and designers and the restaurants those people ate and the stations where they filled up their gas tanks.   Now, in this case most of those people were in the Netherlands because the US doesn’t build those kinds of ships, but you get the idea.

When it comes to private jets, however, the US rules, and many of the buyers are rich people from around the world. Gulfstream, which manufactures top-of-the-line private jets that sell for between $65 and $80 million, has sold planes to not only Bezos, Musk and Gates, but to many non-Americans like Jack Ma, Cristiano Ronaldo and James Dyson. And just like the giant yachts, when some billionaire buys one of those jets, they’re providing an income not only to the people working at Gulfstream, to their suppliers and subcontractors as well, but in the process they’re supporting those people’s families too.

The same holds true for lavish weddings or the over-the-top birthday parties or private golf outings.  All that spending that seems so obscene is in reality anything but in the big picture.  Sure, it may be ostentatious, but so what?  Every dollar spent provides incomes for countless people down the line that never make the coverage.

There’s inequity in every country and in every civilization.  The only thing that differs is how it comes about and who benefits. In Soviet Russia, in Cuba, in Venezuela, Nigeria and countless other nations where the government basically chooses the winners and losers, what you end up with is a few ultra wealthy people ruling over the impoverished masses. 

American inequality today might be greater than in the past, but the difference between now and when the Robber Barons reigned is that today not only do we have a thriving middle class, but even America’s poor live better than most people around the world. 

America has almost 30% of the world’s billionaires.  That’s a pretty good number for a country that represents 4% of the world’s population.  The thing the left doesn’t get is that that number isn’t a sign of coercion or theft or corruption, but rather it reflects the fact that there’s no place like America for someone to start a company that meets the needs of willing buyers. Does it matter to me that that leftist weasel Bill Gates is a gazillionaire?  No, it doesn’t change my life one iota. But you know what does, the PC I’m typing on that’s running on Windows software. I spend hours behind it every single day, and my life is far better because of that weasel.

That’s the point.  Americans don’t need to like billionaires.  They can even hate them.  But the reality is, Americans thrive because of them.  Most of the billionaires and even millionaires in America got that way because they did something to make other’s lives better. America is a place where people can become obscenely rich by creating goods and services that others are willing to exchange their hard earned money for. It’s not perfect, and things sometimes go wrong, but the freedom, opportunity and choice combine to make the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans far better.  The fact that a few become billionaires along the way is easily a tradeoff worth making. 

The Terrorists’ Real Victory Wasn’t The Towers; It Was Much Worse

The year 2026 is an interesting one. It has both the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States and, simultaneously, the 25th anniversary of September 11.

The two events are inescapably intertwined. For me, 9/11 shattered much of what had come before it.

I was born twenty years after World War II ended. Growing up—and being educated—in the 1970s and 1980s, I knew America was good. Raised on military bases in Italy and Cuba, I was exposed to parades, marches, and military drills that bred patriotism.

We flew on military planes, we sang the National Anthem before every movie in the theater, and my friends and I would regularly eat lunch in the Gold Hill Barracks galley (cafeteria), with a table of Marines on one side of us and a table of Navy NCOs on the other.

While my specific experience was unique, the feeling of patriotism wasn’t. For the most part, Americans knew America was fundamentally good.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that I had imprinted on my soul that America was always destined to win WWII. Not because the Kaiser shipyards together delivered a new Liberty Ship every day for years, or because North American Aviation could produce 30 Mustang fighters per day, but rather because we were the good guys and the Nazis and the Japanese were the bad guys. Like Manifest Destiny before it, America was destined to triumph.

I carried that same framework long after college. Sure, you could look at Vietnam and make the argument that the United States was involved in something that it should not have been—an arguable, but far from convincing, point—but that didn’t change the fundamental nature of America. Nations, like humans, make mistakes, but ours was essentially good.

For me, that was the backdrop upon which everything else operated. Like gravity, it’s not something that you think about regularly; you just know it’s there. It’s true, and you go about your everyday life.

September 11 shattered that for me. Like most Americans alive on that day, I remember exactly where I was. I was in Atlanta, having gone back to bed after returning from the gym. My sister called me after the first plane hit the tower, and I turned on the TV and watched.

“What the hell!” I asked myself. “How the hell does that happen?” It was only a couple of minutes later when the second plane crashed into the South Tower. Suddenly, it was like Americans must have felt when they heard of Pearl Harbor. America was being attacked!

I spent the next seven days sitting in front of my TV, probably 20 hours a day. Other than going to the eerily empty Publix across the street for food, I was glued to my set. Of course, it didn’t take long to understand exactly what was going on. Osama bin Laden’s Muslim terrorists had attacked America.

I must confess, I knew very little about Islam or Muslims at the time, and what little I knew was from headlines: the ’72 Munich Olympics, Ayatollah Khomeini’s takeover of Iran, the 1993 WTC bombing, the twin embassy bombings in 1998, and a few other events.

So I did some reading… Things like Bernard Lewis’s The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years, Dore Gold’s Hatred’s Kingdom, Steven Emerson’s American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, as well as anything I could get my hands on from Robert Spencer and David Horowitz.

That reading, along with observing actual events, made it clear we were seeing the revival of a 1,400-year clash of civilizations that had largely waned for most of the last 400 years. A crystal-clear result of 9/11 for me was the realization that Islam is simply incompatible with the United States.

But 9/11 turned out to be a catalyst for much more. George Bush, against all observable facts, claiming “Islam is peace,” was just the beginning and the latest iteration of political correctness that was beginning to infect America.

Although Americans were united in a way not seen in decades in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it would not last. The media would showcase every American wartime mistake and lionize those calling for America to withdraw.

By 2003, rallies were common, with activists calling George Bush “Hitler”, and in 2004, the Democrats would nominate a globalist, John Kerry, for president. Four years later, America would send Mr. “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” to the White House.

The quarter-century following 9/11 would see “political correctness” meld the interests of Communists, environmentalists, gays, minorities, and Islam, and together they would morph into a largely anti-American party, i.e., Democrats. They were and are anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, and, fundamentally, anti-Western civilization. Their immediate need to protect the “religion of peace” started an avalanche of victimization that would pick up every minority or disgruntled group along the way.

Statues would come down, and not only those of Confederate Civil War generals, but men who built our history, men like Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and more. Language would change. Marriage, which had meant one man and one woman for more than 2,000 years of Western civilization, was suddenly something else.

Wearing a sombrero or dressing like an Indian for Halloween was suddenly cultural appropriation. The “Broken Windows” policing and “stop and frisk” approach to manifest criminals that had saved urban America from the devastating crime rates of the 1990s were replaced with “Defund the Police” and “community responders.”

Our borders were essentially eliminated, and blue states and cities decided that protecting invaders was more important than immigration law. Not to mention that millions of years of biology were erased by the sudden “reality” that men could become women and women could become men. And from that, children could be butchered without their parents’ consent.

For too many Americans, the legacy of September 11 is a nation that is something of a Bizarro world, where up is down, right is wrong, and anything pro-American is somehow bad.

I’m not one of them. For me, the legacy of September 11 is just the opposite. It reinforced much of what I already knew to be true and, regrettably, took for granted.

By forcing me to examine the history of America, of the world, and of civilization in general, I now understand that I was right to believe that America is the greatest nation in human history, but now I understand why. Our Founding Fathers, while imperfect, left us with the greatest document since the Bible.

The freedoms protected by it, the separation of powers dictated by it, the limited government established by it, and the entrepreneurial tsunami it unleashed combined to birth a people who created more prosperity for more people than any nation in human history and saved the world from fiery suicide twice along the way.

My blog is called Imperfect America, and the subtitle is Voltaire’s observation that “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” Nothing demonstrates that reality more than America. From her “Original Sin” to today, America is imperfect, but very much a force for good.

To the degree that September 11 set in motion the cleaving of too many Americans from the understanding of the things that make her the greatest of God’s creation, the terrorists succeeded far more than they ever imagined.

I, for one, try every single day to correct that, either by writing here and elsewhere or by suggesting that we might not want to take it all for granted. Because if history shows us anything, unappreciated and unprotected civilizations can collapse, and sometimes do very rapidly.

Follow me\ on X at: @ImperfectUSA