Joe Biden Considers A Scorched Earth Policy On His Way Out The Door

Scorched earth is one of the most brutal strategies in war.  It can be an offensive or a defensive strategy and usually leaves a wasteland of destruction and starvation in its wake.  One of the most famous examples of an offensive use of scorched earth is Sherman’s “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah in November to December 1864.  He not only burned Atlanta to the ground, but for a wide swath all the way to the ocean he left a trail of destruction, from military targets, to infrastructure to crops.  The goal of course was to damage the military, but more than that to destroy everything and impede logistics and commerce.  The larger goal was to break the morale of the South and any hope that they could not only never win, but show them that their lives would be destroyed if they continued to fight.  He succeeded in spades and his campaign proved critical to the Confederacy’s surrender five months later.

The most famous defensive use of the policy was probably that of Emperor Alexander I when facing an advancing Napoleon during the French invasion of Russia in 1812.  As the French advanced further, the Russian troops embarked on a campaign of taking whatever supplies they could carry then setting fire to or destroying virtually anything that could be of use to the enemy. While in Moscow many buildings were spared, they were largely empty husks by the time Napoleon arrived. Having far outdistanced his supply trains and unable to live off the land, the Napoleon began his slow retreat from a campaign that would leave 350,000 dead French on the fields of Russia.

Another use of scorched earth is retribution.  This was possibly most famously utilized by the Romans in Carthage after the Third Punic War in 146 BC. Wanting to inflict revenge against the city that had loosed Hannibal on them half a century before and ensure their greatest rival never threatened them again, the legions leveled the city down to bricks, burned farms forced citizens to relocate 10 miles inland and barred them from rebuilding. Carthage would remain a desert for a century until Ceasar recognized its strategic value and begin rebuilding it. 

Joe Biden, who, unlike Sherman or Napoleon or Hannibal or Ceasar, will be forgotten the moment he exits the stage, is nonetheless looking at the scorched earth policy with a keen eye.

Biden, the politician who’s never had a job that didn’t come from the government, has contempt for the Republic.  For him, America, and in particular the government is just a vehicle for accumulating power and money.

The man is an inveterate liar. He lies about important things and trivial.  He lied about riding the train, the death of his grandfather and about being shot at in Iraq.   He lied about the truck driver who killed his wife and daughter in 1972, claiming that the man had been drunk despite police records of the time showing no such thing.  He cheated in college, lied about his standing at graduation in law school and, fatally for his 1988 presidential run, plagiarized Neil Kinnock, a British politician.   

If there is a legacy to Joe Biden pre Barack Obama, it is his destruction of the confirmation process for the Supreme Court. For most of our history up until that point in 1987 Supreme Court nominations were largely collegial processes that focused mainly on the candidate’s knowledge of the law and their qualifications for sitting on the bench.  Joe Biden and fellow liberal urchin Teddy Kenedy savaged Bork for his conservative views and, as the New York Times suggested, the Bork nomination “… in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics.” From that point forward, politics was no longer an arena where ideas were debated as a sidebar to American life.  From that point going forward, Democrats shifted hard left and in less than two decades the cancer of the left would infect virtually every element of American life. 

Joe Biden did that.

Not satisfied with ruining our economy, adding trillions to the national debt and allowing 10 million illegal aliens to invade the country, on his way out the door Joe Biden may be getting ready to eviscerate what’s left of our justice system and the rule of law.

Presidents have used their pardon power for years, with the most famous being that of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford. Last week Joe Biden, despite saying he would not do so, pardoned his son for every federal crime he may have committed over the last 11 years, both those for which he had been convicted and those he had not.  That ensures that the Trump administration cannot charge the younger Biden once they take over the White House.

Biden’s pardon was unprecedented.  Most pardons are for specific crimes, and while Ford’s pardon of Nixon was a similar blanket immunity, it was specifically tied to the dates he was President. The younger Biden’s, however is far from specific and applies to no official duties.  It just happens to coincide with the moment Junior joined the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, despite having zero experience in or knowledge of the energy business.

Controversial pardons are nothing new.  Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of 16 Puerto Rican terrorists in August, 1999 and later his brother, but Biden is said to be mulling doing something extraordinary, preemptively pardoning the people who used the justice system to persecute Donald Trump and his supporters, including the treacherous Liz Chaney and Adam Schiff.  Then there’s also Anthony Fauci, the COVID liar and General Milly, the traitor who thinks it’s his job to inform enemies of his Commander in Chief’s plans.  There are no doubt many others he’s considering, including Mayorkas & Garland.  And to top it all off, Biden is being encouraged to, and is no doubt considering, offer a blanket pardon to all illegal aliens who are here in the United States illegally.   

Combined with the $2 million the DOJ paid Page and Strzok for releasing their text messages about conspiring to keep Trump from winning in 2016, what we’re seeing Biden contemplate here is a scorched earth destruction of the rule of law.  Basically one party is telling its stormtroopers they can use the police power of government to persecute their opponents with no limitations because if they succeed, their opponents never make it into office to hold them accountable, and if they fail, their crimes can be pardoned before the enemy ever takes over. Heads we win, tails you lose…

If Biden burns down the Republic on his way out the door, Democrats has better take cover.  The Constitution is, as John Adams said, “made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Democrats have shown themselves to be anything but.  If they see fit to torch it, they should not be surprised if the GOP doesn’t decide to stop playing the patsy limiting themselves to the Constitution’s Marquess of Queensberry Rules. There’s a reason FAFO videos are so popular.  Americans covet justice; Democrats flout it at their peril.

 

Leftists in the Justice System Should Pay For What They Unleash On Society...

When I was 12 years old we moved to the Navy base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  We moved in the summer and by the time school started I’d made friends and was feeling pretty comfortable.  One day during the first week of class I was sitting in the back of Mr. Scroch’s Social Studies classroom before he arrived.  While we waited some friends and I were messing around, throwing erasers at one another and calling each other names.  Then we noticed a man sitting in the front row.  We immediately settled down but I remember ducking my head and yelling something to the old guy about how he must have failed a lot to be there with us.

Moments later Mr. Scroch walked in the door. After he and settled his desk the man in front stood up, pointed out the three of us, and said “Mr. Scroch, would you please send these three gentlemen to my office at the end of the day.” As my eyes bugged Mr. Scroch said, “Students, I’d like to introduce our vice principle, Mr. Andrews.”

We dutifully went to Mr. Andrews’ office after school and somehow, inexplicably, I found myself laughing at him when he asked if we thought we were funny. I protested that class hadn’t started yet but he was having none of it.  He then called my dad to come pick me up.

And that’s when I learned something about the military, or at least how it was decades ago.  Apparently, when you’re a kid in a military family, particularly when living on a military base, your dad is held accountable for your actions.  Basically it’s his job to keep you in line, and if he can’t do that then his career can be impacted.

Although this is where things get a bit blurry as to my actual punishment, what’s not blurry is that I learned that having your dad called to pick you up from school was a bad thing… and I don’t think he ever had to again…From that point forward I knew that I was being held responsible for my actions, and I behaved accordingly.    

Clearly, forty some years later, that lesson stuck:  Actions have consequences.

Sadly however, that lesson doesn’t apply so much today.  At least not everywhere.

One place it often does is the private sector.  Doctors have to carry mountains of insurance in case they make a mistake and someone dies or is harmed by them.  Architects carry insurance in case one of their buildings collapses. Supermarkets carry insurance in case someone slips in the produce isle and breaks their arm.  And you and I and most Americans carry car insurance in case we run a red light and T-bone a Chevy Impala at the corner or First & Main.  Americans, eschewing Shakespeare’s advice to “Kill all the lawyers”, are a litigious people.  Why?  Basically because – other than a sizable army of grifters – most Americans think one should be held responsible for one’s actions.

But you know where that rule almost never applies?  Government.  From politicians making promises they break as soon as they take their oath to schools that fail to teach students to a Pentagon that can’t seem to account for $220 billion in gear, someone could write a book about all of the failures of government driven by incompetence and negligence. 

While there is no dearth of examples of government being unaccountable for its actions, there is perhaps one place where government accountability should be the rule more than any other:  the Judiciary.  In particular, District Attorneys, parole boards and judges as they relate to violent criminals. Unlike when the Pentagon loses a hammer or when a transportation department builds a road to nowhere, when criminals are let back out on the street to terrorize citizens, there are real consequences for real people. But regardless of the gravity of those consequences, the people who created that circumstance are never held accountable.

We see it almost every day across the country, where some career criminal with a rap sheet as long as your arm kills someone or rapes someone or pushes someone in front of a train and we soon discover they were let out early on parole or were sprung via a laughably low bail or walked out of a jailhouse after no bail was required. 

Invariably those failures result in blood on the streets or victims in a hospital or bodies in a morgue.  Those are real world consequences of decisions made by government employees who have no fear of themselves or their families suffering consequences for their bad decisions. And it happens all the time.  Prosecutors plea attempted murder down to assault and a judge sets a unconscionably low bail and suddenly a violent criminal is back out on the street.  And it happens from the other direction as well, when gullible parole boards believe professional liars when they promise they’re reformed and won’t reoffend and allow them out years early. 

Recently two members of an Illinois parole board resigned (not fired) after a convict to whom they granted parole murdered the young son of his ex-girlfriend the day after he was released. That’s news only because it almost never happens.

The solution to this problem is actually quite simple, although there is zero chance it ever gets implemented. What is it?  Accountability.  Judges and DAs should be held accountable for the crimes committed by the people they put back out on the street, at least for X number of years.  Same deal for parole board members.  They should be held accountable for the crimes of criminals they put out on the street for the duration of remainder of their original sentence. I’m not suggesting that they should face the chair if one of the thugs they put back on the street murders someone, but they should share some of the consequences of their bad decisions.  Perhaps getting fired with no pension, disbarment, some time in jail or something sufficiently painful so that they take their duties seriously.   

Now of course this won’t guarantee recidivism drops to zero. That’s impossible. But it might put “Fear of God” into the people in whom the public has put so much trust. 

No doubt there would be a great deal of pushback from “justice reform advocates”, defense attorneys and state and local treasurers, but regardless of the merits of their arguments, none outweighs the right of the public to be safe in their communities from known criminals. 

This may seem like a draconian solution, and like most hard fixes it would take some time to work itself out, but eventually judges, DAs and parole board members would hone their decision making skills so that they make decisions that are better balanced between the desires of the criminals for relief and the desire of the community for safety.  There is certainly a balance to be had between the rights of criminals and the safety of a community, but right now Democrats have put a bag of lead on the side of the criminals and citizens across the country are paying the price. This might just help bring the scale back into balance. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Unsolicited Advice to Donald Trump for Winning the White House in 2024

I’d like to offer some advice to Donald Trump. This offer comes from someone who in November talked about following him into a raging inferno then in January questioned whether supporting him was worth the fight. 

How does one go from being such a rabid fan to sitting on the fence in such a short period of time?  Messaging.  As I mentioned in my January piece, Trump’s embrace of the grifters running the GOP suggests that he might be taking his eye off the ball.  As such, I’d like to offer three bits of unsolicited advice to the former and hopefully future president. 

First, stop focusing on the stolen 2020 election and focus on America today. Not that 2020 wasn’t important, it was. But it’s 2023 and we’re 20 months away from the next election.  There simply isn’t time to fix 2020, and any energy spent trying to do is that much less energy going into saving the country in 2024.  Given the trajectory of the country, if we’re not victorious in 2024 there will likely be no more America as we know it by 2028. 

Second, to stop taking credit for the vaccine.  The more Americans know about it the less they like it, and many of us hated it from day one. While putting the development in motion was understandable at the time, the fact is that it was used as a cudgel to coerce the American people into submission, and may have terrible long term consequences to come.  It’s an issue best let go as his supporters hate it and his enemies wouldn’t give him credit for it regardless.    

Third, and most importantly, focus on issues that impact Americans where the proverbial tire hits the road.  Here are seven.

1)  Immigration:  Promise to build a wall. Guarantee that the first thing he will do in office is begin the process of building a wall from Brownsville to San Diego.  No nation can be a nation if it doesn’t have a border and the invasion on our southern border is far more of a threat to Americans than anything going on in Ukraine. We’ve seen the virtual elimination of our border since Joe Biden was installed as president and watched as over 5 million illegal immigrants walked in virtually unimpeded. At the same time we’ve seen 100,000 deaths a year from Fentanyl overdoses and are forced to watch as cartels bring their violence to American streets and mimic Mexico by bringing their infrastructure here and having comrades take powerful positions in government.  He should promise that if Democrats and activist judges throw roadblocks along the way again, he will use the military to patrol the border where no wall exists until the wall is actually complete.

2)  Wokeness in government: He should promise to eliminate every element of the racist Critical Race Theory in government along with the DEI “diversity, equity and inclusion” treachery.  He should tell America the government will stop operating programs based on race and will stop setting various groups of Americans against one another in the name of “equity” and victimhood. The police power of government will no longer be used to favor any group over another or to use demographic data to achieve “diversity” objectives. He should promise that every single element of the federal government will be agnostic as it relates to immutable characteristics. 

3)  Energy independence: Promise to return the United States to energy independence.  He will stop the demonization of fossil fuels in and by our government. We will stop having the nation’s economic well being taken for granted and sacrificed at the altar of the “climate change” hoax.  He will stop wasting American tax dollars pursuing the fiction of green energy as the destruction of the environment associated with the mining and production of materials used in car batteries, solar panels and wind turbines is far greater than that associated with the production of natural gas and oil.      

 4)  Return to gender normalcy:  Eliminate every element of the federal government that blurs the lines between men and women.  While there may indeed be a tiny number of Americans who actually suffer from “gender dysphoria” the reality is, men are men and women are women. This has been a fact throughout all of human history and remains so today for 99.995% of human beings. Our government should no more base public policy on the desires of .005% of the population who genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria than they should base it on the slightly less frequent existence of Siamese twins. And he should promise to pass a federal law outlawing “gender affirming poison and operations” for children under the age of 18.

5) School Choice: Work to give every parent in America school choice.  School is often the primary place where children learn about the history of the nation as well as the 3Rs.  Increasingly our schools are not only not teaching students to read, write and do arithmetic, but they are becoming indoctrination camps for anti-American, anti-science, racist poison that is undermining the foundations of American liberty, opportunity and prosperity.  Although most education is administered at the state level, the Department of Education plays a significant role and he should promise to harness DOE’s resources to encourage every state to give parents control over their children’s education.    

6) Crime:  Use every Constitutional resource available to reverse the Democrat’s war on police and the American people in the name of “equity”.  Democrat soft on crime policies have put citizens’ lives at risk, and cost the lives of thousands of people across the country since the fiction of Michael Brown’s “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” in 2014 and the riots in response to the death of Saint George Floyd in 2020. Gone will be the days when the justice system is more interested in the rights of criminals at the expense of the rights, the safety and lives of victims.  If Democrats were really interested in helping POC and poor Americans they’d call for greater police presences and longer prison sentences for criminals.  But they don’t.  Trump should make it clear he does. He wants to protect night clerks, subway riders, kids walking to school and every other law abiding American as they simply go through their daily lives.  Victims’ lives matter. Certainly more than those of criminals who prey upon the innocent and the weak.

7) Overhaul of the security apparatus:  Trump should promise to return the American security agencies to their original mandates, i.e. protecting the lives, property and rights of the American people and their country.  Promise to clean house of the leadership in the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA and the NSA so that the American people can once again have confidence that their government is there to protect them, not act as the enforcement arm of a political party and persecute them for exercising Constitutional rights.  In addition, he should promise passage of legislation that makes explicit a prohibition of government agencies working with social media firms to infringe on 1^st Amendment rights guaranteed in the Constitution.  

The entire point of this suggestion is for Trump to make it crystal clear that his sole focus is the saving of the American Republic, securing for all Americans the ability to exercise their God given rights and the ability to go through their daily lives without fear that the borg of government or the thugs empowered by it will destroy all that they live for. 

If Trump can convince voters his focus is on their future and not his past, the White House is his for the taking.  

Unfettered, Uncontrolled Immigration is a Cancer on the American Republic.

Unfettered, uncontrolled immigration is a cancer on the American Republic. 

The question is, why does it continue unabated?  There are lots of reasons.

One of the big drivers is the pernicious Chamber of Commerce.  Big business in America needs workers.  Illegal immigrants swell the worker pool, doing many of those supposed “jobs American’s won’t do.” You know, those in the construction industry, hotels, farming, etc.  To the degree that big business can employ illegal immigrants at wages below those which would be required to pay Americans to work, illegal immigration is a winning issue for them.

Another is the Catholic Church, which not only solicits funds from parishioners but also generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually for supporting the illegal alien invasion.    

The Chamber and the Vatican are only part of the cabal of businesses, NGOs and government agencies that have built an ecosystem around the illegal immigrant trade. Somebody has to sell the cell phones the government is giving to illegals.  Companies have to facilitate the tens of billions of dollars illegal aliens send home every year. Someone has to provide the gasoline for planes to fly immigrants around the country.   Schools get bigger budgets – to the tune of $59 billion.  Hospitals earn almost $20 billion a year. Even hotels get into the mix, with one upscale Times Square hotel with rooms going for $400 a night completely booked with illegal immigrants some of whom spend their time beating their spouses, doing drugs, drinking, throwing out food and having sex in the stairways. And of course the tens of thousands of bureaucrats across the country at all levels who must be hired to deal with the onslaught.  All of this paid for by government, which means by taxpayers. Beyond all of that, we’re even paying $6 million a day to defense contractors to NOT build a wall on our southern border! 

The amounts involved are simply staggering, well over $100 billion annually (or $200 billion depending on who’s counting) and that’s surely a severe undercount when considering that doesn’t count the “enforcement” of the border element of the equation. Every single year…

Needless to say, there are a lot of people in the country making money from the surge in illegal immigrants. While your money goes into the pockets of the illegal alien empowerment cabal, it’s only money.  There are other, far more vicious costs.  Not the least of which was paid by the families of the 100,000 Americans who died of a fentanyl overdose, a drug that almost exclusively comes over the southern border.  Plus there were many times that number of addicts who didn’t succumb and continued to wreak havoc in their homes and communities. And then there are the tens of thousands of women and children who suffer as a result of sex trafficking across the border. And then there’s the price paid in life and treasure by the victims of illegal alien crime.  And Democrats whined when Trump wanted to spend a few billion to build a wall…

And exactly how many illegal immigrants are in the country?  Numbers are all over the map.  In 2021 DHS estimated that the number of illegal aliens in 2018 was 11 million.  Not surprisingly that’s essentially the exact same number the government has been claiming there are for decades!  That 11 million is of course a lie.  The same year Yale and MIT estimated the number at 22 million and potentially as high as 29 million.  Way back in 2005 Bear Sterns estimated the number was 20 million with another 3 million coming in annually.  If that assessment was accurate then here 18 years later we’d have another 52 million illegals in the country for a total of 72 million!

The one thing we know is that the government has been telling us the number is 11 million since the 90s. That is a lie.  It is simply impossible.  In just the last 22 months 5.2 million people illegally crossed into the United States, and that doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands if not millions who eluded detection.  The exact number of illegal aliens in our midst is impossible to know for certain, but the most likely number is 35 million or more. 

Given that illegal aliens seem to make up almost 10% of our population, the question is again:  Why doesn’t someone stop this invasion.  The real answer is actually quite simple:  Power.

The reason this is not stopped is because illegal aliens flock to large cities in Democrat strongholds.  It’s not because they vote, although no doubt some of them do illegally.  No, it’s all about numbers.  We’ll start with the proportions reported by Pew Research in 2019 about where illegal aliens live.  As the report parrots the government’s lie of 11 million, we’ll triple their stated numbers.  Doing so gives us 33 million illegal aliens spread over all 50 states. 

Importantly however, 80% of those 33 million are located in large metropolitan areas of in just 15 states:  AZ, CA, FL, GA, IL, MD, MA, NJ, NY, NC, TX, VA & WA.  That’s approximately 24 million people, with 14.5 living in Democrat states and 9.1 living in GOP states.  The fact that they are people and but not citizens is critical, because Congressional representation is based on population, not citizens.  The number of people each Congressional district represents is approximately 735,000.

Of the 15 states listed above, 8 have majority Democrat Congressional delegations (CA, IL, MD, MA, NJ, NY, VA, WA) 4 have majority Republican delegations (AZ, FL, GA, TX) and one (NC) is even.  California, with its estimated 6.6 million illegal aliens, has between 8 & 9 more seats than it would without illegal aliens. New York with its 2.1 million approximately 3 more Congressmen while Texas, with its 4.8 million has 6 or 7.  When you do the math those 24 million illegal aliens living in those 15 states result in a net positive of 6 Congressional seats for Democrats. 

If six seats doesn’t sound like much, think again.  In 4 of the last 13 Congressional elections had the minority party had just six more seats they would have been the majority party. And with that majority comes power.  As the government has accumulated more power, as Washington has increased its control over the everyday lives of the American people, and as the leviathan of the bureaucracy has grown, the value of each and every illegal alien increases. 

Money and power.  Probably not news, but there it is. Those are the driving forces behind why this invasion of illegals is not being stopped, but why it’s being actively encouraged.  It’s interesting too that the cabal who are abetting this invasion are the familiar faces pushing the policies behind much of the dystopian chaos that our biggest cities are suffering through today:  Activist NGOs, big business, bureaucrats and of course the Democrat party. 

Hiding their avarice behind the fig leaves of “compassion” and “empathy” the members of this cabal increase their bank accounts and their power with little regard for the good or the desires of the citizens of the United States.  But the truth is, why should they?  They are all but declaring war on the United States and the American people, yet somehow they keep “winning” elections.  Who says insurrection doesn’t pay?   

Collapse of Civilization: Lessons Voters Might Take From Roman Britain

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it,” said George Santayana. He could well be describing modern leftists, careening back into the dark ages of post-Roman Britain.

At the end of the 2^nd century AD Britain was a fully developed province of the Roman Empire.  It was as Roman as any city in the Empire. While still largely rural, Roman Britain developed towns and cities that mirrored those found in Italy or North Africa and connected them with a spectacular roadway. They had majestic villas, sprawling estates, baths, plumbing and of course aqueducts.  The Romans brought industrial sophistication to mining, unprecedented architectural capabilities and improved agriculture.  The province was awash in imported goods from around the Empire: Wine from Gaul, olive oil from Hispania, pottery from North Africa, and philosophy teachers from Greece; all the while exporting precious metals, agricultural products, shellfish and salt across the Empire.

One of the extraordinary things about the Roman Empire was the unprecedented, widespread prosperity it created from the Pillars of Hercules to the Levant and virtually everywhere in between. While there had always been a market for fine goods such as silk and porcelain and exotic foods, the Romans brought those goods to the masses. By building roads, ports, transportation hubs and funding the trade necessary to support the Legions, the Romans drove economies of scale and created a mass market for goods that had formerly been available only to the rich but had become inexpensive across the Roman world.  In doing so they created a cosmopolitan empire so thoroughly Roman that people from what are today Morocco and Britain and Germany and Israel likely spoke some version of the same language and would have found familiar products available regardless of where they were in the Empire.

Back in Britain, three hundred years after Caesar first invaded the untamed island in 55 BC the province was a sophisticated, shining example of all of the Empire had to offer. It was not to last however… In less than a century after the Romans abandoned the island for good in 410 the population collapsed, the economy collapsed, cities became ghost towns or disappeared and chaos reigned. Londinium, whose population peaked at 60,000 in the 2^nd century, dropped below 20,000 and saw more than 75% of its buildings dismantled with the materials carted off into the countryside.

In less than a century Roman Britain went from a rich, flourishing cosmopolitan province with bustling urban centers and goods from across the known world to an economic and cultural backwater where modern architectural, plumbing and farming techniques seemed to have disappeared along with most of the import of goods. 

Most of the people living on the island in the middle of the 4^th century probably assumed, like much of America in 2022, that the advances of civilization move only in one direction, upward.  They expected to continue to enjoy inexpensive food and pottery and clothing from elsewhere in while selling their wares in return.  The government would continue to provide protection and would maintain the ports and roads that facilitated trade. 

When those things didn’t happen life in Britain became a far darker experience.  Cities disappeared, warlords set up fiefdoms and invaders came from seemingly everywhere. Farming techniques were lost, building techniques were lost, trade collapsed and citizens were forced to become self sufficient as numerous petty would be “kings” set up trade and travel barriers and goods from the Continent became scarce.  The opposite of economies of scale and free trade took hold and Britain became far less prosperous as goods became more expensive, countless products and varieties of products simply disappeared and staples had to be produced locally.

It’s here where Santayana’s missive becomes relevant. Given that the history of post Roman Britain so clearly demonstrates the fragility of civilization’s advances, we might want to pay attention.  The reality is, our world, far more tenuously than the Britain of 1700 years ago, is but X bad decisions away from an agrarian, subsistence economy with no electricity, no gas, little trade, few economies of scale and most certainly no security or safety. 

Go through a day and see how many things we rely on that we couldn’t replace if a disaster occurred.  Imagine a blackout.  How many things would that loss of electricity impact?  Not only the lighting in our homes, but the refrigerators, phone chargers, garage door openers as well.  Outside our homes there’s even more: Elevators.  Gas pumps. Plumbing.  Street lamps & stop lights. Virtually everything in a hospital. Cell phone towers. Police switchboards and dispatches. Train signals and countless other things.

Then there’s the social aspects of such a crisis.  Rules and laws would go out the window, and it wouldn’t take long. During the New York City blackout of 1977 crime surged, with looting, vandalism and arson rampant (over 1,000 fires were set) while police arrested 3,776 people in the largest mass arrest in the city’s history.  The chaos cost over $1 billion in today’s dollars, and the lights were off for less than 24 hours!  Now jump forward to the BLM / Antifa riots of 2020 and the defunding of police.  Not only was there chaos and mayhem, there were murders, assaults, and rapes nationwide and communities literally burned to the ground. Then there is the mass looting and random violence that has occurred since 2020 and seems to be growing worse every day… and through all of this we still had electricity!

Of course electricity is only one element of what keeps our society civilized.  There’s gasoline, there’s trade, there’s what used to be a widespread respect for the rule of law.  Imagine no diesel fuel.  Trucks wouldn’t be able to deliver food and store shelves will go bare.  You probably have enough food in your kitchen for your family to last a few days or maybe a week at most. Then what? Are you going to grow wheat on your windowsill or in your backyard?  Is the neighborhood stray cat going to be your family’s next meal? Do you have a cow for milk? Not to mention medicines, building materials, gasoline for your car… the list of goods delivered via diesel is endless. 

One of the downsides of trade, division of labor and economies of scale is that most of us are dependent on others to provide for us those things we don’t produce for ourselves… which is to say, almost everything.  Our society is based on a trade system where we get paid to do some things and we pay others to do the things we don’t. It’s a well oiled machine… until it’s not.    

And that’s the point.  The climate alarmists who want to do away with fossil fuels have no concept of the ramifications of that folly. The equity cultists who want to eliminate the police and “reform” the justice system don’t care about the consequences of that absurdity. 

Just as the razor thin layer of atmosphere surrounding the earth sustains life on earth, our modern society thrives thanks to plentiful, inexpensive energy and a respect for the rule of law.  Inexplicably, those are the two primary targets of the Democrats who are currently in charge of wide swaths of the United States.  Indeed Californians regularly endure the absurd manmade disaster of rolling blackouts while Illinois is about to essentially decriminalize crime.  Neither is necessary…

When Americans step into their well lit, safe and private voting booths on November 8^th they’d do well to think of those 5^th century Britons who were about to careen into a darkness from which it would take almost a millennia to emerge, and vote accordingly.

 

The Twisted Line from Broken Windows to a Broken Republic

Years ago I was writing about blacks and Democrats and looked at the impact Rudy Giuliani made in New York City.  Over the course of his tenure from 1994 – 2002 there were 3,440 fewer black murder victims in the city than there might have been had New York simply experienced the average nationwide crime decline between 1994 & 2002.  “That’s 3,440 families that did not lose a son, a father, a breadwinner, or a role model. 3,440 black men still alive to take care of and support their families…”

Saving 3,400 black lives and keeping 3,400 families intact didn’t happen in a vacuum. Those lives were saved by better policing, or more accurately, actual policing, via a program “Broken Windows”.  The Broken Windows policing approach was developed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in 1982.  “Broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes.”

And in the early 90’s the visible signs of crime in New York City were everywhere. Subways were covered with graffiti; Times Square was nothing but peep shows, liquor stores and vacant storefronts.  But there weren’t only signs of crime, there was actual crime, and a lot of it, with violent crime and murder rampant.  In 1993 there were 2,420 murders in NYC for a rate of 13.3 per 100,000, almost 50% above the national average of 9.51. 

With the advent of Broken Windows, the city started cleaning up graffiti, arresting the squeegee thugs who intimidated drivers stopped at red lights and started targeting petty criminals.  Giuliani knew what he was doing.  Before his election he said that “he cared about statistics, but the real measure would be whether people actually felt safer. That, he said, was the ultimate test of policing and political leadership.” By the time he left office in 2002 he had delivered both the statistics and a feeling of safety – at 960 the murder rate had plummeted by 64% or 4.75 per 100,000, 15% below the national average. As the crime rate plummeted the city and its citizens thrived.  Times Square transformed from a seedy denizen of hookers and pickpockets and drug dealers into a shining tourist Mecca filled with glistening theaters and hotels and restaurants.  SoHo and Chelsea and Greenwich Village transformed into vibrant, inviting places. New Yorkers and tourists alike felt like New York was once again a place they could enjoy without feeling like they were in a war zone…

The point of all of this is, small things matter.  Subways covered in graffiti, people urinating in the streets, homeless camping out on sidewalks and kids stealing beers and Nyquil from CVS… none of these things by themselves send a society into the abyss.  But when they’re tolerated they tell the perpetrators that laws don’t matter, and soon shoplifting turns to burglary turns to robbery which turns to assault and sometimes murder. And, as criminals and crime proliferate and violence becomes more common, those law abiding citizens who can, flee for safer pastures, and all that remain in cities are criminals and their next victims who don’t have the resources to escape or can afford their own personal protection militia.  That’s when dystopia goes from being the fiction of Hollywood blockbusters to reality.

None of this is particularly insightful requiring an above average IQ to see.  But just because something is common sense doesn’t mean it’s common.  The idiocy of the anti Broken Windows theory, if one might call it that, was demonstrated by the clearly low IQ mayor of Baltimore Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in 2015 in the wake of the death of Freddy Gray in police custody.  The mayor stated that “while we try to make sure that they (protestors) were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well”. So the chief law enforcement officer of the city of a major American city decided to give “protesters” space to destroy said city. What was important was not the right of private property owners to retain their property, not the desires of citizens to be safe in their communities, not the expectations of taxpayers that their leaders would enforce the law… no it was the wishes of those intent on destruction. 

Small things lead to big things and the results were predictable, although protesters destroying property are not exactly small things.  In 2014 there were 211 murders in Baltimore for a rate of 33.84 per 100,000 citizens. Already high compared to the national average of 4.44, things got a lot worse afterwards and every year since 2015 the city has had over 300 murders with 2021 coming in at 337 and a murder rate of 58.27 per 100,000.

And of course the thing about murder is that it is the most extreme crime possible.  It’s at the top of the crime pyramid if you will – as an example, out of a given set of criminals, 80% might be willing to commit robbery, 40% assault and perhaps 2% murder. We therefore can assume that if the tip of that crime pyramid is getting bigger, the lower part is growing in tandem, if not more.  And indeed it has. Additionally, murder is relatively easy to measure as you usually have a body to count.  With most other crimes it’s harder to know a crime has been committed as typically someone needs to report it, and increasingly people are simply not bothering as they feel like nothing is going to be done, particularly as it can take literally hours for just to get a response from a 911 call in the first place.

Although George Soros’ DAs are a BIG part of the problem, out on the streets the problem is clearly less policing, both in terms of actual police numbers and what laws are being enforced.  As such, the solution would seem obvious:  More police and more enforcement.  But there’s the rub. As woke cities and states reduced the enforcement of and penalties for crimes in the name of “equity” they simultaneously eviscerated their police forces.  Not only are cops retiring and “quitting in droves”, but across the country cities are finding it increasingly challenging to recruit new officers to fill the vacancies.  So now they find themselves in a situation where they have more crime and fewer officers to enforce the law. 

That’s a vicious societal death spiral that’s extraordinarily difficult to pull out of.  The increase in crime chases more taxpayers and tax generating employers out of the cities and states just at the time when those bodies have to spend more trying to recruit new officers.  Eventually other services suffer and more people decide to leave, further eroding the tax base and the community.  We see that taking place in real time as citizens are escaping crime ridden cesspools in droves. 

But the thing is, that vicious cycle doesn’t start out that way. It starts with words like “empathy” and “tolerance” and “equity” being used to turn a blind eye to those aforementioned small things.  While empathy and tolerance might be laudable as personal characteristics, they, along with the fiction of “equity”, are cancers as governing characteristics. Democrats leverage voters’ sympathies to push for policies that sound humane but in reality create needle and crime ridden homeless encampments, eviscerate the criminal justice system and make life worse for virtually every citizen in the country. 

Can America pull out of this societal death spiral?  That’s a good question.  It will take voters deciding that reality trumps emotion and that an imperfect Republican Party trumps a soulless Democrat Party.  We’ll see on November 9 whether Americans 0f 2022 have the courage New Yorkers exhibited in 1993.