No, the United States did not Steal California from Mexico

We’ve all heard the claims that the United States stole California from Mexico and therefore in reality it belongs to Mexico.

That’s not quite… right.  California, like most of the world, has a history that’s slightly more complex than will fit on your average bumper sticker.

Prior to the Spanish arrival in 1565 there were over 100 different tribes inhabiting what we know as California. Most were small and the total population of the area is estimated to be approximately 300,000. 

Although there were some minor explorations, and small settlements, California remained  largely unexplored and unsettled by Spain for most of the next 200 years. This was due to a combination of factors such as the distance from Spain, the strained Spanish finances but also the fact that there were no pack animals, little agricultural tradition, and a food supply that was less than appealing to Spanish palates. 

By the late 18^th century however the Spanish decided they needed to better organize their North American territories to preempt incursions from other European powers, particularly the French and Russians. As a result Spain began a more robust exploration of the state and would slowly colonize it, setting up missions along the vast coastal areas. 

By the early part of the 19^th century however Spain’s fortunes were changing, the empire was stretched too thin and after a decade of fighting, Mexico gained its independence in 1821. The new nation included what is today Mexico as well as California and much of the American Southwest, stretching east to Texas and north to Colorado.  And here’s where the rub in the argument that the United States stole California begins.

The population of California in 1800 was approximately 300,000 – almost all natives – essentially the same as it had been for centuries. By 1848 however it had dropped to half of that due to disease, which was responsible for 60-80% of the decline and the working to death or killing of the natives by the Spanish.

California at the time of Mexico’s independence was already sparsely populated, with just 200,000 people and that number was rapidly shrinking.  (For perspective, that’s ½ of 1% of today’s 40 million inhabitants.) Add to that the fact that Mexico could barely be called a functioning country as in the 27 years from 1821 to 1848 it had literally 40 different governments. As would seem obvious, the governments were dysfunctional, had an incredibly large land mass to govern, little tax revenue coming in and very limited finances with which to field an army to secure it, nevermind carry out the minimum responsibilities of a government. 

To better understand how dysfunctional and empty Mexico was at the time take a look at Texas.  In 1835 Texas had a population of less than 45,000 people, 30,000 of whom were Anglo settlers who’d been given permission to settle the lands by the Mexican government.  The remainder included approximately 7,000 Mexicans and 5,000 black slaves. Because of conflict with the Mexican government on issues from slavery to religion, in October of that year Texas started a war for independence and by March 1836 it had declared itself the Republic of Texas.  That could never have happened had Mexico been able to populate the area on its own or keep it from breaking away.  But it couldn’t, so Texas was born. 

The American annexation of Texas a decade later in 1845 was the catalyst that brought California to the United States. When the US annexed Texas there was a dispute with Mexico as to exactly where the southern border was. The Americans said it was the Rio Grande while the Mexicans said it was the more northern Nueces River. After negotiations failed to reach an agreement American troops marched to the Rio Grande to bolster the American claim. The Mexicans, seeing this as an encroachment on their land, attacked the American troops and the United States then declared war.

The war, like the Texas war for independence, was short lived, with hostilities ending in September of 1847, and resulted in Mexico ceding California and much of what is today the Southwest of the United States, as well as relinquishing all claims to Texas. At the same time the Americans paid Mexico $15 million and assumed $3.5 million of debt owed to Americans by Mexico.  After negotiations of terms, The Treaty of Hidalgo ending the war was signed in February 1848 and California was admitted to the Union in 1850. 

At that time California had a population of approximately 150,000, the majority of whom were the remnants of the native Indian tribes. Over the next twenty years that native population would decline to approximately 30,000, with diseases being the main cause, but with upwards of 20-25,000 being the result of intentional killings by the new settlers.

The year of 1848 was of course an important year for California for another reason, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill, and the resulting whirlwind would bring over 300,000 prospectors and would be treasure hunters into the state from across America and elsewhere.  By the 1860 Census the population of the state was recorded as 379,000, 90% of whom were white.

And here we get to the most interesting part of this argument. If it were truly the case that California belonged to the people who lived there previously, it most certainly wouldn’t be Mexicans. When California became a state there were very few Mexicans living there and 50 years later that had not changed. According to the Census of 1900, California had a population of 1,485,000 people, of which only 8,086 were from Mexico. That’s less than 1% and only 2% of the foreign born. Compare that to Brits at 85,000, Germans at 72,000, Chinese at 40,000 and half a dozen other countries who had more than Mexico, including Italy, Ireland, France, Sweden and even Switzerland with 10,000. Certainly some of the 1.1 million native born Californians may have had Mexican heritage, but based on the 1860 Census, not very many did. 

Which brings us to modern day California. Today 40% of the state’s 40 million people are Hispanic, and if we suppose that 65% of those are Mexican or of Mexican heritage, that would mean about 10 million people living in California are of Mexican heritage.

Ten million is a big number, but the reality is, it doesn’t do a single thing to support the notion that California belongs to Mexico or that they are the original natives to California. They are clearly not. Almost all of them, or their parents or grandparents came to the United States within the last century, most likely during the last half century. 

The reality is, Californians of Mexican heritage not only have no more claim on California than anyone else, they actually have much less than white and Asian families that go back to the 19^th century. And Mexico itself has no claims against California because their country was too weak and dysfunctional to even maintain it, nevermind defend it. 

The United States won California as a result of winning a war, the way lands have changed hands for virtually all of human history.  This latest attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the United States in general and its western states in particular is disingenuous at best and an outright lie at worst. But of course leftists never let facts get in the way of a good victimization story…

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Originally published on June 14, 2025

https://thefederalist.com/2025/06/13/the-claim-that-america-stole-california-from-mexico-is-an-ignorant-lie/

Of Foxholes and Atheists and Donald Trump

 The leftist elites always hate Republicans, but there is something much deeper going on with their hatred for Donald Trump. The desire to destroy him has an almost religious element to it.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. The basic premise is that when facing an existential threat, particularly when lives are on the line, people will look for something stronger than themselves, often God, to pull them through.

The opposite might be when things are good. Then, atheism, or at least an indifference to God, grows.

Sadly, in this context, the last 75 years have been very good for the West. WWII was horrible, of course, but there were some good things that came from it.

The first good thing features two sides of the same coin, and that coin is the utter destruction of Germany and Japan. I don’t mean their defeat, but rather the utter destruction of their infrastructure and that of many of the nations fighting them. The result for the relatively unscathed United States was that its full wartime manufacturing footing put it in a position to provide pretty much of everything the war-torn world needed. The result was that by the middle of the 1950s, the American economy, with 5% of the world’s population, approached 40% of world GDP. Times were indeed good.

The other side of that coin was that because the German and Japanese infrastructures were so completely destroyed, they could leapfrog over many iterations of evolution and begin again with the latest technologies, machinery, and processes. The result was that by the 1980s, the Japanese and German economies were the most powerful in the world after the US.

The second positive outcome of WWII was the Cold War. Now the Cold War had many downsides, including the hot wars in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, but what it did was draw a clear line between who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. America and the West were far from perfect, but we knew that at the end of the day, the West was the land of freedom, while the communists were tyrannies constantly seeking to expand.

The result of that clarity was that, for the most part, Western nations understood there was real danger in the world and prepared for it. They focused on trading with one another, they took defense seriously, and while they sometimes tolerated communists in their midst, they rarely made heroes of them.

The consequence of that Cold War clarity, and the Soviet and Chinese understanding that the West was willing to fight to preserve freedom across the planet, was a relative peace. And that relative peace was the West’s undoing.

For the half-century from the end of World War II until 2000, the world experienced more economic growth than it had in the previous 2,000 years combined. Driven by relative peace, world trade took off both within the West and with the developing world.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to perpetual prosperity. The West, basking in its victory over the Soviets and its certainty that communist China would evolve into a modern Western democracy if only allowed to sell us tchotchkes, began to turn on itself.

The peace / communist parties, which had been funded by Moscow and had always been a fringe element of modern Western polity, suddenly morphed into environmentalists and cloaked their anticapitalist ideas in far more voter-friendly “Earth First” shibboleths. Now, just as the money spigot from Russia was coming to an end, a far larger resource was becoming viable…Western governments.

The result was the extraordinary growth in the power of the far left in Western politics. And it wasn’t just environmentalism that was driving the train. As the Cold War wound down, Western nations used their “peace dividends” to shower citizens with benefits while simultaneously seeking to regulate their economies into perfection. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t work!)

The perfect encapsulation of the West’s metastasizing can be seen in the form of the European Union. Imagined as a vehicle to foster peace and then trade between perpetually warring European states, it morphed into a leviathan that not only seeks to control virtually every aspect of citizens’ lives in its member states, but it seeks to control who can grow what and when, how states can control their borders and even whether sovereign states can conduct their own elections.

Like so much of the modern West, an idea that started out as something ostensibly good metastasized into cancer. Stopping the pouring of chemicals directly into rivers morphed into eviscerating farms. A temporary safety net for the downtrodden morphs into generational welfare. An empathetic desire to help victims of war morphs into an invasion by legions of military-aged men.

And it’s not just capitalism and freedom that have taken body blows. The third leg of the stool upon which western civilization stands is Christianity, and it has been brutalized by Western prosperity, as have the foundations of Christianity, namely, marriage and children.

As they say, idle hands are the Devil’s workshop. The West’s relative prosperity has caused citizens not focused on a common enemy to turn on their own history. From British universities dropping Shakespeare and Chaucer to the New York Museum of Natural History removing Teddy Roosevelt’s statue to the Spanish government’s vow to “decolonize“ the nation’s museums, to the cancer of DEI, across the West, nations are turning their backs on their own foundations, the things that set them apart from—and above, frankly—every other civilization in human history. From socialism to communism to Islam, Western intellectuals have led the charge, via schools and the media, to champion everything that is anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-masculine, and anti-white.

At the end of the day, the globalist elites co-opted the hard-won prosperity and peace by leveraging technology, Chinese tchotchkes, and social media algorithms to aim society’s guns at the very things that built success in the first place. They’ve created a Mexican standoff where everyone loses as the core elements of Western civilization are undermined by policies specifically formatted to destroy them, while the resulting “culture” is not equipped to support anything close to the same level of civilization.

All of this is why Donald Trump is for the left, a new Jesus Christ—not in the sense that he’s godlike, because I think we can all agree that he’s not, but because he embodies their eventual destruction. Thus, just as Christ was a heretic whose message of love and a gracious God had to be destroyed because it threatened the established order, Trump’s pro-America, pro-masculinity, and pro-Western civilization message must be destroyed because it threatens the New World Order.

The globalists argue that they are best equipped to structure the lives of citizens, organize world economies, and control everything from speech to cow farts to electricity generation. Any message that suggests that citizens should control their own lives, that capitalism makes for the most prosperous outcomes, and that free speech is a cornerstone of civilization must be quashed.

Western elites think Donald Trump is the common enemy they need to unify citizens under the banner of globalism. They’ve got it backwards. They’re more likely to discover exactly how many of their citizens feel like they’ve been crouching in a foxhole waiting for someone to inspire them to climb out, pick up their weapons, and charge into a battle of ideas to take back their lives. Imagine the sheer horror on the globalists’ faces when they realize that Donald Trump just might be that guy...

Can a Nation Built By Giants Survive the Disability Industrial Complex?

Vivek Ramaswamy got himself in some hot water a couple of weeks ago when he tweeted about American culture. He’s wrong on the big picture, but his comments about American workers hits a nerve… 

While the US Constitution and free market capitalism set the foundations for American prosperity, it took a rugged, passionate, free people to build it. From George Washington to George Washington Carver to millions of other Americans, the United States was carved out a continent of forests that seemed to go on forever, fertile plains, vast mountain ranges and scorching hot deserts.  Over time American frontiersmen, settlers and entrepreneurs forged a country that seemed to have all of God’s blessings in abundance.

Conditions were rarely easy for most Americans throughout most of our history. Coal miners spent 12 – 16 hour shifts in dangerous mines in which they sometimes couldn’t even stand up. Frontiersmen built a homestead and a farm out of a thick Appalachian forest while fighting brutal winters and a tenacious Indian population. Slaves toiled for years at backbreaking work during freezing winters and boiling summers. At the end of the 19th century over 50% of Americans still lived and worked as farmers, a far more dangerous job than most people understand. The industrial revolution brought sweatshops and drove a thirst for steel, trains and petroleum, industries that brought new dangers.

One sometimes has to marvel that the colonies survived long enough to coalesce and challenge the British for independence and then go on to grow and prosper (mostly) for over 200 years as it changed the world.

Were the Americans who carved a nation out of a continent somehow so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who crisscrossed a continent with railroads, telephone lines and highways so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who won two world wars and sent a man to the moon so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who invented the mechanical reaper, air conditioning, vulcanized rubber and the microchip so different than Americans today? Not based on DNA they weren’t. But that doesn’t mean they were the same. While the DNA of the American people today is no different than that of the people who invented the elevator or the light bulb, the American people writ large certainly appear to be.

Go back little more than one generation and it seems like Americans were something of another species. Compared to 2025, they appear to be relative supermen. In 1970 there were 79 million people working in the United States supporting 1.5 million workers on Disability Insurance (SSDI). That means that one person out of every 52 workers was on Disability… Fast forward 5 decades and it seems as if the country has turned on its side. By 2024 the number of Americans working had risen by 100% to 161 million people. During that same period however, workers receiving disability insurance skyrocketed up 380% to 7.2 million. Today, instead of one out of every 53 workers being on disability, it’s one in 22! That number is particularly interesting because the United States of 1970 was a far grittier place than the United States of 2025.

First off, the United States in 2025 is a much different workplace than the one that existed in 1970. In 1970 fully 25% of the American workforce worked in manufacturing while 50% worked in the service industry. Today, 8% of the American workforce works in manufacturing while over 70% of workers work in the service industry. Given that designing a website, taking an order at Chili’s or greeting a guest at Marriott is generally less dangerous than welding together various pieces of a Ford Ranger or operating a blast furnace at a US Steel plant, America should be a safer place to work. And indeed it is. The death rate for American workers in 1970 was 18 per every 100,000 workers. By 2023 that rate had dropped to 3.5, a decline of 80%.

But of course work is not the only place where one gets hurt. Today, virtually everywhere Americans go everything seems safer. Cars have seatbelts, antilock breaks and airbags. Houses have GFCI circuit breakers in bathrooms and kitchens and smoke detectors in almost every room. Lawn darts are but a distant memory and towns across the country require helmets for bicycle riding and virtually every appliance and medicine comes plastered with book length warning label. At the end of the day, America has become a far safer place to live and work than it has been at any time in its history.

But somehow in that much safer America, the total of people listed as disabled and receiving disability payments has skyrocketed:  The government spends more on disability than on food stamps and welfare combined.  American workers paid .5% of their paychecks for SSDI when it began 70 years ago, but in 2022 they paid 2%.  That means that $2 out of every $100 an American worker earns goes to support someone not working.

How is that even possible? Have Americans become weaklings, unable to stay healthy? Has some unknown affliction made us incapable of working? No. There is an affliction, but it’s not biological. It’s called the nanny state. From judges who rubberstamp virtually every claim they ever see to a quarter of applicants suffering from musculoskeletal injuries – which conveniently enough cannot be detected by doctors – to outright fraud (more)(more)(more) and states seeking to shift costs to the federal government, SSDI is a symbol of much of what is wrong in America today, where in 2022 fully 4.5% of working age Americans were on disability. The worst thing about this dysfunctional program is that the fraud keeps people who are in real need of help waiting in line, sometimes to die.

When government decides to play the role of caretaker and redistribute wealth from workers to everyone else, it should come as no surprise that many people will choose to jump from the working pool to the everyone else pool. For more proof just look at the food stamp program over the same 50 year period. While the population has increased by about 75% since 1970, workers by 100% and disability by 380%, food stamp recipients grew by over 1,000%!

The economics of the welfare state, including the “disability industrial complex” cannot be sustained. If the record of the last 50 years were to be repeated over the next 50, in 2075 the country would have 320 million workers supporting almost 30 million people on disability and 450 million people on food stamps. Those numbers are simply unsustainable, particularly if the goal is to Make America Great Again.

American workers and entrepreneurs have together created the greatest wealth and prosperity the world has ever seen, but eventually the numbers stop working.  The thing I think Ramaswamy misses is that it was inevitable that the spirit that helped forge a nation out of a continent and dot it with jewels like the Empire State Building, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge would reemerge and shrug. That’s what happened in November. For it to make any difference however, the nanny state will have to be eviscerated, and not just the regulatory part of it. The redistribution apparatus will have to be dismantled too, and the disability industrial complex is a good place to start. 

Paris 2000 & Paris 2024: A Tale of Two Cities...

On New Year’s Eve 1999 I was tending bar at Outback Steakhouse in DC.  As midnight rolled through each time zone celebrations from each city were shown on TV.  At 6:00 I looked up and what I saw would change my life. It was Paris and I was captivated.  Everything seemed to be outlined in lights.  The bridges, the Eiffel Tower, the walks along the river, the Louvre… seemingly everything. I was enchanted and turned to a friend and said “I have to go there…” 

Five months later I was standing on one of those bridges I’d seen on TV.  It was my first visit to the city and it was the most beautiful place I’d ever been.  I remember standing on a bridge near the Louvre, staring at the Eiffel Tower and saying to myself “I have to live here someday.”

The next day I would meet my future bride in the form of my guide in the gardens of Versailles.  I spent a week in the city and easily had the greatest week of my life. I would go on to visit France a dozen times over the next 20 years and experience much of what the city and the country had to offer… and I would eventually live there too.

The celebration that I’d seen on that night in the bar had been a carefully choreographed effort to show the world, on the biggest stage, the beauty of Paris, the glory of France and invite the world to visit.  It worked for me and tens of millions of others. In 2002 France would become the world’s number one tourist destination, a position it has held for most of the quarter century since.  Tens of millions of tourists would visit Paris and France and their billions of Euros make up 10% of France’s GDP.  That celebration might just have been the most effective advertisement in human history.

Now, jump ahead a quarter century when Paris is hosting the Olympics.  The event began ten days ago with what was essentially a three-hour commercial in front of one of the largest worldwide television audiences possible, with upwards of 1.5 billion people watching. 

And what did France do with this once in a lifetime opportunity?  Showcase French culture? Showcase the most beautiful city in the world? Showcase the bridges or the buildings or the sculptures or the parks? The Sun King - Louis XIV, Victor Hugo, or Baron Haussmann, the father of the city we know today?  Umm… not exactly.

While there were tiny glimpses into some of that, the reality is that the opening ceremonies were a celebration of everything but the grandeur of France. From an early ménage à trois hookup in the public library to the despicable mocking of the Last Supper by a cast of deviant trans characters to what looked like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse sitting in front of the Eiffel Tower, almost the entire thing was a giant middle finger to face of culture in general and Christianity in particular.  And don’t be fooled by the Olympic Committee’s “apology” if anyone was offended.  Nor by the designer Thomas Jolly’s disingenuous claims that the feast was based on a Greek festival featuring Dionysus, the god of wine and the father of Séquana, the goddess of the river Seine.  In the same piece TheWrap quotes an Olympics producer stating: “Thomas Jolly took inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting to create the setting…Clearly, there was never an intention to show disrespect towards any religious group or belief … [Jolly] is not the first artist to make a reference to what is a world-famous work of art. From Andy Warhol to ‘The Simpsons,’ many have done it before him.”

Despite the denials, the opening ceremonies were clearly an attempt to push LGBT deviancy into the mainstream of world consciousness – in a way that it could never have reached viewers in most of the world otherwise – and do so while mocking the faith of Christians, the one faith the left feels safe in mocking. 

Rush Limbaugh used to say “Politics is downstream from culture”. He talked about it in the context of schools, Hollywood and the media acting as the bleeding edge of ideas that the left was trying to inculcate into America, and that eventually legislation would follow.  There is no better example of this than gay marriage a decade ago and today’s trans ideology and its attendant child mutilation demands.

What we saw on Friday was an attempt to use this traditionally – by design – apolitical venue showcasing human achievement, human competition and most of all human spirit, as the camel’s nose in the world’s tent for the homosexual / transsexual agenda. 

And that right there is the crux of the problem.  The mocking of Christianity is of course vile, but a free society thrives on free speech, and that includes mockery and derision. Similarly, the LGBTQXYZ123 agenda, while perhaps unseemly to many, is welcome to take its place in the arena of ideas. That’s not the problem. No, what makes this event so despicable, and frankly, disheartening, is the fact that given the platform and three hours in front of a billion viewers, rather than France showcasing her beauty and elegance and history and culture, someone decided to hand that opportunity over to activists bent on showing France, not as one of the great foundations of western civilization, but rather to be a nation of depravity, sacrilege and deviance.

Make no mistake, while the Olympics are indeed about athletes and competition and spirit, at the end of the day, money is what makes them work. Broadcasters pay many billions of dollars for the right to be able to broadcast the games. Companies pay billions of dollars to be associated with the games for the specific purpose of advertising their offerings. Hosts pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the Olympic Committee and promise to spend billions more on the games, often knowing they are going to lose money in the process, all in hopes of generating money in the long run from tourism.

This Olympic betrayal is not going to destroy tourism to France. People are still going to come, by the tens of millions. The Louvre and the Mona Lisa aren’t going anywhere. The Eiffel Tower isn’t going anywhere and Paris’ spectacular bridges and boulevards aren’t going anywhere.  But what might have been destroyed is the illusion that French culture in the 21^st century is anything resembling or worthy of that which built some of the greatest achievements in western civilization. Does anyone who watched that spectacle imagine that the France of the 21^st century could ever match the glories crafted by the France of history that brought us the Rights of Man, Mont-Saint-Michel or the palace of Versailles?  Of course not. It won’t do anything in the short run but make Paris and France the butt of jokes. In the long run however, that’s a different story.  Cultures rarely die in a grand cataclysms, but rather wither on the vine from neglect, indifference, ingratitude and contempt. That, I think is the message of the 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony in Paris. For a nation I love, that’s a message, I for one would rather not have seen.

Follow me on Twitter at ImperfectUSA

Dear Donald Trump: Compassion Should Not Be A Suicide Pact...

America is a land of immigrants. We’re told that constantly, and it’s true. Of course it’s also true that immigration of one sort of another is a hallmark of almost all of human history.

Wherever humanity originated, at some point members of the species immigrated everywhere else. It is of course never a simple issue. Sometimes it’s the result of the peoples being chased from their homelands like the Vandals who were chased by the Huns from eastern Europe into the Roman Empire, eventually settling in Gaul then Iberia and finally North Africa. Other times it’s the result of a people who seek to expand their territory through conquest such as with the various Muslim caliphates that emerged from Mecca & Medina whose desire to encircle the Mediterranean was only stopped by Charles Martel in Tours in 732 and by John III Sobieski in Vienna in 1683.

History is full of examples of peoples immigrating from one place to another. We often think of the earliest peoples moving into an area that was previously uninhabited. That may possibly be true of North and South America, but for the most part it’s not true. When the earliest humans immigrated out of Africa and into Europe, Asia and Oceania, they encountered our cousins, the Neanderthals, and after 100 centuries of war eventually eradicated them.

All of this to say that immigration is nothing new in human history. And it’s not in American history either. The United States was built by immigrants from Europe from a land that was extraordinarily sparsely populated when they arrived. It’s estimated that there were 4.5 million inhabitants north of the Rio Grande in 1492, or about one half a person per square mile. That compares to approximately 32 in Mexico at the time, 33 in Spain, 60 in France and the 103 in India, the world’s densest nation at the time.  Today America stands at approximately 100 people per square mile. 

From its beginning, what became America experienced a series waves of immigration which included approximately 86 million people through 2019, a number that has increased to approximately 100 million over the last 5 years. Although Donald Trump stemmed the tide somewhat, Joe Biden has opened up the floodgates with more than 10 million illegal immigrants pouring over the nonexistent border since his installation. That’s fully 3% of the US population.  As significant numbers of those people are heading to New York, California and other blue states who roll out the red carpet and give them free money, the Democrats don’t fight to keep the border open because it helps their Congressional numbers.  

This is simply not sustainable. Particularly when the overwhelming majority of the people coming across the border are from countries that don’t share our values and have little experience with the freedoms that helped create history’s greatest nation & economy. 

Across the country we’re seeing sanctuary states and cities being overwhelmed by the events they supported in the first place. Citizens, veterans, children and more are being displaced to make room for illegals, and taxpayers are picking up the tab. Virtually every aspect of public services is being overwhelmed, from shelters to schools to hospitals to police.

The good thing is, Donald Trump has promised that on day 1 he will start the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. That, combined with a wall the likes of which we’ve never seen is a great start.

But there’s a problem, and Jesse Kelly hit it right on the head on Twitter…

“70% of Americans SAY they care about the border.

Run one video of little Pedro sobbing as he and mother Lupe get loaded into an ICE vehicle a they get deported back to Guatemala and that 70% number will drop to around 5%.

Country is too soft for mass deportation. No chance. 0.”

Kelly is right. America is simply too soft to do what’s necessary in order to deal with this disaster.

Americans are largely a compassionate people. The LBGTQXYZ travesty we’re experiencing today is at its core the result of Americans reacting to gay partners not being able to visit dying lovers in hospitals during the AIDS epidemic because they didn’t have rights and families of the dying kept them out of the hospital rooms.

Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of babies are aborted annually because Americans are angered at hearing that a victim of rape or the mother of a severely handicapped fetus are forced to give birth rather than get an abortion.

In wide swaths of the country policing and justice have been eviscerated because too many Americans believe that blacks are incapable of overcoming slavery that ended a century and a half ago or discrimination that was outlawed back in the 1960s.

Americans are indeed a compassionate people, but sometimes compassion can get you killed. Compassion has a role to play in a moral civilization, but when it becomes the driving force to the exclusion of rational thought, it ceases to be a virtue. (See Europe, which since 2015 at Angela Merkel’s direction during the war in Syria, imported tens of millions of military aged men from Africa and the Middle East who are bringing war to the streets, many of whom despise western culture and want to bring Sharia.) You cannot run a country based on teary anecdotes. They make for great media and heartfelt stories, but they make for terrible policy.

If Donald Trump is going to fix this situation, he’s going to have to be willing to endure the unprecedented level of vitriol that will be thrown at him. AOC crying at the side of cages will be child’s play compared to what the media will do with images of little Pedro and his pregnant mommy being pulled from the taxpayer provided hotel room and loaded up into a DHS van. He’s going to have to be willing to endure stories about the heartbreaking lives that face deportees back in Mexico, Guatemala and Venezuela and the rest of the countries from whence they came with him playing the role of Hitler. At the end of the day, if Donald Trump is going to lead the nation out of the morass that Democrats and the swamp have led us into, he’s going to have to be willing to be vilified, cursed, defamed, libeled, reviled and basically all of the other things he has been exposed to over the last 8 years, on steroids.

He wasn’t willing to endure that abuse last time and allowed random judges to throw roadblocks all along the way, and as a result his wall was never finished and now there are 10 million new illegals here as a result. If he’s going to be the leader Americans need right now, he’s going to have be a lot more George Patton and a lot less Mark Milley…

Skynet: Terminator Wasn't Fiction, It Was History - And We're Living It

Sometimes art imitates life and sometimes life imitates art.  Today we are living the latter… and it’s called The Terminator.  Little did we know when we first watched Arnold utter “I’ll be back” in 1984 that we were actually watching our real future. 

For those who don’t remember, Terminator was set in 1984 Los Angeles when a cyborg is sent back from 2029 to kill Sarah Connor. The premise is that at some point Skynet, an artificial intelligence defense system, had gained self awareness and launched a nuclear war in its effort to destroy civilization and the humans who built it.  A resistance had formed and John Connor was leading it to victory over Skynet.  In a last ditch attempt for victory Skynet sent the Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor before her son, John, could be born. 

While the names may have been changed to protect the not so innocent and while we may not be in 1984, make no mistake, we are very much in the throes of the apocalypse that Linda Hamilton was driving off into the sunset to face.

Our Skynet is called Silicon Valley and its comrades of the American left.  Unlike Skynet, which gained self awareness, Silicon Valley, is full of people who seem to have no self awareness at all.  They proffer ideas that normal people recognize as ludicrous such as men can give birth, America is systemically racist and defunding police leads to safer streets, yet they think they are correct about everything.  Just look at the world they exist in. The Bay Area is overrun with homelessness, drug addicts literally sprawled out on the sidewalks, the streets are covered with human feces and hypodermic needles, violence is raging out of control and so many criminals shoplift with impunity in full view of employees and cameras that national chains and mom & pop shops alike are having to close their doors because they’re losing so much money. What’s more, their calls for defunding police persist, despite extraordinary spikes of violence. 

The left is anything but self aware.  They push insane policies that lead to the literal destruction of society and somehow believe they are standing up for the oppressed.  They claim that America is racist while in fact the United States may be the least racist nation on the planet.

Of course none of this would matter if Silicon Valley were today just the sleepy erstwhile farmland it was when Hewlett & Packard launched their company in 1939, or even as late as 1976 when Apple was launched.  But Silicon Valley is no longer that tranquil, serene suburb, but rather it has become the hub of our Skynet.  Silicon Valley, between social media, information hosting and communications, has gained a stranglehold on virtually every American citizen.  Privacy no longer exists.  Free exchange of ideas no longer exists.  Opinions that differ from the approved script are no longer allowed and are banned from the public square. 

Silicon Valley in general and social media in particular have set Americans against one another every bit as much as Skynet set humans against one another via nuclear war.  The truth is, social media is even more insidious than Skynet.  At least with nuclear war you understand the enemy is indeed an enemy and you recognize that mortal danger that lies ahead. Social media creates enemies where there used to be friendship, it creates victim oppressor relationships where none exist, it provides tools for groups to attack individuals with unapproved ideas and do so both online and off, usually with impunity. 

Like Skynet, which started out as a useful tool to game out various scenarios and ended up bastardizing itself into a tool to conduct actual war, social media started out as a useful tool to connect with friends and ended up as a tool allowed citizens to go to war against one another.

In addition to turning people against one another, the other aspect of The Terminator that rings far too true in 2021 America is the erasure of history. Schwarzenegger went back in history to try and eliminate Sarah Connor in order to stop John Connor from ever existing.  In a similar way, social media, BLM, Antifa and Democrats writ large are actively erasing American history.  First it was statues of Confederate generals, then it was the Founding Fathers followed in short order by Aunt Jemima and Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss.  Half of history is erased and the other half is rewritten.  No longer was America born in 1776, but rather 1619.  No longer was America founded on freedom, but instead on slavery.  America was never a land of opportunity but a land of oppression. 

The last, and perhaps most disturbing element of The Terminator documentary is the fact that Skynet never gave up.  Although the movie ended with the cyborg crushed to death in a press, we all know that that was not the real end of the story.  Not only did the cyborg survive, but Skynet kept sending newer and better assassins to kill Sarah or John or somehow destroy the past to prevent the future.  Donald Trump is our John Connor and his tenure in the White House was the perfect demonstration of this unbridled attack machine:  Four years of the Russia hoax, even after it was proven demonstrably false… Kids in Cages… “Suckers and losers”… “Good people on both sides”…  Trump’s a racist… Trump’s a sexist… Trump hates immigrants… Trump’s a fascist… Obstruction of justice… Not to mention the impeachment.  And when all of that fails, they blatantly steal an election under the cover of night and then attack the people who point out the theft as racists. And then another impeachment!

The left was and is simply relentless.  Like Skynet, they literally never, ever give up. Even when you think they are defeated, when you win the highest office in the land, they find novel ways to thwart your victory. Get elected on the platform of building a wall they engage a dozen different ways to thwart it.  When one element of the Skynet swamp is eliminated three more simply arrive to take its place.

At the end of the day, Silicon Valley, the Media and the Democrat party are what Skynet was: an existential threat to civilization and everything we hold dear.  A threat to common sense, rational thought, individual freedom, the Constitution, and most of all, the Republic.  America has been the bulwark against tyranny in the world for almost a century.  When our Skynet succeeds in eliminating the United States, the entire world will be less safe and eventually civilization will collapse just as it did when 2029’s Skynet launched its war. 

Reece’s characterization of Skynet couldn’t be more accurate today:  “Listen and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.”  That is the future we are facing.  Unless Americans can figure out how to stop it. 

Fifteen Years Later: The 9-11 Attacks and the Silver Lining Found Within

Yesterday was of course the 15th anniversary of the attacks of 9-11. Like most people, I remember that day, that moment when I realized the nation was under attack like no other day in my life. I remember walking into a practically deserted Kroger supermarket near midnight to get some food as I hadn’t eaten much of anything all day and had nothing in the house. It was somber and no one really spoke other than some torpid greeting and a forced smile.

It was literally like the foundations of one’s being had been shaken. War was something you read about in history books… something FDR or LBJ talked about, not something you watched live on your TV on some random Tuesday morning in September. War was something that happened on battlefields in other countries in places where Americans often can’t pronounce or sometimes can’t find on a map, not in New York City and Washington, DC. We had won the Cold War and peace was overtaking the planet. The booming economy of the 1990’s was said to be the direct result of the “Peace Dividend” brought about by Ronald Reagan’s victory. How was something like this even possible?

On Monday America was a bustling marketplace of ideas and commerce combined with might and virtue that was leading the world into its post history phase, one where freedom and free trade and prosperity were things to be striven for, if not always achieved. On Tuesday America was on her knees having been sucker punched in the head and gut while leading the parade of nations towards prosperity. As is often the case with history, it sneaks up from behind and takes hold of your world and rips you from your path and puts you on hers.

Here, fifteen years later I can say that the attacks of 9-11 are one of the most defining moments of my life. Not because I lost any members of my family or any friends or even had my way of life changed significantly. No, the thing I lost was my innocence. For me, September 11th was like some macabre combination of discovering there is no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy all on the same day that you discover that you’re adopted, your wife’s cheating on you with your best friend, your religion is actually a cult and your accountant has stolen all your money. Having grown up on living on military bases around the world and been in the Army myself, I had this illusion that the United States was surrounded by some force field of grace that protected it from such attacks. Of course that force field was made up of the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who worked diligently to protect the country, but those were the machinations that went on behind the curtain while we citizens celebrated holidays, watched football and went about our daily lives.

After 9-11 that all changed. As the truth about the origin of the attacks became clear, as the realization that the United States was not unambiguously seen around the world as a force for good, it became necessary to do some introspection. And I did. And the result is probably not what Osama Bin Laden wanted… at least not with me.

I started writing my blog in 2009 soon after our socialist / fascist president, Barack Obama, began his quest to destroy the United States as the leader of the world. I was sufficiently motivated to do so largely because of 9-11. Why? Because 9-11 forced me to reexamine what I “knew” to be true about my country. I’d grown up saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in school, I’d grown up saluting or putting my hand on my heart whenever the National Anthem was played, I’d grown up reading about the United States twice saving the world from world wars that were started elsewhere. I’d grown up knowing that the United States was a force for good.

But having someone viciously attack your country’s two most important cities makes you wonder about that. Watching as millions of people around the world cheered that attack and support its motivations makes you wonder about that. Having millions of Americans agree with the basic premise behind the attacks – although in most cases not the attacks themselves – makes you wonder about America’s goodness.

For me that introspection forced me to question everything that I had believed my whole life… but the funny thing is, that introspection didn’t lead me to hate my country. It didn’t cause me to decide that America was in reality a dark force seeking to pillage and control the entire world. No, in fact, 9-11 forced me to examine the history and nature of the United States and as a result, while I recognize that she is indeed imperfect, it turns out that the United States has been the greatest force for good in all of human history. (Read Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People)

The American Constitution and the freedoms protected within, along with the theory of free markets championed by our founders have brought about more freedom and more prosperity than has ever existed. The history of man is largely one of war, bare sustenance if not abject poverty and of course, oppression. The United States has – as a part of, then the leader of the “West” – helped change that reality for billions of people around the world. The United States has indeed saved the world from two hot world wars, won another cold one, and provided a beacon of hope to people around the world. Millions of people have come to America seeking her freedoms and prosperity while tens of millions more are inspired to try and reproduce some aspects of our experiment in their own nations.

And so it goes that, thankfully, for myself and millions of others, the attacks of 9-11 did the exact opposite of what they were intended to do. They inspired many Americans to reexamine their history and rediscover the moral good that the United States stands for, the economic opportunity she stands for and the framework for freedom our Constitution supports. While I cannot be thankful for the events that occurred 15 years ago or for the carnage that has followed, I take joy in the fact that they reinvigorated a patriotism that had become mundane, they forced me to cherish not only our freedoms but the mechanisms by which they came to be and how they are secured.  And perhaps most of all they forced me to recognize that such freedoms, while granted by God, exist in a world of men and must be prized, protected and promoted in order to endure.  And I'm not alone.  That's what you call a silver lining...

Barack Obama will go down in history as the most successful president since Abraham Lincoln...

The eight year reign of Barack Obama will go down as the most important in American history since Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln led the United States at the single most important decision point in its history. At stake was no less than the question of whether the country would continue as a single nation or would it split in two as Manifest Destiny was fulfilled. Would there be a largely agrarian, slaveholding Confederate States of America bordering on a largely industrial and free United States of America or would a single, free and economically mixed United States emerge? At no point in the subsequent century and a half did the United States ever face a more foundational question.

Six years into Barack Obama’s presidency - and looking with much trepidation at the “last” two - one can’t help but wonder what kind of a nation will emerge on the other side. “History” said Winston Churchill, “is written by the victors” and like it or not, Barack Obama is the victor. Not sure about that? Take a look at the latest capitulation by his supposed opposition, Boehner and McConnell, the GOP leaders of the House and the Senate, respectively. In what is only the most recent example of obsequiousness they have vociferously attacked their own base in order to allow Obama to continue with his patently unconstitutional amnesty.

And what is it that Barack Obama has done to merit such distinction? He has opened the Pandora’s Box of unprecedented, omnipresent, government intervention. And like the evils escaping from Pandora’s Box, once government intervention is put in place you can’t get rid of it. With Obamacare he decreed that the government can tell Americans what they must buy, for their own good. With his NLRB appointees and the nationalization of General Motors he has eviscerated private property rights. With his using the IRS to muzzle opposition and his FCC taking over the Internet, he has taken a sledgehammer to concept of free speech and free markets.

In addition, his regulatory bonanza and welfare policies have cut the legs out from the basic premise of hard work being the key to success in America. By making entrepreneurship and job creation more difficult and by providing a seemingly endless array of benefits, he has driven the labor participation rate down to levels not seen in four decades.

And of course it’s not just the laws. He has set black against white as he constantly invokes racism in places where it simply doesn’t apply. What’s more, he has essentially told black Americans, those who are at most risk of being victims of crime, that the police are their enemies. He has set the poor and middle class against the rich as he assails the successful as robber barons who earned their success on the backs of others.

The country was far from perfect when Barack Obama took office and you can make the argument that it was already heading in a troubling direction when he came along. But the difference is, unlike Abraham Lincoln, who sought to save the Union, Barack Obama set out to fundamentally transform it. And that he has… from a place where individual initiative was the key to overcoming challenges, achieving success and finding happiness to a place where the first instinct of many is to look for someone to blame for their lack of success or happiness, or to try and figure out which arm of government to look to provide them.

Combine that entitlement / victim mentality with a legion of regulatory diktats and unconstitutional decrees – that no one in power seems willing to fight – and you have a recipe for a banana republic where power is held by whoever bribes the largest number of people and creates scapegoats to fuel populist furor. And so it goes as a nation of giants transforms into a nation of beggars and a government limited by the Constitution becomes a one limited only by a president’s appetite.

No president in 150 years has changed America more. Not Roosevelt, not Kennedy, not FDR not Reagan. Such is the transformation Barack Obama promised and delivered. Most Americans won’t view it as success, but the left does. Therefore, if history is indeed written by the victor – or in this case by his lefty sycophants in the media – Barack Obama will go down as the most successful president since Abraham Lincoln. And at this point it might be useful to think of something Churchill’s enemy, Adolph Hitler, said: “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”