Minnesota: Why the Left Will Win America's 2026 Civil War – With Republicans Helping Them Do So

The United States is facing an existential threat. My guess is this summer will be the most violent, damaging domestic summer since the Civil War. And I predict the left will win and come out victorious on the other side. They will, after winning this new civil war, seek to eliminate the last vestiges of republicans.

I use a small r because while some Republicans are true republicans, most are not. And when the left wins the war, those RINOs are going to “work with” Democrats to create the illusion that America is still a republic, but it won’t be. They will use every tool available to silence dissent, take control over virtually every sector of American life, and they will implement rules so that America becomes a one-party nation.

Now I say all of this with the great hope that I am wrong, but I don’t think I will be.

The cowardly Republicans are going to cave in every conceivable manner in order to try to forestall a civil war. At every level, they are going to give in to the left, they are going to “compromise” their principles, and they are going to betray their voters and our Founding Fathers.

And I mean that at every level in every branch. There is simply no universe where Republicans have the intestinal fortitude to do what’s right in the face of withering attacks from the left.

There is literally no better example of this than election integrity. Nothing animates GOP voters like election integrity. Not abortion. Not welfare fraud. Not guns. (A majority of Democrats support it as well!) Literally nothing gets rank-and-file Republicans more animated in 2026 than elections, but still, the Republicans do nothing about it.

But the catalyst for the Summer of Love circa 2026 (which is already starting) won’t be election integrity per se, but rather immigration. The challenge is that the Democrats have spread 50 million illegal aliens across the entire country. From Maine to California and everywhere in between. This will not be like the Civil War, where the two sides were mostly geographically separated. No, this is going to be like a dozen people thrown into cage matches all around the country.

And why is this going to be the Big One? Because as we’re seeing in Minneapolis, the left has perfected the business model of professional protest movementeers. They’ve been training for more than 25 years. We saw it in the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, the IMF protests in DC in 2000, Occupy Wall Street in 2011, and the 2020 version of the Summer of Love.

They’ve literally been perfecting it for the last quarter century, and now they are preparing to strike. They are well funded, have a millions-strong army who have been exhorted to hate and violence by a treasonous media, are highly organized, proactive, and most of all, local governments around the country, even some in red states, are on their side.

The result will be a spreading of what we’re seeing in Minnesota as the temperatures rise, and it will be a perfect storm of success for them, regardless of how it turns out. On the one hand, there are countless “observers” who are willing to risk their lives to go out and attack ICE agents because they know that, if they die, they’ll be lionized as freedom fighters who laid down their lives in the defense of innocent children, regardless of the actual facts, and the propaganda value will be immeasurable to their cause.

What’s more, on the off chance that any of the protesters actually get arrested, the local DAs will release them without bail or charges, or federal judges will refuse to sign off on the arrest warrants. None of this, of course, is speculation. It’s all real and happening right now.

Whatever the outcome, the left wins. If their troops are killed while fighting ICE, we’re told that the fascist Trump is guilty of the murder of innocents. If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, he’s a dictator. If a governor calls out the National Guard, it’s a police state. Whichever way it works, the media will spin it as David versus Goliath with the law-abiding citizens and ICE characterized as the Philistines.

Minnesota is only the beginning. It’s likely the left will pursue a multi-month strategy in which they hit multiple cities simultaneously and others in isolation to distract and fragment the administration’s attention.

But the Summer of Love is just one element of the treachery that is going to go on. To appease these leftists, the Republicans are going to bend themselves into pretzels trying to prove that they are not what they are being accused of.

We’ve already seen it. Trump promised to get rid of the Department of Education. Not only is it not gone, but Republicans fully funded it. Countless programs that fund left-wing programs have also been funded, and they’ve refunded programs that Trump cut. Over at Justice, the administration has not made a single arrest related to the theft of 2020, the persecution of the J6ers, or the travesty that was Russiagate.

The reality is, Republicans, and sadly, that includes Donald Trump, are not serious about fixing America, pulling us back from the leftist precipice we have been teetering on for twenty years. If Trump were serious,

• He would put Greenland, Europe, Venezuela, Gaza, and Iran on the back burner—that doesn’t mean ignore them—and invoke the Insurrection Act.
• He would clear out and charge the protesters in Minnesota and would nationalize the National Guard in any circumstances where ICE agents are being targeted with harassment and violence.
• He would immediately begin RICO investigations of the NGOs that are funding these protests.
• He would also investigate left-wing judges who are sometimes operating hand in hand with said NGOs.
• He would ramp up deportations and allow those deported to appeal from their home countries, while freezing all funds going to states that provide benefits to illegal aliens, as well as all states and locales that act as sanctuary cities.
• And finally, he would use every power at his disposal to convince GOP legislators to make the cuts to the budget necessary to choke off the funds going to those behind all of this.

The moment he does the above, he will be labeled a Nazi, a fascist, a tyrant, and more. But the reality is, he’s already being called that, so it doesn’t really matter.

Republicans have been living in a fantasy land where Democrats are honorable people. They’re not. Democrats are in a knife fight, and they know it. They’ve taken to heart Sean Connery’s lines from The Untouchables: “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!” The only difference is that Elliott Ness was on the side of the good guys; Democrats are not.

Democrats are prepared and are willing to burn down the country to maintain their power. The Republicans need to understand that and decide to stop them, using every tool available. But sadly, Republicans are too worried about being called bad names or having their sensibilities bruised to suit up and man the barricades against the wretched hordes that are the Democrats.

We are at war. The Democrats showed us their playbook in 2020, and they’re rolling it out now. I’d like to think the GOP has the stones to fight that war before it becomes an all-out, hot civil war, but I’ve not seen any proof that such intestinal fortitude exists. I hope I’m wrong.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

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

Guest post by Martha Careful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Party of Science Ignores... Data

About 20 years ago I read a piece about the North Miami police department eliminating the swimming requirement for the police.  With a working knowledge of geography and having visited Miami many times, I thought this was a bit odd and kind of a bad idea.  After all, North Miami has hundreds of miles of canals, lakes and beaches. Predictably, the reason the requirement was being dropped was because “blacks are less likely than whites to know how to swim because of economic disparities between the groups…”  Basically because not enough blacks were qualifying to become police.

That was long before the cancer of wokeness had taken hold of much of America.  I was dumbfounded.  Nobody with a functioning brain would have looked at that situation and said we have to eliminate a key element of the job requirements so we can let more members of X group join.  But that’s what the people in charge decided.  If someone with a functioning brain were actually in charge they would have said something like, “If our goal is to have a more diverse workforce…” a questionable assertion in the first place “and not enough otherwise qualified black candidates can pass the swim test, maybe we should simply take those candidates who meet the other requirements and teach them how to swim.”

But that’s not what they did.  And that is just another demonstration that Democrats aren’t actually serious people seeking to help the communities they represent.  No, their goal was to cater to the “equity” crowd, even before it had a name.  And they have continued to do so for the last two decades. 

Take gun control.  They have been gun grabbing for decades.  They use every mass shooting as a lever to try and wrest guns out of the hands of Americans and eviscerate the 2^nd Amendment.  While it is certainly the case that gun violence is a problem in America, the reality is, it’s not the guns, it’s the criminals and the Democrats who pamper them.

There are 350 million people in the United States.  Of those there are 280 million adults, 90 million of whom say they own at least one of America’s 400 million guns, with an average of almost 5 guns each.  And how frequently do those 90 million gun owners commit crimes with those guns?  Not very often.

It’s estimated that more than 80% of gun crimes are committed by people who came into possession of their weapons illegally, which means that conservatively 20% of gun crimes were perpetrated by legal gun owners.  There are almost 100,000 shootings in the United States each year (not counting suicides). If we assume that 20% of those shootings were by legal gun owners, that would be 20,000 shootings.  To put that in perspective, that would mean that .0002% of legal gun owners commit crimes with their weapons, or conversely, 99.9998% of legal gun owners never use their guns in crimes… As a matter of fact, despite what the Democrat media tell you, “Good guys with guns” help stop between 1/3 and ½ of all active shooter incidents nationwide.  But Democrats work continuously to take guns away from all of those apparently violence eschewing citizens while at the same time seeking to free actual violent criminals from jail or prison or not send them there in the first place.  And they are the ones who actually commit most of the crimes and the worst crimes, and it’s not even close.  Making matters worse, Democrats rarely seek to focus on the strong correlation between anti-depressants and violence, particularly with young people.  They would rather preen in front of cameras and accuse Republicans of having blood on their hands than actually focus on the real issues that spill so much blood. 

And there is indeed much blood on the hands of Democrats.  In what must seem counterintuitive to them, more gun control results in more mass shooting deaths.  California is a perfect example.  As it’s become more difficult for law abiding Californians to legally obtain guns over the decades, to the point where it’s almost impossible to actually exercise the right, the rate at which the state exceeds the rest of the country has skyrocketed:  “From 2010 on, California’s per capita rate of mass public shootings was 43% higher than the rate in Texas and 29% higher than in the rest of the United States. Since 2020, the rate in California is 276% higher than in Texas and 100% higher than in the rest of the U.S.” That is partially because there are fewer of those “Good guys with guns”… In LA Country where one mass shooting took place this year there is one gun permit for every 5,660 adults and in San Mateo County, where another took place, there is one permit for every 24,630 adults. By comparison, there is one permit holder for every nine people in the 43 right-to-carry states.

Whether it’s murder on a small scale or a large, this data would only be of interest if someone were actually interested in solving the problem and reducing the amount of bloodshed.  Needless to say, Democrats rarely look at the data and conclude that making it easier to allow law abiding citizens to own weapons might actually help reduce said bloodshed.

Then there’s the border.  The Democrat Party, led by Liar in Chief Joe Biden, tells us that the American border is secure while Americans watch thousands of illegal immigrants stream across the border every single day. Those poor “asylum seekers” are given phones, have to promise to return to court to have their cases adjudicated – sometimes in 5 or 10 years – and are sent on their merry ways.  Of course many of those never even bother to show up for court. And hundreds of thousands more are simply released without even being given a court date.  To make things even more ridiculous, while they’re busy gaslighting the entire country, Democrats are shivving their single most solid constituency. 

Of course the border is not a new problem. In 1986 Ronald Reagan signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act which granted asylum to 2.7 million illegal aliens in return for securing the border.  Democrats took the asylum and screwed Reagan and the nation on securing the border.  Since then no president other than Trump has had any interest in securing the border, and he was stymied at every single turn by Democrats and leftist judges.  The result is that today there are upwards of 40 million illegal aliens in the country with millions more crossing the border every year. 

Like the gun data, the data on illegal aliens isn’t hard to understand. It’s pretty simple math.  The phones alone the Biden administration gives to illegals cost $360,000 every day while in aggregate illegal aliens cost Americans $250 billion PER YEAR. To put that in perspective, the wall Trump wanted to build was estimated to have a price tag of under $25 billion.  And now, it’s only going to get worse with Biden ending the Trump era Title 42 which was the equivalent of trying to stop your car by dragging your feet on the ground, a-la Fred Flintstone.  But now that that’s gone Biden is sending 1,500 Army troops to help… let even more illegals in! 

Whether it’s standing on shore as victims drown in Miami, not allowing armed citizens to protect themselves and their communities or simply ignoring the costs associated with illegal immigration, it’s clear that Democrats aren’t serious people and don’t care about the average American. Given that Democrats demonstrate their disdain for citizens every single day one wonders why anyone votes for them.  Stockholm Syndrome, anyone?

Follow me on Twitter at ImperfectUSA

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?   

Why Culture Matters: The Natural State of Man is One of Poverty, Scarcity and Conflict

One of my favorite teachers in high school was Mr. Kelly. Ostensibly he was a reading teacher, but his interests were far more inclined towards history and cultures. We once got into a discussion about the great cultures throughout history. The obvious names came up… the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Romans, Aztecs, ancient China etc. Then he asked the question about what determines a great culture. My answer was something like: “A great culture leaves something tangible behind.” My reasoning was simply that whether the Parthenon, the Coliseum, various pyramids or the Great Wall of China, all of these cultures left tangible representations of their greatness. Mr. Kelly then posited that maybe that was the wrong measure. Maybe instead we should measure a culture’s greatness by the vibrancy of life enjoyed by its people during its heyday. In particular he mentioned two cultures in western Africa who left nary a trace of their existence, but apparently had a vibrant society centuries ago. He suggested that it was possible that they were every bit as great as the cultures as those we usually mention when discussing history. I was skeptical but it was an interesting discussion.

Sadly, after 30 years I don’t remember the cultures he mentioned. But I do remember the question itself of how we go about measuring great cultures. That question is very much relevant today. Since then I can’t remember how many times I’ve heard various professors or pundits or pontificators suggest something like “All cultures are equal and deserve the same level of respect”. I’m as skeptical about that today as when I first heard it. Yesterday’s New York Times provided a perfect example of that exact thing. In it was a story titled: U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies. The various Marines and soldiers who became aware of the abuse were told by higher ups that they could not intervene because it was “their culture”. Indeed, a number of American servicemembers who took steps to stop the rampant pederasty were disciplined and even kicked out of the military.

This story comes on the heels of two other events that bring up the question of cultures. Europe is being invaded by millions of Muslims. The United States is being invaded by millions of Mexicans and others from Latin Americans.

Today we find ourselves in a situation where the West, home to the greatest accomplishments of mankind, are under siege by “migrants” from cultures and nations that are abject failures. The West in general, and the United States in particular, are the home of the greatest advances in human history – or in some cases harnessing innovations from elsewhere: Computers. Man on the moon. Mapping of the Human Genome. Flight. Nuclear power. The Mechanical Reaper. Air conditioning. The automobile. Plastic. Electricity. Add to those things that are essential to Western, or at least American culture: Representative government. Limited government. The outlawing of slavery. Freedom of speech and the press. Freedom of worship. Individual rights. Private property. Together these things have allowed the West to create nations where more people have enjoyed more prosperity, more freedom, and longer lives than any people in history.

Prosperity, freedom and longevity may not be the best measures of a culture’s greatness, but they are probably pretty close. Of course that doesn’t mean that either the United State or the West are perfect. They are not, not by a long shot. But for all of their failures they are by and large exponentially better places to live than the rest of the world.

It’s thus strange then that many of the beneficiaries of these advanced cultures seek to diminish them and draw an equivalency with other cultures, regardless of the reality. In much of the Muslim world women are 2nd class citizens… at best. Homosexuals are murdered. The freedoms of speech or the press or religion are virtually nonexistent. Most of the population lives in poverty, or not far above it. And of course there is the near constant threat of terrorism or war, as more than half of the ongoing conflicts on the planet involve Muslims.

Then there is Mexico and Latin America where the economies are in constant turmoil, where corruption is a way of life, where governments know few if any limits and where drug cartels reign supreme via bribes and brutality.

None of those things create a foundation for prosperity or freedom or longevity. But somehow not only are Americans and Westerners supposed to respect these dystopian cultures as equals, at the same time we are supposed to welcome the masses escaping them into our communities. It would be one thing if the vast majority of these “migrants” were seeking to assimilate into their new locales and contribute to their prosperity. They’re not. In Europe Muslims are seeking to apply “sharia law” in enclaves across the continent - UK - France and trying to bend the locals to their mores... including outlawing Octoberfest in Germany!.  Ninety percent of Middle Eastern “refugees” are on food stamps and “Asian” rape gangs proliferate, seemingly without fear. In the United States illegal immigrants receive government assistance at twice the rate of the native population while in some places they are responsible for over 1/3 of the murders and other violent crimes.

Unfortunately, the subject of culture is no longer simply an academic question to be discussed in Social Studies class. Today the question implies real world consequences such as poverty and death. While Muslim or African or Hispanic cultures may have positive aspects about them, and may have been great at one time long ago in history, today they are largely dysfunctional and often abject failures where the citizenry suffer great calamity both economic and physical.

Liberals in the west would have us eliminate all borders and welcome in anyone who might want to escape their failed states as we are assured that “diversity” is the key to the West thriving. As usual, they are wrong. The Judeo Christian foundations of the West, the march of limited government begun with the Magna Carta, the individual freedoms hammered out in the US Constitution are all elements of a culture that has laid the foundation for the success the West currently enjoys. While adding various elements of far less successful cultures may make liberal elites swoon, it doesn’t do much for the society as a whole, and in terms of jobs, education and quality of life it usually has a decidedly negative impact on those at the bottom of the economic spectrum… but not so much for the elites behind their walled gardens.

As this is America and liberals see racism and hate around every corner, I'll state that this is not some clarion call for a whitebread America or West. On the contrary. It matters not whether someone's hue is that of milk or oil. It’s the culture that matters, not the skin. Charles Napier, the British Army's Commander-in-Chief in India in the 19th century understood this. When confronted by Hindu priests angry at the Brits prohibiting Sati – the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband – he said this:

"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."

Can anyone imagine a General in Barack Obama's Army saying something similar and keeping his job?

Customs matter. Culture matters. The natural state of man is one of poverty, scarcity and conflict. The West has greatly succeeded in diminishing all three. Western culture is indeed imperfect and leaves much room for improvement, but there’s a difference between introspection and cultural suicide. Western elites don’t seem to know the difference. Maybe they should be forced to endure life in some of those failed states before they are allowed to diversify our culture out of existence.

Kim Kardashian, Robert F. Kennedy and why Donald Trump Scares the Hell out of the GOP

If you ask any American who Kim Kardashian is – other than perhaps one of her 34 million Twitter followers – they’ll likely tell you she is a vapid, self(ie) obsessed brunette with a propensity for public displays of nudity who leads a reality show band of dysfunctional misfits. They’d be right of course, but that wouldn’t be whole story.

That characterization would miss the fact that she is a brilliant marketer and businesswoman who has successfully harnessed rapidly evolving social media for a decade, and in turn attracted the attention of millions of young fans at a time when young people are notorious for having short attention spans. She has in turn turned those millions of fans into hundreds of millions of dollars not only for herself and her family, but for E! and a wide swath of the American publishing industry.

Good or bad, Kim Kardashian is an American cultural icon. So too is Donald Trump. When it comes to self promotion, Kim’s a piker as Trump has been at it for almost four decades – although she has ten times as many Twitter followers.

And now, in perhaps the greatest example of self promotion in human history, Donald Trump is running for President. And he just might win. In the world of political media, where seasoned politicians have spent years cultivating messages and controlling coverage, Trump is running the table. Although there are currently 17 candidates for the GOP nomination, from a media perspective there is really only one. He is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room… and as a result many seasoned and successful politicians will not survive for long.

And he’s doing it on someone else’s dime, despite the fact that he could afford to spend 10 times what everyone else in the field could, combined. Just as Kim Kardashian has leveraged the media to benefit herself, Donald trump has leveraged the media to put himself at the front of the pack. While Rick Perry, the extraordinarily successful governor of Texas is eliminating the paychecks of his staff, Trump has spent nary a dime advertising his campaign. Just as you may not like the way Kardashian gets coverage, she’s very good at it… and so is Trump. It’s neither the fault of Kardashian or Trump that America is celebrity obsessed. They simply take advantage of it.

But to write Trump off as a mere celebrity would be a mistake. He’s that, but much more. He is a consummate operator. Although he was born with a quarter billion dollar silver spoon in his mouth, to his credit he has improved on what he was born with twenty fold. Certainly there have been very public stumbles along the way, but each time he has recovered, spectacularly.

For those gnashing their teeth as to how it’s possible that a celebrity, with what might charitably called shaky conservative principals, could be leading the GOP field, they’re missing the forest for the trees. Donald Trump is not leading the field just because he’s a celebrity. He’s not leading the field because he said Mexico is operating a modern day Mariel boatlift and he’s going to build a wall to stop it. He’s not leading because he said something rude about Megyn Kelly. While those all have contributed, he’s leading because Americans think he can and will get something done… particularly building the wall.

In A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House Arthur M. Schlesinger recounts a story about the president’s brother Robert F. Kennedy… if I remember it correctly! As Attorney General RFK noticed a sign on the GW Parkway indicating the exit for CIA headquarters. He called someone in charge to get the sign removed. Months later the sign was still there. He called again. Months later the wheels of bureaucracy had still not turned and the sign was still there. Finally Kennedy called the Parkway gardener and told him to take it down personally… and it was gone.

Americans see that nothing works in Washington. America has become that sign. Cameras catch thousands of illegals crossing into the country every single day for decades and yet Washington can do nothing. Regardless of how much money is spent on welfare it keeps growing. The tax code is so complex that the people who wrote it don’t even understand it. Government has become V’Ger from the first Star Trek movie; it’s taken on a life of its own, with no master.

Rightly or wrongly, Americans think that Trump can be government’s master. He may not say the right things, he may be a crony capitalist of the highest order, he may have an ego the size of the Empire State Building… but he gets things done. America sees itself as the Wolman Rink of the world, and the Washington establishment is the Koch administration.

Sadly, the GOP establishment and the media don’t get that. In what is perhaps the most inane interview in political history, Bradley Blakeman, a former Bush administration official complained that Trump doesn’t have the infrastructure, the boots on the ground that campaigns usually have. He decries the fact that Trump has not announced who his advisors are, hasn’t spent any money on a campaign and doesn’t have what’s necessary to get voters out to the primaries. Americans don’t care if Trump spends a dollar on his campaign. They don’t care that he doesn’t have an army of advisors telling him the right thing to say, the name of the president of Burundi or what the new EPA regulations stipulate about CO2 emissions. Americans don’t want someone who can ace a civics test. They want someone who can get things done. Trump does that.

Blakeman, like the GOP establishment, misses the fundamental point. The point of campaigns is to get voters excited and get them to vote, not to build infrastructure or hire campaign strategists. The establishment fears Trump because he can win without them. He doesn’t need them or their cabal to succeed. Like Ronald Reagan before him, Trump can and does take his case directly to the American people. And if a president doesn't need the establishment... their power is gone… and with it their privilege. Then they will have to figure out how to compete in the real world, where effort and results drive success, something they are not particularly accustomed to doing.

Of course, Reagan had a long track record of success in government experience before he entered the White House. Trump does not. For six years we’ve lived with the consequences of a president who has no executive experience in government. It’s been a disaster. But it’s been a disaster not because Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing, but rather because Barack Obama is an anti-American anti-free market narcissist with dictatorial proclivities. Donald Trump too is a narcissist and may have dictatorial proclivities and isn't exactly Adam Smith... but he’s nothing if not rabidly pro-American.

Actual voting is still months away and by January Trump may have faded from view like most of the males who enter the Kardashian universe. But until then, Donald Trump is giving Americans something they crave, someone who promises to go to Washington and change the rules, break the bureaucracy and get something done. In the process he’s doing the nation a great service that hopefully will outlive his campaign… reminding Americans that that the business of Washington isn’t to perpetuate its own power, but rather to serve at the behest of the people.

Donald Trump is the Canary in the GOP Coalmine

Donald Trump is performing a very important task for the GOP… he’s an indication that the brand still has a pulse. Not much of one… but it’s there.

Americans are fed up with Republicans, particularly the establishment types. How do we know? Because twice in the last six years a majority of voters elected Barack Obama as president. In both cases Obama won against the establishment’s to carry the party’s water. John McCain, while strong on defense and right on the Surge, was wrong on much else including campaign finance reform and immigration, and he refused to highlight the anti-American friendships of Barack Obama. Similarly, while Mitt Romney was right on Russia and China, he was hardly a conservative, having implemented RomneyCare and pronouncing himself a Republicans who believed in Climate Change. And he too refused to attack Obama where he was most vulnerable, this time on Benghazi.

When Americans had a choice was between a hardcore liberal Democrat and a milquetoast Republican, a majority picked the Democrat, twice, despite the fact that he was utterly unqualified in both cases. In 2008 he was unqualified because he had never run anything… ever, and in 2012 he was utterly unqualified because in four years of running the government he had gotten literally everything wrong. But a majority of Americans voted for him rather than the GOP milquetoast.

Which brings us to Donald Trump. He may be many things… arrogant, brusque, a crony capitalist and only marginally connected to the GOP… but one thing he is not is milquetoast. Which is why he is now leading the GOP for the nomination. Some Republicans don’t like what he has to say, but they like the fact that he’s saying it and the is willing to stand up and unabashedly fight for his position. He’s like Chris Christy used to be – and just as bad in some ways. When he’s in the ring you know exactly where he stands, and Americans like that.

When Trump said that Mexico was not sending over their best and suggested that many of the people coming over were criminals, he started a firestorm, from every direction, including from Republicans. And of course the media dutifully reported on his comments and promptly lied, and put words in his mouth. While many Republicans may not quite agree with Trump, they sure as hell don’t believe the narrative coming from the Democrats and the White House that every illegal alien in the country is just a poor, formerly destitute angelic youth who is simply seeking a better life for himself. Because that narrative is so counter to the reality Americans see on the news and on the street corner, conservatives are willing to accept some hyperbole if it at least means the issue gets addressed… something the Chamber of Commerce owned GOP establishment is unwilling to do.

Donald Trump may not make it to the finish line. But if he doesn’t, the GOP ignores his message, and style, at its peril. If the GOP establishment produces another milquetoast candidate who’s not willing to articulate and defend conservative positions, particularly those that related to immigration and border security, they will lose. Whether the nominee is Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders or some dark horse who’s not even on the radar yet, if the GOP doesn’t give conservatives a candidate who is willing to take the fight to the Democrats in a no holds barred match, they’ll find themselves with the first triple defeat since FDR. And this time they may not find their way back.

Conservatives may not currently have a viable alternative to the GOP, but they do have the choice to sit at home and do nothing. And do nothing they will. After two cycles of being ignored, only to be proven prescient in their prognostications on the disaster of Barack Obama, conservatives have little motivation to engage the enemy again if the fighters on their team aren’t willing to mix it up. Donald Trump may be a flawed candidate, but he’s invigorating the Republican base, something the establishment of the GOP hasn’t done in too many years.

Barack Obama's Amnesty won't be legal, but it will likely be permanent...

Sometime over the course of the next week Barack Obama is likely going grant amnesty to millions of people who are in the United States illegally.

He’s doing this very much against the will of an overwhelming majority of American people. Not only do polls show that Americans are 3 to 1 against his giving amnesty to illegals, but his party, which very much supports his position, just got shellacked in voting booths across the country, at every level. Nonetheless, Barack Obama plans to do it anyway, because he feels he’s right… and because he can.

Technically he can’t really grant permanent amnesty because that would require the law to be changed. He’ll probably use his prosecutorial discretion to simply tell them that – at least while he’s president – they need not fear deportation. He’ll likely accomplish that by telling the DHS to basically look the other way and not deport those who are here illegally, depending on who they are, when they arrived, whether or not they have kids, etc. While as the chief executive of the government, he does indeed have the Constitutional power to tell agencies how they should act within the law, he does not have the power (legally) to tell them to close their eyes and arbitrarily ignore the law. Which is likely exactly what he’s going to do.

This action presents a variety of dilemmas. The first is the fact that Congress, not the President, writes the laws. (Although as demonstrated dozens of times with Obamacare, Barack Obama either doesn’t understand this or doesn’t care about it.) For Congress, there is only one Constitutional remedy available to them: Impeachment. When Obama grants Amnesty to 5 million people next week, he will almost certainly have committed an impeachable offense. This however is likely to be a bridge too far for most in Congress. The result will be that for the next two years millions of illegals will come out from the shadows, will buy houses, get jobs, get married and begin living their lives as if they were in the United States legally. Which brings up the second dilemma.

In 2017, when a GOP president takes office he won’t be able to simply reverse Barack Obama’s Executive Order, as presidents regularly do when they disagree with the policies of their predecessors. While he’ll have the legal authority to do so, the Democrats and their media lapdogs will ensure that every newscast in America is filled with stories of downtrodden immigrants who have spent the last two years building a life founded on the American dream and how any politician who seeks to send him back home to Mexico or Guatemala is simply a racist. I would doubt there are many in the GOP who have the stones to stand up to such withering attacks and defend the Constitution… although I think Ted Cruz probably does.  Such is the spineless GOP... Even now, on the heels of one of the GOP's biggest victories in decades and at a time when Americans 75% against amnesty, soon to be Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already capitulated on the option of a government shutdown to address the president's overreach. 

Theoretically Congress does have one other avenue available through which it can pursue a remedy: the courts. This however is a very iffy proposition. The federal court system is extraordinarily slow, and given that Congress has impeachment as an option, the likelihood of the Supreme Court getting involved is rather thin. In addition, a split decision on the case (unlike US v. Nixon) declaring the Executive Order illegal would simply cause Obama to reword it and issue another.

Most despairingly for those who value the Constitution and the nation, Obama’s amnesty will likely have the impact of opening the floodgates of immigrants from Latin America. Already the presidents of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are reported to believe that Joe Biden has laid out the welcome mat for their citizens seeking to emigrate to the United States. In 1986 Ronald Reagan gave amnesty to 2.5 million illegal aliens and the result was 20 million more crossing the border over the next three decades. In 2014, when Latin America is the home of 40 of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world – including the 18 top spots, how many millions will follow after Barack Obama’s amnesty next week?

Finally, the dilemmas are not reserved for the GOP. If Barack Obama is allowed to blatantly ignore the law and simply choose not to enforce it, what will the next president be free to do? What if a GOP president directs the IRS to not collect capital gains taxes or estate taxes? What if a GOP president directs HHS to stop direct deposit of welfare checks, forcing those on welfare to stand in line at a government office to pick up their checks? What if a GOP president decides to stop enforcing civil rights legislation that he thinks is outdated? If Democrats have no problem with Barack Obama rewriting Obamacare or immigration law to suit his own needs, they will be hard pressed to not be seen as hypocrites when a GOP president chooses to do the same when he targets their golden calves. At that point we cease to be a nation of laws and become a nation of men, the exact thing our Constitution was established to prevent.

The United States has survived as a representative democracy for 225 years because presidents understood that they were not kings. Even presidents who might have thought they were, such as Teddy Roosevelt and FDR, in the end demurred to the Constitution when the chips were down. Barack Obama on the other hand has decided that even in the face of a blistering defeat he is going to implement his policies, Constitution be dammed. Let’s hope the next part of the Constitution he decides to ignore isn’t the 22nd Amendment.