We’re living Barack Obama’s legacy in real time.

Barack Obama’s legacy here started early.  Not quite in office for six months Obama showed his hand with his characterization that “The police acted stupidly” in reference to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates a professor at Harvard who, locked out of his house, broke in.  A neighbor, not recognizing Gates, called 911.  The police arrived and things didn’t go well and Gates was arrested. 

When asked about race and the incident a week later, Obama responded:  "I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home, and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately."

Without the facts Obama stated the police acted stupidly and implied that racism might have played a role. Nothing however about Gates’ reported “loud and tumultuous behavior” just racism and police misbehavior. 

But this was just the beginning.  After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin, Obama said:  “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son...Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”

Again.  All race, no facts.

But there’s more. 

About the killing of Michael Brown Obama said: “In too many communities around the country, a gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement… Too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement — guilty of walking while black or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness.”

About the jury not indicting the NYPD officer involved in the killing of Eric Garner Obama said: “that we are going to take specific steps to improve the training and the work with state and local governments when it comes to policing in communities of color; that we are going to be scrupulous in investigating cases where we are concerned about the impartiality and accountability that’s taking place.”

In these instances and more Obama made the killing of a black man by police about race. It’s no surprise that the BLM movement began under Obama nor that the fiction of “systemic racism” took hold or that the black victimization ideology became omnipresent.

That’s unfortunate.

Like Rod Serling might have said, imagine if you will if Obama had handled those differently. 

What if he had said about Gates:  He should probably have remembered that the police were simply trying to protect his neighborhood after neighbors called them. Misunderstandings happen.

Or this about Brown:  Michael Brown was killed after stealing from a store, attacking the proprietor and attacking a policeman.  Had Mr. Brown not done these things he’d likely be alive.

What if he had responded to the riots in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Brown by taking to the airwaves and told black Americans that the problem in their communities is not racist police, but criminal activity and fighting with police? 

What if he had nationalized national guard troops to restore peace in Baltimore or Ferguson rather than standing by and later coercing police forces around the country into “consent decrees” which invariably increase crime.

But he didn’t do any of those things.  Instead Barack Obama reinforced the notion that blacks are victims of systemic racism, that they cannot win on an even playing field and that in any negative outcome racism must be the cause.

It is that victimization that leads us to where we are today.  The Internet is simply bulging with videos of blacks behaving badly. Flash mobs robbing stores. Punching random people on the street. Pushing people in front of trains.  Running over bicyclists. Attacking bus drivers.  Destroying merchandise in stores. Rioting on cruise ships. Attacking airline workers. And more.  Sure, we have to state the obligatory reality that other people commit crimes too, but the fact of the matter is, blacks do so at far higher rates.

Race relations is reaching a boiling point. To put this in perspective, in 2007 75% of whites and 71% of blacks thought race relations in America were either good or very good.  By 2021 those numbers were down to 43% and 42% respectively, and no doubt they’re lower today. 

The reality of that dichotomy can be seen in two events from last month.   

In April Karmel Anthony, a 17 year old black high school student knifed and killed fellow 17 year old Austin Metcalf at a track meet in Frisco, Texas.  The family, claiming self-defense, has raised over $600,000 in support, with many of his supporters posting explicitly anti-white racist comments. 

Later that same month Shiloh Hendrix a white woman in Rochester, New York was captured on video calling a black child a nigger – vile word for certain, but one frequently used by blacks but arbitrarily off limits to whites.  After claims of death threats and pleas for security she raised over $700,000, with many of her supporters posting explicitly anti-black racist comments. 

Combine all of that with the growing phenomena called “Black fatigue” and cities, states and members of Congress calling for reparations and you get an idea of where America’s  temperature is on the scale of race relations.

And that’s where we are today. Obama had the opportunity to go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents. He not only didn’t take it, but he made it worse. 

For longer than I can remember we’ve been told that America needs to have a Conversation about Race™.  We did, for generations, but it was always about whites abusing or keeping blacks down. That is, or at least is now, the wrong conversation. The conversation America needs to have today is pretty much the opposite. Far too many blacks see the system, the police, whites and society at large as racist, see themselves as victims and feel like they can do anything without consequences. That’s a recipe for disaster. Both for blacks and for America.  And that’s Barack Obama’s legacy. 

There may be a tiny sliver of hope, however. There are a growing number of black personalities and potential leaders who are pushing back on that victimization narrative.  Guys like Jason Whitlock, Byron Donalds, Charles Payne, Jason Riley and others are regularly telling their millions of followers how to succeed in life sans the victimization narrative, sort of a wider version of what Chris Rock did with his spectacular video How not to get your ass kicked by the police!

With Donald Trump at the helm Barack Obama’s legacy has the potential to be reversed as more Americans of all hues decide that the everything is racist shibboleth and more broadly the cancer of DEI get the derision they so badly deserve.

A Sad Legacy of the Culture of Victimhood and Grift

For over a month we’ve seen videos exposing Hamas’s depravity. Its soldiers’ blatant disregard for human life and the seeming joy with which they carried out their depravity was disheartening.

Sadly, this kind of depravity can be found closer to home, too, where videos abound of black crime across America, with people shot, pushed in front of trains, sucker punched, beaten to a pulp, and even killed by individuals, gangs, or groups of “teens.”

In both cases, the perpetrators have an ostensible enemy at whom their anger is directed. For Hamas, it’s Jews, and for blacks, it’s whites. Apologists for both groups claim it’s the actions of the “oppressor” that caused the “victims” to react. For Hamas, it’s Jews “stealing” Palestinian lands. For blacks, it’s slavery and Jim Crow. In both cases, though, the outsized violence against bystanders demonstrates that those are just convenient justifications for evil people to gain power.

Hamas’s soldiers, while blaming Jews for everything, often target Muslims as well. They also carelessly target their weapons, striking their own people, while hiding soldiers and materials behind women and children in mosques, schools, and hospitals. When Israel retaliates and civilians die, the resulting images make great PR.

In America, even as the grifters at BLM and Antifa claim that white racism is the cause of virtually every evil, which inevitably creates black criminals who abuse whites or rob, plunder, and destroy businesses, the reality is that most of the victims of black criminals are themselves black. But that doesn’t matter to the race hustlers who use lies and deception to keep blacks and naive white liberals angry. Democrat race pimps don’t care that far more black blood is in the street because all they need is one video of a white person acting or reacting against a black person, and they’ve won the lottery, as they did with videos of Rodney King and George Floyd did.

In reality, being an oppressed minority is not necessarily a recipe for failure, as Thomas Sowell explains in Discrimination and Disparities. He discusses the relative success of various minorities around the world, including the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews in Eastern Europe, Indians in East Africa, Koreans in America, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and many other groups reviled in the countries in which they live.

The reality is that American blacks and the Palestinians have both had many opportunities to achieve success and usually squandered them away.

First, the Palestinians. Up until the mid-20th century, there was no such thing as Arab Palestinians. In the 2,000 years before the pre-Christian era, the one constant in the land was a Jewish presence, whether as a nation or as a vassal of Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. After the Romans ended the Jewish nation and created a Palestinian colony, there were the Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks and, eventually, the Ottomans, and then the English.

The one constant was the Jews. Aside from Bedouins and the Druze, who have been there for several hundred years, the Arabs who identify today as Palestinians mostly drifted into the land beginning in the 1830s.

For the century preceding Israel’s establishment, much of the area was sparsely populated with towns and tribes in constant battle. In addition, the land was inhospitable, and agriculture struggled (something that changed only when Zionist Jews brought in modern farming techniques and hard work).

Jews were a majority of the population of Jerusalem as early as at least 1875—and in the late 19th century began purchasing land from the Arabs. By 1948, Jews owned 8% of the land that would become Israel, while 3.3% was in Arab hands, and 17% had been abandoned by Arabs planning on returning after Israel was eliminated. Britain owned the remaining 70%, which it took from the Ottoman Turks after WWI. The local Arabs never owned it. Thus, it’s a lie that Israel stole its land from the Arabs.

In 1924, Britain split the land in two, with British-mandate Palestine going to the Jews and Trans-Jordan (modern-day Jordan) going to the local Arabs. That didn’t stick. In 1948, after the Arabs had already gotten Trans-Jordan, the UN split British-mandate Palestine again, creating the State of Israel, which was liberally interspersed with an Arab state. The Arabs responded by attacking the newly created nation to take it all.

In 1999, Bill Clinton negotiated a treaty between the PLO and Israel that would have given the Palestinians 92% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and various concessions within Israel proper. The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, rejected it and instead launched a war against Israel. In 2005, Israel exited Gaza, removing 5,000 of its own citizens, and allowed the area to be self-governing. The citizens elected Hamas.

Since Israel exited Gaza, the world has donated over $10 billion there. Sadly, instead of spending money on building up the infrastructure and industry, Hamas put much of that money into building a “Metro” of tunnels into Israel and buying weapons to attack Israel. Imagine how different Gaza would be had its leaders spent that money building schools and viaducts, training entrepreneurs, or enhancing the agriculture industry.

But alas, they didn’t—their leaders would rather maintain the cult of victimhood as it’s far more profitable. (Just before his death in 2004, Yassir Arafat was said to have had a personal fortune of between $1 and $3 billion – stolen from the gullible Palestinians.) Hamas simply said that Israel was the enemy and was responsible for the Palestinians’ plight and then focused on war. Of course, it didn’t have to be that way. Israel built a thriving nation out of the desert. With global support and money, the Palestinians could have done the same. They chose not to.

Similarly, in the United States, slavery ended in 1865, and Jim Crow was gone by 1965, but that didn’t stop the victim industrial complex from poisoning the minds of many black Americans. For four decades, the Democrat party, the media, and America’s schools have told blacks they can’t succeed because of white racism. (This despite the fact that American blacks have incomes that exceed the average of almost every country on the planet.)

They’ve told blacks that racist whites are waiting to lynch blacks. Since at least 2008, they’ve told blacks that, because of systemic racism, they cannot succeed and aren’t responsible for their conditions or actions. Along the way, grifters like Patrisse Cullors, Ibram X. Kendi, and Barack Obama got rich. When Barack Obama was elected race relations were about the best they’d been in history. Not so much now… Imagine what America would be like today had he been a unifier and tried to empower black entrepreneurship rather than being the race pimp he was.

At home and in Israel, we’re seeing the same thing: People greedy for power and wealth tell specific groups they’re victims incapable of helping themselves, thereby turning them into drones committed to violent struggle. Then, say their alleged oppressors are subhuman beings who deserve what they get. Do all of this, and it’s no surprise that these “victims” embrace a savage mindset without empathy, making them not only willing but enthusiastic about unimaginable and routine cruelty.

While the “oppressors” are the ostensible targets, it doesn’t really matter if innocents get killed, which is exactly what we see. Hamas is sacrificing Palestinians, and blacks are killing blacks along with whites and Asians, all because they believe the lie that they’re victims and their oppressors deserve what they get. Victimhood is a bloody game but, sadly, a profitable one.

Not news - nor a surprise: The Government Lost the War on Poverty

Recently the Supreme Court put an end to Joe Biden’s efforts to gift erstwhile college students almost a trillion dollars in “debt relief”.  That’s a lot of money… but in reality that’s a tiny fraction of the money the government has wasted on redistribution, AKA social programs over the last six decades.

Next year the United States will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the War on Poverty, initiated by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. The War’s programs initially started on a modest scale but have expanded almost parabolically since. At the 50^th anniversary of the launch the government had spent more than $22 trillion on various welfare and redistribution programs and today spends $1 trillion a year on said programs… not including various “targeted” expenditures under Social Security or Medicare, which make the true total simply unknowable.  To put that in perspective, $1 trillion is greater than the GDP of 194 of the world’s 213 countries. 

Is this massive expenditure justified by the results of the War on Poverty? Initially one might suggest the results say yes. As of 2021, poverty in the United States hovered at approximately 11.6%, down from the approximately 18% rate in 1964 when the War on Poverty began. That’s a reduction of 6.6%, or almost one third. 

A closer look however reveals that that 6.6% reduction after an expenditure of $30 trillion seems underwhelming to say the least.  To see the full picture of the failed War on Poverty one need only look at the poverty rate over the 15 years prior to its beginning.  In 1949 the poverty rate in the United States stood at 34%, fully one third of the nation’s population.  Over the next 15 years, without significant government redistribution programs, indeed, without the War on Poverty, the poverty rate fell almost by half, falling from 34% to 18%, a reduction of a full 16 percentage points.  So, without government spending significant money poverty fell 16% in a period of 15 years, or 1.08% per year.  But with government spending more than $30 trillion over the next 55 years it fell by a total of just 6.4%, or .12% per year! That essentially means that without government intervention the poverty rate was falling 10 times faster than it did once government programs kicked in.       

And that 11.6% itself deserves a closer look.  In 2014, when the War on Poverty turned 50, the American poverty rate was still at 15%. That means that after spending $20 trillion over the previous half century the government had successfully reduced poverty by a mere 3%. When Barack Obama he entered the White House in 2008 the poverty rate stood at 12.5%.  It jumped up to 15% for four years before dropping back to 12.5% by the end of his presidency and where it was when Donald Trump took the White House. A mere three years later Trump’s economic renaissance had reduced poverty by 2%, bringing it to its lowest level in history, 10.5%, before the Covid scam derailed the prosperity engine. To put that in perspective, Donald Trump’s economy brought poverty down by 2% in 3 years, fully half as much as government spending did in the 53 years between 1964 and 2016.   

And of course the income numbers only tell part of the story.  Sadly, there is much more to it. 

An unintended consequence of the War on Poverty appears to have been a skyrocketing of single-parent households, which is a significant driver of poverty.  In 1964, around 4% of American children were born to unwed mothers. By 2021, this percentage increased a full ten times to 40%. Under the heading of Unintended Consequences one could observe that the welfare programs intended to save children from poverty, have, by making it economically and socially viable for single-parent households to exist, in fact stranded many children in poverty and worse, inflicting on them the coincident pathologies of poor education and crime, not coincidentally, both also being consequences of government failure.

From another perspective, let’s draw a comparison between the effects of government spending and the impact of private-sector investments. Let’s take just three companies, Apple, Amazon, and UPS who together had about $1 trillion in revenue in 2022, approximately the same amount the government spent on welfare that same year. These companies – and many others like them – revolutionized industries, drove many trillions of dollars of business for customers and vendors and affiliates; directly and indirectly employ millions of Americans who are breadwinners for their families, and at the same time generated trillions of dollars of wealth for investors.    

One can only wonder what might have happened if the more than $30 trillion the government wasted on its failed War on Poverty had instead been invested in startups similar to Apple and Amazon.  Not that we want the government taking our money and investing it – WE DON’T – but imagine the impact that money might have had had it somehow been targeted towards entrepreneurship and economic development. The 2% reduction in poverty during Trump’s first three years demonstrated with crystal clarity that market driven prosperity is a far more efficient vehicle for reducing poverty than government spending of any form. At a minimum, a market driven solution would likely have fostered a far more empowered, economically vibrant and dramatically more prosperous population than the generational dependency created by the government with its alphabet of aid programs. 

Benjamin Franklin understood this more clearly than virtually any politician in America today, having commented: “I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”

Whether it’s student debt or the federal and state welfare perpetuation machines, America would be better off looking to the Founding Fathers for guidance than the grifters at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue…

The Fundamental Transformation of a Nation - Barack Obama's "Gift" to America

Barack Obama promised to fundamentally transform America.  He tried…  We can look at the politicization of federal agencies under his watch, at victimization becoming a virtue, at the intrusion of government into American’s health decisions and we can look at the damage his Justice Department inflicted as they coerced cities around the country into “consent decrees” that neutered police forces.  There is of course much more, but in reality the most fundamental transformation for which Barack Obama is responsible has nothing to do with his time in office. 

The backlash against the leftist policies of Obama brought us the unabashed patriot, Donald Trump.  But by the time Trump was inaugurated the cancer of 8 years of Obama had done their damage and much of the federal government had become fully engaged members of the cult of progressivism.  From the fiction of widespread white supremacy, to environmental extremism to LBGTQXYZ fanaticism to the open borders lockstep, leftism was now baked into much of the government ruling America. 

Trump shocked the world and stepped into a Washington that more resembled a swamp of vipers than the seat of a functioning government.  The leftist cabal – including a wide swath of those government workers – spent 4 years seeking to derail the plans of the dually elected president of the United States.  This treachery culminated in November of 2020 when the government colluded with the media and social media to execute a coup against the sitting president under the guise of “The most secure election in American history”. 

And it is that coup with which Barack Obama achieved his greatest success in “transforming” the United States; it gave us Joe Biden.

As bad as everything Obama did while in office, nothing he did compares to Joe Biden. Since being installed as president, Biden has done an insane number of things that simply make no sense from a rational perspective.

Literally the first thing he did was reduce the amount of energy available to Americans. He cancelled completion of the Keystone XL Pipeline which would have brought more Canadian oil. Soon thereafter the administration threw up roadblocks to domestic oil production both offshore and on federal lands.  First they curtailed new leases and “reviewed” existing ones.  Later, when they backed off a complete ban, they instituted a virtual ban, which included increases in fees and other elements to make extraction more expensive for energy companies and everything more expensive for Americans.

Next his administration propelled mandates for the untested vaccine that swept across the country which saw Americans subjected to restrictions on travel, shopping, employment and more. Nationwide tens of thousands of firemen, police, teachers and even Navy Seals lost their jobs and incomes because of vaccine mandates for a virus with a survival rate of above 99.9% for almost everyone.  Building on that lunacy the Biden CDC recently issued a recommendation that states require Covid vaccinations for school children despite the fact that the survival rate for ages 0-19 is 99.9997%. So this administration would have seventy five million American children vaccinated with a medicine that has had no long term testing and where the long term effects are, by definition, unknown. This is part and parcel for an administration with so little regard for children that it supports the castration and mutilation of children who are not old enough to vote or to drive, often without the knowledge or consent of their parents. 

Then of course there is the economy. With the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act Biden poured trillions of dollars into the economy and drove inflation to levels not seen in 40 years. Everything, from energy to housing to food to clothing… virtually every single thing Americans use has gone up in price since Biden became president, often by giant leaps.  As a consequence Americans are fighting to stay afloat financially, with 60% worse off than they were a year ago and a staggering 40% of businesses missing their rent payments in October. 

As if making Americans less prosperous wasn’t enough, Joe Biden has made the world less safe. In August of last year the Pentagon exited Afghanistan in such haste that it left behind literally tens of billions of dollars of weapons for the terrorists now running the country to use as they please.  Not content to arm one just one terrorist government, the administration pushed to reopen negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal.  Then there is Russia and Ukraine. Early on in the conflict when the sides were close to an agreement to cease hostilities Biden sent his puppet Boris Johnson to scuttle the negotiations and as a result the world is the closest it has been to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

All of this has changed America, and not for the better. But while rising prices and forced vaccinations may change American behavior, they don’t rise to the level of transforming the country.

But changing the demographic makeup does.  And this is where Joe Biden is fulfilling Barack Obama’s goal.  He invited essentially anyone willing to make the trip to come to the United States by telling them that they would not be detained and they would be able to get healthcare.  Not surprisingly, millions of people from impoverished nations crossed the border into Club Biden.  Since Biden became president it’s estimated that more than 5.5 million illegal immigrants have crossed the southern border.  And that doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands or millions who crossed and were never seen by the Border Patrol in the first place. 

There is something called “replacement theory” which Democrats label as a conspiracy theory amongst racist whites. It’s not that.  As Tucker Carlson demonstrates in a piece from earlier this year, replacement theory isn’t a right wing conspiracy theory at all, but rather a plan Democrats have spoken about for years.  As they will tell you, the goal is to outnumber the mostly white, American born population with people who look and think differently.  Not surprisingly the way they accomplish that is by inviting in millions of people from countries that rarely share American mores and values. 

To put that 5.5 million plus people in perspective, that’s more people than live in 28 out of the 50 states, it’s more people than South Carolina, Oregon, Oklahoma and Connecticut individually or Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware and Washington DC combined!  It’s also more than the population of every single city in America other than New York.  Every single one… 

At this rate by the end of Joe Biden’s first term as many as 15 million new illegal aliens could be here, all of whom need healthcare, schooling, food, shelter and clothing, provided free of charge by American taxpayers already struggling to put food on the table, fuel in their cars and keep a roof over their heads.

That is a fundamental transformation.  Once those 15 million people get to vote Republicans will never win another election and America will become San Francisco.  But “they’re not citizens” you say, and they can’t vote.  Given the current state of affairs and the Democrat’s fading allure among actual Americans, how long do you think before that changes?  Remember, these are the people who told us that gay marriage was all they wanted but are now telling us men can have periods and allowing hospitals to do unnecessary mastectomies on girls without their parents’ knowledge. 

We are on the cusp of a real, fundamental transformation of America.  There are however those who want to move the country back in the direction of sanity.  Hopefully when all of the counting is done tonight - or tomorrow or next week or next month or whenever - they will have been elected and the Democrats will have been sent packing.  

Joe Biden Transforms the Pentagon From a Strong Horse to a Weak Woke Horse, Just When It Counts Most...

Back in 2003 a Muslim woman sued the Florida DMV because she wanted her driver’s license photo to be taken while she was wearing a niqab, or veil, which would have covered her entire face other than her eyes.  I remember thinking how absurd such a request was.  Not that the veil was absurd, but rather the idea of taking a picture specifically intended to identify someone with all of their identifying features covered. The request obviated the basic reason of why the picture was being taken in the first place. 

A year later, again out of Florida, the North Miami police department dropped its requirement that police officers know how to swim.  Apparently because they were having a hard time finding qualified black applicants who could swim, rather than teach otherwise qualified black applicants to swim, the police did away with the requirement.

The purpose of the DMV issuing drivers’ licenses is to make it possible to identify someone by looking at them and the purpose of a police force is to protect and defend the people within a particular jurisdiction, and in cities surrounded by water that might require swimming.  Anything that defeats the very purpose of an organization is probably a bad idea from the perspective of accomplishing that organization’s mission.   

Which brings us to Joe Biden’s Pentagon.  Building on Barack Obama’s turning NASA into a Muslim outreach program, Joe Biden has decided to turn the Pentagon into a monument to wokeness.  While the Pentagon has been moving in the woke direction for years (as demonstrated by a deadly political correctness, the repeal of DADT, women in combat and picking up the tab for sex change operations) Joe Biden has turned the military into a full fledged social program.

So how can Joe Biden beat Obama’s deadly despicable modifications to the Rules of Engagement?  How about pregnant women in military cockpits?  Yes, you read that right.  Joe Biden has the American military “Designing body armor that fits women properly, tailoring combat uniforms for women, creating maternity flight suits and updating requirements for their hairstyles… It will take an intensity of purpose and mission to really change the culture and habits that cause women to leave the military.” 

If the legion of stumbles Joe Biden has already made in his short time in office haven’t convinced you of such, that sentiment alone should demonstrate clearly that he is not a serious man.

The role of the military is to protect and defend the nation and its allies as well as enforce treaties the United States has entered into, whether that’s ensuring safe passage of shipping in domestic and international waters or making preemptive strikes against terrorists planning on striking American or allied targets.  All of those things and more involve training to kill, and possibly actually killing enemies.  Military is deadly business as large numbers of lives are at stake.  Not only are there hundreds of thousands of Americans under arms who actively or potentially put their lives in danger to protect the nation on a daily basis, but there are millions of people at home and abroad whose lives are impacted by the success or failure or American military operations.

And so, in this universe where the Chinese are willing to operate the open secret of concentration camps filled with their own citizens, are claiming sovereignty over virtually the entire South China Sea, are building outposts around the world, cornering the market on strategically critical rare earth minerals and turbo charging the world’s largest military, Joe Biden wants to make sure pregnant pilots have uniforms that fit.  In a world where nuclear weapons are in more, and more unstable hands than ever before, where bioweapons like the Coronavirus can kill millions and terrorism can strike anywhere anytime, one of Joe Biden’s first acts was to lift the ban on transgender enlistments.  Joe Biden is an unserious man who has no place as Commander in Chief and in any rational world he wouldn’t be allowed within a thousand miles of the nuclear football.  But there he is sitting in the White House – sadly as the result of Democrat fraud – and turning our military into a woke petri dish.

And there’s a reason he can do it…  Most people think of the military as jets in dogfights, solders storming a den of bad guys or ships bombing a coastline.  It is all of those things and more, but the reality is the military spends an overwhelming majority of its time preparing, planning and training rather than actually fighting… which is why leftists think they can turn it into a series of social experiments.  It’s easy to measure quotas and enforce the latest politically correct policies when no one is actually shooting at or trying to kill you. Importantly, that work is where troops learn the skills necessary to survive actual combat and lay the groundwork for success in actual war.  But to the left in America doesn’t care about that. They’re more interested in the optics of diversity and inclusiveness than they are in mission success and are willing to sacrifice the latter for the former. And to the degree the military focuses on those social issues, counts pigments or genders or tries to manipulate political allegiances, the less effective the training is and at the end of the day, the less capable the military is to accomplish its primary mission.  

Osama Bid Laden said:  "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." Joe Biden is signaling to the world the American military is anything but a strong horse and he’s leaving no ambiguity about it.  The world sees this, our allies see this, and most importantly our enemies see this.  People around the world recognize that the United States has been the vanguard of freedom for a century and ushered in a period of economic prosperity unprecedented in human history.  But at the same time, most rational people recognize that nothing good lasts forever.  If the United States is literally telling the world that our military is focused on maternity flight suits and trans enlistments while the borg of China is expanding and strengthening its military and economic reach to unprecedented levels, we shouldn’t be surprised to see American influence deflate like a week old balloon animal as allies and friends turn their allegiances toward the strong horse.  When the left’s dream of diminished American influence comes to pass the irony will be that the tag on the boot standing on their necks will read “Made in woke America”. 

2020: The Year Democrats Put America on a Path to Collapse

It’s possible that 100 years from now people on this planet will look back at 2020 as the year the world began its descent into hell. Hell is what life was for most of the people who lived on earth before the United States was founded. In what might come as a surprise to many progressives, the United States did not create slavery. Slavery has existed since the beginning of mankind and was a common element of societies on every continent, including Africa. For most of human history the common experience of most people was one of poverty, subjugation, war and early death, whether they were slaves, slave owners or anyone else. This held true whether someone lived in Pharaonic Egypt, the Roman Empire, China’s Han Dynasty or even Elizabethan England, or virtually anywhere else on the planet. The average life expectancy around the world for most of human history was somewhere between 25 and 35 years old and infant mortality could be as high as 30%. Families would usually have many children because so many children never survived to adulthood.

It was into this world that the United States was born in 1776. The world did not measurably change on July 4th of 1776. On the contrary, the world stayed very much the same for many years to come. But what the establishment of the United States did, along with the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, was bring to the world the first nation in history to have at its core the principle of God given individual rights, individual freedoms and a government explicitly limited in its power. What this American experiment did was give unprecedented life to the yearning of humans to worship as they liked, to say what they felt, the freedom to life the lives they wanted to live and protect them from tyranny. (Obviously none of that applied to slaves in the new country, but at the time slavery was a common practice around the world including both Africa and Europe.) The result of this unprecedented freedom was the creation of the fertilizer that would in time become the garden from which many of the greatest advances in the history of mankind would emerge.

The year America was born 85% of the world’s population - 50% in the developed Europe - worked either directly or indirectly in farming , one of the most dangerous jobs in the world and an industry that had not significantly changed in 1,000 years. Today that number is lower virtually everywhere in the world and in the US and much of the west that number is below 5%, freeing up 80% of the population to do everything from becoming doctors, scientists, astronauts, teachers, actors, journalists, entrepreneurs and even bloggers! It was a Virginian, Cyrus McCormick, who made that possible with his invention of the mechanical reaper in 1831.

Later, far from the farm, in what is possibly the most extraordinary sequence of scientific advances in all of history, in a mere 66 years Americans went from inventing the airplane to sending men to the moon and returning them safely to earth. A mere sixty six years!

And the list of advances directly or indirectly due to the incredible opportunities in the United States is simply extraordinary. From the assembly line for cars to plastic to elevators to air conditioning to personal computers, the Internet and the smartphone, the United States has been the fertilizer from which unprecedented inventions and advances have together brought more prosperity to more people around the world than at any point in human history.  Not only are more people living more prosperous lives, but they are living longer, with the average life expectancy in the world going from 29 in 1800 to 46 in 1950 to 71 today. And just to be clear, all of the advances of the last two centuries did not originate in the United States. They did not, but American success and spirit of entrepreneurship helped inspire others around the world to make further contributions as well.

Americans have been able to make those stunning advances and many many more because of the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution and our capitalist system. Today we find those two pillars that helped power the world's march to prosperity under siege. From the Communist Black Lives Movement to the Antifa fascists to their media enablers, the nation finds itself at an unprecedented precipice. In one direction sits a future empowered by opportunity and prosperity, albeit an imperfect one, where things will not be perfect, things won’t always be fair and there will be winners and losers. But progress will continue as American capitalism and entrepreneurship push forward economic advances while free discourse allows for the exchange of ideas to push forward cultural advances.

In the other direction sits an abyss of mob rule and fascism where Americans will be forced to speak with one voice or be silenced and where, in the name of fairness and equality businesses will eventually come under the control of the mob and the government, which will have morphed into one. The Constitution will be discarded like yesterday’s newspaper, and the rights and freedoms that spurred the creation of the nation in the first place will become distant memories. Religious freedom will be gone. Freedom of speech and the press will apply only to those who toe the leftist party line. The 2nd Amendment will be history and confiscation will be the order of the day. Private property will cease to exist. And while the fascist regime will not succeed in producing prosperity, it will produce an equality of sorts, but one of poverty for everyone, except of course for those who wield the reins of power. Crime, corruption and extortion will become rampant and the United States will come to resemble a third world banana republic where the common man is subject to the whims of government apparatchiks, those with money & access, and anyone with a gun.

If this sounds a little like Dante’s Inferno, it should, but one doesn’t need to go back 500 years to understand what our future looks like. We just have to look at the recent history of places like Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, China, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, etc. Communism and its fascist twin always produce the same thing… dictatorships, failed economics and widespread death and poverty. That is the history that will be written about the United States if we allow the BLM / Antifa / mainstream media triumvirate (via their Democrat puppets) to take power in November. Barack Obama used the IRS to silence opponents prior to the 2012 election and the FBI to try and overturn Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. For Democrats like Obama and Biden, the Constitution is more a collection of suggestions than the articulation of a set of functioning rules by which they have to operate. Imagine what a Democrat empowered by the radicals burning down America’s cities and rewriting her history would be willing to do…

America as we know it won’t end on January 20th 2021 if Joe Biden wins, but it will be a far darker place and the future of failure will be imminent.  One need only look at the disastrous outcomes in places like New York, Chicago, Baltimore, LA, Detroit, Minneapolis and the dozens of other cities run into the ground by Democrats to understand what would lay ahead for the country, and frankly, much of a world without America's leadership. The only question is, will it take Democrats more or less time to destroy the United States than it took Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant to save it.

Donald Trump, Superman and the Suit of Kryptonite

I was skeptical when Donald Trump announced he was running for President.  I was however, by election time very much in his camp and up until January or February I thought he’d been an extraordinary president.  But this Coronavirus has changed the calculus.

Since the problem was first brought up, he hasn’t done what almost any modern President would be inclined to do… He hasn’t taken charge of or nationalized anything.  Not hospitals, not pharmaceutical companies, not healthcare manufacturers not university research labs.  He hasn’t used the power of the office to require citizens to shelter in place, nor demanded testing nor quarantine or tracking of those with the virus.  The bottom line is, he hasn’t used the power of the federal government to take charge of this crisis and impose a solution.      

Most certainly Hillary Clinton would have done so.  As would have Barack Obama and probably John McCain and even George Bush… But Donald Trump didn’t… And that’s to his credit and our good fortune.

Just as Sol Wachtler famously said "a grand jury would 'indict a ham sandwich,' if that's what you wanted."; had virtually anybody else been in the White House during the Coronavirus pandemic, you can be certain that the Executive Branch would have usurped a vast array of powers from state and local governments, created new previously unimagined powers on the thinnest of Constitutional grounds and in turn created a plethora of new agencies with vast powers that would undoubtedly lasted far longer than the “crisis” itself.  But it wasn’t anyone else in the White House, it was Donald Trump, and he didn’t do any of those things.

He has managed this crisis almost perfectly.  It hasn’t been without problems, but he has done what an American president is supposed to do.  He utilized the Constitution and its inherent federalism to help states and governors to respond as best as they could to their particular circumstances.  He didn’t dictate, but rather, he gave assessments and information and suggestions and came to the aid of states and cities when they called.  In a word, he acted like a President in the Constitutional sense.

This is particularly notable because of the extraordinary claims experts were producing via a variety of “models” that were supposed to predict the future.  Two million or more Americans dead.  Three hundred million Americans infected.  This was the Black Death incarnate.  But Donald Trump didn’t bite.

He actually did what Presidents are supposed to do in war… take the advice of the generals, of his advisors and decide what is best for the country.  Generals are often accused of wanting to bomb the enemy into the Stone Age.  That’s usually wrong, but it is the case that a general’s job is to win a battle or a war.  That is their focus and for outsiders who don’t understand the dynamics of what the military is tasked with, the generals and admirals focus on attacking and killing or neutralizing the enemy can seem barbaric.  But it’s not.  That’s their job… but it’s the President’s policy to set policy, taking their input into consideration along with that of the State Department, the intelligence community and other players.  Generals are focused on the battlefield but the President is focused on the country and the world.

The same holds true here.  While the “experts” were looking at the worst case scenarios and  predicting Armageddon, Donald Trump was taking a 30,000 ft. perspective and trying to figure out what made sense and what didn’t, and deciding what he should do and say.  And in the process, he tried to remind the country that economics matter and jobs matter and prosperity matters, both in dollars and actual lives.  In the process, rather than taking over industries or companies, he partnered with the private sector to advance everything from manufacturing ventilators and PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) to developing testing kits to searching for drugs that help protect from the virus or treat it. And he enlisted the Navy and the Corps of Engineers to increase capacity when governors thought they needed it.  Things haven’t proceeded perfectly, but they’ve worked far better than they would have had some proto dictator with a D next to his or her name been sitting in the Oval Office. 

On the ground some governors have applied a light hand in navigating this virus while others revealed the petty autocrats within as they revel in their newfound “emergency” powers – with diktats which often ignored or even set fire to the Constitution and individual rights.  All the while the President resisted calls for the White House to “take command” and issue decrees as to how the country should deal with this virus.  While he listened to the experts, he understood they, like generals in war, are not the only voices to be heard.  The result has been a combination of daily information, regular suggestions as to how states and citizens might comport themselves, and an aggressive suspension of regulations that would have otherwise hindered potential problem solvers.

As if all of this was not enough, Donald Trump has somehow managed to shine throughout this crisis despite having spent the last four years battling the Democrats, Never Trumper “Republicans” and the media on a daily basis. From tax evasion to being paranoid about wiretapping to removing MLK’s bust from the Oval Office to Mike Flynn to Michael Cohen to the 25^th Amendment & incapacity to kids in cages to being a racist to simple incompetence to the Emoluments Clause to the Russian Collusion hoax to the Ukraine hoax to impeachment to claims that he ignored warnings of the coming Coronavirus, the last four years have been an unrelenting hail of vicious attacks.  I can’t help but wonder how most of us would fare if we had to deal with such abuse every day of our lives, and had it broadcast to the world to boot!

Yet somehow, in the face of these withering daily assaults coming from every direction, Donald Trump has not only managed to largely keep his cool, but he’s been able to be an extraordinarily effective president the entire time, from bringing the economy back to recalculating the Judiciary to exiting the absurd Paris climate agreement and the preposterous Iran nuclear arms deal to streamlining bureaucracy to rebuilding the military.  He’s not been perfect, nor has he always kept his cool, but somehow, in the face of endless, pernicious attacks from all sides, Donald Trump has gotten up every day and done his job in leading the American people and the nation.  The equivalent, I think, would be Superman spending 4 years saving the world despite his enemies having clothed him in a suit of Kryptonite from which he could not escape. 

Donald Trump is neither perfect nor warm and fuzzy, but neither is what American needed in 2016 and is not what it needs today.  We need a leader who not only articulates a road ahead that allows Americans to get back to doing what we do best, which is drive freedom and prosperity, but do so in a way that minimizes the yoke of the bureaucratic apparatus built by generations of a swamp culture.  Just as the Civil War gave Lincoln an opportunity to rise to a level few imagined he could, the Coronavirus may give Trump the opportunity to demonstrate leadership that will create his legacy despite the incessant attempts to damage and defame him.  Perhaps 100 years from now we’ll see his visage on Mount Rushmore.

Immigrants, Slaves, Redistribution and a Cult of Personality: Barack Obama and the Last Days of the Roman Republic

Late last year I started listening to the History of Rome app. While functionally terrible, content wise it’s quite good. Having been many years since I read Roman history, it’s a welcome refresher for those things I’ve forgotten and an education for many more I never learned in the first place.

It’s an extraordinary history, particularly the first 500 years when Rome was a republic. As I was listening I couldn’t help but draw a few parallels between the Roman Republic and ours.

Slavery changed the face of the Roman Republic. Although slavery had been an element of Roman history from the beginning, during the Republic’s 4th century it would fundamentally transform it. For most of the first 350 years of the Republic Rome was a somewhat egalitarian state where, although there were rich and poor, many of the lower classes were farmers who owned the land or worked it under contract for patrician owners. Beginning in the 2nd century BC after the Romans finally conquered Spain, North Africa and Greece the Legions began bringing home the vanquished foes en masse and putting them to work on the farms of patricians who were accumulating vast estates by buying out small farmers with tribute from vanquished lands or by simply taking them. As the numbers of slaves working the land skyrocketed, a similar number of free Romans were put out of work, many of whom migrated to the cities. This ever growing number of free Romans who could not provide for their families was a problem for the ruling class and free and subsidized grain programs were implemented. Indeed, in 123 BC Gaius Gracchus codified a law that set aside a given portion of the grain revenue be provided to citizens at a heavily subsidized rate.

So we have immigrants taking the jobs of citizens and many of the displaced ending up on the government dole… Sound familiar? Here in our Republic, according to Pew, 17% of American jobs are filled by immigrants, both illegal and illegal. That, according to an organization that consistently undercounts the number of illegal immigrants, equals 23.8 million jobs. This while there are 94 million American adults not in the workforce, and fully 34% of the population living in homes receiving welfare.

There is of course more… From its beginning the Roman Legions were populated by land owning citizen soldiers. By 100 BC when so many citizens had lost their land to the patricians the requirement for landowning was eliminated all together. As a result, an enormous number of men joined the Legions. And because it’s never a good idea to have armed men standing around with nothing to do, Rome put them to work. It’s no surprise then that during the last century BC Rome grew more than it had at any time in its history and faster than it would at any point during the Empire.

The Legionnaires were of course… government employees. And how do rulers deal with government employees? By promising them the moon and then taking whatever is necessary from the citizens to pay for it when the bill comes due… which is exactly what happened. Indeed, Julius Caesar made himself quite unpopular in Rome when he “redistributed” vast amounts of land and wealth from his enemies in Rome to his Legionnaires.

Finally there is the Cursus honorum, a law that laid out the sequences of public offices that a politician must follow over their career, including terms, frequency, limitations, and from 180 BC, the minimum ages necessary to fill each position. During the last century of the Republic the Cursus honorum was shredded as the Republic came to be dominated by competing cults of personalities around generals who increasingly ignored the law. Gaius Marius was one of the first to openly flout the Cursus’s dictates and after him the floodgates opened, and by the time Julius Caesar and Augustus were finished, the Cursus wan’t much of a suggestion, nevermind a law.

Thankfully, on January 20th 2017 the long national nightmare of the cult of personality known as Barack Obama will finally come to an end, at least the ruling part of it. That is, of course, unless some “unforeseen” event occurs that forces a “postponement” of the constitutionally required election or the next president’s inauguration… But even if we assume Obama recognizes that he can’t overstay his term, one wonders what will be left in his wake.

With his flagrant lying to the nation – Benghazi – his using the police power of the state to intimidate his opponents – IRS Tea Party scandal – his unconstitutional rewriting of laws – Obamacare waivers – and his vast expansion of the regulatory state – Net Neutrality – not to mention the above noted immigration and redistribution policies, one has to wonder if Barack Obama has not set our Republic on a course that mirrors that of the Romans. Is our Constitution better able to withstand a tyrant than the Roman Cursus? Will January bring a new president who pulls back from the Obama overreach and puts the nation back on a strong Constitutional footing or will the new president build on Obama’s imperial presidency and further distance the nation from a limited government republic? Let’s hope that the “Constitutional scholar” in the White House who actually knows very little about the Constitution and respects it even less, is replaced by one who not only understands the document, but recognizes its virtues, and has a record of defending it in the highest court in the land. Hopefully Ted Cruz will have more luck rescuing our Republic from tyranny than Cicero did in saving Rome’s.

Barack Obama as Commander in Chief ... The Pentagon as a social experiment

I’ve probably cited this before, but it’s easily one of the best speeches ever uttered in the movies. In A Few Good Men Jack Nicholson’s Col. Jessep explains life to Tom Cruz’s Lt. Kaffee:

“… And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post.”

This speech came back to me a couple of weeks ago as I was reading about women being given special treatment so that they would pass the Army’s Ranger school. This is just the latest example of Barack Obama misunderstanding – or more likely, not caring about – the fundamental mission of the United States military.

From Berghdal to troops being kicked out of the military for beating up child molesters to gays in the military to women in combat roles, to the dangerous Rules Of Engagement troops must operate under, the Department of Defense has become a playground for political activism and social engineering rather than what it actually exists for, which is to defend the United States from external enemies.

One reason that liberals like Obama feel like they can manipulate the military is because they see it as simply another arm of the government, rather than the unique entity it is. Wherever on the political spectrum one sits, the general role of government is to protect the freedoms of citizens, prosecute those who violate the laws and support economic prosperity via the issuance of patents & trademarks and enforcing contracts, etc. That definition is pretty opaque, but whether we’re talking about the SEC, the FDA or the EPA, the primary goal is not (theoretically) to be prepared to kill hundreds or thousands or millions of people while putting the lives of thousands of Americans at risk.

That however, is exactly what DOD does. The role of the Department of Defense is to defend the nation from external threats, which often includes killing the enemy in large numbers, often violently. At the same time, by definition, it involves putting at risk the lives of American personnel. That fundamentally makes DOD different than HUD or the GPO or the Education Department.

Given the extraordinarily high risks and dangers associated with putting the military in the field, the primary driver of policy should be to further the mission, not social agendas. But the reality is, Barack Obama doesn’t agree with that. To him, putting women in combat or moving the goalposts so that women can “pass” Ranger school is more about combating the “War on Women” than it is about a military prepared to face real combat.

To Barack Obama, gays serving openly in the military make perfect sense as gays can work in law offices or coffee shops or big box retailers with no impact on operations. But the military is not Wal-Mart, Starbucks baristas don’t train to kill people and in most law offices men don’t spend hours and weeks and years training with one another in close quarters where emotions and tempers and jealousies and hormones come into play and put people’s lives at risk while doing so. It’s true, that on the field of battle when the bad guys are shooting at you it doesn’t really matter if the guy next to you is gay or straight or confused if he’s on your side. The reality however is that 99.9% of a military man’s job is not spent in the heat of battle, it’s spent in the classroom learning, in the field training, on back on base regrouping. It’s in those environments where soldiers and Marines spend most of their time that the problems associated with gays in the military are felt, not in the foxhole.

The perfect demonstration of Barack Obama’s view that all government programs are but tools for his social agenda can be found in something tangential to the Defense Department. In 2010 Obama’s NASA Administrator said the following: “When I became the NASA Administrator — before I became the NASA Administrator — He (President Obama) charged me with three things: One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”

For Barack Obama the Pentagon is nothing more than a vehicle for achieving his progressive goals. That alone makes him an unfit Commander in Chief. Unfortunately the next Commander in Chief will pay the price for Obama’s folly. Not only will he inherit a military with morale at the lowest in years, he will inherit the smallest Navy in a century, a powerful and growing enemy in ISIS that is a direct result of Obama’s incompetence, and most dangerously he will inherit a world that increasingly lacks respect for American strength... which ironically, and unfortunately, increases the likelihood of actually having to use the military.

But on the upside he will have female rangers, gay couples and transgenders openly serving and a JAG Corps that has been cowed into towing the administration's line on Berghdal. No doubt that should make him feel better.