America Has a Perfect Storm of Opportunity to Save Herself From the RINOs in the GOP

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was an attempt to deal with a problem that threatened to rip America apart, slavery. Although it didn’t address the underlying institution itself, it banned new states north of Missouri’s southern border from joining the union as slave states.

The delicate balance lasted until repealed by the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854.

Although not explicit, the Act potentially opened up all of the west to slavery. For the north this was simply untenable and the result was the creation of the Republican Party, which formed in 1854 in the midst of the debate.

Of course, both were basically band aids over the real trauma that was destroying the nation, slavery.

The Republican Party was essentially the combination of the remnants of the Whig Party and elements of other peripheral parties. Six years later Abraham Lincoln would be elected the nation’s first Republican president. The party would go on to dominate much of American politics for the next half century.

In 1854 the Republican party came about as the result of America finally having to face a cancer that had been gnawing at it’s core since its foundation. In 2025 it should die for the same reason.

The cancer today is not slavery in the literal sense, but it is slavery nonetheless. In this case it isn’t blacks being held in bondage because of the color of their skin, but rather citizens being held in financial bondage by politicians who have no problem entombing them in a debtor’s prison from which escape is impossible.

The Republicans had a perfect storm of opportunity in 2025. They had just taken back the Senate, they held the House and on January 20^th they took control of the White House. Not only that, they had perhaps the most motivated electorate in a century or more. The tens of millions of Americans who watched as the 2020 election was stolen and then suffered through four years of anti American and anti-common sense policies were ready to take back their country. And they did.

What’s more, this highly motivated electorate spent the first two months of the new administration watching as the Elon Musk led DOGE revealed the billions and perhaps trillions of dollars of waste fraud and abuse everywhere from the Treasury Department to USAID to the Pentagon and elsewhere.

With the new sheriff in town these voters expected that things were going to be different.

Not so much…

No, the Republicans, the party America hired to actually codify the savings and bring some order to federal profligacy showed themselves to be derelict, indeed borderline treasonous the first chance they were given. 

While we’re being told the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (BBB) is a good deal and it cuts spending, that’s simply a lie. Indeed it increases spending and adds trillions to the national debt.

In what seems like record time the Republican party has gone from the party leading America in a new direction to the Go Along to Get Along party. Indeed, coming to power with promises to cut spending, get the federal government under control and to slash deficits, they’re doing virtually none of that. America took the red pill and discovered that it was really a blue pill dipped in food coloring.

The BBB is nothing less than treasonous. It does nothing to address America’s existential threat: Federal spending and deficits. Today America’s national debt stands at over $36 trillion, or over 120% of GDP, the highest level on record. Of that $36 trillion, $29 trillion has accumulated since 2000, 24 years during which the GOP held the presidency for 12 years, the House for 16, the Senate for 10, and all three for 6. Regardless, the spending seems to always go up and the deficits continue to grow until today where every single American, from baby to centenarian, is on the hook for $102,000. That, in a nation where the average household income is $80,000.

And yet the Republicans, the party that’s supposed to represent financial responsibility has presented America with a budget that basically spends like a drunken sailor.

To put this in perspective, one merely needs to recognize that the Republicans had as their number one cheerleader for the last year the world’s richest and most successful man but with the presentation of this “disgusting abomination” they have made a literal enemy out of him. Addressing the Republican treachery head on, Musk suggested “In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people.”

Simply put, the Grand Old Party is grand no more. It is simply Democrat lite and should therefore sent to the dustbin of history.

Of course as we learned with Teddy Roosevelt and H. Ross Perot, third parties don’t work in the United States. The reality is, a new party doesn’t need to be started from scratch. Just as the GOP was built on the remnants of the Whig Party, a new party could be carved out of the decomposing husk of the GOP. Just look to how well that treacherous John Cornyn is doing down in Texas to understand how it’s possible to send swamp rats out to pasture.

And Elon Musk should lead this charge.  Although currently on the outs with President Trump, in reality the two have far in common than not. He should spearhead the creation of this new party, one where financial discipline is, if not the raison d'etre, is a core element beyond compromise.  And the DOGE team has given them more than enough to work with.  Much like Newt Gingrich did in 1994 with his Contract with America, Musk et. al. should build on the DOGE recommendations and put together a new Contract of items that most Americans can agree on and use that to eviscerate the RINO wing of the GOP. 

Most Americans don’t like thousand page omnibus bills that no one can read and fewer can understand.  This new Contract should promise single department bills written in plain English.  Americans don’t like seeing budgets that go up year to year with seemingly zero correlation to the agency’s success or failure.  This new Contract should propose zero based budgeting so that agencies and departments have to make the case for their spending every year or every other year.

These and other no-nonsense policies will no doubt raise the ire of virtually the entire Democrat party, most of the bureaucracy and of course the swamp Republicans.  But they would likely resonate not only with average Republican voters, but they would likely appeal to many of the non-deranged elements of the Democrat party who are simply exhausted with the status quo of dysfunction.  And now is the time, before it’s too late.

One hundred and thirty five years ago slavery was an existential threat to the survival of the United States and it took a war and 600,000 lives to defeat. Debt figures on an accounting sheet might not sound like an existential threat, but make no mistake, they are. Whether Zimbabwe or the Weimar Republic or third century Rome, spending matters, deficits matter, numbers on an accounting sheet can eventually turn deadly. When this debt bubble bursts America will come apart at the seams and it will make the collapse of Venezuela look like a walk in the park.

But it doesn’t have to be. History doesn’t often pair a highly motivated public with the world’s richest man on the same side of an issue so clearly in need of fixing. It has now and we should seize the opportunity and take what little good that remains of the GOP and build upon it a new party that puts the needs of America above those of grifting, power obsessed politicians. That’s the kind of change Americans voted for.

Follow Vince on X at @ImperfectUSA

It's Not Reparations, It's Revenge...

Democrats frequently talk about reparations for black Americans, compensation for slavery and Jim Crow.  Indeed, House member Cori Bush recently proposed $14 trillion as a good place to start.

Any reparations plan would be extraordinarily complex. First, if reparations are to be paid, to whom would they be paid?  To every one of America’s 45 million blacks? (2020 Census)  Including the 4.5 million blacks who immigrated after Jim Crow was gone?  Should the 33 million black Americans aged 50 or below who have only lived after passage of the Voting and Civil Rights Acts?  How about black families whose ancestors lived in northern states where slavery was largely outlawed before America was a nation and Jim Crow never existed?  How about blacks from states like California and Idaho who had neither slavery nor Jim Crow?  Or those of mixed origins with one black parent?  Is one black grandparent sufficient or would it have to be at least 2 of 4?  Do black families who earn $200,000 a year still qualify for reparations?  How about America’s 1.5 million black millionaires?   

The next question is, if indeed reparations were to be paid, who would pay them? America has approximately 250 million white people. Would all of them have to pay? Even those whose ancestors arrived after passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts or whose ancestors arrived after the Civil War, as many Italians and Irish did? Do the 155 million or so who are 50 or younger and were born after Jim Crow was history? How about those descended from one of the 360,000 white Northern soldiers who lost their lives fighting to end slavery? Or those who live in states that never had slavery or Jim Crow? Do the whites of Wyoming, where the black population is 0.9% pay the same as Louisiana where it’s 31%? 

Once we’ve nailed down who’s going to get reparations and who’s going to pay them, then we have to figure out how much.  For the sake of argument, let’s take Bush’s $14 trillion.  That works out to $311,000 to every black American. Again, for argument’s sake, let’s say that all 250 million of the whites would be responsible for making the reparation.  If required to make that payment, that would involve every single white person (including babies and retirees) to write a check for about $56,000.  That’s unlikely to be feasible given that the average median white household income in the US is $78,000.

So, if writing a check is out of the question, maybe setting up a payment plan, sort of like a mortgage.  Spreading the $56,0600 out over 15 years at today’s 6.7% interest rate would make for a monthly payment of $494 per white person. That doesn’t seem too unreasonable, but what about unemployed whites or those on government assistance?  Do they pay?  What about white kids too young to work?  Do they pay or do their obligations accrue until they turn 18 or get their first job?  Then of course, who do they make those checks out to?  Do the white people get to choose which black people they pay?  Or do they make the payment to a pool to be distributed by some upstanding organization that represents black people like the NAACP or BLM or the National Action Network? Are the payments tax deductable? Maybe let the IRS collect the money and have the government distribute it. Would the government need to set up a Department of Reparations to keep the money separate from the rest of the government’s funds? Or maybe the government can pay the whole sum up front and bill the white people. Would individual black people have claim on individual white people’s property if they didn’t or couldn’t pay?  Would jails become debtor’s prisons full of people who can’t pay?

Assuming all of that gets figured out, are new black babies entitled to reparations?  If yes, for how long? Will black babies born in 2075 still be eligible for payments and white ones still obligated to pay? Is it in perpetuity or will it only last 100 years?  If new black babies are not eligible, how would mom explain to junior that he doesn’t get the $311,000 his brother did just because he was born 12 months later?  If a black woman is pregnant when the agreement is made, does she collect for only herself or for her baby too? 

At the end of the day reparations are made for some wrong done… but what if the result of that wrong left the progeny of the person wronged better off than had the wrong not been done in the first place.  Is it possible that reparations aren’t really due?

Approximately 400,000 blacks were brought to the United States as slaves. We assume that had they not been sold into slavery they would likely have stayed where they lived. So, one might ask, would the progeny of those slaves have been better off in those home countries than they are here as a result of their ancestors being sold into slavery?  First, let’s look at incomes. We’ll look at the per person median income (PPMI) in the top 10 modern nations encompassing the places from which those blacks were taken. (see nearby chart)

The average among those 10 nations is $950 per year.  This compares to a median income for black Americans of $13,108 per person. ($19,306 average American X .67)

But of course money isn’t everything, right? How about life expectancy?  In those same 10 nations the life expectancies average 61.6, compared to the United States where the average life expectancy of black Americans is 75.1 years. 

	PPMI	Life Expt.
Angola:	$665	62.3
Congo (DR):	$392	62.4
Cameroon:	$1,245	60.9
Nigeria:	$825	52.9
Guinea:	$876	60.7
Sierra Leone:	$765	60.1
Gambia:	$1,383	63.8
Liberia:	$753	61.1
Mauritania:	1,760	64.5
Senegal:	$844	67.6
Average:	$950.80	61.6
Black Americans	$13,108	75.1

So black Americans have incomes that are 13 times higher than individuals living in the nations from which slaves were brought to America. They also have life expectancies that are 14 years, or 22% longer. What’s more, Americans have freedoms found in none of those countries; they also have levels of entertainment, transportation, food, shelter, leisure, medicines, job opportunities and democracy that citizens of those nations can only dream of. 

As such, it appears that black American descendants of slaves are actually far better off because their ancestors left Africa in bondage and landed in the United States.  Indeed, had their ancestors been taken to Brazil, where the largest number of blacks landed, they might not have survived to procreate because death rates were staggeringly high, or to the middle east where the men were castrated and babies born to black slaves were killed at birth, which explains a dearth of blacks in the middle east despite importing more slaves than the Americas. 

But the relevant progeny for this discussion were brought to the United States, and it appears that they are much better off than the descendents of those who were left behind.  If that were not the case, one would expect that blacks unhappy with America would willingly emigrate to the nations from which their ancestors came. But that never quite happens does it? Which begs the question, given that no one alive today was either a slave or owned slaves and most of the progeny of slaves are exponentially better off than they would have been had their ancestors not been taken to America in the first place, exactly why are reparations warranted?

In fact, they’re not, and that’s the point.  It’s not reparations that are being demanded, it’s revenge, which is a completely different thing altogether…

Arguing with Leftists is an Exercise in Futility...

Last week Dan Bongino talked about the pointlessness of arguing with the left. He said something like “We think the left are simply people with bad ideas while the left thinks we are simply bad people…” He went on to say that while pointless in terms of trying to convince the person with whom you’re “arguing”, it’s worthwhile because others, who may be open minded and paying attention, might be persuaded.

This was driven home to me via a Facebook discussion that started out with a friend’s cartoon suggesting CRT is an innocuous addition to the teaching of American history that shows some of the darker chapters.

My response was: “No one opposes teaching history, warts and all. I studied slavery, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, Chinese workers basically in servitude to build the RR and more. You keep mischaracterizing CRT as just teaching the negative side of American history. It’s not. The heart of CRT is that the US is systematically racist and minorities can’t succeed. That’s fiction and you know it.”

Which started a firestorm from a friend of my friend, from which I’ve excerpted:

It’s apparent that you gained little insight from your studies. If they didn’t touch on the racist systems that led to those events occurring, you obviously got the sanitized, white washed version where the savagery and downright inhumanity to any non-white man BY white men was totally excluded. Just like your fellow GOP white Supremacists, there is NO reality that y’all can’t bend to save your false sense of identity that you’re superior to all non- whites and European genius and goodness is the only reality there is.

American Slavery was different and worse than any other slavery in the History of the World. It’s the only slavery where the slaves were dehumanized. No other slavery treated the slaves like a horse or a chicken.

To which I responded:

It’s true slaves were treated as property, but in fact, slaves in the American south were largely treated better than slaves in South America and the Caribbean. One major reason for that was the Constitution’s ban on the importation of slaves after 1808. Slaves therefore became far more valuable than they were in the rest of the Americas and it was to nobody’s benefit to work them to death. That is, very unlike Brazil, the Caribbean and elsewhere where slaves were cheaply imported and therefore expendable. The truth of this can be seen in the fact that 94% of the slaves brought to the New World went somewhere other than the United States, but by 1860 2/3 of the slaves in the New World were in the American south.

He continued: The effects are still being felt today when George Floyd’s murderer gets 22.5 years for killing a black human being but a black man killing a Police DOG recently was sentenced to 45 years. That just shows that the dehumanization of black folks specifically males is baked in to American society. The ONLY ones who are treated like human beings are the exceptional negroes who make it through systemic racism baked into every institution in America or those who entertain white folks in music, TV or sports. And even they can’t say anything bad about America or their lives could get turned upside down.

Wouldn’t it be nice if American Europeans tried to dismantle this system and rectify the damage? The boost to our economy through reparations alone and the good will gained worldwide as America denounces its past and pledges to make amends would truly place this nation at the top as it stones for its sins. But, white America collectively isn’t interested in any of that. It’s only interested in the maintenance of white supremacy for various reasons, not the least of which is white genetic survival, power and greed.

After more futile back and forth, I decided to take a different tact:

Let’s try a thought experiment... Imagine everything you said is true about programs being stacked against minorities. What do you do to fix them? Reverse discrimination? How about reparations? Who pays? Who gets what? Who decides? Does Obama pay or does he get money? Do recent African or Caribbean immigrants get money too or only people who can trace their lineage back to slavery or even Jim Crow? What about black families who owned slaves? Do the million or so black millionaires get money too? When are things as they should be? What's the measure? Will every company or classroom or board have to reflect the pigment hue of the country as a whole? Will it apply to everything from police to janitors to ditch diggers to the NBA and the NFL? Will all of this change the unwed birth rate in black America? Is murder still to be considered a crime as half of the offenders in the US are black males despite the fact that they make up only 6% of the population? Since reparations will make everything even do we do away with welfare programs that disproportionately benefit minorities?

Or, maybe all of us could be grateful for the fact that today virtually every one of us is extraordinarily lucky to live in a country that allows so much freedom and opportunity that millions of people literally risk their lives to come here every year and probably half or more of the rest of the world would happily change places with almost any American.

He responded: In other words, you’re just another psychotic white Supremacist and it makes NO sense trying to REASON with a psychotic.

To seek to evade all responsibility or accountability for the greatest crimes against Black humanity in history is the mindset of a Savage…PRETENDING to be civilized. Someone who cares nothing about Honor, truth, civility, fair-play OR in obeying their OWN laws, let alone those of God.

White Supremacy has made most white folks, LIKE YOU, spiritual MONSTERS to be able to say stuff like that with a straight face and sleep like a baby at night. There lies the entire problem of Racism in America which is a power dynamic that only WHITE AMERICANS have. Blacks can’t be racist towards you because we haven’t set up systems of power that can destroy the lives of you or your family. White folks do that to blacks ALL the time.

It was clear he was not really interested in ideas focused on making life better for black Americans,  but rather extracting revenge in the form of reparations from the whites who by definition are racists and guilty.

This is why Biden is in the White House, other than the fraud, obviously. Democrats have become the party of grievance, the party of victimization. If they can convince a group they’re victims, they never have to actually accomplish anything. The focus is always on past failures or some other strawman that rational policies simply cannot be allowed to address. It’s the ultimate in maintaining a grip on power. Why ever address policy failures or “unintended” consequences, when it’s so much easier to simply craft a grievance that can simply never be addressed. For Democrats that’s a recipe for success. For America it’s a recipe for disaster.

Secession Is A Radical Solution That Sadly Doesn’t Seem So Radical Any More

Some things in life are constant. My entire life America has been one of those things.  Despite Vietnam, Watergate, Iran Contra, the Dot Com bubble, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Recession and more, the United States has been constant.  America, rife with internal conflicts, differing opinions and more than a few lying politicians was always the land of freedom, the land of opportunity, and the land of endless possibilities.  America and freedom were like the earth below us and the sun and the stars above… constants.    

But constant is relative…  Wait long enough and the earth will be gone. Wait long enough and the sun and the stars will be gone. So too with nations. Ronald Reagan knew this.  He said:  Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  That generation is upon us and we are most certainly watching in real time as American freedom is extinguished, and with it America.

America was fundamentally built on freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution.  Freedom of speech, religion, the right to peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government.  But it’s not just the Constitution itself that makes America.  It’s ideas that flow from it and our history.  Free markets, private property, entrepreneurship, 4^th of July, baseball, high school debate team, cars, suburbs, bake sales, Thanksgiving dinner, spelling bees, Pledge of Allegiance, Christmas antlers,  the National Anthem and more.    

All of that, both the actual rights and the ideas beyond them all are under attack in America of 2021.  Whether petty tyrants using the Covid hysteria to eviscerate our freedoms of religion and assembly and to crush our businesses or social media oligarchs shutting down debate in the 21^st century town square or education departments causing Martin Luther King to spin in his grave as they abandon his dream, the America of Norman Rockwell paintings is being torn apart idea by idea by idea.

This past summer Americans were helpless as cities from coast to coast burned in response to the killing of George Floyd and they were told the violence was understandable and “mostly peaceful protests”.  This past year many Americans saw their lives upended as their jobs or businesses were destroyed, their families turned into strangers and churches and schools turned into ghost towns as a result of a disease with a 99.99% survival rate, but we were told that America was facing the gravest public health threat in history.  Now we’re watching as children are taught that math is racist, that hard work is racist, and there is no difference between boys and girls and we’re told that all of this is healthy and reasonable.

At the same time, we’ve watched our history upended as we see monuments to our heroes, from Columbus to Washington to Grant and Lincoln to Booker T. Washington to Reagan toppled in the name of racism!  We’ve watched the indoctrination of grievance as the defining characteristic of American life.  We’ve witnessed the politicization of every single aspect of American society, where everything from sitcoms to sports to sex no longer have intrinsic value on their own, but rather have become mere Rorschach tests for measuring one’s degree of submission to the new normal. 

America has become a nation where objective reality no longer matters, where the free exchange of ideas is no longer allowed and where the exercise of an individual’s rights are tolerated only to the degree that they do not hurt the feelings of some aggrieved victim class.  America has become a bizzarro world where everything from science to math and history to law are no longer constants upon which society rests but rather malleable frameworks for the destruction of everything that does not comport with todays’ woke mores. 

And so it is thorough this looking glass one wonders what is the solution?  In 2016 Americans went to the ballot box and said they’d had enough of the perversion of everything ostensibly American into a cancer on the history of the world and elected a leader who was unabashedly patriotic.  After four years of constant, relentless lies about said leader they returned to the ballot box and reelected the man who was seeking to upend the demonization of America, only to have the election stolen under the cover of the night.  That theft was enabled by the fiction of an existential threat to life on earth posed by a novel virus. Americans went to the ballot box and their will was thwarted.

Rather than set the nation afire, jilted voters looked to the courts for a Constitutional remedy.  A split Supreme Court had demurred from solving the problem before the election but after the election had the opportunity to revisit the question before the votes were certified.  Again they demurred. Once the fraudulent administration was in place the Court had one last opportunity to address the fraud once and for all, and again chose not to act.

So we have a circumstance where citizens go to the polls only to watch those votes stolen.  They then petition the nation’s highest court for redress and are rebuffed.  As they watch the cabal who perpetrated the theft work to institutionalize the very tools with which they purloined the election in the first place, what are citizens who revere the Constitution and love liberty supposed to do?

Do they stand by and watch as what’s left of their country is taken over by those for whom freedom and rule of law are simply obstacles to the permanent domination over the nation?  Become slaves on a modern day plantation where Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington are the masters and the woke anarchists are the overseers who keep everyone in line?  Riot in the streets like BLM and Antifa have done so often?

Or they could pursue secession, where the woke are welcome to the coasts while the heartland and the south choose freedom and the Constitution…  It is indeed a radical notion, but the constant of the free America most of us knew is gone so perhaps the time has come...  When all conventional Constitutional avenues have been impeded, when opponents seek to eliminate citizens’ Constitutional rights and thwart the language of the document itself, what other choice is left?  We can accept the slow death of the Republic as the gangrene of wokness starves the body politic of the blood of freedom, or amputate the cancerous limbs and allow freedom to flow once again through the veins of a nation defined by liberty.  The left has made the radical normal.  Secession is a radical solution that sadly doesn’t seem so radical any more.

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.

A Caliphate foothold in America and Barack Obama’s ignorance about the Crusades, the Inquisition and American History

Barack Obama’s relationship with Islam is definitely strange, at least as relative to that of most Americans. The United States may not be a Christian nation, but it is has always been a nation of Christians in that the overwhelming majority of the country has always been Christian, and remains so today. Given that 0.6% of the United States’ population is Muslim, most American’s familiarity with and knowledge of Islam comes from reading and what they see on TV. Neither can give someone the same familiarity with Islam as would be felt had the grown up with the faith as part of their family and their neighborhood. As shallow as is most of America’s familiarity with Islam today, before 9-11 it was even more so.

But of course September 11 did happen. Watching the scenes of revelers in the West Bank and other places cheering the attacks and thinking back on the first WTC attacks, the USS Cole, the embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi… Americans could have easily come to the conclusion that Islam was at war with the United States. But they didn’t. In fact, after September 11 President Bush was quite clear that that was not the case. And the predicted wave of attacks against Muslims across the country never materialized.

In fact, although there were some isolated attacks, just the opposite occurred. Prayer events where Imams were invited to speak took place across the country. Muslims were interviewed on TV and radio programs seeking to understand the religion and the motivations behind the attacks. In 1942 the hero of the left locked up 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps while in 2001 the bête noire of the left encouraged Americans to embrace Muslims.

Then in 2008 something remarkable happened. Americans elected to the presidency someone who, although ostensibly Christian, was the son of a Muslim, who grew up in a Muslim country, who attended a mosque (irregularly) and who was educated in a Madrasa.  That, in a country where only 50 years before serious questions existed as to whether or not a Catholic could be elected.

All of this is to simply say, America knows that it’s not at war with Islam.

That being said however, apparently Islam is at war with much of the world… and in some places, with itself. Of the 31 active wars going on in the world today (those with at least 100 causalities per year) fully 20 of them involve Muslims on one side or the other… or both. That’s 65% of the conflicts while Muslims make up 20% of the world’s population. At the same time, 29 of the FBI's 30 most wanted terrorists are... Muslims. 

Which brings us back to Barack Obama and his unwillingness to call the Islamist terrorists Islamist terrorists. While most Americans understand that not all Muslims are terrorists, they recognize the demonstrable fact that Islamic terror is a real thing, a real threat, and are simply puzzled by Obama's obfuscation on acknowledging the obvious.  But he has given Americans much to be puzzled about when it comes to his perspective on Islam.

In 2007 candidate Obama, after reciting the Arabic call to prayer (apparently with a perfect accent) he told a reporter for the NY Times that that sound was “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

In 2009 after Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 soldiers and injured more than 30 at Ft. Hood, Texas, while yelling Allahu Akbar – a thread that seems to run through such attacks – Barack Obama told the country this was simply “workplace violence”.

In 2010 Charles Bolden, Barack Obama’s head of NASA told Al Jazeera that one of the president’s three mandates for NASA was: “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.”

In 2012, following the attack on Benghazi which killed 4 Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Barack Obama’s State Department spent $70,000 on ads in Pakistan denouncing the US made anti-Islam video the administration falsely blamed for the attacks. He further spoke at the UN, not in defense of free speech, but to suggest that “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

Finally there is the President’s recent comments equating Islamist terror (although he refuses to use the term) with the Crusades, the Inquisition and slavery & Jim Crow in the US. Of the many things that Barack Obama has said that have puzzled Americans about his perspective on Islam, this might be the most egregious. It shows he has no understanding of history, either Christian or American.

The Crusades were a largely defensive effort as part of a centuries long geopolitical struggle that saw the Muslims stopped at Tours, France in 732, saw the Umayyad Caliphate control Spain from the 7th to the 11th centuries and saw the Ottomans turned back from Vienna in both 1529 and 1683.

In stark contrast to Islamic terror, the Inquisition was “not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions.” This was necessary because prior to the Inquisition local nobles were responsible for passing judgment on heresy and arbitrarily convicted both the innocent and the guilty, often for reasons that had nothing to do with the church and everything to do with political expediency. The Inquisition was the Church’s attempt to eliminate such injustices.

Finally there is slavery and Jim Crow. What Barack Obama doesn’t bother to mention is that from before there was a United States Christians across the colonies fought slavery in the name of Christ. Indeed abolitionists existed throughout our history and Christianity was its driving force. That slavery became a blemish on American history is unfortunate, but it was economics that kept men in bondage, not Christianity, after all the Kansas–Nebraska Act had nothing to do with Christ. So too with Jim Crow. It was culture and economic power that separated the races in the south rather than religion. While some may have used Christianity as an excuse to support such laws, there was always a significant and vocal fight from Christians against such unequal treatment, including in the South. And it was Christianity that Martin Luther King harnessed to inspire the nation to bring the system down.

Barack Obama’s obdurate unwillingness to call Islamic terror by its name stands in stark contrast to his seeming eagerness to characterize a wide swath of activities and events in America as racist. Given that everything from 9-11 to videotaped beheadings to the burning people alive in cages has played itself out right in front of our eyes under the cry of Allahu Akbar, the former makes Americans wonder if Barack Obama is not perhaps some kind of Manchurian Candidate who seeks to soften American resistance to some future caliphate foothold. At the same time his seeming eagerness to immediately insert race into everything from votes against him to the Cambridge police dustup to the Michael Brown incident makes many Americans wonder if Barack Obama is not a modern version of Aesop’s Boy Who Cried Wolf, who sees racism around every corner, regardless of the facts.   

At the end of the day a leader doesn’t necessarily have to be of the same party or color or race or religion of those he leads. But he does have to share their basic values and understanding of the world if he desires their continued attention and engagement. With the Yoga like contortions he persists in engaging in in order to avoid calling Islamist terror what it obviously is and Islamic terrorists what they are, more and more people are beginning to wonder about Obama’s view of the world and view of America.  They understandably wonder how much that view - coming from a guy who didn't even know you're supposed to put your hand over your heart during the national anthem, something most 5th graders know - dovetails with theirs.  It’s about time.

Illegitimacy: America's racist past and present dooms its present and future...

I recently got into a lengthy discussion with some friends that makes me wonder how much longer the country can survive. Why? Because of such starkly different views on the nation, our history and the role of government. Frankly, I've never felt so bewildered in my life as to how people looking at the same information can come to such differing results… and I’ll point out, most of my interlocutors were white liberals.

The original catalyst for this discussion was Ferguson, MO. Almost immediately upon the killing of Michael Brown various friends posted comments on Facebook or linked to pieces discussing the disparity in the way blacks and whites are treated by cops. I was told by a black friend that a black man knows that every time he encounters a cop, regardless of the circumstances, his life is in danger. That cops can and do regularly stop, harass and abuse black men for no other reason than they are black. Ferguson and Brown were just the latest example of that racist reality.

I expressed some incredulity. While I suggested that it might be in fact true that police had a more heightened sense of awareness when dealing with blacks, I posited it might have more to do with the fact that black men, while they make up about 6% of the population, are responsible for approximately 40% of the violent crime in the country than racism. Somehow that didn't seem to fly. "No" that could not be the cause of the disparity. It had to be the racism on the part of some cops and the institutional racism on the part of the institutions that make up our justice system.

I further posited that even if it were the case that black men received a heightened level of attention from police, they could usually minimize the possibility of a negative outcome by being polite, respectful, and, even if they thought they were being unconstitutionally stopped, wait until afterward to file a grievance rather than get into a Constitutional argument and altercation with the officer who’s both worried about his own safety and that of the public. Indeed, I suggested that was likely good advice for anyone, black, white or otherwise, and it was the opposite of what Rodney King had done and increasingly what Michael Brown appears to have done. In hoping to lighten the tone somewhat I linked to Chris Rock’s great “How not to get your ass kicked by the police!” which is funny, but it makes some very good points as well. That didn’t seem to fly either.

The discussion devolved into suggestions that the United States always is and always has been a fundamentally racist country where whites have privilege (that they refuse recognize or acknowledge) and blacks are fundamentally unable to succeed. That was untrue on its face I suggested. To support the former they pointed to the Constitution. I explained that – while slavery is indeed a stain on the American history – the fact of the matter is that the 3/5 compromise was the only way that the Constitution could have been ratified, and that the Constitution put a stop (in 1808) to the importation of slaves, which had the impact of making slaves more valuable to their owners, and thus less likely to be literally worked to death as happened in far greater numbers in the Caribbean or South America where replacement slaves could be brought in without constraint. In addition, I pointed out, while some Founding Fathers such as Washington and Madison did own slaves, many others did not, including John and Sam Adams, and Ben Franklin freed his slaves and became the president of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society. In addition, a quarter of a million whites died during the Civil War to end slavery and save the Union.  I was told I was an apologist for slavery and the Founding Fathers...

I then pointed out that in this racist country where blacks can’t succeed, blacks not only dominate the ranks of sports and recording artists, but are CEO’s of such great American companies as McDonalds, American Express, Xerox, and Merck… and of course Barack Obama was elected to the most powerful position on the planet, twice!

But none of that mattered because America is racist and blacks are disempowered because of the color of their skin. It has nothing to do with unwed motherhood. It has nothing to do with government schools that don’t educate. It has nothing to do with government regulations that make it difficult for young black men to find a job. It has nothing to do with a culture that sometimes ostracizes learning as “acting white” and communities where the number one killer of young men between the ages of 15 & 34 is ... other young black men.  And of course it has nothing to do with government dependency.

There are certainly examples of cops misbehaving and sometimes abusing blacks – and others. We see those videos regularly. But those are the man bites dog stories because the majority of instances do not include abuse and we don’t hear about them. With over half a million cops on duty in the United States every day, even if it were 10 videos a day of such behavior, that would be a drop in the bucket of police interactions with citizens. (That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be dealt with when it arises however.)

And here’s the problem that makes one think that the country just might be doomed. Despite the fact that slavery has been gone for 150 years and Jim Crow for 50, despite the fact that there are 35,000 black millionaires in the United States, America is apparently a place where blacks cannot succeed. Despite the fact that blacks have achieved some of the highest positions possible in Fortune 500 companies, been elected or appointed to the highest positions in the land, dominate a variety of entertainment arenas, America is a racist nation where blacks can’t succeed. Finally, because our Constitution was an imperfect document which made only baby steps towards ending slavery 226 years ago, America is forever doomed to be a racist nation.

It appears to be the case that there is nothing that whites or that the nation can do that will satisfy those who are focused on race.  From 50 years of government set asides and redistribution to a plethora of regulations mandating “diversity targets” in everything from home loans to staffing to college admissions, it never seems to be sufficient to atone for the country’s imperfect history. Increasingly it's becoming evident that there is a large and growing segment of the population that refuses to recognize that progress occurs, even while imperfection persists.

Unfortunately for the nation, as long as the Constitution is our foundation and an apparently racist white majority remains, blacks (and a growing list of other oppressed groups) have no chance of success and therefore everything in the country, from laws to property to achievement, are illegitimate. And of course, once something is deemed illegitimate it's open to being used or taken by the government to satisfy the demands of the dispossessed. Illegitimacy is rarely a good foundation for a well functioning representative government.  As the ranks of those focused on identity politics grow, calls for government action grow along with them... such things do not bode well for America’s future.

Gay Wedding Cakes, Religious Freedom and the Return of Slavery in America

The most common definition of a slave is: A person who is the property of and wholly subject to another. There is another definition however: A person entirely under the domination of some influence or person. Slavery has been outlawed in the US for 150 years, but some people want to bring it back… but not necessarily in the form you might think. Uncle Sam of course is not a master and citizens are not his slaves. The government – at least not the government defined in the Constitution – doesn’t have the right to tell Americans who they have to work for or who their businesses have to serve.

It can however, at least according to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, demand that businesses that offer to provide services to the public not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. That means however that if you are offering to sell cakes, you must not decide that you will sell cakes to men and not women, to Jews but not Christians, to blacks but not whites, or to a native born American but not a naturalized citizen born in Canada.

Interestingly, other than religion all of the limitations are innate, things that people are born with or had from birth. That prohibition also applies to the later characteristics defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act. The CRA says what a business can’t do, it can’t discriminate based on a clear set of criteria… but it says nothing about what they must do. A black chef can’t legally refuse to provide service to someone who walks in simply because he’s white. He can however choose not to provide service to him when the man tells him that the event is a celebration of KKK history. That’s discrimination, but it’s legal discrimination and its well within the chef’s rights.

The CRA lists specific criteria upon which a business is not allowed to discriminate: race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. But that’s it. Other than those reasons any business can choose who they would like to serve. A 7-11 store is well within its rights to say “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service”. By the same token a gun store can choose not to sell a gun to a drunk person and business can choose not to hire people with tattoos. A community can limit its inhabitants to those over 55 or a storekeeper with a Napoleon complex can choose to never serve customers over 6 ft. These restrictions may or may not be prudent, but none of them are illegal as businesses have the right to choose to whom they provide services within the framework of the CRA, the ADA and the Equal Protection Clause upon which both are based.

Which brings us to the issue of bakers and photographers and others. The question is, working under the shadow of the Equal Protection Clause, do such businesses have the right to refuse to provide services for a gay wedding, something their faith tells them is a sin? Absolutely. Do they have the right to refuse to provide services for a gay wedding? Absolutely. Should they be protected from lawsuits for doing so? Of course.

The point is, in almost every one of these cases the service providers did not refuse service because someone was gay. Rather, they declined to participate in an activity their faith tells them is sinful. Indeed the baker in the case actually offered to let the gay couple purchase any one of the cakes in his shop. He was simply refusing to bake a gay themed wedding cake.

The distinction between the activity and a customer’s gayness or lack thereof may be a fine one, but it is an important one. The CRA says businesses cannot discriminate against customers based on various innate or unchangeable characteristics. Significantly, the characteristic of being gay is not among them. Which means that theoretically businesses have the right to discriminate against gays or 22 year olds or journalists with no threat of government sanction. Nonetheless, most Americans oppose discriminating against people for their sexual orientation and the businesses in question were not doing so. (Similarly, 85% of Americans believe service providers should be allowed to decline to participate in gay weddings.)  They were simply declining to participate in an activity that their faith says is sinful.

The jilted couples in these cases looked to the government to force the said businesses to provide the services they wanted. In all three cases the government obliged stating that the religious objections of the business owners were trumped by the couple’s equal protections. That is both unfortunate and absurd. If the government can force a Christian baker to bake a cake for a gay couple, can it force a Muslim grocer who does special orders to special order pork? Can it compel the aforementioned black chef to cater the KKK’s event? Can it force a vegan landlord to rent his building to someone wanting to open a steakhouse? The answer of course is no, no and no and the reason is because Americans are not slaves and the government has no right to compel them to do things that go against their moral convictions.

That is likely news to people in government (and their liberal enablers) who believe they are the masters of the American people. They are not. Americans are free and by constitution they have given government limited powers – even if the government is increasingly obliterating those limits. Of those freedoms,  religious freedom is among the most important.  It is what brought the Pilgrims to America 400 years ago and it’s been a hallmark of American society ever since. A government commanding its citizens to do things beyond its scope is never a good idea, which Obamacare demonstrates on a daily basis. A government commanding its citizens to do something that goes against their religious faith is even worse because it undermines the fundamental legitimacy of the government itself. If these rulings stand, if the most basic freedom to abstain from participating in activities your religion tells you are sinful is now largely gone, then the progressive barbarians are no longer at the gate… they’ve entered your home, taken control of your life and have carte blanche to force you to do whatever it is they demand – or face ruinous consequences otherwise. Such is the kindling with which revolutionary fires are often started…