Pres. Biden, son Hunter, and an inset photo of the Biden clan
Far removed from Plato’s dream of the “philosopher king”, and his notion of politics as an avocation for the wise and godly, is the harsher reality of self-dealing in politics. Biden finally did it: he pardoned his son. Are you surprised? If so, stay off the cable buying channels. Someone else should handle your finances.
Honestly, I expected Biden to do it, or arrange some deal with the incoming Trump. Did you really expect the son to spend a dime in penalties and serve a day in jail? The charade of high-mindedness from Biden and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was for the sycophants and the “unwashed masses”, which is how the party of the masses actually views their masses. My guess is that most of us aren’t shocked.
We’ve grown used to the truth of our politics: it’s long been a lucrative (as in “lucre”) career path, especially for long-in-the-tooth politicos like the Biden clan. FDR had a well-heeled aristocratic lineage, and thus his quasi-socialism was an act of condescending patronage for the plebes. But for LBJ, politics was his ticket out of the poverty of his Texas hill-country hardscrabble life. He sold himself by using other people’s money to purchase other people’s loyalty. Imagine it, using other people’s money to reward still other people, and all of it for fun and profit. Adjusted for inflation, upon his death, he was worth $100 million, quite a haul for a coarse back-slapping politician from Texas’s version of Appalachia at the time.
The “LBJ technique” of haranguing a person to get his way.
Self-interest and greed are alive and well, particularly among people whose public platform has long been a bellicose attack on self-interest and greed. Nancy Pelosi provides another case in point. A scion of Baltimore’s D’Alesandro political dynasty, her elevated social caste helped bring her into marital union with Paul Pelosi of the moneyed class. Elite colleges, prep schools, etc., you get the picture. It’s a form of social incest. Power and money have always had a potent attraction. You don’t need feudalism or capitalism to make it happen. Quasi-socialism, as well as the unadorned kind, works too.
So, Nancy can regale us with the glories of a totalitarian lockdown by pointing to her $15,000 fridge filled with exotic, expensive, chic ice cream. No run-of-the-mill Dreyer’s for this gal. She gets her hair professionally coiffed while everyone else is shut in dealing with their zoomed children. Like the nomenklatura of the Soviet Union, the old aristocracy was swept aside to make room for the Party aristocracy. La noblesse oblige thrives under new labels. The flotsam always floats to the top no matter the political scheme.
Nancy’s refrigerator and ice cream during the lockdowns.
These paragons of equity- and equality-mongering, of concern for the poor and “oppressed”, end up rolling in the dough. So much so that they can no longer ravage Republicans as the party of robber barons. For at least the last few election cycles, the Democrats have nationally outspent the GOP by around 100%, or more. The Harris campaign had raised $2.15 billion when you add Biden’s billion in the early part of the campaign season, and still ran a $20 million debt. Trump’s paltry $338 million, about half of it from donations $200 or less, seems like an embarrassment in comparison.
The party of government is also the party of the hyper-wealthy. Their complaints about “money in politics” and their serial attacks on Citizens United were dropped from the Party’s talking points. It couldn’t be sustained when the Brahmins of wealth lined up behind them. So, the ritual excuses for the loss shifted to “misinformation” and “disinformation”. In other words, they want to censor views and information that they don’t like. It’s scandalous, but it’ll still has currency in Big Media. They demand censorship and an ongoing alliance with Big Money and Big Media. Why don’t they just come out and say it? They want Orwell’s Ministry of Truth [propaganda] and Ministry of Love [persecution] (from Orwell’s “1984”).
They don’t realize that many of their beliefs are revolting to a large swath of the public. There’s too much out there to turn your stomach. Transgenderism – the idea that you can feel and think your way into another sex – is to be assisted by taxpayer dollars and forced into anything designated “woman/girl”. The Leviathan is the strong arm for gender confusion and porn to adolescents.
They wrecked the economy, which everybody has experienced at the gas pump, utility bill, and supermarket. As for crime, they only seek ways to facilitate it, not combat it. People look around themselves and see disorder, filth, and violence. Who wants to raise their kids in that?
The fact is, they suffer the disadvantage of their own minds. Fewer want what they’re selling. It doesn’t take a genius to roll out the videotape. And they gaslight us by calling it “disinformation” and “misinformation”. They demand that campaigns keep it airy, abstract, filled with generalities. “Joy”, joy about what? Trump is Hitler, and it’s the end of “our democracy”. When you confront them with their own statements and actions, they demand a Ministry of Truth. Who’s the real danger to democracy?
Here’s the truth: big government breeds big money in politics which breeds more big government. More big government breeds more lucrative avenues for the unproductive, people who produce nothing but the myriads of ways to take money and opportunity from one group and give it to their voting blocks. Now that’s the real scandal.
In all of this self-dealing, is there any wonder that they save their own from the hoosegow? That’s a minor matter compared to what they have in store for the rest of us.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Charles C.W. Cooke’s piece in National Review provides some insight into the scam that is our politics: “The Misinformation Racket”, 11/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/01/the-misinformation-racket/
MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough called “the scope and scale” of Trump’s victory “sweeping.”
In the 1992 political war room of Bill Clinton, James Carville famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid!” It became a cliché. To a certain extent, it’s a key factor this year. But more lies underneath the public’s fixation with the economy. A troubled economy can be the product of the wrong sort of beliefs. Furthermore, a constellation of beliefs underlies a whole range of issues as a person addresses their ballot. At this point, it’s gone way beyond the economy. It’s the beliefs, stupid!
While blaming the other side for economic problems can catapult a party to victory, as it did for Clinton in 1992, it can also hide disturbing party ideas that’ll only appear once in office. It didn’t take long for Bill Clinton to uncloak the Democrats’ fetish for government control of almost everything – in this case, healthcare, 17% of the economy. Remember Hillary Care? People didn’t vote for this in 1992. It brought to an end the nearly 40-year Democrat reign of the House in 1995. Welcome to Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Forward to 2024, in the attempted postmortem of Democrat losses, donkey party enthusiasts can’t come to grips with the reality that this radical Left version of the party isn’t popular. For instance, transgenderism swiftly took corporeal form under their tutelage and began wrecking girls’ sports, their bathrooms and locker rooms, and in tandem with the propagation of gender ideology in the schools, adolescents were exposed to porn and gender “transition”. Gender confusion for children and Hustler-grade picture books aren’t winners. Duh!
What were they thinking? The Democrats chided Republicans for bringing it up as if the issue was concocted out of thin air by the GOP and Democrats have nothing to do with it. Really? Rachel Levine (born Richard) as Asst. Health Secretary, Biden’s “God bless you” to Dylan Mulvaney after his endorsement decimated Bud Light, a transgender celebration at the White House, and the manipulation of Title IX to sanction XY “girls” in every place with a Girl/Woman identifier are but a few eyebrow-raisers while parents watched their daughters losing to girls of the XY variety in women’s sports. A hard volleyball smash to the face by an XY “girl” changed a real girl’s life forever. Women’s track and swimming were distorted beyond recognition. Women’s Olympic boxing was nearly turned into a murder scene.
Transwoman Rose Montoya, who bared her/his breast implants at the June 2023 White House pride event.
The muddle of broad American sentiment on transgenderism began to crystalize into general opposition, particularly when asked about specifics. The view hardened as we approached the November 5 election. In 2024, after discussion intensified and baleful stories of the ill-effects of transgenderism accumulated, support for the reality of sex at birth increased to sizeable majorities (65%) (see #1). In 2023, almost 70% of respondents to a Gallup poll viewed biological sex to be the determinant of athletic participation (see #2). YouGov in February 2024 chronicled large majorities opposing the “transition” (“gender affirming care”: psyche control, chemical and surgical interventions) of their children by authorities.
Not only were their daughters threatened by the donkey party but government was herding them into cars that they didn’t want and delivering bankrupting energy costs all around. It seemed that the worst of California had come to their neighborhood, their garage, their schools, the intimate spaces of their homes, in many more ways than the price of eggs. The border was erased and the illegal immigrants were rewarded with plane and bus rides to the interior. Towns and cities and schools and housing and streets were flooded with foreign nationals who simply walked across without our approval (violating our laws). Crime spiked. Who voted for this in 2020?
But somehow, much of the after-election analysis skips all of this and wonders into incoherence. Typical of the foolishness was AP’s Matthew Brown in his “An influx of outsiders and money turns Montana Republican, culminating in a Senate triumph” of 11/22/024 (see #4). He essentially blames newcomers and outside money for Montana Democrat Sen. John Tester’s loss and the state turning red. In fact, as of October of 2024, the Tester campaign had outspent Sheehy $69.6 million to $19.7 million. Groups external to the candidates’ campaigns, all of it outside money, broke roughly even between the two. Adding it up, Tester had the money advantage (see #5).
Supporters cheer at election night watch party for Republican Tim SheehySheehy delivers his victory speech
It showed. Sitting on my perch in northwest Montana, I watched 4-5 Tester ads for every Sheehy one, whether streaming or broadcast.
And what of those “newcomers”? “Newcomers” don’t automatically turn a state red. “Newcomers” attracted to Santa Fe/Taos ambience and the “Rocky Mountain High” turned New Mexico and Colorado reliably blue. It’s also quite possible that the migrations of the 1990’s and the early 2,000’s (to NM and Colorado for example) are politically and philosophically different from those of the last decade and a half. The bulk of recent relocators could be classified as “refugees” fleeing the shift to the radical Left on the west coast, myself included, to outposts in Idaho and Montana. Once again, it comes down to beliefs.
The west coast shifted hard Left after the end of the Cold War. The state of Governor Ronald Reagan began to resemble today’s Venezuela more than the Beach Boys. The counterculture rose to prominence as the governing philosophy. The phenomena spread to Oregon and Washington State.
What was true of the west coast simultaneously occurred in metropolitan areas and college campuses across the country. Our cities became hotbeds of grime and violence. Blue states became infatuated with climate-change ideology and its attendant central planning. Taxes, regulation, and misgovernance spread like wildfire, including the literal wildfires.
Colleges morphed into satraps of the Frankfurt School. What’s that? Marxist academics in the 1920s and 1930s coalesced in Frankfurt, Germany, and formed a “School”, a Marxist think tank hewing to the reformulated Marxism of the Italian Antonio Gramsci. It came to the U.S. as its advocates fled Hitler and took positions in America’s elite colleges such as the University of California, Harvard, NYU, etc. Thus, “woke”/critical theory/CRT/DEI arose as a rigid orthodoxy throughout academia. It’s everywhere, unquestioned, inescapable. It passed down the social digestive tract from faculty to student to K-12 to the commanding heights of the culture. You can’t watch an ad, or most anything from Disney, without exposure to it. The c-suite is consumed by it which explains why, for instance, Wells Fargo ads are filled with their various ways to reinflate the housing bubble of 2007-8, and Big Sports’ infatuation with the oppressor/oppressed schtick.
This Leftist groupthink is manifest in urban nodes where we also find the training schools – the colleges – and corporate headquarters. When put into practice, the orthodoxy drives people away. The consequences overwhelm any initial surface appeal. Local economies are warped as sensitive groups like the middle class, the skilled trades, and manufacturing flee to more hospitable states.
Media people such as the AP’s Matthew Brown, infected as they are with the orthodoxy, don’t get it. The dynamic of push/pull is as evident in politics as it is in economics. People are pushed every bit as much as pulled in a particular direction. Maybe “pushed” is more powerful this time around. Could it be that voters were more repelled by the what the Democrats have become than any great affection for Trump? In other words, has the Democratic Party become repugnant?
If so, well, we’re back to, “It’s the beliefs, stupid!”
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election: 5. Gender identity, sexual orientation and the 2024 election”, Pew Research Center, 6/6/2024, at https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/06/gender-identity-sexual-orientation-and-the-2024-election/
2. “More Say Birth Gender Should Dictate Sports Participation”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 6/12/2023, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/507023/say-birth-gender-dictate-sports-participation.aspx
3. “Where Americans stand on 20 transgender policy issues”, Taylor Orth, YouGov, 2/16/2024, at https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48685-where-americans-stand-on-20-transgender-policy-issues
4. “An influx of outsiders and money turns Montana Republican, culminating in a Senate triumph”, Matthew Brown, AP, 11/22/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/montana-republicans-wealth-democrats-8a1fdd90ef328701127d8a21ebb82dd3
5. “Montana Senate race shatters spending records at $309 per registered voter”, Aubrie Spady, Fox News, 10/24/2024, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/montana-senate-race-shatters-spending-records-309-spent-per-registered-voter?msockid=287a0b967a9564c61c991f537b2f65ee
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks on Oct. 7, 2022, in Sacramento, Calif. (photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
Why the focus on California? Simple, California is the head of the progressive snake. Its ideological tendencies permeate the national Democratic Party. Our Vice President, and their losing candidate for president, was politically bred in the specialized, socio-political one-party petri dish of – you guessed it – California. California Democrat muckety-mucks populate Biden’s executive branch posse with a left coast view of the world.
Let’s take a look at California’s election results to get a hint of the chaos and what could have been in store for the rest of us. Wait, they aren’t finished counting in the golden state, and won’t be till Dec. 3, maybe not even then. Speaking of chaos. The state has turned itself into a model of election incompetence, and the national party has adopted it, seizing the COVID panic as an excuse to nationalize the falderol. Much vote fraud was legalized, or made easier to go undetected. Mail-in ballots, election season instead of election day, ballot harvesting, a profusion of provisional ballots, failure to clean voter rolls, and, here’s the kicker, the “curing” of ballots, were pioneered in California.
What’s the “curing”? “Curing” is how the entrenched party discovers new votes. First, the state’s Democrat honchos know the state’s blue precincts, for there are many, and target the “curing” on them. “Curing” refers to seeking out a voter who didn’t properly submit their ballot – missing signature, unmatched signatures, wrong envelope, etc. – and is allowed to correct the mistake (Hmmmm!), and, all of a sudden, a Republican victor on election day wakes up to their loss a couple of weeks later.
Millions of dollars in Democrat war chests exist to fund the cherry-picked treasure hunt. Gov. Newsom has millions left over from his recall treasury to devote to combing blue precincts for more votes. Interesting question: Why vote in elections that have more in common with the shams in Maduro’s Venezuela? California, Californezuela.
If Venezuela’s lefty caudillo, Nicolas Maduro, was California’s governor – no, it’s not as crazy as you think – he’d probably adopt Gov. Newsom’s appropriation of John C. Calhoun. Remember the nullification crisis of 1832? South Carolina asserted the power to prevent the enforcement of federal law (the tariff) within the state at the urging of the influential John C. Calhoun. That’s “nullification”, and blue state fiefdoms in the mold of California have been doing a form of it for decades regarding immigration law. Newsom doubled down on nullification-lite when he blustered after the election (see #1 below), “The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack [after Trump’s victory] — and we won’t sit idle.”
What freedoms? The “freedom” to obstruct immigration law by blocking the cooperation of state and local authorities? The “freedom” of government employees (teachers, administrators) to hide from parents the porn curriculum in third-grade classrooms or the transition of their daughter into a son, all backed up by the Democrat AG Rob Bonta? The “freedom” of XY “girls” to occupy girls’ spaces and sports? The “freedom” of the state to undermine out-of-state parenthood by its self-designation as a transgender sanctuary state for minors from anywhere? The unlimited “freedom” of a woman to end the life of her baby up to the exit from the birth canal, maybe after, who knows? The “freedom” of the state to force you onto government mass transit or into dopey EVs? The “freedom” to experience bankrupting utility bills, blackouts, brownouts, and hypothermia after the nuking of nuclear power and fossil fuels? The “freedom” of the state to be the missing link in the supply chain from ship to shore at its ports by mandating EV 18-wheelers and locomotives, something that doesn’t exist or is impractical beyond measure? The “freedom” of the state to run you out of business? The “freedom” to pay more for everything and fewer jobs to accomplish the feat? The “freedom” to be harassed on everything you say or do, especially religiously? Thanks, Newsom, for the “freedoms”.
Biden followed the California script. Biden’s version of fiscal responsibility is additions to the national debt going from $1 trillion every 100 days in 2021 to today’s $1 trillion every 200 days. Either way, your kids are being robbed.
California is tax-happy and adores the issuance of gobs and gobs and oodles and oodles of bonds. Propositions 2 and 4 (school building, water/flood/drought projects) on the California ballot appear to be headed for approval. It’s astounding that the state’s current budget of $311 billion and its panoply of taxes, taxes everywhere aren’t enough. $25 billion in more debt will be added to the outstanding total state bond debt of $79 billion, and more than $1.6 trillion if you combine state and local obligations (see #3).
California pulls out its credit card, and so does Biden/Harris/DNC; only the feds have a much more robust one, one without limit. They can gin up the money supply by making dollars appear out of thin air. They’ve got a Federal Reserve. Thus, they borrowed California’s fiscal philosophy to achieve new heights of inflation. The old Keynesian adage of spending in bad times and saving in good times was jettisoned. It’s just the spending now, no need for the saving. With the pandemic over and recovery well under way in 2021, and Biden filled with delusions of FDR grandeur, the Democrats jumped at the chance by piling $6.17 trillion of new debt onto the backs our kids (see #5). What did we get for it? Problems . . . and a few EV chargers. Sounds like California.
The country became a goat rope in the manner of California. Every celestial grouping in the radical-left progressive universe was hyped up on taxpayer dollars and deficit spending. It was enough to make drunken sailors appear judicious.
They were doing everything but the bottom-line function of government’s existence. Namely, safety and security. We have a Vice President who personally gave money to bail out rioters, under the euphemism of “protesters”, who were responsible for making hell zones of our metropolitan downtowns. It did nothing but cause the price for out-bounded U-Hauls to skyrocket.
All kinds of bedlam were celebrated on Capitol Hill and the White House. Gatherings of the transgendered were held at the White House with participants exuberantly baring their surgical scars and implants to the world and the assembled press. In the midst of the 2020 riot season and later, the Democrats went full neo-Marxist in Capitol kneelings, calls to defund the police, “reimagining” policing, and full DEI racism. Hiring practices throughout the executive branch were altered as part of the war on merit. A candidate for air traffic controller was golden so long as they exhibited the appropriate intersectionality.
As for the border, it became the apex of bedlam. Not only was the border patrol turned into the Welcome Wagon, but the border jumpers were rewarded with gifts and jet flights to the country’s interior to the chagrin of local officials. Certainly, in this instance, crime does pay. And to think that there’s an entire wing of the Democratic Party devoted to California’s favored position on immigration law, which is decriminalization. They’d like it to be the equivalent of a jaywalking ticket. Harris, their choice to accelerate the misrule, tried to hide her own calls for California-style immigration chaos but failed. Chaos, chaos everywhere, from girls’ bathrooms to the border.
This election was a repudiation of the worldview of 60-65% of the California electorate. The rest of the country rejected the state’s favorite daughter and its approach to governance. When the donkey party decided to go full California, the rest of the country said, “Whoa, whoa there! We won’t sign onto a California neo-Marxist revolution.”
There, that’s my take on what happened November 5.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “‘We won’t sit idle’: Newsom goes on offensive against Trump”, Wes Venteicher, Politico, 11/7/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/07/newsom-california-legislative-session-trump-resistance-00188119
2. “2023-24 State Budget”, State of California, at https://ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2023-24EN/#/Home
3. “Overview of State Bond Debt Service”, California Legislative Analyst’s Office, 2/27/2024, at https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/798
4. “California State and Local Liabilities Total $1.6 Trillion”, Edward Ring, California Policy Center, 2/28/2022, at https://californiapolicycenter.org/california-state-and-local-liabilities-total-1-6-trillion/
5. “U.S. debt by president: dollar and percentage 2024”, Annabel Burba in Consumer Affairs, 11/7/2024, at https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/us-debt-by-president.html
(Schmuck: a foolish or contemptable person; origin in the Yiddish schmok, i.e. penis)
NIMBYs, schmucks
The chant “Save our democracy”, it’s flung like so many shotgun pellets at anyone viewed as an opponent. What about the people, the people doing the flinging? The reality is that we have more “democracy” than ever before, and the dissatisfaction with our plight has never been greater. How does that compute: more democracy equals more discontent? Can the collective, also known as “the people”, act in the manner of schmucks, harming themselves? Democracy, schmuckocracy?
The level of discontent is palpable in polls. Here’s one: Gallup’s recent survey of public confidence in major institutions ranging from the governmental to the social and economic, public and private (see #1 and #2 below). 11 of the 16 measured entities experienced declines; not one turned in a sterling performance. Much of the public’s lackluster assessment of our institutions can be attributed to their current conduct. Biden’s infirmity, an engineered chaos at the border, the embarrassing bugout from Kabul, the highly destructive endeavor to shut down nearly all human activity during a viral episode, inflation, the unaffordability of shelter, the unaffordability of energy, crime, nothing seems to work, boys in girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, etc., goes a long way to heaping scorn on government, on “our democracy”, on any of our institutions that had a hand in the degeneracy.
eople running alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moved down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August, in 2021. (photo: Associated Press)An alleged transgender boxer consoles Italian boxer who quit after 46 seconds in Olympic female boxing match.
It doesn’t end there. Many private ones – “big business”, big tech, the media – get slammed, and maybe deservedly so.
The Supreme Court takes a hit as well. That might be due to another feature of a democracy: the people’s tendency to be acclimated to bunk. Since 1973 when the Court imperiously invented a provision in the Constitution that established a national right to take unborn life, “the people” grew accustomed to it. A 51-year odyssey ensued to do it. So, by today, people crave their newly minted national license to end the life of people who haven’t exited the womb. The Court’s Dobbs decision just struck the word “national” from the license, not the license itself. But don’t expect “the people” to understand such subtlety.
Combine this with the habit of the public to be persuaded by jargon, such as “assault rifle”, and therefore unwittingly consign the Second Amendment to the mercy of demagogues, and we have another journey down Alice’s rabbit hole. The Constitution stands in the way of the passion of the moment so “the people” turn on it and the Court in demanding a shortcut around the cumbersome task of properly amending it. Understanding isn’t a feature of the mob, which sadly is another trait of democracy.
We’ve injected so much unrestrained democracy into our system that our founders’ original design seems strange to anyone born after the Great Depression. Reading the Constitution must seem like a bizarre experience for a population raised on a steady diet of democracy this and democracy that. An example would be the abuse heaped on the Electoral College. Once a powerful faction loses the presidency by it, but wins the popular vote, they agitate to dismantle it and make the head of the executive branch conform to the wishes of the crowds on the two coasts and every urban center with a college campus. It’s not enough that a form of direct democracy is the operative principle of the lower house of Congress in the Constitution. The will of the mob must be made to dominate throughout.
Lest we forget, checking democracy and its mobs was an important goal of the founders. Here’s a sampling of their views:
“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.” – James Madison
“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” – Alexander Hamilton
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” – John Adams
“It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.” – George Washington
There was never a more searing indictment of democracy than that of Ambrose Bierce when he wrote toward the end of the 19th century, “Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”
“The people” aren’t cognizant of our already mammoth strides away from the founders’ restraints on the lustful will of “the people”. Even for the House of Representatives, that bastion of the popular will in the original framing, a state’s representation became determined by single-district direct elections and not by the state legislatures by the late 19th to early 20th centuries. That was only the beginning of the state legislatures’ attempt to neuter themselves in a mad dash away the founders’ wisdom.
The state legislatures were further taken out of the picture with the 17th Amendment: the direct election of senators. They would no longer have any say in the selection of the state’s two senators. Then came the initiative, referendum, and recall – “the people” make law, reject law, and reverse elections. These ideas were championed by 19th century progressives who were more intent on removing the obstacles to their rise to power. Smoke-filled back rooms were replaced by the big-government, neo-Marxist lunatics of the faculty lounge, the so-called “experts”, the constituency of our modern progressive gang, the people mostly responsible for our discontents when you think about it.
In the irony of all ironies, like the state legislatures, “the people” chose people who then took strides to remove “the people” from self-government, and thus enunciated the rise of the massive and unaccountable administrative state. This new Leviathan can make law (regulations), execute their law, and adjudicate on their law without much input of an electorate. Where’s the democracy? It’s here: “the people” elect progressives, and continue to elect progressives particularly in the populous blue jurisdictions, who then heap more layers on the mountainous administrative state like the many bands piling upward in a mature stratovolcano.
No wonder we’re in a hell of a mess. Pressure will build, and it’ll blow like a proverbial Vesuvius, but make sure that you’re not in the path of the political pyroclastic flow that follows. In 2020, a cop-beating video clip went viral and progressives seized the opportunity to dismantle law enforcement, elect DAs who won’t prosecute, decriminalize criminality, riots erupted, people and property were torched, and many cities descend into the dysfunction and lawlessness where they lie today. The only real export of LA and New York City are people as they flee the pyroclastic flow.
Seattle police at scene of riots in 2020 (photo: KOMO News, Seattle)Seattle the day after the occupation by so-called anarchists and Antifa, 2020 (photo: KTTH 770, Seattle)
One word describes the hidden potential of the “our democracy” chant: California. The taxes, the crime, the sordidness, the inner-city dysfunction, and the pervading sense of overall decay envelop the state and its “democracy”. “The people” in the state chose it, and continue to choose it. California’s “our democracy” is a Democratic one-party state.
Unfortunately, the state’s Democratic Party dominates the national Democratic Party. The socialism of the state’s ruling Dems is the guiding philosophy of the national Dems. The state’s Dems wreck the state’s economy and the national Dems work to imitate the wreckage everywhere else. Quite a tag-team duo.
The state’s Dems lay waste to social life in making a mockery of nature’s male and female. Boys rhetorically become girls and the next thing we see is that they’re in the girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and on their swim, track, volleyball teams, etc. The state’s public schools are required to disseminate the gender confusion in the curriculum. Taking his cues from California, Biden announces changes to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to include the transgendered as a protected class thereby codifying rhetorical girls and boys into everywhere (see #3 below).
The not-so-golden state’s administrative state is imperial thanks to the ruling party’s zeal for upending an entire way of life in a senseless and manic effort to modulate the earth’s atmosphere. That’s right, one state of 39 million people (and declining) is gung-ho about sacrificing its people’s standard of living on the altar of climate-change ideology, acting like they hold the thermostat to the global atmosphere. They’d like to take the suicide attempt national, and Biden is accommodating. In May of this year, the EPA issued new power plant regulations that’ll function as a death warrant to reliable, affordable electricity by mandating expensive efforts (carbon capture, etc.) to reduce emissions in fossil fuel plants (see #4-6 below). It’s death by regulation, parroting California’s lunacy, and Europe’s. However, Europe backed away, not so for the zealots in California and D.C.
Do “the people’s” government in America care? Do “the people” even have enough of a pulse to care? As for the first question, no, they don’t care a lick about your plight. As for the second, no sé. These activists in power are true-believers, with all the heart of a Bergen-Belsen commandant. They are coming to get more than your sedan. They sneer at your air conditioner, which is a lifesaver for anyone not living in Malibu (see #7 below). This is totalitarianism pure and simple. Like a rabid Marxist, their ultimate goal is to reengineer humanity, making the new man, woman, whatever. You’ll be forced to live in the world that they have created for you. And, like previous crusades for heaven on earth, it’ll be the opposite.
Watch as we relive the travel from hubris to nemesis in Greek tragedy. The hubris hides ignorance and arrogance which leads to the disaster of nemesis. Welcome to the base of the Democratic Party and the EPA.
We are living the nemesis that arose out of the hubristic arrogance and ignorance of a clan of firebrands, firebrands that we elected. Don’t like Trump, voted for Biden, maybe vote for Harris in 2024? Reality sets in: you avoid the ogre but get the greenie neo-Marxists and ruination.
Both sides decry the escalating cost of housing, the loss of the “American dream”. The problem can’t be laid at the feet of high interest rates or inflation since it predated Biden’s spiking of the money supply in trillions of new spending. No, speaking of supply, it’s a supply problem. It’s been building for decades. Look around you and you’ll hear hostility to housing construction: “The new people crowd my streets and schools”; “I’ve lost my small town”; “The new developments spoiled the scenery; they’re ugly”; “It’s destroying my property values”; “My property taxes have jumped to pay for their infrastructure and public services.” Who’s there to speak for the young’s access to the “American dream”? Nobody. The only ones filling the hearing rooms and filing the lawsuits are NIMBYs galore and eco-revolutionaries.
This method of governance was pioneered by California. Growth control incubated in northern California (Petaluma, 1961). In that instance, “the people” elected county and city officials to freeze in amber the “character” of the place. What do you think happened to the housing supply? Regulations and delays only added to the cost of whatever survives the local gauntlet.
In fact, the brutal gauntlet was extended. “The people” of California gave to the world the California Coastal Commission (CCC) in approving Prop 20 in 1972, providing more avenues to block, impede, and knock out new housing, or make it so expensive that nobody in their right mind would want to pour a foundation in the “coastal zone”, which is another one of those politically fungible concepts that prove useful to all eco-utopians and would-be social engineers statewide.
The CCC is one of many regulatory behemoths that “the people” of the state have created with their own hand in propositions or through their elected representatives to make it difficult to get the nod to nail two studs together. Eco-obsessions reign supreme. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is the mother of all hoops to jump. It empowers the California Department of Fish and Game, the various Air Quality Management Districts, anything conservation oriented, anything eco-utopian, who can only be pacified by project defeat, endless delays, and burdensome costs. It’s a veritable goat rope.
In a microcosm of the state’s protracted assault on housing, a small 4-lot housing development in Los Osos, San Louis Obispo County, was approved as per the state and the CCC-ratified Local Coastal Program (LCP) of the county. Later, the CCC discovered a sand dune on the property, declared it to be in an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA), and repealed the permits (see #8 below). The developers are fighting back in the California Supreme Court. I’m pessimistic because the state’s courts reflect the longstanding and overweening one-party state.
Gauntlets bedevil the entire state. It’s so prevalent, according to the California Association of Realtor’s (C.A.R.) Housing Affordability Index, only one in five home buyers can afford a median-priced house in the state (see #9 below). According to Zillow, of those prospective home buyers, 70% are married and 44% have children (see #10 below). Where do the underhoused with kids go instead of just another rental in a cramped apartment complex? Good question. Possibly, a U-Haul barreling east on Interstate 10 might be their best option.
But do the powerful really care? Do they understand supply and demand or possess even a rudimentary grasp of trade-offs? Eco-purity is expensive, very expensive. So-called saving the coastal zone or preserving the habitat of the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the gnat catcher, kangaroo rat, mountain lion, or whatever happens to dance across the screen of the hawkers of biodiversity, comes at the price of more than a house or rent. The price tag shows as lost opportunities for the young and generations to come. Their “American dream” will be stillborn. But who shows up at the hearings or has an army of “public interest” law firms ready to file suit in court? It’s the current homeowner who already has their slice of the dream and the eco-zealot who doesn’t care about the dream and would be quite happy with a repeal of the Industrial Revolution and upward mobility. They’d be overjoyed with the return of the Middle Ages.
All of this can be traced back to “the people”, to “our democracy”, to the four wolves deciding the fate of the lamb. The people chose societal collapse. It didn’t magically appear out of the ether. And it shows in the names on the ballot. The parties gave them to us, or, more accurately, the party bases. The political parties are more democratic than ever before, and their choices are miserable for anyone outside the “bases”. For that is what democracy led to: the rise of the “base”. Think of the “base” as a mob, an assemblage animated by jive. For the Democrats, they’re enraptured by Marx and his ideological cousins in the Frankfurt School and faculty lounges everywhere. All of this is unstated, mostly unknown to them since their beliefs never came with source footnotes. They deny it while implementing it. Anybody reaching the top of their slimy pole must sacrifice their good sense at the altar of the base’s groupthink.
Prominent Marxists – “critical theorists” (CRT, being woke) – of the Frankfurt School, who would be influential in the West. From top-left; Oskar Negt, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Claus Offe
The Republicans have discovered their own inner mob, or “base”. It’s a cult around Donald J. Trump. People were right to admire his policy successes but they were a product of Reaganism and not anything that might be construed as Trumpism. Social conservatives and free marketeers populated his administration giving the country border control, tax cuts, deterrence, a burgeoning economy, and a Supreme Court that acts like a court and not a legislature – the very essence of Reaganism.
The socialist Bernie Sanders in 2020AOC and powerful Dems announcing their Green New DealMAGA from 2023 (?)
What would a second Trump term bring? I suspect that it’ll be more like Trump and less like Reagan. In economic policy, he’ll pursue his own form of central planning which is called industrial policy with a flurry of tariffs and taxpayer-funded benefits to his own favorites. Right-to-work – freedom from coerced unionization – may take a back seat in a bid for the union vote. Trade protectionism will be combined with a new isolationism, which is nothing more than America alone. We might even see an abandonment of Ukraine. Would any of this be popular among the general public? It’s hard to say, but it sells with the “base”.
How did we get saddled with an inevitable neo-Marxist and Donald Trump when both are detested? Trump in a good week never rises above the upper 40’s in his favorability. The popularity of the Dems’ neo-Marxism is hard to gauge since it’s never exposed as such. People probably wouldn’t embrace the public pronouncements of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party platform if saw the line-by-line plagiarism from the writings of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School or the eugenics of Margaret Sanger.
As of today (8/3/2024), Trump’s favorability stands at 43.3% and is viewed unfavorably by a whopping 51.7% (according to FiveThirtyEight, see #10 below). He’s a consistent stinker. In the same poll aggregation, Kamala Harris’s standing isn’t much better with 42.4 favorable and 49.1% unfavorable. She’s about the same in the pungency factor, even with a honeymoon of media praise, near worship, after her rise to donkey-party heir apparent.
The Dems’ neo-Marxism and its espousal by its candidates is joined by the GOP’s transformation into a personality cult. For both parties, it’s the culmination of a century and a half of the democratization of their operations, and like the injection of direct democracy into more of our politics, dissatisfaction increases with the results.
Political extremists love the democracy rhetoric, aiming to recreate the Paris mob of the French Revolution. Late 19th century progressives – many of whom were socialists (ex.: John Dewey) – pushed for the direct primary to replace party caucuses. Primaries to choose delegates became routine starting in the 1970s for the Democrats and 1980s for the GOP. It resulted in mass fealty to a person or to a groupthink among the base, thus the rise of the Dems’ Bernie Bros and the woke and the Republicans’ MAGA (see #11 below), with a corresponding rise in public disillusionment.
Democratization means rule by the base, not by the franchise. Interparty rivalries get stamped out by a normally radical groupthink that captures the imagination of the party’s activist base. For Dems, the groupthink is an enthusiasm for a campaign to ferret out white/heteronormative/male privilege, to expand the unacknowledged footprint of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School’s principal creed. They’ll hide it because they have to. The stench of the “socialist” label still pervades.
It’s so widespread that party big wheels – long-in-the-tooth politicos and big donors – had to step into the breech in 2020 to sidestep the frenzy for the Bernie Bros by resurrecting the doddering Biden, and later to swap the infirmed Biden for the younger-but-babbling Kamala Harris. At least the Democrats have some adult guardrails which is a backhanded admission that too much democracy can get you into trouble.
Guardrails don’t seem evident in the GOP. Trump romped from primary to primary despite the fact that he’s the weakest candidate in a general election matchup. Trump is popular with the base, unpopular to the those outside of it. An infirm Biden managed to keep it close with Trump, and now the dullard Kamala Harris has drawn even with the man from Mar-a-Lago. Ironically, with Trump in the picture, execrable socialism is still in play, thanks to mob rule in both parties and a broad apathy compounded by ignorance.
It must be hard to admit that schmucks exist in more places than among elites. Look around you, maybe take a long hard look in the mirror. Me too! More direct democracy exposed the likelihood that schmucks have a broader presence than we’ve been willing to admit. Party bases can be full of them. The general public too. “The people” can desire things that they ought not get. The demands of half-witted utopians and adults who’ve already got theirs trample the prospects of the young and those yet to be born. The adults of today confiscate the opportunities of those too young to vote and future generations.
It’s disgusting, and brought to you by . . . democracy. Democracy, schmuckocracy.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Historically Low Faith in U.S. Institutions Continues”, Lydia Saad, Gallup, 7/6/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-institutions-continues.aspx
2. “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 7/5/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-down-average-new-low.aspx
3. “Biden Administration: Title IX Protections Extend to Transgender Students”, Lauren Camera, US News and World Report, 6/16/2021, at https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-06-16/biden-administration-title-ix-protections-extend-to-transgender-students
4. “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants”, EPA, at https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/greenhouse-gas-standards-and-guidelines-fossil-fuel-fired-power
5. “4 Things to Know About US EPA’s New Power Plant Rules”, Dan Lashof, Lori Bird, and Jennifer Rennicks, World Resources Institute, 5/3/2024, at https://www.wri.org/insights/epa-power-plant-rules-explained
6. Much thanks to Gordon Hughes of the National Center for Energy Analytics in “The EPA’s Proposals for Power Plants Satisfy the Definition of Insanity”, National Review, 5/13/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/the-epas-proposals-for-power-plants-satisfy-the-definition-of-insanity/
7. “It’s time to rethink air conditioning”, Rebecca Leber, Vox, 8/26/2021, at https://www.vox.com/22638093/air-conditioning-worsens-climate-change-ac
8. “California Coastal Commission unlawfully blocks home construction”, Pacific Legal Foundation, describing their lawsuit against the CCC in Shear Development Co., LLC v. California Coastal Commission, at https://pacificlegal.org/case/shear-california-coastal-commission/
9. “2nd Quarter California housing affordability”, California Association of Realtors, 8/11/2023, at https://www.car.org/en/aboutus/mediacenter/newsreleases/2023-News-Releases/2qtr2023hai#:~:text=Fewer%20than%20one%20in%20five%20%2816%20percent%29%20home,according%20to%20C.A.R.%E2%80%99s%20Traditional%20Housing%20Affordability%20Index%20%28HAI%29.
10. FiveThirtyEight’s Aug. 3, 2024 poll aggregation at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
11. “10.1 History of American Political Parties”, Open Library, at https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-1-history-of-american-political-parties/
Illustration from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”
Biden’s decline is part of a massive swindle, at once intentional and in other ways stupefyingly unintentional, and involves much more than a single person’s descent into senility. We are constantly confronted with demands to believe in the unbelievable. Many of us do. It’s as if we want to be swindled. It’s become routine, and we are shocked when the list of unbelievabilities turns out to be, just that, falsehoods and fiascos.
Of course, the story begins with the revelation of the not-so-revelatory story of Biden’s mental deterioration. It should have been clear to anyone observing Biden’s 2020 “basement” campaign. It succeeded. We elected a basement president. In that protracted war room of the left, which is composed of the natural alliance of the legacy media and the Democratic Party, all of a sudden it’s now safe to say that the president is a cognitive mess.
President Biden from the 6/27 debateMore of our president
They even admit that they buried the story and knew for quite some time. The leader of Biden’s praetorian guard, Ron Klain, only feeds the news in the President’s Daily Briefing that won’t trigger explosions of anger in the president. According to Politico, dealing with Biden is like coping with an unstable mental patient (see #1 and #2 below):
“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared s***less of him.”
The dean of the left’s war room, the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein, spilled the beans. On CNN he divulged (see #3 below),
“[Thursday’s debate] is not a one off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed [the debate].”
Those around Biden knew and the media’s co-conspirators knew. They gaslighted us, till 50 million people tuned in last Thursday night (6/27) and saw the glaring reality. Shame on them, and shame on many of us for our willingness to keep Biden in the game. Actually, get real, they’re torturing the poor guy.
It doesn’t end there. There’s a popular belief in the government’s ability to rescue us from all of life’s travails. Speaking of the belief in the unbelievable. Why is it that no one will mention the looming catastrophes of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Not Trump, not anybody. If you do, the left’s war room will descend on you like a flock of buzzards. The programs were built with a design flaw: demographics. Increasing numbers of old folks will clash with proportionally fewer working young folks. Taxes going in don’t cover benefits going out, and the national debt continues to balloon. This won’t end well. It never does. The root of it is our preference for the unbelievable.
Let’s move on to the pandemic and our misplaced faith in government employees in the administrative state. Doctors all, and, as it turned out, not to be trusted.
Look at what they gave us. You’ll still see people masking themselves in public when before the triumvirate of Fauci/Collins/Birx rose to prominence, they wouldn’t dream of it. The new paralyzing fear of the simplest public engagement is combined with children still trying to cognitively and developmentally recover from the isolation of Zoomed screens and closed playgrounds. The rush to forcibly vaccinate all of humanity came with a suffocation of the production of therapeutics even as the virus mutated and continued to spread. They even tried to blot out the ingrained human tendency to produce for oneself and family. It was an assault on our very nature. The waterboarding of society lasted longer in blue states, those places with a particularly gripping faith in government “experts”. We’re still living with the consequences in endemic inflation and a stubbornly low labor participation rate.
Who would have thought that they could destroy what makes us human? They tried really hard.
Our stunted nature is evident in a whole line of other unbelievabilities. How did we ever get to the point of assassinating our standard of living in the eco-fantasies of “sustainability” in the span of a decade? Somehow, energy density no longer mattered. Physics no longer matters. Extensive forests of windmills and floodplains of solar panels wrecking the landscape are billed as the salvation from the left’s wet dream of an apocalypse. Suddenly, our finely honed sedan is to be junked in favor of an obese array of batteries, or something else that doesn’t even exist. The already strained grid is to be burdened further. All the while, we’re chained to a chronological escalator to a new world order that resembles something conjured from the imagination of Salvador Dali or Hieronymus Bosch.
XY-people get to pretend that they are XX-people, and vice versa, and the rest of us are ordered to play along. The insecurities of tween and teen girls and boys are used as proof to herd them into the same pretend world.
It’s astounding, our willingness to believe in the unbelievable. Hans Christian Andersen meant more than he intended in his story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (see #4 below). In the tale, two shyster weavers convince the emperor that they will produce raiment that only a fool cannot see. Fearful of being thought stupid, the emperor and his ministers see nothing but go along and pays them for their services. Then, with his new “clothes”, the emperor parades out in public to greet his subjects. No one in the crowd wants to be thought a fool till a child blurts out the obvious. See the parallel?
Fear of being thought a fool makes dunces of us all. People of the left believed in Biden’s sharpness so as not to be called MAGA. A challenge to Fauci/Collins/Birx was said to be proof of the existence of neanderthals among us. Ibram X. Kendi and the rest of the CRT cabal were made into geniuses to avoid the epithet of being called a closet racist. Fear of being labeled an implicit bigot in the c-suite has led to a rush call for the “marginalized” and quasi-obese in advertising campaigns. Anything less is a demand for more shaming sessions in the corporate world. Having an EV in the garage is proof that you’re not a denier, that you’re “smart”, despite the fact that you are afraid to venture 40 miles from your home charger. You’ll have to hide the essential internal combustion engine vehicle parked next to your four-wheeled symbol of virtue. We’re made to pretend that we’re not fools, as we prove that we are.
From Biden to California’s eco-nuttery, we are encouraged to pretend that we’re not making fools of ourselves. Ironically, our enemies are the child in the crowd who isn’t afraid to laugh.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for the analysis and sources in “So Now It’s Okay to Talk about Biden’s ‘Cognitive Decline’”, 7/2/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/so-now-its-okay-to-talk-about-bidens-cognitive-decline/
2. “‘We’ve all enabled the situation’: Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum post debate”, Eli Stokols, et al, Politico, 7/2/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/02/biden-campaign-debate-inner-circle-00166160
3. “‘Not a one-off’: Bernstein’s sources say concerns about Biden have been growing for a year”, Anderson Cooper interview of Carl Bernstein, CNN, video on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhFmaAMC1_Q
4. “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, complete story by Hans Christian Andersen, at https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-andersen/short-story/the-emperors-new-clothes/
The Biden-Trump rematch is in the books. Who won and who lost? Nobody won, and Biden lost. Will they move on to a second match? Hardly.
In a nutshell, by the end of the talkathon, my fears about Biden’s infirmity were confirmed, but my concerns about Trump were elevated. Biden came off as a doddering old Marxist head honcho like one of those Eastern European party strongmen in the waning days of the Iron Curtain, or the party elders standing next to Brezhnev overlooking the May Day grand parade in Moscow in the 1970s. Yes, Biden is infirm but what came out of his mouth in his infirmity was the socialism that is firmly established Democratic Party doctrine. If the party movers and shakers succeeded in pushing him aside, his replacement won’t be an improvement, just more presentable.
The left-wing party establishment got what it wanted under Biden (and Obama), and the country is a wreck for it. Biden resorted to the party’s doctrinal tics throughout the debate: tax the “rich” to save Social Security (it won’t), all the “pay their fair share” talk, the greenie nonsense, the “glories” of ending unborn life as if it was God’s eleventh commandment, and more bribery of friendly political constituencies with other people’s money. It’s disgusting, and ruinous.
For his part, Trump was . . . Trump. He brought his “A” game, as in donkey. He donned his adolescent schoolyard bully uniform for all to see. Vague generalities, superlatives in regard to himself, avoidance of questions in favor of rudimentary insults, and the repetitive use of a monotonous standard line were the essence of his performance.
Trump boasts were routine. For instance, “I’ll end the Ukraine War before inauguration day.” How’s he going to do that? He has no practical leverage on Putin. He’ll hang Zelensky out to dry and give Putin a third of the country, that’s how. All will be done in an isolated meeting after which there will be a smiling Trump photo op. Zelensky won’t be smiling, Ukraine will be in tears, and naked aggression will have been rewarded. Speculation? It’s more realistic than any of Trump’s self-assessments.
Trump made the correct observation that other world leaders see Biden as an embarrassment. After last night’s performance, they see our country as crazy. Are these two people the best that we can come up with?
Now more than ever, we need a real leader to prosecute the case against the creeping socialism that is smothering us, and for the unborn. We don’t have one, certainly not in Trump. Trump has always been merely a walking gesture, the middle finger to our decrepit politico-cultural elites. He’s incapable of presenting an argument, a line of reasoning. It shows every time that he steps onto a stage. In the meantime, the country is careening to insolvency. At this juncture, neither party will even recognize the tidal wave of debt that threatens to swamp us and our ability to defend ourselves. Eco-central planning is no more coherent than the kind in the old Soviet Union. Who do we have to make the case? Who has the wherewithal to convince the American people to turn away from their belief in the impossible, from decadence?
Don’t look for it in Trump. Don’t look for it in either political party. We need leadership, not a middle finger.
Alvin Bragg, Manhattan DAJudge Merchan in the so-called Trump hush-money trail
In the old parlance of the Cold War, the world was divided between a First World (the wealthy nations mostly aligned with the West), a Second World (the communist bloc), and a Third World (everyone else, mostly the poor, corrupt, and so-called nonaligned). The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR blotted out most of the Second, leaving the First and an amorphous blob of everyone else. As the widely recognized head of the First, the U.S. of today has willfully, not inevitably, decided to make its way down into the blob. No better sign of the descent into the corruption thicket can be found than the recent Trump verdict.
It’s more than the political prosecution of an obscure local politician that occurs from time to time. It’s the chutzpah to target one of highest profile figures in this important decision-making year, the chief opponent of the reigning president, and to do so on alarmingly spurious charges. One is left to only admire the ingeniousness in crafting a malign charade out of a patchwork of legal mumbo-jumbo. In the America of today, there’s no need for a seizure of the presidential compound and barbarous firing squads. Just use our mountainous legal code to accomplish the same end. The gambit is all Third World.
Let’s take a look at the travesty. It begins with a jumbled understanding of a “conspiracy” (see #1 below). In the law, a criminal conspiracy is one or more people coordinating the means to achieve an illegal objective, a crime. Absent a criminal end, there is no conspiracy. Think it through. For a bank robbery, you might have three people: one to buy the masks and gun, one to drive the getaway car, and one to rush into the bank to take the money. There are two crimes: the robbery which makes for the second crime, the conspiracy to do it. Without the criminal objective, the disguises were for a masked ball, the driver is a chauffeur, and the third person is making a savings account withdrawal.
In the Trump saga, where’s the crime? Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) aren’t illegal. The bookkeeping entries for payments in the NDAs may or may not be infractions (misdemeanors), but that’s irrelevant since the 2-year statute of limitations had long since expired. When your paramount goal is not to lose power, just use obscure laws in convoluted ways in an intensely partisan jurisdiction before an intensely partisan judge and jury to hang your opponent; and you too can have your country join the ranks of Burundi-style electioneering (in Africa, the Fund for Peace’s most unstable country).
Rest assured; they won’t let a little thing like a statute of limitations stand in the way any more than a generalissimo would. Just magically turn the misdemeanors into felonies and therefore leap over the time limit. The cabal needs a second crime though. How to manufacture one? Establish a conspiracy using the highly dubious Article 17-152 of New York’s election law which oddly defines conspiracy as the use of unlawful means to “to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office” (see #1 below). Let that sink in. Normally, the means become unlawful because the objective is a crime, but promoting or negatively campaigning against a person for office is not a crime. It can’t be. It’s the stuff of campaigns. Bragg did not even prove an “unlawful means” for the second crime that translates the misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records into felonies.
Instead, Bragg and the judge gave the jury a choice of three unindicted possibilities (whew, think that one through): a Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) violation, hypothetical bookkeeping infractions other than the original 34, or some other tax illegality. The whole thing is rubbish. Bragg and a Manhattan court aren’t empowered to enforce FECA, a federal law forbidding Bragg’s, Judge Merchan’s, and a dimwitted jury’s meddling. Regarding the other two, while keeping them silent in the indictment, Bragg and the trial court stampeded over Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to know the charges.
And then for the legal morass to work, proof of intent is still required – evidence of Trump’s state of mind to commit fraud – which Bragg never established for charges that he never indicted. The trial and the verdict are an absolute disgrace.
Not surprisingly, Biden’s number three at DOJ, Matthew Colangelo, left in December 2022 to join Bragg’s team. Coincidence? Call me . . . skeptical. Who leaves a high-status DC post to be an underling to a local DA unless something else is afoot? This stinks to high heaven.
It’s an embarrassment to the U.S. and us, its citizens. Bragg, Merchan, and the numbskull jury made us a laughingstock to the world. What makes our “justice” any different from the CCP’s “People’s Tribunals” to imprison or execute “enemies of the people”? Some say democracy is messy. No, that’s too nice. This makes us third-rate, all of us.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Andrew C. McCarthy’s work on the trial is invaluable in his “The ‘Other Crime’ in the Trump Trial: Conflating Ends and Means”, National Review, 6/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-other-crime-in-the-trump-trial-conflating-ends-and-means/
Obviously, Facebook, and probably much of the techie universe for that matter, is enthralled by hair-on-fire climate alarmism. So much so that they put a “context warning” on a cartoon that was attached to one of my recent posts about the EV craziness sweeping the halls of power, a politicized professoriate, their young charges mobbing the public square, and the beautiful people in the culture. It’s crazy, just think about it. I’ll explain.
Some people are braving the hostility of today’s unofficial (and official) Inquisition who, like Galileo, just stepped forward to say, “Wait a minute!” There are voices out there other than the lefty Union of Concerned Scientists. One such voice is the Cornwall Alliance (https://cornwallalliance.org); there are others. They raise some glaring questions that few if any denizens in big media newsrooms would know enough to ask.
Right off the bat, Cornwall and most others don’t deny the existence of man-caused (anthropogenic) climate change – i.e., global warming. They assert, however, that the doom-mongering is not science. One should never say “the science says”. “Science” has no vocal cords. It’s a method that comes close to “trust but verify”, or “where’s the beef”, or simply “prove it”. Waiting for “science” to say something treats the whole endeavor as if it were a homogenized mass of one mind. May as well put up a huge picture of Mao to represent all of China, er “science”, in one fell swoop. People that wallow in “the science says” aren’t scientists and wouldn’t know which end of the telescope to use, or explain a hypothesis, or how to conduct a fitting test for one, the essence of science. Thus, it’s easy for the scientifically illiterate to jump to doom.
Such stunted science-minds would never consider, or ask, the following:
* What is the nature of the warming? Much of the available evidence indicates that the warming is concentrated in the upper latitudes and affects average daily low temperatures (mostly at night) and not the highs.
* What are the actual effects of the warming? Are they all bad? No, and on balance, they are likely to be positive. Warmer global temps in the upper latitudes extends the growing season and expands the amount of the earth’s surface for agriculture. The growing season starts earlier and ends later. Plants love CO2. Conversely, history shows that bad things happen with cooling (the Black Death, famine, for instance).
* What about droughts? They come and go, and are sensitive to localized conditions, like cold/warm water currents. El Nino is a result of warm ocean water; La Nina is born of cold. Warm water warms the air above it and warmer air has more room for more water vapor for more rain. The jet stream accommodates and sends it to one area and away from another. One place is in drought, and another can’t handle the deluge. The cycles are called “decadel” because they come and go every 7-12 years on average. Welcome to nature, and not a soccer mom’s preference for an SUV.
* Are the scare stories of an avalanche of “extreme weather” accurate? No, the evidence suggests that our current weather patterns haven’t varied from the historical record going back in time using tree rings and core samples. If anything, they prove that climate, and its short-term equivalent, weather, varies around a mean, sometimes quite dramatically, and also that climate (long term weather patterns of at least 30 years) has never been steady-state. The earth wobbles on its axis; the orbit slightly shifts; and solar radiation jumps up and down. And we have always put in and taken out stuff since we ventured out of the cave. Variation, like all of nature, is the chief characteristic of our weather and climate.
* Is the nation of Micronesia, or the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard, about to disappear in rising sea levels? No, because we are talking about inches in the single digits covering centuries if not thousands of centuries. It’s manageable. Talk to the Dutch who’ve been dealing with holding back the North Sea for at least a half of a millennium or more.
So, why are our science semi-literates in power so gung-ho to ruin our lives? Simple, for them, Chicken Little is a divine oracle. The apocalypse is nigh. For them, we can’t adapt our way out of the doom. For them, we must mitigate, and that means turning our lives upside down, declaring war on fossil fuels, and erecting the Soviet to oversee our wants and desires.
Actually, we can adapt, not mitigate, because their Chicken Little is essentially a witch doctor. A sea wall can handle a few inches of rise in coastal waters protecting Obama’s mansion investment on Martha’s Vineyard and Oprah’s luxurious enclaves in Montecito (Santa Barbara) and Maui. Receding ice sheets in the polar regions is more than compensated by more land open for farming and a longer growing season. Feeding more people sounds good to me. More greenery from more CO2 has a tremendous upside.
This war on fossil fuels throws common sense out the window. What do we gain (benefits) by handcuffing millions and billions of people to a crippled grid and treating the possession of an SUV as a war crime? What are the costs? The forced exchange of what works for what doesn’t will mean that more people will enter the ranks of the poor. Pencil it out. We’ll have less CO2 in the air and more filth and poverty on the ground. It’s insane.
Yep, this is our moment of insanity.
RogerG
Sources:
* Additional YouTube presentations on green matters, the other side to the debate:
1. Michael Shellenberger, “Why renewables can’t save the planet”, at https://youtu.be/N-yALPEpV4w?si=-frZCso5LEaCVNIj
2. “’What Percent Of Our Atmosphere Is CO2?’: Doug LaMalfa Stumps Entire Panel With Climate Questions”, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Ca.), 2023, at https://youtu.be/bJfrKNR3K2k?si=9Cn0wiMwaqa8DQfe
3. Stephen Hayward, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Global Warming”, 2014, at https://youtu.be/RZlICdawHRA?si=WiZZs82W58z6D0ns
4. A balanced assessment of EV’s: The Car Guys, “THE BIG EV LIE. Why They Won’t Save the Planet & All About Dirty Electricity”, 2021, at https://youtu.be/sytWLB4-W-M?si=34ck2aFrRkRiql9n
5. Pete Buttigieg’s slick glibness. Watch him skate around the immense problems associated with an EV life. One key problem is generating the electricity to make it all work. He talks about the grid but not about the sources for an immense expansion of the necessary generation of the electricity. “’Which Uses More Electricity…A Refrigerator When It’s Running Or Electric Car When It’s Charging?’”, in questioning of Buttigieg by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky), 2023, at https://youtu.be/avi9iBC8opU?si=LoSEVadXpLZK09J1
* This is not a comprehensive list but is a sample of a robust debate that exists outside attempts in the media to quash it. Real science cannot be suppressed.
They are coming for more than your family sedan. They are going to upend, disrupt the entire system that brings everything to your home, grocery store, et al. You’re going to be hit big time in your pocketbook and in every facet of your life. Get prepared for it is coming, if not stopped.
Is Biden determined to turn me into a Trump voter? Trump, no doubt, is the ugly face of my party, but Biden and his donkey party are trying to construct a totalitarian state on a preposterous green agenda. Animating the whole venture, as is true with all totalitarian crusades, is a belief system on how best to organize and control people. To gain popular traction, it’s best for all such crusades to contain a strong apocalyptic element, one powerful enough to justify stampeding the people into acceptance of its dictates and regimentation. It’s happening before our eyes, right now! Say goodbye to the republic and hello to the Soviet.
The EPA is the chief engine of the transformation from citizen republic to rule by all-powerful commissars. Under the guise of “climate change”, we are being ordered to scrap our already immense sunk costs in affordable and reliable transportation for the mirage of something that doesn’t exist, and if it does, it’s a catastrophe as a replacement. Prepare for a calamity, one that’ll conspicuously fall more seriously upon our children and generations to come. Your kids will be the real victims.
March is turning into a deadly month for the health of our constitutional republic. The EPA earlier in the month announced its intention to follow the template of California, one of a few states famous for turning many of its residents into refugees. Like the authoritarian clown car in Sacramento, tighter emissions for “light duty” vehicles (cars, trucks, many SUV’s) will be imposed from 2027 through 2032, eventually sealing the death warrant for the production of nearly anything with an internal combustion engine (see #1 below). Say goodbye to more than the citizen republic. Say goodbye to that thing in your garage that allows you to get the kids to school, or you to work, or pay a visit to grandma for Thanksgiving, for its life will be wrung out of it by regulating and taxing it to death in escalating licensing fees and costs for upkeep, parts, and fuel. Manufacturers will be forced to eliminate their production. The comrades in power plan to leave you with no way out but into their approved and glorified golf cart. This is nothing but totalitarianism “for your own good”. And, of course, they know better about what’s good for you. Right?
On the heels of that monstrosity, the commissars proclaimed a similar rule for the fleet of big vehicles that bring everything from produce to your grocery store to all things from an Amazon distribution center, everything that fills a shelf (see #3 below). It’ll be much worse for those people who choose to live outside the controllable and tight confines of an urban area. Think about it, all that stuff that was affordably made available at your fingertips will be crammed onto battery-powered big rigs (fuel cells create their own immense problems, see #2 below) of limited capacity, range, and tremendous recharging difficulties.
The mammoth costs of so-called “innovating” our way out of these imposed problems will only short-circuit the necessary wealth to satisfy other necessities of life. These blinkered potentates have no understanding of the gargantuan trade-offs that they are inflicting on us. Either that or they don’t care.
My bet is that they don’t care. Why? They possess a religious fervor for an ideology that justifies, in their mind, taking over more and more of your life. For them, they are busy saving the planet, even if it means destroying your standard of living. You see, their religio-ideology is founded upon a robust, promethean definition of “social cost” and “externalities”. Like a canon law in the church, their “church”, the two doctrines give overriding weight to real or imagined costs for all of society for everything that you do. Where’s the limits? Practically, there aren’t any. Thus, the creeds become the supreme, open-ended excuses for the EPA, or any commissariat for that matter, to do anything that they want.
In the past, it was national socialist race justice to prevent defilement of the “race”, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to cram equality of condition on all of humanity to prevent exploitation. Today, it’s saving the climate, leaving aside the lack of any credible, peer reviewed evidence that anything that they’re doing will positively affect a global atmosphere under which billions of people are acting independently and beyond the reach of the EPA. Pardon me for concluding that this is nothing but pure stupidity.
In the end, the Biden claque and his Democratic Party are seemingly intent on destroying our way of life and replacing our citizen republic with rule by totalitarian zealots. It’s Petrograd 1917, Berlin 1933, or Beijing 1949. Keeping this crowd in power would have us see the end of much that we cherish. So, if the choice is between the abominable Trump or this gang of totalitarian fanatics, one can be forgiven for preferring boorishness to Big Brother.
RogerG
Sources:
1. In Orwellian language, the EPA announcement: “Biden-Harris Administration finalizes strongest-ever pollution standards for cars that position U.S. companies and workers to lead the clean vehicle future, protect public health, address the climate crisis, save drivers money”, March 20, 2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-position
2. A survey of the literature on the shortcomings of fuel cells:
* “Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles: Everything You Need to Know”, Car and Driver, 9/26/2022, at https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/
* “A review of PEM hydrogen fuel cell contamination: Impacts, mechanisms, and mitigation”, ScienceDirect, 3/20/2007, at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775306025304
* “Fuel Cells”, University of Illinois, at https://publish.illinois.edu/fuel-cells/benefits-and-disadvantages/
* “How Fuel Cells Work”, How Stuff Works, at https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell.htm
3. The same Orwellian language for heavy-duty vehicles: “Biden-Harris Administration Finalizes Strongest Ever Greenhouse Gas Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles to Protect Public Health and Address the Climate Crisis While Keeping the American Economy Moving”, EPA, 3/29/2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-greenhouse-gas-standards-heavy
4. National Review articles that provide excellent overviews of the issues:
* “Biden’s Vehicle-Emissions Gaslighting”, Luther Ray Abel, 3/20/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-vehicle-emissions-gaslighting/
* “Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco”, Andrew Stuttaford, 3/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/electric-vehicles-the-epas-fast-track-to-fiasco/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second
* “Biden Admin Imposes Strict Pollution Standards for Buses and Heavy-Duty Vehicles”, Caroline Downey, 3/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-imposes-strict-pollution-standards-for-buses-and-heavy-duty-vehicles/
2024 is proving the nation to be rudderless. Much of what is happening must seem befuddling to the mass of adults still in possession of their wits. Our upper crust has merged with the Left, aligning with neo-Marxists without necessarily realizing it. The reaction on the Right is a vulgar gesture in the person of Donald Trump. Much of the media is an accelerant to both sides alongside dominant cultural institutions – the schools in particular, which are groomers of the Left. Much of the media has become unwatchable and unlistenable. The year 2024 is a time of the vulgar gesture versus the Left’s scheme of national extinction.
The nation’s suicide begins in the culture, especially cultural curators in the media. It’s easy to write off much of the legacy media for their convergence with the progressive Left. But the media on the Right has its own problems. As stated before, I listen to Hugh Hewitt in podcast form more regularly than any other, but even he has become increasingly disappointing. He’s a Republican booster, no holds barred, and that means a near subservience to Donald Trump if he is the nominee. It leads to stunted conversation and information.
Let me explain. A party is deserving of loyalty only if it remains respectable. The vileness of Trump is beyond question; it’s part of his schtick (Trump being Trump). Trump is disgracing the Republican Party making Hewitt’s subservience disgraceful for a now disgraced GOP. So, this plays out on Hewitt’s show by his steering of interviews, conversations, and information away from criticism of Trump, even among guests who are well-known for blasting the mercurial man of Mar-a-Lago. Airtime is almost exclusively filled with the monotony of anti-Biden banter to the exclusion of everything else. Trump’s and the GOP’s complicity in many of these matters is absent.
The stance of right-leaning media is probably a commercial decision. The talk radio audience is Trumpy in the extreme. Speaking of suicide, it’s commercial self-murder to tick off an audience that’s mostly limited to spewing Hannity or Tucker Carlson talking points. This crowd dominates the talk radio listenership and the GOP. At this juncture, the party and its fellow-travelling talk radio base has made itself unrespectable and undeserving of Hewitt’s kid-gloves treatment, which only ends up soiling Hewitt as he does it.
Don’t think for a moment that the Democrats are a respectable alternative. It used to be said that America is alone in not having a viable socialist party like the Labor Party in the UK or the social democratic party clones throughout Europe. Wrong. We’ve got the Democratic Party. An American social democratic wannabe will remain a nonentity because that space is occupied by the sprawling donkey party. Socialism has a following in the muddled brains of adolescents and among the party’s base and leadership. Peddling an ideological poison pill isn’t a prescription for respectability.
Now, let’s take a look at the latest Marquette Law School Poll. What does it say about the state of the race? Trumpers are giddy about Trump being up by 4 over Biden nationally. But Haley sends Biden packing by 16 (see #1 below). There’s more to this race than the betting-line favorites, much more.
The poll-takers asked a push question to force more of the fence-sitters into a choice between the two leading contenders. From the poll summary:
“These results include voters who initially said they would vote for someone else or would not vote but were then asked their preference if they had to choose one of the two candidates. In the initial question, 13 percent said ‘someone else’ or that they would not vote.” (see #1 below)
Got it? 13% had to be cajoled into embracing one or the other. How much of the rest of the 52% for Trump or 48% for Biden actually were facing the same dilemma but made a choice just to send the polltakers packing? These guys, both of them, are castor oil to the public.
Age is one problem . . . for both. In an ABC News poll, 86% of respondents say that Biden is too old to be president. No surprise there. It also applies to Trump. At an age of 77 at the time of inauguration, 62% think that Trump is aged out. Octogenarians behind the Resolute Desk doesn’t present a pleasing prospect for most Americans (see #3 below).
The reason is obvious. Biden is going from infirmity to dementia before our eyes, while Trump is getting cruder and more caustic by the day. Both are exhibiting crotchety-old-man syndrome. Biden leaves the podium in a daze after regaling us in slurred and attenuated speech and mangled memories. Trump has mentally locked himself into a junior high locker room.
If either one gets elected, will they survive the full four years? Biden has already had one massive stroke. Given his current semi-functional status, another one wouldn’t be surprising. Then, we’ve got Kamala, polling worse than Biden. She could amaze us, but nothing in her years in the public eye is encouraging.
Trump is different. He may serve in leg irons, which will present an interesting conundrum for the Congressional Republican Caucus. The Democrats’ lawfare stable has 91 whacks at him from Jack Smith to DAs and AGs in New York and Georgia. Do you want to bet that at least one of them won’t be made to stick by some dim-witted jury? A mass of the charges is despicable, agreed. But it’s a reality.
Think of it: America not much different from Nicaragua, or taking a page from Putin’s playbook. But I digress.
Anyway, Trump could free himself of the evil Jack Smith with a pardon, unseemly as it will be. Federal charges are within the president’s purview. State and local actions are an entirely different matter. We are probably on untrodden ground here. Since legal actions began before the inauguration, or sentencing awaits, what will happen if a felonious and possibly convicted defendant were to win the Electoral College? The Republican Caucus may have to decide if they really want to shield a convicted defendant from impeachment and removal from office. As for the Democrats, they stand in the wings in glee.
Sir Walter Scott, 19th century Scottish author, said it best: “Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive”. Are Democrats and the Trump gaggle in the GOP deceiving us as they make a clown car of our politics? We may have to replace the eagle with Bozo as our national symbol.
Trump is slightly up, Haley trounces Biden, but so what. She won’t get the nomination; Trump may serve in an ankle bracelet; or Biden will have to serve from a chronic care facility. When you think about it, nobody is doing it to us. We are doing it to ourselves. It’s a democratic republic; we are responsible.
How responsible? Each Republican primary, including the recent one in South Carolina, is proving that the rot has deep roots beyond the muckety-mucks. The parties are marching toward a general election ballot that I will leave blank at the top, and maybe elsewhere. No neo-Marxists and no Trumpers.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “New Marquette Law School Poll national survey finds Trump at 51%, Biden at 49% in head-to-head matchup; each leads primary challenger by more than 50 points”, 2/21/24, at https://law.marquette.edu/poll/2024/02/21/new-marquette-law-school-poll-national-survey-finds-trump-at-51-biden-at-49-in-head-to-head-matchup-each-leads-primary-challenger-by-more-than-50-points/
2. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for bringing the poll to my attention, “Oh, No Big Deal, Just a Survey Showing Haley Beating Biden, 58 Percent to 42 Percent”, 2/22/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/oh-no-big-deal-just-a-survey-showing-haley-beating-biden-58-percent-to-42-percent/
3. “Overwhelming majority of Americans think Biden is too old for another term: POLL”, Meredith Deliso, ABC News, 2/11/24, at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/poll-americans-on-biden-age/story?id=107126589
4. Thanks to Christian Schneider for additional information in “America Is Running Two Presidential Elections at Once”, National Review, 2/22/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/02/america-is-running-two-presidential-elections-at-once/
