“I can only imagine what the political prisoners and dissidents in Russian jails are feeling today [2/21/2025]. Only a year ago Alexei Navalny was killed by Putin in one of his prisons. Before he died, Navalny wrote me a few letters in which he said that what he saw in Russia’s prisons was the same world that I once experienced as a prisoner in the Soviet Union.
. . . I think that in some ways it is worse for the political prisoners in Russia today. We had the advantage of knowing that President Reagan was on our side. But what should the hundreds sent to Russian prisons for many years for daring to call out Putin’s aggression feel today?”
—- Natan Sharanksy, eminent Soviet dissident now living in Israel, after Trump’s comment calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” and accusing Ukraine for “starting the war”, in the Free Press on 2/21/2025 (see #1)
Natan Sharansky
America is morally unmoored. There is nothing “grand” in Trump’s Grand Old Party. The party of Lincoln, the party that staked its existence on slavery’s abolition, is appeasing, if not siding with, a savage tyrant. So much for being “on the side of the angels”. Trump has signed us up for the Satanic host. On this, there can be no question.
To be clear, both political parties are unhinged. The Democrats lunged into neo-Marxism and hate Donald Trump down to his DNA. Conversely, a sizeable chunk of Republicans is enraptured by him. They treat him as their messianic north star. Trump dislikes Zelenskyy and has little use for Ukraine, and now so do they. In lockstep, they come to Trump’s defense no matter what he says and does. They clap like trained seals, or like Putin’s political ancestors during a speech by Stalin to the Communist Party Congress of the USSR.
Loyalty is one thing, obsequiousness another. It is disgraceful. But both parties are disgraceful. We are in an age of bipartisan disgrace.
Has Trump signed the country up for the Satanic host, or are we merely adjacent? Either way, it seems disgustingly so. The shameful abandonment of a beleaguered and desperate people is beginning. A headline from Washington reads “Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Cyberoperations Against Russia” (see #2). Another headline: “State Department terminates U.S. support of Ukraine energy grid restoration” (see #3). These are probably the first of many steps to cut Ukraine adrift, adrift into the maw of Putin’s regenerated Soviet Union, a nation that has inflicted multiple holocausts on millions of Ukrainians. Are we now an abettor, if not an ally, of the new Axis of Evil? Did you sign up for this when you voted for Donald Trump?
J.D. Vance is making himself particularly loathsome. He has been for quite some time. The “dictator” smear, his castigation of the closing of Putin’s Russian Orthodox Church in the country suffering from a Putin invasion, the undocumented charges of waste and corruption, the demands for surrender under the guise of “peace”, heaping blame on NATO, and opposition to aid to the besieged country has been part of his stump spiel for the last couple of years. It is as if Copperheads won the 1864 presidential election. Trump, Vance, and the rest of the trained seals in the cabinet are Putin Copperheads. The converts to the Copperhead caucus in the right-leaning media have joined the abasement.
“It is impossible to live in Russia, but dying is possible.” — Dmitry Merezhkovsky, died in exile in 1941.
So, who is Putin, this person who enjoys the indulgence of Trump and Vance? Sharansky lays it out. He should know. Putin’s regime operates as if the Soviet Union was reanimated, something very familiar to Sharansky. Opposition is killed and jailed. Mariana Katzarova, the UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Russia, estimates the number of currently jailed political dissidents at over 2,000 (see #4). It is hard to say with any precision given Putin’s death grip on news and information in the country. One of the most reliable outlets, Memorial, was shut down by Putin in 2022.
Death grip is fully applicable to Putin’s Russia. Still, some of the more indecent inhumanities have been widely reported. To make you cringe, here are some examples (see #5). Trumpkins, do not avert your eyes for this is what you are signing us up for.
Makeshift memorial to Boris Nemtsov after his murder, March 2015
Aleksei Navalny, founder of Anti-Corruption Foundation, returned from exile only to be rearrested and imprisoned where he died in an Arctic prison camp on Feb. 16, 2024.
Mikhail Lesin, former Russian press minister and Putin critic, was found dead in a Washington, D.C., hotel room on Nov. 5, 2015. His death is considered by many to be “suspicious”.
Boris Nemtsov, former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin and Putin critic, was shot dead on a bridge outside the Kremlin on Feb. 27, 2015. Critics with possible popular traction have shortened life spans.
Boris Berezovsky, former Putin ally turned critic, was found dead in his home in Berkshire, England, on March 23, 2013. Officially listed as a suicide, strong suspicions remain.
Sergei Magnitsky, Russian lawyer and auditor who exposed corruption that was traced to Putin, was imprisoned, suffered beatings, denied medical treatment, and died in prison on Nov. 16, 2009. Our Magnitsky Act, which sanctions Russian abusers of human rights, was named after him.
Stanislav Markelov, human rights lawyer and journalist, was assassinated in Moscow on Jan. 19, 2009, by the same killer of Anastasia Baburova (see below).
Anastasia Baburova, a journalist and human rights activist, was killed alongside Markelov on Jan. 19, 2009.
Had enough? The sources are brim full of poisonings, murders, and disappearances in Putin’s Gulag Archipelago. Inside or outside of Russia, it does not matter. On the hit list was an elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, who was poisoned in September 2004 during the campaign. His face was scarred from it.
Putin barbarity is most resplendent on the ground and in graves throughout Ukraine. Putin starts this war, targets civilians, commits atrocities, and Trump and his sidekick level their abuse at the president of the country resisting the crime. Now, Trump is cutting them off. America, are you going to stand still and let this mauling of our sense of decency continue?
“When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he’s like the 12-year old boy that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. ‘My hero!’ It’s really creepy.” — Malcom Turnbull, 2015-2018 Australian Prime minister, Dec. 29, 2024 (see #6)
Why the toadying to Putin and not Hamas? Try to make sense of it. It boggles the mind unless Trump has some adolescent affection for strongmen. As for Vance, he is just young and foolish. The young establish conclusions first, then root around for a rationale. The result is a logical mishmash. Vance sounds as mature as my 10th-grade students in my high school World History class.
Trump is constructing his Kyiv, as Biden did his Kabul, and the 1975 Democratic Congress did their Saigon. All of them besmirched the reputation of our country, but more than that, they soiled us. Joining the Axis of Evil makes us no better than our co-thugs. Admiration for thugs is a dangerous thing.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Natan Sharansky: A President’s Words Saved Me in the Gulag”, Natan Sharansk, Free Press, 2/21/2025, at https://www.thefp.com/p/natan-sharansky-a-presidents-words
2. “Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Cyberoperations Against Russia”, New York Times, at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/us/politics/hegseth-cyber-russia-trump-putin.html
3. “State Department terminates U.S. support of Ukraine energy grid restoration”, Vaughn Hillyard, NBC News, 2/28/2025, at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/state-department-terminates-us-support-ukraine-energy-grid-restoration-rcna194259
4. “UN Expert Sounds Alarm on 2,000 Political Prisoners in Russia”, The Moscow Times: Independent News from Russia, 2/17/2025, at https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/02/17/un-expert-sounds-alarm-on-2000-political-prisoners-in-russia-a88054
5. Reportage on Putin thuggery include:
“Putin’s Opposition: Dead, Jailed Or Exiled”, AFP in Barron’s, 3/16/2024, at https://www.barrons.com/news/putin-s-opposition-dead-jailed-or-exiled-964f341b
“Most of Russia’s opposition is either dead, in exile abroad or in prison at home. What happens now?”, Emma Burrows, AP, 2/19/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/navalny-russia-opposition-putin-8554f74e229c451f96956939b05d2a99
“The List Is Long: Russians Who Have Died After Running Afoul Of The Kremlin”, Steve Gutterman, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2/16/2024, at https://www.rferl.org/a/enemies-kremlin-deaths-prigozhin-list/32562583.html
“Full List of Putin Critics Who Have Died in Mysterious Circumstances”, Isabel van Brugen, Newsweek, 2/26/2024, at https://www.newsweek.com/putin-critics-dead-full-list-navalny-1870692
6. Malcom Turnbull’s comment can be found on X at https://x.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1873556154556838212?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1873556154556838212%7Ctwgr%5E87a08c42098cfd7dc62d00f18c68b6d36fbf2878%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2F2025%2F03%2Fhinge-point%2F
7. Thanks to Jay Nordlinger for his contributions to this article at “Hinge Point”, National Review, 3/3/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/hinge-point/
Zelenskyy, Trump, Vance in a White Houe meeting, 2/28/2025
*Please read the prior post. It’s primer on this appalling scene in the White House today, written before this blowup. Don’t let Trump apologists explain away this shameful behavior on the part of our president and vice president.
Please watch the scene in the White House of today. It’s shocking behavior . . . on the part of Trump and Vance. Some will put the blame on Zelensky. It’s nonsense. Trump and Vance are not the adults in the room. The bullying of the leader of a country, that was mercilessly invaded, bombed, and raped, by two U.S. leaders who behaved more like thugs, shouting and interrupting the man, piles shame on our country. Putin is dancing a jig, as Brezhnev would have been if Reagan and Schultz had piled on Helmut Kohl, chancellor of Germany.
This is a disgrace by Trump and Vance. It needs to be called out as such. Shame on you, Trump and Vance. Americans should be appalled.
Our president is not a grand thinker. He is, however, the head of a movement dominating the Republican Party. Its platform is grievance. Ironically, now, grievance has become the core of both the Right and the Left. For Trump and his MAGA, the rest of the world is screwing us. The outlook is mixed with some truths, a slew of exaggerations and falsehoods, and absent self-examination. The unintended aftershocks of this political rush could be an America increasingly without partners on our continent, in our hemisphere, and in Europe and Asia. Adjustments will be made by our former partners in the face of an increasingly erratic, unreliable, and at times hostile America, an America that cares a whole lot less about common interests with other nations. Do not expect this to end well.
Trump’s chief complaint is that America is not “Great” because we are patsies. Just Monday (2/24/2025), he stood before the press and announced his tariffs in a verbal cascade of victimhood (see #1),
“We’ve been mistreated badly by many countries . . . . We were taken advantage of. We were led by, in some cases, fools, because anybody that would sign documents like they signed, where they were able to take advantage of the American people, which happened over the last long period of time, except for a little four-year period that took place four years ago. But anybody that would agree to allow this to happen to our country should be ashamed of themselves.”
Per Trump, shame on you, Americans, for preferring Toyotas to Chevies.
His incoherence is glaring when he talks about the glories of tariffs. But what is foreign trade, the thing to be tariffed, taxed? It is an exchange of a foreign producer’s goods and services for a country’s currency (paper). So, a U.S. trade deficit is our possession of their valuable things, and their accumulation of our paper. Conversely, as Trump seems to prefer, a surplus is our reverse accumulation of their paper in return for our valuable things. At root, Trump’s talk is nonsense, but it is soothing syrup to a crowd addled by a sense of victimhood.
Though, his tariffs – for Trump, “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” – will torpedo his campaign promise to reduce inflation. Any tax hikes, like tariffs on business, any business, foreign and domestic, passes through to the consumer. It works like this: raise taxes (like tariffs), increase business costs, raise prices, reduce consumption and production. A bad deal all around. The price floor rises for all goods and services, both foreign and domestic. So much for “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”. So much for ending inflation.
A better understanding of trade would be helpful. The flow of goods and currencies passes through a foreign trade infrastructure. GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), currency foreign exchange agreements (FEA), and the adjudication of FEA disputes in the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (New York Convention) work to ease the flow of trade so the foreign paper (currency) can be made valuable to its possessor. In other words, a trade deficit (more goods, less paper) or surplus (more paper, less goods) or “balance” (the value of the paper and goods in equal measure) is not as important as Trump thinks. But the superficial language of trade, absent clarifications, lends itself to demagoguery.
Admittedly, the trade numbers are relevant for national security, social, and political reasons. By themselves, they are more than sufficient to support more domestic production of physical goods. But why aren’t we more of a manufacturing powerhouse? Certainly, we came to face renewed competition from our formerly WWII-ravaged economic rivals.
The resulting challenge exposed our self-inflicted inefficiencies, thus the need for some self-examination; something buried in the rhetoric. Our appetite for New Deal tax and regulatory schemes, and bloated business bureaucracies, proved to be a hindrance under competitive pressures. Furthermore, we exposed our manufacturing to the vast expansion of the regulatory straitjacket in the 1970s due to manufacturing’s many impacts on the natural environment. Land use controls, the expansion of the eco-superstate, their spread and expansion at all levels of government, and a labyrinth of empowered NIMBYs, mandates, permits, and hearings wreaked carnage on the sector.
(Image credit: Rick Gershon/Getty Images)
The air in the LA basin is cleaner due to the subsequent flight of physical production. They continue to flee. California declared war on affordable energy and the Philips/Conoco refinery in Wilmington is closing, the latest manufacturer to skedaddle the hyper eco-state. Much of the Chevron complex now resides in Houston. Adjacently, the regulatory war on housing will make the rebuild of Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena a nightmare. Cleaner air (except for the fires), combustible landscapes, Hiroshima devastation, and bankrupting energy are the new realities of the eco-Leviathan.
Manufacturing – the physical production of any kind – began a slide into the snake pit of our predatory unions, litigious culture, voracious “civil rights” lobbies, and taxes, more taxes, regulation, and more regulation. The split between the permission economy (physical production, manufacturing, construction, timber harvesting, et al) vs. permissionless economy (initially small-scale innovation that becomes capitalized into Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Nividia, et al) is the main feature of this new hyper-regulated economy (see #2). Traditional manufacturing is relegated to being the red-headed stepchild.
Jones and Laughlin Steel Pittsburgh, 1950sThe Googleplex, Mountain View, Ca.Climate activists protest the Richmond refinery in California, 2017
Without addressing this problem, Trump’s tariffs are foolhardy. They will jack up prices, raise the cost of business inputs, threaten employment, and pull the only available ladder out of the snake pit that America has made of itself. American economic activity, and particularly manufacturing, cries out to be something other than survival in a snake pit.
DJT should address the pit before he tries to sell the narcotic of tariffs to the public. If not, trade relations will be disrupted as our friends scramble to protect themselves and their nascent industries. New trade arrangements will arise with America seen as just another economic belligerent.
To make the tariff scheme palatable to the public, the jargon of “reciprocity” is employed to hide the real purpose of tariffs. The prime directive of tariffs is to punish domestic consumers for preferring a foreign-made product. I am skeptical of their use as a bargaining chip since the tariff prime directive remains, even if reciprocity agreements are temporarily achieved. The political pressure by the snakes in our pit will make a hash of the “reciprocity”.
What Trump is doing to international trade, he promises for our foreign policy. Already, an undertow of cynicism infects our relationship with our allies (see #4). Trump sees our national security as another arena to apply the same approach as he would with a supplier of pipe. For instance, Trump has introduced a cushy deal for rare earths as a part of a survival package for Ukraine. To him, it is like demanding from the supplier the free gratis addition of brass fittings to the order. Trump has made extortion an element for a relationship with the United States.
For Trump, it is not enough to stand athwart a thug’s subjugation of another country on a continent already made jittery by two previous 20th-century world wars totaling over 100 million deaths and the USSR enslavement over half of it. Not surprisingly, eyebrows are raised in European capitals by Trump’s Belgian Congo-style treatment of Ukraine. Trump’s America comes close to being the reincarnation of the British East India Company.
It is not as if Ukraine has a realistic alternative to Trump’s USA. The situation has a key role to play in Trump’s Art of the Deal for international affairs. If you are dependent on him, you are at his mercy. It results in the odd abuse of friends with whom he can control, and odd praise of enemies with whom he does not. Trump recently declared that Putin is smart and strong and Zelensky is a dictator (I kid you not) and stands accused of starting the war (I kid you not). He gets away with it because he has leverage on Zelensky that he does not have on Putin, thus the pandering to a thug and the defamation of Zelensky. It is negotiations by shakedown in threats, insults, and extortion. For Trump, it must be like extracting concessions out of his favorite pipe supplier. The unrestrained nature of international affairs presents a playground for Trump’s baser instincts.
Trump’s Ukraine/Putin stage act reminds our friends and allies of the danger of getting too close to America. Post-WWII, South Vietnam’s existence was placed at the mercy of American domestic politics and resulted in the collapse of South Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. Leaping forward to 2020, American domestic politics reared its ugly head over Afghanistan with the rise of Trump and his subsequent Doha Accords with the Taliban. Trump and his people repeated the Nixon/Kissinger tactic of negotiating the future of our friend and ally without them being in the room. Timetables for an American withdrawal were set only to be inflamed by more American domestic politics with calamitous effects for Afghans. Afghanistan descended into a dark age at our bidding.
The fall of Saigon, 1975, and evacuations from the roof of the American embassy.Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meeting with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now the Taliban’s de facto political leader, in Doha, Qatar, in September 2020. (Photo: U.S. Department of State/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)Thousands of people are trying to flee Afghanistan as the Taliban strengthens its grip on the country. Some people chased a U.S. air force plane down the tarmac, while others tried to force their way onto planes at the Kabul airport. (photo: screen shot, Axios)
Can you blame any potential international partner for wariness in getting too close to the USA? They have alternatives. They could cut their own deals with our common enemies turning America First into America Alone. Appeasement might sound more appealing than laying yourself open to America First and an insane Democratic Party.
They could expand their defense capabilities and magnify their efforts in coalitions without a troublesome USA. Trump’s America First becomes America Problematic. Such arrangements will not have our interests at heart. America First, now known as America Alone, will be an unreliable, isolated nation with an expanded dependence on an even greater military buildup than is possible given our current domestic politics. Are you prepared to slash entitlements? Our crazy Democrats went bonkers over George W. Bush’s 2005 nibbling at Social Security’s edges (see #3). What makes you think that Democrats would not seek to ride the hysteria to more political fame and fortune this time around? Bottom line, America Alone becomes America Weaker.
This is our “master of 4-D chess” at work. We are not prepared for the consequences. The “most beautiful word in the dictionary” only disguises our deep-seated economic problems. America First will cause our friends to run for the exits. Any “peace” deal over Ukraine will come at the expense of more screw-tightening on the victim. America needs to address what we have done to ourselves before we scapegoat our friends and allies. Welcome to the world of America First.
The rabble-rousing has the advantage of feeding popular prejudices. Grievance has proven to be a political winner. The Right has discovered its inner victim in the same manner as the Left for over a century. The world should be leery of an America united in grievance.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Trump: ‘Tariffs Are Going Forward On Time, ‘We’ve Been ‘Led By Fools”, Tim Hains, Real Clear Politics, 2/24/2025, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/02/24/trump_tariffs_are_going_forward_on_time_weve_been_led_by_fools.html
2. “The Future of Innovation in the United States: Permissionless or Regulated?”, Mohamed Mutii, Econlib, 10/14/2023, at https://www.econlib.org/the-future-of-innovation-in-the-united-states-permissionless-or-regulated/
3. “How George W. Bush Lost Personal Accounts For Social Security”, Peter Ferrera, Forbes, 4/7/2011, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2011/04/07/how-george-w-bush-lost-personal-accounts-for-social-security/
4. For an American public uninterested in the foreign discussion about America, tune into this podcast, “Can German centrists keep ignoring the hard right AfD?”, The Daily Telegraph, 2/24/2025, at https://youtu.be/LiLEeFlbfHk?si=eOveyaQX98wuaumb . It covers more than the results of the German election. Toward the end of the interview, a major German parliamentary leader expresses major skepticism of a Trump-led America.
No, I’m not schizophrenic in praising President Trump in one post and criticizing him in another. I compliment him when it’s possible, but can’t in good conscience when it’s impossible.
By now, we should have grown accustomed to the erection of façades around our leaders. Today, it seems more necessary than ever. A veil, an army of handlers and eager media apologists, and a well-staffed cleanup department is erected to shield the public from the reality. Sounds like Biden. I’m convinced Biden’s basement campaign of 2020 had much to do with his mental and physical frailty. After four years, it metastasized and the shield became a howler of lies, clear to anyone with functioning eyes and ears.
Come to think of it, Trump has a façade mostly created for him by his supporters. They have to make sense of his ad hoc, ad hominem, episodic, and rambling pronouncements. His boosters ignore the simple prospect that he is exactly what we see: impulsive and not particularly enlightened, nor well-disposed to deliberate and deep thought – mental qualities harmful to strategy. In attempting to make sense of the verbal bursts, apologists augur, like a shaman reading bones, a coherence that doesn’t exist.
A person’s cranium is not transparent. “The cleanup on aisle 9” brigades among Trump’s people jump into action with some form of “he’s playing 4-D chess”. The assertion is unprovable, and not open to inductive reasoning any more than an insistence on reincarnation. Upon hearing the divination, the rest of the Trump fans resound in a chorus, “That’s it!”
It’s comical. Many on the formerly sensible Right twist themselves in knots to make sense of the jumble. Case in point, Hugh Hewitt. A normally calm and reasonable person with a distinguished professional and academic pedigree, he has contorted himself into an enthusiastic Trump apologist, another diviner of the Trump brain. Hewitt regularly proclaims Trump to be a masterful, Machiavellian negotiator on the basis of nothing more than the equivalent of speculation, hopes, and prayers.
Hugh Hewitt at the mic of his radio show.
As a regular Hewitt listener, I’ve noticed his metamorphosis from conservatism to Trumpism, which is a political cult with conservative tics alongside erratic impulses, many far from conservative. Hewitt steps in to impose some artificial comprehensibility to Trump’s mess. Last week, Trump puts his foot in his mouth in blasting the leader of the side that we should want to win in Ukraine while lavishing praise on a widely recognized goon, an obvious enemy in search of his own Lebensraum. Putin is only “smart” – using Trump’s word – if he’s got the guns and the FSB. “Smart” is the wrong word. Putin is a gangster. Maybe “smart gangster” works.
Hewitt’s response is to join Trump’s smear campaign against Zelensky in a desperate reach for a rationalization. He dredges up Zelensky’s 2024 U.S. visit and talks with our then-president, and Zelensky’s heated retort after Trump’s slander of him as a “dictator”. Imagine that, a repartee to a personal insult. How dare Zelensky? It’s Zelensky’s fault. Right?
Hewitt has to find some rationalization for what any sensible person would understand to be intemperate Trump remarks against our national interests. The U.S. national interest is not served by Putin’s conquests on the continent of Europe, end of story. Hewitt can’t wrap his mind around Trump ranking our national interests below his personal grudges.
One should not expect the general public to be better informed than our leaders. It could be assumed that he must be more knowledgeable, he’s president, but behaves like he isn’t – or maybe he doesn’t care. It’s equally possible that impulse control is lacking.
History is studied for what it says about human nature. Not by Trump; he doesn’t read. For people like Hewitt, they cherry-pick their evidence to match their predispositions. Hewitt is fond of reminding us of “shuttle diplomacy” to characterize Trump’s peace mission for the Ukraine War, with a comparison to the shuttle diplomacy of Kissinger in the 1970s. True, that was shuttle diplomacy, but so was Neville Chamberlain’s in 1938 to achieve peace between Hitler and Edvard Beneš, president of Czechoslovakia. The fall of Czechoslovakia and invasion of Poland soon followed. This is more than a historical cliché.
The similarities are greater with this one than Kissinger bouncing between Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Golda Meir. Putin is convinced of Russia’s fate to reconstitute the Soviet empire. Hitler was similarly convinced of his Lebensraum (German expansion for “living space”). The German Wehrmacht was just more successful than Putin’s cronies.
Thus, since we can’t rely on our leaders to be devotees of history, we must inform ourselves. After all, this is a citizen republic. It will require some time and effort on our part. Don’t expect it from Trump and his apologia chorus. The internet can be a wonderful thing, and on it one can find “The Rest is History” podcast with historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. It is available wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube, Apple, Spotify, etc. I chose Spotify. Best of all, it’s free!
You can also go to https://therestishistory.com, or setup an account at spotify.com, for instance, and tune into episodes #528 through #532, each one about an hour long, and will carry you from the 1938 Munich agreement to the fall of Poland. This is a quick and easy way to be more enlightened than either Trump or his apologists. As you watch and listen, think of all that you’ve come to know about the Ukraine War. The parallels are stunning.
Pres. Trump and Maine Gov. Mills at the White House, 2/21/2025
Trump is our era’s Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who led the effort to desert Czechoslovakia in 1938. His impulsiveness and tendency to hitch national policy to personal grudges are deeply troubling.
But the Democrats are worse. They’re crazy. They are cultural revolutionaries on a mission to force us to conform to their conceptions of the “better man [or woman, or whatever] for the better world [?]”. They refuse to define “man” or “woman”, for instance, as one part of their goal to eliminate all distinctions (look up “nihilism”) so as to create new ones of their own fancy. Consequently, women are frozen out of award ceremonies to men who imagine themselves to be women. It’s kooky beyond belief.
It’s also not surprising that it doesn’t much work the other way: a XX man robbing XY men of their track and field medals. Trump, and anyone still rooted in reality, knows this, and he’s willing to say so. Yesterday, at a meeting of governors at the White House, he confronted Maine’s Governor Janet Mills (D). Watch the clip below.
Brutal, blunt, but not wholly undeserved. Gov. Mills’s feelings are of minor concern when compared to the dashed dreams of hundreds, if not thousands, of girls – real XX girls. Their ambitions are quashed by a XY girl who just yesterday was considered a boy. Go get ‘em Trump, and every blue-state satrap that has engaged in this grotesqueness.
Trump and Zelenskyy (r)An airman attached to the 436th Aerial Port Squadron loads cargo during a Ukraine security assistance mission at Dover Air Force Base, Del., Jan. 13, 2023. (photo: DOD)
During the scare over secondhand smoke, and the flurry of smoking bans in public spaces, 60,000 annual deaths from it was frequently cited. Actually, numbers varied from 20,000 to 120,000. When it came down to it, they were numbers pulled out of a hat. Once repeated, they had a life of their own. President Trump does it too.
In yesterday’s Truth Social post, Trump blithely threw out $350 billion in aid to Ukraine. Where did the number come from? Further, where’s the source for “half of the money we sent him is ‘MISSING’”? Not the Inspector General for Ukraine Aid, not the Center for Strategic and International Studies (see #2), not the Kiel Institute which studies international aid to Ukraine. You might counter that he’s president and therefore he must know. That’s not proof; that’s an act of faith.
Going back to the U.S. inspector general of “Ukraine Oversight”, $183 billion was promised and $86.7 billion delivered (see #3). The denizens of the far-Right fever swamps have mentioned $100 billion “missing”, stolen, wasted. Applying the two known numbers, ones that can be sourced, the $100 billion is roughly the difference between what was promised and given. If true, possibly, $100 billion is “missing” because it was never delivered.
President Zelensky in an AP interview of early February cited $177 billion earmarked by the U.S. but only $75 billion sent (see #4). These might be the numbers used in a Kiel Institute study (see #5). The point is that these numbers can be sourced. Where did President Trump’s numbers originate? No source is available, leaving one to entertain the option of them bursting from DJT’s imagination, a frequent occurrence.
I suspect that the press gaggle comment from Tuesday – “You should have never started it” – and the Truth Social rant of Wednesday are connected. In the one, President Trump put his foot in his mouth, up to the ankle, and halfway down the throat. Then, he tried to repair the damage by bloviating with more inanities.
Trump doesn’t understand the first rule of holes. Stop digging!
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Jim Geraghty for the numbers and sources at “Get Ukraine into the European Union”, National Review, 2/21/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/get-ukraine-into-the-european-union/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=first
2. “Where Is the Missing $100 Billion in U.S. Aid for Ukraine?”, Mark F. Cancian, CSIS, 2/11/2025, at https://www.csis.org/analysis/where-missing-100-billion-us-aid-ukraine
3. “Funding”, Ukraine Oversight: Special Inspector General for Operation Atlantic Resolve, Promoting Whole of Government Oversight of the U.S. Ukraine Response; at https://www.ukraineoversight.gov/Funding/#:~:text=Fiscal%20Year%20(FY)%202022%2D,obligated%20and%20%2486.7%20billion%20disbursed.
4. AP interview of President Zelensky, “Zelenskyy: Ukraine received US$76 billion out of US$177 billion approved by America”, 2/2/2025, Reddit, at https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1igjyyl/zelenskyy_ukraine_received_us76_billion_out_of/
5. “Ukraine Support Tracker Data”, Antezza, A., et al, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, 2/20/2025, at https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/ukraine-support-tracker-data-20758/
Donald Trump is proof that no person is deserving of worship. Sooner or later, given enough time and opportunity, we’ll step in it. Trump is no different. The guy must have slept during his high school History classes. College wasn’t any better for him. Read this screed on Truth Social about Ukraine’s Zelenksyy. It’s mind-bogglingly stupid.
“Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and ‘TRUMP,’ will never be able to settle. The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us — We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation. On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is ‘MISSING.’ He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden “like a fiddle.” A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only “TRUMP,” and the Trump Administration, can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the “gravy train” going. I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues…..”
Trump is showing that Zelensky isn’t the problem. He is! For Trump enthusiasts, drop the cultic priestly vestments and get off your knees on your prayer rugs long enough to parse the words of a nincompoop. And to think that this guy is the leader of the Free World. Amazing.
Sentence #1 is incoherent, the rantings of adolescent rationalizations. Is this genius making the case that the $350 billion should never have been spent, or that the war never had to start? Yeah, it wouldn’t have started if Putin hadn’t invaded, and without American support naked aggression would have been rewarded. Strip away the crass, ego-inflating bloviation about himself being the block to all bad things in the world, and what remains is the reality after his loss in the 2020 election. It’s 2025, not January 2021. Now, what are you going to do? Sell out the victim?
Sentence #2 is more evidence of an all-too-human businessman rampaging way outside his lane. This blinkered person behind the Resolute desk reduced all thought and considerations in foreign relations to dollars and cents. It’s the only thing he understands, or thinks he understands. By his convoluted logic, we would have remained a part of the British empire; the South would be represented in the UN as the CSA; a good portion of France, Belgium, and Russia would be part of the German Empire under the Hohenzollerns; and much of Europe and Asia would be Axis satraps. Geostrategy is reduced to an accounting ledger. It’s stupid beyond belief.
Sentence #3 is more pablum. The idiocy is crowned with “Equalization” and “a beautiful Ocean as separation”. Yeah, Europe should pay more, but that’s not as if we shouldn’t pay anything. And that’s not to mean that Europe hasn’t contributed anything – $120 billion from 2022 to 2024 (see #1). Besides, are we going to lead as the USA or hide behind an ocean? Jihadi goat-herders with box cutters on 9/11 proved that an ocean is only a geographical feature to be crossed to get at the Great Satan. DJT, this is not the age of sail anymore.
Sentence #4 is proof that Ukraine is as flawed as DJT during his bankruptcies, or DOGE is discovering that we are. But we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Account for the aid, and keep it flowing. Don’t use it as an excuse to reward a thug.
Sentences #5 and #6 are evidence of Trump showing his capacity to fill the shoes of Izvestia, the newspaper organ of the old Supreme Soviet. They promiscuously applied “dictator” to Thatcher and Reagan. Trump repeats the same style of slander. Trump has lost his mind. Zelensky is more answerable to an electorate than Putin. Putin offs his opponents, both inside and outside Russia. From the streets of London to the presidential residence in Kyiv to outside the Kremlin, he has horrifically poisoned, disfigured, and assassinated opposition. The list is growing. Those surviving disappear in a reconstituted Gulag Archipelago. Trump adds his name to the long list of dictator-lovers going back to the Stalin-apologists of yesteryear. It’s as shameful today as it was then.
The rest is an embarrassment to adult reasoning. “I love Ukraine”, but only if it surrenders to Putin. You see, following the Trump thought-stream, Ukraine is ravaged by . . . Zelensky, by Ukraine itself, not Putin. In Trump’s twisted brain, Zelensky should have surrendered earlier. Thus, it’s his fault. A thug that invaded the country across three fronts without warning or provocation, in a typically mismanaged Russian blitzkrieg, is not to blame. The thinking provokes disbelief. And he is our president. Whew, what a mess.
There is a crazy Right, and Trump is their messiah. He is deified. Everything he says and writes is worshipped as holy script. I’m surprised that they aren’t printed in red. Watch as longstanding pundits of the Right eat their past words. Watch as they morph from Kremlin skeptics to Putin apologists in the span of a short decade, because their god says so.
One question for Hugh Hewitt: What happened to Mike Pompeo? He’s gone into your memory hole. At one time praised to high heaven; now, nothing. He seems to have descended into nothingness like Bill Barr, John Bolton, and anyone who will not make the appropriate sacrifices at the altar.
Hugh Hewitt at the mic of his radio show.
Please, people on the Right, get off your prayer rugs long enough to notice that your Prophet wears no clothes. Reality is uglier than your illusions.
RogerG
Sources:
1. An assessment of European contributions to the defense of Ukraine can be found at “Ranking of European countries by aid provided to Ukraine between January 2022 and August 2024, by type of aid”, Statista, 10/29/2024, at https://www.statista.com/statistics/1499394/european-aid-to-ukraine-by-country/
(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/
Homeschoolers be warned that a politicized science in politicized journals like Scientific American is gunning for you.
If you believe that science hasn’t been corrupted by a political ideology, that it is value-neutral, you are naïve and grossly ill-informed. I invite anyone to go over to the Scientific American website (www.scientificamerican.com) and peruse their links to “Pressroom” for editor bios and “The Editors” for their stories (see #1 and #2 below). The bios read like missionaries of the progressive blob. The editors’ stories aren’t pure science but a monotonous drumbeat for greater central government power, the poker tell of progressivism. These are people who are impertinent enough to claim to represent science in America. Whew, what a mess.
Managing editor Jeanne Bryner encapsulates progressivism’s pretensions in her bio which includes the line “. . . just about everything can be viewed through the lens of science.” “Just about everything” might be the escape hatch from her half-witted flight of fancy. It should be clear to anyone with an ounce of adult-level awareness that moral judgments frequently evade the calculus of the lab. Science could devise an effective means to terminate unborn life, and has (for instance, the abortion pill of mifepristone and misoprostol), but it can’t say squat about whether we ought to. These people hitch “science” to their ideological commitments, such as the charge that we have too many people, and even add numbers, but that’s just quantifying an unquantifiable belief and calling it science.
Politicized science in Scientific American, June 2022 issue
The editors of Scientific American exude progressive conceit. Read their backgrounds; it’s something that they’ve been imbibing since their formative years, whose lifestyle reinforces. Degrees in fields that are hotbeds of left-wing activism are common. Environmentalism appears to be a substitute religion. Many have degreed specialties in journalism. Typical of ideological zealots, no serious consideration of trade-offs plays a prominent role in their thinking. How much of their production is real science, and how much of their “science” is curated through experiences in certain ideologically infected college disciplines, lifestyle preferences, and the prevalent proclivities of their demography (female, college, many single, urban white collar)? Mull over that for awhile.
Editor in Chief Laura Helmuth is straight from liberal-left central casting. Rummaging through her background discloses a propensity for hijacking “the science” for progressive, left-wing causes. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 in a decision that was “both unanimous and quick”, citing the sins of the Trump administration to her brand of “science”.
Laura Helmuth, Editor in Chief
Her “science” is the science of the progressive zealot. Her mind is as closed as a steel trap. I doubt that the writings of researchers in design theory (evidence of a Designer in the cosmos and nature), like the work of the Discovery Institute, would ever be allowed to grace the pages of the magazine. If you’re cool to climate-change jeremiads, don’t expect a call to be a contributor. Under her leadership, Scientific American is in competition with Mother Jones for the same audience. See Helmuth’s Wikipedia page.
Progressivism lies at the foundation of editorial decisions. So, what is it? Progressivism is a ticket to power for people like Helmuth. Going back to the late 19th century, progressives fell in love with “experts”, people like them, people of the appropriate cultural accoutrements like years spent inside classrooms. They worship at the altar of credentials, degrees, and what not. And these college matriculants are said to be deserving of power to lead the population to the promised land. Little things like the Constitution, separation of powers, federalism, the subsidiary principle (localism), rule of law, and popular sovereignty shouldn’t be allowed to spoil the march to the rule of the administrative state.
That’s where we find the editors of Scientific American in their progressive jihad against homeschooling (see #3 below). They complain about the absence of uniform standards for such independent practitioners (parents) and their charges (their children), who are the rebels to their leadership. Of course, the “expert’s” uniform standards will be those that emanate out of the left-infected schools of education and the vile teachers’ unions and into the commissariat of the federal Department of Education and its policies and regulations. Once announced, they become the excuse for a power grab away from parents.
Nothing is worse for the progressive than a bunch of parents making their own choices independent of the “expert’s” set of coercible rules. They treat the population as cattle to be herded.
For example, these “experts” in the editors’ piece lamented the “pushback” of parents in Michigan against the experts’ much-loved registry of homeschooling parents and their children. Sounds like the registry of Jews of a bygone era. Their contempt for the “pushback” is actually a disdain for citizen involvement, something de Tocqueville praised but upsetting to the gurus of Scientific American. They stooped so low as to resort to child abuse to rationalize a diminishment of parental rights. It’s disgusting. If abuse occurred in one home, it is assumed to be characteristic of all parents who teach their own children, or why else bring it up?
Jews in Nazi concentration camps were tattooed with serial numbers for registration.
Here we have “experts” wallowing in the logical fallacy of composition – “if something is true for the part then that is true for the whole or the group too” (see #7 below). An abusing parent who isolates their kid is transformed into being a defining characteristic of homeschooling. This isn’t “science”. It’s something out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook.
The same stance of this we-know-what’s-best-for-your-kids crowd is the pretext for sidelining parents regarding “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming” children as soon as the kids are dropped into the clutches of school employees. California is the Valhalla of this political sect masquerading behind a mask of “science”.
A huge leap in deplatforming California parents in the upbringing of their own children was promulgated in 2017 in the California Department of Education’s notorious Administrative Regulation 5145.3 (see #5 below). Under the guise of “Nondiscrimination/Harassment”, the young “gender-nonconforming” are accorded unique privacy rights not granted to any other student. The policy puts the child in the parental seat. If the child wishes it so, school employees are obligated to lie or withhold information from parents on their child’s condition. The kid may be transitioning with the assistance of school employees and the parents are kept in the dark. Needless to say, some locally elected school boards are resisting (Chino and Rocklin for instance) while the jackbooted California AG, Rob Bonta, responds with lawsuits to compel compliance.
Up to now, Bonta has succeeded. He even managed to sideline a parent initiative to codify the right of parents to be informed by using his power to title and summarize the proposition as “anti-gay” (all described in a prior post). A California judge bowed to Bonta when the parents sued. That put a stop to signature gathering. Parents of California, this, combined with the strangulation of other educational avenues in the state (charters, private and religious schools, homeschooling) may leave you with no other option but to leave the state to save your kids from permanent mental and physical scarring.
Detransitioner. Charlie Evans has set-up a charity to help people in the transgender community who want to stop or reverse their decision (photo: Stuart Nicol)Helena Kerschner before detransitioning and after
The only child abuse may be choosing to remain in the state.
It is heartening to know that the Supreme Court is putting a break on this stampede to the rule of the unelected “expert” – the kind of person utterly adored by the editors of Scientific American. At the federal level, the decision of the Court majority in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo put to rest the power grab of administrative agencies in areas not supported by law. See, such agencies can only operate within the clear parameters of an underwriting law, if one still considers the Constitution operative. If the law is silent or vague, they can’t freewheel it. Congress must clarify or not. If not, regulators aren’t free to legislate. They’re stuck, not us.
Since the 1920s, the Court has upheld parental rights under the 14th Amendment (with a muddled modification in Troxel v. Granville of 2000, see #6 below). Loper Bright drew a bold line for federal authorities, but has little impact on states whose electorates are infatuated with regulators, even if it means making the kids the sovereigns of their own upbringing under the guidance of empowered “experts”, even if it results in a compelled recognition of your daughter as now your son.
The people running Scientific American are typical of the educated “idle hands” class (in the words of philosopher Roger Scruton). In other words, people imprisoned in the Disneyland of their own mind. Don’t trouble them with reality. They have idled away their time in fantasizing about the many ways to be ludicrous.
As with children, so it is true with many of the college educated: idle hands are the devil’s playthings (Benjamin Franklin). The devil is playing around in the “science” of Scientific American.
RogerG
Sources:
1. The Editors of Scientific American in “Pressroom” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/pressroom/
2. Scientific American editors’ stories in “Stories of the Editors” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/the-editors/
3. “Children Deserve Uniform Standards in Homeschooling”, The Editors, Scientific American, 5/14/2024, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/children-deserve-uniform-standards-in-homeschooling/
4. Thanks to James Mason of the Home School Legal Defense Association in “Why Is Scientific American Going After Homeschooling?”, National Review, 7/5/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/why-is-scientific-american-going-after-homeschooling/
5. California AR 5145.3, imposed on all school districts in the state, can be read at https://simivalley.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=7&clip_id=1953&meta_id=123825. This is Simi Valley USD’s version of it. Scroll down to page 8 and the section “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming”.
6. “The Supreme Court’s Parental Rights Doctrine”, parentalrigts.org, at https://parentalrights.org/understand_the_issue/supreme-court/
7. “Fallacy of Composition – Definition and Examples” in Logical Fallacy at https://www.logical-fallacy.com/articles/fallacy-of-composition/
The federal government is supreme in regulating interstate commerce (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3). Fact, end of story!
But California is a law unto itself, free to screw up states that have the unhappy circumstance of sharing a border with it. In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday 5/14, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo stated the obvious: California policies are jacking up fuel prices for Nevadans as well as Californios (see #1 below). You see, much of Nevada’s western fuel market is fed by refineries and pipelines from California, businesses under the thumb of that state’s multifarious politburos.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, Ca., responds to letter from Gov. Lombardo
Newsom responded to Lombardo in the lingua franca of today’s hard-left Democratic Party by saying that Lombardo is a lackey of “Big Oil”. As if parroting the editor of the Daily Worker (1924-1941, official newspaper of the Communist Party USA), Newsom said, “. . . [Lombardo] knows full well that oil refiners are driving up gas prices and making massive profits . . ..” There’s not much room for the CPUSA in our national political corral since that space is increasingly monopolized by the DNC, especially their California affiliate.
Apparently, according to Newsom, refiners are only greedy bloodsuckers in California, and in a few other states acting as cheap knockoffs of the not-so-golden state. The highest retail gas prices by state are all Democrat fiefdoms. The prices (as of 5/16/2024) range from California’s average of $5.24/gal. to Mississippi’s $3.06. No red state rises above Idaho’s $3.83 (see #2 below). My Montana comes in at $3.48.
Gas prices at Fairfax Ave. and Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, 5/17/2024
Following the Marxist template, as usual, is the Democrat supermajority in the state legislature as exemplified in the Newsom-signed state Senate Bill X1-2. The decree would establish a new commissariat to oversee these latest “malefactors of wealth” with power to investigate and recommend penalties to the state’s uber-commissariat, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).
That’ll do the trick. Just persecute by prosecution the people with whom you rely for your fuel. This won’t work, unless you believe in the efficacy and efficiency of a slave economy. Whips and chains and overseers aren’t the best way to get the most out of people. Unlike the mid-19th century’s era of chattel slavery in the old South, no Fugitive Salve Act exists to compel a people’s acceptance of involuntary servitude to Newsom and company. Flight is always an option, as it has been for the past few decades for the state’s middle class, families, and many businesses. What a time to be in the moving business, one of the few growth industries left in the state.
Never do these people look in the mirror. The state gets sanction from the federal government to exceed the Clean Air Act. More federalism? Not! California gets to throw around its market weight in the form of mammoth regulations, mandates, and taxes on refiners that clearly disrupts the interstate commerce in fuel. Just think, its EV mandate alone by 2035 will force the shipment of fuel onto electric big rigs – or electric trains that don’t exist – further ballooning costs and worsening efficiencies in an already California-tortured industry.
The fuel that flows down its pipelines doesn’t fare any better. It does so under the lash of the state’s immense panoply of eco-commissariats. For Nevadans, what comes out the other end is bloated in cost. Just drive on Interstate 15 up and away from California and you’ll see prices drop the more California recedes in the rear-view mirror. Test it out for yourself.
It would be a dereliction of duty on the part of Nevada’s governor to not look out for the interests of his state. Nevada, like all states, has a keen interest in reviving Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, and end the unwitting delegation of that power to fanatics in Sacramento, if for no other reason than the need to avoid the collateral damage from California’s suicide attempt.
Go get ‘em Gov. Lombardo. And Congress, dump California’s exemption. If necessary, federal marshals should seize control of all the state’s ports and repeal the state’s interference in interstate commerce by truck, railroad, plane, ship, and pipeline. Keep California’s malign effects limited as much as possible to its residents, who regularly vote for the mess. No state should be forced to live under the political toxicity of another.
Remember, the U.S. Constitution guarantees to each state a republican form of government, not a California government – Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Lombardo to Newsom: Act now before gas prices get even higher”, KTNV staff (Las Vegas, Nv.), 5/14/2024, at https://www.ktnv.com/news/lombardo-to-newsom-act-now-before-gas-prices-get-even-higher
2. “Today’s Gas Prices By State”, Kelly Anne Smith and Korrena Bailie, Forbes, 5/16/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/gas-prices-by-state/#:~:text=California%20has%20the%20highest%20price%20of%20gas%2C%20with,average%20of%20%243.09%20per%20gallon%20of%20regular%20gas.
