Two Americas: It’s About Money, Not Race

January 8, 2026 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

How are you going to get through the holidays? Will you bake artisanal bread and play board games?

Others will spend the time dying of fentanyl overdose because that is better than acknowledging their lives had fallen somehow even another level closer to hell. These ghosts of our nation drove overdose deaths to record highs. More than 100,000 Americans OD’ed in a recent year-long period, up almost 30 percent from the prior year. According to one researcher, while some users sought out fentanyl others “may not have wanted to take it. But that is what is being sold, and many people are dying without knowing what they are ingesting.” Imagine reaching a point where you don’t care anymore what drug you’re taking. The majority of these deaths, about 70 percent, were among men between the ages of 25 and 54, men who should be creating or influencing or building cars or welding high steel.

Babies are dying too. Overall the U.S. has the worst infant mortality rate in the industrial world. We’re a world “leader” if you isolate the five worst states, where one out of five women of reproductive age live with a high risk of death and other poor maternal health outcomes, such as post-partum hemorrhage, pre-eclampsia and preterm birth. It is unsurprising the same places where babies die are the same places with poor overall health, high rates of substance abuse, mental health problems, and low socio-economic conditions. I did not mention race but you’re thinking it. Hold on.

I know a maternal health care worker in a “border zone,” a so-so neighborhood near a very rich city. She has two broad groups of clients, roughly half middle class women with an education and insurance, and half women on Medicaid. One group starts prenatal care as soon they learn they are pregnant (and they test often at home to learn ASAP) and one group that shows up in the second trimester for a first visit after they can’t ignore the baby bump anymore. One group has practiced good nutrition since trying to conceive, one group usually drinks and takes drugs and got pregnant by “accident.” One group takes their prenatal role as a duty, the first step in a journey that will lead through enrichment classes and Mandarin lessons and a “good school,” and one sees it as a pain in the ass that interferes with work. If you parsed infant mortality statistics with this divide, one group would be below many developing nations.

Most places talking about the two Americas will at this point invoke race. “To solve a complex problem like maternal mortality, we must better understand why mothers, especially those of color, are dying at higher rates,” says the NGO which compiled some of the latest maternity data. In its own reporting, the woke-standard NYT tries hard not to make it all about race but they just can’t help themselves. They see everything through that lens.

But while you can draw racial lines the reality is, as in the developing world, we have two disparate economies living near but not with each other. They have very little in common other than geographic proximity. They may be coded by race but they are separated by money and education. Racial causality — the thing that causes the other thing to happen — as speculative as it is attractive to those who want that simple answer for everything from how Trump got elected to how to move more Nikes by hiring Colin Kaepernick as a spokesman.

To look deeper into the economic roots of Third World America, Hawaii is a fine laboratory example because it removes race as the easy go-to driver of all things bad. Hawaii has no racial majority. The largest group are Asians at 38 percent, that number itself a pastiche of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and others who see little in common with each other other than your statistical needs. Only 24 percent of the population are white, 10 percent native Hawaiian with the rest a broad spread of ethnicities including 23 percent who are multi-ethnic. It is hard to find a simple BLM answer here, or to isolate the mythical idea of “POC” when almost everyone is of some color.

That’s the new world here in Hawaii where abject poverty (some call it West Virginia with much better weather) lives alongside incredible wealth. The stark disparity (a bad joke would label it black and white) makes broad poverty statistics suspect; a millionaire and a homeless person don’t create an average net worth of $500,000. But there is plenty to see off the beaches, large homeless encampments right out of Grapes of Wrath. For the last nine years Hawaii spent more on public welfare benefits, about 20 percent of the state budget, then it did on education. More than one out 10 people in Hawaii get food stamps (SNAP), though the number is even higher if you include free lunches at school and for the elderly. One out of four women and girls say they can’t afford menstrual products and make do with toilet paper or handouts if they attend public school. Fewer working people means fewer tax-paying people, and Hawaii already vies with California for the nation’s highest state income tax. Hawaii exists in distinct economic microbiomes where the division is not color but income; call it spatial segregation. The cops have devolved into a force that essentially manages the social results of the inequality.

If you want to see it for yourself, do some grocery shopping. At Whole Foods in swanky Ward Village nearly everyone has Amazon Prime and pays electronically. There is a huge cheese and wine section and a butcher counter where the butcher talks to you. A sign explains how the cows were raised. At the seen-better-days Times Market on Beretania there are signs saying “no checks” and “we take SNAP” and the ground beef of unknown origin comes in five pound packs. If Whole Foods has things in a can, they came from Italy. Times has very limited fresh anything. You could walk from one store to the other in 10 minutes but no one would. You could probably look up the infant mortality rates for each neighborhood but it’s pretty clear your guess is already correct. You could do the same with reading levels for a few public high schools on the island and the Punahou School, the private high school Barack Obama graduated from, tuition paid by his well-to-do grandparents. You could visit the “nice” CVS where someone asks if they can help you, and then the one where they lock up the razors and deodorant and watch you from the aisle cap to make sure you don’t steal something else.

And if think Hawaii is especially unique in disassembling race from economic inequality, checkout Nantucket, where presidents spend their holidays. Former President Joe Biden drops by the $30 million Nantucket estate owned by private equity billionaire David Rubenstein. Meanwhile the Nantucket outside the mansion’s gates was one of four counties in Massachusetts that saw projected food insecurity rates for struggling families increase by more than 70 percent. Half the local population who are not multi-millionaires struggle to pay their rent. They are close to 90 percent white.

So how to account for Hawaii, with inequality problems in spite of diversity? Or Nantucket? Hawaii is what we’re all supposed to be aiming at, a fully diverse world where whites are a minority. Nantucket refutes the racial narrative. The same problems of economic inequality exist, and can’t be conveniently blamed on the grievance narrative of choice.

If you are waiting for the solution paragraph here you will be disappointed. There’s probably a German word for what this all is, a set of problems without a solution because no one really wants to resolve them; the poor, dressed up as people of color, are far too handy for Democratic politicians to lose. The real missing word we are searching for here is one that describes modern America, one where some bake bread and play board games to pass the time and others OD on fentanyl and watch their babies die. Every day we blame all this on the ravages of slavery or on systemic racism, we simply allow that gap to grow wider. Almost as if someone wanted it that way.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Denmark’s Immigration Backlash: Lessons for America

December 30, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: Asylum, Denmark, Immigration, welfare state
Posted in: Democracy, Syria, Trump

What happens when a country with a long history of tolerance toward immigration and refugees has had enough? What happens when false asylum claims come to predominate, when immigrants resist assimilation? What happens when left-leaning politicians go too far in protecting the rights of immigrants and not far enough in assuring the rights of citizens?

You get Denmark. These are the real lessons for America in what happened to immigration and asylum policy there, showing immigration is a governance problem, not a moral abstraction.

Between 2019 and 2023, Denmark ushered in what is known domestically as the paradigm shift (paradigmeskiftet.) The policy framework prioritized return of asylees and temporary rather than permanent protection when asylum was granted. In 2021, Denmark became the first EU country to revoke Syrian refugees’ residency by claiming parts of Syria were safe to return to. The Danish reframed the debate and caused a rethinking of mass immigration into western Europe.

For years, Denmark was considered the European Union’s black sheep of migration policy. In the aftermath of the 2015-2016 Syrian migration crisis (driven in large part by the Obama administration’s misdeeds in that country), Denmark adopted increasingly restrictive rules to deter arrivals. The key event was in 2019, when Denmark approved its paradigm shift law that made temporary protection for refugees the new norm. Permanent residence was eventually still available, but subject to, among other criteria, full-time, stable employment. By limiting the duration of asylum (in the U.S. and most of Europe, a grant of asylum is indefinite) Danish authorities made it easier to check whether the grounds of protection were still applicable and, if not, whether deportation was feasible. Residence permits of hundreds of Syrian refugees were revoked. In 2021, Denmark signed a memo of understanding with Rwanda, under which the Danes would transfer asylum seekers to a reception centre in the African nation to wait for their applications, a kind of outsourcing strategy. Denmark later backed away from the plan under intense outside criticism.

These changes were justified by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who said mass immigration exerts undue pressure on the welfare state, particularly harming low-income and low-skilled Danes. “For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalization, mass immigration… is paid for by the lower classes,” she stated. “You cannot allow everyone who wants to join your society to come,” she added in a more recent interview. Other Danish officials say their approach is necessary to protect the welfare system and ensure that benefits are only being offered to residents who fully contribute to tax revenue and other social structures.

Changes to the asylum process were not the only measures a Denmark that had had enough put into place. One of the most controversial was Asset Confiscation (“Jewelry Law”) under which Danish authorities can seize valuables, cash, and jewelry from refugees entering the country. Used only in a few dozen cases to date, it allows police to confiscate cash and valuables worth more than about $1500 from arriving migrants and asylum seekers. This was followed by caps on non‑western immigration. The government required social welfare benefits recipients to work at least 37 hours weekly. Though enforced only spottily, legislation prohibiting niqabs and burqas passed. Residential areas with high proportions of non-Western residents were designated “parallel societies,” and subject to everything from economic redevelopment plans to actual bulldozing. Then there was the so-called “Ghetto Law” which allows authorities to forcibly remove foreigners from neighborhoods if the ratio of non-Western foreigners in those areas exceeds 30 percent. Obviously some of these things would never pass in the U.S., culturally and Constitutionally.

When migrants posing as students began streaming in around these tightened asylum rules, as of May 2025, international students enrolled in non‑accredited programs were barred from working, post-graduation job seeking, or family reunification. Generous cash subsidies (around $6000) are available to anyone agreeing to self-deport. Refugees without residence permits who refuse to voluntarily return to their country of origin are required to stay in departure centers without cash benefits or the right to work. By 2019 some 114 restrictions were enacted within immigration policy to deter would-be migrants.

Surprisingly, under these new rules the quantity of immigration increased but at the same time so did the quality, a critical lesson. In recent years refugees still comprised the largest share (35 percent as of 2022) of Denmark’s non-Western population. This is due to the Danish government recruiting targeted migrants, especially in the health and elder-care sectors, in response to declining birth rates. In 2022 the government introduced a fast-track procedure for certified companies to perform more flexible international recruitment, representing about a third of total worker intake. This is a far cry from the mid-2000’s when ten of thousands of Syrians were accepted without regard to job skills, as is the American system. “We’ll take all the refugees we can get,” a Canadian diplomat told me once, “as long as we can choose which ones.”

Denmark does not want to leave people outside to die. “We did not question that people fleeing need help, shelter, and to be protected. They are not fleeing for fun,” one center-left politician said, noting such an acknowledgement was vital to get fellow party members on board. “Migration numbers were simply so big that they could not be dealt with in a way that is sustainable for the welfare state of Denmark. We understood even then that the migration model was broken and we needed to come up with an alternative.” It was in fact the center-left party, not the right wing conservatives, that brought many of these changes into place while in power.  By adopting tough policies, the center-left Danish Social Democrats took on the far-right Danish People’s Party, whose narrative they undercut. The strategy allowed them to reclaim working-class voters concerned about welfare pressures, job security, and cultural cohesion. The left-center party positioned itself as the  choice for “ordinary people who play by the rules,” a far cry from supporting open borders and standing up for the rights of criminal aliens. Political support for the Social Democrats soared, while far-right parties dropped to low single digits. Immigration ceased to be a dominant public concern. Such buy-in was critical to addressing a massive problem for the benefit of the country over that of the party.

Could the lessons of Denmark be more obvious? Even the Washington Post editorialized positively about the Danish paradigm shift as a model for Democrats. But sadly, Democrats in the United States are not ready to follow the advice. This reluctance is all about Trump, the idea that whatever Trump supports, regardless of its merits, is wrong, and thus their failure to take seriously moderation. How many more elections will pass with one party actively promoting illegal immigration? How far toward the draconian moves of the Danes will America have to go before the Dems recognize what America needs done?

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Don’t Be Afraid: Why You Don’t Need to Live Expecting Dictatorship or Occupation

December 23, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: demagogues, Fear, Weimar
Posted in: Democracy

If I had one wish for my Democratic friends this holiday season, it would be this: stop being afraid. Don’t allow yourself to be manipulated into fear, and from there into supporting demagogues who pop up to take advantage of your fears.

Politics today can sound like a thriller novel where democratic institutions collapse spectacularly in Chapter 1. Every headline not supporting your own beliefs becomes evidence “democracy is in danger.” Watch especially for the ones which use the word “existential.” Every deployment becomes an “occupation,” and every harsh move, including something as non-important as building a new wing on the White House, is read as the next confirming step of a dictatorship. Every decision becomes something harkening back to the Weimar Republic’s fall.

The Democratic party and the media that orbit it learned powerful narratives get attention and motivate voters and donors. They had some early help; the “Obama is a Muslim” meme and kerfuffle over his birth certificate were crude forerunners of this style of politics, emotional overstatement masquerading as vigilance. Those early efforts failed because they had no throughline; each crazy idea has to quickly be topped with something new and crazier. So a celebrity cancellation or social media scandal has to be quickly replaced with desecration of the People’s House and if the news cycle did not produce something fast enough after that, then it was OK to fall back on the old tropes of Trump being a Russian intelligence asset or an actual pedophile, because what cannot be confirmed can at least be repeated. Fear-based narratives exist across the spectrum; the left’s authoritarian panic and the right’s worries about replacement theory are mirror images of a sort. All that is necessary is to ignore or distill complex developments into emotionally charged slogans. This is a terrible way to live, akin to Orwell’s Two Minutes of Hate scaled up to the 24/7 news cycle.

Over-stimulated labs rats will eat themselves to death. Living as if the worst possible outcome is always inevitable is unhealthy for you and bad for the very democracy fear is eroding. There are reasons to dial back the panic and allow America to get healthy again.

Forget what late night says for a moment and remember the United States still has robust legal and institutional checks that make authoritarian takeover impossible. The American system was built with multiple layers of constraint, including an independent judiciary, a legislature with law-making power, a free press, state governments with their own authority, and a civil service embedded in administrative law. These things are robust enough to have withstood the chaos of founding the nation, a brutal civil war which tore the country apart, and the rise in Europe and Japan of real fascism backed by what were then the most powerful armies in human history. The structures which sustained the United States are not theatrical props. They have proven difficult to dismantle, certainly not via an executive order. The system works; last month saw a string of Democratic election victories, and the midterms next year are expected to be tightly contested. The Congress many fear has stopped being a check and balance can on Election Day change into a vibrant opposition. It has happened many times before and if it does not happen this round, it is because the People did not vote for it. Our system allows for change to the right or left, some which you may not like or support but which comes about righteously. Those warning of dictatorship too easily forget Trump was twice elected through the same system that produced Obama and Biden, and every other president.

Aside from Congress, the courts and existing laws are active brakes on power and always have been. The Posse Comitatus Act, the Insurrection Act, and subsequent case law place very real limits on how the federal government can use the military at home. When administrations have pushed these boundaries, judges and state officials have pushed back and in each instance the feds backed down. The Rule of Law held. The friction has not been noiseless recently, as the both the administration and Democrats have their own reasons for trying to make it look like the system is failing (looking tough on crime and installing fear of authoritarianism.) But these things are not theoretical. They show the system working.

While the precise percentage of the time Trump lost in the lower courts depends on which subset of cases you look at (regulatory challenges, injunctions, district court decisions, major rulings), the consistent finding is that the Trump administration lost in court a large majority of the time, somewhere between about 60 to 90 percent. Recent analysis at Stanford shows lower court judges across the ideological spectrum are ruling against Trump at similar rates. He’s lost in 72 percent of rulings issued by Republican-appointed judges and 80 percent of rulings by Democratic-appointed judges.

It is true, an analysis by the Court Accountability Project found, that among 23 Supreme Court rulings and temporary orders related to Trump‐administration actions, the administration secured favorable outcomes in about 90 percent of those cases. The Court has ruled for Trump 17 out of 23 times in emergency appeals in his second term. That’s notable, but hardly proof of institutional collapse and that a whole branch of government has been disarmed. The muscle-tussle between the Supreme Court and lower courts is baked into the fabric of our democracy; just look at the struggle to enact civil rights and end slavery, or to drive home equality in the 1960s.

A cyclical shift toward a more powerful Executive does not lead to “No More Kings,” or any kings for that matter. The Supreme Court itself shifts based on who happens to be sitting on the bench when a given case arises, that group of justices there based on who the People voted into the Oval Office. Future Courts can overturn earlier ones — remember the Dred Scott decision. Sometimes this fits one’s preferences (for example, the Court recently refusing to reopen the issue of same-sex marriage and allowing that to stand as the law of the land) or not (the Court overturning an earlier decision assuring the right to abortion under the same rules across 50 states.) It is not erosion, just change.

Stop being afraid, but do not become complacent. Polling data show worrying trends in collapsing public trust, which weakens democratic resilience and paves the way for demagogues. A sizable share of Americans express concern about the health of democracy and increasingly question whether opponents play by the rules. That is not to be ignored. But fear that equates every aggressive political act with the end of the republic is marketing to immobilize people instead of motivating legitimate action. When the public constantly sees disaster, it trains people to expect the worst, amplifies fear-based fundraising and media cycles, and ultimately corrodes civic stamina. Energy is diverted into alarmism rather than into voting, reform, and participation. Democracy’s real defense is faith, to gently paraphrase President Obama, not in politicians, but in the institutions and fellow citizens who, time and again, have proven stronger than their own fears.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Mayo Clinic: I Had Open Heart Surgery

December 20, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: healthcare, Mayo, medicine, Minnesota, Rochester
Posted in: Other Ideas

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota is like a theme park for healthcare. It is physically larger than two Midwestern football powerhouse universities and employs 40,000 people across its facilities there alone (never mind at satellites in places like Phoenix.) The impression is you can get anything fixed, literally whatever ails you, and I was here myself for a serious heart problem.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

The Pointlessness of Protest Culture

December 9, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: Handmaiden's Tale, No Kings, Ohio, protest, Regime Change
Posted in: Democracy, Trump

Days after President Trump called a reporter “piggy,” a group of women boarded a bus in Ohio for a 36-hour “turn and burn” trip to Washington DC to fight for “regime change.” At least a half dozen protesters were dressed as Miss Piggy. They carried handmade “Impeach, Convict, Remove” signs, transgender pride flags, and others wore the red hooded cloaks and white bonnets made famous by The Handmaid’s Tale. A mother of three teenagers, one of them transgender, explained “Something has to change, and we have to start somewhere.”

I feel bad for her, and the others. They just don’t understand how naive they sound, wanting to believe some signs and a long bus ride might affect anything, never mind something as extreme as forced regime change in a democracy. They are not alone in their naivety; elsewhere, colorful ribbons in the red and green of the Mexican flag weaved into twin braids have emerged as a new symbol of “resistance” among Latinas.

Part of the perceived pointlessness of such protests comes from how institutionalized protest culture has become. In the Midwest labor demonstrations and coal mine strikes of the 19th century, protesters risked their lives to hold up signs while hired Wells Fargo thugs beat them. In New York and elsewhere, draft protests during the Civil War were put down by having the regular U.S. Army fire indiscriminately into the crowd. Anti-war protests during the Vietnam era often turned violent, most notably in Chicago 1968, with phalanxes of helmeted cops breaking up crowds with batons and tear gas. And there was the massacre at Kent State University in Ohio, where National Guardsmen used their service rifles to gun down four and wound nine unarmed college students in 1970. All those at any protest risked rough arrest.

For the women now seeking regime change, what once carried genuine risk turned into political pageantry. Cities now issue permits for marches, police escort crowds along predetermined routes, and the media broadcasts images of the wittiest signs and t-shirts. Everyone takes pictures and the whole typically dissolves into a carnival atmosphere. Bring your kids and the t-shirted dog.

Old protests were dangerous because they seriously threatened entrenched economic or governmental power. New protests are safe because they do not threaten power at all, because power does not take them seriously. Ask the Pink Pussy Hat marchers of 2017, whose efforts failed to stop Trump across multiple administrations. The question is if these actions (along with petitions, social media blasts, hashtags) never deliver outcomes, why do people continue to pour time and moral purpose into them? “This will probably end up in history books, if we have real history books,” said one of the Ohio protestors, dressed as a handmaiden. “I’m glad I was able to be a part of it instead of watching it on TV.”

They are united in a visceral hatred of Trump, and see him as a stand-in for everything they dislike or disagree with. It is not like they adore illegal immigrants, it is just that Trump is opposed to them. They protest seeking nothing short of “regime change” because calls for regime change are easier than the long, unglamorous work of civic participation. People feel they have done something, but the machinery they are pushing against barely notices. Sincerity alone is not a strategy. There is a brutal mismatch the protesters do not see between the scale of their efforts and the scale of actual power.

For example, when Marine One flew over the Ohio women as Trump returned to the White House, fists and middle fingers rose into the air. Though signing your name, holding a sign, or shouting in the street feels good, legislation, budgets, and institutions rarely move by feelings alone. The protest thus becomes not a strategy but group therapy. It is catharsis disguised as activism. The social reinforcement of gathering, even if it is just 36 women from Ohio, validates their own sense of moral vision, that they are part of something meaningful instead of residents in a decayed industrial wasteland.

Notice what the protesters are asking for: regime change here, “No Kings” before that, “End the Patriarchy,” amorphous issues like that. There is little anyone can do about those things, if they are even real. The pointlessness of the act of protest is built into the act itself. So when the next end-of-democracy event arrives, such as a Supreme Court ruling that goes against someone’s wishes, protest becomes a way of reconciling oneself to the absence of change and the reality of failure. Faced with no tools other than a vote statistically very few of them ever exercise, and that only available every few years, protests are a psychological palliative to nihilism. Like calling to make up new rules if a presidential election goes the wrong way, like the Electoral College should be done away with, or that the president should be chosen by the popular vote so Democratic Southern California will decide every election for Ohio women, it is all an alternative to doing truly nothing about the status quo.

The women protestors from Ohio have good reason to dislike the status quo, one enforced on them for the last several decades as the Heartland became the Rust Belt. One protestor, a 36-year-old from Georgia, said the president’s treatment of women was a big factor in drawing her to Washington for her first-ever protest. Yet she described herself as the wife of a disabled veteran and a mother of six who relies on SNAP. Another protester in the group was described as “currently unemployed after spending years on an assembly line building steering wheels for Ford vehicles. Her husband is a fully disabled Navy veteran dependent on benefits from Veterans Affairs. She said she is protesting for him and also for other women like her, for her LGBTQ+ family members, for immigrants in her community and for her 69-year-old mother, who relies on subsidized housing. A constant question that runs through her mind, she said, is, “When is it going to come for me?” Answer: it is already here.

Their socioeconomic precarity makes them vulnerable to political fear, while protest offers them some shred of meaning in a world where they feel little control. Their personal struggles only serve to highlight the unclosable distance between their needs and what symbolic activism can deliver. In the age of Trump, the real engine behind protest culture is not hope but fear. Some hope that their voices matter, sure, but with fear of discovering they do not at its heart. It was a 36 hour bus ride back to Ohio. Maybe they had time to think about some of these things on the way back, before the next protest.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Epstein to the Rescue (Not)

December 2, 2025 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

The Epstein Files are the Left’s white knight, the Golem they hope will finally destroy Donald Trump. It is believed Epstein, a pig of a man now anointed the saviour of the Democratic party, will succeed in bringing down Trump where multiple impeachments, Russiagate, fixer Michael Cohen flipping, endless prosecutions over increasing arcane financial acts, three elections, Late Night, and the gaffe or rudeness of the week have failed. This is unlikely.

One reason the soon-to-be-released Epstein files are unlikely to fatally damage Trump is that very little in the new documents will be truly new. Trump’s past social interactions with Epstein have been public knowledge for decades. Photos of the two men at parties were published long before Epstein’s 2019 arrest. Trump acknowledges knowing Epstein, once calling him “a terrific guy” in a 2002 magazine interview, and later said they had a falling-out. None of this is will be newly discovered in any document dump, and none of it has previously produced legal or immoral exposure. To bring down a political figure like Trump, there must be a revelation, a mediagenic single piece of information that dramatically shifts the known narrative. Without a revelatory moment, the story cannot cross the threshold from speculation to actionable misconduct.

The files released to date contain no evidence of Trump’s participation in Epstein’s trafficking. But it’s not as if the Justice Department’s (DOJ) information about Epstein has been sitting around unexamined. Five years ago, the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility released the results of its extensive investigation into how Epstein secured a lenient plea deal in Florida in 2008. The 348 page document only said the deal reflected “poor judgment.” It also noted the prosecutor in charge of child exploitation cases at the time said that none of the victims he spoke with “ever talked about any other men being involved in abusing them.”

What remains is only speculation. Epstein was arrested in 2019, during the first Trump presidency. Nothing came out. Very significantly, the Biden Administration held the same files for four years and nothing came out. Kamala ran against Trump in a heated campaign and nothing came out. Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking and nothing came out. Of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of celebrities, house servants, airplane mechanics, et al, who would have interacted with Epstein, none have come out, not even perhaps to turn state’s witness and save themselves from a conspiracy charge.

The one man who knew everything, Epstein himself, is dead by suicide. The most convincing victim willing to speak out, Virginia Giuffre, is dead by suicide (though she made no allegations against Trump while alive or in her book.) Maxwell’s strategy is to remain tight-lipped; she will plead the Fifth in the House Epstein probe. This is not to say some or all of that left unsaid may contain important material, just to say despite everything, the hard reality is nothing has come out tying Trump to the crimes. Nothing but wanting it to be so says the new document dump will be any different. It is not a surprise. The files coming out were prepared by the Department of Justice to prosecute Epstein, the sole defendant. Why would they contain critical information about others who could also become defendants but somehow just didn’t? The FBI wrote the documents “did not expose any additional third-parties to allegations of illegal wrongdoing. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

Epstein was also one of the most investigated criminals in modern American history. After his 2006 Florida charges, state prosecutors, civil attorneys, newspapers, investigative journalists, and advocacy groups examined his case extensively. After his 2019 arrest, scrutiny intensified further. Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial produced thousands of pages of documents. Throughout, Trump has been scrutinized by political opponents, media outlets, litigation adversaries, and multiple prosecutors. If any credible Epstein-related allegation involving Trump existed, the likelihood that it would have remained hidden through such sustained examination is extremely small.

Here’s one thing the new documents will certainly contain: the names of well-known people who associated with Epstein. These associations are not evidence of criminal or immoral conduct. The already-known Epstein’s contact lists, party guest books, flight manifests, and social calendars include a vast array of individuals. The mere presence of a name in a contact file, a Christmas card list, or a flight log does not demonstrate involvement in illegal or immoral activity. Nobody but Epstein and Maxwell has faced any judicial scrutiny, as opposed to media-wise.

This distinction matters because the evidentiary bar is extremely high. To bring down a public figure, especially one as lawyered-up as Trump, prosecutors would need corroborated evidence of a specific criminal act, a credible witness, something more than snippets of email, and a clear link tying Trump to the conduct. The Epstein files are messy, sprawling, and most often ambiguous. They reveal Epstein had connections with many people, but they do not, by themselves, yet create a case. Of course in certain circles, such as at Harvard, this might be enough to bring down someone; see Larry Summers. But Trump is different.

The most plausible fallout from the files will occur far below Trump’s level. Trump’s persona is based on the perception that he is constantly under attack from elites, institutions, and the media. New allegations often serve to reinforce, not weaken, his supporters’ belief that he is being unfairly targeted. Take a look back at the Access Hollywood tape, two impeachments, multiple criminal indictments, civil judgments, 34 felonies, and a host of scandals that would have ended the careers of any other politician. Few MAGA voters (and remember, Trump himself is not running for anything ever again) remain who would meaningfully shift their position because of guilt-by-association allegations in decades-old documents. And the media will no doubt overplay any tidbits found, adding to MAGA’s view of them as enemies.

Absent new and concrete evidence, which has not surfaced in any release to date, the Epstein files will generate headlines and endless conspiracy theories but not collapse the administration. Trump has survived scandals far more direct and damaging than ambiguous associations in decades-old files. The Epstein story will continue to matter deeply for victims seeking truth and accountability of course, but in American politics, it is unlikely to deliver the downfall some predict.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

How to Survive Thanksgiving 2025 with Liberal Family

November 25, 2025 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

It all starts with a text: “Can’t wait to see everyone for Thanksgiving! This year, let’s keep it civil!” You remember last year, when someone “accidentally” sent your MAGA cap down the disposer. You know the text was not intended for your cousin who live streams her dietary needs (“I guess no one remembers — again — I’m vegan.”) The text was aimed squarely at you, the family’s only conservative.

Every November families across America who haven’t spoken to each other since last Thanksgiving gather everyone under one roof. You may think this is about cranberries and gravy, but really it’s about not talking politics while everyone wants to, as if a political ceasefire and a political battlefield decided to have a baby. The other 364 days a year the country is divided. Today, it is grandma’s table that is divided, the one with ailing Grandpa Joe who only gets about half the jokes on the Daily Show anymore and Aunt Lisa, who brought the gluten-free Jello salad in an NPR tote bag. It is gonna be a long day, because Thanksgiving isn’t just a meal, it is a ritual of arriving after noon, watching the Detroit Lions lose on TV, and snacking, before a 17 course feast consisting of at least two dishes no one touches (green beans and that Jello salad.) This is not going to be like the time you first heard Dark Side of the Moon.

But this year is different in one important way. This year we won. No more Biden in the White House, no more Hillary, no more serial impeachments and Russiagate to get your cousin with the nose ring to predict Trump will be out of office in a few weeks. Nope, this is our turn, our guy in the Oval Office. The key here for you is the pivot, the deflection, being the bigger man. You already won the next three years worth of Thanksgivings, so why bother with explaining China policy to some bored undergrad relative who also doesn’t want to be there? It’s not like you’re going to end up in anyone’s will after all this anyway. You won’t be alone: surveys show two out of five Americans plan to bite their tongues this Thanksgiving, though it’s unclear if they mean holding back or are actually looking forward to the pain. More than half of Americans say talking about politics with people they disagree with is stressful and frustrating. So to help, here are some tips.

The trick to disarming liberal relatives isn’t to argue more effectively about ICE, it’s to arrive bearing gut busting amounts of carbohydrates. Nothing disarms a political privateer faster than a homemade pie, even if you had to buy it at Whole Foods and everyone can see you replated it. You could quote Ron Paul all day and your aunt will still frown, but show up with a good dessert and suddenly you’re “such a sweet boy.” Save the snark like “voting for Trump doesn’t mean I eat puppies, dammit” for much, much later. Like New Year’s.

When the conversation turns to politics, because, see, your other cousin read this article in the Atlantic, it is time for the strategic nod. Don’t worry when she is staring directly at you and muttering “…And that is how democracy dies until we get a woman president,” just nod like “I heard you and I am chewing. A lot of chewing.” This is your Marvel move, engaged, even thoughtful, and open-minded. You chew. You think of Rush lyrics from 2112. You imagine what you’d reply on X. Think judo not boxing. Keep in mind this hack works better with some gnarly turkey leg meat in your mouth than with a forkful of mashed potatoes, so eat strategically. Remember, your cousin probably thinks her earnestness is genuine and she is saving democracy between bites.

Don’t show the table anything from your phone. No one has ever changed their political mind because of a social media post, and they certainly won’t do it over stuffing. Also, don’t forward anything that proves a point. Of course you were right. Just smile.

Bring along the nonpartisan version of Uno. The red and blue cards become orange and purple, and there’s a veto card that skips the turn of a politically chatty player and makes him change the subject.

Remember the dog doesn’t care about politics. The dog loves you unconditionally because it cares not for tax policy or SNAP benefits as long as it gets a bowl of horrid dry crumbly Costco dog food once in awhile. Even if he’s not your childhood pet, sneak him bits of turkey breast under the table and it’ll be cool later when you need him, as dogs agree with everyone who drops food. When things get too intense, simply spring up and announce “Looks like the dog needs a walk” and retreat. You’ll return far less concerned about the discussion, which has shifted to Kamala-Buttgieg chances in 2028. No dog? Step outside for that important work Zoom you just remembered. “No, grandpa, I can’t believe what’s happening in this country, a work call on Thanksgiving, what has this world come to?”

Try “coping ahead.” Before arriving for Thanksgiving, visualize a bingo-style card of things you might hear that would otherwise provoke you, stuff like “Democracy is literally on the line,” or “Fox isn’t a real news station,” or “how could anyone have voted for someone convicted of 34 felonies” or anything to do with Orange Man (center square.) Just be glad words like “mansplaining” and “whataboutism” seem to have run their course. Each time something said does hit on your card, enjoy a small sip of eggnog, or something from that bottle of grossly sweet sherry that’s been on the table since the Carter administration.

Timing is everything. As the table dissolves over coffee into competing monologues stolen from Colbert, slip away and collect your jacket. If someone tries to rope you into “one more thing about January 6th,” feign a sudden fascination with helping wash the dishes. Usually the serious political relatives are still at the table while the others move into the kitchen, relieved another Thanksgiving has ended without 911. Your exit line should be light as the door bumps you on the way out, something like “next year, let’s all agree to just fight over football.”

Scientists say sharing a meal releases oxytocin, the bonding hormone that promotes forgiveness. You will put that to the test this Thanksgiving; that’s better than pretending you have the flu and skipping out. And remember, our democracy, like Thanksgiving, survives not because we agree, but because we keep showing up to talk to each other. Go Lions!

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

The Improbability of Trump’s Third Term

November 18, 2025 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

Jon Stewart joked Trump “already has the merch,” referring to a red “Trump 2028” cap. Steve Bannon keeps teasing “a plan” to keep Trump in office. Russian dissident Gary Kasparov warns of democracy’s demise. It’s a perfect storm of satire, conspiracy, and clickbait, but none of it adds up to a third term for Donald Trump.

It gets worse. Salon ran a piece headlined “Trump’s bulldozer is aimed at more than the White House” trying to tie together the demolition of the East Wing and the “Versailles-like ballroom” which will take its place into an elaborate metaphor of Trump destroying democracy to take a third term. “Post-democratic America,” they call it, finding a partisan ink blot test in the wallpaper choice. They quote an expert on public memory, who explains “Trump’s physical makeover of the White House represents a larger authoritarian project to reshape American society.” Something something about building monuments to oneself so people forget any predecessors. The expert also does not like the new gilding in the Oval Office.

So is it becoming increasingly clear that Trump has no intention of ever leaving the White House? As Jon Stewart said, you don’t build a new extension on your home if you intend to move soon, right?

Who knows what goes through Trump’s mind when he thinks of 2028, but we do know there is no way he is going to run for a third term. Three things make a genuine third-term bid for Trump impossible: the Twenty-Second Amendment, the extraordinary difficulty of changing that amendment, and the legal implausibility of proposed way-out-there workaround schemes. Talk of a Trump third term is rhetorical, a tool for both sides to wind up their bases, and bust chops for the opposition.

To start, there is the 22nd Amendment, passed after Franklin Roosevelt died in office, which bars two-term presidents from being elected again. The 22nd Amendment was passed in an era when Americans were concerned about the ease of dictators overseas to assume office. After Hitler and Mussolini both gained power, there was a concern that the same could happen someday in the United States. This concern was only exacerbated by the rise of Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected to an unprecedented four terms in a row during WWII. So the key language in the Amendment is straightforward: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” That single sentence would, on its face, bar any candidacy by a person who has already won the presidency twice, as Trump of course did in 2016 and in 2024. The Constitution’s text is unambiguous about the electoral limit. You’d need a lawyer like TV’s Better Call Saul to find a loophole.

So why not just change the language of the 22nd Amendment to allow someone to run for a third term? The Founders made it very hard to change the Constitution. It is clear in the original text that to repeal or materially alter an amendment requires either a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states, or a constitutional convention called by two-thirds of state legislatures and subsequent ratification by three-quarters of the states. Both routes are ridiculously high bars, impossible in the divided America of Red and Blue, and have been successfully navigated only rarely in American history, most prominently for something as significant to our democracy as ending slavery, or allowing women to vote. So the 2025 House resolution by Representative Andy Ogles (R- Tennessee) to permit a third presidential term was nothing more than political grandstanding.

That leaves open the possibility of a Vice President Trump, standing beside the next elected president of the United States, maybe J.D. Vance. The idea would be Trump serving as vice president on a ticket in 2028, then ascending to the presidency when Vance resigns early in his term. One problem is that the Twelfth Amendment (“No person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice President of the United States“) bars someone ineligible for the presidency (i.e., Trump having already served his two terms) from serving as vice president. A counter argument would be in such as scenario Trump would not actually be elected as president, he would simply assume the highest office after President Vance conveniently resigned. But Trump himself ruled out the vice presidential gambit, saying the idea is “too cute. Yeah, I would rule that out because it’s too cute. I think the people wouldn’t like that. It’s too cute. It’s not – it wouldn’t be right.”

There are a couple of other scenarios to get Trump in for a third term, but they are for dorm room bull sessions and Constitutional nerds only. For example, the Leftist-favorite 25th Amendment says the vice president becomes president if the office is vacant: “In the case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.” Whoever is next in the line of succession “becomes” the President. It is hard to imagine such off-label word play with the bedrock of Constitution making it past the Supreme Court. In fact, one of the three justices Trump nominated, Amy Coney Barrett, agreed with the obvious reading that the 22nd Amendment bars a third term for anyone. “That’s what the amendment says,” she told Fox News.

That should pretty much end any talk of a third term for Trump, but remember, the people who keep asking him about it in the mainstream media suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome and have no intention of dropping something so good for headlines, despite how obvious the truth is. And Trump, ever-ready to mess with their heads, will always troll along. We heard much of this already in 2020, after Trump lost the election, and pundits were predicting tanks on the White House lawn and the Secret Service having to arrest Trump to get him out of the Oval Office. None of that happened then, and none will happen in 2028.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Harvard Conservative Mag Suspended for Hitler Comments

November 11, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: 1A, First Amendment, Free Speech, Harvard, Hitler, Nazi, Salient
Posted in: Democracy

The Harvard Salient, one of the lone conservative voices on one of the most liberal of campuses, was suspended from publication after language echoing a Hitler speech appeared in an article. The bigger story is one of a collision between defenders of free inquiry and the boundaries that define expression in elite institutions. It comes at a very bad time, as Harvard and President Trump themselves battle over the limits of free speech on campus.

Salient magazine, originally founded in 1981 during the Reagan era, was brought back to life in 2021 to provide a conservative counterweight at Harvard. It is editorially and financially independent from the university, but subject to the oversight of a Board of Directors made up of faculty and alumni, and they are unhappy.

At issue are several lines from the magazine, according to multiple sources including the New York Times. In its September print issue, the Salient published an article by student David F.X. Army that included the lines “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans,” echoing the words Hitler used in a January 1939 speech to the Reichstag in which he gleefully forecast that another world war would lead to the annihilation of Jews. The Salient piece also argued “Islam et al. has absolutely no place in Western Europe,” and called for a return to values “rooted in blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own.” The article went on to argue Europe’s native populations were being displaced by migration from Africa and Asia. There was also another Salient story, published following the September killing of Charlie Kirk, which described the left as “our enemies.”

The Board of Directors fired back, stating “The Harvard Salient has recently published articles containing reprehensible, abusive, and demeaning material — material that is, in addition, wholly inimical to the conservative principles for which the magazine stands. The Board has also received deeply disturbing and credible complaints about the broader culture of the organization” without specifying which articles it found reprehensible or what complaints it had received. An investigation is underway, and while that is ongoing the Salient is not to print. Its editor, however, has vowed to ignore the shutdown order, claiming this was all a mistake.

Editor-in-Chief Richard Rodgers wrote an email to the Salient’s mailing list calling the suspension an “unauthorized usurpation of power by a small number of individuals acting outside the bounds of their authority.” He pushed back against criticism in the school newspaper “branding The Harvard Salient as little more than a hate group that should be monitored and, if need be, silenced.”

Rodgers said the Hitler line was not intentional. He wrote “neither the author nor the editors had recognized the resemblance and that the phrase long predates the Third Reich,” though the Hitler quote should be well-known to students of history, forming the philosophical backbone of the Nazis’ plans to eliminate the Jews from Europe. Rodgers did not appear to address the use of the terms blood and soil. “Blood and Soil” (Blut und Boden) was also a well-known central part of Nazi ideology. It combined racial mysticism (“blood”) with agrarian nationalism (“soil”), expressing the belief that the German people (the Volk) were spiritually bound to their native land. It appeared in propaganda posters, speeches, and art glorifying Aryan farmers plowing German soil, visual shorthand for racial and national unity. It strains belief that Harvard students would be unaware of those associations or their emotional weight they carry in the context of an article on third world immigration into Western Europe.

This should have been just basic First Amendment stuff familiar to Salient’s overreacting board members. Though Harvard, as a private institution, isn’t bound by the First Amendment, it claims to uphold the same values of free expression. Hate speech, accidental or not, is not outlawed by the First Amendment; indeed it is speech that insults and angers that needs the most protection, whether coming from the right or left. It is heavy-handed of the Board to suspend publication based on what is known at present. If there is something more, the Board is obligated to surface that immediately to support their decision and maintain credibility. Their reflexive punishment risks confirming the narrative that elite institutions can’t tolerate ideological diversity. At the same time, Salient should understand when dealing with subjects as emotionally laden as Nazi philosophy, explanation and context are crucial. Ignorance is a poor excuse here.

Somewhere in the vast Harvard educational complex, there are journalism, history, and law classes which in 2025 teach just those very things. Everyone should learn their lesson and move on. The problem is we live in 2025, where dispassionate classroom wisdom often fails on the ideological battlefield.

The Salient case arrives in the middle of Harvard’s and America’s broader struggle between the political right and left. The university has spent months under fire from Donald Trump, who accuses it of ideological bias and hypocrisy. Though Harvard has distanced itself, noting the Salient is governed by an independent board, the controversy inevitably reflects on the university. Harvard cannot duck the larger issues here. As Salient editor Rodgers wrote about the censorship “The traditionalist student becomes the bigot. The publication that prints their ideas becomes the threat. ‘Fascism’ is no longer a historical reference but a weaponized cliché, a way to place opponents outside the moral guardrails of the University.” He concludes Harvard is a campus that proclaims free expression while quietly cultivating fear of it.

Truth, veritas, Harvard’s motto, emerges through debate, not censorship. Harvard remains a mirror of America’s polarization, a place where liberals preach tolerance but struggle to practice it, and conservatives at times crudely test the limits of provocation in the name of free speech.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

New Law Needed to Combat the Surveillance Deep State

November 4, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: Arctic Frost, cell phone, Crossfire Hurricane, Fourth Amendment, January 6, search
Posted in: Democracy, NSA, Post-Constitution America, Trump

Surveillance powers granted to the Deep State allow the FBI and others to spy on Americans as a method of control. Those worried about a slip into authoritarianism must look past whomever is in the White House at any one time and see what new technology and old laws has allowed us to become.

The latest example comes from an FBI document obtained by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) which reveals the FBI targeted eight Republican senators’ personal cell phones for “metadata” collection as part of its Arctic Frost investigation into the events of January 6. One Republican member of the House was also spied on. Metadata shows when and to whom a call is made. It also shows the duration of the call and the physical location for both ends of the call.  It does not require a warrant. It does not require probable cause. The FBI can simply subpoena a company like Verizon or T-Mobile and demand they turn over all the metadata records they have on someone. The FBI teaches local law enforcement how to do it to spread the net.

Whistleblower disclosures to Grassley also revealed the FBI confiscated the government cell phones of President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence during its Arctic Frost investigation. The FBI was seeking to uncover links among the elected officials and people associated with January 6. The goal was to prosecute if possible. To help keep the spying secret, the document detailing this all was stored in an FBI Prohibited Access file.

Grassley’s oversight exposed the existence of Prohibited Access files, a hereto unknown system the FBI used to hide access from most of its internal staff, including the Inspector General, and Congress. Information related to the election-year Crossfire Hurricane spying on Trump associates believed to be connected to Russia was also hidden away inside Prohibited Access files. Grassley is currently seeking more files. Of particular interest are those relating to FBI Special Agent Walter Giardina, who somehow (coincidentally?) played a role in the investigation of Trump advisor Peter Navarro, as well as Arctic Frost, Crossfire Hurricane, Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation of Russiagate, and the Dan Scavino, Roger Stone, and Hillary Clinton cases.

This information raises fundamental questions not only about the separation of powers, political neutrality of the FBI, and the role of congressional oversight, but also about the scope and strength of Fourth Amendment protections in the digital age. Specifically, should warrantless metadata collection be an unlawful search? What compels judicial oversight and safeguards against abuse? And how do we reconcile so-called investigative priorities with constitutional rights?

The old argument here is that the contents of the calls themselves were not accessed. This argument is hopelessly naive. It is dangerous for the FBI to collect phone metadata because such information, including who one calls, when, and for how long, can reveal deeply personal patterns of behavior, associations, and beliefs, even without the content of conversations. Metadata can expose a person’s political affiliations, medical conditions, romantic relationships, and religious practices through network analysis (Did you call your doctor? Then your boyfriend? Then the pharmacy?) When analyzed with AI, these patterns create a behavioral map more invasive than traditional surveillance, one that enables profiling, manipulation, and coercion. The very data once dismissed as “non-content” now serves as a digital fingerprint of private life.

Metadata can also serve as an “index” for the NSA and other agencies to go back and harvest the actual contents of the calls. Metadata is one of the most powerful spying tools available to the Deep State. One remembers former FBI Director Edgar J. Hoover, who in the 1950s and 60s used spy data showing powerful people in secret relationships as a tool to influence their decision making regarding his beloved FBI. Hoover had no idea what the crude surveillance tools of his day would morph into post 9/11.

Listening in on the actual contents of conversations still requires a court-approved wiretap. Yet the collection of metadata is still warrantless. In the pre-cell phone era landmark decision Smith v. Maryland (1979), the Supreme Court held an individual does not retain a reasonable expectation of privacy when dialing numbers from their telephone because the telephone user “voluntarily conveys” those numbers to the phone company, and thus they are “not privy to an expectation of privacy” under the Fourth Amendment. That case concerned pen-trap data (dialed numbers, an olde-timey version of what is now part of metadata) not actual call content. The Court’s ruling has been interpreted to apply broadly to metadata held by third parties (e.g., telephone companies, internet providers, etc.) without accounting for the fact that modern day metadata based on cellular technology reveals far more today than it did in 1979.

A base tension in modern Fourth Amendment doctrine is when the collection of “low invasive” metadata becomes sufficiently revealing, pervasive, or targeted that it should trigger heightened protections akin to a “search” and thus require a warrant. Yet based on current law and practice, obtaining days of call data related to lawmakers’ political coordination in a high-stakes situation sits in the clear legally. The metadata collected during a hyper-sensitive time such as January 6 arguably could yield far more insight than the old Smith paradigm envisioned. At the very least it has a chilling effect on legislators’ free deliberation (the Constitution’s speech and debate clause) and information gathering, as well as risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch. At the extreme are things like blackmail.

Note only GOP senators and a congressman were targets in the January 6 metadata investigation. This makes obvious the partisan weaponization of law enforcement in this case, but leaves open the idea that the tools of surveillance are available in any administration. Even if legal authority exists, the decision to use it in politically sensitive circumstances by any party risks undermining faith in impartial justice and underscores the power of the Deep State to intervene in some of the more important events in our democracy. It pokes holes in the separation of the branches.

The technological and human factors constraining the gathering and processing of information in the past are gone. Many violations of the Fourth Amendment are held in check only by the goodwill of the Deep State, the ultimate nightmare for the Founders. The Fourth Amendment, based on 18th century paper searches, 19th century physical searches, and pre-cellular and pre-Internet 20th century changes, must evolve through legislative reform and judicial reconsideration to ensure digital surveillance is subject to the same constitutional limits as traditional searches and stem the ever-growing power of the Deep State. The elected officials swept up in the metadata investigation surrounding January 6 are just the latest canaries in the coal mine.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

No Kings Marches are Just Memes, Empty as Social Media “Content”

October 28, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: 2028, Anwar al-Awlaki, Democrats, due process, No Kings, Obama. Hillary
Posted in: Democracy, Post-Constitution America, Trump

I’m behind on the news. Did the No Kings marches across America finally change everything? Did Trump vanish, Greta ascend, and democracy restore itself?

I actually swung by the local No Kings march. A lot of the crowd were seniors, almost all white in our blue state, decked out in tie-dye for the women, grey ponytails for the men, and bandanas for the dogs. To them he was Donny Dementia, Impotus, Orange Man (many variations), Mango Mussolini, Hitler stuff, The Lying King, Cheeto Benito, Comrade tRump, and many more unprintable here. Back in the day many of these same marchers could only come up with “Tricky Dick” to call out Nixon.

Their signs reflected the variety of issues under protest, including some oldies but goodies like reprising endless demands around abortion rights, freeing Palestine again, Defund the Cops and Black Lives Matter, Abolish ICE, of course, and multiple ones saying if Kamala or Hillary were president we’d all be having brunch now. One adjacent said “No Kings, Maybe a Queen Someday.” They don’t seem to fear dictators who’ll dictate the right way, I guess. Points for funny slogans to attract “likes” for the sign; there was a “No Kings But Burger King” and one which read “Tylenol Over Tyranny.” A favorite was “Ikea has a Better Cabinet.” Leftists could even get away with homophobic mockery about Putin they’d condemn from the other side.

It was clear almost anything fit under the No Kings meme. In fact the whole thing was simply a 3-D version of what Democratic social media has become. Everything was perfect until Trump and anything from your Netflix bill to war anywhere could be fixed today if Trump would disappear. Words like “fascism” were just pop synonyms for “stuff I don’t like.” What stood out most of all was the sense that the people may be united, not on the range of topics represented, but on their childish hatred of one man.

At the same time as all this righteous anger, the protests offered no road map for restoring institutional balance or civic trust. The lack of cause specificity in the signs was not accidental; it was integral to the movement as emotional glue to attract enough marchers to secure TV coverage. Like many modern protest movements, No Kings thrived as social media, where symbolism and identity matter more than outcomes. The movement’s decentralized nature allowed anyone to participate without hammering out a specific agenda. However, that same openness made it difficult to hold anyone accountable or to sustain pressure on political institutions. And once the marches ended, participants returned to comfortable partisan echo chambers.

It was thus no surprise that in the crowd ignorance was bliss, as random conversations with marchers suggested a wet blanket-like naivety about real Nazism and Hitler, or the mechanics of impeachment or the 25th Amendment, both of which had their supporters. Both crews seemed under-informed that successful employment of either would lead to an equally-hated President Vance that same day.

What made the protest’s moral certainty most jarring was how little awareness there was of how ongoing and bipartisan the “king problem” has been. There seemed no sense that Trump’s didn’t “create the danger of presidential dictatorship, he inherited it.” No one remembered any No Kings marches when George W. Bush granted himself vast powers of domestic surveillance, and to imprison people without due process after 9/11. No one protested much when Bush, without a word from the Supreme Court or Congress, tortured prisoners at secret dark sites and then allowed his CIA to destroy most of the evidence. Obama ordered wedding parties in Afghanistan drone killed while sipping coffee in the Oval Office, and authorized the assassination of American Citizens via those same drones without any due process. He started and/or continued undeclared wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan. His use of the Espionage Act against journalists was egregious and authoritarian. Joe Biden essentially cancelled his party’s presidential primaries and tried to appoint a chosen successor. His FEMA workers improperly collected data about political affiliation of disaster victims. The politicized distribution of hurricane aid money before the 2024 election was no “isolated incident,” a Homeland Security report concluded. Nobody wants to admit America has a bipartisan comfort with executive over-reach on their side. The new boss looks a lot like the old boss, just at times poorly mannered.

“Millions flooded the U.S. streets for the No Kings protests,” wrote one Substack pundit, “to oppose a monarchy which does not exist without making a single tangible demand. Power was not challenged in any meaningful way. The status quo wasn’t disrupted in the slightest.” It was catharsis, self-therapy for political anxiety. It was theatre. It was a self-delusion that watching Gavin Newsom lose in 2028 would be an act of revolutionary resistance. The good news is the No Kings I observed broke up on time, as an unrelated Pride group had a permit to march right after them.

The sad thing is this group of people actually thought they represented moral America. They ignored with gusto the reality that roughly half of the nation voted for Trump and a large number continue to support Trump and his broader political philosophy, especially on immigration. There was no attempt among the marchers to persuade anyone, simply to condemn ideas, many deeply held by the Republican electorate. The marchers served as little more than a reminder of how the Democratic party lacks any real affirmative vision beyond opposition. Without sustained engagement in electoral politics or detailed proposals for reform, No Kings, like Occupy Wall Street and BLM before it, is just neo-hippie ritual rather than a catalyst for lasting change. Like the people who post nothing but AI-created anti-Trump memes repeatedly to their Facebook accounts (and this was indeed a Facebook crowd, not a Trader Joe one) there is an immediate sense of accomplishment, that infamous social media dopamine feedback rewarding performance over accomplishment. You know, like holding a march.

That all this is the face of the opposition party is news mostly only to the marchers. Democrats’ struggle to articulate an issues-driven agenda has created a dangerous dichotomy the Wall Street Journal already noted months ago: although many voters are unhappy with Trump, they trust Democrats even less. Only a third of Americans view them favorably, the lowest for decades.

“Who cares,” the White House deputy press secretary wrote about the marches. But the emptiness of No Kings matters because it mirrors the state of politics heading into an election year. If Democrats hope to win over a divided country, they need to move beyond memes and into policies that actually improve lives. Instead, they are deepening the hole by sustaining a government shutdown over an issue few Americans prioritize. If they want to win in 2026 and beyond, they must relearn how to govern for the majority, not just oppose on behalf of a minority. Otherwise it’s just talk — and noise isn’t power.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

State with Toughest Gun Control Laws Headed to Supreme Court for Spanking?

October 20, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: gun control, Hawaii, Wolford v. Lopez
Posted in: Democracy

It is no surprise Hawaii, with some of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws, now finds itself before the Supreme Court, seeking to defend its position against a challenge that could reshape many states’ approach to firearms. Hawaii has forced on its citizens one of the lowest rates of gun ownership via some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country. Let’s see if the latest challenge brings the Aloha state just a bit closer to the broader gun freedoms most Americans enjoy as a right.

The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a major case on gun rights, Wolford v. Lopez, taking up the constitutionality of a Hawaii law (a similar California law is also referenced) that bans the possession of handguns in most commercial places. Existing Hawaii law already bars people from carrying guns on beaches, in parks, and in bars and restaurants that serve alcohol. The specific law under review aims at establishments like stores, hotels, and malls, where people can carry guns only with the permission of the property owner. Under current law, entering a gas station, supermarket, or even a parking lot with a legal handgun constitutes a crime in Hawaii. The default rule in most other states is gun owners can carry firearms onto private property unless they have been told otherwise.

The plaintiffs argue in their petition the law made it “impossible as a practical matter to carry a firearm for lawful self-defense in Hawaii.” “Because most property owners do not post signs either allowing or forbidding guns, Hawaii’s default rule functions as a near-complete ban on public carry,” U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in court documents. The Trump administration urged the justices to take the case, arguing the law violates the Court’s landmark 2022 ruling finding the Second Amendment traditionally and historically gives people the right to carry firearms most places. Four other states still have laws banning guns in areas often referred to as sensitive locations, though similar presumptive restrictions for guns on private property have been blocked elsewhere, including in New York, with its own almost-impossible-to-work-around restrictive gun laws.

The United States is a country uniquely defined by its relationship with firearms. The Second Amendment has shaped American culture, politics, and law for more than two centuries. Yet while the Constitution sets the framework, each state enacts its own set of restrictions. Hawaii stands out for having some of the most stringent gun laws in the nation, making it ripe for the current court challenge to set an example. Hawaiian gun laws reveal the tension between individual rights and presumed public safety, as well as the ways in which local context (Hawaii is one of the bluest of blue states, in which the local Democratic primary usually chooses the winner as the Republican candidate in the general election is seen as nothing more than a necessary evil) influences broader constitutional debates.

Here’s how it works. In order to legally buy a gun in Hawaii you must be at least 21 years old (most states set the bar at 18) and a U.S. citizen. You cannot have commited a felony, or any a crime punishable by more than 1 year in prison, any crime of violence, a criminal offense relating to firearms or the illegal sale or distribution of any drug.

You then start the process at one of the islands’ few gun shops by choosing your weapon — your upcoming permit applies only to this specific gun. You then go to the police for that “permit to purchase.” This application includes a signed affidavit from your healthcare provider, including any mental health providers, that you are not a danger to yourself or others. The cops demand from you a HIPPA waiver, and Hawaiian law protects health care providers from civil liability in connection with the information (potentially including prescriptions) they provide law enforcement. You are also required to take a gun safety course available through licensed gun dealers.

There is a local and national background check, one that requires your permission to include your fingerprints and ID information in the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) Noncriminal Justice Rap Back Service. With Rap Back, a notice will be sent to the Hawaiian PD if, for the rest of your life, you engage in any criminal activity. States not using Rap Back depend on you to self-report your own criminal activity, possibly years later. At present 11 states including Hawaii use the program.

There is a 14-day waiting period on all permits. After the 14-day waiting period the permit will be valid for only 26 calendar days. With the permit you can buy the gun, but still have to register it online or in some cases physically bring it to a police station for inspection and official registration. Keep in mind the law requires firearms be stored locked, unloaded, and separate from ammunition.

But don’t go too far with your new gun. As challenged in the upcoming Supreme Court case, Hawaii is also known for its restrictive policies regarding carrying firearms in public. For decades, the state functionally banned concealed or open carry by requiring applicants to show “exceptional” need, such as proof of specific threats to their safety, before a carry permit would be issued. Very few permits are granted and Hawaii consistently is among the lowest rates of carry permits in the nation. Unique to Hawaii, the county police chief has the final authority and must personally sign off on all gun carry permits. The chief is named in the law as the issuing authority, and previous cases confirm the chief’s personal signature is required. Carry permits are issued only for handguns, and are prohibited for rifles and shotguns.

This comprehensive registration system allows law enforcement to maintain a record of nearly every firearm in the state, creating a government database that could be misused for confiscation or unwarranted surveillance.

Because this policy raises serious constitutional concerns it has faced significant legal challenges, especially in light of recent Supreme Court decisions. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) the Supreme Court established the Second Amendment protects the right to carry firearms in public for self-defense. Hawaii’s law, which presumes firearms are banned on private property unless expressly allowed, will now be tested against this precedent. In Bruen, the Court struck down New York’s “proper cause” requirement for carry permits, declaring it unconstitutional. Because Hawaii’s law was nearly identical, the ruling forced the state to revise its permitting process. As a result, Hawaii now issues more concealed carry permits. Yet across the entire state only 2,200 people hold a concealed carry license. By comparison, Florida has the most concealed carry permits, with 2.56 million. Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Texas also have over one million permit holders. 

Change in restrictive states seems likely. In addition to the New York Bruen case, which softened Hawaii’s carry laws, and the current Supreme Court challenge on private property carry, the Hawaii law prohibiting gun ownership between the ages of 18 and 20 is the subject of a 2024 lawsuit now moving forward. Plaintiffs filed in U.S. Circuit Court a motion for summary judgment in the case, urging the court to find that Hawaii’s age limit on gun ownership violates the Second Amendment. Hawaii is the only state to have a complete ban on gun ownership for those 18-20.

The Supreme Court’s evolving interpretation of the Second Amendment means states’ restrictions face new legal scrutiny. The Court’s decision in the upcoming Wolford may clarify whether states can flip the presumption of carry rights on private property, setting a national precedent with implications far beyond Hawaii. The ruling will not only determine Hawaii’s future but may serve as a test case to redefine the limits of state authority over firearms nationwide, signaling how far local governments can go in restricting a constitutional right.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

U.S. Troops Have Invaded American Cities Already!

October 14, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: Jade Helm, posse comitatus, Robin Sage, RUT
Posted in: Democracy

Earlier this month President Trump and Secretary of War Peter Hegseth met with over 800 senior military leaders. What happened afterward is a sign of our times. The media portrayed the meeting as unprecedented, when in fact such gatherings on a smaller scale are routine. The big takeaway created by the mainstream media was that American soldiers will be coming to invade your cities. The bad news: it has already been done, over multiple administrations. Once again Libs have lost their mind over nothing new.

Speaking of losing their minds, it is worth wandering through some of the media memes surrounding this meeting before most everyone settled on the hometown invasion one. As soon as the plan was announced, Twitter historians exploded, referring to some meeting Hitler once held with his generals, proof Trump was calling the leaders together to have them swear an oath to him. That did not happen, so the meme switched to what a waste of money holding the meeting was, those busy generals having to fly in. Anyone who has been near the military is familiar with such gatherings to hear a commander’s “intent” and so pass it downstream. People familiar with the military also might know how much the services spend everyday just being around: it costs about 1.5 million dollars to run a Nimitz class carrier for one day, but let’s clutch pearls over airline tickets for the brass. So that meme flopped.

Media outrage ignored the long bipartisan history of draft deferments. For a few days social media focused on showing photos of the leaders and adding sound bubbles to them about things like Trump being a draft dodger and thus not respected. No bubbles were seen explaining Joe Biden, a life guard in high school, got out of the military on a deferment for asthma. And Bill Clinton used a college deferment. George W. Bush avoided Vietnam after his dad got him a domestic desk job in the Air National Guard. Obama just said no.

Never mind all the late night jokes. The same comedians who thought Trump was Hitler last week will tell you this week it’s fascism to ask soldiers to do more pushups.

What the media settled on as the final meme for the meeting was a line by Trump about the military needing to watch for “enemies within” and perhaps use American cities for training. The media ignored the line in every government employee’s oath of office, the one that for a couple of hundred years has referred to enemies foreign and domestic. They’re pretending it’s a revelation when it’s been actual boilerplate for decades. They also treated the idea of training in American cities as something new and terrible, another step towards fascism. The problem is the military has for many years deployed to cities, and has for many administrations, Republican and Democrat, regularly used our cities as kinetic training grounds.

We’ll leave for another time the details of the Posse Comitatus Act, a 1878 federal law prohibiting the use of the military to execute domestic law, except to note what Libs bleat on about Trump violating has a sordid past. The Act was passed under pressure from the Southern states during the Civil War Reconstruction era to prevent the military from being used to oppose Jim Crow laws in the South. It is thus ironic that some of the most significant deployments (notice how things change when you write “deployment” instead of “occupation” or “invasion”?) were in the 1950s and ’60s, when the U.S. military and National Guard were sent to Southern states to enforce federal laws against racial discrimination when local law enforcement refused to do it.

The growing drug problem in the United States and the inability of federal and local law enforcement officials to meet the challenge of massive drug inflow led Congress in 1981 to enact legislation providing for military cooperation with civilian law enforcement officials. Although recognizing the Posse Comitatus restrictions, the law opens the door for extensive use of the military in civilian law enforcement. The Libs seem unbothered by this use of American soldiers on our soil.

Looking back, troops were also used to suppress race riots in the 1960s and 70s, and to quell a multi-day riot in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict. The Trump administration more recently also deployed National Guard troops and Marines in Los Angeles and elsewhere to respond to protests set off by the immigration crackdown. All of this took place, over a period of decades and with many changes in the Oval Office and Congress, without leading the U.S. into authoritarianism, fascism, martial law, or ending our democracy. Some would even argue putting down a riot that paralyzed a whole city might have helped restore democracy, not smite it. So that should clear up Lib panic number 1, the idea troops in our cities is unprecedented.

That leaves Lib panic number 2, that soldiers will use our cities as training grounds. Again, been there, currently doing that.

The military, primarily special ops, regularly trains in major urban areas. It’s a chance for soldiers to practice in a real city while still safely in the U.S. It’s referred to as Realistic Urban Training, or RUT.

For example, in August 2022, black helicopters dove amid the buildings in downtown San Antonio as soldiers moved through parking lots wearing quad-lens night vision. Residents were told they may “hear low-flying helicopters, simulated gunfire, and controlled explosions during periods of darkness.” In September of that same year, police in Phoenix warned the public the city and nearby Peoria, Arizona, would be the scene of “air and ground operations” for “essential military training.” In August 2025, such training took place in Newman, Georgia, consisting of “rotary wing and ground mobility operations and ground based close quarter battle training.” In 2019, U.S. Army Special Operations Command conducted an exercise near Raleigh, North Carolina that ended up being “louder and more disruptive to the nearby neighborhoods than the city anticipated.” That same year, an Army exercise over the Dallas-Fort Worth area had dozens of residents calling a local news station asking why so many military aircraft were flying over the city. Similar exercises took place in Los Angeles in 2019 and 2020, New York 2019 and Tampa the same year, Boston 2013, among other times and places. There is no master list but there are many examples.

There’s also the more well-known Robin Sage exercise, held four times a year since 1974 across 15 North Carolina counties and cities. Special Forces candidates not only conduct controlled assaults, but also live, eat, and sleep in these civilian areas. There was also the somewhat infamous Jade Helm exercise in 2015 which deployed 1,200 soldiers in areas spanning from Texas to California.

Elvia Kelly, a U.S. Army Special Operations Command spokesperson, said units training in “real world” locations like cities provide invaluable experience. “Training off of a military installation allows an exceptional level of realism while enhancing training value. It is meant to enhance soldiers’ skills by operating in an unfamiliar and realistic environment,” Kelly said. “Training in unfamiliar environments provides Army special operations forces new and different training experiences that help ensure they remain at the highest state of readiness.”

It must be exhausting for Libs to go through these kinds of freak outs every week, no matter what happens large or small. So please relax, there’s just nothing new to see here.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

School Refuses Admission to Whites Citing “Tradition”

October 7, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: Blum, Harvard, Hawaii, Kamehameha Schools, Students for Fair Admissions
Posted in: Democracy

Citing “tradition,” a private school refuses admission to whites in favor of anyone who it judges to be a “Native Hawaiian.” But things may change. The group that brought down affirmative action at Harvard in front of the Supreme Court now has its sights set on forcing equal admission policy on Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii. This is one of the latest battles over how to right old wrongs, and whether modern discrimination is the answer to historic discrimination.

Kamehameha Schools, a private K–12 system founded through the last will and testament of once-upon-a-time Hawaiian royal Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop to serve Native Hawaiian children, is facing a new legal challenge to end its 140-year-old admissions policy to favor students of documented Hawaiian ancestry. Bringing the challenge is a formidable enemy, the non-profit Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA.) The Arlington, Virginia-based group launched a website seeking plaintiffs to contest Kamehameha’s policy, saying the preference is discriminatory and unlawful. The group asks “Is your child barred from Kamehameha Schools based on ancestry? It is essentially impossible for a non-Native Hawaiian student to be admitted to Kamehameha. We believe that focus on ancestry, rather than merit or need, is neither fair nor legal, and we are committed to ending Kamehameha’s unlawful admissions policies in court.”

You may recognize Students for Fair Admissions, the organization which this summer reached a settlement with the Department of Defense ending race-based admissions at West Point and the Air Force Academy. In June 2023 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the group in two landmark lawsuits, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina. The suits asked, as will likely the upcoming suit against Kamehameha Schools, three questions: can race be a factor for admission, has Harvard violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by penalizing Asian American applicants by engaging in racial balancing, overemphasizing race and rejecting workable race-neutral alternatives, and whether a university can reject a race-neutral alternative because it would change the composition of the student body, without proving that the alternative would cause a dramatic sacrifice in academic quality or the educational benefits of overall student-body diversity. In short, can race alone continue to be an admission factor?

Except maybe in Hawaii, where the weight of tradition and cultural reparations is being loaded up to challenge the Supreme Court decision that race-conscious admissions policies violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Kamehameha Schools frame the Native Hawaiian-only admissions policy as a remedial measure rooted in the 1883 will of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the last direct descendant of the original national founder King Kamehameha. Bishop (whose name travelers may recognize from the famous Bishop Museum in Honolulu) endowed in her will a massive land trust to reverse the steep educational decline she witnessed among Hawaiians. She specifically stated the money was to go to a school for Native Hawaiians, who at that time were either banned from white, missionary-run schools or forced to abandon their native language and culture in order to attend. Most Native Hawaiians trace the discriminatory practices against them all the way to 1778, the “discovery” of the islands by British explorer James Cook. His men along with subsequent waves of whalers and rogues nearly destroyed the local population through the import of diseases like measles, smallpox, and venereal diseases aplenty. They were followed by Western missionary groups, stout believers who wiped out the local language and forced natives to live under Christian standards. The final straw came in 1893 when the United States forcibly claimed the islands, later to annex them, imprisoning the last ruling royal family member. A sordid history, built on discriminatory, colonial practices. But what about 2025?

Kamehameha Schools is a private institution, which says it “gives preference to applicants of Hawaiian ancestry to the extent permitted by law.” Qualifying for this preference is done through a black-box internal process run by the school itself called the Ho‘oulu Verification Service. The Service not only makes the crucial initial decisions, it also “reserves the right to review ancestry status at any time if new information becomes available.” No specific criteria is publicly listed, though applicants are advised about obtaining original birth and court documents. The goal is to earn a place on the Hawaiian Ancestry Registry/Program, whose own goal is to “verify Hawaiian ancestry through biological parentage regardless of blood quantum.” One can see how it is impossible for a child with two Caucasian parents, or two Hispanic parents, to qualify for preference at Kamehameha Schools.

Then there is Students for Fair Admissions. Its leader, Edward Blum, in an op-ed published in a local Hawaiian newspaper, argues the Kamehameha policy violates Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which forbids race-based exclusion even in private schools. He says he supports the Kamehameha Schools’ mission to educate children in Hawaiian language, culture, and stewardship of the land, but racial preferences are neither necessary nor legal. “SFFA recognizes that Kamehameha was founded out of love for the Hawaiian people and a determination to lift up children in need. Opening admissions to all races does not betray that trust. It honors it in a way that is both moral and lawful,” Blum wrote. “The school can keep its identity, its curriculum, and its priorities without barring children of other races.”

The next step is to see how successful Blum’s Students for Fair Admissions can be in finding plaintiffs, students who believe they were denied admission to Kamehameha Schools based on race. This story has been covered by every local television news station. Protests in favor of the schools’ policy have been held at the state capitol. The taxpayer-funded state Office of Hawaiian Affairs stated it stands in solidarity with Kamehameha Schools — “Princess Pauahi’s [Bishop] will must be protected. Our trusts must be respected. Our futures must be self-determined.” Many local politicians have come out in support. Even the once righteous ACLU in Hawaii publicly supports Kamehameha.

Against this background, Blum’s potential lawsuit faces an uphill fight to locate plaintiffs. If it succeeds, initial challenges will be filed in Hawaiian courts, unlikely to lend a sympathetic ear. It will take years, and deep pockets, to push the case as far as it will likely need to go, to the Supreme Court, as with Harvard. But Kamehameha Schools has deep pockets of its own (as did Harvard.) Kamehameha’s endowment was valued in 2024 at $15.2 billion, comprising $10.5 billion in investments and $4.7 billion in commercial real estate throughout Hawaii. Following the American annexation many Hawaiian royals took possession of vast tracts of then unwanted scrap land. As development took over the islands, the land soared in value and the royals benefactors’ profited mightily. Today the Bishop Trust is one of the state’s largest private landowners.

As an example of how far Kamehameha Schools will go to defend its admissions policy, in 2003 student “John Doe” sued claiming the admissions process favoring Native Hawaiian children was discriminatory. A federal appeals court upheld the school policy (though in a dissent, one judge said the schools’ “worthy” mission nonetheless violated “the Supreme Court’s requirements for a valid affirmative action plan.”) Yet when the student sought to bring the case to the Supreme Court in 2007, Kamehameha quickly settled with him for a reported $7 million and the case was dropped. Four additional students later challenged the admissions policy, but when the case reached the Supreme Court in 2011, the justices without giving a reason refused to hear it.

Native Hawaiian affairs are the third rail of state politics, and the mission of Kamehameha School’s is near-sacred to its many supporters. They have the funds to fight this proposed lawsuit for as long and as hard as necessary. The onus is now on Blum’s Students for Fair Admissions to find a plaintiff with proper standing to sue, and then to embark on the long, upstream struggle for racial justice.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Letter to a Friend Who Now Hates Me

September 30, 2025 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

The Heckler’s Veto Came for Charlie Kirk

September 23, 2025 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

A week before it happened, over 1000 students at the university where Charlie Kirk was assassinated signed a petition asking that he be banned from speaking. Many others came to the event hoping to see Kirk shouted down, the Heckler’s Veto. One assassin exercised the ultimate stop to the exercise of free speech, a bullet into Charlie Kirk’s neck. Violence against the First Amendment exists on a scale. It only takes a little nudge to move the dial the wrong way.

The Heckler’s Veto refers to a fascist tactic where a person or group of people literally shout down a person exercising their First Amendment rights. Free speech was never intended to mean whomever can literally “speak” the loudest, of course. The dial moves, with the natural end of such thinking is mob rule enforced by an assassin’s bullet.

Legitimate ways exist to challenge speakers, including engaging them or ignoring them entirely. In contrast, using a Heckler’s Veto or worse to keep unpopular speakers from expressing their views not only stifles a particular idea, but threatens to chill public discourse in general by discouraging others with controversial ideas from sharing them. Who wants to stand up only to be shouted down by a mob, online (for example, via hacking, deplatforming or denial of service attacks) or offline via a bully boy (punch Nazis in the head) or a bullet?

Protesters cannot unduly interfere with communication between a speaker and an audience. The Supreme Court concluded the government’s responsibility is to control those who threaten or act out disruption, rather than to sacrifice the speaker’s First Amendment rights. Balancing the rights of the speaker, those who wish to hear them, and those who wish to protest is complicated. But simply shutting down one party entirely, or allowing one party to block the rights of the others, is illegal. It is a tactic of Brownshirts. Yet it is easy in divided America to claim the struggle against fascism (racism, misogyny, white supremacy, etc.) overrules the old norms. Imagine the criminalization, capped by the death penalty, of certain thoughts and beliefs. Then look online (and on CNN and MSNBC) to see the cheering over Kirk’s death, the gleeful belief he deserved to die because of what he believed. Or listen to presidential wanna-be and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker who said about political violence “I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it” as if Kirk’s death was retribution.

Though it appears the killer’s motives were “anti-fascist” or something, it matters little. Regardless of what some social media post or irrational manifesto might say, his action is in itself a political one on its face, with political results up to and including threatening our most basic right to free speech. It would not matter to history if the Reichstag fire were started by a sloppy janitor smoking or hardcore ideologues; the result as far as society is concerned is the same.

There might even be some room to argue about that if our society were not at present so skewed against the idea of free speech. From 1984 through every dystopian movie, as well as the sordid history of real dictatorships, the loss of free speech was supposed to come from the top down. A powerful man crushes the press, thugs take over TV stations, that sort of thing. Nobody foresaw the loss of free speech would come – by popular demand – from The People themselves.

Yet that seems to be the way things are going. The sixth annual College Free Speech Rankings, released by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) only the day before Kirk was killed, show a continued decline in support for free speech among higher education students. Students of every political persuasion show a deep unwillingness to encounter controversial ideas at an age when they once were typically putting up Che Guevara posters in their dorm rooms.

“This year, students largely opposed allowing any controversial campus speaker, no matter that speaker’s politics,” said FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff. “Rather than hearing out and then responding to an ideological opponent, both liberal and conservative college students are retreating from the encounter entirely. This will only harm students’ ability to think critically and create rifts between them. We must champion free speech on campus as a remedy to our culture’s deep polarization.” Students now see speech that they oppose as threatening.

The idea students are running from difficult ideas is bad enough. But the next statistic is chilling: a record 1 out of 3 students now hold some level of acceptance – even if only “rarely” — for resorting to violence to stop a campus speech. At my own midwest alma mater, 76 percent of students say shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus is acceptable. It is thus no surprise that when hundreds gathered at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise for a candlelight vigil honoring Kirk, the peaceful event erupted into violence when a local Black Lives Matter activist rode through the crowd on a scooter shouting obscenities, leading to a physical confrontation.

Giving up on free speech is no longer some sort of out-there viewpoint. A recent poll found that while only 2 percent of Democrats and 3 percent of Republicans support violence against opposition party leaders in general, that rises to about 10 percent for opposition party leaders who enact “harmful or exploitative policies.” The former president of the now-defunct Newseum (itself once dedicated to honoring the First Amendment) argues people have developed an alternate understanding of free speech, with students in particular believing “offensive” speech should not be protected, particularly when the offense is directed at groups defined by race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.

Under such circumstances political violence to silence speech should not be surprising. It should just be expected. It is not a turning point. It is a point on a spectrum. Charlie Kirk will not be the last to die.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

U.S. Gets Internal Immigration Enforcement for First Time

September 16, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: 9/11, ICE, Immigration, INS, Visa, visa express
Posted in: Democracy

The millions of illegal aliens resident in the United States got here primarily through two avenues of neglect, exacerbated by a lack of internal immigration enforcement. Here’s how the system works, and what has changed under Trump.

Many aliens simply walked in, using the wide-open southern border. The others, perhaps the majority over the years, were issued legitimate tourist or student visas abroad by a Department of State more concerned with facilitating travel than protecting America. Those illegals simply stayed in America as they pleased, as long as they pleased, doing whatever they pleased, whether that be working out-of-status or in the extremis, going to flight school and conducting the attacks of September 11. There was no one to interfere with their plans once a visa was issued and they were admitted to the U.S. because America for decades lacked any form of internal immigration enforcement. Until now, and now everything has finally begun to change.

The system works like this. A Department of State employee abroad at one of our embassies or consulates issues tourist, student, and temporary worker visas. While the terms of those visas are set by law, the standards of adjudication (i.e., who actually gets a visa under a part of the law called 214(b)) are largely determined by mid-level officials at each overseas post. Once issued, the visa is valid, in the case of most tourist visas, for ten years. That means the person issued that visa can use it to enter the U.S. once or as many times as they like, during a ten year period. There is no further review of circumstances that may change in the person’s life, or their home country, during those ten years. There are an estimated 55 million valid such nonimmigrant visas in existence in the hands of travelers from Niger to Iran, from China to Russia. In FY 2023, the State Department issued over 10.4 million nonimmigrant visas, any  holder of which could apply to enter the U.S. As the numbers keep growing exponentially as staffing stays the same, scrutiny inevitably must drop.

The mantra during the 1990’s, when I was a visa officer as a young State Department employee, was to issue visas, lots of visas, as conveniently as possible. We were told by our bosses we were not law enforcement and our duty was to facilitate travel. As policy we took full advantage of the ability to waive personal interviews for as much as 40 percent of our clientele. We were trained to overlook certain overstays in the U.S., and to not question or review decisions made by others. This mania for issuance reached its peak with the Visa Express program. Visa Express was a Washington-sanctioned State Department program in Saudi Arabia that allowed most Saudi nationals to apply for U.S. visas without going in person to a U.S. embassy or consulate for an interview. The idea was to streamline visa processing, since Saudi Arabia generated huge numbers of applications and in-person interviews were seen as burdensome. Three of the 19 9/11 hijackers got their U.S. visas through Visa Express. Some had gotten their multi-year tourist visas years before. But Visa Express was not an anomaly; most posts overseas had something similar in place. It happened to be Visa Express in Saudi that made 9/11 possible, but it could have been any of us, whispered visa officers globally. It was policy.

Programs like Visa Express were done away with in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, only to creep back a few years later. The Trump administration has now mandated near 100 percent personal interviews once again. Other changes were imposed on a recalcitrant State Department, including a requirement to fingerprint all visa applicants, extensive use of facial recognition technology, and closer liaison with the intelligence agencies. But the prime directive of facilitating travel still remains. It is part of the culture and demands some sort of backup, some sort of internal enforcement.

Once handed his visa, the traveler applies to enter the U.S. at one of hundreds of ports of entry, run until 2001 by the predecessor to Homeland Security, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The visa holder is stamped in for a period of time, typically six months for tourists. A side system exists where people from 41 certain “vetted” countries need no visa at all. In FY 2023, the United States welcomed approximately 18 million visitors to the U.S. under the Visa Waiver Program. Once any of these people left the airport, up to now, almost none had any contact with any form of immigration enforcement, a massive oversight involving everyone looking the other way as the number of illegal aliens in America grew.

I handled the case of a Syrian man. He entered the U.S. on a tourist visa years earlier, and no one cared that he was obviously not a tourist. He attended community college without a student visa because no one at the college cared, received food stamps for awhile, got a driver’s license, upgraded that so he could drive a taxi and work full-time, and eventually bought a house. He even became a notary public in pursuit of his real estate license. At each instance the government officials he encountered did not care he was an illegal alien, if they even knew. He learned he could do what he wanted in America, that the law meant very little. When I was able to deny him his new visa, he asked me a question that has haunted me ever since: of all the people, why do you care? (FYI, he married a Syrian-American and got a waiver for his ineligibility.)

One extreme example of time allowed in the U.S. is student visas. Most international students are admitted for “duration of study.” That means as long as they stay in full-time status, as determined by the school or university mind you, not ICE, they can live and work part-time in America. And weep not; many of these “colleges” are run by fellow nationals out of store fronts, offer no classes, but for a fee validate student status. Some students live in the U.S. in “soft” status for a decade or more (this will soon change to a set, limited time frame under new DHS guidelines.) Other aliens benefit greatly from bogus asylum claims. They are allowed to live and work in the U.S. while the claim grinds through the courts, something a clever lawyer can drag out for years. Then, finally given an order of deportation, under the policy of no internal enforcement, they simply left the courtroom and resumed their illegal life.

At one point the number of illegals grew so high that an amnesty was granted to, for a moment, reset the number to zero. The immigration amnesty was in 1986, under President Ronald Reagan, with the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). This law offered a pathway to legal permanent residency (and eventually citizenship) for most undocumented immigrants who had entered the U.S. before January 1, 1982 and had lived continuously (albeit illegally) in the country. It also provided legal status to seasonal agricultural workers who had worked a minimum number of days as illegals in America. It had the should-have-known but unexpected consequence of reshaping Latino communities, especially in California, Texas, and the Southwest, with long-lasting political and social effects. But employer sanctions in the IRCA were weakly enforced under the no internal enforcement policy, and unauthorized hiring continued. Border enforcement ramped up somewhat, but without creating new legal entry channels for low-wage workers, and without any internal enforcement of immigration law against the new batch of illegal entrants who snuck through, undocumented migration resumed as usual.

Under Trump, things have changed. One of the most significant backstops to so many visas being issued abroad and then promptly forgotten about is a new plan to review the more than 55 million people who have valid U.S. visas for any violations that could lead to deportation. The State Department said all U.S. visa holders, to include tourists and students, are now subject to “continuous vetting,” with an eye toward any indication they could be ineligible for permission to enter or stay in the United States. If such information is found, the visa will be revoked, and if the visa holder is in the United States, he would be subject to deportation.

The pre-Trump eras reflect how U.S. immigration law was often little more than symbolic. Before Trump, the United States pursued immigration enforcement policies concentrating on border security while neglecting the nation’s interior. Both Democrats and Republicans tolerated the presence of millions of illegal aliens, balancing weak enforcement with political and economic considerations. Since Trump’s second administration came into power, the most obvious change in immigration policy is the current campaign by ICE to locate and deport aliens in the United States illegally. This summer storm has been a long time coming. This is a step that the flaccid immigration system demanded for decades, as local, state, and Federal authorities turned a blind eye toward illegals walking free out of court rooms, walking free from prisons, and living any life they chose, good or bad, in America. There is no other country in the world so lax on internal immigration enforcement, and the time has come to play catch-up on the millions of cases allowed by so many officials to be in America. It isn’t authoritarianism or fascism, it is enforcing laws on the books for decades for the first time.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

The Real Cost of Illegal Immigration

August 18, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: alien, AOC, Immigration, Prostitution
Posted in: Democracy

A stretch of Roosevelt Avenue running through AOC’s Bronx district is nicknamed “The Market of Sweethearts,” due to the chaotic bazaar of prostitution there. Most workers are illegal aliens from Central America. It is impossible to provide a definitive number of undocumented immigrant sex workers in the United States due to the clandestine nature of this activity. However, Polaris, an anti-trafficking organization, analyzed information on sex trafficked women to find some 52 percent were illegals. Another study found 72 percent of sex workers were immigrants. That’s uptown, AOC territory. In Midtown, Korean illegal immigration (since there is no visa for prostitution, it is in a way 100 percent illegal aliens, i.e., “unlawful presence”) runs the show. Downtown, it is the Chinese. Elsewhere, borough by borough, different nationalities do the nasty work. New York speaks 700 different languages, just not to each other.

According to The New York Times, sex work has exploded into a “$3 billion-a-year industry” relying on tens of thousands of foreign women ensnared in a form of modern indentured servitude. “The frequently middle-aged women who work in parlors with names like Orchids of Asia and Rainbow Spa,” continues the Times, “are often struggling to pay off high debts to family members, loan sharks, labor traffickers and lawyers who help them file phony asylum claims. In some cases, their passports are taken and their illegal immigration status keeps them further in the shadows.” A federal law enforcement official said the most common method for smuggling women from Asian countries was either a fraudulent tourist visa or a fraudulent work visa. Many came as students, then overstayed to work in the sex industry. What woman, given other legitimate, livable opportunities, would choose to work as a prostitute?

For awhile I worked in a number of New York’s pizza restaurants. Almost to the man all the kitchen work was done by likely illegals, somehow primarily from Ecuador. With my nascent Spanish it wasn’t easy to get to know them, until I hit on some key phrases. It was too sensitive in most cases to ask if the guy was illegal (after all, I was a older, white man just like the owner, who pretended not to know) but I eventually learned that asking how long it was for the guy between visits to his family back home was a good way to get at the idea. Many had been working six days a week for years. I was paid minimum wage plus alongside tips; they got less and worked longer and harder. That’s why, while eating your pizza waiting in line to visit Ellis Island, the slice was only $1.99.

Ellis Island celebrates the historical version of America’s immigration fantasy — Uncle from The Old Country arriving with $5 to grab the American Dream. In fact, the great wave of 19th century immigration, first from Ireland, and then from Italy and Eastern Europe, was driven from poverty at home (same as today) but was drawn by the massive need for cheap, disposable labor in the United States. Instead of staffing pizza joints and massage parlors, Irish immigrants (technically not “illegal” since the U.S. had no real immigration law at that time) were tricked to leave New York City and dig the Erie Canal by hand for pitiful wages. The Irish were also trafficked to New Orleans, where many of the city’s levees and canals were built by laborers who worked under grueling conditions. This came at a cost. Tens of thousands of Irish workers (nobody kept track) lost their lives due to horrific working conditions, malaria, and dangerous flooding. The term “Irish slaves” is sometimes used to refer to the harsh reality faced by these laborers.

That era of exploitation on the eastern and southern coasts mimics that of the great Midwest and western agricultural states. Decades after men like Cesar Chavez though they broke the back of Big Ag, which was using Mexican and other labor to make huge profits, little has changed. I just got an email from Amazon/Whole Foods saying some of the prices on my weekly standard delivery order are going up due to “increasing labor costs.” In the agriculture sector, 76 percent of the exploited persons are immigrants and nearly half of all those are from Mexico.

And that touches the third rail of importing cheap labor to the United States, the actual slave trade, which preceeded mass immigration. Call it racist to bypass the forced nature of this “immigration,” but the parameters are terribly similar. Both involve people being denied basic rights and protections, both situations involve exploitation — long hours, little or no pay, unsafe conditions, and both enslaved people and illegal alien workers are in vulnerable positions, often unable to leave or seek help safely (such as trafficked aliens.) It is certainly not the same but the cheap, exploitable labor that drives prostitution and farm work in modern America is the same in the basics as the cheap, exploitable labor which drove the antebellum global agrarian economy.

The pool of vulnerable labor is by necessity large, with some 18.6 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S. And demanding even more immigration, and playing cops and robbers with ICE, is a key platform for the Democratic party today. So what are they fighting for?

They are for the same base of exploitable labor that has been a part of the United States from near the Founding, only this time dressed up in modern moral dress. The farm workers the Democrats celebrate as hard working men of the soil are just people imported for their vulnerability. Those 19th century immigrants were sacrificing all for a better future by laboring in some of the worst sweat shops of the century (my maternal grandfather was an unschooled child laborer in a candy factory.) It looks good for many family stories to focus on those black and white relatives who came over (and that certainly is the myth behind the Ellis Island version of things) but in reality it hides the same dark tale still being written today.

Despite her pretty words about freedom, AOC supports the sexual exploitation of women and girls. Gavin Newsom supports the use of Mexicans in his “sanctuary” state as long as they do back breaking field work. Eric Adams is ensuring his New York is maintained with inexpensive restaurant food and plenty of sex traders. Forget the sob stories about hard-working dads plucked out of the meat packing plants (undocumented workers make up  up to 50 percent of the meatpacking workforce; meatpacking companies recently paid out $8 million for child labor violations) by Gestapo ICE and focus on what is underlying all those workers being drawn here in the first place. Illegal labor is the engine of a shadow economy and always has been, now fully supported by Democrats.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Trump vs. Immigration, Full-Spectrum Approach

August 12, 2025 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

While all eyes are on what will someday soon be a battle royale in the Supreme Court over whether or not Trump’s plan to do away with birthright citizenship is constitutional, he has elsewhere taken a full-spectrum approach to the immigration problem. Most of the changes now in play will engender court challenges, and some may require legislation, but they show Trump is receiving thorough, detailed advice on immigration, and moving where he can.

The first proposed change is to toughen up the civics test immigrants must pass in order to become U.S. citizens (there are also plans to change the required English exam.) Joseph Edlow, director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) said the civics test was “not very difficult,” and allowed immigrants to easily memorize the questions and answers. He argued this was not really “comporting with the spirit of the law.” He said the test must reflect assimilation expectations. The test was made up of largely random questions and was non-standardized until 2008, when the George W. Bush administration introduced a basic civics test requiring applicants to correctly answer six out of 10 questions. During Trump 1.0 the number of possible questions was raised to 128, and the number of correct answers to 12 out of 20, before the Biden administration switched it back in March 2021 to the current, easier, format.

The current actual list of 100 potential questions, and answers, is online to memorize. The test is oral, and the USCIS Officer will ask the applicant no more than 10 of the 100 civics questions; those age 65 and above with significant time in the U.S. face a smaller battery of questions and can do the civics test in their native language. All other applicants must answer six out of 10 questions correctly to pass. If they fail, they can retake the test one more time. Most TAC readers would hopefully pass without much preparation, based on their 8th grade U.S. government high school class, so give it a try. If you need a refresher, USCIS has what looks just like an 8th grade U.S. government high school textbook online. All in all, it is a test worth toughening up for immigrants when the prize for getting things right is American citizenship.

The next potential change has to do with the infamous H1-B, the skilled worker visa that everyone agrees we need but no one can agree how it should be administered. The latest initiative out of Trump’s Department of Homeland Security would be to eliminate the current lottery system. At present Congress allows only 85,000 H1-B visas to be issued a year, a number dramatically below actual need/demand. Applications are tossed into a drum and 85k are chosen at random for further processing. This puts the British Nobel prize winning quantum physicist on par with the fake credentials of the Indian web designer. DHS is hoping to replace this lottery with a “weighted selection process” of some kind. The Institute for Progress, a nonpartisan think tank, argues the economic value of the visa program to the U.S. could be increased 88 percent if applicants were evaluated based on seniority or salary, and the lottery done away with for good. A researcher at the Economic Innovation Group said “Giving away these visas randomly is an enormous, missed opportunity to attract truly scarce talent that would benefit American businesses and communities.”

USCIS is revisiting the public charge rule, which bars green cards for applicants likely to take public assistance. The rule has existed since Ellis Island days but was more strictly interpreted during Trump 1.0 to include non-cash benefits like Medicaid or housing aid. The Biden administration returned to guidance that did not take non-cash benefits into account.

Foreign students have already received significant attention from the Trump administration, with visas cut off or reduced to certain American universities alongside renewed scrutiny for those applicants granted visas for elsewhere. Students’ social media, for example, is being scanned when they apply for a visa. In Niger, all visa processing has been suspended in part due to a 27 percent overstay rate among students. Foreign students in the U.S. have found themselves more often subject to deportation, such as Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist detained in March 2025.

The next step is Trump’s Justice Department has launched legal challenges in states which allow undocumented, illegal alien college students to pay the tuition rate reserved for in-state residents. That price can often be half of what out-of-state American students or legal foreign students are responsible for. There are about 408,000 undocumented students in U.S. colleges. The Justice Department argues these tuition laws unfairly offer a benefit to foreigners unavailable to U.S. citizens and legal residents and wants it stopped. Attorney General Pam Bondi said “The Justice Department will relentlessly fight to vindicate federal law and ensure that U.S. citizens are not treated like second-class citizens anywhere in the country.” Texas has already dropped the favorable treatment of illegal alien students on its own. Following Texas, Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla) while serving in the state legislature, introduced a Florida bill that ended the tuition break in his state.

Also on the chopping block are favorable tuition policies for the 119,000 illegal alien students protected under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) program, which encouraged in-state tuition for these students. Scholarships available exclusively to DACA students (i.e., not available to American citizens) are being looked at as discriminatory and thus unconstitutional.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

The Colbert Report: Overreaction and the End of Democracy

August 11, 2025 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

Sunny Hostin claims Stephen Colbert’s cancellation is a “dismantling of our democracy.” An X commenter wrote “Democracy is when Colbert is on television.” Sunny is either a host on “The View” or she has fallen off Venus and is unused to Earth gravity. She epitomizes the overreaction that has overtaken rationale thought and replaced political discourse in America.

As background for those who have not fallen with Sunny, Stephen Colbert is a political shouter who has been a fixture on late night TV for decades, starting out on “The Daily Show,” having his own satire show “The Colbert Report” and now hosting “The Late Show.” Democracy in America, however, predates Colbert by some 200 years. Things came to an unfunny conclusion of sorts in July when parent company CBS announced Colbert would go off the air next year for financial reasons. That last thing is what set off the Venusians.

Colbert was a Trump critic. Which is to say whatever Trump did or said on any particular day, later that night Colbert would mock, ridicule, and otherwise shout hatred toward, in front of a woke audience pre-triggered to bray for more blood. It wasn’t funny, didn’t even try to be funny, just Two Minutes of Hate each night. As Orwell wrote, this forced expression of negativity was a key mechanism for maintaining social control, reinforcing the Party’s ideology, and preventing independent thought. It is a baseline for processing information. So it was with Colbert, plus a musical guest. [Applause]

Nobody among his audience, or for that matter anybody who voted Democrat, thought the reason for Colbert’s demise was “financial reasons.” Every X post, every statement issued by a hip Democratic Senator said the same thing: Colbert was canceled because he criticized Trump, often stated in the form of “the regime” or something Hitler-esque. We have gotten to the point, said one Facebook meme, “where those who make fun of the Dear Leader are disappeared.” They all seemed to believe it, and “I Stand with Colbert” signs appeared at the usual protests. On air Colbert told CBS to f*** off, while his mentor Jon Stewart composed an entire musical number consisting of the words f*** off to CBS. Biting satire. [Applause]

It was several late nights of this until little bits of “truthiness” (a Colbert term) came out. “The Late Show’s” ad revenue had plummeted after the pandemic. “Gutfeld!” beat “The Late Show” in the ratings for 21 straight months. Rationale sources explained the Colbert show loses $40 million for CBS every year. Of the network late night shows, Colbert’s had the smallest footprint on social media. The format of late-night television, wrote The Guardian, “was a living relic of a different time, when a youth-skewing audience would reliably pop on linear television at 11:30 pm. The field has been contracting for years, with programs hosted by Samantha Bee, James Corden, and Taylor Tomlinson ending without replacement.” Ad revenue for the genre as a whole was down 50 percent from Trump 1.0 and the Covid years. “It’s long been assumed,” continued The Guardian, “the hosts currently in these once-coveted chairs would be the last, their programs expiring when they decided to step down.” And if Paramount axed Colbert because the White House didn’t like it, why did they give $1.5 billion to “South Park,” who literally the next day attacked the President harder than Colbert ever has (it portrayed Trump begging for sex from Satan)? That night Colbert riffed off “South Park” to make a micropenis “joke” about Trump. [Applause]

Colbert actually was canceled for financial reasons. None of that mattered, because the Orange Man had scuttled another piece of democracy and we were one step closer to fascism. Everybody said so. If Trump supported it, the left must oppose it. If the left opposed it, it must be part of America’s creep toward fascism. Nothing is just a problem, a thing, a disagreement anymore. Everything is life or death, at least until the next meme spikes the bloodstream of the MSM and social media to call the left again to arms. It should be seen as the kind of biting satire “The Daily Show” used to be capable off before it started to view itself as the last gasping voice of freedom (plus commercials.)

As with Colbert, the obsession with overreaction finds leftists getting tangled up in supporting the most bizarre things.

For example, Robert F. Kennedy’s plan to make it impossible to buy soft drinks with food stamps, SNAP, seemed a no-brainer. SNAP is designed as last chance nutritional assistance, to buff up the poor diets of people too poor to afford healthy meals. To keep SNAP users on track, certain things, such as prepared foods, cannot be bought with food stamps. Owing to the massive soda lobby (The American Beverage Association, which includes Coca-Cola, strongly opposes restricting soda purchases by food stamp recipients. Why? SNAP recipients spend from $1.7 to $2.1 billion annually for sugar-sweetened beverages) soft drinks were always somehow allowed for SNAP, even though they have zero nutritional value. A Department of Agriculture survey found SNAP households waste about five percent of their food budget on soda. Yet when Kennedy proposed banning soft drinks, The New York Times had to run an article asking if the move wasn’t an “overreach that penalizes poor people” and “just increases the stigma for people who are trying to make ends meet.” Colorado is the only state under Democratic control to support excluding soda in 2025. But to cap things off the NYT stills has to conclude “Academics are unsure if removing soda from SNAP would improve public health.”

It is the same with cane sugar in Coke (Trump likes it, so the media finds reason to oppose it) and of course illegal immigration. The latter is particularly sad. Somehow millions of Americans support (because Trump opposes) illegal immigration, those who jump the visa lines, and go on to commit crimes ranging from immigration, Social Security, and welfare fraud to child abuse and murder. But they pick our tomatoes on the cheap, bleat some, seemingly twisting to support a grotesque form of capitalism (near slavery), an odd point of view for avowed socialists. Someone should tell AOC.

It’s exhausting to live on the edge every day as the left does, swerving from death knell to death knell, everything being the decisive blow. Think I’ll relax watching some TV. [Applause]

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Yellow Supremacy in Japan?

July 28, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: election, Japan, Kamiya, Sanseito
Posted in: Democracy, Trump

When in doubt, blame the foreigners. Such is the case in Japan, undergoing a bout of what we’d in the U.S. call “Yellow Supremacy.” But is it more than an election season ploy to wind up a crowd? Is it a movement or a protest vote?

From its earliest contact with foreigners as dramaticized in Shogun, it has been love-hate superimposed on classic xenophobia. During my years in Japan, I remember sitting embarrassed on a crowded train, jam packed as only Japanese trains can be, with empty seats next to me. No one wanted to rub thighs with a foreigner. I watched taxis zoom past like I was a man of color in New York trying to hail a cab Uptown from 96th Street. At the same time I cannot forget an elderly Japanese woman walking several blocks out of her way in the rain to ensure I made it to my destination when neither of us had the language skills to fully communicate directions. It is a strange place, Japan, usually benign and eccentric if not occasionally annoying.

But recent developments indicate perhaps a return to a racist side of Japan that saw it slaughter Christians wholesale centuries ago, and stampede through Nanjing killing Chinese, seeing them as not worthy of even conquest and enslavement. The country that gives us Pikachu has a dark side that begs you to lock up the liquor when daddy comes home late.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

RIP, er, RIF, State Department

July 22, 2025 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

RIP, er, RIF, State Department as we knew you. One of my early duties during my over two and a half decades working for the State Department was to “support” Secretary of State James Baker’s official visit to London. I read up on current policy, made sure I had my passwords and combinations in hand in case they needed crucial documents from the embassy after hours, and shined my shoes. Baker traveled with a large party, taking up a whole floor in a very nice central London hotel. Then I got a taste of real Foreign Service life: my first task was to make sure every TV in all the rooms worked. Then, after Baker arrived, I was to get the required wake-up time for each member of the staff and, at the conclusion of my overnight shift the next morning, call each to summon them to breakfast, despite the hotel having a very nice complimentary service that did just that same thing. Later I sarcastically became known as “Ambassador to Harrod’s” after having to escort so many Mrs. Important Somebodies shopping while hubby was on a diplomatic business trip to the UK.

While there were of course better days, and things may have changed since I left, I can’t guarantee you that a Foreign Service Officer (FSO; no doubt a “special assistant”) isn’t right now walking two steps behind some Assistant Secretary, carrying his briefcase for him. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t shed too many tears alongside those who claim recent staff cuts at State are the end of diplomacy or ceding territory to the Chinese or any such nonsense. State is a bloated, corpulent, insular, risk adverse, academically in-bred, stifling, overly bureaucratic, back stabbing, stogy, mid-20th century institution that lost its mojo after the Cold War ended and everyone who worked there would admit it if they weren’t afraid of the “corridor reputation” that drives promotions, assignments, and retirement gigs at think tanks and universities. In Senate testimony, current SecState Marco Rubio complained the State Department decision-making process was far too cumbersome. He described receiving a memo requiring 40 people to approve before it landed on his desk. “We can’t move at that pace in this world,” Rubio said.

The staff cuts give State perhaps its last chance to become useful in the foreign affairs community, or to forever watch the big flexes continue to go to CIA, NSC, or the military while State is lucky to be assigned to maybe check to see if the TVs work in all the adults’ hotel rooms.

The history of this last chance began many institutions ago, as post-Cold War Secretary of State after Secretary would come into office ordering a third-party efficiency study, which was quickly ignored. They then added vertical stacks of offices designed to service pet projects and find new purpose (Hillary was the worst, with whole sections of the building filled with offices frantic about women’s rights, LGBT stuff, and tin stoves for Africa, all mostly designed to provide B-roll footage for her upcoming presidential campaign.) Secretary Colin Powell arrived from the Pentagon aghast at the slowness of getting things done in Foggy Bottom, but was quickly consumed by the bureaucracy before he abandoned State in the worst pet project of all, staffing up the Iraq War reconstruction effort and Embassy Baghdad, then the world’s largest mission.

The more recent history starts in February of this year, when some 2,000 DOGE-adjacent RIF notices were sent out to domestic State employees. Those State employees, alongside people in nearly two dozen other agencies sued, claiming President Trump had no constitutional authority to fire Executive Branch employees like that. The cases found a sympathetic West Coast judge (of course), who issued a nationwide injunction (of course) reprieving the workers for a few months. Meanwhile, there were budget cuts. A hiring freeze. A freeze on the infamous FSO intake exam. About 1,400 employees resigned or retired “voluntarily.” State rewrote its own rules for issuing RIFs, allowing it to lay off employees due to their specific post, region or bureau and created nearly 800 new domestic “competitive areas,” making it easier for the department to pick and choose which people to eliminate. Then, earlier this month, the Constitutional case made its way to the Supreme Court, where 8-1 (Kentanji Brown Jackson dissenting, of course) issued a decision saying Trump indeed did have the authority to fire.  The RIFs followed three days later, on July 11.

A reported 1,107 local Washington-area civil service employees were RIFed, in addition to nearly 246 Foreign Service Officers currently on domestic assignments. Including semi-voluntary retirements and resignations, the total workforce reduction at State since Trump took office is about 3,000 people, some 15 percent of the total. “Headcount reductions have been carefully tailored to affect non-core functions, duplicative or redundant offices, and offices where considerable efficiencies may be found from centralization or consolidation of functions and responsibilities,” the department said in notice to staff on Friday.

Though State provided no statistical breakdowns, talk suggests impacted offices include the Bureau of Cyberspace and Policy, Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, Bureau of International Organization Affairs, Bureau of Energy Resources, Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Multilateral Trade Affairs office, Office of Agriculture Policy, Global (Climate) Change, and others, for a total of 132 offices within bureaus. It does not appear many RIFs touched one of State’s largest internal organizations, the Bureau of Consular Affairs. Consular controls the issuance and revocation of visas worldwide, as well as U.S. passports, both now firmly in line with Trump’s America First agenda.

Sources indicate personnel affected seem to have been pulled from all levels of experience, as the RIF was largely based on the job someone unfortunately held as of the cut-off of May 29. It is said on the FSO side high ranking as well as Senior Foreign Service officers were included, and at least one domestically assigned ambassador and one person who was headed out to be a Deputy Chief of Mission abroad. State has signaled no further domestic reducations are planned at present, and has been coy about any serious plans to cut back diplomatic staffing abroad (the latter is probably a mistake if cutting waste is the goal; see here. Domestic changes without changes overseas are little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the ship of State.)

Some employees seeking to retain their jobs will reach out to the Merit Systems Protection Board, a three-person panel that hears appeals to firings and other disciplinary actions the federal government takes against civil servants and FSOs. The problem is the Board has so far this year already received 11,166 appeals, about twice its typical workload. The Board is also not fully staffed, ensuring a years-long backlog. Another Hail Mary move is the federal judge who first blocked Trump from implementing mass layoffs before the Supreme Court intervened said she plans to litigate the legality of individual agency workforce reduction plans. The FSO employee’s association created a defense fund for those headed to court to somehow try to reverse the RIF.

Back here on earth, it is best to ignore the Democratic cryers saying this RIF will damage the U.S. on the world stage. There is still plenty of work to be done for real change at Foggy Bottom and meanwhile there are still plenty of State Department employees at work in line with the department’s new America First orientation, as opposed to its grasp-at-relevance purple-haired global orientation. No one likes to see decent people lose their jobs because they were inadvertently caught up in something bigger than themselves, but the changes at State are long overdue and very necessary if the institution is to survive as anything but America’s concierge abroad.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

New York Goes After X on Free Speech

July 15, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: 1A, First Amendment, Free Speech, Musk, Twitter
Posted in: Democracy, Post-Constitution America

Can someone please tell New York things have changed? New York city and state are stuck in the Biden era or earlier, repeating themselves in hopes something might change. They are still stuck in BLM-catch-and-release policing and surprised crime is not falling, and still have people hoping defunding the cops might somehow be a way to make the streets safer. Meanwhile, they just elected Zohran Mamdani, a wacky radical socialist, as their Democratic candidate for city mayor, a guy who makes AOC look like she could be an editor for The American Conservative. But the most ancient policy move of recent memory is a new law to force social media censorship on a state-wide level to cut off conservative content. X, only recently freed from the confines of being Twitter, is right in their crosshairs. The good news is Elon Musk and X are fighting back.

The New York law, S895B, would create “terms of service reports” in which social media companies would disclose to Attorney General Letitia James (of Trump lawfare prosecution fame) whether their terms define hate speech, racism, extremism, misinformation, harassment, and foreign political interference. The companies would then include those definitions in a report. The report would also require companies to disclose a “detailed description” of their “content moderation practices” regarding these categories and provide metrics and data as to the number of content, groups, and users flagged for violation, number of actions taken, and types of enforcement actions. Failing to submit the report could engender a $15,000 per day fine. NY Governor Kathy Hochul signed the law in December 2024, and it is set to go into effect this year.

New York is years too late in trying to censor social media under the guise of “hate speech.” In 2022, Donald Trump said at a rally in support of GOP midterm congressional candidates “Another one of our highest priorities under a Republican Congress will be to stop left-wing censorship and to restore free speech in America, which we do not have.” There were at that time already 100 bills in state legislatures aimed at regulating social media content moderation policies. What is truly shameful is how progressive voices relished the power to censor because the most popular platforms followed their wishes but could not see how quickly things could change and the censor’s aim be redirected at them. In a little-known 2018 case, a lawyer for Twitter even told a judge the company had the right to censor protected groups. “Does Twitter have the right to take somebody off its platform if it does so because it doesn’t like the fact that the person is a woman? Or gay?” a judge asked a lawyer for the company. “The First Amendment would give Twitter the right,” the lawyer replied. The thinking at the time, and still alive today though less acted upon, is our 1A free speech rights only cover the government’s actions, not private enterprises like social media.

Things hit a low point in 2020 when Twitter and Facebook became the censors the Founders feared when they wrote the First Amendment. In the 18th century, none of those forward-thinking men could have envisioned a day when technology and global corporations would overshadow the power of governments to control information. The social media giants at that time tried to disappear a story from the New York Post claiming Hunter Biden had sold a Ukrainian company access to his father Joe. The censorship was so complete other writers were afraid to even include a link to the story, for fear their article too would be made to disappear. You could not tweet a link to the Post’s story or send it as a direct message on Twitter and you couldn’t post it on Facebook without some sort of red flag. If you were an unimportant person your message would just be blocked. If you were important, like a conservative journalist trying to report out the fuller story, your account would be locked. The NY Post, one of the largest mass circulation dailies, could not RT its own article. It was high times for the woke and their newly-discovered ability to silence opposing views, 1A be damned. The left pretended a corporation with the reach to influence elections was just another company that sells stuff.

Online free speech may not have been saved entirely by Elon Musk, but he came pretty close when he bought Twitter and renamed it X. Alongside the new name came a rebirth of free speech. Writers and pundits who had been blackballed from Twitter (including me) were reinstated. Once again a diverse range of viewpoints was allowed. “Hate speech” was not used as an excuse to silence legitimate political expression. Things were looking up until just recently, when New York sought to bring back the bad old days with its new law.

But this time Elon Musk is fighting back. X sued New York to challenge the state law requiring social media companies to submit semi-annual reports about how they are suppressing certain kinds of speech. X claims provisions in the “Stop Hiding Hate Act” violate the First Amendment and threaten free speech. X challenged the broader constitutionality of the “Content Category Report” portion of the law, arguing it forces companies to disclose “highly sensitive and controversial speech” protected under the Constitution, and noted content moderation “engenders considerable debate among reasonable people about where to draw the correct proverbial line,” and “this is not a role the government may play,” saying the law’s “attempt to tilt the marketplace of ideas” by harnessing public pressure to achieve its goals is impermissible since the government “cannot do indirectly what [it] is barred from doing directly,” citing National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo. “The state is impermissibly trying to generate public controversy about content moderation in a way that will pressure social media companies, such as X Corp., to restrict, limit, disfavor or censor certain constitutionally protected content on X that the state dislikes,” says the suit.

There is a good chance X will prevail. The “Content Category Report” provisions of the New York “Stop Hiding Hate Act” are almost identical to a California law (Assembly Bill No. 587) that presidential-wannbe Gavin Newsom signed in 2022, requiring social media companies to submit similar reports to the California attorney general. X challenged that law on the same grounds of unconstitutionality, and a U.S. court of appeals ruled in their favor. Also in 2022, Texas won at the circuit level with a similar case, making it illegal for social media to censor, delete, or otherwise interfere with viewpoints, what is known as content discrimination. The answer to “bad” speech is simply more speech to air opposing viewpoints. Elon Musk knows this. New York does not. Yet.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

The Secret Financial Weapon to Use Against Illegal Immigration

July 8, 2025 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

Buried in the Big, Beautiful Bill is a weapon Trump can use against illegal immigration, deincentivizing working illegally in the United States while at the same time cutting into money laundering by Mexican and other drug cartels. It is a 3.5 percent remittance tax on money sent by aliens in the U.S. home to their country. Small change? By the end of 2023, remittances sent by workers in the U.S., many illegal, to low- and middle-income countries reached approximately $639 trillion dollars — about 78 percent of total remittances across the globe for the whole world. The main recipient countries include India (12.6 percent of the total sent), Mexico (7.5 percent), China (6.4 percent), and the Philippines (4.8 percent). Mexico currently receives money tax free. U.S. law makes it possible and needs to be changed.

“Directo a México” is the official remittance program of the Federal Reserve Bank, facilitated through the FedGlobal service, which allows illegal immigrants to transfer money to Mexico’s central bank at no additional fee. Since 2003, after an agreement was signed by George W. Bush, users of U.S. financial institutions subscribed to Directo a México can send payments to any bank account in Mexico at no cost. New Yorkers can see such services advertised in Spanish on the subway; in smaller cities the transfer work is done by Wells Fargo, Moneygram, and check cashing storefronts. States with large populations of illegal Mexicans, such as California and Texas, rank highest in remittance outflows.

It is a well-used system — in 2023, Mexico received $63.3 billion in remittances, establishing the country’s position as the second-largest destination for such funds worldwide. Remittances from abroad account for roughly 4.5 percent of Mexico’s total GDP (in some poorer Mexican states remittances comprised 14 percent or more of their GDP) and form the largest single source of foreign income for Mexico, outstripping the income brought in by any other source, including foreign direct investment from the United States, tourism, and manufacturing exports. The total value of remittances increased by roughly 32 percent between 2019 and 2023, rising by an average of five percent per year. Mexico does not just send hundreds of thousands of illegal workers to the U.S.; its domestic economy outright depends on them working in El Norte. Much the same for the other leading countries, such as India, though the bulk of its remittances comes from H1-B visa holders.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum knows the value of the program and showed just how desperately her country relies on these remittance payments in a statement which “fanned the flames of the LA riots.” “Mexican citizens in America work hard to pay their bills. We don’t want this tax to affect the remittances of our countrymen,” Sheinbaum said. “If necessary, we will mobilize. We will not allow them to punish those who help the least fortunate.”

Sheinbaum may be focused on more than the “least fortunate of her country.” According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “The expanding volume of remittance transactions provides more than economic benefits to regular Mexicans; it also presents ample opportunity for exploitation. Criminal organizations take advantage of the small-increment nature of remittance transactions to evade oversight regulations and launder money related to drug trafficking and other illicit income streams, a practice which has increased in frequency since the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted cross-border movement and the associated traditional methods of bulk cash smuggling.”

As the fentanyl crisis, illegal immigration, and cartel-related violence become increasingly prominent flash points in the United States-Mexico relationship, the expanding flow of remittances between the two countries should face increasing scrutiny from policymakers. Mexican cartels are awash in cash from U.S. sales of fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, and marijuana. Presently, up to 10 percent of all Mexico-bound remittances may be drug money moved by criminal organizations like the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, according to Reuters. A report by the Mexican think tank Signos Vitales estimated at least $4.4 billion in remittances sent to Mexico last year could come from illegal activity.

Sadly, from 2017–2022, the U.S. Department of Justice successfully prosecuted only seven drug trafficking cases involving misuse of remittances. Yet taken together, even those handful of cases still involved the laundering of more than $100 million. Cases typically involved criminals owning a crucial element of the supply chain, the remittance storefronts.

What can be done to slow the flow of remittances, maybe the profits of drug cartels, into Mexico? One bill, a proposal by Representative Kevin Hern (R-OK) and then-senator J.D. Vance sought to impose a 10 percent fee on remittances sent abroad. This initiative, entitled the Withholding Illegal Revenue Entering Drug Markets (WIRED) Act,was used as a guide for the text in the Big, Beautiful Bill to add a 3.5 percent tax on remittances into Mexico.

Meanwhile, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) wants to increase the remittance tax in the Big, Beautiful Bill from 3.5 percent to 15 percent following Sheinbaum’s threats. “I’m introducing legislation to quadruple the proposed remittance tax. America is not the world’s piggy bank. And we don’t take kindly to threats,” Schmitt said on X. “As I’ve said many times before: America isn’t an economic zone. It isn’t an airport with a shopping mall attached. It’s our country.”

Given the involvement of the Mexican drug cartels, it is clear more than a tax is needed. President Trump must immediately empower the Department of Justice to aggressively investigate remittances into Mexico. The Department should also look into the storefront remittance centers in America which are the source of much of the money flowing southward. According to CSIS, in several of earlier indictments, individuals indicted “systematically opened several branches of remittance providers to be able to process the high volume of remittances necessary to launder money. While handling such volume single handedly would be a daunting task, collectively, these networks facilitated the movement of illicit money without raising any alarms.” Tighter background checks on potential branch owners could be a first step. Identification requirements for transfers are currently more relaxed than those needed to set up a formal bank account or to wire significant sums of money. Reuters interviewed two dozen Mexico residents who said they had been paid by the Sinaloa Cartel to act as conduits for remittances, turning the money over to cartel operatives after receiving it.

“Follow the money” says the old adage, and following the flow of cash into Mexico is  a twofer: make it less profitable for illegal aliens to work in the U.S. while at the same time cutting into the money laundering networks set up right under American authorities’ noses. This represents a natural next move in Trump’s immigration crackdown, and another justification for the Big, Beautiful Bill.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

What Will Iran Do Next?

July 1, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: Iran, Qasem Soleimani
Posted in: Democracy

The world now knows Trump’s initial play. But what of Iran’s next move? Here history suggests a course forward, which, if history is indeed our guide, says diplomacy is the endgame. What matters most to Iran is regime survival and some form of diplomacy is the only path.

Look back at the previous time the United States “bombed Iran,” the assassination on January 3, 2020 of Qassem Soleimani, the powerful Iranian major general and the head of the Quds Force, in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad International Airport in Iraq. Soleimani was an almost mythical figure in Iran; when I visited there prior to his death, I saw his face painted on massive wall murals next to the religious leaders of the country. Soleimani was in charge of Iran’s overseas militia and terrorist operations, and directed the Shia resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. He quite literally had American blood on his hands and through his charisma and tactical skills, played a critical role in Iran’s regional reach. The U.S. killing him so overtly — like a mafia hit, everyone was intended to know who did it — was expected to set off a massive and global retaliation by Iran. President Trump, then in his first term, was accused of starting World War III (#WWIII was trending on Twitter) and kicking off a new cycle of violence against America forces in the region. Sleeper cells would be activated and a new front in the Iraq War was said to be imminent. Sound familiar?

Instead, despite much saber rattling — Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei vowed “harsh revenge”– Iran’s response was tepid. A few days after the assassination, Iran launched “Operation Martyr Soleimani,” sending all of 16 missiles against U.S. bases in Iraq, including at al-Asad airbase and Erbil. No Americans were killed. Sound familiar?

Then-Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif tweeted Iran was finished fighting and was not actively pursuing further escalation. Trump undertook no immediate counter-attack, and in a speech spoke only of further economic sanctions alongside some vague thoughts on future agreements. The two countries’ actions add up to a collective “I’m done if you’re done.”

Iranian leaders know theirs is a semi-developed nation, unlike Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq (and Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos before them.) It does not need to be invaded or occupied, it can be effectively destroyed as a industrialized nation from the air, as the Israeli’s and U.S. are demonstrating. As only a regional power, it suffers from a massive technological disadvantage in any conflict the U.S., a nation perhaps sadly, now long past the calculations of “kill a few Americans and watch them run” that drove it from Somalia in 1993 after “Black Hawk Down,” or out of Lebanon after the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks by Iranian-proxy Hezbollah. Trump’s America will take a punch to throw back two.

America’s lack of dependence on Persian Gulf oil means 2025 is not 1991. There are threats by Tehran to close the Straits of Hormuz. But Iran needs the oil to flow more than the U.S. does (and in Washington’s current calculus, who cares about Europe’s and China’s needs.) Iran under sanctions is near totally dependent on what oil it can export, Tehran’s biggest source of external income. Oil requires massive infrastructure, all of which can be bombed and most of which has so far been untouched by Israel and America. Iran’s military operates in large part out of fixed sites. Its navy is small and its bases can be destroyed from the air, its harbors mined. The Iranian military is ranked globally below Indonesia. Iran knows it will never find itself in a fair fight, especially stripped as it is now of its nascent nuclear threat. That has changed everything.

Iran’s government meanwhile is a tense coalition of elected civilians, unelected military, and theocrats. They face an almost schizophrenic population, happy to chant Death to America but equally open to the idea, albeit on more liberal terms than most American presidents, Republican and Democrat, have been willing to offer, of finding a way out from under sanctions that would open them to the world.

Iran 2025 understands its limits. Despite more saber rattling — Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh warned recently “all U.S. bases are within our reach and we will boldly target them” — think about the provocations Iran has endured without significant escalation: U.S. troops landing in-country in a failed hostage rescue in 1980, U.S. support for Iraq using weapons of mass destruction and the provision of intelligence which allowed the Iraqis to rain missiles on Iranian cities in 1980s, the U.S. shooting down an Iranian civilian aircraft, killing some 300 innocents in 1988, U.S. invading and occupying Iran’s eastern border (Iraq 2003) and western approaches (Afghanistan 2001).

In 2003, when Iran reached out diplomatically following initial American military successes in the War on Terror, George W. Bush flippantly declared them part of an Axis of Evil. U.S. forces then raided an Iranian diplomatic office in Iraq and arrested several staffers in 2007. The U.S. has kept crippling economic sanctions in place for decades, helped execute the Stuxnet cyberattack in 2010 destroying many of Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and another 2019 cyberattack, never mind what nasty things the Israelis have done covertly on our behalf. Nothing led to a wider war. Soleimani died in context.

Iraq, politically and geographically in the middle, has every reason to help calm things down. Look what it has not done so far in response to Israel dismantling its nuclear program piece by piece: no dirty bomb on Tel Aviv, no terror acts against Israel or the U.S. anywhere in the world, no known major cyber attacks, no activation of the Houthis to attack shipping in the Gulf, no proxy attacks against vulnerable American enclaves in Iraq. The lobbing of missiles into Israeli cities and Qatar is by no means inconsequential, but it is within the accepted (and expected) boundaries of tit-for-tat. No one could have expected Iran to do nothing and history would not support that. Limited retaliation is an expected part of the calculus of the Israeli and America strikes; the New York Times even reported Iran “coordinated the attacks on the American air base in Qatar with Qatari officials and gave advanced notice that attacks were coming to minimize casualties.”

What will happen next is likely up to Trump, and Israel. But what will happen next next is in Tehran’s hands. Their goal is regime survival first of all, some sort of modus vivendi with Israel and the West in second place. The decades long strategy to match Israel as a regional nuclear power has failed. What was bombed once by Israel and the U.S. can be bombed again. History suggests Iran will absorb the next blow, and seek a diplomatic solution to assure its own survival. Washington seems to agree; “We’re not at war with Iran,” Vice President J.D. Vance said. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.” This is a watershed moment in the history of the Middle East.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Like It Was Only Yesterday

June 24, 2025 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

I purposefully held off writing anything until now  because none of that happened. None of the apocalyptic predictions came true even a little bit. We had protests, we had a parade, and then on Monday morning we all went back to work or school. The panic was simply because of the left’s unnatural desire to hyper-inflate anything Trump does into an endgame to set those endorphins aflutter. Time passing shows it best.

In Hawaii, many of the signs read “One King, No Dictator” at the “No Kings” anti-Trump protest. That’s because here the extreme left are still protesting the late 19th century overthrown of the beloved Hawaiian monarchy by the United States, so they do want a king, just not Trump. That was the broad theme, maybe we do need to do something about immigration, but just not Trump. But unless Trump left office between the time I’m writing this and the time you are reading it about ten days later, you can see how well all those signs worked out. Same for the MSM commentary on the protests and their evil twin, the Washington DC military parade.

It was supposed to be a big weekend, the one for “No Kings” day. Senator Alex Padilla had just been wrestled out of Kristie Noem’s press conference, what was called a “red line for democracy.” ICE and the Marines were on the streets of LA and everyone knew the next step was a hair’s width away, martial law, Insurrection Act, suspension of habeas corpus, all that. But the kicker was the military parade in Washington, on Trump’s birthday and it turns out JD Vance’s wedding anniversary (which nobody had on their conspiracy bingo card) and that was seen as the end of democracy in America itself. Pundits claimed the tanks would take up positions around the White House after the parade to enforce a coup, leaving Trump sole dictator. The parade was a ruse ahead of, again, martial law, and at the very least a sign of the increasing politicization of our military and the crowning of Trump as its authoritarian leader, a la Putin and Kim Jong Un, and of course, Adolf Hitler.

Back to those “No Kings” protests. The crowd where I was was well-behaved and the nearby cops looked bored. An interesting twist from earlier protests was the replacement of pro-gay signs with pro-transgender signs, with their extra rainbow flag stripes. Gay has become passé (never mind BLM), just that newly married couple down the street, and despite the attempts by Pride month organizers to whip up anti-Trump sentiment nobody seemed to care. Same with abortion; when Roe went away we were told so many horrible things would happen but it seems like they got the scale all wrong and it is yesterday’s protest topic.

So now the meme is something about transgender people, seemingly centered on the one real thing Trump did to them, pull them out of the military. You’d think this affected tens of thousands of people based on the protest crowd’s zeal, instead of the reality. The number of trans troops is far lower than estimates by advocates, which ran up to 14,000 people. The Defense Department said actually 4,240 service members, or only about 0.2 percent of those in uniform, have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Some of them may not even like the military and are satisfied getting out early. Nobody in the protest crowd seemed to care, because a great bad thing by Trump had been done and thus democracy was at risk. More than one person warned me that after Trump was done with the trans people he might come after me. They all knew that poem.

The sun was very hot the day of the protest and things broke up early.

The military parade was a complete failure, as democracy survived. Not one TV commentator I heard mentioned the inspiration for the thing was Trump attending a Bastille Day military parade in France, a democracy equally proud of its martial past. Instead the comparisons were all to Russia and China and North Korea and of course, the Nazis. The problem was that we did not have a Nazi parade. Our soldiers, instead of paying tribute to the Leader, mugged for the cameras, waved at kids from atop tanks and otherwise stuck to marching, somewhat out of step. They are our sons and brothers, not stormtroopers. If anything the parade was boring; the cameras caught Mario Rubio yawning, Melania appearing to fall asleep at one point, and Trump looking more tired than dictatorial.

Afterwards the tanks went back to wherever they came from with habeas intact. The whole affair looked much like a super-sized version of what you’d see on the Fourth of July in many smaller towns, albeit without the local high school marching band and the mayor waving from an open car. The roads in Washington DC even looked like they survived in decent shape; the MSM, desperate to find things to criticize, warned for weeks armored vehicles would tear up the asphalt and stick the taxpayers with a big repair bill.

Quick question: does anyone remember the Padilla incident? Once called a red line for democracy, ten days later it is hard to Google.

That is the whole point of this belated commentary on the protests and parade. None of what the MSM told you was going to happen, happened. Not even close. It just took a bit of time to see it clearly and that their end-of-the-world predictions were, in retrospect, just wrong. Same as for Trump Term 1.0, when we were constantly warned of WWIII, that America had reached its Reichstag moment, Russiagate, the Pee Tape, and so on.

It seems like only yesterday (i.e., the day before the parade) the New York Times wrote the point of the military spectacle was to “generate footage of tanks massed on the streets in numbers more often seen in countries where a coup is underway” and to “create optics that support his claim that public dissent constitutes an existential threat to the nation. He also apparently seeks to get the American public used to seeing our armed forces in a new light… Rather, it should be viewed as an institution that serves at the behest of a leader and his ideological and political agendas.” Branching off to sweep in ICE doing its job in LA, the Times explained Trump was “flooding our screens with images that habituate us to a new reality of federalized state militia members standing opposite civilian protesters.”

The ever-skittish Washington Post writer Jonathan Capehart took to “neutral” PBS to fear monger about the insidious plan behind Trump’s actions in LA and Washington. “I think they’re creating the political conflict because — I interviewed Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison in the run-up to the anniversary, the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. And he [Ellison] brought up on his own the rumor that the president was going to pardon Derek Chauvin. And the attorney general said that the president might do that as a distraction to larger goals. And one of the larger goals that the attorney general mentioned that has always been in the back of my mind is to create the conditions that would allow the president to invoke the Insurrection Act. And once the president invokes the Insurrection Act, all sorts of powers are handed to the president, you know, suspending elections, and other things… That is among the reasons why I am so concerned about what we’re about to see tomorrow [the parade.]

Trump did not pardon Floyd’s killer Derek Chauvin, did not invoke the Insurrection Act, and did not cancel any elections as Capehart was given a national stage to proclaim. He just had a parade. By now the Democrats and MSM have mostly moved on from the stories and end-of-world scenarios listed above, and are focused on new stories and end-of-world scenarios that will prove equally as false and empty, fear mongering in a childish form. Read them now as you would read them in a couple of weeks, after the fact, and see how silly it all sounds.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Biden’s Missing Children

June 17, 2025 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

The loss of even one child is a tragedy. The loss of over 7,000, some potentially to sex traffickers, due to Joe Biden’s immigration policies, is a national shame.

As part of its open borders policy, the Biden administration failed to investigate more than 7,300 reports of human trafficking involving child migrants and tens of thousands of other concerning leads, reports from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) show. HHS is working through 65,605 backlogged findings from the last administration into cases of unaccompanied migrant kids who may have been abused by sex predators or trafficked by gangs. The Department faces 7,346 human trafficking reports alone involving unaccompanied minors. In one notorious case, “a young girl who arrived at the border in the custody of individuals claiming to be her family was bruised, disoriented, and in pain. Medical examinations revealed that she had been raped, yet she was sent back to her abusers because no verification was done to confirm her guardianship.” “This is such a stain on our nation,” said a whistleblower with HHS.

The Trump 2.0 administration took up the issue of the lost children, with a small starter number of 36 prosecutions to date. HHS determined over 100 child sponsors were suspicious enough to warrant further investigation, just from a single intake site. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in a letter sent to Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., asked for “an immediate update on government wide efforts to find and rescue children who were placed in harm’s way” by Joe Biden’s policies. Together they represent, according to HHS, “a systemic failure of the Biden administration,” which resulted in “children’s lives being put at risk.”

What did Biden do to knowingly place so many children at risk? Biden’s actions stand in grotesque contrast to his stated goals of simply offering hard working migrants a chance at a better life. At the cost of their children, apparently.

With no legal avenue for them to immigrate, Biden just did away with any effective border enforcement, allowing migrants to simply walk north and blend into the estimated 11 million illegals already in the U.S. For those who wished to quasi-legalize their status, vast numbers of economic migrants requested asylum. Asylum applicants must demonstrate if sent home they would be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. The definition of those protected grounds has varied based on American domestic politics. However, asylum never has been and was never intended to stretch to economic situations affecting blanket-like most everyone in a country. “Wanting a better life” has never been grounds for a claim under any president.

Economic immigrants without legitimate claims to asylum have long taken advantage of slow processing. A Mexican man caught on the border who says he came just to work may be sent back almost immediately. However, should he make a claim to asylum, the U.S. is obligated to adjudicate his case, however frivolous.

The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act requires those seeking asylum be detained while their cases are processed. But for political reasons, the Biden administration simply released most asylum seekers into American society. Asylum seekers become eligible for work authorization if their case pended more than 150 days, as almost all do (like the anti-Semitic Egyptian terrorist fire bomber in Colorado.) Trump has since ended this system. He also negotiated for many asylum seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico instead of working the while in the U.S.

The problem has always been what to do with the kids. While many children at the border are with parents, others arrive with human traffickers, some on their own. “Children” can include everyone from infants to 17 year old “boys,” and the dangers of housing vulnerable children among adults should make it obvious why the law is written as it is. While on the face a nice solution sounds like “parents with their own kids,” imagine the terrible things that can still happen when children and adults are detained together.  Also under Trump, parents arrested at the border are criminally charged with illegal entry. Due process laws do not allow children to be kept with the parent because the child is not being criminally prosecuted. The answer under Trump was to put “kids in cages,” to detain children separate from their parents under Federal control as their parents cases played out through the legal system.

Democrats and the media accused Trump 1.0 of running “concentration camps” on the border, ignoring America’s long history of holding children for their own safety. Bill Clinton’s 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act set new records for immigrants of all ages detained. George W. Bush’s 2005 Operation Streamline was a zero-tolerance plan to prosecute all illegal entrants. But to avoid the logistics and negative optics, the program made exceptions not written into the law for adults traveling with children. Nature finds a way, and more and more economic migrants arrived with somebody’s child in hand as a Get Out of Jail Free card. Fewer kids in cages, but more illegals.

Obama initially prosecuted only those adults found illegally entering more than once. The administration in 2014 established then-legally permitted family detention centers to hold parents and children — potentially indefinitely — in cages as a means of deterring others. There were also children held alone in cages when they arrived without parents, or in the hands of human traffickers, or when their parents were criminally dangerous. The program ended only because of a 2016 court decision ordering the release of most of those families and largely prohibiting family detention facilities. Adult men, women, and children, would be caged separately.

Abetted by the media, Biden’s strategy was simply to ignore all this precedence and allow children, accompanied or not, to enter the U.S. freely. Little vetting was done of so-called “guardians” many were matched with in an effort to get the maximum number of people across the border with the minimum of political fuss. It does not take a degree in government (or criminology) to see how bad actors would quickly recognize and exploit such a system for their own needs. The result is the massive, backlogged, clean up Trump’s HHS faces, years after the Feds lost sight of so many vulnerable children for their own policy to “succeed.” One hopes the majority of missing children were eventually reunited with their illegal alien relatives, and only a few were drawn into the underworld of child labor and sex trafficking. But until HHS corrects Biden’s shameful lack of oversight, no one really knows.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

The Wages of DEI at Thomas Jefferson High School

June 10, 2025 // 0 Comments

Tags: discrimination, George Floyd, Harvard, Mark Spooner, north carolina, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, TJ
Posted in: Democracy, Other Ideas, Post-Constitution America

The results are in for one school — after four years of DEI-driven, basically race-based admissions, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as T.J., in Alexandria, Virginia has seen its national ranking fall to 14th place and its number of National Merit Scholar semi-finalists cut nearly in half. And according to the Virginia Attorney General, as of May 2025 it is in violation of the Virginia Human Rights Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for discriminating against Asian American students in the admissions process at the school and under Federal investigation. It is steadfastly sticking to its radical admissions policy despite the negative effects. Given T.J.’s role as a STEM feeder school into the Ivies and Big Tech, this is more than another culture war battle. It affects national security.

Until four years ago the only way into T.J. was via a rigorous entrance exam. Then in 2020, following the death of George Floyd, T.J. officials became concerned about their negligible number of black and Hispanic students and changed admissions standards. The test was gone, replaced by a “holistic review” including “students who are economically disadvantaged [who now make up over 11 percent of the student body] English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools.”

Without the entrance test, the black student population grew to seven percent from one percent of the class, while the number of Asian American students fell from 73 to 54 percent, the lowest share in years. A group of mostly Asian American parents objected to the new plan and started the Coalition for T.J. The coalition filed a lawsuit with the help of the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation. Instead of seeing weighting of experience factors as a way to level the playing field for underrepresented groups, they saw racism. The experience factors were just a work-around for straight up race-based decisions.

In 2022, a federal judge found the school board engaged in impermissible “racial balancing” when it overhauled admissions. In May 2023, however, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of the new admissions process, finding T.J. had not discriminated against Asian American students in its admissions policies. The appellate court found that there was not sufficient evidence the changes were adopted with discriminatory intent. The court said that the school had a legitimate interest in “expanding the array of student backgrounds.” Too bad for the Asians, America’s on-and-off again minority; there’s only so many seats available at T.J. The court found T.J.’s essay-based admission policy was not a proxy for race-based decisions. T.J. was thus able to make racially-motivated decisions without appearing legally to make racially-motivated decisions. Because of this twist of logic, Supreme Court decisions in key affirmative action cases, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, did not apply.

The Supreme Court then declined certiorari—it would not hear the case—in Coalition for T.J. v. Fairfax County School Board. The conservative Court’s denial left in place the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals affirming the discriminatory policy. The declination is in contrast to the Court’s earlier rejection of affirmative action, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard, and of race as a primary admissions factor. T.J. was free to not really/but really discriminate in its admissions process.

One factor T.J. would rely on was an applicant’s public middle school zip code, a good indicator of race in a divided Fairfax county. Zip code was to become one proxy for race, a work-around to Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard which supposedly outlawed race alone as a primary admissions factor. Schools like T.J. may use race as an admissions criterion so long as it is not the only basis for a decision, with the implied so long as the goal is diversity (supposedly good on its face) and not whitewashing (naughty.) It is this policy the Supreme Court refused to review. “The holding,” Justice Alito added in his dissent, “effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group [Asians, in the instance of T.J.] with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups.”

That is all history because enough time has passed that we now know the results of this legal tomfoolery. Once the top-ranked public high school in the nation, T.J. fell to 14th place in the 2024 U.S. News rankings. According to the U.S. News Best High School Rankings Methodology, academic performance constitutes at least 50 percent of a school’s overall ranking. This includes standardized test scores and participation and success rates in advanced courses like IB and AP, contributing to two categories that hold significant weight in determining a school’s ranking: college readiness and state assessment proficiency.

Also, the school, which once boasted 157 National Merit Scholar semifinalists in 2020, saw that number nearly halved for the 2025 scholarship competition (the school says the data may also reflect problems during Covid.)

“The decline is the inevitable consequence of elevating ‘equity’ over excellence,” wrote Mark Spooner, on his blog Fairfax Schools Monitor.  “In 2020, then-Superintendent Scott Braband announced the School Board’s determination that DEI would no longer be ‘a thing’; it would henceforth be ‘the thing’ in the Fairfax County public school system. T.J. was the obvious first target for this ‘social justice’ initiative because more than 70 percent of its students, admitted under rigorous academic criteria, were Asian Americans. The racial imbalance was deemed unacceptable.”

Spooner went on to write “We are more than three years into the T.J. experiment, but the Fairfax County School Board hasn’t yet addressed its successes and failures. Whether an objective analysis will ever be conducted is questionable, for the program was adopted primarily for ideological reasons, and the Board may be reluctant to subject its ideological assumptions to scrutiny. The elimination of entrance exams and other academic criteria forced T.J. to introduce remedial math courses for academically unprepared students. How many students needed to be enrolled in these programs? And did the programs succeed in rapidly bringing students up to speed so they would thereafter thrive at T.J.? We don’t know, but there are disturbing clues. Information has emerged that the drop-out rate at T.J. has spiked, particularly among some minority groups. If this is true, it suggests that the softened admissions standards may have hurt the very students who were intended as beneficiaries.”

Though it appeared to have been settled by the Supreme Court’s non-intervention, the Virginia Attorney General’s recent move may reopen the issue. According to the Attorney General, Asian American students received 56 fewer offers of admission immediately following the shift in policies, after consistently making up more than 60 percent of admitted students. He said the school was already a “minority majority high school,” but the board “determined it was the wrong minorities. The board abandoned a race-neutral, merit-based system that previously was in place, and they adopted a policy structure specifically designed to reduce the number of Asian American students.” The Attorney General referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice for further enforcement under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as a next step. The Trump administration has threatened to withhold money from schools and colleges over DEI efforts that amount to discrimination, and has opened an investigation into T.J.’s admissions policy.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Et Tu, Bruce Springsteen? TDS Rides the Backstreets

June 3, 2025 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

I love Bruce Springsteen. I love his music. I saw my first Springsteen concert in 1977. I’ll never stop listening to “Born to Run” or the “Ghost of Tom Joad,” but I will do so saddened that my hero succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) and has switched in performance from righteously talking about political issues (small “p” issues like poverty, AIDs, and injustice) to Politics as it exists on Sunday morning talk shows. He’s bought the MSM line American democracy is to be talked about in the past tense, and embraced the hypocrisy characterizing TDS.

The Boss reinforced his earlier remarks about President Donald Trump at the Co-op Live in Manchester, England. “My home America, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” said Springsteen. “Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American spirit to rise with us, raise your voices and stand with us against authoritarianism and let freedom ring.”

He worked similar comments into the same show later on, saying “There’s some very weird, strange, and dangerous sh*t going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now. They are removing residents off American streets without due process of law and deploying them to foreign detention centers as prisoners. That’s happening now. The majority of our elected representatives have utterly failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.”

He purposefully finished the night’s show with “Chimes of Freedom,” an old Bob Dylan tune which Bruce poignantly played years ago in East Germany, in one of the first rock concerts permitted by the old Communist regime. Any serious Springsteen fan listening would get the message. For those who don’t know the song, “Chimes of Freedom” uses the metaphor of chimes to represent enlightenment. The song depicts a shift from darkness to light, where the chimes signal the coming of a better future for those seeking liberty. If you are Bruce Springsteen and you are going to dis on Trump, you do it this way.

Trump of course fired back, calling Springsteen “highly overrated,” “dumb as a rock,” “a pushy, obnoxious jerk,” and a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!)” on Truth Social. Trump promised to launch an investigation into whether Springsteen (and other celebrities like Oprah) accepted money as payback for their endorsement of Kamala Harris during the last presidential election. Springsteen was paid $75,000 for singing at a Harris rally, which may be ruled compensation for the endorsement. Springsteen previously campaigned for other Democratic candidates, to include Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry.

To criticize Bruce is to mock God, but here goes. His affliction towards the working man, migrants, and the downtrodden, rings a bit hollow when you understand the man’s networth to be over $1.2 billion (we make the same exception for a lower price for Bill Maher.) Since they figured out the lyrics to “Born in the USA,” the left has increasingly grown Bruce’s audience into a bicoastal one, the same one fed by the mass media and Hollywood, and eschewed the middle of America where Bruce once found his people. His comments suggest he has forgotten those he writes about — the steelworker in Youngstown, the unemployed auto plant worker from Indiana, the highway cop in Nebraska — are statistically likely to be Trump supporters. They may no longer be able to afford the hundreds of dollars a concert ticket costs to keep Springsteen wealthy. Bruce is happy to have taken their money, and now to tell them they are wrong (roughly half the country) in their beliefs. He wants them to forget he lives very comfortably less than an hour from Trump in New Jersey (I-287, Colt’s Neck to Bedminster Country Club) and that his daughter has ridden horses competitively there. He is willing to sell his old audience out over a single disputed immigration case involving a Turkish graduate student into believing freedom of speech is lost in America.

That is a real sign of TDS, exaggerating the fear over isolated cases and blowing up the fear over what might be happening next. So the Supreme Court is biased and a challenge to the Rule of Law until you realize about half the decisions under Trump have been majority ones, for and against. As in Trump’s first term, there is a constant drumbeat suggesting the next election will be canceled, or that it will be the next court case where Trump denies the judiciary and creates the Constitutional crisis the left almost seems to long for as justification for claiming the sky is constantly about to fall.

The other TDS sin Bruce commits is pretending everything Trump does, for example on illegal immigration and due process, is sui generis. Bruce is well-read, yet somehow reconciles his concerns over the number and type of deportations Trump is doing with the fact that his co-author and podcast buddy Barack Obama deported so many more, more than 3 million people, 75 percent or more of whom did not see a judge to plead their case (under Clinton and Bush, millions were also deported without judicial oversight.) Most of these removals were “summary removals” carried out through long-standing legal procedures such as “expedited removal” and “reinstatement of removal,” which do not involve a hearing before an immigration judge.

Alluding the complexity of issues is another marker of TDS, and like the media, Bruce seems unaware immigration law works very differently from the felony criminal law version of due process he knows from Law&Order reruns. TDS does not play well with complexity. Where were the protests against Obama, Clinton, or Bush from center stage like the brave Dixie Chicks? No president before in U.S. history has been required to get “court permission” to defend his own borders. Maybe that is worth talking about onstage by someone a bit more articulate than Kid Rock.

On the subject of due process, Bruce must also be aware of the case of American Citizen Anwar al Awlaki and his American son, both murdered via drone strike on the direct orders of his pal Barack Obama. That version of due process was a memo. Then-Attorney General Holder said of the al Awlaki killing “that a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to ‘due process’ and that the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protection against depriving a citizen of his or her life without due process of law does not mandate a ‘judicial process.’” It was unknown at the time, but Holder was referring to a secret white paper prepared by the Office of the Legal Counsel laying out the legal justification for the U.S. government to kill one of its own citizens extrajudicially, Orwellian legality not worth a protest song by the Boss. The kill white paper draws heavily from the case Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in which the U.S. rendered an American citizen from Afghanistan and sought to detain him indefinitely without trial as an enemy combatant, all without a peep out of Bruce.

With his guilt over getting out of service in Vietnam now made into a concert highlight soliloquy leading into an angry version of “Born in the USA,” Springsteen believes he remains a voice for veterans. Perhaps it is true, albeit limited to the now politically safe territory of the Vietnam War. But not a word under multiple presidents, including his bud Obama, for the miscellaneous wars of recent history, unjustified, including the launch into chaos of once stable Libya and the creation of massive flows of the refugees Bruce is willing to call out 2025 America for (but those flows were into Europe not America, and so maybe did not fit into the E Street songbook.) You’d think 7,000 dead Americans and some 4 millions dead Muslims might be fodder to sing about, versus one Muslim academic sidelined from Columbia University.

Did I mention I love Bruce Springsteen? I know all the words to all the songs from The River, and play air drums along with “Badlands” when alone in the car. I single him out among all the TDS sufferers because he has singled himself out, blatantly willing to remain silent while our country slipped into dark places under earlier administrations, adopting a Chicken Little stage pose only under Trump. Let us wish him well in his recovery someday from TDS so he can get back to making great music.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

A Victory Speech Over Neoconservative Foreign Policy

May 28, 2025 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

In what can be called a victory speech over failed neoconservative foreign policy, President Donald Trump proclaimed the end of 30-some years of existing foreign policy in the Mideast. The thing which dragged the U.S. through pointless wars from Libya to Yemen, is now done.

At an investment conference in Riyadh, in a speech little-commented on by the MSM, Trump said:

“In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. And the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.”

For the first time since Gulf War 1.0 in the 1990s, America is not fighting in the Middle East. Trump arranged a fragile ceasefire with Yemen, a proxy war against Iran by multiple U.S. presidents. Trump is withdrawing American troops from Syria, became the first American president in 25 years to meet with a Syrian leader, and announced alongside his speech the end of sanctions against that country. He is finally negotiating with Iran toward some sort of nuclear deal to replace the one he unilaterally canceled in his first term. Progress has not always been in a straight line, but there has been progress.

One need only to look back on the past decades to see the difference. The United States once overtly supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, leading to thousands of deaths on both sides. Pivoting, the U.S. invaded Iraq in 1991 after Saddam moved into Kuwait. Saudi Arabia was threatened, saved from war by U.S. intervention because of its oil reserves, which the U.S. was then fully dependent on. In the neocon spasms following 9/11, America invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, beginning a plan called nation-building in both countries to displace national governance with U.S. puppets and local Islamic traditions with western ideas on women and society. Those nation-building actions gave support to warnings issued by al-Qaeda and ISIS that the west sought to neuter Islam and turn the Middle East into a part of a new global empire. Rumors circulated American troops in Iraq were issued maps of the Syrian border ahead of plans to turn the massive military to sweep west into Syria and Lebanon following the “conquest” of Iraq. As that war brought Iran into the fight, U.S. troops were deployed to Syria, the Turks threatened invasion, and Russian intervention complicated the struggle. ISIS rose to replace al-Qaeda. The U.S. began a war in Libya, overthrowing another ugly but stable government, leading to chaos which continues to this day. Massive streams of refugees flowed into Europe. Yemen dissolved into an ungoverned space. The Afghan war threatened to spill into Pakistan.

Though actual numbers can never be known, the Costs of War Project estimates over 940,000 people died directly as a result of violence due to American foreign policy in the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. An additional 3.6-3.8 million died indirectly due to factors like malnutrition, disease, and the breakdown of healthcare systems related to these conflicts. The total death toll, including both direct and indirect casualties, is estimated to be between 4.5 and 4.7 million. The Costs of War Project also highlights the significant displacement caused by these conflicts, with an estimated 38 million people displaced since 2001. Some 7,000 U.S. military service members died. The Project estimates the wars cost the U.S. over $8 trillion. Afghanistan today is ruled by the Taliban, Iraq by Iranian proxies. Nation-building was a complete failure. The broader neocon interventionist policy failed.

Indeed, the best summation of America’s decades long policy in the MidEast is Trump’s: “the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. And the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.”

Words are easy, actions often much  harder. So what is next? Trump stated his “fervent wish” Saudi Arabia follow its neighbors, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, in recognizing Israel. He said a nuclear deal is within sight with Iran, adding he “never believed in having permanent enemies.” Both are hard asks.

But in a sign of what may be the most significant change alongside the new foreign policy, Trump met the new leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Shara, a former al-Qaeda jihadist (one makes peace with one’s enemies, not one’s friends) who led a rebel alliance that ousted Bashar al-Assad. Trump posed for a photograph with al-Shara and the Saudi crown prince that “dropped jaws in the region and beyond.” Trump added in support of his growing realpolitik approach “In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.”

Syria now stands at a crossroads with Trump. The end of sanctions will give the country its first chance at economic breathing room in 14 years. Al-Shara has invited American energy companies in to exploit Syria’s oil. But the ball still rests in the Syrian court. Syria must decide whether to reject Iranian terrorist support and stop providing a safe haven for those fighters. Gulf leaders rallied behind the new government in Damascus and want Trump to do the same, believing it is a bulwark against Iran’s greater influence. Pressure will come from the United States for Syria to cut its ties with Russia and dismantle the Russia bases and enclaves there. Though al-Shara has confirmed his commitment to the 1974 disengagement agreement with Israel, Trump will no doubt seek his support for the Abraham Accords. He’ll also want Syria to assume responsibility for ISIS detention centers in Northeast Syria.

There is a lot to talk about and many difficult steps ahead, but a start is a start. Syria has its opening, as Trump makes clear the goals of fostering human rights, nation building, and democracy promotion have been replaced by a pragmatic emphasis on prosperity and regional stability. “I am willing to end past conflicts and forge new partnerships for a better and more stable world, even if our differences may be profound,” Trump said.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.