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The Counterculture Became the Culture

california democrats meet
California Democratic Party, the largest Democratic Party organization in the largest Democratic state, holds its annual convention in Sacramento (May 2017). Approximately 2,500 delegates will chart their future in the wake of the debacle in the fall of 2016.

*Below is my preface to John Papola’s podcast, “California Was Doomed in the 1960s”. It begins with the state’s latest effort to diminish the role of parents in their children’s education. After reading my introduction, please grab a cup of coffee and watch Papola’s depiction of California’s journey into the abyss.

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* transgressive: adj.; involving a violation of moral or social boundaries; relating to art or literature in which orthodox moral, social, and artistic boundaries are challenged.

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No better example of California’s descent into the transgressive countercultural abyss can be found than the state-orchestrated construction of a wall to separate parents from their child’s emotional health, specifically gender anxieties, in the state’s schools. But standing in the state’s way is the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974, the federal law that confirms the right of the parent to govern the upbringing of their children, even while in the schools, by requiring parental access to their child’s school records (see #1). The state and its counterculture need to be reminded of the little matter of federal supremacy in The U.S. Constitution (Article VI, Clause 2).

And, now, we must add the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal District Court for the Southern District of California to FERPA. SCOTUS this month removed the stay (order to temporarily halt) issued by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on District Court Judge Roger Benitez’s ruling against California AG Rob Bonta and the State of California in Mirabelli v. Bonta. The upshot of SCOTUS’s ruling is the likelihood that Mirabelli will prevail in the case (see #2 and #3).

The court drama erose when the state and its deeply imbedded counterculture in the state’s political fabric and huge mass of the electorate, as part of their protracted war against traditional institutions like the family, passed AB1955 in 2024, pseudonymously calling it the “The Safety Act”. It mandated the erection of a wall of secrecy for the schools against parents about their child’s gender anxieties and any school “transitioning” efforts. The title, “Safety”, egregiously conceals the real intent, much like the language-mangling in the 1930s Reich’s pathway to the death camps in “The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” or “The Law against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities”, or Stalin’s war on the peasants in his euphemistically titled “land reforms” and “dekulakization”. It’s stupefyingly Orwellian. It’s a political landscape that Orwell would immediately recognize.

A full SCOTUS ruling against the state and its pervasive counterculture would validate the Trump administration’s decision to withhold $811 million of federal aid to the state for this heinous behaviour. It’s another battle in the counterculture’s fight against established norms and institutions. The State of California is the counterculture’s command-and-control center in pursuit of its cultural revolution.

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I have often pondered the “root causes” of California’s predicament. Something drove this native Californian of 63 years, like millions of others over the past couple of decades, into becoming a resident of somewhere not governed in the manner of the not-so-Golden State.

Is there a “root cause” for the repellant nature of the state? Rhetorically, Democrats have tried to claim a copyright on the “root causes” talk, which is nothing but their tactic of avoiding the obvious: send Vice-President Harris around the world to hector poor countries for not magically raising their per capita GDP, but avoid the glaringly self-evident necessity of enforcing the border and removing the border-crashers. Something catastrophic has been happening to California. What’s the possible “root cause”? Look into it long enough and you’ll discover that the counterculture became the culture more powerfully there than anywhere else. It’s a popular mindset that overwhelms the nicer and more populous swaths of the state. It shows in elections over the past two or three decades.

Woe be to you if you live outside these beautiful places where the beautiful people live. You are forced to pay for their poorly understood ideo-philosophical fixations. Do you doubt it? Look at your utilities bill or the price at the pump. Look at the paltry gallons-per-minute rating (gpm) of your toilets and shower heads, and your home’s two water meters which function as triggers for punishing fines and extra charges. You run into taxes, taxes everywhere, hidden and open. If you’re a young family, watch as your kids develop gender anxiety and other radical thought-fads in their classrooms. The kids are cognitively corrupted. Don’t think for a moment that most private school alternatives are entirely free of the mind virus. Don’t be surprised that your kids end up at Harvard or State U in a frenzy over the patriarchy or rushing to Minneapolis to obstruct federal law enforcement.

We were warned at the beginning. When a republic of popular sovereignty was laid before our feet in 1789, George Washington was adamant about the absolute necessity of an enlightened populace. He wrote, “As the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” Is public opinion equally enlightened everywhere? No, a thousand times No! The moral and mental crippling is no more evident than in the populous coastal strip between San Diego and San Francisco, and these people vote like it.

So, what’s in the heads of the state’s electoral super-majority who have continually endorsed this hideous transformation from young innocence to angry chants of “Free Palestine” and “River to the Sea” and “I am She”. In that space between the ears lies the counterculture. The counterculture’s foundation is rebellion, a rejection of western civilization, our inheritance of faith, family, marriage, the rest of civil society, private property, the work ethic, the basics of our way of life. It is nihilism (the denial of an ontological natural order of things) combined with narcissism (a fervent self-love, solipsism). Yet, it also carried with it the seeds of totalitarianism – the desire to control not only what people do but also what they think (hence “totalitarian”). It’s a uniquely all-controlling, all-embracing, if incoherent, mode of governance nestled on the west coast and urban nodes.

Not so surprisingly, nowhere is the rule of this outlook more complete than in the birthplace of the Summer of Love. But as with most things cultural, this goose was cooking for decades, if not centuries, before Timothy Leary’s “turn on, tune in, drop out”. Turn back the pages of time to a strain of thought in the Enlightenment: the table rosa – the mind and personality as a “blank slate”. It’s the dawn of the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate. Are people made (nurture) or born (nature) better or worse, lesser or greater? The question needed to be raised to remove aristocratic rule. It was believed that “born” led to feudalism, “made” led to equality and popular sovereignty and the sunny uplands of the better world.

Fine distinctions such as “equality” of opportunity and “equality” of outcome were not fully grasped at the time, leaving “equality” of outcome to gestate into Marxism, and into today’s DEI, CRT, state-sponsored identity favoritism (affirmative action for “protective classes”), etc. To pave the way, a new class of social engineer, the credentialed “best and brightest”, was believed to hold the sacred keys to mold a better person for a better world. They were granted the power in the administrative state and the schools to shape the mental table rosa, to shove out the old and insert the ruminations of this emerging class of pedants. It’s the “progressivism” in TR (Yes, TR had this impulse.), Woodrow Wilson, FDR, JFK, LBJ, Obama, and Biden, and today’s Democratic Party. Today, the Party’s base takes it to 11 (the famous “11” of Nigel Tufnel in “This is Spinal Tap”).

Progressives unleashed the malady of hubris (overweening pride) in one’s abilities to manage others. It’s the dawn of the administrative state outside democratic accountability and constitutional restraints. Key to their claim of authority is their alleged possession of the “science”, the “science” of all things from factory floor management to combatting poverty, the beginning of the “follow the science” mantra. Of course, the “science” was no real science. It is the science of activists with little actual understanding of science. It led to eugenics and forced sterilizations, lobotomies, hierarchies of race, miscegenation laws, a robust income tax to fund the Progressives’ ambitions, Jim Crow, the New Deal’s extension of the Depression into a Great one, the Great Society’s grotesque anti-poverty programs that maligned life throughout the 1960s to the present, and their current climate-change jihad, etc.

Confidence flowing into arrogance is the byproduct of the hubris. Closed-mindedness is not far behind. Try to convince the cognitively infected that chromosomes matter. Go ahead, try. A subsequent birth dearth – after the pervasive women-can-have-it-all and pregnancy-as-disease messaging, chemical abortions and castrations, the permanent sterility of sex-change surgeries, the normalization of novel “marriages” which by definition cannot procreate, and the profusion of “incels” (male involuntary celebrates) – is praised . . . until someone enlightens them of the fact that there won’t be anyone around to change their bed pans. We’ll have to import the fertility of foreigners, and everything that comes in tow with them.

First came progressivism and its “science” of everything; next came its extension into speculations on the human mind. The 1950s were rife in conjectures masquerading as absolute truth. People in lab coats replaced the minister and mom and dad. The “science” of psychotherapy – actually a philosophy, not a science – broke down something as complicated as the human mind into a few grossly simplistic and adolescent toy blocks. Mom and dad, the family, norms, and faith came under clouds of suspicion. Now, all that is needed is the demographic heft of the Boomers and their youth rebellion on meth.

The cultural revolt would blossom into hippies, communal families (hello, Charlie Manson), “flower power”, socialism, and a rejection of much that came before. Fueling the tumult, and anticipating the Boomers, was the neo-Marxist chattering classes in academia such as Foucault and Marcuse, whose acolytes would eventually penetrate nearly everywhere in the culture, from kindergarten to grad school to the c-suite. Nowhere is this truer than San Diego-to-San Francisco.

The schema doesn’t work today any better than it did in the heyday of Haight-Ashbury. The counterculture’s attack on standards of sanity and the extension of “lifestyle” to cover public displays of filth and anti-social behavior only led to the blight of 30% of the country’s homelessness residing in the “Golden State”. Poop maps and vigilance are requirements to enjoy the state’s urban amenities.

The counterculture became the culture of California with all its hairbrained inconsistencies, but united by a rejection of the old and established. The narcissism and nihilism of the prior decades and into the present gradually removed the older guidelines only to leave a void to be filled with social decay and an increasingly emaciated economy, the state’s current condition.

The 1960s counterculture absorbed the latent neo-Marxism and the prevailing pseudo-science of its most ardent academic practitioners. It came out from the shadows as the state faced the social and economic repercussions of the peace dividend (decline of defense and defense-adjacent industries), massive foreign in-migration (much of it illegal), the rise of the new faith of environmentalism, and the teeming hordes of the mental and drug-addled turning our urban public spaces into open sewers. The state is becoming increasingly unlivable. It’s as if the trendy denizens of Laurel Canyon and Haight-Ashbury moved out of their haunts, coiffed their hair and dawned tweed, and moved into the Democratic Party and right into the state legislature and governor’s mansion.

Yes, indeed, the counterculture became the culture in “blue America”, with California as its epicenter.

RogerG

Sources:
1. “Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)”, CDC: Public Health Law, 7/10/2024, at https://www.cdc.gov/…/family-educational-rights-and…
2. “Court sides with parents in dispute over California policies on transgender students”, Amy Howe, SCOTUSblog, 3/2/2026, at https://www.scotusblog.com/…/divided-court-sides-with…/.
3. Federal District Court Judge Roger Benitez’s ruling in Mirabelli v. Bonta: “Federal Judge Issues Permanent Injunction Against Parental Exclusion Policies in California Schools”, California Policy Center, 12/23/2025, at https://californiapolicycenter.org/mirabelli-olson…/.

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Gaslighting the Public on Vote Fraud

Bellevue woman receives 16 ballots addressed to her apartment number with different names | wgrz.com
Bellevue woman receives 16 ballots addressed to her apartment number with different names in October 2024. (wgrz.com)

Why the campaign to convince the public that the voting system is safe and secure when the claim cannot survive a rudimentary examination? Go ahead, type “vote fraud” or something similar into a Google or Bing search field and you will get link after link praising its sanctity. Yet, what they assert is not proven. Just apply the minimal amount of mental energy to the subject to cut through the bogus mantra-like narrative. We are gaslit.

I had experience in running a precinct voting station in northern California in the 1980s, at the ground, nuts-and-bolts level. Granted, that was four decades ago and mostly involved in-person voting, but, looking back on it, the system was problematic back then. Basically, people were matched with their voluntarily disclosed addresses. The person signed the registrar’s list next to their alleged name and address and were handed a ballot. We were prohibited from asking for ID. They marked their ballot, handed it to a poll worker, and it was deposited in the box. After closing (8 p.m.), the number of ballots had to equal the number of signatures and then I delivered the locked box to the registrar’s office for tallying.

Can you discern any possible avenues of fraud in that system? The system is essentially reliant on personal honesty such as truthful signatures. Transparency laws require voter lists be made public. Any activist can have a copy. It begins with an oral statement of identity at the poll. How truthful is the person requesting the ballot? Is the signature an effective safeguard? Does the list accurately represent only valid voters? Delivery to the registrar’s office meant the ballots flow into the sea of paper. At the precinct level, any other concerns were above my pay grade.

And that was in-person voting, which is widely recognized as the most secure. What happens when ballots are scattered through the mail? A precinct voting booth is replaced by the kitchen table. What goes on behind those residential four walls is anybody’s guess. One person completing multiple ballots? Who knows? All that is necessary is a reasonably matching signature.

Are temporary, part time election employees apt to be forensic handwriting experts? I doubt that graphology is a widely practiced science. Will scanning machines and their software capture any fraud? Possibly, but so what. The fraud can’t be traced to any one particular ballot. The ballot has no user name, enters the ballot ocean in the county office, is already counted thereby cancelling a valid vote if fraudulent, while the fraudster disappears into the multitude, avoiding any dragnet because there isn’t likely to be one. So much for the deterrence of the law. So much for the proud boast “experts agree that there is no widespread voter fraud” (see #1). It’s hilarious.

I searched the net and only received affirmations of election purity on the first two or three pages of links. That might mean the “experts agree”, or they are either deluded or further muddying the reputations of “experts” in a partisan crusade. Pick a website and go to the relevant page. The reasons for the system’s alleged “righteousness” are dubious to say the least.

Let’s take a look at the attempted debunking of claims of dangerous levels of voter fraud in a piece that was produced by two UC Berkeley academics (see #2), a view dominating the first two pages of links in Google or Bing when searching “voter fraud”. The points raised are ubiquitous and partisan, but very misleading and cannot survive analysis.

The first obvious and bewildering allegation is, “Voter fraud is very rare….” This will not survive basic scrutiny. Compare voter fraud with shoplifting using similar computational methods. The rate of voter fraud (quotient) is calculated by taking the total number of detected instances of vote fraud (dividend) and dividing it by the total number of votes cast (divisor). With shoplifting, the rate of shoplifting (quotient) is determined by dividing the total number of shoplifting instances (dividend) by the total number of primary household shoppers (divisor). Yes, it’s rough but the two forms of larceny provide some commonality for comparison purposes.

If voter fraud is “rare”, so is shoplifting (larceny), using comparable computational methods. Shoplifting mathematically exists at a rate of .00846. The “detected” level of voter fraud in Arizona was .0000845. Yeah, the “8” moves back three digits for voter fraud, yet both convey “rare” no matter how you cut it. The voter fraud rate is corrupted by “detected”. If you are not vigilant because it is assumed to be “rare”, the low rate is a self-fulfilled prophecy. In addition, the devised voting system can make the discovery of fraud nearly impossible. Both calculations have their noise in the numbers.

Yet, that low shoplifting rate has caused some retail chains to fly the coop out of states like California and cities within it like San Francisco, L.A., Oakland. A low number does not capture the scale of the problem. Retail operating margins hover around 3%, but retail “losses” due to theft of around 1.6% of sales bites into the reason to remain in these locales (see #3). The “rare” rate of larceny is nonetheless driving some retailers into bankruptcy, or skedaddling.

Could a similar “rare” rate of vote larceny be discouraging people to vote? “Nah”, says the UC Berkely grads. They cite 6 reasons for why there’s nothing to see here. It’s balderdash.

Reason #1: “Only valid voters can get a ballot in the mail.” How “valid”? Are millions of “inactive” voters potentially “valid” voters? In response to a legal settlement with Judicial Watch in 2016, the California Secretary of State pledged to remove 5 million “inactive” voters from its voter rolls. L.A. County alone was responsible for 1.5 million (see #4). That’s a filthy list of voters. In that same year of 2016, there was about one person improperly on the list for every 3 voters (see #5). And the UC Berkeley grads are trying to tell me that only “valid voters” get a ballot by mail, or other ways? They asserted that there’s absolutely no possibility that some of those 5 million didn’t make it into the vote count. Really, in a wild shot-gunning of ballots through the mail like in 2020? It defies logic.

Reason #2: “It is very hard to make fake ballots.” This is your typical straw man. Photocopying ballots does not constitute even a small slice of the “stolen election” charges. The accusation might be out there but it is hard to find. The tactic of our post-doc candidate and her prof is to push an accusation that few if any are making and then knock it down. Straw men litter academia like in social media.

Reason #3: “Voters must affirm their identity”. How? By signature, and the eagle-eye (?) precision of temporary workers pouring over the signature books and autographs on mail-in ballot envelopes. And all of this is based on registration lists later shown, usually under threat of legal action, to be afflicted with a third flotsam – the dead, moved, or improperly registered. It’s like operating a Walgreen’s on the honor code in a sea of L.A. homeless. Then, compound the problem by flinging mail-in ballots hither and yon to be marked by heaven-knows-who in the unmonitored environs of millions of kitchen tables, all vouched by a signature. Remember, no ID. That’s a whole lot of pressure on temporary workers seeking to make extra money for Christmas. Anyway, “affirmed” or realistically not affirmed, any signature is irrelevant after the ballots enter the ballot sea. It’s counted, period.

Reason #4: “It’s very hard to duplicate mail-ballot envelopes”. Straw Man II. The “safeguards” of a government return envelope and envelope bar codes are beside the point. They are no way to guarantee the intended person voted. Get the signature later or produce a close approximation. Our grad student and her prof make this howler: “This signature usually cannot deviate significantly from the signature on their original voter registration card, or the ballot will be rejected.” Who’s expected to pinpoint the “deviations”? Yes, it’s our supersleuth temporary election workers, grandma or grandpa seeking to score a few bucks for the grandkids’ Christmas.

Reason #5: “The Postal Service will notice oddities.” Mmmmm? Our campus duo makes this announcement: “Anyone hoping to conduct mail-voting fraud would have to avoid detection by not only regular election officials, but also the U.S. Postal Service.” Let me get this straight, unionized postal workers receiving an avalanche of ballots will successfully weed out the fraudsters. There’s something about Arctic ice salesmen that keeps ringing in my head. This is beyond comical.

The final “reason” should lead to a laughter-induced seizure.

Reason #6: “Voter fraud is a serious federal and state crime.” Yeah, and murder, burglary, theft, extortion, racketeering, etc., are as well. So what? They still occur, and a lot in some places. Talk to any resident of south Chicago, or almost anywhere in California. Much of it goes unreported and falls through the cracks as untraceable. And that makes it like vote fraud.

And all of this is the corkscrew logic to avoid bringing a driver’s license to the precinct polling place. The Democrats protesteth too much. It’s intriguing. Is there something going on here that they are not telling us? States with ID laws make the things easy to get and accept other ways to establish ID. Compare it with the TSA requirement of ID at airports. Of the millions passing through the nation’s airports, the loudest complainers make one think of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Red Brigades of 1970s fame. Bewailing an innocuous safeguard understandably brings to mind bewailer nefariousness, and rightly so.

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RogerG

Source:
1. “What you need to know about voter fraud in California”, California Voter Foundation, 10/10/2022, at https://www.calvoter.org/content/what-you-need-know-about-voter-fraud-california.
2. “6 ways mail-in ballots are protected from fraud”, Charlotte Hill and Jake Grumbach, UC Berkeley via The Conversation, UC Berkeley, 9/30/2020, at https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/6-ways-mail-ballots-are-protected-fraud.
3. “Crime isn’t the full story: What else is affecting retailers in urban areas, in 4 charts”, CNN, 10/12/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/12/business/target-closing-us-cities-crime-dg.
4. “Calif. Begins Removing 5 Million Inactive Voters on Its Rolls”, Susan Crabtree, Real Clear Politics, 6/20/2019, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/20/calif_begins_removing_5_million_inactive_voters_on_its_rolls__140602.html.
5. “2016 Presidential General Election Results – California”, The U.S. Elections Atlas, at https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=2016&fips=6&off=0&elect=0&f=0.

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Trump’s Real Art of the Deal: Bash Your Friends, Pander to Thugs

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Here’s our self-described Oval Office “genius” at work:

“We gave back Greenland to Denmark after World War II. How stupid were we to do that, we did that.” — President Donald Trump at the 2026 World Economic Forum, 1/20/2026 (see #1)

When will Trump’s most ardent sympathizers and supporters stop making excuses for his steady stream of whoppers? It’s dangerous. The reporter Salena Zito in September 2016 laid the groundwork for the omnibus excuse for Trump’s habitual use of shameless falsehoods when she wrote, “When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” Her rendering of seriously and literally may be true but when combined with diplomacy, he is a fool. He puts us in peril.

Whoppers are not the only common feature in Trump’s spiel. The guy’s secret sauce in international diplomacy is to beat up on friends, allies, and anyone weak, vulnerable, and dependent on us, the low hanging fruit, the ones truly susceptible to his threats and cajolery. The “Art of the Deal” is to pander to thugs while treating our partners to the worst sort of threats and brow-beating. Putin and Xi get kid gloves while everyone else gets the Zelensky treatment. Remember the infamous February 2025 meeting with Zelensky in the White House? Go ahead, read the transcript here (see #2). The tactic is to drag the victim closer to the victimizer, while expecting minimal face-saving gestures on the part of the reprobate. There you have it, The Art of the Deal, the diplomacy edition.

The above verbal blast before a forum of people at Davos who know better is flat out false. We never “gave back” Greenland to Demark, nor was its claim of sovereignty over the place seriously challenged for three centuries. How brazenly false is the bombast? Let me count the ways (see #1 and #3).

* In 1721, the unified kingdom of Denmark-Norway began a concerted effort at settlement of Greenland. No one seriously contested the move.
* In 1814, Denmark’s retention of control of Greenland was confirmed after the Napoleonic Wars in the Treaty of Kiel.
* In 1941, after the Nazi conquest of Denmark, the Danish government in exile signed an agreement with the US to help Denmark’s government-in-exile keep Greenland out of the hands of the Nazis. The pact recognized Denmark’s sovereignty of the place.
* In 1951, a defense pact between the US and Denmark for the US to build Thule Airforce Base in Greenland recognized “the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark” over the island.
* In 1954, the US supported the successful passage of the UN resolution guaranteeing Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland.

Yes, Truman in 1946 offered to buy the island but Denmark rejected the offer, and the matter died there till our orange and elderly loose cannon in the White House started to make noise about the place.

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Anti-Trump protests in Greenland, March 2025. (photo: Christian Klindt Soelbeck / Ritzau / Christian Klindt Soelbeck)

It’s what Trump does in his Art of the Deal praxis: maul our friends and allies, like Demark or Ukraine – watch out Taiwan – because they won’t shoot back. As for Putin and Xi, Putin’s possession of 5,460 nuclear warheads and Xi’s CCP, with the second largest economy, 600 and growing nuclear warheads, and nearly 400 warships and submarines, get the equivalent of a Valentine’s Day bouquet of roses and a peck on the cheek. And for this he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?

Honestly, Trump’s foreign policy is the one typically exercised in the schoolyard. Ingratiate yourself to the bullies and treat weaker friends and allies with risible contempt. Makes you wonder, is Trump a juvenile 79-year-old? Is he exhibiting signs of age-related mental decay, different from Biden’s only in kind? Something to think about, and be concerned about since this guy has the security of the country in his hands.

Near and current octogenarians wanting to be president may not mean that we’ll get the wisdom of advanced age. It could mean that we get the opinionated old fart who causes worries for everyone at Thanksgiving dinner. Biden, now Trump. Go figure.

May be an image of text that says 'N-c JOURNAL RNAI EITHER EITHERAWARD AWARD YOU OUtheNOBELPEACE the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE or YOU'LL INVADE GREENLAND? THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE X@Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

RogerG

Source:

1. “Did US give Greenland to Denmark after WW2? Fact-checking Trump’s ‘stupid’ claim at Davos”, Hindustan Times, 1/21/2026, at https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/did-us-own-greenland-give-to-denmark-after-world-war-2-fact-checking-trumps-stupid-claim-at-davos-101769010422536.html.
2. “Vance’s heated argument in the Oval Office”, transcript, AP, 2/26/2025, at https://apnews.com/article/trump-zelenskyy-vance-transcript-oval-office-80685f5727628c64065da81525f8f0cf.
3. “The Cold War Agreement That Opened Greenland to the US Military”, History, 1/15/2026, at https://www.history.com/articles/1951-agreement-that-allows-us-military-presence-in-greenland.

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Is This All that Our Country Can Produce, Embarrassments?

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Recent elections are an embarrassment to our country. 2008 gave us a slick, smooth-talking community organizer (aka left-wing activist/agitator). Well, anyway, we proved that we’re not racists. After two terms of that, 2016 gave us a vulgarian. Not a Republican mind you, but a Perotista (an acolyte of Ross Perot, the Reform Party of the 1990s). Well, at least he (Trump) was not her (Hillary). 2020 gave us another of those “at least he’s [Biden] not him [Trump]” as our chief executive, along with a lefty cultural revolution, a Kabul bugout, and inflation. Four years later, we’re back to the vulgarian and “at least he’s [Trump] not him [Biden]”. Our last three elections were vote-against affairs, not vote-for. It’s fair to say that we have produced subpar leaders of the free world, maybe even embarrassments.

Our current embarrassment is incapable of inspiring anyone beyond his political groupie, MAGA. It’s what happens when people cloister themselves into their insular socio-political bubbles. The world wide web does not help. Indeed, it seems to have accelerated the self-sequestration in a fog of ignorance. The web is the polluted equivalent of the Cuyahoga River when it caught fire in Cleveland in 1969. The longer one spends on it, the dumber one gets and the more excitable are our vacuous minds. When booting up, warning labels should be affixed as they are on booze and cigarettes.

Do you think that the other side has anything better to offer? They swim around in a crowd of Democratic Socialists (the Bolsheviks’ former moniker), eco-militants (Bolsheviks under another banner), “geniuses” who can’t define “woman”, activist swarms on the hunt for systemic oppressions (inspired by Marx), and tax and spend addicts who would turn the country into the Soviet Union with the Soviet Union’s fate. Now that’s a claque to vote against.

Neither side acts like they understand the simple maxim that politics is about addition, not subtraction. Our current occupant behind the Resolute desk is all the rage among his groupie, even if it was proven to them that he was the second gunman on the grassy knoll in Dallas, November 22, 1963.

The groupies reorient their positions to align with his, even if they must delete their old Twitter posts and see to it that their old speeches don’t see the light of day. Listening to Hugh Hewitt is a daily reacquaintance with the debasement. Free traders become enthusiasts of the “most beautiful word in the English language”, tariff. All of a sudden, no one is a “neocon”, even if Trump can’t define it. Trump moderates on China, Tik Tok, abortion and so do they. He and his sidekick, Vance, berate the leader of a country victimized by the most brazen act of territorial aggression since the little corporal went hunting for Lebensraum, and the Trump choir approvingly chants in unison. Immediately, out came many versions of the “Zelensky deserved it” line based on the shocking charge that he wore the wrong shirt and pants. Vance was especially heinous. Revolting.

For his second term, Trump is as unbridled as a kid in a candy store, but with access to his daddy’s bank account (Fred Trump, worth $300 million in 1999 dollars, double in today’s money). Only, the candy store is today’s presidency with all of its assumed near-imperial powers. He’s a mixed bag. Enforcing federal law (immigration law), finally, good. Cutting taxes, lessening the eco-evisceration of our transportation and energy industries, finally, good. Seizing Maduro and his vicious wife, finally, good. Siding with Israel to prove that the mullah-junta in Teheran have no clothes, and no nukes, good, finally.

But it also includes declaring a trade war on the world on his simple signature. Some of it is juvenile grandstanding in replacing “Mexico” with “America” for the Gulf. Some of it is blatant extortion. Trump panders to Putin, berates Zelensky, and bullies a vulnerable Ukraine into a minerals deal.

Now, he’s busy treating Denmark like an enemy, like maybe the . . . CCP. It’s looney. The ChiComs get a better deal. The CCP gets our advanced Nvidia chips and Demark experiences the seizure of a huge chunk of its sovereign territory. Yes, “sovereign” by 1916 US/Denmark treaty, a 1951 mutual defense pact, and 1954 UN resolution.

All of it over Greenland. Interesting thought experiment: What happens if Trump sends in his version of Putin’s “little green men” into Greenland and Denmark resists? What happens if Denmark, a charter member of NATO, invokes Article 5 of the NATO Treaty which decrees the responsibility of member nations to come its aid? Imagine that, Polish and Czech fighters flying sorties against our “little green man”. Sure, it’s a conundrum, but will probably end with the breakup of NATO. If so, Trump is wittingly or unwittingly Putin’s stooge? Trump invites such conclusions when he delivers a handsome strategic victory to the henchman in the Kremlin. Whose side is he on?

Is this the meaning of America First? America Alone is more accurate.

After ten years in the public eye, Donald Trump is no mystery, or shouldn’t be. The guy is celebrated for his bluntness. More importantly, he is disgustingly vain, an embarrassment, and mesmerized by big and splashy events. Here he is in a text message to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Stoere:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT” (see #1)

It reads like a petulant teenager on Instagram. Peace for “8 Wars PLUS”? Hogwash. The vast majority of his diplomatic interventions did not establish peace, and India, a potential ally in Cold War II, is left grinding their teeth. His other attempts were limited to bashing our . . . friends (Israel, Ukraine, NATO). He has no leverage with the thugs, unless he goes to war, which would disqualify him for the Nobel Peace Prize. The whole thing is shameful. We should be mortified. It is unbecoming of a president.

It would be nice for us to be on the side of the angels. Are we anymore? We are behaving like Putin. Yet, our alternative to the 78-year-old juvenile is a cabal of neo-Marxists. In the party, moderates are Mensheviks and the base is Bolshevik. Either party faction is an invitation to ruin. Right now, they have rediscovered their inner John C. Calhoun, another storied Democrat of the 1830s. They are infatuated with nullification in pursuit of their Jacobin-style revolution. Jacob Frey (D), Minneapolis mayor, demanded that federal law enforcement leave the city: “Minnesota needs ICE to leave . . . . (see #3)” Even stronger, “get the f— out!” Sounds like South Carolina’s 1861 ultimatum for federal troops to vacate Ft. Sumter.

The assault on the Supremacy Clause (The Constitution, Article VI, Clause 2) is garbled in gibberish about the fed’s enforcement of the federal code, Title 8. Let that sink in, the feds enforcing federal law. Violators of that law are amazingly described as “our friends and neighbors”, as if that is relevant. Yes, they could be, but they are “friends and neighbors” who violated federal law. Being a “friend and neighbor” is immaterial to being a lawbreaker. The talk billowing out of the mouths of Mayor Frey and Governor Waltz is a mash of incoherence, if not a demand for old style nullification.

Presently, that’s the political lay of the land. One party has turned itself into a MAGA fan club, while the other has greater affinity for The Communist Manifesto than The Declaration of Independence. And amazingly, the 2026 midterm, which coincides with the 250-year anniversary of The Declaration, offers the likely prospect of The Manifesto’s rise to governing prominence in at least the House.

Oh, what a mess. A groupie fan club or the hammer and sickle without the flag. In 2026, if you think that you can have the Democrats without the hammer and sickle, just give them a little time in the seat of power and you’ll get the opportunity to be . . . California. Enjoy.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “The exchange of messages between Norway’s prime minister and President Trump”, Reuters, 1/19/2026, at https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exchange-messages-between-norways-prime-minister-president-trump-2026-01-19/.
2. “Tearing Apart NATO, over a Trinket”, Jim Geraghty, National Review, 1/20/2026, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/tearing-apart-nato-over-a-trinket/.
3. “Minneapolis mayor on Trump threat: Minnesota doesn’t need additional troops”, Ashleigh Fields, The Hill, 1/15/2026, at https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5690999-unrest-minneapolis-ice-presence/.

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Why Are Democrats So Intent on Making Illegal Immigration the Hill to Die On?

How will the surge of illegal immigrants impact the US economy? | Fox News Video
Caravans of immigrants approaching our southern border, 2019, amidst Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy.

California Exodus — It’s Real. People are leaving California, I get… | by Michael Rhodes ...

Why is the Democratic Party, down to its base, going bonkers over the enforcement of federal immigration law, even to the point of taking up the 19th-century southerners’ cause of nullification? In this case, they are trying to “nullify” immigration law as much as possible in so-called state “sanctuaries” from federal immigration enforcement. More than that, Democrat bastions are scenes of rampaging mobs and flame-throwing officeholders like those in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland, and other blue-dots on the national map. Why the willingness to die on that hill?

It’s naked politics, pure and simple, contradicting the facetious and lofty rhetoric of the street barkers. The street urchins at the tip of spear may not understand it, but the party mandarins do. At its brass-knuckled core is congressional reapportionment. Blue states and localities are bleeding people because their blue governments are a detriment to personal prosperity. The flight shows in almost any measure from state finance department reports to moving company data. Don’t expect these states to change their spots. Heaven knows, in their blinkered minds, it can’t be their policies that have driven people away like the escapees jumping the Iron Curtain or Cambodians fleeing the Khmer Rouge.

So, import a population by any means, legal or illegal, to cover the losses. After all, according to the courts, it’s “persons” not “citizens” in the language of the Constitution in Article I, Section 2 regarding the census, and on to reapportionment. To facilitate the influx, they demand that Title 8 of the US code be treated as if it does not exist. So much for seeing that the laws be faithfully executed, while electing a president who refuses to fulfill his oath of office.

Nonetheless, we still have laws that stipulate the terms for legal presence on our country. These laws didn’t appear in our legal codes by imperial decree. Our elected representatives wrote and approved them over decades. Subsequent Congresses of our elected representatives have chosen not to change them. That makes them “our” laws – the very essence of popular sovereignty – and not the sole possession of tiny street cadres in blue bastions. These acts of criminal interference with the execution of our laws are challenges to a cornerstone of our constitutional republic, popular sovereignty.

Simply put, these street mobs of the self-anointed are demanding to overturn the national elections that produced these laws. What they can’t earn in elections, they demand from bullhorns and wanton acts of illegality.

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Protests in LA over ICE detentions, June 2025.
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An “ICE Watch” person blows a whistle as federal agents conduct an immigration raid in Minneapolis, Minn., January 13, 2026. (photo: Ryan Murphy/Reuters)

Comparing this to the struggle against Jim Crow is pure nonsense. Jim Crow was plainly unconstitutional, as is a president who refuses to faithfully execute the laws. Where’s the unconstitutionality of the entirety of Title 8 of the US code? True, enforcement varied from closer legal adherence to an effective repeal through deliberate neglect, even going so far as to subsidize the illegality, under Biden. Did Americans ever want Title 8 stricken? No Congress has voted to remove it or alter it. No popular mandate in congressional elections has arisen to accomplish the feat, which is the only poll that counts.

The courts have not been of much help. They are incoherent in interpreting the constitutional provisions on reapportionment and the census upon which it is based. In 1962, the Supreme Court issued its famous decision in Baker v. Carr that established the “one man, one vote” standard for the exercise of reapportionment by a state. Legislative districts must be nearly equal in population for the purpose of adhering to “one man, one vote”. Notice, it refers to voting people, and noncitizens can’t vote in federal elections.

Then came Department of Commerce (Trump) v. New York in 2020 with the Court preventing the Trump administration from including a citizenship question on the census form, clearly to exclude noncitizens from the census numbers for purposes of reapportionment. Much of the argument centered on the Constitution’s use of “persons” to be counted, not “citizens”. Back to Baker v. Carr, how equal in “persons” are districts that are drawn with 40% noncitizens in some and 5% in others? If 500,000 total population per district, citizen and noncitizen, is our equality number, one district might have 100,000 voting-qualified adults while another might have 60,000. Where’s “one man, one vote”? 60,000 have same the congressional power as 100,000. Was “person” meant to mean “citizen”?

The conundrum will have to be addressed by the Court sooner or later. But as it sits right now, blue states have a vested interest in illegal immigration, any immigration, to fill the depressions in their population balance sheets caused by their unappealing policies. It’s either official, flamboyant, and bombastic rhetoric, calls for physical “resistance” to federal law enforcement by animated “ICE watch” activists rushing to threaten, dox, and disrupt our officers from enforcing our laws, or accept the slide to political irrelevance due to their own self-inflicted acts of ruination.

Never bet on voluntary humility. Circumstances, though, may dictate otherwise. An unavoidable acceptance of humble pie might require the admission that greenie utopias, tax systems as looting expeditions, equality of result supplanting equal opportunity, the public schools turned into struggle sessions, etc., is not attractive to the stable elements in any population. Though, don’t bet on it.

Barring such a “Come to Jesus” moment, it’s go bonkers and prepare to die on the hill of illegal immigration, for foreign nationals to break our laws. Illegal immigration is a matter of survival for Democrats who have been busy destroying their cities and states.

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RogerG

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Trump and the Coarsening of Our Political Culture

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On 1/11, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell divulged (see #1) that the Trump Justice Department served grand jury subpoenas on the Federal Reserve as part of an investigation of perjury in testimony before Congress about the renovation of Federal Reserve buildings in Washington, D.C. It’s the same gambit – allegations of “lying” to federal authorities and Congress – utilized by Democrats against Republicans.

It was activated against Trump’s first National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, in 2017, and before that in 2005 targeting Scooter Libby. The threat loomed large throughout the FBI’s targeting of Trump and his campaign in Crossfire Hurricane and the ensuing Russiagate saga that consumed his first term. Now, salivating with the power for retribution, Trump’s people are throwing around the much-abused perjury allegation in the service of his policy impulses.

No, this coarsening of our politics didn’t begin with Trump. It began with the Democrats, and none more conspicuous than the sham Trump prosecutions beginning in 2023. Back in the White House, Trump and his people are eager to respond in kind. The Democrats have long been drunk on power; after all, they are the party of government, a government of ever-expanding power. Trump and his people are similarly in need of a field sobriety test.

There are legitimate debates to be had over the constitutionality of “independent” federal agencies like the Federal Reserve and about policy struggles over the appropriate level of interest rates. But this, the use of police powers to coerce a win in a policy debate? Ideologically, our modern Democratic party is closer on the political spectrum to Marxism and Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s NKVD head, and his famous dictum: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Move over Democrats, let Trump and his people take the seats next to Stalin’s henchman.

Trump clearly wants to flip the “affordability” script before the 2026 midterms in November. To do that, he’s convinced that he needs cheap money – a return of quantitative easing, or basement level interest rates, maybe forever. Cheap money absent a recession or depression is an invitation for 1970’s style inflation. A combination of Biden’s trillion-dollar spending bills and interest rates below historical averages produced the inflation that contributed to the resurrection of Trump in 2024. So, Trump wants to “flip the script” by being a Democrat, through fiscal incontinence and currency devaluation (easy money). Trump seems to have no reluctance in turning us into Juan Peron’s Argentina (an accumulated inflation rate of 300% over 6 years in the 1970s).

Trump regularly boasts about his smarts, and his opponents not so. Is he? Probably not because anyone who has the constant need to remind others of their exalted intelligence is hiding the fact that they are not. This kind of self-assured person can get us into trouble.

He is so smart that only he, and Democrats, contend that business taxes are only paid by businesses, foreign or domestic. A tariff is a business tax. It’s a tax on a business’s supply chain. Therefore, magically in his mind, these business taxes do not raise prices. Huh? Yes, hikes in mandatory minimum wages, capital gains, corporate income taxes do, but somehow a 15% tax at the port for a needed component is not. This is not smart. It’s stupid.

As of November’s CPI, inflation stubbornly remains above the Fed’s target of 2% (2.7-3%). The price of fuel has declined to mitigate the jump in the cost of living while Trump at the same time exacerbates it by inflicting a 15% or more tax increase on a business’s supply chain (Remember “Liberation Day”?), leaving aside the price inflation that accompanies a decline in market competition from the tariff wall. A smart person would know this, but apparently not this “genius”.

Obama, Biden, Harris were the American heirs of Juan and Evita Peron. Now, let’s add Donald Trump to this new Mount Rushmore of governmental mismanagement and coarseness. Were those predecessors any smarter than him? No, they just had the commanding heights of the culture to run interference for them. They were as coarse as him in their thinking and behavior.

We have developed a tradition of coarseness in our politics. Are we any better than the turnstile regimes in Latin America? One has to wonder.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell”, Jerome Powell, video on X, at https://x.com/federalreserve/status/2010510130970849338.

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A Civics Lesson for the Constitutionally Semi-Literate on the West Coast (And Elsewhere)

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Portland mayor Keith Wilson

The U.S. Constitution (see #1):

Article I, Section 8, Clause 4: “[The Congress shall have Power] To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” From the earliest days, the Supreme Court has defined this power to include the power to establish the terms of a foreign national’s presence in the United States.
Article II, Section 3: “[The President] he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed . . . .”
Article VI, Clause 2, The Supremacy Clause: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
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The design of our system of government is easy to understand, except for west coast rabble-rousing officeholders and their critical mass of voters in our big urban nodes, many college faculties (people who should know better but don’t), and much of our legacy media dotting the nation. Social media is often abuzz in profound ignorance.

So, for those who are, or intentionally make themselves, Constitutionally illiterate, a basic primer is required. Article I, Section 8 lists the approved areas of law that the federal legislature (Congress) can approve, often called “enumerated powers”. One of those powers is Clause 4: the power to establish the terms for presence in the country, which Congress did in “8 U.S. Code, Ch.12: Immigration and Nationality”. Article II, Section 3 empowers the president with the duty to carry out (execute), or enforce, these laws. Article VI, Clause 2 makes those laws and presidential actions supreme over the contrary wishes of state or local power brokers.

Got it? In a nutshell, within the legal confines of Article I, Section 8 (and a few other places), Congress and the President are supreme. The immigration blather of Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, Minnesota governor Tim Waltz, Portland police chief Bob Day, Portland mayor Keith Wilson, and Oregon governor Tina Kotek is empty virtue signaling, or just plain stupid. If their actions interfere with the administration of federal law, they are committing obstruction of justice as defined in 18 U.S. Code § 111. Bottom line: the federal government is supreme within those “enumerated powers”.

The above culprits espouse facetiously heartwarming rhetoric of care for people being investigated for various violations of federal law in 8 U.S. Code, Ch.12. In Portland yesterday (January 8th), two people were shot as they tried to harm federal officers in an attempt to evade an investigation into their legal presence in our country, and affiliations with violent gangs known to be present in the vast underworld of illegal immigration. Mayor Wilson rushed to the microphones and cameras to emote,

“Just one day after the horrific violence in Minnesota, our community here in Portland was witness to a moment of fear, confusion, and heartbreak. Earlier this afternoon, two people were shot and injured by federal agents in the Hazlewood neighborhood. Violence in our community is devastating. These are not statistics. These are human beings. Portland is not a training ground for militarized agents . . . .”

“Two people”? These weren’t just “two people”. They were suspects in violations of federal law. Portland’s Mayor Wilson and Mayor Frey of Minneapolis are in cahoots to hide the reality. Mayor Wilson characterized a conversation with Mayor Frey as follows: “We shared not just our concerns, but our grief for the families who are suffering and grief for the recklessness of our federal government.” Further demagoguing the story, he said, “ICE agents and their homeland security leadership must fully be investigated and held responsible for the violence inflicted on the American people in Minnesota, in Portland, and in all the communities across America.”

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Bodycam footage of “ICE Watch” Minneapolis activist Renee Good during her fatal confrontation with federal officers.

These people aren’t just with “families” or to be blurred with the “American people”. Also, they are often and misleadingly referred to as “our residents”. The blowhards are putting makeup on a pig. The suspects may “reside” in the country or place, but that’s the crux of the problem. By law, they ought not be. While here, they are suspects in violation of our immigration laws and, if participants in “ICE Watch” groups, violators of our obstruction of justice laws.
Completely ignored in this toxic blather is the fact that the prior administration refused to enforce the law. Even going so far as to give aid and comfort – subsidies – for lawbreaking: debit cards, cell phones, plane flights, free housing in expensive hotels, and the massive relabeling without legal warrant of illegal immigration as “asylum”. Biden should have been impeached for this refusal to execute his Constitutional duties. Instead, the country was flooded with foreign nationals illegally present in our country.

Correction of this nearly 4-year dereliction of duty requires immense law enforcement efforts to match the scale of the dereliction. The coterie of left-wing officeholders on the west coast, and elsewhere, is wantonly dismissive of the basic rudiments of our Constitutional order. Whether through ignorance or willful blindness, it matters not.

The Constitution places them down the pecking order in regards to federal supremacy. Their efforts at sanctuary from federal immigration laws is clearly unconstitutional. More than that, it can be construed as an obstruction of justice. Instead of hosannas, they are deserving of perp walks.

Left-wing firebrands in public office on the west coast and elsewhere need to be reminded of President Jackson’s response to John C. Calhoun’s defense of South Carolina’s Act of Nullification (of the 1832 federal tariff law) when he tersely said, “. . . disunion by armed force is treason.” He further declared,

“[South Carolina’s ordinance of nullification] is founded, not on the indefeasible right of resisting acts which are plainly unconstitutional and too oppressive to be endured but on the strange position that any one state may not only declare an act of Congress void but prohibit its execution . . . .” Additionally, “. . . to give the right of resisting laws of that description, coupled with the uncontrolled right to decide what laws deserve that character, is to give the power of resisting all laws.” (see #3)

John C. Calhoun timeline | Timetoast timelines

In other words, chaos. With the dense in mind, Declarations of Sanctuary (from immigration law) are acts of nullification. Calling them acts of noncooperation is a semantical way to dress up obstruction of justice, or nullification, in false pieties.

If not manacled in a perp walk to an FBI custody van, they ought to be exposed to civil financial forfeiture by anyone made to suffer bodily, emotionally, and property damage from the concomitant lawlessness. Incitement to lawlessness by people who show no sign of at least a minimal acquaintance with our Constitutional order, which they are required to know, ought to lead to personal bankruptcy. Keep it in mind you lords of left-wing fiefdoms.

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RogerG

Sources:
1. Goggle the “U.S. Constitution” and jump to its various articles and sections.
2. “Elected Officials Don’t Really Want Peace or Calm”, Jim Geraghty, National Review, 1/9/2026, at https://www.nationalreview.com/…/elected-officials…/.
3. “Jackson’s Proclamation to the People of South Carolina”, Britannica, at https://www.britannica.com/…/Jacksons-Proclamation-to….

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The Problem with Hitching Your Wagon to a Wild Horse

Don't Hitch Your Wagon to the Wrong Horse: Vendor Partnerships Make for Poor Positioining

Let’s be clear, the “wagon” in the metaphor is your support and beliefs; the “horse” is a magnetic political personage, such as Donald Trump or Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Zohran Mamdani. Put the two factors together and you will experience “disappointment”.

One of the recent Trump dustups regards the August jobs report. The looming analysis on the state of employment at the time of the fuss was not likely to be encouraging, and wasn’t. So, President Trump dumped Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfer. He nominated E.J. Antoni, a Heritage Foundation economist and fervent Trump supporter, to replace her. Based on his activity since January 6th, 2021, it would be fair to classify him as a Trump zealot, more like Sean Hannity than an economist. His since-deleted Twitter account was littered with inflammatory remarks about groups and Trump’s opponents. He was at the January 6th Capitol riot. In his role as Heritage economist, he was known to distort economic numbers to benefit Trump. His credibility as an honest broker was shattered long ago (see #1).

Donald Trump's tweet announcing the nomination of Dr. E.J. Antoni as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with a photo of Trump smiling behind a desk with Dr. Antoni standing beside him.

Quite understandably, Senators Collins (R, Maine) and Murkowski (R, Alaska) were taken aback and refused to fall in line behind Antoni. On Tuesday, President Trump pulled the nomination. Many Senators balked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics becoming The Bureau of MAGA Statistics (Dominic Pino’s phrase). The “Deep State” jargon can only take you so far in refashioning government agencies into mouthpieces of your personal agitprop.

And what about those employment numbers? They aren’t reassuring for the rest of us. Lets’ look under that rug. The August report was, to put it mildly, disappointing, like the May and June numbers (see #2). The economy added a disheartening 22,000 jobs, far below the forecasted 75,000. The unemployment rate rose to 4.3% and the number of unemployed persons increased to 7.4 million. It doesn’t stop there. Job openings decreased from the previous month and the long-term unemployed rose to 25.7%. Not good by any stretch of the imagination.

Maybe to a certain extent, Trump can’t believe it after all his “great trade deals” and his list of sporadic successes of individual plant openings, ribbon cuttings, and promises from various economic actors. Neither could FDR during the Great Depression, but a depression became a Great Depression under his watch. Both men suffered from a form of tunnel vision. FDR believed that feverish government activity would rescue us so couldn’t restrain himself. Ditto for Trump. His acumen in real estate was great for real estate, but not necessarily an advantage in understanding the whole economy. There remains much room in his head for economic illiteracy (Google “Thomas Sowell”).

The reaction can be attributed to bombastic personalities and their attraction to big, flashy events, like a moth to a flame; however, the mundane and fundamental basics of an economy get short shrift. Trump is completely unaware of the serious trade-offs that accrued from his tariff war on the world. He unwittingly recreated the conditions of the COVID shutdowns by disrupting supply chains in his April demand that the world bend a knee. Long-established business arrangements were ripped apart.

Trump now needs easy money to paper over his damage, leading to persistent attacks on Fed chair Powell and the rest of the Fed Board. Of course, easy money after assaults on the supply chain won’t end well, any more than it did after COVID and Biden’s $3.7 trillion infusion in 2021. Here we go again. This time it’s Fox News as cheer leader instead of CNN, MSNBC, and the networks with the pom poms. Hitching wagons can be dangerous if the “horse” is a spirited believer in things that aren’t true. Don’t expect the ride to be comfortable.

Constitutional Guardrails

RogerG

Sources:

1. Three sources on the background of E.J. Antoni: (1) CNN at https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/30/politics/ej-antoni-nomination-withdrawn-bls; (2) New York Post at https://nypost.com/2025/10/01/us-news/white-house-yanks-controversial-nominee-ej-antoni-to-helm-bureau-of-labor-statistics/; and (3) National Review at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-obamacare-ratchet-effect/.
2. “Payrolls rose 22,000 in August, less than expected in further sign of hiring slowdown”, CNBC, 9/5/2025, at https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/05/jobs-report-august-2025.html?msockid=287a0b967a9564c61c991f537b2f65ee.

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Our Politics of the Unrestrained Id, with the Ego and Superego Nowhere in Sight

Far-left Squad Members
From left, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Cori Bush, D-Mo.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., are among the lawmakers who signed the letter. (Getty Images)
Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers remarks at the Prairie du Chien Area Arts Center in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, on September 28, 2024. (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI / AFP) (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Donald Trump delivers remarks in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, on Sept. 28, 2024.
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Rep. Maxine Waters (D, Ca,) in June 2018 advocating public intimidation of Trump administration officials

Maxine Waters (D, Ca.) advocating mob intimidation of Trump administration officials and their families in restaurants and other public settings in June of 2018: “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them! And you tell them that they are not welcome, anymore, anywhere.” (see #1)

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC, D, NY) on the eve of Trump’s second inaugural, January 20, 2025: “Well, we are on the eve of an authoritarian administration. This is what 21st century fascism is starting to look like.” (see #2)

Vice President J.D. Vance’s response to Jon Favreau, former Obama speechwriter, who questioned his account of the sniper attack on immigration officers in Dallas: “The gunman had anti-ICE messaging carved on the bullets he used. What, precisely, did I get wrong, dips***?” (see #3)

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In Freud’s schema, the human mind is a bureaucracy divided into three departments. At the base level, we have our id, our basic drives and primal desires. It is checked by the ego, the rational department that ties us to reality, and the superego which is our moral conscience. If our politics today is anything like Freud’s theory, our id has free reign and the other two are atrophying due to lack of use.

“Dips***”? Vice President Vance is all of 41 years old, an adolescent among officeholders (Sen. Grassley, 92). His crassness can be attributed to his youth, but not completely. The young are very impressionable. His mentor is Donald Trump. Our president has a well-rehearsed schtick of public coarseness. We’ve even invented a word, “Trumpian”, to soften our squeamishness about language and behavior that would have led our mother to send us to our room without dinner. Then, watch the rest of the Trump entourage in and out of his inner circle indulge in sycophantic loutishness.

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Vice President J.D. Vance

Hold on, though. The Left, meaning the Democratic Party (the institutional Left) and its street militias, Antifa and their tans-militant allies, even pre-Trump, had nearly cornered the market on linguistic and behavioral incivility. They’ve been doing it for years. “Bush lied, people died”; “No blood for oil”. The Weather Underground. The spiked trees to injure lumbermen. Of late, recall Ferguson, Kenosha, George Floyd, the entire 2020 summer of riots, torched downtowns, the killings, the statue toppling, defacements of our founders and those who died in our wars? Recall the invention of new words to castigate those who disagree – nearly anything with a “phobia” suffix and the boundless use of racist, patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, “settler colonialism”, et al? Recall The 1619 Project, the attempt to implant revolution in the minds of young people? The 2023-4 cancel mobs and antisemitic hostility on campuses? Sen. Chuck Schumer’s threat to Supreme Court justices?

This is not “both sides-ism”. It’s my survey of the political landscape. What the Right has done in being “Trumpian”, the Left was already there and upped the ante. There was nowhere else for the Left to go but mayhem. Bellicosity is a territory they already occupy.

As such, some on the Left’s fiery id edge have added firearms to the Molotov cocktail in their arsenal. Convinced of the truth of trans ideology, children were targeted in Minneapolis and Nashville as well as a Supreme Court justice or two or three. Let’s not forget the murder of Charlie Kirk. In 2017, a Bernie Sanders supporter decided to try and veto with a rifle the lives of Republican congressmen practicing for a baseball game. In a state with an electorate already overwhelmingly oriented to the Left, California, mobs rampaged to stop the enforcement of federal immigration law. It happens wherever a Democrat one-party state is firmly entrenched.

The Left’s assault on law enforcement is resplendent in Texas, an epicenter of the chaotic and flagrant and massive illegal immigration of the prior administration. Reminiscent of Fidel Castro’s cadres in Cuba’s outback, leftists orchestrated ambushes of law enforcement. The recent sniper attack in Dallas on ICE vans (by Joshua Jahn) is just the latest episode in a string of armed “resistance”. It’s the unrestrained id expressed through the barrel of a gun.

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Joshua Jahn, the 29-year-old behind the deadly Dallas ICE shooting on Sept. 24, 2025.

Again, that bastion of the Left’s id, California, in their latest effort to harm federal law enforcement officers, passed a bill and signed into law by Gov. Newsom (SB 627) to forcibly unmask them and expose them and their families to the same people who are inspired like Joshua Jahn. Let’s be clear, California votes to secede, not once but continually, in so many ways. It’s a state in rebellion. SB 627 is unconstitutional, and cannot be enforced, and if it is, state officials should be arrested and charged with treason. It’s happened before, 1860-65.

Clearly, Sacramento’s performance politics is meant to appeal to the id of the one-party state’s large base. Throwing red meat is the tactic of the id feeding the id. On the Right we have Donald Trump and his followers doing it in the language of the schoolyard or locker room. Counterpoised are those on the Left and their trigger-happy id practitioners, some content with complete ruination and ostracization of their opponents while others veer into filling body bags. Our politics is a coarse, crude, and violent hot mess.

Where’s our collective ego and superego? Could it be in the person of Erika Kirk in her supreme act of grace and forgiveness? We couldn’t find a better way in the rediscovery of the better angels of our nature than following her lead. God bless her.

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Erika Kirk at her husband’s memorial, 9/21/2025

RogerG

Sources:
1. “Watchdog says Maxine Waters inciting ‘mob violence,’ presses ethics complaint”, Adam Shaw, Fox News, 7/5/2018, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/watchdog-says-maxine-waters-inciting-mob-violence-presses-ethics-complaint?msockid=287a0b967a9564c61c991f537b2f65ee.
2. “AOC in total ‘fascism’ meltdown on evening of Trump inauguration”, Kelly Garino, Daily Mail, 1/20/2025, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/galleries/article-14303887/AOC-total-fascism-meltdown-evening-Trump-inauguration.html.
3. Vice President J.D. Vance X post at https://x.com/JDVance/status/1970897642361135146.

Posted on

The Bane of Populism. This Won’t End Well.

President Donald Trump and His Supporters, in Photos | National News | US News
Trump and his supporters in 2019

“MUST CUT INTEREST RATES, NOW, AND BIGGER THAN HE HAD IN MIND. HOUSING WILL SOAR!!!” — President Trump on Truth Social, 9/15/2025 (see #1)

What is the “this” in the title? It’s the president’s push to lower interest rates by as much as 2.5 points, maybe 3. That’s a lot in monetary and interest rate terms. The president finds the Fed’s recent quarter point drop “too little, too late”. He wants 10 times that. Is the Fed Board suffering from TDS? Hardly. There are sound reasons to be cautious about lowering interest rates. The president is playing with fire.

What is the “bane” of populism? Vox populi is NOT vox dei, or “the voice of the people is NOT the voice of God”, a necessary reformulation of an old Roman saying. Popular opinions are erratic, often reliant on deeply embedded falsehoods, incoherent, and a slave to the moment. And to be honest, some “elites”, as well as almost all populists, are soiling themselves almost daily. The populace at times may seem to be a better fount of wisdom, until they aren’t.

In an election greatly influenced by Biden’s high inflation, meaning too many dollars chasing too few goods and services, President Trump, the so-called populist, seems intent on reinflating the inflation balloon. The last few incidences of galloping inflation and economy-wide maladjustment – the 1970s, 2007-8, and 2022 – were not euphoric traipsings through the economic daisies.

In this respect, before I get started, we have to remind ourselves that Donald Trump is a real estate tycoon. Real estate magnates love low interest rates, and so does the Dow. They focus like a laser on goosing demand for real property and securities. Their portfolios soar in value when money is easy. It’s great for the holders of these things, bad for everyone else looking to buy. Low interest rates help disguise in cheap loans the artificial leap in prices, the inflation. People are invited to run up more debt.

Everyone wins, right? Hogwash. The government swamps the economy in easy money until personal finances go underwater. The bubble bursts, asset values plummet, and people suddenly realize that they owe more than the thing is worth. Hello, tulip bubble of 1637. Hello, the 2007-8 financial crisis, and anyone who bought a new car in 2023. The 2007-8 crisis helped elect Obama and a coming to power of a party ideologically hard-wired to goose demand in all ways possible and ignore the supply half to the equation.

In this respect, Trump wants to inject heroine into the economy like the Democrats. The Democrats wish to make addicts of us through fiscal policy, like the Schumer/Pelosi/Biden trillion-dollar bills to refashion the nation to fit their dreams – adding $3.7 trillion to our national debt from 2022 to 2024. Floods of dollars sloshed around on the heels of the Covid lockdowns. Supply was disrupted as demand was goosed. This didn’t end well. Inflation leapt to 9% in summer 2022.

Biden claims 40-year-high inflation will rise if Republicans win | Fox News Video

Trump is eager to repeat the formula. He disrupted supply with his declaration of a trade war on the world. Supply chains became tenuous, like during the COVID lockdowns, as suppliers reeled from Trump’s jump in tariff rates of up to 25% (or more) against everyone and nearly everything. When suppliers and producers adapt to this new environment, it won’t redound to lower prices. Compound the problem by the president’s refusal to do, or propose, meaningful fiscal restraint. The elevated fiscal floor of Biden and the Democrats essentially remains intact, with or without a DOGE, as the big-dollar entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) remain untouched on their path to insolvency.

The CBO in January expected the 2025 deficit (annual overspending) to hover around $2 trillion. The total federal debt (total accumulated tab) is pegged at $37.41 trillion as of this month (Sept.). Has overspending been cured by Trump, or DOGE? No. Add this fiscal heroine to the economy’s bloodstream. Mmmmm, rattled supply chains and a bloated money supply, have we seen this movie before?

The Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) won’t be of much help. Tax cuts are a great idea since they keep more money in the creative private sector. The tax cuts in the BBB were mostly, technically speaking, not a reduction in tax rates but a continuation of existing ones from 2017, with a few bribes for favored political constituencies in states like Nevada and organized labor in Michigan and Pennsylvania (the spiel of the tax-free tips, overtime, and Social Security benefits). One spur for growth – the lowering of the capital gains tax bite and generous depreciation allowances – won’t produce substantial economic benefits for a few years at a minimum. It took the money-supply belt tightening of Fed chair Paul Volcker and Reagan’s tax cuts a couple of years to create the climate for the Reagan boom.

Deregulation will have the same delayed effect. Now, to tide us over till the benefits of the business tax cuts and deregulation kick in, Trump wants easy money. So, any mid- and long-term economic advantages of the bill will be negated by worrisome inflation. Throw his tariffs into the mix and the benefits of the BBB and deregulation will not be felt till way over the horizon, if ever. Then, the whole enterprise will be short-circuited by a return to power of the neo-socialist Democratic Party riding a wave of popular displeasure over declining fortunes, the same circumstance that made Trump 45 into 47. With the Dems in power, any relief from the Leviathan will be thrown into reverse.

It’s the bane of populism. Populism can be reduced to “popular”, doing what is popular. And what is popular, once again, is fickle, contradictory, incoherent. It bounces around depending on the moment, group, circumstance, and frequently rides on a deep current of fables. “Elites” are held in disrepute after some disgraced themselves of late in their tenured positions and bureaucratic sinecures (Fauci, et al). For many among the populi, no one can be trusted except . . . Trump/MAGA. The bantering bilge flows with little check.

President Trump is the embodiment of populism. He pushes the BBB . . . and . . . his toxic tariffs. He excoriated Biden’s inflation as he repeats Biden’s mistake. Like he talks “peace through strength” while he shifts from hostility to nonchalance about the victim of the most flagrant act of aggression on the continent of Europe since Stalin incorporated all of Eastern Europe into personal satraps.

Like all populists, the dramatic gesture is preferred. Populist politicians are drama queens. A populist is a slave to headlines. Out comes the language and behavior of the drama queen, the belittling nicknames and quick strikes. The impulsiveness and insults fit into a medium – social media – which is not conducive to deep thought, to a populace growingly accustomed to thinking in social media’s rhetorical burps.

Sloganeering is the preferred mode of expression, if not thought. “No more forever wars” becomes code for an isolationism that cannot be said. Quick strikes – butcher-and-bolt – have a credible use in, let’s say, taking out Soleimani and Iran’s Fordow. But you have to possess more in the national security toolkit than a bunch of one-and-dones. Trump follows the headlines and loves to be in them, but don’t expect logical consistency or much of an eye for the long term. Trump is as flippant as fads, maybe more so. He has shown the capacity to embrace two things that undermine each other: condemn inflation while stoking it.

The last jobs report came out, it’s disturbing, so he fires Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer for delivering the bad news. For the populist leader, two beliefs came together in his mind: he’s convinced that a lurking deep state is at work, and he can never be wrong. He replaced her with a lackey, Heritage’s E.J. Antoni. Now, Trump has his Winston in Oceania’s Ministry of Truth. Life imitates Orwell’s art in “1984”.

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E.J. Antoni with President Trump

President Trump wants easy money, the Federal Reserve Board seems reluctant, having been burned by lowering interest rates in summer 2022 which helped to ignite the 9% inflation. So, he replaced one retiring board member with his chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen Miran. This guy had to square the circle of reducing inflation and inaugurating a trade war on the world. So much for credibility.

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Stephen Miran

To make this move even more surprising, Miran didn’t resign from his position as Trump’s chief economic adviser. He took a “leave of absence” which expresses his desire to return to Trump’s inner sanctum and favor. If you believe that he’ll be an honest broker, stay away from the crazy uncle trying to convince you to invest in Mongolian tugrugs (currency).

Troubling signs are evident. The producer price index of services jumped 1.1% in one month, July (see #3). The last time it was that high for one month was the 1.3% in March 2022, the harbinger for Biden’s 9% inflation in the summer of 2022. Currently, inflation stays stubborn at around 3%, above the Fed’s target of 2% (see #2). The durable goods sector (autos, appliances, etc.) is in a tailspin. It’s what happens when you hammer supply chains with 25% tariffs. Trump absolutely needs easy money to cover the slide.

Add it all up and we have Trump’s mind: scatter-brained, fickle, and unintelligible. But what did you expect? He’s a populist. We’ll quickly learn that populists are no better than our disgraced elites. The populace doesn’t like inflation but like the things that bring it about. They love easy money and government bennies from all the spending. Trump is a leader, but a leader to where? This won’t end well.

May be an image of text that says 'PANIRZ LASVEGABREVEIN-JOURNAT VEGASREVEIATC JOURNAL 2025@CREATORS.COM I FEEL DESERTED... IKNOW HOW YOU FEEL.. FEEL...IMAFREE I'A IMA A FREE MARKET CONSTITUTIONAL CONSERVATIVE... X@Ramireztoons michaclpramirez.com'

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Trump calls for ‘bigger’ interest rate cut ahead of Fed meeting”, Reuters, 9/15/2025, at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-calls-bigger-interest-rate-cut-ahead-fed-meeting-2025-09-15/.
2. “Current U.S. Inflation Rate is 2.9%: Why It Matters”, Nerd Wallet, 9/11/2025, at https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/inflation#:~:text=The%20current%20U.S.%20inflation%20rate%20is%202.9%25%20for,release%20from%20the%20Bureau%20of%20Labor%20Statistics%20%28BLS%29?msockid=287a0b967a9564c61c991f537b2f65ee.
3. “Beware the Return of Inflation”, The Editors, National Review, 8/15/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/08/beware-the-return-of-inflation/.