Are you tired as I am of being lectured to in ads? The normalization of a morbidly obese kid in a hotel ad. Sexual transgressiveness throughout the commercial breaks. A major bank constantly reminding us of how they use our mortgage payments and savings and checking deposits to reinflate the 2008 financial crisis. Car companies showing us how slavish they are to the kind of people who have destroyed California’s grid and economy, and the government who has become their handmaiden, by trying to sell us on range anxiety. The list goes on and on.
Now, at last, we the sane get a two-fer. American Eagle Jeans gave us a smoking hot lass in a smoking hot car burning rubber. Take that Bud Light!
Please watch the clip. It’s great. It’s about time.
Is California intent on committing suicide? Indeed, should a state be allowed to consciously self-poison itself to death, or play Russian roulette with no empty cylinders? The state’s electorate seems to be gung ho. It isn’t the only state in the psych ward. Illinois, New York, much of the northeast, share adjoining cells. A cure, though, is on the way in the form of the EPA’s Lee Zeldin reversing Obama’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding” on carbon dioxide despite the kicking and screaming of the patients (see #1).
Oh, they’ll fight it in court, trying to make their last stand on the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision of 2007 (5-4) which concluded in an act of mind reading of the 1970 Congress in its Clean Air Act that the unmentioned carbon dioxide should be included as an “air pollutant”. Carbon dioxide is part of the cycle of life: plants love our waste (carbon dioxide exhalings, fertilizer) and we love theirs (oxygen). One would think that Congress would have devoted special sections in the law declaring that a part of the cycle of life to be “harmful” to human health. Silence on the subject is not proof of inclusion, and so said three of the dissenters in the decision, the only remaining Court members from 2007 (Roberts, Alito, Thomas). It’s very likely that Zeldin’s decision will be upheld.
Zeldin is trying to rescue California from itself. Its grid is a bankrupting mess, and an ugly fire hazard to boot. The state is busy destroying cheap energy – much of it right under their feet – and affordable, reliable transportation. I don’t know what golf courses are going to do with lawnmowers powered by battery packs the size of cinder block walls. California had over 43 refineries in the late 1970s; now the state will be down to 6 producing fuel by 2026 (Philips 66 in Long Beach and Valero in Benicia are set to close in 2026) (see #2). A projected $8-to-$10-per-gallon gas price will dent anybody’s plans for upward mobility (see #3).
California’s shedding of population over the past couple of decades is nothing new. President Biden had an answer in throwing open the borders and producing a tidal wave of illegal immigrants ready to flood into the state’s well-established illegal-immigrant underworld. After all, it promises to protect illegals from federal law. So, after the chaos, some 2024 projections of the state’s population showed a slight uptick. But what happens when the American people get sick of it, elect as president illegal-immigration’s worst nightmare, shuts down the border, and the deportations and self-deportations begin? The ongoing flight of the middle class and their jobs will be glaring as ever.
Back in 2023, one study predicted that California could lose 5 congressional seats after the 2030 census (see #4). The reasons are obvious. The state has made itself inhospitable to the backbone of civilization and prosperity – the strivers, middle class, etc. Though, it must be admitted, based on decades-long election results, that degringolade (a rapid decline or deterioration) is electorally popular. It’s a one-party state not by accident, a one-party state to oblivion.
Please watch the interview of Prof. Marshall Toplansky, Business and Economics professor at Chapman University, on the troubling circumstances which Californians have brought upon themselves. Admitting the problem is the most important step toward to recovery.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “EPA Releases Proposal to Rescind Obama-Era Endangerment Finding, Regulations that Paved the Way for Electric Vehicle Mandates”, EPA bulletin, 7/29/2025, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-releases-proposal-rescind-obama-era-endangerment-finding-regulations-paved-way.
2. “California Oil Refinery History”, California Energy Commission, at https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/californias-petroleum-market/californias-oil-refineries/california-oil.
3. “California gas prices could top $8 a gallon by 2026, new study says”, KGO ABC 7, 5/10/2025, at https://abc7news.com/post/california-gas-prices-could-top-8-gallon-2026-university-southern-study-says-heres-what-know/16370075/.
4. “California Could Lose 5 Congressional Seats in 2030 Reapportionment”, The Census Project, 9/21/2023, at https://thecensusproject.org/2023/09/21/california-could-lose-5-congressional-seats-in-2030-apportionment/.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders participate in a stop on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour at the Dignity Health Arena Theater in Bakersfield, California, on April 15, 2025. (photo: REUTERS/Aude Guerrucci)Zohran Mamdani, NYC mayoral candidate. (photo: Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times)Pres. Trump announcing his “Liberation Day” tariffs, April 2, 2025
It’s probably always been true that shallow thinking prevails in our world. X good/Y bad, the binary pervades thought without much cognitive work behind it. What else explains the teenage rise of the now 22-year-old phenom Greta Thunberg (mentioned in earlier posts)? Or the overturning of the century-plus expansion and refinements of the grid and personal transportation in the crushing span of two decades, by law? Or the sudden appearance of sex shapeshifting as an incontrovertible “reality” taking over women’s swimming and track meets? Or sports gaming profits are a “good” without any recognition that these profits represent many more “losers”? Or, in a similar manner, a boost in government revenues from tariffs is a “good” absent any realization that they come at the expense of consumers and businesses, a much bigger class of “losers”? Our public conversation is chock full of the silliness. It’s the era of the shrill and shallow.
At the spearhead of this nonsense is a combination of the Trump phenomenon and the neo-Marxist Left in the Democratic Party and its street militias. The former first. Take Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. The only thing being liberated is money out of our wallets and “freedom” from our beneficial supply chain arrangements. The confluence of “liberation” and rising economic distress is . . . amazing.
That won’t stop pundits like Hugh Hewitt on his radio show announcing the “good news” of higher-than-expected government revenues from Trump’s tariffs (last week). It doesn’t take much more than a thimble of reasoning to understand that, for instance, the MSRP of that new truck on the showroom floor just jumped $1,500, or Amazon deals are fewer and far between. When was the last time that you heard a self-proclaimed Reagan Republican extolling the virtue of a huge tax increase?
It doesn’t stop there. Trump’s on-again/off-again support for Ukraine stands out for head-scratching. Is Putin a good guy or bad guy, despite the fact that he wantonly invaded another country like the Wehrmacht did Poland. Is a dogmatic obsession with a “pivot to Asia (China)” the right way to go, even though crap happens elsewhere? In 1984, when asked by a reporter about the greatest difficulty facing a Prime Minister, British ex-PM Harold Macmillan responded, “Events, my dear boy, events.” Events are happening elsewhere that unexpectedly impact Trump’s much cherished “pivot”. Is it too much to expect of our leaders to understand that a green light to Putin is a green light to Xi, is a green light to the mullahs, is a green light to Kim? Empty grousing in the 1930s about Japan in Manchuria and Mussolini in Ethiopia was fully appreciated by the Chancellor of Germany. Dominoes exist in more than a game.
Many of Trump’s political successes is less evidence of him playing 4-D chess but is, more than anything, proof that he’s blessed by the sheer incoherence, incompetence, and malignancy of his opponents. Popular loathing for the donkey party is at record highs according to the latest WSJ poll (see #1). Are election results a product of an overwhelming enthusiasm for a particular candidate or a measure of a greater dislike for the other choice?
Trump-love occupies a niche in the American public, far from sufficient to get him elected. Helping Trump along the way is an opposition party oriented for dystopia. No matter Trump’s negatives, the alternative has positioned itself as a catalyst for XX “boys” and XY “girls” throughout K-12 into college, education dysfunction, defund the police, the mutilation of the economy and the quality of life in green fads and inflation and mounting public debt, and urban wastelands of filth, crime, and homelessness.
Who, other than Democrats, wants an intermingling of genitalia in middle school bathrooms based on nothing but the hormone-fueled feelings of tweens? Mercurial teen self-identity leads to XY “girls” blasting through the tape by 4 yards at the girls’ state high school track championships. Of course, don’t look for it to happen the other way around (XX “boys” taking gold medals in competitions with the XY variety). The whole scene flummoxes and angers ma and pa and grandma and grandpa in the stands. Democratic Party infatuations suddenly hit home.
When Trump tariffs, the Dems are boxed in a corner. Trump proves that he can be just as good a central planner as they ever were. How can they complain? Ever since Republicans began to embrace their inner Milton Friedman in the 1960s, Democrats were the buddies of economic xenophobia and our extortionate labor unions. Trump flips the old political script, tossing freedom economics out the window, and proves that the GOP can function as economic xenophobes and gangsters every bit as well as the Democrats in their effusive pandering to the AFL-CIO.
What’s left of the old Democrat coalition? They’ve got their eco-lobby with its thinly educated white-collar and mostly public-employee constituency. Add to them the cadres of social revolutionaries led by old socialist crackpots like Bernie Sanders and the New Age socialism of the glib and juvenile AOC. Oh, let’s not forget the only expanding clump in their atrophying coalition: unmarried women. Husbands and children are not on their agenda, while preferring a government spouse to a biological one. The party’s future is even more depressing as they fling the LGBTQ+ agenda at the face of God-fearing Hispanics, flood the labor market with desperate peasants, and persist in abandoning the economic and social interests of Black males.
We have the rule of the shallow and shrill. Our primary elections are not faithful renderings of a party’s members, but a playground for the most animated, the shrill and shallow. The rest stay home. MAGA and the Democrats’ social revolutionaries present firebrands to the general public in November, or people who speak the lingo. American politics, as seen by outsiders, must appear to be riotous clown show. Interesting.
Speaking of the shrill and shallow, an update: President Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a trade deal this past Sunday (7/27). After chores, and during exercise, I’ll listen to podcast and talk-show punditry and be exposed to the latest hyperbole about the deal. There’s too much we don’t know and too much yet to be negotiated. Yet, we do know to expect a jump in automobile and durable goods prices since tariffs on cars (15%) and steel and aluminum (50%) remains. Don’t forget that “tariff is the most beautiful word in the English language” for Trump. At least for now, till our potentate-in-chief changes his mind, some certainty returns to business. Stay tuned for more “progress” on the America-as-victim-of-the-world front.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Democrats Get Lowest Rating From Voters in 35 Years, WSJ Poll Finds”, Aaron Zitner, Wall Street Journal, 7/25/2025, at https://www.wsj.com/…/democratic-party-poll-voter….
Social Manias (Wikipedia): mass movements which periodically sweep through societies. They are characterized by an outpouring of enthusiasm, mass involvement and millenarian goals. They are contagious social epidemics, and as such they should be differentiated from mania in individuals.
**********
It’s Wikipedia. Take it for what it’s worth. Nonetheless, the words generally hit the mark about a defining characteristic of our times: our self-conceit. We have convinced ourselves that we are smarter and wiser basically because we have instant access to nearly everything written, said, and done, which in reality means that we access no more than a molecule of it, the stuff that caters to our biases. Rather, instant communication has made us easily triggered as we congregate into zealous groupings of fellow believers in the unbelievable. Smart phones have nothing to do with making us smart. They’ve made us stupid, and armed with a heightened capacity to rally around our stupidity. More commonly, instant connectivity has produced a flurry of just-add-water social manias.
*Please watch the accompanying video of an interview with Lionel Shriver on the Triggernometry podcast, “Mania: How Societies Go Crazy – Lionel Shriver”. Watch it below.
She went from vocally pro-choice and a 2020 Biden supporter to DeSantis and a scourge of the “woke” (see NPR interview in #1) in four years. She’s a contrarian in regards to current trends but also against her past self. For me, that’s integrity.
Take three of the hottest topics paralyzing the public conversation today: climate change, transgenderism, and Trump-o-mania. First, who thunk it possible that an emotionally troubled teenager, Greta Thunberg, would be elevated to the Jeremiah of our times? How’s that possible? It can happen when nearly every natural phenomenon is fed into the mania vortex of climate change, something simplistic enough for an addled youngster.
Climate activist protest in front of BlackRock headquarters in New York on October 29, 2022 (Getty Images)
Think about this omnibus excuse – climate change – as you watch it. Lefty politicians are able to duck responsibility for poor wild land management practices while pursuing utopian social engineering schemes instead of focusing on keeping the lights on, streets and neighborhoods safe, maintaining roads, water at the tap, collecting the garbage, and schooling that actually enhances cognitive abilities – the Main Street stuff of government. Instead, anything bad is shoved into the climate-change worm hole: droughts in a windy drought-prone climate (Mediterranean), firestorms in overgrown and deadened wildlands that seemed to be intentionally groomed for combustibility if it wasn’t for simple and willful neglect. Can it get any more insane?
Human agency in this schema only counts if it can be assigned as the cause – not them and their policies, of course – and always tied to a grand theory that denounces you and I for having a life independent of their direction. We are said to be the cause of Katrina in 2015, not the corrupt, incompetent, and lazy state and local officeholders who neglected the levees in a city below sea level. Yes, insanity rules, alongside the influence of Greta.
Nature will hand to them an unending stream of pretexts for meddling in our lives, nature being nature. The latest made-to-order excuse came via the Guadalupe River flash flood of July 4th with 121 dead, 170 still missing. The “Texas Flash Flood Alley” area that stretches in a southwest arc from Dallas through Austin to the Rio Grande is described by the Lower Colorado River Authority as having “one of the greatest risks for flash floods in the United States” (see #2, #3). Of course, for the maniacs, large numbers of people filling recreational sites on a holiday in a region prone to flash flooding, the river rising 25 feet in a mere 2 hours in the early morning, at a time of year conducive for it, had nothing to do with it. For the unhinged, its’s SUVs, Big Oil, affordable and reliable energy. Hmmmmm.
A man surveys debris along the Guadalupe River after a flash flood struck the area, in Kerrville, Texas. (photo: AP/PTI)
Flash Flood Alley lived up to its reputation leaving grieving parents and relatives. It’s too horrifying to contemplate. Pray for God’s solace for the grieving.
It’s not a time to politicize nature. Yet, some of us do it, and ignore the history of, for instance, the 1900 Galveston hurricane and flood (8,000-12,000 died) or the San Antonio floods of 1913 (180 died) and 1921 (220). Right now, the quest for political power trumps all (no pun intended). It’s easy to do once climate change becomes embedded in our mental architecture. The millenarian side of the social mania soon kicks in to bully by edict the entire population into the preferred lifestyles of the true believers.
Deep inside every true believer lies a budding totalitarian. If you’re old-school enough to believe that chromosomes matter, you and your kids will be ostracized, hopefully not in a gulag. How did we go from dating, the prom, and childhood innocence to doctor-assisted chemical and surgical mutilation, sometimes without parental knowledge or consent?
It’s baffling, until one notices the ubiquity of cell phones around 2013/14 and the simultaneous appearance of gender anxiety, especially among pre-teen and teen girls (see #4). The connection is highly suggestive. What we have are the makings of a social mania, a contagion. The sudden rise of it is astonishing, and can’t be explained by sole reliance on the LGBTQ+ lobby’s favorite cause: children are freer to announce their “gender fluidity”. Is it actually the “freedom” or the viral spread of the notion of that “freedom”?
Colin Wright, evolutionary biologist at the Manhattan Institute, is an astute observer of the transgender scene. He cites research that unsurprisingly shows California to be a hotbed of youthful transgenderism. “Sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants and transgendered youth means more of both (see #5). Youth in the state between the ages of 13 and 17 are identifying as transgender at a rate 38% higher than the national average. Middle and upper middle-income communities in the state with a major university, like Davis, are keenly susceptible. One sample of youth in the Davis Joint Union School District expressed trans identities at “nearly 4.3 times the national average, and 3 times California’s average” (see #6). In a state already governed by the Left’s idea of anything goes, the surge is likely due to something other than “freedom”. Could it be that the notion spread at the speed of digital bytes across cell towers to your daughter’s TikTok app on the cell phone that you provided her from your family plan?
More than gender confusion can transit the digital pipeline. Zany fan clubs can quickly coalesce around an online celebrity. Donald Trump flooded the digital airwaves in 2015-16 with no real claim to fame other than his celebrity. From then on, Trump, Inc., was sidelined in the minds of most people. If your teenagers have those cell phones sticking out of their back pockets as they stroll around campus, so do the likes of Paul Gosar (R, Arizona), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia), and Lauren Boebert (R, Colorado). So does your grandpa and grandma and mom and dad. MAGA goes viral. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler in 2024 was caught on many more cameras than Reagan’s near-death experience in 1981 – Trump’s occurring before a crowd of thousands, each person with the A/V and broadcast power of CBS News.
Lauren Boebert (R, Colorado) and her cell phone.
MAGA crowd, July 17, 2024
His stage presence is magnified to a part of the population degraded and abandoned by the self-anointed “better people”, of those whose wealth and status insulate them from the consequences of their actions and beliefs, and are almost invariably condescending and of the Left. Peggy Noonan wrote eloquently about this growing class of the culturally dispossessed in 2016 in “Trump and Rise of the Unprotected” (see #7). Trump scratched their itch and the rabid fan club MAGA was born.
This is a mania, emotive and reactionary, for people suffering under another form of bigotry. People without an appetite for haute cuisine and lefty/progressive views, who live in the “wrong” zip codes, who believe in the Bible and not the denizens of the faculty lounge, who own guns and a V-8 pickup, who work by the hour, and have no appetite for the scolding of the pampered set in their leafy suburban homes, lofty Manhattan flats, gentrified brownstones, insulated behind the walls of their gated HOA, and tightly, socially cocooned with others like them.
MAGA is rooted in more than Trump. For that reason, a “cult of personality” is inadequate in explaining its emergence. It’s more of a fan club around Trump because he captures their angst. Yet, they’d suffer severe anxiety if Trump should ever find common cause with the immigration/regulation/taxation/transgender agenda of the California Democratic Party. Celebrity fan clubs can be volatile, especially if the object of affection should turn out to be a child molester, which in this context would be politically analogous to Trump becoming squishy in the culture war. Watch some self-anointed MAGA mouthpieces go bonkers over Trump’s decision to support Ukraine. Betrayal can be disorienting, dizzying. Keep a close eye on family members so disposed.
Around the dawn of the new millennium, my wife, son, nephew, and I packed 2 canoes for 5+ days on the Wild and Scenic Upper Missouri River, reliving the Lewis and Clark expedition. At the campfire, I read passages from the Lewis and Clark journals at the places on the river where the events occurred. In one location were the so-called buffalo jumps, places where Native Americans stampeded a herd over a cliff, harvesting some of the carcasses and leaving the rest to rot. The Native Americans triggered a few at the front and led the rest over the precipice. A few influencers were enough to spell doom to the rest. Sound familiar?
Herd opinions, herd confusion, viral manic-depression. These features of our time are spiked by the cocooning made possible by Googling and cell towers. It’s proof that technology has little to do with making us better people. In fact, it can bring out the inner demons of our nature (as opposed to Lincoln’s “better angels”). Just look at the peaceful-but-violent happenings in L. A.
RGraf
Sources:
1. “Contrarian Lionel Shriver deftly satirizes anti-intellectualism in ‘Mania’”, Maureen Corrigan, NPR, 4/9/2024, at https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243652224/contrarian-lionel-shriver-deftly-satirizes-anti-intellectualism-in-mania
2. “Managing Floods in Flash Flood Alley”, Lower Colorado River Authority, at https://www.lcra.org/water/floods/.
3. Thanks to Jim Geraghty for the heads up in “Progressive Voices Turn Texas Tragedy into Partisan Blame Game”, 7/11/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/progressive-voices-turn-texas-tragedy-into-partisan-blame-game/.
4. “Yes, Gender Confusion Is Socially Contagious”, John Stonestreet and Shane Morris, Colson Center, 10/17/2024, at https://colsoncenter.org/breakpoint/yes-gender-confusion-is-socially-contagious.
5. “How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States?”, Herman/Flores/O’Neill, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, at https://web.archive.org/web/20230106231411/https:/williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf.
6. “BREAKING: New Documents Reveal Shocking Surge in Trans-Identified Students in Davis, CA Schools”, Colin Wright, Reality’s Last Stand, 1/17/2023, at https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/breaking-new-documents-reveal-shocking.
7. “Trump and Rise of the Unprotected”, Peggy Noonan, originally in the Wall Street Journal, 2/25/2016, but available here: https://fairlyhonestbob.com/2016/03/02/trump-and-the-rise-of-the-unprotected/
President Trump announcing his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, 2025.
Javier Milei in a speech before the World Economic Forum in 2024: “If measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, competition, price systems, trade and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty.” (see #1)
Donald Trump on his tariffs in April 2025: “You know, someone said, ‘Oh, the shelves, they’re going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. But we’re not talking about something that we have to go out of our way. They have ships that are loaded up with stuff, much of which — not all of it — but much of which we don’t need.” (see #2)
Is there a difference between Donald Trump and Javier Milei? Yes, an emphatic “yes”. Trump is a classic central planner with all the limitless self-regard that the position demands. Milei is reintroducing free markets to a country that has not had many for decades. With Trump, we get a person who asserts the power to determine how much we deserve and “need” and how much we should pay for it. Milei is dialing back Trump-style manipulations with impressive results. The other shoe has yet to drop in the U.S. on the fundamental disorder to supply chains from Trump’s economic illiteracy in his tariff campaign. Stay tuned, The Big Beautiful Bill or no, there are troubling signs in the consequential durable goods sector.
Argentina’s President Javier Milei attends the opening session of the legislative term at the National Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 1, 2025. (photo: Matias Baglietto/Reuters)
Let’s start with Milei’s Argentina, and add Poland’s rise to the mix. After decades of socialistic Peronism, Argentina under Milei is teaching a lesson to Donald Trump. Year-over-year, the nation’s economy has grown 7.7%. Poverty is beginning its downward slide. Milei has corseted government interference (for instance, ending rent control in Buenos Aires), cut spending, restrained the money supply, and eliminated many price controls. The result is an Argentinian renaissance.
Poland showed the way for Milei. In 1989, Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland’s Finance Minister after the shedding of communism, cut spending, balanced the budget, reigned in the money supply, ended many government spending programs, basically freed-up the economy, and Poland took off (see #3). It remained free of Brussels by not joining the euro. We would be happy with 3% growth in GDP. Poland is humming at 5%.
Where is Donald Trump leading the U.S.? In some ways, in the opposite direction. All governmental interventions are not equal in their effects. Some have greater impact than others. Supply chains are crucial. That which disrupts supply chains ripples down to layoffs, repos, and personal bankruptcies. After treating the U.K. like the CCP, one in which we amazingly had a trade surplus, Trump is targeting South Korea and Japan with 25% tariffs. It’s madness.
Expect showrooms and car lots to have fewer offerings in that industry of the most durable of all durable goods. No big deal for Trump, we only deserve two to choose from, right?
It’s all over the place, everywhere you look in automotive industry reports. Signs are abundant of a coming automotive industry recession. Quoting AutoForecast Solutions, industry insiders such as F & I and Showroom expects “light-vehicle sales will fall for the first time since 2022 due to uncertainty around the tariffs”. It’s a perfect storm of a Federal Reserve skittish about inflation and keeping interest at their current level, Moody’s downgrading of the U.S. credit rating, Conference Board Leading Economic Index’s fall of nearly 2% in March-April, rising loan defaults, etc. (see #4)
No wonder Trump is on a jihad against Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. Trump wants easy money to paper over the effects of his tariff war.
In putting makeup on the pig, President Trump and his spokespeople trot around citing normal manufacturing shifts (Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Stellantis and Toyota) that were planned and announced before Trump announced his America-the-victim-of-the-world tariff war, as if the resulting chaos is a stroke of genius. Trump should take this comedy routine on the road.
Buyers aren’t stupid. If people see price increases on the horizon, they buy while the getting is still good. The numbers are the numbers. The June auto sales numbers fell by 2.6 million from April to June. March and April were great because tariff reality would soon set in. Jonathan Smoke, chief economist at Cox Automotive Inc., put it bluntly: “The party is over.” This isn’t a mysterious happening according to Smoke: “It’s clearly slowing. It’s because of affordability getting worse and forcing what we think will be production declines to keep supply in balance.” (see #5) Translation: Think again about buying that new car.
The goal is reshoring. Laudable, but the method asinine. It jumps over the question of why they left. Is it merely the attractiveness of slave or peasant labor? Cheaper labor overseas has always existed and yet the country grew. What happened between then and now? We decided to muck up the works. By law and government interventions, we turned organized labor into an extortion racket. We taxed and regulated our way into near oblivion. We have greater difficulties in building anything. Try to build power plants, refineries, dams, mines, roads, power lines, even housing, in the good ‘ol USA. Home-grown NIMBYs and greenie revolutionaries have a greater influence on our economy than Malaysian peasants.
Conversely, we could tack in the opposite direction and make our country accommodating to industries. It’d be like the mysterious voice in Field of Dreams: “Build it (a free economy) and they will come.”
Instead, we have a president and his Republican Party fan club who’d rather throw up a wall, like a curtain, to hide the extortion racket and the government bludgeoning of economic activity, and then paste “Make America Great Again” over the mess. Jargon replaces accountability.
In that good ‘ol USA, central planners like Trump, not us, decided that we needed upscaled electric golf carts to replace our family sedan. Anything large powered by fossil fuels was to be pounded into dust by CAFE standards. The car industry played along because they’re essentially cowards. Hitching your industry cart to government and its activists, whether Friends of the Earth or MAGA tariff-enthusiasts, depending on who temporarily holds the reins of power, can be an economically unhealthy thing to do. Watch California become a Third World nation, er state.
And it shows in the crap foisted on us. It’s high-priced, underpowered, loaded down with gimmicks to mask their shortcomings (turbochargers); beset by stunts like cylinder deactivation, on/off engine disruptions during idling, the carbonization of direct fuel injection, the notorious 10-spead transmissions; and range anxiety coupled with spontaneous combustion of battery packs for those “virtuous” EVs.
At least The Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) corrected some of the folderol. The only problem is that we have a Donald Trump (DJT) intent on wreaking havoc on the guts of economic activity. What the BBB giveth, DJT taketh. Sounds like central planning.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Milei’s speech can be viewed in YouTube at https://youtu.be/4z44XP4u9Xs?si=OEB-mRfFMY2xts1U.
2. “Trump says children could have ‘2 dolls instead of 30’ with his tariff plan”, Alex Gangitano, The Hill, 4/30/2025, at https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5275798-trump-says-children-could-have-two-dolls-instead-of-30-with-his-tariff-plan/.
3. “Shock Therapy: What We Can Learn From Poland”, Taylor Marvin, Prospect Journal, at https://www.prospect-journal.org/articles/2010/11/11/shock-therapy-what-we-can-learn-from-poland.
4. “2025 Auto Sales Slump Forecast”, Hannah Mitchell, F & I and Showroom, 6/3/2025, at https://www.fi-magazine.com/376082/2025-auto-sales-slump-forecast.
5. “Car sales plummet following pre-tariffs panic buying: ‘The party is over’”, Ariel Zilber, The New York Post, 7/1/2025, at https://nypost.com/2025/07/01/business/car-sales-plummet-following-pre-tariffs-panic-buying-the-party-is-over/.
6. An excellent synopsis of Milei’s success can be read at “The Milei ‘Miracle’ Is a Vindication of Free Markets”, The Editors, National Review, 7/8/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/07/the-milei-miracle-is-a-vindication-of-free-markets/.
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