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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.

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Occams’ Razor: The Gaslighting, Obfuscation, and Deception Just Ended. Charges Were Announced.

* Occam’s Razor: a scientific and philosophical rule of the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex.

Please view the accompanying press conference by the Utah County District Attorney. The charges clearly exposed the motivation for murdering Charlie Kirk. The Left-adjacent media and its participants have much to apologize. The shooter was not “MAGA”. It was preposterous to begin with. The presentation by the district attorney clearly shows this to be the latest and deadly example of left-wing violence going back to riots, mobs, vandalism, deaths, intimidations, ambushes, and real inflammatory jargon covering a decade or more, right to the present. So, as Groucho Marx famously said, reformulated for current circumstances, “Who are you going to believe, them or your lyin’ eyes?”

RogerG

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Gaslighting and the Murder of Charlie Kirk

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People attend a vigil at Timpanogos Regional Hospital for Charlie Kirk, the CEO and co-founder of Turning Point USA who was shot and killed, Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025, in Orem, Utah. (AP Photo/Alex Goodlett)

* Gaslighting: a form of psychological abuse and manipulation where one person, the gaslighter, tries to make another person doubt their own perception of reality, memory, and sanity. The term dates back to the play/film, “Gaslight” of 1940. In the story, a man dims the gas lights in his wife’s bedroom and blames her as part of a plot to drive her into insanity to steal her wealth.

Can we know the truth of something? Yes, truth exists. If not, we would be rootless, and so would our world. Life would be chaos, no verities to guide us. While technology has greatly expanded our field of vision, so much of the information is filtered. If we receive it in its raw and unfiltered state, our modern education has handicapped us in making sense of it. The dispensers of all that comes our way are just as blind as the recipients. Primordial herd instincts kick in and things go viral, poorly understood and unrestrained. Example: George Floyd.

We are adrift at the mercy of those who have need to gaslight us to salvage the last vestiges of their failed worldview. Theirs is an ideology of recent origin and consequence, single-mindedly corseting all human experience into a story of victim and victimizer. It grew out of and found a home in 19th-century Progressivism, the militant socialism of Karl Marx, the softer socialism of today’s Democratic Party, the New Deal, mid-20th century neo-Marxism, and today’s environmentalism. The government became the repository of great power, so long as its enthusiasts controlled it as well as the cultural buttresses of the edifice, the cultural commanding heights.

“The long march through the institutions” of the 1960s radicals began in earnest, and they succeeded. They dominate the schools – K through grad school – entertainment, the faculty lounge, much of the government work force, huge swaths of organized labor, the c-suite, many white-collar demographics, swaths of college-educated single women, the big foundations, the legacy media, much of the new media. Their adherents swarm on social media. Their blinkered view is a manifest failure, and thus the need to gaslight us.

Rudi Dutschke
Rudi Dutschke (with bullhorn) speaking to student protest from the late 1960s or 1970s. He was at the time the “chief ideologist” of Socialist German Student Union and a leader of the massive and disruptive protests that erupted all over Europe in 1968. He was a longtime advocate of the Left’s “long march” to dominate the culture. The “long march” is a reference to Mao’s 1930s “long march”, or military retreat, to remote Shaanxi province during his communist revolution.

They need not know that they are gaslighting us. They are acting out the disquiet and anxiety of their philosophy crashing down. Belief smashes into reality. Reaching for excuses, they end up manipulating our perception of reality, and themselves.

In the progressive redoubts of our media and broader culture, the tactic is acute. Their reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk is a case in point. I’m reminded of the five stages of grief: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. Where is our progressive media? Mostly, somewhere between denial and anger.

They deny any complicity in birthing and propagating the mindset of a person who could gun down a husband and father of two. Their refrain: “It wasn’t us.” They additionally turn to bargaining with “The other side is as bad or worse” and “He deserved it”, and anger in “How dare you”. At this juncture, depression is nowhere to be found, but acceptance takes a disgusting turn.

Throughout, gaslighting is used to throw up a smokescreen to obfuscate their connection to the mind of the shooter. “It wasn’t us” took the form of “He’s MAGA”. They hang their hat on superficial identity characteristics, not the suspect’s mind, the essential cause of the killing. His parents were described as well-to-do Republicans, his father a sheriff, the family well-acquainted with guns. Democrat political consultant Joel Montfort wrote on X (see #1),

“Raised in the stereotypical All-American white conservative family with a sheriff for a father, Tyler grew up around guns and knew how to use them. It’s the guns.”

He found room to shoehorn the Democrat shibboleth of gun control into his gaslighting.

Regurgitating the same line was Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of the Democrat-adjacent Meidas Touch media outfit, who said on X (see #1), “So after days of Republicans blaming and vilifying Democrats and trans people for Kirk’s murder despite having no clue who the person was, we find out it’s a white guy from a Republican family in Utah who loved guns.” It appears to be a nervous tic on the Left to distract attention away from the shooter to the inanimate object that he was holding on that rooftop. Classic gaslighting.

Then facts tumbled out contradicting that dry run at gaslighting. The shooter was the black sheep of the family. Shell casings were engraved with transgender and Antifa messaging, first debunked by the leftist bastions in the media, then relegated to the memory hole when that dodge was exposed. Heck, now, it appears that the guy had a transgender lover.

MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd moved right into the bargaining part of the grief liturgy, “He deserved it”. You see, according to Dowd, the victim is “hateful”. Speaking about Kirk, Dowd insisted (see #2), “I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”

MSNBC Fires Hideous Hack Matthew Dowd After His Victim-Blaming Remarks About Charlie Kirk ...
Matthew Dowd comments on the death of Charlie Kirk.

Other moral miscreants on the Left jumped to a sick form of acceptance. A MIT researcher wrote (see #3), “I really want to see that video of Charlie Kirk dying again because it works better than my anti-depressant.”

The crowd in the staff room at TMZ was caught cheering when the news of Kirk’s killing was broadcast (see #4). The co-hosts of the live program jumped into damage control by saying a video feed of a rather mild car chase in LA caused the outburst of adulation, but others discounted the hastily devised rationale. One disturbing fact: the timing of the news announcement and cheers doesn’t match the excuse. The cheers align with the appearance of the news of Kirk’s killing during the car chase video feed. Classic gaslighting.

Chesterfield Public Schools board member Dot Heffron mirrored the left’s joy in her Instagram post (see #5): “Call me old fashioned, but I remember when we used to be okay with shooting Nazis.” She was forced by her colleagues to resign. Dean of Students at Clover Hill High School, Alana Hartman-Hall, decided to taste her foot like Heffron when she posted (#5), “When you promote violence and advocate for a percentage of teachers and students to be sacrificed to school shootings … You reap what you sow.”

Bargaining proceeds apace in “They are just as bad, if not worse”. The shambolic attempt to compile lists of political violence to match or exceed anything from the Left was concocted to disguise the reality. The definition of “political violence” was fudged and instances excluded and included to fit the preordained conclusion. The only indisputable act of carnage by the Right is Jan 6. The rest are . . . bizarre. The confrontation in the Pelosi home was by a deranged homeless man, for instance.

However, an entire 2020 summer of riots (“mostly peaceful” riots?) is somehow missing from the left column. What about the run of memorial defacements and statues throughout that same year? Do you doubt the existence of the free-range leftist student mobs on college campuses for the past decade or more? Oh, don’t forget, what about the antisemitic elements that shut down swaths of college campuses and made life dangerous for Jews throughout much of 2023-24? The LA mobs that attacked and threatened ICE and CBP officers this year? The ambushes of ICE officers outside their offices in Texas (see #6)? When the Left does political violence, they do it big, really big, and often. Gaslighting has to be a go-to in the Left’s toolkit.

Anyone’s news feed is littered with examples of a media intent on hiding its fingerprints on a mode of thought that is all-too-easily a greased slide to revolution and violence. Just lather on the gaslighting to hide the fact. Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk is dead, his wife a widow and children fatherless, many of our colleges remain unhealthy to mind and body, large precincts of our media spew a skewed version of reality (gaslighting), and many denizens of these spaces are intellectually and morally crippled and unhinged.

Putting aside the gaslighting, we have a lot of shoring up to do to, as the Democrats and the Left are fond of saying, “save our democracy”. We can start by dethroning the Left and unplug their gaslighting.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Liberals Hype Tyler Robinson’s Conservative Roots After MAGA Backlash”, Nick Mordowanec, Newsweek, 9/12/2025, at https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-murder-tyler-robinson-maga-liberals-2129055.
2. “MSNBC’s Shameful Breaking News Coverage on Charlie Kirk”, Becket Adams, National Review, 9/14/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/msnbcs-shameful-breaking-news-coverage-on-charlie-kirk/.
3. X post by John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine, 9/12/2025, at https://x.com/jpodhoretz/status/1966474553049092170.
4. “TMZ’s X/Twitter Inundated with Demands for Firings After Staff Heard Cheering During News of Charlie Kirk Assassination: ‘F**k You,’ ‘You’re Done’”, Warner Todd Huston, Breitbart, 9/12/2025, at https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2025/09/12/tmzs-x-twitter-inundated-with-demands-for-firings-after-staff-heard-cheering-the-news-of-charlie-kirk-assassination-fk-you-youre-done/.
5. “Update: Chesterfield School Board member resigns after uproar over social media post”, Michael Phillips, The Richmonder, 9/14/2025, at https://www.richmonder.org/chesterfield-school-board-member-asked-to-resign-by-peers-youngkin-after-social-media-post/.
6. “Left-Wing Militants Charged with Attempted Murder After Ambushing Officers Near ICE Facility”, James Lynch, National Review, 7/8/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/left-wing-militants-charged-with-attempted-murder-after-ambushing-officers-near-ice-facility/.

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We Have Him

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This morning on Fox and Friends President Trump announced “with a great deal of certainty” that “we have him in custody”. The arrest of the suspect was made possible by a tip to authorities from someone close to the person. His surrender was arranged by his father and a minister close to the family.

It’s premature at this moment to draw any strong conclusions or lessons about him, us, and our times. That will be necessary, but not now.

All we have is sorrow, grief, prayers, and thoughts of reaching out to comfort his devastated wife and family. It’s the thoughts of what’s next for them that weighs heavy on me.

RogerG

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The Latest on the Kirk Shooting

Exclusive | Gun Charlie Kirk shot with revealed
Kirk, the suspect, and the gun (counterclockwise from upper right)

Let me crow a bit. As predicted, based on rudimentary information from the scene, the weapon was not a semi-auto, AR platformed gun. Sorry, Maxine Waters. One shot taken, one hit, and skedaddle. That fits a bolt action rifle. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised that it was outfitted with a scope, since such guns normally have one attached. Thus, the one-and-done. The shooter must have known the place as a student, frequent visitor, employee, or both. That leads me to believe it was a student, or was one in the recent past. He knew the area well enough to devise his escape. What does all this mean? This was not a professional hit. These perpetrators are motivated by zealotry. If it was a professional hit, the target would have been higher profile.

So, what is the current state of the evidence? According to reports – whose accuracy I cannot vouch – the likely weapon was found. It was bolt-action, the most accurate firearm mechanism commercially available. It provides the most secure platform for combustion and release of the bullet for accuracy in a firearm, but a shooter must have time to reacquire the target in the sights to take follow-up shots. This guy, if his rifle was scoped, could accurately see that additional shots were not necessary so he could flee the scene immediately. Shoot-and-run.

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The rifle discovered nearby had a Mauser-style action in 30-06 caliber. The Mauser action can be found on many popular sporting rifles made by manufacturers like CZ and Ruger (M77 for instance). 30-06 is a beloved sporting round, proof that any gun, no matter its caliber or mechanics, is a “human killer” if pointed at one. The hysterical frothing at the mouth, normally by firearm simpletons, that ARs are special man-killers, is pure nonsense. The murderer of Charlie Kirk made manifest what plain common sense reveals.

As for the killer, he’s somewhere in the vicinity of the crime scene. The longer this takes, the further he flees. Authorities are in the possession of higher quality surveillance footage, clear enough to reveal his precise appearance. He is young, of student age. Like the Nashville shooter, this killer had festooned his ammunition with engravings of LGBTQ jargon (3 rounds were left in the magazine, one short of the normal 4). The Nashville murderess had such jargon on stickers applied to the gunstock. This murder was the action of a zealot.

So, no, you won’t find George Soros fingerprints on this carnage; though, he funds the movements and groups that spawn these warped individuals. And, no, this killer is not brilliant. He’s an example how far fanaticism can push a person’s limited creativity in carrying out mayhem. This guy will be captured soon, dead or alive. Zealotry is a deadly enterprise.

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RogerG

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Charlie Kirk’s Murder, A Watershed

Charlie Kirk appears at a Utah Valley University speaking event in Orem, Utah, U.S. September 10, 2025. (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune via REUTERS)
Charlie Kirk appears at a Utah Valley University speaking event in Orem, Utah, U.S. September 10, 2025. (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune via REUTERS)

I’m thinking of Charlie Kirk. May God shelter his soul and comfort his wife, children, and family.

The Left in America echoes the Left in Russia of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s recounted in Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s 3-part historical novel, The Red Wheel. It’s eerily reminiscent: the strong current of militant socialism on college campuses, the scent of violence wafts along with these groups, the killings, murders, assassinations. Lenin’s brother, Aleksandr, was executed in 1887 for the attempted assassination of Czar Alexander III. Previously, in 1881, they succeeded in taking the life of Czar Alexander II, his father. Nicholas II’s reform-minded prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, was murdered in 1911 while attending an opera in Kiev. That’s a taste. Everyone in conspicuous positions of authority lived on pins and needles.

Sound familiar? Militant socialism – we call it “woke” – is a smothering orthodoxy on campus. The unremitting intimidations of conservatives, disruptions, threats, the closing of their venues overhangs our places of higher (?) learning. Charles Murray, social scientist, and professor host, Allison Stanger, were attacked at Middlebury College in 2017. Stanger suffered a concussion. In 2018, 5th U.S. Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan was prevented from speaking before the Stanford chapter of the Federalist Society. Stanford apologized. These are more than anecdotes. They are common enough to be indicative.

On 10/7/2023, one of the most bestial acts in recent memory was inflicted on Israelis by Hamas. The acts were unspeakable, but on the next day protests erupted on and off campuses in defense, ostensibly, of the Palestinians, specifically of Hamas, the people who run Gaza and committed the slaughter of 1,200 people. Parts of our campuses were shut down and American Jews threatened and terrorized.

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An anti-Israel sign with the phrase “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” at a protest at Tulane University, 2023, in New Orleans. The phrase has been criticized as calling for the destruction of Israel. (Credit: Ryan Zamos)

One doesn’t have to hunt very long to find examples of the toxic nature of our schools. The Democratic Party is the institutional embodiment of what is happening to our young people. The party activists demand a fight. The militancy on the Left is on the march. The moderate Democratic Leadership Council is replaced by The Squad, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Jasmine Crockett, et al.

In December of 1859 in his newspaper The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison wrote of John Brown,

“In firing his gun, John Brown has merely told what time of day it is. It is high noon.”

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William Lloyd Garrison

RogerG

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A Dying Thought Experiment

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Charlotte mayor Vi Lyles speaks during a press conference in Charlotte, N.C., December 17, 2019. Inset: Surveillance footage shows Iryna Zarutska (in black hat) and Decarlos Brown Jr. on a Charlotte light rail train shortly before the attack. (Jeremy Brevard-USA TODAY Sports/via Reuters, Screenshot via Charlotte Area Transit System/via WBTV News)

A thought experiment that’s approaching two centuries old, or maybe longer? The Jacobins of the 1790s thought that they could toy with a culture and civilization like a lab biologist splicing genes (The Cult of Reason, The Reign of Terror, revolutionary tribunals, the guillotine). Marx thought he could bring about a new world order by reshaping every person’s mind, marriage, and family, all the way to the totality of life’s arrangements (thus, totalitarianism). 19th-century Progressives injected into the mainstream the thought that a class of credentialed “experts” would lead us to nirvana. Are people with sociology degrees the arbiters of our existence? And then, today, some amongst us contrived a more robust Marxism, tied to progressivism, and infecting those “experts”, that swells the membership of victimizers and victims so as to perpetuate the revolutionary churn (being “woke”).

What are the results? The zealots become divorced from reality as the world collapses around them. Anarchy reigns, lives destroyed. They are experiencing the death throes of their thought experiment and can’t bring themselves to apologize.

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Witness the grotesque word salad of Charlotte’s mayor, Vi Lyles, as she attempts to rationalize the unprovoked murder of a young lady on her city’s public transit system. She wants us to understand the killer, as he plunges a knife into the young woman’s neck, all caught on a surveillance camera (see #3). The release of the videotape occasioned a press conference by the mayor where she referred to the murder as a “a tragic situation that sheds light on problems with society’s safety nets related to mental healthcare.” “Problems with society’s safety nets”, you’ve got to be kidding.

It’s the “root causes” mumbo jumbo of today’s progressives. The huge caravan throngs swamping over our border once Biden took the oath of office, it was said, could not be addressed by enforcing the border. It’s the same as Lyles’s (see #4) “we will never arrest our way out [of] issues such [as] homelessness and mental health.” We must somehow cure poverty in the Third World before we can have border security. An administration spokesman said of VP Harris’s approach to Biden’s border crisis (see #1), “The vice president’s work and what we’re focused on this afternoon is thinking long term and getting at the root of the problem as the administration simultaneously addresses the immediate challenges at the border.” Then, Trump takes the oath and within a few months, we have a cure.

Chicago’s mayor Brandon Johnson is all into the “root causes” mantra. He adds a hostility to constitutional federalism and the Second Amendment to the political liturgy. According to Johnson, other states are responsible for Chicago’s inability to control violent crime. He charged on X (see #2),

“Chicago will continue to have a ‘violence problem’ as long as Red states continue to have a gun problem. The endless flow of illegal guns into Chicago can be traced to Red states like Mississippi, Indiana, and Louisiana.”

Johnson wants every state to have Illinois gun laws, and until they do, the residents of south and west Chicago will have to tolerate the killings of their loved ones. The question never occurred to Johnson: Why is a good portion of his city a war zone and not these other places? Is it because of the relative prosperity in these places from all the gun running to Chicago gangs? When you have to defend the indefensible, you sound like Harris, Lyles, and Johnson.

We are witnessing the death throes of a thought experiment. It can’t stand under the weight of its failures. Not holding people accountable, a fruitless campaign to eradicate all vestiges of poverty and personal anxieties everywhere, and social workers as substitutes for cops leads to, well, Charlottesville, Chicago, the 2020 summer of riots, statue toppling, and Washington, D.C. For that matter, throw in New York City, good chunks of California, the entire urbanized west coast for that matter, almost any place run as a Democrat one-party fiefdom.

And to think that New York City may be on the cusp of electing an out-and-out Marxist. Will we ever learn?

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Harris’ mission to tackle migration root causes scores big money support but border crossings remain high”, Priscilla Alvarez, CNN, 2/6/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/06/politics/kamala-harris-migration/.
2. “Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson blames city’s violence problem on ‘red states’”, staff, Washington Examiner, 9/3/2025, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/3790926/chicago-mayor-brandon-johnson-blames-red-states/.
3. “How Long Will We Tolerate the Madness in Our Streets?”, Rich Lowry, National Review, 9/9/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/how-long-will-we-tolerate-the-madness-in-our-streets/.
4. “What the Hell Is Charlotte’s Mayor, Vi Lyles, Talking About?”, Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review, 9/8/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-the-hell-is-charlottes-mayor-vi-lyles-talking-about/.

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Please, Leszek Balcerowicz, Rescue Us from Ourselves

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Leszek Balcerowicz

Who’s Leszek Balcerowicz? He was Poland’s Finance Minister in the country’s first non-communist government, then served twice as Deputy Prime Minister (1989–1991, 1997–2001) and as Chairman of the National Bank of Poland (2001–2007). He and his wife of 47 years, Ewa Balcerowicz, are economists. He oversaw Poland’s economic reforms from communist collectivism to free markets and democratic capitalism. By all accounts, it worked, while it failed in Russia, possibly owing to Russia’s penchant for sclerotic autocracy and state-empowered cronyism (let’s leave that for another time).

Why bring him up? He is the counterpoint to Trump and his bunch, the Fox News stable grafted onto the executive branch. I doubt seriously that Americans voted for isolationism and protectionism. Tariffs and withdrawal from the world didn’t show up in any polls of the public prior to November 4. Yet, those are what we are getting. Reluctance to defend the international order is evident in stories of Trump’s people pressuring Israel not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities and some voices in the administration expressing a willingness to cut Ukraine and NATO adrift. Protectionism is the sole remaining root for Trump’s tariff war on the world after every other explanation is reduced to incoherence. Balcerowicz’s story is a fresh breath of sanity in our domestic maelstrom of security and economic claptrap.

Balcerowicz faced a tall order in 1989 with the collapse of Poland’s communist regime. Collectivism, once begun, is like drug addiction. The recovery is hell, but eventually a healthier person is restored. Free market “shock therapy” was initiated, tough times ensued, Poland stuck with it, and today Poland is rivalling Japan in per capita income. It’s a lesson well worth remembering as we lurch toward Trump-inspired collectivist protectionism.

Heck, we can’t even reform our bankrupting entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) without a political bloodbath. Trump promises to do nothing about them, and is trying to centrally plan his autarkic economy through his “most beautiful word in the English language”, tariffs. Businesses are watching as their decades-long economic arrangements are hammered into rubble and markets tumble.

A marked contrast is Poland. Per capita (per person) GDP is a good measure of economic health. In 1990 it was Brazil-sized at $12,810, $4,000 behind Mexico’s. In 2023 it stands at $43,585, a mere $2,500 short of Japan’s (see #1). Japan, once the darling of industrial-policy Democrats with its state-management in The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), and an unacknowledged centerpiece of Trump’s economic outlook, has flatlined for three decades. Demographically, it is in the midst of social suicide with a 1.20 fertility rate, and now with an economy to match. Trump is eager to repeat the performance with his own MITI run out of the White House and his executive orders, something akin to imperial decrees.

Hedgeye - Cartoon of the Day: Tough Times In Tokyo

Oh, 2026 is the year that Poland is projected to surpass Japan in per person wealth. Barring Trump dragging the world’s economy into the toilet, aka 1930, the future looks bright for a country near the front lines abutting Putin’s horde. Not so for us.

Poland shows the way forward, not Donald Trump. If only the Republicans had the guts to study the career of Leszek Balcerowicz. Instead, as they play footsie with Donald Trump, the tumbling securities markets forecast dark clouds. Sure, bear and bull markets do not always presage a nation’s future fortunes, but sometimes they do. All the elements of serious economic disruption are present: massive government meddling, Trump’s demand for irresponsible monetary policy to cover his tracks, shattered business relationships, mammoth uncertainty, and the beginning of the pullback of capital. If capital goes into hiding, we’re in serious trouble, Great Depression territory.

In the runup to our near future expect the demagoguery of all the Wall Street vs. Main Street blather to take center stage. The class warfare of J.D. Vance links rhetorical arms with AOC/Bernie Sanders. Is it all that inconceivable for our Vice-President to show up at AOC’s next “Fight Oligarchy” rally? One has to wonder. They might have to change the title to “Fight Wall Street”. Mmmmm, “Occupy Wall Street”? Are we there yet?

AOC chimes in after JD Vance refers to Kamala Harris as 'trash' | Fox News

A simple economic lesson will be taught to our President and his palace coterie, while the rest of us live it. Wall Street and Main Street are as intertwined as Ford and its supply chain. They can’t occupy insular realms, bubbles, silos. A withholding of capital sets off dominoes that careen onto Main Street. Investors seek to avoid Trump-driven risks by not exposing their wealth (capital) to his whims. Following the inevitable chain of events, less capital means less maintenance and growth of enterprises which translates into less business for the diner and hardware store on Main Street.

It’s a lesson well understood by any economist worth their salt. Thank goodness Poland trusted theirs, led by Leszek Balcerowicz, and stayed the course. We, in America, would rather hitch our wagon to our erratic president, and his merry band of Fox News alumni, all adhering to his faulty presumptions. It’s great for Poland, bad for us.

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RGraf

Sources:

1. Thanks to Dominic Pino of National Review for these insights in “The Stat: 2026” in National Review Magazine, May 2025, p.9.

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Car Enthusiasts, Your Life Is About to Change for the Worst

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Ford 2021 Bronco SUVs on the assembly line at the Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Mich., June 14, 2021. (photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters)

Sometime in early 2027, President Trump will probably be impeached . . . again. Why? When the party in power botches things, they’re normally punished at the polls — “It’s the economy, stupid!” Inflation, shortages, business closings, people thrown out of work, recessions/depressions, etc., won’t make for a winning message. That bodes ill for the already impeachment-prone Trump, leaving aside the question of the legitimacy of any effort to remove him from office.

People are already lining up to do the favor, or predicting it. The reliably extremist Democrat Al Green (the one removed for disrupting President Trump’s March 4 speech to Congress) announced in February (see #1), “This president is unfit.” Further in the well of the House he said, “I rise to announce that I will bring articles of impeachment against the president for dastardly deeds proposed and dastardly deeds done.” Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon agrees. Four days after the November 4 election, Bannon augured (see #2),

“Hakeem Jeffries could be, will be, the speaker of the House in two years. And the first thing he will do in the early days of 2027 is move to impeach Donald Trump. Trust me. They’re gonna put $10 billion in back of him [to take the House]. They have nobody else.”

Trump is behaving in ways to prove them right. People vote their pocketbook. It’s more than a cliché. It’s true. Stake out a position that leads to harming the voters’ children and personal fortunes and they will send you packing. Biden and Kamala Harris, et al, are proof of concept. Trump is determined to join them.

I can’t think of a more politically self-destructive act than laying waste to a good portion of the economy just in time for the 2026 midterms. His tariff war – 10% across the board, 25% on our neighbors, potentially sky high on everybody else, and the concomitant uncertainty from all the flip flops – will wreak havoc on everything, maybe with the exception of most food processing. We’ll have food, but to hell with an affordable car, or truck, or SUV, or van, or 18-wheeler, if you can find one. Expect long lines at the grocery store filled with people holding food stamp (SNAP) EBT cards.

To bring home the consequences of the Trump foolishness, let’s just take a look at the rear undercarriage of an “American-made” SUV as it passes from the U.S. to Mexico, to Canada, and back to the U.S. The inputs for just the suspension strut towers go from Pennsylvania to Coahuila, Mexico, to Livonia, Michigan, for final assembly. The differential gearbox begins with aluminum from Quebec, then to casting in Coahuila, then for machining in Ontario, Canada, and then to North Carolina for assembly. The rubber bushings for the control arms starts with synthetic rubber from Monterrey, Mexico, and then to Iowa for their attachment to the control arms. The suspension’s cradle is from Kentucky, and other pieces such as the trailing blades and brackets emanate from Kentucky, Ontario, and Puebla, Mexico.

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Assembly of the various parts into a rearend occurs at Vaughan, Ontario, and Detroit. Then it is rushed to Kansas City, Mo., Fort Wayne, Ind., and Windsor, Ontario, etc., for attachment to the final product. Under Trump’s tariff regime, the final product will be hemorrhaging blood from his tariffs. It’s insane.

Why the circuitous route? Doesn’t it seem unnecessarily complicated? Those questions would arise from your typically myopic and autarkic central planner, people like Peter Navarro and Donald Trump. This process pencils out in terms of value-added and cost-benefit according to the people with skin in the game. That’s what a market does when allowed to operate freely.

Why not just disentangle the various paths and make it all occur in the U.S.? Go ahead and try. Uprooting the suppliers and their plants will come at a terrible cost and take years. In the interim, people will be going to the polls to vote against the wreckage. The complexity of disentanglement was nicely expressed by Flavio Volpe, president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, when he compared it to an omelet: “You can’t unscramble it once it’s done.”

Trump is Don Quixote charging windmills. Biden wanted to shove us into very expensive golf carts masquerading as family sedans. With Trump, even that screwball option may not be available. I don’t know about you but I’m keeping my 10-year-old Tundra and 9-year-old Venza. Buying new ones is likely to be a nightmare. Expect the entire auto industry to pull back as well. Now that’s the making of economic hard times.

Will the Democrats finally succeed in adding Donald Trump’s scalp to their lance this time? Well, as they say, third time is the charm.

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RGraf

Sources:

1. “Donald Trump Faces New Impeachment Bid After Speech to Congress”, Martha McHardy, Newsweek, 3/5/2025, at https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-impeachment-al-green-2039765
2. “Steve Bannon Warns of Potential Third Donald Trump Impeachment”, Aila Slisco, Newsweek, 11/8/2024, at https://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-warns-potential-third-donald-trump-impeachment-1983079
3. Thanks to Ryan Mills of National Review for his piece “North America’s Auto Supply Chain Took Decades to Build. Trump’s Tariffs Could Crush It” at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/north-americas-auto-supply-chain-took-decades-to-build-trumps-tariffs-could-crush-it/