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).
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.
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.
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)Donald Trump delivers remarks in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, on Sept. 28, 2024.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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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”.
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.
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.
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/.
* 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?”
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 (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.”
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.
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/.
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.
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.”
No, the title is not a reference to the likes of Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson joining the ranks of Antifa or the crowd behind Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy. But they are unknowingly thinking like a Marxist.
The emergence of this new mental orientation on the Right begins with being “woke”. Specifically, it’s jargon for a hypothetical state of awareness, a capability of perceiving the deeper reality that is concealed to all but the most discerning. Facts are optional. The idea is traceable to Karl Marx, and therefore central to the “woke” Left with all their “critical theories” of oppressor/oppressed and the beleaguered “marginalized”.
Marx was not satisfied with a call for revolution. That’s too simple. His thought is more robust than that. He sought to explain the stream of all human experience since the dawn of time. For him, we are socialized into our status as oppressors or the oppressed. To set the world right according to him and Engels, the complete human, not just society, minds and all, need to be reshaped to be truly “free”. We must be cleansed of this filth of past and present socialization. He’s advocating totalitarianism pure and simple.
Marx called the malign socialization of traditional society “false consciousness”. In Marx’s fevered imagination, almost everything in our existence trains us into accepting our condition, like our language, family, marriage, faith, traditions, etc. Marx wanted all of it junked and refashioned at the behest of his woke “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. For anyone with an ounce of humanity, this should send shivers down your spine. We now have generations trained in the gibberish. It shows, look at the young.
Neo-Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt School in 1920s and 1930s Germany (technically, the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research) – Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, etc. – fled Nazi Germany, landed in the West, most notably the U.S. The virus spread in the academic “soft sciences” throughout the 1950s to today, waiting on the gullibility of Robin DeAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, BLM, Occupy Wall Street, the college campus mobs, statue topplers, the faculty lounge, and the looser canons of the Democratic Party such as AOC, Mamdani, the surviving Squad, Bernie and his “bros”, the DNC.
Herbert MarcuseMax HorkheimerTheodore Adorno
What infected the Left has spread to the Right in what the French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye referred to as The Horseshoe Theory: both Left and Right come to mirror authoritarian tendencies, but actually more than that. A woke Left leads to a reaction in the rise of a new woke Right. Marx has his bourgeoisie bogeymen; Fascists have their liberals (classical liberals, that is), “cosmopolitans”, Jews, or anyone that they see as undermining national solidarity. Parts of the new Right have copyrighted their own hobgoblins.
The woke bookends: JD Vance, AOC
All claim to have the gift of seeing the clandestine threat, the hidden structure of oppression, and are thus awoken. An element of the Right shows symptoms of the “woke” infection. It starts with a unique vocabulary for the Right, words that remind a person of the allegedly hidden cabals and insidious networks not seen by the average person. Establishment, elites, neocons, globalists, warmongers, the deep state, for instance, all generalities, litter their harangues. Only they are awoken enough to expose it. QAnon appears, the alleged Epstein/Israeli cabal, the swamp, etc. Similarly, Marxists forever after 1917 were in a constant state of vigilance against “wreckers”, underground churches and worshippers, samizdat free thinkers, kulaks, saboteurs. Now the Right has joined the thought-fad by listing their own scapegoats.
Tune into Candace Owens and her tirades about the pernicious influence of Jews bordering on blood libel (the medieval canard about the murder of Christians by Jews to use their blood in religious rituals). Coming to the defense of the emotionally unstable Kanye West and his rant against the Jews of Hollywood, here’s Candace:
“What if that is what is happening right now in Hollywood? If there is just a very small ring of specific people who are using the fact that they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism, it’s food for thought, right? And I think, again, there have been enough people that are speaking out about a ring in Hollywood, also a ring potentially in DC, that we should start to ask those questions.” (see #1)
Sounds innocuous? The talk of a “ring of Jews to shield themselves” in Candace’s punditry smacks of the same shadowy forces occupying the minds of the Left. She said in the manner of Marx and Lenin when speaking of the bourgeoise, “They will kill people before they allow that ring to be exposed.”
The stark language of generalized and shadowy forces is strikingly similar to the bombast of the evil machinations of the bourgeoisie coming off the pen of Lenin in 1919: “The bourgeoisie and their agents in the workers’ organisations [sic] are making desperate attempts to find ideological and political arguments in defence [sic] of the rule of the exploiters.” (see #2)
For some on the Right, like their “woke” soulmates on the Left, antisemitism is making a comeback. Since the memory of the demonic Holocaust, though fading, still haunts us, their antisemitism is prefaced by disclaimers, versions of “Oh, no, not me” and “Some of my best friends are . . .” and “I love . . .”. It’s rhetorical maneuvering to engage in antisemitism by angling the Jewish identity into a cabal working against the interests and will of the American people.
Tucker Carlson and Candace Carlson traffic in antisemitism
The influential Tucker Carlson drinks at the same trough. Recently, he has been consumed in anxiety over the nefarious influence of the powerful, who just so happen to be Jews. On Zelensky, the president of Ukraine of Jewish ancestry, Tucker defames him and the leader of Blackrock in a two-fer, “Sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock.” Blackrock, the investment firm? It is led by Larry Fink, also Jewish. Compare this to some of the things in Völkischer Beobachter (National Socialist official newspaper, “People’s Observer”). (see #3)
He throws aspersions at Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, for being insufficiently devoted to the U.S., for having divided loyalties with you-know-who (Israel). Remember, Carlson has tirelessly expressed mortification about the post-9/11 wars, the “forever wars”, and warmongers. His argument, taken to its obvious conclusion, demands no foreign policy till we have solved all our problems. It is isolationism. Our special relationship with Israel, a country under constant threat of annihilation, is a regular source of annoyance to him.
The Jew thing crops up in his head. In response to Shapiro and other conservative commentators, he insists, “. . . so many of these people don’t seem to have the same level of actual care for American citizens.”
Contrasting himself with the allegedly rootless Shapiro, a Jew, he is unflinchingly American:
“I’m from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. I’m shocked by how little they care about the country.” (see #4)
You see, this new online Right is immersed in the old bigoted trope of the “cosmopolitan” Jew, a people who cannot be trusted to have patriotic monogamy.
As for Americans who sign up for the IDF, Carlson ranted,
“There are a lot of Americans who’ve served in the IDF — they should lose their citizenship. You can’t fight for another country and remain an American, period.”
It is lost on him that Americans joined the Canadian Air Force to fight for Britain in WWII, that Americans for a century volunteered for the French Foreign Legion, and to fight communists in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, Angola, etc. Should they be booted from the ranks of citizen?
Carlson traffics in the Epstein/Mossad conspiracy story. More tales of the unhinged. He ruminates (see #5):
“. . . I think the real answer is Jeffrey Epstein was working on behalf of intel services, probably not American [Mossad]. . . . Now, no one’s allowed to say that the foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that’s naughty.”
There seems to be no grand mystery where a Jew cannot be found to be in the middle of it.
All such thought-fads that become embedded in the culture have a catalyst, usually a combination of events, mercurial personalities, and a potential reservoir of acolytes anxiously looking for a leader who can personify their angst. In 2015, a leader appeared in the form of Donald Trump and his coalescing MAGA movement. No, he’s not Hitler. No, he’s not an anti-Semite, far from it. He’s of the ilk of Theodore Roosevelt, a man who always wanted to be the “bride and every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every Christening” (according to TR’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth). Many people at the time became infatuated with TR as a force of nature (many still do). Specifics mattered little. Ditto for Trump and MAGA. Democracies are susceptible to enchantment.
His acolytes in the media and administration speak of him and his words with such reverence. His words carry the divine sanction of the Gospels. Yet, honestly, the yearning on the Right is based on real and pressing concerns. Our government is so big that it is no longer answerable to us. Our public spending and debt spiral out of control. Our education system has become the Left’s prep school, a training ground for future hordes of malcontents. The terms “boy” and “girl” are forcibly muddled making sexual privacy and safety meaningless. Genital mutilation of minors (“gender-affirming care”), really? Crime is seen as a call for therapy. Public barbarism in roving gangs of youth and ramshackle tent encampments sprawling across our cities have made salient parts of them unlivable.
This is the low-hanging fruits of the Left’s long march though the institutions. The Left’s cultural sickness spread to other countries in our foreign policy. Pride flags unfurled at our embassy in Kabul, really? The reaction did not stop there. The long twilight struggle against international terrorism in the 9/11 wars of Afghanistan and Iraq was fodder for “populists”, first by the Left (“Bush lied, people died”, “No blood for oil”, Code Pink) and now by parts of the Right, to take the indictment further to include “forever wars”, “warmongers”, “neocons”, the Bushes.
Trump and MAGA gave the angst organizational form. Trump and his movement produced the “populist” Right’s vocabulary and targets of derision. Everyone and everything in the newsfeed get sucked into the new Right’s vortex. Unwittingly, Trump and MAGA are the catalyst and accelerant for the new woke Right. Intentionality is irrelevant. Gadflies on the fringe, from tiki-torch machers in Charlottesville to Trump foolishly having lunch with the antisemite Kanye West and the far-Right blowhard Nick Fuentes, are attracted to a burgeoning movement with real concerns.
Without the rise of Trump populism and its disparagement of “elites” and the amorphous “establishment”, it’s hard to conceive of a wokeness on the Right. Real misbehavior – the Russia hoax, lawfare, “the resistance”, higher ed’s neo-Marxist cultural revolution, etc. – invites ruminations of a conspiratorial underworld. The Left sees it in “whiteness”. The Right might see it in the Jews, “neocons”, an intersectionality between the two, globalists, a conspiratorial “deep state”, etc.
Some on the “woke Right” end up sounding like their brethren on the Left in a condemnation of capitalism, or free markets, as nothing more than an abstract ideology and not the product of government simply leaving people alone. Both ends of the spectrum are enthused about government and its politics manipulating the economy to benefit some oppressed class.
Poster of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) showing the hidden hands of capitalism. Some on the right sound like the PSL.
Let our vice president, J.D. Vance, in his own words, illustrate the union of the Left and Right in their “wokeness”:
* The Left’s Mother Jones magazine quoted Vance’s endorsement of the 2023 UAW strike when Vance said he was “[r]ooting for the auto workers across our country demanding higher wages.” (see #6)
* Vance supported Biden’s “bigness in business is badness” FTC chair Lina Khan by saying, “A lot of my Republican colleagues look at Lina Khan … and they say, ‘well Lina Khan is sort of engaged in some sort of fundamental evil thing.” Further adding, “And I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.” (see #7)
* Vance champions the Democrats’ spendthrift rationale for entitlements, reducing a looming disaster for the young to the blasé, “One way of understanding the Social Security problem is, old people can’t work, young people can, babies can’t.” And curtly concluding, “So people at a certain age support the babies and the old people.” (see #8)
Between bashing business for exploiting workers and praising lefty economists/lawyers and boosting bankrupting entitlements, Vance exemplifies something more than “populism”. He signifies that coming together of the woke Left and Right in embracing the union extortion racket, socialist economics (an oxymoron since socialism is all about government, not economics), and the old getting the chance to pillage the young. It’s abominable.
The French writer, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, in 1849 once quipped, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, or “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. Or at least, the two ends merge into the same mass over time, all “woke”, all sounding like each other, all sounding Marxist.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Candace Owens Goes on Bizarre Screed About ‘Ring’ of ‘Quite Sinister’ Jews in Hollywood”, Alex Griffin, Mediaite, 3/8/2024, at https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/candace-owens-goes-on-bizarre-screed-about-ring-of-quite-sinister-jews-in-hollywood/.
2. Lenin’s opening line in “Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, March 1919, at https://old.iclfi.org/english/wv/935/qotw.html.
3. “Tucker Carlson called Ukraine’s Jewish leader Zelenskyy ‘rat-like’ on his Twitter show, repeating a well-worn antisemitic trope”, Haven Orecchio-Egresitz, Business Insider, 6/8/2023, at https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker-carlson-calls-zelenskyy-rat-like-antisemitic-trope-2023-6.
4. An excellent piece on Tucker Carlson’s darker manifestation of late was made by a former friend and colleague, James Kirchick, in “Tucker Carlson’s Dark Turn”, 7/24/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/09/tucker-carlsons-dark-turn/.
5. “Tucker Carlson Claims Jeffrey Epstein Was Working for Israel to Blackmail American Politicians”, Michael Luciano, Mediaite, 7/11/2025, at https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/tucker-carlson-claims-jeffrey-epstein-was-working-for-israel-to-blackmail-american-politicians/.
6. “J.D. Vance Really Wants You to Believe He Supports Striking Autoworkers”, Noah Lanard, Mother Jones, 9/19/2023, at https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/09/donald-trump-jd-vance-josh-hawley-uaw-strike-biden/.
7. “Vance: Biden FTC chief is ‘doing a pretty good job’”, Rebecca Klar, The Hill, 2/27/2024, at https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4491363-vance-biden-ftc-chief-is-doing-a-pretty-good-job/.
8. “The Trump-Vance Ticket is a Repudiation of Free-Market Conservatism”, Victoria Guida, Politico, 7/16/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/16/the-trump-vance-ticket-is-a-repudiation-of-free-market-conservatism-00168578.
Trump has signed an executive order for tariffs increase. (Reuters: Kevin Lamarque)
Introduction: An era of freer trade made it possible for me to give new life to a dying refrigerator. Better for it to be of use in my garage than in a landfill. No freer trade, I junk the thing.
************
No news here. President Trump proclaimed that his tariffs brought into the treasury $150 billion so far, by the end of July. His Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, projects $300 billion by the end of the year (see #1). The use of tariffs as a revenue generator is now a familiar part of Trump’s spiel. We’ve always had tariffs for a variety of well-worn reasons, but for most of our country’s history, a history without an income tax, tariffs were the chief source of revenue for Uncle Sam for all that the feds did at the time. Now we have an invasive income tax AND a new and ubiquitous tariff regime with a 15% floor covering most that enters the country thanks to Trump. The key lesson is our federal government’s insatiable appetite for more money to cover its still-growing $37 trillion debt, which just piles onto the backs of the citizens both the income tax and Trump’s tariff protectionism and its accompanying higher prices.
But who really pays the tariffs? In a display of economic illiteracy, Trump really believes foreigners pay. Read this display of historical and economic incoherence:
“In 1913 for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government.” (see #2)
Is Trump advocating the abolishment of the income tax to make room for his “most beautiful word in the English language”? No, an end to the income tax appears nowhere in sight. Astonishingly, he actually claimed that foreign countries paid for our federal government. In the same breath, he and his Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, contradict their logic by admitting price increases and fewer choices are the likely outcome.
Here’s Trump in an interview with Kristen Welker: “I don’t think that a beautiful baby girl needs – that’s 11 years old – needs to have 30 dolls.”
Here’s Lutnick in an interview with CBS’s Margaret Brennan advocating the avoidance of the tariffs by buying American: “[people who manufacture here] don’t pay a tariff. They don’t pay a tariff at all. So, President Trump says it all the time, build in America, you don’t pay a tariff.” And assumably you don’t have to worry about any tariff-induced price increases, or so says Lutnick (see #3).
The statements are incomprehensible. Trump doesn’t care that a margin of the buying public will be priced out of the market, and Lutnick fails to understand that a tariff raising the price of imports will lead to jumps in domestics as well. The price of the imported Toyota increases by $1,500 which leaves room for Ford to raise theirs by $750. The price floor is raised for all products no matter their country of origin (see #4).
Artificially raising prices alters behavior of all who confront them. Like me. Recently, my house refrigerator/freezer went on the fritz. It wasn’t cooling. The condenser coil was frosting over blocking the flow of air from the fan. The compressor is fine, so why the frost blockage? The defroster function clearly wasn’t working. The two most accessible parts in the defrost chain are the thermostat and defrost timer. Now began an online search for parts.
The price of parts varied dramatically for OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer, possibly American) and the import (some from China). The price for the thermostat ranged from the OEM $60 to the import $8, and the defrost timer went from the OEM $120 to the import $22. Following the advice of the $3.37-billion in net worth Howard Lutnick or the $5-billion Donald Trump, versus the income of pensioners (my wife and I), they would have me pay the $180, which might not fix the thing. These guys could afford to junk the thing and shell out $1,500 for new, for two, maybe more. No big deal for them, one living in a $35 million Bridgehampton, NY, estate, and the other at Mar-a-Lago. For me, $30 makes the gamble worth it, which is what I did.
President Trump with Mar-a-Lago in the backgroundHoward Lutnick and his Bridgehampton, NY, mansion
It worked. “Buying American” would mean another appliance in the county landfill instead of one in my garage for ice cream and cold drinks.
That’s how economics works. Prices are signals to us and unleash incentives and disincentives for certain economic actions. Policies that artificially raise prices inordinately affect people at one end of the income margin while being meaningless to those at the other end. But those at the upper-income end seem to be making the policy.
Speaking of being out of touch. Trump portrays himself as the blue-collar messiah. No, he’s only a blessing to certain blue-collars – the ones with plenty of campaign cash and political pull – at the expense of other blue-collars. And for the rest of us, we must navigate a more difficult market. Unfree trade has its costs, big time.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “July tariff revenues break monthly record, with $150B collected so far in 2025”, Amanda Macias, Fox Business, 7/29/2025, at https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/july-tariff-revenues-break-monthly-record-150-billion-collected-so-far-2025.
2. “’A little tough love’: Top quotes from Trump tariff talk”, France 24, 3/4/2025, at https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250402-a-little-tough-love-top-quotes-from-trump-tariff-talk.
3. “Transcript: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” July 20, 2025”, CBS News: Face the Nation, 7/20/2025, at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/howard-lutnick-commerce-secretary-face-the-nation-transcript-07-20-2025/.
4. “Tariffs—Everything you need to know but were afraid to ask”, Adam S. Hersh and Josh Bivens, Economic Policy Institute, 2/10/2025, at https://www.epi.org/publication/tariffs-everything-you-need-to-know-but-were-afraid-to-ask/#:~:text=By%20raising%20the%20cost%20of%20foreign-produced%20goods%20or,goods%2C%20allowing%20domestic%20businesses%20to%20also%20raise%20prices.
Helicopter parenting seems to be a feature of some child raising today, may be an inbred reflex for older marrieds finally birthing one or two children. It comes with unforeseen costs which will be borne by the child later in life. The coddling cripples the youngster from developing the coping mechanisms and needed personality corrections when facing difficulties. Life disciplines if allowed to operate. The costs of leniency appear later when bail becomes necessary for storming federal courthouses, assaulting ICE agents, toppling statues and defacing cemeteries, and roaming around in mobs threatening free speech on campus. Mom and dad, get prepared for a hefty therapy bill as well. Coddled people are frequently nervous wrecks as adults.
The costs of coddling reach humungous levels when implemented on a national scale, such as showering subsidies, tax code benefits, and tariff protections on certain industries. Government becomes a helicopter parent, permissive and indulgent, enticing their dependents to continue in their morbid obesity and gross wastefulness. Who ultimately pays? Guess what . . . You!
Does any of this make any sense? “Yes” to the recipients, and “no” to everyone else. The more important question is, do our elected poohbahs wallow in this form of bad parenting on a national scale? Yes, because it pays. It buys the votes of people nostalgic for a world before the latest innovation. It goes something like this: my dad worked on Chevies, Fords, and Dodges, and that’s how God created the world. Who doesn’t want to freeze in amber the world of their formative years? Luddites of every generation will always be a potent political constituency.
The application of economic laws (supply, demand, price signals, incentives, etc.) to government was explored by economists Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan in something that they called Public Choice Theory. Surprise, they showed that politicians shop around for votes. They won the Nobel prize in economics for their groundbreaking work. Tullock took the analysis further by examining the immense hidden costs of tariffs; something Trump refuses to understand (see #1, #2).
Tariffs coddle the too-big-to-fail companies and their extortionate union parasites, both with their tentacles deep into the campaign war chests of the elected. Then, once in office, the bennies roll in, now especially under Trump. Trump’s most beautiful word in the English language, tariff, acts as an accelerant for a new growth industry, special consultancy services (tariff brokers and such) to help business navigate the new flood of paperwork and rules, and army of new government hires, regurgitated out of Leviathan. These services aren’t free, and add new costs to the bottom line and the public purse, all to be borne by you in fewer choices, higher prices, and higher taxes and/or public debt.
Think about it, think about a time before the income tax. Yes, there was a time when April 15 was just another spring day, and not the deadline to avoid fines and jail. It used to be the natural order of things, except for the brief period of the Civil War, until 1913 and Woodrow Wilson signed the implementing law after the 1909 approval of the 16th Amendment allowed the monstrosity. After it and other changes to the tax code, who doesn’t need a tax accountant to steer clear of the maw of the IRS? Many, many. The government’s insatiable appetite for more money added a new layer to the cost of living, the professional tax accountant and lawyer and software.
Trump is accomplishing the same feat with his “Liberation Day”. That and all the subsequent trade deals will end up spiking the average U.S. tariff from a low of 2.5% in 2024 to over 5% in 2025, and a general 15% on a huge portion of it (see #3). It’s a flat-out tax increase added to the bottom line, added to your cost of living and running a business. Trump boasts of billions pouring into the federal treasury as if it is coming out of the pockets of foreigners. He’s selling a falsehood. Much analysis has been devoted to who pays the tariffs (see #2). It shows the residents of the authoring country footing the bill. I don’t think Trump cares because tariffs are “beautiful” to him; they harken him back to a time 70 years ago, the world of his youth, and his obsession with recreating it.
The sheer absurdity of Trump’s tariff regime will be clear if we take a look at one industry, copper. You know, the hotly sought-after basic and essential stuff for the Dems’ greenie electrified utopia or Trump’s buy-only-America one. It’s a classic case of a blockheaded Trump obsession mucking up U.S. industries by pushing a solution in search of a problem.
Let’s start with a basic stat: 45% of U.S. copper consumption is imported (see #5). The remaining 55% is domestically produced. So, why the 50% tariff on imported copper? Intended or not, Trump is forcing domestic users of copper to pay more for it out of a constricted internal supply. Why constricted? Over decades, we willed it so. Try to open a new mine and avoid the stinging swarms of eco-zealots at all levels. Behind walling off the richer seams behind national monuments and lines of legal-eagle firing squads, the potentially condemned seek other venues of investment. 55% could be a lot more but isn’t because we’d rather pay to dig up the land under other people. Currently, the U.S. ranks seventh in proven reserves in the world, more than China, but won’t touch much of it (see #5).
And, anyway, it’s not such a bad idea to diversify sources for national security reasons. Domestic supplies can be disrupted by events such as strikes by Trump’s newfound allies in organized labor’s extortion racket. Natural disasters and mechanical breakdowns in the chain from mine to mill, as happens in oil refining, are inevitable. Is it such a horrible thought to be on good terms with countries like Chile, our largest foreign source? Though, If you see foreigners as enemies, like Trump, economic or otherwise, don’t be surprised that many of them end up providing new naval basing and investment opportunities for the CCP. Tariffing our hemisphere will require a much bigger navy to blockade South America.
The bottom line is that coddling domestic producers behind the padded walls of 50% tariffs makes them more willing to buy off the eco-gangsters and their featherbedding union masters, a win/win for producer and parasites alike. The only loser is the DIYer trying to wire his garage. Maybe now, his only option is shivering in winter.
Coddling “Made in America” by federal helicopter parents is a surefire way to screw up people. It isn’t good policy in raising children nor in the making of prosperity.
RogerG
Sources:
1. If you want to get into the weeds of Tullock’s insight, read “The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, monopolies, and Theft”, Gordon Tullock, Rice University, June 1967, at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1967.tb01923.x.
2. For a more concise depiction of Tullock’s thesis, go to “The Hidden Costs of Trump’s Tariffs”, Augustin Forzani, National Review, 7/31/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/07/the-hidden-costs-of-trumps-tariffs/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=first.
3. “Trump Tariffs: Tracking the Economic Impact of the Trump Trade War”, Erica York and Alex Durante, Tax Foundation, 7/29/2025, at https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs-trade-war/.
4. “Chart: The Average U.S. Tariff Rate (1890-2025)”, Dorothy Nuefeld, Visual Capitalist, 4/10/2025, at https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-average-u-s-tariff-rate-since-1890/.
5. “45%”, Dominic Pino, National Review Magazine, September 2025, p.11.
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/.
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