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The Shrill and Shallow Rule the Roost

AOC and Bernie Sanders at rally
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders participate in a stop on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour at the Dignity Health Arena Theater in Bakersfield, California, on April 15, 2025. (photo: REUTERS/Aude Guerrucci)
Zohran Mamdani, wearing a suit and tie, smiles broadly while standing behind a lectern.
Zohran Mamdani, NYC mayoral candidate.   (photo: Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times)
Kids News: American trade tariffs affecting Australia explained | KidsNews
Pres. Trump announcing his “Liberation Day” tariffs, April 2, 2025

It’s probably always been true that shallow thinking prevails in our world. X good/Y bad, the binary pervades thought without much cognitive work behind it. What else explains the teenage rise of the now 22-year-old phenom Greta Thunberg (mentioned in earlier posts)? Or the overturning of the century-plus expansion and refinements of the grid and personal transportation in the crushing span of two decades, by law? Or the sudden appearance of sex shapeshifting as an incontrovertible “reality” taking over women’s swimming and track meets? Or sports gaming profits are a “good” without any recognition that these profits represent many more “losers”? Or, in a similar manner, a boost in government revenues from tariffs is a “good” absent any realization that they come at the expense of consumers and businesses, a much bigger class of “losers”? Our public conversation is chock full of the silliness. It’s the era of the shrill and shallow.
At the spearhead of this nonsense is a combination of the Trump phenomenon and the neo-Marxist Left in the Democratic Party and its street militias. The former first. Take Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. The only thing being liberated is money out of our wallets and “freedom” from our beneficial supply chain arrangements. The confluence of “liberation” and rising economic distress is . . . amazing.
That won’t stop pundits like Hugh Hewitt on his radio show announcing the “good news” of higher-than-expected government revenues from Trump’s tariffs (last week). It doesn’t take much more than a thimble of reasoning to understand that, for instance, the MSRP of that new truck on the showroom floor just jumped $1,500, or Amazon deals are fewer and far between. When was the last time that you heard a self-proclaimed Reagan Republican extolling the virtue of a huge tax increase?
It doesn’t stop there. Trump’s on-again/off-again support for Ukraine stands out for head-scratching. Is Putin a good guy or bad guy, despite the fact that he wantonly invaded another country like the Wehrmacht did Poland. Is a dogmatic obsession with a “pivot to Asia (China)” the right way to go, even though crap happens elsewhere? In 1984, when asked by a reporter about the greatest difficulty facing a Prime Minister, British ex-PM Harold Macmillan responded, “Events, my dear boy, events.” Events are happening elsewhere that unexpectedly impact Trump’s much cherished “pivot”. Is it too much to expect of our leaders to understand that a green light to Putin is a green light to Xi, is a green light to the mullahs, is a green light to Kim? Empty grousing in the 1930s about Japan in Manchuria and Mussolini in Ethiopia was fully appreciated by the Chancellor of Germany. Dominoes exist in more than a game.
Many of Trump’s political successes is less evidence of him playing 4-D chess but is, more than anything, proof that he’s blessed by the sheer incoherence, incompetence, and malignancy of his opponents. Popular loathing for the donkey party is at record highs according to the latest WSJ poll (see #1). Are election results a product of an overwhelming enthusiasm for a particular candidate or a measure of a greater dislike for the other choice?
Trump-love occupies a niche in the American public, far from sufficient to get him elected. Helping Trump along the way is an opposition party oriented for dystopia. No matter Trump’s negatives, the alternative has positioned itself as a catalyst for XX “boys” and XY “girls” throughout K-12 into college, education dysfunction, defund the police, the mutilation of the economy and the quality of life in green fads and inflation and mounting public debt, and urban wastelands of filth, crime, and homelessness.
Who, other than Democrats, wants an intermingling of genitalia in middle school bathrooms based on nothing but the hormone-fueled feelings of tweens? Mercurial teen self-identity leads to XY “girls” blasting through the tape by 4 yards at the girls’ state high school track championships. Of course, don’t look for it to happen the other way around (XX “boys” taking gold medals in competitions with the XY variety). The whole scene flummoxes and angers ma and pa and grandma and grandpa in the stands. Democratic Party infatuations suddenly hit home.
When Trump tariffs, the Dems are boxed in a corner. Trump proves that he can be just as good a central planner as they ever were. How can they complain? Ever since Republicans began to embrace their inner Milton Friedman in the 1960s, Democrats were the buddies of economic xenophobia and our extortionate labor unions. Trump flips the old political script, tossing freedom economics out the window, and proves that the GOP can function as economic xenophobes and gangsters every bit as well as the Democrats in their effusive pandering to the AFL-CIO.
What’s left of the old Democrat coalition? They’ve got their eco-lobby with its thinly educated white-collar and mostly public-employee constituency. Add to them the cadres of social revolutionaries led by old socialist crackpots like Bernie Sanders and the New Age socialism of the glib and juvenile AOC. Oh, let’s not forget the only expanding clump in their atrophying coalition: unmarried women. Husbands and children are not on their agenda, while preferring a government spouse to a biological one. The party’s future is even more depressing as they fling the LGBTQ+ agenda at the face of God-fearing Hispanics, flood the labor market with desperate peasants, and persist in abandoning the economic and social interests of Black males.
We have the rule of the shallow and shrill. Our primary elections are not faithful renderings of a party’s members, but a playground for the most animated, the shrill and shallow. The rest stay home. MAGA and the Democrats’ social revolutionaries present firebrands to the general public in November, or people who speak the lingo. American politics, as seen by outsiders, must appear to be riotous clown show. Interesting.
Speaking of the shrill and shallow, an update: President Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a trade deal this past Sunday (7/27). After chores, and during exercise, I’ll listen to podcast and talk-show punditry and be exposed to the latest hyperbole about the deal. There’s too much we don’t know and too much yet to be negotiated. Yet, we do know to expect a jump in automobile and durable goods prices since tariffs on cars (15%) and steel and aluminum (50%) remains. Don’t forget that “tariff is the most beautiful word in the English language” for Trump. At least for now, till our potentate-in-chief changes his mind, some certainty returns to business. Stay tuned for more “progress” on the America-as-victim-of-the-world front.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Democrats Get Lowest Rating From Voters in 35 Years, WSJ Poll Finds”, Aaron Zitner, Wall Street Journal, 7/25/2025, at https://www.wsj.com/…/democratic-party-poll-voter….

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Our Age of Tech-Assisted Manias

47 Examples of Group Behavior - Simplicable

Social Manias (Wikipedia): mass movements which periodically sweep through societies. They are characterized by an outpouring of enthusiasm, mass involvement and millenarian goals. They are contagious social epidemics, and as such they should be differentiated from mania in individuals.

**********

It’s Wikipedia. Take it for what it’s worth. Nonetheless, the words generally hit the mark about a defining characteristic of our times: our self-conceit. We have convinced ourselves that we are smarter and wiser basically because we have instant access to nearly everything written, said, and done, which in reality means that we access no more than a molecule of it, the stuff that caters to our biases. Rather, instant communication has made us easily triggered as we congregate into zealous groupings of fellow believers in the unbelievable. Smart phones have nothing to do with making us smart. They’ve made us stupid, and armed with a heightened capacity to rally around our stupidity. More commonly, instant connectivity has produced a flurry of just-add-water social manias.

*Please watch the accompanying video of an interview with Lionel Shriver on the Triggernometry podcast, “Mania: How Societies Go Crazy – Lionel Shriver”. Watch it below.

Mania: How Societies Go Crazy - Lionel Shriver

She went from vocally pro-choice and a 2020 Biden supporter to DeSantis and a scourge of the “woke” (see NPR interview in #1) in four years. She’s a contrarian in regards to current trends but also against her past self. For me, that’s integrity.

Take three of the hottest topics paralyzing the public conversation today: climate change, transgenderism, and Trump-o-mania. First, who thunk it possible that an emotionally troubled teenager, Greta Thunberg, would be elevated to the Jeremiah of our times? How’s that possible? It can happen when nearly every natural phenomenon is fed into the mania vortex of climate change, something simplistic enough for an addled youngster.

Climate activist protest in front of BlackRock headquarters in New York on October 29, 2022 (Getty Images)

Think about this omnibus excuse – climate change – as you watch it. Lefty politicians are able to duck responsibility for poor wild land management practices while pursuing utopian social engineering schemes instead of focusing on keeping the lights on, streets and neighborhoods safe, maintaining roads, water at the tap, collecting the garbage, and schooling that actually enhances cognitive abilities – the Main Street stuff of government. Instead, anything bad is shoved into the climate-change worm hole: droughts in a windy drought-prone climate (Mediterranean), firestorms in overgrown and deadened wildlands that seemed to be intentionally groomed for combustibility if it wasn’t for simple and willful neglect. Can it get any more insane?

Human agency in this schema only counts if it can be assigned as the cause – not them and their policies, of course – and always tied to a grand theory that denounces you and I for having a life independent of their direction. We are said to be the cause of Katrina in 2015, not the corrupt, incompetent, and lazy state and local officeholders who neglected the levees in a city below sea level. Yes, insanity rules, alongside the influence of Greta.

Nature will hand to them an unending stream of pretexts for meddling in our lives, nature being nature. The latest made-to-order excuse came via the Guadalupe River flash flood of July 4th with 121 dead, 170 still missing. The “Texas Flash Flood Alley” area that stretches in a southwest arc from Dallas through Austin to the Rio Grande is described by the Lower Colorado River Authority as having “one of the greatest risks for flash floods in the United States” (see #2, #3). Of course, for the maniacs, large numbers of people filling recreational sites on a holiday in a region prone to flash flooding, the river rising 25 feet in a mere 2 hours in the early morning, at a time of year conducive for it, had nothing to do with it. For the unhinged, its’s SUVs, Big Oil, affordable and reliable energy. Hmmmmm.

A man surveys debris along the Guadalupe River after a flash flood struck the ar
A man surveys debris along the Guadalupe River after a flash flood struck the area, in Kerrville, Texas. (photo: AP/PTI)

Flash Flood Alley lived up to its reputation leaving grieving parents and relatives. It’s too horrifying to contemplate. Pray for God’s solace for the grieving.

It’s not a time to politicize nature. Yet, some of us do it, and ignore the history of, for instance, the 1900 Galveston hurricane and flood (8,000-12,000 died) or the San Antonio floods of 1913 (180 died) and 1921 (220). Right now, the quest for political power trumps all (no pun intended). It’s easy to do once climate change becomes embedded in our mental architecture. The millenarian side of the social mania soon kicks in to bully by edict the entire population into the preferred lifestyles of the true believers.

Deep inside every true believer lies a budding totalitarian. If you’re old-school enough to believe that chromosomes matter, you and your kids will be ostracized, hopefully not in a gulag. How did we go from dating, the prom, and childhood innocence to doctor-assisted chemical and surgical mutilation, sometimes without parental knowledge or consent?

It’s baffling, until one notices the ubiquity of cell phones around 2013/14 and the simultaneous appearance of gender anxiety, especially among pre-teen and teen girls (see #4). The connection is highly suggestive. What we have are the makings of a social mania, a contagion. The sudden rise of it is astonishing, and can’t be explained by sole reliance on the LGBTQ+ lobby’s favorite cause: children are freer to announce their “gender fluidity”. Is it actually the “freedom” or the viral spread of the notion of that “freedom”?

managing teen cell phone usage

Colin Wright, evolutionary biologist at the Manhattan Institute, is an astute observer of the transgender scene. He cites research that unsurprisingly shows California to be a hotbed of youthful transgenderism. “Sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants and transgendered youth means more of both (see #5). Youth in the state between the ages of 13 and 17 are identifying as transgender at a rate 38% higher than the national average. Middle and upper middle-income communities in the state with a major university, like Davis, are keenly susceptible. One sample of youth in the Davis Joint Union School District expressed trans identities at “nearly 4.3 times the national average, and 3 times California’s average” (see #6). In a state already governed by the Left’s idea of anything goes, the surge is likely due to something other than “freedom”. Could it be that the notion spread at the speed of digital bytes across cell towers to your daughter’s TikTok app on the cell phone that you provided her from your family plan?

Gender Confusion - Culture Smart Moms - Moms for America

More than gender confusion can transit the digital pipeline. Zany fan clubs can quickly coalesce around an online celebrity. Donald Trump flooded the digital airwaves in 2015-16 with no real claim to fame other than his celebrity. From then on, Trump, Inc., was sidelined in the minds of most people. If your teenagers have those cell phones sticking out of their back pockets as they stroll around campus, so do the likes of Paul Gosar (R, Arizona), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia), and Lauren Boebert (R, Colorado). So does your grandpa and grandma and mom and dad. MAGA goes viral. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler in 2024 was caught on many more cameras than Reagan’s near-death experience in 1981 – Trump’s occurring before a crowd of thousands, each person with the A/V and broadcast power of CBS News.

Lauren Boebert's cell phone is decorated with a sticker... of Lauren Boebert.
Lauren Boebert (R, Colorado) and her cell phone.

 

Opinion | Why MAGA Nation Embraces Donald Trump - The New York Times
MAGA crowd, July 17, 2024

His stage presence is magnified to a part of the population degraded and abandoned by the self-anointed “better people”, of those whose wealth and status insulate them from the consequences of their actions and beliefs, and are almost invariably condescending and of the Left. Peggy Noonan wrote eloquently about this growing class of the culturally dispossessed in 2016 in “Trump and Rise of the Unprotected” (see #7). Trump scratched their itch and the rabid fan club MAGA was born.

This is a mania, emotive and reactionary, for people suffering under another form of bigotry. People without an appetite for haute cuisine and lefty/progressive views, who live in the “wrong” zip codes, who believe in the Bible and not the denizens of the faculty lounge, who own guns and a V-8 pickup, who work by the hour, and have no appetite for the scolding of the pampered set in their leafy suburban homes, lofty Manhattan flats, gentrified brownstones, insulated behind the walls of their gated HOA, and tightly, socially cocooned with others like them.

MAGA is rooted in more than Trump. For that reason, a “cult of personality” is inadequate in explaining its emergence. It’s more of a fan club around Trump because he captures their angst. Yet, they’d suffer severe anxiety if Trump should ever find common cause with the immigration/regulation/taxation/transgender agenda of the California Democratic Party. Celebrity fan clubs can be volatile, especially if the object of affection should turn out to be a child molester, which in this context would be politically analogous to Trump becoming squishy in the culture war. Watch some self-anointed MAGA mouthpieces go bonkers over Trump’s decision to support Ukraine. Betrayal can be disorienting, dizzying. Keep a close eye on family members so disposed.

Around the dawn of the new millennium, my wife, son, nephew, and I packed 2 canoes for 5+ days on the Wild and Scenic Upper Missouri River, reliving the Lewis and Clark expedition. At the campfire, I read passages from the Lewis and Clark journals at the places on the river where the events occurred. In one location were the so-called buffalo jumps, places where Native Americans stampeded a herd over a cliff, harvesting some of the carcasses and leaving the rest to rot. The Native Americans triggered a few at the front and led the rest over the precipice. A few influencers were enough to spell doom to the rest. Sound familiar?

buffalo-jump-11

Herd opinions, herd confusion, viral manic-depression. These features of our time are spiked by the cocooning made possible by Googling and cell towers. It’s proof that technology has little to do with making us better people. In fact, it can bring out the inner demons of our nature (as opposed to Lincoln’s “better angels”). Just look at the peaceful-but-violent happenings in L. A.

RGraf

Sources:

1. “Contrarian Lionel Shriver deftly satirizes anti-intellectualism in ‘Mania’”, Maureen Corrigan, NPR, 4/9/2024, at https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243652224/contrarian-lionel-shriver-deftly-satirizes-anti-intellectualism-in-mania
2. “Managing Floods in Flash Flood Alley”, Lower Colorado River Authority, at https://www.lcra.org/water/floods/.
3. Thanks to Jim Geraghty for the heads up in “Progressive Voices Turn Texas Tragedy into Partisan Blame Game”, 7/11/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/progressive-voices-turn-texas-tragedy-into-partisan-blame-game/.
4. “Yes, Gender Confusion Is Socially Contagious”, John Stonestreet and Shane Morris, Colson Center, 10/17/2024, at https://colsoncenter.org/breakpoint/yes-gender-confusion-is-socially-contagious.
5. “How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States?”, Herman/Flores/O’Neill, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, at https://web.archive.org/web/20230106231411/https:/williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf.
6. “BREAKING: New Documents Reveal Shocking Surge in Trans-Identified Students in Davis, CA Schools”, Colin Wright, Reality’s Last Stand, 1/17/2023, at https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/breaking-new-documents-reveal-shocking.
7. “Trump and Rise of the Unprotected”, Peggy Noonan, originally in the Wall Street Journal, 2/25/2016, but available here: https://fairlyhonestbob.com/2016/03/02/trump-and-the-rise-of-the-unprotected/

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Donald Trump, Central Planner

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President Trump announcing his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, 2025.

Javier Milei in a speech before the World Economic Forum in 2024: “If measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, competition, price systems, trade and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty.” (see #1)

Donald Trump on his tariffs in April 2025: “You know, someone said, ‘Oh, the shelves, they’re going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. But we’re not talking about something that we have to go out of our way. They have ships that are loaded up with stuff, much of which — not all of it — but much of which we don’t need.” (see #2)

Is there a difference between Donald Trump and Javier Milei? Yes, an emphatic “yes”. Trump is a classic central planner with all the limitless self-regard that the position demands. Milei is reintroducing free markets to a country that has not had many for decades. With Trump, we get a person who asserts the power to determine how much we deserve and “need” and how much we should pay for it. Milei is dialing back Trump-style manipulations with impressive results. The other shoe has yet to drop in the U.S. on the fundamental disorder to supply chains from Trump’s economic illiteracy in his tariff campaign. Stay tuned, The Big Beautiful Bill or no, there are troubling signs in the consequential durable goods sector.

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Argentina’s President Javier Milei attends the opening session of the legislative term at the National Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 1, 2025. (photo: Matias Baglietto/Reuters)

Let’s start with Milei’s Argentina, and add Poland’s rise to the mix. After decades of socialistic Peronism, Argentina under Milei is teaching a lesson to Donald Trump. Year-over-year, the nation’s economy has grown 7.7%. Poverty is beginning its downward slide. Milei has corseted government interference (for instance, ending rent control in Buenos Aires), cut spending, restrained the money supply, and eliminated many price controls. The result is an Argentinian renaissance.

Poland showed the way for Milei. In 1989, Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland’s Finance Minister after the shedding of communism, cut spending, balanced the budget, reigned in the money supply, ended many government spending programs, basically freed-up the economy, and Poland took off (see #3). It remained free of Brussels by not joining the euro. We would be happy with 3% growth in GDP. Poland is humming at 5%.

Where is Donald Trump leading the U.S.? In some ways, in the opposite direction. All governmental interventions are not equal in their effects. Some have greater impact than others. Supply chains are crucial. That which disrupts supply chains ripples down to layoffs, repos, and personal bankruptcies. After treating the U.K. like the CCP, one in which we amazingly had a trade surplus, Trump is targeting South Korea and Japan with 25% tariffs. It’s madness.

Expect showrooms and car lots to have fewer offerings in that industry of the most durable of all durable goods. No big deal for Trump, we only deserve two to choose from, right?

It’s all over the place, everywhere you look in automotive industry reports. Signs are abundant of a coming automotive industry recession. Quoting AutoForecast Solutions, industry insiders such as F & I and Showroom expects “light-vehicle sales will fall for the first time since 2022 due to uncertainty around the tariffs”. It’s a perfect storm of a Federal Reserve skittish about inflation and keeping interest at their current level, Moody’s downgrading of the U.S. credit rating, Conference Board Leading Economic Index’s fall of nearly 2% in March-April, rising loan defaults, etc. (see #4)

No wonder Trump is on a jihad against Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. Trump wants easy money to paper over the effects of his tariff war.

In putting makeup on the pig, President Trump and his spokespeople trot around citing normal manufacturing shifts (Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Stellantis and Toyota) that were planned and announced before Trump announced his America-the-victim-of-the-world tariff war, as if the resulting chaos is a stroke of genius. Trump should take this comedy routine on the road.

Buyers aren’t stupid. If people see price increases on the horizon, they buy while the getting is still good. The numbers are the numbers. The June auto sales numbers fell by 2.6 million from April to June. March and April were great because tariff reality would soon set in. Jonathan Smoke, chief economist at Cox Automotive Inc., put it bluntly: “The party is over.” This isn’t a mysterious happening according to Smoke: “It’s clearly slowing. It’s because of affordability getting worse and forcing what we think will be production declines to keep supply in balance.” (see #5) Translation: Think again about buying that new car.

The goal is reshoring. Laudable, but the method asinine. It jumps over the question of why they left. Is it merely the attractiveness of slave or peasant labor? Cheaper labor overseas has always existed and yet the country grew. What happened between then and now? We decided to muck up the works. By law and government interventions, we turned organized labor into an extortion racket. We taxed and regulated our way into near oblivion. We have greater difficulties in building anything. Try to build power plants, refineries, dams, mines, roads, power lines, even housing, in the good ‘ol USA. Home-grown NIMBYs and greenie revolutionaries have a greater influence on our economy than Malaysian peasants.

Conversely, we could tack in the opposite direction and make our country accommodating to industries. It’d be like the mysterious voice in Field of Dreams: “Build it (a free economy) and they will come.”

Instead, we have a president and his Republican Party fan club who’d rather throw up a wall, like a curtain, to hide the extortion racket and the government bludgeoning of economic activity, and then paste “Make America Great Again” over the mess. Jargon replaces accountability.

In that good ‘ol USA, central planners like Trump, not us, decided that we needed upscaled electric golf carts to replace our family sedan. Anything large powered by fossil fuels was to be pounded into dust by CAFE standards. The car industry played along because they’re essentially cowards. Hitching your industry cart to government and its activists, whether Friends of the Earth or MAGA tariff-enthusiasts, depending on who temporarily holds the reins of power, can be an economically unhealthy thing to do. Watch California become a Third World nation, er state.

And it shows in the crap foisted on us. It’s high-priced, underpowered, loaded down with gimmicks to mask their shortcomings (turbochargers); beset by stunts like cylinder deactivation, on/off engine disruptions during idling, the carbonization of direct fuel injection, the notorious 10-spead transmissions; and range anxiety coupled with spontaneous combustion of battery packs for those “virtuous” EVs.

At least The Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) corrected some of the folderol. The only problem is that we have a Donald Trump (DJT) intent on wreaking havoc on the guts of economic activity. What the BBB giveth, DJT taketh. Sounds like central planning.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. Milei’s speech can be viewed in YouTube at https://youtu.be/4z44XP4u9Xs?si=OEB-mRfFMY2xts1U.
2. “Trump says children could have ‘2 dolls instead of 30’ with his tariff plan”, Alex Gangitano, The Hill, 4/30/2025, at https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5275798-trump-says-children-could-have-two-dolls-instead-of-30-with-his-tariff-plan/.
3. “Shock Therapy: What We Can Learn From Poland”, Taylor Marvin, Prospect Journal, at https://www.prospect-journal.org/articles/2010/11/11/shock-therapy-what-we-can-learn-from-poland.
4. “2025 Auto Sales Slump Forecast”, Hannah Mitchell, F & I and Showroom, 6/3/2025, at https://www.fi-magazine.com/376082/2025-auto-sales-slump-forecast.
5. “Car sales plummet following pre-tariffs panic buying: ‘The party is over’”, Ariel Zilber, The New York Post, 7/1/2025, at https://nypost.com/2025/07/01/business/car-sales-plummet-following-pre-tariffs-panic-buying-the-party-is-over/.
6. An excellent synopsis of Milei’s success can be read at “The Milei ‘Miracle’ Is a Vindication of Free Markets”, The Editors, National Review, 7/8/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/07/the-milei-miracle-is-a-vindication-of-free-markets/.

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The Latest: California, Reliably Blue and Reliably a Mess.

Gas prices near $10 per gallon in California - YouTube

Yep, Californios, it is worsening. The troubling trends continue. Here’s the latest.

Tomorrow, July 1, the cost of getting from point A to point B in California will increase. The state’s gas tax rises from 59.6 cents per gallon to 61.2. More is in the offing each year for the foreseeable future. Also, the state’s latest tightening of its low-carbon fuel standard will be slamming drivers on the same day adding up to 15 cents to each gallon. Coupled with the garroting of California’s domestic oil production and the loss of oil refineries (Valero, Philips 66 in Benicia by next year), Californios could be looking at sticker shock at the pump – $8-per-gallon in 18 months is a real possibility.

Keep in mind that this is a popularly elected government in veto-proof numbers. Ruin is quite popular in the state.

Like Stalin’s prosecutor at the show trials, the state’s apparatchiks are impervious to the pain they are causing. They are zealots to the revolution. According to the San Joaquin Valley Sun, California Air Resources Board Chair Liane Randolph said in recent testimony before the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee, “’We don’t analyze a retail cost …. [CARB’s analysis] does not identify specific costs to specific consumers ….’” (see #1)

Through what can only be described as Soviet-style central planning, the one-party state is constructing environmentalism’s utopia – like Lenin, or Mao, or Castro did Marx’s – no matter the impracticality or the economic bleeding of its people. Gas prices are just one canary in the mine. There’s a whole slew of other symptoms of the rotting corpse. Some are toxic policies and some are pure stats.

In US News and World Report’s state rankings, California is last in affordability, “47th in employment, 47th in energy infrastructure, 46th in air and water quality, 45th in growth, 42nd in public safety, 42nd in short-term fiscal stability, and 37th in K–12 education.” (see #2) The ruling party is running the state into the ground.

This is a high-tax state, dahhhh! The Tax Foundation places the state near the bottom (48th) in its State Tax Competitiveness Index (see #3). My gosh, how can anyone afford to live there?! This is a financially and personally deadly utopia.

If you’re looking for a place to retire, don’t make it California. According to BankRate’s annual analysis, only three other states are worse than the “golden state” (47th), while, adding insult to injury, you are still spry enough not to have your kids take away your car keys and occasionally have to roll up to a gas pump in the state.

Indeed, driving is increasingly a perilous adventure in the state. It is at the bottom in the quality of its roads, fifth-worst (see #4). While on those washboards, you will be facing collectively some of the worst drivers, the third-worst, and the second-worst accident and drunk driving rates in the country. No wonder its donkey-party insurance market is in tatters.

Putting up with all that will leave you and your kids exposed to some of the worst cultural influences on the planet. The ruling party’s theoreticians have embedded transgenderism and the mission statement of the LGBTQ+ Human Rights Campaign into elementary school instruction. Identity politics, rooted in neo-Marxist theory, was getting set to become a high school graduation requirement in a new “ethnic studies” course, till Donald Trump and AG Pam Bondi began to enforce recent Supreme Court decisions banning the noxious bunkum of “racism to fight racism”. With state encouragement, and the heightened potential of social contagion of too many kids on too many “smart” phones, you might find your kid transitioning without you even knowing about it, all under the protective wing of your kid’s guidance counselor.

For your daughters, highly sexualized boys could be sharing a bathroom, locker room, or competing with them. The whole scene is turning into a monstrous social sewer. No wonder the state’s only growth industry is the outward-bounded moving trade. So says U-Haul (see #6).

People aren’t stupid, except possibly for a critical mass of the state’s electorate, or so it seems. It can’t last. Even for the most die-hard California new age Democrat neo-socialist, civilizational decline can’t be a pleasant experience. Till that realization becomes a reality, you-the-sane have two options: get out like so many others or just continue to swim around in the septic tank. Simple.

California Comes With Me

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Bains calls for CARB chief to step down”, Daniel Gligich, San Joaquin Valley Sun, 5/30/2025, at https://sjvsun.com/news/politics/bains-calls-for-carb-chief-to-step-down/
2. Thanks to Jim Geraghty for the summary at “‘No One Is Incredibly Pumped’ About Kamala Harris Running for Governor”, National Review, 6/30/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-one-is-incredibly-pumped-about-kamala-harris-running-for-governor/. I pirated many of the stats from him. For the USNWR report, “California” at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california.
3. “Taxes in California: California Tax Rates, Collections, and Burdens” at https://taxfoundation.org/location/california/
4. See “U.S. States With the Worst Roads”, Jonathan Jones, Construction Coverage, 4/30/2025, at https://constructioncoverage.com/research/states-with-the-worst-roads. Also “California has some of the worst roads in the nation, new study says. Where does it rank?”, Jaqueline Pinedo, Sacramento Bee, 4/10/2024, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article287533375.html.
5. “The Numbers Don’t Lie: California Ranks Among the Worst Drivers in the U.S.”, Eugene Bruno, Eugene Bruno and Associates, 12/13/2024, at https://sdlawyers.com/the-numbers-dont-lie-california-ranks-among-the-worst-drivers-in-the-u-s/.
6. “California ranks last in growth for fifth consecutive year, U-Haul says”, 1/7/2025, at https://www.kdrv.com/news/regional/california-ranks-last-in-growth-for-fifth-consecutive-year-u-haul-says/article_31927000-6e72-5e25-b994-5951a1b1adf1.html.

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Are We Nuts? Steve Witkoff as Our Metternich?

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Steve Witkoff

Yesterday (6/19/2025), Donald Trump announced a two-week reprieve for the mullahs. That’s dangerous. Many legitimate estimates put Iran at two weeks from a nuclear bomb. Two weeks is a rough assessment that can’t preclude one week or less, if rushed. If he succeeds, Khamenei will have the premiere blackmail weapon, or turn Tel Aviv into Hiroshima, before time runs out. Is Trump about to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory? How did we get to this point? Well, partially, it’s the language, stupid! (Like in James Carville’s famous words from 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid!”). Read further.

Today, our overheated politics disfigure our language. In the Left, “top 1%” (billionaires), “men” (the “patriarchy”), “privileged” (anybody white or male or anyone able to escape the public schools for their kids), “heteronormative”, “…phobia”, et al, denote an evil presence. In the Right, specifically the MAGA universe, “establishment”, “elites” (which practically means anyone of high status in a demographic), “neocons” (the old Reagan coalition), “Wall Street” (shared with the Left), “globalists”, et al, are used to identify their meanies in the world. Each side has their jargon. Since MAGA and the MAGA-adjacent are in power, it’s their linguistic twaddle that presently holds sway in personnel choices and policy.

In MAGA world, the buzzwords lead to some really odd policies (a tariff war against the planet, the crude verbal abuse of allies) and personnel choices. Right now, an “elite” real estate developer, Donald Trump – one who hobnobs with “Wall Street” and “globalists” – makes some stylistically crude overtures to blue collars, essentially big labor unions, but also turns to buddies in his high-end real-estate social circles for statecraft positions and advice, people whose only real experience is in the cocooned transactional world of U.S. law and real estate, people like Steve Witkoff. Any criticism of these picks is dismissed by tarring these wayward voices with MAGA’s list of jargonized horribles.

The ancient Greeks wrote of hubris (excessive pride) leading to nemesis (retribution, bad happenings). Could the reliance on buddies, absent any real background in the field, with overconfidence in their abilities, lead to nemesis and catastrophic failure for the nation? One need only examine Witkoff’s résumé to understand the lurking dangers.

Who is Steve Witkoff? He’s a lawyer and real estate developer from New York, like Trump (see #1). He was Trump’s lawyer in the 1980s. According to Witkoff’s testimony in Letitia James’s New York civil suit against Trump, his friendship with Trump began in 1985. During this decade, he became heavily involved in real estate development. His sole interaction with foreigners was his 2016 effort to sell his group’s stake in the Park Lane Hotel project in the Central Park neighborhood. All his activities occurred under the aegis of American legal norms. The friendship with Trump endured through it all.

The result is a man totally out of his lane in international diplomacy. He succeeded in the release of a couple of American hostages in singular transactions that required no real sacrifice from malevolent actors (Hamas, Putin). These were important for their families, but are not evidence of any acumen in the momentous arena of international statecraft. As Trump’s travelling envoy, he’s been an embarrassment. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t realize that he’s been given impossible tasks in trying to broker deals in conflicts without middle ground. In one, Putin invaded another sovereign country, brutalizes its people, and can’t back down because of the heavy sunk costs in the effort. It’s either conquest or being overthrown and execution, always a strong possibility for dictators.

An isolated American real estate lawyer is a duck out of water in places not corseted by American legal norms. Additionally, he was given the job of bringing an end to the Gaza War. What made him think that a deal was possible between the victim of mass murder and the butchers of men, women, the old, and children, many burned alive? A level of fanaticism is at work that a real estate lawyer schooled in real estate deals cannot comprehend. He cannot envision that the side across the table from him isn’t united with him in common purpose, like making money. They’re goal is your demise, not anything like achieving mutual benefit under American contract law. These malcontents are cut from the same cloth as the 911 hijackers. Negotiating with them will get your throat slit, as many discovered on the planes during 911.

People who have cut their teeth in a lifetime of American real estate transactions run the risk of being ill-suited to handle the world’s cutthroats. Witkoff was stunned coming face-to-face with them; he admits it. At the Arab summit in March, he said about his discussions with Hamas (see #2),

“I thought we had a deal, an acceptable deal. I even — I even thought we had an approval from Hamas, maybe that’s just me getting — getting, you know, duped . . . .” (see #2)

Getting “duped”? After being “duped” by Hamas, Witkoff engages with Putin and comes away with, “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy.” He then proceeded to sound like Putin’s Russia Today network endorsing Putin’s seizure of the Crimea and Ukraine’s eastern provinces (see #3). He then points to plebiscites in them, under Russia’s guns, to justify Putin’s declared right to rewrite borders at his whim. And, like a parrot out of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Witkoff blames NATO. Is this guy Putin’s ambassador to the U.S. or our envoy to Russia?

To be honest, he sounds like his partner in real estate, Donald Trump. Remember Trump’s Putin-like hammering of Zelensky in the Oval Office earlier this year? Repulsive, absolutely repulsive.

A transactional approach to foreign policy assumes a commonality of purpose that doesn’t exist. It’s easier if only money is at stake. Any other motive – ideology, religious fanaticism, an overriding sense of grievance – throws the transactional approach into the category of self-annihilation for the side not so disposed. Trump is transactional, and so is his special envoy. It’s stupid, it’s dangerous. Are we nuts?

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RogerG

Sources:

1. Thanks for Jim Geraghty’s insights and sources in “The Fate of Israel and Iran Is in Steve Witkoff’s Hands”, National Review, 6/20/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-fate-of-israel-and-iran-is-in-steve-witkoffs-hands/. I strongly recommend his Morning Jolt newsletter. Sign up at https://link.nationalreview.com/join/4rc/newdesign-nls-signup?
2. Thanks to Jim Geraghty for this source: “Trump’s longtime buddy testifies as defense expert in Manhattan fraud case”, Erik Eubelacker, Courthouse News Service, 11/14/2023, at https://www.courthousenews.com/trumps-longtime-buddy-testifies-as-defense-expert-in-manhattan-fraud-case/
3. “Steve Witkoff Says Putin Not a ‘Bad Guy’, Stumbles on Ukraine Geography”, Ellie Cook, Newsweek, 3/23/2025, at https://www.newsweek.com/steve-witkoff-ukraine-ceasefire-russia-mistake-regions-annexed-vladimir-putin-2049224

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Crazy Times

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AOC (l) and Pres. Trump

Major elements of the Right and Left are completely unhinged. Crazy has been institutionalized. In Freud-speak, the superego and ego have been short-circuited and it’s a clear path to the raw id.

On the Right, something happened in the time frame from the 2008 Tea Party to the MAGA of today. It actually took a short seven years (2008-2015). What had started out as a call for a smaller government of lower taxes and less regulation, an advocacy of a return to our governmental roots, had somehow morphed into a cathartic cry, a demand for a rhetorical middle finger, an enthusiasm for stick-it-to-the-libs political theater. Thus, we get a continual stream of owning-the-libs YouTube videos; we get Donald Trump and his MAGA in all its bombast and incoherence. It feels good to watch and hear Trump crudely insult anybody not-Trump or Charlie Kirk in his well-choreographed, rapid-fire schtick verbally dismantling a mental adolescent without the public practice. It’s Lebron James against the weekend warrior. It’s fun, it feels good, but how healthy is it?

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MAGA

The Right “wins”, but what have they won? A trade war against the world? A cuddling with anti-American thugs? A fusillade of verbal tirades against our friends and allies? The cavorting with union thugs? A silly nibbling at our spending habits (DOGE, a banal assault on “waste, fraud, and abuse”) while ignoring the drunken sailors of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid who are pell-mell driving us over the cliff? Does any of this make any sense? Of course not.

On the Left, they’ve got all the political theater of Donald Trump at his worst, and more, much more. They’ve got Antifa, antisemitism, racism as “anti-racism” (DEI, CRT, etc.), campus mayhem, a summer of riots, keffiyeh-clad street goons armed with guns and Molotov cocktails, LGBTQAI+ gangsters, Bernie bros, the neo-Marxism of neo-Marxist professors, The Squad, AOC’s babblings, and a monopoly on the cultural commanding heights to propagate the cognitive filth. I could go on, but your eyes would glaze over.

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Antifa in uniform

For them, something happened from the time of Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, George Kennan, and JFK to The 1619 Project, to Trayvon Martin/Michael Brown/George Floyd, to maybe 2014, maybe 60 years. “The long march through the institutions” of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School (google it) took a little longer to fully dominate the synapses of the stewards of the Democratic Party. After that, it didn’t take long for them to replicate MAGA – a middle finger but only on the left hand – and take it to Spinal Tap’s “11”, their preferred behavioral stance.

When the Left resorts to political theater, it’s often of the lethal variety. Talk to store owners across the country in 2020 and the Holocaust survivors of today marching for mercy for the Hamas-held hostages. Many of the innocent end up walking on rubble, maimed, dead, or being treated in burn wards. “Free Palestine” has replaced “Allahu Akbar”.

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The fringes of the political continuum are an unholy mess. I don’t expect darlings of the Right like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk (sometimes), a chunk of the Right’s podcast world, et al, to rush out and praise Ukraine’s amazing drone strike against Russia’s strategic airfields (see #1) or Israel’s sudden decapitation of Hezbollah with exploding pagers and airstrikes. Such imaginative gutsiness on the part of the Ukrainians and Israelis is hardly applauded in such circles. The fact that Ukraine and Israel occupy the front lines in the defense of western civilization scarcely crosses their radar screen.

Records Show Fox and G.O.P.’s Shared Quandary: Trump - The New York Times
Tucker Carlson with Marjorie Taylor Greene and former President Donald J. Trump summer 2020. “I hate him passionately,” the Fox host texted in January 2021, referring to Mr. Trump. (photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times)

 

Their tunnel vision is America First, which really is America Alone, and America Weaker. In their myopic minds, we are not to have a foreign policy till every American problem, real or imagined, addressable by government or not, has been eradicated. Till then, our oceans will protect us, they assume . . . despite the fact that illiterate jihadists wielding box cutters, strategic bombers, missiles, high-altitude surveillance ballons, nuclear subs, drones, and satellites have shown them to be irrelevant or just another conduit, not a barrier, for those who wish to do us harm. Faith in geographical features is not a substitute for strategy.

I also don’t expect the elders of the donkey party to turn over a new leaf from the neo-Marxist infestation in their midst since Barack Obama ushered it into the party’s inner sanctum. They are just as fearful of their fanatics as the GOP is of the MAGA horde lurking in their venues. Both cohorts at the fringes cause the parties’ “adults in the room” to cower in fear.

For donkey party loyalists, their notion of reform after their defeat at the hands of the orange man is to be shriller about what got them booted in the first place: boys now girls/girls now boys, border erasure, a state-sponsored onslaught on the people’s quality of life in pursuit of environmentalist fairy tales, a morbidly obese government that only promises the déjà vu of 1980s Argentina, etc. – the same stuff that drives average people nuts. They don’t get it, and probably won’t till a few more debacles finally detox them.

For a GOP still hitched to an impulsive and bullheaded chieftain, they are left to be dragged along in whatever direction his impulses take them. They are left to stunningly embrace Big Labor’s robber barons after spending a career condemning them. No “right to work” for these sycophants. Former free traders are sounding like zealous converts to the cult of Smoot-Hawley. If Regan were alive today, he’d have to leave the Republican Party as the Democratic Party left him in the 1950s.

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Watch Trump castigate the Courts, his courts, since many of these judges were appointed by him, including the current 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. They were chosen for their adherence to the rule of law – original intent – not the rule of Trump. The Rule of Trump is strict obedience to his every wish. In a few upcoming cases, he may come to understand that the rule of law is not the rule of Trump. He may well learn that “emergencies” are not construed to be a carte blanche takeover of Congress’s trade powers in Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 (Trump, it’s in Article I, not Article II.). The vast body of immigration law has some due process provisions in limited circumstances; the whole thing does not fall under Trump caprice. The presidency does not have temples with altars waiting to receive sacrifices to them.

As for the Democratic Party, their temples have in their inner sanctums, not open to the prying eyes of the general public, altars to Karl Marx and his apostles. He goes unmentioned but is the guiding light for the party beliefs and actions. Little that they propose escapes the ideological straitjacket of his junk thought. Their Don Quixote revolution against imaginary oppressors has little room for reality, culture, restraint, law and constitutions. The crusade ends up where it always has: a disaster for all concerned. Look at California. Look at North Korea. Look at post-Soviet Russia.

Karl Marx and the Dems | Editorial Cartoons | wmicentral.com

So, here we are, buffeted by fringe crazies. MAGA follows their guru in lockstep and the donkey party can’t escape the neo-Marxist mind-fog of its shrillest members. Interesting times.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Ukraine stages audacious attack on airfields deep in Russian territory”, Christopher Miller, et al, Financial Times, 6/1/2025, at https://archive.is/dVnxk#selection-1571.0-1571.70

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Voilà, We Still Have a Constitution. Oops, I May Have Been Premature.

Biden Nominates Judges to District Benches, Court of International Trade

After the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) decided that the president does not have unilateral power to declare a trade war on the world, Stephen Miller, President Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, proclaimed (see #1), “The judicial coup is out of control.” What Millerite rubbish.

Miller’s feral reaction had resonance at a time when courts were inventing “rights” and making law out of whole judicial cloth. That was the time of the imperial judiciary, and rightly condemned. Not now, at a time of a 6-3 originalist, conservative majority.

Now, we’re in the era of new imperium, that of the imperial presidency. So, what do we call it when Trump with a stroke of his pen declares a trade “emergency” against the planet? The tariff power unquestionably resides with Congress in Art. I, Sec. 8. It’s nice to hear a court – The U.S. Court of International Trade – return to the literal, original, and simple meaning of the law and The Constitution. There is no place in our rule of law for Obama’s phone and pen, Biden’s edicts on rent moratoriums and student loans, and his wanton dereliction of duty to enforce immigration law, and now Trump’s decrees on tariffs on anyone, at any time, at any rate, for almost any reason – just declare an “emergency”.

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But not so fast. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a stay (a stop order) of the CIT decision in V.O.S. Selections v. Trump to give time for the Trump people and the plaintiffs to present their appellate briefs.

Well, let’s clear this up right now. Who are the plaintiffs, the people who brought suit? They aren’t your typical eco-lefties or your run-of-the-mill identity group hustlers angling for more privileges and taxpayer-funded bennies. They are folks who have a conception of government more in line with the Founders, people who seek to have The Constitution applied as written. Their creed stems from James Madison, not Karl Marx. They are free market, limited government people.

Spearheading this suit against His Majesty Donald Trump is the Liberty Justice Center (LJC), not the ACLU or the radically leftist Southern Poverty Law Center. The Liberty Justice Center’s mission is to “challenge the latest and greatest threats to liberty across the country” and strives to “revitalize constitutional restraints on government power and protections for individual rights” (see #2). The LJC stepped up to the plate to defend VOS Selections (importer of wines and spirits), FishUSA (fishing tackle producer), Genova Pipe (producer of irrigation and plumbing supplies), MicroKits (producer of electronics kits), and Terry Precision Cycling (producers of bicycles and cycling accessories) to stop Trump’s tariffs from driving them into bankruptcy.

LJC is doing for them what they did for Mark Janus before the U.S. Supreme Court in the famous Janus v. AFSCME decision of 2018 which reaffirmed the freedom of an individual public employee to not join a union. Today, it’s the freedom to stay in business without having to face the existential threat of arbitrary and capricious actions of a national executive straying far outside his constitutional lane.

Trump relies on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), within the National Emergencies Act, in the same manner as the Democrats worship the Constitution’s commerce and necessary and proper clauses to bring down on our heads the bloated Leviathan, the same one that has jacked our economy, our lives, our national debt, our kids’ schools, our neighborhoods, our housing, our girls’ sports, etc. IEEPA grants to the president certain economic powers only during an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the nation. Thus, Trump is sharing the same ideological space with AOC, Bernie Sanders, The Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Elizabeth Warren, The Squad, and Karl Marx . . . if he was still around to mingle in Democratic Party confabs.

So, what’s the “unusual and extraordinary threat” to justify the power grab, according to Trump? Think about it. The “emergency” lies in the commonplace business arrangements that have been around for the past 40+ years, if not longer. Now that’s odd: a 40-year-old “unusual and extraordinary threat”. At what point in a time span does “normal” suddenly become an “emergency”? If he wants to bring back those $17/hour factory jobs in droves, bring back his glorious 1950s, he ought to work with Congress to throw up the protectionist walls, shower taxpayer funds on a few favorites, and possibly muzzle the eco-predators that are actually busy making a hash of our economy. Policy is the proper response, not imperial ukases. But try to get that through a Congress of razor thin majorities. In other words, in our constitutional order, there is no mandate for Trump central planning.

Once we clear away the MAGA rubbish talk and get our bearings, governance by imperial whim is not becoming of Lincoln’s last best hope of earth. The sloganeering America First is verily America Ruined. The least that we can do to rescue our reputation as a free people of a free country is to retain some sense of the rule of law. Let’s hope that we have a Supreme Court who agrees.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “The Sudden End to Tariffs and the TACO Trade”, Jim Geraghty, National Review, 5/29/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-sudden-end-to-tariffs-and-the-taco-trade/
2. Liberty Justice Center, “What We Do”, on their official website at https://libertyjusticecenter.org/about/

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The World Turned Upside Down

Upside Down World - What To Know BEFORE You Go | Viator

Legend has it, probably apocryphal, that George Washington’s Continental Army band played “The World Turned Upside Down” during the surrender ceremony of the British army after the Battle of Yorktown. A tune that was written to mock the Puritan parliament’s suppression of traditional Christmas festivities in the 1640s ended up expressing a historical truism: Give it enough time and things flip. For instance, the markers that defined the Left now are true of the Right and vice versa. It is profoundly true in this brief interlude called the Trump era.

Trump has abetted the rise of a sixties peacenik faction of the Right. The logic and thoughts of the Soixante-Huitards – radical Left, anti-War protesters who massed in Europe and America during 1968, the “peaceniks” – have resurfaced on today’s Right. The most recent example of the phenomena appeared a month ago on Joe Rogan’s podcast in a debate between Douglas Murray and Dave Smith. Watch it below, all nearly 3 hours of it.

If I closed my eyes, I could swear that I was hearing Tom Hayden or Abbie Hoffman or Rudi Dutschke (of “the long march through the institutions” fame) in the person of Dave Smith, the self-described libertarian and Donald Trump enthusiast. It’s de-ja-vu all over again, in an alternative universe.

The Emergence of a New Left – Marxist Education Project
Collage of the Sixties Radical Left

The confusion between generations that the situation engenders was aptly fictionalized in Rob Long’s tale of an imaginary surveillance transcript of two Harvard undergrads discussing their latest plans for an anti-Trump protest.

The Malin on LinkedIn: Rob Long works at The Malin West Village.⁠ ⁠ What he does: Writer and…
Rob Long

In it, they unwittingly sound like Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan leaving their conservative fathers dumbfounded by their lefty sons’ embrace of free trade and Friedman in their outcry against Trump and MAGA. Here’s Long’s depiction:

************

Harvard University Undergraduate Surveillance ICE UNIT 7

BEGIN EXTRACT 09:33:02 04.04.25

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: So I was thinking, for the anti-Trump rally, we come at them with something powerful and progressive, like “From the River to the Sea, World Trade Should Be Free,” you know, something like that.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: That’s amazing. And I have some posters with, like, that guy’s face on it, who’s that guy again?

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Milton Friedman?

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Yeah!

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Awesome. We need a bunch of those.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: This is going to be an amazing demonstration. We’ve got the free trade stuff, and the Friedman guy stuff, we just need some other stuff . . .

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Someone in the steering committee meeting suggested, like, an RFK Jr. slam? Like, Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Big Pharma’s the Way to Go.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Not loving it.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: We can workshop some more. But I think we need to make a statement supporting our allies at Novartis and Bristol Myers Squibb.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Totally.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Any other allies we should support? Should we have a team carrying signs in solidarity with Walmart? They’re on the front lines of this trade stuff.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Good instinct. Let’s keep it diverse. Let the teams know we don’t want to be just anti-Trump. That just gets us negative coverage. We need to keep it on the key progressive issues, like free trade and military intervention.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Right. We made that clear in the planning meeting.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Yeah. Us too. Let’s keep it issue-based. That’s what’s going to have impact.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Right. But some of these issues? It’s like, I’m a senior and I could swear that my freshman year in my Intro Poli Sci class we were against free trade, because it was just a tool of the global patriarchal elite.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Yeah, I was in that class, too. Plus, were you in World Health Systems in Crisis? I’m pretty sure everything RFK Jr. is saying now was in our textbook. In fact, I know it was because I used some of his stuff about seed oils in my final paper.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: And in my freshman year Survey of Modern Geopolitical Strategy we were told that when two countries have a border dispute we’re not supposed to intervene.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Yeah. Does that mean I should tell the Ukraine team to pick another issue?

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: No, no. No. I mean, no, right? It’s just weird how everything changed. And it seems like some of the stuff we’re now in favor of is . . .

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Stuff my dad was saying a few years ago?

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Right! Exactly! My dad was always telling me that tariffs are taxes and taxes are bad.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Oh, that’s a good one! I’ll tell them to make up some posters with that one!

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just that . . . it feels very strange to be agreeing with my Republican father. About politics and economics and stuff.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Agree with him? But he’s a Republican! He’s a Trumper!

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: No, actually he’s not. He’s not anything, I don’t think. Anymore. It’s kind of sad, actually. He just sits in the den with a lost expression on his face. When I showed him my Free Trade Now! tattoo he asked if it hurt and when I said no he asked where I got it.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Hey, look. Yes, things are a little upside down right now, but you said it yourself! We’re at Harvard! We’re not supposed to think about this stuff, we’re supposed to lead!

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: You’re right. You’re right.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: And you’re lucky your dad’s a banker. Mine is a college professor. All of this Gaza stuff hit him really hard. He didn’t know which side he was supposed to be on. We had to have him institutionalized.

END EXTRACT

** Rob Long, “The Long View”, National Review, June 2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/06/document-extract-surveillance-transcript/

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Again, the Dave Smith and Douglas Murray debate on the Joe Rogan Experience is linked below. Enjoy.

RGraf

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The Golden State’s War on the Outs by the Ins

* Please watch the interview with Jennifer Hernandez, environmental law and land use expert and former chair of Holland & Knight’s West Coast Land Use and Environmental Group, for insights into the California housing crisis. You’ll be captivated by what she has to say.

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I am a native Californian and was a resident until retirement (2015). Why did I leave? Yes, I did not like the now entrenched and hard-core collectivism of the state. The lurch to the left, and in many cases the far Left, and the one-party monopoly on power, were serious problems for me. But then it dawned on me that all of it was popularly chosen. I was actually fleeing the state’s electorate.

These electoral choices had real world, smack-you-in-the-face repercussions. On many subsequent trips to the coast in the course of my long life in the state (mostly raised in Santa Maria), I noticed something that is really evident to some extent across the country, but is hyper-visible in California. The $70,000 sports car, homes, and the trails on the bluffs above the crashing waves are occupied by the grey-haired. Far more recuperations from hip surgery are evident than the paddle of little feet and strollers. Much of the area is a retirement home writ large.

The ritzy enclaves have a few scattered elementary schools, but I don’t know why. Grey hairs have declining fertility. The young ones are a rarity. Then it dawned on me. The state has chosen, through long-established popular consent, feudalism and its manorialism. Governance is feudal with a ruling and privileged generational “nobility” in a one-party state, and socially and geographically it is markedly divided into exclusive zones protected by gates and walls in some cases and a bevy of law, red tape, regulations, and a labyrinth of agencies in most others – the manorialism. The upshot is a favoritism for those who already have theirs – the Ins – and a suppression of the dreams of the striving – the Outs. Age wise, on the ground, it shows as the grey-haired in their seaside villas and in the driver’s seat of the $70,000 Corvette, while crumbs are left for blue-collars and the young with families.

Frankly, I couldn’t stomach it any longer. It’s more than political. It’s immoral. Each election was an episode of bashing my head against the wall. Nothing changed, and only got worse. Self-harm is not part of my psyche; so, I fled the state’s electorate.

“Socialism is the feudalism of the 19th century”, a quote loosely attributed to thinkers far afield as Adam Smith and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (see #1). A modern reformulation of the quote would read, “Socialism is the feudalism of California of the 21st century.” A heavily socialized economy, and oriented political system, produce a few winners (Ins) who have constructed the means to protect what they have acquired and enjoy at the expense of the Outs, the young seeking upward mobility.

At the top of the list of causes is the infatuation with environmentalism, a freezing in amber of the natural setting, with its continual invention of new eco-crusades such as climate change. Agencies, regulations, laws and lawsuits are exploited to preserve their playground by targeting the biggest threat, new housing. It’s been happening for decades.

The Boomers went from the Summer of Love and Dead Heads to nest eggs, great hiking opportunities, and fireplaces beside bay windows overlooking the ocean. The fallout was a housing shortage for the most vulnerable, the young who need the economy to grow to make room for them. That’s not compatible with the vision of the good life as defined by the eco-fatuations of the one-party state’s political constituencies: white-collar public sector unions; the keyboard demography (in Hernandez’s words) of entertainment, the education establishment, financial services, administration of all kinds, and Silicon Valley; and the litany of government-loving and ever-evolving transgressive victims’ groups who are closely allied to the above. Mom and dad and kids, and people who make things in the trades, have no place in this world. They are an afterthought.

A civilizational legacy is similarly an afterthought. No realistic consideration is given to the needs of future generations. The kids are ignored. The way that life is constructed in the state resembles a looting expedition. Use it up; let it crumble; I won’t be around anyway. Sucking it up so the young have opportunity and the simple necessities like shelter is inconceivable for those who already have theirs.

It’s not that this generational California aristocracy doesn’t care; it’s that they don’t know how to care. Their beloved command society which created the mess, and is geared to preserving their assets, is now directed to solve the housing crisis by of course . . . command. They actually think that more commands, diktats, will grant to the serfs what they need and not threaten their loot and position. Stack the plebes in “five-over-ones” (five floors above the parking) in $1 million units at a cost of $8,500 in monthly rent, all made “affordable” by subsidies, in a few plots limited to “transit corridors”. Commanding “affordable housing” doesn’t mean that it happens. No one can afford it, not the taxpayers nor the beneficiaries. It’s a joke. Don’t think for a moment about pruning the eco-zealotry or the NIMBY access to the Leviathan and their supportive nest of eco-vipers.

The return of a housing free market would be a godsend. Standing athwart is the enemy of free markets, big government. In an all-expansive state government, such as in California, the rats scurry about exploiting cracks and openings in the mammoth governmental maze to halt development, forever on the lookout to quash their hated “sprawl”, or anything that can endanger their property values or vistas. This is popular sovereignty, of a sort, but one with an open hostility to property rights. Their notion of property rights is their property and their “right” to extend a sphere of control that encompasses miles beyond their deed.

They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and it shows in ungodly housing prices, which is great for them but an impenetrable iron curtain for anyone stretching to reach for the next rungs to the good life, usually the young or anyone with insufficient funds to break into the exclusive club. Besides being a boon for U-Haul, this colossal regulatory contrivance is symptomatic of a solipsistic personality (very self-centered or selfish), a character flaw, written into the mode of governance. Imagine that, a character flaw as a governing principle.

The maiming of the housing supply is only one avenue for solipsism to sprout. It’s no secret that the huge majorities in the state are elated about not giving the young the slightest chance for a slice of the American dream by preventing them from exiting the womb in the first place. Abortion is wildly popular. But honestly, post Dobbs, the inner abortionist has been unleashed almost everywhere, even in red states (Montana, Ohio, etc.). However, a special ecstasy for it thrives in California. They’ve proudly legislated themselves as a “sanctuary” for ending unborn life.

Not only that, they are an official “sanctuary” for the young who managed to avoid the suction tube at the start of their life to mutilate themselves in “sex transition”. Those governing super majorities actually believe that they can outlaw chromosomes, or at least by law declare them subordinate to an adolescent’s erratic emotional state. It’s breathtaking, and shocking, shocking for parents made powerless in the face of government functionaries who are empowered to nurse and coddle the vulnerable and impressionable behind the backs of those who brought them into the world.

The whole state appears to be in an open state of war against the young, or anyone in those family-formation years clawing a path to the good life. The state is a bloody gauntlet for the young and blue collars, the Outs. And guess who is holding the clubs? Why, of course, it is the Ins. It’s more than a collectivistic state. It’s a solipsistic one. The two go hand in hand.

RGraf

Sources:

1. A general history of the statement is explored in Britannica at “Feudalism: Development in the 19th and 20th centuries” at https://www.britannica.com/topic/feudalism/Development-in-the-19th-and-20th-centuries

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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.