Caravans of immigrants approaching our southern border, 2019, amidst Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy.
Why is the Democratic Party, down to its base, going bonkers over the enforcement of federal immigration law, even to the point of taking up the 19th-century southerners’ cause of nullification? In this case, they are trying to “nullify” immigration law as much as possible in so-called state “sanctuaries” from federal immigration enforcement. More than that, Democrat bastions are scenes of rampaging mobs and flame-throwing officeholders like those in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland, and other blue-dots on the national map. Why the willingness to die on that hill?
It’s naked politics, pure and simple, contradicting the facetious and lofty rhetoric of the street barkers. The street urchins at the tip of spear may not understand it, but the party mandarins do. At its brass-knuckled core is congressional reapportionment. Blue states and localities are bleeding people because their blue governments are a detriment to personal prosperity. The flight shows in almost any measure from state finance department reports to moving company data. Don’t expect these states to change their spots. Heaven knows, in their blinkered minds, it can’t be their policies that have driven people away like the escapees jumping the Iron Curtain or Cambodians fleeing the Khmer Rouge.
So, import a population by any means, legal or illegal, to cover the losses. After all, according to the courts, it’s “persons” not “citizens” in the language of the Constitution in Article I, Section 2 regarding the census, and on to reapportionment. To facilitate the influx, they demand that Title 8 of the US code be treated as if it does not exist. So much for seeing that the laws be faithfully executed, while electing a president who refuses to fulfill his oath of office.
Nonetheless, we still have laws that stipulate the terms for legal presence on our country. These laws didn’t appear in our legal codes by imperial decree. Our elected representatives wrote and approved them over decades. Subsequent Congresses of our elected representatives have chosen not to change them. That makes them “our” laws – the very essence of popular sovereignty – and not the sole possession of tiny street cadres in blue bastions. These acts of criminal interference with the execution of our laws are challenges to a cornerstone of our constitutional republic, popular sovereignty.
Simply put, these street mobs of the self-anointed are demanding to overturn the national elections that produced these laws. What they can’t earn in elections, they demand from bullhorns and wanton acts of illegality.
Protests in LA over ICE detentions, June 2025.An “ICE Watch” person blows a whistle as federal agents conduct an immigration raid in Minneapolis, Minn., January 13, 2026. (photo: Ryan Murphy/Reuters)
Comparing this to the struggle against Jim Crow is pure nonsense. Jim Crow was plainly unconstitutional, as is a president who refuses to faithfully execute the laws. Where’s the unconstitutionality of the entirety of Title 8 of the US code? True, enforcement varied from closer legal adherence to an effective repeal through deliberate neglect, even going so far as to subsidize the illegality, under Biden. Did Americans ever want Title 8 stricken? No Congress has voted to remove it or alter it. No popular mandate in congressional elections has arisen to accomplish the feat, which is the only poll that counts.
The courts have not been of much help. They are incoherent in interpreting the constitutional provisions on reapportionment and the census upon which it is based. In 1962, the Supreme Court issued its famous decision in Baker v. Carr that established the “one man, one vote” standard for the exercise of reapportionment by a state. Legislative districts must be nearly equal in population for the purpose of adhering to “one man, one vote”. Notice, it refers to voting people, and noncitizens can’t vote in federal elections.
Then came Department of Commerce (Trump) v. New York in 2020 with the Court preventing the Trump administration from including a citizenship question on the census form, clearly to exclude noncitizens from the census numbers for purposes of reapportionment. Much of the argument centered on the Constitution’s use of “persons” to be counted, not “citizens”. Back to Baker v. Carr, how equal in “persons” are districts that are drawn with 40% noncitizens in some and 5% in others? If 500,000 total population per district, citizen and noncitizen, is our equality number, one district might have 100,000 voting-qualified adults while another might have 60,000. Where’s “one man, one vote”? 60,000 have same the congressional power as 100,000. Was “person” meant to mean “citizen”?
The conundrum will have to be addressed by the Court sooner or later. But as it sits right now, blue states have a vested interest in illegal immigration, any immigration, to fill the depressions in their population balance sheets caused by their unappealing policies. It’s either official, flamboyant, and bombastic rhetoric, calls for physical “resistance” to federal law enforcement by animated “ICE watch” activists rushing to threaten, dox, and disrupt our officers from enforcing our laws, or accept the slide to political irrelevance due to their own self-inflicted acts of ruination.
Never bet on voluntary humility. Circumstances, though, may dictate otherwise. An unavoidable acceptance of humble pie might require the admission that greenie utopias, tax systems as looting expeditions, equality of result supplanting equal opportunity, the public schools turned into struggle sessions, etc., is not attractive to the stable elements in any population. Though, don’t bet on it.
Barring such a “Come to Jesus” moment, it’s go bonkers and prepare to die on the hill of illegal immigration, for foreign nationals to break our laws. Illegal immigration is a matter of survival for Democrats who have been busy destroying their cities and states.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 4: “[The Congress shall have Power] To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” From the earliest days, the Supreme Court has defined this power to include the power to establish the terms of a foreign national’s presence in the United States.
Article II, Section 3: “[The President] he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed . . . .”
Article VI, Clause 2, The Supremacy Clause: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
*************
The design of our system of government is easy to understand, except for west coast rabble-rousing officeholders and their critical mass of voters in our big urban nodes, many college faculties (people who should know better but don’t), and much of our legacy media dotting the nation. Social media is often abuzz in profound ignorance.
So, for those who are, or intentionally make themselves, Constitutionally illiterate, a basic primer is required. Article I, Section 8 lists the approved areas of law that the federal legislature (Congress) can approve, often called “enumerated powers”. One of those powers is Clause 4: the power to establish the terms for presence in the country, which Congress did in “8 U.S. Code, Ch.12: Immigration and Nationality”. Article II, Section 3 empowers the president with the duty to carry out (execute), or enforce, these laws. Article VI, Clause 2 makes those laws and presidential actions supreme over the contrary wishes of state or local power brokers.
Got it? In a nutshell, within the legal confines of Article I, Section 8 (and a few other places), Congress and the President are supreme. The immigration blather of Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, Minnesota governor Tim Waltz, Portland police chief Bob Day, Portland mayor Keith Wilson, and Oregon governor Tina Kotek is empty virtue signaling, or just plain stupid. If their actions interfere with the administration of federal law, they are committing obstruction of justice as defined in 18 U.S. Code § 111. Bottom line: the federal government is supreme within those “enumerated powers”.
The above culprits espouse facetiously heartwarming rhetoric of care for people being investigated for various violations of federal law in 8 U.S. Code, Ch.12. In Portland yesterday (January 8th), two people were shot as they tried to harm federal officers in an attempt to evade an investigation into their legal presence in our country, and affiliations with violent gangs known to be present in the vast underworld of illegal immigration. Mayor Wilson rushed to the microphones and cameras to emote,
“Just one day after the horrific violence in Minnesota, our community here in Portland was witness to a moment of fear, confusion, and heartbreak. Earlier this afternoon, two people were shot and injured by federal agents in the Hazlewood neighborhood. Violence in our community is devastating. These are not statistics. These are human beings. Portland is not a training ground for militarized agents . . . .”
“Two people”? These weren’t just “two people”. They were suspects in violations of federal law. Portland’s Mayor Wilson and Mayor Frey of Minneapolis are in cahoots to hide the reality. Mayor Wilson characterized a conversation with Mayor Frey as follows: “We shared not just our concerns, but our grief for the families who are suffering and grief for the recklessness of our federal government.” Further demagoguing the story, he said, “ICE agents and their homeland security leadership must fully be investigated and held responsible for the violence inflicted on the American people in Minnesota, in Portland, and in all the communities across America.”
Bodycam footage of “ICE Watch” Minneapolis activist Renee Good during her fatal confrontation with federal officers.
These people aren’t just with “families” or to be blurred with the “American people”. Also, they are often and misleadingly referred to as “our residents”. The blowhards are putting makeup on a pig. The suspects may “reside” in the country or place, but that’s the crux of the problem. By law, they ought not be. While here, they are suspects in violation of our immigration laws and, if participants in “ICE Watch” groups, violators of our obstruction of justice laws.
Completely ignored in this toxic blather is the fact that the prior administration refused to enforce the law. Even going so far as to give aid and comfort – subsidies – for lawbreaking: debit cards, cell phones, plane flights, free housing in expensive hotels, and the massive relabeling without legal warrant of illegal immigration as “asylum”. Biden should have been impeached for this refusal to execute his Constitutional duties. Instead, the country was flooded with foreign nationals illegally present in our country.
Correction of this nearly 4-year dereliction of duty requires immense law enforcement efforts to match the scale of the dereliction. The coterie of left-wing officeholders on the west coast, and elsewhere, is wantonly dismissive of the basic rudiments of our Constitutional order. Whether through ignorance or willful blindness, it matters not.
The Constitution places them down the pecking order in regards to federal supremacy. Their efforts at sanctuary from federal immigration laws is clearly unconstitutional. More than that, it can be construed as an obstruction of justice. Instead of hosannas, they are deserving of perp walks.
Left-wing firebrands in public office on the west coast and elsewhere need to be reminded of President Jackson’s response to John C. Calhoun’s defense of South Carolina’s Act of Nullification (of the 1832 federal tariff law) when he tersely said, “. . . disunion by armed force is treason.” He further declared,
“[South Carolina’s ordinance of nullification] is founded, not on the indefeasible right of resisting acts which are plainly unconstitutional and too oppressive to be endured but on the strange position that any one state may not only declare an act of Congress void but prohibit its execution . . . .” Additionally, “. . . to give the right of resisting laws of that description, coupled with the uncontrolled right to decide what laws deserve that character, is to give the power of resisting all laws.” (see #3)
In other words, chaos. With the dense in mind, Declarations of Sanctuary (from immigration law) are acts of nullification. Calling them acts of noncooperation is a semantical way to dress up obstruction of justice, or nullification, in false pieties.
If not manacled in a perp walk to an FBI custody van, they ought to be exposed to civil financial forfeiture by anyone made to suffer bodily, emotionally, and property damage from the concomitant lawlessness. Incitement to lawlessness by people who show no sign of at least a minimal acquaintance with our Constitutional order, which they are required to know, ought to lead to personal bankruptcy. Keep it in mind you lords of left-wing fiefdoms.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Goggle the “U.S. Constitution” and jump to its various articles and sections.
2. “Elected Officials Don’t Really Want Peace or Calm”, Jim Geraghty, National Review, 1/9/2026, at https://www.nationalreview.com/…/elected-officials…/.
3. “Jackson’s Proclamation to the People of South Carolina”, Britannica, at https://www.britannica.com/…/Jacksons-Proclamation-to….
* 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/.
Charlotte mayor Vi Lyles speaks during a press conference in Charlotte, N.C., December 17, 2019. Inset: Surveillance footage shows Iryna Zarutska (in black hat) and Decarlos Brown Jr. on a Charlotte light rail train shortly before the attack. (Jeremy Brevard-USA TODAY Sports/via Reuters, Screenshot via Charlotte Area Transit System/via WBTV News)
A thought experiment that’s approaching two centuries old, or maybe longer? The Jacobins of the 1790s thought that they could toy with a culture and civilization like a lab biologist splicing genes (The Cult of Reason, The Reign of Terror, revolutionary tribunals, the guillotine). Marx thought he could bring about a new world order by reshaping every person’s mind, marriage, and family, all the way to the totality of life’s arrangements (thus, totalitarianism). 19th-century Progressives injected into the mainstream the thought that a class of credentialed “experts” would lead us to nirvana. Are people with sociology degrees the arbiters of our existence? And then, today, some amongst us contrived a more robust Marxism, tied to progressivism, and infecting those “experts”, that swells the membership of victimizers and victims so as to perpetuate the revolutionary churn (being “woke”).
What are the results? The zealots become divorced from reality as the world collapses around them. Anarchy reigns, lives destroyed. They are experiencing the death throes of their thought experiment and can’t bring themselves to apologize.
Witness the grotesque word salad of Charlotte’s mayor, Vi Lyles, as she attempts to rationalize the unprovoked murder of a young lady on her city’s public transit system. She wants us to understand the killer, as he plunges a knife into the young woman’s neck, all caught on a surveillance camera (see #3). The release of the videotape occasioned a press conference by the mayor where she referred to the murder as a “a tragic situation that sheds light on problems with society’s safety nets related to mental healthcare.” “Problems with society’s safety nets”, you’ve got to be kidding.
It’s the “root causes” mumbo jumbo of today’s progressives. The huge caravan throngs swamping over our border once Biden took the oath of office, it was said, could not be addressed by enforcing the border. It’s the same as Lyles’s (see #4) “we will never arrest our way out [of] issues such [as] homelessness and mental health.” We must somehow cure poverty in the Third World before we can have border security. An administration spokesman said of VP Harris’s approach to Biden’s border crisis (see #1), “The vice president’s work and what we’re focused on this afternoon is thinking long term and getting at the root of the problem as the administration simultaneously addresses the immediate challenges at the border.” Then, Trump takes the oath and within a few months, we have a cure.
Chicago’s mayor Brandon Johnson is all into the “root causes” mantra. He adds a hostility to constitutional federalism and the Second Amendment to the political liturgy. According to Johnson, other states are responsible for Chicago’s inability to control violent crime. He charged on X (see #2),
“Chicago will continue to have a ‘violence problem’ as long as Red states continue to have a gun problem. The endless flow of illegal guns into Chicago can be traced to Red states like Mississippi, Indiana, and Louisiana.”
Johnson wants every state to have Illinois gun laws, and until they do, the residents of south and west Chicago will have to tolerate the killings of their loved ones. The question never occurred to Johnson: Why is a good portion of his city a war zone and not these other places? Is it because of the relative prosperity in these places from all the gun running to Chicago gangs? When you have to defend the indefensible, you sound like Harris, Lyles, and Johnson.
We are witnessing the death throes of a thought experiment. It can’t stand under the weight of its failures. Not holding people accountable, a fruitless campaign to eradicate all vestiges of poverty and personal anxieties everywhere, and social workers as substitutes for cops leads to, well, Charlottesville, Chicago, the 2020 summer of riots, statue toppling, and Washington, D.C. For that matter, throw in New York City, good chunks of California, the entire urbanized west coast for that matter, almost any place run as a Democrat one-party fiefdom.
And to think that New York City may be on the cusp of electing an out-and-out Marxist. Will we ever learn?
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Harris’ mission to tackle migration root causes scores big money support but border crossings remain high”, Priscilla Alvarez, CNN, 2/6/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/06/politics/kamala-harris-migration/.
2. “Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson blames city’s violence problem on ‘red states’”, staff, Washington Examiner, 9/3/2025, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/3790926/chicago-mayor-brandon-johnson-blames-red-states/.
3. “How Long Will We Tolerate the Madness in Our Streets?”, Rich Lowry, National Review, 9/9/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/how-long-will-we-tolerate-the-madness-in-our-streets/.
4. “What the Hell Is Charlotte’s Mayor, Vi Lyles, Talking About?”, Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review, 9/8/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-the-hell-is-charlottes-mayor-vi-lyles-talking-about/.
*The NFL announced the continuation of the “social justice” messaging in the endzone for the 2025 season.
Yes, I’m complaining again. Maybe I shouldn’t. But I can’t help but notice that pro-football, both the NFL and Division 1A college in this era of the transfer portal and NIL, has swelled beyond an athletic contest of trained, skilled, and fit athletes under great coaching into an extravaganza, a bacchanalia in many cases, a show to rival anything on Broadway, and embellished with trendy ideological crusades. A manufactured over-the-top enthusiasm is evangelized in the commercials that glosses over reality. The whole thing from the pregame to halftime and afterward has become our secular society’s version of America at worship, a worship of the outlandish.
Our pews are emptying but 100,000-seat stadiums packed, tv ratings off the charts. But where’s the game; where’s the simple fact that this is a match between teams of the highly honed in mind and body? The comely Carrie Underwood struts out on a runway to belt out the theme of Sunday Night Football amid pyrotechnics, strobe lights, and flashy cameos of rock and football celebrities. The Sao Paulo game between the Chiefs and Chargers had a gaudy Super Bowl-style halftime that’ll rival anything in February, or the raunchiest Mardi Gras. Again, where’s the game; where’s the clash of great athletes in shoulder pads in all this hubbub?
Trendy ideological beliefs permeate the production. Five years after George Floyd, the deadly summer of chaos, defund the police, metropolitan downtowns laid waste, and the subsequent flight of business and the middle class from these toxic environments, the NFL is still pursuing “social justice” – er, “equity”. The games continue to be festooned with a national anthem for a racial group. End zones are tattooed with “End Racism” or “It Takes All of Us”. Is this a Democratic Party rally or a game?
Yeah, “end racism”, and end the gratuitous virtue signaling. The NFL overtly perpetuates the myth that men and women are equal in their fascination for sports (see #1 for insight into that). The NFL lavishes funds on flag football so the girls can show off their physical prowess (proof that everyone is over-paying for this thing). I thought that transgenderism abated the illusions of physical “equity”. It’s more than expanding the fan base. Throughout, including the commercials, physical differences are whitewashed, and women are equally gonzo as the men. It’s as if the NFL is busy shaming those women, maybe most, of different inclinations. It appears to be the NFL’s vast social engineering project.
It’s true. The NFL is proof of John O’Sullivan’s First Law (see #2): “Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.” Thanks, Roger Goodell, for the garish twice-weekly cultural revolution. I just want a game absent all of the folderol.
Watch Greg Kelly and Megyn Kelly (no relation) on her show. I won’t vouch for everything said but sympathize with the sentiment. I, too, am done with the NFL.
Oh, by the way, you can drop that ridiculous kickoff routine.
RogerG
Sources:
1. For instance, review “A Sex Difference in the Predisposition for Physical Competition: Males Play Sports Much More than Females Even in the Contemporary U.S”, Matt Hayward, editor, NIH: National Center for Biotechnology Information, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3498324/.
2. Can be found in “John O’Sullivan’s First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing”, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, at https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/05/john-osullivans-first-law-all-organizations-that-are-not-actually-right-wing-will-over-time-become-left-wing/.
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.
Is California intent on committing suicide? Indeed, should a state be allowed to consciously self-poison itself to death, or play Russian roulette with no empty cylinders? The state’s electorate seems to be gung ho. It isn’t the only state in the psych ward. Illinois, New York, much of the northeast, share adjoining cells. A cure, though, is on the way in the form of the EPA’s Lee Zeldin reversing Obama’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding” on carbon dioxide despite the kicking and screaming of the patients (see #1).
Oh, they’ll fight it in court, trying to make their last stand on the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision of 2007 (5-4) which concluded in an act of mind reading of the 1970 Congress in its Clean Air Act that the unmentioned carbon dioxide should be included as an “air pollutant”. Carbon dioxide is part of the cycle of life: plants love our waste (carbon dioxide exhalings, fertilizer) and we love theirs (oxygen). One would think that Congress would have devoted special sections in the law declaring that a part of the cycle of life to be “harmful” to human health. Silence on the subject is not proof of inclusion, and so said three of the dissenters in the decision, the only remaining Court members from 2007 (Roberts, Alito, Thomas). It’s very likely that Zeldin’s decision will be upheld.
Zeldin is trying to rescue California from itself. Its grid is a bankrupting mess, and an ugly fire hazard to boot. The state is busy destroying cheap energy – much of it right under their feet – and affordable, reliable transportation. I don’t know what golf courses are going to do with lawnmowers powered by battery packs the size of cinder block walls. California had over 43 refineries in the late 1970s; now the state will be down to 6 producing fuel by 2026 (Philips 66 in Long Beach and Valero in Benicia are set to close in 2026) (see #2). A projected $8-to-$10-per-gallon gas price will dent anybody’s plans for upward mobility (see #3).
California’s shedding of population over the past couple of decades is nothing new. President Biden had an answer in throwing open the borders and producing a tidal wave of illegal immigrants ready to flood into the state’s well-established illegal-immigrant underworld. After all, it promises to protect illegals from federal law. So, after the chaos, some 2024 projections of the state’s population showed a slight uptick. But what happens when the American people get sick of it, elect as president illegal-immigration’s worst nightmare, shuts down the border, and the deportations and self-deportations begin? The ongoing flight of the middle class and their jobs will be glaring as ever.
Back in 2023, one study predicted that California could lose 5 congressional seats after the 2030 census (see #4). The reasons are obvious. The state has made itself inhospitable to the backbone of civilization and prosperity – the strivers, middle class, etc. Though, it must be admitted, based on decades-long election results, that degringolade (a rapid decline or deterioration) is electorally popular. It’s a one-party state not by accident, a one-party state to oblivion.
Please watch the interview of Prof. Marshall Toplansky, Business and Economics professor at Chapman University, on the troubling circumstances which Californians have brought upon themselves. Admitting the problem is the most important step toward to recovery.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “EPA Releases Proposal to Rescind Obama-Era Endangerment Finding, Regulations that Paved the Way for Electric Vehicle Mandates”, EPA bulletin, 7/29/2025, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-releases-proposal-rescind-obama-era-endangerment-finding-regulations-paved-way.
2. “California Oil Refinery History”, California Energy Commission, at https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/californias-petroleum-market/californias-oil-refineries/california-oil.
3. “California gas prices could top $8 a gallon by 2026, new study says”, KGO ABC 7, 5/10/2025, at https://abc7news.com/post/california-gas-prices-could-top-8-gallon-2026-university-southern-study-says-heres-what-know/16370075/.
4. “California Could Lose 5 Congressional Seats in 2030 Reapportionment”, The Census Project, 9/21/2023, at https://thecensusproject.org/2023/09/21/california-could-lose-5-congressional-seats-in-2030-apportionment/.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders participate in a stop on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour at the Dignity Health Arena Theater in Bakersfield, California, on April 15, 2025. (photo: REUTERS/Aude Guerrucci)Zohran Mamdani, NYC mayoral candidate. (photo: Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times)Pres. Trump announcing his “Liberation Day” tariffs, April 2, 2025
It’s probably always been true that shallow thinking prevails in our world. X good/Y bad, the binary pervades thought without much cognitive work behind it. What else explains the teenage rise of the now 22-year-old phenom Greta Thunberg (mentioned in earlier posts)? Or the overturning of the century-plus expansion and refinements of the grid and personal transportation in the crushing span of two decades, by law? Or the sudden appearance of sex shapeshifting as an incontrovertible “reality” taking over women’s swimming and track meets? Or sports gaming profits are a “good” without any recognition that these profits represent many more “losers”? Or, in a similar manner, a boost in government revenues from tariffs is a “good” absent any realization that they come at the expense of consumers and businesses, a much bigger class of “losers”? Our public conversation is chock full of the silliness. It’s the era of the shrill and shallow.
At the spearhead of this nonsense is a combination of the Trump phenomenon and the neo-Marxist Left in the Democratic Party and its street militias. The former first. Take Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. The only thing being liberated is money out of our wallets and “freedom” from our beneficial supply chain arrangements. The confluence of “liberation” and rising economic distress is . . . amazing.
That won’t stop pundits like Hugh Hewitt on his radio show announcing the “good news” of higher-than-expected government revenues from Trump’s tariffs (last week). It doesn’t take much more than a thimble of reasoning to understand that, for instance, the MSRP of that new truck on the showroom floor just jumped $1,500, or Amazon deals are fewer and far between. When was the last time that you heard a self-proclaimed Reagan Republican extolling the virtue of a huge tax increase?
It doesn’t stop there. Trump’s on-again/off-again support for Ukraine stands out for head-scratching. Is Putin a good guy or bad guy, despite the fact that he wantonly invaded another country like the Wehrmacht did Poland. Is a dogmatic obsession with a “pivot to Asia (China)” the right way to go, even though crap happens elsewhere? In 1984, when asked by a reporter about the greatest difficulty facing a Prime Minister, British ex-PM Harold Macmillan responded, “Events, my dear boy, events.” Events are happening elsewhere that unexpectedly impact Trump’s much cherished “pivot”. Is it too much to expect of our leaders to understand that a green light to Putin is a green light to Xi, is a green light to the mullahs, is a green light to Kim? Empty grousing in the 1930s about Japan in Manchuria and Mussolini in Ethiopia was fully appreciated by the Chancellor of Germany. Dominoes exist in more than a game.
Many of Trump’s political successes is less evidence of him playing 4-D chess but is, more than anything, proof that he’s blessed by the sheer incoherence, incompetence, and malignancy of his opponents. Popular loathing for the donkey party is at record highs according to the latest WSJ poll (see #1). Are election results a product of an overwhelming enthusiasm for a particular candidate or a measure of a greater dislike for the other choice?
Trump-love occupies a niche in the American public, far from sufficient to get him elected. Helping Trump along the way is an opposition party oriented for dystopia. No matter Trump’s negatives, the alternative has positioned itself as a catalyst for XX “boys” and XY “girls” throughout K-12 into college, education dysfunction, defund the police, the mutilation of the economy and the quality of life in green fads and inflation and mounting public debt, and urban wastelands of filth, crime, and homelessness.
Who, other than Democrats, wants an intermingling of genitalia in middle school bathrooms based on nothing but the hormone-fueled feelings of tweens? Mercurial teen self-identity leads to XY “girls” blasting through the tape by 4 yards at the girls’ state high school track championships. Of course, don’t look for it to happen the other way around (XX “boys” taking gold medals in competitions with the XY variety). The whole scene flummoxes and angers ma and pa and grandma and grandpa in the stands. Democratic Party infatuations suddenly hit home.
When Trump tariffs, the Dems are boxed in a corner. Trump proves that he can be just as good a central planner as they ever were. How can they complain? Ever since Republicans began to embrace their inner Milton Friedman in the 1960s, Democrats were the buddies of economic xenophobia and our extortionate labor unions. Trump flips the old political script, tossing freedom economics out the window, and proves that the GOP can function as economic xenophobes and gangsters every bit as well as the Democrats in their effusive pandering to the AFL-CIO.
What’s left of the old Democrat coalition? They’ve got their eco-lobby with its thinly educated white-collar and mostly public-employee constituency. Add to them the cadres of social revolutionaries led by old socialist crackpots like Bernie Sanders and the New Age socialism of the glib and juvenile AOC. Oh, let’s not forget the only expanding clump in their atrophying coalition: unmarried women. Husbands and children are not on their agenda, while preferring a government spouse to a biological one. The party’s future is even more depressing as they fling the LGBTQ+ agenda at the face of God-fearing Hispanics, flood the labor market with desperate peasants, and persist in abandoning the economic and social interests of Black males.
We have the rule of the shallow and shrill. Our primary elections are not faithful renderings of a party’s members, but a playground for the most animated, the shrill and shallow. The rest stay home. MAGA and the Democrats’ social revolutionaries present firebrands to the general public in November, or people who speak the lingo. American politics, as seen by outsiders, must appear to be riotous clown show. Interesting.
Speaking of the shrill and shallow, an update: President Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a trade deal this past Sunday (7/27). After chores, and during exercise, I’ll listen to podcast and talk-show punditry and be exposed to the latest hyperbole about the deal. There’s too much we don’t know and too much yet to be negotiated. Yet, we do know to expect a jump in automobile and durable goods prices since tariffs on cars (15%) and steel and aluminum (50%) remains. Don’t forget that “tariff is the most beautiful word in the English language” for Trump. At least for now, till our potentate-in-chief changes his mind, some certainty returns to business. Stay tuned for more “progress” on the America-as-victim-of-the-world front.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Democrats Get Lowest Rating From Voters in 35 Years, WSJ Poll Finds”, Aaron Zitner, Wall Street Journal, 7/25/2025, at https://www.wsj.com/…/democratic-party-poll-voter….
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.
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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