Posts Tagged → loyalty
ICE & Tariffs are acid test of loyalty to America First
Support for secure American borders and controlled (and highly limited) immigration is a basic tenet of loyalty to America. People who want open borders and all of the chaos and cultural destruction that follow are by definition enemies of America, as it was founded and run for the past 250 years. We cannot have open borders and have a nation, especially a nation of laws, and a nation of laws that are applied equally to one and all. When borders are erased, the nation is erased.
That Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become the target for de-funding and dissolution by an entire political party says a lot: That political party is once again, like it was in 1860, the main domestic enemy of America. That political party wants to dissolve ICE, and with it, dissolve America.
Please, do not tell us that you are a Democrat, but that you “don’t agree with that.” Like the Democrats who I know personally, and love, and yet do not understand.
If you are a registered Democrat who votes for elected Democrats, who are trying to implement open borders policy, then you are supporting open borders and all the flows from it. So, opposing open borders, and supporting ICE, is one acid test of loyalty to a constitutional American republic, as founded.
A second acid test of loyalty to America is support for tariffs on our trading partners. Tariffs protect American manufacturing businesses, American jobs, many American unions, and often equally match foreign tariffs on American products tit-for-tat. Saying that you are for tariffs tells us straight-up that you want America to be treated equally by its trading partners, and that you do not want American jobs to be shipped overseas to our competitors. Supporting tariffs also says that you want America to enjoy having strategic depth across a universe of business sectors and manufacturing areas. Without strategic depth in domestic production, America is at a great disadvantage against our trading partners and enemies.
A classic example of domestic weakness is the array of critical minerals and metals that America depends upon and which we source from outside America. Most come from unstable regions where child slaves and environmental catastrophes go hand-in-hand with the related mining, or from enemies like China, who can use embargoes to damage American military and communications production. Tariffs correct artificial market inequities, and create financial incentives for domestic production and mining within America.
Yes, conventional modern economics states that tariffs have a negative rebound effect on American consumers, who supposedly end up paying for those tariffs when they buy foreign products imported into America. Without question there is some truth to this, especially in the early stages of tariffs on certain products, especially things like furniture. And yet there is also a ton of evidence to the contrary, where once America met tariffs on us with tariffs on them, our own domestic capacity was once again incentivized to giddyup and go.
I myself have a front row seat on the tariff policy debate. In the world of hardwood timber, logs, and lumber, we are witnessing a one-two punch in the international markets that has caused hardwood products to hold steady in a low area. When China’s domestic demand for American hardwoods dropped several years ago, then our log and lumber prices fell commensurately. We used to cut certain hardwood species and put them right onto shipping containers bound for Asia; not much right now.
Add tariffs to that weak Chinese demand, and we have a suppression of our hardwoods markets. As a result, a lot of Pennsylvania and New York sawmills have gone out of business in the past couple of years. And timber is a poor investment right now. However, as painful and as scary as this situation is, it is the kind of natural market correction America needed. I cannot blame President Trump for this situation, and frankly, I cannot really blame AutoPen Biden for it, either, as these are supply-and-demand forces beyond America’s control. One thing President Trump can and did control, however, was the matching of tariffs on Chinese wood flooring and furniture with American tariffs of our own.
Why not? If you love America, and you want America to survive and thrive, then you want Americans to stop giving away our products, our money, our jobs, our natural resources. Tariffs do that, quite well. Especially when you live in the Number One Trading Partner nation in the world, America.
In conclusion, if you oppose ICE and secure borders and controlled legal immigration, then you are for chaos and the destruction of America. Just like you were an outside enemy seeking our failure. And if you oppose tariffs, or you oppose giving the president the power to tariff trade items, then you really have it in for our American union workers, and you hate our small towns and manufacturing plants. You have then failed two acid tests of your loyalty to America.
And if you are disloyal to America, you should not be surprised when people like me, loyal patriots, view you with great skepticism. But then, if you belong to the political party of 1860 insurrection and slavery, you are already used to that…and it seems you wear that big scarlet “A” as a badge of honor!
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To What and to Whom are you loyal?
Couple of interesting conversations in the past 48 hours about loyalties, one in the Juneau, Alaska airport with a guy distributing whisky around the world, and the other guy a lawyer back East. Both educated but practical, both smart and articulate, neither particularly ideological, and neither a consumer of Breitbart or Gateway Pundit news information. Which is to say, both are opinionated but not well informed, and their loyalties show it.
Both men say they are Republicans or the admittedly endangered species Kennedy Democrats (John F. Kennedy today would be a far-right America-First conservative Republican, but I digress) both say they are moderates, both say they want a “centrist” or a moderate to be the next president. Their joint political loyalty is to the idea of bipartisan and moderate political philosophy.
The lawyer takes great umbrage at President Trump taking on the executive branch’s administrative state, saying that “Trump wants to make himself monarch of America.”
The whisky salesman wants “a return to civility.”
As far as I can tell, both these very different men are devotees of ideas or images of ideas that were last seen dead on the side of the road America has traveled in the past ten years. Americans chose Donald Trump precisely because of the so-called “political moderates” standing for nothing in particular and constantly making self-serving “bipartisan” deals amongst themselves that always, always exclude Mister and Missus America. It’s what prompted the America First/ Make America Great Again movement.
As a great sage once said, If I am not for myself, who will be for me? In other words, you can’t live in America and be concerned more about people and places outside of America and still have America thrive and survive or even last as America for long. Thus MAGA and Trump enduring and actually thriving despite an unrelenting attack by the establishment media, Hollywood, academia, the Federal executive branch’s administrative state, corporate America, Wall Street, and the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association, to name but a few of America’s domestic enemies.
The American people know their survival and freedom is on the line, and they have stuck with their only true advocate through thick and thin.
The notion of “civility” also died when the establishment media came out of the closet in 2008 not as ideological crossdressers, but as war-painted cannibals bent on wanton, bloody destruction of everyone they opposed. Compare the openly partisan fake news media now to 2008 and it’s like they aren’t even the same species; that is how much toxic political poison the mainstream media “news reporters” have drunk since going all-in for non-vetted Barack Hussein Obama back in 2008. The un-civil establishment media is so openly un-civil and fake that the Biden White House issued an open memo demanding that all Fake Newsdom rally ’round the Biden Crime Family and attack Republicans instead of reporting on the treasonous international bribery the Biden family has engaged in for years.
As they say, you can’t make this stuff up, because this truth we are living is crazier than any fiction we could write. And I don’t know what planet a grown, intelligent, experienced adult American is living on to want or expect civility and moderation in a heavily one-sided toxic atmosphere like this. Trump isn’t the cause of this environment, he is the victim and the symptom of the corrupt sickness assailing America by way of “moderate” divided loyalties.
You – an American citizen of voting age – cannot both be loyal to America as a sovereign nation with the rule of law applying equally to all citizens and also support a wide-open southern border with millions of illegal immigrants coming in. You – the proverbial reasonable citizen in the street – cannot be loyal to an America where the rule of law prevails in all things, and also support a federal bureaucracy that is untouchable, unreachable, and that insubordinately does not answer to its Chief Executive, who was (and still is) Trump.
Trump a monarch? Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but…well, the US President is Chief Executive of the Executive Branch of American federal government. The Chief Executive is in a way, I suppose, a sort of monarch in his executive domain there. He is the boss. When the taxpayer-paid staff of that same executive branch openly rebels against their chief executive and acts insubordinately, it is they, not the President, who is acting like a monarch. Trump was elected by The People to run the executive branch, and the staff people of that executive branch are supposed to abide by their oaths of office, and follow the orders of their chief executive. When those staff people do what they want, and not what the elected chief executive wants, then they are each acting like petty kings. They are in open rebellion against The People of America.
So here we are, a people of divided loyalties. We want things that can’t possibly exist, and we are loyal to fake news media outlets because we still want the taste and smell of the old civility and moderation we once enjoyed. We want an unelected, unaccountable federal bureaucracy to continue on as if its continuing rebellion against the President was no big deal, while simultaneously telling ourselves that we are the good Americans. After all, we want stability and security and moderation and civility. And so we support the true villains in American politics, instead of the champions of a free America with the rule of law for all, the MAGA America First advocates like President Donald Trump.
If your hunting club suddenly turns anti-gun, would you stay loyal to it? If your work place suddenly throws you out into the street for no good reason, would you stay loyal to them? If your children’s school suddenly became disloyal to your children’s best interests and to you, would you remain loyal to that school?
I myself am loyal only to the founding first principles for which American government is supposed to stand. When the government ceases to represent or implement those principles, then that government and the individual staff people in it no longer have my loyalty. They are loyal to themselves and to their power, not to me and my rights.
I am loyal to Power To The People. We, The People own the federal bureaucracy, not the rogue, corrupt, violent, lawless staff at the FBI, ATF, DHS et al. who are the Gestapo KGB strongmen of the Biden fascists seeking to bend all people to their evil will through illegal midnight raids on the homes of their political opponents. These people cannot ever have the loyalty of the American People. And people who are loyal to these vile anti-freedom alphabet organizations are no longer Americans, because they have abandoned the basic principles of fairness and due process that used to make America America.
Whither America right now is a question of loyalty, your loyalty, to whom and to what.