Posts Tagged → money
What the new J6 weaponization fund means, to me
Two parts to this blog entry. First part is what the new January 6th (J6) weaponization fund for reimbursing victims of the weaponized Biden DOJ means to me. Second part is Roger Stone’s outstanding essay about this fund and its larger context, its background.
Part 1: What the new “Anti-Weaponization Fund” means to me.
While I am not one to tout my victim status, as if I have much in any case, the new reimbursement fund for J6 victims means something concrete to me. It means precisely $3,000, the amount I was unfairly forced to spend to have a competent attorney present when two FBI agents “interviewed” me about J6, several years ago.
Yes, I was at the January 6th, 2021 mostly peaceful protest out in front of the US Capitol in Washington, DC. Like a million other fed-up American citizens that day, I stood exactly where us peaceful protestors were supposed to stand that day: Out in front and around the sides of the building.
I did not break anything.
I did not hurt anyone or attack anyone.
I did not go inside the US Capitol, nor try.
All I did was peacefully stand out in front of the barricades, in the approved area, sing our National Anthem, sing God Bless America, chant “USA! USA! USA!,” and watch in horrified disgust as uniformed police officers illegally beat, pepper sprayed, gassed, bombed, and shot with rubber bullets myself and the peaceful protestors all around me.
I watched a police officer wearing black tactical gear walk up and down the barricades, leaning over them and clubbing peaceful protestors in the face, head, hands, shoulders, and arms with his baton. These American citizens had done nothing illegal or wrong or threatening. They were just standing there. The instigation and violence was all with the police.
I watched a handsome young man in a business suit, carrying an American flag and standing at the barricade, get shot point-blank in the face with a police-only explosive flash-bang grenade. His cleanshaven face was blasted white, and blood ran out of his eyes, nose, and mouth. He staggered backwards, unable to see, and then members of the crowd helped move him back, away from the ultra-violent police officers.
I watched dozens of events like this, got gassed several times and shot dozens of times with rubber bullets, before my friends and I called it quits and walked to where our chartered bus was waiting at Union Station. We rode home to Pennsylvania in mostly stunned silence. The raw and lawless evil we had just experienced out in front of the US Capitol was precisely the opposite of what is supposed to happen in our constitutional republic. We citizens are supposed to be able to peacefully assemble and petition the government with our grievances.
Instead, we were abused, beaten, hurt, antagonized by the very people paid to actually protect us. It was a shocking experience, which I wrote about the day after here on this blog.
And then a year and a half later, two FBI agents showed up at my home. One very butch lady named Melissa, and a forties-aged guy named Patrick Armor. I was not home, so Agent Armor engaged with my wife and two kids at home at the time. Yes, he said, they really wanted to talk with me. No, I had done nothing wrong on January 6th, but they really wanted to talk with me about things I may have seen.
My son asked Agent Armor if I had to contact him, and what would happen if I just ignored them.
“Oh, we will talk with Josh one way or another,” Agent Armor said, implying that the same wildly unreasonable official violence America was watching being used against all kinds of J6 victims could easily be brought to bear on me, too. You know, the 6AM dawn door-busting raid by 25 to 30 heavily armed federal agents in tactical body armor, grenades, and machine guns that so many other peaceful J6 protestors had been treated to.
A couple hours later I got a photo of Agent Patrick Armor’s FBI card, and I emailed him. He responded quickly, and encouraged me to just “talk on the phone” with him. Which of course was a huge red flag by then, as the Biden FBI and DOJ had been on a zero-due-process Stalinesque round-up of political enemies across America. A prospective victim like me just had to talk on the phone, the federal agent would lie about it, and make up something that would then justify arresting that innocent person, and then your life was over.
So I assured Agent Patrick Armor that I would have an attorney get in touch with him, and set up an interview with an attorney present, thereby protecting my constitutional rights.
Months later we met in a local attorney’s office. Me, the attorney, her stenographer and recorder, Agent Patrick Armor and an Agent Oh (not a stage name; he was Korean, and Oh is a common Korean last name).
When Agent Patrick Armor asked me if I saw anything illegal or involving violence or destruction, I said “Yeah, I saw the police! I watched the police badly injure and beat the hell out of innocent peaceful protestors, with no cause!”
Agent Patrick Armor just waved that off. No no, not that stuff, the crowd, the protestors is who the FBI is interested in. Instead of asking for more about the illegal police brutality I was willing to testify about, Agent Patrick Armor began asking me about what I did on January 6th.
“You know exactly what I did on January 6th better than I can recall now almost two years later” I responded. I reminded him and Agent Oh that their cell phone tracking ability could pin point every step I took on January 6th, from the bus ride starting in PA to the walk to the US Capitol to the location out in front of the US Capitol, and everything afterwards.
“If you already know where I was and what I did, then what is your purpose here of asking me to remember fine details of a chaotic day almost two years ago, if not to entrap me and accuse me of lying,” I said.
Agent Patrick Armor smiled cruelly at that response, and then began asking me about everything I did, everything everything everything about my experience that day, and what groups and organizations I belong to (he seemed genuinely alarmed about the old guy sportsmen’s clubs we have here in Pennsylvania, asked pointedly if I belonged to Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers or other similar organizations, and did not ask me about my friends who had been with me on J6); he even critiqued my blog essay about my J6 experience, pointing out that the Capitol Rotunda is actually inside the building, and not outside, as I had mistakenly written.
Note to freedom-loving Americans: When you have a federal agent criticizing your blog to your face, you have a justice system that is going off the rails and falling into the deep river canyon below. It is lawlessness in a free society that honors free speech.
After what felt like hours and hours, I had had enough, and said “I am done talking about something I can barely remember so long after the fact.”
My attorney assured me that I had not incriminated myself, nor lied, nor done or said anything that could be used against me by these federal agents. Little did she know then just how evil the Biden FBI was then becoming in these same circumstances, throwing law and constitution out the window in its pursuit of perfectly innocent people, like myself.
And so, that fake and unnecessary intimidation FBI interview hung over my head until President Trump won re-election for a third time in November 2024. All of my friends wondered aloud if some Biden Gestapo squad would come busting into my home at 4AM with fake charges from that interview. I concurred, but could think most about that three grand spent on the lawyer, instead of on the new roof our home needs.
So yeah, I intend to file a claim with the J6 weaponization fund people, and see if I cannot get my three grand back. I did nothing wrong, nothing that warranted two FBI agents grilling me. It would mean a lot to me, symbolically and financially, to get my money back.
Part 2: Here is Roger Stone on this subject, and he speaks for me if my words above are insufficient for you:
“…
The Republic in Chains
Empires rarely collapse all at once; they decay incrementally like an ancient cathedral left exposed to centuries of salt air and corrosion.
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Empires rarely collapse all at once; they decay incrementally like an ancient cathedral left exposed to centuries of salt air and corrosion. The marble still glistens from a distance. The banners still wave. The ceremonies continue with rehearsed grandeur. Yet beneath the surface, the foundation begins to rot. Institutions once built to safeguard liberty metastasize into instruments of coercion. Bureaucracies swell into ravenous organisms consuming the very constitutional restraints that gave them life. The citizen gradually transforms from sovereign to subject while the state cloaks its appetite for power in the sanctimonious language of “security,” “justice,” and “democracy.” America now stands perilously close to that precipice.
This week the United States Department of Justice quietly acknowledged what millions of Americans have understood for years. On May 18, 2026 the Department of Justice announced the creation of what it calls the “Anti Weaponization Fund” a staggering $1.776 billion mechanism established through settlement agreements tied to the lawsuit Trump v. Internal Revenue Service. The suit stemmed from the unlawful leak of President Donald Trump’s tax returns and those of his family and business entities. Rather than monetary damages flowing directly to President Trump and the plaintiffs, the settlement instead creates a process whereby victims of government weaponization and political lawfare may seek apologies and financial redress from the federal government itself.
Pause for a moment and consider the sheer historical gravity of this announcement. The federal government is now formally establishing a taxpayer funded compensation structure for Americans harmed by politically motivated abuses carried out by government institutions. That alone is an indictment more damning than any speech ever delivered from the Senate floor. The very existence of this fund is an admission that the cancer of weaponized governance metastasized so profoundly throughout federal agencies that it now requires an official remediation process.
The Anti Weaponization Fund draws its money from the Treasury Department’s permanent Judgment Fund, the same perpetual appropriation mechanism historically used for government settlements and legal liabilities. Approximately $1.776 billion will transfer into the fund over the coming weeks. The structure itself is extraordinary. A five member commission appointed by the Attorney General will oversee claims, including one member selected in consultation with congressional leadership. The President retains removal authority over commissioners, and the panel will continue hearing claims until no later than December 1, 2028. Quarterly reports will be submitted to the Attorney General. Audits and anti fraud mechanisms are supposedly built into the process, while any remaining money at the end of the program returns to the federal government rather than activist organizations or politically connected nongovernmental entities.
The commission will reportedly evaluate claims according to the “totality of the circumstances,” including legal costs, imprisonment, financial losses, reputational destruction, and other demonstrable harms tied to politically motivated investigations or prosecutions. No partisan requirement officially exists. In theory any American who believes he or she was targeted by government power for ideological, political, or personal reasons may apply for compensation or formal acknowledgment.
That detail alone distinguishes this fund from earlier government settlement structures such as the Obama era Keepseagle settlement involving discrimination claims against the Department of Agriculture. Critics on the left have already erupted in apoplexy, hysterically describing the fund as a “slush fund” for Trump supporters and January 6 defendants. Yet the irony is staggering. These are the same political factions that spent years applauding taxpayer funded legal crusades, multimillion dollar special counsel investigations, coordinated intelligence leaks, censorship campaigns, and prosecutorial fishing expeditions aimed almost exclusively at conservatives, populists, Trump allies, and dissidents.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declared that “the machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American.” Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter condemned the use of federal authority for “improper and unlawful political, personal, or ideological reasons.” Those are remarkable words because they constitute an extraordinary institutional confession. The Justice Department is effectively admitting that the federal apparatus became infected with partisan venom.
The term “lawfare” itself has become one of the defining terms of modern American politics. It is derived from combining the words “law” and “warfare,” a concept popularized by Air Force Colonel Charles Dunlap in 2001. At its core, lawfare means using legal systems as weapons rather than instruments of justice. Courts become battlefields. Prosecutors become political assassins wearing tailored suits instead of military uniforms. Investigations are strategically timed to destroy reputations, bankrupt adversaries, silence dissent, and manipulate public perception. The process itself becomes the punishment. Endless subpoenas, coordinated leaks, selective prosecutions, confiscatory legal bills, ruined careers, frozen bank accounts, and public humiliation become tools of attrition.
The Left perfected this strategy with almost medieval precision. The American legal system was transformed into a labyrinthine torture chamber designed to exhaust political enemies financially, emotionally, physically, and psychologically. They understood that even if convictions never materialized the spectacle itself could still inflict irreparable damage. The goal was never merely prosecution. The goal was obliteration.
Closely intertwined with lawfare is the broader phenomenon known as the weaponization of government. This phrase refers to the abuse of state power against citizens for political or ideological purposes. Agencies originally created to defend the nation instead become praetorian guards for entrenched bureaucracies and political factions. Intelligence agencies surveil political opponents. Federal law enforcement stages theatrical raids. Regulatory bodies harass disfavored industries and organizations. Social media companies receive pressure from government officials to censor lawful speech. Bureaucrats become unelected sovereigns operating behind layers of institutional opacity.
The Founding Fathers would have viewed such conduct as the behavior of tyrants. Thomas Jefferson warned repeatedly about the consolidation of executive power. James Madison feared factions manipulating institutions for partisan domination. George Washington cautioned against corrosive political tribalism consuming the republic from within. Benjamin Franklin famously warned Americans that they had been given “a republic, if you can keep it.” One suspects these men must now be rolling over in their graves as modern Americans witness armed federal agents behaving like a domestic occupying force.
I know this reality personally. I was besieged in my own home despite never committing a crime involving violence, espionage, or insurrection. Before dawn, 29 heavily armed FBI agents descended upon my residence in what can only be described as an outrageous pageant of intimidation orchestrated for maximum political theater. They arrived like a militarized phalanx storming a terrorist compound in Tikrit rather than serving a process crime indictment against a 66 year old political consultant. CNN had been conveniently tipped off in advance and positioned outside my home before the raid even began. That fact alone remains one of the most brazen and scandalous indications of collusion between federal law enforcement and corporate media in modern American history.
The entire spectacle was designed not for justice but for humiliation. It was political pornography masquerading as law enforcement. Federal agents armed with automatic firearms and other weapons arrived in tactical gear and stormed into my home before sunrise while cameras rolled outside to ensure maximum public degradation. Such conduct belongs in banana republics and collapsing authoritarian states, not in the constitutional republic established by George Washington and defended by generations of American patriots. They sent more people to arrest me than they did to neutralize Usama Bin Laden.
What happened to me was not isolated. President Donald Trump endured years of coordinated investigations, leaks, fabricated narratives, selective prosecutions, and unprecedented legal assaults. The Russia collusion hoax poisoned the nation for years despite collapsing under scrutiny. The Mar a Lago raid shattered all historical norms surrounding former presidents. Confidential tax records were leaked with virtual impunity. Intelligence officials manipulated media narratives while prosecutors and bureaucrats operated with astonishing asymmetry.
General Michael Flynn was financially annihilated through prosecutorial misconduct. Internal government communications later revealed discussions about whether the goal was to “get him to lie” or “get him fired.” A decorated military officer who served his country for decades was destroyed because he represented a threat to the permanent bureaucracy.
Rudy Giuliani, once celebrated as America’s Mayor for leading New York through the ashes and smoke of September 11, was transformed by the establishment media into a caricature to justify the destruction of his finances and reputation. His law licenses were attacked. His bank accounts were strained. His name continued to be dragged endlessly through the mud because he dared to challenge the ruling class and stand beside President Trump. The same media institutions that once canonized Giuliani suddenly treated him like a public enemy because political obedience matters more to the establishment than truth or loyalty.
Michael Caputo and his family also became casualties of this malignant culture of lawfare. Caputo has now filed one of the first claims seeking restitution through the Anti Weaponization Fund after years of investigations, smears, financial devastation, and personal suffering tied to the Russia investigation era. The implications are enormous because his claim may become the first domino in a tidal wave of similar filings by Americans who believe they were politically targeted.
The Michael McMahon case has now become one of the clearest modern examples of why Americans have lost faith in the integrity of the justice system itself. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated the entire case against Michael McMahon in New York, a stunning development made even more extraordinary by the fact that the decision was ultimately unopposed by the prosecution. That detail speaks volumes. Cases with genuine evidentiary strength are defended aggressively on appeal. Here the government effectively stood aside while the conviction collapsed. Yet despite the implosion of the case, Michael McMahon had already endured imprisonment, financial devastation, reputational destruction, and years of emotional torment inflicted upon both him and his wife Martha along with their three children. The cost was not merely personal. Tens of millions of taxpayer dollars were incinerated pursuing a prosecution against an innocent man that many Americans now view as fundamentally meritless from the beginning. Careers were destroyed first while questions came later.
Similarly countless January 6 cases have begun unraveling under deeper legal scrutiny. Charges once wielded like political bludgeons were later narrowed, reconsidered, vacated, or criticized after defendants had already lost homes, careers, businesses, and years of their lives. The damage had already been done. Men and women were transformed into political hostages while cable news networks converted prosecutions into prime time entertainment. The process itself became the punishment.
John Eastman likewise became one of the most visible casualties of modern lawfare. Eastman, a constitutional attorney and former law professor, advised President Trump regarding legal theories surrounding the disputed 2020 election. For that alone he became the target of disbarment proceedings, criminal investigations, financial ruin, public vilification, and relentless professional destruction. Regardless of whether one agrees with his legal theories, the broader danger is unmistakable. Lawyers cannot provide candid constitutional advice to presidents or political clients if every unpopular legal argument risks professional annihilation years later. Once legal advocacy itself becomes criminalized, constitutional government begins suffocating beneath the weight of political vengeance.
Jeff Clark represents another central figure in this expanding landscape of lawfare victims. Clark served as a senior Department of Justice official during the final year of the Trump Administration, including as Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division and previously as head of the Environment and Natural Resources Division. A highly credentialed attorney educated at Harvard and Georgetown, Clark became a target because he questioned aspects of the 2020 election process and discussed potential investigative avenues within the Department of Justice. For those actions he became the subject of coordinated political attacks, congressional targeting, bar disciplinary proceedings, raids, investigations, crushing legal expenses, and attempts to destroy his professional livelihood.
Supporters argue that Clark is being punished not for criminal conduct but for offering legal advice and participating in internal executive branch deliberations that political opponents later found objectionable. The implications are chilling. If government lawyers can be professionally destroyed for providing controversial advice to elected officials, then future administrations will govern beneath a permanent cloud of fear, intimidation, and ideological enforcement. That is not constitutional governance. That is bureaucratic terror masquerading as ethics enforcement.
Then there are the January 6 defendants. Nearly 1,600 Americans were charged in connection with January 6. Many lost careers, homes, businesses, pensions, reputations, marriages, and years of their lives. One only needs to glance at social media to see and read all their stories which are, admittedly, too voluminous to fully comprehend all at once. Some J6er’s were held in prolonged pretrial detention under conditions critics described as punitive and politically motivated. Images of nonviolent defendants being marched in shackles, isolated, denied opportunities, and publicly vilified became symbols of what many Americans viewed as selective justice and ideological vengeance.
President Trump repeatedly described many January 6 defendants as “horribly treated” and victims of weaponized government. He issued pardons and commutations for many involved. Lawyers representing January 6 defendants are already signaling their intention to pursue restitution claims through the Anti Weaponization Fund for legal expenses, imprisonment, lost livelihoods, reputational destruction, and emotional suffering.
Predictably establishment figures erupted in outrage. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges have already moved to challenge the legality of the fund in court, arguing that taxpayer money should not compensate January 6 participants. Yet even Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declined to categorically exclude such claimants, emphasizing instead that cases will be evaluated individually according to the totality of circumstances.
That phrase is critical because it suggests the commission may examine prosecutorial conduct, sentencing disparities, pretrial detention practices, financial ruin, selective charging decisions, and broader patterns of government behavior rather than merely accepting official narratives at face value.
Meanwhile politically connected figures on the left routinely escaped accountability for conduct that would have destroyed any conservative public figure. The violent Black Live Matter domestic terror attacks during 2020 caused billions of dollars in damage, destroyed neighborhoods, injured police officers, and terrorized cities across the nation, yet media organizations often described the chaos as “mostly peaceful.” Prosecutors dropped charges. Politicians raised bail money. Celebrities endorsed the unrest. Americans watched a bifurcated justice system emerge before their eyes. One standard existed for regime loyalists and another for dissidents. This asymmetry shattered public trust.
The Department of Justice announcement therefore represents something far larger than a settlement agreement. It is a tacit acknowledgment that confidence in federal institutions has catastrophically eroded. Once citizens begin viewing law enforcement and intelligence agencies as partisan actors rather than neutral guardians of justice, the moral legitimacy of the republic itself begins to fracture. Civilization depends upon confidence in impartial justice. Without it nations descend into tribalism, cynicism, instability, and eventually societal disintegration.
The Anti Weaponization Fund does not erase the damage already inflicted. It does not restore ruined reputations, recover lost years, or repair shattered families. It does not undo unconstitutional surveillance, improperly motivated political prosecutions, media coordinated character assassinations, destroyed careers, or psychological trauma. But it does represent something profoundly important. It is the first formal recognition by the federal government that the machinery of the state was corrupted and turned inward against the American people themselves.
For years millions of Americans were told these concerns were paranoid fantasies. They were mocked, censored, ridiculed, and dismissed. Anyone questioning federal agencies was branded dangerous, extremist, conspiratorial, or unhinged. Yet now the Department of Justice itself has effectively admitted the disease existed all along. The Goliath finally confessed what I and so many other Americans already knew. It had become sinister. It had become monstrous. And now after years of humiliation, intimidation, prosecutions, raids, censorship, surveillance, bankruptcies, and public destruction, the American people are finally demanding restitution from the very monster that turned against them.”
******
FBI Agent Patrick Armor at my front door, speaking to my gentle wife and one of my kids
Sometimes no deal is good enough
President Donald Trump, the best president of my lifetime and the modern day savior of American democracy, believes in capitalism. He believes in “The Art of The Deal.” He believes that most humans, given good choices to select from, will almost always if not always choose logical, reasonable, rational options.
It is with this earnest mindest that President Trump has approached the Middle East. And in some ways, his view on human choices and preferences has, in fact, borne out with the wealthy Gulf states (Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait). These sparsely populated countries are exceptionally rich, and everything they do is centered on money. Money is the language that President Trump speaks most and best, because he is a capitalist. And it is piles of money that keep the rulers of the Gulf states in power.
So, money brings together some of President Trump’s foreign policy goals into alignment, or slight overlap, with the oil producing Arab Gulf states.
Where this money-and-comfort mindset and worldview fails is in the face of apocalyptic, genocidal supremacists like Adolf Hitler back then, or the jihadi Iranian Shia mullahs in the present. These people did not and do not speak the language of money or human comfort and happiness, other than to use these thoughts to move themselves forward on the chess board in the short term. Their currency is raw power and sheer domination and control of everyone in front of them, by any means necessary.
They are ruthless, whereas President Trump believes in choices and opportunities.
The jihadi/ Hitlerian supremacist view is contrary to President Trump’s view. The totally rational “Mutually Assured Destruction” doctrine that kept Soviet Russia and America from nuking one another in the Cold War does not apply in Iran, nor with any other Islamist country. There, money is only a means, not a goal. Lots of jihadis are happy to live in poverty, if it helps them achieve their measure of wealth in power and human subjugation.
Trump believes in kindness and human choices, free people making their own choices and reaching “deals” for mutual benefit. On the other hand, Jihadis believe in you, me, and Trump all on our knees (which is why the American and European Left share common cause with the Jihadis).
America was founded on individual freedom and choice, which are completely the opposite of Islam, and especially the jihadis within Islam. These two world views are incompatible; they do not overlap in a Venn diagram. To date, leaders like President Trump have managed to find points of contact between Western values and Islam where friction is least, but he has been unable to really find significantly overlapping areas of interest. The Abraham Accords came very close to bringing the Sunni Arab countries into a shared Venn diagram space with Israel and America, but those accords are pretty shaky. As soon as jihadis somewhere start their la-la-la-la yodeling thing, the Gulf states reflexively go into retreat. Culture is powerful.
With Iran, there is no compromise. Not because America does not want to, but because Iran’s apocalyptic, genocidal, fanatic jihadis do not accept any point of contact between themselves and anyone else that is not resolved 100% on their terms. And they will fight to the very end, even if they have to drag down their enemies with them into the abyss, to seek that end result.
President Trump is both a patient and loving man. That is clear. But he is also having trouble computing that anyone can be so different from him and from America’s hope and promise as are the Iranian jihadis. And so he keeps on trying to “make a deal.”
Mister President, a lot of us Americans, who are still squarely and absolutely in your corner, think you have tried more than is possible or than is even smart. You have done all that is possible to avert an absolute showdown with the Iranian jihadis, and they have been unable to meet you halfway. You must now accept that they are incapable of thinking like you, thinking in terms of mutual benefit. They do not think like that, or like you.
If the Iranian jihadis are allowed to stay in power in any way, shape, or form, they will return to their field of battle with America on their own terms. They will have learned from their mistakes since 2025, and they will adapt. Iran will find a way to destroy or damage America, one way or another, if they are allowed to remain in power.
You must finish the Iranian jihadi job, Mister President. If you love America as much as we all think you do, then you must make the unpleasant decision to wipe out the Iranian jihadis. It is us or them, and we elected you to protect Us.
We know that this is a difficult time for you, President Trump, and we stand firmly with you, at your side. Absolutely no one else in American politics has the strength of character that you have, and if you do not save America from jihadi Iran now, then we will end being apocalyptically victimized by them in the future. There is no art of the deal that you or anyone else can pull off that will avoid this; only military success right now will protect America.
Who is MAGA? What is MAGA?
Quite a bit of debate going on about the Make America Great Again movement started by candidate Donald Trump in 2015. Now that the movement to get Donald Trump elected succeeded a third time, and his policy goals are being implemented, the next question becomes “Whither MAGA?”
The question of why any American opposes the mere concept of Make America Great Again is beyond me. Why an entire political party has defined itself as opposing everything that a president does, including pledging to demolish the privately funded ballroom addition he is overseeing on the White House, is a question more for psychiatrists than political scientists. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real, it is measureable, it is quantifiable, and it is probably operationally definable, if some enterprising PhD student wants to contribute something useful to an otherwise useless, politicized, and anti-ideas moribund academia.
Americans suffering from TDS have a real problem, and I hope they get it treated professionally. On the flip side, conservative patriots like moi viscerally despised impostor Barack Hussein Obama, but not to the point of irrationally opposing even the occasional good things he did. You know, throwing out the baby with the bath water. Not that I can recall good things that Obama did, but probably there were some, like adding new acreage to a national park somewhere.
More to the moment are the questions of who is MAGA and who runs MAGA and what will become of this political movement when Preisdent Trump terms out of office. Who in the world of politics will pick up Trump’s mantle, his movement, and reassemble the successful team for future campaigns?
Right now a bunch of professional pundits have claimed the MAGA gatekeeper role for themselves. Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Roger Stone, maybe Alex Jones, and a few other public opinion figures who make their living from speaking into a microphone and to a camera continue to make strident statements about MAGA, as if they own it, define it, speak for it. Other political pundits, like Dinesh D’Souza, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, et al, certainly speak to and about MAGA principles, but they make no open claims to actually own or represent MAGA.
I reject all of these people, and anyone, frankly, from claiming this role. Even President Trump no longer really “owns” this movement that he created ten years ago.
This whole question, raging though it may be, reminds me of the whole predecessor Tea Party movement that began in 2008-2009 in Central Pennsylvania. No sooner had someone, and I won’t bother to research who it was who dubbed this grass roots voters backlash against the woeful Republican Party establishment and its hand-holding big brother Democrat Party, but immediately, anyone involved in conservative politics, conservative political activism, issue activism, or donating to conservative or GOP political campaigns, was awash in Tea Party related emails, appeals, mailers, brochures.
Quite a few so-named “Tea Party” 501(c)(4) groups were formed in 2008-2012. Even more related LLCs were formed. All were run by aggressive business people who sensed an opportunity to make money from politics yet again, and who appealed to voters and activists as being leaders who best captured and represented Tea Party ideals and principles. Many of these people claimed to be moral leaders, leaders of morality and ideological purity. Most of these people and their groups and organizations were shams, frauds, fakes, and did not stand the test of time. They are found few and far between today as part of the MAGA movement or cause, having been exposed as simple opportunists.
On the opposite end of this spectrum sits people like yours truly, my past political campaigns, and this blog, who have never made a net gain penny from politics, but who instead continue to hemorrhage personal money in the cause of political dialogue, policy debate, individual freedom, small government, accountable government, constitutional principles, our nation’s founding principles, etc.
I can also think of a few tireless, devoted political advocates here in Pennsylvania, who I will not name in full, who continue to donate their personal time and money to the cause of First Principles, without hope or expectation of remuneration. Dean, Ron, Jim, Jeff and others have all stood the test of time since our collective political arousal in 2008-2009. Yes, others have risen up to contribute their voice to the cause of freedom, and honest elections, but they also seek to make a living doing it. That is a business endeavor, not a selfless devotion.
Despite plenty of political activism in the 1980s, as a conservative Central PA Democrat, my own first personal try at elected office was in 2009-2010, when I ran as a Tea Party conservative Republican candidate for US Congress here in Central PA. I ran for state senate in 2012 and 2015, eventually removing myself from a great race for state senate in late 2015, due to a severely injured knee obtained while bear hunting. Back-to-back surgeries on what had been my “good” knee in January 2016 eliminated my ability to do what I enjoyed and did best, going door to door and meeting voters. It marked the end of my interest in elected office. But not the end of my interest in politics.
In 2015 I became full-blown MAGA, despite plenty of mockery from establishment Republicans serving on county GOP committees. Their 2016 “Dump Trump” slogan failed, as their shallow RINO candidates failed.
2016 marked the end of the Tea Party, as it morphed from a broad, ground-up, grass-roots-led freedom movement into the MAGA movement led by one Donald Trump. Trump used that movement of First Principle America lovers to get elected to office. Now that he succeeded, I do not think anyone can justifiably claim to lead it, or own it, or speak for it. Not even Trump.
I now look at people like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson the same way that I looked (sideways) at the people who came out of the shadows in 2008-2010 to claim un-earned leadership roles and money-making opportunities in the Tea Party. That populist movement may have finally found its footing under a new name, MAGA, and it may have elevated some people who spoke or occasionally speak our language, but it is wholly owned by you and me, citizen voters.
The strength of the Tea Party and its MAGA incarnation is that we Americans spoke to each other in town halls and municipal meeting rooms and at rallies. This was the most authentic voice and debate possible.
Each of us has an equal voice in this. People who make money and a living from this movement are automatically suspect in my eyes. They can’t possibly be in this for the right reason.
And like the big family we American citizens are, you and I can argue and bicker and sometimes disagree with one another about policy and candidates. But not one of us is a gate keeper for our collective movement, and no one we might want as a spokesman, would have the ridiculous arrogance to claim such a role.
Playin’ the Quatar in the quicksand
Past few weeks I have been overwhelmed with the fast pace of everything, including my work, and just let the last blog post stand as the latest word on things: America is badly divided, really like two different countries at this point. President Trump is about to declare the Insurrection Act in effect, something this blog advocated back in 2020. Lawless judges continue to try to play policy pro with legal cases that require a simple Yes or No ruling. It has been amazing to watch the “Blue” states and jurisdictions demand that the Feds stay out of their crime waves. They like their crime, and by God, they are gonna keep it…forgetting tha we Americans have a right to go anywhere in America without fear of being beaten to death.
Then again, the 1940s-1950s Democrat-run South was like this: Lawless, violent, in open revolt against the federal government’s effort to integrate public schools.
But President Trump stole the show with his effort to bring peace of some sort to Gaza and Israel. This looks like languidly playing a Quatar-guitar while also sinking into the Middle East quicksand. Because the people supposedly facilitating this momentary conclusion of hostilities with Trump are the very same people who have been stoking the same conflict for the past seventy years, including on our own American college campuses: Qatar.
For decades, Qatar has dumped billions of dollars into American college campuses to buy entire programs filled with far-Left Marxist pseudo professors who preach hatred of America, Christianity, Capitalism, Israel, and Western Civilization. Qatar is a tiny postage stamp of a country with more oil money than it can use at home, so it is very effectively using it to eat into America’s foundation with jihadism and faux journalism.
Maybe Trump is playing Qatar here, but it sure openly looks like Qatar is playing Trump, luring him in with unrealistic promises meant to further weaken America and Israel, bog down America in the Middle East quicksand, and stop the anti-jihad momentum that Israel and America have been successfully implementing the past six months.
For example, now American troops are supposedly going to be stationed in Gaza to enforce the ceasefire….a stupider idea cannot be invented, but here it is. Our own troops will be at the mercy of Hamas, and will serve as a block on Israel being able to get Hamas back in the genie bottle. Anything that happens to our troops will be blamed on Israel. A wedge will be further inserted between these two great natural allies, America and Israel, and the only people benefiting are the jihadis of Qatar, Hamas, Turkey, and Iran.
Maybe it will hold, and it will all work out great. I am no pessimist, but I am a realist. I admire President Trump’s willingness to take big chances for the right reasons, but I also worry that he tends to see everything in the world narrowly through his own lens of golf courses, resorts, and money-solves-all-problems. Including the flea-infested quicksands of the Middle East, which have historically eaten up and spit out the bones of many different great civilizations. Sometimes reality just has to be accepted, no matter how frustrating or painful: appeasement is not peace, and appeasing the jihadis only encourages them to do more damage.
America is not too big to fail in Gaza, and a lot is riding on the line. Good luck to America and Israel and to our entire Western Civilization.
Labor: To work for something of value
Today is Labor Day in the USA, and while it might have some bad Marxist roots with the early unions, the fact is that it has also evolved into the uglier side of capitalism, which is an orgy of shallow consumerism. Big retail sales of everything from underpants to mattresses to cars, America today is awash in carnival tents and men in top hats and coat tails, barking loudly at the masses to step right up and buy the latest greatest gadget or whatever.
Not too long ago, labor unions played such an important role in American politics (and in British politics, for that matter), that every Tom, Dick, and Harriet knew precisely what Labor Day was about. That most Americans, especially our youth, make little or no mental connection between Labor Day and the people who labor away with their hands and bodies to make things of value for us, for them, is the real take-away meaning of today’s national holiday.
But how could young people know, or older Americans recall, what Labor Day is about if nearly all of our labor has been curiously shipped overseas, and to our enemies, no less? A factory job was the family and church and community- sustaining source of income from the 1930s until about 2000, when the last of our American factories were carefully packaged up and sent to China. Now we have 25 years of no no labor and no factories, just Rust Belt husks of buildings, churches, and communities across the Eastern and Mid-Western USA. No wonder our kids are clueless about Labor Day.
However, our snickering elected officials know precisely what Labor Day is about, because it is still directly relevant to them. These self-anointed elites who seek to dominate all of us use our labor to enrich themselves, through the mis-appropriation and mis-spending of our tax monies. This self-destructive activity happens most and worst in liberal “blue” states run by the Democrat Party, where voters enable single-party rule without the checks and balances of multi-party competition. That this repetitive voting pattern is self-defeating seems not to matter to leftist messianic utopians, whose Big Government god requires nonstop sacrifice and endless cash invested in friendly “businesses”.
Where does this endless cash come from, which enables the extravagant “public servant” aristocracy? YOU.
You labor, pay high taxes on your income, and that tax money is taken for messianic utopian policies, like disproven climate change nonsense, that enriches other blue aristocrats who are invested in these schemes.
Ideally, you, the citizen, pay taxes to the government so the government can pay for services to you, the citizen: Firemen, policemen, public education in math, history, and spelling, public roads, trash pickup, etc. This is the social compact of democratic representative government; you get concrete services in return for relinquishing your own money to the Tax Man.
But when government becomes detached from the symbiotic relationship, and begins doing things for itself, and ignoring the citizen, you have tyranny. This is becoming brutally apparent in Britain, France, and liberal states in America. California is an especially scary place because of how far out of alignment the state government is with the citizenry. No services, but instead illegal migrants, homeless encamped in private front yards, general lawlessness, and the highest of high taxes to boot. Complete breakdown of the social compact between citizen and government, and don’t you dare step out of line.
This failure continues because most of the citizenry continues to vote for a single dominant political party that hates the citizenry. In liberal venues, hating yourself is the greatest of virtue signals, and is highly rewarded with public acclamation. I myself could not live in such an unsustainable and bizarre place. The people there are living off of the banked fumes of once-great capitalist endeavors there, now either departed or departing for Texas, Tennessee, or Florida.
Last week Britain’s highest court ruled that the illegal migrants overwhelming British society – built with citizen labor taxes – have higher value and more rights than the citizens themselves. Such brazen detachment from the long established democratic social compact means the British citizens are now mere money sources, slaves, really, infested by and under the boot heel of a parasitic government and its new stakeholders, the illegals, who contribute nothing and demand everything.
Even the British Union Jack flag is being outlawed on the streets of Britain, because it “offends” the illegal border invaders! Say the “wrong” thing about this, do the “wrong” thing about this, and you actually go to jail. True tyranny, not freedom, not democracy.
Britain is headed to civil war, as any nation would be where the government has turned against the people it is supposed to serve, and upon whose tax-paying largesse the government depends. The same thing is happening here in American blue states, where entrenched single party rule, based on a taxpaying slave-political elite slave owner relationship, is about to be confronted by a fed-up federal government trying to hold the Union together. Something of value worth laboring for, again, as it was in 1861.
This is the meaning of Labor Day today.
Traitor Tehran Tucker Carlson Gleefully Leaps Off Cliff
Tucker Carlson has been a fixture on the political middle and right for about six or seven years. For years he slowly built a real following while he was at FOX News, where he did journalism stuff. He earned his following because he asked good questions, he dug into people’s political backgrounds and background information on political and cultural issues of the day. He challenged all kinds of political blind spots and taboos and unhealthy “bipartisan” spaces where taxpayers and American citizens always seem to lose and corrupt political careerists always seem to make out incredibly well.
After Tucker Carlson left FOX, he seemed emboldened to break even more artificial constraints, to ask even tougher questions, and to promote more individual freedom in the face of an increasingly constitutionally questionable government apparatus. He was the quintessential “independent investigative journalist” that Americans want so badly.
Without question, the Biden Administration was his foil in his new independent role, and also probably his brightest time. With so much brazen Biden family corruption, protected and enforced by a brazenly weaponized federal bureaucracy, and so much more related stuff to chase down, Tucker Carlson found himself ever more squaring off against the entire estabalishment media enterprise. This “mainstream media” conglomerate made then and very openly today makes no bones about being completely aligned and in bed with just one political party.
So this was the boxing ring in which Tucker Carlson found himself. He then got a ton of money from Iranian businessman Omeed Malik, and if the Foreign Agent Registration Act documents dug up by ace investigative reporter Laura Loomer are true, Tucker also got substantial money from Qatar. And then he bought himself a classic hunting and fishing ranch in Montana, and started interviewing people in his flyfishing man cave.
Bit by bit, aspects of Tucker Carlson’s raging hatred began to seep through, then shine through, and then eventually poured out in these interviews. Probably due to open pressure to at least try to appear not to hate all Jews, Tucker hosted an interesting guy named Bret Weinstein. And throughout the entire interview, Tucker’s hostile face set barely changed an iota. Despite receiving fascinating new information from Weinstein that corroborated a great deal of conclusions that Tucker had come to on certain political issues, he never smiled or showed any warmth toward his guest.
Check out the photo below that I screenshotted from that otherwise excellent interview.
Contrast Tucker’s demeanor towards fellow Israel hater Rep. Thomas Massie, where they are all chummy, laughing, easy going during that interview. Which is also a fascinating interview, and were Massie not a hater of Israel and Jews, and not such a theoretician and purist, I could then see why his presence in Congress was so useful.
Anyhow, Tucker started racking up interviews with professional Jew haters, for whom publicly breaking this Western taboo is a source of professional income. People like US Lt. Col. Douglas Macgregor, and history-dabbler Darryl Cooper, neither of whom have anyting positive to say about Jews or Israel, and who make a living saying nonsense about them. Not even the Nobel prize winners, the leaders in economic, medical, or technological areas. Nothing good to say, period, which indicates they have a problem.
In his many hours interviewing them, and others like an Arab Christian in Israel, Tucker never challenges them. He does not ask them to more fully explain their questionable ideas. Rather, Tucker just lets them say whatever they want about Jews, the European Holocaust, and Israel, and then after encouraging them, agreeing with them, he moves on to the next thing.
And then Tucker himself became an open antagonist towards Jews and Israel. He recently sat interview-style across from US Senator Ted Cruz with cameras running, and instead of an interview, Tucker went on the attack, including the bizarre assertion that the Jews of today are unrelated to the Jews of the Bible and ancient Israel.
As an aside, if today’s Jews are not descended from the ancient Jews, then why does their DNA show them to be from the Near East, despite at least a thousand years living in white Europe? Why are they the only people on Earth who speak Hebrew, study Scripture in Hebrew and Aramaic, and practice Judaism? If not them, then who and where the heck are the Jews? Tucker does not bother to answer this simple question, as casting doubt on Jews is his only goal.
The final straw for a lot of former Tucker Carlson admirers like me just happened, days ago. If you thought the man had an atom of Christian belief, human decency, American loyalty, or even just some integrity inside of him, Tucker Carlson has aggressively, even wantonly, dispelled that notion. Tucker conducted a ridiculous, puffball questions, friendly “interview” with one of the most evil, violent, cruelly despotic autocrats on Earth today.
Yes, from his Montana man cave, Tucker Carlson interviewed the hand puppet “president” of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, who reports directly to Ayatollah Khameini, the “Supreme Leader” of Iran, on July 4th, American Independence Day. In his time with Pezeshkian, a true monster, Tucker has no interest in asking real questions, like can we go inside Evin Prison and interview some of the women your forces are raping and torturing right now. Nor did Tucker go to Iran and do a “man on the street” tour, where the journalist just asks random citizens their opinions on things. Of course, Iran is oppressive and is run like North Korea, where one small mis-step costs you your family, your home, your wife, your life, so even if Tucker would insist, he would encounter stone faces.
Instead, Tucker Carlson willingly, and occasionally with outbursts of that weird fake glee he has, served as an airbrushed mouthpiece for the mullahs who rule Iran with a brutal and unjust fist, and who threaten the world with their genocidal, homicidal death cult. Tucker makes excuses for them, he aided and abetted them, he gave aid and comfort to them, he put lipstock on their pig faces, he made common cause with them.
One utterly contemptible example: “Has Iran tried to assassinate President Trump?” To which Pezeshkian answers that this is an Israeli lie meant to rope America into forever wars. And Tucker Carlson simply nods in agreement and moves on! No second question, no aw c’mon ya can’t blame everything on Israel.
Apparently Tucker Carlson really meant it when he wrote in 2020 that he never liked Trump anyhow. Yeah, no kidding. You won’t even challenge this bold faced lie by your Iranian buddy.
They, the Iran of “Death to America!” since their 1979 revolution. They of at least a thousand Americans killed through Iranian terrorism in Lebanon, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, elsewhere. They of known attempted assassinations against President Trump and election hacking in 2020, documented by the FBI.
There is speculation that Tucker Carlson must have been paid a lot of Iranian money to do this, and that seems reasonable. Whether Tucker just sold out America for the symbolic thirty silver Shekels, or whether he was paid directly into a Swiss bank account, or whether he gets some syndication rights income from this, any way we cut this last horrendous act, “Tehran Tucker” Carlson is a traitor to America.
Interviewing Bret Weinstein on Covid policy vs Covid science
Bret Weinstein maintained his composure despite Carlson’s open hostility on a subject Carlson would normally be animated about
His face hardly changed from this unfriendly grimace the entire interview. Tucker just does not like Jews, not even Dr. Bret Weinstein, a conservative and risk-taking researcher willing to help Carlson
How much money was Carlson paid to be the airbrusher mouthpiece foreign agent for the evil Iranian empire that seeks to nuke America? What a traitor
Fair trade, not free trade
When I ran for Congress (at that time the PA 10th inhabited by Democrat Tim Holden, which included about all of Schuylkill County and parts or all of Berks, Lebanon, Dauphin and Perry counties) in 2009-2010, I remembered and repeated a phrase from my long ago 1980s political activism days in Centre County – Fair trade, not free trade.
Despite being fifteen years ago, this phrase caught on with our voter audiences. They really liked it, and many voters I met while campaigning had personal stories about their family’s various jobs in then-shuttered factories. And I was reminded of watching a high tech glass and industrial mirror factory close up shop in State College, PA, around 2000. It was the old Corning branch there on the Benner Pike. Literally sat there and watched the workers carefully, lovingly package up their machinery for its trip to the “new” factory in China. Some of the workers went over to train their Chinese counterparts, before returning to State College without a job.
Funny thing that President Trump’s tariff policy amounts to this exact summation of the more or less running bank account that every responsible nation keeps with all other trading partners. The fact that only most nations are tariffing American made goods at high rates, while enjoying very low tariffs on their products imported into America, is a sign of what ails us Americans: We think we can give give and give away everything we have, and we are too big to fail from it all. Which is nonsense.
Interestingly, we see the same argument about illegal immigration and endless government spending: No limits, America must take and absorb all of the costs that the world places on us…Everything is “free free free” except, of course, it isn’t free. These policies come with huge costs to Americans.
Free trade, as in giving away our trade imbalances for free, which enriches everyone else and impoverishes Americans, is a sign that our policy makers and indeed our own voters falsely believed that America is such a huge fountain of bounty and wealth that it can endlessly sustain this. What a silly and dangerous fantasy.
Sending our factory jobs, indeed our actual factories with all of their equipment and machinery, abroad to be re-born in China, Vietnam, India and elsewhere was nuts. It sent our means of production, our workers, our jobs, and our money out of America. All America got in return was maybe cheaper and junkier versions of what we had once made here, at a high quality. And yet this “free trade” thing picked up steam as big American corporations and their pet politicians began to take on a global view of trade. No longer were companies based in Delaware “American.” Rather, many of these companies’ senior leaders considered them to be global citizens that just happened to find a perch in America.
This off-shoring of everything America makes, grows, produces went on unchecked for a good thirty years, until everyone began to notice the downside, the cost. Just about every East Coast and Mid West state now has its own “rust belt” area. Areas filled with hulking, empty brick buildings and over-grown parking lots next to rivers and highways tell the sad tale of America’s economic downfall, and our nearing ruin.
Sure, we had a lot of government spending in the past twenty years to temporarily make up for the job losses, the depressed wages, the looming home foreclosures. But that spending is unsustainable. It is “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” It is simply printing Dollars for the sake of printing them. Less and less stands behind them. And yet someone standing way back there in the background was making a ton of money off of this screwy policy, while the rest of us Americans lost from it.
And so now we have a bold and very natural pro-America policy, the equalization of tariffs, making trade fair, not free, and the whole world is suddenly going upside down. My 401(k)! My dog’s retirement account! Oh my God, what will happen?
Folks, relax. Do a bong hit or have a glass of red wine. Our American world is not only not going to end, it is going to return to our glory days. Yes, it takes time, it will take time, so don’t be a bunch of prissy little Gen Z weenies demanding immediate gratification. America is worth fighting for, and these dueling tariffs are the opening salvo. Round One.
You know what is kind of oddly funny about that Fair trade, not free trade slogan? As apt as it is right now, I got that from some 1980s Centre County union workers, which trade or factory or coal mine they were in, I no longer recall. But they were right. And Trump is right. And we Americans are all aligned together on this to Make America’s Economy Great Again…
All together now, breeeaaathe…
No pain, no gain
The old gym motto “No Pain, No Gain” applies to the much-needed economic shakeup the Trump Administration is bringing to the entire planet. If we Americans do not put up with a little temporary pain and necessary readjustment now, for our own good, then we will enjoy no huge gain later on. It takes work to then earn and enjoy resulting benefits.
President Trump’s promise to American citizens was that he would return us to glory days, a golden age, which we richly deserve. Trump is correct that America has been the world’s piggy bank for decades, due to the huge tariff and trade imbalance. We should add that being the world’s piggy bank is an unsustainable and unfair arrangement paid for by the long forgotten American taxpayers, who see very few benefits in return for handing over their hard-earned cash to every Tom, Dick and Harry the American bureaucracy could dream up.
As we have learned over the past eight weeks from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), trillions of American taxpayer dollars have been illegally mis-spent on millions of dubious schemes, ideas, organizations, and fantasies, many of which directly aimed at harming the United States. American taxpayers have been funding their own sworn enemies through agencies like USAID, DHS, EPA, HHS, and the Department of Education.
In other words, domestic enemies here in America were running the federal government, and using our tax money to damage and destroy America. This egregious situation is only in addition to the lopsided international tariff arrangement that has grown out of control since about 1920.
The tariff situation is egregious by itself. All kinds of countries we Americans think of as “allies” have had heavy tariffs placed on importing American food and manufactured products, including milk and dairy, steel, etc. Many of these countries’ governments paid what minimal tariffs that the USA had in turn on products being imported into America, in effect buoying up their own private businesses.
America did not do that for our own businesses, and in fact America has had very low to no tariffs on most imports. And now after essentially handing over our own wealth and manufacturing sectors to foreigners for decades, we are tired of being the economic piggy bank or punching bag or host body for all of these takey-takey people around the world. It is hard to understand why Americans, particularly working and taxpaying Americans, support this large imbalance and wealth transfer from America to the world.
And yet, as we see, plenty of working Americans are arguing against tariff parity, and are setting fire to Tesla cars and dealerships as a form of protest against DOGE finding and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money. Do you have to be mentally ill to belong to that one political party? Do you have to be self destructive to be a voting member of that one political party?
Do you have to hate America, Americans, the rule of law, and everything great about America to belong to that one political party?
Why would any normal American belong to that one political party?
Just as DOGE is causing Americans to take a long hard look at federal government mismanagement, Trump’s tariff parity is going to cause a shake-up in our international trade relationships, no doubt. It is going to cause some re-arrangements of pricing and products we are used to having easily available to us. For example, cheap Chinese crap on Amazon is probably not going to be as cheap any longer. And yesterday the Princess of Patience and I went to look at a new car for her, and we see how the new tariff parity might effect car prices. We learned that those foreign-brand vehicles already ordered and in the pipeline are not subject to tariffs (our family is positively prejudicial in favor of Toyota vehicles).
Of course, foreign brand vehicles made here in America are not subject to tariffs, either, and many Toyota cars and trucks are made in America.
Long and short of this subject is give these policy changes time to work. Already America is seeing immediate positive responses from many foreign trading partners, who are lowering their own tariffs because they know that their own industries cannot afford to absorb Trump’s tariffs. They will lose their export markets if they lose American buyers. So just be patient, remember that this is all being done for your own good and your own bank account, and know that it will work out well.
Putting up with these changes is like making deposits into your bank account. You might feel like you are missing opportunities to party with your money in the short term, but in the longer term you will be very happy.
DMZ Mexico here we come
Mexico has always had a lawless cowboy “Pancho Villa” kind of relationship with America. Historically, Mexican raiders would come across the border, whether that border was where it is now, or when Mexico owned what is now Texas and raided across into what is now Oklahoma, California, New Mexico, Arizona etc. Mexicans always preyed upon Americans, whether they were lone homesteaders or big cattle barons.
Anyone who has an interest in this rough border history can pretty well boil it down to the Alamo (a frontier fort that became a symbol of American resistance to Spain and Mexican imperialism, and then later a successful rallying cry in search of revenge for the Mexican massacre of wounded Americans there, “Remember the Alamo!“) and you can watch several good movies about that. Or you can read up on the Texas Rangers. No, not Chuck Norris type Texas Rangers, with nickel-plated Colt 45 1911s and fast cars, or the baseball team, but the very early and very real Texas Rangers. Guys like Frank Hamer. Guys tough as steel wearing true ten gallon hats, riding beautiful strong horses, with big Bowie knives strapped, lever action Winchester rifles across the pommel, and Colt Peacemaker revolvers on their hip, chasing Mexican cattle rustlers, banditos, and thieves back and forth the border in bloody mortal combat.
Books with amazing photos have been published, and I think some early silent movies were done on the Mexican-American border. It is a history that few Americans know about today, because our relationship with Mexico has been defined for a long time in terms of tourism, itself a very new human experience, and to lesser extent the importation of fresh fruits and vegetables long grown with human excrement in lieu of animal manure.
It is also a history now rife with all kinds of modern far-Left anti-America fabrications and nonsense, not the least of which is at history.com, as well as many other anti-America websites that blatantly lie and whine about the legitimate American defense of its borders.
America’s relationship with Mexico only began to become something positive when Americans became tourists there. Acapulco, later the Yucatan Peninsula, became destinations for the then-new 1960s cruise ships. Then industrial investment came, car factories, John Deere tractor parts factories, some hand tools, all positive, although readers should know that Mexican law still forbids foreigners from owning land there.
Over time Americans became literally fat and happy, our own material success killing us, robbing us of our competitive spirit and even of our own will to live. Americans became oblivious to the myriad problems afflicting us, including cross-border drug exports from Mexico. The beautiful movie Act of Valor captured the old American attitude towards border security, before the Biden Administration and its bipartisan supporters opened the border wide for everyone and everything – human sex trafficking, including small children, fentanyl, marijuana, assorted pills, cocaine, forty million foreign invaders from around the planet, just walking in to America.
Suddenly Americans began to really suffer from all the open border problems, and notice the cause. Thousands of illegal alien drunk drivers killing entire American families, repeat offender homicidal maniacs raping and murdering beautiful young American girls, beautiful and promising young American boys and men accidentally ingesting poisonous drugs and dying. The list of maladies afflicting Americans from the Mexico export of bad stuff became too big, too bad, too serious to ignore any longer.
And so Americans voted for President Donald Trump to close the open border, stop the one-way flow of death, violence, and destruction from Mexico, and fix the problem once and for all. And so within thirty days of being sworn in, President Trump correctly declared the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorists. This means their members who are here on American soil do not enjoy the protections of civil rights or basic criminal law. Rather, they are legally and correctly viewed as armed invaders who intend to do Americans harm, and so they can be shot like dogs, on sight. Beautiful.
Things are looking up, right? Well, not so fast.
In response to all this good course correction stuff, Mexico is right now in the speedy process of making it illegal to hold their citizens accountable for their illegal acts, in Mexico or in America. In other words, the Mexican government is working hard to protect the drug cartels and their human smuggling, drug smuggling, weapons smuggling, and violence smuggling. Presently a pile of drug cartel hit squads are actively murdering Americans and foreigners right here on American soil, usually over drug dealing and money laundering. The Mexican government wants this situation to continue.
Essentially America is going back to the ultra violent 1860s frontier relationship that we had with Mexico, except that it is now official Mexican government policy to unleash their marauders upon us. America is facing a Mexican guerilla war on our southern border, from Tijuana all the way to Florida’s coastline, enabled by the Mexican government.
I am not a military expert, or really a military anything. I could not command a platoon let alone a pineapple. However, I am a long and passionate consumer of human history, and I think history is instructive in instances such as what America now faces along our Mexican border. America must take decisive control of the most dire situation there right now, which is the lawless borderland that allows psychotic murderers easy access deep into our homeland.
Extending a hard American military presence across the Mexican border is hopefully not needed, but it is what is going to have to happen in some shape or form to give us the full control of our side that we need. It is fully 100% justified. It is time for a demilitarized zone on the Mexican side. Whether that DMZ is a half mile, a mile, or ten miles, it is what needs to happen to give America the protection we need from Mexico’s predatory behavior, both official and unofficial wink-wink nudge-nudge.
I want to say that I admire Mexicans. I think the legal Mexican immigrants to America are the new Americans. In my experience, they universally work very hard, value tight and strong families, they believe in God and His higher law. They are patriotic and proudly serve in America’s toughest combat units. Great people, great Americans. Welcome, please.
I spent time in Mexico as a kid, as a volunteer on a Green Cross ambulance among the pobrecitos in a very sad, very poor area. It is a story for another time, but I came to love regular Mexicans at that time, and I still feel very warmly towards those who want to become legal Americans and share in this incredible country with us. They are most welcome here.
It is the lawless banditos we are worried about here, with this borderland issue. And that includes the Mexican government.
Frank Hamer, Texas Ranger and righteous American patriot
Texas Rangers patrolling the Rio Grand River
Pancho Villa, Mexican bandito
Uniparty movie & more Democrat Party lawlessness
The “Uniparty” is quite real. It is an unholy amalgamation of elected Democrats and Republicans-In-Name-Only as well as their assorted financial backers. Both of these groups have more in common with one another than what separates them, because their common interests are Democrat power and Republican money. The RINOs will always sell the Democrats power, and the Democrats will always ensure that the Republicans get lots and lots of money.
This cozy relationship is already on display, as something like 30 “Republican” US senators have lined up to oppose President Donald Trump’s strongest cabinet picks, people who would bring law and order and clean elections back into vogue. E.g. Trump nominated Rep. Matt Gaetz to be his Attorney General, and already the DC Swamp RINOs are lined up to oppose his nomination. Gaetz is among a literal handful of elected Republicans across the entire nation who both could and would make election integrity real, and vote fraud accountable to the law.
Think just how rotten to our core America is with elected “leaders” who actually oppose election integrity. A bunch of them must be making a lot of money from the corrupt status quo, to be so brazen in their opposition to election integrity and accountability to the law.
Witness also the open and defiant voter fraud taking place in Bucks County, PA, and in other Democrat Party strongholds in Pennsylvania. We are watching Democrat county commissioners openly flout the law and two recent PA Supreme Court holdings while they count ballots that are clearly disqualified.
Says Democrat Bucks County commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, “Precedent by a court doesn’t matter any more in this country. And people violate laws any time they want. For me, if I violate this law, it is because I want a court to pay attention to it.”
In other words, elected Democrat Diane wants a different court to have a different holding than the two holdings the PA Supreme Court already had on this very exact subject and question. She wants to help Democrat lawyers seeking out friendly activist Democrat judges to keep ignoring the law and the legal precedents that are standing in her way of getting more power. This is not an act of personal defiance or of some citizen engaging in civil disobedience against some terribly unjust law. No, this is just yet more Democrat Party lawlessness in a long long line of Democrat Party lawlessness going back to 1860.
Nothing has changed there.
What has changed is that the Republican Party, created in 1855 to oppose Democrat Party slavery and in fact throwing down in the Civil War, has long ago capitulated to the Democrats in these apparently boring matters of clean elections and the basic rule of law. The rotten GOPe just doesn’t care, because as far as they are concerned, win or lose, they still have their official positions and they still make lots and lots of money from insider trading with the Democrats.
So US Senator-elect Dave McCormick must watch in disbelief from the sidelines as the GOPe does and says literally nothing to save his already acknowledged two-week-old electoral win over election denier and anti-democracy candidate Bob Casey from the lawlessness out of Bucks County and other Democrat strongholds. Elsewhere in America, Democrat strongholds like California are STILL counting (fake, illegal) ballots to get their Democrat candidates disbelievably over the Win finish line in Republican districts, weeks after Election Day ended with the Republican candidates winning.
And yet neither the Republican Speaker of the House nor the Republican US Senate majority leader have voiced their opposition to seating such clearly fraudulent candidates in their respective houses. Both Speaker Johnson and Leader McConnell are GOPe RINOs. The rule of law is unimportant to them; money is.
Here is a funny thirty-three second Charlie Chaplin silent film that fits the Uniparty situation perfectly. The two supposed opponents face off against one another in a duel, and yet both opponents are reluctant to actually shoot at one another. Each ends up firing his revolver randomly in all directions, taking out birds aflight as well as the bystander people involved in overseeing the duel. When it is apparent that neither opponent is injured, they celebrate together and run off screen hugging one another, uncaringly jumping over the prostrate bodies of their apparently dead seconds and assistants.
This silent film sums up the Uniparty perfectly. America as a nation, our rule of law, clean elections, our democratic norms and American citizens alike are the innocent bystanders gunned down by the corrupt Uniparty. Watch it and cry.