Monday, July 07, 2025

Hell Freezes Over As Congressional Republicans Don’t Blow It

 

The Democrat crowing about how the Big Beautiful Bill is going to be the doom of the Republicans is about as convincing as Zohran Mamdami’s college app claim that he’s a black guy; in his defense, he is more Indian than Elizabeth Warren, in a manner of speaking. Though their social media doofuses and regime media toe-sucks are hooting about how Hakeem Jeffries set a record for running his fool mouth and how voters will totally be angry with the GOP for killing eleventy million people – the BBB is even deadlier than net neutrality, climate change, and not allowing confused children mutilate themselves to conform to their delusions combined – this is a huge and humiliating loss. It is also a rare exception to the usual GOP MO of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way – this victory capped perhaps the most potent first six months of a presidency ever. Donald Trump came in kicking commie tush, and for the last half-year, he’s been landing score after score while melting every temporary setback his detractors have dealt him. Just a month ago, Iran had a nuclear program. Now, it’s a smoking ruin. Today, no innocent honor student undocumented migrant can walk home from reading to orphans without living in fear that ICE will disappear him into an alligator-guarded gulag. DEI is DOA, the stock market is setting records, and colleges are bending the knee to the hated King. Heck, he has even ended the Rwanda-Congo War and brought peace to Zohran Mamdami’s people. 

But, without the BBB passing, it would have been all for naught. The Democrats knew it, and they went all out to stop it. When the sky doesn’t fall and the Dow soars higher, they get to explain, “Sure, Trump’s brought America a new Golden Age, but his tweets are still really mean!” 

Another winner: J.D. Vance, whose tie-breaking vote got the Senate buy-in. But it was his behind-the-scenes work that helped smooth the way. This guy was deep in the mix, making it happen, and he will get credit for it. Though we have an incredible bench, the nomination is pretty much his in 3.5 years. Right now, the big question is who the Dems will pick to star as McGovern Mondale in the 2028 production of “When In Doubt, Go Left 3: We’re Due for a Win, Right?”

It’s so weird to be saying good things about GOP congressional leaders, but John Thune – he sounds like an MCU villain who fights Iron Man – made it happen without blowing up the filibuster or setting a bad precedent. This was the kind of masterful performance you would expect of Mitch McConnell – yes, I know you curse his name, but until now, he was the unchallenged master of senatorial strategy and minutiae. Totally out from Cocaine Mitch’s shadow, he made the hard calls that cut some of our favorite little tidbits from the bill in order to pass the big stuff. Someone has to be the bad guy. Someone has to make us mad to get things done. Thune did it without being condescending or obnoxious. We now know we have a Senate majority leader who makes it happen. That will serve us well when we build on this win.

Okay, Mike Johnson. Who the hell is this guy? Where did he come from? When he got voted Speaker, most of us thought he was an asterisk on a placeholder. Mitch would have to score him an eight-ball of his cocaine just to get the preternaturally serene southerner up to “mild-mannered.” And yet, he did the impossible, again and again, somehow bringing together utterly incompatible factions to create that nearly invisible area of overlap in the Venn Diagram that was the BBB. He did the impossible. And you know what else they are saying is impossible? Expanding the House GOP majority in 2026.

Another winner…hear me out. The Freedom Caucus. Even the hardest conservatives have gotten frustrated with them when it looked like they were going to kill the deal time and time again. We agree with them on the merits of spending – given the chance, I’d replace food stamps with community gruel pots– but still, they often drive us crazy. But that’s their job. They push things right. This BBB is significantly more right-wing than it would have been without their brinkmanship. Would they have tanked it? Maybe. They have to keep that possibility out there even when it looks suicidal. The Freedom Caucus is basically Cleavon Little in “Blazing Saddles,” and the rest of the House are the people of Rock Ridge wondering if they are just crazy enough to do it

And the losers? I mean, besides the entire Democrat Party? The Lol-bertarian Twins Rand Paul and Thomas Massie believed their own hype of being stalwart, principled iconoclasts standing in the breach. The Freedom Caucus got something by being a pain; these two got zilch and succeeded in doing what many believed impossible – making libertarians even more annoying. There’s no universe where their ideological fantasies pass any House or Senate that might ever exist on Earth.

Trump must crush Massie unmercifully as a cautionary example of those who don’t get on the team. Paul still has a cycle to get his head right, but we’re tired of smug talk. We want wins on the scoreboard, not some dork showboating for sophomoric incel fanboys by failing to accomplish anything except making sure no one else can accomplish anything, either. And if the passage of the BBB helps rid us of them, that’s yet another reason to celebrate.

Imagine – celebrating what the GOP has done. Well, that’s the reality, at least today. Tomorrow, it might be back to monkey business as usual, but we should savor this while we can.

What the First 6 Months of the Trump Admin Have Revealed About Our ‘Experts’

 

The first six months of the Donald Trump administration have not been kind to the experts and the degree-holding classes.

Almost daily during the tariff hysterias of March, we were told by university economists and most of the Ph.Ds. employed in investment and finance that the U.S. was headed toward a downward, if not recessionary, spiral.

Most economists lectured that trade deficits did not really matter. Or they insisted that the cures to reduce them were worse than the $1.1 trillion deficit itself.

They reminded us that free, rather than fair, trade alone ensured prosperity.

So, the result of Trump’s foolhardy tariff talk would be an impending recession. America would soon suffer rising joblessness, inflationor rather a return to stagflation—and likely little, if any, increase in tariff revenue as trade volume declined.

Instead, recent data show increases in tariff revenue. Personal real income and savings were up. Job creation exceeded prognoses. There was no surge in inflation. The supposedly “crashed” stock market reached historic highs.

Common-sense Americans might not have been surprised. The prior stock market frenzy was predicated on what was, in theory, supposed to have happened rather than what was likely to occur. After all, if tariffs were so toxic and surpluses irrelevant, why did our affluent European and Asian trading rivals insist on both surpluses and protective tariffs?

Most Americans recalled that the mere threat of tariffs and Trump’s jawboning had led to several trillion dollars in promised foreign investment and at least some plans to relocate manufacturing and assembly back to the United States. Would that change in direction not lead to business optimism and eventually more jobs? Would countries purposely running up huge surpluses through asymmetrical trade practices not have far more to lose in negotiations than those suffering gargantuan deficits?

Were Trump’s art-of-the-deal threats of prohibitive tariffs not mere starting points in negotiations that would eventually lead to likely agreements more favorable to the U.S. than in the past and moderate rather than punitive tariffs?

Would not the value of the huge American consumer market mean that our trade partners, who were racking up substantial surpluses, would agree they could afford modest tariffs and trim their substantial profit margins rather than suicidally price themselves out of a lucrative market entirely?

Economists and bureaucrats were equally wrong on the border.

We were told for four years that only “comprehensive immigration reform” would stop illegal immigration. In fact, most Americans differed. They knew firsthand that we had more than enough immigration laws, but had elected as President Joe Biden, who deliberately destroyed borders and had no intention of enforcing existing laws.

When Trump promised that he would ensure that, instead of 10,000 foreign nationals entering illegally each day, within a month, no one would, our experts scoffed. But if the border patrol went from ignoring or even aiding illegal immigrants to stopping them right at the border, why would such a prediction be wrong?

Those favoring a reduction in illegal immigration and deportations also argued that crime would fall, and citizen job opportunities would increase, given an estimated 500,000 aliens with criminal records had entered illegally during the Biden administration, while millions of other illegal aliens were working off the books, for cash, and often at reduced wages.

Indeed, once the border was closed tightly, hundreds of thousands were returned to their country, and employers began turning to U.S. citizens. Job opportunities did increase. Crime did go down. Legal-only immigration regained its preferred status over illegal entry.

Trump talked of trying voluntary deportation—again to wide ridicule from immigration “experts.” But why would not a million illegal aliens wish to return home “voluntarily”—if they were given free flights, a $1,000 bonus, and, most importantly, a chance later to reapply for legal entry once they arrived home?

Many of our national security experts warned that taking out Iran’s nuclear sites was a fool’s errand. It would supposedly unleash a Middle East tsunami of instability. It would cause a wave of terrorism. It would send oil prices skyrocketing. It would not work, ensuring Iran would soon reply with nuclear weapons.

In fact, oil prices decreased after the American bombing. A 25-minute entrance into Iranian airspace and bombing led to a ceasefire, not a conflagration.

As for a big power standoff, World War III, and 30,000 dead, common sense asked why China would wish the Strait of Hormuz to close, given that it imports half of all Middle Eastern oil produced?

Why would Russia—bogged down in Ukraine and suffering nearly a million casualties—wish to mix it up in Iran, after ignominiously fleeing Syria and the fall of its Assad clients?

Russia usually thinks of Russia, period. It does not lament when tensions elsewhere are expected to spike oil prices. Why would Russia resupply Iran’s destroyed Russian-made anti-aircraft systems, when it was desperate to ward off Ukrainian air attacks on its homeland, and Iran would likely again lose any imported replacements?

As for waves of terror, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis have suffered enormous losses from Israel. Their leadership has been decapitated; their streams of Iranian money have been mostly truncated. Why would they rush to Iran’s side to war with Israel, when Iran did not come to their aid when they were battling and losing to the Israelis?

Has a theater-wide war really ever started when one side entered and left enemy territory in 25 minutes, suffering no casualties and likely killing few of the enemy?

As far as the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, why should we believe our expert pundit class?

Prior to the American and Israeli bombing, many of them warned that Iran was not on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon, and therefore, there was little need for any such preemptive action.

Then, post facto, the same experts flipped. Now they claimed, after the bombing that severely damaged most Iranian nuclear sites, that there was an increased threat, given that some enriched uranium (which they had previously discounted) surely had survived and thus marked a new existential danger of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

Was Trump really going to “blow up”, “destroy” or “cripple” NATO, as our diplomatic experts insisted, when his first-term jawboning led from six to 23 nations meeting their 2% of gross domestic product defense spending promises?

Given two ongoing theater-wide wars, given Trump’s past correct predictions about the dangers of the Nord Stream II pipeline, given the vulnerability of an anemic NATO to Russian expansionism, and given that Russian leader Vladimir Putin did not invade during Trump’s first term, unlike the three presidencies before and after his own, why wouldn’t NATO agree to rearm to 5%, and appreciate Trump’s efforts both to bolster the capability of the alliance and the need to end the Ukraine war?

Why were our “scientific” pollsters so wrong in the last three presidential elections, and so at odds with the clearly discernible electoral shifts in the general electorate? Where were crackpot ideas like defund the police, transgender males competing in women’s sports, and open borders first born and nurtured?

Answer: the university, and higher education in general.

The list of wrongheaded, groupthink, and degreed expertise could be vastly expanded. We remember the “51 intelligence authorities” who swore the Hunter Biden laptop was “likely” cooked up by the Russians. Our best and brightest economists signed letters insisting that Biden’s multitrillion-dollar wasteful spending would not result in inflation spikes. Our global warming professors’ past predictions should have ensured that Americans were now boiling, with tidal waves destroying beachfront communities, including Barack Obama’s two beachfront multimillion-dollar estates.

Our legal eagles, after learning nothing from the bogus Mueller investigation and adolescent Steele dossier, but with impressive Ivy League degrees, pontificated for years that, by now, Trump would be in jail for life, given 91 “walls are closing in” and “bombshell” indictments.

So why are the degreed classes so wrong and yet so arrogantly never learn anything from their past flawed predictions?

One, our experts usually receive degrees from our supposedly marquee universities. But as we are now learning from long overdue autopsies of institutionalized campus racial bias, neo-racial segregation, 50%-plus price-gauging surcharges on federal grants, and rabid antisemitism, higher education in America has become anti-enlightenment. Universities now wage war against free-thinkers, free speech, free expression, and anything that freely questions the deductive groupthink of the diversity/equity/inclusion commissariat, and global warming orthodoxies.

The degreed expert classes emerge from universities whose faculties are 90% to 95% left-wing and whose administrations are overstaffed and terrified of their radical students. The wonder is not that the experts are incompetent and biased, but that there are a brave few who are not.

Two, Trump drove the degreed class insane to the degree it could no longer, even if it were willing and able (and it was not), offer empirical assessments of his policies. From his crude speech to his orange skin to his Queens accent to his MAGA base to his remarkable counterintuitive successes and to his disdain for the bicoastal elite, our embarrassing experts would rather be dead wrong and anti-Trump than correct in their assessments—if they in any small way helped Trump.

Three, universities are not just biased, but increasingly mediocre and ever more isolated from working Americans and their commonsense approaches to problem solving. Ph.D. programs in general are not as rigorous as they were even two decades ago. Grading, assessments, and evaluations in professional schools must increasingly weigh non-meritocratic criteria, given their admissions and hiring protocols are not based on disinterested evaluation of past work and expertise.

The vast endowments of elite campuses, the huge profit-making foreign enrollments, and the assured, steady stream of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid created a sense of fiscal unreality, moral smugness, unearned superiority, and ultimately, blindness to just how isolated and disliked the professoriate had become.

But the public has caught on that too many Ivy-League presidents were increasingly a mediocre, if not incompetent, bunch. Most university economists could not run a small business. The military academies did not always turn out the best generals and admirals. The most engaging biographers were not professors. And plumbers and electricians were usually more skilled in their trades than most journalist graduates were in their reporting.

Add it all up, and the reputation of our predictors, prognosticators, and experts has been radically devalued to the point of utter worthlessness.

Elon Musk’s ‘America Party’ Poses Threat to GOP

Elon Musk, as we all know now, has had a rupture. The friendship between himself and President Donald Trump has been ruptured. Now, they’re not just frenemies, but they’re kind of hostiles. And they’re going back and forth against each other.

This is a tragedy because we have the world’s richest and probably most creative man versus one of the most successful politicians of the 20th and 21st centuries, Donald Trump, and wonderful president so far. And they should be working together.

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But now Elon Musk, in his anger, has decided to create a new party called the “[America] Party.” And he outlined the platform. And whether it’s on regulation, taxes, tariffs, free speech, it’s very Republican. It’s not close at all to the Democratic platform. But it’s really—it’s almost identical to the Libertarian Party. And it’s designed, I’m afraid, to lose seats for the Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections and maybe even, if he were to be successful, in the 2028 presidential election.

A word of caution: All of us know the history of third-party movements, and it’s not very good. And I’ll get to that in a second. So it would be logical and probably wise to say that, well, this is crazy. Elon Musk is just nursing a grudge. He’s going to spend a lot of money. And the American party is going to go nowhere.

Remember the name “American party,” it’s kind of reminiscent—I don’t know if that was intended, of course, it wasn’t. But in 1968, George Wallace and Curtis LeMay—one of my heroes—the head of the B-29 program in World War II, ran as a third party on the American Independent Party. They added ”Independent,” but that was an American party, third party—they got about 8% of the vote. A lot of people think that ’68 vote, because he was a Democrat, hurt Hubert Humphrey more than it did Richard Nixon. It might have swung the election.

So it’s kind of an effort to hurt Donald Trump, both in the Congress and his successor in four years. But here’s the question that I have for Elon Musk, and that is, does he really believe that he can pull this off? Apparently, he does.

I would like to say, as I said, that it’s impossible that he can do it. But I would also have said 10 years ago it’s impossible that anybody can break into the big three auto companies. We had American Motors dropped out. Remember the DeLorean automobile, and I think that was the ’70s. That didn’t make it. He did. Tesla still has the highest stock value of the big three.

I would’ve thought no one could ever challenge NASA—that government monopoly. He did. I thought, wow, he paid so much for Twitter. How could he—you can’t just rebrand it ”X” and after paying three times its market value, be a force. Would it work? He did it. I don’t need to get into Starlink. So everything he’s done is successful. So people should be very careful about writing a third-party movement off.

But that being said, let’s just look at similar cases in history. In 1980, John Anderson, a moderate Republican, didn’t get along with Ronald Reagan. He said he was going to run as a third party. Remember that Reagan, until about the last three weeks of the campaign, was running behind Jimmy Carter. And everybody said John Anderson, if he takes 6% or 7%—which he did—of the vote, Reagan will lose. Reagan won. And remember, “There you go again, Jimmy Carter,” in that one very dramatic debate.

I mentioned the 1968 George Wallace campaign. I think that may have hurt Humphrey. And then, some of you were going to say, “Well, wait a minute, Victor. George Wallace, politically, was closer to Richard Nixon than he was Hubert Humphrey. So that’s a wash.”

If you look at the two third-party runs by Ross Perot—remember 1992? He really had a grudge against the Bushes. He ran and he got almost 19% of the vote. And if you look at the margin that Bill Clinton won by, about eight or nine points, that did hurt George H.W. Bush. I do think that most people felt that Ross Perot was more conservative than liberal and closer to the Bush position than he was the Clinton. And that third-party effort in ’92 spoiled the reelection bit of George H.W. Bush in large part.

He did it again in 1996. Everybody writes that second attempt off. He pulled out. He was all over the map. He still won almost 9% of the vote.

And if you add up all of Bob Dole’s votes, popular votes, and Ross Perot’s—and I think he was much closer to Bob Dole than he was to Bill Clinton, who was running for reelection—it’s almost equal to the Clinton vote, may or may not had a role.

Strom Thurmond, he won four states as a Dixiecrat in the 1948 election. And boy, everybody said that Harry Truman was running behind, well behind Thomas Dewey, and if Strom Thurmond bolted the party, they were done for. He took four states, won those electoral votes. Harry Truman still, in a comeback surprise, won by over four points. It had no effect.

There’s two times I think we could finish by saying third parties did really matter. And one was in 1912. Teddy Roosevelt, he had taken over after the assassination of William McKinley. He’d finished out a first full term. It was his second term. He wanted to run again. And his appointed successor—I mean, the person that he endorsed—William Howard Taft, he felt was not progressive enough. So he ran against him. And he had a third party—not the American party, but the Bull Moose Party.

And what happened? He won 27% of the vote. William Howard Taft only, I think he got six electoral—he only won six states. And he only won 23%. But here’s the kicker. If you had put Teddy Roosevelt’s votes with William Howard Taft, they would’ve creamed Woodrow Wilson, who was a hard-left progressive. So that was a spoiler election.

The other one was a famous one in 1860, when Stephen Douglas, who had those famous debates in the senatorial race in Illinois against Abraham Lincoln, was the Democratic nominee against Abraham Lincoln.

John Breckinridge broke off from the Democratic Party and had a Southern Democratic Party. And he took enough votes away from Stephen Douglas that got Abraham Lincoln elected president with—thank God—only 40% of the vote.

What I am getting at is there is no record ever that a third-party candidate can win the presidency or will make a fundamental change in the makeup of the Senate or the House.

I don’t think in the next midterm election there’s going to be [America] Party senators or representatives. However, they do, in some cases, affect elections. And for the most part, it’s unpredictable.

Nobody knows what the situation will be in 2028. But Elon Musk must know that it won’t be a constructive role, that he is more akin to Donald Trump and the conservative movement than he is the people who have persecuted him and tried to put him out of business.

So let’s hope that he looks at history, comes to his senses, and says, “For all my disagreements with Donald Trump, they pale in comparison to what has become of the Democratic Party.”

 

A Reminder of What the 4th of July Means

 

Today is the 4th of July, and I’d like to remind everybody what the 4th of July is.

It’s the formal date when the Second Continental Congress—about a year and four months after the shots heard around the world, the first shots of the Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord, were fired—the Second Continental Congress decided to formally disband the 13 colonies from Great Britain.

Now, two days earlier, Richard Henry Lee of the famous Lee family—he was the first cousin of Light Horse Harry Lee, the father of Robert E. Lee—had introduced an amendment called the Lee Resolution that formally was approved and said we are divorcing ourselves from Great Britain. But two days later, John Adams and mostly Thomas Jefferson decided they needed a more holistic document that would list 23 grievances, why it was necessary. So that version of Jefferson, and to a lesser extent, Adams, became the formal Declaration of Independence. And it was ratified on July 4th.

And we all know it from our high school days, or we should. The first famous line, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to disband …” And then, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” the first line of the second paragraph. So, it’s a foundational document.

And it doesn’t mean that men are God. When Jefferson wrote “that all men are created equal,” it doesn’t mean that they were equal at that time. But it gave an aspirational goal that, if you think about it, would put the Founders out of business, so to speak. Because if all men are created equal and you create this wonderful place, and you don’t have a blood and soil argument that only the people who were here and related to the Founders by race and ethnicity are Americans, but all men are equal, people will flock to the United States. And they might not look like the original Founders. But they would represent the original Founders. They would be the same type of people by ideas and values.

And so the idea of America was really established with the 4th of July. And we’re going to have the 250th anniversary a year from now that will celebrate the 250 years of the United States of America. Today, it’s the 249th anniversary of the 4th of July. This is not the Constitution that will be ratified in 1787 and will formally establish the government. Fourth of July declares that the 13 colonies who have been at war with Great Britain for about 14 or 15 months, and are operating on what we will call the Articles of Confederation, will then free themselves at the Battle of Yorktown. And then they will have a new type of government, which we now call the U.S. Constitution.

There’s a couple of other things to remember on the 4th of July. The British have a very different idea than we do when they look at the 23 grievances. They said, “Wow, you guys have it pretty easy. We’ve been as nice to you, or better, than the people in Canada. And we have all these Commonwealths and they’re not revolting.” And if you want to look at an interesting document, read “The Great Historian.” A good friend of mine, Andrew Roberts, has addressed all 23 grievances from the British point of view and said, “Ah, that was nothing. Oh, they were crybabies. You shouldn’t have done it.”

It was an interesting argument. But it has a phenomenal effect on history because if you look at Canada, if you look at New Zealand, if you look at the former South Africa, if you look at any of the British commonwealths, or for that matter, any country in Europe, they follow a parliamentary system. But the Founders who created the United States—and through this Revolutionary War learned about what was wrong with the British and what were the alternatives for consensual government, came up with this tripartite based on Montesquieu and the separation of powers. It goes back to the Spartan and Cretan constitution, antiquity. They came up with a unique government of checks and balances—Supreme Court, Congress, president. Executive, legislative, judicial. All equal branches. All checking each other and balancing each other, based on a system of federalism, that each state would have the right to be autonomous and free, as long as it did not contradict or conflict with the laws of the union itself. And they solve that problem of the Articles of Confederation.

And this system, 249 years ago, whether it persevered—I don’t know how it persevered in the Revolutionary War. The Americans didn’t have a lot of assets. The French helped a great deal. But then we had the War of 1812. The War of 1848. And of course, the American Civil War, where 700,000 Americans died trying to abolish slavery, and some trying to perpetuate it. And then, of course, we had the Spanish-American War. And then World War I, where 117,000 Americans died. Two million of them went across the Atlantic Ocean to save France and Britain from German precisionism or German autocracy.

And yet, less than 22 years later, the United States would be in another world war, and we would lose about 420,000. And then the Korean War, 1950 to 1953—35,000. Fifty-six thousand in Vietnam. 

So, it’s very valuable on this date, to realize that from time to time, from generation to generation, thousands of Americans have fought to protect the ideas of the American Revolution and the United States itself.

And on this July 4th, we need to give them a due. And remember what they did, who they were, and why they did it.

Thursday, July 03, 2025

The End of Patriotism?

 

America has a major problem: nearly half of Americans -- 42% -- don't believe in America. According to Gallup, just 58% of adults say they are either "extremely" or "somewhat" proud to be American. That number has been in steep decline for a decade: In 2004, that number was 91%, and was still 81% as of 2016. Then it began to tumble, and it hasn't recovered.

The trend isn't equivalent across the political spectrum. Republicans have always been far prouder of their country: their pride number has never dropped below 84% in 2022, and currently stands at 92%. The serious decline is located among independents, who have dropped from 76% in 2013 to 53% today, and Democrats, who plummeted from 80% to 36% during that same period. Furthermore, Americans' age correlates highly with levels of American pride: 83% of the Silent Generation venerates the country, as do 75% of Baby Boomers and 71% of Generation Xers -- but just 58% of Millennials and 41% of Generation Z do.

So, what precisely happened?

The answer is simple: Republicans started winning, and Democrats spiraled off. President Donald Trump's victory in 2016 sent Democrats spiraling into an anti-American black hole, with their pride in America dropping off a cliff during the first Trump term, recovering only moderately during Joe Biden's term (62% in 2021), and then plummeting again this year. Democrats embraced a new and extreme anti-American point of view, reflected most obviously in the elevation of figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; and now New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani.

These figures, emblems of a new wave in the Democratic Party, are disaffected with America in general. If the promise of Barack Obama is that the vessel of the Democratic Party could be used to bottle the fire and fervor of the revolutionary left, these radicals believe that all bottles must be shattered -- that the institutions of the United States must be exploded entirely. They see the reelection of Donald Trump as indicative of a deep rot at the heart of the American experiment, and wish to eviscerate the fundamental ideas of that experiment. They champion the supposed virtue of the Third World and the supposed evil of the United States; the supposed beauties of socialism and evils of capitalism; the supposed virtue of transgressive social values and the supposed evils of traditionalism. They believe that America's unique Constitution is a framework for oppression; they believe that rights are mere guises for despotic power, and that duties are cynically placed fetters upon their true selves. They are, as I describe in my upcoming book, "Lions and Scavengers," scavengers: They are all about tearing down, not about building something new.

They have taken over the Democratic Party -- and they are making extraordinary inroads among younger Americans. Ironically, that's due to the failure of the very institutions the political left hijacked and misused for decades: Democrats heavily regulated and taxed the free market and then blamed the free market for recession or inflation; Democrats hijacked our educational institutions to pay off their union cronies and indoctrinate young people in their mindset and then blamed capitalists for failing to pay off young people's debts; Democrats abused our scientific and governmental institutions and then suggested that Republican resistance was actually Biblical fundamentalism rearing its ugly head.

Meanwhile, political independents grow increasingly discouraged by our politics. They see Republicans shifting the deck chairs atop the Titanic of state as Democrats eagerly drill more holes in the hull -- and they are increasingly depressed. They are not wrong to be. But they are wrong to believe that they can or should chart a middle course between those who love America and her founding principles and those who despise them. We should all be proud of America, the greatest country in the history of the world, with all of its faults and flaws. And we should work to correct those faults and flaws rather than seeking its overthrow, or despairing and throwing up our hands.

The Decline and Fall of Our So-Called Degreed Experts

 

The first six months of the Trump administration have not been kind to the experts and the degree-holding classes.

Almost daily during the tariff hysterias of March, we were told by university economists and most of the PhDs employed in investment and finance that the U.S. was headed toward a downward, if not recessionary, spiral.

Most economists lectured that trade deficits did not really matter. Or they insisted that the cures to reduce them were worse than the $1.1 trillion deficit itself.

They reminded us that free, rather than fair, trade alone ensured prosperity.

So, the result of Trump's foolhardy tariff talk would be an impending recession. America would soon suffer rising joblessness, inflation--or rather a return to stagflation--and likely little, if any, increase in tariff revenue as trade volume declined.

Instead, recent data show increases in tariff revenue. Personal real income and savings were up. Job creation exceeded prognoses. There was no surge in inflation. The supposedly "crashed" stock market reached historic highs.

Common-sense Americans might not have been surprised. The prior stock market frenzy was predicated on what was, in theory, supposed to have happened rather than what was likely to occur. After all, if tariffs were so toxic and surpluses irrelevant, why did our affluent European and Asian trading rivals insist on both surpluses and protective tariffs?

Most Americans recalled that the mere threat of tariffs and Trump's jawboning had led to several trillion dollars in promised foreign investment and at least some plans to relocate manufacturing and assembly back to the United States. Would that change in direction not lead to business optimism and eventually more jobs? Would countries purposely running up huge surpluses through asymmetrical trade practices not have far more to lose in negotiations than those suffering gargantuan deficits?

Were Trump's art-of-the-deal threats of prohibitive tariffs not mere starting points in negotiations that would eventually lead to likely agreements more favorable to the U.S. than in the past and moderate rather than punitive tariffs?

Would not the value of the huge American consumer market mean that our trade partners, who were racking up substantial surpluses, would agree they could afford modest tariffs and trim their substantial profit margins rather than suicidally price themselves out of a lucrative market entirely?

Economists and bureaucrats were equally wrong on the border.

We were told for four years that only "comprehensive immigration reform" would stop illegal immigration. In fact, most Americans differed. They knew firsthand that we had more than enough immigration laws, but had elected as President Joe Biden, who deliberately destroyed borders and had no intention of enforcing existing laws.

When Trump promised that he would ensure that, instead of 10,000 foreign nationals entering illegally each day, within a month, no one would, our experts scoffed. But if the border patrol went from ignoring or even aiding illegal immigrants to stopping them right at the border, why would such a prediction be wrong?

Those favoring a reduction in illegal immigration and deportations also argued that crime would fall, and citizen job opportunities would increase, given an estimated 500,000 aliens with criminal records had entered illegally during the Biden administration, while millions of other illegal aliens were working off the books, for cash, and often at reduced wages.

Indeed, once the border was closed tightly, hundreds of thousands were returned to their country, and employers began turning to U.S. citizens. Job opportunities did increase. Crime did go down. Legal-only immigration regained its preferred status over illegal entry.

Trump talked of trying voluntary deportation--again to wide ridicule from immigration "experts." But why would not a million illegal aliens wish to return home "voluntarily"-- if they were given free flights, a $1,000 bonus, and, most importantly, a chance later to reapply for legal entry once they arrived home?

Many of our national security experts warned that taking out Iran's nuclear sites was a fool's errand. It would supposedly unleash a Middle East tsunami of instability. It would cause a wave of terrorism. It would send oil prices skyrocketing. It would not work, ensuring Iran would soon reply with nuclear weapons.

In fact, oil prices decreased after the American bombing. A twenty-five-minute entrance into Iranian airspace and bombing led to a ceasefire, not a conflagration.

As for a big power standoff, World War III, and 30,000 dead, common sense asked why China would wish the Strait of Hormuz to close, given that it imports half of all Middle Eastern oil produced?

Why would Russia--bogged down in Ukraine and suffering nearly a million casualties--wish to mix it up in Iran, after ignominiously fleeing Syria and the fall of its Assad clients?

Russia usually thinks of Russia, period. It does not lament when tensions elsewhere are expected to spike oil prices. Why would Russia resupply Iran's destroyed Russian-made anti-aircraft systems, when it was desperate to ward off Ukrainian air attacks on its homeland, and Iran would likely again lose any imported replacements?

As for waves of terror, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis have suffered enormous losses from Israel. Their leadership has been decapitated; their streams of Iranian money have been mostly truncated. Why would they rush to Iran's side to war with Israel, when Iran did not come to their aid when they were battling and losing to the Israelis?

Has a theater-wide war really ever started when one side entered and left enemy territory in 25 minutes, suffering no casualties and likely killing few of the enemy?

As far as the extent of damage to Iran's nuclear infrastructure, why should we believe our expert pundit class?

Prior to the American and Israeli bombing, many of them warned that Iran was not on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon, and therefore, there was little need for any such preemptive action.

Then, post facto, the same experts flipped. Now they claimed, after the bombing that severely damaged most Iranian nuclear sites, that there was an increased threat, given that some enriched uranium (which they had previously discounted) surely had survived and thus marked a new existential danger of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

Was Trump really going to "blow up", "destroy" or "cripple" NATO, as our diplomatic experts insisted, when his first-term jawboning led from six to twenty-three nations meeting their two percent of GDP defense spending promises?

Given two ongoing theater-wide wars, given Trump's past correct predictions about the dangers of the Nord Stream II pipeline, given the vulnerability of an anemic NATO to Russian expansionism, and given that Russian leader Vladimir Putin did not invade during Trump's first term, unlike the three presidencies before and after his own, why wouldn't NATO agree to rearm to five percent, and appreciate Trump's efforts both to bolster the capability of the alliance and the need to end the Ukraine war?

Why were our "scientific" pollsters so wrong in the last three presidential elections, and so at odds with the clearly discernible electoral shifts in the general electorate? Where were crackpot ideas like defund the police, transgender males competing in women's sports, and open borders first born and nurtured?

Answer: the university, and higher education in general.

The list of wrongheaded, groupthink, and degreed expertise could be vastly expanded. We remember the "51 intelligence authorities" who swore the Hunter Biden laptop was "likely" cooked up by the Russians. Our best and brightest economists signed letters insisting that Biden's multitrillion-dollar wasteful spending would not result in inflation spikes. Our global warming professors' past predictions should have ensured that Americans were now boiling, with tidal waves destroying beachfront communities, including Barack Obama's two beachfront multimillion-dollar estates.

Our legal eagles, after learning nothing from the bogus Mueller investigation and adolescent Steele dossier, but with impressive Ivy League degrees, pontificated for years that, by now, Trump would be in jail for life, given 91 "walls are closing in" and "bombshell" indictments.

So why are the degreed classes so wrong and yet so arrogantly never learn anything from their past flawed predictions?

One, our experts usually receive degrees from our supposedly marquee universities. But as we are now learning from long overdue autopsies of institutionalized campus racial bias, neo-racial segregation, 50-percent-plus price-gauging surcharges on federal grants, and rabid antisemitism, higher education in America has become anti-Enlightenment. Universities now wage war against free-thinkers, free speech, free expression, and anything that freely questions the deductive groupthink of the diversity/equity/inclusion commissariat, and global warming orthodoxies.

The degreed expert classes emerge from universities whose faculties are 90-95 percent left-wing and whose administrations are overstaffed and terrified of their radical students. The wonder is not that the experts are incompetent and biased, but that there are a brave few who are not.

Two, Trump drove the degreed class insane to the degree it could no longer, even if it were willing and able (and it was not), offer empirical assessments of his policies. From his crude speech to his orange skin to his Queens accent to his MAGA base to his remarkable counterintuitive successes and to his disdain for the bicoastal elite, our embarrassing experts would rather be dead wrong and anti-Trump than correct in their assessments -- if they in any small way helped Trump.

Three, universities are not just biased, but increasingly mediocre and ever more isolated from working Americans and their commonsense approaches to problem solving. PhD programs in general are not as rigorous as they were even two decades ago. Grading, assessments, and evaluations in professional schools must increasingly weigh non-meritocratic criteria, given their admissions and hiring protocols are not based on disinterested evaluation of past work and expertise.

The vast endowments of elite campuses, the huge profit-making foreign enrollments, and the assured, steady stream of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid created a sense of fiscal unreality, moral smugness, unearned superiority, and ultimately, blindness to just how isolated and disliked the professoriate had become.

But the public has caught on that too many Ivy-League presidents were increasingly a mediocre, if not incompetent, bunch. Most university economists could not run a small business. The military academies did not always turn out the best generals and admirals. The most engaging biographers were not professors. And plumbers and electricians were usually more skilled in their trades than most journalist graduates were in their reporting.

Add it all up, and the reputation of our predictors, prognosticators, and experts has been radically devalued to the point of utter worthlessness.

128 Democrats Reject Latest Trump Impeachment—Here’s the Major Reason Why

 

The Democrats, under kind of a volatile and unhinged Rep. Al Green, introduced articles of impeachment in an effort to impeach President Donald Trump for a third time.

Remember, there were two successful impeachments. But of course, they failed to get a conviction in the Senate during Trump’s first term.

And this one was strange because 128 Democrats of the House caucus voted against it. And so, Reps. Al Green and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and all of these people that were affiliates for “the squad” and the radical fringe couldn’t even get a majority of Democrats.

And you know why that was? Think about it for a reason. One of them was that Sen. Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who’s not speaker but she still has the influence on Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the speaker who voted against the resolution, said, “Wait a minute. You got to remember that if we do this, we’re going to get killed by clips every day during the midterms.”

And those clips are going to show President Barack Obama, in the single year 2016, he dropped 26,000 bombs. And it wasn’t just in Syria. It wasn’t just in Iraq. It wasn’t just in Afghanistan. He dropped them in Libya. He dropped them in Somalia. He dropped them in Yemen.

Twenty-six thousand bombs. And they all had one thing in common. He didn’t think he had to go to the Congress to ask permission. Why did he think that? I don’t think he was legally required to. But there was a political reason.

At that time, in 2016, he had no majority in the House. He was down over 40 seats. And he had no majority in the Senate. And had he gone and said, “I’m the Mad Bomber. And I’ve been bombing Libya from 2011 to 2016 without your approval. And I want to keep doing it. I’ve dropped 26,000 bombs this year. I want to keep bombing,” they would’ve said, “No. It’s partisan, maybe.”

And so, Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries knew that that was hypocritical.

On the last day—as I said earlier—the last day that Barack Obama was in office, he knew that Trump was coming in. And he knew that he had to go out with a bang. So, he took the B-2 bombers, probably some of the same pilots, and he ordered them to take off from Missouri. And they flew 5,000 miles longer to Libya. And they bombed supposed terrorist elements of this Libya chaotic mess that he had created by bombing it earlier in 2011. Nobody in the House, on the Democratic side, said a thing.

So this opposition is really hurting the Democrats because it’s so hypocritical. But more importantly, it’s an act of omission.

You want to say to them: “Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, AOC, what’s the status of homeless people in your district? What do you want to do with illegal immigrants? You brought them in, 12 million of them. And they’re here illegally. Why would you have sanctuary cities that protect even the criminal element? Why would you not want to deport them when 54% of the American people do?”

In other words, they’re not paying any attention to what people want: affordable housing, affordable gas, affordable energy, safe streets, secure borders, deterrent foreign policy. None of that.

All they’re doing is saying, “If Donald Trump does something, we are going to be irate. We’re going to use pornography. We’re going to use smuddy language. And we’re going to oppose him. And now, we’re going to impeach him.”

And some people in that party said, “This is so unhinged. It’s so contradictory. It’s so paradoxical. It’s so hypocritical. It’s just fodder for campaign messages in every purple House race in two years. Don’t do it.”

So, it was a surprise.

And as far as people on the Right, to finish, we were told that 30,000 people were going to die, from some of our close friends in the MAGA group. We were told this was going to be World War III. And then you wanted to say to yourself: Well, who would do that? Who would do that? Who would start World War III? Russia? Russia’s bogged down in a theater-wide war. It’s lost a million dead, wounded. It’s not going to do anything.

Well, China? China. China. China’s got about 500 or 800 nuclear weapons. We have about 6,000 or 7,000 that could be deliverable very quickly. But more importantly, China’s oil comes outta the Strait of Hormuz. They don’t want to go in there. They don’t want to send anything to Iran.

And finally, our people who impeached Donald Trump should remember a great truth. One of the subtexts of this entire war—I should say two—Iran was a complete paper tiger. It had never any military ability. It had almost lost the war against Saddam Hussein from ’80 to ’88. It sued for peace. Its only method of hurting people was through third-party terrorists. It had no military capability to speak of. And yet, it scared seven or eight presidents. That was No. 1.

And finally, Iran is the most hated country in the world—the theocracy is. So, when we had this strike and the aftermath, the only people who were voicing support were people like North Korea, Venezuela. And that’s about it. Anybody else basically said, “Well, I don’t like the United States. And I don’t like Europe. But these people are crazy. And I do not want them to get a bomb.”

So, they have no support. And they weren’t militarily capable. And the only people who failed to see that—and indirectly, by this impeachment, were trying to help Iran—were whom? Our own Democratic Party—at least a minority of them.

Seventy-nine of our Democratic colleagues in the House wanted to embarrass Donald Trump and line up on the side with a few lunatic regimes that did not even include Russia and China and others of that ilk.

In the End, Everyone Hated the Iranian Theocracy

It is hard even to digest the incredible train of events of the last few days in the Middle East.

Iran had been reduced to an anemic, performance-art missile attack on our base in Qatar—the last Parthian shot from a terrified regime, desperate for an out—and a ceasefire.

Iran would have been better off not launching such a ceremonial but ultimately humiliating proof of impotence.

Even worse for the theocracy, Iran’s temporary reprieve came from the now magnanimous but still hated U.S. President Donald Trump.

So ends the creepy mystique of the supposedly indomitable terror state of Iran, the bane of the last seven American presidents over half a century.

For Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, it was hard to swallow that U.S. bombers got their permission to fly into Iranian airspace from the Israeli air force.

A good simile is that Trump put a pot of water on the stove, told Iran to jump in, put the lid over them, then smiled, turned up the heat—and will now let them stew.

As postbellum realities now simmer in Iran, the theocracy is left explaining the inexplicable to its humiliated military and shocked but soon-to-be-furious populace. All the regime’s blood-curdling rhetoric, apocalyptic threats against Israel, goose-stepping thugs, and shiny new missiles ended in less than nothing.

A trillion dollars and five decades’ worth of missiles and centrifuges are now up in smoke. That money might have otherwise saved Iranians from the impoverishment of the last 50 years.

How about the little Satan Israel, to which Iran for nearly 50 years promised extinction?

Israel had destroyed Iran’s expeditionary terrorists, Iran’s defenses, its nuclear viability, and the absurd mythology of Iranian military competence. And worse, Israel showed it could repeat all that destruction when and if necessary.

So, the most hated regime in the world crawled into the boiling pot because it looked around in vain for someone to void Trump’s ultimatum for a cease and desist.

But there were no last-minute saviors to rescue them.

The dreaded decades-long Iranian nuclear threat?

It is either gone for now, or if it resurfaces, it will be again far easier to vaporize at will than to rebuild a lost trillion-dollar investment.

Russia? Its former Barack Obama-John Kerry re-invitation back into the Middle East lasted only a decade.

It will now cut its losses like it did with the vanished Assad kleptocracy in Syria. Putin exits the Middle East not entirely displeased that his lunatic Iranian client did not get a bomb—but did get its just desserts. A tense Middle East tends to prop up Russian export oil prices.

Did China come to the mullahs’ aid?

No, they were not shy about ordering their Iranian lackey to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, through which 50% of Chinese-purchased oil passes.

For Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the Iranians are treated as little more than Uyghurs with oil.

The world decided that it was tired of a half-century of crybully terrorism, empty nuke threats, mindless mobs screaming scripted banalities, cowardly murdering, and medieval theocrats threatening the general peace.

So, the world turned its back on Iran. And with a wink and nod, it let Israel and the U.S. do what they must.

As for Iran’s terrorist appendages, Hezbollah’s commanders are either dead, maimed, or in hiding.

Hamas has fled into a subterranean labyrinth.

The last Assad thug fled to Russia.

The crazy Houthis? They are reconsidering the idea of launching their last missile at the cost of their last port or power grid.

The anti-Trump Democrats and loony left?

Their talk of impeaching Trump for the supposedly “illegal” 35-minute, one-off strike will fade.

The Trump mission equaled less than one day of Obama’s predator drone strikes, targeted killings, or his five-year chaotic bombing in Libya.

Is the incoherent left furious that there is no more Iranian nuclear threat?

Mad that no Americans were killed last Saturday night?

Furious America likely killed few if any Iranians.

Or is it raging because Trump ignored Iran’s last-gasp attack and instead orchestrated a cease-fire?

Of course, in the Middle East, there is never a real end to anything.

We may see freelancing terrorists try to fill the vacuum of Iran’s decline. Or Iran itself may try to let loose a terrorist cell. It may later boast it has hidden away some enriched uranium.

But no matter.

The dimensions of this new Middle East will persist.

The new reality is that either Israel or the U.S. —if they keep their earned confidence within proper limits—can now ensure a non-nuclear Iran by easily blowing up its costly nuclear program as often as it is rebuilt.

Thursday, June 26, 2025

And With That Development, the GOP Should Fire the Dem Senate Parliamentarian

 

President Trump’s reconciliation package is on life support. Almost every major portion of the bill has undergone more surgeries than a transgender person at this point, and it’s due to the Democrat Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough. She has applied the Byrd rule, which prevents ‘extraneous’ provisions from being logrolled during this process. These provisions now require a 60-vote threshold instead of a simple majority.  

The portion that reins in rogue federal judges was sliced off, and now welfare reforms tweaks got the hatchet treatment as well. Making the Trump tax cuts permanent was also a casualty of this Democrat leech, along with immigration enforcement measures. In short, this unelected Democrat is trying to usurp the will of the people, who voted for Trump and these legislators to enact these three key legislative goals. 

And speaking of transgender surgeries, this woman took a tomahawk to the tweaks we want for Medicaid. As PBS Newshour’s Lisa DeJardins noted, the ban on transgender care in Medicaid is out, along with these portions: 

It Doesn’t Matter If Iran Can Build a Bomb. It Matters If America Has the Guts to Bomb It, Again.

 

We’re now in the aftermath of the Saturday night, June 21st American strike to take out the three enrichment plants that were necessary for Iran’s acquisition of a bomb. And we’ve had now four or five days of reaction to it. And it’s kind of been mixed. And I’d like to review, very quickly, the validity of the criticisms of the strike and what the strike was really about.

There’s a lot of people on the American Left, in the media—there was a leak from the Pentagon as well—saying that this strike really didn’t achieve its aim of destroying, entirely, these three enrichment facilities. But of course, we don’t know that. We wouldn’t trust the Iranians, who say that it didn’t harm them. Of course, they’re gonna say that.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency that watches this says that it was very successful. I agree with it. The military says it was very successful. And the point being is it doesn’t really matter to what degree—it’s 90% destroyed, 80% destroyed, 100% destroyed—it’s been severely damaged. And it doesn’t really matter for this reason: Iran will have to rebuild them.

There’s been all sorts of rebuilding costs out there in the public domain: $100 billion, $200 billion, $400 billion, $500 billion, to go down 500 feet, 300 feet, 200 feet in a new mountain cavern. And remember, they would be reacting to a B-2 strike. And they would look at the damage and they said, “We’d have to go even lower, which means we’re gonna have to spend more money.”

But here’s the interesting equation. Add the money that Iran, still subject to oil embargoes, with an economy that its gross domestic product has collapsed by 45% over the last two or three years, is going to come up with a wherewithal and make that argument to the people: “Hey, everybody, you’re going to miss now not just one paycheck, but two paychecks every three months because we have to rebuild the nuclear facilities that were completely demolished. And we have to spend more money.”

The Iranian in the street would say: “And then what? They’re gonna be destroyed again. How can you stop them? You have no air defenses. The Russians don’t want to give us air defenses. The Chinese will not give us air defenses. Why would they want to give us air defenses? They go up in smoke. They only humiliate their own equipment. It’s you—you, the military; you, the theocracy—that’s the problem.”

And so, if you boil that down, ask yourself, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, is it more—is it cheaper for Iran to go back and start from scratch and build these mountainous subterranean facilities or is it cheaper for the United States to send another seven or 10 or 12 B-2 bombers and send them into airspace for about 35 minutes and take them out? That’s what they can do.

But there is a caveat. There is a warning here. There’s only one limit on our ability to take out the next generation, should it appear, of uranium enrichment. And that problem is not in Iran. It’s not in Hezbollah. It’s not with Hamas. It’s with Washington and Tel Aviv.

Will the United States government have the courage and have the competency and understand the geostrategic complications and implications and dangers of Iran having another bomb? And what I mean by that is, if you have another Obama administration or if you have another Biden administration, will they act when they see another uranium facility being developed? Will you have another Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel?

So, what am I getting at? The only worry that we all have in the West is that Iran, at some future date, will look at the political composition in Washington and Tel Aviv and say, “We’ve seen this bunch before. So, pedal to the metal. Let’s hurry up and enrich because they will not stop it.”

But even then it will take a huge investment, a huge investment that has to be sold to a population that has been deprived of trillions of dollars of internal development, that has been diverted to Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the Assads that are all up in smoke, and then they will have to hear an argument to re-arm all of those people for terrorist deterrence, and then rebuild everything for nuclear deterrence, and hope there’s somebody not like Netanyahu and President Donald Trump in Washington.

And for now, those are pretty good odds that the strike is successful and will be in the near future.

Unhinged Rhetoric Reveals Left’s Desperation

 

After the June 21st, Saturday night bombing of the nuclear facilities in Iran, the Left has kind of gone crazy.

I’ve mentioned in earlier videos their inconsistency, where they now want to invoke the War Powers Act and resolution that Congress must approve these interventions. Of course, they never did that during either the Clinton or Obama administrations who bombed regularly and frequently, and much more frequently than President Donald Trump, without any worry about getting a resolution.

But it opens a larger issue up and that is, the Left knows that they are not polling well. They know that the party’s base is controlling their narrative, and they know that that narrative supports issues from transgenderism to an open border, to lax enforcement of criminal statutes, to something like Kabul abroad that has no public support.

And they’re angry. And this anger is coming from the base of the party. And the base of the party are the green radicals, the Green New Deal people. They’re the diversity, equity, inclusion, black caucus people. They’re the trans people. They’re the Antifa people. And it’s manifesting itself in a way we’ve never really seen before.

Just to give you a few examples:

Ilhan Omar, the controversial representative from Minnesota, sounded off the other day. And she said that the United States is basically worse than Somalia—where she came from, I guess as a preteen or 12 or 13 years old—and it’s worse than the dictatorship in Somalia.

If she really believes that, of course, the question is begged to be asked, why did you come here? Why don’t you go back? Why are a million people a year, under the Biden administration, committing illegality—breaking the law—to get in here? Why don’t a million people go back to Mexico? Or why don’t we all go back to our countries of origin? It made no sense.

Then we had “The View” with Whoopi Goldberg. And she weighed in and said that black people today—remember, this is a multimillionaire person who’s making millions of dollars for sitting there and sounding off like this—black people have it worse than people who have it in Iran today.

And if you look at the average black income of women, it is approaching normality and it’s parity with their white counterparts. In some cases, of the white working class, it’s higher.

I don’t know what she’s talking about. It’s completely absurd. Why would anybody say that? Why would you say that when black people are doing better than ever and have more of a combined gross national product than, probably, black people in the entire world put together? Why would she say something like that?

Then we had Jasmine Crockett, the controversial Texas representative. She went off on the last election and said that half of the people that voted for Trump were mentally ill—half the country that voted for Trump. She was basically going down a racist rant.

Then she said that people only voted against former Vice President Kamala Harris not because of her word salads, not because of her incompetence, not because she couldn’t give interviews, not because she had to completely flip from her former left-wing positions, at least for 90 days, but because they voted for an old white man.

Can you imagine somebody on the Right saying the only reason people voted for Kamala Harris is they just wanted to vote for a middle-aged black woman? That would end their career.

And then, of course, we had Mr. Padilla, Alex Padilla, he’s our senator. And as I mentioned earlier, he crashed a press conference by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary. He barged in and he was screaming and yelling and he had no identification. He wanted to do something like, I guess, he wanted to top Sen. Cory Booker’s Spartacus, 25-hour filibuster to nowhere.

But he was arrested because people didn’t know who he was. I think he was angrier that he’s a senator and nobody, even in a state, knows that he’s a senator from California.

But then, he started sounding off and said, “Well, I’m not against deporting criminals.” And I just said, “Full stop, you are. Because you were one of the sponsors of sanctuary cities in your prior manifestation as a California official. And the whole purpose of a sanctuary city is not to turn over criminals to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So, you have no credibility.”

And finally, we end with California Gov. Gavin Newsom. He had a little flirtation with moderation. He had a podcast—I guess it’s defunct now, but he tried to bring on people like Charlie Kirk, sound reasonable, say that he agreed with Donald Trump that biological men shouldn’t compete in women’s sports.

And then somebody tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Gavin, your party is crazy. They’re left-wing lunatics. You would never be nominated. You’re polling 4%. How are you going to get the nomination? So, the correct position, Gavin, is to sound crazy like they are. And crazier, even, than Sens. Bernie [Sanders] or Elizabeth Warren, ‘the squad,’ or Crockett. And then you can move back and do the podcast, once you’re nominated.”

So, as a result, Gavin Newsom is doing his little body movement. He’s challenging Trump to come out here, mano a mano. He said that Vice President JD Vance is a liar, he wants to debate him.

And during the riots, he did a French Laundry 2.0. He was up in Napa, where he seems to feel most comfortable, doing a wine tasting while people were, I don’t know, destroying federal property, attacking the police, setting cars on fire, looting. And after, he said that this didn’t exist and that Donald Trump had overreacted and prompted this by nationalizing the California Guard.

So, he’s completely melded down. This is beside the point that he doesn’t address, at all, our high taxes, the lack of available water, our electricity rates, the most expensive gas in the United States, the disaster in Pacific Palisades and the inability to re-burn, what caused it, etc., etc., etc.

So, you add it all up and every once in a while you see James Carville and he’s trying to remark on how crazy they are but in the mode of his criticism, he’s crazy because he says things that are even crazier.

So, whatever Donald Trump has done to them—and maybe that will be his lasting legacy—he had the ability to expose what used to be Democrats as absolutely unhinged and nihilistic. And I don’t think anybody wants any part of them.

How the Transgender Movement Turned the Left Against Women

 

One is that President Donald Trump had issued an executive order suggesting or maybe threatening K-12 sports programs—and indeed, college and higher education as well—that if they allowed biological men to compete in women’s sports, then he was going to consider cutting off federal funds for that.

But at the same time he did it, the number of transgendered women—that is biological men who have transitioned to supposedly women—has increased and soared in women’s sports.

So, here on the West Coast, a trans athlete dominated the state high school track and field competitions, winning three or four main events. The same thing happened in Oregon. The same thing had happened in Washington. The same thing is happening in Minneapolis with girls baseball in the finals.

The point is it’s usually a phenomenon in blue states and in particular, blue cities. And Donald Trump’s executive orders are going the way of sanctuary cities. People are just ignoring them because they feel that he wouldn’t dare cut off federal funds because it would shut down the whole school.

But let’s get some background on this whole transgendered sports phenomenon. And maybe there’s five or six things we should keep in mind.

No. 1: We know a lot about gender dysphoria. There’s a long history of sex research about people whose psychological or hormonal makeup does not match their physical characteristics. But here’s the key: They’re very rare.

Until the transgendered—I don’t know what we would call it—phenomenon in the last 10 years, we accepted classical epidemiological studies that showed there were about five people who suffered from genuine transgendered phenomenon per 100,000 people: 0.005%. If you do the math, in a country of about 340 million people, we’re talking maybe 20,000, maybe 0.005%, or five per 100,000, maybe 10.

But you see the Pew poll and other polling ask students on campus, they ask the general public and they say there may be 20 million people. But there has been no history of that once the science of epidemiology started, which suggests it might be more of a trendy phenomenon than actual biological or scientific matter.

The second thing to remember is this is not new.

As a classicist, I can tell you that there are documented fables, myths, poems, histories about people who feel they were in the wrong bodies. The most famous is Catullus Poem 63, about a young man who performs transsexual surgery on himself in a fit of mania in honor of the god—the sexually ambivalent god—Cybele and castrates himself and is very unhappy when he wakes up out of the frenzy.

We have this novelist Petronius’ “Satyricon,” where a lot of men are cross-dressers—which is a different phenomenon—but transvestism. And we have—I think there’s a fable in “Phaedrus” about men who change into women. And we got to remember the god Hermaphroditus that comes from Hermes and Aphrodite—the combination of a male and female god. And there’s many fables about that.

So, it’s an ancient phenomenon.

Here’s another thing to remember. Does anybody know—and I’m asking a genuine question—does anybody know of a female athlete who decided that she was in the wrong body and she transitioned to maleness, manliness, and she won a major event? I know of none.

So, when we talk about transgendered sports, we’re talking about one phenomenon. We’re talking about men.

And if anybody—let me ask a corollary question as I pause here. Does anybody know a famous, well-known, but especially spectacular male athlete that transitioned? I don’t. It’s usually men that were not very successful, at least in the elite of their division or their field, who transition to feminism. And then they become very, very successful.

And this is very important because we are told that once you transition, you are a genuine new sex. That your prior muscular skeleton frame doesn’t really matter, given your hormonal treatment. But it does. Because when we’re talking about transgenderism in sports, we’re not talking about women who become men. And because they don’t succeed in that sport, that reminds us that they’re not fully men. Or if they were, they could just declare their new gender and compete competitively.

And by the same token, 100% of what the controversy is about are men who have bigger frames, more muscles who transition and dominate women’s sports in a way they did not dominate male sports. In other words, they’re taking.

Final thoughts: It has so many political ramifications. One is the party of the left, the Democratic Party, has embraced this 20-80 political issue—20% to 30% tops support this, of the American people. And yet, they’re going down the road of a very unpopular development and supporting transgendered women who are decimating and destroying female sports.

The second thing is it’s counterintuitive. The Left was supposed to be for gender parity. And that meant—that was defined by giving money and attention and resources to women so that their sports would be equivalent to male sports. And now we’re kind of reactionary. We flipped it upside down, where males go around the back, take over women’s sports, and essentially, destroy it. And yet that is popular among many on the left.

And then there’s a final political corollary. We were also told by some radical feminists—especially as it applies to women in combat units—that women could do anything that men could do. A small percentage can, physically. But the vast majority—in terms of muscularity, size, frame, endurance, lung capacity—cannot.

So it kind of, in a weird way, also affects that issue that women cannot really compete with men on the battlefield—at least in tasks that require physicality and muscularity.

Let’s just end the discussion with a brief summation.

Transgenderism is an old phenomenon. It was very, very rare, a very small percentage of the population. Sometime around 2005 to 2015, it exploded as a civil rights issue. And the numbers have been vastly inflated. It’s been trendy among young people on campus. But it has almost destroyed female sports in a way that’s ironic, tragically ironic, because the Left once was a protector and the champion of female sports and now it’s de facto, it’s destroyer.

Israel Dismantles Iran’s Defenses, but Will It Be Enough?

 

We are at a historic time in the Middle East. Never in our lifetimes have we been closer to a complete revolutionary fervor that gives promise of normalcy for the Middle East. And never have we been in more danger of seeing the entire region blow up.

What am I referring to? The war right now between Iran and Israel.

It is surreal. If we had this conversation five years ago and I said to you, the Iranian nation—that is huge compared to Israel, 10 times the population—the Iranian nation has lost all control of the Houthi terrorists and they are themselves neutered. Their surrogates in the West Bank, Gaza are neutered. They’re gone, Hamas as a fighting force. The formidable, the terrifying Hezbollah cadres, they’re inert.

There is no more Syria—the Assad dynasty, the pro-Iranian Syria—it’s in chaos. But whatever the chaos is, it seems to be anti-Iranian. There is no Shia Crescent, starting with Tehran, all the way to the Mediterranean. Lebanon is free of Iranian influence. So is Syria. Gaza, de facto, will be.

There is no Russian presence. It’s not a patron. It is not a protector. It’s not a power in the Middle East. It’s tied down in Ukraine.

And Iran itself, the formidable powerhouse of the Middle East that evoked terror all over, has no defenses.

And now we’ve seen five days of war, in which the Israelis have systematically dismantled all of the Iranian missile defenses. They have air defenses. They have dismantled the terrorist hierarchy. They have dismantled the people who are responsible for the nuclear program.

We’re down to a single critical issue. They have suffered casualties. The Iranians have sent over 400 ballistic missiles and drones into Israel. And 90% are stopped but that 10% gets through.

But here’s the crux. All of this chaos and all of this war will be for naught if Iran’s theocracy emerges intact from this war and its nuclear infrastructure can either be quickly rebuilt or there are elements of it that have been missed and maybe there is enough fissile material—if not already, soon—to make another bomb.

So, here we are at the critical point.

Should Israel continue, does it have the ability to nullify the entire nuclear program, which was the object of this war? Or must it rely on the bunker-buster devices, bombs of the United States?

And if the United States should try to go into these key nuclear facilities and blow them up—with the ordinance and the aircraft that it has, which Israel lacks—will it be fighting an optional Middle East war? Of which the MAGA doctrine says: No more forever wars. No more intervention in the Middle East. No more ground troops.

Or can President Donald Trump say: “I’m not an isolationist. I’m a Jacksonian. You should have known that when I took out Qasem Soleimani in my first term, when I took out Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, when I took out the Wagner Group. I don’t like to intervene. But when people threaten the United States and our deterrence as a matter of conjecture, I want to ensure that they understand the repercussions.”

And so, is there a fight between the isolationists and the Jacksonians or is it just a minor group of people on the right who don’t want any action at all?

And we don’t know the answer yet. But if this war should end with the Iranian regime intact and the elements of its nuclear program recoverable, then, in some ways, it will be all for naught. And people will make the necessary adjustments in the Middle East. And it won’t be necessarily, well, Iran is still very weak. They’ve lost all their terrorist surrogates. They have no air defenses. They’ve lost their media. They’ve lost their commanding—it will be more like, my gosh, Iran survived everything that Israel and, by association, the United States threw at it. It’s indestructible.

And so, we’re at a critical cusp. It’s, do you risk more danger by taking out and eliminating the nuclear threat for good and, by association, humiliate the theocracy to the point it can be overthrown, or do you play it safe and have negotiations and allow the regime and the remnants to survive?

I don’t like forever wars. I don’t like preemptive wars. I do not like the United States intervening anywhere in that godforsaken area. But if the war ends with the regime intact and a recoverable nuclear program, it won’t just be back to square one, it will be a disaster.

So, we’ll see what happens. And hold on, everybody. I think we’re going to see things that we haven’t seen in a lifetime in the Middle East. And it could turn out very bad, but it could also turn out to be quite revolutionary and remake the map of the entire region.

The ‘Donald Trump Is Evil’ Routine Isn’t Going to Cut It Anymore

 

We’re in very troubled and chaotic times. We’ve got a theater-wide war in the Middle East with the Iranian theocracy on the ropes. We’ve had mass “No Kings” demonstrations in the United States. And we’ve had kind of a hysterical reaction to President Donald Trump’s deportation warrants.

But here’s my point. We’re not hearing alternative proposals from the opposition party. What I mean is, if you do not want the 12 million who entered the United States illegally under President Joe Biden, you might want to issue alternative proposals.

Maybe you could say to Donald Trump: “Well, wait a minute. If people have been here five years and they have no criminal record or they’re gainfully employed, they’re not on any public assistance, can we issue them a green card? Pay a fine?”

I’m not hearing any of that. Nothing. All we’re hearing from California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is that everything was peaceful and then Donald Trump nationalized the California National Guard, and the result is chaos.

But that’s not what we see. We see people spitting on police officers. We see people throwing concrete at them. We see people looting stores. We see stores boarded up. We see buildings defaced. We see people taking over the street. We see people stopping the 101 Freeway and major traffic. We see people waving the Mexican flag, of the country they don’t want to go back to, and spitting and burning the flag of the country they insist on staying in.

So, there’s chaos. And the more that Karen Bass assures us that everything is fine, the more that we know that she’s not telling the truth. And we’re back to the Palisades Fire, where, then, she was physically in Ghana. Now, she’s mentally or psychologically somewhere else. But she’s not the mayor, as we interpret the mayor.

So, we’re looking for positive suggestions from the opposition party.

All we hear about Iran is that Donald Trump wants to start a theater-wide world war. This is what we’re hearing from Democratic senators. No American president has said, “I am willing to negotiate,” more than Donald Trump with the theocracy.

When we look at the Democratic Party, what do we find? We had a North Carolina representative, she recently posted a media photograph of Donald Trump’s head decapitated next to a bloody guillotine with the idea that we need cuts. Think of that. This is an elected representative disseminating, basically, a call to behead the president of the United States, who had survived a year ago two targeted assassination attempts.

Then we had our own senator here in California, Alex Padilla. He deliberately did not wear his identification. In fact, nobody knows him. If I saw Alex Padilla on television, I wouldn’t know he was our senator. He’s never done anything. But nevertheless, he had no identification. He heard that Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security, was gonna have a press conference. He barges in. He disrupts it. He tries to make a scene. And what happens? The Secret Service doesn’t know who he is either, so they restrain him. And then he becomes a folk hero with his street performance.

Unfortunately for Padilla, he thought it would be a Sen. Cory Booker moment. Remember Cory Booker—25 hours to filibuster nothing? There was no impending law. It was just “Donald Trump is evil” for 25 hours. He thought he would get the same media attention. But unfortunately, there was the “No Kings” parade and the war in Iran, and nobody really knew much about what he had done, other than he’d made a complete fool out of himself.

And then we had this No Kings parade. And it was really funded by multibillionaire left-wing donors, like Christy Walton, one of the heirs, by marriage, to the Walton fortune; #MeToo; all of these groups.

But what I don’t understand—maybe you can help me—is “No Kings”? Donald Trump has been subject to more lower court district injunctions in the first five months of his administration than President Barack Obama and Joe Biden combined throughout their whole 12-year tenures.

He has been the object of five civil and criminal suits when he was in the political wilderness. He was the subject of an effort to take him off the ballot. He was the only president ever in history to be impeached two times. King? He has had more judicial, executive, and congressional restraints placed upon him, which he has followed, than any president in history.

So, the whole basis of this No Kings demonstration was incoherent.

Let me just quote, in finishing, a few vital statistics. At the height of all of this paranoia and hysteria about illegal immigration, deportations, the people—the people, us—CBS took a poll, 54% supported Donald Trump to continue deporting people who had come here illegally. Illegally. And then we had a poll from Rasmussen—a weekly tracking poll—that, you know, sampled about 1,700 people: “Do you support what Donald Trump is doing as president?” And it was 53% positive.

But here was the really stunning statistic: 54% of African Americans expressed positive appraisals of Donald Trump. I think it was mostly because they support the deportation of illegal aliens. But 53% of Hispanics did too. This is at a time when Donald Trump is being smeared and slandered as a racist, a fascist, a dictator. Yet, minority groups, constituents polled higher—in the case of African Americans—than so-called whites. And Hispanics polled the same, 53% approval, as whites.

So, something is missing here. And I think I know what it is. If you do not have a coherent, positive message—and the Democrats don’t—and you keep haranguing and trying to smear and slander and talk about killing the president of the United States, then people are going to lose confidence here. And that’s what’s happened in California with Mayor Karen Bass, Gavin Newsom. And it’s happening on a national scene.

We’re getting incoherent chaos and nihilism when we need a two-party system and people to offer constructive suggestions. We’re not getting that and I don’t think we will.

The Optimistic, the Realistic, and the Pessimistic Scenarios for Iran

 

We’re in the midst of about the seventh to eighth day of this Iranian-Israeli conflict and we’re getting all sorts of information. It’s not disinformation or misinformation, it’s just speculation because we don’t really have enough information coming out of Iran or out of the White House or out of Israel to make a firm consensus—a solid consensus—of what’s actually going on.

In that lacuna, maybe we should just, very quickly, look at a pessimistic, an optimistic, and a realistic appraisal.

Here’s what the pessimists are saying—these are not my views. I’m trying to give an accurate portrayal of what they’re saying.

The pessimists, both here in the United States and abroad, are of two types. They are the MAGA base and they are saying:

This breaks President Donald Trump’s promise not to intervene in wars that are optional. This is a forever war. If we hit the Iranians, that will not be the end of it. That will be the beginning. They will send cadres all around the world to attack our diplomats, our soldiers. They may try to kill Trump, again. And this is a violation of his campaign oath.

Realistically, some military analysts say:

Well, wait a minute. Even if you take out some of the more prominent nuclear facilities, doesn’t mean they can’t be rebuilt very quickly. So, then the question hinges on: Are you going to take out the regime?

There’s not a lot of evidence in the past that airstrikes will take out a regime. We tried it with Saddam Hussein, as you remember, in 2003. And it did not work. We tried it with Muammar Gaddafi during the Reagan administration. It did not work. We couldn’t quite get rid of Slobodan Milosevic. That was a combined air, in the Balkans, and we had troops on the ground.

So, it doesn’t seem that even if the Israelis or us took out the supreme leader, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the government would collapse or that whatever replaced it would be much different, in this pessimistic appraisal.

And the pessimist then would say:

Why not negotiate and bring back the monitors? And you would have a breathing space of three to four years, given the rubble of the current nuclear infrastructure, whether it be heightened, the tension. And we could negotiate ourselves out of this and stop this war that has ripples throughout the Middle East and involve superpower possible intrusion from China, Russia.

Let’s go through the most optimistic scenario, very quickly. There are people who are saying:

No, no, no, no, no, no. This is going great. Israel’s taken out 50% of the mobile launchers. If you look at the number of missiles that are reaching Israel each day, they are diminishing. And Israel’s ability, therefore, to knock out these vestigial attacks will increase. And they have wiped out all of the command and control of people in their 50s and 60s in the military. They have taken out a whole generation of nuclear physicists.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is all by himself. And now that he’s hit an Israeli hospital, he can be taken out. And the Iranian people may come up and decide—come out of the shadows and say, ‘We’re tired of them, especially because most of these people that have tormented and directed the torture and the oppression and the destruction of our daily lives are dead.’

And now, Khamenei is under assault. And he may be killed and that would create a revolution. And if you have a revolution, even if you did not hit all of the sites that would be necessary to ensure the end, forever, of the nuclear program of Iran, a new government would be better. And they, on their own initiative, would take it out.

That’s an optimistic appraisal.

Here’s a realistic appraisal. That Donald Trump is going to wait for at least a week. And he is going to see if the Israelis can come up, on their own, with a formula, in lieu of a bunker-buster, to diminish or actually end all of these nuclear infrastructures, viabilities.

And what do I mean by that? Send commandos on the ground. Take F-35s with small bunker-busters just again and again, every day. Send them through the same blast hole. Or maybe get a C-130 and jerry-rig it up to get a—I don’t know—a 30,000-pound bunker-buster. You wouldn’t be at 50,000 feet. It might not have the momentum. But if you came in at 30,000 and you had air supremacy, maybe you could drop two or three of them, four or five of them with a C-130. And the United States would not be involved.

And then more importantly, Israel is achieving complete supremacy of the air. And by that I mean not just the ability to go into Iranian airspace, but more importantly, to diminish both the number and the effectiveness of Iranian missiles that are landing in Israel.

As far as the MAGA base, the fact that Donald Trump said that he would take up to two weeks to make that decision and that he’s talked to people in the MAGA base and he’s assured them there’s not gonna be a lot of boots on the ground, there’s not going to be a long American presence. If he intervened, it would be a one- or two-shot deal.

I think he’s pacified most of the criticism because the MAGA base isn’t going to say, “My gosh, you sinned against us. We’re going to look at—” Whom? There’s nobody else there. There’s only Donald Trump. There’s no Republican alternative to him. And so, I think he’s pretty safe there.

And finally, are Russia and China gonna come in? I don’t think so. Russia looks at this and it starts to bully. It starts to say, “This is our former patron. We should protect it.” But Russia’s got its hands full in Ukraine. It’s lost over a million wounded, dead, and lost. It is in a wartime mode against Ukraine. And more importantly, when they look at the Middle East and they see all this turmoil and oil prices creeping up, they think it’s wonderful.

How about China? China, for just the opposite reasons, is not going to intervene. It looks at this and says, “Oh my gosh, we used to get 70% to 80% of the oil from Iran, 50% of all the Middle East oil goes to us. We don’t want any turmoil. Please just cool it. Stop it. It’s not in our interest to encourage this conflict to continue.” And more importantly, China is in a trade war with us. And the last thing it wants is to get on the wrong side of a still military-superior United States.

Sum it up: The war seems like it’s going well for Israel, in their point of view. There’s a 50-50 chance there might be a regime change. There’s probably a 25% chance, if there were, it would be something much, much better. The United States may have to intervene but it’s holding back because it still thinks that the Israelis, as brilliant as they are, will come up with some sort of new solution to destroy these underground facilities.

That is the realistic appraisal. And it’s somewhere in between, as I said, the pessimistic and the optimistic outlook that I reviewed.