The Fantasy House of Mark Carney

 Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now believes he is more than just the Western foil to President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement — he is the global one.

Accordingly, he seems determined to demonstrate to the world how to stand up to Trump, to force Trump to lose the midterms, and to hurt the U.S. economy to such a degree that Trump will never again bully other nations.

So, at the 11th hour, Carney stormed out of an apparently completed tariff deal with the United States that would have privileged Canada over almost all of America's other trading partners. Canada, we recall, has enjoyed a $50 billion goods trade surplus with the U.S. for years in a supposedly free and equitable North American trade zone.

Carney claimed that American proposals stripped away Canadian sovereignty and quashed Canadian culture, particularly French-Canadian culture. Yet he has not released the documents detailing the bilateral offers he rejected. Nor has he allowed his representatives to explain to the media why Canada blew up the negotiations at the last minute. Carney's ever-changing excuses, explanations, and invectives about what happened are incoherent and contradictory.

That said, analysts on both sides of the border now concede that American digital-media companies do not customarily pay special taxes, as Carney demands, to promote local, regional, and ethnic culture while operating in Canada — any more than Canadian companies would be taxed for those purposes in the U.S.

Canada and the U.S. both agree that China dumps cheap steel and aluminum into Canada, allowing Canadian manufacturers to use that cost advantage to export assembled vehicles to the vast U.S. market at prices below those of American vehicles. In that way, Canada's new partnership with China circumvents America's tariffs on Beijing. China will also send nearly 50,000 electric cars and trucks into Canada under a meager tariff, ensuring that the Canadian EV market is increasingly dominated by Chinese vehicles.

But Carney's ploy goes beyond helping the communist Chinese dictatorship gain trade leverage over his own NATO neighbor. He has eagerly concluded a comprehensive Chinese-Canadian pact involving travel, visas, food safety, energy, and public security. Carney has grandly described these new agreements with Beijing as part of a new paradigm in which "middle powers" like Canada play China against the U.S. (Canada's annual nominal GDP is roughly the size of New York State's).

How ironic that Carney attacks his neighbor, the U.S., for trade unfairness while warming to the communist dictatorship in China. Communist China, after all, is history's greatest violator of trade protocols — guilty of manipulating its currency, dumping products to secure market share, violating copyright and patent laws, and imprisoning a million Uyghurs.

Has Carney learned anything from Panama's misadventures after naively inviting in a Chinese omnipresence at the American-built Panama Canal? Does Carney recall that the American Monroe Doctrine originally was aimed at foreign intrusion into the North American West?

Canada's new partner is a totalitarian police state that infected the world with its manufactured gain-of-function COVID-19 virus, which killed more than 1.5 million North Americans. China stonewalled inquiries and never offered details about the pandemic's origins in its Wuhan lab. It has promised to conquer Taiwan and so terrified its democratic neighbors — Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea — that they have joined a defensive alliance with the U.S.

So what drives Carney's hubristic fantasies? Has Canada's natural wealth in oil, gas, timber, and minerals made it a military and economic dynamo, as it once was?

Hardly.

Canada's population is 11.8 percent of America's. Its economy is barely one-thirteenth the size of America's. Canadian GDP per capita is only 60 percent of America's.

Canada quietly relies on the U.S. military to deter foreign powers from North America, whether by fending off challenges to Canada's extensive Arctic claims — including its dubious claim of absolute sovereignty over the Northwest Passage — or by keeping Canadian skies free of foreign combat aircraft and missiles.

Canada's navy — once one of the world's preeminent surface fleets — has been reduced to fewer than 30 ships. Its 89 American-made jets are more than 40 years old.

Paradoxically, Carney's dreams derive not from confidence and strength but from insecurity and defensiveness. Carney and former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau nearly ruined the Canadian economy despite the country's treasure trove of natural resources. Canada has only half the GDP of California — a state currently decaying under neo-socialist governance — despite having roughly the same population.

Nearly 45 percent of Canadians are either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents. These often-impoverished immigrants impose gargantuan social-welfare costs that Canada's European-style socialist economy simply cannot support. While Carney lectures on "Canadian values," Canada's fertility rate of 1.25 is among the lowest in the Western world, while euthanasia accounts for 5 percent of all deaths, the highest rate in the West.

Nevertheless, Carney now claims, in passive-aggressive fashion, that the U.S. bullies Canada — even as Canada runs trade surpluses with America, relies on the American economy for 72 percent of its exports, and depends on the American military for its safety. That asymmetry indirectly subsidizes Canada's disastrous energy, immigration, defense, regulatory, and tax policies.

The Canadian energy industry depends on U.S. purchases of much of its tar sands oil, specialized U.S. refineries, and American pipelines. For over a decade, globalist Canada refused to meet its NATO commitment to invest 2 percent of GDP in defense, relying instead on American magnanimity to protect North America from foreign aggression.

No matter. Carney has melodramatically characterized his tiff with the U.S. as a "fight" and even a "war." Yet, oddly for such an anti-American Canadian hyper-nationalist, Carney is a globalist banker who, until he became prime minister, held citizenship in three nations.

Yet the Canadian prime minister who urges Canada's vulnerable working classes to decouple from America is himself — like thousands of Canadian grandees — deeply entwined with the United States. Some 91 percent of Carney's investments are in U.S.-based companies, and two of his four children, like their father, attended college in the United States. Both now reside in America, along with nearly one million other Canadians. Apparently, Carney is so eager for a veritable economic, cultural, and political war with the United States that 91 percent of his holdings remain invested in the homeland of his enemy.

But why, from a position of such hypocrisy and vulnerability, has Carney blown up the trade agreement, ginned up anti-American Canadian nationalism — and done so now?

Only in this way, Carney believes, can he stop autonomy referenda in Alberta and Quebec. And only in this way can he openly interfere in the U.S. midterm elections by targeting new tariffs at red and purple border states while working directly with left-wing Democratic politicians to help Democrats regain control of Congress and restore the prior status quo.

His anti-American screeds have certainly worked at home. Canadians now boo at the mere sound of "The Star-Spangled Banner." They brag of a new "elbows up" policy to stop U.S. "aggression." Their social media is flooded with braggadocio about new ways to hurt Americans. Some three-quarters of the country has bought into Carney's fantasies. Hating America is the new Canadian pastime.

But, sadly, this will not end well for Canada, for at least five reasons.

First, America certainly is not the cause of Canada's maladies, other than by subsidizing its suicidal domestic choices for years. Canada's self-destructive socialist and globalist policies are its government's doing alone.

The United States did not force Canada to adopt European-style socialist policies of mass unvetted immigration, subsidized green energy, near-disarmament, and unsustainable social-welfare spending. America did not urge Canadians to stop having children or enlist their government to help them kill themselves.

In truth, America prefers a militarily and economically strong Canadian partner, not a weak one lashing out from insecurity.

Second, the American public has so far been mostly indifferent to the spat. But now that the North American media has begun revealing the extent of Canada's anti-American venom, along with Carney's brinkmanship and disingenuous rhetoric, anger is rising at his cheap politicking and the animus he has fanned.

In sum, Carney has no idea that he is reframing the dispute not as a conflict with Trump but as an affront to the American people themselves — who have long memories.

Third, for all his globalist background and internationalist performance-art stunts, Carney is alone on the world stage. Europe may applaud his defiance, but it has no desire to join his anti-American campaign. When the United States finally insisted on symmetrical trade, only communist China and Canada — the latter enjoying the most generous entree into the American economy of any country in the world — slapped counter-tariffs on the United States. Apparently, other nations did not agree that Carney's perennial $50 billion surplus was his birthright.

Fourth, Canada is far more vulnerable than the United States if Carney's "war" continues. Canada relies on the United States for 72 percent of its exports, while America relies on Canada for only 15 percent of its own exports. Last month, even before the full effect of the new tariffs was felt, Canada lost 42,000 jobs while the United States gained 160,000. The damage will only grow, ever more asymmetrically, as tariffs mount on Canadian businesses.

Nearly a million Canadians reside in the United States, but only 350,000 Americans live in Canada. And it is easier for a Canadian to obtain an expedited U.S. work visa than for an American to do the same in Canada. Indeed, Canadians do not appreciate that they are nearly the only visitors in the world granted six months of residence in the United States without a visa.

Fifth, since Carney walked out at the last minute, it will be incumbent upon him to resume talks — especially as the damage he has done to Canadian workers and small businesses worsens. But should Carney seek to renew negotiations immediately after the Canadian provincial elections and the U.S. midterms, he will be exposed as a disingenuous politico who ginned up the fight to manipulate both Canadian and American balloting to benefit himself and his party.

If that happens, he may learn that the American friendship train has left the station. He will also discover that China treats obsequious outreach from Western "middle powers" as weakness to exploit, not magnanimity to reciprocate.

Carney's political disingenuousness will eventually earn the animus of Canadians and Americans alike — who may ironically unite in their distaste for Carney and his fantasy house.

How Are We Doing With the Midterms Seven Weeks Out?

 Look, I can’t tell you that everything is going to be OK for us patriots in the midterms. I think it will, but I’m not sure. Nobody knows for sure. What I do know is what the correlation of forces, to my mind, indicates. It indicates another 2022, a year when we Republicans were going to clean up against an unpopular, semi-conscious president. And we did OK. Not great. OK. And it looks to me, from where I sit, from who I’ve talked to, from what I’ve seen, and yeah, from my gut, that that’s the high-water mark for the Democrats. They might do OK. They might get the House by a few seats, and they might cut our lead in the Senate. That’s just my perspective, though. I’ve talked to well-placed optimists and doomers (one who, you know, says we lose the House and 50-50 in the Senate if we are lucky). But I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows.

Let’s look at the big themes, then get down to specific cases. What do the Democrats have going for them? History, for one. History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it often rhymes. The party in power, especially in a second term, tends to struggle in the midterms. People get tired of the status quo. The problems add up, the friction and the fog of war slow the progress, and people get bored. That gives Democrats another advantage: excitement and intensity. And boy, are they ever excited and intense about taking us out. They can’t wait to crawl out of their old folks’ homes, cat-overrun condos, moms’ basements, Hollywood mansions, university dorms, and perverted communes to vote out those wicked patriotic Americans of the Republican Party. They would crawl over broken glass to vote against us or at least hire illegal aliens to do the crawling over broken glass that American Democrats won’t do. Every single one of them is going to vote, probably several times.

That intensity leads to their third advantage: the polls. Negative polling can demoralize Republican voters. But to the extent the polls are not actively bent to support the Democrats (which some of them manifestly are), Democrat intensity skews the polls because Democrats actually answer them. Anecdotes are evidence of nothing but anecdotes, but I like to informally poll fellow Republicans about whether they ever respond to political polling. I never do. And they tell me they never do. I don’t know who the Republicans answering these polls are, but I haven't met one.

The polling is terrible for us if you take it at face value. It has us losing in places we have no business losing. But I just can’t make myself believe it. The polls don’t fit the fundamentals, and they’re too darn convenient for the opposition. Is that wishful thinking? It may be, but it’s wishful thinking based on polling’s track record of failure. Remember the famous 2024 Ann Selzer Iowa poll that had Kamala three points up on Trump? Trump ended up beating her by something like 13 points. And just a couple of weeks ago, Hasan Piker’s Hamas-diddling puppet Abdul in Michigan was supposed to win by double digits over his moderate (sic) Democrat opponent, but he ended up barely squeaking to victory by a point or so. The polls are wrong a lot, and always in one direction. When’s the last time you found a polling error that favored a Republican? That’s about as likely as finding leftovers in JB Pritzker’s fridge.

Of course, the polls could be right. I don’t think they are. Given the dire unanimity of the current polls, disbelieving them means betting on both the malice and the incompetence of the pollsters. I’ll take that bet, especially when so many are polls from outfits you’ve never heard of, like the “University of College/Pepsi Challenge Public Opinion Survey” or the “Geebo Strategies Online Solutions.”

What do we have in our favor? Well, we have a ton of money. That’s good. Plus, the folks in the know whom I’ve talked to like the strategy of waiting until after Labor Day to really start spending. Democrats have been spending for a while, but traditionally you spend early to create a positive image for your candidate and tear down the other guy. That used to work, but will it work now? This is a very partisan environment. If you’re a Democrat, we already know what we think of you, and all the ads with you and Mee-maw sitting on the porch talking about values you don’t actually believe in aren’t going to change your image as an avatar of a political party that supports crime, communism, castration, and open borders.

We also have Donald Trump, who’s good for turning out our voters. His ability to enrage the other side is already baked in, but he’s going to be out and about everywhere rallying our troops. That’s good. And while the convention was slammed for low ratings, it did what needed to be done. It set a positive tone and motivated our base.

This election is all about turning out our base. We now have a decade of experience getting the kind of voters in our coalition to come out and vote when Donald Trump himself is not on the ballot. We better turn them out. That we can’t is everyone’s big fear. But the base staying home because it’s mad seemed much more plausible when the Democrats were just annoying rather than a threat to our way of life. It’s easy to say, “Who cares?” when, at their core, both parties are composed of people who generally like America and want what’s best for it. But that’s not true with today’s Democrats. They want to flood us with Third World barbarians, mutilate our kids, take our guns, tax us into poverty, and outlaw normal people. Yeah, there’s an affordability problem, and there’s a crime problem, and there are lots of other problems, but the Democrats caused all those problems, and everyone knows that it’s not like they’re going to fix them. America has become vastly more partisan, and vastly more binary, and I’m thinking that very few Republicans are going to be able to swallow the idiotic notion that we need to show the dumb Republicans among us (and there are a lot of dumb Republicans among us) what-for by allowing the election of a bunch of communist pervert-enablers.

I just don’t think Republicans are going to stay home in droves, much less actually vote for Democrats. I do expect the polls to tighten as we get closer to Election Day, largely because that’s when pollsters have to start thinking about their reputations and will take at least a couple of their fingers off the scale. It always happens.

So, let’s look at the races. There’s just too much going on in the House to go through individually, but our maps will do a lot to limit any damage. The House is going to be tough because we only have a handful of seats in our majority, but some of the folks I’ve talked to were confident about it in private. These people have nothing to lose by telling me what they really think. You can take it or leave it. But while Team Black Pill will get all the regime media coverage, know that there are a lot of GOP guys out there who think we can do OK in the House.

The Senate remains our firewall. We have a 53-seat majority. Democrats need to net four seats to overcome JD Vance’s tiebreaker vote. Let’s ignore the wildcard scenarios, like whether Lisa Murkowski or John Fetterman might switch parties to ensure a majority. Let’s find those four seats, if we can. We’ll start with the seats Republicans are defending. Keep in mind, the polls are negative for Republicans in pretty much all of them.

I’ve talked about Texas and that blasphemous imp Talarico already this week, and for the reasons I set forth, I think we hold it.

With the guy with the Nazi tattoo having been replaced by the guy who has kids with his second cousin, Susan Collins has a very good chance of keeping her seat in Maine. It would be pretty wild for the Maple Syrup State to swap out the chair of the Appropriations Committee for a guy who makes family Thanksgiving dinners awkward with sexual tension. She’s likely to win.

North Carolina is probably the Republicans’ toughest fight, with Michael Whatley struggling against that state’s less masculine version of Abigail Spanberger. Roy Cooper is a straight-up leftist pretending to be a moderate, and North Carolina is a purple state. I think we lose that one, but we shouldn’t give up.

Dan Sullivan in Alaska has to contend with Dem dirty tricks like ranked-choice voting and a doppelgänger on the ballot. It will be tough. I think he holds – a lot of Alaskans depend on oil, and the Democrats want to end the industry. But it will take money and effort.

Jon Husted is allegedly struggling in Ohio against leftist retread Sherrod Brown. The same is true in Iowa, with Ashley Hinson against Josh Turek. Both of these are red states. It’s hard to toss out an incumbent like Husted, and Hinson is a strong candidate. It’s going to take money and work, but I think we pull it off and keep both seats. There is also some crazy talk about Democrats expanding the map to Kansas and Florida. That’s just not going to happen, and if it does, it’s such an apocalypse that nothing else is going to matter anyway.

Now, the best defense is a good offense. What states are we going to take from the Democrats? Jon Ossoff is getting the full-court press from the regime media in Georgia; he’s an even more beta Beto, but they do like young, glib, good-looking guys. He’s up against Mike Collins, who’s a good old boy, and who I’ve gotten to know a little from interviews. The dude is smart. He ran a trucking company. When you talk to him, he doesn’t talk to you in hack clichés. He talks about money, organization, getting out the vote, and what matters. Do not underestimate him the way a lot of people seem to. Governor Brian Kemp, who backed somebody else in the primary, just decided he wanted to remain a viable GOP candidate in 2028 or later and has endorsed Collins. Let’s see if he turns his formidable Republican machine out to snatch that Senate seat; if he does, that makes him viable in the future. If Kemp can’t help recapture the seat, what good is he? In any case, we have a decent chance in Georgia, but let’s be conservative and assume we don’t; though if we do, that destroys all the Democrats’ dreams once and for all.

In New Hampshire, John Sununu seems to have a decent shot at beating Chris Pappas, who’s another Spanberger Democrat who talks moderate but would vote left. New Hampshire is a purple state, and they do elect Republicans. The name Sununu still means something there. Again, my conservative nature tells me that it’s more likely than not that we lose, but if we win, oh boy.

In Minnesota, Michele Tafoya is running against a lunatic, pervert-loving communist woman in a state that elects lunatic, pervert-loving communist women of all genders. But enough about Tim Walz. We’re probably not going to win this one, but there’s that outside chance.

And then we come to Michigan, where Mike Rogers, a straight-up veteran patriot, is going up against Abdul El-Sayed, a straight-up Islamist communist who makes AOC look like William F. Buckley. Here we’ve got a real opportunity, and I think it’s more likely than not that the good people of Michigan are going to want to be represented by a resolutely normal guy rather than a guy who dreams of imposing socialist sharia on a country he despises. I think we win this one.

So let’s tally it up. I think we lose one we had, and I think we gain one we didn’t. I think we have a couple of other pickup opportunities in purple states, but it’s hard for me to see them picking up any in our red states. It could happen, but I don’t think it will.

So I put the Senate at 52 to 54 GOP.

This is just a snapshot just under seven weeks from the midterm election. That’s an eternity. Anything can happen. And anything probably will happen.

The Rule of Law Cannot Be Based Upon 'Feelings'

 One of the primary tenets of the American legal system is the importance of precedent; the common law doctrine of "stare decisis" means "to stand by things decided." The purpose of law in such a system is to provide stability and predictability, so that people can conform their conduct to the law's requirements.

Another way of describing this is "the rule of law." At its core, the rule of law in this country means that all individuals and entities, including the government, are subject to the same laws, which will be applied fairly, consistently and uniformly. This principle is at the very foundation of the U.S. government and legal system.

The importance of the rule of law is one of the reasons the mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy trial continues to create shockwaves. Eleven of the 12 jurors voted to acquit Clancy of murder, even though Clancy killed her three small children.

In one of her many recent interviews, Clancy juror Paula Devlin said that she and the other women on the jury saw the case as an opportunity "to make it better for other women in the future." "Justice for those children," she said, "is this never happening again."

Those are manifestly incorrect statements. The jurors in the Clancy case have no control over whether some other woman someplace else kills her children. Making things "better for other women" was not their job. Nor was it their job to make sure that Clancy "gets the help she needs." Their job — their only job — was determining whether Clancy knew right from wrong when she committed those acts.

That — not some notion of female activism — was what "justice for those children" demanded.

Devlin was also the person who "outed" the juror who would not vote to acquit Clancy, by revealing to Gayle King on "CBS Mornings" that the lone holdout was one of three men and the only black person on the jury. That man has since been under vicious and relentless attack on traditional and social media.

That juror made his decision based on his evaluation of the evidence. He decided that Clancy knew what she was doing and was therefore guilty. He had that right, just as any juror in a criminal case does.

The jurors who have given interviews have spent an inordinate amount of time discussing their feelings. That is irrelevant. If a jury's verdict is based not upon what the law is but upon "feelings," then the result in any given case will depend on whose deciding the case and how you can make them "feel," not on the facts and what the law requires.

That is unpredictable. It is subject to enormous abuse. It is a recipe for chaos. And yet it seems to be a common modus operandi for women.

Earlier this week, I was reading a law review article written in 2019 by attorney Samantha Harris and Brooklyn College professor K.C. Johnson. Titled "Campus Courts in Court," the authors analyzed hundreds of cases brought by students who had been accused of sexual assault at colleges and universities, and who later sued, claiming that their constitutional rights had been violated.

The schools were reacting to the 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter from the Obama administration's Department of Education, threatening all institutions of higher education with loss of their Title IX funds unless they took dramatic steps to curb "rape culture" on college campuses. Panicky schools lowered the burden of proof in sexual assault cases from "clear and convincing" evidence to "a mere preponderance" of the evidence, effectively eliminated the presumption of innocence of the accused, forbade legal representation and the rights of the accused students to cross-examine the student's accuser, and permitted the accusers to appeal if a disciplinary tribunal exonerated the accused. Under those conditions, an accusation of sexual assault was tantamount to a finding of guilt. Accused students lost scholarships and were expelled with stains on their academic record that left them unable to enroll in other schools and affected their future employability.

In short, it was a due process nightmare, and the subsequent litigation exploded. By the time Harris and Johnson published their article, more than 500 cases had been filed against colleges and universities (with hundreds more since); the defendant institutions lost — or settled — most of them. Legal expert Gary Pavela was quoted saying, "In over 20 years of reviewing higher education law cases, I've never seen such a string of legal setbacks for universities, both public and private, in student conduct cases. Something is going seriously wrong."

Interestingly, Harris and Johnson reported that the results in cases tried in federal courts did not depend on politics; there was no statistical correlation between the outcome of the cases and whether the judges had been appointed by a Democrat or a Republican president.

But there was a demonstrable difference based upon the sex of the judge. Male federal judges found in favor of the student plaintiffs in 53 percent of the cases. But female federal judges decided in favor of the defending institutions and against the accused students — who were almost all men — in 67 percent of the cases.

I am a woman who has been an attorney for 40 years. And yet I now find myself wondering whether women are cut out for decision-making roles in the legal profession — serving as judges or on juries — because distressingly large numbers appear to be unable (or unwilling) to put their personal feelings aside and decide the case according to what the law is — not "to send a message," to "show compassion" or "to make things better for all women."

Applying the law as it is, is difficult and lonely work. It sometimes produces results that are deeply unsatisfying, and it will rarely make you popular. You must be willing to consider not only the impact of your decision in this particular case, but the longer-term implications — the precedential effect. If a primary motivation for your actions is what other people think of you, how decisions make you feel about yourself, or how something is going to play on social media, you are ill-suited for the job.

In short, it takes not only intellectual integrity and a clear-headed understanding of human nature, but also vision and courage.

In truth, however, those attributes seem to be in short supply among women and men in leadership roles, in the legal profession and elsewhere. We live, increasingly, in a culture where "truth" is a matter of opinion, "science" is whatever someone needs it to be to advance their agenda, and "right" and "wrong" don't exist, except to the extent that you can whip up an irate consensus among your ill-informed followers on TikTok.

The American legal system as we have known it cannot survive that.

Our second president, John Adams, once wrote that "the rule of law" in the United States means that ours is "a government of laws and not of men."

Is America Committing Suicide?

 

    “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” — Abraham Lincoln

    “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has [first] destroyed itself from within”—Will Durant

Here is a recent headline from Breitbart: “The Dying Citizen: Los Angeles Democrats Seek to Open Door to Foreigners Voting in City Elections.”

Nations, countries, empires change, of course. That is, to a certain extent, inevitable. Some disappear forever. Babylon, Assyria, Persia, the Hittites, Girgashites, and Sumer are no longer with us, at least not by those names and governments. Some nations survive, but in different forms. Egypt today is not the Egypt of the pharaohs. The Rome of Italy is not the Rome of the Republic or Empire. The Britain of the Empire doesn’t even come close to the Britain of the 21st century. Some countries — very few — actually don’t change much. China doesn’t call its one-man ruler of today an “emperor,” and its government is now a “communist,” but it’s basically the same as it’s always been — one man on top, with his nobility, killing its people and giving them whatever the government wants them to have. A government by another name, but still the same.

So, it’s not surprising to see the America of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution changing, morphing into something else. Sir Alexander Tytler told us that the average life of the greatest civilizations is about 200 years. That’s the average; some go longer, some not so long, but it averages out to about 200 years. America is 250 years old this year, at least the United States in name. But the country has changed, and is changing. The Breitbart headline above indicates that. Amnesty is coming, folks, and we aren’t going to stop it. It’s part of the “change” that America is undergoing.

Of course, to say that America “has changed” or “is changing,” we must have some standard of comparison: changed from what?

The self-destruction Lincoln spoke of obviously indicates a change from what had previously been, and in America’s case, we look at what the Founders established, or at least set forth as the ideal for the nation. America has never adhered perfectly to its founding principles; just as no Christian ever perfectly obeys the teachings of Jesus, our country has fallen short of its founding ideals. But they are there to guide us, to show us what our Founders wanted the nation to be. And we have certainly changed from those principles. Boy, have we changed, and the Democrat Party is attempting to completely overthrow those ideals. The Breitbart quote above is one indication of that.

Our Founders would never have even thought in such terms as letting foreigners vote. A country doesn’t exist without citizenship. It would be nothing but a globular, amorphous mass of humanity without any unity. Even the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t accept that.

Our Founders wanted America to be a country with a virtuous citizenry and limited government, with a Constitution based upon the teachings of the common God all Americans of the time believed in. “The future and success of America is not in this Constitution, but in the laws of God upon which this Constitution is founded” (James Madison). Note, please, the “future and success” of America is based upon the “laws of God.” Well, to say the least, the Democrats do not believe and want that, and are trying to extinguish it. And for half the country, at least, they have changed it.

But while some change is inevitable, death is not (e.g., Egypt, Rome, Britain). The Democrats, however, are trying to kill the America our Founders established, yet keep the same name. I guess they want to call their country “America.” They are trying to kill everything else; we’ll see if the name “America” survives their onslaught.

Not all change is bad, of course. We are all certainly happy that slavery no longer exists, at least the chattel slavery of early American history. We’d like to see racism die, but the Democrats keep that going. But again, they want to, and are killing Judeo/Christian virtue and replacing it with promiscuity and licentiousness. They are attempting to destroy what little remains of the limited government Constitution and replace it with socialist totalitarian oppression. “The greatest danger to American freedom is a government that ignores the Constitution” (Thomas Jefferson). That is exactly what the Democrats want. They are endeavoring to decimate the American dream of individual advancement and achievement through property rights and hard work, and replace it with government dependency and oppression for as many people as possible. They have (with a whole lot of help from Republicans) destroyed government frugality and fiscal responsibility, and supplanted it with spendthrift waste and corruption. And it’s all for one reason — power.

Actually, the Democrats (most politicians) don’t really care what kind of America exists, or even if “America” exists, as long as whatever is “there” is controlled by them. What they are doing has one aim in mind — total power for themselves, none for you. That’s the “change” they want most. It will kill the America our Founders established.

“It is in the nature of an empire to disintegrate soon, for the energy that created it disappears from those who inherit it” (Will Durant). Can we save America, the America of the Founders? Do we want to save virtue and limited government? Well, I do. But to save that, we will have to get rid of the cancers that are now killing America, and voluntarily return to the principles of the Declaration and Constitution. It can be done, but the problem is, at least half the country doesn’t want to. They want to murder traditional America and live their promiscuous, licentious, debauched, corrupt lives, dependent upon a dominant, totalitarian government.

Yeah, we are destroying from within the America our Founders established. That’s suicide.

Is It Time to Stop Funding Libraries?

 Have you been to the library lately? I bet you haven’t. I bet, unless you have young kids, you haven’t been there in 10 or 20 years, at a minimum. Why would you go when you have everything they offer available to you at home, either delivered immediately digitally, or the next day physically? It begs the question: why are we still paying for them?

Yes, the things in libraries are “free,” but sometimes free is too high a price to pay for something.

There are two types of libraries: the small ones in rural communities, and the large ones in major cities. The small ones are cesspools of left-wing propaganda – go to one and look at the children’s book section and you’ll see “graphic novels” that would put the Penthouse letters section to shame. There are drawings for kids that, if they were photographs, would be a crime.

But these are done under the banner of “diversity,” so they’re important and good…or something.

The big city libraries are glorified homeless shelters. It would be child abuse to bring your kid there without an armed guard. The smell of body odor and weed has tattooed itself to the books and walls, and whispers of “Quiet, please” have been replaced by grunting junkies if you happen to disturb their high.

What does the library offer that people need?

Used books are basically given away online and in local shops or garage sales, and they have no due date. Anything new can be bought cheap online or just digitally, requiring no space to store them.

I remember when they started carrying VHS tapes and DVDs, giving Blockbuster fits over the “free” competition. It was just a ploy to get people to go into them again. It worked for a while, then it worked out about as well as it did for Blockbuster.
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Now, libraries are meeting places for Drag Queen Story Hour and deviant art that couldn’t make it anywhere merit mattered.

Librarians get taxpayer money to put on events, and they all end up being left-wing events. Why do conservatives vote to fund our opponents? Is it simply because voting against library funding would trigger some kind of nostalgia in people that doesn’t exist otherwise? They’re there, they exist, and people are free to go to them, but we don’t. Still, the prospect of them going away maybe triggers something in people they don’t want to let go of, even though they have no practical use for them.

It's the mentality that fills boxes in basements with things we can’t get rid of but never see the light of day – sentimental value does not create usefulness or shelf space.

My wife will kill me for this, as she absolutely loves libraries, but even she comes away from trips with the kids there full of disgust over what the kids’ section is full of.

We should not be paying for it.

Sell the books, sell the buildings and the land, use the money to pay off debt or lower taxes, and recognize that the days of libraries are over. They weren’t necessarily rendered useless by the Internet, but by the people hired to run them.

The problem isn’t the concept; it’s the people. The politicians who must bring a left-wing agenda into everything they do and the librarians who can’t have a desk without a seizure-inducing “progressive” rainbow flag on it. The 40-year-old single white women angry at the world that all their abortions didn’t pay off with love, riches and happiness who’ve decided to take their pending fear of dying alone out on the societal norms they think they’re courageously standing up to. They’re the type of people who view agreement and conformity to a radical left-wing agenda as an act of rebellion.

We should stop paying them by eliminating the need for their jobs.

Shut it all down. History is full of things – businesses and organizations – that have outlived their usefulness. The library absolutely had its time and place, but that passed long ago. It’s time to call it a day and stop wasting money by funding our opponents. Maybe a new, online model can be created by the private sector – if there’s one thing to know about life is if there is an actual need or want, the private sector will fill it – or some left-wing billionaires can step up and pay for them. Otherwise, close them down, end the subsidized indoctrination and drug centers (watch this video for one example) and enjoy the savings.

Mark Carney Is Leading Canada ‘Right Over the Cliff

 

I know we’ve talked a lot about the current Canadian-American trade dispute, but it involves larger issues of globalism versus nationalism versus North American relations versus the United States paradigm versus the EU paradigm, etc., etc. 

And what’s happened is I would call it [Canadian Prime Minister] Mark Carney’s fantasy house, Mark Carney’s dream house, Mark Carney’s imaginarium. He has no … It doesn’t seem like he has any connection with reality. His economy has lost 41,000 jobs. It depends on exporting to the United States 72% to 76% of all of its products. 

That is going to be very difficult. It is now difficult. It’s going to be almost impossible if he continues. He has to keep his oil wells going, and given the fact that other provinces have not been ready and willing to make pipelines to the rich tar sands of Alberta, he depends on a 4 million-barrel export a day to the United States. 

Some of it is thick tar sands, some of it has been diluted and is marketable elsewhere, but it’s a very good deal for Canada. When you talk about cutting that off, you’re talking about cutting your nose to spite your face. This would be the most self-destructive thing. The fact that Canada even mentions it shows that they’re entering a period of delusional thinking. 

This new relationship with China, they’re bringing in 48,000 low-tariff, I think it’s only 6%, EVs. They’re going to ruin what little they had left of the Canadian auto industry. But more importantly, that trade agreement is ushering in a whole set of new agreements, some of them military. 

Does Canada know, does Mark Carney know, that if Canada negotiates a special military relationship with China and it’s on our borders and we have NATO relations, that will endanger the alliance and it will permanently wreck the relationship between Canada and the United States?  

The other thing that’s very disturbing is right now, as we speak, the European Union model is under assault, not by America, but by Europeans. 

They don’t believe the socialist model of open borders, illegal immigration, dismantling fossil fuels, not using fossil fuel resources, subsidized expensive green energy, de-arming, disarming, whatever term we use, low fertility, works. They used to have, about a quarter-century ago, the 470 million Europeans, they had about the same gross domestic product as the United States. 

Now they’re $10 trillion at least smaller. So, why is Canada emulating the EU failed model? Forty-five percent of your population was not born in Canada or their parents weren’t born. Why are you subsidizing green energy and you’re not utilizing this rich resource in Alberta? Why are you disarmed? 

Why won’t you meet your 2% commitments? You may or may not have done it just one year, but why do you repeatedly not do that when you have such a vast nation and it is so exposed in a very dangerous world, in the Arctic, in the Northwest Passage, and the airspace over North America? 

And the answer is your economic model does not allow you much margin. Your immigration model does not allow you much margin of error to compensate for these decisions that you’ve made for a weaker, poorer, more disunited Canada. You feel you can’t arm yourself because the United States will protect you. 

You feel that you need a $50 billion surplus because the United States is far wealthier and you’re in dire straits. 

Next problem. You don’t express your disagreement or anger at the United States over trade policy by warming up to, and allying with China, which is the greatest trade violator in history with its patent theft, copyright theft, dumping product below the cost of production, currency manipulation, forced labor camps. 

And you don’t win yourself national support when no other country except you and China have slapped counter-tariffs, not because they didn’t want to, not because they couldn’t do it, but because they realized they were running surpluses for years with the United States, and they could still make money with a more symmetrical trade agreement. 

You apparently don’t think that. You think if you lose your special $50 billion surplus relationship, or you might have to rearm, the choices that you’ve made on energy and immigration and economic policy prevent you from being competitive, and you need to be thus indirectly subsidized.  

But more importantly, you’re not going to win world sympathy, at least among the United States and other countries that are its allies. 

Now you’re engaged in an anti-Israel boycott. So, any products that were produced in the West Bank, you’re not going to buy. I have a question for you, Mark Carney. Does that include products that come from China that were assembled by a forced million-person labor force, the Uyghurs? Does it come from Nigeria, where Christians are being slaughtered? 

Does it come from parts of the Russian Federation before the boycott? You imported things from them. They treat their minorities very harshly. No, it’s completely asymmetrical. 

And finally, do you think that that sets a good example when you alone of the Western world are assisting people to kill themselves and that results in over 5% of your deaths each year being government-aided at a time when people really don’t know all the causes of suicide or terminal disease or there’s medical breakthroughs? 

You, in this weakened economic state, are still allowing assisted suicide, not allowing it, promoting it to such a degree that you are the capital of assisted suicide.  

And finally, this was a disagreement between governments, between Mark Carney, the globalist, and Donald Trump, the nationalist. And Donald Trump wanted to seek parity with Canada. 

It didn’t want to run up a surplus with Canada. It didn’t want to take over Canada. Those were trolling memes. What it wanted was basically no surplus on either side, Canada arming itself like every other member of NATO, North Americans getting along. But you, Mark Carney, turned this into a literal war. 

Those are your words, not mine. You use the word battle and war, and then you whipped up Canadian national anger and venom to the petty level that you Canadians are now booing the Star-Spangled Banner. They’re talking about putting signs up at the border warning Americans. This idea of moral superiority. 

Americans are oblivious to this until now. They didn’t … They were as critical of Donald Trump as anybody. You whipped up popular fervor against the United States. Donald Trump didn’t say to Americans: Get angry at what they’re doing to … because you only represent 10% to 15% of our trade. It doesn’t make much difference. 

We’d like to treat people equitably. We like to have basically small surpluses and small deficits. You were the one that did this, and it’s very paradoxical and ironic that you take this high moral ground when in actuality you’re dealing with a murderous government in China and you’re adopting economic policies that make you poor and you blame that poverty on other people. 

All you have to do is look in the mirror and say, “We can reform and open and deregulate the economy. We’re not going to be that naive to trust China. We know the Chinese agenda, and we’re going to take another look at various things culturally, like open borders, illegal immigration, mass euthanasia, that make us quite different. 

“And we’re not going to blame our problems on the United States or suddenly decide very loudly and virtue signal that we’re not going to trade with any products that come from the West Bank under Israel’s occupation.” 

Iran Is Preparing an October Surprise Before the Midterms

 

We’re about 50 days out from the midterms, and everybody seems to have an October surprise. What’s the situation on the ground in Iran? 

One of the big surprises is we don’t know because this is the first really major engagement where there are no Western journalists allowed into Iran. There are no U.S. ground troops. There are no embedded reporters. The Mossad maybe has agents on the ground, but they’re not publicizing that fact. And Iranians who sporadically call people in the West on their cell phones are hunted down.  

So, a lot of it is subjective conjecture. 

But I think it’s pretty clear that Iran is planning, as it is now sporadically, but planning an October surprise near the midterms. Their entire strategy has been to delay, negotiate, attack, delay, negotiate, attack. And the purpose was to, A, drive up the price of oil through that uncertainty, especially in hitting ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and B, get closer and closer and closer to the midterms. 

They don’t really care about the details or statistics of American congressional operations. They don’t really understand that for the Democrats to cut off all aid to military forces that are fighting the regime, that means money that we give Israel, intelligence that we give the Gulf, but more importantly, our daily expenses from the Pentagon, they’re going to have to have a large veto-proof Congress. I don’t think they’ll get that even if they were to win the midterms. 

But that’s what Iran is worried about and concerned about, that they want the Democrats to win. 

Why the Democrats? 

They remember in 2009, a million of them went out in the street to overthrow the regime. Barack Obama, newly inaugurated, didn’t do anything. He just kept mute for about 12 days. 

Why? Because he was going to negotiate with a theocracy about their nuclear program, and he wanted to reboot Iran as part of a rival to democratic Israel and the moderate Gulf regimes. He thought by empowering the Shia Crescent in Iran, in Syria, in Beirut, on the West Bank, and in Gaza, he could have creative tension, and he would be the adjudicator. 

But the people don’t really trust the Democrats, and they know they’ve been very critical of this effort to hurt the theocracy. 

So, Iran and the Democrats have the same goal: create chaos. They have the same goal, and that’s to defeat Donald Trump. The Democrats want the Iranians to create chaos, drag out the war, and therefore drive down public opinion and raise the price of gas. That’s clear. They’ve all but said that. 

And in turn, the opposition has a what? What would we call it? An October surprise? It is gaming the midterms as well. 

Now, what are they thinking? 

They are thinking that every time the Democrats come into power, they negotiate with this horrendous regime. They don’t trust that the Democrats want it gone. They fear, third, that the Democrats may be in power in the Congress. They fear that Donald Trump is at 40% popularity, and he might have to make concessions to them. 

So, in their interpretation of the calendar, the clock, the time remaining to the midterms, it might be they feel time is running out given two things. 

One, they don’t have any fuel, gasoline, or diesel. We know that much. The gas lines are three to four miles long, and food is scarce, and air conditioning is probably nonexistent. Inflation is rampant, and things are deteriorating at a geometric rate in Iran. 

And two, they don’t think anybody will come to the rescue except Donald Trump, and Donald Trump right now has control of the Congress. 

So, in their way of thinking, they may think an October surprise would be to go out in the streets right before the midterms and show that they thank the United States, they support the United States. 

There’s another October surprise. We haven’t heard much from the Kurds. The Turks have been very adamant that they did not want us to help the Iranian Kurds because that could spread into the Turkish Kurds, and the same thing is true of the Iraqi Kurds and the Syrian Kurds, etc.  

But they have been more active than usual in the last week. If they sense the people of Iran are rising up or are about to go for broke, they may want to as well join them. So they may have an October surprise. 

Bottom line is we should look then sometime between Oct. 15 and Nov. 3, I would imagine that the Iranian regime will send a huge barrage of missiles into the Gulf states. They will not touch Israel because Israel will reply in a manner that is unthinkable. But they will think they can damage the reputation and the competency of the Trump administration right on the eve of the midterms. 

The people will also think that they want an October surprise, but it’ll be a very different one. They’ll think they have one last shot to go out and by popular upheaval get rid of the regime before the Democrats, if they think they’re going to win, and that’s what conventional wisdom is before it happens. 

And the same thing is true of the Kurds. 

There’s one more October surprise. We don’t know what Donald Trump is going to do, and opinions vary. In the last two weeks of October, he may decide to have a negotiation that actually gives us a peace and opens the Strait. The Strait is open, but without any interference from Iran. I doubt that, but that is a possible October surprise. 

Or he may retaliate against the aggression, or retaliation might be aimed at anything the Iranians do to try to affect the midterm election. 

And what would that be? Hitting dual-use targets, hitting command and control, going for broke himself. 

So, sit tight. There’s a lot of known unknowns about Iran. It’s not a stable situation. Anything can happen and anything probably will right before the Nov. 3 midterms. 

The Democrat Chicken—or the Socialist Egg?

The primaries are over, and the November general election looms.

Suddenly, the Islamo-socialist podcaster Hasan Piker—who is now infamous for blaming America for 9/11 and warning Jews that “someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews”—is persona non grata on the Democrat stump.

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat nominee in the Michigan Senate race, once enlisted Piker to jump-start his lethargic candidacy. Now that he is locked in a close general election race against a strong Republican, El-Sayed dismisses the antisemite, who has suddenly outlived his usefulness, as a mere “social media person in California.”

Clinton-era Democrat politicos like Rahm Emanuel and James Carville insist that Democrats have divorced themselves from the hard-left democratic socialists.

Really?

If that divorce were real, why would so many Democrats be cheering a potential Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presidential run in 2028? She is, after all, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America‘s New York chapter.

Did lifelong socialist Bernie Sanders not run twice for president—not as a third-party candidate, but in the Democrat primaries? And did he not nearly capture the nomination in 2016 and 2020 until terrified donors and insiders intervened to abort his candidacies?

Did House Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries not endorse Democrat mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, also a member of the DSA’s New York chapter? And did Jeffries not thereby choose Mamdani over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo?

Did California Gov. Gavin Newsom—the opportunist par excellence, multimillionaire, and presidential hopeful—not recently declare that “capitalism as we know it doesn’t work”? (Who, pray tell, are “we”?)

Has not nearly every major Democrat stalwart, including Senate leader Chuck Schumer, called for a “big tent” party that includes unapologetic socialists?

Many Democrats, of course, reject the socialists’ calls to eliminate the Pentagon, close prisons, and dismantle the Senate. But perhaps only because such wild fantasies cannot succeed, at least for now, and repel most American voters.

Where, then, did these largely young, inexperienced, and naive democratic socialists find their agenda?

Self-declared socialists now demand an open border and mass amnesty for illegal aliens; the abolition of police and prisons; war on fossil fuels; radical DEI mandates; free health care for all; wealth taxes on billionaires and even millionaires; deep defense cuts; and an end to military aid to Israel.

Yet these are hardly the socialists’ positions alone. They closely resemble earlier Democratic Party programs and demands. The socialists now talk a grand leftist game; during the Biden years, Democrats tried to enact much of the agenda the socialists later claimed as their own.

So, did newly radicalized Democrats spawn this socialist offspring, or did the socialists radicalize the old party of John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton?

Who created whom?

The answer is demonstrably clear: Democrats radicalized themselves. Only later did an underfunded, motley socialist crew jump aboard their increasingly extremist bandwagon. By the time the Democratic Socialists of America became nationally known, the new Democrats had already supplied their model of governance.

When democratic socialists claim that “billionaires” owe their success to government, they merely echo President Barack Obama’s taunt to successful business owners: “You didn’t build that.”

Obama lifted that moronic socialist meme—like his “spread the wealth” line—wholesale from Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren. In 2011, Warren boasted that no wealthy American had succeeded on his own, reiterating the classic socialist rationale for confiscation: “The people” make success possible and must therefore be repaid.

In his first term, Obama sought to take over the nation’s health care system while concealing his socialist agenda. He partly succeeded through his now-failing Obamacare plans. His effort rested in part on the claim PolitiFact later named its “Lie of the Year”: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

Obama also cut more than $100 billion from defense. His “apology tour” and dismissal of American exceptionalism likewise anticipated these more recent socialist one-world talking points.

Who cooked up DEI?

Who but the Obama and Biden administrations vastly expanded government hiring and promotion by race, gender, and sexual orientation? Who unleashed the Justice Department to pressure the private sector to follow suit—until the Supreme Court declared much of this DEI tribalism unconstitutional?

Sanctuary cities and neo-Confederate state and local nullification of federal immigration law were mainstream Democrat policies long before 2020. Former President Joe Biden’s Democrats—not the socialists—destroyed the southern border and admitted more than 10 million illegal aliens. Until the 2024 election cycle, Biden had also effectively imposed a moratorium on deportations.

Long before forming the 2020 Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris advocated banning fracking, while Biden called for banning new fracking on federal lands and waters.

Long before the DSA and DSA-adjacent cohort of Mamdani, Piker, El-Sayed, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib began mouthing antisemitic talking points, prominent Democrats like Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”), Al Sharpton (“diamond merchants”), and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (“them Jews”) had shown the party’s tolerance for licensed Jew-hatred. More recently, more than 100 House Democrats voted to cut off all aid to Israel.

The same pattern applies to political methods. Democrat officials gave wink-and-nod support to the violent Antifa and Black Lives Matter movements long before the democratic socialists became a major force.

As early as August 2015, the Democratic National Committee officially endorsed BLM, while many Democrats defended Antifa.

In 2018, then-deputy DNC chief Keith Ellison posed proudly with an Antifa handbook and preened about “the book that strike (sic) fear in the heart of @realDonaldTrump.” By 2020, even FBI Director Christopher Wray was claiming that Antifa was more an “ideology” than a real organization of frequently unhinged and violent protesters.

During the post-George Floyd mania of 2020, then-Sen. Kamala Harris, soon to become vice president, praised calls to defund the police. She even boasted on national television that the weeks-old, increasingly violent demonstrations would not—and should not—cease before the election.

Some establishment Democrats went further, personally threatening violence. Who screamed outside the Supreme Court, warning the justices, “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions”? Not a fringe socialist, but the Senate’s top-ranking Democrat.

And in 2018, Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters urged her followers to threaten and “harass” Trump Cabinet officials.

More importantly, when the democratic socialists urge the next Democrat administration to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College and the filibuster, and admit Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia as two new left-wing states, where did those ideas originate?

Mainstream Democrat leaders had already embraced the entire agenda during the first Trump administration, if not earlier.

And who is more lawless: the loudmouth, self-proclaimed radical socialists who talk of weaponizing state and federal power, or the still more radical Democrats who actually wielded it?

Who tried to remove a major Republican presidential candidate from ballots in more than 20 states?

Who sent FBI SWAT teams into Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate?

Who brought four farcical lawfare cases aimed at imprisoning Trump?

Who concocted the Steele dossier and spread the lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation?

The answer: mainstream establishment Democrats, acting without any help from a coterie of fringy, downwardly mobile white urban socialists who were then largely irrelevant.

The once-fringe democratic socialists became mainstream largely by imitating an increasingly socialist Democratic Party. They did not infiltrate the Republican Party, form a viable third party, or—even after Sanders’ first campaign in 2016—abandon boutique Democrat causes, from open borders to gun control, to concentrate on economic radicalism.

Instead, they adopted the modern Democratic Party’s media, messaging, and methods and joined it, first informally and then formally. Fittingly, they are not called the republican socialists, independent socialists, or simply socialists of America.

In sum, the socialists did not swallow the old Clinton Democrats; those Democrats were already gone. A party radicalized over decades instead welcomed younger copycat socialists who proved even more zealous and embittered than their elders—and gave them their first national home.

 

True Democratic Socialists Can’t Run on Their Real Platform

 

I’d like to talk about the current rise of the Democratic Socialists of America and the idea of socialism itself.

Socialism innately is antithetical to human nature. Most people want to keep the profits of their own labor, and they don’t think the government, especially an unelected bureaucracy, can manage an economy, a supply-and-demand economy, better than average people can.

In other words, in the United States, 360 million people, all operating on agendas that they think are best for themselves and indirectly for their country, are smarter than a few experts in a central bureau, like the Soviet Union, issuing commands. And we know that’s true because socialism has never worked.

There are now socialist governments in Europe. The EU has 100 million people more than the United States. Their gross domestic product is $10 trillion less. China was socialist. It still has command-socialist elements in its economy. They have four times the population. Their GDP is $10 trillion less than ours.

In other words, an American capitalist economy, even with its socialist fringes, one American produces more than four of his Chinese counterparts, 30% more in goods and services.

So, the socialists know that, so they can’t run on what they want to do. That is, take over utilities, command the economy, open the border, and pretty much do what the Democrats already wanted to do, which, and to be frank, the Democrats are socialists prior to the democratic socialists absorbing the Democratic Party.

Pack the court, end the filibuster, bring in new states, destroy the Electoral College, defund the police, recognize BLM and Antifa, etc. That was the Democratic Party, and the Socialist Party agreed with all of that and joined them.

So, socialists know that that’s not popular. They’re not going to run on it. They may carve out districts in Boulder, in the Upper West Side, in parts of Chicago, in California, and where they’re completely blue socialists, carved-out left-wing districts, and socialists may be honest.

But in purple districts, in statewide races, they can’t say who they are.

So, if Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democratic nominee, has said on record that he follows Sharia law, or that fireworks or football or traditional American pastimes like Thanksgiving are silly, or that he wants to take over the health care system and abolish private health insurance, or he wants to tax the rich to distribute, or he wants basically open borders, he’s not going to tell you that.

You know what he’s going to do? He’s going to put a cowboy hat on, and he’s going to talk about sports and that he was a high school athlete, and he’s a good old boy from Michigan.

If you’re Mr. [James] Talarico in Texas, he’s not going to tell you he believes there’s a multigendered Jesus, or that God has no gender, or that meat-eating is terrible and you should have vegetarian diets only, or that you should abolish private healthcare and nationalize the medical industry. He’s not going to say any of that to Texas.

You know what he’s going to do? He’s going to walk around in a rented truck and a cowboy hat and talk about how great Texas beef is.

Up to a point. Up to a point.

When he gets elected, as we see with Mr. [Zohran] Mamdani, did Mr. Mamdani in New York ever tell us that he was going to confiscate private apartments he felt were unfair to renters? Did he ever say he was going to make multiple food markets and say that there would be no ID to use them?

Because when he initially said you had to have an ID to come in there, then he was contradicting himself because he felt like he was [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. You have to have an ID to show you’re a legal citizen. Well, he was requiring IDs to go into a socialist—not now.

So, what he said in the campaign and what he’s actually doing are two different things.

If you elect a Talarico or a [Troy] Jackson in Maine or an El-Sayed in Michigan, you’re going to get something completely different from what they campaigned on. You’re going to get a socialist radical agenda, much of what you’ve already seen under the Biden administration.

You’re going to get an attempt to open the border, mass amnesties for illegal immigrants, systematized national healthcare directed from a bureaucracy, a subsidized energy sector, a war on fossil fuels, an isolationist policy aligning with countries like Spain, Cuba, Nicaragua, not the revolution that’s happening in Latin America now, where country after country is rejecting communism and socialism, embracing Americanism and free markets, and the Western Hemisphere is becoming basically a pro-American continent.

You’re not going to see any of that.

One final warning. Socialists have a mean streak. They don’t like us. They think that we’re parochial and we’re uneducated and we’re nationalistic, and they’re utopian globalist philosophers. So, they try to needle us, needle us.

That’s why El-Sayed said he wanted to get rid of, he thought that fireworks were silly. We’re silly. Thanksgiving, silly. Football, silly.

That’s why Talarico thinks these people think God or Jesus are male. They’re silly. There are multiple genders. And these guys that sit down with that big steak, that just doesn’t make sense.

I’ll end on this anecdote. There was a 9/11 commemorative group, and they were signing a declaration commemorating 9/11 as the anniversary is upon us.

Mamdani has been criticized, criticized that he has brought Islamists into the government and antisemites. And he’s saying that he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, and he has, in the past, talked about defunding the police. He’s in a veritable war with the NYPD in New York.

OK, so what does he do when he signs this? He takes the ceremonial pen. Who would you give it to on a commemoration of 9/11?

I think you would say, “Well, the firefighters were heroic.” And then somebody would say, “Well, I think the NYPD was too.”

OK. “How about the Red Cross?” Yes.

“So I’m going to give this to the NYPD, the pen to the … ”

No. No, no, no, no, no.

He’s going to give it to his Islamist, legal counsel, who defended a lot of Islamist terrorists, including the brother-in-law of one of the hijacker suicide bombers that helped kill 3,000 Americans.

But he’s not going to … He’s not stupid enough. He’s not going to have him sit next to him, as you would think, to receive the commemorative pen that he signed this document, this commemoration document.

You know what he does instead? He turns to the only Jewish major commissioner that he has, Ms. Jessica Tisch, the commissioner of the NYPD, and she’s Jewish, and she’s NYPD, and he says, “Would you hand this to Mr. Ramzi Kassem?”

Think about that imagery. What do socialists do? He’s basically needling her and us, and saying, “I’m going to have as my little servant somebody from the NYPD and somebody who’s Jewish to hand the pen over to someone who hates the NYPD, hates the United States, and is antisemitic.”

And that’s what he did. They will continue to do that for one reason. They do not like the United States at its creation. They did not like America as it matured, and they despise it now at its fruition.

Thanks to Progressives, the West Is Collapsing Again

For most people, the story of the medieval world was one of cramped cities, constant violent crime, and episodic outbreaks of deadly plagues—the dividends of unclean urban conditions, rotting food, fouled water, open sewage, and unchecked rats, fleas, and lice. Most of each day was spent simply trying to survive until the next.

Castles and walls dotted the landscape to protect kingdoms from marauding tribes and foreign invaders. City gates were usually closed at dusk to keep out nocturnal marauders. Public executions drew massive crowds. And religious schisms and conflicts often turned deadly.

In other words, it was not altogether unfamiliar to the world we are becoming today.

Yet meanwhile, science advanced quietly among true elites at universities, courts, and monasteries, producing windmills, mechanical clocks, and eyeglasses. Sophisticated crossbows were manufactured in great numbers. Large, multi-sail warships were built that could cross narrow seas.

Some of history’s greatest literature—Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” and St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologiae”—was the product of the medieval mind.

We still gaze dumbfounded at the architectural genius and beauty of the colossal cathedrals of Cologne, Florence, Milan, Paris, Rome, and Seville. The Byzantine cathedral Hagia Sophia may have risen near the beginning of the medieval period and for a millennium, nothing rivaled its majesty. All these medieval architectural masterpieces were built without computers, porta-potties, overtime, or building permits.

Yet after the collapse of the classical world (circa AD 500), Western civilization still needed a millennium to recover even a modicum of its lost knowledge and technology. Centuries passed before the Renaissance saw hygienic principles of sewage systems, aqueducts, and waste disposal—not to mention the medical expertise of classically trained doctors and scientists.

Modern Medievalism

Yet our progressive-regressive modern West is now suddenly beginning to resemble the medieval age—with one important caveat: After centuries of so-called “progress,” we should know better.

Our mounting urban filth, dangerous streets, and resurgent diseases are juxtaposed with brilliant revolutions in artificial intelligence, bioengineering, robotics, satellite technology, spaceflight, and cancer research.

Unlike their counterparts in the medieval fiefdom, our officials know how to stop disease, crime, and filth but apparently choose not to. Their neglect grows out of a sick ideology that divides the world into the blameworthy “oppressors” and the blameless “oppressed.” The victim is always right and must be championed—at least from a distance or as long as he does not show up smelly on your doorstep.

We have just experienced a tribal invasion of millions of impoverished foreigners swarming across our southern border—until the belated resumption of border-wall construction, medieval-style, and the deployment of detested patrols who try bravely to stop them.

Western urban street crime seems to require the army to restore calm yet often grows unchecked when troops are barred from helping police.

It is technically illegal for people to camp out on public sidewalks or someone else’s property—unless they do so in such numbers that paralyzed city officials look the other way.

Defecation, urination, fornication, and drug injection are now routine spectacles for hurried sidewalk passersby. If Los Angeles or Berkeley allows its streets and sidewalks to become medieval, should we be surprised by outbreaks there of deadly medieval diseases like typhus and leptospirosis—or that our storm drains now double as sewage gutters?

Today’s mayors will not stop rats from breeding, while officials—most recently in Los Angeles, for example—consider proposals for taxpayer-funded “hygienic sexual-relief clinics” offering homeless people “private sexual relief through masturbation.”

In New York, some of the richest people in the world sidestep rancid piles of rat-infested trash. In San Francisco and Chicago, some of the world’s greatest cancer researchers check their shoe soles for human feces before entering their space-age labs.

Weirder still, the Western world has become both the most regulated and the most lawless civilization on the planet. Our state environmental detectives visit industries to ensure that their effluvia do not contain one part per billion of a particular toxic substance. And state and federal regulators, with dozens of letters after their names, examine daily microscopic traces of dangerous toxins in the bubbling pools of sewage at treatment plants.

Yet under cover of darkness, masked city workers decked out in hazmat suits, rubber boots, and gloves use high-pressure hoses to blast politically correct feces, urine, blood, and drug detritus into storm drains. These modern marvels carry the mess out to pollute supposedly pristine ocean waters—where a fisherman can be fined a small fortune for tossing an inert, empty soda can into the smelly water. In the modern West, one-billionth of Roundup is a threat to civilization; tons of feces on city sidewalks are not. The theory? The more the law-abiding are monitored to the nth degree, the more society can withstand exempting the lawless to do as they wish.

How strange is our postmodern medieval intersection between barbarity and civilization?

The Oppressive Oppressed

In California, a century of traffic science and public-safety research had established strict licensing rules for truck drivers navigating fully loaded 80,000-pound, double-trailer behemoths amid tiny subcompacts on our busy freeways.

Our legal system has insisted that drivers of such interstate semis must be highly skilled and certified before stepping into the potentially dangerous T. Rex of a big rig. They must be 21, possess a valid California driver’s license, pass a Department of Transportation physical, and undergo background and drug screening—all before scoring 80 percent on a required 50-question technical exam, followed by a thorough two-hour, in-person test of their driving skills. Sounds great—in theory.

But not in fact. For fear that someone, somewhere, somehow, at some time might be inconvenienced by these rules to protect the public, nearly 20,000 illegal aliens obtained commercial driver’s licenses from a compliant state of California without even proving rudimentary knowledge of English. They were free to exploit loopholes, leverage exemptions, and avoid background checks.

The result?

Our new leftist apparat empowered thousands of incompetent drivers. Many cannot distinguish a yield sign from a stop sign, and most cannot read a word of English. They drive as they please—racing, swerving, and veering, with a 40-ton trailer wagging behind them.

They now own our Wild West freeways so that our elite can feel morally superior to the mere lab-rat drivers on whom they experiment. The architects of these laws are often chauffeured in large limousines, SUVs, and motorcades or prefer to fly in private jets.

Western civilization mostly phased out public executions nearly a century ago. But before it congratulates itself on its distance from the medieval world, consider that the therapeutic Left now canonizes, rather than hangs, murderers. (Which is more medieval: to hang a murderer or to romanticize a known assassin?)

Luigi Mangione assassinated Brian Robert Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in a December 2024 ambush and pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from the killing last month. He has been deified by scores of young leftist women who swoon over the trust-fund scion’s good looks and politically correct violence. Indeed, admirers even produced a musical about his supposedly heroic murder of the health care executive.

Charlie Kirk was grotesquely murdered during a livestreamed public event, after which, for months on end, some on the Left celebrated his shooting and mocked those who mourned him. When Lindsay Clancy brutally strangled her three small children with an exercise band, women on the Left did not merely cite her supposedly extenuating postpartum depression but deified her as a victimized “everywoman”—with scarcely a voice for the three young lives snuffed out before they had a chance to grow up by the person who, until recently, everyone understood was supposed to care for them most: their mother.

The new secular revolutionaries know that their city upon a hill won’t work—and will crash and burn—if conservatives likewise deify the murderer of a populist Marxist podcaster. What would they do if conservatives, in tit-for-tat fashion, were to join in to gush over the handsome killer of a popular socialist activist? What if a returning combat veteran slew all his children and then developed a cult of admirers demanding his PTSD guaranteed him an exemption from the law? What if the Secret Service, on four separate occasions, had to shoot at would-be right-wing assassins of President Barack Obama?

Modern, sophisticated, humane science now has the technology to save most premature babies at 23-24 weeks. But in pre-civilizational fashion, Massachusetts—to the cheers of “enlightened” feminists—has enacted laws to allow abortion (involving the collapse of the infant’s skull and the siphoning out of its contents) right up to the moment of birth. The media hailed this license to kill a viable infant as “strengthening abortion care.”

In this brutal juxtaposition of life and death, modern and ancient, we invest millions to save one premature infant of six months, only to allot a few dollars to kill a baby as it looks out the birth canal and almost reaches a new life.

Chic Barbarity

These contradictions and alternate universes of the modern medieval West are still quite different from their counterparts in the medieval world of 500-1400.

At least the medieval age believed that it was incrementally gaining knowledge to fight age-old terrors of the human and natural worlds. And such progress would eventually lead to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the current affluence and freedom of the West.

In contrast, our retrograde contemporary world knows how to prevent ancient diseases. We have mastered the science of sewage control and treatment. We have sought to regulate away most of the dangers posed by life-giving machines. A hundred years of penal science has established that police visibility and law enforcement deter crime.

Yet reactionary Marxism, socialist-mandated equality, and authoritarian, heaven-on-earth utopianism—going beyond even the excesses of the medieval Church—war against the progress of civilization. These ideologies arise not from fear of God or of violating ancient customs and traditions, but from smug moral narcissism—with the addendum that our atheist saints must never suffer the consequences of their destructive ideology.

After all, there are no homeless people on the lawns of the humanitarian Malibu celebrities, but plenty of security for the very progressives who defunded the police in crime-ridden cities.

Martha’s Vineyard humanitarians blasted Immigration and Customs Enforcement as Gestapo thugs, even as they readied care packages for illegal aliens dropped off at their community center—but only after they had ordered buses to transfer the “Other” far away.

Redistributionist gasbag and socialist Hasan Piker—channeling medieval pogroms—warns Jews that their future is bleak in America, then whizzes off in his $200,000 EV Porsche Taycan Turbo S people’s wagon.

So again, what is this plague of modern medievalism?

It is a disease of the 21st-century West, where hundreds of millions have transcended the age-old struggle to live one more day and now enjoy the unchecked freedom and affluence of democratic market capitalism.

In a world where we deem it our birthright to die in our sleep at 90, we do not worry about who struggles to produce our food, build our homes, provide our fuel, or conquer our diseases. We care only that they do so on demand. And thus, on autopilot, we are free to get tatted and pierced, remain glued to our iPhones, and perhaps even consider transitioning as we worry about cosmic things—like the need to celebrate the murderer or torch a police precinct.

Regressive Progressives

So the progressives, socialists, and Marxists gave us universal “caring.” They birthed a puritanical holiness, a narcissistic sanctimoniousness that decrees the rape victim of an illegal alien acceptable collateral damage—allowable to ensure that the illegal alien remains free to enter the country unaudited and unquestioned.

The poor typhus-bearing rats that scurry along the public sidewalk shall not be denied their breeding grounds among the sanctified but soiled and infectious blankets of the homeless.

The modern medievalist demands that the 30-year veteran of our wars be drummed out of the military as an enemy of the people for refusing the experimental mRNA vaccine—but not the COVID-19-infected, unvaccinated illegal alien who, amid lockdowns, strolls across the Rio Grande without a word from our secular saints.

Virtue-signaling concern for the nihilist—at someone else’s expense—is the new national creed.

And the “victim” and racist killer Decarlos Brown—now deemed “too incompetent to stand trial”—readying his knife to slice open the throat of the innocent, doomed, 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, in the seat ahead of him, is the poster child of our modern medievalism.

 

The Left Is Dragging America Back to the Dark Ages

 The more you look around us today, I think a good description of 2026, culturally, economically, socially, politically, is that we are in a modern medieval world.  

Maybe we’re progressive regressives, and I don’t mean that just in the sense that progressives are regressive, and they are, but that one part of our society is advancing at lightning speed to the future and progressing. But the other part is regressing, and regressing at a phenomenal pace back to what I would call the medieval period. 

Remember, the medieval period was roughly that area in time after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, roughly AD 500 to around AD 1300 to 1400, the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. In medievalism, we often talk about primitivism after the destruction of the classical world during the Dark Ages, the early medieval period, and it’s characterized by epidemics, bubonic plague, typhus, typhoid, smallpox, terrible sanitation in urban centers. They had forgotten the Roman use of sewage and aqueducts. 

There were open borders. National states popped up that couldn’t defend themselves, so you saw castles and walls pop up all over the European countryside in a way you had not during the Roman period. In cities, they were walled, towns even, and the gates closed at dusk to prevent gratuitous crime. 

But at the same time that this was happening, you had some of the greatest works of literature in the Western world. You had Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” Dante’s “Inferno,” St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica.” And if you look at the architectural expertise and scientific knowledge of architecture, it was progressing at a geometric rate when you look at the huge cathedrals at Seville or Cologne. 

I should remind everybody that around 536, Santa Sofia was created, the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. It would be the largest church in Christendom for a thousand years. And everything from the mass production of crossbows to eyeglasses was a product of the medieval period, even if, as I said, the daily lives of most people were wretched. 

Now let’s switch to the modern period. All of us now can call anywhere in the world in seconds on our iPhones. Anything you want to know, past, present, future, you can just get on a cheap computer and ask an artificial intelligence program from the many free platforms. You can watch movies, you can watch entertainment on satellites. Anything you want is at your fingertips. 

The nation itself is exploring space. We’re getting close to conquering cancer. I can attest to that. Computers allow you to write without even speaking. You can, unfortunately, compose a whole term paper or a book with AI. You can make a movie with AI. 

Yet at the same time that’s happening, look at what’s going on in Berkeley here in California or Los Angeles. We’re seeing outbreaks of medieval diseases that we thought had been conquered years ago, given our sophisticated knowledge of sewage and water treatment. We had a typhus breakout in Los Angeles. We had leptospirosis, a rat disease, in Berkeley. 

You look at the homeless camps all over our major cities. People are just out in the open fornicating, urinating, defecating, injecting drugs. There’s tons of feces that has to be removed, and it’s so strange in this modern medievalism. 

We have sophisticated researchers who go into a hospital in Chicago or go to a cancer center in San Francisco and have to check the bottoms of their shoes to make sure they don’t have feces as they go into their space-age laboratories. 

It’s really funny. In the medieval period, public hangings and beheadings were sort of public events that people flocked out to see. Is that any different than our glorification of murderers? 

And there is a difference. Luigi Mangione, they named an opera after him in California. The killer of Charlie Kirk brought people jubilation. I won’t even get into Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three children and became every woman to the feminist left.  

At least in the medieval period, they knew that the murderer had done something wrong and was being punished. In the post-medieval period, we are glorifying that murderer, and that’s really striking. 

And so, what I’m getting at is we are the most regulated, the most advanced, the most modern, the most scientific society in history, even as we can’t solve problems that were solvable, and the medieval period would have died to know the solutions that we have in our hands to make sure we have clean water, to make sure there is no crime, to make sure there is no disease, to make sure that people don’t defecate on the street. But we don’t do it. We willingly don’t do it. 

Now, the question to finish is why? 

We have an elite that has embraced a very toxic ideology throughout history, and that is mandated, government-sanctioned equality of result. And they have divided, therefore, to further that ideology, the world into victims and victimizers, an arbitrary classification, sometimes based on class, but increasingly on race. 

And once they identify someone as a victim who’s not responsible for his plight, then it’s the duty of the society to allow him to express himself. If you have a lot of teenagers who want to loot a jewelry store, then you say they were hungry and they needed food.  

If you see homeless people living on the street, then it was because of something the majority culture did to them. 

And the result of that is when people engage in very dangerous antisocial behavior, an elite will tell the rest of us that they’re not subject to law enforcement or they’re not subject to the laws that apply to the rest of us. 

But there are two really pernicious addenda here. 

No. 1, the people who do this on the left, who believe in this mandated equality and a binary of victim and victimizer, are never subject to the consequences of their own ideology. Nancy Pelosi‘s home is not surrounded by homeless people. Jane Fonda doesn’t have to trip over people injecting drugs when she walks outside her door. The Hollywood stars in Malibu who champion the homeless have very clear security. You can’t get near their homes. 

In other words, we, the lab rats, are those upon whom they experiment. 

And there’s another reason as well. It’s not just that they experiment on us. and this ideology is not applicable to itself, but more importantly, they believe that they are morally superior because most of them are agnostics or atheists. They have lost their God, but they have found it in a post-Enlightenment caring, abstract though it may be, for victims. 

And when you put this religious element to it, because it makes no sense to allow medieval diseases and medievalism to dominate your cities in crime, filth and homelessness, but they do it. They feel morally superior, and it gives them meaning in their life in a way that we, the majority, find not morally superior, but morally repugnant.