The New Democratic Socialist Party Is a ‘Graveyard of Bad Ideas’

 

 There’s a lot of opposition to the Trump counterrevolution. There’s talk of a Democratic resurgence.

But before we write off the Republicans—and
I’m very confident. I think they’re gonna do well in the midterms, for
reasons I’ve outlined before. Do we really want the alternative

Because I think the way to characterize the new democratic socialist
party is it’s sort of a graveyard of bad ideas. That is that, especially
in the Obama administration and in the post-George Floyd period, we
were told that there were new paradigms, new exegesis, new protocols,
agendas that were going to be lasting and permanent, and change America
for the better.

And they have been tried under former President Joe Biden, and they’ve been found wanting. And I think they’re mostly, now, relegated, as I said, to the boneyard, maybe, of bad ideas.

One of them was this idea that a previously small minority of people
that suffered from gender dysphoria—maybe 0.001% of the population—was
actually a huge group of oppressed peoples, in the manner of the civil
rights plight of African Americans or Latinos. And therefore, we had to
recognize separate restrooms for trans people. Boys—biological men, I
should say, competing in female sports. And we just went whole hog
I think all of us at work, all of a sudden, one day, we woke up and
people were listing their pronouns. I haven’t seen that recently

Anyway, we were told there was this large stealthy constituency of
oppressed trans people and that they had innate grievances against the
majority. And they were quite big.

I don’t think people bought into the idea that there are more than
two biological genders. The rest, I think, as a recent Czech diplomat
lectured former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Munich, Germany, the rest are socially constructed.

Nor did we really look at the effect of biological males competing in
sports, especially contact sports—that can be volleyball or things like
boxing—the effect of a biological male on female sports, and the
fairness, or I should say unfairness, of it.

And of course, the transitional surgery, the effect on hormones. The
Left had been so careful to warn us about Big Pharma and the medical
industry and unnecessary procedures, and yet they were very
undiscriminating and just kind of approved whole-hog the idea that you
can make these radical surgeries on young teenagers and give them very
dangerous drugs—steroids and hormones, antidepressants. And I think now
we’ve seen the result of it. And it’s not gonna recur.


Open borders were another bad idea. And we had 10,000 people coming
across the border. I think the iconic turning point was when Alejandro
Mayorkas, the former Biden homeland security secretary, was standing on a
podium and saying at the border, “The border is secure.” And you could
see thousands of people coming in—10,000 a day, 10 million to 12 million
over four years.

I don’t think anybody realizes the enormity of the task to find those
10 million to 12 million. They added to a pool of 20 million, giving us
30 million illegal aliens. And we had another 20 million people not
born in the United States that were residents. Some were citizens, some
were legal residents, some were on student visas.


But the point is, we have 53 million people, 16% of the population
wasn’t born here, without any idea how to assimilate, acculturate, or
integrate them into the body politic.

So, I think the idea of open borders, as Secretary of State Marco
Rubio pointed out in Europe, is a dead letter. Nobody’s gonna come back
and say, “We have to let in another 10 million or 5 million.” It impacts
the poor. It swamps our social welfare network, as we’ve seen with
500,000 criminals. It spikes our crime.




Another one is the idea that we’re gonna live in a United Nations
utopia and you really don’t need a deterrent military. Europe went down
that path after the end of the Cold War, 1991, all through the ’90s and
the new millennium. They disarmed. Germany went from having the biggest
army in NATO to having one that wasn’t really an army anymore. Europe,
despite its $20 trillion gross domestic product and despite its 500
million-plus population, is totally disarmed.

We ourselves let our defenses lax under Biden. I think everybody sees
now, after the Iranian nuclear threat, what China’s up to, what Russia
is doing in Ukraine, that you have to deter your enemies. And that
requires a strong defense budget.

I think, as well, we owe—we’re getting into the trillions of dollars.
And we’re anticipated to get to, in the next decade, I don’t know, it
could be $40 trillion in debt. It’s not sustainable. The interest on the
debt, right now, is larger than the defense budget. Europe is suffering
the same malaise. But the idea of modern monetary theory—the Left told
us—or that since we are loaning the money to ourselves and bondholders,
it’s turned out to be bogus.

The fact is we ran up all of this debt because the Fed, during the Obama and first Trump administration and the first Biden administration,
kept interest rates low, so we borrowed billions, trillions of more
dollars, at rates as low as 2% or 3%. And now the rates came up. And we
saw what a catastrophic idea that was when we have to service it

I don’t think anybody’s gonna make the argument that we need more
socialist entitlement programs funded by borrowed money. If you borrow
the money and it’s unsustainable, you only have three choices: you can
default on it and ruin the nation’s credit rating, you can confiscate
money, or you can inflate your way out of it.

There’s a fourth, but I don’t see Europe, yet, learning that lesson:
You can grow your economy and get greater revenues. That’s what we’re
trying to do in the United States.

Fifth, finally, very quickly, I think diversity, equity, and
inclusion has sort of been exhausted. It’s showed not to be unworkable,
that is, how do you determine who is a victim and part of the
victim/victimizer binary, historical grievances? If you’re Latino or
black or Asian, do you prove that somebody was mean to you? Your
great-grandfather was a slave—great, great. It’s very hard, if you’re
one-quarter white, half-Asian, one-quarter Latino, what particular group
are you?

It was an emphasis on superficial appearance, contrary to the content
of our character. It was on the color of your skin. That didn’t work
out too well. It gave people exemptions, and it said that, I,
psychologically, if I make a mistake or I don’t work hard or I wanna
apply to Harvard, but I don’t have the SAT scores or the grades of other
people, I should get that. Or if I’m in a pilot training program or I’m
a surgeon and I don’t quite make the standards, there’s other criteria,
kinda like the Russian commissar system, where if you were
ideologically pure, then you were given exemptions from performance.

And so, I think we now see that DEI is disruptive, it’s
discriminatory. And I think, after experimenting with this under the
guise of affirmative action, but especially, the last four or five
years, people are sick of it. It’s incoherent. And it’s dangerous. It’s
dangerous. It puts people in key positions in the economy, where life
and death matters, and they are promoted or assessed or retained on
criteria other than mer


And so, we can sum up by saying there’s four or five things that went
full-bloom, full-blast under the Obama and Biden administrations. And I
think President Donald Trump
and this counterrevolution were able to show the American people that
the trans fixation, the open borders, the idea of being pretty much
disarmed, deficits—I call it deficit socialism—and DEI didn’t work out


There was a laboratory United States that tried these things, and it
hasn’t worked. And Europe, I think, would agree that it has to follow
the same pathway of reform or it’s going to end up a Third World
country.

Preventive or Preemptive? The Pros and Cons of a Potential US Strike on Iran

 

President Donald Trump is positioning the largest naval and air forces with submarines off the coast of Iran—in the Persian Gulf, in the Mediterranean, in the Red Sea—that we’ve seen since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And there are pros and cons about striking Iran.

We’re not at war with them right now, so this is what we would call either a preventive war, long-term threat, or a preemptive war, that there’s a short-term threat that has to be precluded by the use of force.

It’s very controversial, and we don’t know whether he’s going to pull the trigger or not. He said help was on the way when the protests were maximized. Anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 people, estimates say, were killed. Those protests are now—we haven’t seen much of them, given the mass death and murder on this awful regime of some, it’s getting nearer, as you know, a half-century, 46 years.

So, what are the pros and cons of what we’re doing? Does he have to go to Congress to get a declaration of war? No. No more than the Obama administration had to do when they bombed Libya, for example. But there are pros and cons, and let’s go through the pros first.

It has been the dream of eight presidencies, going back to Jimmy Carter, all the way to Donald Trump, to have some type of regime change.

There’s one exception, Barack Obama. He had a harebrained scheme, remember, that he was going to empower Iran. He had the Iran deal. He brought in $400 million at night on pallets to give them money that had been sanctioned. He lifted the sanctions. So did Joe Biden. The idea was to balance off Israel and the Arab countries with a Shia revolutionary country. And then that would produce creative tension, I suppose, that Obama thought he would adjudicate.

But other than that, every president has wanted an end to that anti-American regime. They have killed more Americans than any terrorist organization, probably as much as ISIS or more than ISIS, given the use of shaped charges in Iraq. So, that makes sense that you’d want to get rid of it.

You would also, in this cat-and-mouse game that we played for 20 years about Iranian nukes, it’s a given that anytime they sign a nuclear nonproliferation deal or they give someone their word, it’s not going to happen. They can’t be trusted. They’re a revolutionary, ideologically driven, not rational regime. But it would be very good if they didn’t have the ability with their hypersonic missiles or their other ballistic missiles to hit Europe or our allies in the Middle East or even, at some future date, us. So, you could end that project for good.

They’re in remission now, thanks to our prior bombing missions, but we haven’t ended that threat. It’s existential as long as the regime is in. It would be a moral thing, as I said, 10,000 to 30,000 protesters were murdered. Their bodies were not even given back, in some cases, to their families, secretly buried.

And this regime, as we speak, is hanging people, executing people. It’s a rogue regime. And the moral case is strong to help out the protesters, and there might be a chance that Donald Trump could time his attack with a second wave of protests.

It would also stabilize. Everybody thinks it’s going to destabilize the Middle East. It would probably stabilize the Middle East. And with the source of funding for Hamas, for the Houthis, and for Hezbollah completely cut off, those terrorist organizations may die in the vine, and the Arab countries might feel more secure that they could cut a deal according to the Abraham Accords with Israel.

But there are cons. Let’s make no mistake about it. When you park 200,000-ton displacement carriers, one in the Persian Gulf and one in the Mediterranean, those are big targets. They’ve got some of the best air defenses in the history of naval warfare. They have a fleet of accompanying ships. Hopefully, their air arms could take out the ability of the Iranians to hit them with either drones or missiles, but it’s not a sure thing. And they’re big targets. And we’ve got about 5,000 Americans on each one of those carriers, and they’re a $13 billion, $14 billion investment. So, that’s a great risk.

The midterms are coming up in November. Most presidents are very wary to take on an optional military engagement when there’s so many unknowns up in the air, and it could either sink the Trump administration’s prospects in November or, if he was able to displace and get rid of this horrific regime, the first of, as I said, eight presidents to be able to do that, that would be quite an achievement, it might help him in the midterms.

He has another problem. That is the MAGA base. The MAGA base is neo-isolationist. He campaigned in 2016 and 2020 against so-called forever wars, optional military engagements, especially in the Middle East. In the past, he’s been able to square that circle by limited engagements. In other words, the taking out of the Wagner Group in Syria, the killing of Qasem Soleimani or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, or the bombing of the nuclear facilities. They were all finite, very short, solved the problem. Bombed ISIS into oblivion. Said he was going to bomb them, he did.

This is a little different. There’s not so easily an endgame here because this is a huge country and it’s got a very ideologically fervent population.

There’s another thing, too. The protesters themselves, we think, are pro-Western. They want to bring back the shah, but we’re not sure of that.

So, if you’re a protester and they killed 30,000 of you and you’re afraid to go back out and you’re sitting in your apartment and you see bombs raining, and they’re not going to be completely accurate, and take my word for it and your word for it, these Iranians know how to do Hamas and Hezbollah-like tactics. Their missiles and their command and control will not be in something that says a secure bunker. They will be near hospitals. They will be near mosques. They will be near schools. They will be, as we saw in Lebanon, in residential areas. So, there will be collateral damage.

Will the Iranian public have the long-term view that that’s in their interest, or the short-term view and turn on the Americans?

These are all pros and cons, but ultimately, Donald Trump will have to make that decision. He’ll have to make the decision pretty quickly because you can’t just take those many naval assets and stick them halfway across the world. In terms of deployment, wear and tear on the machinery, deployment time, etc., there is a window. And the window is probably about another six weeks. He’ll have to make that decision.

We have the Olympics. You would not want to strike during the Olympics, apparently. He’s got to worry about the Israelis. On the one hand, they want the regime gone. On the other hand, the last time they exchanged missiles and attacks with Iran, they were getting very low on anti-ballistic missile defense weaponry. So, we don’t know quite where their stocks are now.

Finally, what should Trump do? I’m not going to advise him. I don’t have the expertise or the knowledge to advise him. But I do think that he might want to have a brief press conference or address to the nation, five minutes, not detailed, just say that we are facing an existential threat for nearly 50 years with this country. It’s killed thousands of Americans in Iraq and Lebanon. And it is a human rights abuser. It murders its own people.

And it’s very important, given its key role in controlling the Strait of Hormuz, where 20% to 30% of the world’s oil passes every day. And more importantly, the price of oil will depend on it as well.

And here are the dangers and here are the advantages, and I’m going to make my—it doesn’t have to be that explicit, but he needs to give some information to the American people.

‘You Owe Us’ Is the Mantra of the Left

 

person 1: Two things that came together for me. One was [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani’s 9.5% increase in the property tax for New Yorkers, but not that alone. I’m sure our audience has read about that. But I was looking at Power Line. I always like to give a shout-out to them because they have some great articles, and they were comparing New York State’s budget versus Florida’s budget.

And they came up with, well, it’s only half at the state level. So, I thought, well, let’s look at the city level, New York City versus Miami. And while the billions that each of them has to spend is not meaningful in and of themselves. So, for example, New York City’s budget is $127 billion while Miami’s is only $3.4.

But that being said, per citizen, what has to be paid into these cities? And so, for Mamdani, each of his citizens has to pay $14,431 in for his budget. And in Miami, it’s just half of that, at just under $7,000 per citizen.

person 2: And it’s more disproportionate because in New York, the number of people who are actually paying taxes is a much smaller percentage than in Miami.

He inherited the city that was this blue-chip financial market, this cultural, financial capital of the world, and the first thing he did was raise spending by $11 billion.

Second thing he did was prove that he couldn’t get the trash or the snow off the street during the storm.

Third thing he did, it was very hard to find an appointee who somewhere in their dark history had not issued or written something antisemitic.

All he does is smile and try to be … basically, his message is: I’m not Lenin, and Trotsky or Stalin. I’m the nice, happy-faced communist, and you’re going to like me, and you’re going to like my communism. We’re all going to get along.

I mean, if you’re in New York, if you’re in California, you got a choice.

If you’re in California and this billionaire tax passes, and you’ve got to come up with $50 million, you’re going flee. If you’re in New York, and they’re going to raise your property tax on these multimillion-dollar buildings, you’re talking what could be $20 or $30, $40, $50 million more a year, then you’re going to flee, get out.

If you don’t, they’re just going to keep doing it. They’re going keep targeting you because they have an idea. I don’t think people realize that.

The socialist mind … I knew a lot of socialists in the universities and some friends of mine, and they always think … The whole core of socialism is, I work hard, and no one knows how I suffer at my job as a nurse, as a farmer, whatever. And I believe in the labor theory of value.

Why is it that when Victor had a Ph.D. but he was pruning vines, he was only making $4 an hour—I was for three years—and then all of a sudden, five years later, he is an academic, and he is sitting in between classes and having coffee and he’s making $50 an hour. That’s not fair.

And so, they don’t think about supply and demand, expertise, education, nothing. And somebody would say, “Well, when Victor was pruning vines, a lot of people could not only prune them, they could probably prune them better.”

When he was teaching a particular Greek literature class, and they thought that was an important class to offer. Questionable, but that’s what they said. Very few people could do it. They don’t accept that.

And so, they run on this envy that we work hard, and we get up, and we do things, and therefore we should be compensated. And that’s what a socialist is, and they’re going keep raising taxes.

The other thing about it is, when they raise taxes, they don’t ever say thank you. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, even former Sen. Dianne [Feinstein], they’re all wealthy, but they never said, “We want to thank the people in California that are the 1% that are paying 50% of the income tax.”

And by the way, the 50% of the income tax in California, there’s only about, I don’t know what there is, 250 billionaires? They usually pay capital gains tax. They pay at about, I don’t know, 28%. The people in that 1% of Californians are highly compensated professionals and small businesspeople who make a million or two million, three million dollars, and then they get hit with a 13.3% tax rate, plus their federal plus Medicare.

So, they’re paying 55% of their income and nobody ever says, “Thank you for doing that, you people, we have a very skilled elite that allows us to have this huge budget.” They don’t. The attitude is always, “They have to. They have to pay more.”

I remember in 1991 there was a fiscal crisis in California and the state was broke.

Well, it’s always broke. It always has a deficit, but this was a really bad deficit. So, they decided to go after all state agencies, and one of them was the California State University system. In the past you always could lay off part-time lecturers. But then they got the idea, we exploit those people so well. We pay them so little that by laying them off—we really reduce about 40% of our classes, which are big money earners. And they don’t cost us anything. We exploit them. No benefit. But the ones that really are the high-priced assets, if you’re going to go after budget cuts, are the tenured full professor, top step in fields that we feel are not essential.

I disagreed with that. So they started laying off Russian professors, classics professors—I was on leave that year—dance professors, which was bad. It was really bad. But when you listen to them, and I knew them very well, they’d say, “Well, these people can pay. Why aren’t we taxing more? Why don’t we raise taxes?”

I said, “We already have the highest income tax.” Well, they have a lot of money, or they wouldn’t be able to pay what they do. But they never made the connection that their job was dependent on somebody being willing. So, they had just contempt for the people that were already paying their salaries.

And some of these classes had three and four people in them. But it was just outrage. It was never, “Why don’t we cut our expenses and save the taxpayer?” It was always, “Ah, they owe us. They owe us.” And that’s the attitude of the Left.

Obama's Latest Interview Is an Unbelievable Rewriting of History

 

Former President Barack Obama continues to make the podcast rounds as he joined Brian Cohen in what could only be labeled as one of the most insufferable interviews available on the internet. Obama managed to do what he does best: pretend to take the moral high-ground while having ruthlessly targeted anyone politically opposed to him.

Obama was always the master of this. He’d do something nakedly political and accuse everyone who opposed it of being “political.”

“Stop being political and pass my law that destroys American healthcare.” https://t.co/UQtYJ2EE51

— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) February 15, 2026

Obama jumped onto the leftist talking point of the Democrat Party being the party of unity, while the Republican party has a monopoly on divisiveness, anger, “us/them” style of politics, and almost laughably equating the Left to Bad Bunny’s recent profane halftime performance that nearly no one in the United States could actually understand.

OBAMA: “The other side does the mean, angry, exclusive, us/them, divisive politics. That's their home court. Our court is coming together.”pic.twitter.com/9Ph6hxHzUz

— Brandon Straka #WalkAway (@BrandonStraka) February 14, 2026

“That’s their home court,” Obama said. “Our court is coming together. A great example, it wasn’t political, Bad Bunny’s halftime show.”

Of course, by “unity” he means when his running-mate labeled his opponents as racists who would work to reinstitute slavery. Or how about the “basket of deplorables" line from his would-be successor, Hillary Clinton? It seems almost daily that we hear of a leftist politician calling ICE officers Nazis.

I guess he forgot when "his side" called the other side Hilter, Nazis. etc -- or maybe he just doesn't think that is divisive https://t.co/aNALwZEqNn

— Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) February 15, 2026

Barack Obama was the most divisive president in modern American history. https://t.co/lzZaONJADj

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) February 14, 2026

Obama normalized and weaponized the idea of “if you disagree with me, you are evil and want people to die.”

He set the table for the us/them politics we have today.

But he also has the self-awareness of a blind squirrel so what can ya do. https://t.co/FlZlt4nMuQ

— Matt Whitlock (@MattWhitlock) February 15, 2026

The lunacy doesn’t end there. Obama also took shots at President Trump, alleging that Trump has harassed and intimidated states who didn’t vote for him, and claiming that he would have never done the same.

.@BarackObama: "When I was president, I suppose I could have simply unilaterally ordered the military to go into some red state and harass and intimidate a governor there or cut off funding for states that didn't vote for me... but that is contrary to how I think our democracy is… pic.twitter.com/MACkwm8Fmd

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) February 14, 2026

It’s hard to break down just how absurd this statement is. Trump has only had to conduct these large-scale operations in sanctuary cities who are openly and flagrantly defying federal law, and because the Democrat-run states Trump desires to withhold funds from are engaged in billions of dollars of fraud.

Obama also seems to think that he never used his government power to target political opponents after making a claim that is a complete rewriting of the work of his administration. It seems rather hard to forget that the IRS targeted Tea Party aligned groups for increased scrutiny, with James Comey running cover for their political activity, among the countless other activities his administration got up to. Does the Steele Dossier even need to be mentioned? The number of cases are simply too vast to write about.

Obamacare was literally written to threaten to cut off funding for states that wouldn't vote for Obama's policies. There were multiple Supreme Court cases on this! That was the organizing principle of the stimulus, too. That's before we even get into suing nuns or running guns to… https://t.co/MMHryax464

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) February 15, 2026

He literally sued nuns. https://t.co/JC9kBICagG

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) February 14, 2026

Obama went after the Sisters of the Poor in court, authorized a drone strike on two American citizens without due process, was running guns to Mexican cartels, and oversaw surveillance of Fox News, the AP, and CBS News https://t.co/zuTNexdhZJ

— Sean Agnew (@seanagnew) February 15, 2026

The good news for conservatives is, that if they have resorted to trotting out Obama to try to clean up their mess, you know that we are winning. If it weren't for him and his ego, Donald Trump would have never come down that escalator and ushered in a new age of conservative governance.

How Do They Come Up With So Many Stupid Goosestepping leninist Democrats?

 

You have to hand it to Democrats, no matter how many times you are certain they can’t do something – be more corrupt, act sleazier, hate the country more, be idiots – they find a way to exceed what anyone thought was possible. In a sick way, it’s an accomplishment – a perverse one, but an accomplishment nonetheless. It’s enough to make you wonder if there is some sort of performance enhancing drug that lowers the bar to the point that you’d need a shove not to clear it. 

The idea of a human being running a 3-minute mile was, for decades, laughable…until Roger Bannister did it in 1954 – finishing in an astonishing (for the time) 3 minutes 59.4 seconds on May 6th. Until then, no one had done it, as the speculation was a human being simply could not run fast enough for that long. In about 100 years of timing running races, no one had ever done what was considered impossible. On June 21 of the same year, the “impossible” record was broken by John Landy. Since then, the record has been broken 17 more times, with countless more runners besting 4 minutes regularly now. 

No one could do it…until someone did it, then everyone started doing it and have been doing it ever since, proving that nothing is beyond the reach of human beings if we really apply ourselves. 

Unfortunately, while that is true for the good things in life, it is also true for the bad, and the bad gets really bad when it comes to intelligence and members of the Democratic Party.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez flew to Munich, German Democratic Republic, this week to participate a security conference where she and her fellow Democrats whine about their claim that the President is a fascist in the home of fascism, “genocide” in Gaza in the places where real genocidal plans were hatches, and climate change in person when they could have simply done a Zoom call and saved the “carbon footprint” of the flight.

What’s the fun in that? You don’t get a “free” trip to a conference in Europe for you and your fiancé if you just video chat in your appearance. I’m not saying she brought her finance with her to Germany, but I do think it weird she’s been “engaged” for years, whatever the reason, when a secondary effect of that is her fiancé’s finances do not need to be included in her financial disclosure forms. With her fellow leftists having their net worth skyrocket to the multi-millions due to the “earnings” of their spouses and all the justified scrutiny that comes with that, I’m just saying that putting off a wedding for as long as possible, in my opinion, makes political sense.

You gotta make hay while the Sun is shining, I guess, and certainly before the sunlight creeps into where all the money comes from…if that’s what is happening. (Just a guess…or one of them doesn’t really want to get married and that’s why they’ve been engaged since 2022.)

In Munich, this intellectual leader of the left was asked a simple question about whether or not the United States would come to the aid of Taiwan if China invaded, as they are desperate to do. This not-ready-for-prime-time-person responded with what could easily be described as an attempt to make Joe Biden look like a genius and Kamala Harris come off like a great orator. 

AOC answered, “Um...you know...I think that uh...this is...such a, ya know, I think that...this is a um...This is, of course, a, uh, a very longstanding, um, policy of the United States, uh, and, I think, what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point, and we want to make sure that we are moving in all our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.”

Can you believe Jeopardy hasn’t called yet?

How does a political party produce someone so, um…articulate and special? How does a political party, that same political party, produce a series of “victims” of a child sex predator – who was a proud member of that same political party – who became entangled with that predator not when they were children, but when they were adults? Can’t they even stage a photo-op properly? 

They can’t, because they don’t mean any of it. Do you really think AOC likes this country or cares about Taiwan or anyone who isn’t obedient, for that matter? Does any part of you genuinely think there is a single Democrat in the House who cares at all about who Jeffrey Epstein abused? 

Democrats didn’t say a word about any of them for 4 years, now they can’t shut up about it. But only about the one man in the “files” who is only complained about by Epstein, as President Trump booted him from his life more than 20 years ago. Everyone else in there is a Democrat – all the people who stuck with him after his time under house arrest for soliciting sex from minors are Democrats. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a pattern. It’s who Democrats are.

So, it’s not that the party produces idiots, although it certainly is a magnet for them, it’s that it attracts horrible people who are awful to the children, women, animals, plant life and everything else that is not them or could hinder their goosestepping march to power. It’s not the 3-minute mile, more like the 3-point IQ. It’s who Democrats are.

Minnesota Insurrection Proves ‘Blue State Model’ Has Failed

 

I wanna talk a little bit about the open defiance of the federal government. I’ve mentioned that earlier, but when you collate everything that Attorney General of Minnesota Keith Ellison has said, Gov. Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, it’s unabashed, unapologetic, insurrectionary rhetoric.

It’s not just that they’ve told Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave. It’s not just that they’ve told their own police forces and law enforcement in Minnesota, in general, not to come to the aid of ICE. It’s that they’re actually working hand in glove with people on the street.

In other words, they encourage them to take pictures, to harass, to block ICE law enforcement activity. And you get the impression that they feel there’s no consequences.

In other words, they’re saying to the rest of us, the 330 million people outside Minnesota, that we, Minnesota elected officials, have the God-given right to pick and choose which federal laws we’re going to obey. And we are just not going to obey the enforcement of federal immigration law. We don’t really care about 10,000 people coming across the border during the Biden administration per day, but we do care about the federal government rectifying that lapse or that crime, by trying to find out where and who and how to get these people out, in Minnesota.

Nor do they care that ICE, according to its own figures, has rounded up 4,000 people with various criminal misdemeanors and felonies, and got them out of Minnesota. And that has contributed to Minnesota’s low crime rate.

But the problem is this, that they understand that the Trump administration, if they were to enforce immigration law to the full letter of the law, that would include collateral people, that when they’re going after criminals, they say, “Or how about you? You’re in the house. Do you have ID?” And if they’re not, then we’re going to deport them. They don’t want any of that. And they don’t want to turn over people, as I said, in the jails.

And that is a model for what I would call the blue states. Is it new? I mean, the Democrats get very upset when you say, you’re the party of insurrection, going back to the civil rights movement and before, the Civil War.

You know, April 12, 1861, when state’s righters in South Carolina said that we’re not going to honor federal law within the confines of South Carolina, along with six other Confederate states, at that time, who had seceded. And we don’t think federal property belongs to you.

So, this is the tradition that Walz, Frey, and Ellison are relying upon. And it’s an unbroken tradition going all the way from John C. Calhoun, as I said, all the way to Orval Faubus, George Wallace, Lester Maddox, segregationists of the 1960s. And the Left has never really confronted it. They said, well, these were just Dixiecrats or Southerners, and we were on the vanguard of civil rights.

No, but when you look at the actual vote of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Act, the Democratic Party voted 60% to 65% in the House and Senate, maybe a little higher, 67%, in one case, to pass those legislations. But the Republicans had a much higher percentage—80% in the Senate and the House on the particular votes were for civil rights.

So, this is something that’s disturbing, that it’s a trademark of over 150 years that the Democratic Party has, maybe it feels that it’s more a people’s party, but they feel they can defy federal law at their own volition.

And again, how do you respond to it? If you don’t respond to it, then you set the precedent that states that are blue can arbitrarily pick and choose which federal laws they want. Although, of course, they want federal monies to come back. And it’s a very dangerous precedent because we’ve seen it in the 1860s, where it led to.

And finally, something else to keep in mind: It’s symptomatic of a larger problem in the blue states. And we’ve kind of flipped the blue/red state paradigm in which we’re seeing 3 million to 4 million people fleeing, for the most part, northern industrial, what we would call in the old days, Yankee blue states, going to the South, which were, traditionally, up until the 1960s, less dynamic societies—more rural, more pyramidal in their economic classes: small group of wealthy, large group of poor, very little middle class—dating back to the Antebellum states.

But what we’re seeing is a complete failure of the blue state model. And the failure is ironic because it’s neo-Confederate. Just like the old Confederacy and the Antebellum South, these blue states are obsessed with race. This is where DEI comes from. This is where, if you’re one-sixteenth of this, or you have DNA of that, you identify, primarily, by your ethnic or racial background and not your common humanity or your common American citizenship. Very similar to the South.

In these blue states and California, from where I’m speaking, there is no middle class. It’s disappearing. It either leaves or realizes that the high tax, highly unregulated, high crime paradigms, and high deficits as well, high debt obligations, in all of these places, like Chicago or Minneapolis or Washington or Baltimore, it’s not a very conducive atmosphere—in Portland, Seattle—for the middle class.

Their downtowns are dying. People are leaving. That’s another trace that we see going back to the neo-Confederate period, that there wasn’t a middle class in the early South. By the way, it’s very ironic that there is a middle class in the South. There is a dynamic economy and there’s less emphasis on race.

Of course, the main neo-Confederate characteristic, all these states feel that they’re unique, they’re chauvinistic, that Minnesotans or Californians or Oregonians are superior morally. And therefore, they have the moral, spiritual, the intellectual right to say, I’m not gonna follow the federal government, if I decide not to.

Now, of course, it’s pick and choose. During the Obama period, they wanted the federal government to suppress state rights, in cases where people question the federal government, who were conservative. But for the larger part, they feel that they’re a law and a culture unto their own.

In conclusion, what’s gonna stop it? People have to identify this blue state model for what it is. It’s a desperate anger, sense of failure, frustration that they cannot create heaven on earth. The high tax, high regulation, green frenzies, woke ideology, DEI, anti-business, billionaire’s tax—all of this is drying up the economy. The crime policies that George Soros DAs, prosecutors—there’s high-crime areas and people don’t want to be there. And they understand that. And their reaction to it is to get angrier, more chauvinistic, and more defiant, especially of the federal government.

If they would relax and say, my gosh, President Donald Trump is gonna send people in to lower our crime rate, to get criminals off the street, to work with us—you think they would enjoy that? No. It’s nihilism. And it’s spreading.

And unfortunately, as I said earlier, in an earlier podcast, there’s nothing in the Constitution about a state leaving the Constitution, the Constitution of the states. But there is something about how federal law, the supremacy clause, supersedes state law.

So, what I’m getting at is all of these states, and Minnesota, now, in particular, are openly defying the federal government, in the tradition that led up to the Civil War and after the Civil War, led to Jim Crow and the crisis and the confrontations of the 1960s.

Final irony: This is all from left-wing, liberal, progressive, enlightened people. And they have chosen a most unenlightened, backward position because the common denominator is they feel that this is a source of power and continuity of their control of government.

Trump, Beware—These ‘Unforced Errors’ Could Hand Democrats a Midterm Win

 

Well, I think the best simile is that there’s a pathway over the mountains, like a pass, but on one side there’s a shear drop, and the other, there’s, on the right side, there is ample room, if you travel close to the mountains and not get near the precipice.

Now, what is the precipice? There is a pathway to save the Republican Congress and thereby to save the Trump counterrevolution. We saw what the alternative was under Joe Biden, but it’ll be much worse in 2028 if a Kamala Harris wins and has a Democratic Congress waiting for her, which she could have, at least at the beginning of it in November.

So, what do we have to look at? What are the perils that you’ll fall over the cliff as you go on the pass to the midterm? The first is these unforced errors. I don’t want to get into who did it or whose fault it is. I’m just suggesting that when you say Rob Reiner after his death, you say something untoward, I’m talking in a strict political sense now, it’s not good.

Why? Because to repeat the Trump success in 2024, you must do three things. You must win black males at 26%. You must win Hispanic males about 55% and get them out to vote. And you must win or come break even with independents. That’s in addition to getting your base out.

But if you make fun of Rob Reiner after he’s dead and not say, you know, not honor the old Latin warning [de mortuis nil nisi bonum], don’t say anything bad, don’t say anything unless it’s good about the dead, then you’re going to offend whom? The independents.

And so, this week we had this strange little meme or video that President Donald Trump was sort of the Lion King, and all of his enemies were various animals that inhabit the jungle. And I think Joe Biden was an ape and all that. But there was the Obamas portrayed as primates.

Now, you could argue two things. Well, Joe Biden was too, so it wasn’t racial or he didn’t care what you thought of it. He didn’t think it was racial. And the Obamas, remember, Barack Obama engineered, tried to engineer his destruction in August, September, October of 2015, before the election, when they called in John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and said, ignore the intelligence, go after Trump. But that doesn’t matter. The matter is there’s a whole history of the United States of racism that equates people who are black with primates.

So, whoever did it in the White House, or whether it was an ad for an upcoming TikTok video, it doesn’t matter, people don’t matter, the independents don’t like that. And you will either lose independent votes or you will lose a week of precious time trying to explain what I just did.

And then finally, as you’re going toward the midterms, there’s a sheer drop, another sheer drop, and that’s called history. Only three times in the last hundred years has an incumbent president in his midterm, first or second—this is Trump’s second midterm—picked up seats. They usually lose seats.

The problem is, in the House, he can’t afford more than four or five seats, depending on these special elections. He could even lose the Senate. I don’t think that’s possible, but it could happen. We saw what happened in 2020 in Georgia when he lost two conservative seats in one of the most conservative states, Georgia, to, not Democrats, but hard leftists. It’s possible.

So, you have to break history’s pattern. George W. Bush did it. He picked up seats. And you can do it. FDR did in his first, I think, 1934 election. You can do it, but you have to do everything right, keep away from the precipice.

So, what’s in his favor? In his favor is he has already enacted the architecture of a radical economic revolution that’s going to pay dividends in March, April, May, and just get better. And that’s based on, not speculation on my part, but fact. The biggest deregulation movement since the Reagan revolution. Tax cuts, and not just tax cuts for affluent people, for waitresses, for people on Social Security, etc. And then there’s energy development. We’re gonna get up to 14 million, 15 million barrels of oil.

So, whatever’s gonna happen in the Middle East, we have a buffer that we’ve never enjoyed before. And then in addition to that, there’s, Trump says, $18 trillion in foreign investment. Just cut it in half and say $9 trillion. That’s nine times larger than Joe Biden’s trillion dollars over four years. So, we’re gonna see massive foreign capital coming in here, creating jobs. The gross domestic product is going to take off with tax cuts and deregulation.

I know Kevin Warsh, he’s a wonderful, professional economist, colleague of mine at the Hoover Institution, he’s absolutely independent, but he will look at this empirically in a way that his predecessor did not. And he will see that there is a lot of growth and there has been a lot—GDP’s up to 5.5, but the inflation rate has gone down. And he will cut interest rates, not radically, but insidiously and continually.

And you put all that together and it’s gonna really make a big difference if the president and his team talk about it daily and compare it to the Biden disaster.

The other thing is Trump’s biggest asset was immigration. He stopped it. He didn’t curtail it. He stopped illegal immigration. They said that was impossible, comprehensive immigration—no, he didn’t need any of that. He just followed the law.

But now he’s getting these bad optics and these blue enclaves where it’s organized, the opposition is organized by left-wing money, Antifa, etc. And they want Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be portrayed as Nazis, they want to dox them. So, ICE wears masks. And you know the whole story.

They’re looking, they want to encourage people, they being elected officials—Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. They want people to go out and confront them, and they actually want people to be hurt or worse, to be martyrs.

Why not just stay in places like we saw last week in West Virginia? Four hundred or 500 criminals rounded up. People who are happy. Law enforcement, both state, county, and local, complied. Not in the news, except the dividends that it’s a safer place and the law was enforced. Doesn’t mean you’re going to neglect the blue states. You’re just going to until the midterms.

Look at places like Arkansas or Wyoming or Montana. Just look at places where you have a receptive population and a compliant and cooperative law enforcement entity. And that will give you great publicity that there’s no violence, there’s no protest, but you’re deporting thousands of criminals.

And if you go into a criminal enclave and there happens to be somebody there and you say, I have, by law, I have to ask you what’s your status, and he is here illegally, then deport them. Doesn’t mean you have to neglect the law.

There’s another advantage that Trump has. They’ve raised, I think, $90 to $100 million. They’ve out-raised the Left by three or four times. And the billionaire class of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, not to mention Marc Andreessen or Elon Musk, they have defected, and it’s really hurting the Democrats.

What they’re looking at in California with this billionaire’s tax, you can be a billionaire and have property and investments, homes, but you might only have, I don’t know, $100 million. They’re gonna take $50 million from you on your aggregate worth. That’s not gonna go over well with the billionaire class.

And there, that’s just a foretaste of what Kamala Harris will do if she has a Democratic Congress. So, they’re gonna be able to raise more money, not just from the rank-and-file MAGA people, but from the donor class, which has been historically Democratic.

And finally, there’s known unknowns. We’re at the precipice of radical things that are going on in Ukraine and the Middle East. They could be very bad, but they could also be very good. Mostly, foreign policy does not change a midterm election unless it is dramatic, fundamental, and a peace in Ukraine where you’re not getting 10,000 or 20,000 people killed and wounded a week, total casualties, not just fatalities, or you see that Iran’s government is overthrown and there’s a popular uprising where the United States is not seen as it was in Iraq as an invading foreign occupier, but as a helper of popular descent, that could be enormous.

Just to review, there’s a lot of pros that could disrupt the historical cycle and see the Republicans hang onto the Congress. But there’s a lot of dangers, and you can go over the cliff if you continue to go into places like Minnesota, where they don’t want you, and you don’t really want to be there, but you feel obligated. I can understand that. But do that after the midterms.

And the same thing is true—ignore what history says. This is a whole new ball game. We’ve never seen politics like this, and you can win the midterms even though you’re an incumbent president. And don’t make errors that don’t need to be made.

Just put a czar on social media and say anything that comes through to the public from social media, from the Cabinet, has to be looked at first. Put Don Jr. in it. Put Eric. Just tell him somebody has to be responsible so this doesn’t get out and lose constituencies that won you the election in 2024.

China’s Quiet Infiltration of America

 

I'd like to talk about our two cold wars, the one that we won against Russia and the one that we’re de facto in against China. They’re very different. And I would argue that the 45-year Cold War with Russia was much easier to win, despite their 7,000 nukes, than it will be with China for a variety of reasons that we should all be aware of.

No. 1, Russia was Russia, kind of a pariah state. It was isolated from the so-called free world. Europe was Europe, and Asia and the United States had guardrails against it. There were no students de facto from Russia in the United States. None. Statistically, almost none. There was no conduit for espionage or the expropriation of American scientific and engineering knowledge out of our Ph.D. programs, MBA programs, you name it. There was very little espionage by students. There were very few Russian nationals in the United States. We just didn’t let them in. There was no American investor class in Russia.

Remember how controversial Armand Hammer was? He was the head of Occidental Petroleum. He had the pencil monopoly in Russia. His parents had been living in Russia. They had been pro-communist, at least his father, as I recall. And then they’d gone back to the United States. He’d grown up part of his youth in Russia. He spoke fluent Russian. And he was our de facto business liaison with the communist government. Every time there was a JFK or Nixon or Johnson administration, and they wanted a back channel, they called up Armand Hammer.

I don’t know quite what his sympathies were, but he was about the only one, and he was a pariah. People were angry at him.

Take the example with China today. It’s much different. And funny, there was a sense that Russia had very bad propaganda. People thought that Russians were crude. They thought they were cruel, that nobody liked them in the Third World when they came in.

Even today in Hollywood, have you noticed that almost every villain in every movie is a Russian? He has that kind of guttural Russian accent. He’s got a shaved head. He has a tattoo when he takes off his shirt. He’s covered with tattoos. There’s the three-bar Orthodox cross. It’s a very cruel caricature, but we don’t do that with China.

And remember that we thought we were going to be blown up by Russia. They had 7,000 nuclear weapons. They had the mother of all bombs. I think it was a 50- or 100-megaton bomb they dropped. It was all over our childhood in school. That propaganda wasn’t propaganda. Actually, it was the truth. I can remember having to do drills.

So, we were clear who the enemy was and what they were capable of. China is very different. They were an ally of ours in World War II. But unlike Russia, that we did not include in the Marshall Plan, and we stopped Lend-Lease right after, we had a much more empathetic view.

China was deindustrialized. It didn’t really have a chance. It hadn’t made a deal with Hitler as the Russians did. It had been preyed upon by Japan. And so, there had been American missionaries, not colonialists or imperialists. We never had an imperial project in China. But it was sort of a goodwill. It wasn’t even lost during the Korean War.

We had this good feeling about China, and there are 300,000 students. People in the administration, I don’t know why, are thinking of having 600,000. If you have 1% engaged in active espionage, that would mean you would have 3,000 students who are actively trying to glean information in labs, in research projects, in joint endeavors with American academics, sending that home. Almost every student who leaves the United States and goes home to China is interrogated by the intelligence arms of the People’s Liberation Army.

It’s nothing—the Russians had no such clout. There were almost no, as I said, no Russians here. Three to 5 million people are foreign-born from China. I think 3 million of them who are in the United States are not U.S. citizens. They’re residents. That would be unheard of in the Cold War with Russia.

I don’t know how much investment there is, but it seems like every American capitalist has made a fortune in China. People have suggested it might be trillions of dollars over the last 40 years. I’m not saying they have dual loyalties, but there’s an insidious idea that China’s not really an enemy because of the massive amount of money that has been invested there.

And that means, put the Chinese students, the Chinese residents, the foreign investment, and our history of empathy with China—it’s very, very hard to tell people that China is an existential enemy in the way that Russia was.

And we all know that they played the DEI, woke propaganda card. Especially, we saw that with COVID. It wasn’t just that we were supposed to believe that crazy idea that a sick pangolin or a bat 100 miles away gave the world COVID when the Wuhan lab was right there, a level 4 lab with American expertise, instrumentation, and some money provided by whom? Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak, and others, Francis Collins, perhaps.

And so, what I’m getting at is, every time that we tried to criticize the corruption of the World Health Organization or China, they came back and said, here you go again. You’re racist. You’re racist. This is the Yellow Peril all over again. This is the Rape of Nanking, your style. It was almost as if they had studied the DEI mosaic in the United States, and they had tapped into it in a way that the Russians couldn’t.

They were lily-white, guttural-speaking enemies on the Hollywood big screen. And the result of that is, as we speak today, can you imagine if there were Russian bio labs? One was about 10 miles from here. I used to work there in high school at the packing house. It was used later by this operative of the Chinese Communist Party. There was one in Las Vegas. There may be more.

Can you imagine if the Russians bought farmland next to U.S. high-security military bases? We would have never allowed that to happen. We would have never funded a Russian lab.

So, there are so many different ways that China has infiltrated the cultural, social, economic, political life, the military life of the United States, that they are much more insidious, much more powerful. And of course, they have 1.4 billion people. The Soviet Union at its height, I think, had 240 million. So, they are a much more formidable enemy, and they’re much more adept at knowing where we are strong and especially where we are weak.

Midterm Palpitations

 

Recent regional special elections have seen Democratic candidates win a number of special election races.

Now energized left-wing politicos remind the nation daily that every incumbent president, except three over the last century, has suffered substantial midterm losses in Congress.

Polls show President Donald Trump suffering an average 11-point negative unfavorability rating.

So Democrats promise to soon stop all new legislation and end Trump and his counterrevolution itself.

But the left will never offer any alternative agenda on the economy, the border, crime, or foreign policy.

Instead, the new Democrat-Socialist Party views the Biden disaster of 2021-2024 not as a result of his puppeteers’ toxic policies of open borders, 21 percent aggregate inflation, dead-end green energy subsidies, DEI mandates, trans fixations, and an appeasing foreign policy that led to wars abroad and emboldened China.

Instead, they now blame those catastrophic years on former President Joe Biden’s own enfeebled state — as if he were merely a hapless, debilitated messenger for their otherwise superb radical message.

So, absent a positive agenda, Democrats will simply run all their state and federal campaigns as if Trump, their satanic monster, is on every ballot.

Their Trump obsessions result in three now well-worn strategies.

The first, of course, is still more chaos.

The left believes that the unending 2020 riots cost Trump the election.

Ever since, they have sought to concoct a nihilist replay — whether the Tesla hysterias, the perpetual threats of government shutdowns, tough-guy talk of open insurrection against the federal government, or the current, performative-art, anti-ICE violence in Minneapolis.

They concede that most Americans still support Trump’s closed borders and legal-only immigration, but hope they want a return to “normalcy” even more.

The more violence, Nazi-invective, and sheer craziness the left can instill — storming church services, ramming ICE vehicles, taking over the streets, or boasting of armed resistance — the more they believe that voters will blame not them, the instigators, but Trump, the target of their insurrectionary madness.

In Democrats’ blinkered reckoning, voters supposedly would prefer 10,000 illegal aliens methodically and daily swarming the border instead of seeing Minneapolis in utter neo-Confederate revolt.

Second, Democrats seize on every Trump art-of-the-deal excess or coarse putdown.

They scream that narcissistic Trump’s new ballroom has wrecked the White House. Or madman Trump was on the verge of fighting our NATO brethren in Greenland. Or cruel Trump wrecked our relationship with the lovable and blameless Canadians.

Democrats grant that voters sincerely like Trump’s secure border, the new trade agreements that correct past asymmetries, a rearming NATO, a defanged Iran, and the end to Maduro’s communist thugocracy — but not Trump’s messy art-of-the-deal means to achieve those desirable ends.

They scream that Trump talked crazily of making Canada a 51st state, not that it was finally shocked into promising to pay what it owed back in NATO contributions, securing its side of the border, and addressing its massive trade surpluses with the U.S.

So, Trump needs to avoid the very melodramas the left wants to exploit, which detract from his own undeniable accomplishments and the Democrats’ previous disastrous record.

Third, Democrats still rely on their ossified partnerships with the media, academia, and popular culture to mouth the old talking points.

So we are told ad nauseam that Trump caused the “affordability” crisis.

Or Trump is still Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s puppet.

Or Trump was an Epstein groupie.

Or Trump’s trade war crashed the economy.

Behind this stale Democrat boilerplate lies a deep fear that the Nietzschean Trump, just as he beat all their lawfare ambushes, will also do the impossible and avoid losing the Congress in November.

And they should fear.

Trump’s catalysts for a booming 2026 economy are already in place.

No one can now stop massive deregulation, new tax cuts and incentives, recalibrated tariffs, unprecedented foreign investment, record energy development, and the new emerging technologies.

All that is needed before the midterms is not controversial new initiatives, but more focus on the current boom in GDP, lower inflation, and increased purchasing power — all in contrast to Biden’s inflation disaster.

Voters still support closed borders and deportations of criminals and the millions who swarmed in under Biden.

But the best way to remind them of a secure border is to concentrate on partnering with red and purple state and local law enforcement for the next few months.

Each week, the thousands of systematically deported criminals in these jurisdictions will contrast with the thousands of violent offenders who are sanctuaried and protected in failed blue states.

And without the smokescreen of the ICE psychodramas, there are a lot of Democrat fears — like the vast Somali fraud in Minnesota, the even greater welfare scandals emerging in California, and the antics and verbiage of the hard left, like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the herky-jerky Gavin Newsom, who turned California’s natural paradise into a man-made purgatory.

Scott Bessent Calmly Shuts Down Senator Warnock’s Anti-Tariff Rant

 

Senator Warnock, a Democrat from Georgia, blasted Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, blaming President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs for month-after-month declines in manufacturing jobs and for leaving small businesses in his home state struggling to keep pace with large manufacturers. Bessent responded calmly, arguing that while the numbers may not yet reflect it, the Trump administration’s economic policies are rapidly laying the groundwork for a manufacturing boom, securing trillions of dollars in foreign investment, and dismissing outlets like the Wall Street Journal as out of touch with Main Street.

“Thank you, Chair Scott, and welcome, Secretary Bessent,” Warnock began. “President Trump promised that his administration would usher in a, quote, ‘Golden Age’ of American manufacturing. In September 2024, at a rally in my home state of Georgia, Donald Trump said, quote, ‘We’re going to have a manufacturing boom.’ Secretary Bessent, we’re now more than one year into the Trump administration, yes or no. Has there been a manufacturing boom in the United States?”

“There are the beginnings of a manufacturing boom,” Bessent replied. “We have intentions, factory groundbreakings, sir.”

“So your answer to that is yes, there’s been a manufacturing boom?”

“That we are at the beginning of a manufacturing boom.”

Sen. Warnock went on to pin the struggles of American businesses on the president’s tariff policies, citing a Wall Street Journal article that placed the blame for the manufacturing downturn squarely on tariffs.

“Okay, you and I could agree to disagree,” Warnock responded. “But more importantly, manufacturers are telling us something different. Manufacturers are struggling because of the president’s policies, and that’s what they keep telling us, and the facts keep telling us. In fact, just this past Monday, the Wall Street Journal published this article entitled, ‘U.S. Manufacturing is in Retreat and Trump’s Tariffs Aren’t Helping.’ I request consent to enter this article into the hearing record, Mr. Chairman.”

“Secretary Bessent, do you know how many manufacturing jobs the United States has lost since Liberation Day in April 2025, when the president first announced his tariffs?” Sen. Warnock asked.

“Yes, Senator, because you were out of the room, but it was already brought up,” the Treasury Secretary quipped.

“We do many things. I don’t need you to tell me where I was,” Warnock fired back.

“Seventy-two thousand,” Bessent said. “And I will point out that the Wall Street Journal is not called the ‘Main Street Journal,’ and they care more about Wall Street than Main Street.”

“Sir, I’m not asking you to opine on the Wall Street Journal. I have three minutes. Just answer the questions that I’m actually asking you. So, 72,000 manufacturing jobs, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Thank you for answering the question. Manufacturers shed workers, shed workers, in each of the eight months after President Trump unveiled his tariffs on what he called Liberation Day. I would submit that it’s a strange liberation and a curious freedom that leaves you unemployed.”

Even worse, smaller businesses are struggling to keep up with the tariff chaos. Big manufacturers may have the resources to shift suppliers. And I need you to understand the spirit of my questions. I spend a lot of time talking to the people in Georgia who’ve given me the great honor of representing them in the United States Senate. And so, this is about them. And especially our small businesses. They don’t have the ear of the President. They don’t have access to Mar-a-Lago. And so, they’re not able to insulate their company from the worst of the tariff. Secretary Bessent, small businesses without the same resources or unfettered access to the President, what should those businesses do for relief if they can’t get into Mar-a-Lago?

“Again, sir, small business competence is up,” Bessent replied. “And we are seeing that the One Big Beautiful Bill gives the full expensing for equipment, factories, and ag structures.”

“They are telling us that it’s more expensive to make basic things,” Warnock replied. “We are moving in the wrong direction. The facts don’t lie. The president lies often. But the facts don’t lie. In fact, if you’re saying we’re at the beginning, basically your answer to those small businesses is wait a little while. Is that the answer?”

“You ask about manufacturing?” Bessent said.

“That’s right. I’m asking you about this manufacturing boom. Will we see something different a year from now?”

“We are going to see it. I was just in my home state, Senator Scott’s state, South Carolina, that we are seeing a boom there,” the Treasury Secretary replied. “And I believe Georgia has very good pro-business policies. I’m sure you will see a boom there also. The factory build intentions are quite high.”

Rather than pressing for specific figures on the manufacturing boom Bessent cited in South Carolina, or asking how that growth might spread across the rest of the country, Sen. Warnock spent the remainder of his time offering his own assessment of the manufacturing economy. He continued to pin rising costs, from groceries and electricity to health care and small businesses, on the Trump administration, blasting it for problems the administration has repeatedly said are the legacy of the Biden era. 

I’ll tell you what I see. I see as I talk to folks that it’s more expensive to build things in America. I see that we’ve lost 72,000 jobs a year into this administration. We’ve lost manufacturing jobs every month since he called for Liberation Day. And meanwhile, folks who are working in these small businesses trying to make their lives work, they’re seeing higher costs. They’re seeing their costs go up for groceries. They’re seeing their costs go up for electricity. They’re seeing their costs go up for health care. And I think the American people are still waiting for a solution. So far, we haven’t seen one coming out of this Trump tariffs regime. The Baptist preacher is done. I have no time left.

Despite Warnock’s view of the matter, in 2025, several countries and multinational corporations announced massive new investments in American manufacturing, totaling in the trillions, and commitments the Trump administration argues were secured only through its tariff policies. 

While that manufacturing boom has yet to fully register in nationwide economic data, the administration insists that, at the ground level, manufacturers are already praising the tariffs and that those massive investments will soon translate into measurable gains across the country

Why Minnesota Is Becoming America’s New Nullification Crisis

 

In the months before the April 12, 1861, firing on Fort Sumter, there were lots of sharp divisions in the North about the proper reaction to the first seven Confederate states that had already left the Union.

Not all Unionists believed that war was inevitable. Some, in fact, were happy to be done with the departing South and thus see their stain of slavery gone from the Union. Similarly, others agreed that the emerging Confederacy was not worth the trouble and costs of war, and the secessionists could just form their own nation and stew in their own backward, servile juice.

But after Fort Sumter, Abraham Lincoln—who was hated as much by the Confederates as President Donald Trump is by the woke and socialist left—gained a consensus that the Constitution had no clauses about any lawful departure from the union. But it did operate under a clear supremacy clause that made state obstruction of federal law and occupation of federal property veritable sedition.

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Lincoln and the preservationists felt that they easily had the moral high ground of abolition versus the continuance of slavery. Nor did they want a North America of fragmenting, warring nations in the manner of Europe.

Something similar is emerging over Minnesota, the South Carolina of our age.

Once sanctuary states, cities, and counties had established the precedent that, with impunity, they could nullify federal immigration law, then what followed was a logical and mounting descent into the current open defiance of the federal government. How odd that self-described progressives are now acting out the visions of prior kindred nullificationists and neo-Confederates from John C. Calhoun to George Wallace.

The reaction of the rest of the nation, especially its conservative half, to Minnesota resembles the 1861 disconnect in the North over the insurrectionary states.

Some believe that if Minnesota wants to protect its approximately 1,300 jailed illegal alien murderers, rapists, and assorted felons, so be it, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement should leave such a dysfunctional and dystopian state to its own self-destructive path.

In this way of “See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya” thinking, Trump should stick to the red and purple states, clear them of criminal aliens with the help of local enforcement, but without the organized performance-art leftist resistance. Then he could contrast the nation with the difference between low crime, noncontroversial deportations, versus the blue-state model of protecting illegal alien criminals and their indifference to the mayhem they inflict on the innocent.

If Minnesota further wants to be a state like 1861 South Carolina that openly defies the federal government, then also so be it. But it should accordingly not expect federal funding for its pick-and-choose approach to federal law and property.

Has Minnesota forgotten that, like blue-state America, it cheered on Barack Obama’s Justice Department when it successfully sued Arizona in 2010, insisting that it was Obama’s right as a federal custodian not to enforce federal immigration law at the border—and thus not legal for Gov. Jan Brewer to use her state resources to enforce a federal law that derelict federal officers would not?

But on the other hand, contemporary Unionists objected that such live and let suffer is defeatist. Moreover, there are millions of Americans inside insurrectionary Minnesota who do not support their neo-Confederate leaders. Millions in Minnesota properly see themselves as Americans first and Minnesotans second.

In this line of argument, just as Lincoln refused to give up federal armories, property, and offices inside the South—most notably Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor—to insurrectionists, so too the Trump administration has an obligation to protect federal property and offices in Minnesota and to enforce federal law throughout the nation, at least if it is to continue as a nation.

Very soon, Trump will have to decide which strategy is preferable and politically viable before the midterms.

Meanwhile, Minnesota’s highest elected officials have ordered local and state police not to protect federal immigration officers from the very street violence that they fuel. Indeed. Gov. Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey, and Attorney General Ellison are actively encouraging Minnesotans to obstruct federal officers from enforcing federal laws—despite the mounting violence that follows their collective prompts.

The three know that organized and well-funded groups organize the protests and incite the violence. And perhaps the trio even welcomes would-be martyrs to use their vehicles to ram ICE officers or to arrive at protests armed with military-grade, semi-automatic pistols with plenty of magazines and ammunition to spare.

Walz and company further quietly accept that they could easily mitigate the violence by simply turning over roughly 1,300 criminal illegal aliens in various Minnesota jails to federal authorities. To do so would lessen the chances of violence, make Minnesota a safer place, and expedite the rotation of ICE out of Minnesota.

But, of course, Walz, Frey, and Ellison have no such intentions, given their schemes are elsewhere.

Given the failure of an increasingly socialist Democratic Party in 2024 to offer a more popular and convincing agenda than Trump’s, it believes its future lies in an increasingly redistributionist America, fueled by unlimited, unaudited immigration from the former Third World. It views as a political asset millions of arriving poor in dire need of massive federal health, food, housing, and education subsidies and entitlements, imbued with DEI victimhood, and nursed on America as toxic at its birth and ever more pathological ever since.

So, for the Minnesota state officials, screaming for ICE “to get the f— out of Minnesota” is more than mere braggadocio. It is a reminder that the Democratic Party wants a safe place for illegal immigration, the fuel of a future dependent constituency—as the architecture of the recent massive Somali fraud attests.

Democrats also believe that the more turmoil, the more violence, the more resistance, and the more a general sense of chaos and unrest swirl around the Trump administration, the more they can drive down its popularity before the midterms.

They still cherish the months of riot, violence, and arson in the George Floyd “summer of love” in 2020 as critical in defeating Trump.

Now as then, the Left believes it can create a lose/lose dilemma for Trump: send in the National Guard to restore order, and he confirms that he is a “Nazi” and using the “Gestapo” to quell “peaceful” protests. Stand down, and the Left owns the street, exasperating the MAGA base that mysteriously Trump has allowed the criminal left to nullify the enforcement of federal law in near-secessionist fashion.

There are other Democrat agendas, both short- and long-term.

The Minnesota Democrat apparatus either knowingly turned a blind eye to, protected, or silently partnered with the architects of likely the largest theft of federal welfare and entitlement monies in U.S. history—largely by the Somali community, both immigrants and their second-generation apparatchiks. The Democrat elite counted on the prophylactic cry of “racist!” to exempt the Somali community from any legal accountability. And so far, it seems right in that assumption.

And the public?

Polls reveal its trademark ambiguity. A majority voted for Trump to enforce immigration law, close the border, end illegal immigration, and deport those who broke federal law. But that hope and the reality of implementing it are two different things—especially when a state like Minnesota has not just institutionalized illegal immigration but nearly canonized foreign nationals illegally residing in the U.S.

To sum up public opinion, the proverbial people want all criminal illegal aliens deported as soon as possible, and they may even support the deportations of all 10 million-12 million illegal aliens who came en masse, unaudited, and with the de facto blessing of the Biden administration.

But that said, they want the act of deportation of the non-criminal to be out of sight, out of mind—as if magically they can simply disappear and thus either self-deport or assemble at ICE stations eager to be sent at no cost home.

For now, Walz, Frey, and Ellison are upping the rhetoric, fanning the violence, and talking openly about how best to nullify federal law and impede federal enforcement. They are convinced that they have galvanized national opposition to the hated Trump, smothered the Somali fraud scandal, and stopped ICE deportations of their constituents.

In all of those assumptions, they have little idea they are following the Confederate script to the letter. And like their spiritual forefathers of 1861, they grow ever more cocky, boastful, and defiant as they create martyrs, spread narratives of victimhood, and daily slouch toward another Fort Sumter.