Category: Trump

Is That So Much to Ask?

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Recently I posted, “Cut and Paste Anglo-America.”  The post was linked by my favorite news aggregation site, “Whatfinger” and got a lot of visibility with folks who aren’t usually on the site.  One was a Canadian named Linn who wasn’t thrilled with my tongue in cheek idea of rearranging the two English speaking North American countries into a blue country and a red country.  Here’s what he had to say:

“I think it is offensive to assume Canadians would be blithely willing to give up their history and identity to become a part of the United States. It is ironic that President Trump ran on a patriotic campaign of Make America Great Again, but other Americans think that Canadians do not have the same patriotic feelings about their country even though the government had been usurped by the foul socialist left. Hopefully, Pierre Poilievre will make great strides in Making Canada Great Again.”

When I read his comment, my first thought was, “I’m glad not all Canadians hate Trump.”  Linn sounded like a Canadian patriot who wanted to get back his country from the Leftists.  Bravo!

And it made me think of how long ago it was when I thought we could win back the country just by electing Republicans.  How long ago I felt that the majority of Americans thought like me.  I guess it was in 2004; more than twenty years ago.  Wow, it seems even longer.  And I thought of all the disappointments and waking up to just how useless and dishonest the Republican establishment actually was.  Until Trump showed up it was Bushes, McCain and Romney all the way down.  So now even when we win, I find myself pessimistic.  After all the globalists control the whole apparatus of the modern world and do untold damage day in and day out.

But Linn’s comment got me thinking, there are good conservative people in most of the Western world.  Look at the right-wing parties growing larger in Canada, England, France, Germany, Holland and Italy.  Even Sweden and Denmark are beginning to come around.  And look how the Right has already taken control in Austria and Hungary.  And I’m sure there are conservative parties growing in every country in Europe.

Maybe it isn’t too late.  Maybe things will come to a head while Trump is in office.  Maybe we’ll see actual progress not just lip service to fixing the things that are broken.  What would make a big difference would be if Trump’s deportation effort worked well and became a template for the Europeans to follow.  Imagine if the French or the Italians were inspired to follow his lead and sent all the freeloaders packing.  Now that would be a miraculous sight.

I guess what I’m thinking is that maybe Trump is a leader for our side not only in America but around the world.  Maybe his example will rally people to the parties that want to take back their countries from the invaders.  His stubborn determination to get the job done is kind of a big deal and if he succeeds here other countries might follow his lead.  Everyone is always saying that America is the leader of the “free” world.  Well, why does free have to be code for leftist?  After all the leftists don’t want freedom anymore, except the freedom to define their sexuality in increasingly twisted and dysfunctional ways.  We want freedom of speech, thought, action and association.  We want freedom from being invaded by people who don’t like us or the way we live.  We want our country back.  Is that so much to ask?

How Will We Know?

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So, we’ve had a lot of fun.  Since November 5th most people on our side have had a real holiday from grief.  We got to enjoy Thanksgiving and Christmas buoyed by the knowledge that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been relegated to the ash heap of history.  What a wonderful phrase that is.  What an image.  There’s this enormous pile of cinders and burnt garbage and jumbled among these things are Joe Biden and Kamala Harris laying there covered with debris and looking extremely sad and confused.  So evocative of a better world!

But it’s best not to forget that this victory is just the beginning of a very long and difficult struggle to wrest control of the federal government from the horde of awful bureaucrats that make everything about our government expensive, inefficient and destructive.  It will be up to Trump’s cabinet to force a monkey wrench into the gears of government and wreck it.  And the question remains; will they do it?

I get the impression that Kash Patel really means to do just that.  And the fact that he was a prosecutor leads me to believe that he might have a good idea how to accomplish his goal of disemboweling the FBI.  I think of his tenure as the test case.  How long will it take for him to get going on the job?  And how long will it take before someone like me can tell that it’s working?  I’m guessing I’ll be able to tell if he’s having the desired effect if the New York Times and NPR are screaming that he’s destroying the FBI.

Maybe a bigger fish to fry is the purview of the Secretary of Defense.  Assuming Pete Hegseth is approved by the Senate he’s going to have an enormous job clearing out all the woke generals and other officers that Biden and Obama plunked down in the military.  But almost as important will be his implementation of Trump’s plan to end the Ukraine war.  I assume it’s going to be necessary for Hegseth to micromanage the defense department personnel to prevent them from continuing to supply the Ukrainians with endless weapons and money to keep the killing going until the last Ukrainian is dead.  He’s going to have to replace the existing supply chain personnel with people loyal to himself.  That’s going to take some doing.  There’s an enormous amount of money that gets distributed from the billions that go to Ukraine.  Shutting off that spigot is going to anger hordes of people and it might even trigger violence.  Hegseth will have his hands full.  I guess I’ll know that Hegseth is succeeding if the number of Ukrainians being killed falls drastically.  Probably the best indicator will be peace negotiations breaking out between Ukraine and Russia.

And finally Trump himself has a big part to play.  He has to get involved in the negotiations on the budget.  What I’m secretly craving is to hear that he’s managed to slip into the budget the elimination of the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  If this could be eliminated it would put an enormous hole in the funding for PBS and NPR.  The elimination of those two toxic waste sites would in one fell swoop elevate the public discourse in this country immensely.  Think of it.  I might never see Jonathan Capehart’s homely face ever again.  For that alone I would consider Donald Trump’s second term in the White House a thunderous success.

How Sweet It Is

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I watched a few video clips today.  There were a few highlights.  Justin Trudeau did his sad face and said he will resign his office as PM in March.  Oh, boo, hoo.  Very sad, too bad.

And then I saw that sideshow with a smiling Kamala next to Speaker Johnson as she read out the numbers on her Electoral College loss to Donald Trump in the November election.  Yay, Kamala!  You go girl!  Brat Summer Kamala, woo hoo!  That’s the fun way to imagine a future of winning unencumbered by pathetic present-day failure.

So that’s the four-year anniversary of J6.  Well, that’s a pretty good day.  I guess it could have been better.  Maybe Joe Biden wandering into a jet engine or off a parapet.  But it will definitely do.  So that will be the last of J6 for the rest of eternity.  Well, not quite.  We can expect some Congressional investigations that may end up in Kash Patel’s lap to prosecute.  But that’s a story for another day.  Let’s just say there won’t be any more anniversaries on the news.

When I think about what the next few months will be like I’m guessing most of what we’ll see will be the Senate cabinet approval hearings.  And the captured media will broadcast the likes of Adam Schiff, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer grandstanding rumors and slander against all of the Trump nominees.  That’s only to be expected.

But it makes me wonder what kind of strategy is being formulated by the principals in meetings with Trump right now.  After all, time is short and there’s a lot to do.  Hopefully they’ve long ago assembled long lists of government employees based on either actual crime against the American people or responsibility for divisions or areas of the bureaucracy where crimes were committed.

As an example, if I were Kash Patel I’d search out the documents that declared that white men made up the most dangerous terrorist threat to the United States and get all the names associated with that decision.  Then these people could be brought into the Senate and made to testify.  And they would have to provide some factual basis for these pronouncements.  Of course, at the end of the whole thing they’d be fired for sure.  But toying with them would be fun.  It would be sort of like the show trials that Stalin and his boys used to put on in Moscow.  Who knows?  Some of them might even name names when tempted by the hope (false of course) of saving their jobs.  Maybe they’d give up Wray or Garland.  But either way it would be fun.

If Trump wanted to really increase his popularity, he could go back to his reality tv roots and set up a weekly program on X or Truth Social or wherever, on which he provided a running tally of how much money he had saved the US government by firing bureaucrats.  And he could highlight the show with a profile of some especially over-paid leech that also had caused some particularly egregious harm to the American public.  I want to nominate Rachel Levine as the stand out for week 1.  This eye sore has been a boil on the neck of this country ever since it was first announced he would be donning the skirt and wig as United States Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services.  And just to add insult to injury he is now an “admiral” somehow.

Trump could reuse his “You’re fired” tagline but instead of calling the show, “The Apprentice,” he could call it, “The Ejected.”  Maybe he can have a graphic that shows the victim being launched from his office chair and follow a trajectory that lands somewhere novel each week.  One day it could be into the ocean or maybe a shark tank, another time it could be one of those industrial scale wood chippers, the ones you can throw a whole redwood into.  Now of course no one would actually be harmed but think of how much fun it would be imagining it.

Well, as you can see, I’m letting my imagination get the best of me.  But that’s what it’s like before Trump takes office.  Later on, the reality of the constraints that government puts on the president will sink in.  But for now, it’s Rachel Levine in a trajectory headed for the moon.  How sweet it is!

Change to Get Behind

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Greetings folks.  In 2025 the big news is corporations (and the federal government) will be bringing all their workers back to the office again.  I guess a five-year vacation is about enough.  With an actual president in charge, it seems like people will need to stop watching YouTube videos all day and start wearing pants again.  But not you Jeffrey Toobin.  That ship has sailed.

The new meme that’s out there coming from the Left is “Let’s forget the past and find common ground.”  Which translates to “We tried to destroy all of you and Trump but failed so how about we make believe we don’t hate you in exchange for you doing everything we tell you to do.”  It’s such a tempting offer.  It has almost everything, except us winning.  You see this from Democrat congressmen and senators.  They’ll tell you how nothing will be passed without their approval so the compromise position is Republicans let them dictate the acceptable legislation agenda.

I guess we’re about to find out if Johnson and Thune are any better than Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell were back in Trump’s first term.  It’s a cinch they can’t be any worse.  Luckily, I think Trump has learned a thing or two in the interim and he won’t let these turkeys screw things up like their predecessors.  In fact, maybe Trump intends to administer the government more or less by executive order.  If I were in his shoes, I think I would declare a national emergency and pay for the deportation by commandeering private resources like airliners and rail transportation to funnel these people into Mexico and let the Mexicans figure out how to get rid of them.

And I’m only half joking about how to handle the deportations.  I think a national emergency will allow him to sideline every local democrat judge who will attempt to block his every move.  Because it truly is a national emergency and whatever he has to do to fix this is justified and in the long run cost effective.  I can’t even imagine how many billions of dollars are currently spent on the feeding, housing, medical care and judicial costs for these tens of millions of illegal aliens.

But this is just me talking.  Does Donald Trump have a plan that will accomplish the things he says he will do and does he have the nerve to follow through on those plans in the face of relentless opposition from the Democrats in congress, in the courts and all of the deep state personnel who will do everything imaginable to prevent this from happening?

I think Trump should stage the deportation process to allow himself as much cover as possible.  He should start by deporting all the serious criminals; the felons and the gang members.  Practicing on this soft target will deflect a lot of the outrage and at the same time give him a chance to find all of the pitfalls and roadblocks that exist.  Also, he can use them as the worst case for what he can expect from the home countries of the aliens.  One of the Central American countries (can’t remember if it’s Honduras or Guatemala) has already stated that they will retaliate for their citizens being deported by evicting American troops from their country.

Well, it doesn’t sound like much of a threat.  After we finish transferring their criminals back home, we can then pack up our troops and send them home.  Win, win.

I guess, like everyone else, I’m anxious to see what Trump looks like in action.  I don’t expect miracles but I’m curious to see just how hard he punishes his enemies in the federal executive agencies.  Kash Patel will be the test case.  He’s on record as saying he wants to shut down the FBI building and turn it into a museum.  I hope he doesn’t.  I’d prefer he just empty out the building, one fired FBI agent at a time until it’s down to single digit occupancy.  Now that’s change I can get behind.

In a Businesslike Manner

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After a little fuss and muss Speaker Johnson is Speaker Johnson again.  Okay.

And I hear the judge in New York City is going to sentence Trump right before his inauguration.  Who knows, maybe he’s going to try some dirty tricks like locking him up for the inauguration ceremony.  Maybe the Supreme Court Justice will have to swear him in from Ryker’s Island.  Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Okay, so we’re dealing with mental cases everywhere we’re supposed to have sages and scholars.  Well, what can I say.  These are fallen times and we have to expect idiots to drool on themselves quite a lot of the time.  But things continue to fall apart apace.  Some percentage of our veterans harbor homicidal tendencies toward the United States.  Well, they have lowered the standards for mental fitness so this should be expected.

But this is going to continue while Donald Trump begins to assemble and deploy his cabinet and they get to work terminating the deep state.  I won’t be surprised if some disgruntled former FBI agents decide to take pot shots at him going forward.

But I have bigger fish to fry.  Camera Girl was complaining about the foaming soap dispensers that I bought a bunch of years ago.  It seems they weren’t working smoothly.  The pump would get jammed.  So, I took one apart and tried to figure out what was wrong.  Well, there wasn’t much there so I washed the components and put them back together and tried it out again.  Well, now it wasn’t jammed but the damn thing didn’t work.  Nothing came out.  So now I was getting mad.  I took another one apart and cleaned it up and still couldn’t find anything wrong.  And when I put it back together it didn’t work.  Nothing came out.

So, I stopped taking them apart and since the internet is our friend I did a search for foaming soap dispensers and found this cool exploded view of the mechanism and noticed something.  There is a tiny ball that acts as a check valve.  This ball allows soap to be sucked into the valve but not pushed back out.  And I couldn’t remember seeing such a thing in the two pumps I disassembled.    Well, the stupid thing is only an 1/8th of an inch in diameter and transparent plastic so when I cleaned out the pump, I must have washed it down the drain both times.

Now this was very annoying.  I have since ordered fifty 1/8th inch polypropylene balls and a tube of food grade silicone grease.  With these invaluable supplies I intend to restore the two dispensers back into functionality.  Moreover, I will grease all of the pump pistons with the silicone and thereby satisfy Camera Girl’s original complaint about my equipment choices for the various sink areas of the house.  There are currently six of these dispensers in the place and each one will require this overhaul.

I wonder if she appreciates how lucky she is to have a technical individual of my caliber at her disposal twenty-four/seven?  I doubt that she could have gotten the quick response and analytical acumen that I provided in this foamed soap crisis from just any regular husband.  Far from it.  The only thing I regret is that because of the critical nature of the crisis there was not time for me to send out RFQ’s (requests for quotations) to three qualified bidders on the project.  Business, after all, should be conducted in a businesslike manner.

New Year’s Resolutions – 2025

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At this dawning of the rolling year, it is more than normally desirable that we make some slight provision for improving our behavior.  Some people try to lose weight or stop smoking.  Others look for a better job or start a hobby.  I’ve vowed to finish my book.  And to accommodate that effort I will be clearing the mornings for writing and editing the book.  This may impact my posting schedule (from time to time) but I think it’s necessary.  Time slips by too quickly if there are too many competing priorities.

Now I don’t intend to abandon the website.  OCF will have its daily photo and quote.  And whenever something needs my approbation, scorn or explanation I will promptly respond.  And I will link to anything that I think interesting or thought-provoking.  But when there’s a slow news week and I’ve already gassed off about the usual suspects I may just take a pass.  On days like that maybe I’ll link to a song I like or a clip from a movie that makes me smile.

And from time to time, I’ll put up a chunk of my story to get feedback from the readers here.  And I’ll write about writing sometimes!

So, none of this is dire.  With Trump entering the White House in a couple of weeks I’m sure I’ll have all kinds of stimuli for posts that will make it impossible to do my fiction writing work.  After all, the world is drifting into troubled times and that is sure to goad me into taking to my little soap box and barking out condemnations and propounding simple-minded plans of action.

But I do see that I’ll have to prioritize writing if I ever hope to finish that darn book.  I do think there is some writing in me.  And I won’t know how hard or easy selling books is until I give it a good old American try.

As for the news today, we’ve all been watching the attack in New Orleans and then listened to Biden try to string a few dozen sentences together without sounding like Max Headroom (and failing).  I love how he tells us the guy is a follower of ISIS but not to jump to conclusions.  So, because he’s a Moslem whose parents came from the Middle East and he’s declared jihad on America we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he’s an Islamic terrorist?  Would that be insensitive to the various followers of the religion of peace?  Well, never mind.  Biden is so laughably irrelevant that he might as well have started to read from a Dr. Seuss book as the words of that speech his handlers handed him.  More interesting would have been a statement from Trump advising the federal law enforcement agents not to destroy any of the evidence before his team has a chance to see what really went on.  Well, this is a small part of what I expect at the border for the foreseeable future.  So, it barely merits comment.  Let’s pray nothing bigger is in the wings.

 

And just to show that my heart is in the right place, I’ll put together a few things that might lighten your day.

 

 

Eeny Meeny Chilly Beany, the Spirits are About to Speak

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[It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.  –  L. Sprague de Camp]

Only a great fool would claim to know in advance how 2025 will end.  Everything from nuclear Armageddon to the return of the Prince of Peace is definitely on the table.  My radius of likely outcomes is slightly narrower (at least on the upside).  I could easily imagine things going very wrong between the United States and Russia or China or Iran in the foreseeable future.  And by wrong I don’t necessarily mean a full nuclear exchange with either of the first two of those nations.  There is plenty of room for low level violence and sabotage that could cause our lives to be much worse.  For instance, an aircraft carrier is becoming an increasingly vulnerable target to any number of new threats.  If a carrier were badly damaged or even sunk it might not lead to a nuclear exchange but it would cause a cascade of actions that will threaten war.

But let’s put war aside for a moment.  At least global war.  Let’s look at what will be going on in North America.  Trump intends to close the borders.  And that will both include Mexico and Canada.  This will change the way things are done in several aspects of life.  It will impact migration (obviously) but it will also impact industry.  A lot of stuff is built in Mexico and Canada.  The transportation of these products will be impacted.  And illegal importation (drugs, sex slaves) will also be impacted.  The Mexican and other gangs that control these illicit trades will have to be confronted head on in what will amount to a war on the southern border.  This alone could be the toughest thing Donald Trump will be faced with during his presidency.  He may have to live in a bunker due to the military capability of these gangs.  It’s a cinch their snipers are a lot more accurate than the ones the CIA found during the 2024 election.  Anyway, if he’s serious he’ll have his hands full with this action.

As for the economy, well, I think by default things will get somewhat better.  Just seeing the Greens pushed out of the White House will encourage the petroleum industry to improve the energy situation in the United States.  Who knows, maybe gasoline will fall below two dollars again.  And if that happens it will have a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy as transportation costs fall and with it the price of most commodities.  Now I wouldn’t exaggerate the extent of this.  Prices don’t usually fall except during a recession.  But if they stop going up it will begin to stanch the economic bleeding of the middle class.

Beyond that Trump can do a lot to encourage corporate on-shoring of manufacturing.  Tariffs can be of two varieties.  You can raise tariffs on the products of foreign companies or you can put tariffs on products that are manufactured outside of this country regardless of the nationality of the company that owns the factory.  This will encourage companies (foreign or domestic) to manufacture here the products they want to sell here.  Personally, if a Toyota car is built in Georgetown, Kentucky I consider it more American than a GM car built in Mexico or Canada.  So, will any of this happen?  Possibly not in 2025.

And finally, will he drain the swamp in 2025?  Well, not completely but he does want to put Kash Patel in charge of the FBI.  I read that they had him under investigation.  I don’t know much more about him than what I’ve read but wouldn’t it be amusing if it turns out he’s a vindictive bastard who took his own targeting personally and wanted a lot of payback.  I think there could be a lot of very amusing things going on in Washington this year.  And from my point of view that’s worth something in and of itself.

So those are just some hints at what might be going on.  Let’s hope it’s more swamp draining and less Armageddon but whatever else it’s going to be very busy and very exciting.

A New Year’s Eve Look Back in Gob Smackedification

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If 2024 had been the plot for a novel no one would have believed it.  The former president is running for the Republican nomination while under indictment in four separate cases in three separate jurisdictions.  He is found guilty in two of them even before the end of the primaries and every time a court case goes against him his popularity grows.  The incumbent Democratic candidate wins the primaries handily but drops out a hundred days before the election because he sounded like a talking turnip during the only debate.  The Democratic candidacy is handed over to the vice president because only she can legally use the multi-billion-dollar war chest but she also sounds like a talking turnip, albeit a slightly higher pitched one.  During the campaign the Republican candidate is put on open display by the secret service to not one but two snipers, one of whom misses a kill shot by fractions of an inch.

The media and the US government conspire to hide the incumbent president’s advanced dementia for his whole term in office, going so far as to claim he is actually some kind of political four-dimensional chess master while video evidence proves he’s forgotten how a door knob works.  When the election can’t even be stolen through massive blue city fraud the media claims that racism and misogyny are responsible despite the large gains the Republicans make among women and minority voters.  And as a parting absurdity the people in charge of the White House start rattling off thousands of blanket pardons including the president’s bag-man son who was already found guilty for various offenses large and small and whom the president had sworn he would never pardon.

And on the other side, the once and future Republican president has allied himself with a whole retinue of unlikely allies and future cabinet picks including the richest man in the world, a scion of the Kennedy clan and other heterodox individuals who would normally be anathema to a Republican administration.  And finally, the greatest absurdity of all is that this president-elect is someone like Donald Trump.  An almost cartoon character.  A caricature of the American huckster.  A modern-day P T Barnum.  But the only Republican to be honest about how the American political system is totally rigged against normal Americans.

And none of that even mentions incipient strains of World War III filtering out of the neo-con madness in Ukraine and with the Middle East in virtual flames as Gaza, Syria and Iran boil over in open war.  Just the other day the explosion of a weapons depot was so huge that some observers mistook it for a tactical nuclear weapon detonation.  And so, with just twenty days left before the end of the Biden presidency there seems to be no pause in the frenetic madness that has engulfed the world stage.

Looking back on this, stuns the mind.  To me this is the result of massive overreach.  When the Democrats unleashed George Floyd, COVID and election fraud in 2020 they pulled out all the stops and ran Washington like some private fiefdom.  And they brought in a collection of misfits and weirdos that couldn’t get out of their own way.  And so, they blew up the economy and unleashed actual stagflation.  They hid the stagnation part by putting everyone and his brother in government no-show jobs.  But the inflation was right out there for all to see and feel.  They tried to tell people that they shouldn’t believe their own lying eyes when looking at their empty wallets but instead bask in the glow of Bidenomics that was making them rich.  Of course, unless you’re an investment banker, tech entrepreneur or tenured Ivy League professor you probably don’t have a seven-figure 401K plan to offset the order of magnitude growth in the cost of housing and eggs but then again poor people should just shut up and vote Democrat.  Right?

So, as it turned out reality really is real.  And now the good(?) guys have their turn at bat.

I think I begin to understand how things speed up during these end of civilization events.  Once instability sets in, unbalanced parts of the system start to randomly knock into each other and catastrophic collapse is more or less inevitable.  Well, I guess this thing has to play out.  Perhaps 2025 will be a chance to do maintenance on the system and get it at least firing on an even number of cylinders.  Who knows?  Maybe Trump will turn out to be a Diocletian-like historical character who comes up with a patchwork solution to allow the empire to limp along for another century or two before complete collapse.

Well, there’s my annual pep talk.  Happy New Years and I’ll put together a look forward for tomorrow.

An Object Lesson in Civics

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I was getting together with some New York City friends.  We were at a local Chinese restaurant that we have been known to frequent.  Full disclosure, I had the chicken chop suey because the kung pao chicken is too spicy so soon after my Christmas gorge fest.

We eventually got around to talking about Daniel Penny and his surprise acquittal by a New York City jury.  And then we talked about mayor Eric Adams and his trouble with the FBI.  It was agreed that he was being targeted not because he was guilty of the crimes he probably did commit but because he had complained about the outrageous scourge of illegal aliens that the city was being forced to house and feed.

I said I thought that maybe after Trump takes office, he might cut a deal with Adams to have pressure put on the judges and prosecutors persecuting Trump in exchange for a pardon on the charges the FBI has brought against Adams.  Of course, I said this tongue in cheek.  New York Democrats will never stop attacking Trump until he cuts off federal funds to New York.  So, if he helps Adams, it will only be because he wants to make a deal with Adams to deport the New York illegals.

And then we talked about New York City’s future.  Basically, the crime and dysfunction has gotten so bad that even “safe” neighborhoods like Shore Road in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn were experiencing levels of violent crime never seen before, even in the 1990s.  And outrages like the illegal alien who set a female subway rider on fire and watched impassively as she burned to death.

I asked whether it seemed likely that the disastrous conditions would elicit a powerful reaction to restore law and order and save the city.  The answer I got was no.  They felt there wasn’t the will to fix things.  The elites who sponsored Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams as mayors wouldn’t change course no matter the consequences.  The were intent on enforcing progressive policies regardless of the consequences.  Of course, my friends freely admit that these elites will eventually abandon New York City for safer suburbs once their families are at risk in the city.  And once the people with the money abandon New York City it will begin to look like Philadelphia and Newark and eventually Detroit.  So that was their take.  New York City is in its death spiral.  The crime that the Democrats unleashed after the summer of George Floyd will be the cancer that kills Gotham by the sea.

It’s a funny thing.  Several years ago, I returned home to my old neighborhood.  And it was basically unrecognizable.  The new immigrants there had taken over and made the place their own.  Well, even if it made me a little sad to see my childhood memories thoroughly erased, I could understand that it was the nature of cities like New York.  But knowing that the city would be utterly destroyed is different.  It’s completely unnecessary.  A city full of immigrants from all corners of the earth needs law and order even more than some homogeneous ethnic enclave.  Everyone needs to feel like the law is there to protect them from chaos.  The fact that the progressives have declared law and order racist is proof that they don’t deserve to govern.  But it may take the destruction of every blue city to prove to everyone in this country that fact.  Oh well.

Looking Out Through the Overton Window

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Here I am at Friday.  Now all that remains of my holiday week is a measly weekend.  But I won’t grouse (much).  In the afterglow from way too much rich food and late nights watching old movies I muse on the current political situation and wonder what the future holds.

And I’m reminded of something that has been said a number of times about Trump.  It’s not so much what he finishes as what he normalizes.  Before Trump the Republicans were so cowed by eight years of George Bush and eight years of Obama that their idea of innovation was volunteering to capitulate on citizenship for illegal aliens.  Was it Jeb Bush who declared it not a crime but an act of love?  And then Trump comes along and says he’ll build a wall and now eight years later Latinos vote him into office on the strength of his promise to deport millions of Latinos!  So, what is the lesson?  Stop being afraid of what your enemies will call you and instead worry about what your friends need.

And imagine if Trump applies that same idea to all of the problems that beset his constituency.  And who is his constituency?  I would say it’s everybody that isn’t in the elite or working directly for the elite.  That gives him a lot of ground to choose from.  There is an enormous opportunity to punish corporations that hire illegal aliens and/or off-shore their manufacturing plants.  Forcing these corporations to hire Americans should be job two (directly after deporting the illegals).

And another big population that voted for Trump was men.  Men broke for Trump.  Even a lot of non-white men voted Trump.  Well, how about he has our back by striking down feminist affirmative action everywhere it is found.  Women have been advantaged by the law and the bureaucracy for long enough.  Stop whining about being held back and just stand on your own two feet for a change.  No more quotas and no more special dispensations around physical requirements for things like fire-fighting and the military.  If you’re too weak for the job find an easier job.

And finally, finishing off the race hustlers who scream racism when they discover that equal opportunities don’t result in equal results is probably the most important thing about which Trump can shift the Overton Window.  I don’t expect Trump to achieve all of his results.  He may only deport a fraction of the illegals and only punish a fraction of the companies employing illegals.  He may only drain half the swamp.  But what he will do is change the argument from how quickly the Republicans should capitulate to the Left, into how to primary the RINOs that don’t follow his lead.

All of the old guard pundits who mocked Trump for the last eight years and declared him a fluke who won’t get anything done have been proven wrong.  Even the stupidest and most dishonest admit this is the Age of Trump.  He has tapped into an angry populism that can fuel major change if it is channeled skillfully.  Trump has four years to fix things.  If he comes close to doing that, his successor can follow in his footsteps and continue the job.  Namely, give us back our future.