Lessons Have Been Learned

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Indiana’s Republican establishment legislators voted against a redistricting plan (seven of them).  Well Donald Trump backed primary candidates against them.  Read what happened.

President Donald Trump exacted revenge on Indiana Republican legislators who foiled his redistricting push last year in the state, backing challengers who unseated five incumbents in Tuesday’s primaries, NBC News projects.  One other GOP state senator who faced a Trump-endorsed opponent was locked in a tight race, while another survived.  The double-digit defeats of the five incumbents, some of whom are veterans of the Indiana Legislature, underscore the influence Trump continues to wield over the Republican Party, even as his approval rating among Americans broadly sags amid rising gas prices and the Iran war.

Regardless of mid-term elections and all the various Democrat howlings going on, this one instance shows that something fundamental has changed.  Fake conservatives are being exposed and targeted for replacement all over the red states and beyond.  And make no mistake, Trump legitimized this.  He was the one highlighting who was fake.  He called them out.  And now there are the beginnings of accountability.  Just as with Cornyn in Texas, fake conservatives are being challenged in Indiana and they will be targeted elsewhere.

Now this won’t be a clean sweep anywhere.  Even red states have pockets of progressivism, mostly around the cities like Austin in Texas and Salt Lake City in Utah.  There will always be exceptions.  But it’s encouraging to see leadership in Washington that calls out the fakes.

And with just a little luck, the recent Supreme Court ruling that condemns race-based gerrymandering will net enough seats in 2026 to hold onto the House of Representatives.  But if the Dems get the House back in 2026, we’ll survive it and more.  Trump is a powerhouse of annoying policies that will keep Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer screaming and crying for the next two and a half years.  And that is a long time.

And with just a little luck we can hope for a Republican president in 2028 and good things going forward.  And even if the worst occurs and the Dems control Congress and the White House, I feel that we have learned enough about what is going on to protect ourselves from the fallout.  We no longer have to pretend that we have anything in common with the Left and we will run our lives based on what will allow us to preserve the things that are important to us.  There won’t be any nonsense about meeting anyone in the middle.  Because there no longer is a middle.  There’s us and there’s them.  The things they say amongst themselves is poisonous and evil and shows you their true intentions and they have nothing to do with coexistence.  They intend to destroy us and all we can do is protect ourselves by every available means.

And we will.  We’re getting better at running our own states and excluding them from our communities and their policies from our lives.  There will be setbacks but we’ve learned a lot and we will move forward.  This I believe.

Peak Woke

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We seemed to have passed through what can be described as “maximum wokeness.”  Sometime after 2020 all of the stupidest delusions about race and sex reached their apex.  Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, LGBTQ madness like trans-everything and radical feminism like #metoo were all reaching a high tide.  Insanity was piled on insanity and all the stupidest beliefs ran amok.  People were fired and jailed and even killed during cancellations, purges and outright rioting.

But since 2025 many of these beliefs have been shown to be absurd or even dangerous and fewer and fewer people will admit to believing in these things.  Sure, in places like California, New York and Minnesota the lunatics are too numerous and too crazy to come to their senses but in many other jurisdictions the folly of what had been going on finally woke up enough people to the madness that things have been reversed to a large extent.  And with Trump in the White House and a conservative Supreme Court many of the worst excesses are being swept away.  Even old liberal attacks on constitutional practices, like racial gerrymandering of political districts are being overruled and eliminated.

With all that said serious damage has been done to a couple of generations of young men in this country who have been deprived of the career opportunities that were instead reserved for women and foreigners.  And this damage cannot be easily repaired.  If a man doesn’t have a stable, well-paid job how is he supposed to attract a wife and afford to raise a family?  And if he can’t do that then his line ends with him.  Multiply this by the millions and you’re looking at the cancelling out of America.

Currently you hear about young men avoiding college and professional schools and instead heading into the construction and other trades like welding and mechanics.  And this may be the only alternative to allow a generation of young men to earn a living.  Now, this may be necessary but it seems like a step backward for all the families who scrimped and saved to help their kids to become doctors and lawyers and engineers.  Now their grandchildren are back in the blue-collar world that they came from.  But then again maybe it makes more sense to take the jobs that do exist and strive to start your own business and not be beholden to corporations that despise you.

Now, I’ve got grandchildren in college and even one graduating soon.  And they are going to have to navigate these same obstacles.  And it’s very difficult to know what to tell them.  But I know what’s most important.  I need to do whatever I can to support them and encourage them to strive to succeed in whatever they find available to them to earn a living and raise a family.  Because, in all honesty, those are the only things that count in this world.  All the other nonsense about status and prestige is just that; nonsense.  The people you interact with are the essence of what we call human life.  And as long as they can live a happy life with them, they are rich.

Fear and Loathing in Dunwich

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Every week I spend several hours with someone whose politics are almost diametrically opposed to mine.  And I mean that literally.  Left, right.  Up, down.  You name it.  And interestingly we get along fine.  Now, we never talk politics, never.  Because we know that all we could possibly do is disagree.  So, we stick to business and to things that are universally human.  We love our families and we want our town to win the soccer games against the neighboring towns.  Nothing more controversial than that.

But even when all we are talking about is work, other things creep in.  And even when we are avoiding “current events” it’s hard not to let anxiety about the state of things surface.  Neither of us want to say much because we’re both avoiding putting a spin on what is fueling this anxiety.  But I think there was an “unspoken agreement” that we both feel that things are very, very not good.  And then she said something kind of odd, “Do you think that we’re reaching the end of one or both of the major parties?”  I tried to finish off this almost non-conversation by saying, “Well, maybe it’s not as bad as it seems.  Maybe every generation is like this and it’s not as bad as we think and things will just muddle along as they are now.”  And that was the end of the talk.  We moved onto Dunwich trivia.

But this got me thinking.  I think I see signs that things are very not good in the Blue States.  When the true believers start to wonder if things can go on the way they’re going without a change of party there is something very, very wrong.  I don’t want to blow this out of proportion or start putting money on some collapse theory.  But I get the definite feeling that all is far from well within the Democrat Party.  If I were to guess I think the socialists and the populists on the Left are eroding the “center” of the Democrat party to such an extent that a lot of the old guard don’t recognize what their party has become and are very worried by this change.

Maybe a good example is what is happening in the Democrat Senate race in Maine.  Governor Janet Mills was the establishment favorite to be the Democrat candidate to run against the Republican incumbent Susan Collins.  Graham Platner who is an oyster farmer, a Marine veteran and Harbor Master of the town of Sullivan is the Bernie Sanders candidate.  Mills attacked him based on his comments on Reddit about rape and violence and because he has a tattoo on his chest that resembles a nazi symbol (a Totenkopf).  But just last week she dropped out of the race and Platner is now the leading Democrat candidate.  Platner is a socialist and a populist and typifies the new Democrat direction.  Now someone like Platner would frighten a lot of old Democrats, especially the women.  The violent rhetoric, the adoption of a pro-Gaza, anti-Semitic stance, the pro-gun talk are frightening and confusing to a lot of these Democrats.  So, I think the question I heard was an honest one and means there is a lot of fear about what is going on in their party.

Of course, that’s not that different from what is going on with the Republicans.  Populist candidates are primarying establishment hacks like John Cornyn in Texas.  So maybe this is all just part of the increasing polarization of the country.  But maybe saying “just” the polarization is minimizing just how dire the situation really is.

Let me end this by saying there is fear and confusion throughout our country and we’re going to have to let it all play out before we know just how bad the crack-up will be.

Of Pyramids and Pitchforks

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Like the Pharaoh Cheops I know the pain and exultation inherent in an enormous engineering project.  Yes, he built the Great Pyramid of Giza.  But I built the Great Pond of Camera Girl.  So, let’s just look at the stats:

 

Project Name Great Pyramid of Giza Great Pond of Camera Girl
Length of project 27 years (total) 27 hours (active time)
Scope 2.6 million 2.5-ton blocks 270 gallons of dirt
Volume of project 92 million cubic feet 36 cubic feet
Size of Crew 40,000 1
Total manhours 1,752,000,000 27
Significance of project Final resting place of pharaoh Husband making wife happy
Projected lifetime of structure millennia until roots from cherry tree puncture liner
Tools copper tools, ropes, levers, sledges shovel, pitchfork, rake, wrecking bar, wheelbarrow, 4″ level (plastic), good old American grit and determination

 

Based on scope I guess I’ll have to hand it to Cheops.  27 years is a pretty good effort.  Of course, if we count the fact that I’ve been throwing out the garbage and repairing stuff around the house for almost 50 years all of a sudden Cheops is coming up kind of short.  Isn’t he!

But I don’t want to overreach.  People have been travelling to Egypt for millennia to gawk at the pyramids and so far, Camera Girl is the only one who has praised my great engineering project.  And even though she has been quite generous with the superlatives I must admit that 92 million cubic feet of limestone blocks isn’t anything to sneeze at.  I mean I dropped one of the rocks I dug out on my foot and that damn thing hurt but a five-thousand-pound rock is a little bit more of a big deal if it ends up on your foot.  So, okay.  Cheops wins.  He’s big man on campus.

But let’s look at this from a different perspective.  What did Mrs. Cheops have to say about the whole thing?  Based on my research after watching “Land of the Pharaohs (1955)” she must have been buried alive with Cheops.

Now maybe she was down with this.  Who knows?  But my knowledge of Camera Girl leads me to believe that this would not be to her liking.  Now as a charter member of the He-Man Woman Haters Club you might think I would be an advocate for this kind of wife entombing.  But you’d be wrong.  By any objective measure she is very high in the ranks of women and hardly ever uses her feminine wiles and never takes advantage of the modern anti-male legal or social mechanisms to make my life miserable.  By my reckoning she is a good egg and fully worthy of this amazing civil engineering marvel.

Next, we’ll fill it with water and put in a bunch of water lilies and other plants and then buy some goldfish and sit around in the afternoon and watch these aquatic vertebrates do their thing.  And then one day the local Great Blue Heron will discover this little water hole and eat all of the fish in one meal.  But as Camera Girl always says, “Everybody’s gotta eat.”