Category: Politics

The Upside of Zohran Mamdani

What I like about the winner of the New York City mayoral Democrat primary is that he is not a 'stealth ideologue' a phrase I have been using for years to characterize the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris.  Mamdani, unlike the mendacious foursome just mentioned, comes clean about what he and the Dems intend:

Mamdani is now the mainstream of the once great Democratic Party.

The only difference is that Mamdani isn’t afraid to say what other Democratic politicians try to hide.

Think about what Mamdani has proposed or supported:

  • A yearlong freeze on rent
  • A $30 minimum wage
  • Free bus service
  • City-owned grocery stores
  • Defunding the police
  • Calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.

“Mainstream Democrats” support every one of these positions in one way or another.

With the advent of Mamdani it will be more difficult now to remain a Useful Idiot as so many of the supporters of the Dems are. You know these people. We have them in our families and in our neighborhoods and workplaces.  A lot of them are the "college-educated white women" of a certain age.  They rescue cats and dogs and support what they sincerely believe are good causes. But they are lazy and inattentive and too wrapped up in their private lives to pay proper attention to current events. Their loving and nurturing feminine nature impairs their political judgment and makes them easy marks for the fraudulent come-ons of professional pols like Phony Joe Biden who has 40 years of experience of looking into the camera, smiling, and making an emotional appeal. The women think, "He's a nice man!" They cannot see past the polished style to the lack of substance.  Conversely they cannot see past Trump's off-putting style to his genuine and salutary substance.  In the case of pretty boy Gavin Newsom, they are so taken by his style that the question of substance doesn't even arise.  I had to agree with Sean Hannity one night when he remarked that Joy Behar of The View has a "crush" on him. Joy Behar, that well-fed paragon of wisdom and insight!

But old men, too, are part of the Useful Idiot contingent.  Lazy, inattentive, superannuated and superficial, pissing their lives away hitting little white balls into holes and — worst of all — living in the past.  Mamdani, as a sort of Fidel redivivus, may help these Rip van Winkles wake up.

One more thing. It is good that the battle lines are clearly laid out. Let the battle begin, the battle for the soul of America. Mamdani is a Great Clarifier as is our boy Trump.  John Catsimatidis, billionaire, said on Stuart Varney's show this morning that  Trump has God on his side. How would he know? Does the billionaire have a hot line to the divine? What is within the range of our knowledge, however, is that Trump's the man to save the Republic, and make the whole world a safer place, as he already has.

Related: Should Mamdani be Deported?

Trump, Nukes, and Nation-Building

It is blindingly evident that Ayatollah Khamenei and the rest of the  radical Islamists in control of Iran must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. Donald Trump has been clear and consistent about this during the ten years he has been in the political spotlight.  He may speak of diplomacy and agreements but he understands that a piece of of paper will not deter such savages. 

Unlike the feckless and demented Joe Biden, Trump has excellent threat-assessment skills. He understands that the greatest threat to humanity is not 'white supremacy' or 'climate change,' but nuclear war. And unlike his impotent predecessors Obama and Biden, he knows better than to make idle threats. He gave Khamenei 60 days. On the 61st all hell broke loose.

So what DJT has to do is supply the Israelis with the bunker buster bombs and delivery systems (B-2s) to annihilate  the infrastructure needed to develop the nukes. [Corrigendum 6/19: I am assuming, probably falsely, that the USA can simply supply the Israelis with the bunker-busting GBU-57s and the B-2s so that the IDF can do the job.]

But there is dissension in the MAGA ranks. I wonder if Tucker Carlson is aware of the distinction between preventing the present Iranian regime from acquiring nukes and forcing the Iranians to adopt a Western form of government. I am for the first, against the second. The Iranians have the right to any government of their choosing, including an Islamic theocracy as long as it does not support such  terrorist surrogates and proxies as  Hamas and Hezbollah, and as along as it does not develop nuclear weapons.

As my respect for Carlson goes down, my assessment of Fetterman goes up. Funny world. 

The Neo-Con mistake was to think that we can teach the peoples of the Middle East how to live by invasion, occupation, and nation-building. Utter folly.  But that is not what Trump is about.  Preventing Khamenei and his gang from acquiring nukes is entirely consistent with Trump's non-interventionist  foreign policy.  [On second thought, a great power such as the USA cannot be purely non-interventionist if it is to succeed in protecting its own interests. Here non-interventionism meets its limit. In the present emergency, an exception must be made: the USA must intervene to prevent the rogue state from acquiring nukes. The preceding sentence smacks of Schmitt: I am currently immersed, critically of course, in his works.] 

"The Romans, foreseeing troubles, dealt with them at once, and, even to avoid a war, would not let them come to a head, for they knew that war is not to be avoided, but is only put off to the advantage of others." (— Nicolo Machiavelli, in "The Prince.")

Applying Machiavelli's point to the present: War to the death cannot be avoided with Khamenei's Iran. So let's get it it over with. Khamenei is stalling; he thinks he can survive the current Israeli onslaught, develop his nukes, and fight later.  (This is essentially General Jack Keane's analysis. Sounds right to me!) So what DJT has to do is supply the Israelis with the bunker buster bombs and delivery systems (B-2s) to annihilate  the infrastructure needed to develop the nukes. [Not right. See my first corrigendum supra.] This may  ignite a popular uprising against the clerical thugs, which could only be good. Trump and Netanyahu have made it clear that the Iranian people are not the enemy.

Addendum 6/19. What I wrote above leaves something to be desired: political theory is not my wheelhouse. It takes a bloody long time to "study everything" as my masthead motto recommends. See the comment thread and in particular the linked articles for a nuanced overview of the entire geopolitical shit-scape.  

Political Nominalism

One form political nominalism takes is loyalty to a political label. 

In late November I heard a self-described "life-long Democrat" on Fox cogently explain why Kamala Harris lost the election and why her political career ought to be over. Despite the accuracy of his analysis, the fool remains a Dem! That makes no sense. When the thing labeled no longer exists, why cling to the label?

It is not as if the old Democratic Party can be brought back. The transmogrification unto wokery has proceeded too far. The young Turks have taken it over, the 'woke' squadristi mainly, AOC et al.,  and the members of the old guard (Pelosi, Schumer, et al.) are on their last legs. But there is no fool like an old fool, and a huge, but dwindling, number of useful idiots still vote Democrat out of misplaced loyalty to an empty label or else because of their delusional opposition to Trump. But they, like Pelosi & Co., will soon pass into the night, and the sooner the better, not that I wish them physically dead; I wish them politically dead. The physically dead can't make political mischief.

But wait a minute! Don't the dead vote in Dementocratic precincts?

 

Nancy Pelosi in 1996: A Pre-Trumper on Tariffs

You have probably seen this by now, but in case you haven't, here is Nancy Pelosi in 1996 talking sense! I didn't think she had it in her, given the inanities she has been spouting for the last quarter century. I don't see much if any difference between what she said then about  tariffs, trade imbalances, and trade reciprocity and what Trump is saying now.

Part of what enrages contemporary Dems about Trump is that he has (a) stolen their thunder, and (b) is actually doing things they only talked about doing, e. g,  curtailing waste, fraud, and abuse at the federal level, controlling the borders, and shrinking the size of the federal government.

Blinded by their mindless rage, they cannot assess policy proposals on their own merits, but only on whether or not they are supported by Trump. If Trump is for it, they are against it, no matter what it is, and vice versa.

Anti-Trump Dems cannot stand the man because he has transformed the fat-cat GOP into a people's party.  The Never-Trump Republicans cannot stand him because he gate-crashed their rich guy club and exposed the bow-tied Beltway/Bulwark boys and girls for the effete and epicene bunch they are.  Interestingly, Trump has won the sympathy, though not the full support, of the socialist outlet, The Militant. See here for a recent article in support of my assertion.

But he wins because he is loaded too, and more importantly, loves his country, its people, and has the biggest cojones of the toughest hombre on the world stage at present.  

Let Them Eat Woke

Alex Castellanos:

Democrats, your party has a product problem, not a marketing problem. Don’t look around. Look in the mirror. Your problem is staring back. You’ve lost the ability to govern your country. That’s why your party expired in 2024 with Kamala Harris. That election was not a changing of the guard, it was the end of an era. The organizing principles that have defined the Democratic Party since the 1930s are now exhausted and near the grave.

Right. The Dems persist in thinking that their problem is one of 'messaging.' In a sense, it is: they have no message and they have no messenger.  I heard Jen "Circle Back" Psakis last night describe Kamala Harris as "brilliant." Truth is, she's a lazy, inauthentic know-nothing, and the opposite of brilliant. Just listen to her speak. She thinks the Cloud is a physical object up in the sky!

And you voted for her? What were you thinking? Were you thinking? Or were you emoting?  I understand that you don't like Trump.  Do you live your whole life on the basis  of likes and dislikes? Do you make major life decisions on the basis of knee-jerk reactions? Perhaps you are spending too much time on Facebook. Thumbs up! Thumbs down! Don't be a knee-jerk jerk off.

Addendum

My claim that the Dems have no message is not quite right. They have a message, a nefarious one that they wisely do not broadcast plainly, knowing that it would not sell well among the majority if honestly presented.  Hence all the vacuous and obfuscatory nonsense spouted by Kamala and Tampon Tim, together with merely performative clownish gyrations, pantomimed page-turnings, and expressions of unhinged hilarity and 'joyousness.' They must think we are idiots. But the joke is on them since expressions of contempt do not win votes.

As for their message, it is garbage from the git-go. Leading the cavalcade of Unsinn: the claim that there is no biological difference between men and women, a falsehood that underpins the morally offensive policy that biological males must be permitted to compete in women's sporting events. 

Why We Are Winning

Roland Fryer, WSJ, The Economics of DEI and MEI. (Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence)

Victor Davis Hanson, Five Ukrainian Fables

James Piereson, New Criterion, Too Many Democrats

Kimberly Strassel, WSJ, Trump's School Choice

Paul Craig Roberts, Every Vote for a Democrat is an Attack on America.  HT: Tony Flood who writes, "Salient line (for me): 'And still, American citizens vote for Democrats. How can a population this stupid be made great again?' "

We are winning, but it will remain a nasty slugfest for the foreseeable future, as my man Hanson fully appreciates. We need to get tough with our political enemies, as they reveal, day by day, the full depth of their depravity.

Victor Davis Hanson, New Criterion, MAGA agonistes. Excerpt:

Trump has now inherited an almost bankrupt country. The ratio of debt to annual gdp has reached a record high of nearly 125 percent—exceeding the worst years of World War II. The nation remains sharply divided over the southern border, which for most of Biden’s term was nonexistent. Trump’s own base demands that he address an estimated twelve million additional unvetted illegal aliens, diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and racial quotas, and an array of enemies abroad who are no longer deterred by or content with the global status quo. The eight-year Obama revolution in retrospect did not change American institutions and policies nearly as much as the more radical four-year Biden tenure. And so often, when drastic remedies are proposed, their implementation may appear to the inured public—at least initially—as a cure worse than the disease.

Take the example of illegal immigration. Since Trump left office in January 2021, two major and unexpected developments have followed during the Biden years. First, the border did not just become porous but virtually disappeared. Indeed, Biden in his first hours of governance stopped further construction of the Trump wall, restored catch-and-release policies, and allowed illegal immigrants to cross the border without first applying for refugee status.

Given the magnitude of what followed—as many as twelve million illegal aliens crossed the border during the Biden tenure—the remedy of deportation would now necessitate a massive, indeed unprecedented, effort. The public has been increasingly hectored by the Left to fear the supposedly authoritarian measures Trump had in mind when he called for “massive deportations.” Left unsaid was that such deportations would only be a response to the prior four years of lawless and equally “massive” importations of foreign nationals. And yet, while the twelve million illegal entrances over four years were an insidious process, the expulsion of most of those entrants will be seen as abrupt, dramatic, and harsh. In addition, it was much easier for felons and criminals to blend into the daily influx of thousands than it will be to find them now amid a population of 335 million.

In-Lieu-of-SOTU: Trump’s Congressional Address

Fabulous address by Trump to both houses of Congress last night. It kept me up beyond my monkish bedtime. So I got up 'late' this morning at two a.m.

How good was it? The boneheads of The Bulwark are going bonkers. 

Can I say anything bad about it? Well, our boy spoke of two genders instead of two sexes. And he needs to learn  that the correct phrase is 'rare earth minerals,' not 'rare earths.'

Roger Kimball:

Many commentators have said that Trump 2.0 has accomplished more in six weeks than other administrations accomplished in four, six or even eight years. It is true.

Tonight, the president provided a detailed inventory of his initiatives. Within hours of taking office, he designated illegal immigration a national emergency. Trump noted that Democrats kept saying that new legislation was needed to fix the border. But in fact, he said, “all we really needed was a new president.” Trump declared war on inflation and took steps to undermine the deep state and its racist DEI initiatives, thus restoring merit and race- and colorblind justice to their proper place in the economy of American values. He also took a page from the Book of Genesis, and articulated the non-woke, matter-of-fact truth that there are only two sexes: male and female. The crowd (but not the Democrats) cheered at that bit of common sense. 

The president presented a bracing tour d’horizon in his opening sally. He ordered federal workers back to work: “They will either show up for work, in person, or be removed from their job.” As I write, the Trump administration is ending “weaponized government,” restoring free speech, underwriting English as the official language of the United States and pursuing a policy of “drill, baby, drill” to exploit America’s energy resources.

 

A Coordinated Assault on All Fronts in a Fight to the Death

I don't pretend to understand Trump's battle plan, but it may be that this guy does:

The Trump Team fooled everybody, including me. As last week’s various lawsuits sprouted restraining orders like early buds emerging all over the willow trees in springtime, most commenters expected Trump to take a necessary pause for defensive retrenchment. Surely, we all thought, it would take Trump’s anti-bureaucrats some time to clear the judicial logjam. But all of us were wrong.

image 8.png
 

A brief pause to clear past the TROs wasn’t Trump’s strategy at all. No pauses! Instead, yesterday Trump tripled down, jamming the battle tank’s accelerator into overdrive and smashing ahead in a whole different direction. His new battlefield banner unfurled yesterday afternoon in the form of one executive order plus three separate press conferences, which together sent a just-relaxing Deep State enemy racing for the bunkers with its trousers still half off.

And don't fool yourselves, muchachos: this is a fight to the death:

Some people will regard my title as hyperbole.It is not.Trump, I believe, understands he is in a fight to the death.The American establishment tried to discredit and ruin him, to imprison him, to assassinate him.They stole his 2020 reelection from him. They tried to steal his NY properties. It is not possible for Trump to have illusions about what he is up against.  He is up against evil.

Trump knows that the fight is not just about him. It is about America. For decades a corrupt American establishment has been running the government for their benefit at the expense of the American people. Trump says he intends to take government out of the corrupt establishment’s hands and put it back in the hands of the people.That is the last place the establishment wants it.For them the struggle Trump began in 2015 is existential. If Trump loses, America loses, and the establishment wins. Civil liberties will disappear, especially for “racist” white people and for people who think there are only two genders. Censorship and false narratives will prevail, and we will live in a belief system constructed for us by the establishment and the whore media for whom government is a profit center.

I don’t know how many of Trump’s appointees understand that they are in a fight to the death. How strong are they?If Trump doesn’t win, their careers are over. The establishment will see to that. If the Establishment proves to be stronger, will  Trump’s appointees change sides and abandon the fight?

I don’t know how many MAGA Americans understand the stakes. How many of them think that the fight ended with the election victory and now President Trump will put everything right? If this delusion prevails, the emergency extra-legal steps Trump must take if he is to prevail will lack support among his followers.The whore media will paint a picture of Trump as a tyrant.

Addendum (2/14)

Report Card on Trump's First '100' Days.  He promised to hit the ground running, and he did. His accomplishments so far have been astonishing. If his propensity for hubris doesn't do him in, he's headed for Mount Rushmore. His interregnum did him a world of good. His getting nixed* in 2020 redounded to his benefit. His cabinet choices were outstanding and all have been or will be confirmed. A truly diverse and inclusive bunch in the proper senses of these terms, and no 'equity' in sight. 'Equity' is unjust and can get you killed. Individual MERIT rules as it must and by right: fight, Fight, FIGHT! that it be restored. The obstructionist crapweasel Dementocrats haven't learned their lesson yet, but they will in the end. They had better, or they are done for. They way they are going, 2025 may be their last year.

As I have recently opined, however, we do need an opposition party to insure checks and balances all up and down the line. The Dems would do just fine if they could thoroughly reform themselves by purging the hard-Left scum and getting back to basic sanity and moral decency. But that's a big 'if.'

If you've been around a while, you know that the Dems weren't always full of Schiff and his ilk: this used to be the party of JFK, a resolute commie-fighter who stood tall against Nikita "Shoebanger" Krushchev, and was a lifelong member of the NRA. I shudder to think what would have happened in October of '62 had Clinton, Obama, or Biden been president.

_________

*An allusion to the outcome of the Kennedy-Nixon contest of 1960.

Could Kamala Explain the Difference between True and Magnetic North?

I doubt it. She thinks 'the cloud' in cyberspeak refers to a physical object in the sky. Remember that howler?

Why are the Dems so dumb? They lack both a message and messenger. The think they failed to 'get their message across.' But they had no message to get across, and no one to get it across.  Did you see the unedited Sixty Minutes video?  Kamala the Joyous  could not explain why she wanted to be president.  She is perhaps fit to be a kindergarten teacher, but not POTUS.  Is that not blindingly evident? And are you not an emotion-driven fool if you let your TDS impel you to embrace the Joyous One?  I'll leave Tampon Tim and his page-turner of a wife out of this rant.

Part of what make the Dems dumb is their inability to learn  from experience, as witness their continuing to play the race and Hitler cards. Do they have a death wish? And what does it say about the nearly half of the voters who cast their ballots for that intersectional dumbass?

Collateral observation. The voters are not the electorate. Two reasons. First, the voters include those who vote illegally; the electorate, used normatively, as I am using the term, does not. Second, the electorate include those who do not vote in a given election. The electorate comprise those who are legally entitled to vote. You are legally so entitled only if you are a citizen who has not disqualified himself by, say, committing a felony.  Bernie Sanders thinks that felons should have the right to vote. I make an invective-free case  against this foolish and indeed asinine view at Substack, sine ira et studio. 

By the way, it appears that magnetic north has shifted position.

Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly on FAFO

Here.

Megyn Kelly, being relatively young, may be forgiven for referring to Elliot Ness as Elliot Nest (ouch!), but Steve Bannon, whose superannuation shows, and who ought to know better, either missed her mistake or let it pass, being the gentleman that he is.  

In all other particulars, however, the short video is delightfully on target.

As for the man himself, what Kennedy said about Nixon could also be said about Trump: "The man has no class."

But what is more important, both domestically and internationally, class or the ability to kick ass?* We conservative quill-drivers do some good, I suppose, but none of us are positioned to bring about decisive, world-shaking, change. While we sit at our ink wells and drive our quills, great men stand at the ramparts and drive history.

But we the people must keep an eye on them. It is not that power corrupts; it does not. It is that we who are all morally defective and susceptible to the blandishments of power, abuse it.  Power itself, however, is good. If it were not, why would all-power count among the omni-attributes of deity?

The Founders understood how easily fallen natures are suborned by the possession of power. So they designed a constitution-based republic with built-in safeguards to check and balance the executive's power lest it issue in tyranny.

Long live the Republic, the republic our political enemies aim to tear down.  They will not succeed. The right man came along at the right time, whether or not by divine design.

But one thing troubles me. Government by executive orders cannot be what the Founders had in mind. Given our current predicament, however, such orders are a necessary evil. If Congress did its job, they would not be necessary.

An executive order is an edict. 'Edict' and 'dictator' share the PIE root, deik-. And so, true to his word, Donald Trump was a dictator on Day One, reversing the pernicious edicts of his corrupt predecessor, Joseph Biden who on his first day, playing the dictator, viciously and stupidly reversed Trump's  wise  2017  border policies.  Biden ought to have been impeached and removed from office on the grounds of dereliction of duty and failure to uphold the Constitution he swore to uphold and protect.  But so divided have we become, that Biden's removal could not be brought about.

And so here we are. If in the unlikely event that the Dems take back the White House in 2028, the cycle of reversing and promulgating edicts will begin again.  A suboptimal outcome, that.

One more thing. We need an opposition party as part of the system of checks and balances. The Dems would do just fine if they could be restored to sanity, the Camelot sanity of the early 'sixties, say.  But that is a big 'if.' Kamalot would be a disaster. If the Dems persist in their subversive ways, however, serious thought will have to be given to the question whether their party should be outlawed. 

I'm serious. The CPUSA was never outlawed, as far as I know.** There was no need to, because of their relative lack of political clout. Outlawing them would only have given them attention and brought them supporters. But the transmogrification over the last decades of the Dems into a hard-Left subversive outfit with real chances of winning puts a different complexion on the matter.

Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism.  But toleration has limits: it negates itself when extended unto political suicide. 

____________

*To put it politely and allusively, 'kick donkey.'

**I'm not an historian, so correct me if I am wrong or omitting pertinent facts.

Scott Johnson on Richie Havens

Powerline:

Havens grew up in Brooklyn singing with a choir in church and with doo wop groups on street corners. He crossed the river to figure out how to make a go of it in Greenwich Village as a performer. He recorded two albums on Douglas Records before he signed a contract with Verve Forecast in 1967. He seemed to materialize out of nowhere that year with Mixed Bag, a beautiful album of folk covers and original compositions. The album was full of striking performances, but none more so than Havens’s interpretation of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like A Woman.” By the way, I may need to take a break from what is meant to be an occasional series until we celebrate Bob’s birthday next May with our traditional Bobfest.

By the way, did you catch Amy Klobuchar's oblique reference to Dylan at the Trump Inaugural? And what a speech our boy gave! He can turn on the gravitas when he wants to and needs to.  

MAGA, Majority Rule, and Consent of the Governed

Here:

In short, the political battle between the Left and Right is best understood as an existential fight over what America will be. The Left pushes for a metanoic transformation, while the Right tries to catalyze an epistrophic one.

Metanoia is a forward-looking change — a recognition that one’s past way of life was flawed in some fundamental way. Regret precipitates a self-rejection that drives the transformation, which is a deliberate turning away from one’s previous identity. In contrast, epistrophe is a backward-looking change — a realization that at some point one betrayed the true self and embraced a false mode of being. Epistrophic transformation, then, is a return to one’s essential identity — a return to a previous (and more authentic) way of life.

Under the second Trump administration, America will be transformed — and it will be an epistrophic transformation. The citizens of the country have unmistakably rejected the Left’s claim that our traditional identity was morally untenable.

Very good over all, but is the last quoted sentence true? 

The concept democracy includes at least four sub-concepts: majority rule, universal franchise, equality before the law, and consent of the governed.  Consider the first and the fourth.  They are in tension with each other. Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, but he won the latter only by about 2%.  So almost half of the voters did not give their consent to be governed by Trump and his entourage and to be subjected to his and their agenda. 

As a citizen and a patriot, I am very happy with the outcome: I want to see our political enemies soundly defeated and demoralized.  As a philosopher, however, one who values truth above all else, and along with it, the ancillary virtues of  precision in thought and speech,  I must point out that that it is false that the citizens have unmistakably rejected the depredatory Left's signature allegation.

The false claim is being thoughtlessly repeated by too many media pundits on our side. Widely bruited as it is, it may have the negative effect of causing complacency. We are in a war with the Left and it won't be over soon, if ever. The National Sanitation Project, as I have been calling it, may take a generation or more. All of our institutions need the political equivalent of fumigation.  That includes, of course, the RCC which, though not part of the state apparatus, is an institution that affects the course of the ship of state.

Encouraging Trends

  • The acquittal of Daniel Perry. He should never have been charged with a crime. Although there are instances of toxic masculinity,  there was nothing toxic about Perry's manly behavior. He ought to count as a hero in the mind of anyone who can think straight. 
  • The decline of race-delusional BLM bullshit.
  • The death of DEI. 
  • The de facto presidency of Donald J. Trump over a month before his inauguration.
  • The decline of gas prices. I paid $3.099/gal for unleaded regular at Costco, Mesa, AZ two days ago. What did you pay?
  • The resignation of Christopher Wray.
  • And the list goes on. Morning in America!