Why Donald Trump Will Not Be the Republican Nominee

opinion posted by William Levin at American Thinker

Among Republicans, conventional wisdom on Donald Trump is split, in particular whether he will be the 2024 nominee. The arguments in favor boil down to four assertions:

1. Nothing matters until the voters have their say.

2. Never underestimate Trump.

3. He consumes the available oxygen in the political room.

4. And, most especially, polls showing a DeSantis surge and loss to Biden cannot be trusted due to biased lead-in questions, the underweighting of Republicans and the focus on registered voters instead of likely voters. 

In other words, Donald Trump, against the odds, remains the once and future Republican kingpin.  Despite the very legitimate concerns regarding many of Trump’s decisions and actions, Trump retains his popularity with hardcore Republicans.  Or so the argument goes.

Herewith are the counter arguments, focusing on the non-standard, that will prevail at the end of the day.  In the spirit of the holidays, they are set to music as nine reasons Trump will never be the Republican nominee.

1. Grover Cleveland. Americans will tire of hearing that Grover Cleveland foreshadows Trump as the only president to hold office in non-consecutive terms.  Trump is no Grover Cleveland, and the political climate of today is not the same as it was in 19th Century America.  To boot, Cleveland was a popular Democrat, and at the time, he was only the third candidate to win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College to Republican William Harrison. Harrison won the nomination only as a fill-in after former Secretary of State James Blaine declined, and Harrison sealed the fate of his short-lived tenure by pushing for a high tariff regime, which was viewed as benefiting wealthy industrialists.

2. Actual Precedent.  American history is filled with examples of one-term presidents who subsequently failed to secure a second term.  In the 19th century, John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, and Chester Arthur all failed to win re-nomination.  In modern times, while no incumbent has been successfully primaried, the effect has been the same. When Estes Kefauver won in New Hampshire, Truman left the race.  After Lyndon Johnson beat Eugene McCarthy by a slim 7 points in New Hampshire and Robert Kennedy entered the race, Johnson famously dropped out in a nationwide address.  Gerald Ford, by the narrowest of margins, won the nomination over Reagan on the next to last day of the convention.  In his comeback, Reagan decisively beat one-termer Jimmy Carter.

3. The 11th Commandment.  President Reagan famously refused to bad mouth fellow Republicans.  Trump has followed the opposite path, attacking Republicans in his way, including Senate candidates who displeased him (“MAGA doesn’t vote for stupid people with big mouths”), and most disturbingly those he appointed: Attorney General Bill Barr (“weak and frightened”), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (“very disloyal” if he were to run against Trump in 2024), Vice President Mike Pence (“Mike did not have the courage to act” in rejecting Electoral College results).  The ad hominem attacks extended to supportive foreign leaders (“f*** him” when Netanyahu congratulated Biden) and even family members. (After Ivanka supported Barr on election testimony, “Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, election results.  She had long since checked out….”)  Ivanka has publicly sworn off all involvement in the 2024 election.  Politics requires friends and Trump has few friends.

4. OODA Loop.  Military strategy has developed a powerful, but deceptively simple doctrine known as Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, in a continuous loop, or the OODA loop.  In 2016, Trump decisively won the OODA loop campaign, getting in the heads of his 16 rivals for the nomination, with unconventional attacks, jibes, nicknames, humor, 24/7 brashness, and, as it turns out, utter media domination.  But a winning formula once has no staying power.  The greatest counter to Trump’s tactics is steely silence from DeSantis.  Trump’s novel plan of 2016 is dead on arrival, and he has no replacement strategy.  DeSanctimonious will not cut it this time.  If anything, everyone is in Trump’s headspace, not least Ron DeSantis, akin to constant bombardment in military terms and the classic sign of a losing OODA loop strategy.

5. Preference Cascade.  A preference cascade is one of the great social observations which shows that at times, a prevailing orthodoxy will suddenly and unexpectedly fail. It happens when individuals discover all at once that their own seemingly unorthodox beliefs are widely shared.  Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit was one of the first to recognize in 2016 that Trump was the beneficiary of a preference cascade.  In 2024 no such surprise is possible.  Trump himself, his ego, and his tactics are too well-known to allow for a shocking coalition.  If anything, DeSantis will win the preference cascade this round, as it is more likely than not that Trump will lose decisively in the early primaries and never recover to mount a serious campaign.

6. The Enemy of My Enemy.  The dictum that the enemy of my enemy is my friend is the Democrats only real strategy for 2024.  Trump is the Democrats’ one hope for victory, the enemy of DeSantis they want and need.  Hence the puzzle of criminal indictments.  Push too hard and it may sink Trump from grabbing the nomination.  Let the indictments linger and it angers core Democrats or may allow Trump to win.  In Ron DeSantis, Republicans voters have the complete solution, a true and simple opponent of the Democrats.  They will take it.

7. Trump as Independent.  The Democrat fallback prayer is that Trump retaliates against ungrateful Republicans, definitionally true if they fail to nominate him, by running as an Independent.  Republicans should have no fear on this point.  It is incredibly difficult to mount an Independent campaign and it will not be supported after a failed primary season.  More to the point, it is not in Trump’s DNA to run as a sure-fire loser.  The better reason would be that he has genuine first-term accomplishments.  Trump in the end, will treasure his legacy over throwing an election to the Democrats.  

8. The Straw and the Camel.  Just as one snowflake can ultimately set off an avalanche, it will never be known exactly which Trump mistake fatally harmed his candidacy.  Let the historians fight.  What is certain is that Trump regularly fuels controversy by attracting attention to himself over party and policy, never more so than the release of the Superhero NFTs.  In the end, the decisive factor may simply be that Trump is limited to one-term, making him a near lame duck from the outset.

9. True Victory.  Biden is unlikely to be the Democrat nominee in 2024.  But nothing will make this as certain as a Trump primary defeat to DeSantis.  There is zero chance the Democrats will risk a campaign debacle pitting Biden against DeSantis: a youthful, vigorous, first-rate intellect and highly successful governor.  Trump could step aside with the satisfaction that in the end he defeated Hillary and Biden, passing the torch to the next generation.

Many reputations lie in tatters prematurely burying Donald Trump.  Yours truly does not want that shame.  If it happens, the best defense is the wisdom that “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”

So Republicans should be in high cheer this season, notwithstanding the poor midterm showing and the recent House Speaker turmoil. Trump will not be the nominee.  DeSantis will be a stand-out, two-term president.  Attention will turn to assuring a meaningful Republican presidency.  Winning the House and Senate. True fiscal rectitude.  China disengagement. A 30-year nuclear power plan.  Drill baby drill to supply Europe’s energy needs.  A recentered America.

‘Tis the season for hope and wishes.

X22, And we Know, and more- Jan 9

 

What's the fastest way to ruin your day? You're on Twitter, casually waiting for any NCIS LA related tweets to appear in the #ncis la tag search, then suddenly the 'Recent' tab just completely vanishes, leaving you with nothing but the out of order Top tweets!!

Tried every basic troubleshooting trick I can think of, nothing changed. Which means, the fastest and most reliable way I have of getting news and keeping track of live reactions to an episode I don't want to see is mysteriously gone!! And on 1 of the worst nights of the year as well.

If there's any techies on here who know Twitter and don't have accounts, what do you do if this happens? Is it temporally or forever?

Here's tonight's news:

A Rendezvous With Rwanda? ~ VDH

As Americans separate, do we really know the final consequences of what the diversity, equity, and inclusion tribalism truly entails?

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

“Despite being Black, he [Rep. Byron Donalds] supports a policy agenda intent on upholding and perpetuating white supremacy.”—Representative Cori Bush (D-Mo.)

“Larry Elder [former candidate for governor of California] is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.”—Erika Smith, Los Angeles Times 

America is an increasingly multiracial society. Despite its early history of slavery and racial segregation, and ongoing bias and tensions, the United States remains one of the few contemporary multiracial constitutional systems that have actually worked. Yet recently few have appreciated that achievement.

Usually multiracial nations and empires—Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires—require some level of coercion incompatible with a democratic constitution to force calm. Brazil, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Kenya  may be currently multiracial democracies in theory, but in fact they are often sectarian and tribal cauldrons.

In most such places, pride, solidarity—and even safety—are only found through common religious, ethnic, and racial bonds that become all-encompassing. The individual’s primary allegiance to each particular warring group inevitably becomes incompatible with every other’s overriding loyalties.

The United States is insidiously nearing that abyss. It has all but renounced its old commitment to the melting-pot, and a “content-of-our-character” ideal of assimilation and integration within a common culture. But as we obsess on race and accordingly separate, do we really know the final consequences of what the diversity/equity/inclusion tribalism actually entails?

The first rule of tribalism is that the racial or ethnic collective superimposes solidarity over the individual, who then becomes a mere cog in racial-political wheel. Conservatives such as Larry Elder or Byron Donalds become especially despised as examples of successful individuals who reject tribal labels and loyalties. Are LeBron James, Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.), and Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) all to be black comrades first and quite different individuals second—if at all? In the same manner, do Adam Schiff, Devin Nunes, Donald Trump, and Mark Milley all share identical and overriding loyalty to “whiteness,” to the degree that we forget about their individual personalities?

One strange aspect of this new racialization is a post-Al Sharpton, post-Louis Farrakhan growing exemption accorded to elite and privileged minorities to stereotype others—blacks, though more often whites—in toxic, sometimes repulsive fashion. If embraced by any others, such hatred would be career ending. A few examples suffice:

In a 2021 video, Brittney Cooper, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University, claimed that white people were “villains.” She predicted that “whiteness is going to have an end date,” and she grew a bit heated in her desire to hasten that inevitable “end date” with the rally cry: “We gotta take these muthaf—ers out.” Cooper did not explain the methodology by which America will “take out” white people.

Earlier, Texas A&M professor Tommy Curry earned some temporary buzz by casually stating in a class, “Today I want to talk about killing white people in context.” In a much-watched video, he also matter of factly opined, “In order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die.” We might call this new genre “snuff racism,” in which the new racism legitimizes eliminationist rhetoric.

But as a precursor to what, exactly?

In a lecture sponsored by the Yale School of Medicine, psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani gushed that she “had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step.”

We are told by the diversity industry that “words matter” and have “consequences.” Perhaps they do, given that such violent trash-talking of obscure academics can filter into the larger society. Is that why “The View” co-host Sonny Hostin, resorting to once taboo Hitlerian arthropod imagery, recently compared white suburban women to cockroaches and Republicans to insecticide: “I read a poll just yesterday that white, Republican, suburban women are now going to vote Republican. It’s almost like roaches voting for Raid, right?” Substitute “black” for “white” and Hostin would be out of a career under the rules of her own cancel culture.

Whoopi Goldberg on the same show reduced the Holocaust into an intramural war between “white people”; her convoluted “apologies” only confirmed that she was historically ignorant and deeply prejudiced.

Not too long ago Damon Young, an occasional New York Times contributor pontificated, “Whiteness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people . . . .”

If that were true, then I suppose Young should call Sonny Hostin for the Raid spray, Professor Cooper for the take-out solution, or Dr. Khilanani for a revolver.

The elite pundit and racialist Elie Mystal infamously wrote, “I can, more or less, only deal with whiteness when I want to . . . White people haven’t improved; I’ve just been able to limit my exposure to them.” Lester Maddox or Bull Connor would have nodded in approval.

Mystal’s antebellum choices loudly to self-separate are his own. But meanwhile his neo-segregation views accelerate and encompass everything from racially set-aside college “theme houses” to selecting roommates on the basis of race. Rarely has Mystal’s Plessy v. Ferguson utopianism been more openly resurrected than at an off-campus U.C. Berkeley student dormitory. There residents were proudly warned to exclude entrance on the basis of race: “Many POC moved here to be able to avoid white violence and presence, so respect their decision of avoidance if you bring white guests. White guests are not allowed in common spaces.”

How, in 2023, such apartheid rules are allowed by quasi-public housing reflects just how pervasive and venomous woke orthodoxy permeates society, and how bankrupt appeasing institutions have become.

Of course, to enforce this sort of “white guests are not allowed” apartheid, segregationists will eventually have to revisit and consult past handbooks of their racist kindred spirits to figure out the occasional borderline cases. Have the Berkeley racists yet determined whether a black resident could bring in a half-white guest? Or whether a blond-haired, blue-eyed Spanish-speaking Argentine may enter through the front door? Is a gay or disabled white intruder allowed in the back entrance?

Note how class considerations disappear. And why not, given the most vehement racial incendiaries are so often among the wealthiest and most privileged of all Americans? By definition, an Oprah Winfrey or an Ibram X. Kendi are said to be victims. The Indiana Uber driver, the Modesto waitress, and the Anchorage custodian become their victimizers, simply by virtue of their shared whiteness—or rather their “white privilege” that has apparently earned them far more money, privilege, and influence than the victimized Winfrey or Kendi.

In a multiracial society, who is who is increasingly impossible to ascertain, given intermarriage and our labyrinth of races, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and ethnicities. As a consequence of both racial rewards and stigmatization, opportunists will continually create either new racial personas, à la Elizabeth Warren or Rachel Dolezal, to monetize racial preferences, or continually seek advantage in victimhood by citing endless micro-oppressions or indeed inventing altogether discriminations, in the fashion of the Duchess Meghan Markle.

The problem is not just determining what tribe, half-tribe, or quarter tribe to which we each belong, but calibrating the hierarchies of particular grievances that each claims amid the labyrinth of competing tribal oppressions.

The force-multiplying effects of all these factors have now become absurd: is the half Brazilian with a Hispanic last name a “Latino” and does he have a shared reparatory claim on historic “discrimination” against Mexican Americans?

Can the half Haitian, half Irish immigrant, claim to be 1) black, and 2) a victim of oppression by piggybacking onto the black American experience?

So ancient efforts to sort out racial, religious, or ethnic differences for the purposes of discrimination and worse are the woke’s ultimate model—from the Confederacy’s genealogical tables to root out the “one drop” to the Third Reich’s resort to yellow stars to ascertain who was Jewish. But any self-sustaining tribal categorization must descend into Orwellian paradoxes. Darker-skinned Punjabi immigrants are sort of privileged in terms of vaguely defined “diversity,” but not to the extent that they would impinge on reparatory hiring of, say, Latinos from anywhere on the globe, who in turn are often indistinguishable from Italian, Greek, or Armenian Americans who find no such affirmative action boosts.

But still crazier, once a person goes fully tribal, then he opens the door to the laws of stereotypes, both its advantages and its boomerangs. If you insist the individual cedes to the group, then more than a half-century after the Civil Rights moments you will find only contradiction and hypocrisy in citing group underrepresentation and its causes. Asian Americans are overrepresented in many professions such as highly compensated orthodontists and pharmacists. Is that because they enjoyed inordinate racial leverage? Yet they are underrepresented as U.S. Marine officers; is that because of systemic racism?

No one would dare require the NFL or the NBA “to look like America,” given blacks are variously over represented in these two lucrative professions by a magnitude of five to six times their demographics in the general population.

To defend such racial engineering in sports, the argument of using non-meritocratic criteria to pass over black, talented running backs and favor Asian or Latino athletes solely on the basis of race—would be, well, racist. And, of course, such racial gerrymandering, it would be additionally argued, would lower the quality of professional sports itself, once talent was subordinated to race. And yet recently we are told the overrepresentation of black players in such a violent sport as professional football is now as racist as was prior underrepresentation.

So how odd that in areas that are critical to the national well-being, from medical school admissions to airline pilot training programs, we insist that diversity’s non-meritocratic criteria are essential. Yet in contrast non-diversity, merit-based standards alone should govern professional basketball?

In the matter of stereotypes, we have descended into yet another absurdity, using collective pigeon-holing when it serves tribal advantage and then decrying it as unfair when it becomes inconvenient.

The word “white” is now an agreed-on pejorative as we see from Kendi’s denunciation of “white privilege” to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley’s promises to learn about and then root out “white rage.” But where are the data used to confirm such a blanket accusation?

Does Milley define “white rage” as the propensity of white males to die in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq at twice their numbers in the general population? According to the Pentagon new laws of woke, there must be culpability for such toxic disproportionality and thereby a woke corrective? A DEI czar might ask whether the armed services cynically targeted rural and southern whites and its recruiters “pushed” them into combat units?

A few rubrics that might substantiate or reject “white rage” could be found by examining Justice Department and FBI data on homicide, violent crime, hate crimes—and interracial violent crimes. But in all those categories so-called whites are clearly what the diversity industry again calls “underrepresented.” In contrast, blacks are vastly overrepresented, at nearly double their demographics in hate crimes, and over five times in the commission of murders and violent assaults.

Would not a privileged, white, and angry or raging population be disproportionately violent rather than less violent and homicidal rather than suicidal? And yet whites have far higher suicide rates than do either blacks or Latinos? How is all that possible?

As far as the current epidemic of officially reported antisemitic hate crime, blacks are vastly overrepresented as perpetrators. In New York City alone, black offenders account for 43 percent of reported hate crimes.

There is no future to this sort of racial discrimination, segregation, and hatred. History informs us where it leads. We live in a society, after all, where exercise is now deemed racist, weight loss racist and using the word “American” or “immigrant” racist—as the race industry is clueless that when everything is deemed racist, then nothing can be racist.

The only method of avoiding a Rwanda-style chaos is simply to forget racial categories, preferences, and reparatory actions entirely, and instead simply enforce the Civil Rights-era anti-discrimination laws on the books that were supposed to protect everyone from everyone but are now ignored and routinely violated by our own government.

What World Order?

There is no world order! Whatever it once was, whatever glories it once gave us, that order is long gone.

by Brandon J. Weichert for American Greatness

Last year I was in Washington, D.C. giving an off-the-record briefing to senior members of the Department of Defense. After having mentioned three times the “U.S.-led world order,” I stopped myself in the middle of my briefing, looked at the audience of senior military personnel, and realized how absurd I sounded. I stood there like an idiot for what seemed to be an eternity—with everyone awkwardly staring at me. I am convinced now that my reaction was entirely justified and sane, given the circumstances. 

After all, we were discussing the ongoing Russo-Ukraine War and the possibility of having to defend against or, rather, respond to a Russian nuclear attack. “World order?!” I thought incredulously as I attempted to regain my composure. In that moment, I felt as though I were staring down a deep, black abyss and having that Nietzschean moment where the abyss (in this case multiple three and four-star generals as well as two former Trump Administration National Security Council members) stared back at me. 

Look around, Washingtonians, there is no world order! Whatever it once was, whatever glories it once gave us, that order is long gone. 

What we’ve gotten ourselves into instead is a world in total disorder with ordinary Americans left holding the proverbial bag, in terms of cost and blood—and an indolent political class totally unwilling to concede that they’ve gotten most everything wrong (because, except in rare cases, their kids aren’t the ones paying for those mistakes). 

What’s more, the very thing high-ranking members of the so-called “deep state,” are accustomed to doing—acting boldly and loudly whenever we are in doubt—is the one thing most certain to worsen the situation, particularly for the one country that the post-Cold War liberal order is supposed to benefit: the United States.  

Upside-Down World

Everywhere we turn, there are wars and rumors of war. Russia in Ukraine. China in Taiwan. North Korea invading its southern neighbor. Iran letting loose unholy terror upon its Sunni Arab and Israeli neighbors. And let’s not even talk about the chaos at our southwestern border. (Seriously, few in Washington want to even know about this problem!) 

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the blessedly bloodless American victory in the Cold War was supposed to give us a new age of human development, peace, and prosperity. The unipolar world order was heralded by Democrats and Republicans alike. It would be based on the timeless American values of justice, liberty, equality, and prosperity. International free trade, promotion of democracy, liberal human rights, and norms enforced by purportedly unbiased international organizations and backed up by U.S. military power, these were the ideals that would undergird a post-Cold War peace that was supposed to last us for at least the duration of the first half of the 21st century. 

We ought to have known better. In fact, the brilliant international relations scholar, Robert Gilpin, wrote about the inherent stability of unipolar systems. We would have done well to take that seriously.

One could argue that the relative stability of the 1990s proved that Gilpin was onto something in his assessment. But, something happened then wherein Washington, rather than taking a step back and letting the systems it had crafted to manage a complex world take the lead, started imposing itself everywhere. With each imposition, the value of the U.S.-led world order in the post-Cold War era became less appealing to other countries, such as China and Russia. Alternative power centers not only began arising to challenge the unipolar world order, but those systems were soon coalescing into explicitly anti-American alliances that, over time, threatened the national security of the United States itself. (Does anyone really believe that China and Russia are natural allies, in the way that America and Britain are?) 

I Miss the 1990s

It is hard to believe that just 30 years ago, the Russians fantasized about becoming members of the Western trading system and NATO after having spent the previous 40 years resisting these things. In the 1990s, as well, the Communist Chinese—who were never democrats-in-waiting as the neoliberal elite in Washington believed—were making so much money from the American-created world order that they did not initially feel compelled to translate that wealth into the military power required to challenge the United States. 

What we are experiencing today, however, is a world order undone mostly by bad American policies. Of course, nations like Russia or China that were home to very different cultures than that of the United States, were unlikely ever to become as compliant to Washington as the Europeans are. Yet, their resistance quotient to the U.S.-led world order would be much lower today if Washington had just tried to act with a bit more restraint in certain areas. 

For example, former President Bill Clinton used American capitalism as a blunt force instrument to bash open the markets of developing economies—including Russia—and effectively immiserated those struggling nations when they were at their weakest. Then, President George W. Bush proclaimed his intention to topple all dictators globally and replace their regimes with democratic and capitalistic ones. After prematurely winning a Nobel Peace Prize, President Barack Obama spent his eight years in office bombing weddings and funerals throughout the greater Middle East, hoping to occasionally kill an actual terrorist, with a fleet of drones. Today, Joe Biden courts nuclear war with Russia. 

Far too many American policymakers conflated America’s hegemonic position in the world system as a responsibility to use inherently limited American troops and capital to attempt to extinguish nearly every brush fire that erupted globally. In so doing, we often fanned the flames of crisis and resentment and, in many cases, would have been better off not acting at all (see Edward Luttwak’s infamous essay “Give War a Chance” for more on that). 

Far too few U.S. leaders in Washington since the end of the Cold War have ever dared to ask themselves, what are these problems to us? And, as a corollary, why must U.S. military power or capital always be expended to address these problems? 

Whose Order is It, Anyway?

What sort of “order” courts a multi-sided conflict with two nuclear powers, such as Russia and China, and two nuclear rogue states, such as Iran and North Korea? What kind of “order” are we living in where not only nuclear world war appears to be the desire of our elites, but those same elites utterly refuse to invest in even the most modest form of defense against such ghastly weapons, such as space-based missile defense? In what way are any of these outcomes favorable to the United States? 

Our current predicament was certainly not what President Ronald Reagan envisioned when he told a befuddled Dr. Robert Wood of the Naval War College at a White House briefing in 1982 his belief that the USSR was a “real Mickey Mouse operation” and that the Soviets were destined to lose the Cold War by the end of his second term. 

Nor is the world we are living in presently the vision of Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, who took to the airwaves in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse to declare that the new post-Cold War order would not be governed by “the law of the jungle” but by the very American principles of the “rule of law.” 

It is incumbent upon all members of the American political establishment to recognize how precarious is the position their actions (and the actions of their predecessors) have put our once-mighty nation in since the end of the Cold War. And in realizing this unfortunate truth, our leaders in Washington must chart a new way forward in foreign policy. 

That pathway forward cannot be isolationism and retreat. It also cannot mean viewing every situation as a crisis needing resolution via the vast expenditure of what are today limited national resources and military might. Some variation of John J. Mearsheimer’s “offshore balancer” approach—or “offensive realism”—would be preferable. 

Such a new paradigm would not only recognize but also embrace the limits of U.S. power while simultaneously guarding our real national interests, which are: first, the protection of the American homeland; second, the expansion of prosperity through fair trade deals; third, the embrace of willing strategic partners globally, and giving those powers the tools they need to survive and thrive; fourth, the acceptance that other cultures exist and that nations of those different cultures will not always be willing lapdogs of Washington’s preferences; and fifth, that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all—unless the American homeland or its core interests are directly threatened. 

It’s time that Americans everywhere realize how lucky we were to have avoided the Cold War becoming a nuclear world war—and how blessed we are by geography. We must also now understand how foolish we were in letting that historic victory evaporate, to be replaced by the very real prospects of a nuclear world war today.

Absolute Chaos Erupted After Authorities in Mexico Capture the Son of 'El Chapo' - And Nothing Will Change

Joe Cunningham reporting for RedState 

If you had been in Culiacan, Mexico late last week, you would have found yourself in a war zone as Mexican police fought back against the Sinaloa cartel.

The fighting erupted after Mexican police arrested the son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was the de facto head of one of the cartel’s subgroups. The Cartel de Sinaloa (CDS) raised absolute hell in Culiacan, and the resulting violence led to the deaths of nearly 30 people – cartel and police officer alike.

The chaos was a bloody reminder of the cartels’ power in Mexico. They can and will wage absolute war to protect their own and their business interests. But, as the Associated Press points out in a piece out today, this wasn’t some operation done to clean up Mexico.

It was a display of muscle — helicopter gunships, hundreds of troops and armored vehicles — at the initiation of a possible extradition process rather than a significant step in a homegrown Mexican effort to dismantle one of the country’s most powerful criminal organizations. Perhaps coincidentally, it came just days before U.S President Joe Biden makes the first visit by a U.S. leader in almost a decade.

López Obrador has made clear throughout the first four years of his six-year term that pursuing drug capos is not his priority. When military forces cornered the younger Guzmán in Culiacan in 2019, the president ordered him freed to avoid loss of life after gunmen started shooting up the city.

The only other big capture under his administration was the grabbing of a geriatric Rafael Caro Quintero last July — just days after López Obrador met with Biden in the White House. At that point, Caro Quintero carried more symbolic significance for ordering a DEA agent’s murder decades ago than real weight in today’s drug world.

This is a pretty significant acknowledgment that should be terrifying, especially for folks living on or close to the border – the Mexican government has no real interest in taking on the cartels. They just want to do the bare minimum to make the U.S. happy and little else. There are all sorts of reasons for this – ranging from fear to corruption within the Mexican government, but the bottom line is that the Mexican government has very little authority where the cartels are concerned.

One of the sources for the AP story pretty much nails it from the start.

“Mexico wants to do at least the bare minimum in terms of counter-drug efforts,” said Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of international operations who spent 13 years of his career in Mexico. “I don’t think that this is a sign that there’s going to be closer cooperation, bilateral collaboration, if you will, between the United States and Mexico.”

While capturing a criminal is a win for justice and rule of law, Vigil said, the impact on what he sees as a “permanent campaign against drugs” is nil. “Really what we need to do here in the United States is we need to do a better job in terms of reducing demand.”

Mexico is becoming more and more a failed state. Its government has no power, drug cartels run the show, and if our southern border is anything to go by, people are looking to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible and by any means necessary – including by paying those same cartels to get them out.

With a failed state below us, we also should be tightening the border, but Joe Biden has taken an extremely hands-off approach to the border while his administration has insisted there really isn’t a problem. As my colleague Nick Arama mentioned earlier, the President’s upcoming visit to the border is little more than a show that Border Patrol knows is all for a photo op and not really meant to shed light on what’s actually going on.

What’s worse, they have no plan. Even if they decide there is a problem at the border, they have no idea what to do to fix it. They’ve been haphazardly shipping illegal immigrants all over the country – it’s okay when they do it, but God help Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis if they do it again – and detaining, releasing, and never following up on the ones they happen to stumble across.

That’s not to mention the hundreds of thousands of getaways federal agents couldn’t get throughout 2022 alone.

Now, when Vigil makes the claim that “Really what we need to do here in the United States is we need to do a better job in terms of reducing demand,” he’s not wrong, but there is another aspect that repeatedly gets missed – we’ve had decades to fight the battle at the border, and we did nothing.

Back in December, I wrote about the failure of the U.S. to recognize and confront the fentanyl threat in its infancy. From Bush to Biden, the last four administrations have done seemingly everything necessary to let it become a full-blown crisis. So, while the government of Mexico collapses in the wake of the powerful cartels, the U.S. has done nothing to prevent them from establishing a fentanyl market in the U.S. That, combined with Biden’s insistence that the border isn’t a problem, has allowed a huge influx of illegal immigrants and, more important, an insane amount of drugs to flood our streets.

And yet, while they complain about how racist Title 42 is, they are perfectly fine expanding it in order to keep out Haitians and Cubans. There’s something seriously wrong with that, yet they don’t seem to recognize the issue.

A failed state to the south and an incompetent one in D.C. It’s no wonder no one sees an end to the crisis.

Red States Need To Stop Letting Academia Flip Us Off

posted by Kurt Schlicter at Townhall

The beauty of federalism is that, in some states, we patriots are nominally in charge. Places like California, New York, and Massachusetts are communist hellholes, and they remain communist hellholes because the communists in charge of those hellholes demand policies that ensure the perpetuation of their communist hellholedom. But good gravy, why are so many red states where we conservatives have the governor’s mansion and the legislature, and therefore the car keys to floor it on conservative policy, so damn spineless that we refuse to carve out the tumors of communist hellholedom that threaten to metastasize throughout our red paradises?

There are many such infested institutions, but let us focus on one of the most visible and most deadly to society because it infects and poisons the young people who will take the leadership roles in society down the road (that they primarily come from colleges is yet another problem). The fact is, even in red states that should damn well know better, state colleges and universities not only indoctrinate students in CRT garbage, but actually build DIE infrastructures that perpetuate wokedom and crush the students who yearn to breathe and learn freely. We could stop it with a snap of our collective fingers, yet for some reason, Republicans seem terrified at the thought of offending the ragged collection of man-bunned TAs, tweed-jacketed dorks, craven, cat-fancying administrators, and daddy issue-smitten purple-haired co-eds who seem to run our colleges.

Our colleges. Ours. We built them. We taxpayers pay for them. We taxpayers should dictate how they function. Why won’t we?

First of all, “we” does not include Ron DeSantis. The guy on the cutting edge of crushing CRT just gave all the public colleges in Florida a short fuse to report on their woke web of organizations and activities. The university eunuchs freaked, of course, claiming that this was just a first step toward wiping the slate clean on the government-funded woke fascism plaguing Sunshine State academia. Why, diversity consultants may be fired, conformity enforcement teams curtailed, kangaroo courts adjourned! 

Yeah. Exactly. He’s going to destroy their dreams. It will be beautiful.

They should look on the bright side and celebrate the glory that is Our Democracy in action. We were told – by them and their allies endlessly over the last couple years – that Our Democracy is facing the most perilous of perils. No longer! Heavy D ran on a platform of nuking woke and he’s simply giving the people what they wanted by about 20 percentage points.

So, why do they hate Our Democracy? Basically, if you don’t want him and his legislators to decree the policies the people have demanded – that not one red cent gets spent on this racist commie nonsense – then you are an insurrectionist of treason who hates America.

Oh wait, they are totally into that last part.

The Governor of the Falling Frozen Iguana State is also replacing the board of trustees of a super-liberal public college with people who don’t hate normal Americans, and that has the freakshow fuming. As regime media outlet Yahoo News put it, “DeSantis takes aim at Sarasota's New College, transforms board in conservative overhaul.” He sure did! His new trustees include CRTslayer Christopher Ruto and a Hillsdale College professor. The pinkos are most perturbed at the thought of classes that teach actual history, actual literature, and actual knowledge instead of woke intersectional mind goo. And too bad for them – there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.

So where are the other red governors on this? Why is Greg Abbott not taking a break from failing to use his cops and soldiers to secure the Texas border and demanding his legislature defund the police haters, as well as the rest of the motley crew that controls Lone Star academia? The joke in Texas is that UT is Berkeley with BBQ, but why should that be? Ban all CRT crap, fire all the diversitycrats, mandate that all administrator ranks be slashed, and require that all faculty hiring include proportionate numbers of patriots, believers, veterans, and people who have actually had real jobs. After all, these are our states and there is no good reason we should be subsidizing the  efforts of people who hate us to enslave us.

But, of course, soft Republicans resist imposing their iron discipline on academia. Why? Well, one reason is that the regime media will call them mean and they don’t like that. Or worse, the regime media will say they hate education. But they should hate education, at least the brand being foisted on our young people today. It’s not education. It’s a joke. There is zero excuse for a guy who sweats it out on an oil rig in the Permian Basin wringing oil out of the dirt under the blazing sun getting runned by the state for tax money that then goes to underwrite some nose-pierced princess’s degree in Marxist puppetry. Or Marxist interpretive dance. Or anything Marxist, other than how to stamp out Marxism forever.

These are the RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel GOPers, the ones who just want to go along, get along, and lose (Fire Ronna by going to www.HireHarmeet.comand make your objections known to reelecting the O-5 loser to another term).

But mostly, there is also the almost willful refusal of a lot of these Buick Republicans to understand and accept that college today is not like their alma mater of yesteryear. Nostalgia is, after all, a helluva drug. They remember their fraternities and sororities, their gentleman’s C grades, lots of Budweiser, and making out in the bushes around the quad. But that college experience is gone, washed away in a tsunami of political correctness and rigid, surveillance state thought control. They don’t get that the Lamda Lamda Lamdas and Omega Mus are not attending toga parties but mandatory training on microaggressions, their privilege, and the horror of patriarchy. Sure, it’s still fun to watch football, but tailgating before the big game against the University of College is where the similarity to their college years ends. Colleges are no longer campuses creating educated citizens; they are commie conformity factories run on our dime.

This must stop throughout our country, but it must first stop out in the red states. It's a betrayal of the citizens of these states who are expected to pay for it and who want trained workers capable of contributing to society, not destroying it. It’s a betrayal of the few professors who want to teach students instead of converting them into CRT cliché- spewing automatons. And it’s a betrayal of the kids who just want to get a real degree and maybe score a little action without having to get a notarized certificate of consent before rounding second base.

Red state rulers, get on it, because Ron DeSantis is again making most of the rest of you look like ineffectual saps.

5th Circuit Delivers Big Ruling on Deposing Jen Psaki in Biden Social Media Collusion Case

Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

I reported earlier on some of the bombshells that the Missouri AG Andrew Bailey announced they’d discovered in the lawsuit against the Biden administration. The lawsuit, filed by the Missouri and Lousiana Attorneys General alleged the Biden administration had been colluding with Big Tech and social media to “suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content” on their platforms with “dis-information,” “mis-information” and “mal-information” labels.

The Biden administration’s effort to squash speech extended to some pretty well-known names, including Tucker Carlson, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, and Tomi Lahren. But it was clear that members of the Executive Office of the President were regularly badgering Big Tech and social media like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to comply with shutting down anything the Biden team thought went against the narrative, including on things like COVID.

The Republican attorneys general pursuing the social media case had also been trying to depose former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki to find out what she knows. But the 5th Circuit just blocked their attempts to depose her, overturning the lower court’s ruling that would have allowed the deposition. The Circuit Court said that her testimony “did not merit the “extraordinary circumstances” needed to proceed with depositions of current or former high-ranking government officials.”

The Court said, “As Press Secretary, Psaki’s role was to inform the media of the administration’s priorities, not to develop or execute policy.” The Court said there wasn’t enough in the record to “demonstrate that Psaki has unique first-hand knowledge that would justify the extraordinary measure of deposing a high-ranking executive official.” The Court rejected the argument that because she was involved in the making comments about telling social media companies to remove their “COVID misinformation” that involved her in the scheme.

That didn’t discourage Louisiana AG Jeff Landry, “We have no problem with the court’s request. We look forward to obtaining more discovery.”

I think given the significant involvement of the Executive Office of the President that I wrote about earlier, the Court should have allowed it. It shows multiple EOP officials were involved and that there’s a lot to uncover there. But while the attorneys general may not be able to depose Psaki, it’s not going to stop them from getting more documents and evidence. So if the Biden team thought they were going to wiggle out of this, that’s not happening.

Nancy Mace Declares She Is a Purple Republican Who Is “On The Fence Right Now” About Supporting House Rule Changes

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

(Bonchie reporting below)

The true enemy of a constitutional republic are the Mitch McConnell’s and Nancy Mace’s of the professional political class who build systems to undermine the will of the people under the pretense of representing them.  These are the abusers, the professional abusers, the psychologically Machiavellian and inherently evil people within the system of power who operate on false pretense.  They are smiley-faced fascists and liars, period.

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.” ~ Taylor Caldwell

[Transcript] – MARGARET BRENNAN: We begin with one of the Republican members of Congress who was with Speaker McCarthy on all votes. That’s Nancy Mace of South Carolina. Good morning to you, Congresswoman. Welcome back.

REP. NANCY MACE: Good morning.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Again and again, 14 times the hard right faction of your party refused to vote for Kevin McCarthy even after he was making repeated concessions to them. How can Republicans possibly govern when your party is so unruly?

REP. MACE: Well, first of all, I want to say number one, Kevin McCarthy, is the only member that- that I know of, that could bring all the different groups together within our own party, because we do have different factions, just like Democrats do. And that’s, that’s the first thing. And then the second thing is that sometimes democracy is messy. It looked kind of like an unnecessary and prolonged food fight last week. And I agreed with many Americans who thought that. I came home this weekend and listened to folks of all sides. I represent a very purple district, I have all sides to serve. And there was a lot of frustration with the prolonged and unnecessary food fight that we had this week. But you saw democracy on full display. And I think that’s healthy to have that kind of debate. I’m glad that it’s over and we can move forward.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, I mean, some would say it wasn’t so much democracy as it was dysfunction. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page was pretty scathing. Said: don’t believe the happy talk this was a healthy display of deliberative democracy. It was a power play. A group of backbenchers saw an opportunity to exploit the narrower GOP margin of five seats to put themselves in positions of power that they hadn’t earned through seniority or influence with colleagues. If this rules package passes, with all the concessions that Speaker McCarthy made, this will leave you beholden, won’t it? To those backbenchers?

REP. MACE: Well, a couple of things I want, I want to say on the rules package, the rules that are governed the way- that will govern the way the House operates. There are some very great good ideas in there like the 72 hour rule, having three days to read a bill before it comes to the floor for a vote, having a path to balance the budget over the next 10 years, ensuring that they’re spending off- offsets, especially with mandatory spending. If you’re gonna increase in one area, then you have to decrease in another. But I will tell you, when I ran for Congress two years ago, I won by one point, and I ran to be a new Nancy in the house. And what I saw last week was a small faction of the 20, who were acting just like the old Nancy, trying to cut back room deals in private, in secret without anyone knowing what else was going on. And when they did the rules package. At the end of the day, there was only one point that was changed. That was on the motion to vacate. That was the only difference in the package that we’re going to be voting on tomorrow that was different from the original package that was proposed. So my question really is today is what back room deals were cut- did they try to cut? And did they get those because we shouldn’t be operating like Nancy Pelosi, this small faction. They’re the ones that are saying they were, quote, fighting the swamp, but then yet went and tried to act like you know, like, they actually are the swamp by trying to do these back room deals. And we don’t know what they got, or didn’t get. We haven’t seen it. We don’t have any idea what promises were made or what gentleman’s handshakes were made. We just, we just have no idea at this point. And it does give me quite a bit of heartburn, because that’s not what we ran on.

(crosstalk)

MARGARET BRENNAN: So Speaker–

REP. MACE: It’s quite ironic.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So you are saying Speaker McCarthy is not being transparent about all the deals that he brokered in order to win this job.

REP. MACE: I’m saying there’s a small handful of individuals in that 20 who were trying to cut deals in secret.

(crosstalk)

MARGARET BRENNAN: Didn’t they succeed in doing that?

REP. MACE: And not let anybody else know about them. We’re not sure, we don’t know at this point. And that does give me pause and gives me significant heartburn on what direction we’re going to take. I represent a purple district, I have to represent Republicans, Democrats and Independents. I want to know that the positions that I have are going to have a voice that it will have weighed in the conference. There are a lot of members like me that- that have issues with some of the policies that we’re going to be working on. Look at what happened after overturning of Roe v. Wade. We didn’t have a plan and I want as a woman and as a victim of rape want to know that we’re going to be serious. That we’re going to be balanced in protecting the rights of women and protecting the rights of the unborn. There’s a way to do it both and not be guided by one extreme or the other.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, I just want to clarify there because I had asked you initially about the rules package, which is published and would be voted on tomorrow. Are you saying that you’re going to withhold your vote on those published agreements until you know what these back-room deals were?

REP. MACE: I am considering that as an option right now. I like the rules package. It is the most open, fair, and fiscally conservative package we’ve had in 30 years. I support it, but what I don’t support is a small number of people trying to get a deal done or deals done for themselves in private, in secret to get a vote or vote present. I don’t support that. That is just what Nancy Pelosi does. And that’s not what they should be doing. And so, I am on the fence right now about the rules package vote tomorrow for that reason.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Got it. It reportedly includes a pledge that would likely require a $75 billion cut to national security funding. Do you support that part of it?

REP. MACE: I want to see- I want to see it in writing. I want to see what promises were made. And what we are being told is that- that these handshakes, what’s going on these promises will go through regular order and go through the regular appropriations process. I don’t want to see defense cuts. I- again, we don’t, we don’t know what deals were made. And that’s something that we should be transparent about. Sunshine is the best medicine. That’s what we’ve always said. So what, what are we guaranteeing or what promises were made? We should know.

MARGARET BRENNAN: The speaker has reportedly given the Freedom Caucus, that ultra-conservative faction, a third of the seats on the powerful Rules Committee which controls which bills make it to the floor. You’ve called Matt Gaetz, one of its members, a political D-Lister and a fraud. You’ve sparred with Marjorie Taylor Greene, I’ll show our viewers part of that and let them interpret your meaning. How are you going to work with these folks to get anything done for the American people?

REP. MACE: It’s going to be very difficult. Matt Gaetz is a fraud. Every time he voted against Kevin McCarthy last week he sent out a fundraising email. What you saw last week was a constitutional process diminished by those kinds of political actions. I don’t support that kind of behavior. I am very concerned as someone who represents a lot of centrists, a lot of Independents. I have as many Independents and Democrats as I have Republicans in my district. I have to represent everybody. I am concerned that common sense legislation will not get through to get a vote on the floor. And I, for example, we have 12 bills that we’re supposedly going to be voting on in our first week in office. Three of them are abortion- abortion bills and pro-life bills. I am pro-life. But I have many exceptions. But they are not legislation, pieces of legislation, that can pass the Senate and get onto the desk for the president to sign into law. And so if we’re going to be serious about protecting life, for example, maybe we should look at more centrist views, like ensuring every woman has access to birth control, because if you can reduce pregnancies, you can reduce the need or want for women to have abortions, for example, a very common-sense pragmatic point of view. But that’s not what we’re going to be voting on this week. And I am concerned I want to see pragmatic- pragmatics at work, common sense, fiscal, conservative issues at work that represent all views.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Before I let you go, I have to ask you, you have a new colleague from the state of New York, Representative George Santos. He says he’s embellished his resume. You could say he just flat-out lied about work history, education, family background, how can you work with someone like that? And does he need to be removed from office?

REP. MACE: It’s very difficult to work with anyone who cannot be trusted, and it’s very clear his entire resume in life was- was manufactured until a couple days ago when he finally changed his website. It is a problem. If we say we can’t trust the Left when they are telling the truth, how can we trust our own? Americans want transparency, and the one lesson I’ve learned in DC: if you want a friend you can trust, get a dog.

MARGARET BRENNAN: I understand you are a dog fan. All right, Congresswoman. Thank you.

REP. MACE: I am a huge dog fan. Thank you.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Thank you. Nancy Mace. Thank you for your time this morning. (link)

Nancy Mace Exemplifies Republican Idiocy on Face the Nation

Bonchie reporting for RedState

After the battle over Kevin McCarthy’s ascension to Speaker of the House concluded, there was concern that the deal struck to satisfy the holdouts might end up being opposed by Republicans on the other end of the caucus. Sure enough, we are getting our first signs of opposition.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) appeared with Margaret Brennan (click here for a taste of her bias) and was asked whether she would vote for the rules package that was agreed to. Her answer exemplified Republican idiocy that too often rears its head.

I know there are those on the right that despise Mace, but I’m more agnostic about her. Like with most Republicans (because almost none are perfect), there are areas I don’t agree with her, but certainly, there are areas of common ground as well. With that said, what she’s saying here is really, really dumb and counterproductive.

If you watch the clip, Mace actually praises the rules package as the most “open, fair, and fiscally conservative package in 30 years.” Yet, she then goes on to decry that it was garnered via “backroom deals” in order to secure votes for McCarthy, and because of that, she’s now on the fence about voting for it.

Does that make sense to anyone reading this? Because it makes none at all to me. She admits that the rules package is excellent and is a generational win for conservatives…and then says she may not vote for it because she doesn’t like how it was formulated? I find that to be absolutely ridiculous. Who cares how the steak was cooked if it tastes great? Take the win, Nancy.

Look, I get that she’s not a fan of the 20 Republicans who held up the process, but without those holdouts, Mace doesn’t get the stinking rules package she is now praising. Does she really not understand that, and is she really willing to flush a major victory down the toilet for no other reason than spite? How is she acting any different than those she’s been criticizing?

Democracy is messy, and the House is purely that. It is not designed to be an institution where powerful elites dictate to the membership. Mace should recognize that in deciding how she’ll vote on the rules package. Yes, the process was chaotic and not everyone fell in line. So what? That’s how it’s supposed to work, and that’s why such a great rules package now exists to vote on. Voting against it out of some misguided attempt to punish her colleagues for thinking for themselves would be silly. Hopefully, she’s not seriously considering that.