Can the Swamp be Drained?

posted by Steve McCann at American Thinker 

On October 17, 2016, Donald Trump issued a press release and subsequent Tweet stating, “I will make our Government honest again -- believe me. But first I am going to have to #DrainTheSwamp.” in Washington, D.C. Thereby creating a campaign slogan that was instrumental in his winning the 2016 election as Trump seized on an extremely popular position that resonated with a majority of the electorate.

Trump recycled a phrase used by Ronald Reagan in reference to the necessity of reducing a bloated government bureaucracy. In 1983, Reagan described his primary mission as “draining the swamp” in Washington, D.C. Trump used the phrase to describe his intentions to derail rampant corruption by venal lobbyists, entrenched bureaucrats, and the self-serving governing elites of both parties.

Both men failed in their respective attempts to “drain the swamp.” Reagan was stymied by a Democrat-controlled House for both of his terms. Trump, during the first two years of his term, was hamstrung by an avalanche of politically-motivated leaks and inane investigations as well as intransigence on the part of the Republicans in both Houses of Congress. In his second two years, a malevolent Pelosi-led House focused almost entirely on impeaching him twice.

With the failure of the two most conservative presidents over the past sixty-four-years, and in the case of Ronald Reagan, the most popular president since Franklin Roosevelt, to “drain the swamp,” the question has to be asked. Can the swamp be drained and if so, how?

As with almost everything in the current political arena, the first step is to follow the money. Discretionary spending (all government outlays outside of entitlement programs and interest) accounts for over a quarter of annual federal government spending and is subject to the whims of Congress on a yearly basis. In 1999 discretionary spending amounted to $572 Billion, in 2023 $1.72 trillion, or an increase of 200% while the cumulative rate of inflation since 1999 is 82%. 2023 discretionary spending was larger than the annual gross domestic product of Australia or South Korea.

There is virtually no appetite in Washington, D.C. to cut spending as numerous companies and countless organizations are feeding from the seemingly bottomless trough continuously being replenished by 535 mostly self-serving members of Congress who will not curtail spending as they benefit from sizeable political donations from 13,000 lobbyists spending over $4 billion a year, the millions of dollars in unaccountable “dark money,” and the personal profit from insider information. There is a reason so many become multi-millionaires after only a few years in Congress.

Then there are the 430 departments, agencies, and sub-agencies and the millions of federal employees issuing regulations and edicts while effectively distributing or spending unfathomable sums of money. Thus, being overwhelmingly susceptible to bribery and extortion.

Officially there are three million federal employees, the vast majority of whom are protected by a near-intractable web of civil service laws and regulations. They are exceedingly difficult to fire regardless of the justification. Additionally, there are another 8 to 10+ million federal contract employeesscattered throughout virtually every department, bureau, or agency all with contractual employment protection.

Finally, there is the increasingly Left-leaning federal judiciary which will be sympathetic to legal actions filed in opposition to any executive orders issued by Trump to dismiss vast numbers of federal employees or to curb the spending, regulatory, intelligence gathering, and audit powers of any government agency. The judiciary will stymie virtually any attempt to use executive orders to “drain the swamp.”

The leviathan that is the “Swamp” has been allowed to grow to the point where it cannot be drained on an incremental basis. Any pledge to “reform” the government or any department or agency is nothing more than a hackneyed political slogan that will never come to fruition.

Government has become so large and corrupt that the only means of potentially “draining the “swamp” is by abolishing entire departments and agencies, thus reducing discretionary spending and potentially eliminating corruption.

The citizenry, while claiming to be upset that the government is too big or intrusive, needs to elect to Congress those pledged to reduce spending and corruption. If Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and candidates running for Congress campaign on “draining the swamp” they must lay out the following plan on how to accomplish it.

All 430 departments, agencies, and sub-agencies were created by acts of Congress and signed into law by the president; therefore, Congress and the president can eliminate and/or restructure any or all of them.

This includes the rogue CIA, NSA, FBI and 14 other “intelligence agencies” all of whom should be disbanded, their intelligence activities reconstituted in one or two new agencies and limited to foreign-originated threats while the FBI’s domestic police activities are transferred to the states. Further, after the unmitigated debacle of Covid-19, the FDA and CDC and other health bureaucracies must also be eliminated and replaced.

By abolishing entire departments and agencies, the employees of those agencies would be effectively terminated. Those agencies not eliminated could be merged into more efficient and less intrusive entities.

The Courts would have no say in the process as these are actions unquestionably in the purview of Congress per Article One, Section 8 of the Constitution.

Despite the inevitable blustering and baseless accusations by the Democrats and their sycophants in the legacy media, these overhauls can be achieved by a simple Republican majority in the House and 52 or 53 Republican seats and the use of the budget reconciliation process in the Senate. Donald Trump, as president, would have to not only promote this strategy on the national stage but forcefully keep the Republicans in Congress united and focused.

If Trump regains the White House and the Republicans win control of Congress and they fail to do what is necessary to fulfill their pledge to “drain the swamp” then the “Swamp” will continue to grow incrementally larger, become more corrupt and intrusive, and evolve into being essentially drain-proof.

If Joe Biden is reelected, the “Swamp” will continue to grow larger at an accelerated pace, become vastly more corrupt and intrusive, and will be permanently undrainable.

X22, And we Know, and more- April 26

 

By the slimmest of margins, the US system has worked again

Conrad Black - Commentary on the broader Geopolitical aspect of US decisions..

Authentic American hero: US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson ?

Depends on how you interpret his recent actions 

All of Europe that is not dominated by the Kremlin should rejoice in the passage of the long-delayed bill of assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan in Washington on April 24.

Traditionally, the US has been unified in the face of a serious external enemy. There was no such enemy between the end of the US-UK war of 1812 and the latter stages of the First World War a century later.

At that point then-president Woodrow Wilson inspired the masses of the world with the vision of enduring peace, joining what he claimed to be a “war to end war and make the world safe for democracy”.

The post-war world would be based on the League of Nations and a solid defensive alliance linking the US, UK and France. He completely lost control of the political apparatus and public opinion of his own country and it lapsed back into frivolous isolationism.

President Franklin D Roosevelt, who had served in a prominent role in the Wilson administration, knew Europe well and was the only American president who spoke German and French.

As UK prime minister Winston Churchill said in his parliamentary eulogy of Roosevelt in 1945: “President Roosevelt foresaw the great dangers closing in upon the pre-war world with far more prescience than most well-informed people on either side of the Atlantic.”

Roosevelt was careful to maintain national unity through the Second World War and to associate the opposition party equally and completely in the post-war institutions, in particular the founding of the United Nations.

His successor, president Truman, carefully recruited bipartisan support for the containment strategy that the US conducted throughout and to ultimate success in the Cold War that ran from 1947 to 1991.

The eminent Republican senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Arthur Vandenberg, who died in 1951, once famously said: “Politics ends at the water’s edge.”

So it did until the terrible domestic crisis of Vietnam. Through the Reagan years and the de-escalation of the Cold War with Mikhail Gorbachev, a bipartisan foreign policy was reassembled and confirmed in the highly successful first Gulf War in which Iraq was forced to disgorge Kuwait.

This was seriously shaken by the shambles that followed the second Gulf War, in consequence of which Iran became the principal influence in Iraq.

The disgrace of the US bunk in Afghanistan in 2021 under the current administration of President Joe Biden appalled most Americans and all of America’s allies while delighting the enemies of the West.

After a very shaky beginning in which the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, who retired in September last year, in a singular triumph of military intelligence informed a committee of the US Senate that Russia would successfully occupy all of Ukraine within a few weeks, America responded well to help the country. It joined up with Europe and Canada and led the Western Alliance in a commendably generous response for Ukraine, even if the timing of the approval of transfers of steadily more sophisticated weaponry should have been much more rapid than it was.

In the inimitable complexity and occasional purblindness of American foreign-policy formation, Republicans justly outraged at the administration’s attempt to admit unlimited unidentified foreigners across the Southern border – with the presumed intention creating a durable Democratic majority – sought to trade the resumption of a genuine frontier in the South with approval of proposed aid packages for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

This may have been a useful tactic briefly and the administration did produce, with the co-operation of the Republican Senate leadership, a ludicrous compromise that would supposedly limit illegal migrants to two million a year, although no confidence could possibly be placed in its ability to achieve even that.

This shabby endeavour collapsed as it deserved to do but in the process, the renegade, Palaeolithic isolationist detritus of the old pre-war Republicans raised its hoary head and threatened to sack the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives if he broke ranks and facilitated the passage of the foreign assistance measures without profound reform of the porous southern border.

There is some miraculous quality in the three-dimensional maze of the American constitutional system that ensures that in serious crises something sensible ultimately happens.

A significant minority of Republicans did not grasp the fact that failure to support Ukraine would lead to the effective Russian re-occupation of that vast country at the centre of Europe and would thus substantially undo the principal geopolitical effect of the West’s great bloodless strategic victory in the Cold War.

The passage of a country of almost 40 million people and a serious source of agricultural and industrial production back to the control of the Kremlin after an heroic effort to accomplish its permanent independence – and after abandonment by the leader of the Western alliance – would have been an embossed invitation to Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea to do as they wished. They could do so secure in their most cherished fantasy that the Western Alliance had atrophied into a spavined paper tiger.

The avoidance of this horrible fate is down partly to former former president Donald Trump strongly endorsing assistance to the three recipient countries in April and supporting the new Republican speaker Mike Johnson and more particularly the courage of the speaker himself.

Johnson gambled continuity in his position in furtherance of the vital interests of the US, the Western Alliance and the gallant populations of Ukraine and Israel fighting in outright wars aggressively inflicted upon them for their continued existence as independent states – and dire attempts at intimidation of Taiwan.

He is an authentic American hero: he and his country have done the right thing and there is good reason to believe that a satisfactory compromise will be achieved in Ukraine.

There is also good reason to believe the deserved and necessary Israeli victory will be achieved in Gaza and that the People’s Republic of China will think better of attempted coerced reunification with Taiwan, contrary to the late Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung’s commitment with former US president Richard Nixon in 1972.

By the narrowest of margins and in harrowing circumstances, the tenebrous American system has worked again.

 https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/04/by-the-slimmest-of-margins-the-us-system-has-worked-again/

Speaker Johnson, Reaching Across the Aisle, Reaffirms America’s Heritage of Bipartisanship in Foreign Policy

 Putting the American national interest and the strategic interest of the West ahead of his own job security should earn him the homage of his party and his country.

Speaker Johnson is a hero, and his act in putting the American national interest and the strategic interest of the West ahead of his own job security by assuring the passage and enactment of desperately needed aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan should earn him the homage of his party and his country. Tying those questions to President Biden’s disgraceful opening up of the southern border in a cynical drive to create a permanent Democratic majority, no matter the cost in rising crime, strained social services, and aggravation of chronic narcotics problems, might have seemed to have some merit as a tactic. 

When the Democrats responded with a completely unacceptable “border compromise” that would admit at least two million illegal migrants each year, though, it was clear that the issues had to be separated. The Democrats must carry the can for their misguided policy on the border, and the Republicans are right to have ignored the know-nothing, head-in-sand, paleoconservative isolationists who were prepared to acquiesce in the Russian gangster-invasion of Ukraine winning back the largest piece of what they lost in the great, almost bloodless, western victory in the Cold War, while also jeopardizing Israel as it fights for its life, and practically inviting the subjugation of Taiwan by China. 

Appalling though the political condition of Mr. Biden’s America is, chiefly because of Mr. Biden, historians of the future will recognize the deliverance achieved when President Trump endorsed aid for Ukraine and strongly supported the speaker. Together they suppressed the mindless isolationists in the Republican Party, while Mr. Biden finally started to face down the antisemites in his party. A great and historic disaster has been avoided and Mr. Johnson has shown that America has not completely lost its sense of self-preservation and its moral bearings.

Through much of the Cold War the frequently repeated truism “politics stops at the waters’ edge,” coined by the distinguished Republican senator, Arthur Vandenberg, a former isolationist, applied to American foreign and security policy. Apart from misuse of customs and tariffs, in which the Democrats were for tariffs “for revenue only” and the Republicans for higher tariffs that protected American industry and promoted American employment but raised the cost of imported goods, foreign policy was rarely an important issue in American policy until President Wilson was compelled to enter World War I because of German sinkings of American merchant ships on the high seas, and had the inspiring vision of making the Great War a “war to end all wars” and “to make the world safe for democracy.” 

To this end, Wilson proposed a defensive alliance between the United Kingdom, France, and America, and a League of Nations in which all independent countries would participate and where serious mechanisms for the resolution of international rivalries would be created. Wilson, a Democrat, had not troubled to take any Republicans with him to the Paris peace conference, nor to consult them at all, and a bitter partisan debate ensued, and the United States declined to join the League of Nations, though it was an American invention, and made no alliance with Britain and France. As many had predicted, the resulting peace planted the seeds of revanchisme and as the supreme commander of the Allied armies in World War I, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, stated, “This is not peace, it is a 20-year cease-fire.”

America lapsed back into isolationism, Prohibition, the greatest equity bubble in history, followed by the Great Depression, which spread throughout the advanced world and blighted the 1930’s. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had served as assistant secretary of the Navy under Wilson and was an advocate of Wilson’s program but also agreed with his cousin Theodore Roosevelt’s desire for the United States to play a role in the world appropriate to its great power, spoke French and German and had many connections in those countries and saw the next war coming with great clarity. His vast New Deal workfare programs absorbed the chronic unemployment of the 30s and recycled millions of people back into the private sector as the economy recovered, were transferred from infrastructure and conservation to national defense. 

With great virtuosity, Roosevelt gradually shifted the support for his administration away from the famous liberals like George Norris and Robert La Follette, who were isolationists, toward southern supporters of large armed forces and traditional amenability to the British and the French, such as Walter George and Pat Harrison, who had opposed much of the original New Deal. The soon-to-be world-famous aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown were largely constructed by unemployed people who quickly learned about riveting and other basic shipbuilding skills, under the direction of naval architects and shipyard foremen.

To assure general support for his war and post-war plans, Roosevelt padded his administration with Republicans including Henry Stimson, who had been President Hoover’s secretary of state as Secretary of War; Frank Knox, who had been the Republican vice presidential candidate in 1936 as Secretary of the Navy; John G. Winant, Republican governor of New Hampshire, as ambassador to Great Britain; Patrick Hurley, Hoover’s war secretary. as ambassador to China; and Edward Stettinius, Republican chairman of United States Steel, as Secretary of State. 

The man who set up and directed the OSS, forerunner to the CIA, was a former Republican candidate for governor of New York, William J. Donovan. He sent equal delegations of Republicans and Democrats to the San Francisco conference that founded the United Nations in 1945, and the spirit of bipartisanship that he sponsored during the war continued almost seamlessly into the Cold War. This was exemplified by Vandenberg supporting the Truman administration’s policy of containment. The last gasp of traditional Republican isolationism until recent days vanished when Senator Taft was defeated at the Republican convention in 1952 by General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in Western Europe and founding commander of NATO.

The uniform collaboration of both parties in international relations probably reached their highest point with the Formosa Resolution of 1955 in which the Democratic-controlled houses of the Congress, directed by the Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, with a vote of 85 to 3, and Speaker Rayburn, by 410 to 3, delivered practically unanimous votes authorizing the president to use any level of force he judged appropriate in the Formosa Straits separating Free China from the communist mainland. It was understood that this included nuclear weapons. 

America and the world were well served by having at that time a president so militarily knowledgeable as General Eisenhower. On several occasions in the year after the adoption of the Formosa Resolution, he received visits from the chiefs of staff requesting the use of nuclear weapons against the People’s Republic of China. As Eisenhower out-ranked all of these petitioners and some of them had served under him, he had no difficulty discerning that their arguments in favor of recourse to nuclear weapons were nonsense, and that the consequences of agreeing to the requests would have been strategically dangerous and morally indefensible.           

The concept of a bipartisan foreign and strategic policy was blown up in the Vietnam War, and President Reagan’s introduction of anti-missile defenses, which ultimately won the Cold War, and incidentally saved Israel from terrible damage ten days ago, was generally ridiculed by the Democrats in the Congress, by few more strenuously than by Mr. Biden. A narrow consensus was patched together in the first Gulf War, but it disintegrated in the shambles after the second Gulf War. Mr. Johnson has revived it, and deserves the nation’s gratitude and respect.

https://www.nysun.com/article/speaker-johnson-reaching-across-the-aisle-reaffirms-americas-heritage-of-bipartisanship-in-foreign-policy

CONRAD BLACK

Lord Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, was Chairman of Hollinger International Inc. and a founding director of the New York Sun.

Conrad Black: The nadir of our once great nation

It was my privilege last week to meet with a western Canadian group of public-spirited and accomplished individuals who are so concerned by what they see as the general decline of Canada, they believe that a radical change of policy direction is all that will prevent us from becoming a failed state. 

It was a spirited session, replete with entertaining, if somewhat bibulous but friendly interruptions. In preparation, I had done some updated research and concluded that their concerns were more justified than I had thought even a few months ago, when I last wrote about this subject in this column.

Among the principal points that have arisen are that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) now predicts that Canada will be the poorest performing advanced economy in the world until 2060, if it continues on its present path. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s watch, Canada’s per capita average incomes increased by three per cent, from $54,154 in 2016 to $55,863 in 2022, while that of the United States rose by 12 per cent, from $65,792 to $73,565; for a family of four, that is a substantial differential that puts the average American family in a distinctly higher income category than their Canadian analogue. 

In approximately the same period, cash generated in Canada and invested outside Canada exceeded incoming investments in this country by about $285 billion. From the onset of COVID in February 2020 until June 2023, the number of private-sector jobs in Canada increased by 3.3 per cent, while public-sector jobs rose 11.8 per cent, and public-sector employees are paid 31 per cent more on average than those in the private sector.

Canada now has 4.1-million public-sector employees, more than 10 per cent of our entire population. If the United States had an equivalent number of government employees, they would total about 33.5-million people. The actual number is around 23 million. Canada’s public sector is not markedly more comprehensive or superior to that of the United States in the service it provides to the people it serves. This is a straight case of administrative incompetence. We should have a million fewer jobs on the public payrolls and rebate the money spent on their salaries to the taxpayers.

We are chronically overtaxed: 45 per cent of the average family’s income is paid in tax, costing an average of over $48,000 a year — by far the largest household expense. The tax increases in the latest budget will only aggravate these problems. We are not only overtaxed and underpaid, the principal costs have been grossly mismanaged. Last year, we admitted around 500,000 immigrants, many of which are in a desperate housing scramble. Notwithstanding that the average American makes more than the average Canadian, the average housing unit in Canada is approximately 40 per cent more expensive than in the United States.

As of 2021, according to Fraser Institute numbers, money invested per employed person in Canada trails the corresponding U.S. figure by 58 per cent, a gap that has been steadily widening over the years. It is not just the United States with whom we are failing to compete. Cramped little countries with almost no natural resources like Belgium, the Netherlands and Ireland have surpassed us in terms of per capita income. If the present trajectory continues, we could soon be passed by South Korea, which was a rubble heap with no industry at the end of the Korean War in 1953, and Israel, which has constantly been at war for its entire history and was a poor and primitive desert at its founding in 1948.

Our uncompetitiveness cuts across almost every field. Health care, once one of the hallmarks of Canada’s status as a country distinctive from, and more caring than, the United States, is a shambles. In 30 years, waiting lists have increased from nine weeks to 28 weeks. Of 30 countries with universal health care, Canada’s system is the most expensive as a percentage of GDP, has the longest waiting periods, ranks 28th in doctors, 23rd in available beds and 24th and 25th in number of MRIs and CT scanners. It is a disaster that has now stooped to promoting the virtues of suicide through the medical assistance in dying program. It is the purpose of health-care regimes to prolong life, not shorten it.

Throughout its history, it has been the vision and national ambition of Canada to be a superior country: prosperous, just and sensibly self-governing, but not complacent. Many have lamented that we did not receive more attention in the world and didn’t cut a more glamorous figure among the nations of the world. But Canadians have always, and rightfully, been proud of being a successful country. We are, for the first time, in danger of losing that status; if the trends of the last decade continue, this treasure house of a nation — with a skilled, law-abiding and diligent population, with two of the world’s most distinguished cultures as its official languages — will indeed be in danger of becoming a failed state.

These material shortcomings are aggravated by deficits in public policy. For more than eight years, we’ve been thoroughly distracted by a rigid, mindless preoccupation with environmental nostrums, a wildly exaggerated and self-defamatory assault on our history mislabelled as “reconciliation” with Indigenous peoples and an absurd preoccupation with gender issues that has made us a laughing-stock in the world for carrying wokeness to the point of imbecility.

Between 1995 and 2022, fossil fuel use in Canada has increased nearly 59 per cent, and even if we stopped emitting carbon entirely, global emissions would only be reduced by a paltry 1.5 per cent. We have been duped into being ashamed of our resources, making war on our principal industry (oil and gas) and artificially straining the financial condition of a great many of our countrymen needlessly, all in the name of crusading to save the planet. The gender issue is completely bogus: there are two sexes and every adult person has the complete freedom to work out his or her own sexuality, without coercion or invasion of privacy. Agitation for mandatory modification of language according to transitory gender self-identification, like premature sex-change operations, is nonsense.

We have also debilitated ourselves morally, in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world, by promoting the outrageous blood libel that this country ever engaged in any form of genocide or slavery. Slavery was effectively illegal in Canada 40 years before it was abolished in the British Empire. The nadir of this exercise in self-humiliation was the story of murdered Indigenous children in unmarked graves in Kamloops, B.C., for which Canadian flags throughout the world were lowered for months, and of which no concrete proof of the existence of such graves has been produced.

We appear also to have acquiesced in the practical abolition of the principal language of the country in Quebec, were about 22 per cent of Canadians live. All the federal parties tacitly supported this. We are starting to disintegrate.

National Post

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/conrad-black-the-nadir-of-our-once-great-nation/ar-AA1nm57W

Marxist Health Officials Want You Committed

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

One of the more insidious features of Marxism’s manipulation of language is its stigmatization of opposing points of view as some form of mental disorder.  Opposition to “gay marriage” is said to be a “sign” of homophobia.  Distrusting Islamic terrorists who celebrate 9/11 and shout, “Death to America,” is a “symptom” of Islamophobia.  Wanting the federal government to secure our borders and enforce existing immigration law “reveals” underlying xenophobia.  Not wanting biological men to force their way into ladies’ locker-rooms and showers suggests that a person “suffers” from dreaded transphobia.  

Notice that all these purported psychiatric disorders are categorized as “phobias,” or more plainly, as “irrational fears.”  Marxists routinely use loaded medical language not only to demonize or disgrace their foes but also to transform any political disagreement into something that it is not.  Respecting marriage as a millennia-long institution that celebrates the bond between one man and one woman has nothing to do with being afraid of homosexuals.  Being prepared to defend yourself against those who want you dead does not mean your worries are unfounded.  Insisting that foreigners immigrate to the United States lawfully is entirely rational.  Ensuring that your mother, wife, sisters, or daughters are safe from strange (and frequently dangerous) adult men intent on intruding into their private spaces requires selfless courage.  Still, because Marxists depend upon distortions of reality to instigate cultural friction and manipulate the masses, opposition to whatever politically expedient wedge issue is currently being used as a battering ram against society must be diagnosed as a psychological abnormality.  You could say that Marxists are committed to the lie that opposition to Marxism rests on irrational fear.

Sure, communism murdered over a hundred million people in the twentieth century alone, but that’s no reason to fear an ideology that seeks only to empower the “common man.”  Right?  I don’t know whether it reveals more about the persistent malevolence of Marxism’s unashamed supporters or the human race’s inexhaustible supply of gullibility that Marx continues to lure willing disciples to further his vile legacy of mass starvation, torture, and death.  Marxism is the evil clown lurking in the sewer that reappears every generation to feast on tender human flesh, but almost every college campus in America would insist that such a description is hyperbole stemming from irrational fear.  To oppose socialism and communism today because of the murder spree the twin philosophies undertook in the past is Marx-o-phobic and should be treated like any other mental illness.

At least that’s what the psychologists and psychiatrists would say because Marxists took over the mental health profession long ago.  It is a well-known observation that wherever Marxists infiltrate, they soon corrupt.  Environmental science would not be fixated on the demonstrable lie that human energy consumption is precipitating catastrophic “climate change” if Marxists had not needed a global boogeyman to frighten national populations into embracing a centrally controlled economy.  President Trump would not be seated as a defendant in four separate criminal trials and scores of civil suits if Marxist prosecutors and judges were not committed to perverting the rule of law for ideological gain.  Schools and employers would not be selecting applicants based on the color of their skin or exotic sexual appetites if DEI, ESG and other Marxist initiatives had not elevated privileged mediocrity over hard work, skill, and merit.  Nobody would be so asinine as to call mathematics “racist” if Marx’s civilization-destroying acolytes had not first succeeded in permeating every level of education.  

Science and justice are dead because Marxists rise to power only after summarily executing knowledge and truth.  Once they have done so, Science works for Marx.  It is why the biological tenets of Lysenkoism thrived in the Soviet Union despite their glaring absurdities.  It is how “climate change” fearmongers can be wrong about every prediction (and flip-flop between prophecies of a cooling and warming Earth) and still be honored as “experts.”  And it is why entire chapters in medical textbooks are written that categorize the slightest opposition to Marxist orthodoxies as indicative of a troubling mental disease.

This makes sense, since communist societies have a long history of imprisoning political dissidents in psychiatric wards as an effectively humiliating alternative to criminally prosecuting ideological rivals.  What?  You don’t believe in the abolition of private property or that breadlines are the fault of anti-government, capitalist pigs?  You must be crazy!  Send this lunatic to the nuthouse!  

In the former Soviet Union, it was not unusual for a family member to “disappear” one day without any formal notice from the State or for heartbroken relatives to discover only years later that their loved-one had died during “treatment” in an insane asylum.  Similar human rights atrocities have occurred in Central and South American communist countries and still occur in communist China today.  Marxists are fond of sentencing their enemies to a nightmarish existence in which the body is trapped in a straitjacket and the mind is kept numb with a drip-feed cocktail of tranquilizers and other antipsychotics.  

I must admit that Marxists’ proclivity for treating their enemies as mentally ill has made me reluctant to involve the government in the legitimate mental health crisis that afflicts the United States today.  Bright minds (including the late, great Charles Krauthammer) have long pointed to changes in civil commitment statutes over the last half-century that made it more difficult for patients to be committed against their will and the subsequent closure of government-run psychiatric hospitals throughout the country as being chiefly responsible for spikes in certain categories of violent crime.  A good deal of research on homelessness, addiction, suicide, and murder suggests that the trend toward deinstitutionalization since the 1960s has produced tragic results.  

On the other hand, I am extremely leery of returning certain involuntary commitment powers back to psychiatrists and government health “experts” when both professional communities pray at the altar of Marx.  Just as the Patriot Act was sold as a necessary national security measure before proving to be a grotesquely unconstitutional domestic surveillance weapon used against American citizens, empowering the federal government with renewed authority to fight mental illness sounds reasonable in theory but will most likely result in a substantial number of MAGA Americans being forcibly disarmed, prejudicially labeled, and involuntarily confined.  After all, in the eyes of a Marxist counselor or judge, is anyone more “dangerous” than an enthusiastic supporter of President Trump?  Sadly, J6 political prisoners know that answer all too well.

Make no mistake, Marxists are already using the language of mental health to intimidate political opponents.  A small Chicago suburb recently removed the only Republican from the village’s library board.  His “crime”?  He opposed “drag queen bingo,” criticized the board’s plan to replace the Pledge of Allegiance with a statement that the town’s land had been “stolen by white Christian men from the Indians,” and refused to post his “pronouns” on the library’s website.  The town’s Marxists insisted that these viewpoints made them feel “unsafe.”  “This has nothing to do with political affiliation, and everything to do with dangerous extremism,” one Marxist explained, before expressing dismay that the thought offender had refused to be re-educated. 

Meanwhile, in the UK, police officers and a government psychologist forced their way into a man’s home not because he had committed any crimes but rather because they had “a few concerns” about a social media post in which he had encouraged Christians to “stand up” after an Islamic terrorist stabbed a bishop in Australia.  “People raised concerns about your views…about what’s going on in Australia,” one police officer explained.  Just as in Illinois, jackbooted authoritarianism comes in the form of psychological “help.”

Marxism could be defined as a system in which insane tyrants rule and sane objectors are committed for their “health.”

It Took Ten Years For Powerful People To See That Leftism Has Crossed A Red Line

posted by Bob Parks at American Thinker 

I’ll preface my commentary with the obvious: All of the “mostly peaceful” protests by our “college educated” on campuses nationwide that are clearly pro-Hamas and aimed at Jewish students are wrong, illegal, and all involved should either go back to the classes their parents and taxpayers are funding or be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

But why the sudden sanctimonious outrage from the media and pundit class, billionaire donors, business leaders, and politicians? Why are the harassment and threats against Jewish students a red line that’s been crossed and now found to be totally unacceptable? It’s only because the current violence hits too close to home.

Several major donors have called a hard stop to their past donations:

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, a Columbia graduate, said he was stopping donations immediately and charged the college with failing to keep its Jewish students safe.

Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman, a business school graduate, said he would stick with a stop on donations which began shortly after the October 7 Hamas massacres.

[snip]

Cooperman, Blavatnik and Kraft have donated nearly $100 million in total to Columbia, according to some estimates — money that has created multiple buildings on campus, scholarships for engineers, and a center for Jewish students.

After Eric Garner’s death in 2014 death and Freddie Gray’s in 2015, college students eagerly joined the burgeoning #BlackLivesMatter #DefundThePolice movements. Permitless street protests started becoming a new norm where traffic was strategically snarled, and thousands of commuters were held hostage to those who believed they could demand to be heard at the inconvenience of others.

Many of those protests resulted in millions of dollars of public and private property damage, looting of businesses, and burning of buildings and homes in predominantly black neighborhoods. Still, we were all told to deal with it because protesters were exercising their right to free speech.

America Isn’t The First Empire Doomed By Open Borders

Like empires before us, we have lost our cultural confidence and moorings, increasing the risk of being overrun by newcomers.

Jeremy Carl reporting for The Federalist

No subject is as central to America’s future and no subject gets to the heart of the failure of our current regime more than immigration policy. As a result, few subjects are as riddled with taboos in their public discussion. What will happen when the ethnic composition of large parts of America is transformed in ways America’s European founders never could have foreseen? And in the interim, what will happen to whites as they continue to lose political power amid their shrinking proportion of the population, as anti-white rhetoric and actions accelerate?

Whether or not you believe that “demography is destiny,” these fundamental demographic questions cannot simply be papered over with happy talk. The reality is that the white population, and thus the white voting share of the population, is rapidly diminishing. The fact that whites and “whiteness” are so frequently publicly demonized in a country with a current white voting supermajority does not inspire confidence in how society is likely to treat whites when they are a much-diminished minority.

There is a graphic T-shirt that’s popular in “Indian country” and on some left-wing college campuses. It comes in several versions, but the most popular has several Native Americans in traditional dress hoisting rifles while looking sternly at the camera. “Homeland Security: Fighting Illegal Immigration Since 1492,” it reads. Another version with the same picture says, “We should have built a wall.”

I chuckled the first time I saw one of these shirts. It’s a clever slogan on its own terms that makes the point that Native Americans, of course, were here when the first white settlers arrived. But upon further thought, I realized the statement it made was profound — it just cut in the opposite direction of the way it was intended.

While Native Americans have arguably benefitted from joining the most globe-spanning power that has ever existed, they also paid a heavy price. Today, there are almost 10 million self-identified Native Americans in the United States, as well as millions of other white-identified Americans with at least some Native American ancestry. But Native Americans learned, much to their regret, the consequences of the failure to protect their border, their language, and their culture. Their failure to do so should cause whites to redouble their efforts not to make the same mistake.

America’s Wide-Open Gates

For as long as there have been political communities, immigration — ultimately who is allowed to join a political community — has been a central concern. It was certainly a lively debate in the days of ancient Rome, which many scholars have argued fell in large part thanks to poorly controlled immigration.

Distinguished English historian Peter Heather of King’s College in London is one of those scholars who has argued for the centrality of immigration in causing the fall of the Roman Empire. This interpretation was echoed by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson: “When the Roman Empire fell,” Johnson remarked on a 2021 trip to Rome, “it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration. The empire could no longer control its borders, people came in from the east, all over the place, and we went into a Dark Ages.”

Romans had not always been so lax about immigration. At the peak of Roman power, immigration was only offered to conquered peoples. And even then, most were barred from settling in the Italian heartland. As another writer, Annalisa Merelli pointed out, it was the Roman Empire’s saving of thousands and thousands (some say upward of 200,000) of Goth tribal refugees fleeing from the Huns in 376 that led to Rome’s sack less than a century later. After a variety of mutually broken promises between the two sides, the Goths turned on their Roman rescuers at the Battle of Adrianople in 378, a massacre of Romans that saw the deaths of more than 30,000 and would eventually lead to the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

While few would suggest that today’s immigrants have plans to militarily besiege America, it does not take a leap of the imagination to extend the analogy to our own times. Like Rome, we have lost our cultural confidence and moorings, which dramatically increases our risk of being overrun both literally and metaphorically by newcomers.

As the Christian conservative writer Rod Dreher wrote pointedly of the essential question facing the West:

The massive migration of barbarians into the Roman Empire, in the 4th through 6th centuries, changed European civilization permanently. They caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and centuries later, the rise of a new civilization there, based on the descendants of old Roman stock and Christianized Germanic tribes. Will the latter-day descendants of those Europeans be able to hold back the “barbarian invasions” from Africa [by far the largest source of coming global population growth] in the 21st century? Or will they have to do as the Romans did and absorb the strangers, and, over centuries, create a new civilization?

One can argue that the latter strategy is the correct one, both practically and morally. But either way, one cannot deny it is a choice. Today, white people in America and throughout the West are facing the prospect of permanent minority status in countries founded by their ancestors. American (and increasingly European) immigration policies are not copied anywhere else in the world. China tightly controls its borders, letting in only a few thousand legal immigrants per year. In Japan, despite having the world’s most rapidly aging population and a shrinking workforce, just 2 percent of its population are immigrants, mostly from ethnically and culturally similar Asian countries. Immigrants make up less than 1 percent of Mexico’s population.

Yet increasingly whites find themselves self-ghettoized in America and Europe, with the new leaders of the “coalition of the ascendant” increasing daily in number using the institutions and sociopolitical mechanisms developed from European traditions in the West to seize political power at the expense of Americans of European origin.

In 1938, future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill published While England Slept, a collection of his speeches delivered over a decade that warned of the country’s dangerous passivity in the wake of German rearmament. By the time the British public and political class took his warnings seriously, it was almost too late. 

Many contemporary immigration writers on the right, this one included, have sounded similar warnings for many years about the dangers of America’s wide-open border and about the risks we face as a society as we rapidly transform the demographics of the American people.  To this point, while our writings have been received enthusiastically on the grassroots right, most “conservative” politicians continue to sleep peacefully.

It remains to be seen whether they can be awakened from their slumber in time to save the country for their posterity.