Trump’s Cleanup Crescendo

In Latin America, in China, in the Middle East, the outline of Donald Trump's plan of action is becoming clear. 

It is of a scale to take the breath away.

American Thinker 

It’s obvious to me that during the four-year hiatus from the White House occasioned by a stolen election, President Trump gave thoughtful consideration to what had to be cleaned up domestically and internationally. It’s equally clear that he mapped out how he planned to do that, and despite media, congressional, and judicial intransigence, he plowed ahead. We are at a point now where the blueprint is obvious. It’s a continuing, ascending trajectory.

The Americas

Having hoisted Maduro out of Caracas to stand trial here for his crimes, the U.S. made it perfectly clear that Russian and Chinese security personnel and military equipment were no match for a determined U.S. military. As an impoverished, abandoned Maduro pines away in prison awaiting trial, Cuba is next on the list of places that need fumigation.

The U.S. has offered $100 million worth of humanitarian aid for Cubans who are starving in a country that, absent free oil from Venezuela, is in almost perpetual blackout. Raul Castro has rejected such aid because we insist that it be distributed through designated private charities rather than the Cuban government, which would use it to sustain itself.

This Thursday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe visited there with a message demanding that Cuba open up its economy and send Russian and Chinese listening posts packing. There are increasing riots in the streets, and on Friday, the communist party headquarters in Havana was set on fire. The day after Ratcliffe’s visit, the press reported that Raul Castro was likely to face U.S. criminal indictments.

Jeff Childers explains the administration’s Latin American policy:

Another way you could look at it is that the Trump Administration is deploying Democrat-style lawfare against communists all over the American hemisphere. The historic nature of what we’re doing cannot be understated. Rather than using classic tools of diplomacy, international aid, covert ops, and the military, the Trump Administration is doing something new: using domestic criminal laws and simply exercising jurisdiction over the whole hemisphere as though it belonged to us.

The “criminal indictment” playbook resembles a classic decapitation strike, but without the war part. After January’s Maduro operation, Latin American countries are learning that the US can reach into their countries whenever we want and pluck out the violent strongmen who have always confidently believed they can send drugs and terrorists through our formerly porous borders, co-opt our local politicians and judges, and set up shop here -- without any consequences.

Well… fool around and find out. But it’s bigger than that. These “small stories” are an expression of a new hemispheric policy. We’re not just cracking down on domestic crime at home, we are policing the whole hemisphere. When you combine that with the President’s approach to Russia and China, you begin to see something immense emerging.

Trump has been very firm with Beijing and Moscow in our part of the world. He’s rudely evicted them from South and Central America, the Panama Canal, and the Caribbean. But at the same time, he is also softening our positions on Ukraine and Taiwan, retreating from NATO expansionism in Europe, seeking trade deals with them, and courting both Putin and Xi with high-profile diplomatic outreach.

Wait -- this is where it gets really good. Every bit of all that geopolitical reorganization is happening completely outside the United Nations’ “rules-based international order.”

He is, as Childers observes, making the UN irrelevant. (I could argue that the UN did that itself over recent decades, but fair enough -- Trump has sealed the crooked, corrupt organization’s fate.)

China

There’s been lots of coverage of the visit to China, which, by my estimation, was very successful. As the parties were meeting, the U.S. allowed two or three Chinese vessels safe passage through the Gulf of Hormuz, a passage that China will now be less dependent on as it will be buying oil from our West coast -- a more secure, reliable, and shorter route.

In public statements of what the U.S. and China agreed to, Xi importantly said. “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.” He said this just as U.S. forces are once again massing near Iran with the promise of forcing Iran’s capitulation to our terms, most important of which is surrendering its nuclear arms and ambitions.

Due to our blockade, Iran has not been able to ship out any oil. It has exceeded its storage capacity and must nevertheless keep pumping or severely damage its facilities, so it is simply pouring oil into the Strait of Hormuz, compounding its economic woes with an ecological disaster.

Counterterrorism

In line with our efforts to hamstring the mullahs and end international crime in the Western Hemisphere, our counterterrorism efforts are bearing fruit. 

1. Late on Thursday night @FBI agents landed at New York Stewart International Airport with Mohammad al Saadi in handcuffs. Al Saadi, the leader of an Iran-backed Iraqi terror group is allegedly responsible for more than 20 attacks across Europe and Canada and for planning attacks in the U.S..

2. Jose Enrique Martinez Flores, who goes by “Chuqui,” the highest ranking Tren de Aragua leader to be extradited to the U.S., also just landed in the U.S. in shackles. Flores allegedly oversaw TdA’s drug trafficking, extortion rackets, prostitution rings and murder operations.

Then, last night, in an operation that makes any fictional representation look amateurish, American operators, working with local Nigerian forces, killed Abu-Bilal-al-Minuki, the second in command for ISIS global operations, a man with the blood of countless innocents on his hands, including many Christians.

Election Reform

Even as redistricting efforts take shape, the President has more success bringing foreign dictators around than he has had with Republican senators. He’s not giving up on the insistence of honest elections. Upon returning from China, he tweeted:

"Maryland just had 500,000 Fake Mail-In Ballots revealed.

"We cannot, as a Country, put up with this any longer!!! Voter I.D., and Proof of Citizenship must be approved, NOW.

Crooked Mail-In Voting must be stopped!!! PUT IT ALL IN THE HOUSING AND FISA BILLS. MAKE AMERICA

GREAT AGAIN!!!"

"THE SAVE AMERICA ACT MUST BE PASSED, NOW. Use the Housing and FISA Bills to get it done!

As some Republican senators stall, more and more evidence is finally being made public about the corruption in the 2020 election. How much longer the holdouts can afford to resist in the face of such evidence is unclear to me.

And just as the 2020 election legerdemain becomes apparent, the evidence that J6 was a setup, involving Nancy Pelosi, the FBI, the D.C. police department, and the media, is no longer being hidden. In the latest development, a judge finally unlocked the body cam worn by Officer Michael Fanone, and it substantially contradicts his sworn testimony, testimony that was used to justify imposing severe criminal penalties on mostly innocent people who walked into the Capitol (often at the invitation of Capitol police). 

Wokism May Finally Be Gasping for Air

Activists will probably always be with us, but the consequences for clinging to wokism -- for the media, drops in viewers and subscribers, and for academia, fewer donations and students, for example -- are growing, and I think its clout is diminishing. If so, this explanation of how this abominable French nonsensearrived here might be of interest to you.

(Translated from French) I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism). We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West. We must understand what they did.

Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality -- everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity. Taken individually, these are debatable theses.

Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison. For here’s what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism. Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty. That’s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That’s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion. [snip] A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere. [snip] What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them -- that is the response.

Trump is the ultimate builder, and those titans who accompanied him to Beijing are the people who built Silicon Valley, the AI labs, the startups that make prosperity and peace more possible for more people, not the Europeans who conjured up every bad idea in recent centuries.