One of the objections to MAGA Tariffs is, “who wants to work in a factory?”. It is usually delivered with snark by someone who probably doesn’t know how to change a tire but it is also a real issue – and not nearly the only one we have in re-shoring production to America.
A couple days ago on X I saw a post by a guy who described the time he decided to build a steel mill. Surprisingly enough, he didn’t have too much problem on the tax and regulatory sides. It was there, of course, and some communities do NIMBY such things to impossibility, but the pragmatic facts of life are that some community is going to welcome your mill with open arms and knock down barriers to construction. No; his problem was that he couldn’t get the machines in America. That is, the tools that allow you to make steel.
One thing our Knowledge Workers don’t know (well, one of the very, very many things they don’t know) is how complex industrial processes are. Another guy on X did note that most of these Knowledge Workers would be reduced to drooling confusion if they tried to do the math he does day in and day out to get engineering projects completed. There are, for instance, a large variety of steels and they are all made with different elements added at different times to get the desired results. It takes thought, planning and skill to get this done. And, of course, the right machines. None of which are made in the USA these days.
Imagine that – the USA used to be the world’s premier steel maker and when WWII kicked in we massively expanded our productive capacity so that at the end of it all, we produced more war material than the entire Axis combined – equipping our own large military force on a lavish scale while also sustaining the military forces of our allies. Can’t do it these days, guys. We can’t even try to do it. We can’t make the machines to expand production and we don’t have sufficient people with the basic skills to install and run those machines. We can attend a 2 hour powerpoint meeting discussing our diversity targets, but not much else.
So, the question is actually two-fold: who is to work in these factories and how are we to obtain the skills for the work to be done?
We’re probably going to have to import some skills. That is, if we find we simply don’t have enough skilled people (and we almost certainly don’t) then we’re going to have to shop for them around the world. But, don’t get upset – this is not like importing Third World peasants as we’ve been doing. We’re looking for people with know-how who are willing to become Americans. Like if we want to build a shoe factory in the USA, might be smart if we just pinched a couple shoe factory foremen from Vietnam. They’d probably be delighted to come. Same thing with people who know how to make machines to produce steel and so on and so forth. Once we have the people with the skills, we can then really set to work. But with what workers? I might be ok with a Vietnamese guy running the shoe shop floor, but I don’t want to import the workers from Vietnam. I want Americans working there. How do I get them?
Positive and negative incentives. We’ll tackle negative first.
We have huge numbers of fit people on welfare. Another huge pool of people isn’t fit because it is drug-addled. We must disincentivize the ability of people to sit on their butts swiping the EBT cards…and also disincentivize the ability of people to wander our streets in a drug-induced haze.
Whole bunch of ways to do this – first off, get rid of EBT cards. Why in heck are we making it easy for these people? Paper food stamps. Next, food stamps are only good for basic staples: meat, vegetables, bread, milk, cereals. That’s it. You want a coke? Not with the stamps. You want some cheetos? Not with the stamps. For goodness sake you aren’t using your welfare benefits to go to a restaurant. And while you’re on it – I want you harassed beyond reason to get a job. If you can’t find one after a period of time you’ll be called in to do grunt work cleaning streets and so forth. Nobody gets to sit on their backside getting fed unless they are physically incapable of work. And all of this stops if you do one, simple little task: get a job.
Secondly, stop letting bums be bums. No, you can’t sleep on the streets. No, you can’t be unwashed…so dirty that you could be used as a Walking Dead extra without makeup. No, you can’t be drunk or high in public. And we’re going to harass you even worse than the welfare bums…you’re going to be rousted, ticketed, and spun six ways to Sunday…until you sober up and get a job. Sure, we’ll help. For the welfare bums there will be skills training – including such things as housecleaning and managing finances. For the druggies there will be treatment to get off the sauce. But for both the primary thing will be to make it a gigantic hassle to not have a job. You get what you pay for: right now we’re paying for laziness and druggies. We’re going to have to start paying for sober workers.
Now, some positive reinforcement! For our druggies and welfare bums, there will be a skills deficit, especially early on. Keep in mind that for some welfare people, they’re third generation or more – its been a long while since anyone in the genetic line held down a job. Point blank: these people are at the start only going to be marginally employable and simply won’t be able to make enough money. That’s where we step in and say if you are showing up your 40 hours a week and doing the best you can, we’ll make up any difference between income and basic cost of living. We’re not just helping these people – we’re trying to build a culture of work and responsibility so the kids of these people will start on a higher level and need ever less support to get rolling.
For others – especially youngsters – it is a different set of incentives. Like this: if you are willing to go to college to learn a technical trade (like, say, architecture) then if you’ll work part time in construction while going to school, we’ll free ride or at least heavily subsidize your college tuition. We won’t do a thing for people looking for a “Knowledge Worker” degree…but if your goal is a career where you actually do something, we’re going to help you out…and you’re going to learn the nuts and bolts of how things are done in the real world. The basic thrust here – and people can come up with other incentives – is to make it smart to learn how to do things. To make, mine and grow things. Heck, I’ll take a willing kid out of the ghetto and send him to a college to learn agricultural science while having him work the fields nearby for an existing farm. Think about what we’re totally getting in that exchange. He’s no longer in a place that produces druggies and gangbangers, he’s replacing the illegal working the fields and he’s learning both the theory and practice of agriculture which is going to turn him into someone who is tremendously useful in improving American agriculture going forward. On and on like that.
It is not snap of the fingers and America is Great Again. It is going to take some work. Some thought. A willingness to fail and then just start all over again with a new approach. The first step is what Trump is doing – Tariffs and cutting government waste. That is going to prove the easy part.
Blogs For Victory 
We’re looking for people with know-how who are willing to become Americans.
This is the basis of the entire American space industry. Starting with the war-winning atomic bomb all the way to the first man on the moon, the United States depended on foreign scientists who were willing to work here. From aeronautics and rocketry to electronics (guidance systems, radar and satellites) to physics to chemical engineering, we raided the best and the brightest from Europe in the later stages of the war and after that. Operation Paperclip was controversial, drawing as it did from so many who had been high in the Nazi party, but these people built up our defense and science departments.
Back to the cliche of “saying the quiet part out loud” Kyle Bibby, co-CEO and co-founder of the Black Veterans Project, frets: Black Veterans Warn of Recruitment Woes After DEI Purge
The “quiet part” is the fear that black men and women will not, cannot, qualify for the military on their merit and can only participate in our national defense if we lower the standards for them.
He seems ignorant of the aspect of black military personnel finally being respected for their skills and physical abilities, while now there is the assumption that any black military member is unable to meet objective standards of qualification and had to meet special, lowered, standards to be accepted.
This is the core problem with Affirmative Action, no matter what label might be attached to it. It immediately sends the message that anyone in any of the victim groups affected by it is substandard, unable to meet the same qualifications as the “other”, and therefore not deserving of the same respect. And as the “other” is the non-victim group of white-skinned people, the corollary message is that whites are better than the victim groups because they don’t need special treatment. In other words, the desired effect of making everyone “equal” has the opposite effect, of separating people into groups of ‘good enough’ and “not good enough”.
This “purge” will not only raise the quality of our military, it will give minority service members the respect they deserve
Back to the cliche of “saying the quiet part out loud” Kyle Bibby, co-CEO and co-founder of the Black Veterans Project, frets: Black Veterans Warn of Recruitment Woes After DEI Purge
The “quiet part” is the fear that black men and women will not, cannot, qualify for the military on their merit and can only participate in our national defense if we lower the standards for them.
Did you read the article? Or more to the point, the article from The Hill which the NewsMax article refers to?
Kyle Bibby does not say he fears that black men and women will not, cannot, qualify for the military on their merit and can only participate in our national defense if we lower the standards for them.
He said: “There’s executive orders that actually do things, and then there’s executive orders that are made to send a message, and that message was very clear. Their intent is to try and resegregate as much of this society as possible that they think they can get away with. If they can’t do it through legal means, they’re going to try and do it by making Black people feel that we are unwelcome or unsafe in these spaces.”
In other words, erasing the contributions of black soldiers sends the message that blacks are not welcome in the military, and that this is sending a negative message that could impact recruitment efforts.
The implication Bibby makes with regard to Trump’s EO is nothing more than an attempt to distort the truth, and you repeating it is equally worthless. Amazona’s post explains it quite well, even if you can’t understand it. ANYONE able to meet set standards will be accepted, which by its very nature, requires blindness to skin color, as opposed to special considerations for substandard performance. Through convoluted phrasing trying to elevate DEI as a positive, Bibby tries to conjure an outright lie equating merit based acceptance as a form of segregation. The notable drop in military requitement under the previous administration was largely attributed to the push to accept substandard performance and readiness. Who the heck would want to be in a combat situation next to a bunch who are only there because of lowered standards & capabilities? That would be a death wish.
And here you illustrate why Rocksy is usually just ignored or even deleted. A perfect example is this, which looks like a typical Rocksy whine but is really just another toxic lie:
In other words, erasing the contributions of black soldiers sends the message that blacks are not welcome in the military, and that this is sending a negative message that could impact recruitment efforts.
Naturally, there is not a single word in the EO or the article about “erasing the contributions of black soldiers”.
Who the heck would want to be in a combat situation next to a bunch who are only there because of lowered standards & capabilities? That would be a death wish.
This is the same reason we are appalled at airline company decisions to apply DEI to its hiring of pilots, and the FAA’s application of DEI to hiring air traffic controllers.
Put another way, Trump’s EO regarding abolishing DEI in the military is an endorsement of the sentiment of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. which used to be the hopeful agenda of the nation—to judge people by the nature of their character and not the color of their skin. It is just a slight lateral move to include judging them, when it comes to military standards, by their actual abilities and not the color of their skin.
One of the most interesting, if depressing, developments in American culture has been the black rejection of the teachings of Dr. King, who used to be a hero if not an actual saint in the eyes of the black population in this country, and the odd result that the only place his teachings are now respected is in the white demographic.
A: nobody is erasing the contributions of black soldiers.
B: the only people who want segregation are Leftists.
C: I served with black shipmates and they were as good as or better than me.
This is the same reason we are appalled at airline company decisions to apply DEI to its hiring of pilots, and the FAA’s application of DEI to hiring air traffic controllers.
… and fire fighters, and all law enforcement positions, and astronauts, and heavy equipment operators, and rescue personnel, and stunt specialist, and any other position that might require putting your life & safety on the line.
A clear example of the stupidity of DEI came from the LA fire chief who stated; “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.” -and- “You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency—whether it’s a medical call or a fire call—that looks like you. It gives that person a little bit more ease…”
The real problem is that once you lower standards for one group, you have to lower them for everyone – that is the real failure of initially Affirmative Action and now its replacement, DEI.
The actual perfect example of this is South Africa – after apartheid ended there was a natural desire of the black majority to take charge not just of the political system, but of the total system. Totally understandable – but also, wrong. The reality was and remains that the black majority did not and does not know how to run a modern, Western society. Part of this, of course, was because the white minority excluded black people from it, but it was also based on the fact that the white South Africans were heirs to the thousand years of European development after the end of the Dark Ages…the black Africans were barely iron age when the first Europeans arrived and, for the most part, had been uninterested in emulating the Europeans, preferring their own ways of life. By the time South Africa was created in the wake of the Boer War, the gap between black and white development had narrowed but was still large…and the white South Africans could see this and so opted for apartheid out of fear that turning power over to the black majority would be disastrous…which, in the event, it has been (there are, for instance, more race-based laws in South Africa today than during apartheid; just the target has changed from black to white).
I’ve talked before about Rhodesia which was another nation put down as “white minority rule” and set on the chopping block of History but the reality was that the white people of Rhodesia had recreated a slice of England in Africa and simply wanted to rule themselves as English. The fact that large number of black Rhodesians voluntarily fought to defend this system indicates a very much untold story…the official Narrative on Rhodesia glosses over this entirely because it entirely destroys the Narrative presented. But the crucial aspect here is that you can’t force equality of result – it simply can’t work. You’re handing off things to people who are incapable of managing them.
In the USA we did grossly oppress black Americans – first with slavery and then with Jim Crow. This massively held back the development of black Americans and so on the glad day when the Civil Rights Act was passed, black America’s development was still very much behind that of the rest of America. But the thing to know about this is that the injustice of the past can’t be undone – it can only be halted going forward. What needed to happen for black America, finally freed from all legal disability, was to work and grow. It was going to take a while – there was a significant black middle class and some black upper class in 1965 but the broad mass was not there yet…and only time and work was going to fix it. But that didn’t suit the needs of the Left, which was already spinning pro-black myths to replace the pro-white myths of yore.
This is why we get ridiculous readings of history where every significant event or invention was driven by black people. They diligently search for any black person who was involved and then place that person front and center as if the thing wouldn’t happen without the black person’s input…naturally in the face of white racism. The Narrative is that black people dragged our dumb racist white a**es into the future. I mean, sure: Katherine Johnson was a great mathematician…but the way they tell the story these days is we wouldn’t have made it into space without her…not quite true because, you know?, there were other mathematicians who could calculate orbital mechanics. But we can’t just say “great job” to her…we have to make her a Fighter Against Racism and The Real Reason Honkey Did It. All of this designed to artificially bridge a gap which can’t be bridged by anything other than work and time. In 1965 it was going to take a century of work to bring black America up to the level of the rest of America. Nothing doing. Has to happen right now – see? The only reason black people aren’t running the show is you dumb racist whites won’t let them! So, given this inherent genius of black people, time to just force them into positions.
But you can only do that by lowering standards – and explaining that these were white, racist standards designed to make it seem like white people were smarter than black people when its quite the other way ’round, cracker. And then we have to lower all standards…partially because the people held to a higher standard would sue the heck out of you but also to ensure that nobody is really all that good and so nobody can draw performance comparisons and their logical conclusion.
Previously posted
You’re boring us.
It looks like he is boring himself, if all he can do now in his sad pathetic schtick of LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT MEEEEEE! is just reposting old s… stuff.
That’s where we step in and say if you are showing up your 40 hours a week and doing the best you can, we’ll make up any difference between income and basic cost of living.
Maybe, temporarily, but not as a permanent support system. People with marginal skills will not develop better skills if their lower skill levels are subsidized—-basically rewarded.
On the other hand, knowing that the subsidy will expire in whatever length of time can reasonably be expected to provide enough time to rise up the ladder in skills and therefore income is motivation to improve.
And who is this “we” of which you speak? The federal government? The federal government which is bound to its delegated duties and forbidden to any others? That Constitution which allegedly forms the foundation of our political philosophy?
This is a great “solution” as long as it depends on state and local “we” doing the subsidizing.
Another huge pool of people isn’t fit because it is drug-addled.
My tolerance for these people hit zero a long time ago. I have written about a friend whose company offers great jobs at great wages for entry-level engineering types of work, providing equipment and the ability to work from home, and they can’t find people to fill the positions. Oh, a lot of very qualified people apply—and then fail the drug tests.
Now I like to have a drink every now and then, on occasion “drinks” (plural). But if it came down to a choice between a margarita and a job, the liquor would not be a part of my life. We have sanitized drug use, especially marijuana, to the point of being accepted as benign and harmless and just part of life, and that has led to a whole generation that can’t imagine life without it. (Have we learned the lesson yet, of the Left’s push to legalize pot and therefore increase the Dependent Class?) We have lost a huge chunk of otherwise productive workers who have chosen to use pot rather than give it up to have good jobs.
The first thing to so is make welfare of any kind dependent on passing drug tests. If we can find a non-invasive way to test for blood alcohol then include this, too. If someone can’t pass a test for intoxicants, he or she can go live on what used to be called “work farms” or “workhouses”. Kind of a modern version of the Depression’s CCC. We don’t need to subsidize rent so they can live like productive people. We don’t want them to starve or freeze, but we don’t owe them luxury or the illusion of normalcy.
This, and going back to the model of housing the mentally ill would, within a generation or two, go a long way toward creating a civil and civilized society.
I agree that the final stop for the druggy is a work camp – after giving the person every opportunity to get clean if they insist on remaining high in public…then off to a camp they go, possibly to live out the rest of their lives under supervision. I don’t want to be mean – but I can’t allow them to be useless and a blight on the public square. I also have to be merciful to the sober, after all. And you’re also right about income support not being forever…it would be some sort of sliding scale (worked out based on local conditions) which will come to an end right about the time that any reasonable person who applies themselves will start to rise up the income ladder. And, of course, with the re-industrialization of America and the end of cheap imported labor, there would be plenty of jobs even at a low technical level which would still be able to pay a decent wage to any diligent person.
I think we need to start doing what Mike Rowe has been talking about, and promoting the trades instead of pushing for college. 25 years ago a fleet manager at a Ford dealership told me that he had pushed all of his kids to get college degrees, and they did, and got good jobs, which disappeared when companies were sold and so on. But his top mechanic was making more than $150,000 a year (and this was in 2000!) and got several offers a week from dealers trying to hire him away. I know a couple of companies in the oil patch where heavy equipment operators are making more than the company presidents. Welders and plumbers are always in high demand.
All of these jobs demand sobriety and not using drugs, but they pay well and offer a lot of job security, especially for the ambitious.
Bernie Sanders has given the Right the equivalent of a fumble, if we are smart enough to pick up that ball and run with it.
He seems quite proud of his invention of a new phrase, the “pseudo democracy”. At least he repeated it in his statement, as if to make sure we got it.
The thing is, the nation has been run by a pseudo democracy, if you define a democracy as a nation governed by elected representatives of the people. The nation has, in fact, been run by unelected political appointees, who have been creating rules and regulations with the power of law without the participation or even oversight of the only legal legislative body in the country—Congress. Which, of course, has meant bypassing the whole concept of democracy, or government by the people through their election of representatives.
So what Trump, et al, have been diligently working to dismantle is the real pseudo-democracy of this country, the consolidation of power in the hands of unelected elites, to return that power to the people.
I think the Right should glom onto that phrase, give Bernie full credit for inventing it, and then point out that as usual he has everything backwards and upside down but he still managed to come up with a good phrase, just one that accurately describes government by the Left.
There seems to be a sense that allowing logging in national forests is somehow a radical concept, when in fact it was the restriction of logging in those forests that represented radical political interference in the actual purpose of establishing the Forest Service in the first place.
The use of the word “and” in the highlighted section, above, is significant. In legal terms it is an imperative, unlike the word “or” in the preceding part of the statement.
This is why the Forest Service, which administers the national forests, is part of the Department of Agriculture, not Interior.
The whole “save the trees” thing seemed weird to me even when I was a kid – if you look at a pine forest, you’re quickly realizing that they grow like weeds. It is why pine is generally an inexpensive type of lumber…it grows fast and in large quantity. And it makes sense, IMO, that we set aside part of our forests just for logging.
But the Left didn’t really want to save the trees – they didn’t want me to build a house out of lumber. They want me in a cement Life Pod eating bug paste.
Don’t discount the power of virtue signaling. If you can claim a spot on the Higher Moral Ground by claiming to be “protecting the EARTH!!!” by a few performative acts like marching or posting shrill attacks on logging then you are going to go for it.
As for cement pods being a desirable alternative to wood, some day Spook might enlighten us about the environmental impact of cement and concrete.
Wood is really the first renewable energy material—it takes little skill to grow or harvest it and anyone can cobble together some kind of shelter out of it. And it can be burned to provide heat (saving lives) and cook food. Before harvesting it stabilizes steep slopes, preventing erosion and contributing to the health of streams and rivers and by extension the health of riverine populations, while providing shelter and habitats for wildlife and recycling carbon dioxide (“capturing” carbon, a beloved concept of the Left). But the key here is “renewable”—-forests must be constantly renewed. They can renew themselves through the natural patterns of fires, adding tons of pollutants to the air in the process, or they can be managed to remove trees that are slowing the renewal process by spreading disease or blocking access to light or water.
Trees are not just static ‘things’—they are living entities with life cycles meaning constant change and man can work with those changes to benefit forests and humanity—and the environment.
The Great Interest Reset: Trump’s Strategy to Save the US from Biden’s Borrowing Binge
Very good – and I like how it acknowledges that we’re going to have some pain, but we have to work through this. I did a post on X less than 2 days ago basically saying everything sucks and its going to take a lot of work to get out of it…that little post has approx 308,000 views at this point and the comments are overwhelmingly positive. People know. Or, at least, our people know. The “Hands Off” nitwits probably thought we could just go on forever as is with them leeching off the productive economy while sneering at those who know how to do things. Our people know it can’t go on – it is all going to crash. So, maybe we have to crash at least parts of it on purpose? That is what Trump is doing…might hurt. Will cause some dislocations. Needs to be done and the long term payoff will be immense.
I remember touring the countryside of Peru back in the mid-90s and seeing campaign signs for Alberto Fujimori stating that things were going to have to get worse before he could make them better, and being very impressed that even the poorer people understood this. He got elected, things did get a little bit worse, he kicked Sendero ass, and then things got better and the economy was so much better and without the terrorism. (When he got busted stealing and a Lefty got elected to replace him I told South American friends they would have been better off in Peru if they had just paid him a couple of million dollars a year and kept him on as president, and they agreed.)
“Hands Off” is probably motivated by a few elements. One, of course, and no doubt the biggest, is that the organizers and funders of this are recipients of the graft being threatened by DOGE and trying to preserve their territory of protected entitlement. Another is the utter stupidity of so many who seem to think, though “think” is probably not an appropriate word to use here, that there is some serious political message in there somewhere. And then there is what I call the “siphon effect”. If you have ever siphoned a liquid you know what I mean—-once the liquid starts to flow it pulls all the liquid behind. I think a lot of “protesters” are just being sucked along in the wake of the others. (The incoherent moron asked to define “fascism” because he was waving a sign claiming that Trump or Musk are fascists, is a great example. He admitted he had no idea, and someone just handed him a sign when he walked by so he was out there in the crowd waving it. He had been given a paper with some sort of script to describe his passion for the cause.)
Regarding the second category: “Protesting” has become an end and goal of its own, no longer tethered to any particular cause or message. I just read a short bit on the reaction to Columbia’s cracking down on violent and anti-semitic “protests’ in which one young woman whined that she had applied to Columbia specifically because it “promised a robust protest environment” that was, evidently in her mind, being changed. And that’s it—she chose a school because it promised to be a place that would encourage and enable her need to “protest”.
We all need to feel relevant, but while our former cultural norms linked relevance to actual accomplishment the new norm is purely performative—-that is, “relevance” can be attained merely by being part of something that postures as a “protest”—-against whatever, no matter how poorly understood, no matter how shallow and superficial the pretense might be.
I think this is an example of my observation on the allure of Leftism being its promise of being a shortcut to the Higher Moral Ground—in this case, the illusion of relevance (and therefore of virtue) merely by being part of a “protest” of some sort, for some stated reason.
They are morally and intellectually empty – so, this gives them a sense of being both accomplished and good. It is why these Fighters for the Working Class are now mobilized to save government bureaucrats and the Fortune 500. Nothing really means anything…it is all about social positioning. The cool kids are all at the “Musk is a fascist” table. Musk isn’t even Conservative…he’s a pretty liberal guy. He just recognized that if he wants to achieve, he can’t do so in a world infected by what he calls “the woke mind virus”.
I think that politically—if you define “politically” as a blueprint for governing the nation—-Musk is probably pretty firmly on the side of Constitutional governance. At least I haven’t seen anything from him indicating a preference for consolidating power in the hands of elites or top-down ruling from a Central Authority. He admits that he was a Democrat because, in his own words, it was “the party of kindness”—hardly a political manifesto.
My take on Musk is that he paid little attention to politics. He was, after all, a pretty busy guy with a lot on many different plates. And then something caught his eye, and like so many on the spectrum once it got his attention it got his focus, and he liked what he saw from Trump once he started to pay attention to it. We may never know what shiny thing caught his attention, and he might not even really know. The thing is, once he did shift his focus to how the country is governed (rather than just feeling good about supporting “the party of kindness”) he zeroed in on the problems and became committed to solving those problems.
And I think he gets a great deal of personal gratification from becoming part of something really important. His many accomplishments in other areas are certainly important, but once he stopped coasting on the surface of politics and realized the long-term impacts of the death spiral the Left had put the country into he realized that he was in a unique position to—to be somewhat melodramatic—help save the nation. While “space” is certainly bigger than he is, and so are the other issues his efforts have touched upon, none of them have the emotional and intellectual gratification of actually stopping a cascade of failure and turning the country around. He gives the impression having liked being an American citizen but not necessarily finding a deep commitment to it, and then he found that commitment.
And it helps to have Trump as a partner in all this. The Trump/Vance/Musk team has to provide a real rush of emotional gratification as well as that of objective accomplishment. I doubt that Musk has ever had, to put it in cliched 2025 context, “bros” before, and it’s FUN! Especially when they are making such a difference in the country he has realized he really loves.
I think if he were really “pretty liberal” he would be more supportive of having federal money support Liberal causes. He just strikes me as a guy who was on the Liberal train kind of by default, by accepting the superficial trappings of the Democrat Party without giving it any real, analytical, thought, but who realized it was a train to nowhere and is actually harmful to the country. So he got off and decided to try to slow it down by taking away most of its fuel.
The saying that “if you are a hammer everything looks like a nail” has a corollary: If you are a problem solver you can’t walk away from a challenging problem you have the ability to solve.
I suspect, Elon allowed himself some personal acceptance of leftism when his son transitioned. I also suspect he largely rejected much leftism after his son committed suicide claiming “My son is dead, killed by the woke virus.” Plus, being an astute businessman, Musk fully understands the financial needs of running a competent viable business, or businesses in his case and understands that all businesses are tied to the success or failure of the origin country.
When they tell us who they are, we must pay attention. When they tell us their agenda, we must believe them.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gn1H3EdbYAYFpsd?format=jpg&name=medium
Another beautifully written article from amuseonX: Who Watches the Judges? Congress Must Investigate Judge Boasberg
@amuse
Boasberg was just smacked down – but to our distress ACB again sided with the Liberals…which is just bizarre. Makes no sense to entertain the possibility that an enemy alien can’t be removed. The law – both Enemy Aliens Act and the rest of our immigration laws – is pretty clear on the matter: if the Executive determines the person is inadmissible then they can be removed forthwith. There doesn’t have to be a conviction – there just has to be a determination by the relevant authorities. As one reads the relevant statutes it is clear – and a little surprising – that some thought was put into it. We don’t want to deport people to death…but we also don’t want bad guys abusing our asylum system. So it is all backstopped by the ability of the Executive to simply make a declaration.
And it has to be that way – once again, all Executive power is vested in the President, alone. Only the President can decide who is to be deported in the final analysis and there’s no legal way to second guess this. Boasberg was trying to say that he could second guess…and so have a lot of other judges. And, yes, I do realize that some Supreme Court decisions have sought to apply some Constitutional protections to aliens – these decisions are incorrect. The Federal courts should have entirely referred the matter to the Legislative and Executive branches. There is no judicial issue – no Constitutional concern – if a foreign is ordered out of the country. There can’t be – to make it so means that, in theory, a foreigner in a foreign land could demand we secure their rights in their home country. It just makes no sense.
ABC is just embarrassing herself. At least the other three openly vote strictly on party lines, but she has to pretend she is making her decisions based on analysis of the law—and then she can’t analyze the law. Her feeble efforts to explain herself just point out how unqualified she is for this role. I think she is a perfect example of the Peter Principle—-promoted on merit up to a point but then promoted to a level above her ability.
It is super irritating: the law, precedent and simple common sense place Trump – as Chief Executive – on solid ground here. The Executive decides if foreign nationals can stay. It really can’t be anyone else just in a practical sense. The higher Courts – including SC – should be telling these district judges to simply knock it off, at least as it regards immigration. Perhaps a case can be made that there’s a process for firing bureaucrats (though I’d hold that any such binding process violates the Executive’s Article II powers) but for foreigners it is just what it is: they are foreigners and the Executive decides if a foreigner is persona non grata…and there doesn’t have to be a stated reason for it.
This is akin to the pardon and declassification power – inherent to the Executive position and not judicially reviewable. If the President says someone is pardoned, they are. If something is declassified, it is. If someone is to be deported, out they go.
The Judges, as a whole, have grown too arrogant – assuming they have a final say when what they actually have is just a say…and they still have to contend with the Executive and Legislative powers which they may not usurp under any pretext.