Conservative Values

Living in the Insane World

Mark Noonan36 Comments

In 1877, President Grant, just out of office, embarked on a world tour. He had been pretty much at the helm of great events since 1861 and he and his wife and long talked of a day when they would just travel the world…this was the fulfillment of what must, at times, have seemed an idle hope. They were in no hurry and stopped at many places along the way so the tour went on into 1879 (and, of course, travel by steamship and train is much slower than modern methods). In the course of this tour they visited the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey (including the Holy Land then under Turkish rule), Egypt, Greece, Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, India, Burma, Siam, Indochina and Japan. Aside from his wife, he was accompanied by his son, Jesse, a journalist to document the trip and one aide. He was never under any threat of harm, was greeted warmly wherever he went and generally had a splendid time.

This, my friends, was the real world. A sane world. Of course, there were dangers – Lincoln had been assassinated in 1865. The Empress of Austria would be assassinated in 1898. But the world was sane. Safe. Murder was a rare and shocking thing (my grand-uncle Eddie Diggins was murdered in a speakeasy in 1927 and it made the New York Times – back pages, sure; but a murder in LA of someone of no real prominence made the papers in New York; that is how odd murder was). Now, why bring this up?

Because Trump has removed Secret Service protection for a lot of people of late – most notably John Bolton. This is causing quite a lot of outrage in the Ruling Class as these people are allegedly under threat of assassination, especially by agents of Iran. This might well be true – and I respond to this worry by saying that John Bolton and the rest of these people who had a hand in making this insane world should suffer the consequences of their actions. We’re not supposed to be in a world where a former official of the US government is at risk of assassination. We’re supposed to be so powerful and respected that nobody but a sheer madman would dream of killing one of our people. The solution to a threat by the Mullahs in 2025 was to have removed the Mullahs from power in 1979 when they took our Embassy. Our Ruling Class didn’t. And the replacements which have moved in since then never made any real response to the 1979 outrage. Indeed, some of the Ruling Class replacements who have come and gone positively encouraged the Mullahs to remain in power.

So, if a Mullah tries to kill you, I’ve got no sympathy.

We’re not supposed to live in a world of terrorist bombs, assassins, bums sleeping in tents, illegals pouring across borders, grooming gangs in England, sex tourism in Thailand, gangsters running Haiti, Hamas sending in rape/murder squads, 300,000 Americans overdosing on drugs, bridges that can’t be repaired for years, wildfires burning out of control for lack of water…you getting the picture? This world has gone mad and I don’t propose to protect the people who made this world from harm. They should have thought about it while they were destroying everything…I’m not going to hide a guy behind walls and guns where he’s safe from the consequences of his actions. Perhaps this will concentrate some minds going forward? Make some decisions go different ways?

We can only hope – meanwhile, let those who made the mess live in it.

UPDATE: Right around the time I wrote this, Trump ordered the declassification of the JFK, MLK and RFK files. I’m not expecting much – everyone has had plenty of time to carefully sanitize them. OTOH, our Ruling Class has a lot of very stupid people in it so maybe they didn’t? In these cases, I always recall that the Brits are keeping part of their Himmler death documents secret until 2045. I’ve always thought this weird – the “conspiracy theory” about it is that the Brits offed Himmler and faked his suicide because they didn’t want him to spill it about contacts between the UK (especially, perhaps, Royal Family) and Himmler during the war. But, if so, why not just destroy the documents? But, if the documents have been destroyed, why keep them secret until 2045? It is just weird…and maybe someone sifting through, say, the JFK files can shed some light on the sequence of events…like why the FBI didn’t have Oswald under surveillance given he was a known Commie kook and the President was coming to town?

Now What?

Mark Noonan5 Comments

I will have a January 20th post up, of course. Liberation Day is nearly here! But before we get into Trump 2.0, I want to take some time to sort of review where I am, politically, and where I think we need to go to really get out of this mess.

As has been seen over the past dozen years or so, there has been a fairly significant shift in how I view things – not really so much a change in ideological perspective, but more an understanding of just how wrong things have gone. This, I think, is a journey all thinking people have been on – even some on the Left have taken it, while remaining Left overall. The bottom line is that if you are a person of moderate intelligence, a bit of goodwill and some patriotism, you can’t possibly believe the same exact things you did in, say, 2005. The trouble with our Democrats, the overall Left and the diehard Never Trumpers is that it is forever 2005…the only wrinkle they’ve added to it is the trans issue (which has proved very destructive to these people and they don’t realize it yet).

It has been a journey! Someone a little earlier on X referenced the McMartin Preschool Trial and that blast from the past got me realizing that it was then and there the first doubts crept in…that the Media is simply lying. That government institutions don’t have a few bad apples, but are rotten barrels. And that if they’d lie like that – even after it was clear the lies were exposed – then just what else are they lying about? But the beginning always ties into the end…and now we see here of late that again and again senior people in our public and private institutions are sexual degenerates…when not messing with kids, they are just being generally horrifically abusive to anyone they can dominate. And that while they’re doing it, everyone around them knows it and doesn’t talk about it until it is too late.

The archetype of this is Jimmy Savile over in the UK – the man became a major player in 1964 when he started hosting Top of the Pops and remained front and center in the public eye until his death in 2011. And it was only in 2012 that the sexual abuse allegations exploded into the public sphere…but once that happened it came out that as early as 1963, before he rose to the top, people knew what he was doing. And he was allowed to just keep on doing it. You read he was made a member of the exclusive Atheneum Club in London…and was nominated by Cardinal Hume, who appears to have played a role in covering up sexual abuse scandals in the Church…and round and round it goes.

But this isn’t about sex scandals – it is about an Establishment filed with abusers and enablers and its all covered up by the MSM. And then you move on to defense contractors. Other government contractors. People getting grants from the US government for very bizarre-sounding projects. And we can’t stop people from crossing our border and then you find that we’re giving grants to NGO’s that are providing transport to the border and illegals are caught with pre-paid debit cards and just now Speaker Johnson tells us that when he met with Biden like a year ago he knew he was gaga but didn’t bring it up in public.

So, you conclude: what has gone on is all nonsense. Its all just a corrupt scam of one type or another…people raking in money, doing payoffs, working deals where in return for burying this bit of scandal that thing will be done. And where are the decent people? Oh, right: there are none. At least, not in the institutions. If they were decent, they’d expose it, even if it cost them their job. And that means that the very best people are…go-along-to-get-along careerists. Guys, this sort of system nearly got Trump killed in Butler, PA. And it doesn’t matter if the slackness was deliberate or just how things are…absent Trump’s miraculous turn of his head, he’d have died right there and we might be locked into bloody civil war right now. All a full review tells us is that the rot has been there a very long time. McMartin happened in 1983. JFK’s assassination in 1963. McCarthy was hounded out of the public square for pointing out the obvious in 1954…just when did the USA become dipped in filth with no chance of logic or common sense coming out on top?

All we can say is that it was a long time ago. Before most of us were born the seeds of the current swamp were planted. Sure, probably as early as Woodrow Wilson. Or even Teddy Roosevelt who got a free ride from the press because they liked him and who first came up with the idea that a President can do whatever he wants unless expressly prohibited by law. But we also know: once you step aside from the rules, everything that comes after is wrong. As I said a while back ago, if you start your equation with one plus one equals three, then everything that comes after is wrong, no matter how desperately you try to make it right. Once you have an error your only way out is to go back to the error and correct it, and then start all over from that point.

And that, ultimately, is what I think we’re doing. Perhaps a bit haphazardly, certainly not totally consciously, but that is it. In a way, finally trying to carry out Warren G Harding’s “return to normalcy”. Keep in mind that he said that in the 1920 Presidential election…this was before FDR and the New Deal. We didn’t have a military-industrial complex at the time. The FBI was just a few guys in the back rooms of the Justice Department. The CIA and NSA were far in the future. Government regulations were still a rarity. But Harding could see – and the American people could feel – that the period of time from McKinley’s assassination to the end of Wilson’s term had gone wrong. That muscular American foreign intervention was just not good for us. That preening “great men” trying to force us down new paths wasn’t wanted. With Return to Normalcy as his slogan, Harding got more than 60% of the vote…and he and Coolidge did try to get us back to normalcy. It was our bad luck that Hoover managed to get himself into the Harding/Coolidge administrations and managed to work himself into the favored spot for the 1928 GOP nomination when Coolidge (who could easily have won it) decided not to seek a second full term. Hoover, who was a Progressive to his core, was merely a mini-FDR in policy…with the unintended catastrophe being this nominal-Republican (we’d call him a RINO today) presiding over the start of the Great Depression and tarring the GOP for 40 years with it. By the time the GOP had recovered, it was too late – the rot (the swamp) had become overwhelming.

Trump is our attempt to return to normalcy. Not for nothing is Trump looking back and back for policy inspiration. Having been at the raw end of the Swamp for ten years now, he’s not in a mind to take their policy recommendations at face value. I have seen statements of his on economics and foreign policy which could have been lifted out of McKinley’s last speech (worth a read; a bit dull, but its like the sun coming out when you consider where we are). Even on immigration, all Trump is trying to do is get us back to the Immigration Act of 1924 – which was itself a huge component in the attempt to return to normalcy…because tens of millions of Third World immigrants wasn’t normal. Keep in mind that Titanic wasn’t built to provide John Jacob Astor swank accommodations across the Atlantic…it was to get steerage immigrants into the American labor market as fast as possible. The luxury of the Titanic was PR…the money was from importing cheap labor. White Star. Cunard. Hamburg-America, North-German Lloyd and many smaller firms…all competing to build the biggest and fastest ships to transport poor people into the American labor market. The Act of 1924 put a stop to it (and put those firms mostly out of business – only Cunard sort of survives as a subsidy of Carnival Cruises). Side note: Titanic was built by White Star, which was owned by International Mercantile Marine which was founded by J P Morgan, who wanted to monopolize the Transatlantic trade in labor which would, of course, benefit the profitability of his industrial interests in the USA. Neat, huh?

Do keep in mind that the Immigration Act of 1924 didn’t stop immigration. It is condemned these days because it excluded Asians and is described as something that simply stopped immigrants from coming in, but that isn’t so. Plenty of immigrants continued to arrive…just not a flood of immigrants, and those that were allowed in were cream of the crop from their home countries. Naturally, these days we won’t exclude based on race or national origin…but it simply makes no sense to allow a flood of unvetted immigrants to pour in. It is abnormal to do that. Stupid. Insane. Directly harmful not just to us, but to the immigrants, themselves…especially the lower end of the immigrants who are bound to be most abused all through the process.

And that gets us to our conclusion here – what are we to do? Simple: find out where we screwed up, go back to that point and fix the mistake. For immigration, the mistake was the 1965 immigration act. Like that, again and again and again. We keep losing wars? Why? Well, because we allow military officers to think of it as a career rather than a calling…they aren’t striving to defend America, but to get that star on their shoulder, and then some more. Pete Hegseth pointed out that we now have 44 four-star officers on the roles…we had 7 in World War two. This is what careerism breeds. Meanwhile, in the pre-WWII army, outside of MacArthur (who was unique in so many ways) the men who lead us to victory were majors and lt. colonels until just before the war started. They weren’t working for promotion, but to make the best military force they could. The mistake, then, is the gigantic military bureaucracy…get rid of it and turn the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines back into warfighters.

One thing I believe is crucial is to jettison certainty – everything needs to be thought about. Certainty does exist. There is absolute truth. But right now we’re in such a fog of swamp-created nonsense that we can’t be sure about anything. We might have to sort of feel our way forward here. Be ok with some potholes and some mistakes along the way. But the goal is to return to a sane, rational, logical and common sense society. A place where normal human beings can live and work. A return to normalcy.

Normal vs Insane

Mark Noonan20 Comments

Their real objection to Hegseth is that he’s a normal man. Good looking guy, too. Incredibly in shape. They hate that. What I mean is that the basic Liberal’s path to getting a girl these days is to be a “male feminist” which means agreeing with every dumb thing feminists say and hoping you get a shot at it…the darker side is, of course, the actually abusive men who declare they are feminists so they can gain access to their victims. Hegseth is…a man. No saint. As someone once said: “soldiers are no angels, nor the gentlest of creatures”.

Their attempted smears of Hegseth on grounds of drinking and dallying with the ladies is, well, ridiculous and reveals that his critics have spent no real time with a combat unit. People who have signed up to be at the sharp end of a war – even if no war is going on at the moment – do live a little bit on the edge. In wartime, probably a little over that edge. In the World at War TV series, I believe it was an interview with cartoonist Bill Mauldin where he relates the story of when he was in Italy and taking a little break in a bombed out Italian house and in walks a British Tommy with a young Italian girl of…shall we say, questionable moral character…and the pair, taking no apparent notice of Mauldin, proceed to do what boys and girls will do. After they had finished they got up to leave, the Tommy saying, “good day, Yank”, and back off to the battle for him. When you might die soon, questions of morality get a little hazy. And you don’t judge the military by civilian standards. Ever.

The fact that Hegseth is in superb physical condition at age 44 tells us that he’s not a boozer. That he is a good looking man explains why he had plenty of opportunities with the ladies and didn’t refuse them. That he’s now married for five years and there are no recent allegations of him getting off the morality ranch shows that his statement that he underwent religious conversion six years ago is credible. In other words, in his late 30’s, he grew up a bit, as men will do. Sure, would have been much better if he had come to this ten years previously…but life is life and we’re not on a schedule.

They hate Hegseth because he’s a normal man – but they fear him because he’s not one of them. He’s not a career officer who kissed butt to get stars on his shoulders as prep for moving into a defense contractor job as prep for returning to the Pentagon and on and on ad infinitum. He’s not committed to the defense bureaucracy. Not committed to letting today’s brigadier general become a major general just because its his turn. Not committed to “diversity” when what we want is lethality. An old veteran like myself has seen over the past few years our Navy ships covered in rust and I know that its all gone wrong…no sailor would ever allow his ship to look like that. This means that our current sailors, ain’t. I believe that most of them want to be and will be if given leadership to become sailors…and that is what I hope Hegseth will do for the entire military. And the Left hates that, too…to them, the military is a social program for their experiments. For patriots, it is the lifeblood of the nation.

As we watched the lunatic ravings of the Senate Democrats, it became crystal clear that Trump represents a return of sanity to DC…Democrats are in a last-ditch, rearguard defense of insanity. And it is clear they learned nothing from the election…they even engineered some Code Pink crazies to disrupt the start of the hearing (who should now be prosecuted like J6 defendants, IMO). They don’t realize that 2024 was a demand that the craziness end…the clear failure in the California wildfires just putting a nice cherry on top of that…all that money to be spent and they couldn’t even get working fire hydrants. No. We’re done with that. We don’t care about boutique Liberal whines. We want things to work. We want things to be sane again.

Carter and the End of Decency

Mark Noonan12 Comments

We’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead and I really did try – almost made it 24 hours after Jimmy Carter died. But there’s just too much nauseating hagiography out there…including, to much disgust, from some on the Right. So, something that I might have waited a week for comes out today.

First off, let’s remember how Carter rose to political prominence – by running a campaign in Georgia in 1970 which was overtly racist in messaging. Was Carter a racist? Probably not – or, at least, not a vicious sort of racist. But he played directly to white racism in Georgia (which was still strong) in order to get into office. That is the rankest sort of political cynicism. The Establishment likes to play this like he was just being clever…sorry, that was being evil. That was the indication of the sort of person Carter was: nakedly ambitious and willing to sh*t on his own views if it would get him ahead. That this campaign was after he claimed Born Again status puts a question mark on the sincerity of that…

In addition to being ambitious, Carter was always certain he was the smartest man in the room. Now, to be fair, everyone who seeks power is a little bit insane. You wouldn’t do that if you weren’t a little crazy. But given that, wise people still find ways to work with others. Carter didn’t. He just expected everyone to toe his line even if he did periodic 180 degree course alterations. Because of this, his relations with the Democrat-controlled Congress were just terrible. He was just certain he was right about everything and that any opposition was idiocy when not malevolence.

Because of this, he held anyone who did oppose him in contempt. And this wouldn’t have been so bad if he wasn’t so entirely wrong about everything. He got into the White House and obtained pretty much what he wanted (even Congressional opposition did usually fade away as it was still Democrat to Democrat) and everything went to heck in a handbasket. The two biggest things that took him down were inflation and the Hostage Crisis…and his program was big spending and appeasement of anti-American forces around the world. When we gave him a humiliating defeat because of this did he pause to reconsider? Nope. He felt that an idiot (Reagan) had beaten him because the American people were too stupid to understand how great Carter was.

He hated that loss. And he went around for the rest of his life trying to make it go away. The Habitat for Humanity stuff was marketing – “see, he helps the poor!” But the teeth of it was him going around the world – especially when Republicans held the White House – and directly undermining American policy and lending his support to some of the very worst people in the world. He was a big fan of the Castro regime, Chavez’ regime in Venezuela…and when the Communists in Nicaragua lost an election in 1990 Carter was very grudging in admitting it.

In essence, Carter was the final result of 1968 – that is when the anti-Americans started to take control of the Democrat party and Carter was all-in on that…essentially holding that the reason for the world’s problems is American policy. Unless run by a saint like Carter, of course. In the long term, Clinton, Obama and Biden have just pushed this line ever further…if you wonder why there is this bizarre desire in the Defense and Foreign Policy establishments to appease the Iranian regime, look back no further than Carter…who started it and in the time since then Democrat after Democrat has just hired and promoted people who hold to the anti-American view (with the GOPers never getting rid of such people…though we hope this changes come the 20th).

The indecency of the modern world has many sources and goes back a long way…but we must never forget Carter’s role in making it official American policy to foster indecency around the world. If you wonder why its considered acceptable for horrid tyrannies to get seats on UN human rights councils, look no further back than the Carter year where it became official US policy to bow and scrape before foreign savages to atone for our alleged sins. Carter, with his moralizing tone, ushered in the modern era of tribal massacre and systemic looting.

It is my hope that Trump tears this all our root and branch. A systemic housecleaning of all these children and grandchildren of Jimmy Carter who infest and infect our Establishments. True decency in the world comes with the entire legacy of Carter – including the preening self-aggrandizement – is tossed into the trash.

The World is Insane Because We Allow it to Be

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Good post on X – read the whole thing but here’s the crucial part of it:

The “civilized” world has insulated itself in rules and laws and higher-than-thou “morals” that the enemies of everybody simply do not share, don’t care for, and do not have holding them back.

I’ve often thought of writing in depth about the French war in Algeria because it keeps popping back up in my head as the world burns as the turning point…the time when the world decided to stop defending civilization. As I’ve noted before, the primary tactics of the anti-French FLN were the torture/rape/murder of Algerians who didn’t back them and the setting of bombs in French Pied Noir cafes. Faced with this, the French army got a bit vigorous in response…but never got close to the brutality of the FLN. The world took a close look at this (ie, put on a blindfold so they couldn’t actually see anything) and declared that the French were the bad guys…an assertion the French Ruling Class (under De Gaulle of all people!) went along with. Presto – it now became accepted in the world that if you want to beat the West, be absolute savages and they’ll eventually not only quit, but pretend that you’re not savages. They’ll give you money. Seats at the UN. You’ll be placed in charge of human rights commissions!

Do keep in mind that our “higher-than-thou” morals got a woman set afire on the NYC subway yesterday. You’d think that we’d eventually reach a limit that even our Ruling Class won’t go beyond but you’d be wrong – this morning Nate Silver was out with a post saying that, “hey, NYC actually has a relatively low crime rate so what’s the fuss if the odd lunatic thing happens?”. I’m paraphrasing but I’m not at all kidding. They’ve gone so far into “higher-than-thou” that they’re actually saying that a torching or two of a human being is just one of those things that happens…really, really think about that. They only say this, of course, because they are confident they will never be the person burned alive…never be the person who’s child is kidnapped, raped and murdered…never be the person who has to live in an apartment complex taken over by a criminal gang…

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s intern commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 federal death row inmates. The 3 who are still to get whacked? It seems that their real crime – the unforgivable thing – is that their crimes including crimes against Diversity. Murdering two kids, not getting credit for it so you then go and try to murder more? That gets a commutation. The intern put it out that Joe, in good conscience, couldn’t allow Trump to sign the death warrants. Don’t try to make sense of it – there is no sense in it. Whether you’re opposed to the death penalty or not this action was just absurd. They could have been commuted last year if making sure death isn’t applied is right…and if you really thought that death wasn’t appropriate, then you’d commute all 40. Its just raw insanity…it is just what the Ruling Class is like. You know, like Governor Hochul lauding the security cameras for catching the torch-a-passenger guy without mentioning that he’s an illegal immigrant in a sanctuary city and State.

We are so very close to complete societal collapse – it might not seem like it, but keep in mind that these things are always “slowly, and then all at once”. Had we not elected Trump last month, I’m not sure we would have got through the next four years. It is still not certain we will…depends on how effective the new Team Trump is. But Trump is already injecting reality back into the mix. Lot of people made a lot of funny jokes about his statements on Panama, but Trump just entered the real world there…and is dragging us with him. We have pretended since we gave Panama our canal (Panama, as a nation, had nothing to do with the creation of the canal…heck, they didn’t even provide labor for it; all of that came from the USA and the Caribbean islanders) that everything is just hunky dory…but it hasn’t been. There has been massive trafficking across and through it. China has gained footholds. Trump claims that the Panamanians are screwing us on use rates…and while I don’t know this is true, it would surprise the heck out of me if it wasn’t because the USA is everyone’s patsy. Trump, by making his apparently off-the-cuff and outrageous statement regarding taking it back is simply resetting us back to reality…now the Panamanians will have to actually deal with a real United States that is insisting, not asking.

It is so crucial for us to live in reality – a reality where the Mexican government is a charade and everything that happens there regarding drugs and trafficking is Cartel controlled with no reference to Mexican law. A reality where we can’t choose between packs of Syrian savages so we’d better just get out. A reality where continued war in Ukraine helps nobody. A reality where we simply must deport the illegals. On and on and on like that. But four years will not be enough…and that’s is the pickle we find ourselves in. Some of the stuff Trump will have to do is going to be unpopular or at least not understood right off…and J D Vance (or whoever gets the 2028 nod) will have to commit to continuing Trump policies, with the attendant risk that frustration will cause a temporary rejection of same. 2024 was a must-win for us…but so, too, will 2028, 2032 and 2036 be. That is how long it will take just to make sure we don’t die. Let the Democrats back in before 2040 and they will resume the insanity…and place it on overdrive.

Just keep that in mind as we go forward – and make all criticisms of Trump policy with that in mind. Don’t feed the lunatics any easy meals. Make them earn their opposition by coming up with rational complaints…absent such, just dismiss and ridicule them. This is our part – being patriotic citizens. Each of us is small, all of us together are big. And Trump will need us.

MAGA is Coming

Mark Noonan7 Comments

The Congressional GOP tried to pretend it was 2016 last night – trying to help the Democrats ram through a 1,500 page continuing resolution which was packed with Democrat spending priorities and various things to hamstring the incoming Trump Administration. For the moment, it appears to have been stopped – with Elon Musk and JD Vance leading the social media charge against it. It could, of course, come back! But it still was a least a victory for a day…and the first time we actually made a GOP-controlled chamber of Congress listen to us.

To listen to the RINOs, this was once again just one of those darned things we couldn’t change – if we wanted relief for hurricane victims, we had to go along with all the Democrat spending. This was never a convincing argument in the past but, also, there never was much we could do about it…but now we’ve got at least a significant number of MAGA representation and at least one friendly social media platform…we are both able to get our message out and there are enough MAGA representatives in Congress to make it so that any RINO going along with it would be heavily exposed come re-election time. Like this: if there are 220 GOPers in the House and 195 vote for it, that’s cover. If there’s 220 and 150 vote for it…that’s catastrophe…that’s clearly providing the votes for a Democrat bill. Rely on it: they will try to ram it all through…the Uniparty is still pretty strong and utterly hates us.

The strongest message I saw yesterday on Social Media – from accounts large and small – was to keep hammering back on it with “why can’t you just pass a hurricane relief bill?”. This, of course, was deadly for the Uniparty. Their argument was that we had to go along with the Dems because they control the Senate…our argument (and its unanswerable) is why don’t they have to go along with us as we control the House? The secondary argument (also effective) was to say, “put action off until the 6th for Trump’s signature on the 20th”. We all do feel for the hurricane victims but our bet is that most of them would back us on this…sometimes you do have to do the patriotic thing even if it hurts. To wrap it all up in a pretty bow, we also pointed out that whatever fallout there is will occur while Biden is President…not Trump. This isn’t even our mess – its the Democrats’ mess. Let them clean it up. Or not. We don’t care. By the time votes are cast again, the budget crunch of December 2024 will be ancient history…if there’s a time for such a fight, it is now.

The fact that there was a genuine pushback and that it was at least partially successful shows that the Trump victory is for real…it wasn’t just a vote against Biden, it was a vote against the Establishment…and the GOP part of that Establishment as much as any other part. People don’t want business as usual. If the Left had a lick of sense – or wasn’t motivated purely by hatred – they’d realize that now was the time to try to get things like universal health care or at least something like it. We don’t like the health care system. We don’t like Big Pharma. We’re also open to ideas, knowing that nothing is going to be perfect. They could bring their proposals to us and get a hearing…buuuut being hate filled and stupid, they are turning the CEO murderer into their sick and twisted version of a hero. Not really sure what we’re going to have to do with the overall Left…they are so amazingly ignorant and filled with hate that its going to be a problem just dealing with them. Of course, if we really do get the promised reforms, the Left will see a drastic reduction of taxpayer funded Leftist storm troopers and that will lower the overall temperature over time.

Like a lot of people, I’m feeling very positive about the future – understanding that the mess the Biden people made is real and will take some time to clean up (do note that they’ll stop putting out bogus economic data – no longer need to protect a Democrat so we’ll shortly be getting true inflation and unemployment data). But I feel like for the first time in a long time – maybe since Reagan – that we’re going to have policies designed to help America…and that gives me hope.

The New GOP

Mark Noonan18 Comments

So, Trump appointed Lori Chavez-DeRemer Secretary of Labor…and much heartache ensued.

This is mostly because she was one of the few House Republicans to sign off on the PRO Act – a union-favorable bit of legislation which has been proposed and shot down in Congress by various means. It polls very well – though probably with the poll questions couched in a way to make it as favorable as possible. The biggest sticking points on the Right are that it essentially voids “right to work” laws and allows independent contractors (the “gig economy” – Uber drivers and such) to organize and strike even though they aren’t technically employees of the company they work for. The first point is the very biggest sticking point – we on the Right fought for years to make it so that unions can’t force people to be union members and pay dues…the PRO Act would essentially undo that and allow the unions to siphon off money even from people who don’t want union representation. So, Chavez-DeRemer is, in my view, wrong on this issue.

Why did Trump appoint her?

Very simple: he knows that the future of of the GOP is tied to working class voters – this is life or death for us. We either retain working class votes (and expand our support among various minority working class demographics) or we’re cooked. This pick is a tip of Trump’s hat to workers…and allows us to talk to the workers over the heads of the labor union bosses. This is worth having someone economically Left in the cabinet. And, in fact, points up the need for us to start to rethink how we do things.

Let us first be clear that we are not anti-union. There is nothing wrong at all with workers combining together to obtain the best deal possible from their employer. But let us also state firmly that public-sector unions are an abomination – any such thing is essentially a conspiracy to defraud the taxpayers as a public-sector union’s goal is to take more money from the taxpayers regardless of performance. That said, it is time for the GOP to become a union shop, as it were. When there is a dispute between workers and a large corporate entity, our sympathies must lie with the workers.

This doesn’t mean we go socialist or do something stupid like that – but we must be seen as the party that will listen to the worker’s concerns and see if a deal can be worked that avoids a strike and keeps a company profitable. We all know that the economy is forever changing and that business must continually adapt to changed conditions to remain profitable…and that profits aren’t bad; they are the only reason anyone engages in business to begin with. But when we have a situation where, say, a company is trying to import workers or export the factory…we should be dropping like a hammer on that corporation and taking the side of the workers. It doesn’t matter if ACME can make the hammer cheaper with slave labor in China…ACME will just have to make that hammer in the USA paying American-scale wages to American workers. Sure, the workers will also have to understand the thin profit margins on each hammer and adjust their pay expectations to that – as well as their productivity requirements. But this is all just the fair give and take that is supposed to happen in an economy built for a sane nation. Nobody is going to get everything they want – but reasonable people will get everything they need.

The main thing here is that the old GOP is dead. It actually died when we got our Trifecta after the 2004 elections and we couldn’t even defund NPR. It would have been nothing to do it – not that much money, we had the majorities…just do it. Nothing. That is when we started to learn that the old GOP had been running a con on us for decades and their only goal was to keep corporate taxes low and defense industry profits high. Now we sit on the cusp of Trump II and it is high time everyone got on board – the old ways didn’t cut it. We lost. Now we have to try something new…and when you try something new, it is going to be difficult and often uncomfortable. Perhaps this or that pick or policy by Trump will fail…doesn’t matter. We have to try things. In the trying will be the education which will get us to our goal…an America where the Constitution is again law (and much more strengthened) and we’re free and prosperous. This will take a long time. There will be failures on the path…but we’re on this path and we have to stay on it, or we’re doomed.

Waking Up From Woke

Mark Noonan25 Comments

So, I’m suspended on X for a week – kinda surprising as I’m a verified account but my assumption is that I got mass reported by the Left. It still mostly works via automated systems, after all! Anyways, I’ve appealed the suspension and we’ll see how that goes.

But, still a great overall site – and one of the things I saw recently was people talking about what made them wake up from Woke. We already know that quite a lot of prominent people who used to gravitate Left are now supporting Trump – but aside from the bigs like Musk and RFK, plenty of small fry are also discussing this. What it is all coming down to, from what I’ve seen, is people hitting that tipping point where the lies about Trump become so absurd that they can’t be ignored. This point is going to vary from person to person, of course; and most people on the Left will swallowing anything and will never hit that point…but the more intelligent do, and I think they all will over the next couple years if they haven’t already.

And it isn’t just lies about Trump – though that is most prominent – but the lies in general. Another big who went from Left to sane is J K Rowling of Harry Potter fame. Make no mistake about it, she’s still Left – and still doesn’t fully see that it was the early parts of the Left program which led to where we are today – but she just couldn’t stand the lies about men in women’s spaces. It is so obviously false to have men in women’s sports and private spaces that she rejected it and now gets massive Left pushback…which she laughs off as she sleeps peacefully on her pile of money. But she, like other bigs, has it easy on that score: having that much money does make you pretty much immune. The smaller people have to have real courage to come out as sane – and all glory to them, even if they do retain many Left positions.

As I’ve yammered on about endlessly, it is the lies that are the problem. We could have full on socialism and it wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t built on a fabric of lies (yes, I know; you can only have socialism via lies but supposing there was some perfect world where you didn’t have to lie to be Socialist). Everything is endurable, no matter how tyrannical and even cruel, if the truth is still demanded. It might be harsh to be shot for opposing the dictator…but it is much worse to be socially and financially ruined by liars who are themselves immune from such ruination. You can obey the dictator and live…but under Woke Rule, you can only live peacefully if you agree to lie. I don’t mind people thinking I’m wrong…I can’t stand people lying about what I believe.

I do believe this is going to become an increasing trend – 18-29 year old males went heavily for Trump on 11/5. That is, the people most lied about and most often compelled to lie just to live went for their way out. But so is everyone – I believe the only demographic that didn’t swing to Trump is unmarried, upper class urban and suburban women with college degrees…in other words, only the most relentlessly propagandized people still haven’t shifted. But even they will – there is just so long you can keep the “refugees welcome” sign out as you barricade your door against South American gangsters roaming your neighborhoods. We are waking from woke…sanity is returning…and with it, the chance to really reform our nation.

The Times They are A-Changing…

Mark Noonan23 Comments

Trump has commenced the shake up of the American system. I do expect all of his nominees to eventually be confirmed or at least given recess appointments – this is what the American people voted for. Most estimates indicate that not only will Trump win the popular vote, but will end up just at or slightly over a majority of all votes cast. The people spoke: change is coming. And it really needs to be embraced.

I know plenty of very smart, knowledgeable people on the Right who have varied objections to this or that Trump nominee. Gaetz, of course, has the most open opposition and I get it: that is, I understand the underlying reason for being dismayed. But hear me out on this: Gaetz, or someone very much like him, is precisely what is needed. To get the change we need requires a clear and clean break from the past. Those placed in charge of the departments must have zero loyalty to the current structure – the current leadership and the assumptions of that leadership.

It cannot be understated just how wrong we’ve gone – that what we have done, as a people, for many decades has been based upon mistaken or just plain false assumptions. To take one example: Russia. Step back for a moment and think about the situation in 1945: Russia controlled all of Eastern and Central Europe. An Europe that the Anglo-American alliance had proposed to free as a result of the Second World War. We could have done it. Russia was not all-powerful in 1945. The army they had along the Elbe was all they had, and it was weaker than the Anglo-American army right across that river. Russia did not have atomic weapons and had no means of striking effectively at either the UK or the USA. Russia, point blank, was at our mercy – and this before you consider that most of their industrial and agricultural production lay in ruins and the Red Army only deployed because of American trucks and American food. We simply could have ordered them to clear out – they would have had no choice but to obey or face a suicidal fight against us.

This was not done. There were various reasons we kept to the concept of alliance with Russia – some of it orchestrated by Russian agents in the US government – but the bottom line is that we still sought cooperation with Russia. Fine. It was a policy. Maybe a bad policy, but it was the policy. We basically consigned Central and Eastern Europe to Russian domination. And then we decided that this domination was bad and required us to go toe to toe with the Russians for decades. What on Earth for? To stop Communism? But we weren’t even stopping Communism in the United States. We let Communism conquer China. We left Communism in control of North Korea. We let Communism take over all of Southeast Asia. Cuba: still Communist! When you think back on it all it does seem a false show, doesn’t it? that the USSR eventually fell based on its own contradictions just makes what we did even stupider…but, we did it; and now here in 2024 we’re still supposed to stop the Russians (heirs of the Communist Russians) because…why? What are we defending in Ukraine? What are we defending in Europe? A British kid is about to spend years in jail because he attended an anti-immigrant protest…other Brits are being routinely visited by the cops for social media posts. Just what are we doing here?

We’re just keeping on based on the mistakes of the past, now enshrined as if they were holy relics never to be questioned.

We need to break from all that. To start afresh. What, really, is our desire? In both foreign and domestic policy? Perhaps we don’t really know? The only thing we do know is that everything that has happened has gone wrong – that welfare designed for a hand up has become a life style. That tolerance for the odd has devolved into drag queen story time. That welcoming the stranger has become the trial of Laken Riley’s murderers. That NATO morphed from defending the Fulda Gap into trying to eject the Russians from the Donbas. Its all a gigantic mess – and nobody who had a hand in making it or who has accepted this lunacy as normal can be in charge any longer. That we need people totally unconnected to it.

I often use Jacky Fisher as the exemplar for change – though a career Naval officer he was never part of the system of the Royal Navy. He lived in it, he loved it – and he knew it was completely useless for its intended task (maintaining naval supremacy), so when he got in charge of the beast he proceeded to change everything, holding loyalty to no persons or assumptions of the past because those persons and assumptions had all gone wrong. He built an entirely new Royal Navy – a much better Navy and one which saw Britain through the titanic struggles of two world wars. And do keep in mind that he was hated. With a white hot passion. Most of the senior admirals of the Navy despised the man – he was lower class (maybe even mixed race!), he was no gentleman, he was screwing with the stately progression of professional Naval careers and advancing other lunatics! You know: lunatics who thought that a warship should concentrate on combat effectiveness rather than spit and polish.

That is what Trump is trying to do here: insert people into office who are not at all loyal to what is and has been. I have called someone like Gaetz a hand grenade and there is that aspect to it…but he’s not just a grenade. He wasn’t chosen to be a bomb. Trump sees something else in him – maybe he’s wrong, but Gaetz wouldn’t have been picked just to say outrageous things…he was picked because he and Trump think that he can change the way things are done. In other words, that Gaetz has ideas for executive actions that will turn the Department of Justice around – to make it into something it currently is not. We know that nobody at Justice is remotely interested in the word…the whole system is designed to destroy identified enemies, increasingly those who are political enemies of the Democrat party. We want a Justice department that is dedicated to justice…we can’t get one with the current personnel under the current rules…we need someone who will go in, ruthlessly fire the worst actors, and simply insist that those remaining and brought in dedicate their lives to justice. Maybe Gaetz will fail, but that is why he was appointed…so, too, all the rest.

It is going to be a wild and bumpy ride! The hatred and fear of the current Ruling Class will cause them to try every expedient to thwart change. This will not be easy. We will lose a few rounds. But if we stand behind Trump and his team, they will have the underlying political mandate to continue. This doesn’t mean blank acceptance of everything Trump and Co do, but it does mean that anyone with an ounce of patriotism will be wary of contradicting Trump and only stand athwart on the most crucial of issues. That has to be our test, as a people: our willingness to ratify our own votes. We gave Trump a majority – we must sustain him in carrying out what we elected him to do. If we don’t, if we let the Ruling Class scare us off, then what we did 11/5 was meaningless.

America, 2.0

Mark Noonan55 Comments

First off, it wasn’t even close.

I did a search of my X account and found a post I did 9/18/2024 where I figured that Trump was going to win 312 Electoral Votes with a 50/50 shot at a popular vote win. Keep in mind that I didn’t know. It was a guess – a rather sophisticated guess but I was talking about the future. But ever bit of factual data I could see on September 18th suggested a significant Trump win.

I did a bit of another search and on X as early as 8/22/2022 I was suggesting that Pennsylvania was the next Florida – that is, the next Purple State to go Red. Why did I think that? Because really since 2016, all voter registration trends in Pennsylvania favored the GOP. You can’t ignore crucial data like that – not if you want to understand American politics. The major political parties invest huge amounts of time and money registering voters and they don’t do it for fun: power and money are at stake at the end of the process. It is a crucial aspect of political power in the United States…and the Party that is gaining voters is the Party getting ready to win…if not now, then soon. Pennsylvania is still not Red…but if the GOP keeps up the effort, then by 2032 it will be – that is, a State where Democrats will find it increasingly difficult to win anything, let alone the State’s Electoral Votes.

I’m not some super genius. I know that lots of political pundits like to make it seem like they are possessed of esoteric knowledge, but it is really no more than checking a Secretary of State website. It is right there for anyone to see…and you really don’t even have to do your work here because there are data nerds all over the place – Left and Right – who handily collect the data and provide it in easily read graphs. What I saw in September – and in 2022 – was something anyone could see. And yet all through this election cycle, almost the entirety of the MSM and the pundit class was telling you the Democrats had the advantage. They were just lying. Nothing more. They were serving the Democrat Narrative.

Which turned out to be a pretty bad idea. As was once famously said: C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute. It is worse than a crime: it is an error.

You know how many times I have said that they lie, they lie all the time, they lie about everything, they lie when the truth would work better? Well, this was definitely one of those cases where the truth would have served them better – had they simply told the truth, that Trump was doing well right out the gate, they might have ditched Biden earlier, or found a better replacement, or run a very different campaign. But, the thing about liars is they’re rather stupid – they mostly only get away with it as long as nobody calls them out on it. Trump called them out.

What will the new Trump term look like? No idea, really. MAGA covers a lot of ground. My biggest concerns are reigning in the Deep State – especially America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Firing lots of people. Hiring patriots. Making strict laws and rules about how such agencies must have as their first duty obedience to law and protection of the rights of the American people. It really is better that a hundred guilty men escape than one innocent be jailed. Right now, any American coming up against federal law enforcement is essentially guilty unless the federal government decides to let them go. That has to change. Those who enforce the law must be most committed to restricting their own activities and only acting against an American citizen when they have iron-clad proof of law breaking.

Everyone else will likely have different primary concerns but to me the first goal is to make certain that if we lose in 2028 or later, the federal government will simply lack the capacity to oppress me.

This is, no matter how you slice it, just the first of very many steps. A very long process. It took a century for the American Left to destroy Law and make the Constitution a dead letter. It will take us a while to restore it all – and restore it in the face of an American population which doesn’t fully understand the reason for certain Constitutional requirements. But they do understand basic justice – and that is the pivot we can use to advance our reforms.

I feel proud to be an American today. My people proved they are still free – not serfs in waiting. We can save our nation.