constitutional issues

Our Government is Bad. Like Really, Really Bad

Mark Noonan62 Comments

So I guess the FBI employs 13,000 agents – which seems like a heck of a lot – and 5,000 of them were employed going after J6 people. Little back of the envelope math and that means 38% of the FBI was concentrating on that.

In 2022 (the last year complete stats are available) 73,654 Americans died of fentanyl overdose.

You’d think the FBI would have concentrated on that problem.

Even if J6 had been an actual insurrection that caused the death of cops, you’d still think that 73,000 people dying from a drug overdose would draw a little more attention than J6. You know, given that if J6 was an insurrection then not only did it fail, it didn’t even appreciably slow things down.

Why did the FBI do this?

  1. It is easy. Fighting the drug cartels takes a lot of very hard work, often in very bad locations, at great personal risk. Going after J6ers involved finding a law-abiding patriot who was somewhere in proximity to the Capitol and then dragging his/her unresisting a** through the judicial wringer.
  2. It is what the political bosses wanted. The pay and promotions were going to be handed out based on who did the most to nail the J6ers.
  3. Regardless of how things came out long term, the FBI agents were sure that the GOP would never do anything to them and would keep referring to them as “our brave and dedicated FBI”.

Guessed wrong on that last one, guys! But more importantly, what this reveals is the utter rottenness of the FBI – and, indeed, all agencies of government. Even if one wants to put the worst possible reading on J6, hardly anyone involved committed an act of actual violence. Most of the people brought to court had just been in the area or had peacefully entered the Capitol for a few minutes (this also tells us that the actually violent were probably agents – even if free-lance – of the FBI). No decent, moral human being would do more than pass out fines to these people…maybe in one or two more egregious cases give them six months in jail. What the FBI did to the J6ers was simply horrific – they did this to Americans. To us. It was nightmare stuff out of some dystopian novel where the Nazis won WWII.

The other day I watched a documentary called American Nightmare. It is one of those true crime docuseries and when I turned it on, I had never even heard of the case – though as it went on, it was clear that it caused at least a bit of a media sensation when it was happening (I haven’t watched much TV news over the past many years – though, full disclosure, since Trump was elected I have watched more than usual to get my gloating in). The basics of the story is that a lunatic broke into a home in the middle of the night, tied up the guy after drugging him and then kidnapped the girl. When the guy woke up from the drugs – and sat in fear doing nothing for a while because the kidnapper had threatened him if he went to the police – he called the cops who then immediately suspected him of murdering his girlfriend. It got worse when the girl was let go (after being held for two days and raped twice); the cops then decided this was all some scam worked up by the girl based on a recent movie plot. The cops were getting ready to charge the couple with felonies over making a “false” police report when, lo and behold, a totally unrelated cop – just doing her job, no special intelligence or ability needed – found the clues that indicated the story was real…and then they got the guy.

Who had also done this sort of thing before. But nobody believed the accusers. Now, to be fair, the MO of the perp was absolutely bizarre. If someone came up to me and told me that story, I’d be doubting it heavily. But the cop’s job is to check things out. You know: investigate. Had the cops done some investigating they would have found sufficient in the earlier cases to nab the guy before the poor girl featured in the story had been kidnapped and raped. But, that’s hard, you see? Much easier to just aggressively interrogate the victim(s) and hope you can catch them in a lie that you can prosecute.

The bad guy was caught almost by accident. A good cop just doing her job put two and two together. But there were probably scores of cops involved over a period of years when the creep was operating who never did put two and two together. And I’m not saying they just missed something – they didn’t look. And in questioning the victims, the cops routinely lied to them. About what they were after as a police force. When the victims were given their police files after it was all over, it was clear that the cops never did anything but first try to nail the guy for murder, then tried to nail the girl for false report when she turned up alive. After I finished watching, I turned to the Mrs and said, “are criminals only caught because they’re dumber than cops?”

Guys, I think it is really bad: that we’re living entirely on luck right now. Or had been until 1/20, at least. I wouldn’t trust an employee of any government agency with a burned out match right now. When not overtly corrupt, they’re lazy and stupid. Maybe one in a hundred is actually trying to do a useful job in the day to day. Now we better understand why US Naval warships are rusted, why planes on routine flight paths crash, why a train wreck with chemical spills is just left to sort itself out, why fire hydrants in LA don’t have water…the people running the show haven’t a clue what to do. Right now the Left is filled with whines about the uncertain economic futures of the people on the DOGE chopping block and I’m like, “what would you say you do around here?”

In response to us playing The Bobs here, multiple FBI agents have filed suit against President Trump…claiming it is a violation of their rights if he gets a list of FBI agents who worked on J6. The Democrats will find some federal judge to issue an injunction. I hope Trump just ignores it – of course the President – who is the chief law enforcement officer of the USA – gets to know what the cops were working on. It is all so very stupid – but, hey, its what they’re going with.

I had estimated some years back that about 1 in 3 federal dollars was wasted – just uselessly spent when not outright stolen. I massively underestimated it. And now we get to find out just what its all been wasted on…and how many people have had their rights violated by the thieves.

I really hope the security people for Trump, Vance, Rubio..heck, all of them…is tip top. The Blob will not go down easy.

We Have One President

Mark Noonan13 Comments

As JD Vance posted on X today:

Career bureaucrats don’t get to violate lawful orders from the President of the United States. They answer to the president, and he answers to the people.

Really not that complicated.

And as I said some long while ago: we elect one person to be President. Per the Constitution:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Not vested in a committee. Not vested in government employees. Not vested in some bizarre coalition of media types, bureaucrats, former Democrat Presidents and RINOs: a President has all executive power. If there’s something the federal government is allowed to actually do, it is the President who does it. This is actually a bit different from every other nation on Earth – because we’re a bunch of American weirdos as far as form of government goes. Personally, I like it – but it is a strange hybrid of Monarchy, Republic and Democracy. If run properly, it works like a charm. All Trump is doing is moving us back to a Constitutional form of government.

And that has the overall establishment (more and more are calling it The Blob – and that’s a good description) in a panic. As I’ve also been saying: there’s trillions of dollars of annual spending at stake here. Huge numbers of people – foreign and American, private and public sectors – simply live off The Blob. They have no other life skill than extracting taxpayer money from it. They don’t do anything. They don’t know how to do anything. Their whole career path (and lots of them have advanced degrees!) is get in and then just rising up the path ever higher in the government/corporate/NGO system. Never having once been held accountable but each year getting more income and benefits. Trump is a threat to that – and it does involved millions of people. Over on Bluesky the Left is apoplectic – and there are subtle calls for violence. If I dug deeper I’d probably find open calls – but looking at Leftist chatter is something you can only do in short bursts.

Of course, I do expect The Blob to react – and I honestly hope that Trump’s security team is absolutely first rate. Vance’s too. Heck, even Rubio’s. Remember, many Leftists are certifiable and just as in the two attempts in 2024, there are plenty of people who will believe that shutting down USAID is the End of Our Democracy and will act accordingly.

UPDATE: Just want to point out something as we really start to get some whines from The Blob about how hard this all is. Peter the Great in his great, reforming drive in Russia relied mostly on a few close aides and some foreign employees because he simply didn’t – or couldn’t – trust a lot of run-of-the-mill Russians to carry out the reforms (they were by and large not liked by the Russian people who preferred to stick with their old ways). This did make sure a lot of Peter’s orders were carried out with dispatch but he got the “cat’s away/mice will play” problem. In other words: if Peter wasn’t directly watching, these people would steal everything that wasn’t nailed down. Eventually it was found out and Peter, being what he was, had the miscreants knouted – this was whipping with a pretty horrific rawhide device.

On the day of the punishment he had it all done in the public square with him and other prominent people in attendance along with a great mass of Russian people. There was no specific number of lashes ordered – they were to be beaten until Peter said to stop. They went at it. Probably quite the horrific spectacle but it was getting Peter’s point across. Why bring this up?

Because when the thieves were a few strokes away from death, Peter ordered a halt. The men with the whips then shouted up to Peter:

“Please, little father, let us beat them a little more: they stole the bread out of our mouths!”

Peter, though, ordered it stopped. Here’s the thing – everyone who works for a non-profit who is making more than the average American income is stealing money out of the mouths of the poor. That they are doing it legally just makes it worse. A non-profit is a charity. Its why we don’t tax it. A charity isn’t a place to have a career – its a place to dispense aid to the poor.

The people losing their place at the troughs should count themselves lucky we’re not whipping them for what they’ve done.

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.

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.

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.

Do You Want to Die?

Mark Noonan38 Comments

Couple things came across on X today that got me thinking a little more deeply about our current condition.

The first was a news report about the President of the International Olympic Committee claiming, to quote, there is “no scientifically solid system” to determine male or female.

Next thing was a report out of the UK where the government is going full-Gestapo against British people who dared to be upset about foreign savages stabbing British girls.

Final thing was, in response to that, someone posting a link to the Sex Pistols song, God Save the Queen. You remember it, don’t you? I do; and this bit:

God save the Queen
She ain’t no human being
There is no future
In England’s dreaming

These three things rolled around in my head a for a bit and it occurred to me, very counter-intuitively, that because the Brits tolerated that lyric, they are now being arrested for posting memes about foreign savages.

It might seem wrong to think that because, of course, the UK government is savagely repressing free speech whereas the Sex Pistols were a sort of test case for free speech. The sort of thing we were told we must allow to happen or we’d all end up arrested. Well, the Brits did let it happen – and now they’re being arrested. Funny, isn’t it?

There’s no future in England’s dreaming. They did get that right, but not how they meant. What they meant was that there was no future in England’s dream of a solidly middle class society of strictly law-abiding people who did the right thing cheerfully. Punk rock was at war with that. So was the rest of British pop culture – and, indeed, pop culture all through the West; taking endless shots at the staid, boring old fuddy-duddies who just wouldn’t let people have fun. We’ve got to fight for our right to par-taaaaay!

But, of course, nobody was ever against having fun – but the fuddy-duddies did object to thinking that being garbage was fun…being drunk. Being stoned. Being on welfare. Dressing like a weirdo. This wasn’t fun; this was just being insulting. And living off the productive while doing it. So the fuddy-duddies objected and got made even more fun of…and so they just let it happen because, being fuddy-duddies, they didn’t want to seem rude. Problem was that there was a social system which was based upon sobriety, hard work, thrift, being law-abiding…and it was so very successful that it built a surplus that lazy, profligate drunken thieves could take advantage of. That old fuddy-duddy society is now long gone…and now your daughter can be murdered by a foreign savage and if you object you’ll get a visit from the police.

And that brought my mind back to the IOC President – what he said is a lie. He knows it is a lie. Everyone who heard it knew it was a lie. He knew that everyone who heard it knows that he knows it is a lie. Yet, he said it; he went ahead and lied. And he still has his job. The particular lie here isn’t really the point – the point is that our society has become so entirely suffused with lies that we don’t really even notice them. A lot of people commented on the article – but only very rarely did anyone call it a lie. They called it stupid. They called it ignorant. They called it all sorts of things but only a few (me, included, of course) called it what it is: a lie.

You have to really roll that around in your head for a moment, what the IOC guy said: he is denying not some controversial theory of the universe but a self-evident truth. I don’t need to prove to anyone what a man is. I don’t need a DNA test. I need to merely see the person – naked if necessary just in case there’s been some surgery, etc – and that will tell me what I need to know. I no more need to prove a person is man or woman than I need to prove to anyone that water is wet by pouring a bucket of it over their head. We know water is wet. We know what a man is. We know what a woman is. There’s no guesswork here. And that makes the IOC President a liar – quite an egregious and ridiculous liar. The only possible out for him would be a determination that he is stark, raving mad. Because only a madman can possibly not know the difference between a man and a woman. Anyone else making such a claim is just a liar.

It is said that C. S. Lewis was greatly influenced by G. K. Chesterton and I do believe this is true – if for nothing else than that both of them hit upon the requirement that if you’ve gone wrong, you have to go back to the mistake – no matter how far back that is – and fix it from there. It is no use trying to tinker with the mistake. You can’t fix wrong – you can only stop being wrong. And as I pondered all of this, it came into my mind that the error – where we went wrong – was when we accepted the assertion that we must tolerate wrong if we want to be right.

You know the argument: its generally associated with the Libertarian ideal these days but its been around for a long time. Let’s just say it started with Voltaire in the 18th century – “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it”. This, of course, was in stark opposition to the societal expectation of his day – in both Catholic and Protestant countries – that there are some things you just couldn’t say. Mostly related to blasphemy against God. To be sure, some nations took it hard in the direction of not saying anything against the King, or the government, or the higher orders in general and that was wrong. But because Louis XV would unjustly send a man to the Bastille for speaking out of turn about Madame du Pompadour it doesn’t necessarily follow that we must allow everything to be said as if nothing matters.

It is a good theory, I’ll grant it that – it does seem that if I in any way curtail someone’s ability to say a thing then it might come out that I, in my turn, am curtailed. But what if what the other person is saying is just a lie? What if its an insane lie? What if its an assertion that we can’t tell man from woman? To be sure, we didn’t immediately jump from Rousseau’s absurdities to “hey, I can’t tell what a man is”, but it is a rather straight line. There is another quote from Voltaire which is pertinent here: “those who can make you believe absurdities will get you to commit atrocities”. Yeah. No kidding, Volty ol’ buddy. We went from the absurdity of the proposition that humanity once lived in a “state of nature” to “you can be born in the wrong body” in just 250 years. Blink of an eye. So maybe defending to the death everyone’s right to say whatever they damned well pleased wasn’t such a good idea?

What we’ve done is place lies on the same platform as truth and said, “you’re equal, have at it”. But lies, being lies, cheated and has now kicked truth to the curb and is running wild. Here’s my assertion on this: nobody actually believes a lie. Even the people who get conned out of money by the more conventional kind of liar – you know: “hey, I can get you 25% returns forever, just give me your money”. Nobody believes that – the “suckers” are just hoping they get paid before the pyramid scheme blows up. Everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a free lunch and that what is too good to be true is always false. A six year old can believe a lie. A senile person can believe a lie. No person in possession of their senses does.

But people do go along with the lies – for a variety of reasons and none of them matter. What matters is that they are participating in them even if just by silent consent. And they participate because they are expecting a payoff before it all goes to hell. Even if that payoff is just what they think will be a little bit of peace and quiet. And after now a couple centuries of allowing lies to pervade we are now in a situation where things are starting to crack – and I mean the basics of civilization. You see it: most obviously in the public brawls and looting of stores. But it is also in a bridge that can’t be repaired for years, or a space capsule that can’t land because, apparently, someone forget to make sure it could land…or maybe they didn’t even know what’s required for landing a space capsule? But they launched the thing! They did that – clearly didn’t know if it would work, but they launched it. Far more important than the space ship was that the lies were agreed to…and I’m sure the workforce that failed to replicate 1969 tech is filled with diverse and equitable people…when we need some geek with a slide rule to just do the math.

So, as Chesterton and Lewis pointed out, to fix this we have to go back to the beginning and start all over again. Our mistake was to allow lies. We must not allow lies any more. First off, we have to punish those who are lying. This is crucial: they must feel real pain. Not so much to punish them (though there is that) but to instruct everyone else that lying is bad. Really bad. Like so bad you should never, ever do it. Not even a little bit. Secondly, and far more importantly, we have to ban lying. We can’t let people lie and call it free speech. Just can’t. I know: tricky. This won’t be easy – but if we allow lies to flourish then we’ll just get more lies. Liars like to lie – beats working for a living. Until it is legally and socially impossible to lie and be rich, we’ll just continue to be overwhelmed…and our civilization will die. First in a round of cruel oppression as the liars try to kill everyone who won’t go along, secondly as everything falls apart because liars can’t do things like keep roads and sewer systems working. And do keep in mind that I said the liars will kill us – in fact, they already are: those girls stabbed in Britain were stabbed by liars. Sure, maybe a foreign savage held the knife, but it was a polished, urbane bureaucrat who invited the savage in via lies. Bottom line is that one way or another a lot of people are going to lose everything – liberty, property and life. Your choice: liars, or you.

The Declaration Test

Mark Noonan24 Comments

On July 4th, 1776 we said, among other things, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. In fact, we asserts this as a self evident truth. You know: like the sun in the sky. I don’t have to prove this is correct, it is what it is. If you reject it, you are a liar or insane, just as you would be if you said at noon at the sun wasn’t up in the sky. To be sure, people can dispute this dogma and the United States is the only nation in the world – and likely will always be the only nation in the world – to assert such a thing in its founding document. But being an American requires subscription to certain dogmas, much as being a Catholic or Evangelical, Muslim or Jew requires subscription to certain assertions. The only way America works is if, by and large, everyone accepts certain things as a given – in America’s case, the Declaration of Independence is bare minimum…if you don’t believe what’s in it, why in heck are you here?

I believe that the problems of America today – as a society – stem from the atrophy of belief in American dogma. That is, we have increasingly ignored the Declaration and gone about doing things which directly contravene what the Founders fought for. This is not some novel idea: all nations and religions eventually have the same problem: a collapse of belief. Some nations and religions recover, others don’t – but they only recover by harking back to first principles and rigidly enforcing them. This is what we must do to save America: we must make belief in America near-universal among Americans. All things we decide to do must pass what I call the Declaration Test: is the proposal in conformity with the Declaration of Independence? If it is, then let us do it. If it is not, then it is abhorrent and must be rejected.

Think about this for a moment: right now, China runs various psy-ops on us while also bribing our institutions to work against American interests. This is part of China’s asymmetric warfare model against us. China reviewed her options in the mid 1990’s after the Gulf War showed American military superiority and decided that any sort of direct military confrontation with the USA would be a high risk operation. At least, that is, until America was massively weakened. Using the lever of “free trade”, China entered the USA and set about the program of undermining us from within while continuing to build up traditional military and industrial might for themselves…so that if a war came, it would be the USA in the morally and physically weak category. And even if war didn’t come, then the erosion of American confidence would leave China the dominant power in east Asia, Africa and South America. There were many arguments made in the 1990’s about why we needed to engage in the China trade – we’d make money! We’ get a strategic partner! Wealth would moderate China’s political system! This was all drivel, as we can see in the results but what was wrong from the beginning is that the USA, as an institution, could not legitimately engage with China. Why? Because China’s government does not have the consent of the governed. The PRC is a standing insult the the ideals of our Founders. It is a rejection of American dogma from start to finish.

It must be understood that under American beliefs, the government of China has not the just authority to do anything. Sure, they have the physical power to do things, but that isn’t the same as having the just power. Never in Chinese history has there been a Chinese government which had the consent of the governed (with a Taiwan exception, of course). If we as Americans enter into agreements with China, who are we agreeing with? A treaty binding on America is a treaty negotiated by the elected President and then ratified by the elected Senate – with any further legislation needed to enforce the treaty created by Congress and signed by the President. In other words, on our side, a binding treaty is something done with the consent of the American people via the mechanisms those people have devised to determine popular consent. China’s government is a corrupt oligarchy which shot its way into power in 1949 and never let go. If we make a deal with China then it means we’ve just made a deal with what amounts to a Mafia. Deals with the mafia are never a good thing – sure, mobsters are noted for keeping their word at times, but you’re still dealing with mobsters. You know: liars and thieves who will twist the deal to suit themselves.

Think about how it would be if we had never dealt with China – certainly never dealt with China since 1949. China, herself, would still be an economic backwater and a distinctly third rate military power. We wouldn’t have Chinese money corrupting our politics and society. Our position in the western Pacific wold remain supreme…we wouldn’t have Taiwan, South Korea and Japan furiously building up their military forces, almost certain to eventually encompass carrier battle groups and nuclear weapons. If we had merely obeyed the dogmas of the USA – if we had put China to the Declaration Test, the USA and the whole world would be better off.

So, too, with one thing after another, in both foreign and domestic affairs. All of our problems stem from a rejection of the wisdom of the Declaration and the embrace of ideas contrary to it. Deep State? Where and when did the American people in Congress assembled really consent to domestic spying? When was it announced before hand that the government would collect masses of data on us and then, after reviewing that data without a warrant, launch criminal investigations of us? The Russians are kicking us out of our base in Niger…when was consent obtained from the American people for us to have a base in Niger? I’m pretty up on things…I don’t recall that debate and decision. When did we consent to sending billions of dollars to NGO’s to transport millions of illegals to the US border? Oh, sure, it was in a law enacted somewhere…but I don’t remember us having a debate about it like, say, we had an open and lengthy public debate about building the Panama Canal. All the time now our government and institutions are trying to slip things in on us – the whole trans thing came out of nowhere with no popular demand and no public debate. It was just decided one day that people can change gender and everyone just had to conform to that. On and on and on like that. Keep in mind, I’ve made no judgement on the merits of the issues I’ve listed – my complaint isn’t that we have a base in Niger or that a guy in a dress wants to be called “ma’am”. My complaint is that we did not obtain the consent of the governed on either issue. Do whatever you want – as long as there’s a debate and decision. As long as consent is obtained.

The Declaration Test must become our go-to thing. Anything that anyone wants – or any thing we discover going on – must be referred to that document and a determination must be made as to whether or not it conforms to it. This is not a Right/Left debate – it is an American/Un-American debate. If we are to be Americans – if we want to be Americans – then we’d better start being Americans.

An Atomic Lie

Mark Noonan22 Comments

Got into a very long debate on X about the morality of the use of the Atomic Bomb. It is seriously gotta be the biggest engagement post I’ve ever had there: as of this moment, 56,600 views, 358 reposts, 3,100 likes and 474 comments. In strict X parlance, I have been “ratioed”. This means you have more comments than reposts and usually means you’ve said something ridiculous. Not in this case. If you clicked on it, you’ll see that my post was a picture of my Dad as a young Marine, the notation that he was waiting on Okinawa to invade Kyushu in November of 1945 and finishes up with a small, editorial comment about those who say that A Bomb was bad.

Some of the comments are bad faith but most, in my view, simply betray ignorance. Some times well meaning ignorance, but ignorance nonetheless. And that actually has me a little worried. If you go through the comments you’ll see that several times I pointed out the four options available to Truman in July, 1945. They are, sometimes very briefly stated:

  1. Blanche at the cost of finishing off Japan either by nukes or invasion and agree to negotiate a peace which would force Japan to surrender their Empire, but leaves in place the Japanese Ruling Class which waged the war…and that Ruling Class now convinced that their suicidal fight to the death got us to blink. That they are our moral superiors and just need better material for Round II. In other words, this end almost certainly means another war – and maybe a nuclear war as Japan did have a nuclear weapons program. So Pearl Harbor Two might have been Los Angeles and San Francisco getting nuked.
  2. Starve Japan to death. The Japanese were incapable of feeding their population from domestic food production. Like Britain, it was import, or starve. Japan had no means of obtaining resources of any sort as our command of the sea was absolute. We could have just stood off and let starvation kill Japanese until they quit. This would have been up to tens of millions…and they might not have quit. Once their population dropped to sustainable levels, they might have still refused.
  3. Invade Japan. This is a very well known option and all post-War analysis indicates this would have been a horrific affair with maybe a million American casualties and untold millions of Japanese deaths.
  4. Drop the Atomic Bombs and so instruct the Japanese that we could kill them with no loss to ourselves; that any future dying would only be Japanese and to no avail.

As I also pointed out at various points, commanders in war, civil and military, are besieged by a host of information arriving all at once from every point of the compass. Some of it is false. Some irrelevant. Some flat contradictory with other information arriving at the same time. Out of this morass of data, the commander must tease out the correct information or lose. This is not an easy task. It is not a neat and tidy exercise as it can sometimes appear in a history book. This is why when looking back, caution must be taken. We weren’t there. We weren’t under those particular stresses. We benefit from hindsight no matter how much we try to set that aside. In my view, Truman made not just the best of a bad situation, but the correct moral decision. The intention was not to massacre Japanese, it was to end the war by the swiftest means…to end the effusion of blood, Japanese as well, as quickly as possible. And it was done; in the end, no matter what else, it worked. And if you want to call it wrong, you simply must come up with an obvious, superior option which was known to the decision makers at the time. There simply wasn’t any beyond these four. None of them were perfect, all of them posed risks: Truman chose the best one.

Do keep in mind that the comments condemning Truman as a monster issued from both Left and Right. People are getting united in a shared insistence that there was simply no justification at all for dropping the Bomb. What this tells you is that the general propaganda line has worked. And, of course, we know that propaganda does work. But this is doubly disturbing this propaganda issued to condemn the Bomb originated in the Soviet Union to denigrate our effort in WWII – to make out that we were bad, and so excuse Soviet actions. This line was picked up by Nazi-apologists as a means of getting around the Holocaust. But now it has morphed into a general belief that America is morally tainted. When added to slavery, it is being used to make out that America is the bad guy in the world. That we’re the nation that has to be destroyed. And the Right is participating in this – going along with it. And from what I can tell, they are doing it mindlessly…just so they can have something they agree with the Left on. A “see, I hate that, too” moment.

When we combine this with the “anti-colonialist” attitude of the Left and the increasing number of people on the Right who are condemning Israel’s war in Gaza, we can see our problem: basically, our entire civilization is in the dock and it is being found guilty. That it is ignorant people making the ruling is neither here nor there: ignorant jurors get a say. And the USA is being found guilty.

This is worrying not just for the fate of our nation, but for the fate of anything resembling civilization. Islamists savages went on a rape/murder spree and that’s in the Memory Hole while college kids riot on campus in favor of the savages. We’re being told we have to save Democracy in Ukraine even though elections have been suspended there. The Free World we defend with NATO arrests people for misgendering. China buys whatever influence it wants – and our open border and drug addiction may very well be a Chinese op. But we’re not allowed to fight against it because we’re the bad guys…the people who held slaves and who cruelly and needlessly nuked Japanese children. You see?

We really have to win this November. Not for Trump. Heck, he’s not even the guy we remotely need right now. He’s just massively the superior of the alternative. But we, the Americans – those of us who are left – have to take control of our country. Or we simply won’t have one – it’ll be falsified out of existence. We must find the ways and means of getting the liars out of all power and influence and simply re-instructing an ignorant population on what America actually was, and can be again.

Just Some Thoughts on Government

Mark Noonan4 Comments

I’ve always been a Monarchist at heart. Ever since I was a kid and I read things like The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights and The Lord of the Rings, the concept of the Lord’s anointed has appealed to me as the most logical method of human government. Anyone who reads my books can easily tell that there is Monarchism deep at the heart of it all. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, Christ is King, right? Heaven isn’t a Democracy; and Heaven is hierarchical. It is said that there will be greatest and least in Heaven…of course, even the least in Heaven has it better than the greatest on Earth; and given that it is Heaven, there isn’t a matter of jealousy or ambition. The least will be pleased that the greatest in Heaven are the greatest. I can imagine myself – certainly not the greatest – living in one of the very small mansions in my Father’s house, and gladly serving the greatest. I honestly can see in my mind’s eye a heavenly abode for me; it is made of stone and set in a meadow. With eternity, imagine the stories I could eventually tell? My joy would be complete.

There have been many kings and queens, good and bad, in history. Descent does have a bit of the luck of the draw in it. But if you look at the royal lines over time, what you see is that for the most part, most monarchs were trying to do the right thing. Sometimes ably, sometimes less so. Only rarely was a real idiot or criminal raised to the throne. Democracy is far more apt to raise the unfit on the simple fact that anyone who aspires to power is predisposed to be an idiot or criminal. What fool, after all, would really want to be in charge? To seriously have the fate of a nation in your hands? The wise person flees from such a burden, if he can. A good example of this wisdom is a scene in the 1956 movie of War and Peace. Natasha (Audrey Hepburn) tells Pierre (Henry Fonda) that she would give him absolute power over Russia because his heart is pure…Pierre is asked what he’d do and his answer is, “I’d hesitate”. That is wisdom, as such.

To be sure, as I’ve said before, I am also the last democrat left on Earth. Maybe not exactly the last, but certainly there aren’t many like me. That is, people who really do trust the people. But one must keep in mind what “trust the people” means. It isn’t taking a public opinion poll of dependent people who have been relentlessly lied to by an overwhelming popular culture. It is simply accepting the decision of people who are free and as independent as society can make them. A mature man or woman who owes nobody making a decision: I ratify it, even if I think its wrong. I do think that voting is crucial, even in the most venerable of a Monarchy. The king does need to know the desires of the people; and the only way to really assess that is to ask them. But just as Monarchy is highly dependent upon the quality of the Monarch, so Democracy is highly dependent upon the quality of the People. Garbage in, garbage out is ineluctable.

We are, as we all know, in a complete mess right now. I saw a video clip of a young lady wrapped in a Palestine flag saying she was terrified that climate change would kill her. Just think of the amount of lies she had to be fed over years to get to such a pathetic state. And in our current system, she gets a vote. That is, she gets to cancel me out – not that I’m any great person, but I have at least some knowledge and so I’m not supporting the massacre of Jews nor am I afraid of the temperature rising a couple degrees over the next 100 years. The bottom line is that getting out of the current mess is going to be a problem as long as people like that poor girl get a say. She’s simply incapable of making a valid decision – even about her own life (though we will always remain wary of interfering in the personal choices of even the greatest fool). We must find a method to nullify the votes of fools – because if we don’t, then we’ll never be able to get at the liars who make the fools.

Because that is the crux of the matter: the lies. If we didn’t have quite so many liars, we wouldn’t have nearly so many problems. But the liars lie because lies work – and in a system where only voting matters, then the best liar is going to usually prevail. Only rarely will someone even partially moored to truth rise to the top in a Democratic system. Our riddle is how to preserve freedom while making sure fools serving liars can’t destroy freedom.