"Whenever I go into a restaurant, I order both a chicken and an egg to see which comes first"

Sunday, February 9, 2025

So, Sue Me! - Why The Left Will Never Understand The Mean Streets Behind Trump's Putsch

Washington has been in a tizzy since Elon Musk has been let loose and is cutting a swath through the bureaucracy.  The Left, locked in their own dark, commiserating closet, assumed that Trump would make good on his promise to reduce the size and influence of government; but never in a million years did they think it would happen like this - a putsch, a pogrom, Kristallnacht, SS storm troopers breaking into government agencies in the dead of night, rounding up bureaucrats like old Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.  They knew that Trump was capable of such genocide, but they never actually thought it would happen.

 

Bob Muzelle sat disconsolately on the steps by the fountain in Lafayette Park overlooking the White House - a serene, settled place from the outside; a place of considered governance, an icon of America - but now transformed into the headquarters of the Gestapo, the Wehrmacht, and the Nazi high command. 

Of course the White House had seen troubles in the past - Watergate, the plumbers, and 'I am not a crook' Richard Nixon - but nothing like this.  Nixon was a pussy compared to Donald Trump, a dangerous, reckless, soulless man out to destroy America and remake it into his own twisted, perverted image. 

'What's a mother to do? thought Bob.  The cloying, annoying advertising jingle of the 1960s kept popping into his head at the most inopportune times, but was telling him something - despair was part and parcel of the human condition, preparatory to action.  The pert, trim housewife sternly looking over her lovely family with pique - she had spent hours cooking - was the image which blocked Bob's view of the avenue, the lawn, and the North Portico of 1700.  He shook his head.  'We must organize!'. 

 

He thought back to his days on the Pettis Bridge with Martin and Ralph, the Freedom Rider bus trips to Selma, and the March on Washington - heady days of promise and optimism - but now only saw Armageddon.  He and his colleagues had pulled out every stop to defeat Donald Trump, marshalled every resource, challenged with skirmish and open field assault; and nothing had worked.  Not only that, he was now full of fiery vengeance, Siva The Destroyer, God before Sodom and Gomorrah. 

Of course anyone who had followed Donald Trump's career, especially the mean real estate streets of New York knew quite well what he was up to.  Intimidation, threat, and bullying were the stock and trade of the market.  No one gave an inch despite the billion dollar law suits, the legal and financial onslaughts, and the terrorizing barrage of affidavits and depositions; and even then gave it up millimeter by millimeter. 

Trump had been brought to trial by New York prosecutors who accused him of cooking the books, of inflating real estate value in an attempt to snooker potential buyers. 

Of course he added tens of thousands of dollars of value to his various Trump Towers, hotels, and commercial properties.  In the bareknuckle arena of New York real estate this was all par for the course.  Buyers and sellers would inflate, deflate, overrepresent, and underrepresent, challenging, threatening, and suing to beat the band.  No one, especially Donald Trump ever flinched.  In the unlikely event that any issue ever came to court his army of defense attorneys would either have the case dismissed or adjudicated with minimum damage to their client.  Legal fees and fines were part of the cost of doing business in New York. 

 

So when Elon Musk on Trump's order marched into the offices of USAID, turned over desks, emptied file cabinets, tossed computers onto the street, and escorted hundreds of shellshocked bureaucrats out the door, the President knew that the legality if not constitutionality of his actions would be challenged in court and that he might even lose; but in the barroom battle of politics, he would win. 

By the time legal challenges ever reached the courts, USAID would be an empty shell and its workers blown to the four winds.  His primary goal - reducing the size and influence of government - will have been attained, and the consequences of so doing, if any, were worth the minor risk. 

The whiners continued to howl.  'How could he? How dare he?' but there was no way on earth that they would be able to stop the panzer Anschluss.   

A group of Democrats assembled outside the doors of the Department of Education, next on the Trump-Musk agenda for shuttering.  One Congressional representative, as meanspirited and ugly as they come, yelled at the guard at the gate who was as implacable and immovable as a Queen's Beefeater Guard at Westminster. Her face a twisted, demonic caricature of some Satanic ghoul, she shouted and fumed to no avail.  She was the poster girl for the opposition.  All Sturm und Drang with no influence whatsoever.  

 

Bob, an old civil rights demonstrator had joined the Congresswoman and had been in the small crowd of protesters.  He felt the adrenaline rising as he did in days of old when he stood before Bull Connor and his ax-handle wielding thugs, but this was a desultory, ragged bunch of petty complainers who knew in their heart of hearts, standing there in the rain, they would make not one whit of difference to Donald Trump. 

What the Left saw as an anti-democratic attempt to uproot, toss, and dismiss the government of the United States, its laws, and its authority was nothing of the kind.  It was a classic 'So, sue me!' confrontation meant to overwhelm, cow, and force capitulation.  This time, Trump knew, the engagement would be a piece of cake.  He had been up against the toughest of the tough in New York in a no-holds-barred bloody brawl and he welcomed every bit of it.  

The political left, already discouraged, humiliated, and badly beaten in November, was barely able to stage a Punch and Judy show let alone take on the meanest man in Dodge. 

Bob, soaked through and disconsolate, made his way back to Scientists for Social Justice, the non-profit agency he founded and managed but soon to be as discarded and forgotten as quickly as USAID and the Department of Education in the sweep of Trump's structural reform.  On the street after so many good years, Bob mused; but this was not the way he had planned it.  No retirement parties, no speeches, and no applause; not even a recognition of the halcyon years, the years of righteous struggle, the good fight. 

Already everything in the office was in hock, for donations had become a trickle after the Trump victory.  Supporters knew that the new man at 1700 meant business, and along with DEI and windmills, the days of lonely hearts club commiseration were over. Not only was a Hitler in the White House, but Bob was out of work. 

'Don't worry, dear', said his wife of many years, herself a social justice warrior but a far more stable, realistic one than her husband, 'you've had a good run'; which of course were the very words he did not want to hear.  They were reserved for an old classmate who sailed through his 'development' career as smoothly and concern free as a ketch on a sunny lake.  He worked in the shitholes of Africa but dined like a king, bedded caramel-colored women, and retired content and guilt-free. 

Bob had been wedded to his work.  He believed in what he did despite the niggling doubts of relevance and worse, hanging out with dull, ugly women.  That was another thing.  Not only was Donald Trump trampling democracy, he was doing it with harem of beautiful blonde, blue-eyed trophy women.  

'Goddam him!', shouted Bob out the window to no one in particular.  'Goddamn him!'

Saturday, February 8, 2025

Donald Trump Channels The Robber Barons - Unbridled Ambition, Laissez-Faire, And Wealth Creation

The so-called Robber Barons of the early Twentieth Century -the great industrialists Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan- are icons of American history, responsible in large part for the creation of the great American industrial empire of steel, railroads, energy, and finance.  They had vision, ambition, will, intelligence, and a fearless sense of competition.  They brooked no comers, and worked to control and monopolize their economic investments and to expand them into other sectors of enterprise.  They were unstoppable, untouchable, and inviolate, and thanks to them America began its ascent to world power. 

Only a few times in history have such talent and remarkable creativity come together in a genius cluster.  The Founding Fathers were such cluster - how was it possible that Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Adams, and Monroe came together at the same time?  What series of antecedents, variables, historical influences, and pure luck facilitated such an assemblage?  What factors predisposed the emergence of such Nineteenth Century Russian literary geniuses - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, and others?

The Robber Barons fought hard against the demands of labor and any attempt by government to favor workers over owners.  Workers, while indispensable for the manual labor required to extract oil, build rail systems, and make steel, for industrialists were simply figures in an economic equation, pluses and minuses on a spread sheet manipulated to increase profit. 

This unfettered economic system was the engine of wealth creation.  The expansion of Vanderbilt's rail system provided thousands of jobs for the laborers who worked the line.  Carnegie's steelworks, vital for industry, employed thousands more.  The profits from their companies were invested in Morgan's banks and then invested in further economic activities. 

 

Given the nature of individual endeavor - a hardwired, ineluctable drive for survival, dominance, and control - and given the capitalist nature of the American economy, there are new titans - Gates, Bezos, Jobs, Brin, and Buffett - who have engineered the same economic revolution as their Robber Baron predecessors even while under the yoke of government surveillance and intervention. 

Economic innovation and transformation is not the result of some assemblage of workers and community organizer but the genius of the few, the unique, and the unusual.  The Robber Barons showed the way - that capitalist hunger, individual motivation, and absolute will are the sine qua non elements of economic progress.   

All of America was built this way.  What was more aggressively capitalist than the enterprise of big landowners in the South and West.  Such 'aggrandizement' led to the spread of economies of scale, mechanization, increased productivity and greater access to foodstuffs by the population.  

The West was won just as the East in the hands of Carnegie and Rockefeller was won - through will, determination and raw personal ambition.  Again, while land reforms and some measure of social support was welcomed, attempts to redefine capitalist enterprise to fit a more 'inclusive' model, is wrong-headed. 

 

Capitalists in any generation have ambition, confidence, will, vision, courage, and intelligence; and Carl Sandburg's poem Chicago said it best not only about the city he loved but about America:

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
            Bareheaded,
            Shoveling,
            Wrecking,
            Planning,
            Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
            Laughing! 

And so it is that Donald Trump will attempt to remake America - to return it to its earliest entrepreneurial roots, to rid society of neo-socialist progressivism and the ethos of wealth distribution. Through punitive regulation and taxation and uninhibited public spending, Joe Biden and his Congressional associates consolidated, expanded, and applied all the agencies of federal power to remake the country in their Utopian image.  

Heedless of the failure of Soviet-era communism and European socialism - both intended to create classless, economically equally societies - the former President pursued a policy that numbed individual enterprise, deflated personal ambition and innovation, and created a society of entitlement. 

Progressives still held to the idea that an equalizing social reform, one which transfers wealth from those who produced it to those who have not, is the best way to create their Utopian vision of social harmony, peace, and nobility.  America's early capitalists have been cancelled for their predatory injustice to the working man, their corporate greed, and trampling ambition.  Men are not supposed to act this way, and must be bound to a more compassionate, inclusive social contract.  

There is no room in America, say progressives, for the likes of Gould, Fisk, and the rest of them.  The infrastructure, wealth, and economic dominion they created was unparalleled, but instead of being credited with the founding of the modern American capitalist engine, they are dismissed, canceled, and relegated to insignificance. 

Trump unabashedly and proudly turns to these men for inspiration, example, and guidance.  They not only embody American enterprise but the most human enterprise.  Human beings have bought, sold, and bartered since the first Paleolithic settlements. They have promoted, advertised, raised or lowered prices according to supply and demand without education, training, or algorithms. Self-interest, the most hardwired trait of human nature, has always been expressed in the acquisition of land, resources, wealth, and power. 

 

Over the millennia the roughest edges of raw capitalism have been smoothed - the market operates far more efficiently when bloody conflict and the law of tooth and fang are moderated and tempered.  No one has ever succeeded in neutering aggressive self-interest, and society has learned to live with the inevitable disputes over value, territory, and ownership.  Regimes have tilted either left or right on this issue - some tending to reign in private enterprise and replace it with a more communitarian approach; others unleashing its mighty potential come what may. 

Donald Trump is among the latter.  He is a believer in the innate, hardwired self-interest of human nature, and knows that as always it has been the engine of wealth creation.  The freer enterprises are to pursue wealth and market dominance, the better off society will be.  Darwin understood this best - the survival of the fittest was no matter for arbitration or adjudication, but winners and losers in an evolutionary struggle. 

 

There is nothing wrong with recognizing, acknowledging, and feting the most productive in society - honoring them for their contributions and opening the way for them to continue.  Donald Trump, as witnessed by his Cabinet appointments is all in on capitalist enterprise and letting market forces determine outcomes.  Dirigisme, state financial dictates, and centralized planning are discredited socialist economic tools.  Supply will always respond to demand without government interference. 

A fair, equitable, objective justice system is the key to orderly economic progression. Justice recognizes free competition and the opposing forces within it, and adjudicates disputes between conflicting interests; and that is why Trump has given the reform of the Justice Department top priority.  It was used and abused by the previous administration to promote their political interests and to punish opponents, and now it must be restored to its former stature.  Free competition, government demurral, and a vigorous court system is the new ethos. 

Friday, February 7, 2025

The White Brigade Comes To Washington - Majority Rule Not Minority Interests, The New Trump Ethos

It is no coincidence that the face of the new Trump Administration,  Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, is a pretty, lily white, blonde, blue-eyed woman. 

 

The contrast to Biden's spokesperson who in her first press conference praised the President for choosing her, a gay, black, immigrant woman to the post, could not be more stark or telling.  White people are back, said the President, 'Get over it'. 

For four years Americans were subjected to progressive hammering about race, gender, and ethnicity - everything was about racism, identity, and diversity.  No opportunity was lost to harass voters for their white privilege, their settled racial elitism, and their stubborn refusal to see the Dawn of a New Age.  

Black people were on every television ad, on every school dais, in government, the private sector, and education.  DEI initiatives ensured that inclusivity was never an incidental issue but a front-and-center one, and tens of millions were spent on diversity seminars, special DEI offices, monitoring for offensive, racist speech, and the promotion of a general atmosphere of racial heterogeneity over all else. 

Millions of Americans, sick and tired of the lecturing, hectoring, and intimidation of the Left; and fed up with the disproportionate representation of black people, barely over ten percent of the population but for all intents and purposes looking like fifty, voted for Donald Trump who made good on his pledge abolish all racially woke programs. 

America is a majority white country, he said, and my Administration will reflect that demographic reality.  While the Left howled 'racism', challenging the President for his non-black Cabinet appointments, he replied once again, 'Get over it'. An administration of talent not identity will be my hallmark.  The net was cast widely, and as expected, most appointments were white. 

Why was that a surprise, asked the President. The highest levels of industry, computer engineering and software, finance, and the professions - despite desperate decades-long affirmative action programs - have few blacks in residence.  While the NFL and NBA are well over 90 percent black, no other industry even breaks par. 

Talent and excellence have not color, said the President; and when a person of color attains the highest level of achievement, creativity, ambition, and insight as his Asian and Caucasian counterparts, he will be selected and placed without reservation. 

The whole fallacy of latter-day affirmative action, a feel-good black Utopian white idealism, would be finally put to rest by the new President.  Sixty years of civil rights, presumptive racial priority, and affirmative action have had little demographic effect - inner cities are still dysfunctional and prisons are crowded with black offenders - and the culture of dependency and entitlement has only served to depress ambition, learning, and correct civil behavior.  A new ethos of responsibility and merit would do more for black communities than years of coddling, overbearing compassion, and cultural myopia. 

The Left of course, already stung, bloodied, and despondent over the election of Trump which most thought virtually impossible given the historical rightness of their cause, were hysterical as they watched the parade of whiteness march into town. 

First there was the election victory party at Mar-a-Lago, the new President's Florida estate where the only black and brown people in evidence were trimming the hedges, skimming the pool, and washing the dishes.  The rest of the gathering was lily white, as white as snow; not only that was so perfectly and spectacularly blonde, unblemished, beautiful, and statuesque. 

These marvelous blonde young things were acting as if nothing was amiss in this perfectly manicured, gloriously white event.  They were oblivious to the absence of color.  For many this was how they had been brought up, privileged, heirs to great fortunes, and legatees to family tradition.  For others, this was what Hollywood, screen tests, and Charlize Theron, Scarlett Johansson, Marilyn Monroe, and Margot Robbie were all about - the irresistibly blonde, blue-eyed icons of America. 

When photographs of the event were published and circulated, the Left was apoplectic.  How could years of affirmative action, the lionization of the black man, the pantheon of color, the tribute to African heritage, the overwhelming destiny of racial plurality have been wiped out so quickly?  It was unexpected and unthinkable, horrendously portentous.  If this was the cast of an all-night party at Mar-a-Lago, what would this mean for the White House and the country?

The wailing, breast-beating, and rending of garments by the aggrieved, humiliated, soundly defeated Left increased day by day.  Each victory party, each new round of hopefuls at Mar-a-Lago, each official appointment was a dagger in the heart of stunned, wounded, and disconsolate liberals.  Not only did a man they considered evil, a traitorous insurrectionist and dictator-in-waiting win the election; and not only would their 'progressive' agenda be tossed in the trash, but this unconscionable whiteness would be the meme, the ethos, the zeitgeist of the day. 

It was the last straw, the worst humiliation, the most damnable, inexcusable insult; but blustering and incoherent, they could only howl.  In a hackneyed Benneton ad of racial diversity they hugged each other in love, harmony, and sympathy.  We know what's right, they said, and that flame of righteousness will keep us for the next four years.  

 

While to the Left such white cavalcade seemed an in-your-face blunt racist statement, it was nothing of the kind.  Trump was only reflecting reality - white people were still in the majority, and even as their numbers declined, white European civilization was still at the very heart of America.  'Whiteness', soon to be colored with Asian tones, would still remain the ethos of the country - based on the foundational principles of Jefferson and the Enlightenment, fueled by Christian faith, and with a solid European moral core.  

American patriotism knew no color, only devotion to the concept of nation and its positive, productive, entrepreneurial values.   The black population had not yet joined this commonwealth of eager opportunity; but when it did, it would be welcomed.  For the time being however, its interests would be removed from the top tier of national priorities. 

'Buggering idiot...uber-racist...cad...Hitlerian Kristallnacht wannabee...pogrom-lover...brute', cried the Left blinded by Trump-hate. The last bits and pieces of woke racialism went swirling down gutters and into drains, into the Potomac and out to see.  They grasped and clutched at them but came up with nothing.