Long Live The King! - The Importance Of Monarchy And Why Americans Should Not Be Afraid Of It

No Kings! was the meme of the recent anti-Trump protest, a silly, hastily confected, airy thing concocted by opponents of the President who have been at sixes and sevens since his victory.  The Left, flummoxed by his decisive reforms, scrambling for a legitimate, policy-oriented response, have come up with nothing but nostrums - nothing of any substance to counter the President's moves to reduce the size of government, remove every last damaging trace of DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusivity), refocus the military on muscular defense and soldierly warfare, energize the private sector, close the borders and promote a Machiavellian nationalism. 

 

Instead, the harping, wheedling, and whining continue, toy arrows shot from children's bows, insignificant, harmless sallies against a strong, defiant, and unbowed president; and the demonstrations intended to expose his anti-democratic, arrogated royal concentration of power have been seen by opponents and defenders alike as a gasping, childish attempt at 'veracity'.  The truth of this monarchical bigot must be known, and the king toppled. 

Now, if the real truth be known, the idea of monarchical rule has its appeal.  The assertion of concentrated power and authority was history's rule for millennia.  The world would still be a Paleolithic veldt had it not been for kings, queens, shahs, emperors, and shoguns.  Louis XIV, Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Suleiman, and Cyrus the Great were not just imperial puppets, but masterful, determined, visionary men who extended empire and high culture, created wealth, learning, and art, and are examples of human intelligence, will, and ambition.

The empires of Europe, Persia, India, China, and Japan are the result of such kingship, monarchy, and supreme rule; and those countries which remember their past cultural history and still hew to its imperial principles have avoided the divisive, chaotic, impossibly ungovernable situations of Europe today, awash in anti-establishment immigrants determined to undermine the very foundations of Christian liberalism. 

China is unapologetically imperialist, Confucian, capitalist, and authoritarian and is soon to become the world's unchallenged politico-economic power.  Russia, Turkey, Poland, and Hungary have turned to their imperial pasts for inspiration and defiance against the flaccid democracies of the EU and the West; and the conservative opposition in France, Britain, Italy, and Germany has made clear their intentions to return their countries to Christian, European, traditionalist roots.

 

Shakespeare wrote scathingly about Jack Cade, the peasant turned would-be revolutionary in Henry VI, Part 2. He was a caricature of the ignorant, willful, venal, and brutish peasant.  He and his like knew nothing – could never know anything – about affairs of state, high culture, and courtly sophistication.  For better or worse – and Shakespeare pulled no punches when he described the inanity of the petty causes and feeble justifications for the War of the Roses – the aristocracy was the foundation of England.

The aristocracy provides an important cultural anchor to society.  It embodies the unbroken history of its culture.  The Queen of England was the inheritor of Empire, Enlightenment, parliamentary democracy, and a long tradition of the unification of Church and State.  The ancestors of the present Conte de Villiers de Rochambeau Artois fought the Infidel in Jerusalem, sat at the court of The Sun King in Versailles, and fought against the Scots.

The ancestors of Emmanuel de Miramon Fargues rode in the Third Crusade.  He was the last in a long line of French aristocrats who had fought for Christianity, suited up in the wars against usurping English kings, fought Henry V courageously at Agincourt, survived the Jacobin Reign of Terror, defied the little Corsican Napoleon in his predation and murderous wars of vainglory, were advisors to Louis XIV, and arbiters of high French culture for centuries.

Getting rid of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was easy, but not so the aristocracy. Even the most patriotic Frenchman understood that the post-Revolutionary period was far too bloody, vengeful, and above all chaotic for the new Republic, and eventually welcomed back the aristocracy which could provide the social order that France had enjoyed for centuries.  Emmanuel's family was one of those celebrated and revered and quickly regained its position and social, cultural, and moral authority.

French greatness, said Emmanuel, was thanks only to the aristocracy.  Yes, the peasantry had tilled the land, worked the mills, and fought in the trenches in foreign wars, but it was the dukes, counts, viscounts, and other well-bred members of the court who patronized the arts, promoted and preserved French culture, and continued to serve as the anchor of a great nation.

Alexander Hamilton disagreed with Jefferson's populism and promotion of majority rule.  The mob could not be trusted with the fate of the nation, and at the very least a body representing a more temperate, broad, intelligent view of governance should be created to mitigate the necessarily self-interested, venal, and uneducated views of the many.  The English system, despite its unfortunate colonial rule over America, was a masterful combination of monarchy, aristocracy, and democratic institutions, room for all as long as the central, historical, cultural ethos was not disturbed. 

The American society that Donald Trump inherited from his successor, Joe Biden, is a chaotic, divided, culturally rudderless nation.  Progressive policies have encouraged cultural separatism in the form of race, gender, and ethnicity identity.  The ethos of America as written in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, is Christian, individualist, patriotic, and respectful.  This ethos was intended to be and remain central to the Republic forever.  America might be a pluralistic nation, but all would gravitate towards the center, pull for the same objectives, live respecting common principles.  

There would be no need for a king, said Jefferson, because the fundamental intelligence of a democratic people would prevail.  Hamilton disagreed, and his vision of a nation descended into a chaotic version of governance has come true. 

So if Donald Trump has kingly intentions, they are not of the Caligula variety - the brutal, savage, oppressive rule of tyrants - but of Victoria, Tai Zong, Xerxes, Peter, and Chandragupta I.  Trump understands that a country so far gone in centripetal politics, the fragmentation of culture and society, and the morass of sectarian fighting cannot survive against the imperial will of China and Russia.  He cannot become king, but his attempts to restore an originalist core to the nation is kingly. 

America shares this ambition with much of Europe, whose conservative leaders have seen the same descent into chaos, the same loss of a central ethos, and the resultant ungovernable, weak, inchoate society and have decided to do something about it.  They are not apologetic about their respect for the Christian, imperial, highly cultured world of the past and hope to restore at least some of its influence. 

This contemporary era is a political watershed - the times are changing, and the democratic free-for-all is over.  Order will be restored and all citizens will march to the same drummer.  A call to Orwellian autocracy? Far from it.  Only a return to originalist values, a cultural, spiritual, and philosophical center around which culture can diversify and proliferate. 

No kings? Shortsighted, historically myopic, and hopelessly vain.  The centralization of Donald Trump is not a concentration of federal power but a concentration of citizens around a central, ethical core. 

Lourdes In Bethesda - Miracles, Magic, And Two Old Virgin Marys Preach Righteousness To Suburbia

Adalina Perez and Paula Oleander were old ladies of worth - or at least that was what had been ordained from them early on in their lives.  Adalina, a Dominican, showed light and promise as a young child growing up in the Bronx, a girl of simple faith and devotion, a pert, curly-haired little girl who was often seen on 116th Street selling fresh empanadas made by her mother Luisa who worked for a wealthy Jewish family downtown but found enough time to to make her special, savory, delicious treats. 

Adalina did well at school but never near the top of her class.  She was rewarded more for punctuality and attendance than any academic promise, but unlike many of her classmates who dropped out early, she graduated and somehow - some said it was thanks to her sexual precocity and friendship with Alonzo Rodriguez,  Alderman from the Bronx who took a shine to the young girl and secured her a place at City College. 

It was there that the young Adalina became aware of her heritage. The times were long before the identity/diversity movement of today, and rather than being included for her difference, was marginalized because of it. She was indeed far less bright and talented as the majority Jewish students, many of whom were later to become well known jurists and Hollywood producers, but she had enough piss and vinegar to resent, revolt, and object.  She became known as 'that wiry-haired cunt from uptown' who was never given the time of day, and who spent a dreary four years making her way but little more. 

She became a school teacher in a white East Side school - she had tamed her hair, lightened her skin, and lifted all Bronx Latino-isms from her speech. She was a good, if ordinary teacher, and without much fanfare collected her paycheck, prepared her lessons, and returned home to the Bronx at night. 

It was on the Lexington Avenue line that she met Luis Rodriguez, a Bronx Hispanic of Puerto Rican and Dominican parents who, like her, had made his way downtown with the same providential political friendships but without the sexual allure of Julia, and his admission to Columbia despite his ordinary academic record and test scores, was secured; and when he met Julia he was on his way to law school, admission again politically engineered, for he had neither the ability or legal penchant for normal acceptance. 

 

In any case, they were a good match, one thing led to another, and they were married in the Church of Santa Maria on a sunny May morning. 

Their move to Adams Morgan, then a solidly Hispanic neighborhood of Washington DC, was the perfect nurturing environment for their transformation into progressive activists.  There, among thousands of Latinos, most illegally in the country but trying their best to survive if not prosper, the Rodriguez couple were converted from white wannabees to Latin movers.  Everything Hispanic was right and proper, from street slang to enchiladas, tacos, and black beans. 

Luis joined a Latin advocacy non-profit and Adalina became a member of the Hispanic Teachers Alliance, a subsidiary of the teachers union and one committed to the promotion of Latino educators and the promotion of Hispanic culture within the school system.  The two had become wedded to a cause, and had dedicated their lives to preserving the dignity of the Hispanic. 

All this would have been well and good, but along with their Hispanic focus came necessary allegiance to the emerging progressive canon of the times, and before long were as fully participant in all measures of liberal enterprise as any.  In time, progressivism became more than a means to an end but the end in itself.

 

Although welcomed by their progressive colleagues, they were never accepted by their more conservative peers. In fact, they both had become rather fervid and tightly wound as they got older, refused any dialogue with 'the uninitiated' and were wholly and unremittingly cancel-minded when it came to outsiders.

Adalina became insufferable, and she became hyper-sensitive to perceived insults and ethnic innuendoes.  Everything to her ears was a slur, a deliberate attempt to demean, derogate, and dismiss her.  Of course the current debate on illegal immigration inflamed her and drove her over the top.  She became a whirling dervish of anti-ICE and anti-Trump hatred, a vixenish, ugly, demented harridan. She and her husband built impenetrable walls around themselves and no one but the politically saved were let in.  Acquaintances with even a trace of circumspection let alone conservative sympathies were cancelled. 

Personality, character, humor, faith, intellect, irony, and creativity went out the window. Political philosophy was the only measure of faith and reliability.  The two of them had become insufferable, narrow, hectoring, inmates of a horrifically crazed institution. 

Paula Oleander was born and raised in Bogota by wealthy middle class parents, had come to America as many of her cohorts had, to study, and graduated from a respectable eastern university - not Harvard or Yale but by no means at the bottom of the list. There she majored in Hispanic studies with a minor in South American literature - a rather obscure area of study since the continent, other than for a few fantasists of Magical Realism, had produced little of note.  Yet she went at her studies like a feral dog and managed to graduate with acceptance to another third-tier university for graduate studies.  There, as she had as an undergraduate, pursued Hispanic studies and culture. 

Well-educated, well-bred, and moderately-schooled, she became drawn to progressivism via academics. Most eastern universities at that time, as now, were solidly liberal, and soon she was drawn as a poster child for Hispanic identity and as a living example of diversity, equity, and inclusivity.  In fact she subsumed her by now quite white, traditionalist American persona into this political nexus, and like Adalina became a committed progressive. 

Paula, however, unlike Adalina became a moderately wealthy suburbanite and somewhat of a Gertrude Stein.  She held gatherings, social seances, poetry readings, book clubs, and ladies teas all in the interest of 'culture' but always with strong progressive undercurrents.  Most recently she organized a celebration of a minor Maryland artist whose paintings of Keane-like wide-eyed black children displayed the kind of inter-racial sensitivity and empathy that Americans needed. 

She had the good breeding and good taste to keep her passionate progressivism in check and moderately expressed, but at heart she was no different from Adalina in her commitment to social justice. While temperate and quiet, her offerings were as pedestrian, uninspired, and lacking in any thought or insight as her counterpart. 

As fate or serendipity would have it, the two by now old women met each other in Bethesda where Adalina and her husband had moved - their only capitulation to capitalism ever - to the suburbs and were virtual neighbors of Paula.  It was only a matter of time that the two met at one of Paula's seances. 

While never good friends - their backgrounds and education were simply too far apart - they were the progressive bookends of Bethesda, both committed to the same idealistic progressivism, but each going about it in different ways.  They were called a bit harshly but not unfairly by some as 'The Old Virgins Of Bethesda'.

They rarely saw each other but were aware of each other's doings, respectful at a distance, but dogs from different packs.  The flapped away and banged on in their own ways about diversity, equity, and inclusion, shook their heads at the anti-Hispanic Gestapo-like roundups of their ethnic soulmates, but by now were too old to demonstrate. 

They both faded into obscurity once the Trump revolution had become endemic and universal.  All the shibboleths of progressivism were being toppled one by one, and the two old ladies didn't know what to do with themselves.  The stuffy basement gatherings of alte kockers who fell asleep at the throbbing pedantry of Paula's events became fewer and fewer; and Adalina and Luis eventually moved to Florida where they both had Hispanic family roots. 

And so it was across the nation, or at least up and down the coasts - liberal women like Adalina and Paula faded into the woodwork, took up crochet and gardening, and retired quietly. 

Community - The Last Refuge For The Faint Of Heart

The hostess at the vernissage - a gathering to celebrate the works of a local artist - talked about community.  As she looked around the room and wondered at the marvel of such a diverse assembly all having come together to celebrate the life of an ordinary woman who turned childhood reflections into art, she smiled.  Comfort for the aged, she intimated, but defiantly added, 'But we are not done!' 

Her appeal was lost on the group all of whom wished they were somewhere else rather than in an airless suburban basement listening to the artist's interpretations of the childhood memories she put on canvas; but such is the nature of the beast.  Getting old is not for the faint of heart. Any port in a storm, although this one, rotten timbers, emptied bilge, and oily, scummy residue, was perhaps not the one these friends had expected. 

Community is lifeblood, said the hostess who was full of the moment, warmed by the association of so many friends and former colleagues who had come together to celebrate the artistry of an ordinary person who had given heart and soul 'to the world'.  

'If you knew that the rule that you followed led you to this, of what use was the rule?, asks the Anton Shugur character in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men; and that surely was the thought running through many of the heads of the assembly when they heard that the artist, now in her eighties had spent five hours a day, every day, at the easel. 

 

But most of the group were old academics who had taught at a minor university, an institution that had just been bumped up by the state from community college to something more respectable, but still was the go-to place for students with little promise but hopes of something bigger than the third-rate suburban life in which they had been brought up. 

Art at Milford College - MK as it was cattily called because of the low literacy rate of its students - was an add-on to the core technical curriculum offered there; so for the group there was no disconnect between the simple swatches of color and exaggerated effects of the artist's works and great art.  All one and the same, so everyone was happy.  They all had soldiered along huffing and puffing to make intellectual ends meet, so her effort was applauded not for excellence but with empathy. 

'Community', the hostess went on.  'Community, that all-important glue that holds us together, especially in these troubled times'. 

 

It was only a matter of time before the miseries inflicted by Donald Trump were brought up, and there was a knowing nodding when the reference was finally made.  

A murmur went through the gathering and a black woman stood up and said, 'Amen'.  There was a gleeful happiness in everyone in the room reading from the same prayerbook, feeling the same desperation, the same empathetic sympathy for each other, the same gloriously righteous feeling of belonging to a community of the like-minded. 

Resisting the urge to go on about what was happening outside the room, the hostess returned to the business at hand, and went on with her eulogy of the artist 'whose insights, sensitivity, and sublime perceptions have enriched our world'. 

One by one the artist displayed her canvasses, each more incredibly ordinary than the next, but felt it necessary and in keeping with the spirit of the group, to explain how and why she came to paint the scene before them. 

'Where does your inspiration come from?', she was asked. 

The artist looked confused, for of course the question had never come up for her as she painted whatever image came into her head that day.  She stumbled to find an appropriate answer to an essential question getting at the nature of artistic enterprise; but since there had been no depth of feeling, insight, or existential questioning of this pots and pans weekend dabbler, she could not reply. 

'Let me rephrase the question', the man in the back went on, and more kindly and gently, he moved the question away from serious matters to the fanciful colors and jagged black marks on the two paintings before the group. 

'Oh, yes', the artist said. 'Now I understand', went babbling on for ten minutes about nothing of any importance or relevance whatsoever. 

The show went on and on until the back row had fallen sound asleep, and the front row was nodding off. The artist, for the first time publicly celebrated, was in her element and simply could not shut up. She rambled on about her beloved father who was losing his sight and his vitality until she read him one of her poems; her long-deceased brother 'who picked acorns in the Fall'; her friends who braided each other's hair until she realized that no one was paying the least attention. 

The hostess was right in a way.  The group that had gathered around something other than potted plants and verbena had indeed left the assembly happy and satisfied. There was, as the hostess had remarked, more to life than they expected; and if it took some bad, horribly pedestrian art to wake up this somnolent dying-in-place crowd, so much the better. 

The idea that their deeply-felt progressivism had been conjoined with a new appreciation for beauty and artistic inspiration made them feel especially good. 

This affair was not exclusive to Bethesda, Maryland but to living rooms and improved basements everywhere - Bible discussion groups, men's sensitivity sessions, book club gatherings, victim's commiseration meetings were de rigeur, par for the course, part of the inevitable rush to closure.  'Our kind of people' in small groups, a subset of social class, was what helped make some sense out of a very imposing, competitive, individualistic world. 

So, who are we to take exception to the insufferably bad paintings displayed that May Sunday in a suburban basement? Or the treacly poems or the off-the-shelf women's romances chatted about in ladies' book clubs?

Yet there is always something depressing about all of them - time-fillers, cute bibelots on the mantelpiece, distractions, communal empathy - but reminders only of our eager futility. 

She meant well - the bad art, the dutiful questions, the soggy empanadas, the 'breathless love for each other' - and all ended well, back to the Barcalounger and cold cuts, but no one expects Picasso in a suburban Maryland neighborhood, so be happy with what you've got even though you might be fumbling around for answers in all the wrong places. 

The Art Celebration was a waste of time and effort, but part of the end of life scramble; and who is to criticize that?  Well, maybe there are lesser and greater wastes of time and this one was near the bottom, but everyone tried, and we have to give them credit for that. 

Israel's Fierce, Righteous Destruction of Iran And Hamas - Lessons From Hiroshima, Dresden, And Sherman's March To The Sea

In a bold, brilliantly planned and executed espionage and military campaign Israel has launched (6/13/25) a defiant, aggressive preemptive strike on Iran, taking out its principle uranium enrichment facility, killing its top military leaders and nuclear scientists, and destroying much if not most of its missiles and assault aircraft. 

 

This strike was considered necessary because of Iran's public, longstanding demands for the annihilation of the State of Israel and the extermination of the Jews, its financial and military support for the regional terrorist organizations Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and its development of a first strike nuclear capability. 

At the same time it launched what should be its final military action against Hamas in Gaza - action that has been delayed in the hopes of a Western-brokered peace, but never shelved.  Decades of Palestinian military incursions, and the rebuilding of its military infrastructure after the initial Israeli assaults following the October 7th massacre of Israeli civilians, meant that a final, overwhelming, consequential invasion would have to occur; and now it has. 

These strikes and incursions will put to rest the dangerous, insidious, corrupt notion of the innocence of Hamas, the righteousness of their demands, and their demands for a state.  Hamas is a terrorist organization sponsored, aided, and abetted by a genocidal Iranian regime, both determined to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth.  

The fanciful, febrile, ignorant assumption that Israel is the enemy of Palestinian sovereignty and dignity - a brutal occupier, a neo-colonial force of oppression and violence - has had its day.  American campuses, the European Left, and the feckless, hopeless United Nations will have to face reality.  Their innocent heroes are murderers, genocidal killers as malicious as the Nazis. 

It is incredible that the West has simply stood by and listened to the hateful anti-Semitic screeds of Iranian ayatollahs, believing that good will, negotiation, and consideration would transform them and return Iran to the commonwealth of nations.  The nuclear treaty engineered by then President Barack Obama was a sign of America's idealistic myopia.  Iran got everything from the deal - a minor ten year delay in their nuclear program and a free rein to support its client states to attack Israel. 

Iran kept building its nuclear program, fooling a credulous America that it was adhering to treaty provisions, upped its support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and prepared for a long-awaited final solution for the State of Israel. 

It is no wonder that Israel has decided to go it alone, to act, and to once and for all neutralized the existential threat of Iran.  They now have a strongly committed American president in the White House in Donald Trump, and can expect his full and unequivocal support. 

Faced with this existential threat, Israel's intentions are no different than the Americans in World War II.  They would used whatever military means at their disposal to completely destroy Nazi Germany and Japan. The firebombing of Dresden and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were examples of America's resolve and conviction that they were facing an implacable enemy. Civilian casualties were not collateral but deliberate.  Only if the people of Germany and Japan watched the complete destruction of their government and land would their countries ever again threaten others. 

General William Tecumseh Sherman, Union Civil War leader espoused the same theory almost a hundred years before. Only if the South was reduced to rubble would its military be destroyed but more importantly so would be the will of its people. 

Israel has made it clear - its attacks on Iran are intended both to neuter its offensive military capabilities, and to show the Iranian people the corruption of its leaders and lead to their overthrow. 

Sherman’s brutal marches from Tennessee to Atlanta, Atlanta to Savannah, and Savannah up through the Carolinas have been called ‘disproportionate’, but they were not.  There is no doubt that Sherman left a trail of ruin and desolation behind him; but he targeted the ‘plantationists’ – the wealthy landowners who led the South into war and who persisted in the fight at the expense of hundreds of thousands of young lives and the destruction of territory, culture, and history.

Sherman was doing exactly what the Israelis have done in Gaza.  He wanted to show the common people who was responsible for the misery they had suffered.  He was willing to open himself to criticism, opprobrium, and hatred by those Southern aristocrats whom he had chased; but he knew that the citizenry would know better.  Their leaders over whom they had little control were behind the foolish and ill-advised war.

Sherman, like the Russian general Kutuzov who by strategic retreat drew Napoleon deeper and deeper into the winter hinterland where his forces froze and starved to death, avoided direct confrontation with the enemy.  Sherman knew that the Union forces were superior and would eventually and ultimately prevail, but he understood that military conquest was only part of victory.  

His goal was to humiliate the South – to show its people that the heralded aristocratic Cavalier was nothing compared to the tough and gritty farm boys from the North; that its leaders were inept and incapable of stopping the Union advances.  Sherman wanted the South never to rise again.

Sherman understood – like the Israelis – that military victory was only partial; and that complete victory was the destruction of the will of the enemy and its civilian population.  Sherman said, “War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, so let’s give them what they want.”   Sherman understood that such complete capitulation could only be achieved if he “traversed holy ground” and captured cities which were symbols of the Confederacy and what people were led to believe was Southern supremacy; and if they were easily taken or destroyed, the will of the people would be further eroded.

Sherman was very clear about his march through the Carolinas.  He knew that the journey would be arduous and physically demanding; but he wanted to burn a trail through the very heart of the Confederacy – the place where the rebellion had started – to show the South once and for all that not only had their armies been beaten, but that their whole culture had been destroyed. 

Machiavelli said, “Men hate those who destroy patrimony more than their fathers”; and Sherman understood that destroying patrimony would be the total destruction of the enemy.  The South would recover from the physical devastation, Sherman knew, but would never recover from the absolute humiliation of its culture.

Sherman – again like the Israelis – was unapologetic about civilian casualties, for he knew that political regimes, no matter how autocratic, are a result of a supportive or at least complaisant population.  Complicit civilians whether directly or indirectly so, must suffer the consequence.

Sherman's marches through Georgia and South Carolina while successful in assuring that the South would never rise again  have now been shown to be inapplicable to the current situation in Gaza; and Israel has learned this lesson.  Intimidation within the context of a hysterical, maniacal enemy will never work.  Given Sherman's successes, it was worth trying; but Israel misjudged the restorative energies of Hamas and the ferocity of its Palestinian supporters.  

There can only be one and only one solution now - the ultimate, final, deliberate, and incontestable destruction of Hamas and Gaza itself and the complete and unequivocal removal of the Iranian threat. 

Israel fights with the same moral rectitude and purpose as their radical Islamic opponents.  They will brook absolutely no threat to the Jewish homeland, and civilian Palestinian and Iranian deaths are the price the enemy must pay for its aggression and permanent hostility.  The Israelis know that they are fighting an enemy and its patron which uses a territorial imperative – a Palestinian state – only as pretext for the annihilation of Israel, the ridding of Arab lands of the infidel, and in preparation for universal Islamic rule.

From Bro's And Ho's To Congress - Taking Chuck Schumer And His Liberal Claques For The Ride Of Their Lives

Alonzo Lucius Washington was a black man from Anacostia, Washington's worst penitential slum, an inner city ghetto neighborhood of pimps, ho's, spinners, and grills like a thousand others from Baltimore to South Central, and yet there was always something unsettling about all of it, the bro' talk, the pimp walk, the bevy of high-shelved, big booty women, the crewe, and the drive-bys.  

It was who he was - or at least what the zeitgeist, ethos, and meme of the neighborhood said he was - but this couldn't be the be-all and end-all, the zenith, the apogee of his life. 

 

'S'up, Bro?' said The Big Man, Richie Slats, the godfather of Anacostia, kingpin, white powder grandee of the projects, just back from Folsom, the federal pen farthest from the 'hood that the law could secure, for Richie had made his way out of every lock up from Bangor to Miami.  His connections were simply too good, and his money stacked too high for imprisonment to be what it was supposed to be.

'All good, Richie, all good', said Alonzo passing the Big Man a draw from opium heaven, straight from the Killing Fields, pure unadulterated H Cambodian gold. Richie took a pull, smiled, and gave 'Zo a bearhug. 'Whatchoo still doin' on the streets, Zo?', the Big Man asked.  'Why don't you come work for me? A real fairy tale, and that's fo' real'. 

Alonzo thanked the man, paid him his respects, and walked the short distance back to Block D, Section 34, Apartment 106 of the New Heights Projects inaugurated in the Mayor For Life Marion Barry days, and now a shithole, a sex by the hour shooting gallery, a miasma of rot and garbage.  Maybe it was time to throw his lot in with Richie. 

His father, Alonzo Lucius Cassius Washington had been one of the city's glass storefront black poster boys, hired by banks to sit in plain view of the street to show how integrated they were, raking in the change while making big money on the street, taking it from dude white boys with Bombay Black and Panama Red, a good hang time while the brothers did their thing in Watts, Detroit, and Newark. 

Times had radically changed since then, and with the affirmative action fairy tale, black men hastened up the corporate ladder with absolutely nothing but the street in their resume. Somehow the ofays from uptown wanted some down to earth ghetto reality, and the homeboys were quick to jump. 

Pharoah Jones hooked up with a Congressional bitch from Delaware who needed some color in her cabinet, and during his tenure he managed well, quite well, all tricked out and ghetto like the lady wanted until she and he got tired of the affair and went their own ways. 

Times were different now. 'We don't do that affirmative action shit no more' said LaFarge Owens. 'It's big time money with the Chief', the new President who in one fell swoop did away with affirmative action, woke, feel-good hiring and opened his doors to entrepre-fucking-nures, men of any color who knew how to make a buck, the American dream of economic opportunity, prosperity, and the good life. 

Now, the Office of the President knew a flim-flam scheme when they saw it, but in the spirit of entre-fucking-preneurial opportunity and the new frontier of American private enterprise, they accommodated Alonzo and his Armani-outfitted shysters from the 'hood.  The Ponzi scheme they presented was as transparent as fine Moroccan cotton, but attractive from a bottom line perspective.  This ghetto refuse might very well take Chuck Schumer and his claques for the ride of their lives with some nice benefits for the Office as well. 

 

'Take 'em for a fucking ride', said Talbot Prentice, and a plan was hatched to snooker the swells of the Democratic party good.  Schumer, already in arrears for secret child support, and pending bankruptcy because of bank 'overdrafts' was the target, a rube, a clueless john, a feckless idiot who had made his living pandering to the woke left and making squandered millions; and mirabile dictu he fell for it hook, line, and sinker. An old Jewish moneylender caught in his own greedy trap. 

All was fair in love and war, Prentice and the President well knew, and what he had suffered at the hands of the Democratic bottom-feeders needed retribution.  Years of villainy, lawfare, and insidious ad hominem attacks could not go unpunished; but hanging in rightful execution was too good for them.  So the underhanded brilliant scheme of Alonzo Washington, his bro's, and the officers and good people looking out for the President's interest set all in motion, 

First was Anastasia Perkins, a drop-dead beautiful mulatto from New Orleans, friend of the President and dutiful political supporter, who was to be first on the scene - a wet and willing seductress that the Senate Minority Leader would be at great pains to refuse; and refuse he did not, so taken was he with the fact that finally he was living the life of 'diversity', not just talking about it. Hidden cameras, spy-craft and AI locked the door.  Schumer was theirs ipso facto, de gustibus non disputantum est. 

Then was the network of Wells Fargo, Citibank, Vanguard, and Aruban offshore banks, a marvelous nexus of legal and extra-legal shenanigans that compromised the dopey, confused and totally outflanked and outgunned Senator before he knew what was happening. 

Before the day was out his net worth, promised to him to be in the hundreds of millions was zero, zilch, nada.  The man was emptied, ruined and stood on the podium the next day as naked as a jaybird. 

He had been taken for the ride of his life and left on the curb.  Not only was his bank account emptied and transferred into the accounts of the President and his new associate, Alonzo Washington, but the leader of the opposition was ruined, an emasculated political puppet. 

Alonzo was a reasonable, temperate, and patient man, not one to return to the 'hood and boast how he took down the Minority Leader of the Senate.  He simply returned to business as usual, pimping and whoring, a bit on the side with the drug trade but under the radar as a conservative operative, at the request of the Administration but never beholden to them. 

'White folks are made of money', he said, 'all for the asking' and so one of Washington's entrepreneurial success stories writ - the acumen and brilliance of the new Godfather of the Slums. 

Bass Boats, Gun Racks, Church Goin', And Donald Trump - The White Middle Class Is Back

Berkeley Roberts had, as Tennessee Williams' Maggie said in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, been born poor, raised poor, and expected to die poor, and for decades his family had seen that prophecy come true. Particularly in the dismal Biden years when everything black was raised to new heights and everything white was dismissed, dishonored, and discarded, Roberts felt consigned to his small dirt farm and forgotten. 

 

Roberts was not black poor, not welfare poor but still scrambling to make ends meet, to make something out of the soybeans and corn he grew, the hogs he raised, and the old tractor he rented out to neighbors and to maybe have enough in reserve to buy a few acres for his sons. 

He shot squirrels and 'coons, had barbecues in the Fall, pulled in his share of bass from the lake, and took down a deer or two during hunting season.  Life was not exactly bad, but dreary, predictable, and without much hope.  He watched as America's borders were opened and millions of illegal aliens poured into the country and treated like royalty, as the black man was lionized, and as gay men paraded down the avenues of the Nation's Capital like they owned it.  Ordinary folks like him were invisible at best and considered bigoted blights at worst. 

Roberts' folks had come west from Virginia and North Carolina in the 1850s, leaving their depleted tobacco lands for the promise of cotton in the Mississippi Delta.  His people were not landowners or plantation grandees, but laborers - the organizers and overseers of the thousands of slaves that cleared the cypress swamps and made the rich bottom land of the river as fertile as that of the Nile. 

His ancestors worked the plantations of the Farnsworths and Marshalls until they decided to strike off on their own, move to the hills, work their own property, live simply but independently, and make a living.  After the Depression years, the family moved and settled just across the line from Meridien where they had lived ever since. 

The Roberts had never accepted a dime from the government, paid their way, educated their children, staved off serious illness and were proud that they had fulfilled at least a part of their American heritage; but at every critical, dismissive, and accusatory remark from Democrats in Washington - they were nothing but Bible-thumping cracker ignoramuses, racist mongrels, tarpaper shack toothless sister-fuckers - pride turned to anger, at worst a spiteful, vengeful rage. 

Never Confederate flag-waving neo-secessionists like many of their neighbors, the Roberts still felt the sting of century old insults of Reconstruction, and the consignment of the white farmer to the backcountry and political oblivion. 

Then came Donald Trump who from his very first day in office promised to change all that, restore racial balance, give credit if not honor to the descendants of the white, Christian, European civilizations responsible for empire and the spreading of wealth and culture.  His promise was not one to reward the country's elites- they had done well since the founding of Jamestown and the implantation of the patrician English Cavalier tradition in the New World - but yeomen like the Roberts. 

 

The American Left had hectored and hammered for decades about the marginalized, the poor, and the disadvantaged black man, but the white American was left aside, supernumerary and insignificant in progressives' pursuit of some febrile idea of racial justice.  The white middle class never complained and took the insults and dismissiveness in stride, secure they thought on small family farms, with little legacy and inheritance, but with the same raw, eager, patriotism of the first settlers who had moved west. 

Yet during the Biden years when dismissiveness became a nasty, bullying hatred, this marginally middle class became angry.  They had never fed from the public trough and wanted no government largesse, only a modicum of understanding if not respect.  Progressives were championing the black man who was responsible for a gross disproportion of rapes, murders, assaults, and robberies; absent fathers leaving illegitimate children scattered throughout the ghetto; violent, recidivist social misfits who after seventy years of civil rights, were still settled in poverty and dysfunction. 

The white middle class took offense.  Their dutiful, respectful, patriotic, Christian ways meant nothing to the cliques and cabals ruling Washington under Biden.  The progressive vision for America was a 'diverse' one, but that new caste system, like the Aryan one, was based on race - but a reverse  system where blacks were at the top of the pyramid and whites were at the bottom.  

Progressives claiming systemic racism and white privilege felt that this demission was necessary and required.  The Roberts family, just be being white, were considered the inheritors of the slave-owning past.  There was nothing to do to disclaim this assertion.  It was settled history.  Racism was in their blood. 

When Trump was elected for a second term and exhibited all the resolve, power, and authority vested in him to reverse the divisive, destructive progressive programs of 'social reform', Berkeley Roberts and thousands like him cheered.  They would get nothing from the new conservative government, and never expected or wanted it.  All they hoped for was a recalibration of the American meme - race, racism, diversity, and identity were no longer to be the measurements for access or the valuation of morality.  

Originalist policies recalling Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and Adams were to replace the corrosive notions of Lafollette, Debs, Brandeis, and Gompers, the aggressive governmentalism of FDR and LBJ, and the hideous, deforming Biden years. 

 

Adlai Stevenson, Democratic candidate for president running against the popular General Dwight D Eisenhower had it right in one - 'the little man', the heart and soul of America should not be forgotten. Of course Stevenson's solution was to redistribute the wealth of those industrialists who had built and enriched America in a socialist economic transfer.

Much more appropriate to the lot of the little man were the verses of Walt Whitman who in his poem I Hear America Singing praised the labor, the brawn, the muscle, of the worker:

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands...

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

'Each singing what belongs to him', the heart of conservative values, distorted, deliberately confused and misinterpreted by successive governments which wanted only an arrogation of power - what belongs to them. 

Walt Whitman spoke to Berkeley Roberts and the American 'little man', the heart and soul of the Republic as he had always been.  When thanks to Donald Trump the decks have been cleared, the trash taken out, and America's house cleaned, Whitman's vision will be restored.  

It's Not Just Trump - Conservatism Has Returned And Is Here To Stay

Progressives are still whingeing and whining about Donald Trump and his devilish, autocratic. insurrectionist Presidency.  The mania has turned to hysteria and progressives everywhere have turned into dervishes - possessed, howling streetcorner preachers shouting that Armageddon is around the corner, and the End is nigh. 

 

The miasmic scorn for Donald Trump and the complete unhinged disassembly of rational political belief of the Left is indeed something to watch.  Political opposition is part and parcel of democracy, but such opposition has been turned into unremitting hatred.  It has become a blood-curdling affair, a steaming, high blood pressure eruption and uncompromising insults.

The ranks of the Left resemble the wild, mad screeching and incontinence of a Bosch painting, the worst demented wards of an insane asylum - a madhouse, a loony bin, a crazed, wild, anarchic place. 

Somewhere along the line, the progressive Left's simple, labor-oriented, socialist, communal politics got twisted out of shape, and became the feral, untoward tangle of hatred it is now. There seems to be no point to liberal politics today, no distinct, unique policy proposals, no initiatives, no reasonable answers to questions of economics, finance, or national order. 

The progressive charter, its canon, its creed is Trump hatred and an ancillary, universal condemnation of all conservatives, branded in an instant as racist, that all-purpose, all-encompassing, meaningless term to express scorn for and mistrust of any opposing values. 

'Racist', they howl at the moon and at anyone who dares question the native, primal supremacy of the black man; the certainty of the gender spectrum, and the evils of capitalism; and it is a howling and a maniacal one. 

Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, having seen the savage primitivism of the African tribes, the human sacrifice, the cannibalism, and their raging bestiality realizes that he is no different, and worse, all humanity at heart is the same. 'The horror...the horror', he says on his deathbed. 

There is something of this horror in the awful, violent, unrestrained, almost pagan hatred of the Left for Donald Trump and all conservatives.  Their shutting down of any opposition, their incessant branding of any different ideas as damningly racist and profoundly ignorant, their book burning, midnight cabals, and emotional savagery beggar belief. 

Donald Trump having taken the brunt of this hatred for ten years, virtually his whole political life, is unconcerned, nonplussed.  He goes on with his conservative agenda and laughs at the impotence of the Left.  There is nothing stopping his fundamental, systemic reform of American government.  

Just as Javier Milei, conservative president of Argentina says each time he eradicates one ponderous government bureaucracy after another, Afuera!, Donald Trump repeats as DOGE goes about the business of dismantling government agencies. 

Trump is unbowed and unintimidated in his opening up the country to oil and gas exploration, building pipelines and refineries, and expanding ports and shipping, lowering taxes and reducing regulation, taking a strong America First approach to foreign policy, and ridding the country once and for all of the pernicious, divisive DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) movement of the Left. 

One by one big corporations are eliminating DEI departments, cancelling Pride activities, refusing affirmative action and returning to a merit-based workplace.  Free speech is returning as the formerly intimidated now speak their mind on formerly taboo subjects of race, ethnicity, and sexuality.  There is a firm No! to unrestricted immigration, and a forthright statement of a return to originalist principles and a central, European Christian ethos. 

These changes are not cosmetic, but the Left is still whaling away at Trump, never once addressing the systemic issues that these changes represent or the fact that they will soon become ingrained, embedded, permanent, and unshakeable principles once again. 

Conservatism is an ethos which has remained valid ever since the emergence of William F Buckley, Milton Friedman, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan and before that Cleveland, Taft, and Coolidge.  The core principles of conservatism - small government, a strong national defense, free enterprise, and low taxation - have not changed although the effort to apply them became much more difficult after the long four-term tenure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who used the Depression as the justification for strong, interventionist government and whose example was followed by successive Democratic presidents, most notably LBJ whose Great Society was modeled after Roosevelt's programs. 

Donald Trump is no different, and beneath the Sturm und Drang of his aggressive moves to further the conservative agenda, it remains fundamentally unchanged since the early days.  In fact, the terms of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were the first conservatives; and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution are the foundational elements of the new republic - a nation of individuals acting out of self-interest but with consideration of the common weal, supported by a limited government which would apply the rule of law and little else. 

The progressive movement, a radical, socialist model of communalism and state authority, has in recent years made inroads into this conservatism, and convinced much of the American public that government is not only the guarantor of their Constitutional rights, but their interpreter and activist engine.  It is government which sets the rules of engagement and approved behavior.  

Free speech was limited to exclude any speech that was seen antithetical to progressive social reform; minority groups were promoted to the exclusion of all others based on a tendentious definition of traditional American pluralism - diversity, equity, inclusivity, and the free market was controlled, limited, and directed by government to favor their economic/political vision.  

Now, under Donald Trump, all these historically heretical notions are being denied, refused, and eliminated.  Free speech means any speech - let the listener and the speaker beware.  Free markets mean untrammeled ability to innovate, create, and produce wealth.  A free society means one based on talent, ability, and ambition. A strong national defense means not only military security against international threats, but creating an internally strong social and economic fabric - no unlimited immigration, a robust program of energy independence, and the restoration of a clear national ethos.

There is nothing new or surprising about the Trump initiatives, only the aggressive, confident, uncompromising way he is going about business.  Reduce the size of government? Just do it, and send in the butchers, bulldozers, and wrecking balls.  Energy independence? Free the oil and gas sector to dig, mine, and explore; create a nuclear capacity; and reinvigorate clean coal. Lower taxes and regulation? Executive order and insistent Congressional initiatives.  Free speech? Use every federal governmental, judicial, financial, and economic authority to rid the nation of pernicious, useless, divisive DEI programs. 

The Left, flummoxed and flabbergasted, has yet to mount a cogent, responsible response.  It has been too caught up in Hate Trump to consider anything else but removing him from office, and so must sit by, whingeing, wailing, and howling while the juggernaut makes its way from coast to coast 

Not only is conservatism back for the period of Trump's term.  It is here to stay, for the President is not just using levers of federal power but restructuring government from the bottom up. 

Progressive redoubts on the coasts have become fearful, tremulous, agitated places still concerned with deposing Trump and cancelling any and all his supporters; but the time has passed as had the torch.  No longer will the country put up with the Left's fantastical, imaginary premises and Orwellian authoritarianism. 

Not only is Trump back but radical conservatism is as well.