“Success will bring unity to our country,” a victorious Trump told supporters on Super Tuesday. This presupposes that his opposition wants success. Success means liberty, freedom, the Bill of Rights, honest democratic elections, freedom of speech and association, meritocracy, real capitalism, a rising standard of living for all, rational immigration with borders, and self-responsibility. Trump’s opposition, in both parties, want NONE of these things. So if by success Trump means freedom and prosperity, he’s not going to unite good people with bad people. The bad guys, and the fools who support DemComs and RINOs, don’t want success. They have the media, the schools and much of the corporate world behind them. This is why Trump’s battle continues to be so ferocious.
The only way to drain the swamp is cut off their money supply (massively reducing the size and scope of the government), arrest and try for treason the top offenders: Starting with Biden, his Cabinet and Obama. If that’s what we’re talking about, I am all in.
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Ever since my time in the White House it has bothered me.
I know politics is a filthy business. As my late father always used to say: “Politics: disgusting but oh so fascinating.” True enough. But politics in the age of Trump is something else.
I was ready for personal attacks against me as Deputy Assistant to the President. Especially since I was early on given the mandate to publicly justify and explain the President’s national-security travel ban. My dismantling of the legacy media narrative that our policy was somehow “racist,” as opposed to predicated on an Obama-era threat assessment concerning which nations were incapable of guaranteeing to us that terrorists weren’t traveling to the US from their territories, was clearly the “trigger” for a smear campaign that shocked even me.
Coming after a high-ranking White House official was, of course, expected. I was clearly a proxy for the man the establishment really hated. Just look at what they did to my Boss and his family and are still doing today. But when “journalists” started to calumny my wife and my high school aged son – calling him a “traitor” in one headline smear piece – even I was shocked. Who are these people, and why do they think a man’s family can be targeted over a difference in politics??
I know I have a certain reputation in the public sphere as a rather serious person. The British press labelled me President Trump’s pit-bull, and when the hosts of The Five were asked what tattoo they would get if they ever did, my former FOX News colleague Jesse Watters picked a portrait of me, since I am “the scariest man on television.” That’s a maybe. However, I am not made of stone, and I still cannot fully internalize the levels of hatred demonstrated by the Democrat Party, the media, and the Washington Establishment. But I have a theory.
I have said for some years now that the dividing line in America is no longer a party political one. In fact, the labels of Republicans and Democrat, or even the broader taxonomy of Conservative versus Liberal, are utterly defunct. There is only one meaningful dividing line that separates one American from another, and it is predicated on love and hate.
Today our nation is split along the answer to one question: “Do you love America, or hate America?” Do you believe this is the greatest and freest nation ever created by man, a “shining city on a hill,” founded on unalienable rights derived from our being made “in the image of our Creator?” Or do you believe, as does the radicalized Democrat Party, that we are an intrinsically bigoted country riven through with neocolonial attitudes and run as a patriarchy where women and minorities are “oppressed?”
For the truth is, we are living in the most perverse of times, with an “elite” that truly hates the nation and the people over which they have power. Why else would our government open our borders, be fine with the more than 100,000 lives annually taken by fentanyl and other drugs trafficked across the border? Or the murder of innocent 22-year old nursing students by illegals released by Democrat prosecutors? How else can you justify giving billions to our sworn enemies and deliberately infecting our armed forces with the sexually perverse and abnormal? In fact: what else would an administration do differently over the last three years if its avowed goal were to destroy America? Think about it.
And then it hit me, thanks in large part to the fascinating interview I just did with the courageous California pastor Jack Hibbs. Why do they so hate President Trump, and why will they use any accusation and any tools against him, his family, and anyone who works for him? The elite hate President Trump so very much because he loves America. Is there anyone alive today who has sacrificed as much as this one man? Simply because he wants America to be “Great Again,” he is facing 700+ years in prison, has been fined half a billion dollars, and banned from doing business in the city he has brought billions of dollars to.
The good news? Hatred only gets you so far. Sooner or later the bile eats you up inside.
We will – eventually – win because our fuel is love. Love of nation, love of family, love of country, but in order to start clawing back our Republic, we need President Trump back in the White House.
A version of this article was first published in 2005. Capitalism Magazine is republishing it again because its message still remains relevant today.
Born over 100 years ago in Holy Mother Russia and educated under the Soviets, Ayn Rand became the quintessential American writer and philosopher, upholding the supreme value of the individual’s life on earth. She herself led a “rags to riches” life, wrote best-selling novels that championed individualism, and developed a philosophy of reason that validates the American spirit of achievement and independence.
The story of Ayn Rand’s life is, in the words of the Oscar-nominated documentary Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life: “a life more compelling than fiction.” Born February 2, 1905, she wrote her first fiction at age 8, when she also showed signs of being an intellectual crusader, vowing to refute a newspaper article claiming that school was the sole source of a child’s ideals. A year later she decided to become a writer: inspired by the hero of a children’s story, who embodied “intelligence directed to a practical purpose,” she had a “blinding picture” of people–not as they are but as they could be.
In high school and college, she discovered two figures whom she never ceased to admire: Victor Hugo, for “the grandeur, the heroic scale, the plot inventiveness” of his stories, and Aristotle, as “the arch-realist and the advocate of the validity of man’s mind.”
Escaping the tyranny and poverty of the U.S.S.R., she came to America in 1926, officially for a brief visit with relatives. A chance meeting with her favorite American director, Cecil B. DeMille, resulted in jobs as a movie extra and then a junior screenwriter. After periods of near-starvation, she sold her first play to Broadway and her first novel, We the Living, set in the Soviet tyranny she had escaped. With her first best-seller, The Fountainhead in 1943, she presented her ideal man, individualist architect Howard Roark. But it was, she said, “only an overture” to her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged in 1957, a mystery story about the role of the mind in man’s existence. With Atlas Shrugged her career as a fiction writer ended, but her career as a philosopher had just begun.
Her philosophy–Objectivism–upholds objective reality (as opposed to supernaturalism), reason as man’s only means of knowledge (as opposed to faith or skepticism), free will (as opposed to determinism–by biology or environment), and an ethics of rational self-interest (as opposed to the sacrifice of oneself to others or others to self). The only moral political system, she maintained, is laissez-faire capitalism (as opposed to the collectivism of socialism, fascism, or the welfare state), because it recognizes the inalienable right of an individual to act on the judgment of his own mind. Your life, she held, belongs to you and not to your country, God or your neighbors.
Ayn Rand understood that to defend the individual she must penetrate to the root: his need to use reason to survive. “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism,” she wrote in 1971, “but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.” This radical view put her at odds with conservatives, whom she vilified for their attempts to base capitalism on faith and altruism. Advocating a government to protect the individual’s right to his property, she was not a liberal (or an anarchist). Advocating the indispensability of philosophy, she was not a libertarian.
Despite being outside the cultural mainstream, her novels became best-sellers and her books sell more today than ever before–half a million copies per year. There is a reason that Atlas Shrugged placed second in a Library of Congress survey about most influential books. There is a reason that her works are considered life-altering by so many readers. She had an exalted view of man and created inspiring fictional heroes.
A sui generis philosopher, who looked at the world anew, Ayn Rand has long puzzled the intellectual establishment. Academia has usually met her views with antagonism or avoidance, unable to fathom that she was an individualist but not a subjectivist, an absolutist but not a dogmatist. And they have thus ignored her original solutions to such seemingly intractable problems as how to ground values in facts. But even in academia, her ideas are finding more acceptance, e.g., university fellowships and a subgroup within the American Philosophical Association to study Objectivism.
Ayn Rand left a legacy in defense of reason and freedom that serves as a guidepost for the American spirit–especially pertinent today when America and what it stands for are under assault.
The summer of 2003 was said to be Europe’s hottest in 500 years. Those who saw this as largely due to human-caused climate change could reasonably have blamed the US, the global leader in carbon emissions. Less so in 2023. The International Energy Agency’s estimates of 2023 carbon dioxide emissions, published last week, show all climate change roads (still) lead to Beijing, even if that’s inconvenient.
In 2003, the annual carbon emissions rankings saw: 1) the US at 5.7 gigatons, 2) the PRC at 4.6 gigatons, 3) the EU at 3.6 gigatons, and no one else really matters. By 2013, Chinese emissions had jumped 125 percent and American emissions dropped 10 percent, leaving Chinese emissions more than double that of American. European emissions had fallen fast and India emerged as a clear fourth.
Fast-forward 10 more years and American emissions dropped again, actually a bit more quickly than the prior decade. There are people who still think the PRC and the US are about equal in emissions. In 2023, China was at 12.6 gigatons versus America’s 4.5 gigatons. The EU’s emissions also fell from 2013-2023, and it’s now fourth globally, with India grabbing third.
In 2023, the US, India, EU and heck, let’s just toss in Japan too, combined to 1.8 gigatons less in terms of emissions than China, alone. The PRC’s emissions growth has slowed sharply in the past 10 years, but the volume increment was still 175 percent larger than the increment to Indian emissions (with the others declining).
Advocates of tight restrictions on emissions cite their views as supported by science and skeptics’ views as selfish and/or completely wrong. And some climate change skeptics say odd things. But the climate movement’s devotion to science and the overriding imperative to cut emissions often vanish when emissions are attributed to sovereign sources. Then science is unceremoniously dumped in favor of fairness.
It’s not fair to hold China accountable because of history or population size or income level or a vague merger thereof. The atmosphere doesn’t care about your excuses, wasteful Americans, but is forgiving of China’s roughly 64 percent share of global coal emissions. The per capita claim may be the worst. China has the same population as India and 4.5 times the emissions.
The important per capita failing concerns solutions. Per climate change warnings, there’s not nearly enough time for solutions via personal decisions. Solutions must be imposed top-down, as broadly as possible. It’s one government, and to a notable extent, one man who can change the trajectory of 1.4 billion people.
The climate change return to influencing Xi Jinping, history notwithstanding, is many times higher than any other form of climate change advocacy. And if he can’t be moved, advocacy is largely performative. If the US, EU, and Japan had all cut emissions by half 2003-2023, and India’s hadn’t grown at all, China would have still caused a global increase.
Some climate change advocates previously went beyond fairness to fantasy. There was an expressed belief that, if the US led on emissions, China would follow. This is dead now, right, my green friends? Numbers over 20 years show otherwise. The slightest bit of sense shows otherwise. Science doesn’t mix well with faith that Xi, of all people, waits for American leadership.
The best defense of PRC emissions levels is the world’s factory defense. Many Chinese numbers are inflated by global demand for cheaper goods—emissions were relocated along with jobs. If so, serious climate change action calls for painful US policies to block cheap, carbon-intensive imports from China. Actually prohibitive tariffs or low quotas.
Those are costly, but there’d be a logic to them. There’s no climate logic at all in leaving tariffs and quotas on China untouched while pausing American exports of liquefied gas, as the Biden administration did in late January. The pause is not even performative—it will likely increase global coal use or shift gas markets toward bad actors, plus harm American producers and workers.
The climate change movement often expresses frustration at not being taken seriously. Export halts for the US, protests for the EU, and fairness for China, whose emissions are 80 percent higher than the US and UE combined. This is why.
Former President Donald Trump celebrated the unanimous Supreme Court ruling keeping him on the presidential ballot in Colorado and other states that ruled him ineligible.
Minutes after the court released its decision, the 45th president took to Truth Social to call the ruling a “BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!
9-0 shocker on Supreme Court.
Does this mean election fraud is now illegal too?
I like these comments from my Facebook thread:
Justin Scott Allen: “I think the leftists were warned how close the nation is to CWII, and they simply went along as they have other cheats planned. They pretty much refused to reveal their thinking. It’s beyond crystal clear ‘the rule of law’ is a phrase to which leftists at best pay lipservice, which they feel free to ignore the moment they believe there will be no repercussions for their multi-tier application of justice.”
Leeda Dundale: “Yes, the Dems have other plans and believe me they won’t be good for the Election!”
Why would members of the Supreme Court who vote against the Constitution and the Bill of Rights every single time (in the case of the Obama appointees), much of the time (in the case of bought-and-sold and/or blackmailed Chief Justice Roberts), or a lot of the time (the squishy Trump appointees) — why would they suddenly find reason, principle and justice? Why have they suddenly discovered the U.S. Constitution?
Do they have their limits? Why no other limits — why only this one? What about election fraud? And what about the immunity for Trump as president for actions that Biden already gets immunity for, as president (e.g. having documents in his possession outside of government offices)? Do you seriously think the majority will rule in Trump’s favor on those cases?
They’re planning on getting him in jail. So no worries about the ballot case. That could come back to haunt them with one of their own candidates, someday.
I smell a rat. Come November (if not sooner), we’ll know if I’m right.
Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on Twitter at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, Michael Hurd Ph.D. on LinkedIn, @DrHurd on TruthSocial
President Joe Biden is declining at a geometric, not an arithmetic, rate. His cognitive challenges are multifaceted.
His gait is shaky. His daily use of stairs now risks the chance of a tenure-ending fall. Even when he sticks to the teleprompter, he so slurs his speech, mispronounces words, and glides his syntax that at times he becomes as incomprehensible at the podium as he is unsteady in his step.
He now speaks a strange language foreign and untranslatable to most Americans. White House transcribers leave hiatuses in their written texts of his remarks to reflect that they either have no idea what he said, do not wish to publicize their guesses at what he said, or do not wish the public to know what he was trying to say.
Despite the circling-the-wagons media and the passive-aggressive sycophants like the opportunistic Gov. Gavin Newsom in waiting, the left understands that Biden will be lucky to get to the August convention. This spring and early summer, he will not campaign as a normal presidential candidate, and this time around, there is no pretense of the COVID epidemic to excuse his absence.
The people have already polled numerous times that their president is unfit to serve now and, in the future, should not run. So the 2020 Faustian bargain is in shambles. Remember its quid pro quos: all the major Democratic presidential candidates of 2020 nearly simultaneously pulled out the primaries to coronate Biden—but only on the condition that Biden would play to the hilt his “ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton” schtick that would offer a veneer to the otherwise unpopular hard left agenda of the new Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren/the Obamas/Squad Democratic Party.
The people voted for a “return to normalcy,” all while the left destroyed the southern border, unleashed a critical legal theory/George-Soros crime wave, dismantled hard-won deterrence abroad, and printed money to spur hyperinflation.
Moreover, it is increasingly clear that the entire Biden family consortium is compromised and corrupt. Neither Hunter nor Jim nor Frank Biden had any consulting skills, business expertise, or corporate experience to warrant leveraging over $25 million from foreign interests. Their only commodity was to sell corrupt parties the appearance that Joe Biden would be quite willing to help their various causes if they enriched his family. Everyone knows that to be true, and only now, as Biden sinks into incoherence, are his protectors shrugging about the obvious money-making schemes that revolved around a corrupt senator, vice president, and private citizen, Joe Biden.
None of Biden’s record is popular. His policies on the border, economy, energy, foreign policy, and crime poll below 50 percent. And this trifecta of Biden’s mental deterioration, family corruption, and failed presidential record will only grow worse.
Then there is the Kamala Harris issue—the Spiro Agnew insurance policy of our age that so far has protected Biden from overt efforts to replace him. She is as unpopular as Biden and often as incomprehensible, but without the excuse of age or mental diminishment. Of all the major Beltway elected officials, only Sen. Mitch McConnell polls worse.
By August, Democratic donors and politicos may well conclude that the only way to rid the party of both is to release Biden’s delegates, open up the convention, and let candidates fight over the now-free delegates. Harris then will not be nominated, but not through a backroom, Machiavellian removal of a black woman. Instead, she will “fairly” lose an “open” and “transparent” free-for-all of various Democratic want-to-be replacements and recede into a sober and judicious Mike Pence-like retirement.
The problem with this scenario, of course, is that late-season convention or post-convention machinations in the modern era don’t work out too well. In 1976, Ronald Reagan, after losing a series of early primaries and being declared nearly inert, suddenly caught fire and entered the August 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City within striking distance of incumbent Gerald Ford. President Ford, remember, had never been elected either president or vice president.
In the end, in one of the most acrimonious Republican conventions in memory, a wounded Ford won the nomination by only 117 delegate votes out of some 2,257 cast. In some sense, Ford never recovered and lost the election to Jimmy Carter, even as the tumult gave Reagan the exposure and his team the experience needed to win the nomination in 1980.
About two weeks after the 1972 Democratic convention, a desperate George McGovern and the Democratic hierarchy removed Vice President running mate Sen. Thomas Eagleton from the ticket due to revelations of little-known past electric shock treatments given to combat depression. After futile efforts, the Democrats settled on the Kennedy clan’s Sargent Shriver, who had never run for office. McGovern would have lost anyway to an incumbent Nixon. But the margin of defeat in one of the greatest landslides in presidential history was often attributable to the sheer chaos of changing a vice presidential candidate so late in the campaign.
In sum, the Democrats can—and may have to—replace Joe Biden, and they can ensure that Kamala Harris is not the nominee, but the means of doing so will be chaotic and messy and will wound the winner for the rest of the campaign.
Trump’s Circuitous Path to Victory
Donald Trump challenges have now been discussed ad nauseam, and they are threefold: he must either beat or postpone campaign-season court trials—and find perhaps $800 million to $1 billion to post bonds, pay interests on them, and meet gargantuan legal fees—without turning off donors and supporters and by avoiding the diversion of Republican National Committee and various campaign funds to his own personal defense.
As in the past, Trump will be vastly outspent, perhaps by 3-1 or 4-1. Molly Ball’s infamous Time 2022 essay outlined the left-wing scheming that ensured a mail-in/early balloting election by aggregating the deep state, the corporate boardroom, the social media monopolies, and the 2020 riotous street thugs of Antifa and BLM. What she called a “cabal” and “conspiracy” was designed not so much as a one-off to defeat Trump as to create a permanent system by which a Trump-like candidate could never win a presidential election, both in 2020 and afterward.
Given changes in the 2020 state voting laws that saw 60-70 percent of the ballots in many swing states not cast on Election Day, while the rejection rate of faulty ballots counter-intuitively plunged despite such an influx, Trump will have to win by 3–4 points. Otherwise, in the swing states, we will again stare at the late-evening televised wizardry in which his huge leads mysteriously melt on the screen as drop boxes and mail sacks are tallied.
To achieve a 51-plus majority in the popular vote—no Republican has achieved such a national ballot margin in 36 years since George H.W. Bush beat Mike Dukakis in 1988—Trump will have to win, or win back, more Independents, apostate Democrats, and RINO Never-Trumpers.
He can do that in only two ways:
One, he must hammer away at Joe Biden’s disastrous record on the border, energy, race, foreign affairs, the economy, and social issues that scare moderates and fence-sitters, especially when comparisons are made to the achievements of 2017-2020. Inner-city residents are being tag-teamed by both the influx of thousands of illegal aliens who apparently have first claims on stretched social services and street criminals who loot, assault, and carjack mostly their law-abiding neighbors with impunity.
Two, Trump needs to model his remarks after his Iowa Primary victory speech or his recent Fox Townhall event with Fox’s Laura Ingram. Translated, that means there is no reason to reference Nikki Hayley’s deployed husband, to refer to her as a “birdbrain,” or to say much of anything other than she will lose, and in the process, she is needlessly hurting more than half of America by draining resources away from the only real chance to repeal the current socialist agenda.
Hayley is imploding without any need for a Trump push. Magnanimity, rather than salt in her self-inflicted wounds, is the better strategy to unite the party. Trump has cemented his base. He will increase his share of minority voters who have been hurt the worst by the Biden socialist agenda. But to ensure victory and a Republican Congress, he cannot give swing voters a reason not to vote for policies and initiatives that they overwhelmingly prefer over those of the now hard-left Democratic Party.
In sum, after Super Tuesday, when Hayley will either quit the race or become inert, Trump needs to call her, politely remind her of her promise to support the nominee, and welcome her back into the fold. If she is wise, she will likely agree to disagree, let bygones be bygones, and thus pledge to support the assured nominee, Trump.
Two of her three choices are in her own interest: 1) She endorses him, and Trump wins, and she is vibrant in 2028; 2) she endorses him, and Trump loses, and she is still viable; 3) she opposes him, and Trump either wins—and she is persona non grata—or he loses, and she is blamed for splitting the party and his defeat. Breaking her public promise to support the nominee will bleed what support she retains, and would prove a suicidal blunder.
Trump has achieved the greatest political comeback since Richard Nixon arose from the ashes of defeat in California in 1962 to win the nomination and presidency in 1968. Trump’s Phoenix-like rebirth from January 2021 to the present was achieved by Biden’s failure, the natural empathy accruing from the weaponization of the law by partisan or corrupt prosecutors against him, and Trump’s greater success in giving independents fewer reasons to vote against him. If he can praise those he defeats, call for unity, and campaign in 50 states in non-Republican strongholds, then he can win—even despite the hatred of the left, the corruption of the media, the weaponization of the bureaucracy, and the eroding trust in the way we vote.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O’Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the recently released The Dying Citizen, and the forthcoming The End of Everything (May 7, 2024)..
Photo: RICHMOND, VIRGINIA – MARCH 02: Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks during a Get Out the Vote Rally March 2, 2024 in Richmond, Virginia. Sixteen states, including Virginia, will vote during Super Tuesday on March 5. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Immigration to the USA — originally, a free country — used to mean: “You’re welcome. Now make your own way, and leave your fellow man alone.”
The greatest proof that you were a worthy immigrant? Your willingness to come. There were no freebies, there were no free rides. The price of freedom was self-reliance. Without self-reliance, you could not be free. You could ask for charity, but NEVER compel or coerce it.
Today’s warped concept of immigration is 100 percent the opposite. The less independent, the less self-reliant, the less responsible and the more corrupt you are — the better. Why? Because you’ll feed as a parasite off the state, and that will keep the established parasites who run the state in permanent power.
There is nothing misguided or accidental in today’s open border politics. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s all done in broad daylight. Biden brags of it daily, and laughs at the good people forced to endure it, and forced to pay the bills through taxes, inflation and crime. Today’s immigration policies are deliberately designed to destroy what’s left of what used to be the best of America.
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Contrast the timeless, clear brilliance of Aristotle with today: “Trust the science, which means: Trust the government. Do what you’re told or we’ll label you a threat to democracy.”
Without critical, independent and objective thinking, freedom cannot continue.
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THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 