I’ve never been much of a poker player, but I understand that expert players can read the “tell” on their opponents’ faces. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the “tell” on the actions of our Democratic friends informs us that they are afraid.

Why would President Biden shovel out a boatload of executive orders in the first week of his presidency advancing climate change and fighting systemic racism?

Why would the Deep State sic the FBI on candidate and then President Trump, and then let Kevin Clinesmith, the guy that falsified a document, off with a tap on the wrist?

Why would the rulers nod and wink through a summer of riots that caused death and destruction in many American cities, and then build fences and call out the National Guard to protect them against a few “far-right” LARPers? And if that isn’t enough, mount an impeachment against a president who has already left office?

Oh, and by the way, How come it was Vice President Pence that ordered up the National Guard to Washington D.C.? Why not Trump, the commander-in-chief? Inquiring minds would like to know.

What is going on here? These “tells” show that the ruling class, for all its power and its domination and hegemony, is terrified by the barbarians at the gates.

Let us tell the recent Story of the Rulers and the Commoners. In the Fifties, the rulers built suburbs and interstates for the commoners. Then in the Sixties commoners were reviled while well-born radical children of liberal parents occupied university offices or became flower children. Then the leaders of the Silent Majority, Nixon and Agnew, were sternly shown the door. Then the Reagan Democrats elected Reagan. Then Bill Clinton was a New Democrat that worked with Republicans once the commoners voted him a Republican Congress, and all good people started to worry about the Religious Right. Then in 2006 Nancy Pelosi got a bunch of moderate Democrats elected to Congress. Then, in the 2010s, first Obama marginalized commoners as bitter clingers, sicced the IRS on the Tea Party, and then Hillary Clinton back-handed commoners as a basket of deplorables. Under Trump commoners were derided as white oppressors. Then, January 6, 2021, a day which will live (pause) in infamy, the day the commoners suddenly became dangerous insurrectionists, and the Capitol of Panem would now be defended by fences and the National Guard.

(How does a YA writer like Suzanne Collins manage to nail our present ruling class in The Hunger Games, as Frances Hodgson Burnett did the British upper crust a century ago in The Secret Garden? Where does that come from?)

See, I think that the reality behind the poker game is this chart of U.S. government spending as a percent of GDP. It shows 80 years, from 1900 to 1980 of glorious ruling-class growth, with loot and plunder for all, punctuated by a couple of lovely wars. But since 1980, the total spending as a percent of GDP has been flat, at about 35-36 percent GDP.

Now, I don’t know what you think when you look at that chart. But I say to myself that it shows that the game is up. In whatever indirect way the American people speak, they have spoken: no more increases in government spending. But our Democratic friends propose to spend trillions on climate change and on Medicare for All, and I know not what else. And that is after all the massive spending on COVID stimulus.

Ain’t gonna fly, and that is the meaning, I think, of all the Biden executive orders. Biden’s handlers are throwing everything at the wall, hoping something will stick. I doubt it.

The problem is that USG is facing the fact of Chantrill’s Law: “government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.” Pensions? Health care? The only thing our leaders have done recently is try to squeeze in more free stuff with ObamaCare and add stealth income taxes to Medicare. Education? But our teachers don’t feel safe!

Obviously, the only way we will ever reform today’s government — the backed-up sewer of a century of educated-ruling-class vote-buying — is through a massive smashup. And if you ask me, the Biden agenda brings that date forward.

Now, our liberal friends can only think within their own worldview, which privileges noble educated youth fighting the oppressors for justice. But in the coming years they will find themselves tangled up in a struggle with a force that is neither revolutionary nor directed from above. The monster that devours progressivism will be an instinctual, chthonic, semiconscious rebellion from the depths of common humanity. And our liberal friends won’t have a clue what to do about it.

But at some level they that something is wrong, that there is a glitch in the matrix. And so they are afraid. They are right to be afraid. And it shows in their actions.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

There could not be a second American Revolution today. The modern equivalents of Madison, Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Paine, and Adams would all have been cancelled, jailed or deplatformed by now. Under the unfolding dictatorship of the Biden regime, they would possibly be murdered or convicted as “domestic terrorists”. The history that’s repeating itself seems to resemble the French Revolution more closely than the American one. A pretty good description of the French Revolution from New World Encyclopedia online:

The French Revolution (1789–1799) was a period of ideological, political and social upheaval in the political history of France and Europe as a whole, during which the French polity, previously an absolute monarchy with feudal privileges for the aristocracy and Catholic clergy, underwent radical change to forms based on Enlightenment principles of republicanism, citizenship, and rights. These changes were accompanied by violent turmoil, including executions and repression during the Reign of Terror, and warfare involving every other major European power.

The Revolution was originally a popular uprising against the absolute power of the king and against the privileges and wealth of the elite, and was perpetrated in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity. In reality it led to the loss of liberty, dictatorship and nationalism. The revolution was based on a hatred of tradition and desire to use the power of the state to create a new order. People were given new identities as citizens of the state. To crush the resistance to revolution and the new order about 18,000 – 40,000 people were executed.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

When giving speeches and talking to audiences, I’ve often been struck by how few Americans, even those who are highly educated, have any idea where the energy they use in their home or business comes from. I’ve asked college students where the electric power is generated, and they shrug and then point to the electric socket in the wall. The electric currents just come magically through that plug.

For millennials, supporting green energy is cool and even virtuous. It’s a popular and costless way to save the planet — until the power doesn’t flow through the grid. Then the laptops, hairdryers, Netflix shows, computer games and iPhones run out of juice.

That may happen one of these days — and in the not-too-distant future (just ask Californians about blackouts), when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

Which brings me to President Joe Biden’s take-no-prisoners approach to energy. The goals: kill fossil fuels; stop the building of pipelines; enter international treaties that outlaw fossil fuel use; end drilling on federal lands; strangle the oil and gas industries with regulatory assaults. And then throw billions and perhaps trillions of tax dollars at wind and solar farms.

So, let’s go back to the question I ask students: How much of our energy needs today are met with fossil fuels — the so-called dirty energy?

The U.S. Energy Information Administration recently released a chart showing the latest official data on U.S. energy production sources from the Department of Energy. Some 80 percent of all our energy comes from oil, gas and coal. Less than 5 percent comes from wind and solar. Somehow, Biden is going to magically flip these percentages around in five or 10 years? Even the federal forecasters who support renewable energy think that is highly unlikely.

Even if Biden were able to quadruple American production of green energy over the next decade — a huge undertaking — we will be meeting about 25% of our power needs. Where will we get the other 75% of our electric power and transportation fuels? Battery-operated cars such as Teslas and Chevy Volts need electric power to recharge the massive batteries.

As we produce less oil and gas domestically, two bad things will happen. First, gas prices are going to rise rapidly — perhaps to above $4 a gallon. Prices have already started to rise at the pump to more than $2.50 a gallon in many markets. Second, we will make up for the lost domestic energy production by importing more energy from Saudi Arabia, Russia and OPEC nations.

We will reverse the energy independence achieved under former President Donald Trump to dependency on OPEC nations under Biden. This certainly isn’t good for the U.S. economy and jobs here at home. But it’s great news for the Saudi oil sheiks, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the communists in Beijing — all of whom are going to make out like bandits. They can’t believe their good fortune.

Maybe so, my younger and more idealistic friends say. But at least we will be doing our part to save the planet. Alas, no. China and India are building more than 100 coal plants as we shut ours down. China and Russia just signed a multibillion-dollar deal to build a pipeline from oil-rich Siberia to the big cities of China. Would Beijing invest in that infrastructure if they had any intention to stop using fossil fuels? Trump was right when he said that we have the toughest environmental standards in the world. So, shifting energy production out of America only increases greenhouse gases.

Perhaps over the next several decades, wind and solar power will be cheap enough to meet most of our energy needs. But are we to starve ourselves of energy in the meantime? Are Americans willing to pay $4 or $5 a gallon to fill up the tank with Saudi oil or Russian gas?

Wouldn’t it be smarter, safer and, yes, more virtuous to get the energy we need from Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota or even Alberta, Canada, than from countries that hate us?

Stephen Moore

The development from Aquinas through Locke and Newton represents more than four hundred years of stumbling, tortuous, prodigious effort to secularize the Western mind, i.e., to liberate man from the medieval shackles. It was the buildup toward a climax: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. For the first time in modern history, an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture; the trend that had been implicit in the centuries-long crusade of a handful of innovators now swept the West explicitly, reaching and inspiring educated men in every field. Reason, for so long the wave of the future, had become the animating force of the present.

Confidence in the power of man replaced dependence on the grace of God—and that rare intellectual orientation emerged, the key to the Enlightenment approach in every branch of philosophy: secularism without skepticism.

In metaphysics, this meant a fundamental change in emphasis: from God to this world, the world of particulars in which men live, the realm of nature . . . . Men’s operative conviction was that nature is an autonomous realm—solid, eternal, real in its own right. For centuries, nature had been regarded as a realm of miracles manipulated by a personal deity, a realm whose significance lay in the clues it offered to the purposes of its author. Now the operative conviction was that nature is a realm governed by scientific laws, which permit no miracles and which are intelligible without reference to the supernatural.

Just as there are no limits to man’s knowledge, many [Enlightenment era] thinkers held, so there are no limits to man’s moral improvement. If man is not yet perfect, they held, he is at least perfectible. Just as there are objective, natural laws in science, so there are objective, natural laws in ethics; and man is capable of discovering such laws and of acting in accordance with them. He is capable not only of developing his intellect, but also of living by its guidance. (This, at least, was the Enlightenment’s ethical program and promise.)

Whatever the vacillations or doubts of particular thinkers, the dominant trend represented a new vision and estimate of man: man as a self-sufficient, rational being and, therefore, as basically good, as potentially noble, as a value.

The father of this new world was a single philosopher: Aristotle. On countless issues, Aristotle’s views differ from those of the Enlightenment. But, in terms of broad fundamentals, the philosophy of Aristotle is the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

In epistemology, the European champions of the intellect had been unable to formulate a tenable view of the nature of reason or, therefore, to validate their proclaimed confidence in its power. As a result, from the beginning of the eighteenth century (and even earlier), the philosophy advocating reason was in the process of gradual, but accelerating, disintegration.

Two of my memes from social media yesterday:

Here’s an inexpensive COVID relief bill: SHUT DOWN the government and leave the economy the hell alone. Cost: $0

Biden doesn’t want to reopen government schools. I agree. Defund them, shut them down and PRIVATIZE education.

From an article entitled, “The GameStop Rally Is a Lively Party, and Regulators Aren’t Welcome”:

“The stock market saga surrounding GameStop has shown that retail investors hold immense potential. Where GameStop gave power to the players, financial apps have given power to the people. These apps have brought investing to the palms of countless hands across the world. Maybe these new investors will “disrupt” the market, but every great innovation was at one point termed a market disruption. This is no different.”

It’s fascinating to watch leftist Democrats rush to use government regulation to protect the hedge fund investors from market losses. Our Uniparty, the Democrats, are now everything they always claimed their conservative opposition to be. Money, not markets, are all these shallow, power-grubbing leftists care about.

From another article entitled, “Why Corporations Should Cater to Consumers, Not Causes”:

“Firms leveraging situations and social issues is not new, but showcasing their moral authority despite a disinterested consumer base is.”

Exactly right. Business is not politics. Businesses should focus on the product or service they’re selling, NOT on political views. Unfortunately, that becomes impossible in a fascist state where government has so much sway over companies via regulation and taxes, that businesses no longer function AS businesses.

#NotMyDictatorship

There is one party that seeks to demonize, criminalize and extinguish dissent.

Everybody agrees that our country is in crisis – and agrees that it is the worst crisis since the Civil War. But at the same time, we tell ourselves a comforting tale about the source of the crisis that perpetuates the problem instead of providing a path to ending it. We say our politics are “divisive” and talk about “unity and healing” as though that would miraculously be achieved if everybody stopped … what? Disagreeing? All politics is divisive. That’s the healthy basis of our constitutional order: the freedom to disagree. To suppress disagreement, to outlaw it – as many Democrats and their Big Tech and media allies are demanding these days – is to end democracy as we know it.

The problem is not that we disagree. We are not suffering as a nation from healthy disagreement. We are suffering from a Tsunami of Hate emanating from the Democrat Party that seeks to demonize, criminalize and extinguish dissent from the 75 million supporters of Donald Trump. It is now official Washington dogma that to question an election result – something the congressional Democrats have done in the face of every Republican presidential victory since 2000 – is now “insurrection” and “domestic terrorism,” or the incitement thereto, and needs to be prosecuted and suppressed.

You can’t have a democracy if this is the attitude of a party that controls all three branches of government, is enabled by a corrupt and compliant media, and is determined not just to defeat, but to humiliate, destroy and expunge from the record an ex-president who is supported by a greater segment of the American electorate than any American leader before him.

There is Democrat-sponsored legislation pending that would prevent any public building or artifact, even a “bench” from being named after the 45th president of the United States. There is a farcical witch-trial to impeach the same villain even though he has left office and is now a private citizen. There is even Democrat talk of stripping Trump of his pension, despite the fact that he gave his entire $1.6 million salary as president to the American people – something no president before him has done. If ever there was a public lynching, short of stringing the victim from the nearest tree – and there are no lack of leftwing calls for that – the Democrats’ unrelentingly vindictive assault on the defeated Donald Trump down to the last petty detail is it.

But what is in effect a total war is not merely a war to cancel Donald Trump. If it were, it would be reprehensible enough, but not a threat to the nation itself. This demonic hate directed by the Democrat Party towards Trump is also hate for the 75 million Americans who voted for him. And there is no shortage of reminders of that. Ordinary Americans in all walks of life who happen to think that Trump’s presidency – which included record employment and record economic growth, delivered benefits for all Americans, particularly American minorities, secured America’s borders, defeated America’s terrorist enemies and led to an unprecedented reconciliation between Arab nations and the State of Israel – was a worthy achievement are treated as social pariahs, have their careers destroyed and (shades of the Kremlin) are regarded as mentally unfit and in need of deprogramming.

In a March 2020 interview with Axios, James Clyburn – the third ranking Democrat in the House and the political figure most responsible for Biden’s primary victory – raised the specter of Hitler when speaking about Trump, calling the president a racist and likening modern-day America to Germany during the Nazi Party’s rise to power. “I used to wonder how could the people of Germany allow Hitler to exist,” said Clyburn. “But with each passing day, I’m beginning to understand how. And that’s why I’m trying to sound the alarm.”

A Tsunami of Hate – not “divisiveness” – is the root cause of our political crisis and the most existential threat we have faced since the war to end slavery.

The fact that the threat posed by the Democrats’ Tsunami of Hate is not just to Trump and his supporters, but to America itself, was evident in one of Biden’s first directives as president, declaring that a war on America’s “systemic racism” would be a priority of his administration: “The fact is systemic racism touches every facet of American life.”

This is one of the Big Lies that have become articles of faith for Democrats, and is easily refuted. The 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed “systemic racism.” Here is the Wikipedia description of the law:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub. L. 88–352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964) is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and later sexual orientation and gender identity. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations…

If systemic racism or institutional racism were a serious problem in America – let alone touched “every facet of American life,” – as Biden says, what do you think would happen? Assume, as Biden and woke Democrats generally seem to think that all white people are racists, there are thousands of black attorneys, attorneys general, prosecutors, judges, legislators and occupiers of the highest seats of government. If there was a scintilla of truth in this statement there would be thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lawsuits filed under the Civil Rights Act. There are no such lawsuits. The claim that “systemic racism touches every facet of American life” is itself a racist lie, whose evident target is white people, since according to the woke, “people of color” can’t be racist.

Not surprisingly, one of Biden’s first week initiatives was a systemically racist plan to provide financial assistance to small businesses whose owners were black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American. Only whites were excluded. But Asian Americans as an ethnic group have higher incomes than white Americans. So what rationale for this policy is there but anti-white racism?

How virulent is the anti-white and anti-American racism of the Democrat Party? Consider this unhinged but also unchallenged statement by Vice President Kamala Harris defending the Black Lives Matters rioters whose “protests” caused billions in property damage, led to 25 deaths and injured 2000 police officers in the summer of 2020: “The reality is that the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human… It’s no wonder people are taking to the streets [to protest]. And I support them.”

In other words, the 44th president of the United States, the “most admired man in America” for over a decade wasn’t treated as “fully human,” or Martin Luther King – the only American with a national holiday in his honor (courtesy of President Ronald Reagan). This lunatic hatred of white America is now not only acceptable in the Democrat Party but the hateful creed of its leaders.

To be fair, there are two main areas of systemic racism in America today, but both are supported and enforced by the Democrat Party which is why they exist. The first is the systemic racism that traps inner city children – mainly ethnic minorities – in inferior schools that for fifty years and more have failed to provide 80 percent of them with the skills that are necessary to succeed. Every year 40% of inner city children drop out of school without graduating, and 40% of those who do, are functionally illiterate. The Democrat teacher unions – the same which went on strike during the pandemic with full pay at the expense of children who could not afford to miss school – exert absolute control over these school systems and have stifled all attempts at reforms. They are unalterably opposed to every alternative to their racist policies from charter schools to vouchers give inner city kids the same privilege as their middle-class counterparts, which would allow their parents to enroll them in schools that will teach them.

The other nationwide systemic racism is affirmative action programs which discriminate against all ethnic groups but those designated “oppressed” – a convenient leftist fiction used to justify all manner of injustice. If you’re black or Pacific Islander or Hispanic, go to the head of the line for a job, a promotion, a place at Harvard, a coveted training position to become a surgeon or other medical specialist. If you’re white or an ethnic minority whose community supports educational values and scores well on exams, like Asians, forget that place at Harvard, you’re screwed.

How racist is that? And how readily is this racism supported by a president and an administration, which like our most dedicated foreign enemies thinks America is a nation of slavers and racist oppressors, while at the same time our borders are under siege by black, brown and Asian minorities desperate to become citizens of the most tolerant, inclusive and egalitarian society on earth.

America will not be healed until the Democrat Party returns to its senses, repudiates its current racist attitudes, and stops demonizing its opponents as what Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called “enemies of the state.”

David Horowitz