Category: Politics and Issues

Nikki Haley is running to be the first woman to be President and Kristi Noem has endorsed Trump to put her on the Trump’s VP short list but maybe the woman who should be President is Kim Reynolds, the governor of Iowa. 

When Reynolds elected as Terry Branstad running mate as Lt. governor, no one would have expected Reynolds prove to be one of the most effective Governor and the perfect leader during the Covid pandemic.   In many ways, she had her issues including two DUI’s in 1999 and 2000 where she hit rock bottom with problem drinking.  Since 2000, she has been sober.

Her political career began as being the treasurer of Iowa 76^th largest county before moving to the Iowa legislature in 2008.   In 2016, she finally received her college degree while serving as Lt. governor at the age of fifty-seven.  

Reynolds was an accidental governor when Branstad, the longest-serving governor in the state history, was appointed as ambassador to China and for many conservatives viewed her as a boring moderate, member of the political establishment.  In 2018, she managed to win the election as governor in her own right by 2.7 percent and managed to clear fifty percent of the vote while most polls had her trailing in the race.  Iowa rural west carried her over the top. Starting in 2016, Iowa was shifting to the right and moving light blue state through purple state before moving to the red category.

Michael Dukakis and Al Gore won Iowa plus Obama both won the state twice plus Tom Harkin, a long-time leftist icon won five terms.  The state swung sixteen points as Trump carried the state by nearly ten points and repeated that in 2020 plus in 2022, Republicans carried all the congressional district and GOP holds 34-16 in the state senate and 64-36 in the state house.  Kim Reynolds presided over the change from a purple state to a red state.  While DeSantis gives credit to changing Florida from purple to hard red in 2022, overlooked was Kim Reynolds own coattails.

What changed Reynolds own image was her handling the Covid Pandemic. While Ron DeSantis, South Dakota Kristi Noem and Brian Kemp get credit for leading the opening, and DeSantis essentially became the leader of the skeptics camp, many did not see Kim Reynolds own performance which in the end match those of her follow governor.   For many governors, they were forced to access without much guidance and very few had any public-health background, nor did it help that much of the information coming from Anthony Fauci and his follow scientists were contradictory if not outright wrong.  As Kim Rynolds noted recently, she came out of Covid a different governor.  What emerged was a more confident leader who used the Republican advantage to push transformative agenda and, in the process, won re-election of nearly 19 percent. 

Democrats Attorney General and Treasurer lost in 2022 and now she chairs the Republican Governors Association which shows rising respect among her fellow governors.  Republican parties in Minnesota, Michigan and Illinois do not have money and in disarray, Reynolds preside over one victory over another.  As one reporter noted, “She talks in streams, with a message that’s both disciplined and detailed, long on things accomplished rather than grievances unaddressed or shadowy forces arrayed against her. She sounds, in short, like a winner.” 

Reynolds record includes, expansion of school choice, a six-week fetal heartbeat abortion and cut taxes three times while phasing in a flat tax and reduces the state’s corporate-tax rate by more than half and eliminating taxes on retirement income.   On the budget side, she streamlined state government while eliminating twenty-one cabinet-level agencies and kept Iowa budget growth below the rate of inflation.   

Like DeSantis, she signed bans on sexually explicit books in school while dealing with sex and gender education and protecting minors from radical transgender medical treatments.   She noted that she was step ahead of Florida banning critical race theories and public -employee trainings.  She put her own stamp on the Iowa courts and this court reversed a 2018 ruling on the Iowa constitution protecting a right to abortion.  (Litigation over the heartbeat bill is ongoing so this has yet to be settled.)

Kim Reynolds is not a bomb thrower and is what we in Iowa call, Iowa nice, and she has same ability that Reagan, explaining her position in a calm tenor and just a tenor could be what needed to have to bring back many of the suburban voters we lost in 2020. 

Finally, back to Covid, Governor Reynolds understood that Iowa produces ten percent of the nation’s food supply and if a long blanket lockdown would have disastrous for food supply in America.  And she withstood the criticism for opening up her economy. She was proven right and now, as Republicans look for option for 2024 who is not Trump, they might want to look the humble chief executive from Iowa.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Jon Turley began a recent article on the rise of censorship with this quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, warning us that we can end up being the monsters we hate.

Turley, an old-fashioned Democrat who still believes in free speech and opposes censorship, observed, “President Donald Trump in particular and conservatives in general. It’s an age when reason and restraint are strangers…In various areas, Democrats have embraced repellent concepts in the effort to silence or even jail their opponents. What is most striking is that legal arguments now used by the left were once used against the left… As someone who was raised in a liberal, politically active Democratic family in Chicago, one of the greatest disappointments of my lifetime has been to watch the Democratic Party fight against free speech, pushing both censorship and blacklisting.”

Examples he has given included.

1. Democratic leaders have called for social media to ban or suppress opposing points of view, and the Twitter files showed, there was secret efforts by federal agencies including FBI to engage censorship by surrogate.
2. President Biden declared Social Media companies were killing people by not censoring citizens, never mind the fact that much of the information about the vaccines and Covid-19 by the government and much of the “establishment” were wrong and the skeptics censored were far more correct in their information.
3. New York Democrats proposed a bill to limit speech to “save democracy and as Turley noted, “former Democratic labor secretary suggested that free speech could be a form of tyranny.” (Reich praised Twitter removing a former President Donald Trump from their sight as a move to save Democracy, so Reich makes it clear that social media can decide what is and is not seen when he noted, “Someone has to decide on the algorithms in every platform – how they’re designed, how they evolve, what they reveal and what they hide.”  So as long Reich side is in control of the censorship, it is okay.)

Turley noted that when he warned of the abuses of prior periods like the Red Scare in congressional hearings, Representative Don Goldman invoked Oliver Wendall Holmes view that you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, Turley pointed that this quote came from a case to justify the imprisonment of socialists for their views during the Woodrow Wilson administration.  As Turley noted, “Other Democrats have used the line as a mantra, despite its origins in one of our most abusive anti-free speech periods during which the government targeted political dissidents on the left… Many today dismiss free speech concerns over the prosecution of Trump and his aides for their actions in challenging the 2020 election.”

On the recent Georgia indictment, Turley warned, “Like others, I opposed those actions and rejected Trump’s claims of systemic voting fraud. However, some of us have great reservations about the criminalization of such challenges, particularly under the type of sweeping conspiracy theory put forward by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. …While the Georgia indictment contains serious charges related to some individuals, the effort to bag Trump through a sweeping racketeering claim could lead in the future to the criminalization of election challenges by both parties. At one time, such a prosecution would have raised a modicum of concern on the left.”  Turley reminded the left that Democrats opposed certification of Republican victories and certainly if one can go after Trump for opposing the 2020 election, what could be done to any Democrats since they have challenged Republican victories. 

The Democrats are now the party of censorship, and we are talking the censorship of political ideas.  We now know much of the censored information from Covid to Biden’s corruption has proven to be correct. 

The recent Republican debate shows some difference but there are some similar.  Take the issue of Ukraine during the recent Republican debate.  Haley’s argument is that there is a connection between Tawain and Ukraine, if we fail to support Ukraine, China may view Taiwan as vulnerable whereas others fear that are we concentrating on the Ukraine at the expense of the Chinese.  The reasoning begins with using up our own military stock and the billions we have spent with no end game in sight. 

The one thing that everyone agrees with, no United States troop will enter the conflict to aid the Ukrainians and it is their war to win or lose.   As I mention, what needs to be explored is the review of the Weinberger doctrine which was controversial in the 1980’s during the Reagan years.

Just a remainder, those principles were:

1. Forces should not be committed unless the action is vital to national interest.

2. Forces should be committed wholeheartedly with the intention of winning – or they should not be committed at all (No half-hearted commitment).

3. Forces should be committed with clearly defined political and military objectives.

4. The use of force should be the last resort (after all diplomatic initiatives have been exhausted).

5. The relationship between objectives and the force committed should be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary.

6. Before committing forces abroad (in foreign countries) there should be some reasonable assurance of public support.

As for the Ukraine, is it similar to helping mujahideen to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan? After the Russian invasion, we aided the mujahideen against the Russians and they provided the blood and we the money.  In the case of the Ukraine, there is no support for American troops to be involved in the defense of Ukraine and that Ukraine fate is up to the Ukrainian people.  There is no support for American troops and since Ukraine is not NATO country, there is no reason to involved European troops.   

The question is how much support is too much and what is the end goal?  Has the aid been parcel out bits by bits and in a half-hearted fashion?  Has Biden’s administration delayed providing M-1 tank and F-16 fighters, and does this violate the dictum that forces should be committed wholeheartedly or not at all?  And what are the clearly defined political and military objectives?  What is victory?  And how does the definition of victory change in the course of war?  During Korean war, once the Chinese joined the fight, the objective went from the entire the Korean peninsula as one entity favorable to the West to merely defending the status quo of independent South Korea not controlled by communists. South Korea has zoomed ahead of North Korean and is not just a developed nation economically but is a leading military power in the region. 

In the case of the Ukraine, a NATO official hinted that a negotiated peace would allow Ukraine to be part of NATO and Russia in control of eastern portion of Ukraine.  Ukraine gets the protection of NATO in the future and aligned with NATO and EU, has a chance to provide its own economic miracle as a counter to Russia.  Certainly, having a military power of quarter of million soldiers with armed citizenry behind it will provide security for much of central Europe, the Nordic and Baltic states along with Poland which is in the process of strengthening their military.  The Polish-Ukraine alliance will include a minimum of 500,000 soldiers, well trained and with the latest military equipment.  Poland economy is on the verge of overtaking Great Britain by the end of the decade and many of the Baltic and Nordic states have their own sound economics bordering Russia.  This gives both United States and NATO option if Central European nations are capable of defending against Russia in the future.  This could be seen as a military objective in which followers of a modest foreign policy could get behind.  This is one policy that both Haley and DeSantis could agree on along most Republicans.    (There will be some debate on whether Ukraine should be a member of NATO, but the reality is that in order to gain a peace treaty, Ukraine has to be guaranteed some security arrangements against future Russian incursion and NATO is the one that provides that.)

Reagan years saw their number one objective as defeating the Soviet Empire and how does a modest policy face our number one threat, China?  The one thing that Reagan understood is that our economy strength played a role in our national defense and presently our economy is not strong presently with inflation percolating and energy policy designed to weaken our local energy production.   An American first policy begins with energy independence policy, full speed ahead along with anti-inflationary policy. Reducing spending and getting our budget under control. 

I made the case that the importance of supply side economy and that its definition must be expanded in my book, “Americas at the Abyss, will America survive?” Government spending must be controlled, regulations burden reduced, and supply side had to move beyond just tax cuts. Trump did two of three, reduce regulation and tax reduction which benefited most Americans. The result was continuation of the recovery and more importantly the middle class, minorities, and lower income saw their income increase.  Economic growth matters but Trump failure to get government under control hurt his overall economic plan and the massive spending during the Covid pandemic along with the anti-growth lockdown hurt the economy in 2020 and ended Trump chances to win. 

GOP governors are pursuing tax reductions and yet, they are conscious of making sure that they keep spending under control so as not to repeat what Brownback did in Kansas, cut taxes but failed to cut spending accordingly.  The new generation of governors are doing both while not just cutting taxes but trying to flatten taxes. 

The United States is in the middle of the tax-reduction revolution on a state level and as Jared Walczak of Tax Foundation, observed, “The past three years have seen the largest wave of state-tax cuts in the modern era, certainly since income taxes were created over a century ago at the state level. We have seen more than half of the states with income taxes cut their top rates. We have seen trimming of rates in other taxes, including thirteen states with corporate-income-tax cuts, a couple of states with sales-tax cuts, and trimming other taxes as well.” And these states are enacting real tax reforms.   State governors are providing a game plan to take to Washington to strengthen the economy.

The number one rival is China and China is building its military and have overtaken the United States with number of ships built but the negative for Chinese is that xi has increased government intervention in their economy and there is an economic slowdown occurring combined with population implosion, China may get old before it progresses further economically.   China advantage is that the present Administration has engaged policies that benefit them including the Green new deal in which our domestic energy is penalized while going with renewables benefits China since they control much of raw materials needed to produce wind and solar energy. 

Austin Bay in his Strategy page, “The Japanese fleet is the largest in the region and the South Korea fleet is growing. Japan also has naval and air bases American ships and military aircraft use, especially in wartime. The combination of Japanese, American and South Korea naval and air forces match whatever the Chinese can deploy against them. The large increase in Japanese defense spending is meant to maintain that superiority.”  An America First policy will include strengthening alliances in the Pacific to counter China and as I mention in my book “America at the Abyss, Will America survive?” that India must be included as part of any long-term alliances. India has border clashes with China and a natural rivalry, but Modie government is part of the BRIC’s economic alliances and that includes weakening the dollar as the reserve currency.   So, diplomacy is a must to keep India aligned with us.

Frederic Fleitz noted, “That the heart of the Ramaswamy/Haley argument over the Ukraine War is the ultimate goal of the American policy on the war.  Ramaswamy’s position, though far from perfect generally adheres to the America First principles of prioritizing the security of the American people, keeping America out of unnecessary wars, and focusing actual threats to U.S. security like our southern border and China. Meanwhile Haley’s interventionist position, with no exit strategy and no limiting principles on foreign aid, is closer to President Biden’s.  … Vivek Ramaswamy has made some mistakes in his proposals to end the Ukraine war, but he realizes that the Biden Administration approach is feckless and unsustainable. I hope Mr. Ramaswamy quickly his proposals on the war so they are not so generous to Russian and holds Russia accountable.”

Ramaswamy view that we are driving Russia into the hands of China does have some merit similar to Allies position in 1935 toward Italy invasion of Ethiopia.  Italy had not yet been a full ally of Nazis Germany and the year before, Mussolini protected Austria in a German attempt to overthrow the government and have Austria part of greater Germany.  The Allies and the League of Nation sanctioned Italy (except oil which would have hurt Italy) and drove Italy toward Germany.  Italy shortly afterwards joined Germany in a security pact and moved away from the alliances.   That is also debatable point since Putin himself wants to rebuild a new Russian empire and build up Mother Russia with control of those nations like Ukraine.  So, lot depends how one feels about Putin own view. 

Finally, an America first/Modest foreign policy begins with the control of the southern border. A nation that can’t control its border ceases to be a nation and massive illegal immigration along with the influx of drugs seeping through the border undermines any support for legal immigration and undermines the principles of successful immigration policy, assimilation.  An immigration policy without assimilation as its goal is national suicide and that is where we are right now. 

An update on state unemployment numbers by states.  Just as previous 35 months, Republican governors outperformed their Democratic counterpart on lower unemployment and those states with both legislature and executive also have lower unemployment. 

65 percent of top half with the lowest unemployment have Republican governors and 63 percent of Republicans governor are at or less than national unemployment average. We compared four of the most Republican states with the top four populous Democratic states, the same results as Republican governors outperformed Democrats governors.    Three out of four Republicans are below the national average in unemployment rate compared to only one Democrat governor below the national average. This trend has been obvious since August of 2020 that Republicans have led in economic growth and producing jobs.

I wrote in a recent post, “The United States is in the middle of the tax-reduction revolution on a state level and as Jared Walczak of Tax Foundation, observed, “The past three years have seen the largest wave of state-tax cuts in the modern era, certainly since income taxes were created over a century ago at the state level. We have seen more than half of the states with income taxes cut their top rates. We have seen trimming of rates in other taxes, including thirteen states with corporate-income-tax cuts, a couple of states with sales-tax cuts, and trimming other taxes as well.” And these states are enacting real tax reforms.”

Our politics is poison but there are three people who have played a significant role in this poisoning: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama.  Hillary Clinton, who managed to get away with compromising national security with her personal server, also invented the Russian collusion hoax.  Her campaign set up the false story that Trump was a tool of Putin, even though she began the infamous “reset” which reversed the tougher Bush’s policy.    Most have forgotten that Obama did truly little when Russian invaded Ukraine in 2014 and Obama/Biden administration view was that Ukraine was vulnerable to Russia and in an interview, Obama stated, “We have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.”  Nor did Obama/Biden administration provide lethal military assistance to Ukraine. You can argue that Obama administration was correct in their analysis but what you can not argue is that Obama administration was tough or even tougher on Putin than Trump administration proved to be.  As for Biden, we know that he got a prosecutor fired who was investigating Burisma, a company paying his son about million dollars a year.  Biden family got their cut from Ukraine. 

Hillary Clinton fake dossier became the basis of Trump prosecution and everyone in FBI, CIA and higher ups in the administration knew that this was fake but yet no one came forward and stated there is no evidence that Trump was a Putin’s puppet.   This was known in 2016 during the election but yet neither Obama nor Biden stated it was not true. 

For past seven years, Hillary Clinton has still lied about the Russian collusion, but she yet been called out.  Biden DOJ goes after Trump on everything, Biden has failed to tell the truth as well about the Russian collusion hoax or his profiter as a public official. Obama could easily have stopped this by simply saying, “there is no evidence that there was collusion between Russian and Trump.”  He refused to do so and, in the process, the Democrats and the left began a campaign to undermine Trump administration with special council investigation.  Many Democrats still to this day believe the Russian collusion hoax and much of the media spent the entire Trump administrating feeding the lie and many members of the Obama administration appeared on television repeating the same lie.

What if Obama told the truth?  The environment would be less contentious, and Trump would have been more willing to collaborate with the Democrats on issues. Issues like the border wall might have been solved or dealt with as many Democrats during the Bush administration actually supported a wall.  Politics has always been contentious, but we have gone beyond the contentious stage and moved toward the outright hatred stage where half of American hates the other half and now the other half is returning the hate.  The fall out of the 2020 elections is a direct fallout of the 2016 Russian collusion hoax as many Republicans now view the 2020 election as illegitimate and there is certain more evidence that 2020 was rigged than 2016.  We now know that FBI pressured social media and the general media not to publish information about the Hunter Biden laptop which provided evidence of Biden’s corruption that reached to his father.  Voters were denied access to information as the FBI hid this evidence and many in the “retired intelligence” declared any mention of the Biden’s laptop was Russian misinformation.   One survey done showed that many voters were not aware of the laptop and enough may have changed their vote had they known.  There were enough voter irregularities to be concerned including stopping counting voters in the middle of the night only to resume it later. (Note that this doesn’t mean that Biden did not win the elections or what voter irregularities exceeded the margin of fraud. I have seen numbers to indicate that what voter irregularities that did exist did not exceed the margin of Biden victory even in battleground states.  There were enough irregularities to be concerned about election security.) 

For Trump voters, if the left and Deep state were willing to ride a fake collusion to remove Trump, why would they not fix the elections or at least rigged it.  There are enough legal scholars just as Jon Turley and Alan Dershowitz have questioned the political case presented against Donald Trump. Alan Dershowitz went as far as noting that many of the things he did to help Al Gore in 2000 Florida recounting could have been prosecuted under the legal theories by Atlanta District Attorney.

Donald Trump could have pursued prosecution against Hillar Clinton but chose not to do that but maybe in hindsight, he should have.  At least the truth about the Russian collusion hoax and Clinton own abuse of handing classified information would have known then.  Barack Obama had the opportunity to simple say “No evidence of Russian collusion” but chose not to do that.  Joe Biden could have said a similar thing and decide not to go after Trump post 2020 election, but he chooses not to.  Hillary Clinton could quit lying about the Russian Collusion hoax and tell the truth, but she chooses not to.  History and America would have been better had these three admitted the truth to their supporters and say 2016 election was legitimate.

North Carolina has now accepted the No-Labels as a political party, and this now makes it ten states that the party is eligible for. North Carolina now joins Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota.    When you look at these states, Arizona, North Carolina, and Nevada are key battle ground states and even Red States like Florida could be changed and flipped to one political party over the other.

I have mentioned in a previous piece that No-Labels could hurt Republicans more than Democrats, “In a recent Arizona poll, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema independent campaign actually takes more votes from Republicans and a recent Emerson even noted that she takes 21 percent to 34 percent of GOP voters depending upon the candidate versus only 8 percent of Democrats.  As one news report observed, “One of the more fascinating elements of the polling is Sinema’s continued popularity with a sizable bloc of Republicans, a dynamic similar to her 2018 Senate victory when she ran as a Democrat. That year, she peeled off enough Republicans and independents to defeat then-GOP Rep. Martha McSally.”

Other surveys showed that if it was a Biden-Trump contest, that 63 percent are open to voting for a moderate independent candidate in key battle ground states. 

If you look at their proposals, they are reflective of what many Republicans believe and for many Republicans who are tired of the Trump drama, this actually gives them an option.   We are talking getting our border under control, combining voter ID and early voting similar to laws passed in Red States like Georgia.  Election security is important Americans and No-Labels promotes that.  Congress needs to get our financial house in order and  on energy, it is “all of the above” but they noted, “When Washington tries to prohibit exploration of America’s fossil fuel resources or discourage investment in the sector, all it does is weaken our country and strengthen other oil- and gasproducing countries like Russia that will gladly meet the world’s growing demand for energy. Meanwhile, neither Democrats nor Republicans in Washington have done enough to champion the expansion of carbon-free nuclear power, which is more reliable than wind and solar and cleaner than oil and gas. Despite the fact that US nuclear facilities are among the safest industrial facilities in the world—and newer reactor designs could make them even safer—the number of nuclear reactors in the US hasn’t increased in three decades.”

These proposals are attempted to be centralist in nature but in these days, being in the middle is still far to the right of the present Democratic Party, which has become the socialist party of the America, but the GOP is still trying to define itself, is it the Party of main street and the common folks.  Who will stand up for the middle class?     They also stand up for parents to be able to escape failing schools and protect citizens from criminals. 

I made the case that the importance of supply side economy and that its definition must be expanded in my book, “Americas at the Abyss, will America survive?” I made the case that government spending must be controlled, regulations burden reduced, and supply side had to move beyond just tax cuts. Trump did two of three, reduce regulation and tax reduction which benefited most Americans. The result was continuation of the recovery and more importantly the middle class, minorities, and lower income saw their income increase.  Economic growth matters but Trump failure to get government under control hurt his overall economic plan and the massive spending during the Covid pandemic along with the anti-growth lockdown hurt the economy in 2020 and ended Trump chances to win. 

We are now in the decisive battle as a movement to identify what conservatism will be in the 21^st century and be able to turn this nation around.  The future of conservatism is to combine Trump populism with Reagan conservatism.  The battle is between the populist conservatives and more traditional conservatives.   Dominic Pino detailed this recently, “For decades, tax cuts have been at the center of the conservative economic agenda. But some on the right want to deprioritize them in favor of other economic goals. Senators Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, J. D. Vance, and others talk of the need for a new Republican economic agenda focused on things such as industrial policy or social policy. The Trump administration sought to increase tariffs, and conservative defenders of protectionism are being more vocal…Tax cuts seem to irk some right-wing commentators. In May 2020, writing for the American Conservative, Michael Cuenco bemoaned the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the 2017 tax-cut law that Donald Trump signed, and called for a “reformulation of fiscal policy along populist economic nationalist lines.” He wrote, “The reformist right should ask: is there any way to stand athwart the supply-side swamp yelling Stop?”

The No-Labels movement is a direct rebellion against Trump and the radicalization of Biden and the Democrats.  Joe Manchin, whose own political career as United States Senator will most likely end in 2024 and now is talking leaving the Party. While he voted the majority of the time with the Democrats and Biden, he represent a state that depends upon fossil fuels.  He has seen his constituents betrayed by the Party he served faithfully for decades.  Manchin is now running as quickly as possible to the center.

The little secret that needs to observe, the average Trump supporter would be supportive of much of the No-Labels movement and as Trump showed, Reagan conservatism and Trump Populism can be combined for effective policies.    The MAGA movement is not the radical movement, and the No-Labels has the opportunity to combine their ideas with Trump populism/Reagan conservatism in the post Trump era.   

We stand at the cusp of nation slowly imploding into camps but yet in reviewing the No-Labels movement one can see that there is movement that is not far different from the Trump populism/Reagan Conservatism.   

I recent read a piece about Donald Trump “might be our first dictator” and while there is strong opinion about Donald Trump, we saw that after four years of a Trump Presidency, being a dictator was not one of them. The Trump administration was full of chaos, hardly did we ever sink close to a dictator ship.  It can be argued that we have to fear the present administration more and its violations of civil liberties including working with social media to censor stories.  We saw during the end of the Obama administration, our FBI pursuing an investigation to keep Trump from winning the election and then later, uses the same false story of Russian collusion as the basis for impeachment.  The FBI continued the investigation despite knowing the story was false as did President Obama and Vice-President Biden. Of course, Hillary knew since she was the one who started the false stories.

In the Biden administration, we have seen pro-life arrested on the flimsy of excuses or parents viewed as domestic terrorists and of course the massive censorship efforts on the Covid.  I could go on, but you would be hard press to find a similar record during the Trump administration for it was Trump who was the victim of the Deep state machinations. 

There is the charge of cult of personality and while many Trump supporters are willing to back their candidate with all the indictments, but the reality is that there are enough legal thinkers including Jon Turley who question the validity of many of cases against Trump and certainly we have seen two tier system in which Republican are getting prosecuted for crimes that Democrats don’t.   Joe Biden abuse and mis handled classified documents since he was a US senator, and the Obama DOJ gave Hillary a walk on her internet server despite the fact that James Comey admitted that she violated the law, but she didn’t really mean to do it.  Yeah right.

Matt Margolis wrote that there is enough evidence that Joe Biden wanted Trump out as a candidate including stories from the New York Times and his own words.  Matt noted, “And yet this wasn’t the only time Biden has made it clear that his administration was going to go after Trump to prevent him from becoming president again. Biden told a reporter he would use “constitutional” means to “make sure” Trump wouldn’t return to the White House.” (This was after a reporter asked, “How do you reassure [world leaders] … that the former President will not return or that his political movement, which is still very strong, will not once again take power in the United States?”)  You can decide who is acting more like a dictator and who is not..  Is This Proof That Joe Biden Ordered the Indictment of Trump? – PJ Media and New Questions Raised About Joe Biden’s 2022 Remarks Regarding the Prosecution of Donald Trump – RedState

We are witnessing a government that has essentially declared war on the Middle Class in so many ways, beginning with the policies that denies them gas grills, poor water heater, outlawing their combustion engine car and authors like Carol Roth and Joe Kotkin had detailed the war on the middle class and small businesses in their writing.  Joel Kotkin noted, “Nearly two-thirds of Americans feel their economic prospects have diminished over the past two years. Housing purchases are suffering huge declines as costs have reached the highest levels since 2007, and that’s before the onset of what many predict could be a serious recession. Overall, in the six months from June (2023), American households lost a remarkable $2.3 trillion in value, according to Redfin.”  For Kotkin, it is about property rights and the Middle class has lost ground, “The key issue is property. The changing class dynamics are reflected by patterns of land ownership. House prices have grown three times faster than household income over the past two decades, as the OECD noted in 2019…These trends have been exacerbated by a climate-driven housing policy that seeks to pack people into dense urban areas. Such policies are reversing 75 years of expanding property ownership in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia as well as other high-income countries. Property ownership, widely seen as key to middle-class status, is morphing into a rich man’s game. In the decade from 2010, the proportion of real-estate wealth in the US held by middle-class and working-class owners fell substantially, while that controlled by the wealthy grew from 28 per cent to 43 per cent. In this period, high-income households enjoyed 71 per cent of all gains from housing wealth, while the shares of middle- and lower-income families declined precipitously.”

There is are reason to be oppose Donald Trump, but for many in the Middle Class and much of Middle America viewed Trump as the one politician who gets them and certainly they can’t trust the Democrats who have no interest in securing our southern border, or fights the left climate change policies  that have raised both food and energy prices and they are not sold on supporting Ukraine for they may  view another endless war. They wonder why we care more about Ukraine borders but not our own.  As Kotkin noted about the environmentalist movement impact on the average American and many of the younger generations, “The middle class is also under pressure from green ideology. Perhaps the once aspirational middle orders will resign themselves to renting – a future where they will ‘own nothing and be happy’, as the gnomes of Davos suggest. Maybe so, at least with sufficient drugs and videogames. But as the younger generations age, they won’t be able to fall back on their own assets, and instead will have to rely on the state…Nor can they count on a reliably growing economy, the traditional engine of upward mobility. Today’s green theology, adopted by both the bureaucratic clerisy and oligarchic elite, has little room for the robust economic growth that might sustain a comfortable middle class. Meanwhile, the elites’ wealth continues to rise regardless, thanks to asset inflation. In the US, recent impressive job-growth numbers came predominantly in lower-wage service professions like restaurants and hospitality. In the past three months, almost two-thirds of all new jobs occurred in historically low-paying sectors.”

One serous problem of Trump was his performance during the pandemic which crushed a growing economy and it was a disaster and he backed it.  What did he learn, and would he repeat it?  Certainly, his criticism of DeSantis pandemic response rings false and voters have to decide if his legal problems even if they feel that the charges are bogus will hurt his re-election changes.  The Trump is a dictator is pure nonsense since we have seen four years of Trump in action and can easily compare them to the present President, and a better case can be made that Biden is moving our country to a China style dictatorship. 

Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) economic plan can be described as a left of center populism.   He identifies the problem by noting, “Since then, rising interest rates have also put homeownership out of reach for even more Americans. In the last two and a half years, home financing costs have risen by 150% and the average cost of a home has increased by 23%. As more and more people are priced out of home ownership, rents have skyrocketed as well, rising 17% over the last year.”

His solutions are traditional old fashion liberal Democrat beginning with including raising the minimum wages, allowing students to declare bankruptcy and have college loan as zero interest rate and Medicare for all.  He also wants to renegotiate trade deals and put tariffs on lower developing countries.  His view on trade, “Free trade agreements have put American workers in competition with low-wage workers elsewhere in the world. “Free trade” sounds like a good idea, but it means that employers move production to places where environmental regulations are lax and where worker protections are non-existent. Companies in the US have to either offshore or extract concessions from their workers” and his solution, “Renegotiate free trade agreements and impose compensatory tariffs on imports from low-wage countries.” 

His goal is to strengthen unions as a counter to major corporations returning the days in which three out of every ten workers belonged to a union. Of course, today, the biggest problem is that while workers in private sector unions had declined, public sector unions have increased and, in the process, use their power to support the increase of government powers.  Many of the policies have led to the results he deplores including increase housing prices and college education going up. 

Here is what is missing in the RFK thesis, promoting economic growth, and expanding the economic pie.  Most studies show that raising minimum wages actually hurts those at the bottom of the economic ladder and while RFK calls for a minimum fifteen dollars an hour but in many communities, fifteen dollars an hour is the reality.  Around Cedar Rapids, jobs are advertised starting at 15 dollars, showing that markets can adjust as right now there are not enough workers to fill slots and wages have gone up accordingly.

As previously discussed, we have seen many Republicans governors leading their own revolution of tax reform, spending restraint and economic growth producing lower unemployment and more growth than their Democratic counterpart.  RFK still believes in government directed economic strategy.

A few years ago, we did survey and found that many conservatives may be classified as populist capitalist and while they hate socialism, they view capitalist as benefitting the rich as the expense of them.  Over the years, many voters, right or left, have expressed in our polls the view that the system is rigged against them, and they may not be wrong.  Writers like Carol Roth and Joel Kotkin have made the case that over the past decade many in the middle class and lower class lost ground while the wealthy have increased their wealth. CNBC Jim Kramer declared the pandemic produced the greatest transfer of wealth from the main street, middle class, and small businesses to the wealthy 1 percent. This is why RFK populism will attract some on the right as he is making the case that they have lost ground and he will help them gain some of it back.

Richard Fernadez recently asked the questions, “Suppose we got it all wrong and the real crazies are the TV people in nice suits and $300 haircuts?” and as Glenn Reynolds noted in a recent NY Post column, “It wasn’t farmers and factory workers who came up with the idiotic COVID responses — nor was it they who originated the more or less criminal idea of conducting “gain of function” research on making dangerous viruses more dangerous.” The reality is that much of what was tried by the experts failed miserably but then if these same experts had studied past pandemics, they would have known that this would end in failure. Shutting down schools and businesses lead to economic catastrophe for millions with which we are still struggling with. The data for those whose mantra is follow the science is becoming overwhelming including increase suicide, mental illness, economic dislocation, and even more premature deaths now and into the future.  We failed to stop the infection and the vaccine that we were told was a game changer proved to be a complete failure in stopping the transmission, but many lost their jobs because of vaccine mandates being enforced, a vaccine mandates for a vaccine that didn’t even stop the transmission.

The same brilliant people who gave us the covid lockdowns also gave us the brilliant idea that if we take police off the street, cut funding for police protection, and allow criminal back to the street or not prosecute crimes just as shoplifting would have no impact on crime was equally stupid.   Glenn Reynolds added, “It hasn’t been landscapers and auto mechanics championing the notion that a child in the single-digit age range can make a lifetime choice about his or her genitalia or maintaining that even criticizing that idea is itself a species of “violence…Ordinary Americans haven’t been claiming the way to promote free speech is to censor people or the way to end racism is to classify everyone by race and consequently treat them differently…It’s not the working class that wants to “save the planet” by blocking traffic, starting forest fires or banning pickup trucks or gas stoves (though private jets remain surprisingly free from criticism).”  We are being told that a hot July was sign of climate disaster even though it has been known to get hot in the summer.  I mean, Arizona reaches 110 degrees in the summertime is hardly news or sign of climate apocalypse, but our so-call experts are tying to tell us that we need to rid ourselves of pickup trucks and gas grills to save the planet or for that matter eat bug instead of steak or chicken. 

What does a society succeed if the elites and “intellectuals or brains of society” are plain nuts.  Glenn Reynolds noted, “Exactly how important is open to question — in his recent book “How Innovation Works,” Matt Ridley argues that most 19th- and 20th-century innovations actually came from tradespeople and industry, not academics doing abstract research — but important enough.” And while society needs intellectuals or thinkers, they also need doers who are willing to take risks to move society forward.  Reynolds observed, “Communism and Nazism started as intellectual movements; so did such fads as eugenics and lobotomies…The Tuskegee Experiment wasn’t the product of racist Klansmen but of the curiosity of credentialed public-health experts… Ideas can be dangerous; playing with them can be like gain-of-function research with viruses — if they escape into the general environment, disaster can ensue.”

A century ago, many of the people running our government, along with running our economy, many of our universities and media were varied and not necessarily the same class.  I remember meeting a long-time reporter in Kansas City who got his start in the circulation department. I questioned him, “The circulation department?”  He smiled and responded, “I started as a paperboy.”  He lived in an era in which he learned the basic in writing in High school and spent his life perfecting his craft.  Today much of the media, academics, politicians, and even much of our business class are members of the same class.  For many in the media, their willingness to follow the narrative as oppose to challenge comes from the reality is that many of them know the powerful officials and hold similar views and attitudes.

We have a leadership class that really can be at times be classified as “bat shit crazy.”  Reynolds concluded, “The result is that any crazy idea can flourish if it’s stylish. And it’s gotten more dangerous, probably because social media allow so much self-herding behavior by elites. Dissent is instantly ostracized before it even has a chance to be considered…A decade ago, the crazy ideas I listed earlier would have been seen as beyond the pale of civilized political discussion. Now they’re all endorsed by leading American institutions…That’s the hallmark of dysfunctional politics, and dysfunctional politics is what we have.”   Listen to the debate and what you will hear that much of the stupid ideas put into effect didn’t come from the Middle class, the workers or even MAGA but from the leadership class.