Even as Emmanuel Macron is zapping President Trump for being a nationalist, the French president will be pushing, in Trump’s absence, a whole new initiative built around—you guessed it—globalism. And guess who is funding Macron’s “Paris Peace Forum”?
The following is a speculative “future history” of how online free speech was protected from the censorship of Big Tech progressives by the creation of a regulatory agency known as the Federal Platform Commission.
The basic rule of international power politics is simple: The stronger and more aggressive countries tend to dominate — that is, unless other countries can pull together an alliance to defend themselves.
The headline in the November 19 Wall Street Journal put the matter plainly: There are “Two Americas.” One America that gains from globalization, and another much larger America that loses from globalization. And as we now know, this cleaving of the nation is not just a matter of economics, it’s also a matter of life and death.
Over the last century or two, plenty of seers and scribblers told us that technological advances were a two-edged sword. For all the gains in our standard of living that inventions would bring, so, too, would come dangers—and maybe even more downsides than upsides.
Why have activists on the right and left joined together to oppose the AT&T-Time Warner merger? After all, there have been plenty of big mergers in the last few decades, most of which have attracted little controversy. So what is it about this particular deal?
This is a rich country: In times of disaster, we can afford to take care of our own, while not sacrificing the working wages of our own—or the safety of all of us. That’s why we need the Jones Act.
President Trump has flip-flopped on the war in Afghanistan, in defiance of his campaign promises and also of public opinion. Why the flip-flop? Did the Establishment make him do it? The Deep State? Or both? Meanwhile, we must ask: Does public opinion matter anymore? The answer is yes, but the people will have to work a lot harder to make sure that their voice is heard.
Is this our “Sputnik Moment”? That is, the moment when Americans wake up and realize that they face a grave threat from a foreign power? Sixty years after Sputnik, we see that China, with quadruple our population, is on the move. It has plenty of orbiting satellites, as well as a whole class of satellite-killers that we might not be ready for. To top it off, China’s plans to go to Mars, the next place in the space race, are well far along—possibly exceeding those of the U.S. These strategic Chinese developments are finally getting the attention of the Washington Establishment.
According to a 2012 estimate by Gallup, 13 percent of the world’s adult population—640 million people—would move to the U.S. if they could. And of course, under the doctrine of chain-migration, that number of immigrants could easily quadruple in a few years’ time. In other words, with a Bernie Sanders-style president spending more money on healthcare while not defending the border, you could take the $10,000 in per-capita health spending tab and multiply it by another billion or two people.
Kicking off his tax-reform campaign on Wednesday with a forceful speech in Springfield, Missouri, President Trump got right to the point. Tax reform, including tax reductions, should focus on Main Street, not Wall Street.
As we drill down on the dangers of corporate monopoly, we can observe that the worst offenders are Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. We might even turn those four companies into an acronym, GAFA. And yes, GAFA is the antithesis of MAGA—Making America Great Again.
In his famous “New Nationalism” speech in 1910, the “Great Trust Buster” Teddy Roosevelt described “the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.” A century ago, that was how one “drained the swamp.” TR knew that the struggle to reform, and thereby secure the full blessings of citizenship, must always be new because in any era, if the struggle for reform ever grows old and tired, then we will lose those blessings. Today, it’s not Standard Oil and the railroads we have to worry about, but rather Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Let’s consider five key realities about the politics of police work confronting America’s law enforcement officers in 2017.
Like the latter days of the Roman Empire, in this American republic, much of the elite has abandoned its national duty. So it’s been the commoners, with no higher title than citizen, who have undertaken the hard work of defending. America’s cops have been our steady blue-collar centurions fighting crime. In fact, a 1971 study found that police force had overwhelmingly blue-collar backgrounds; the fathers of 80 percent of NYPD recruits in that era were laborers or service workers.
1. Ideas Have Consequences
Back in February, Virgil wrote about the “climate of violence” swirling around President Trump:
Is there a media-driven “climate of violence”? You bet there is, and it’s being whipped up by the left and the Main Stream Media, here and across the world.
In a March 17 piece, “Donald Trump, Rosie the Riveter, and the Revival of American Economic Nationalism,” Virgil took note of President Trump’s speech, two days earlier, recalling the B-24 plant at Willow Run, Michigan. And that article brought forth an outpouring of WW2 memories from Breitbart readers, many of them recording what they had heard, over the years, from fathers, mothers, and other loved ones who lived, worked, and fought in that era. Virgil sifted through all the comments, more than 1800 of them; these left him inspired, informed, amused, and, okay, sometimes bemused. On this Memorial Day, let’s take a look at some of these comments from Breitbart readers.
In 1981, Baker guided President Ronald Reagan’s big tax cut through the Senate; indeed, later in the 80s, he served as Reagan’s White House chief of staff. Baker liked to say that he learned the secret of politics in the first grade: “I learned how to count.”
President Trump took a risk by intervening in Tuesday’s special election in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District. That is, a more cautious president might have chosen to “stay above it all” and just let the election play itself out. Instead, in the run-up to the April 18 balloting, Trump charged in, firing off a half-dozen tweets to his 28 million followers.
The win of Republican Ron Estes in the Kansas special election spoiled the victory celebration that the Democrats and the Main Stream Media had been hoping for. Yet the first rule of celebrations is that there’s always another celebration—and we don’t yet know who will be happy in 2018.
In case you hadn’t noticed, President Trump has enemies in the Main Stream Media. And the April 6 strike on Syria hasn’t changed that.
Like Trump, Ronald Reagan had his early—and painful—baptism of fire. But the 40th President bounced back and entered into the pantheon of American immortals. Yes, he made mistakes, but he knew how to recover from them, and keep his eye on the agenda ahead. History smiles on such leaders.
In his March 20 speech in Louisville, Kentucky, President Trump sounded many familiar and important themes, including the importance of jobs, manufacturing, trade, and the need to revive the coal industry. And yet he also added a new and larger “meta-theme,” namely, the urgency of building up our industrial strength for the sake of economic and national security. That meta-theme, we might observe, is the essence of the “American System” of Henry Clay.
In his speech in Ypsilanti, Michigan, President Trump addressed what is arguably the most important economic-policy idea in U.S. history. In the years to come, the pro-growth, pro-jobs, pro-profits alliance that Trump espoused in Ypsilanti will become permanently embedded in Republican thinking—and, quite possibly, Democratic thinking as well.
Sometimes the Deep State isn’t so deep. For something that’s supposed to be submerged, it doesn’t always hide very well.
As more voices weigh in on the issue of the Deep State, the Beltway left assures us it’s all a figment of our fevered imaginations.
I’ll hope you’ll continue to join me on our tour of the Federal Triangle, the heartland of the Deep State. We started our tour at the Department of Commerce, and so next we’ll visit the federal bureaucracy in the next building over — the Environmental Protection Agency.
Please, walk with me, and let’s take a tour of the Deep State. Virgil is used to being a guide. After all, in his immortal way, he was the docent for Dante as he traveled through Hell and Purgatory, 700 years ago, in “The Divine Comedy.” More recently, Virgil has been haunting a different kind of netherworld, here in Washington, DC—the Deep State.
The Deep State never sleeps. It’s always doing something. Doing something, that is, to undermine the Trump administration. And sometimes, in its zeal to de-Trumpify its home turf of Washington, DC, it jeopardizes American national security. The Deep State doesn’t seem to care much about that, but maybe the rest of us should.
The feud between President Donald Trump and Senator John McCain is heating up. The protagonists on both sides of this fight are intense and determined, and yet if we dig beneath the personalities, we can see an even deeper conflict—an ultimate conflict of visions. And that clash of worldviews, in turn, is full of implications for the behavior of the Deep State in the months and years to come.
Virgil, in his immortal way, has gained possession of a second transcript of a meeting of the Deep State Executive Committee. Although he has been unable to verify this document or identify the attendees, he believes it to be an accurate portrayal of ongoing Deep State activities against President Trump.
The Deep State has done its dirty work, getting rid of Michael Flynn, the now-former national security adviser to President Trump. And so the MSM, having taken direction—even dictation—from the Deep State, is moving in for the kill. The ultimate target, of course, is Trump himself.
What do you call it when The Washington Post, which hates Republicans, seeks to advise them on what to do? That is, when the Post pretends to be offering honest constructive advice to the GOP? As in, do this, and it will be good for you. Maybe we could call it the Post Pretense, or the Post Ponzi, or the Post Prevarication. Or maybe we should just keep it simple and call it the Post Put-On.
Is there a media-driven “climate of violence”? You bet there is, and it’s being whipped up by the left and the Main Stream Media, here and around the world. And it has a clear purpose: The ultimate goal is the destruction of the Trump presidency—and, for at least some, seemingly, the goal is the assassination of President Trump himself.
Virgil, in his immortal way, has gained possession of a transcript of the most recent meeting of the Deep State Executive Committee. Although he has been unable to verify this document, or to identify the attendees, he believes it to be an accurate portrayal of ongoing Deep State activities against President Trump. Where appropriate, he has added explanatory hyperlinks.
In the past, Virgil has taken note of various Main Stream Media tricks, such as the false “argument from authority” and the “assertion of a false conflict.” Well, the MSM is at it again. This newest trick can be called, “build him up so as to try to knock him down.” A case in point is the lead editorial in The New York Times on January 31, entitled, “President Bannon?”
Recently, Virgil, in his immortal fashion, traveled to Beijing and got this download from Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, President of the People’s Republic of China, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission. Here’s Virgil’s version of what’s inside Xi’s mind.
It’s too early to know what will become of the Trump presidency, and yet we can already gain some clues as to where its leader is heading. And we can start by looking at the seventh president, Andrew Jackson, who is very much a model for the 45th president.
A lion isn’t always beloved, but it is always respected, even feared. In his inaugural address today at the Capitol, President Donald Trump roared, and decades’ worth of vapid orthodoxy melted away.
The MSM has gone up against Trump once again—and lost once again. However, reporters aren’t used to losing power struggles in DC, and they are have gone back to school—the school of war. Here are five major topics that journalists are avidly discussing as they plots their revenge on the dreaded Donald Trump.
