Donald Trump’s Mugshot and the Berlin Wall of Democrat Propaganda

The Democrats are making a final push against Donald Trump, the culmination of their unrelenting efforts since 2016. But is their propaganda becoming so obvious that, rather than persuading voters, it finally opens their eyes to reality? The Soviet Union stands as an example of how “propaganda collapse” plays out and how that might happen here, too.

I went to college back in the 1980s, when Communism was still perceived by most Americans as a bad thing—although not one of my political philosophy professors. He proudly characterized himself as “Somewhere to the left of Lenin.” When professing his love and respect for the Soviets—but not enough to leave Florida and move to Moscow— he often tried to square the circle of their military prowess and the reports in American media about their economic failings.

Thus, he pointed out that the Soviets built rockets sending men into space, built weapon systems the Pentagon told us could obliterate the West, dominated Eastern Europe, and were the power behind the Vietnamese who defeated both the French and the Americans. Given all the Soviet’s demonstrated military and technological prowess, he asked, how was it even remotely possible that they could not build washing machines or cars on par with anything produced in the West? Given that they controlled one of the greatest breadbaskets in the world, Ukraine, how could it be true that there was rampant starvation?

The professor had a ready answer: The stories about the Soviet’s economic failures were lies—propaganda produced by the CIA and segments of the capitalist American media.

And it wasn’t just economics. It was politics as well. The Soviet Union had one of the most robust constitutions in the world, he insisted, with an array of guarantees that any citizen in the West would feel comfortable with: Freedom of speech, the press, right of assembly, worship etc. The gulags of Siberia were simply more Western propaganda.

Eventually the professor’s fiction about the communist nirvana could be sustained no longer, but by that time I had graduated and was stationed in West Germany. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reality of the desolation of the East started to become clear. Indeed, the juxtaposition of the abject economic failure of the East with the prosperity of the west put the lie to everything my communist championing professor and his favorite newspaper, the NY Times, had tried to drill into our heads for years.

The fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t the end of communism, nor even the Soviet Union, which would stand for an additional two years. But when it comes to discussing the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism in Eastern Europe, that fall is the thing that most people remember.

I’d posit that we witnessed a similarly epoch-defining event recently: Donald Trump’s mugshot. There’s nothing extraordinary about the mugshot itself, but sometimes an image is much more than just the pixels it’s made up of. What this particular image really depicts is the culmination of eight years of lies and propaganda from Democrats and the Swamp. In one picture, Americans understand exactly what has been going on for the last eight years.

With that mugshot, even people who hate Donald Trump will recognize that America is evolving into a tyranny, like Venezuela with Chavez or Turkey with Erdogan, a place where laws don’t matter other than as tools to crush opponents. They see that the apparatus of the state is simply a vehicle for distributing power among your friends and punishing your enemies.

And in an echo of the 1930s, when Stalin was starving millions of Ukrainians to death and the New York Times was telling us fairy tales, today’s media are telling us that Trump is indeed a criminal, the charges are damning, and that Americans are finally coming to recognize him as one.

The difference is that it took half a century for the truth about the evil of the Soviets to finally find the light of day, while the truth about the evil of the Democrats and their Swamp comrades has taken just a few years… Indeed, you could make the argument that it’s taken less than six months.

Trump’s first indictment, this past March, accuses him of using his own money, rather than donors’ money to pay hush money, suggesting that election law required him to use campaign contributions to keep hidden a sordid story about sex. His second indictment, in June, accuses him of mishandling documents, something every president has done, but no others were indicted for. (And, of course, Trump did not mishandle the documents.) His third indictment, on August 1st, was for attempting to overturn the 2020 election results, this after he’s on video telling his followers to “peacefully and patriotically” make their way to the Capitol. His last (so far) indictment was issued on August 14th, and accused him of seeking to interfere with the 2020 election by falsely claiming he wanted the Secretary of State to manufacture votes.

In less than six months, the Democrats have indicted Donald Trump four times, with the cases scheduled to run through at least the spring of 2024, right into the heart of primary season. Aside from the absurdity of the indictments themselves, this is easily the most blatant example of election interference the United States has ever seen. Indeed it’s so blatant that even a majority of Democrats who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 think it’s interference.

To make matters worse for Democrats, in his interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump looked and sounded as presidential as he ever has. While his outlandish personality serves him well at rallies filled with supporters, his presidential decorum, command of the facts, and his clear confidence while speaking with Tucker are exactly what appeals to those voters put off by doddering Joe Biden’s inability to put an intelligent thought into words or walk up a flight of stairs. While a good interview alone won’t get the job done, for those who are looking around wondering what the hell the Democrats are doing, it likely opens a door for him.

As with most things in life, timing is everything, and the Democrats may have hit the sweet spot…for Donald Trump. While Biden has been less than lucid for most of his presidency, today he more often looks like an escaped Alzheimer’s patient than he does a president. The longer Democrats allow Joe to run with the fiction that he is going to be on the ticket in November, the stronger the contrast becomes with the robust, energized, and cogent Trump. At the same time, every day seems to bring more proof to light that Biden is not only a liar, but he’s been on the take from America’s enemies for years.

Many Democrats would no doubt vote for a fence post so long as it was running against Donald Trump, but there are likely a significant number with functioning brains who recognize that regardless of how much they dislike Trump, he’s a far better choice than Joe Biden.

Of course, Democrats could ditch Biden for Harris, Newsom or, God forbid, Michelle Obama, but that doesn’t solve the problem they’ve created with the trials. Trump will be sitting in courtrooms during critical periods of the campaign, but that doesn’t mean he’ll lose support as a result. Indeed, just the opposite is likely to happen as he has countless surrogates who will use the fact that he couldn’t be there because of the Democrats’ treachery to excite a crowd and grow support.

In addition, the trials will offer daily opportunities to remind voters of the Democrats’ hypocrisy and mendacity as they manipulate the justice system to crucify Trump while the Bidens, Hillary, and virtually every swamp dweller gets off scot-free.

It would be the ultimate irony if the indictments that Democrats hoped to use to finally defeat Donald Trump were the vehicles through which America finally came to see their mendacity and propelled their worst nightmare back into office.

2020: The Year Democrats Put America on a Path to Collapse

It’s possible that 100 years from now people on this planet will look back at 2020 as the year the world began its descent into hell. Hell is what life was for most of the people who lived on earth before the United States was founded. In what might come as a surprise to many progressives, the United States did not create slavery. Slavery has existed since the beginning of mankind and was a common element of societies on every continent, including Africa. For most of human history the common experience of most people was one of poverty, subjugation, war and early death, whether they were slaves, slave owners or anyone else. This held true whether someone lived in Pharaonic Egypt, the Roman Empire, China’s Han Dynasty or even Elizabethan England, or virtually anywhere else on the planet. The average life expectancy around the world for most of human history was somewhere between 25 and 35 years old and infant mortality could be as high as 30%. Families would usually have many children because so many children never survived to adulthood.

It was into this world that the United States was born in 1776. The world did not measurably change on July 4th of 1776. On the contrary, the world stayed very much the same for many years to come. But what the establishment of the United States did, along with the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, was bring to the world the first nation in history to have at its core the principle of God given individual rights, individual freedoms and a government explicitly limited in its power. What this American experiment did was give unprecedented life to the yearning of humans to worship as they liked, to say what they felt, the freedom to life the lives they wanted to live and protect them from tyranny. (Obviously none of that applied to slaves in the new country, but at the time slavery was a common practice around the world including both Africa and Europe.) The result of this unprecedented freedom was the creation of the fertilizer that would in time become the garden from which many of the greatest advances in the history of mankind would emerge.

The year America was born 85% of the world’s population - 50% in the developed Europe - worked either directly or indirectly in farming , one of the most dangerous jobs in the world and an industry that had not significantly changed in 1,000 years. Today that number is lower virtually everywhere in the world and in the US and much of the west that number is below 5%, freeing up 80% of the population to do everything from becoming doctors, scientists, astronauts, teachers, actors, journalists, entrepreneurs and even bloggers! It was a Virginian, Cyrus McCormick, who made that possible with his invention of the mechanical reaper in 1831.

Later, far from the farm, in what is possibly the most extraordinary sequence of scientific advances in all of history, in a mere 66 years Americans went from inventing the airplane to sending men to the moon and returning them safely to earth. A mere sixty six years!

And the list of advances directly or indirectly due to the incredible opportunities in the United States is simply extraordinary. From the assembly line for cars to plastic to elevators to air conditioning to personal computers, the Internet and the smartphone, the United States has been the fertilizer from which unprecedented inventions and advances have together brought more prosperity to more people around the world than at any point in human history.  Not only are more people living more prosperous lives, but they are living longer, with the average life expectancy in the world going from 29 in 1800 to 46 in 1950 to 71 today. And just to be clear, all of the advances of the last two centuries did not originate in the United States. They did not, but American success and spirit of entrepreneurship helped inspire others around the world to make further contributions as well.

Americans have been able to make those stunning advances and many many more because of the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution and our capitalist system. Today we find those two pillars that helped power the world's march to prosperity under siege. From the Communist Black Lives Movement to the Antifa fascists to their media enablers, the nation finds itself at an unprecedented precipice. In one direction sits a future empowered by opportunity and prosperity, albeit an imperfect one, where things will not be perfect, things won’t always be fair and there will be winners and losers. But progress will continue as American capitalism and entrepreneurship push forward economic advances while free discourse allows for the exchange of ideas to push forward cultural advances.

In the other direction sits an abyss of mob rule and fascism where Americans will be forced to speak with one voice or be silenced and where, in the name of fairness and equality businesses will eventually come under the control of the mob and the government, which will have morphed into one. The Constitution will be discarded like yesterday’s newspaper, and the rights and freedoms that spurred the creation of the nation in the first place will become distant memories. Religious freedom will be gone. Freedom of speech and the press will apply only to those who toe the leftist party line. The 2nd Amendment will be history and confiscation will be the order of the day. Private property will cease to exist. And while the fascist regime will not succeed in producing prosperity, it will produce an equality of sorts, but one of poverty for everyone, except of course for those who wield the reins of power. Crime, corruption and extortion will become rampant and the United States will come to resemble a third world banana republic where the common man is subject to the whims of government apparatchiks, those with money & access, and anyone with a gun.

If this sounds a little like Dante’s Inferno, it should, but one doesn’t need to go back 500 years to understand what our future looks like. We just have to look at the recent history of places like Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, China, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, etc. Communism and its fascist twin always produce the same thing… dictatorships, failed economics and widespread death and poverty. That is the history that will be written about the United States if we allow the BLM / Antifa / mainstream media triumvirate (via their Democrat puppets) to take power in November. Barack Obama used the IRS to silence opponents prior to the 2012 election and the FBI to try and overturn Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. For Democrats like Obama and Biden, the Constitution is more a collection of suggestions than the articulation of a set of functioning rules by which they have to operate. Imagine what a Democrat empowered by the radicals burning down America’s cities and rewriting her history would be willing to do…

America as we know it won’t end on January 20th 2021 if Joe Biden wins, but it will be a far darker place and the future of failure will be imminent.  One need only look at the disastrous outcomes in places like New York, Chicago, Baltimore, LA, Detroit, Minneapolis and the dozens of other cities run into the ground by Democrats to understand what would lay ahead for the country, and frankly, much of a world without America's leadership. The only question is, will it take Democrats more or less time to destroy the United States than it took Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant to save it.

Having Survived Barack Obama, Back to Where the Tire Hits the Road...

I started writing this blog in 2009 after having written various random pieces over the years following 9/11. I started some months after Barack Obama was sworn in as President. I thought he was a clearly a socialist, perhaps a Communist, but most certainly un-American. One of the first signs there was a problem came prior to the election when an interview he had done years prior surfaced when he bemoaned that the Constitution was a “Charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you but doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf." Building on that he promised to “fundamentally transform the United States”. Finally, the promise of a black president didn’t quite play itself out the way some had expected. Some Americans felt that if we finally elected a black man to the presidency it would fundamentally demonstrate the United States was not the racist country so many had accused it of being. Not so much.

On the contrary. Many people started looking at that document Barack Obama saw as defective and started suggesting the entire country was built on a racist foundation. They began using 21st century mores to disparage the Founding Fathers and the Constitution they gave us over two centuries before. For them, an America that is not perfect is therefore evil and racist. Hence the name of this blog “Imperfect America”… drawing on the quote from Voltaire: “Perfect is the enemy of the good”. My first post was titled: “Racism: America’s Original Sin” essentially pointing out that the 3/5 Compromise did not at all mean what activists suggested it meant, and that in fact, had it not been for that compromise the Constitution might never have been ratified, blacks in the South might have been stuck in a country where slavery was fully accepted and a war the war that ended slavery might never have occurred. No, slaves would have been stuck in a nation that was not balanced by vociferous anti-slave voices as there were in the eventual United States. That was the start of this blog, but the areas of concern were many…

Over this past eight years I’ve pilloried Barack Obama, teacher’s unions, the BLM snake oil salesmen, Social Security Disability, Democrats, the media, big government, regulation, spineless Republicans and even Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The list of enemies of freedom are legion, and most of them – but not all – live in the DC metro area and control the country like an unchecked borg "assimilating" everything in its path. Government rarely passes on an opportunity to get involved and make matters worse, regardless of the area or the Constitutionality of its actions. The lust for power from bureaucrats and politicians seems to know no bounds… and that won’t necessarily change with Donald Trump in office.

But what I think will change is the danger that the country is in. For eight years I’ve lamented the fact that Barack Obama and the progressive left were seeking to turn the nation into a third world socialist paradise such as Venezuela or Greece or Cuba. In some respects they’ve succeed, but thankfully in some they have been stymied. They will no doubt continue to mobilize their comrades in the media and academia to advocate for their march for progressive fascism, but given that there are fewer elected Democrats today than there have been in almost a century, they may have a somewhat difficult road ahead. Indeed Barack Obama’s legacy just may end up being the decimation of the Democrat party… which would be a fitting "fundamental transformation".

Donald Trump may be many things, but one thing he is not is Barack Obama. He may be something of a big government liberal, but he’s not anti-American. He may be too tied to big business to appreciate the challenges of small businesses, but he’s not an absolute enemy of free markets. Put another way, after eight years of worrying that the United States is about to careen off the path of freedom and die on the march to a socialist / fascist progressive nirvana, today I look forward to a future where freedom, liberty and limited government have an opportunity to retake their place in the pantheon of ideas on which the country thrives. That doesn’t mean that there are no threats left or that Donald Trump will be the savior we need. Trump will, no doubt do many things that cause conservatives such as myself to bang our heads against a wall, but at the end of the day, for the first time in eight years we at least know that our president’s starting point is not that America is always wrong, that America is racist, that government is good and the private sector is evil. America may not be perfect, but with someone other than a progressive Democrat in the White House we at least have an opportunity to address real issues of consequence and perhaps set the stage for a revival of prosperity.

As such, while I will continue to write pieces for this blog from time to time, it is now time for me to focus on a few other things a bit closer to home where I might be able to have a more direct impact.

Thank you for reading…

A dab of Communism and a dash of Fascism, Barack Obama's economic philosophy in practice

The primary reason Communism doesn’t work is that it goes against the very nature of man. In Communism there is simply no motivation for anyone to work hard. When there is a zero correlation between the amount or quality of work you do and the compensation you receive, your motivation to work hard, or maybe work at all, simply evaporates. This is particularly true given that the compensation for the slacker at the next desk is equally without correlation as he continues to get the same salary regardless of whether he actually gets anything done or not. And while Communism as we know it has only been around since 1848, the ideas behind it have been around for much longer… and not surprisingly it was a failed ideology long before Marx and Engels gave it a brand name.

I’m not going to suggest that Barack Obama is exactly a Communist… even if he was, apparently he’s smart enough to lie about it if he knew it would harm his image… I do however think he’s a fan of one of the basic mantras of Communism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” with him deciding who needs what. At the same time he’s very much a fan of the Fascist economic model where private property exists but government mandates much if not all of its activity. For him everything else is to simply be manipulated in order to achieve those two tenets of his philosophy.

For six years Barack Obama has been doing everything in his considerable power to bring that philosophy into effect in the United States. In all fairness, many of the things he has pursued had their genesis in previous administrations, but under Barack Obama they found an unabashed champion who was willing to turbo charge them as he sought to “fundamentally transformed America”.

The scorecard of Obama’s accomplishments is breathtaking:

• The percentage of Americans working to support the nation is at a record low. 44% 
• The number of Americans on food stamps has exceeded 46 million for an unprecedented 3 years. 
•  The number and percentage of Americans on "disability" are at record highs: 8.9 million & 6.4% 
• The federal income tax is at its most progressive point in modern times with the top 20% paying 94% of all income taxes while the bottom 40% actually get money from the government. 
• With Obamacare the government has taken direct control of almost 20% of the American economy, while the EPA has a death grip on a vast expanse of industries from autos to energy to dry cleaning. Regulations are accumulating at an unprecedented rate and their scope seems boundless. 
•  And finally, as a result of all of this, more businesses are failing than are starting and the country is experiencing the slowest economic recovery in over half a century. 

If the words Communist or Fascist are too strong for delicate sensibilities, let me paint the picture in a slightly different way. Imagine the United States is a wagon with a combination of passengers and people pulling it. Where the wagon goes to find food and sustenance and to build prosperity is determined by the people pulling it. As long as there are enough people on the ground pulling the wagon, and those people are willing and able to put forth the effort to figure out where they should go and how best to get there, everything works out fine. Over time however if enough people stop pulling and jump into the wagon such that the ratio of passengers to pullers becomes too great, the wagon will eventually stop, as will the pursuit of sustenance, prosperity and everything else and stagnation and collapse will begin. But wait! It gets worse! Not only are there too many passengers in the wagon, but they have put chains on the ankles of those pulling it, have decided they know better how to pull the wagon – despite the fact that they are not pulling anything – and they have decreed that they get to decide how everything is distributed. Welcome to Barack Obama’s world. To put things in explicit terms, in Barack Obama’s America 140 million people are working to support a population of 320 million, which includes a record 100 million adults not working. That is the lowest rate in history.

So, while the Communist Party USA may not be celebrating their party’s ascendance into the White House, they are no doubt cheered by the fact that the country is being “transformed” in their direction. That does not bode well for anybody associated with the American wagon, whether pulling it or passenger…

Will Barack Obama bring back slavery to the United States?

Without a doubt November is going to bring us the single most important election in the United States since 1860. At that time too the country was on the verge of an irreparable breach, and by the time Lincoln was inaugurated in March of 1861 seven of the eleven eventual confederate states had seceded, with the remaining four gone two months later.

I’m certainly not suggesting that the United States is going break apart if Barack Obama defeats Mitt Romney. When citizens go into the voting booth in November they are certainly not being asked to choose between Stars and Bars or the Stars and Stripes. If the choice were that stark, if the choice were that clear, even the most brain dead Americans could figure out who to vote for.

The fissure today is far more subtle. Fully half the population doesn’t pay any income taxes and many of those people are on the government dole. Government debt is 100% of GDP and at the current rate will reach 200% in a little over a decade while inefficient government spending takes up a quarter of GDP annually. Government regulation at all levels threatens not only to strangle the struggling private sector, but more and more individual freedom itself.

While far less stark than what the country faced in 1860, the consequences for the American people are no less as great. Although there is nothing the government does today that is the equivalent of the viscous and inhumane institution of slavery, in the long run an unfettered government is no less dangerous. Indeed, egalitarianism was a staple of Soviet propaganda for decades but the Kremlin’s statist policies cost tens of millions their lives and hundreds of millions their freedom.

Given the explicit choice between slavery and freedom Americans are smart enough to choose freedom. The question is, with such an explicit distinction absent from the ballot, can they make the right choice?

How many Americans want to spend over half of every workday toiling just to pay for government? How many Americans want to pay taxes so that 50% of their fellow citizens don’t have to? How many Americans are satisfied postponing vacations, clipping coupons, working overtime and choosing shank or chicken over tenderloin just so the government can take money out of their checks to give people with cell phones, multiple TVs, air conditioners and satellite dishes? How many people want government deciding what companies can make, who they can hire or telling them how to run their businesses?

But of course none of those choices will be written on any ballot. They will be there nonetheless, and that is the challenge. Are Americans willing and able to look beyond the glittery Hollywood produced commercials, the endlessly fawning media coverage and the unceasing appeals to “fairness”, and of course the ubiquitous “Hope and Change”, to understand that the real choice is simply between freedom and slavery. Not slavery in the sense that blacks are going to be fitted for shackles while whites enjoy mint juleps as they sit on their porches, but rather all of us are on the road to slavery where the overseers are government bureaucrats who tell you what you can eat, where you can live and what you must buy. At the same time the government masters will confiscate ever increasing amounts of your money to pay for things you would never pay for yourself. And of course don’t forget about your guns too.

In the ultimate irony, it is under the banners of “rights” and “fairness” the government is simultaneously turning the American population into a nation of sharecroppers. Sharecropping was of course the tactic of usurious rents and loans that indebted the newly freed slaves to the land they worked and made it almost impossible to exercise their newly granted freedom. The more money the overseers spend the deeper is the crushing debt the not so free American citizens must toil to service.

In the United States the whole concept of slavery has a racial connotation rightly imbued with violence and oppression and heartbreak. The slavery that lays ahead with Barack Obama’s progressive America doesn’t have that racial component, nor does it bring to mind the heart wrenching images that most of us associate with the word. The reality is however that statism has a long history of equally barbaric images, from the Soviet Union’s gulags to Communist China’s slave labor system to the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields. In those cases, the slavery was imposed at the tip of a bayonet. Here it is being welcomed in via the ballot box by people who are caught up in the anti-capitalist propaganda disguised as “hope and change”.

The assertion that the progressive policies of Barack Obama and the Democrats are nothing but Communism Lite invariably brings charges of hate speech and racism. So be it. That doesn’t make the assertion any less true. The simple question is, are enough Americans able to see through the thinly veiled pleas to “worker’s rights” and “fairness” to recognize the hammer and sickle below and the slavery that comes with it?