Viva la Revolucion

Where do we go from here?

I was wrong.  My Darkly Optimistic Substack leaned more heavily into the “Darkly” part.   I did not stay up late on election night and falsely assumed that the pollsters were correct, that it would be a close election and that it would likely be a repeat of 2020 when Trump’s thin leads in swing states would be overcome with ballots that magically appeared in the middle of the night.   I clearly did not have sufficient faith in the American people to overlook Trump’s brash personality.   I overestimated the depth of indoctrination that had taken place.   It was Victor Davis Hanson that made the right call.  For months, he had been saying that this election looked and smelled a lot like 1980 when the hapless, scolding Jimmy Carter was ahead in the polls until late October and Reagan ultimately wiped him out.  Indeed, many of the same elements echoed that election--- inflation, a troublemaking Iran, the appearance of weakness abroad, and an outsider Republican candidate that even the GOP chafed against.

There are plenty of pundits that are dissecting the election results, so I see no need to regurgitate those views here.   Along with Victor Davis Hanson, Scott Adams may have also been prescient- that we now have sufficient brainpower around  to cause a Second American Revolution.  I have called Elon Musk the Benjamin Franklin of our time and having Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy reshaping our out of control government (especially in light of the overturning of the Chevron doctrine which gave deference to the unelected administrative state) gives us a once in a generation opportunity.   The hope that the 2024 election has ushered in a new beginning brings to mind the line from James Earl Jones’s grand soliloquy in the film Field of Dreams comes to mind.

“America has rolled by like an army of steam rollers.  It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again.”

We do have a talent for remaking ourselves.  Trump’s election is an opportunity to reverse course and put us on a firmer path to the future. The Economist magazine (now, a highly misnamed publication),  endorsed Kamala Harris over Donald Trump because “a second Trump term comes with unacceptable risks,” and that Harris “stands for stability.”

Among other reasons for disputing its endorsement, America is a place where risk is a way of life.   The unacceptable risk we would be assuming with Harris would be remaining on the trajectory we were on –bloated, overbearing government and unsustainable debt, forever wars, DEI deeply embedded in all of our institutions, and a border open to millions of unvetted illegals.  

Another watershed moment came in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan and the  Reagan Revolution.  While there are many parallels to today, ironically Trump was the only candidate that did not invoke Reagan’s name during the 2016 Republican primaries.  Both were outsiders, scorned by the Republican establishment as well as the MSM.  Both entered office with an aggressive Iran and another foreign nuclear power making threatening, expansionist moves, and a recalcitrant Europe.  Both pushed family values but were themselves divorced.   Reagan was referred to as The Great Communicator, but he was really The Great Negotiator.  He knew when to negotiate and when not to.  Many forget that the hawks in his party did not want to negotiate with Gorbachev and Reagan brushed them aside when he felt the time was right.  He knew when to walk away from a deal as he did at Reykjavik.   Despite his many great achievements, Reagan failed to bring our gargantuan government under control.  He was able to slay the Soviet Union, but our own government became less responsive to the people and more totalitarian as the years have gone by.

Yes, Trump is rougher and cruder than Reagan.   But he has much more on his plate.  He has three threatening nuclear powers – Russia, China, and North Korea, and another one, Iran, on the brink of becoming one.  He has an opposition party that is much further to the left and more radical than Tip O’Neil’s Democrats. 

And he has a Deep State that has been weaponized against him and the American people.

Which brings me to two important but probably overlooked occurrences- Peanut the squirrel and Tim Walz’s Covid response.   These seemingly unrelated occurrences are, I believe of real importance and embody the significance of what we face.  It is important to remember that today’s Radical Left is adept at the slippery slope, and that slope has now been greased.   We went from “safe, legal, and rare” to abortion up until birth and let the baby die if the abortion fails in fairly short order.  We have gone from “common sense gun control” to talk of mandatory buybacks, i.e. gun confiscation.   The owner of Peanut had his house invaded by a swat team of government officials and his little pets seized and euthanized in a very cold and clinical fashion, without discussion and without recourse.   During the presidential campaign, it came to light that during Covid,  vice presidential candidate Tim Walz ordered teams of police to shoot people that came out of their homes with paintballs.   These government actions should scare the hell out of you.  It is not a stretch to consider that a government that would seize Peanut and shoot people with paintballs would turn to seizing people and firing live rounds instead of paintballs at noncompliant citizens.  How much this affected the election, we cannot say, but the Peanut story went viral just before the election.

One singular question looms large in this Second American Revolution.

Retribution and Deterrence

We have, in fact, been engaged in a low level cold civil war and in recent years, there has been talk of it turning  hot in some quarters.  Fortunately, for now, this one has been settled at the ballot box and hopefully this election mandate will avert a violent one.  

As of this writing, there has been a peaceful transition of power.  While Melania Trump snubbed Jill Biden, the meeting between Joe Biden and Donald Trump went very well and was friendly and cordial.  And I am reminded of the words Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address at the close of the Civil War:

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are into bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”

The question I raise is whether we are ready to do this, and to what extent can we do this?  The Regime has committed so many unconstitutional actions-  the abuse of the FISA court, attempting to keep Trump off the ballot, lawfare, and on and on.  We now have individual states that have announced that they are willing to revert to nullification to resist the policies of the election results.  Should the Trump administration go scorched earth?  Or should it make an earnest attempt at unifying the country?   Where along that continuum should we be?  At the very least,  there are certain institutions and individuals that need to be held accountable to deter their actions in the future.

The FBI
The FBI top levels must be cleaned out entirely.  It abused the FISA court with the Steele dossier.  The FISA Court was a special court that was established without our traditional adversarial checks and the FBI defrauded it.  Sadly, John Roberts, who has jurisdiction over it, announced no reforms after this egregious abuse.  Then, the FBI paid Twitter to suppress the Biden laptop story, in another affront to the First Amendment, and put pressure on Facebook and Twitter to suppress information and deplatform individuals during Covid.  It hid information regarding the Hunter Biden laptop, which affected the 2020 election.  To date, there has been no accountability for these assaults on our system.  The FBI must be restructured and the individual that did these things must held accountable. 

Anthony Fauci
I can make a case that Anthony Fauci caused as much damage to American society as a nuclear device going off in a mid-sized U.S. city.   He skirted U.S. law, lied to Congress and to all of us, recommended actions that will cause lifelong impairment to our youth, and yet he was the highest paid federal employee and was allowed to retire in luxury with Secret Service protection.  The effects of what he did changed the results of a U.S. election, and the course of history while all the while, he proclaimed, “I am The Science.”   His hubris knew no bounds and he has yet to be held accountable.  It appears that Rand Paul will be seeking to uncover what Fauci did at NIH, and I do not believe Fauci is resting easy.

Mark Milley
Mark Milley allowed DEI to creep into our military, brought drag queens in to help recruiting, had our soldiers read Ibram Kendi, called a halt to military operations to root out “white extremists” (none were found), and blathered about “white rage.”   He claimed he was surprised by how quickly the Afghan army buckled under the Taliban during the Afghan withdrawal debacle—it’s his job NOT to be surprised.   But what he really needs to be held accountable for is his subversion of the chain of command- telling area commanders that they reported to him.  His call to his Chinese counterpart to tell him he would give him a heads up if Trump did anything precipitous was arguable treasonous.  We have a chain of command and a military that is accountable to civilians,   No one elected Mark Milley and his actions were severe breaches in a Constitutional Republic and he needs to be held to account so this never happens again.  Lloyd Austin going AWOL while he had health issues was also a serious breach.  In a dangerous world with nuclear armed foes where vital decisions may need to be made in seconds, we can’t let this pass.

Alejandro Mayorkas
Like Fauci, Mayorkas did severe damage to our society.  He flat out lied about the border and lied about our border agents.  He is responsible for the deaths of Laken Riley and others like her.  He has permanently changed communities like Springfield, Ohio and  numerous small towns in Maine and across the country.   His inaction has put pressure on big city budgets, and has subordinated the needs of our citizens to the citizens of other countries.  He has put us at risk by waiving through millions of military age men, completely unvetted.  The fact is that we will not be able to deport 12 million people, but even a partial remediation will be politically and financially costly.  In the meantime, Venezuelan gangs are taking root in many of our cities. 

There are many, many others that need to be held to account—the 51 individuals that falsely claimed that the Hunter laptop was misinformation, the people that perpetrated the Russia hoax,  the Soros DA’s that are permitting crime to wreak havoc in our cities, the operatives that have warped and corrupted our electoral process, the university presidents that have allowed Hamas and antisemitism to take root in their institutions, the doctors that have butchered youths in the name of “gender affirmation,” the individuals like former CDC director Rochelle Walensky who lied about the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine, the people at FEMA that diverted funds to resettle illegals and then deny help to Trump supporters.  

What is the appropriate balance between the desire to reunite us in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, and the need to deter the antidemocratic, totalitarian, and anti-Constitutional behavior that we have witnessed since Covid (and before)?  How far should Trump push it? How deep should he go? I don’t really know where those contours are.  All I can say for now is that the individuals and organizations above must be held accountable or it will happen again.

But for now, at least, I’m grateful that the election wasn’t close and while there are still ballot shenanigans going on in certain areas like Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, it wasn’t enough to stop Trump from winning the popular and electoral vote.  I’m happy that Antifa and BLM didn’t emerge and cause violence again.   I’m delighted that the results will give DEI a solid push downhill.  I feel like I can at least breathe again.