Inauguration Entertainment Spectacle

I'm thoroughly enjoying Trump's ascendancy into office, along with the incessant beating of breasts and gnashing of teeth by Trump's critics.

The inauguration speech was powerful, concise, and absolutely true. Trump called out the corrupt elitists who have betrayed America in their quest for more power under a one-world oligarchy:

For too long, a small group in our nation's capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left. And the factories closed. The establishment protected itself but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. That all changes starting right here and right now. Because this moment is your moment. It belongs to you. . . . 

For many decades, we've enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry, subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military. We defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own. And spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America's infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay. We've made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon. One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world.

The only thing more encouraging than this was the spectacle of protesters, vandals, and similar detritus with too much free time all attempting to sabotage the event. Many of them have been arrested and should be punished to the full extent of the law.

As for people who merely fulminate how "oppressed" they are or how terrible it is for America to reclaim its sovereignty, I will continue enjoying their outrage for as long as Trump remains in office. They are outing themselves as a fifth column and accelerating a conflict that is long past due. If the fifth column is put down, wonderful. If America proves ungovernable and splits up, that's also fine, as we will cast off deadwood that is dependent, parasitic, and cannot thrive on its own. Cut them loose and allow them to fulfill their dream of being loyal subjects of a Third-World oligarchy.

What Truly Infuriates Many Of Trump's Opponents

People who oppose Trump tend to do so because, as followers, they take their cues from the establishment (corrupt politicians, vacuous entertainers, and mercenary "intellectuals"). But I've noticed that the most virulent and vocal opponents of Trump hate him for an additional reason, namely his manifest intention to reduce government regulation, taxing, and spending. His plan to gut Obamacare alone has sent women of both sexes into fainting spells.

This is a sad testament to how the American people have degraded from free and independent citizens to slavish and parasitic subjects. It's gotten so bad that not only do they demand their lifestyles be subsidized through government force, but they assert a "right" to this plunder. So on the one hand a pro-choice woman proclaims that government must keep its hands off her body, but on the other she proclaims that government must place its hands in everyone else's pockets for her benefit. Dependency, like addiction, breeds cognitive dissonance.

What Trump's opponents seek to defend are not rights, but wrongs. 

The federal government has no constitutional authority -- and certainly no moral authority -- to spend my tax dollars on your birth control, your abortions, your general medical care, your artwork, your housing, your education, your settling in America after migrating from abroad, your "green" technology, your farming operations, or any number of other activities you shamelessly demand that I subsidize.

The only person whose rights are at stake in these transactions are mine, not yours. You are a thief. Having the government as your accomplice makes you no less guilty. Indeed, I have a far greater right to avoid paying taxes for these things if I so chose, than you and the government have in forcing me to subsidize them.

Righteous outrage does not belong to any of you thieves and parasites. It belongs to us, the productive hosts. Attack Trump all you like. You will not destroy the righteous outrage that propelled him to the presidency, and his modest proposals to reduce government are merely one step on a long trek in the right direction. 

The Intellectual Strata Of Society

As inauguration day approaches, I read my daily Facebook feed with a mixture of bafflement and amusement. Fulminations over Trump are a daily (even hourly) occurrence. These people honestly believe that Trump is a mortal threat to American life, ignoring the longstanding and obscene excesses of a federal government that has been running renegade beyond the boundaries of the Constitution for at least three generations. To review:

• Presidents unilaterally embroil America in ruinous and costly wars, a blatant seizure of Congress's sole power to declare war, which Congress hasn't exercised since World War II. In more recent times, Presidents claim unilateral power to spy on and assassinate American citizens without due process of law.

• Congress has utterly cast off its restraints of enumerated powers and operates as a national legislature rather than a federal one. It legislates on all matters great and small, thereby destroying freedom, interstate competition, and creativity. It also spends vast sums of money on anything it likes without regard to enumerated powers, dispensing political favors, bribing states and individuals into even greater servitude, and bankrupting us. Contrast all this to the words of James Madison -- the "father of the Constitution" -- who vetoed a modest public works bill on the basis that it was beyond Congress's enumerated powers and was therefore illegal.

• Federal courts -- when not rubber-stamping federal excesses -- routinely interfere in affairs that are reserved to the states and the people under the Tenth Amendment. They do this under the guise of the Fourteenth Amendment and "civil rights," despite breaking faith with the framers of that Amendment and making all rights hostage to secret Star Chambers.

• And let us not forgot federal agencies, who crank out rules and regulations with the force of law in blatant violation of the Constitution's designation of Congress as sole bearer of the legislative power

I've been writing and speaking about these issues for over a decade to a deaf audience, who frets only now that it faces a president-elect whom it personally dislikes. To go into paroxysms over Trump resembles an Ebola patient who lies quietly in a hospital bed until, quite suddenly, he discovers a hangnail and screams with worry. It's mind-boggling, at least until one considers the intellectual strata of society.

The vast majority of people -- perhaps 70% to 80% -- do not think for themselves as to any of the big issues that control or threaten their lives. These people live day-to-day. Their historical memory is confined to personal experience. They have a confirmation bias that interprets current reality as normal and any contrary thoughts, words, or deeds as abnormal. And, most important of all, they adopt and parrot the worldview of professional "intellectuals," who peddle a facile (and thoroughly false) narrative through the various news and entertainment media. The common man looks up to those who wield impressive-sounding degrees and official titles, eager to be on their side of any public debate rather than risk falling out of step. So the common man plasters a fabricated, bumper-sticker philosophy on his Facebook page or his car to advertise just how intellectually hip he his. In short, the common man is a sheep.

The professional "intellectuals" constitute perhaps 15% to 20% of people. Such people are not intellectuals in the true sense, which means caring about ideas for their own sake and exploring them to their conclusion regardless of consequences. Quite to the contrary, a professional "intellectual" is fixated entirely on consequences. Ideas are merely means to an end, namely power and/or wealth. Such people are not even very intelligent, and they engage in precious little that might be classified as rigorous intellectual work. But they are tenacious and fully devoted to manipulating words and ideas, which the common man will reflexively latch onto without bothering to analyze.

The remainder of the people are the small minority of us who are true intellectuals. We care about the truth, explore it, and speak it even though this infuriates pretty much everyone else, who vastly outnumber us. Our forebears are men such as Socrates, Epictetus, Christ, Thomas More, and many others who spoke truth but were persecuted for it. This blog and my books, for example, are clearly an intellectual exercise. They bring me no material gain whatsoever, but I keep at them because I care about truth and believe it's worth proclaiming, even if few are listening (and perhaps even especially then).

But getting back to my original point, the truth of the matter is that America is seriously compromised politically, financially, culturally, and morally. Trump is not the problem, which is far bigger and likely won't be resolved anytime soon, if ever. I predict that at the first sign of the trouble that has been brewing for a long time, everyone will blame Trump. That's when it will become REALLY invigorating to be an intellectual contrarian. 

En Route To Inauguration Day

When the White House will undergo an enema and, for the first time since Reagan, host a president universally hated by the establishment and its disciples. The latest ploy by the deep state to avert this outcome came to us courtesy of the intelligence community, whose effort to concoct lurid details about Trump fell victim to government ineptitude. Today's Internet is the modern equivalent of the Gutenberg press; now more than ever, people communicate freely with each other without obfuscation or hindrance from the professional "intellectual" class, who cares nothing about ideas but only about the power to be gained by manipulating them. A newscast in America today is merely Pravda or Izvestia in English.

What we are witnessing is bigger than a mere presidential inauguration. This is an uprising of the (patriotic) people against the arrogant, bloated, globalist, and corrupt political class. America was never meant to have a professional political class in the first place, but rather occasional stints of public service by private citizens. What better way to cast off the yoke of modern times than have a president who lacks any experience in public office?

None of this is to say that Trump will govern well. But he will govern against the grain, and that's good enough (assuming that the deep state doesn't exercise its final solution).