Alt-American

Forget, hell!

Posted on April 10, 2025April 10, 2025 by Mike

Unreconstructed Southron Baron Bodissey reports—with pitchers—on the ceremony commemorating the anniversary of the Appomattox tragedy/disaster.

Appomattox: Lest We Forget
This afternoon I attended a ceremony marking the 160th anniversary of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia (which I often sardonically refer to as “the Confederate Nakba”). It was organized by the Appomattox chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and took place at the Confederate Cemetery in the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park. The cemetery itself is on a plot of land that isn’t part of the historical park, and is owned by the UDC rather than the federal government. As a result, at that location we unreconstructed Confederates can engage in our customary activities without being busted for hate speech or otherwise interfered with.

The occasion began with a prayer. We then pledged allegiance to all three flags: the US flag, the Virginia flag, and the Confederate battle flag. Yes, I know some of those pledges are mutually exclusive, but nobody seems to care.

Speak for yourself on that one, young feller. Anyhoo. Onwards.

Following that there were a few brief speeches, several songs, and some reading of poetry. UDC members in widow’s weeds placed a rose by each grave, and two little girls set up battle flags next to each headstone. There are nineteen soldiers buried in the cemetery, all but seven of them unknown, including a solitary Union soldier (who got the Stars and Stripes next to his headstone).

Fuckin’ bluebellied Yankee sumbitch. Anyhoo. Onwards.

Then a number of wreaths were presented and placed next to the memorial stone by representatives of the groups that donated them, mostly chapters of the UDC or camps of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). Not all of the groups were local: one of the SCV camps that presented a wreath was based in Honolulu, Hawaii.

All in all, it was an excellent occasion. It was a reminder — at least for me — that the Confederate battle flag is not about slavery or tariffs or even states’ rights, but rather a symbol of resistance to tyranny, and a reminder that Virginia was invaded and devastated by an alien army.

Deo Vindice!

That penultimate paragraph pretty much says it all, far as I’m concerned.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it eleventy bajillion times

Posted on April 3, 2025 by Mike

This. This, right here.

“We don’t need more turnout, we need real results. We need integrity in the system. We need no mail-in ballots. We need to get rid of the voting machines. We need to limit the early voting period, and especially limit the late counting period – no counting after election day.” https://t.co/raXmUstgGe

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll)

April 3, 2025

Very simple, very easy, no? And yet somehow, all too damned many of us just can’t seem to get their cinderblock-heads around the concept. Guess certain Very Important Personages got too much to lose by jettisoning the present-day corrupt, fraudulent American “election” system in favor of something far more transparent, trustworthy, and commonsensical, which had served us so well for oh, a couple hundred years or thereabouts.

(Via Insty)

A brief history of American protectionism, tariffs, “free trade,” et al

Posted on April 3, 2025April 3, 2025 by Mike

PRO TIP: It was nothing like what you probably think it was.

Protectionism in the United States is protectionist economic policy that erects tariffs and other barriers on imported goods. This policy was most prevalent in the 19th century. At that time, it was mainly used to protect Northern industries and was opposed by Southern states that wanted free trade to expand cotton and other agricultural exports. Protectionist measures included tariffs and quotas on imported goods, along with subsidies and other means, to restrain the free movement of imported goods, thus encouraging local industry.

There was a general lessening of protectionist measures from the 1930s onwards, culminating in the free trade period that followed the Second World War. After the war, the United States promoted the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), to liberalize trade among all capitalist countries. In 1995, GATT became the World Trade Organization (WTO), and with the collapse of Communism its open markets/low tariff ideology became dominant worldwide. Protectionism has increased in popularity since the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Britain was the first country to successfully use a large-scale infant industry promotion strategy. However, its most ardent user was the U.S. Economic historian Paul Bairoch once called it “the homeland and bastion of modern protectionism” (Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes, Bairoch).

Britain initially did not want to industrialize the American colonies, and implemented policies to that effect. For example, banning high value-added manufacturing activities. Thus, the American Revolution was, to some extent, a war against this policy, in which the commercial elite of the colonies rebelled against being forced to play a lesser role in the emerging Atlantic economy. This explains why, after independence, the Tariff Act of 1789 was the second bill of the Republic signed by President Washington allowing Congress to impose a fixed tariff of 5% on all imports, with a few exceptions.

Most American intellectuals and politicians during the country’s catching-up period felt that the free trade theory advocated by British classical economists was not suited to their country. The US went against the advice of economists like Adam Smith, Ricardo and Jean Baptiste Say and tried to protect its industries. Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States (1789–1795) and economist Daniel Raymond were the first theorists to present the argument of the emerging industry, not the German economist Friedrich List. List started out as a free trade advocate and only converted to the infant industry argument following his exile in the U.S (1825–1830).

Hamilton feared that Britain’s policy towards the colonies would condemn the United States to be only producers of agricultural products and raw materials. Washington and Hamilton believed that political independence was predicated upon economic independence. Increasing the domestic supply of manufactured goods, particularly war materials, was seen as an issue of national security. In his Reports, Hamilton argued that the competition from abroad and the “forces of habit” would mean that new industries that could soon become internationally competitive (“infant industries”) would not be started in the United States, unless the initial losses were guaranteed by government aid.

According to him, this aid could take the form of import duties or, in rare cases, prohibition of imports. He called for customs barriers to allow American industrial development and to help protect infant industries, including bounties (subsidies) derived in part from those tariffs. He also believed that duties on raw materials should be generally low. Hamilton explained that despite an initial “increase of price” caused by regulations that control foreign competition, once a “domestic manufacture has attained to perfection … it invariably becomes cheaper”.

In 1789, Congress passed a tariff act , imposing a 5% flat rate tariff on all imports. Between 1792 and the war with Britain in 1812, the average tariff level remained around 12.5%. In 1812, all tariffs were doubled to an average of 25%, in order to cope with the increase in public expenditure due to the war.

In 1816, a new law was introduced to keep the tariff level close to the wartime level—especially protected were cotton, woolen, and iron goods. The American industrial interests that had blossomed because of the tariff lobbied to keep it, and had it raised to 35 percent in 1816. The public approved, and by 1820, America’s average tariff was up to 40 percent.

According to Michael Lind, protectionism was America’s de facto policy from the passage of the Tariff of 1816 to World War II, “switching to free trade only in 1945”.

Somewhat surprising, no? What first got me to thinking about these weighty matters was Bayou Peter’s post on them, expounding Jeff Childers’s post on same. To wit:

It would be easy to dismiss yesterday’s announcement as dry, economic arcana — tariffs, trade deficits, bilateral agreements, country-by-country charts, and economic reports. But don’t be fooled by all the paperwork. What Trump did wasn’t just a historic across-the-board trade action.

It was a once-in-a-century power shift.

To understand how truly historic it was, look back to Bretton Woods, 1944 — the postwar deal where America agreed to carry the world’s economic burdens in exchange for geopolitical dominance.

After the devastation of WWII, the United States promised to help rebuild Europe and Japan, by opening our previously protected markets to foreign goods, keeping our tariffs low to nonexistent, providing the world’s reserve currency, and underwriting global security with American military power.

In return, other countries were supposed to gradually liberalize their economies, buy American goods, and play by the rules. But they never did.

Instead, they took our postwar deal —designed to help them— and ran with it. They piled up tariffs, non-tariff barriers, VAT taxes, and trade cheats while the U.S. kept its markets wide open.

For decades, the American working class footed the bill while foreign economies fattened themselves, and American elites made billions facilitating and perpetuating the grift. That was globalism. It’s not an ideology— it is a business model. And Trump just crushed the model.

I’ve always insisted that Trump is a helluva lot smarter than most people want to give him credit for. The obvious fact that he fully understands what his tariff moves are at bottom all about ought to establish his intelligence to all but the most reflexively stubborn Trump hater’s satisfaction.

Lots more yet to the above-linked posts, natch; dry and deadly dull as the subject matter may seem at first blush, you really, really want to read all three in their entirety.

Update! You gotta love it, you truly, truly do.

Tariff Liberation Day Has Arrived
Cue the mass hysteria. Donald Trump’s Liberation Day has arrived, as the decades of foreign nations tariffing our goods without reciprocal tariffs ends.

The tariff war between the United States and dozens of other nations just took a major escalation, as the president imposed reciprocal tariffs on a number of goods from a lengthy list of countries. (The tariffs are reciprocal in that if a nation tariffs 10% on U.S. goods, so will we on that nation’s products.) The president aims to bring manufacturing back to America and to cow hostile nations. While many economists and media figures are prophesying economic disaster, it is worth noting that tariffs during both Ronald Reagan’s presidency and Donald Trump’s first term boosted economic growth and wage increases here in America.

Trump declared in an executive order that he finds “underlying conditions, including a lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships, disparate tariff rates and non-tariff barriers, and U.S. trading partners’ economic policies that suppress domestic wages and consumption, as indicated by large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States.“

While other countries have been allowed to impose extortionate tariffs on American goods for decades, America has often not imposed reciprocal tariffs, leading to a very unbalanced and unfair system that often drives manufacturing and jobs out of the U.S. It remains to be seen if Trump’s new tariffs can successfully bring home jobs and boost our economy.

Let the shitlibs whinge and complain as loud and as long as they like, Mr President, sir. They’re going to anyway, no matter what you do or don’t do, which we all know full well by now. So let the sound of their rage, frustration, and bitter despair be as music to every ReichWingNaziDeathBeast© ear, sayeth I. Just more for decent, right-thinking Americans to point and laugh at, and that’s a thing of goodness.

Congrats, kudos, all that jazz

Posted on April 1, 2025April 1, 2025 by Mike

The Warlord of Barsoom marks a very special milestone.

A couple days ago, Postcards From Barsoom hit the twenty-thousand-subscriber milestone. I wanted to do something on the day, but I was wrapped up finishing the Starship Troopers essay, and after that I made the mistake of catching a head cold that pretty much nuked my last couple days for anything productive.

When I started sending these Martian missives I never expected that they’d prove so popular. Twenty thousand isn’t a huge number in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a much larger audience than I’ve ever had before. My essays now routinely break the five-figure view mark, meaning that everything I write is going straight into the heads of tens of thousands of people … and, I like to flatter myself (and you), not tens of thousands of random people, but tens of thousands of highly intelligent, thoughtful, and often successful people … the kinds of people who have a greater-than-average influence on the world.

The responsibility of that weighs on me with increasing heaviness. There are consequences to ideas. Every time you say something, it has some influence on the people who hear it. On a densely connected medium such as the Internet, every thought is a sort of wave that pulses out into the collective consciousness; the more connected one is, and the more that wave resonates with connected receivers, the greater its amplitude. This doesn’t only have an effect on the people who directly read something, either. There are second-order effects: someone reads something, and this influences their thoughts, which in turn influences their own words and actions, which has an effect on the people connected to them. And then by extension there are third-order effects beyond that, cascading throughout the noosphere.

Nice to know the Substack thing is working out well for somebody, at least. My own experience over there has been a good bit less salutary, alas: just under 300 suhbscribers, nearly all of the non-paid variety, thereby rendering the financial remuneration far less than what I was assured it would be when the nice Substack lady e-mailed me to inveigle me to start posting on the account I’d set up right after Substack came online and then let lie fallow afterwards, having no clue what I was gonna do with the damned thing. Then again, I’m what you might call an “acquired taste,” I freely admit it.

In this regard, at any rate, John Carter and I have a lot in common:

I didn’t start Postcards From Barsoom with any kind of plan in mind; to be honest, I still don’t have anything that could recognizably be called a ‘plan’. There’s no niche I’m trying to carve out, no one over-riding message I’m trying to communicate. I write about whatever I find interesting enough to capture my attention, I try to be honest without pretending I’m always right, and I try to find creative angles on the subject matter, to say things that haven’t been said before, or at least to say them in a somewhat novel fashion. It’s a constant dance between poetry and science, perched on the razor edge between rigour and ridiculousness. Striking that balance while also being aware of the responsibility that a large audience entails is trickier still. Nothing crushes playfulness faster than the gravity of seriousness.

Preach it, brother-man.

Sen Know-Nothing spouts off, shoulda kept it zipped

Posted on April 1, 2025 by Mike

Another remedial crash-course that ought to’ve been taught in 8th Grade Civics class, if only such things existed anymore.

Supporting a U.S. designated Terrorist Organization is Not Free Speech. Green Card holders have different rules than Citizens. Enough with the ignorant gaslighting Senator Chicken Little (that would be shitlib Sen Chris Murphy from the shitlib state of Connecticut, spectacularly beclowning himself and his constituents for way too many years now—M).

You’re a United States Senator for God’s sake! And for far too long. Learn the difference between immigration law, and restrictions on speech and conduct applicable only to foreigners, and criminal law, which applies to everyone. You’re embarrassing yourself.

If you are granted an American visa or green card, you are a guest. You have zero right to commit any crime or incite hostility against America and her citizens. Green card holders are still probationary and can be deported if they wouldn’t qualify for admission. You’re shamelessly fear mongering about citizens.

Indeed so, my dear. This moronic line from Murphy’s X/Tweet (bold mine): “Everyone in America – citizens and green card holders – has the protection of free speech”—serves to remind me of how, for many years now, it has grated on me all to Hell and gone to have to sit back and watch the selfsame shitlibs who continually dismiss the US Constitution as archaic, outmoded, irrelevant, and incomprehensible nonetheless pretzel themselves to insist that said Founding document somehow applies not just to American citizens alone, but to every living soul on Earth.

This ain’t bad logic, nor is it flawed or inconsistent or frivolous logic, nosireebob. What we have here is in fact no logic at all—ANTIlogic, in a manner of speaking. Y’know, along the lines of, say, an anti-Pope, antimatter, the antiChrist, &c.

You go, Rubio!

Posted on March 28, 2025 by Mike

“Little Marco” is proving his mettle as SecState, and it’s a joy to behold.

Rubio: ‘Every Time I Find One of These Lunatics, I Take Away Their Visa’
At Thursday’s press conference in Guyana, a reporter asked Rubio about a particular case involving a student having a visa revoked, and he did not shy away from it. In fact, he got a little fired up and doubled down on the message that the Trump administration has been sending to people who come into this country with bad intentions. He even put it into simple language that maybe Democrats can understand.

Let me be abundantly clear. If you go apply for a visa right now, anywhere in the world — let me just send this message out — if you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus — we’re not going to give you a visa. If you lie to us, and get a visa, and then enter the United States. and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa. And once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States.

And we have a right like every country in the world has a right to remove you from our country. So, it’s just that simple. I think it’s crazy. I think it’s stupid for any country in the world to welcome people into their country that are going to go to your universities as visitors — they’re visitors! — and say I’m going to your universities to start a riot. I’m going to your universities to take over a library and harass people. I don’t care what movement you’re involved with. Why would any country in the world allow people to come in and disrupt…we gave you a visa to come in and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses. And if we’ve given you a visa and then you decide to do that, we’re gonna take it away. I encourage every country to do that, by the way, because I think it’s crazy to invite students into your country that are coming onto your campus and destabilizing it. We’re just not gonna have it.

So, we’ll revoke your visa, and once your visa’s revoked, you’re illegally in the country and you have to leave. Every country in the world has a right to decide who comes in as a visitor and who doesn’t. If you invite me into your home because you say, ‘I wanna come to your house for dinner,’ and I go to your house and I start putting mud on your couch and spray-painting your kitchen, I bet you you’re gonna kick me out. Well, we’re gonna do the same thing if you come into the United States as a visitor and create a ruckus for us. We don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country, but you’re not gonna do it in our country.

The reporter followed up by asking, “Did you confirm, there’s been a report that 300 visas been permanently revoked?” To which Rubio replied confidently, “Maybe more. Might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.” She seemed shocked at that response, but Rubio did not back down and gave a perfect example of one of the millions of reasons why illegal immigration is such a huge threat to our national security.

At some point I hope we run out because we’ve gotten rid of all of them, but we’re looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up. And by the way, we wanna get rid of gang members too. So, Venezuela sent us a bunch of gang members. I’m sure you’ve heard of Tren de Agua, Mr. President. Terrible gang, vicious gang. They flooded in our…

Yesterday, just so everybody knows, yesterday one of these gang members who was involved in New York City in attacking a police officer, was deported back to Venezuela because they’re now taking flights again, you know, because of, of some strong measures we’ve taken. And this guy lands, this guy’s the guy that attacked a police officer in New York City and laughed about it in court with a smirk on his face. When he gets off the plane in Venezuela, he’s welcomed by this character named Diosdado Cabello. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this guy. And, and he welcomes him, hugging the guy. So, does anybody have any doubt that these people are pushing these people into the United States to destabilize us in the region? That, so, yeah, we’re looking for people like this and we wanna get them out of the United States. Absolutely.

Rubio is referring to 19-year-old Darwin Andres Gomez-Izquiel, who attacked a police officer in January 2024, and Diosdado Cabello is the so-called “Minister of the Popular Power for Interior, Justice and Peace of Venezuela.” In reality, he’s a major criminal involved in narco-terrorism who is wanted in the United States. However, he currently oversees Venezuela’s police forces and prisons as part of Nicolás Maduro fraudulent administration.

If ever there was a pluperfect example of someone embiggening himself to fit his assigned role, Marco Rubio as SecState would have to be it. What we seem to have here is one of those all-too-uncommon cases of the Right Man in the Right Job at the Right Time. Excellent work, young feller, and well spoken also. Ye Aulde CF Chapeau is hereby duly doffed to ye.

The whole megilla

Posted on March 12, 2025 by Mike

Dude hits the nail on the head. I mean, HARD.

Regular reminder that every Ideological Turing Test study has shown that conservatives understand liberal viewpoints quite well, and liberals are incapable of understanding conservative viewpoints. We don’t have to argue, this has been shown and reproduced empirically. https://t.co/6IO5t0mxKq

— Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (@pegobry_en)

March 11, 2025

Good as that is, it gets even better from there.

This is because leftism is a form of narcissism, so they can’t help but projecting their neuroses on other people, and so they’re incapable of modeling other minds (this is also known as “empathy”).

— Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (@pegobry_en)

March 11, 2025

Being the lazy sod I am, I’ll make it easy on myself and just do a screencap of the rest.

As CF Lifers will know, I’ve posited the Leftard/perpetual adolescents connection countless times over the years here, but Gobry’s “leftism=narcissism” formulation never occurred to me. Although it must also be said that seeing it spelled out so directly and concisely makes it seem blindingly obvious now—as if the world’s biggest lightbulb had suddenly switched on in my head. Excellent work, Mr Gobry, sir. Found this thread via Ed Driscoll at Insty; not having known about this guy before, you bet your sweet bippy I hit the “Follow” button with a quickness.

Hats off to our classy, beautiful, politically astute First Lady

Posted on March 4, 2025March 4, 2025 by Mike

I suppose as I type this Trump must be smack dab in the middle of tonight’s big speech to Congress, which is of little or no real import far as I’m concerned. This story, on the other hand, struck just the right note with me.

The First Lady’s Guest List for Tonight Is Fascinating
When Donald Trump takes the stage to deliver his speech to a joint session of Congress tonight, his wife, Melania, will be in the audience, and she’ll have several unique guests with her. But they’re not celebrities or dignitaries. They’re everyday Americans “from all different walks of life” whose lives have been impacted by “disaster wrought by the previous administration.”

Some of the First Lady’s guests have been victims of crimes committed by people who are in the United States illegally, like Allyson and Lauren Phillips of Woodstock, Ga. You might know them better as the mother and sister of Laken Riley, the young nursing student who was brutally murdered on the University of Georgia campus by a Venezuelan gang member who was not only in the U.S. illegally but had also committed many previous crimes.

Mrs. Trump will also have Alexis Nungaray of Houston, Texas, at the speech. Nungaray’s 12-year-old daughter, Jocelyn, was murdered by two men whom the Biden administration caught at the border and released into the U.S. just weeks before they committed the heinous crime. U.S. Border Patrol agent Roberto Ortiz will be in attendance as well. While serving in Texas, he’s been shot at many times by dangerous cartel members.

Remember Corey Comperatore, the firefighter who was shot and killed when a gunman tried to assassinate Trump at a rally last July? His widow, Helen, and their daughters, Allyson and Kaylee, will join the first lady on Tuesday night.

Former Russian hostage Marc Fogel and his 95-year-old mother, Malphine of Butler, Pa., will be there, too. The history teacher was sentenced to 14 years in a Russian prison for attempting to visit the country with medical marijuana. In February, after making a promise to Malphine, Trump secured his release and even invited Marc to the White House upon returning to the U.S.

A couple of the First Lady’s guests have been the victims of abhorrent gender issues. January Littlejohn of Tallahassee, Fla., is the mother of a young girl whose “middle school socially transitioned” her “to a different sexual identity without January and her husband’s knowledge or permission.” Littlejohn is now a parents’ rights advocate.

Payton McNabb of Murphy, N.C., a young female volleyball player who had to step away from the sport “when a biological man playing on the opposing women’s team spiked the volleyball at Payton’s face, leaving her with a traumatic brain injury,” will be there. McNabb is now a member of the Independent Women’s Forum and an advocate for girls’ sports.

Lots more victims of the misbegotten, illegitimate, and wholly criminal Biden junta listed at the link. I’m happy to see them all receive the recognition they so richly deserve from an actual President and his caring, compassionate wife. Speeches? We don’ need no steenking speeches—not when the guest list says everything anybody needs to know, and says it so very well.

Update! The one and only thing that might actually get me interested in Trump’s big speech.

Via WRSA.

Deep dive into some dirty water

Posted on February 28, 2025 by Mike

EXCELLENT run-down of the DOGE dustup, what it all means, the history behind it, how Real Americans should perceive and interpret it, and more, from Jeffrey A Tucker. It’s a Tweet/X/whatever, and a pretty long ‘un too, so rather than do an embed of the original post I’ll just fast forward to the inevitable “Show more…” workaround.

I’m concerned that many people do not understand the historical and institutional context in which the DOGE labor reforms are unfolding. They look at this as if these are some random, chaotic, arbitrary, strange, and even cruel measures to impose on a devoted civil service.

The reality is very different, and I’m not even sure that Elon entirely understands this. For more than a century, even dating back to 1883, the civil service has grown and grown without check from the elected branch, either the presidency or the legislature . The bureaucracies have ballooned from a few to 450 or so. The bloat and absurdities have grown too.

Get this: no one has ever known what to do about it. Not Coolidge, not Hoover, not Nixon, not Reagan, not Clinton, no one. No president has been able to crack this nut. The only reforms ever to have made it through are those that make the administrative state bigger, never smaller.

Countless cabinet secretaries have come and gone, always with the intention of making a change but leaving saddened, demoralized, outwitted, outgunned, and ultimately devoured.

No president has seriously taken on this problem because they simply did not know how. The unions are powerful, the intimidation from the deep institutional knowledge is overwhelming, the fear of the media as been powerful, and every single president comes to power vaguely feeling threatened by the intelligence agencies. The industries that have captured every single agency were also far too powerful to unseat or control.

This combination of institutional inertia has blocked serious reform for a full century. No one has dared. No one has even had a theory or strategy about what to do about this problem. It had become so terrible that most people in politics have simply surrendered, like homeowners who know there are rats in the basement and bats in the attic but long ago gave up trying to fix the issue.

All this time, the American people have felt themselves ever more oppressed, weighed upon, taxed and regulated, spied upon, brow beaten, and otherwise overwhelmed. Voting never made any difference because the politicians no longer controlled the system. The bureaucracies ruled all.

The Biden years underscored the point. We didn’t even need a conscious and present executive. We only needed a figurehead to pretend to be president, just like the Soviet premiers in the old days. The institutions ran everything and the people controlled nothing.

How to deal with this? Trump alone figured it out in his last term: he simply took charge of the agencies in a limited way. There were screams of horror and plots galore. They performed a long stream of clever schemes to destroy him and show him who is boss, which is not the democratically elected president but the forces behind the scenes.

The job of the president, goes the message from all the insiders, is to PRETEND to be in charge but not actually do anything meaningful. Shut up, mug up, obey, and disturb nothing, let the administrative state do its thing without oversight or disruption, and then you will get your honorary library and bestselling autobiography and go down in history as great.

Trump refused the deal and look what happened.

Four years have gone by and Trump is back again, this time with a determination to slay this beast, one that he knows all-to-well. The efforts of DOGE and MAHA and MAGA are epic in scope, breaking a century of pathetic acquiescence toward the deep, middle, and shallow states, at last using moral courage to confront the problem head on, come what may.

They are profoundly aware that they MUST act fast and with some degree of ferocity, even recklessness, else we will default back to the status quo of leaders who pretend to be in charge while the embedded system runs things behind the scenes.

It has been this way for TOO LONG. The voters this time have demanded change, and mustered the faith to believe that change is possible. This is precisely what DOGE is attempting, to make good on a promise, a promise that for once the voters actually believed was credible.

They simply must succeed. There might never be another chance. The way of failure is the path everyone knows the US was on, toward economic stagnation, political scolerosis, and eventual irrelevance in the unfolding of the next stage of social evolution.

As comprehensive, clear-cut, and just dead-on-point good as we’re ever gonna see, I believe. I started to do a little boldfacing here and there (I especially dug that “voters…have demanded change, and mustered the faith to believe that change is possible” bit), but then it hit me that there’s just way too much rich, buttery goodness here to easily be able to find a stopping point once I got started. Some things are just better left alone; they stand well enough on their own, thanks.

Talking sense

Posted on February 24, 2025 by Mike

JD Vance is truly a national treasure.

JD Vance to Young Men: Don’t Let Them Turn You Into ‘Androgynous Idiots’
Not too long ago, I decided to try a bold experiment. I returned to the University of Georgia to take some agriculture classes. The reason I considered it bold is that I was old enough to be many of the students’ mothers (had I been an extremely young teen mom, of course). I learned a lot of lessons about this current generation of teens and twenty-somethings and how college has changed since my first go-round two decades prior, but what really threw me was when a professor asked for my pronouns.

My class was given a virtual assignment to upload a video introduction of ourselves to a school website. “Tell us your name, your major, your hobbies and interests, and your pronouns so your classmates can gain a better understanding of who you are.” I’d never been asked to provide my pronouns in my life and had no interest in starting now. Before I uploaded my video, I watched through some of the others, shocked as these young men and women offered up their “hes” and “shes” and “theys” as if this was all perfectly normal.

But there was one guy, let’s call him Tyler, who gave us his name, his major, and his hobbies and interests, but instead of pronouns, he ended the video with “I’m a dude” and a slight eye roll, obviously mocking the pronoun situation. Let me tell you, he’s the only person from that class I even remember, much less ever gained any sort of understanding of who he was.

Well, JD Vance just gave all the other Tylers of the world permission to crawl out from under their rocks of submission and embrace their God-given masculinity.

On behalf of women — well, the ones who enjoy being women — I would like to say thank you to our vice president.

Vance spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Monday and said a lot of great things, some of which even earned him a standing ovation. But it was his message to young people, especially young men, that really stood out.

My message to young men is don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends, or because you’re competitive. The cultural message…wants to turn everybody, whether male or female, into androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same, and act the same. We actually think God made male and female for a purpose, and we want you guys to thrive as young men, and as young women. And we’re going to help with our public policy to make it possible to do that.

I don’t know about you, but I could listen to that over and over again. There’s a reason why Donald Trump won 49% of the vote from young men (ages 18 to 29) in November and 54% from men overall. Vance touched on that too.

I think this is why young men in particular are so, you know, they’re so inspired by President Trump is because he doesn’t allow the media to tell him he can’t make a joke or he can’t have an original thought. President Trump just says what’s on his mind; that’s a damn good thing.

Amen to that. “We’re fighting for you,” was Vance’s overall message to young people, and it was refreshing to hear. Our country doesn’t just face international enemies — we’re under attack from enemies within who want to debase and degrade our culture.

They’re the ones who want to tell young men that they can’t be masculine and tell women they can’t be feminine. They’re the ones who demand that boys play girls’ sports, who insist that teachers force gender ideology on elementary school students, and who truly believe there are 72 genders.

Well, yeah. Nice thing is, they’re all complete and total psychopaths, so we got that going for us at least.

Coolest. Gift. EVAR!

Posted on February 24, 2025February 24, 2025 by Mike

I sure do hope Trump properly values having this guy so firmly in his corner.

Elon Musk Given “Chainsaw For Bureaucracy” By Javier Milei At CPAC
Elon Musk is no stranger to using physical props to make a point – After his purchase of social media giant Twitter, which shocked the political left to their core, he famously entered corporate headquarters on day one with a bathroom sink in his hands. “Let that sink in” became a mantra and a meme as Musk proceeded to fire around 80% of the bloated leftist company’s staff without any visible decline in operational ability.

The day Javier Milei was sworn in as president he shuttered 13 ministries and fired over 30,000 government bureaucrats. Argentina’s economy has been a train wreck for almost three decades due to socialist mismanagement and out of control debt spending. The country has been indebted to the IMF for many years and was suffering from multiple bouts of hyperinflation since 2001. Milei ran on a Libertarian platform and his campaign promise was to eliminate government waste. He went on to reduce spending by 30% and cut monthly inflation from 25% down to 2.7%.

By all accounts, Milei’s administration has been a resounding success in terms of economic reform and he has proven that Austrian economics work in practice and not just in theory. His open disdain for the political left was refreshing to see in a political candidate – Much like Trump, he has not been afraid to say what he really thinks of progressives.

After a decade of woke authoritarianism (much of it funded with American tax dollars) it’s hard to argue with anything he says here. Milei’s disdain for the political left is only matched by his disdain for big government. His favorite campaign prop was a chainsaw, representing his intent to chop the fat off the bureaucracy.

The saw blade is engraved with Milei’s catchphrase, “Viva la libertad carajo!,” which roughly translates to “Long live freedom, Goddammit!” Musk wielded the chainsaw on stage at CPAC, swinging it wildly. Thankfully the machine appeared to be inert, otherwise Musk probably would have cranked it into action and run around the stage with it.

The saw is a real beaut; best picture I’ve seen of it so far would have to be this one:

See what I mean? Thanks for all you do, Javier.

Finger on the pulse

Posted on February 17, 2025 by Mike

Of the heartbeat of Real America.

NASCAR fans cheer as Trump arrives for Daytona 500 in Air Force One
President Donald Trump received cheers from the crowd at Daytona International Speedway as Air Force One landed at the airport ahead of his arrival for the Daytona 500 on Sunday.

The president’s plane flew over the speedway before it landed at Daytona International Airport. Cheers from the crowd were heard on the FOX broadcast as the pre-race hosts talked to Chase Elliott. NASCAR fans and drivers watched as the plane flew over the track.

Trump released a statement ahead of landing at the airport. He will be the first sitting president to attend two Daytona 500 races at Daytona International Speedway. He attended the race the first time in February 2020.

“This iconic race showcases the fastest, most fearless drivers in motorsports, who represent our Nation’s love of tradition, competition, and automotive innovation,” the statement read. “The Daytona 500 brings together people from all walks of life—from lifelong racing fans to first-time spectators—they all join in celebrating a shared passion for speed, adrenaline, and the thrill of the race.

“From the roar of the engines on the track to the echo of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ soaring through the stands, the Daytona 500 is a timeless tribute to the speed, strength, and unyielding spirit that make America great. That spirit is what will fuel America’s Golden Age, and if we harness it, the future is truly ours.”

Well said, Mr President, sir. Well said indeed.

President @realDonaldTrump arrives at Daytona on Air Force One. pic.twitter.com/FB6xsxaVHj

— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX)

February 16, 2025

Ace has another vid which might be even better than the above one.

“This is your favorite President… You’re talented people, and you’re great people, and great Americans. Have a good day. Have a lot of fun, and I’ll see you later.” –President Donald J. Trump 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/65iFBFDjD7

— President Donald J. Trump (@POTUS)

February 16, 2025

You just know the driver and security personnel riding with OMB were absolutely laughing themselves sick, having the time of their lives on that parade lap. No word on whether Trump unassed the Beast and cracked himself an ice-cold can of PBR after the show was over, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to find out that he did.

About face

Posted on February 16, 2025February 16, 2025 by Mike

Strom sees the Trumpian light. Kinda, sorta, a little bit. What the hey: baby steps, man, baby steps.

I Was Wrong About Trump
No, I am not in love with Trump. He still makes me cringe sometimes, and I still don’t understand the Canada/51st state thing at all, and want nothing to do with Gaza if he is serious about that.

He should make ALL of us cringe sometimes, and anybody who agrees with Trump’s every policy, position, and statement every single time needs to see a shrink and have his head checked. Can’t remember who first coined the phrase (Milton Friedman, maybe? Eh, dunno), but it’s right as rain: if you find yourself agreeing with anyone in the political arena 99 percent of the time, then one at least of you is almost certainly insane…and it’s probably you. True then, true now, true forever.

But there are two vital things about him which I got completely, totally, and without question wrong.

Walter Kirn slapped me in the face (not literally) with a single tweet…

Boom. At least it was a “boom” for me, because I was one of those people who was absolutely certain that Trump was too immature, too narcissistic, and too lacking in self-awareness to put his ego in check and hire the best people and support them. More than that, Trump has withstood weeks of attacks on his “ceding power” to “President Musk.”

And he has shrugged it all off and pushed his collaborators to the front, empowered them, and backed them every step along the way despite the Democrats and the Pravda Media baiting him hourly on how weak he appears.

As the Democrats and the Pravda Media scream about “President Musk,” Donald Trump invites him to give a press conference in the Oval Office with Little X running around. Trump seems so comfortable in his own skin that the richest man in the world waxing about his role in the government isn’t threatening at all; he invited it, and handed the mic over to him.

Same with Kennedy. Same with Gabbard.

I was also wrong about another issue that is perhaps even more important: his competence to take on the Deep State and win.

During his first term, I came to the conclusion that Trump didn’t understand government well enough and that by the end of his term, he hadn’t destroyed the Deep State, but rather they destroyed him. I stand by my assessment of the success of the Deep State. It hobbled him in his first term, which ended with the annus horribilis of 2020. The Deep State ran the United States in 2020, leading to Trump’s narrow defeat in the 2020 election.

As Trump himself has said several times of late, he squandered most of his first term listening to bad advice from people he believed to be his friends but were in actuality no such thing. He has learned from those mistakes, and it shows.

Believe it or not, even some normal people are scared enough about change and still trust the Democrats enough to buy the “woe is me” propaganda, but enough people are waking up that the Democrats are in a losing battle. Trump won’t win every fight, but he is wracking up a lot of wins.

I supported Ron DeSantis in the primaries because I thought Trump would have the will to fight, but not a winning strategy.

I was wrong. Trump might still be stopped, but it won’t be due to his inherent weaknesses. He is performing masterfully.

He is at that, and deserves full credit for it.

Update! Even shitlib ABC journalismist Jon Karl is forced to own up to the painful truth:

ABC’s Jon Karl: Trump’s favorability is now HIGHER than it ever was in his first term.

– 63% want the government to recognize only two sexes
– 60% support deporting illegal aliens
– 60% favor expanding oil & gas productionpic.twitter.com/9fUNRCY0Yp

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok)

February 16, 2025

YEEEEOWTCH! You know saying that had to hurt him like a hydrochloric acid-dipped shiv to the heart.

The “Health” Racket

Posted on February 16, 2025February 16, 2025 by Mike

I must say I was kinda surprised to read Steyn’s take on all this. It wasn’t quite what I would’ve expected from him, although perhaps I should’ve.

I rejoice in the confirmation of RFK Jr as the US Secretary of Health and Human Services (no thanks to longtime Chinese asset Mitch McConnell). “Make America Healthy Again” is the indispensable component of “Make America Great Again” – because the most obvious sign of what’s gone wrong in the country is to take a walk down any main street. No one would bet the future on a country that has debauched its human capital the way the United States has.

As Bobby Kennedy pointed out on The Mark Steyn Show, Americans are the most medicated people on the planet and are the unhealthiest in the developed world; in particular, as RFK also noted on our show, our children are the world’s most medicated children, and have accelerating rates of childhood obesity, childhood diabetes, childhood heart disease. A grade-school diagnosis of diabetes can take up to two decades off your lifespan.

So what’s the answer? Further enriching Blue Cross-Blue Shield? Americans pay more for health care than anybody else, and have lousier outcomes, starting with the most basic indicator of all – life expectancy: According to the UN, from the Swiss to the Australians, the list of peoples that enjoy an extra half-decade of life over Americans lengthens year on year. In the 2023 UN rankings, the United States comes in at Number Fifty-Five on the life-expectancy Hit Parade; for purposes of comparison, Albania – where the men smoke seventy a day and accessing the health-care system requires swimming to Italy – is at Fifty-Three. By 2022 America’s annual spending on health care was twelve-and-a-half grand per capita; Albania’s was under five hundred bucks – which is less than your co-pay on a Covid anal swab; the word “co-pay” does not exist in Albanian.

Four years ago, we first had RFK Jr on the show mainly because no one else wants to talk about this. If you’re wondering why, it’s because his late friend Roger Ailes, of Fox News, told him that in non-election years three-quarters of Fox’s ad revenue comes from Big Pharma.

Five years ago, the state and the pharmaceutical companies joined forces for an unprecedented experiment on you – to damage almost every aspect of daily life, including even more damage to a generation of children. There has yet to be an accounting for that.

And THAT’s what really stings about this, at least for me. Although admittedly, the only way We The Peepul will ever get an accounting is to r’are up on our hind legs at long, long last and demand one. Not “request” one; not ask politely for one; not hold a referendum and vote on whether or not we’d like to have one at some later, unspecified date; but straight-up remind our “public servants” of their proper place in the grand scheme of things, get ‘em skeered and keep the skeer on ‘em, and inform them in no uncertain terms that there is by God going to be one, or we’re gonna damned well know the reason why not. T’was ever thus, ain’t nothing whatsoever new.

More, and even worserer:

I was also glad to see, in the above clip, RFK trash USAid, which was after all founded by his uncle. As noted earlier this week, it’s now a near parodic example of the racket that the federal government has made of everything it touches. According to the above-mentioned Daily Telegraph, Trump has only been in office for three weeks but he’s already killing grannies:

US aid freeze claims first victims as oxygen supplies cut off

Seventy-one-year-old woman dies after being sent home from USAID funded hospital.

This story is by Sarah Newey, the Telegraph’s “Global Health Security Correspondent” in Bangkok. In my day, the Telegraph didn’t have a “Global Health Security Correspondent” in Bangkok or anywhere else. It’s not funded by USAid, is it?

Oxygen isn’t really that expensive. A member of the Steyn team required it at an event in Colorado a couple of years back. It certainly isn’t that expensive if you’re the “International Rescue Committee” and have revenues of over a billion dollars per annum. Of course, like everyone else on the take from USAid, the International Rescue Committee pisses away a lot of its dough. It pays its president, David Milliband, over a million bucks a year. No, not Ed Milliband, the talentless prat who serves as His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Net Zero. This is his brother, David, the talentless prat who was British Foreign Secretary back in the Gordon Brown era and parlayed that into a seven-figure salary with this IRC racket. As I always say, the “non-profits” are where the big bucks are.

The racket goes on. Uniparty warmonger Victoria Nuland was last heard of on The Mark Steyn Show warning that the zillions of US-funded biolabs in Ukraine could easily fall into Russian hands. Why are American taxpayers outsourcing gain-of-function to Kharkiv and Odessa? Well, they’re world-renowned experts in developing a new strain of monkeypox with fewer homophobic overtones…

The good news is that the all-war-all-the-time queen, who’s even more bloodsoaked than David Milliband, has just been appointed to the board of the “National Endowment for Democracy”. Ms Nuland is an expert in democracy, having ended it in Ukraine. “NED” was founded back in the Eighties, at taxpayer expense, to “export the American way of governance” – so that every nation may enjoy the blessings of paying former foreign parliamentarians a seven-figure salary to kill l’il ol’ ladies.

That’s the point. Whether you’re a Thai gran’ma, a Ukrainian infantryman or a New Hampshire grade-schooler, Nuland-Milliband-Big Pharma government is killing you. I wish RFK and the other Trump 47-iconoclasts all the best.

As should we all, whether we find Trump’s personal swashbuckling, over the top style grating or not.

Fair winds, following seas

Posted on February 13, 2025February 13, 2025 by Mike

Probably the smartest, bestest, most encouraging thing Trump v2.0 has done so far is to at last make good on his flamboyantly unfulfilled first-term pledge to hire “only the best people” for his administration. This, in turn, has yielded some unanticipated but nonetheless salutary results.

Trump shares the spotlight in his second term
President Donald Trump did a remarkable thing earlier this week: He let Elon Musk take reporters’ questions about the Department of Government Efficiency live from the Oval Office.

While Musk’s son ultimately stole the show, Trump sat at the Resolute Desk while his tech billionaire ally defended DOGE, a government-cutting project currently dominating the headlines, from media criticism. Though White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt subsequently said she would be happy to have Musk in the briefing room, he didn’t sound like he was ready to compete for her job anytime soon.

It’s long been conventional wisdom that there is only one star of the Donald Trump Show and the only rule in his freewheeling political world is “don’t upstage the boss.” Yet the constant complaints that Musk is the shadow president or the unelected power behind the throne have not created a rift with Trump.

In the sequel to his first term, Trump has been perfectly willing to share the spotlight. Musk is a unique case. The richest man in the world and recent convert to conservatism — Musk is fond of posting videos of Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate economist who was many a young conservative and libertarian’s entry point to the free-market gospel — was especially helpful to Trump in last year’s presidential election. Musk and conservative activist Charlie Kirk were up against an experienced Democratic field operation and, based on the results in all seven battleground states, at least held their own.

But it isn’t just Musk. Vice President JD Vance has kept up a brisk pace of interviews since taking office. At one point during the campaign, he made more than seven times as many such appearances as both members of the Democratic ticket combined. On the night they were elected, Trump singled out Vance to praise for his performance on cable networks Republicans generally deem hostile.

Trump’s Cabinet is stocked with proven television communicators, from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to Attorney General Pam Bondi to newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. When Gabbard was sworn in, Trump asked the group of reporters if they had any questions. As they shouted them out, Trump said, “You know what, I’d like to have Tulsi say a few words first, and then we could answer a couple of questions.”

With a capable staff and Executive Branch appointees backing him up, all of whom he not only trusts but actually seems to like and respect personally, Trump v2.0 obviously learned all the right lessons from his first term in office—and boy, does it ever show. Small wonder, then, that the man should be more unflappable, less temperamental, and more at ease with sharing the limelight, responsibility, and credit with them, in fairly sharp contrast with his first time in the Presidential pressure-cooker. I repeat: MOST encouraging.

Steady as she goes, Mr President sir, steady as she goes. In addition to the aforementioned crew members (sober men and true/and attentive to their duty, to paraphrase WS Gilbert), maintain the heading you’re currently on and you’ll soon have nearly all Real Americans—be they lowly swabbies on their Middie cruise or salty old seadogs with more Bluewater-spray coursing through their veins than blood—solidly aboard the USS MAGA to boot.

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