The Democracy-Challenged

The Confederacy of coastal and globalist elites, networked with the deep state blob, the media, the federal courts, controlled-opposition Christians, and other useful idiots, is threatened by a turn to common sense normal that ignores their “expertise” and instead affirms America, Americans, and the law. Trump’s election, by a vast margin, exposed the Confederacy of coastal and globalist elites et al as Democracy-challenged.

Not to be outdone by the rancor of David Brooks promoting a hostile takeover of the country in the NYT (see previous post) because Brook’s “normal” doesn’t include Trump and MAGA voters, comes another columnist for The New York Times who has wet himself – his “normal” is being exorcised by Trump.

Thomas L. Friedman says “I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future – GV Wire. He goes on to make ridiculous statements. I’ll address a few of these:

First Friedman: “. . .when [Trump] singles out coal miners for praise while he tries to zero out development of clean-tech jobs from his budget — in 2023, the U.S. wind energy industry employed approximately 130,000 workers, while the solar industry employed 280,000 — it suggests that Trump is trapped in a right-wing woke ideology that doesn’t recognize green manufacturing jobs as “real” jobs. How is that going to make us stronger?”

First Reply: Something that must have had Friedman shaking in his booties:

Biden admin quietly admits canceling Keystone XL Pipeline cost thousands of jobs, billions of dollars

The Biden administration published a congressionally mandated report highlighting the positive economic benefits the Keystone XL Pipeline would have had if President Biden didn’t revoke its federal permits.

The report, which the Department of Energy (DOE) completed in late December without any public announcement, says the Keystone XL project would have created between 16,149 and 59,000 jobs and would have had a positive economic impact of between $3.4-9.6 billion, citing various studies. A previous report from the federal government published in 2014 determined 3,900 direct jobs and 21,050 total jobs would be created during construction which was expected to take two years.

But immediately after taking office in January 2021, Biden canceled the pipeline’s permits, effectively shutting the project down. (Emphasis mine.)

How did being trapped in a left-wing “Green” ideology make us stronger, Thomas?

Friedman is worried about “Green” job cuts under Trump.  But, let’s look at recent history posted on the U.S. Ways and Means website:  Biden-Harris Record: Job Losses for Small Business While Adding More Government Bureaucrats.

Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee Jason Smith, 9/24: “A stumbling job market is a part of the price Americans are paying as the Federal Reserve tries to clean up the inflation crisis created by the Biden-Harris Administration’s runaway spending.” (Emphasis mine.)

“-Smallest Businesses Cut Jobs: Small businesses employing less than 10 people cut 43,100 jobs in the last year (Intuit Quickbooks Small Business Index)

“-More Part-Time Jobs: Since the start of the Biden-Harris Administration in January 2021, 1.7 million more Americans have had to take multiple jobs. In August alone, 264,000 more Americans took on part-time work for economic reasons. 

“-More Bureaucrats: Since the Biden-Harris Administration began, 30 percent of new jobs have come from hiring for government salaries. In August, government agencies added 24,000 to taxpayer-funded payrolls.

“-No “Manufacturing Boom”: In August, manufacturers cut another 24,000 jobs and the United States has shed 14,000 manufacturing jobs in the last year.”

Was Thomas L. Friedman never “more afraid for America’s future” then?

What about when transportation secretary Buttigieg had $7.5 billion at his disposal to install EV charging stations around the U.S. from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill, but only managed to complete a few dozen projects. Where did money and jobs go?

Regarding Green energy and Coal: From the Institute For Energy Research:

President Trump has signed executive orders to boost the coal industry, which once was the backbone of the U.S. generating system. Despite coal’s ability to provide reliable baseload power, massive subsidies and state mandates have resulted in significant solar and wind power additions that are causing grid instability. To protect the grid and to help meet rising electricity demand from AI data centers, electric vehicles, and cryptocurrency, President Trump is using emergency powers to keep existing coal plants online. He is also reopening western lands to coal leasing, looking to name metallurgical coal as a critical mineral, and ordering the attorney general to investigate states that have implemented laws against fossil fuel use so that the federal government could waive those rules. (Emphasis mine.)

What should be obvious by now is that intermittent wind and solar power don’t meet the needs for baseload power – the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time. Green energy options certainly will not meet the need for AI data centers. I favor clean nuclear power as do those behind the rise of AI.

Trump, by signing EOs to boost the coal industry, is keeping the lights on. He is working to grow industry, and preparing for the future job growth at home, not globally.

A week after boasting it had achieved 100% renewables energy power for the first time, Spain’s power grid suffered a crippling blackout, along with Portugal’s. Apparently, this was due to over-reliance on what are always fluctuating power sources vs. the base power that comes from fossil fuels, nuclear, or storage batteries. (Emphasis mine.)

Have You Built Your “Grid” Correctly? | ZeroHedge

Friedman is an open borders globalist and is well aware of coal pollution mitigation. He should criticize China (instead of pestering trump) for China’s enormous use of coal. The U.S. has 204 operational coal-powered plants that use coal pollution mitigation. China has 1,161 apparently without coal pollution mitigation.

Second Friedman: “This whole Trump II administration is a cruel farce. Trump ran for another term not because he had any clue how to transform America for the 21st century. He ran in order to stay out of jail and to get revenge on those who, with real evidence, had tried to hold him accountable to the law. I doubt he has ever spent five minutes studying the workforce of the future.”

Second Reply: This statement is beyond idiotic. It is demonstrably false and comes from a bitter bully.

Here, Freidman shows that he doesn’t have a clue about the historic economic boom of Trump’s first term.

Donald Trump achieved significant economic growth, creating nearly 4 million jobs and reducing the unemployment rate to its lowest in 50 years. He also implemented major tax reforms, including the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which provided substantial tax relief for middle-class families and businesses.

“Real evidence”? Another deep state media talking point that is an utter lie. The lawfare against Trump was all manufactured to keep him out of office. The lawsuits came about, then and now, because the deep state “normal” with its control of information and citizens was being affected, not for lawlessness.

After his first term, which was continually beset by attempts to render Trump and “Democracy!” ineffective, Trump, in his 70s, could have stayed home and enjoyed golf and avoided lawfare and two assassination attempts and all of the hassle.

Instead, like Cincinnatus, Trump returned from the feild to save the country from the managed decline “normal” that mealy-mouthed people like David Brooks and Thomas Freidman want to maintain.

Third Friedman: “By attacking our closest allies — Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and the European Union — and our biggest rival, China, at the same time he makes clear he favors Russia over Ukraine and prefers climate-destroying energy industries over future-oriented ones, the planet be damned, Trump is triggering a serious loss of global confidence in America.”

Third Reply: Hyperbolic BS. “Attacking our closest allies”? A U.S. president should put the U.S. first, as do the nations mentioned above. The U.S., to advance America’s interests abroad, should not be a soft touch for anyone. The world is changing, away from globalist preening.

Trump favors peace not Ukraine or Russia. And, shouldn’t the U.S. pull Russia away from uniting with China? Shouldn’t we isolate China so the CCP falls under its own debt?

Perhaps Friedman is terrified because the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is calling for a long overdue overall of the State Dept.:

Today America confronts a new era of great power competition and the rise of a multipolar order with a State Department that stifles creativity, lacks accountability, and occasionally veers into outright hostility to American interests. 

Have you heard about the corrupt USAID working against U.S. interests including free speech? Have you heard about the out-of-control Department is the Global Engagement Center (GEC) that [the Sec. of State] shuttered last week?

The office engaged with media outlets and platforms to censor speech it disagreed with, including that of the President of the United States, who its director in 2019 accused of employing “the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians.” Despite Congress voting to shutter it, the GEC simply renamed itself and continued operating as if nothing had changed.

There are internal and external forces at work to destroy America. Trump and his administration are working to overturn the losses and managed decline of America and America’s own confidence in itself so weakened by nihilist cultural Marxists and grandiose globalist elites who invite in all kinds multicultural crap.

Fourth Freidman: “While Trump is doing his “weave” — rambling about whatever strikes him at the moment as good policy — China is weaving long-term plans.”

Fourth Reply: Yeah, China is “weaving long-term plans.” It’s called world domination. Trump and his administration know this. That is why the changes at the Panama Canal and that’s why the tariffs – to stop China from taking advantage of us.

I listen regularly to the Zoom webinar series put on by the Committee on the Present Danger of China.

The mission of the Committee on the Present Danger: China is to help defend America through public education and advocacy against the full array of conventional and non-conventional dangers posed by the People’s Republic of China. As with the Soviet Union in the past, Communist China represents an existential and ideological threat to the United States and to the idea of freedom—one that requires a new American consensus regarding the policies and priorities required to defeat this threat. 

Americans would be more informed by listening to this series than by anything Thomas Freidman has to say.

Fifth Friedman: “But Trump’s constant bluster and his wild on-and-off imposition of tariffs are not a strategy — not when you are taking on China on the 10th anniversary of Made in China 2025. If Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent really believes what he foolishly said, that Beijing is just “playing with a pair of twos,” then somebody please let me know when it’s poker night at the White House, because I want to buy in. China has built an economic engine that gives it options.”

Fifth Reply: China has options because China has infiltrated the U.S. – its institutions, its land, its finances. China steals innovation from the U.S. and sends it home where it is replicated. Wall Street helps China steal America.

Instead of blustering in the former paper of record, Freidman should have listened to this webinar:

Trump’s America First Investment Policy vs. Wall Street’s China First One: Say ‘No’ to the CATL I.P.O.  

Last month, President Trump told his administration to implement an “America First Investment Policy” to stop Wall Street’s underwriting – and greatly intensifying – the threat we face from Communist China.

This month, four prominent U.S. investment banks are defying his executive action by ramping up their China First investment policy. J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are helping a Chinese military company called CATL raise $7 billion dollars or more from American investors.

They have so far failed to mention President Trump’s directive, let alone its potential negative impact on the value of this foreign adversary’s corporation and its securities.

Sixth Friedman: “The world is now seeing Trump’s America for exactly what it is becoming: a rogue state led by an impulsive strongman disconnected from the rule of law and other constitutional American principles and values.”

And, “[Trump] is undermining our sacred rule of law, he is tossing away our allies, he is undermining the value of the dollar and he is shredding any hope of national unity. He’s even got Canadians now boycotting Las Vegas because they don’t like to be told we will soon own them.

“So, you tell me who’s playing with a pair of twos.

“If Trump doesn’t stop his rogue behavior, he’s going to destroy all the things that made America strong, respected and prosperous.

“I have never been more afraid for America’s future in my life.”

Sixth reply: Who in the “world’ is seeing Trump as you do Thomas? The impulsive rogues of the Blob? The Deep State media? Moral elitists who write in The Atlantic? Globalists who want to continue the plunder of America? Federal district court judges disconnected from the rule of law?

Yeah, Trump is different than the money-laundering Joe Biden, who sold off and told off America, and the infinitely pliable Kamala Harris, so amenable to NYT’s “enlightenment.”

“Undermining the rule of law?” Freidman, it is the federal district judges who pretend to have executive authority over the president that are undermining the rule of law.

Article II of the Constitution says “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

(Amy Coney Barrett – please stop being a soft-touch Catholic social justice warrior and professor at Notre Dame. You clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia! Get your head out of your you-know-what and Reread the Constitution! Get back to originalism!)

“Tossing away our allies”? C’mon. Our allies need to see a strong America and not a subset of One World Marxist handlers. And, what about tossing away $189 billion in military assets to the Taliban and leaving 13 Americans dead in Afghanistan? That is what Biden, Blinken, Milly, and Austin did. How do our allies see this? Should we return to that “normal” way of thinking, Thomas?

“Undermining the value of the dollar”?

Let’s start here. Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen left the U.S. with $7 trillion in USTs due this year.

To service our national debt, our government must now offer Treasury Bills at a higher interest rate to attract buyers. The higher interest rate affects our entire economy from car payments to mortgages to credit cards. The mishandling of the U.S. economy by the elites our budgets are well aware of.

Here’s a coherent perspective on the dollar:

Some believe Donald Trump’s economic policies are designed to end the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. Scott Bessent clears up such misinformation, affirming the dollar’s status as the reserve currency. In Trump’s Economic Revolution, we opined on the long-standing Bretton Woods Agreement that made the dollar the reserve currency and how Trump may be steering away from some of the “rules” that evolved since the agreement was signed in 1944.

The agreement and its unwritten rules are economically unsustainable. Trump is rightfully taking action to change them. However, that doesn’t mean he intends to change the dollar’s status as the reserve currency. As we summarized in the article mentioned above:

The dollar will likely remain the world’s reserve currency as no reasonable alternative exists. However, the unspoken agreements and promises surrounding the global economy may change drastically.

And another perspective: Bessent Says Recent Decline in the Dollar Is a Natural ‘Adjustment’

And, there’s this. DOGE is working:

US Treasury Unexpectedly Reports Sharp Drop In Debt Borrowing Needs, Rates Slide

“Shredding any hope of national unity”? You mean like when Joe Biden called half the nation “extremists”? Did you rah-rah that, Thomas?

“Canadians now boycotting Las Vegas”? Who cares. Fix the trade imbalance here, there and, everywhere. Bring manufacturing jobs home Apple.

There are so many Deep State media talking points echoed in in this article, so much blather, that I can’t address it all without making this post unbearably long.

It’s time for David Brooks and Thomas L. Freidman to put on big boy pants and stop whining like petulant little children who didn’t their Harris way the last election. Grow up!

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Government of the elites, by the elites, for the elites. Hence, the urgent calls for civil war and Color Revolution. Hence the encouragement of dark woke and talk that nods and winks at people taking matters into their own hands!

Far-left Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (D) is calling for mass demonstrations and mobilization with the intention to “punish” Republicans. The extreme language is being seen by some as a return to the violent political rhetoric that resulted in two assassination attempts on President Donald J. Trump last year.

Dem Governor Urges Mass, Extreme Protests Against Trump and GOP.

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A high school English teacher in Waterville, Maine identified as JoAnna St. Germain is being investigated by federal authorities officials after posting a series of extreme and disturbing messages on social media calling for violence against supporters of former President Donald Trump.

St. Germain doubled down on her comments, declaring, “I have zero shame about what I’ve said. I’m not backtracking a single thing. I believe Trump and every sycophant around him needs to die.” (Emphasis mine.)

A Maine female high school teacher is under investigation by federal authorities after calling on the Secret Service to assassinate President Trump

The coastal and globalist elites expected to continue the overthrow of the U.S. and the enslavement of U.S. citizens and illegal immigrants to their dictates and policies so that full-blown communism would take hold.

It is not surprising: Democrats Talk About Illegal Immigrants The Same Way They Used To Talk About Slaves:

“We need immigrants in this country,” Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler said Thursday during a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement hearing. “Our vegetables would rot in the ground if they weren’t being picked by many immigrants — many illegal immigrants.” 

[Jerry] Nadler’s remarks recall the Democratic party’s past reasoning for supporting slavery. Federalist Senior Editor Mark Hemingway pointed out that Democrats in 1823 were backing slavery because if there were no slaves, “Who would pick our cotton?” Today, Democrats are making the argument that low-wage working illegal migrants are necessary to pick “our vegetables.”

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“This will Change Everything You Know… | Victor Davis Hanson”

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The Madness That Is The Green New Deal – Burning Coal To Clear The Air

GND Central Planning:

The Green New Deal and its accompanying legislation—the Inflation Reduction Act—have been based upon the belief that government agents can identify problems and impose solutions by directing resources through command-and-control. While their system gives a nod to prices and private ownership, at best, the organizational structure would resemble what came out of Italy and Germany in the 1930s, or Fascism. Profits and market prices don’t guide that system; indeed, the organizers of the GND and the IRA see profits and market prices as hindrances to their plans, for they represent the capitalist scourge of placing profits above people. . .

The Green New Deal has not failed because of a lack of political will or because government regulators were too good at their jobs. It failed because it is based upon a socialistic model of command-and-control akin to the former Soviet Union. 

Whatever Happened To The Green New Deal? | ZeroHedge

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So Trump was right all along to use the Alien Enemies Act on Venezuela’s state-linked Tren de Aragua – American Thinker

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