Category: Politics

Here’s a quiz; choose carefully!

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component of the US Department of Homeland Security is

• a) a bunch of jack-booted, racist thugs on a power trip
• b) cowards hiding behind masks and terrorizing innocents
• c) the modern-day Gestapo for the Trump administration
• d) routinely violating the Constitution and everyone’s civil rights
• e) all of the above

The correct answer is, if you thought this was a real quiz, you desperately need to continue reading. If you correctly diagnosed the cleverly-hidden satire font, keep reading, too. You may be surprised!

I’m going to take some of the main criticisms I see in social media memes (so much from which to choose!) and explain why they are wrong using everyday language and examples.

Aren’t the masks and lack of uniforms Gestapo tactics? They used to teach history on the History channel; apparently not so much anymore. For the record, the Gestapo proudly wore uniforms, as they were associated with the SchutzStaffel, or SS, under Himmler. They did so because they wanted to strike fear into anyone who saw them, and they didn’t wear masks, because they did not fear anyone attacking them. ICE on the other hand does not wear uniforms because they often have to sneak up on suspects, and they wear masks specifically because they do fear people attacking them (or their families). ICE should have some identifying item (e.g., a badge, a tear-open jacket which shows POLICE) to show once the suspects are engaged, to be clear they are federal agents. But even that depends on the situation, and does not preclude them from completing the arrest without producing those identifying items. Here’s a fine video from NBC Boston which explains:

“ICE is terrorizing brown-skinned people at the airport.” This is part technical correction, part understanding what your rights are, and aren’t. First off, there is (generally) no ICE at the airport. You may see this as an unimportant distinction, but if you want t0 talk intelligently about a subject, you should probably know enough to identify the correct agency. If you’re flying anywhere, you’ll encounter TSA before you board an aircraft. As a reminder of the limits of your rights, try refusing to be searched at the TSA check point, and let me know how that goes! If you’re arriving in the United States, you’ll encounter Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which checks your passport and inspects your luggage. Again, US law and many lawsuits have established that CBP officers have a broad ability to search you and your belongings (including your cell phone) when you arrive. It’s nothing new; it’s been that way since before cell phones!

Perhaps you’ve heard of legal immigrants being arrested at the airport? There are numerous such reports. For example, I just read a Washington Post story entitled, “Scientist on green card detained for a week without explanation, lawyer says.” Yet within the story are these sentences:

In 2011, Kim faced a minor marijuana possession charge in Texas, (his attorney) said, but he fulfilled a community service requirement and successfully petitioned for nondisclosure to seal the offense from the public record.

“If a green card holder is convicted of a drug offense, violating their status, that person is issued a Notice to Appear and CBP coordinates detention space with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement],” a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said Tuesday in a statement to The Washington Post. “This alien is in ICE custody pending removal proceedings.”

Now, you and I may argue about whether deporting a scientist for a decade-old marijuana conviction is a smart policy. But like so many of these stories, there is a valid, legal reason people are being detained. Expunged records are legally available to immigration officials. There is an explanation, and it’s not because of the color of his skin.

Where’s your warrant? No doubt you saw a video with people asking ICE agents some variation on this question. The most famous is NY City Councilman Brad Lander in this clip:

Once and for all, ICE does not need a “judicial warrant” to arrest an illegal immigrant. That’s the law, despite what you may have read on some meme. They do need one to enter private property, but they often get past that by getting consent of the property owner. And there is no right for anyone to interfere with ICE by asking to see such a warrant. Ahh, but Mr. Lander is an American citizen, so how come ICE can arrest him? Watch the video. He locks arms with the man detained and refuses to let go, thus interfering with the federal agents. When you interfere with federal law enforcement, do you think they have to stop, leave, and go get a warrant to arrest you? No they don’t. If they do intend to charge you, they’ll need to explain to a judge the basis for the arrest. In most of these cases, the charges are dropped, which is appropriate.

Lost in this nonsense is the concept of nonviolent resistance, which is legitimate. Mr. Lander can stand up for his principals and interfere, and may pay a price for that act. Nonviolent resistance is not a “don’t go to jail card.” It means you’re ready to pay the price for your beliefs. Good for you. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s famous missive was titled “Letter from a Birmingham jail” for a reason! But don’t think that in any way permits you to interfere with federal law enforcement, nor does it allow you to cross from nonviolent to more active measures (like throwing stones, wrestling, etc.).

Either everyone has due process, or no one does. This one sounds catchy, I’ll give you that. And people tend to think of rights as an all-or-nothing thing. The problem here is treating due process like a thing, rather than what it is: a process. I mean, the word is right there! Due process is different for different people and different circumstances. It means that whatever process (there’s that word again) is in place for the action involved must be followed. The government doesn’t get to short-circuit it. But the process is not the same for all people, at all times, in all actions. For example, in the case of illegal immigration due process, the appropriate law is called expedited removal. It reads:

undocumented persons who are apprehended anywhere in the U.S., cannot prove they have resided in the U.S. for at least two years; and, entered the U.S. between Ports of Entry (POEs) or were paroled into the U.S. and have their parole status revoked, may be deported in as little as a single day without an immigration court hearing or other appearance before an immigration judge.

While the Trump administration has expanded who and where is subject to expedited removal, this law has been in effect going all the way back to George W. Bush. That is the due process: show you’ve been here at least two years and arrived at a POE, or you’re gone. In other cases due process involves much more, but the point to take away is it’s often different.

“ICE is harassing American citizens who did nothing wrong.” This one often comes up when ICE arrests a group and then ends up releasing one of the group because they are a citizen. But here’s the rub: if I show you a picture of a group, can you tell me which are citizens? When ICE goes to arrest a group, they can’t make immediate judgments about who is or isn’t a citizen. They do have information identifying the illegal aliens (legal term) they are going to arrest, and helping such a person hide, flee or evade arrest is a crime. It’s called harboring. The best example of this Kenny Laynez, an eighteen year-old US citizen detained for six hours in Florida. Here’s his arrest video:

Now I think the way the Florida Highway Patrol officers talked to/about the detainees is totally inappropriate. But what young Mr. Laynez did wrong was (1) refuse to open his door, (2) struggle with the officer who removed him, and (3) knowingly giving illegal immigrants a ride. I also think his comments about “you can’t do that” and “That’s not the way you arrest someone” were irritants, but of course the police should be professional enough to ignore them. Should he have been tried? No, and he wasn’t. He was released six hours later, as soon as they confirmed his citizenship. Which leads to the next one:

“I thought they were going to remove the worst first.” I often hear this from people who readily admit they never watched a single Trump campaign rally. While Trump did commit to rounding up the “bad hombres” (his words), he absolutely made it clear he intended the largest deportation effort in US history. Now no one should be under the ridiculous impression that all deportations were on hold until every violent criminal was first deported. When ICE finds a violent criminal alien along with many other nonviolent ones, they all get rolled up. This only makes sense.

Trump has widened the drag net for all illegal aliens, and made it clear that self-deportation is the best way to avoid ICE. While the numbers are in dispute, somewhere between 200,000 and one million illegal immigrants have left the country since the Trump administration began. And ICE stands to go from an annual budget of US $3 billion to US $45 billion, with a onetime plus-up of US $30 billion for detention facilities. So this more intensive search/detain/deport approach is likely to accelerate, not decelerate. Which relates to my final point:

“They are deporting immigrants who have no criminal record.” This sounds like a damning observation, if you don’t listen closely. Let me give you the same concept in a different example, to make the point clear.

They’re arresting fraudsters who haven’t killed anyone.

They’re arresting sexual assaulters who didn’t steal anything

They’re arresting thieves who pays their taxes

They’re arresting politicians who tell the truth.

That last one is of course an impossibility. I just put it there to make sure you’re still reading. What all these examples have in common is a classification error. Illegal immigration is a civil offense, not a criminal one. But in everyday language, both are crimes. I have yet to hear anyone shrug off President Trump’s being found “liable” for sexual abuse because it was a civil court finding.

By definition, illegal aliens have committed a civil violation, so mentioning they haven’t committed a crime is either (1) wrong, or (2) confused. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Now some like to point out that “the detained man has been living in the country for twenty years.” I know of no other crime where we decide, “well, it was so long ago, that’s that, guess we can’t do anything about it.” Certainly President Trump was accused of a crime from thirty years ago, at a date and time unspecified. An Egyptian illegal immigrant lived here peaceably in Colorado with his family (also illegal) for almost three years before he decided to “kill all the Zionists” (his words) by throwing Molotov cocktails at them. Was that the first thing he did wrong?

In case you think the real problem is the numbers ICE is rolling up, consider this chart. Trump’s 2025 numbers? So far, 150,000 deportations. He’s on track to perhaps slightly beat . . . Joe Biden’s record of last year. Was Joe Biden secretly running a Nazi regime? Was he only deporting the worst of the worst? Where was the outrage then?

The government has between one and one-and-a-half million final deportation orders outstanding. These are people of all types who have completed every avenue to become legal immigrants, including asylum, and been turned away. They have no more due process when it comes to being deported. And they are all still in the country. They can be detained by ICE at any time, anywhere, and summarily deported. They have exhausted all forms of due process. But you can bet someone with a cell phone will record the encounter and claim the SS is among us.

You don’t have to agree with the Trump administration’s immigration and deportation policy. You may want to complain about it (I do sometimes, too), or even engage in civil disobedience. Go for it! First ask yourself why it’s different in your mind than last year under the Biden administration, or back in 2012 under President Obama? But comparing it to Nazi Germany and denigrating the ICE officers doing their legal mission under the rules that exist? nICE try, but wrong!

For many years, and verified by study after study, sociologists and child development experts have noted that the youngest children raised in wealth develop faster and better academically than their cohort children raised in poverty. Duh, you might think. But the real question is whether it’s the money or something else associated with the wealth/poverty conditions. Perhaps rich parents spend more time with their children (including two parent vs one parent households), or buy/read more books to them, or hire more qualified care-givers, or provide better nutrition and so forth. If it’s just the money, it points to an obvious solution.

In 2018 a group of researchers decided to take on the challenge of studying the issue. It was not just a theoretical assignment. Real debates were going in Washington, DC (and elsewhere) about direct monthly payments to poor parents of young children, along with related proposals for Universal Basic Income (UBI, the idea of a cash supplement available to all people from the government). The researchers developed the Baby’s First Years randomized control trial: the gold standard among scientific research. They identified one-thousand racially and ethnically diverse mothers (from New York, greater Omaha metropolitan area, New Orleans, and Minneapolis/St. Paul) with incomes below the U.S.federal poverty line, whom they recruited from postpartum wards in 2018-19, and randomized to receive either $333/month or$20/month for the first several years of their children’s lives. The $20 group was the control, representing an amount which induced the mothers to participate, but not enough to make a difference in their children’s development. The $333 group may not sound like much either, but it represented an 18% increase in their available income, a sum designed to elicit a positive change. The study was planned to last forty months, but they extended it twice to a total of seventy-six months.

The rigor of the study is unquestioned: children were routinely tested for four primary child outcomes (language, executive function, social/emotional development, and resting high-frequency brain activity) as well as three secondary child outcomes (visual processing/spatial perception, pre-literacy skills, and diagnosis of developmental conditions).

By early 2022, the team released preliminary results: children in the $333 group were more likely to show brain activity patterns associated with the development of thinking and learning. The results hit just as Republicans in Congress had torpedoed a Child Tax Credit, creating a cascade of bad press. Press reporting and politicians skipped mentioning the usual disclaimers: it was only a preliminary result, it was only one of seven possible measure areas, the results were suggestive (even such a well-designed study cannot be definitive, after all). NBC led with “Giving low-income families cash can help babies’ brain activity” and “No-strings-attached subsidies for low-income families improved brain activity in infants, a novel clinical trial finds.” The New York Times headline was “Cash Aid to Poor Mothers Increases Brain Activity in Babies, Study Finds” but then immediately added the political spin “The research could have policy implications as President Biden pushes to revive his proposal to expand the child tax credit.” And other legacy media wrote/led with much the same.

In May of this year, the team publicized their final results. What, you didn’t hear about it? No one did. Here is the final outcome: After the first four years of the intervention, we find no statistically significant impacts of the cash transfers on four preregistered primary outcomes nor on three secondary outcomes. Zero. Nada, Ziltch. The preliminary finding of increased brain activity washed out when all the data was accumulated; it happens.

How did I find out? Yesterday, the New York Times ran with this headline: Study May Undercut Idea That Cash Payments to Poor Families Help Child Development” with the subtitle, “Rigorous new research appears to show that monthly checks intended to help disadvantaged children did little for their well-being, adding a new element to a dispute over expanded government aid.” Kudos to the Times for even uncovering the report, but I do note they re-introduce uncertainty they didn’t show (“May Undercut . . .”) when they liked the preliminary result. And the secondary language (“adding a new element . . .”) fairly runs away from the obvious.

Speaking of running away, the research team quietly completed the study without publicizing the results, just formally submitting them. The Times buried this point in the article, although it did also note that several co-authors declined to comment on their work.

The study results speak for themselves. Several outside experts wonder whether the pandemic somehow skewed the results, but it is unclear how that would happen, or what to do about it. I do add that two additional findings undercut another common argument: the high-cash mothers in the study did not spend the extra money on alcohol and cigarettes, at least according to self-reporting. Also, they were less likely to work full-time, and reported higher stress than the low-cash mothers.

What to take from all this? Unlike the media and political left which ran with the story as a scientific fact when they approved of the preliminary results, I’m not sure it is definitive in its final form. Maybe the pandemic was too large, the stipend was too small, or maybe the kids will improve academically later in life. Maybe. The real lesson here is how science was used as a political weapon. Acclaimed when it confirms one side’s views, literally hidden–by both the researchers themselves and the media–when it does not. There is a related problem in the sciences called the “file drawer effect.” It happens when scientists simply don’t publish negative research findings; they simply drop them in their files to disappear. This has the effect of letting other scientists end up re-creating the same research rather than building on the negative outcomes, so it wastes resources. But it also indicts the scientists’ objectivity, as they put the outcomes they desire above what the data show.

I haven’t seen any other coverage, especially in the legacy media sites which initially reported. Maybe it’s coming. But the next time someone pipes up with “follow the science,” ask them about the Baby’s First Years study. It’s hard to follow what is hidden.

I have tried politely suggesting people think before texting/tweeting/etc. I have tried mildly poking fun at social media inaccuracies, or gently correcting them. I have tried appealing to people’s humanity, and even pointed out the discrepancy between demanding truth and posting lies. I guess it’s time for a different tack.

The amount of disinformation or just plain stupidity in social media is reaching some unequaled crescendo. It’s not just the politicians, who truth be told, have always shaded the truth, known as spin. Next it spread to the news media and talking heads, who carefully maintained an air of credibility and non-partisanship while clearly favoring one side or the other. Now it’s further democratized to the general public, where people known as trolls take it to a whole new level.

Who or what are trolls? They have always been with us, but in bygone days they were easier to avoid or shame, which regulated their behavior. Trolls are people who simply enjoy causing other people to get angry, especially people with whom they disagree politically or culturally. You might have had a family troll, your distant cousin or uncle who always showed up at family gatherings and brought up some contentious issue or piece of family history, ensuring a loud argument which could never be resolved. He did it because it was his idea of fun. Or she did it because it made her the center of attention. The reason is irrelevant in the end. It was a fundamentally anti-social behavior. But you could avoid being around that troll, or someone more powerful or influential in the family could warn them to STFU (Latin for “please don’t say that”).

Now they’re much harder to avoid. The algorithms which control social media notice who your trolls are, and feed them to you to get a reaction (remember, that’s how they win advertising dollars, by the amount of time and interaction you spend on their media). It’s designed to get you to interact with the trolls, or in internet jargon, “feed the trolls.” Now my wise friends are tut-tutting (love that phrase), “Pat, you know we’re wise to the world, and we would never feed the trolls.” And that may be true. Now you’ve become the trolls!

Yes, I said it, but this is an intervention. Too many of my wise, seasoned, and very lovable internet friends have become trolls. No, they’re not as bad as those family trolls, who were professional psychopaths. Rather, my friends are just practicing occasional troll behavior, which in some ways is more concerning. Other people quickly learn to ignore professional trolls, but when an average upstanding citizen does it, they take others in, too. Because your friends believe you would never troll them.

It’s not all my friends’ fault. Yes, our leaders set a bad example, but I remind that that has always been the case (read about the public lying between Jefferson and Adams, for Heaven’s sake!). And opinion leaders do it too. Fox News is full of it, in all senses of the phrase. Rachel Maddow is a Troll Queen who came to prominence promising to uncover Trump as a Russian mole. . . still waiting on that. These people aren’t stupid, they are businesses or entertainers who knows that outrageous claims=dollars in their pocket. And they won’t stop. But you can.

What evidence shall I present? To avoid unnecessarily calling friends out, I won’t be too specific. But time and again I see people either sharing sources they should know better, or posting garbage that a millisecond fact check would show as wrong. I’m not talking about sharing a New York Times editorial about whether tariffs help or hurt a nation’s economy: that’s arguable, and have at it. I’m talking about claiming Elon Musk is a grifter getting rich off insider government contracts. Or Canada is a fentanyl threat. Or government employees must liquidate Thrift Savings Program accounts to avoid Trump seizing them. Or all foreign aid is either fraud, waste, or abuse. Or the 2024 federal voting results were hacked. Or freeze your credit because DOGE has your data. Stop it already.

In case you’ve missed the news lately, it’s easy to doctor a picture, so any incriminating photo that looks absolutely incredible and you’ve never sent it before? It’s probably fake. Try using Google Lens (formerly Google reverse image search), which will tell you if a photo is AI-generated. Is it a text/tweet? Does it have a date/time stamp? can you access the account and check? Yes, yes, you can, if you care about the truth.

Listen, I’m not saying you can’t express your opinions. Many times when friends share something, I ask them to restate, in their own words, how they feel, and that comes across more reasonable and honest. Or I ask them to check what they are about to share: just type the first line in with the word “hoax” added, and see what Señor Google has to say. When you just share something because you know it’s going to “pwn the libs/Maga crowd,” what you’re really saying is “I don’t care about the truth. I don’t care about my social media friends. I don’t even care if anyone does something stupid because of what I posted.” That, mis amigos, is quite anti-social behavior. Troll-like.

Even worse (I know, it’s possible!), while troll-like behavior is making your “friends” dumber, it’s making you dumber, too. See, when you post something without fact-checking, or just because it makes you feel good to denigrate somebody else, that All-Seeing Eye (the algorithm) says, “hey, John Doe falls for this sh!t. Feed him more!” See, the algorithm doesn’t care about right and wrong, so if you choose to ignore what’s correct or real, it will, too. And you get a steady diet of social media stool. Enjoy!

Way back when, the comedian Jeff Foxworthy had a routine which always ended with the punchline, “here’s your sign.” The set-up was about the fact that stupid people should wear a sign indicating their status (stupid) so you wouldn’t be surprised when their stupidity showed up. It may seem a little harsh, but it was an effective joke routine, and the material to set it up was almost endless.

Next time you’re about to troll, stop, think twice, and remember; Here’s your sign!

After the passage of President Trump’s “One, Big Beautiful Bill” (its literal title, hereafter OBBB), you no doubt have seen some fairly apocalyptic predictions about Medicaid. Keep in mind that these are all predictions. What can we say factually about the program and what the OBBB says about it?

What is Medicaid? Formally Title XIX of the Social Security Act of 1965, Medicaid is a federal-state partnership that provides medical assistance to low-income individuals and families who cannot afford private health insurance. I bolded the key terms. The federal government provides most of the funds (two-thirds) and dictates who always qualifies and what care must be covered. The states provide the rest of the funding and administer the program (with significant variance between the states). It was designed to provide health care to the poorest and neediest: a truly charitable endeavor. In 1965, about 2% of Americans were covered by Medicaid; today it is around 20%. Are there ten times more poor and needy today? Of course not. The change in enrollment is driven by increasing eligibility over time. This chart details some of the changes:

Form the 1970s through 2008, the number of Americans enrolled in Medicaid was driven by population increases (200 million to 300 million approximately) and by more inclusive rules (for example, greater eligibility for women, children, and people with disabilities). The biggest change begins in 2010, when President Obama signed into the law the Affordable Care Act (ACA in the chart, hereafter “Obamacare”).

This law greatly decreased the number of those uninsured by making health insurance mandatory (the personal insurance mandate, backed by a tax penalty), by offering Obamacare marketplaces where insurance could be purchased with a means-tested federal government subsidy, and by increasing eligibility for Medicaid. Most people don’t realize that in the great debate over Obamacare (for example, the personal mandate was ruled constitutional by the US Supreme Court, but effectively rescinded by the Trump administration in 2017 when the tax penalty was set to zero), most of the gains in insurance coverage were due to the simple increase in eligibility in Medicaid (which didn’t require any grand new law).

In the chart, Medicaid enrollment sharply increases after 2008, going from about 40 million to over 90 million at peak. This was also accelerated by a pandemic-era (2020) legal change, called continuous enrollment, which required states to leave persons receiving Medicaid on the rolls whether they still qualified or not. The point here was to avoid cutting people off from their only health insurance during a pandemic. Medicaid enrollment currently stands at around 80 million, after continuous enrollment was cancelled in 2023. The point here is that 15 million people were removed from Medicaid under the Biden administration, not because the government is cruel, but because they were not eligible, under the law.

While most of Medicaid funding goes for poor people over 65 years old and those disabled, the fastest growing segment of Medicaid enrollees is (non-disabled) adult men, age 18-40 who are eligible under the relaxed Obamacare income rules rules. The second fastest-growing group is children, oftentimes children of adults eligible for Medicaid. The federal cost of Medicaid has skyrocketed: from US$333B before Obamacare to US$860B in 2023.

Now to the OBBB. It:

• Requires able-bodied adults aged 19-64, who are enrolled in Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act’s expansion, to work/volunteer/participate in other approved activities for at least 80 hours per month to maintain their coverage.
• Restricts state provider-tax arrangements. This sounds obscure, and it is, but some states taxed medical providers, then charged the federal government too, in effect “laundering” federal resources for state priorities that otherwise would be prohibited. California, for example, used the money to provide health insurance for illegal aliens/undocumented persons. It wasn’t technically illegal, but it most specifically is, now.
• Eliminates certain recent increases in federal funding to states to encourage them to increase Medicaid eligibility, and increases eligibility checks from once every year to once every six months.
• Denies eligibility to non-citizens, some lawful permanent residents, and refugees.
• That’s it. Notice there is no change to eligibility for pregnant women, poor single parents, the disabled, or any other groups.

There are endless estimates about how much money will be “cut/saved,” how many people will be dis-enrolled, how many people will die. It is important to note that all of these estimates are, in fact, just estimates. Estimates of how people will respond to Medicaid and other changes in law have been poor, at best. When the Trump administration eliminated the personal mandate, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated 15 million people (healthy young folks who didn’t care to have any insurance anyway) would quit; they didn’t quit, at all. Now CBO estimates between 10 and 15 million will lose coverage. Are they right this time? No one knows.

Look at the facts of Medicaid coverage above, and the OBBB provisions. Ask yourself these questions:

• Should Medicaid be a program for the poorest and neediest, or a mini-form of universal medical coverage?
• Should working-age men with no disabilities be required to work/volunteer 20 hours a week in order to have government-provided health coverage?
• Should non-citizens have the same healthcare coverage as poor/needy Americans?
• Should states be permitted to use federal resources for programs not authorized by federal rules?
• If the estimated 15 million loss in enrollees under the Trump administration bothers you, how do you feel about the 15 million actually dis-enrolled under the Biden administration?
• How much of the increase in Medicaid enrollment and spending is consistent with the program’s intent? and finally,
• How much are you willing to pay for all of this? Before you toss out “what about ________?” naming another budget item you would rather cut, look at this chart of current federal appropriations. If you can’t cut Social Security, Medicare, or Interest on the debt, the remaining options are limited!

Don’t engage with the headlines designed to enrage you; think! I am not saying cuts to Medicaid are a great idea, but neither are they catastrophic. If you want to join in and debate the topic, first learn something about it. Or at least something more than “people will die” or “what about the children?”

The Two-State Solution is the holy grail of Mideast politics: a way to solve the unending Arab-Israeli conflict by creating a “Palestinian”* state aside the existing Jewish state of Israel. It was the original UN plan for the partition of the region, but was rejected by the Arab countries and peoples. That was only the first time it failed. There were several other attempts, and every time the sides got close, extremists intervened (Jewish extremists assassinated their Prime Minister, Arab extremists provoked widespread violence) to undermine progress.

Despite this long history, western politicians and experts continue to insist the Two-State Solution is the only way to achieve peace. Even after the October 7th terrorist attack, some people continue to support the notion. While Israel is closely divided on politics in pro- and anti-Netanyahu camps, almost nobody there favors a Two-State Solution now. Let me provide an analogy to which Americans can relate.

For our hypothetical situation, let’s change the events of 9/11 to more closely resemble that of 10/7. Imagine a group of highly-organized, Native American terrorists working across several reservations staged the attack. They took down one of the twin towers with a plane and occupied other buildings. During the ensuing stand-off, they filmed hostages begging for their lives before cutting their throats. Eventually, American military units stormed the buildings, but some terrorists escaped with hostages, returning to the reservations.

Then imagine people citing the long history of American mistreatment of Native Americans, justifying the attacks. Accepting the progressive critique of how “Indians” were treated (I don’t, but . . .), it easily surpasses anything the Jews have done to the Palestinians. After all, the Native population in America is a tiny percentage of what it once was, while the Palestinian population has grown five-fold since 1948. (Note: Next time someone says Gaza and the West Bank are prisons or concentration camps, ask them when has anybody ever seen a concentration camp which had a natural population increase of 500%?) Now imagine even more people, especially people outside the United States, calling on America to set the reservations free as independent nations. How would Americans feel about this “Two-State Solution”? I’m inclined to think we might have seen the third use of nuclear weapons, myself.

In a previous post (Gaza Delenda Est), I called for eliminating Hamas and removing the Palestinian people from Gaza (remember, you heard it first here!). Many of my astute friends pointed out the extreme challenges to this approach– which I acknowledge–and those challenges remain. I will note that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have done much (but not all) of the required military work, and both Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump had mooted the same idea (removing the Palestinians). I suggest the Overton window (a concept that says the range of acceptable opinion on anything is a variable which can be moved) has changed.

But none of that addresses the larger problem of Palestinian statehood. There has never been a real Palestinian state, and now there never will be. Nobody wants the Palestinian people. When the Romans exiled the Jews from their homeland, the Jews became wildly successful expats throughout the empire (much to their eventual chagrin, as it made them convenient scapegoats, too). When the Palestinians suffered their Nakba (“catastrophe”), or exile, they became a corrosive force everywhere they went. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) went to Lebanon, upset its delicate ethnic and religious balance, and Beirut went from being the “Paris of the Mideast” to a poster-child for desolation. The PLO then moved to Tunisia and created more havoc. Palestinian refugees went to Jordan and almost overthrew the monarchy. They went to Egypt and had to be forcibly suppressed. And they stayed in Israeli-occupied areas and fought, and fought, and fought.

Worst of all, they gave control of Gaza to Hamas, a move which Israel tacitly accepted, a major mistake by Netanyahu. He thought Hamas was happy to be perfromative against Israel, launching some missiles, conducting some raids, living the good life while corrupting UN aid and building tunnels that no Palestinian civilian could ever use as bomb shelters. Netanyahu and the IDF focused on Iran and Hezbollah, which is why the October 7th attack was such a success (and why the war with Iran is, too). But most importantly, Gaza under Hamas was a precursor: the Palestinians had, for all intents and purposes, a state. When they did, they turned it into a corrupt terrorist base. Where is the evidence that would ever change?

Israel cannot accept incorporating the West Bank, because to do so would very soon make Jews a minority in Israel. They can’t go on forever as an occupying power either. Eventually they will have to grant some successor regime in the West Bank limited autonomy. Such a regime will by necessity need to be not only demilitarized, but completely disarmed., and it will (also of necessity) exist at the sufferance of Israel. It will not be a normal state, because the people have not demonstrated any ability to act as one. Yes, they’ll vote for their leaders, create their own internal rules, and police themselves. No, they won’t vote in the United Nations, conduct foreign policy, or have any authority over the Jews who live amongst them (in some cases) or surround them.

Every act of violence, every new bit of evidence of the corruption and terror Hamas wrought, re-sets the timeline for eventual peace. And only after a prolonged period of peace is the prospect of a Palestinian mini-state even a possibility. Few people reading this (even the youngest) will ever live to see it, and it will only happen when those same Palestinians give up their dreams of reclaiming the country from the Jews.

Palestinians had a state for moments in 1948; they launched an invasion and lost it. They had a territory in 1994, and used it for corruption and terrorism (two intifadas). They had an enclave (Gaza) which freely elected a terrorist organization. How many times does the Two State Solution have to fail?

*I choose to initially refer to the terms Palestine/Palestinian within quotations marks to denote my belief using such terms denotes a reality that does not exist. The people living there are, and always have been in modern times, Arabs. I only use the marks the first time in any blog, to make the point, and afterwards use without further comment. I believe any nation should be able to determine how they are labelled. People from the United States are “Americans,” not United States-ians, because we choose to be called Americans.

Usually, social media nonsense runs off me like water off a soldier’s poncho. But this time, it forced me to summon my inner soldier. Be forewarned: this post may contain flashing anger, strong language, smokin’ rhetoric, but no nudity. At least I think not.

There is a specter haunting DC. A threat so terrible it must be stopped. A crime against all that is holy, humane, and intelligent. It is wasteful of time and money, unnecessary, and potentially damaging to our delicate infrastructure. It is a birthday celebration. And a parade.

On June 14th, the US Army is going to celebrate its 250th anniversary. It’s going to have a big parade in Washington, DC. Army leaders love parades; soldiers don’t. I know. As a onetime cadet and alum of the “long, gray line,” I participated in more parades than most any other soldier (short of the Old Guard at Arlington). We paraded twice a week, sometimes three times when Saturday seemed like too much of a day-off. And I hated all of it: the getting ready, the practice parades, the occasional mid-parade rainstorm, the cold north wind blowing down the Hudson river, the sunburn on one’s exposed ears. I still have “too late/not ready” dreams about West Point parades, as my subconscious seeks something about which to stress.

I hated all the parades, but one. I got “awarded” to march in President Reagan’s inaugural parade (depicted above). The reward was a heavily-policed bus ride to a barracks in Virginia, locked in for a night so we couldn’t commit any misdemeanors, then the honor of being the lead military unit (oldest unit comes first) in the parade line, which put us first after all the horse-mounted civilians. Yes, a great pair of corfam shoes ruined, and trousers which forever after had the faint hint of horseshit. But it was worth it, I think.

So I speak from no love of parades. But I do have great respect for the Army. It deserves a celebration. It didn’t choose to be born on June 14th, 1775. The Continental Congress created it that day. Nor did it choose to make 2025 a special anniversary. The Navy will celebrate the same on October 13th. The Navy won’t have a parade: they’re terrible at marching (just watch any Army-Navy football game march-on). Perhaps they will have a group swim, although I once told a naval officer “isn’t there something terribly gone wrong when a sailor is ‘in’ not ‘on’, the water?” He was unamused. The Marine Corps will celebrate this year, too, on November 10th (of course) The Marines are also eschewing a parade. They would be magnificent if they did it, with 3D holograms of beach landings, drone fireworks, and 24 hour press coverage, naturally. The Air Force will have nothing, as they are about as old as a great Scotch. But I digress.

The parade should be a blast: over 6,000 soldiers with full guidon regalia. Army aviation flyovers. Storied units, with some soldiers in era-appropriate gear (Even I would sign up for that. Hell, I marched in wool–not Merino wool, by the way–in a uniform design from the war of 1812. It combined the breathability of polyester with the smell of damp sheep). This parade should be a visual re-collection of our nation’s history , and one not likely to be recreated in our lifetimes.

Yet something about the Army’s parade has set people’s collective hair on fire. I can’t put a finger on it. Some say it will cost too much; estimates range from US$16-45 million! One note: when estimates range that widely, they’re basically what the Brits call shite. If you count things like “military pay,” “overtime,” and “training time loss” and give them monetary value, you can make a cost estimate as large as you like. President Obama’s inaugural cost the government a very real US$50 million. The federal government spends $50 million every four years on each of the party nominating conventions. The DOD Comptroller reported in 2023 the department spent US$86 million on diversity activities. And the list goes on. Somehow, this one-time, semiquincentennial expense alone merits unique opposition.

But it’s not only about the cost. There are serious national security concerns, too, I’m told. Those soldiers won’t be training. As if one week-plus of downtime was going to be the difference next war. One numbnuts (a technical Army term for someone who should know better) actually said ‘the Army was wasting time and money moving heavy vehicles cross country rather than using them for training.’ Learning how to cross-load an M1 Abrams tank correctly on a train at a railhead, planning the routes so it doesn’t get decapitated by a bridge, and getting all the supplies, fuel, and parts to the right place at the right time ARE training, amigo. Better yet are those who complain that the vehicles might harm DC roads (have you driven there? There are potholes which could double as anti-tank barriers!) or perhaps damage the bridges. Hmmm. Guess the Army never learned how to check that out. Or maybe it already did (hint: Google is your friend):

So no, this isn’t about cost, nor is it about damages, nor is it about military preparedness. This is all about one thing, and one thing only: Donald J. Trump. It seems the Army had the great misfortune to share its birthday with the 47th President of the United States. For that sin, people are calling for the parade to be cancelled, and some idjiots are even planning a protest.

During his first term, French President Macron invited then-president Trump to attend the massive Bastille day military parade in Paris. Trump was impressed, and wanted to do the same in Washington. Not because there was any reason to do so, just because he wanted to do so. It never happened. Now there is an excuse. Do I think Trump readily agreed to any request for an Army birthday celebratory parade? Of course he did. Do I imagine the Army seized on the opportunity? I hope so. If the Army staff didn’t point out the fact there will never be more White House support for a parade than this President, this year, it was malpractice. Every interest group looks for White House support. It just so happens the Army got lucky.

So riddle me this, Batman: if Trump were born on the same day as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, would we be calling to “stand down” vice “stand up” that day? If the Army held its parade on June 13th, would it be ok? Sometimes dates and commemorations are inconvenient. I know people who were born or got married on September 11th; should they not celebrate because of the terrible evil of that day? I don’t feel I am going out on a limb to say the Army will only have one 250th birthday; why spoil it because of someone else?

If you hate Donald Trump, you have a lot of company. Get together and hold a birthday party for Harriet Beecher Stowe, Burl Ives, Pierre Salinger, Che Guevara (!), Pat Summitt, Boy George, Steffi Graf, or the United States Army, all of whom share birth-dates. You can resume your non-stop hatred the next morning, and I’m sure there will be something about which to be angry. In the meantime, tell a soldier “happy birthday” and buy them a drink. If you’re in or near DC, show up and give them some love. They’re marching whether you’re there or not, but I’ll admit, an enthusiastic crowd is at least a distraction from the horse turds.

Everybody else: drop the silly pretenses, and leave my (stupid) parade alone.

In part I, I explained why I don’t feel the outrage so many others do. I made it clear that there are many things the Trump administration is doing that I disagree with either in intent or manner, but I don’t share the feeling that the end is near, as so many liberals, progressives, and the media preach. In part II, I covered what the big challenges are facing America today, and in part III, I suggested what those challenges require. It was a daunting list, yet I ended up sounding somewhat optimistic. In this conclusion, I’ll try to explain “why?”

The first cause for optimism is that it’s always better to correctly understand the world you’re in (and the problems thereof). That may seem obvious, but it bears repeating. Back during the Cold War, there were people who insisted the Soviet Union was just misunderstood, they weren’t as evil or ambitious as they seemed. Sometimes, these people were in power in various Western governments. It wasn’t a disaster, but it never went well. Anyway, people who think all will be well when we get to post-Trump are in for a rude awakening. They have missed the point.

That said, many people on both the right and the left are correctly describing how the world has changed. And that means they will be proposing solutions. Take for instance the economy. From the right, Oren Cass and the folks at American Compass have proposals to support families, unions, middle-class workers, and small businesses! On the left, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have a fascinating analysis in their new book, Abundance, which highlights how government regulations strangle both productivity and progress. Our leaders should welcome such ideas. I would love to hear that President Trump has invited Klein and Thompson to lead a federal study on which federal regulations to amend/eliminate.

On international relations, foreign leaders are admitting they have neglected military spending for decades, and have to adjust. I had a fascinating exchange on social media with someone defending Belgium as a loyal American ally who simply chose to invest in a better life for its citizens. I asked why that same idea didn’t apply to Americans, and of course got no response. Germany recently signaled a major investment in its military; I’ll withhold judgment until I see the spending turn into real capabilities.The notion of a “global policeman” is an historical oddity, and we need to return to reality. Freedom isn’t free, for anybody.

On international trade, no one can argue Trump hasn’t upended the system. That part is done. It’s very unclear if his administration has the acumen to create a new one. I guarantee if they don’t, they won’t get a second chance in 2028. There will be economic dislocations along the way, whoever eventually develops the new trading system. But the jury is still out, as we don’t even have a full quarter of economic data under Trump’s second term yet. What we can’t do is continue along the path of free-trade-no-matter-what that we were on.

Technology remains an unknown. America has the technological genius to win the AI war, but do we have the political genius to enable, enforce, and exploit it? I don’t see that in either party right now. And the people developing the systems can’t do it alone; remember, FaceBook was going to be a global commons of love and happiness–how did that turn out?

Education reform is a mixed bag, in my opinion. Things like growth in home-schooling and charter schools are only good in that having options is always better; they are not sure things, by any stretch of the imagination. But I hear of school systems resuming testing and standards, banning cell phones, and re-creating challenging placement programs. We’ll need a return of non-college track options, too. At the same time, some schools remain tied to things like the 1619 Project and DEI initiatives, which are educational dead ends. At least the general direction in education is toward more competition, which will expose the fads and frauds.

Government spending is where the outlook is most grim. DOGE has been mainly a stunt, notwithstanding saving $100+ billion. Trimming the federal workforce helps, but the way it’s being done is neither healthy nor precise. Everybody continues to swear all entitlements are off the table, which makes reducing the deficit almost impossible. Meanwhile, the MAGA party swears by Republican tax cuts for all and the Democrats profess “wealth taxes” and “ending corporate welfare,” bogus phrases which have no meaning. The silver lining here is that the threatening storm clouds will not blow away, so we have to face up to cuts eventually. I’ll go so far as to say that the party/leader who commits to addressing the deficit/debt issue with real solutions will win the next Presidential election.

One other reason for optimism is how fast the Trump administration is working when it knows what it wants to do. Look at immigration, which I don’t consider one of the great remaining challenges. Trump was always clear about how he felt on immigration; no one can debate that. We were assured by immigration experts that nothing could be done to stop the masses of people heading up through Central America, and that no one could identify all the undocumented/illegal aliens already in the country, that removing them would destroy the home-building and agricultural sectors, and that most of the people here were vetted and therefore not a threat. We have since learned that none of those “truths” were correct.

Border crossings are down somewhere around ninety percent (the exact numbers are in dispute, not the size of the change). The pipeline of migrants in Central America has reversed and is heading back home. The federal government is (for the first time) using all data at its disposal (including tax data) to identify those illegally in the country. Imagine that. Trump’s audacious (or illegal, the Supreme Court has not ruled) deportations have sent a clear signal that illegal immigration is as dangerous once you reach the United States as it was getting there. And people are realizing that no one could vet these migrants, as their home countries either didn’t share data with the US, or didn’t care.

But like many of the bigger challenges, all of this is being done quickly but impermanently. A future progressive Presidency could undo much of it just as quickly. The administration will need to work with Congress in a bipartisan fashion to enact laws that bring stability to the results already achieved. We need better border security, streamlined immigration proceedings, a new merit-based immigration policy, solutions for “the Dreamers,” elimination of birthright citizenship, reform of temporary refugee rules, and leadership to change international asylum law. That’s quite a menu! I have serious doubts about Trump’s ability to do this, even in immigration, which should be his strong suit. And the same goes for all the challenges above.

When you look at my list of challenges, you can see progress or promise in nearly every item. So the challenges are daunting, but I remain optimistic. One final note, about that Trump guy. I have friends who live-and-die on a steady diet of Trump outrage, and it only outrages them more when anyone else doesn’t join them. I don’t, because he’s just not that important. He is at best a transitional figure, and he seems to instinctively understand some of the issues, even if his solutions are often not well-conceived. If you focus on Trump, you have my sympathy. There are thousands of influencers, media types, and “friends” feeding the obsession. He doesn’t merit all the attention, and you’re missing out on profound things happening in the larger world. One day we will be beyond Trump, that much is certain. In the meantime, we all have choices to make: identify problems and solutions, or resist Trump. I choose the former. If you choose the latter, we’ll meet up again in the post-Trump world.

This is the third post in a four-part series. This post covers what the possibilities are following that (perhaps) creative destruction.

What will the changed world look like, if we peer intently at it without filtering it through a Trumpian or Resistance lens? Like this:

Geopolitics and the Military. In case you missed it, Uncle Sam walked off the beat as the world’s policeman. It didn’t happen under Trump. We got tired of the beat way back under “W,” then started taking mental health days-off under Obama. It continued under Trump’s first term and Biden’s senescence. During that period, our absence became noticeable, then obvious. Red-lines crossed, invasions met with outrage or “sanctions,” diplomatic insults ignored or endured. None of the Presidents I mentioned are to blame specifically; they each correctly intuited the American people’s view that enough was enough.

Now we are one tough opponent away from having a military humiliation. That won’t mean the end of anything, let alone the good ole US of A. But it’s a bad situation. In the past, we were able to recover quickly (see Pearl Harbor, Kasserine Pass, Pusan perimeter, the battle of Long Island, Bull Run I & II, and so on), but that is not always an option. It takes economic production and national will, two other things in short supply. Our leaders need to be clear-headed about who we are committed to defending, and why. We are not facing a global peer competitor bent on world domination (like the Nazis or the Soviet Union were). China wants to coerce the world toward its preferences, much like the US did (cooperatively) after World War II. The end result would be bad, and it is something we should oppose. But every nation is going to have to pull its own weight. And the US needs to radically restructure its armed forces quickly and efficiently, since we can’t simply throw money we don’t have at the challenge.

Economics & Trade. Economists used to talk about the “rational consumer” making informed choices as the key to understanding the markets and trade. Such economic theorists never stood outside a Best Buy in the wee hours of Black Friday. Economics may be the dismal science, but it is hardly the rational one. Economics is a subset of national security, as we recently relearned. If a country can’t make the things it needs, it may be denied those things when it most urgently needs them (medicines, computer chips, minerals). The US must recover this notion not in order to become autarchic (meeting all our needs alone), but to avoid being at the mercy of competitors, whether friends or enemies.

This will involve upending the free trade system we built. As a person who benefited greatly from the free movement of goods, services, and people, I lament its passing. As a clear-eyed observer of what’s happening, I admit it has to go. That means more border restrictions, tariffs, quotas, and restrictions. It doesn’t mean a senseless rush to impose all such things against all countries at once. Nixon may have pulled off the madmen theory of international politics with respect to bombing North Vietnam, but that doesn’t make it a viable strategy in general.

Things will cost more. Some things will be unavailable. There will be disruptions. There were under the old free-trade system, too. The fallacy of just-in-time delivery was that not everything can be planned for, let alone adjusted to. Some manufacturing will return to America; we’ll never have as many manufacturing jobs as we once did, because we are producing more things with fewer people nowadays. But there will be more opportunities for decent middle-class jobs.

Education. The American educational system has lost its way. Our brightest students do fine, and we heap resources on those who need more/different/extra help. But the vast majority of students in the middle are terribly short-changed. We spend more than most nations (per student) and get worse results. Schools have increasingly added staff for counselling and managing rather than teachers for teaching.

True story: back when the founders were “bringing forth a new nation,” there were very few public schools. The rich hired tutors, and church schools provided the primary source of education. Our early leaders knew that a Republic needs an educated polity, so they developed the notion of free public education. A (very) secondary benefit was shaping the culture of the next generation. Today we seem to have gotten things reversed. Schools spend too much time pushing cultural agendas, and not enough time ensuring basic literacy and numeracy. You don’t need to engage in a culture war while you’re learning to read-n-write (take note, Montgomery County, Maryland). You don’t learn how to deal with a different person by being told how to think about one, you learn by having a friend in your class who is different.

We could all do with a significant clarification of roles with regard to how we educate our youth. The primary role belongs to parents and teachers in local schools. School boards exist to provide the partnership necessary to enforce those roles, not to tell parents to “mind their own business” or tell teachers how to teach. School boards absolutely do decide what to teach; that is their main purpose. They do this by representing the values and desires of the people in the community. It’s not censorship, it’s local control. And it’s okay if things are different in different places. City and State governments provide funding to address imbalances, and establish requirements for accreditation/graduation. The federal government can also provide funding, and should set national educational standards for achievement. Not use that money as a means to micro-manage it.

Taxes, Spending, Regulations. This is where most of us will feel the pain. We’ve been overspending for so long, so much has to be cut, it will affect everyone. There is no single magic solution, a la “tax the rich” or a wealth tax or ending corporate welfare that will bring the federal fiscal books back near balance. They don’t have to balance exactly, they just can’t be out for whack like they have been for forty-six of the past fifty years! Yes, we should raise taxes on the rich, but we’ll need some benefit cuts, too. More programs need to be means-tested.

Take social security for example. There are many terrible memes about it, like the Ronald Reagan quote that Social Security does not add to the deficit. It was true back in 1981, it’s absolutely false today. Or the meme decrying that social security should not be called an “entitlement” because ‘I earned it.’

It’s called an entitlement because that’s a federal legal term meaning the government “has to” pay it. Still want to change the word? And unless you die early, you’ll get more from social security than you paid in (even accounting for your employers contribution AND interest). See what the problem is? If most everybody gets more than they pay in, the only way the system can work is if the population of young workers (who have not yet retired) is always growing larger than the wave of retirees they are supporting. Guess what? It isn’t anymore, and since the number of twenty-somethings in 2045 is already set, it won’t ever be so again soon.

The good news is there are many small fixes which can make the system sound once more. There’s a website you can visit (here), where you can try your hand at fixing the problem, and it doesn’t require throwing granny off the cliff. But as long as we treat all entitlement reform as untouchable, we’ll continue to hurtle toward a very real, very sizable cut within a decade or two.

As to other spending and employee reductions, here’s a simple point DOGE made which has been lost in the partisan battle. DOGE is characterizing everything as fraud/waste/abuse, and the Resistance is highlighting how each cut will hurt. Did the US Agency for International Development (USAID) really spend US $32,000 on an LBGTQ+ comic book in Peru? No, the Resistance tells us, it was the State Department (not USAID), and it was a gay character, not LBGTQ+ (Snopes says so!). But stop and consider this: in a country seriously over-spending (as measured by our deficit), the system approved funding for such things. The system (people and process, both) thought it was no big deal. Maybe because it was small, but this happens all over the government. Maybe they thought it was important, even critically so. But when you claim we don’t need to radically restructure both the people and the process the government uses to spend money, you have to defend these outcomes. Good luck!

Technology. We are on the brink of an important technological advance. Artificial Intelligence (AI) may prove as revolutionary as the printing press, or merely as important as the personal computer. But it will effect major changes in society, and we don’t know how. We just finished with a small experiment on our own children (smart phones + social media) that has not turned out well in my opinion. We currently let the Communist Party of China have direct access to the ids an egos of our children and young adults (via TikTok), in a way we never would have let the Nazis or the Soviets. The Chinese do not let their own children and young adults access the same info they peddle to ours. And now we are in a technological competition with them for AI supremacy. Did it matter who won the race for the atom bomb? Absolutely for the Nazis, not as much for the Soviets. But do we want to find out what it’s like to come in second? And are we ready in any event?

This may all seem to be bleak and overwhelming. That said, I wouldn’t trade the position of the United States for that of any competitor. Of all the nations/groups involved in this developing new world order, we have the biggest advantages, not least in that we have people on both the left and the right that realize the changes we are experiencing. Denying them, or attributing them to the passing fancies of Donald Trump, are fatal errors. And no, I’m not saying President Trump has the answers. I’m sure someone out there is readying another comment about Trump’s inadequacy or insanity, missing the global forest of challenges for the Trumpian trees.

The Trump administration may have stumbled onto some of the correct policies. They still have to implement them in ways which work. And these policies will require both legislative enactment and sustained commitments well beyond the Trump years. I’ll wrap up my thoughts on that in the final post.

This is the second post in a four-part series. I’ve been thinking about all the dislocation the Trump administration has wrought, what it means, and what will follow it. Today’s installment is about that dislocation.

Sometimes the world seems to change on a dime. You can look at an event, almost always after the fact, and say, “yup, that’s where everything changed.” Take the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. New technologies were already revolutionizing travel and the spread of information. Global trade was booming. The shifting alliance system of Europe, developed after the shock of Napoleon’s reign in the early nineteenth century, had generally kept the peace in Europe and even among the many world-wide colonies for a century. That assassination triggered World War I, destroyed several empires, began the deconstruction of colonialism, undid international trade, and set the table for a far more destructive and disruptive sequel, World War II.

It didn’t happen all at once. There was a month of build-up after the assassination, and of course several years of war and decades of tumult, but it all tied directly back to the gunshot at the carriage in Sarajevo.

Many might suspect the terrorist attack on 9/11 was another such event. It’s too early to tell, but did the world change that day, or in the twenty-some years since? The US got involved in foreign wars: some justified, some not. People all over the world had to adjust to tightened security at airports. Islam received greater attention concerning its relationship with modernity. Oh, it was traumatic, especially to those who suffered a loss or were in the targeted cities. But the world remained remarkably similar. And it was that world which is now fundamentally changing.

Other times the entire world changes fundamentally but slowly. China retreated inward and disappeared from the world over a few centuries at the end of the first millennium. The United Kingdom took forty years or so to understand, address, and finally solve “the German Question.” Which only opened the door to “the Soviet Problem” the US had to understand, address, and finally solve after forty-five years. We appear to be in one of the those cycles of history, where things are changing fundamentally, but slowly.

The changes in the international situation can be neatly summed up: we have returned to a multi-polar world. For a period between 1989 (the collapse of the Soviet Union) and perhaps 2008 (the Great Recession), the US was the sole remaining superpower. It could throw its unchallenged weight around financially, militarily, morally and politically. However, throughout that period, China and the European Union (EU) were growing more economically resilient and resistant to US leadership. For the EU, it was arguing at the margins of the international free-trade order which had benefited both the EU and the US. For China, it was using that order to undermine the US and the order itself. Western leaders believed if they invited China to play by the rules, the benefits of global free trade would liberalize the Communist regime. The Chinese believed they could rig the game, make the West dependent on them, and emerge as a global power. Guess who was right?

Meanwhile, the US military edge dulled and atrophied. Our military remains dominant, but too small and perhaps too centered on legacy capabilities for modern warfare. It is a potent force, but brittle, and not resourced for longer engagements, which is a disastrous weakness when confronting powers that are. I’ll spare you the details on military capabilities, but if you even look at modern combat in Ukraine, you see radically different capabilities. Our military can master these new requirements, but will they be prepared?

Not to mention the erosion of American will. America’s willpower was always the secret weapon of American success. We may not win at first, but we persevere and win in the end, whether its battle, business, or sports. We won early in Afghanistan, but couldn’t stay the course long enough to accomplish our enlarged goals of creating a liberal democracy in the Hindu Kush. Mind you, that was a terrible case of mission creep, but it’s not like we didn’t know how (see Germany, Korea, Japan, etc) or have the resources. And it’s not that the cost in lives was too high: in the years before President Trump negotiated our withdrawal, and President Biden comically and criminally executed it, we lost more soldiers in training accidents annually than in Afghanistan! It took almost fifty years for South Korea to become a developed democracy. We simply lost the ability to persevere.

On the home front, the economic deals we made furthering free trade undermined the American dream for millions of the factory-working middle class. Our political parties took turns reducing taxes and increasing benefits, leading to sky-rocketing deficits and national debt. Any attempt to rein in spending met with dire predictions of poverty for the most vulnerable, or economic ruin for the most productive. Social Security is now drawing down its reserves (the ill-fated “lock box”), meaning we’re paying today dollars to redeem those bonds, and interest on the national debt will soon be the biggest single line item in the federal budget.

The administrative state has gone completely out of control. In the early 1990s, the code of federal regulations contained around 60,000 pages. Today it’s close to 200,000. Even small changes in federal policies or practices run into mind-numbing requirements, such that an administration can easily add to them, but it is almost powerless to remove them. Even Progressives have come to realize that America is drowning in a mass of procedural red tape that prohibits or delays everything from tiny houses to bridges to business start-ups. And we did this entirely to ourselves.

Speaking of self-sabotage, is there anybody who still doesn’t realize our educational system is expensive, inefficient, and produces poor results? While this was largely an academic (sorry for the pun) argument in the past, the pandemic laid it bare: Unions arguing for no school, school systems wasting billions while not recovering lost learning, absenteeism at record rates. Not to mention universities producing “graduates” who can’t write a single coherent page.

At the same time, technology is racing along, changing at a fairly rapid pace. Artificial Intelligence may change everything . . . or it may not. But it will change many things, and only those countries, businesses, and people who are prepared will prosper (thus has it always been). Does the United States I have described sound like a country that is prepared to exploit the change?

Fixing any one of these (trade, military force, federal spending, education, or new technology) would be a herculean undertaking. All at once? Improbable, but that is where we are. What it calls for is drastic, fundamental change in our approach to the challenges. Practically starting over. Look at global trade, for example. Who wants to overturn the system? Nobody. It’s been good for the EU, China, developing nations, the Davos crowd, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), even for some in the United States. But it’s not working the way we want, which means we either have to live with it, or force it to change. That is not done lightly or easily, as Trump’s tariff wars demonstrate.

There’s the one name I haven’t mentioned previously: Trump. Fans and ‘phobes both focus on him (he loves it, by the way), but he’s a symptom of the change, not its cause, and probably not its solution. One thing Mr. Trump has always been very good at is identifying problems, and he called out many of these before he ran for office the first time. I often see social media posts lamenting, “how could the working class fall for this rich phony?” I usually respond the same way: because he was the only one correctly identifying the problems the working class was experiencing. Will he fix them? I have my doubts, but the voters who support him know there is a better chance at fixing the problems when you know what they are, then if you don’t have a clue. Which was the case of the alternatives.

The case for fundamental change is pretty clear. The alternative is to avoid the pain and continue down the path to national insolvency and international irrelevance. But there are few easy fixes, and even when there are some, a few sacred oxen–conservative and progressive– will need to be gored. I am not saying the dislocation the Trump administration is causing is necessarily the right way; rather, you shouldn’t object to it simply because it is dislocation (or because it is Trump’s). We are all going to have to get used to some discomfort (ideological or economic) on the way to recovery.

Part III will talk about that path forward.

A very good friend of many years posed a series of questions to me recently. He applauded my in-depth research and dispassionate consideration of issues, but then pointedly asked why I take the media to task for its bias and exaggeration but why I didn’t subject the Trump agenda to the same level of scrutiny? Why didn’t I see the same “threats to democracy” so many others do? How could I be so complacent with everything that’s going on? These were thoughtful (if somewhat slanted) observations that deserve a response. Here it is.

First, I would answer by asking, “what is the source of your outrage?” If you’re outraged because you disagree with Trump’s policies, you made a category error. Policies need to be argued, neither hated nor cheered. If you’re outraged by Trump’s vulgarity, coarseness, and willingness to shred the restraints of good manners (personally and politically), I totally understand. But is Trump unique in this regard? Only for those who haven’t studied history, as I have detailed with Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, just to cite recent leaders. What is different about Trump is he embodies the whole package, and more importantly, he revels in it, seeking your agreement that he is indeed unique and unprecedented. Your outrage is exactly what he seeks, and you willingly work with him on it. You have to own that, as he is clear about it himself (Musk, too, as it is for all people who enjoy “trolling”)! But what if your outrage stems from the clear and present danger Trump poses to the American experiment? That would seem a self-evident justification for outrage. But whence does that assessment come?

Setting aside my well-worn point that what we have in America is a republic, not a democracy (it’s not germane to this argument, generally, but I’ll never miss a chance to re-state it), this assessment comes from various political leaders, press types, and expert influencers. They work in a mutually reinforcing cycle: Trump acts, political opponents observe that what he has done is “unprecedented” or “illegal” or “unconstitutional.” Media types flog this language in headlines. They then engage experts who comment on how Trump’s actions are not only all those things, they are also a “threat to democracy.” Rinse & repeat.

This cycle assured us Trump’s “Muslim ban” was unconstitutional. That Trump’s lawyers’ argument for Presidential immunity was “without precedent” and “staggering.” That deportations to El Salvador are beyond the pale. That withholding federal funds from universities or not spending amounts appropriated by Congress are systemic challenges. And on and on. What these cases have in common is hyperbole. Some were accepted by the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS); one may not like that, and one certainly does not have to agree with them. But one cannot simply continue to claim unconstitutionality in the face of a recent SCOTUS decision. Others are still up for debate, so what the talking heads should be saying is, “in my opinion” or “if I were in SCOTUS,” not just “it is unconstitutional.” The difference is important, because millions of Americans don’t understand that claims by such politicians, media, and expert influencers are not final. They are debatable opinions. And no, they are not the ones who ultimately make the decision, which is important.

What about those clear, unarguable cases? Like the deportations? Like the visa violations? As I demonstrated in earlier posts, when you ignore the national media and dig into the facts of the stories, they become far less clear, far more ambiguous. Tariffs are another great example. We’re clearly experiencing a major international economic dislocation sparked by the Trump administration’s tariff policies. Foreign governments are up in arms, because they liked the trading system the US developed, and now it is changing. Markets love stability, and the system is changing, so they are punishing everyone until some stability is achieved. When will a new equilibrium be established? No one knows, and neither does anyone know whether it will be more or less favorable to the United States. If you are a member of the MAGA faithful, you take Trump’s word that it will be great; if you are part of the resistance, you pronounce TEOTWAKI*. I prefer to watch and see what happens. I’ll hedge my bets, stay flexible, and adjust. I do know one thing for sure: the United States could not continue on the trade path it was on.

“Is there anything you’re willing to criticize about the administration and its policies?” I can hear my progressive friends cry. Let me count the ways:

• Needless demeaning of opponents, real or imagined (Canada, anyone?)
• Refusal to do the hard math regarding federal revenue and spending (National debt)
• Inability to admit a mistake under any circumstances
• Insistence on the brilliance and correctness of whatever the President says and does, even when he directly contradicts what he said or did yesterday (or five minutes ago!)
• Characterizing all opposition as traitorous or anti- American
• Describing any spending with which one doesn’t agree as “fraud, waste, and abuse.”
• Messaging profound economic changes in policies that inflame (rather than temper) market uncertainty.
• Unnecessarily cruel and demeaning trolling on social media (the crying immigrant case)

And that list is just off the top of my head. And does anybody doubt the media is over-producing critique of the administration? I consume more national media than almost anybody I know, and it is non-stop critique, not to mention social media. I prefer to consider and comment, and argue if necessary. I don’t see any value in the types of “shares” I see filled with vulgarity, photoshop, and obvious lies. Many social media “friends” do, sadly. They share such things, oddly unaware they are contributing to the overall decline in the social construct. Tell me what you think, and more importantly, why!

I could make similar lists of objectionable policies for the Biden administration, the Obama administration, the “W.” Bush administration, and the Clinton administration, just to name a few. Partisans on both sides impute a golden age to whatever recent President represented their “side” and “hell” to that of their opponents. Neither is true. The United States is in a mess, not because of Trump, but because of a series of policy decisions by all those leaders, including Donald J. Trump. Getting out of the mess won’t be easy, and won’t be painless . . . for all of us. But we have a choice: deny there is a problem and continue down the path to certain failure, or take the medicine and attempt to correct it. Note there is nothing certain in Trump’s (or anyone else’s) prescriptions for what ails us: they may be wrong, or they may not work. But I guarantee you denying the problems won’t either.

Coming next, Part II: The Role of Disruption

*The End of the World as we know it