Friday, August 1, 2025

RUSSIA HOAX, EPSTEIN—WILL ANYONE PAY A PRICE?

          It is times like this that I start watching the networks and the New York Times and similar outlets, and I can tell you the official story of the Trump-haters or the deep-staters or whatever you want to call them.  The Epstein files buried in the FBI have incriminating evidence (probably videos) of Trump sodomizing 12-year-old girls.  That is why he can’t release the Epstein files, you see.  It is also why he had Tulsi Gabbard come up with the criminal referral of Obama and cronies for hatching the Russia collusion yarn, complete with the whores pissing on Obama’s former bed in Moscow.  The purpose of the Tulsi document-dump was to DISTRACT all of us from the Trump-sodomizing-12-year-olds story.

 

         The real story is nothing like that.  It’s a story of documents.  That’s all Tulsi Gabbard ever did---release a pile of documents (some previously classified), that prove: 1) Putin didn’t really want Trump to win the 2016 election, 2) the Russians didn’t hack the election or affect the results in any significant way, 3) Putin probably wanted Hillary to win, 4) there was never any cooperation between Trump and Putin, and 5) Obama wanted to render Trump’s presidency a failure by spreading the idea that the 2016 election was somehow illegitimate.

 

         It’s all in the documents.  It doesn’t matter what people’s opinions about the documents are, it doesn’t matter what Marco Rubio thought, it doesn’t matter what Putin (that renowned truth-teller), said years later about who he wanted to win the election, and it doesn’t matter how outraged Obama claims to be by these “ridiculous” charges.  The only thing that matters is what the documents say.

 

         That is why it’s revealing that the networks and the NYT do not discuss the documents.  Never.  The real story has been almost completely ignored, but when it has been discussed at all, the commentary has centered on what the Obama camp says about it or what Brennan or Clapper say about it.  Almost nothing has been broadcast or published about the documents.

 

         I’ve read the documents.  You should too.  To those of us who have followed the Russia collusion story since 2016, it has always been an obvious fabrication, but one which was largely believed because the Democrats and their partners in the media pushed it every day for years.  It turned the 2018 mid-term elections and made Trump virtually powerless for the last half of his first term as president.  In 2019, even after Robert Mueller reported that there was no truth to the Russia collusion story, polls reported that half the country (including 78% of Democrats), believed the Trump election was bogus because of Russia’s secret meddling and Trump’s cooperation.

 

         If you read the documents that have been released, you will see that what happened is exactly what Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe have described.  In late 2016, following Trump’s win, the story of the Russians hacking Democratic computers was falling apart, as was the tale of Russian dirty tricks designed to elect Trump.  Also, the Steele Dossier, which Hillary had paid for, was thoroughly discredited.

 

         In early December, 2016, Obama convened the troops (Brennan, Clapper, Loretta Lynch, Susan Rice, and a dozen others).  At this meeting, Obama directed that an Intelligence Community Assessment (an “ICA”) be prepared summarizing Russian activities involving the 2016 election. The result was the ICA dated January 7, 2017, which referenced all the notes and rumors and speculation and the Steele Dossier, that had already been discarded a month before.  This is what would be used to undermine the incoming Trump administration.

 

         All I’ve described thus far is the easy part.  It’s all in the documents.  What comes next, though, is the troubling part.  What must be done, and what every other president would do is pursue the criminals behind this conspiracy and have them indicted and tried.  My concern is that Trump will not allow justice to take its course, and that he will stop the prosecution of Clapper, Brennan, Comey and Obama for their crimes against the United States. If he does not allow these crimes to be pursued, I am concerned his MAGA supporters will desert him and his presidency will, effectively, be over.

 

         Trump has the reputation and image of a raging bull, wreaking havoc with his enemies, devastating the opposition, and then dancing on their remains.  He likes that image, but it’s not true.  His entire history demonstrates that while he thrives on conflict, he hates finality.  He is never happier than when he is in the middle of a lengthy pissing match, but the actual resolution of the battle, even if he prevails, brings him no pleasure.  He likes the “deal” and making the deal, and then reworking the deal and adjusting the terms.  He thinks he is good at that process, and he is, so that’s what he does.

 

         Also, he apparently dislikes direct confrontation.  That is why when he fires someone (other than on a TV show), it generally happens when they are in the middle of a 12-hour flight to Pakistan.

 

         His final quirk is that he is something of an arriviste, a man insecure in his sense of self-worth because his wealth or social status has only recently been acquired.  Trump wants to be liked by the important people and institutions in America.  This desire of his never seems to fade even though it is obvious to the rest of us that many of those people and institutions will never like him.  They hate him, in fact.  Nevertheless, he will not crush them even when they should be crushed, and he has the power to do so.

 

         The prime example is Hillary Clinton.  In his first campaign, he led chants of “Lock her up!” at his rallies, and his supporters fully expected him to have her prosecuted.  And with her destruction of subpoenaed evidence, her responsibility for the fraudulent Steele Dossier, her criminally negligent treatment of classified information, the bribes accepted by The Clinton Foundation when she was Secretary of State, and her almost-certain responsibility for the American deaths at Bengazi, there was no lack of serious criminality to be pursued.

 

         But Trump wouldn’t do it.  His supporters grumbled.  It was a promise broken by Trump.  It was a serious disappointment to the MAGA faithful that Trump wouldn’t follow through on his promise to provide accountability for the crimes that had been committed by Democrats against the American republic, and even against Trump himself.

 

         And now there is a danger he’s making the same mistake again.

 

         Trump’s sudden refusal to produce Epstein-related materials held by the FBI is the latest example.  There are men Trump considers “important” (e.g., Clinton, Gates, Dershowitz, and many others) who would be embarrassed by publication of details about how many times they flew on Epstein’s airplane or went to Pedophile Island, and Trump does not wish to be the cause of any such unpleasantness for men as significant as himself.  A ridiculous attitude, I grant you, but he views himself as being a member of a sort-of imaginary country club that includes all the “big men” in the world who make a difference and change history, etc.  It’s why he won’t let the ayatollah be killed.  It’s why he treats Putin like a rational world leader rather than like the psycho he is.

 

         For Trump-haters, of course, the only possible explanation for Trump’s decision to shut down the release of Epstein materials is that he is protecting himself, but there is virtually zero chance that is his motive.  If there were any photos of Trump with young girls or other materials that would actually incriminate him in some way, they would certainly have been leaked years ago.  The Democrats have always been willing to tell the most outrageous lies about Trump, so why wouldn’t they have published something truthful, especially in the last four years, that would have destroyed his path to the presidency?

 

         I fear he will feel the same way about the criminal referrals to the DOJ about the Russia hoax, even though he personally was the primary victim of the criminal conspiracy launched in the December 2016 meeting and the ICA of January 7, 2017.  He has already spared Hillary once.  He likes the Clintons.  He thinks Obama is his friend.  Possibly the warmth of his feelings do not extend to Comey and Clapper and Brennan, who were underlings, but Trump gets nothing out of putting snakes like them in prison.  Prison is final.  A criminal conviction is final.  And Trump doesn’t like final.  He wants them out there, writing op-eds in the New York Times so Trump can trash them in a press conference the next day.  It’s all the art of the deal, you see.  He just wants the war over the Russia collusion hoax to continue, indefinitely.  It’s like the tariffs.  There will always be another 5% tax on German steel about to be imposed, but then he will delay the effective date for a week so we can discuss it further.  And then he will threaten 10%.  It’s how he thinks.

 

         His attitude about the criminal prosecutions involving Russia collusion and the Epstein files endanger his administration.  He does not see how important criminal accountability is to his MAGA supporters.

 

         There are many reasons the first Trump administration petered out and became ineffective in 2018, but two of them involved Trump’s failure to carry through on promises he had made.  One was his promise to build a border wall, which he actually attempted, then faced enormous (but predictable) pushback, and then abandoned.  The second was his repeated vow to have Hillary prosecuted for the crimes she had committed during the Obama administration.  Trump decided on his own to drop that initiative.

 

         For a reformer and a game-changer like Trump, success only comes by fulfilling your promises or at least pursuing them relentlessly.  For most standard-brand politicians like Obama and the Bushes and Bill Clinton, promises don’t matter that much.  But if you say “I’m different!  I will actually do X and Y and Z,” and people who never voted before come out of the hills and hollows to elect you, you have to do what you promised or they go back into the hills and hollows and you never see them again. 

 

         Trump has been given a second chance, and his first six months in office have been a startling political success story, but the people who put Trump in office believe that bad guys in suits should go to jail.  Trump does not agree, but he will have to bend on this point or his presidency may crumble.

 

Copyright2025MichaelKubacki                    

 

Monday, June 16, 2025

NO KINGS. GO FISH.

          Yesterday, June 14, was Donald Trump’s 79th birthday and the occasion of a large military parade in D.C. to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army.  It was also the day of “No Kings” demonstrations, which were called that because the demonstrators believe there is a danger Trump will make himself king of America.  They think that even though everything he tries to do as president gets instantly shut down by an injunction from a federal judge somewhere who voted for Kamala Harris.

 

         I went to the No Kings gathering in downtown Philadelphia for many reasons.  For me, it was easy to get to, and free, and I was curious about the signs, the people, the cops, and the different political cults who would attend.  Also, I knew that the newspapers and TV stations in Philly would never actually perform any journalism on the event so if I wanted to know what was happening, I would have to find out for myself.  This is increasingly a problem in a place like Philadelphia, which has been run entirely by Democrats since 1952.   Newspapers used to report news with a far-left spin to it.  Now you often get only the spin and the propaganda, and you can only guess what the underlying facts are.

 

         Even though the weather was a bit iffy, I knew there would be a huge crowd, which added to the appeal.  Two days before, the Soros-backed District Attorney Larry Krassner and Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel held a press conference to say they understood that the protesters in Philly would be just like those who marched for Martin Luther King in the 1960s, so nobody would be arrested.  These assurances were largely unnecessary since we all remember the George Floyd riots in 2020 when the city suffered tens of millions of dollars in damage and looting (and dozens of police injuries), with only a few arrests and no serious prosecutions.  In fact, the city later agreed to pay protesters $9.5 million because the police used tear-gas on people who took over an interstate highway in town and stopped traffic. 

 

         The gathering point was Love Park in the heart of downtown, and my arrival at 11:30 gave me a solid hour to wade through the crowds, photograph signs and tee-shirts and costumes and flags before the march up the Ben Franklin Parkway.  The march would end at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the speeches would happen.  I had no interest in marching or the speeches.

 

         The signs and tee-shirts were predictable but there were a lot of them.  Many dealt with immigration and due process rights and ICE:

 

·       “ICE IS BEST WHEN CRUSHED” 

 

·       “Due Process Is A Right!  Doo-doo Process Is All Wrong!” (with picture of a dog pooping)

 

·       “We Are All Immigrants”

 

·       “On Stolen Land, We are All Illegals.

 

         Probably a majority mocked Trump in some way or echoed the No Kings theme:

 

·       “Only Butterflies Should Be Monarchs!”

 

·       “Trump Is A Cunt.”

 

·       Picture of Trump with a pig nose.

 

·       “ABORT UNWANTED PRESIDENCIES”

 

         Then there were a few oddballs, like the guy in the Alexander Hamilton costume with a Guy Fawkes mask, or the gentleman wearing a FUCK LANDLORDS shirt or the woman carrying an “Obama 2028” sign.

 

         The only group physically separated from the rest of the demonstrators was the crowd in the street at 15th and Arch and not actually in LOVE PARK.  These were the pro-Hamas people carrying huge Palestinian flags and manufactured signs, along with Jewish Voice For Peace, Code Pink, the AnswerCoaltion, and other miscellaneous Jew-haters.  Almost everyone here was wearing a mask or a keffiyeh to conceal their identity.  Because of Israel’s recent attack on Iran’s leadership and nuclear program, I had wondered whether there would be any pro-Iran signs at the rally, and yes, there were a few in the pro-Palestine squad, which may have numbered a hundred people or so.

 

         The mood elsewhere at NO KINGS was festive and fun, with lots of laughter and people greeting old friends and taking pictures of each other.  But the Jew-haters at 15th and Arch?  Not so much.  They just chanted and waved their flags in a somber and disciplined fashion.  Nobody was taking photos of them, and I had a sense it might not be wise to do so.   I kept my phone in my pocket. 

 

         At 12:30, the march began.  I positioned myself on the sidewalk at 16th and Arch streets, at the very beginning of the Parkway, so I could watch the entire crowd walk past me, and I stood there for the next thirty-five minutes.  The police estimate issued later that day was 80,000, which seemed a little high to me but what do I know?  Still, I’d guess at least fifty thousand walked past me.

 

         (There may be some methodology to the estimation of crowd sizes but I doubt it’s a terribly exact science.  Maybe if you spend an hour with an aerial photograph and a magnifying glass, you might get close to a realistic number, but I suspect that doesn’t happen very often.  Usually, you get a police captain looking out at the scene and he says, “40,000” or “200,000” or some other round number.  You never get an official estimate of 73,400, which leads me to believe it’s just some guy picking a number out of the air.)

 

         Anyway, my estimate was 50K+, and I’m sticking with it.

 

         But while I’m uncertain about the total number, I can share some observations about the demographics, because that was my primary interest.  I didn’t care so much about the sheer numbers as I did about who these people were who went to the trouble of going downtown and spending several hours of their Saturday expressing their disdain or dislike or hatred for Trump and his administration.

 

         And the demographics were startling and stark, for me at least.  We basically know who voted for Kamala in 2024, and they were there in downtown Philly on Saturday.  Republicans pondering future elections in 2026 and 2028 would have to be pleased by who was on the streets because there was no hint that the core Trump-haters (who are still legion, of course), are growing in numbers at all.  The people on the streets were extremist segments of increasingly marginalized groups.  What I saw were practically caricatures of the elitist elderly white liberals that Republicans do not fear electorally.

 

         You want cat ladies?  We had cat ladies.  Women were clearly the majority of the group and they tended to be older.  There were certainly young people, of college age and under 30, and they were displaying some of the more radical and obscene sentiments, but those in their 30s, 40s and 50s were much harder to find.  The blue-hairs were everywhere.

 

         As for men, they were quite a bit less numerous.  For one thing, I don’t remember seeing a “bunch of guys” together (except in the pro-Hamas squad), while the women were frequently in groups of 3 or 4 or 5 girlfriends.  The men tended to be accompanied only by a wife or girlfriend, or solo.

 

         By far the most shocking observation for me was the almost-complete absence of black people.  This is the largest ethnic group in the city.  They comprise 40% of the population, and there are estimated to be 615,000 of them living in the city limits.

 

         I counted them.  As I stood on the sidewalk for 35 minutes and watched 50,000 people walk by, I counted 63 black people.  Maybe I missed a few.  Maybe there were 80.  There were NOT a hundred.

 

         There are more black people at Neil Diamond concerts.  There are more black people in Latvia.  There are more black people at Klan rallies.

 

         I counted black faces, of course, because one of the big stories of the 2024 presidential election was the inroads Trump made into the black electorate.  George Bush in 2000 won 10% of the black vote in America, and that was considered a great result for Republicans at the time.  In 2024, Trump secured 20% of that demographic, and his success there is viewed as a big reason for his victory.

 

         It is axiomatic among strategists in both parties that a Democrat cannot be elected president unless he or she brings in at least 90% of the black vote.   It has only been eight months since the 2024 election, but my conclusion from the anti-Trump rally on Saturday is that the Democrats have made ZERO progress in rebuilding the sorts of coalitions they will need to claw their way back into power.

 

         June 14, 2025 was a day of triumph for Republicans.

 

Copyright2025MichaelKubacki             

Monday, April 7, 2025

DUE PROCESS AND 5TH DIMENSIONAL TARIFF CHESS


         You can go for quite some time without hearing the term “due process,” but now I seem to hear it every day.  As ICE and other government agencies gather up gang members and soccer players and Jew-haters and ship them off to their homelands or distant prisons, the howled complaint always seems to be about due process.  “Don’t they get any due process?  Where’s their due process?  Whatever happened to due process???”

 

         In every case, the question that needs to be asked is not “Where’s the due process?” but rather “What process is due?”  Process is expensive and time-consuming, and different people are entitled to different amounts of it.

 

         I am a citizen of the United States and I was born here.  If the Philly District Attorney decides I belong in jail, I get a hell of a lot of process before he can put me there.  I get an impartial judge and a jury of my peers.  I get to cross-examine witnesses and see the evidence against me.  I get a lawyer to present my case and make arguments for me.  I probably get bail.  Even before any of that happens, the DA has to get an indictment against me and a warrant to arrest me.  And even if I’m convicted, I get to argue for probation, or maybe just a fine.  I can appeal my conviction to a higher court.  I can even ask the governor for a pardon.  I am DUE a lot of process.  I get process out the wazoo.  I probably get more process than a guy in any other country.

 

         The people getting kicked out of America don’t get nearly as much process as I do.  That’s how the law works.  They get due process too; it’s just that, for them, not much process is “due.”

 

         For one thing, they are not being convicted of crimes and put in prison, they are merely being sent away beyond our borders.  If the U.S. government grabs a guy from Syria who has been harassing Jews on a college campus and sends him back to Syria, he can step off the plane, walk into a restaurant in Damascus and get himself a nice plate of schwarma, falafel and muhammara.  Yeah, he’s not in NYC anymore but he’s not in prison either.  He’s free.  He’s just in a different place. 

 

         How much process is he “due?”  Not much.  Maybe he has not been adjudicated a “criminal” and maybe he was here legally on a student visa, but he doesn’t get nearly as much process as I do.  If he were arrested and the U.S. wanted to put him in prison, he would get a lot more process, but just to send him back to his homeland?  Not so much.

 

         Then there’s guys who are here illegally.  They have no legal status at all in America.  They may have been convicted of crimes here, or back in their home countries.  Or maybe not.  Regardless, they get nothing.  No process is due.

 

         The amount of process you get is based on your personal legal status and what the government wants to do to you.  What is unusual at the moment is that a lot of people are being deported and the Left is screaming about what is happening to them.  But the way the deportees are being treated, and the legal rights they are being afforded, is not at all unusual or troubling. 

 

*

 

         I’ve never been a fan of the idea that Trump plays 5th dimensional chess while the rest of the world is playing checkers.  He’s a player, and a strategist, and a negotiator, but he’s not an intellectual, and he’s not intellectually curious, and there are a lot of things about which he knows nothing.

 

         The 5th-dimensional-chess theory, however, is an interesting one.  And maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe he is secretly trying to achieve completely different goals from the ones to which he pays lip service.

 

         Let’s talk about his protectionist, tariff-based trade-war, for example.  On its face, not much of it makes any sense.

 

         Why impose a tariff/tax on bananas, for example?  How does it benefit anyone if I have to pay 20% more for my bananas?  Is there a banana industry here in Pennsylvania that is being strangled by those damn bananas growing all over Ecuador?  Then there’s blueberries and grapes and cherries.  They are all grown in the U.S., but not in January.  Why have tariffs on blueberries and grapes and cherries in January?  Why will I now have to pay a tax on them?  What’s the point?

 

         Then there’s all those manufacturing jobs that disappeared (for a lot of reasons) fifty years ago, but Trump now wants them back.  The world of cars and international trade is complicated, I suppose, but what about sneakers?  If we tax Nikes coming from Vietnam and have them made in Arkansas instead, we will be paying $500 for those Air Jordans instead of the $250 we pay now.  Those poor bastards in Little Rock are just NOT going to make sneakers for $100 a week, but the guys in Hanoi will.  So why not let them?

 

         In other words, even if Trump “wins,” much of this tariff war is pointless.  No one in America will benefit---not consumers and not the (mostly imaginary) US manufacturing workers.

 

         So maybe there’s another explanation.  Maybe there’s a 5th-dimensional chess game Trump is playing here and the trade war is just a means to a completely different end.

 

         The inflation that has crippled the American economy over the past five years is the result of the attempted globalist takeover during the COVID years.  The lockdowns designed to get Trump out of office necessitated the printing of trillions of dollars to create a fake economy while the attempted takeover was proceeding.  The increase in the money supply, along with further wasteful spending in the Biden Administration, inflated prices across the economy (and around the world).

 

         There are a limited number of ways to reduce inflation.  One is to “grow out of it” by expanding the economy without increasing the money supply.  Trump is trying to do that, primarily by expanding energy production, but the money supply has been so inflated that this method will take longer than Trump has in office.

 

         The other tool is to remove extra dollars from the money supply through taxation, and maybe that is actually what the tariffs are for.  If I have to pay $800 for a dishwasher rather than $600, and the extra $200 is simply a tax that the US government collects and then removes from the money supply, deflation occurs. 

 

         Trump has been so adamant about cutting taxes that he could never admit he is actually raising taxes, but he doesn’t have to.  He claims, and has always claimed, that it is the Chinese (or the Mexicans, or whoever), that pay the tariffs.  He says it so much that I sometimes think he believes it, but of course, the extra  dishwasher money is coming out of my pocket.  And money that comes out of my pocket and goes to the U.S. government has a name---it’s called “tax.”

 

         Economists who don’t know much about economics will often say tariffs are “inflationary,” but what they really mean is that tariffs tend to increase prices.  Everything that increases prices is not “inflationary,” however.  Killing 100 million chickens quadruples the price of eggs, for example, but it is not “inflationary.”  A lot of events can increase prices but are not “inflationary.”  Inflation is caused by an increase in the money supply.  Tariffs, since they are taxes, are a way of reducinginflation.

 

         And maybe that’s the only purpose of them. 

 

Copyright2025MichaelKubacki

 

                

 

                  

 

              

 

         

Saturday, April 5, 2025

MARCH THOUGHTS

 I write this blog on the ancestral lands of the Lenape, Susquehannock, Shawnee and Iroquois peoples, the traditional caretakers of this water and land and internet.  We honor and pay our respects to indigenous communities here and around the world.

 

*

 

On a t-shirt at Target worn by a 20-year-old guy:

 

 THIS IS THE ONLY SHIRT I COULD FIND

 THAT DOESN’T HAVE CUM ON IT

 

*

 

Since it appears unlikely there will ever be a serious investigation into the attempted totalitarian takeover of America via the COVID pandemic, I will settle for Trump issuing a (very public) Presidential Pardon for treason to Anthony Fauci for the crimes he committed in secretly funding the development of COVID-19 in Wuhan, funding gain-of-function research contrary to U.S. policy, lying to Americans about the nature of mRNA vaccines and vaccine efficacy, masks, social distancing, lock-downs, asymptomatic spread of the virus, the wisdom of lockdowns, etc.  It will be a lengthy declaration.

 

Also named in the Pardon would be Deborah Birx, CDC Director Rochelle Wallensky, US Surgeon General Jerome Adams, and various governors and state officials whose actions killed tens of thousands of vulnerable elderly people by exposing them needlessly to COVID.  This list would include Andrew Cuomo (N.Y.), Phil Murphy (N.J.), Tom Wolf (PA), Rachel Levine (PA), Gretchen Whitmer (Mich.), and many others.

 

This idea is not originally mine.  Hat tip to Capt. Seth Keshel.

 

*

 

The movie Hidden Figures (2016) is about the U.S. space program in the 1950s and 60s when much of the math was still being done by hand.  One scene depicts a meeting of the engineers and mathematicians a few days before John Glenn’s historic orbital flight.  Everybody in the room (especially Glenn himself), is concerned about the data from IBM computers.

 

Katherine Johnson is the only black person in the room, and when the meeting ends, Glenn tells the head of the unit, “Get the girl to do it.  I want the human computer to check the output of the electronic computer, and if she says they’re good, then I’m good to go.”

 

Glenn was not sure he would get in the space capsule.  Only when Katherine Johnson (who had to fight to get in the room), said it was OK did John Glenn finally agree.

 

For those of us old enough to remember that era, the scene rings true.  Then, if your path crossed that of a black professor or lawyer or doctor or some other professional, your first thought was usually, “Wow.  You must be good.  To get where you are you probably had to put up with an enormous load of crap.”

 

And that was Glenn’s conclusion as well.  He didn’t know anything about Katherine Johnson but she was not just the only black person in the meeting, she was a woman as well, so he assumed she had the sharpest math mind in the room and he was willing to put his life in her hands.

 

Today, the situation has flipped.  With affirmative action programs and DEI, you no longer assume that the minority person (unless he’s Asian), is the best of his profession.  Now, when you see a black doctor or a female pilot, you wonder whether they were subject to lower standards or received breaks in their training.  There’s always going to be a nagging doubt regarding their competence, especially if it’s a person to whom you are entrusting your life.

 

And it’s a stigma, meaning the doubt attaches to every professional from a favored minority group, including those who were straight-As, top-of-the-class, 800-SAT students.  If you’re black or female or Hispanic, somebody’s going to wonder whether you’re genuinely a star or whether you got some help along the way.

 

The stigma is one price we pay for a system that is not based on merit.

 

*       

 

“I have to have an orgasm a day with my macrobiotic diet, you see.”

--from “The Driver’s Seat,” a 1974 movie starring Elizabeth Taylor

 

Guys will say anything to get women (especially Liz Taylor), to sleep with them, but I suspect this argument does not yield a high percentage of coital success.

 

*

 

I don’t want to overwhelm you with the things I love about the new Trump administration, but I was DONE with affirmative action, DEI, pronouns, critical race theory, quotas, anti-racism and the rest of the “nice” racism twenty years ago.  I just never thought we would have a president with the guts to condemn it all and try to get rid of it.  I thank him for that.

 

I hate nice racism.  In fact, I think I hate nice racism more than I hate mean racism just because mean racism is almost impossible to find but nice racism still shows up everywhere.

 

*  

  

 

Trump has come in for plenty of criticism during his second term, and that is to be expected.  Haters hate---it’s what they do---and they hate him now no matter what he does.  When he shuts down secret government censorship agencies, and tells the EU they should allow free speech, the haters hate him.  When he finds people defrauding the U.S. out of billions of dollars, the haters decide they like the fraud and corruption.  When he makes a 13-year-old cancer victim an honorary Secret Service agent, they mock him for it, and they mock the kid too.  His efforts may lead to an end of the killing in both Gaza and the Ukraine, but even if he succeeds, the haters will never give him credit for it.

 

So be it.

 

I must respond to one aspect of the endless criticism, however, and that is the claim that Trump has “launched an assault upon the rule of law” or ignored court orders or violated the Constitution.  This charge is made by dopes as well as by sophisticated political observers.  It is even made by lawyers (which is unforgiveable).  All that is necessary to level this charge is an irrational hatred of Trump.  It is simply not true, and whenever I demand specific examples of this attack on the law itself, they are never forthcoming.

 

Trump does not defy orders from courts, no matter how ridiculous they are or how far they may go beyond the court’s legitimate jurisdiction.  When Trump issues an Executive Order relating solely to the executive branch of government, of which he is in charge, and the Democrats find a district court judge in the Northwest District of East Wherever who will rule that Trump’s Order can’t be obeyed, Trump does not defy it.  He never does.  There are plenty of us who think he should defy that order, that it is his duty under the Constitution to defy that judge’s illegitimate order, but he never does it.  He appeals it, and when that Trump-hating judge is reversed by a higher court, Trump wins.  But he never steps outside the legal lines.  Biden defied the law repeatedly. (Remember the student loan forgiveness the Supreme Court told him he couldn’t do, but then he did it anyway?). So did Obama.  (Remember when he announced there were laws he would not enforce even though it was his Constitutional duty to do so?)

 

Trump likes litigation.  Don’t ask me why, but he does.  He sues people a lot, and they sue him as well.  I’ll bet there was never a time in the last fifty years he was not on a court docket somewhere.  He uses the courts to get his way, he uses the courts to intimidate people, he uses the courts to exact revenge on people who have screwed him, and now he uses the courts to establish the lines of authority between himself and the other two branches of government.  But he has always acknowledged their authority.

 

Whenever Trump does something the haters don’t like, they say he is abusing his power.  But his power is enormous, and his power over the Executive branch is total.

 

The first sentence of Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, states as follows:

 

“The executive Power shall be vested in a

President of the United States of America.”

 

And that’s it.  That’s all there is.  Judges have no executive power.  Bernie Sanders has no executive power.  Nobody else in the executive branch has any executive power unless the president says, “Hey, Elon.  Here’s some of my executive power.  Use it for a while to do some stuff I want you to do but then it comes back to me when I say you’re done.”  Sure, there are some limits, but just a few.  He can’t name the Secretary of State all by himself; he needs the Senate to “advise and consent.”  And he can’t bind the country to a treaty by himself either.  

 

Get it?  Donald Trump is not just some guy you don’t like, he’s also a frickin branch of government.  He is the executive branch.  So if he does something within the executive branch, like re-arranging one of the agencies or declassifying a document, or firing executive employees who are stealing government money and giving it to their friends, he can do it.  And any federal judge who claims he can’t should be removed from office.  Most of the (unelected) federal judges who issue these orders know they have no authority to do so but they do it anyway.  That’s why people like Obama put these partisans on the bench, so they will stop elected Republicans from doing the things they were elected to do.

 

As the Executive Orders, injunctions, and appeals pile up, a showdown or showdowns await at the Supreme Court.  And when the ruling comes down that the president has 100% of the executive power under the Constitution, and federal district judges have none, the dam will break and Trump’s orders will be carried out.  I’ll be doing the Snoopy dance that day.

 

*

 

This piece is being published on the 5th anniversary of the COVID lockdown going into effect in Pennsylvania and many other places.  I have written about trying to get one last drink at Billy Murphy’s bar on the day before St. Patrick’s in 2020, but finding they had already shut the doors.  Bars and restaurants closed across the state.  All of them.

 

I should have seen at that moment that the thing was a scam designed to induce panic and obedience in the populace.  Any ruling that Billy’s was somehow “nonessential” was obviously part of a massive fraud and an attempt to subjugate the free citizens of the Commonwealth, and I still regret that it took me another two weeks to understand what was happening.

 

What did it was the sudden about-face from all the Faucis and CDCs and WHOs, who simultaneously decided not only that wearing a diaper on your face would stop a respiratory virus, but that the only sensible thing to do was to force EVERYBODY to wear the diaper.  The giveaway was that there was no science to support this madness and there never had been.  They would publish some articles in medical journals a couple months later that sort-of said the masks worked, and nobody bothered to pick them apart and mock them though it was easy enough to do.  By that point, the terror campaign had worked and everyone knew there would be a heavy price to pay for questioning the madness.

 

That day, March 16, 2020, changed everything.  Those of you who know me are aware I am a political conservative, but I had always more-or-less accepted the role of politics and collective life in America.  Government built roads and bridges and collected the trash.  It set up schools to teach children the basic skills for life.  It protected us from criminals, or at least tried to.  If someone fell through the cracks and couldn’t take care of himself, the government would help.  Of course there was corruption and theft, and politicians were often egomaniacs, or immoral, or stupid, but some kind of government was necessary, and the people involved in it mostly wanted to make it work.

 

Then suddenly, on March 16, 2020, it all changed.  It was as if every important player in society suddenly saw this new virus as a way to take over the world and they all jumped at the opportunity to take our rights and our freedom away.  They closed the churches, schools, libraries, movies, and restaurants.  Public gatherings were banned.  People were separated from family members even if they were elderly and dying.  Any business that was based in some human interaction was shut down.  And any resistance to the New Normal was met with jail or fines or job loss or having your life disassembled.  And no discussion was permitted.  Dissent got you censored and silenced.  Conscientious doctors reporting (unwelcome) scientific conclusions lost their licenses to practice medicine.  Even the courts were mostly shut down so there was no place to fight the tyranny.

 

There was nowhere to turn.  Politicians relished their new power, of course, but all the anonymous, unelected elites who run our world also embraced the shutdown of civil society.  Academia jumped on board, and the news media, and social media companies and tech companies and insurance companies and medical societies and all the bureaucrats in all the government agencies.

 

And in addition to fulfilling their dream of ruling the world, most of them got rich in the process.  The fortunes mysteriously acquired by government people like Fauci and Schumer and Bernie Sanders (et tu, Bernie?) and all the media companies, and the ambiguously-named NGOs, shock us because we thought they were fundamentally good people rather than the thieves and grifters we now understand them to be.

 

Some of that has been stopped, and more of it might be.  We’ll never get our money back but maybe we can stop the fake economy they created with the printing-press money we had to pay for with years of inflation.  Worse is the spike-protein still inside the hundreds of millions who took the COVID vaccines.  Their lives will be shortened, their babies will die, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that can be done about it.  Even worse is that the same people are cranking up the machinery for H5N1 bird-flu vaccines---first for chickens, then for cattle, and finally for us.

 

Still, there have always been horrible people in the world and they have always done horrible things.  And while I was naïve to believe that the politics and institutions of our civil society were based in a benevolent impulse rather than greed and an insatiable lust for power, I have learned that lesson and I can live with it.  I will never trust a journalist again, or a politician, or a bureaucrat, or a so-called “scientist” until I obtain substantial proof they are not merely pursuing their own selfish agendas at my expense.  I don’t care how authoritative they may sound or how much I may want to believe what they are saying.

 

But the great sadness I feel on this fifth anniversary of 3-16-20 is not from the realization that doctors are no longer professionals but just functionaries who do what they’re told, or that government agencies have been captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate, or that Bill Gates wants to kill off a third of the world’s population.  What I can’t abide is that friends, neighbors, and family members gave in to the panic without a second thought.  They believed every lie they were told from the beginning.  The information was out there about masks and social distancing and asymptomatic spread and the dangers of the vaccines, and a large majority of the people I know never went looking for it.  Whatever Lester Holt or Jake Tapper or David Muir or Jimmy Kimmel or Joe Biden told them had to be true, and when they were told that people like me were dangerous and should be shunned, they did so.  (Even my doctors dumped me.)  And they still shun me. To most friends and neighbors and to all my extended family, I remain a leper.

 

I’m not expecting apologies.  I know it’s hard for people to admit they were fooled, but I think they are still hanging on to the propaganda because they can only justify their behavior the last five years if the COVID lies were true.  It’s called cognitive dissonance.  People will do any sort of mental gymnastics to avoid admitting to themselves they were duped.  And as long as there’s no official “COVID Commission” and as long as Anthony Fauci and Pfizer’s Albert Bourla are not in prison, nobody will be forced to face the truth.  We can all just pretend “mistakes were made” or it never really happened quite the way it did. 

 

But while I’m not expecting apologies, I don’t see how I can trust the people who crossed the street to avoid saying hello, or who, when they were told I was scum, treated me that way.  When the bird flu is launched, or whatever the next panic is, the people who dumped me will put the masks back on and stand on the stickers in the grocery store and get the new vaccines.  And I will again be the dirty thing who has to be quarantined or forced to get the shot or barred from society.

 

No thanks.

 

Copyright2025MichaelKubacki