Donald J. Trump – Anthony G. Flood

The picture that snapped me out of my cynical default position

Seated left to right: Elon Musk; Donald Trump; Donald Trump, Jr.; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Standing: Mike Johnson. Aboard Air Force One after UFC event at Madison Square Garden, November 16, 2024

Yes, Make America Healthy Again . . . tomorrow!

Where else would Bobby get a platform of this magnitude for this noble mission?

Who in Trumpworld was talking like that eight years ago?

I wish the table was large enough for Tulsi and Vivek and . . . no, I won’t list every nominee and appointee for Trump’s Dream Team. (I don’t even know who among them, besides those pictured above, was aboard Trump Force One last night.)

Many battles for peace through strength, free speech, bureaucracy busting, government downsizing, crime fighting, invasion repelling, and terrorism crushing lie ahead.

We don’t have four years to undo the dystopia of the last quarter century. Two years to the midterms. One to make a decisive difference.

Expect our enemies to live up to their enemy status, but they’ve been served notice. And expect “47” and his army to work on Trump Time, 24/7, to execute the planned reversal.

In the meantime, don’t miss (as I am temperamentally inclined to do) the many opportunities there will be enjoy the turning of the tide.

Donald Trump gestures as he speaks in front of a painting of George Washington during a Pledge to America’s Workers event in the East Room of the White House on July 19, 2018.

“Trump has been compared to Lincoln. What we may need at this hour, however, is a George Washington.” Anthony Flood, “If the problem be electoral, how can the solution be? Thoughts on our parlous state,” January 7, 2021

“God spared my life for a reason.”

Donald Trump and family, West Palm Beach Convention Center, about 1:00 AM, November 6, 2024. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP)

Schadenfreude . . . on steroids. That’s the dominant emotion for me this morning.

Yes, I’ll look forward to learning exactly how Trump interred—Grover Clevelanded!—Sleepy Joe’s legacy and that of his feckless “insurance policy” (who will condescend to concede at the dinner hour).

To God all the glory.

The people who met defeat last night—the empty pantsuit and her equally hollow-headed Hollywood cheerleaders; the once-upon-a-time friends and admirers who disowned him; the political and judicial prostitutes who persecuted, prosecuted, indicted, impeached, and slandered him; the oh-so-ethically-sensitive “artists” who for a decade fantasized openly about how gruesomely he might be put to death—I’m glad they’re miserable. I hope their misery induces them to expatriate, as they often dare to do when elections don’t go their way.

Nota bene: They haven’t gone anywhere. They’re already plotting his demise (again) and will stop at nothing. For they don’t hate Trump as much as they hate the people who love him, obstacles to their totalitarian designs, who number in the hundreds of millions and will carry on when his work in this life is done.

So, this morning Freude and Schadenfreude are appropriate emotions. But during the interregnum and the next four years, vigilance is what’s required, coupled with an unquenchable thirst for justice.

This time, no more Mister Nice Guy.

Truths the Republican Party no longer affirms or denies

Trump, with blood on his face, raises his fist triumphantly during a rally. I will vote for Donald J. Trump this November. When I did so in 2016 and again in 2020, I was (and am) an anarchocapitalist libertarian. That’s my utterly fallible but defensible political opinion for the Dispensation of Grace. I wish Ron Paul, who had a framed portrait of Murray Rothbard hanging in his congressional office, were running, but he’s not.

In 2015-2016, during the rise of anti-police mania in New York, I’d share this metaphor with anyone who’d listen: when I’m discussing, say, Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) with a friend in Starbucks, I want a big guy with a bat standing guard outside to protect the conversation. I’m now beginning to identify the possible spiritual costs of employing him. Continue reading “Truths the Republican Party no longer affirms or denies”

A perfect storm of converging crises

The dictionary defines a perfect storm as an “unusual combination of events or things that produce an unusually bad or powerful result.” The latter, as I see it, is life as we’ve become accustomed to enjoying it.

Four years ago, I stated my grounds and posed a question to a writer who thinks Christian Reconstruction or Theonomy meets the level of our times:

The argument . . . is over hermeneutics and confessional commitments that flow from one’s interpretation of Scripture. Do libertarians wish to have that conversation? That would be more than fine with me. I’ll need bullet-proof exegesis, however, to believe that Christians are charged, as Dominion theology teaches, with overthrowing Satan’s dominion of this world with its sex-trafficking, drug cartels, arms dealers, blood diamond trade, supervised as they are by pathological warlords; the totalitarian ethnostate of Communist China; radical Islam whose agents are sprinkled the world over; pandemics exploited by globalists and their medicrat tools; the virtually total loss of privacy at the hands of the Deep State, Big Pharma, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence; the trillions of dollars in unpayable debt and the hyperinflation that must follow central banking as the night the day—just to name some of the enormities that blight our planet.

In that post, I didn’t refer to this concatenation as a “perfect storm of crises,” but since then I’ve used this meteorological metaphor when considering our parlous estate.[1] It has come to mean any situation where a highly improbable concurrent of circumstances leads to an event of unusual magnitude or severity. I’d like to know where it falters, if it does.

The “event of unusual magnitude or severity” I refer to is the total collapse of the good of order—civilization, what’s left of it—on which any regular enjoyment of goods of consumption depends. Continue reading “A perfect storm of converging crises”

“At the end of the day”: Trump’s compromise

Donald Trump on abortion: 'It should be the law of the state' “The states will determine by vote, or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land—in this case [abortion], the law of the state. Many states will be different. Many states will have a different number of weeks … at the end of the day it is all about the will of the people.” Donald Trump, Truth Social, today. (Emphasis added.)

“At the end of the day”? Say, when the sun goes down (as I once heard Bill O’Reilly quip)?

Trump’s context is, of course, the U.S. politics and Constitution, not eschatology. The end of the day (ἡμέρας) of man (ἀνθρωπίνης) (1 Corinthians 4:3), every detail of which having been ordained to come to pass (Ephesians 1:11), will inaugurate the day (ἡμέρας) of Christ (Χριστοῦ) (Philippians 1:6; not the Day of the Lord).

In that day, co-extensive with the manifest Kingdom of God, there will be The mercy of God and the unborn child - St George Orthodox Ministry no exceptions for any species of homicide. The penalty will be death (Acts 5:1-11; the Acts period being a foretaste of the Kingdom[1]). God’s will, not “the people’s,” will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10).

Note

[1] See my “Sellers’s Eschatology: Some Distinctives,” June 7, 2020.

To “Remake the World”: The Perennial Dream of the Left, Old, New, and Woke

On the 84th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland I find myself embarking on a study that will be roughly equal parts philosophical, historical, theological, and personal. It will immerse me in the writings of 20th century American Marxists who, despite the path they took, have fascinated me. They thought, wrote, and fought in a world that headed inexorably toward the Second World War, was embroiled in it, and then emerged from it, knocked for a loop. It seemed that, directly or indirectly, these writers were always trying to make sense of the conflagration and its aftermath.

This project will involve me in the risky business of imputing motives to people who claimed to know how the world worked, how it ought to go, and where history was heading. I want to be fair to people I deem mistaken, for I was once mistaken (if that’s not a euphemism) in just the way they were. Some American revolutionaries will admit the failures of their revolutions, but never reevaluate the conceit that human beings can “remake the world.” The day I gave up that conceit is the day I ceased to be a revolutionary.

Professor Alexander Riley, Bucknell University

I distinguish the merely mistaken from those who compound their mistakes with crimes enabled by the power (governmental, academic, and cultural) they wield. Such social outlaws are to be defeated, not refuted. I’m therefore concerned that what’s called “Wokeism” marks, not a break with Marxism, but an organic outgrowth thereof. What would allay my apprehension is a Marxist condemnation of Wokeism. Until I find one, I must take comfort in the writings of Bucknell University sociology professor Alexander Riley, especially his illuminating “Why Wokeism is Not Marxist” and his scorched-earth discrediting of Mark Levin’s American Marxism, “Marxism Misunderstood.” (Please also consider taking a look at my “Marksism Levinism,” an earlier review that complements Riley’s.)

A Marxist critique of the so-called “1619 Project,” which Riley adduces as evidence for his antithesis, is only implicitly against Wokeism. I’ve been amazed to find attacks on the weaponization of the Department of Justice against Donald Trump on the front page, not of The Wall Street Journal, but of The Militant, organ of the Castroist Socialist Workers Party. (Here’s the latest; friends will attest that it’s not the first such article I’ve forwarded to them.) My mental jury’s still deliberating.

Exhibit A in my study is Marxist educator George Novack (1905-1992) under whose influence by God’s grace I did not fall. Alan Wald, whom I mentioned the other day, befriended Novack and began corresponding with him in the late 1960s and would visit him in New York City—my city—and in the end eulogize him warmly and at length, facts I learned only yesterday. (This originally appeared in the magazine In Defense of Marxism in 1992 and anthologized in 2016 here.) I now know exactly where he lived in his last years and how easy it would have been for me to look him up.

Poster announcing symposium for Alan M. Wald on the occasion of his retirement from UMichigan in 2013. https://events.umich.edu/event/12956

The life of Marxist revolutionaries, especially intellectuals, has a negative theological or atheological dimension. They are almost never unsocialized “village atheists,” but unbelief is ever in the background, or under the floorboards, of everything they think, even it only implicit or taken for granted. (It’s impolite, even beneath their dignity, to argue against religion.) In the case of the Novack, the philosophical writer, however, it had to surface sooner or later. I will foreground the fundamental question of worldview, which foregrounding will have a Christian-apologetical purpose.

Worldview is a topic to which Wald adverts every so often, but so far I haven’t caught him exploring it philosophically. That’s not his patch. He suggests that what marks off people he admires from the rest is commitment to remaking the world. Not to improving what they can, but to overhaul the whole.

But that God’s patch (Revelation 21:1).

“Rigged,” Mollie Hemingway’s patriotic service, on the anniversary of The Big Steal

In “If the problem be electoral, how can the solution be? Thoughts on our parlous state,” published January 7th of this year, the day after the political equivalent of a Democrat Party Reichstag Fire evicted The Big Steal from the headlines, I asked how we could wait patiently for another election cycle. What they did a year ago today, and during the years leading up to November 3, 2020, they could do again, effectively perverting this country into a one-party dictatorship.

In the months since, I’ve wondered whether the truth about the war against Trump’s 80 million-strong base (Trump himself is but one man), a war I had followed daily for over five years, could ever vacuum up the corrupt media’s smokescreen.

Without election integrity, which was eviscerated last year, a citizenry in a nominal republic has the potential to become either an aggregate of slaves or an army of soldiers in a kinetic civil war.

Where could people open to the truth find a patient, comprehensive rebuttal of academedia’s bodyguard of liars? How can people who wouldn’t be caught dead searching conservative websites consider what is, for them, the unthinkable?

We now have the answer: they can read Mollie Hemingway’s Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections (Regnery, October 12, 2021). Her patriotic service justifies a qualified hope that, “Yes, truth can win out.” You can read Rigged, and you can put it in their hands.

Hemingway, the eloquent, soft-spoken conservative author, columnist and commentator, a senior editor at The Federalist and Fox News contributor, will not scare off your liberal relatives. In her book, she painstakingly, but never boringly, explores how Democrat operatives, led by corrupt officials and financed by the “Big Money” they excoriated not many years ago, exploited the pandemic to make mail-in ballots the rule, not the exception thereto, and to enact voting “reforms” that make a mockery of “one person, one vote.”

Then she documents the corruption that predictably followed.

Continue reading ““Rigged,” Mollie Hemingway’s patriotic service, on the anniversary of The Big Steal”

If the problem be electoral, how can the solution be? Thoughts on our parlous state.

Trump supporters, who vastly outnumbered security, could have “stormed” the Capitol building, but didn’t. They had the means and opportunity, but no motive. January 6, 2021

President Trump brushed aside the notion of running again in four years. If the theft of the 2020 general election stands, why wouldn’t the thieves do it again?

In Georgia, the crooked machines that shifted votes away from him eight weeks ago shifted them yesterday to give Democrats control of the Senate. Right under our noses. Should we expect different effects from similar causes four years from now?

Trade Secretary Peter Navarro summarized with great clarity evidence that widespread, results-altering electoral and voter fraud occurred. It’s enough to show probable cause to investigate apparent interstate criminal conspiracy (if there’s ever been such a thing). Navarro’s case remains as unrefuted as it is unexamined.

Trump said “You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.” And when theft is proven, shouldn’t something analogous to asset forfeiture apply? Traces of performance-enhancing drugs cost athletes who ingest them their medals. Drug kingpins lose their homes and cars.

Should political actors who rip off 74 million voters occupy their ill-gotten offices?

Trump’s attorney Rudolph Giuliani tirelessly marshaled the evidence before cameras, at risk to his stellar reputation, but it’s been systematically ignored.

Not only by scores of jurists, who are simply not interested in it and who concoct one erudite rationale after another to evade its force.

Not only by a militant leftist media who for years fantasized about a non-existent Russia-Trump conspiracy, while ignoring massive evidence of Chinese Communist Party-Biden Family collusion .

But some of Trump’s so-called friends have outdone jurists and pundits by stabbing him in the back.

Martin Luther King memorably lamented the silence of friends, but the fair-weather variety that bedevil Trump are profiles in cowardice.

Jeff Sessions’s pathetic recusal led the way. It was followed by Mitt Romney’s impeachment vote and Brian Kemp’s refusal to call the Georgia legislature into session to weigh evidence of fraud there.

State legislatures certified electors chosen in violation of their own state laws, thereby violating the U.S. Constitution. They’re complicit in the theft.

Some of them, however, realizing and regretting their error, petitioned VP Mike Pence, President of the Senate, whose office it is to open the envelope and accept or object to the votes, to send the matter back to them for ten days. That’s all Pence had to do. He didn’t have to assume the role of One-man Decider of the Election.

Instead, he waxed sanctimoniously, and irrelevantly, about his alleged inability to object to electors chosen unconstitutionally. His blather about counting all, but only, legal votes turned out to be just that.

And now Pence is being courted to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump with all deliberate speed.

The selective concern about “the sanctity of the American democratic process,”—in short supply the past two months but violated as though on cue by Antifa’s agents provocateurs posing as Trump supporters—would be laughable for its hypocrisy were it not also so insidious.

The half million peaceable assemblers at the Ellipse on January 6th represented Trump’s 74 million voters. They’re now being smeared as “insurrectionists” by the moral equivalent of Der Stürmer, a Nazi rag that didn’t merely lie—as Pravda and Izvestia did daily under Stalin—but also slandered and defamed millions of innocent people.

What is to be done?, Lenin famously asked. Should workers fight only to improve their economic well-being? Or also to rid the country of Czarist tyranny? (Yes, he replaced it with another.)

Should we naively continue run candidates in electoral systems that have no integrity ? How has that worked out?

Yes, we prefer deliberation to violence. But the other side is interested in vengeance—state-directed or otherwise—not deliberation over regular order.

And vengeance not only against Trump, but also his supporters who are being slandered indiscriminately and collectively in the public mind for the misdeeds of a few.

Regarding election integrity, there’s a case to be made for 100% paper ballots. Nothing online. I suggest the same goes for what is to be done about the coup.

In the wake of the Secure the Steal movement’s success, ought we not conclude that the Constitution is a dead letter, a tissue of instructions for ceremonies which the mendacious and vindictive perform to lend their crimes an air of legitimacy?

And people ask me why I ever called myself an anarchocapitalist.

As the Deep State decides on their course of violence against the people who voted for Trump, its corporate, media, and congressional puppets decry violence (which they call “mostly peaceful” when BLM and Antifa perpetrate it).

Patriotic Americans outnumber their enemies, but are not yet strategically positioned to crush the latter. How might they get there?

Again, ask yourself, family members, and friends what is to be done, but before you answer, keep the conversation offline.

Trump has been compared to Lincoln. What we may need at this hour, however, is a George Washington.

Donald Trump gestures as he speaks in front of a painting of George Washington during a Pledge to America’s Workers event in the East Room of the White House on July 19, 2018.

Diana West: The Conscience of a Conservative

With journalistic skills honed over decades, skepticism toward received opinion, a graceful literary style, and considerable courage, Diana West has been contributing to the preservation of America’s heritage of liberty against its enemies, foreign and domestic. She’s been doing this by defending American philosophy, culture, and history—and common sense—in essays, books and, lately, videos.

Her contribution, unfortunately, is not as widely known as its high literary quality would lead one to predict. The Left have mainly ignored her, but false friends on the Right have vilified her, arrogating to themselves the right to determine how far the defense of liberty may go and whose sacred cows may not be blasphemed along the way.

In the words of ex-Communist journalist and novelist Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), West detects a red thread of continuity between his era and ours:

. . . [R]ecounting his experience as a German Communist in the 1930s, [Arthur] Koestler is nonetheless describing the post-Communist, postmodern, post-9/11 American condition. It is the sinister overhaul of language and thought . . . that he personally engaged in, and that was and is the primary tool of Marxist and Islamic subversion. “Not only our thinking, but also our vocabulary was reconditioned,” he explains. “Certain words were taboo.” Certain other words became telltales by which to identify dissenters or enemies. Literary, artistic, and musical tastes, he writes, were “similarly reconditioned” to support the renunciation of independent thought and logic necessary to submit to ideology.[1]

Sounds familiar? She calls for a “cultural reexamination” of the process by which Americans were force-fed one “blue pill” of lies after another and, for the most part, they swallowed them willingly, casting into outer darkness those who spit them out and sought the “red pill” of unpleasant truth.[2] Continue reading “Diana West: The Conscience of a Conservative”

“By any means necessary” revisited

That linguistic barbarism continues to spoil America’s discursive landscape. Once a mere hint of violence sporting the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability, it has evolved into a preferential option for “direct action” exercised by wide swaths of the populace, with its predictable vandalism, firebombing, assault on person and property, and usurpation of legitimate authority.

Below is this blog’s first post, dated October 3, 2018. Reference to the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh dates it only slightly (in my opinion; you may disagree). The logic of the deranged behavior that was on display two autumns ago is now being played out to its dystopian conclusion. I continue to hope that a majority of Americans will pull the country back from the brink this coming November 3rd—indeed, that they will be permitted to pull it back—but events have not allayed my fear that “we are probably living through the run-up to a civil war.”—Anthony Flood

“By any means necessary”: pragmatism on stilts

First published October 3, 2018

Malcolm X’s contribution to the erosion of American political rhetorical standards lives on, most recently in President Trump’s speech at a rally in Tennessee. But at least he was characterizing the expediency of his enemies.

In 1963 Communist-sympathizer Jean-Paul Sartre penned the words that in English become “by any means necessary.”

Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Ernesto Che Guevara, 1960, Cuba

Their African-American popularizer employed it to everlasting effect the following year. (He was assassinated the next.)

Conflating the necessary with the sufficient, it’s literally nonsense. “Any” doesn’t go with “necessary.”

There is, for example, more than one way to get to Times Square from Grand Central. One can walk a few blocks; or hop on the westbound M42 bus; or take the subway, either the shuttle (one stop) or the No. 7 (two). Each of them will do, but none is necessary.

The seductive power of the phrase overrides logic. “By the one means necessary” or “by any means sufficient” lacks punch. What the hackneyed phrase’s users mean is: “What I want is imperative, and whatever achieves it is permissible.” “Whatever it takes,” or “The end justifies the means,” which evacuates “justifies” of meaning.

Continue reading ““By any means necessary” revisited”