And therefore, we bear the burden of having made them desperate, by electing, overall, a really bad crop of national and state politicians. We did this by not asking them questions we should have, or just by believing the lies they told as we chose to believe them, or worse yet, we were too ignorant not to disbelieve them. There's no credit in any of this. The United States has gone from a highly imperfect functioning democracy to a highly imperfect dysfunctional kleptocracy. To some degree even worse, we've gone from a country that did not want kings, to putting kings and everything they stood for right back in power.
Part of how we did that is by not asking questions.
Normally I wouldn't start threads about elections so early, and indeed when this blog started off it didn't' deal with politics at all. But modern times inevitably crept in, and currently, as things are so desperate, there are posts on politics nearly every day. We are, moreover, at a real crossroads in the country's history. The Republican Party, a conservative party after the failure of the Progressive Movement to reform it early in the 20th Century, and a Buckley Conservative Party since Ronald Reagan, has collapsed nearly completely, with only remnants remaining, the way the Whigs did in an earlier era. A party that calls itself Republican and claims to be Progressive exist, but it's neither. It's a fascisic Protestant Francoist party that holds nothing in common with any prior Republican expression. The Democratic Party is reforming before our eyes, and in spite of what Republicans say, after the killings in Minneapolis it's rocketing towards the center, picking up the dropped pieces of prior Republican platforms.
Other parties, of course, exist, but for the most part, their natural members cling to some other party in order to get elected. A Socialist New Yorker ran as a Democrat in New York as he had to. Independants from New England in Congress have done the same. The Republican Party, essentially captured by Know Nothings, are fighting with remnant conservatives, like Thomas Massie, or outright Libertarians, like Rand Paul, who remain in their ranks. More locally, where more, and often horrified old school Republicans remain, they find themselves in constant rearguard action's against Francoist.
And this is our fault. We didn't ask the questions.
And the Press didn't do a very good job either, at least on a local level.
I've routinely followed regional elections for years. As soon as elections get rolling, the Press pretends to be asking the tough questions, and doesn't. Indeed, I know of one case in which a really worthy politician was attacked by a (successful) opponent and only one news outlet followed up on what should have been seen as an obvious lie.
Perhaps less excusable, every election cycle, at least locally, the press puts out questionnaires and then publish the results. I always look forward to reading them, only to find out the questions are utterly lame and the answers aren't followed up upon. It's as if"
Press: What is the most important issue facing Wyoming?
A. The important one.
Press: Okay, thank you for your answer.
Local debates are almost exactly the same, as in:
Press: Mr. Candidate, last year there was an effort to sell off public lands. Can you please tell us if you like kittens?
A. I like them sauteed.
Press: Okay, thank you.
I'm not exaggerating much.
As lame as the questions from the press are, politicians have taken up even avoiding showing up for debates. Republican candidates essentially say; "I love Donald Trump, and the Trumpiness of Trump, with all my heart and soul, and I don't have to talk to you left wing pressmen or the filthy dirty voters".
Well, generally, they can't avoid everyone all the time everywhere. The Press isn't going to do it, so you're going to have to. Indeed, this happened just this past week when Harriet Hageman got a blistering from questioners at a forum at Casper College, causing it to be shut down due to "decorum".
Show up. Ask the questions. Ignore party affiliation. Vote for people who aren't going to screw you.
This is flat out unacceptable and one more example of why everyone who worked at any point for the Trump Administration should be conscripted and sentenced to live outdoors on Diego Garcia for the rest of their lives.
I wasn't going to mark this date. This tragic event is only five years in our past, and therefore it is much too early, really, to be able to fully apprise it.
But attempt to apprise it we must do, and the coup that started on January 6, 2021 did not fail, it succeeded, and whether the fascistic/Francoist revolution it seeks to bring about will succeed or fail is not yet know.
The coup did not fail, as our justice system failed. Trump could easily have been in court within six months and sentenced within seven. Unfortunately, our criminal justice system moves as slowly as Baby Boomers at Walmart as its controlled by them, as is much of our society. This insurrectionist is now in charge.
But will he succeed?
Most Americans do not support the would be caudillo Donald Trump and most are not part of a muddled fascist/Franoist/New Apostolic Reformation movement, or even have its world view. But those who do are running the country right now, aided and abetted by people like opportunistic Marco Rubio and a compliant Supreme Court. The worst tests are yet to come. This year, 2026, is going to be absolutely awful, least we are spared by some sort of Divine Intervention (which I note seriously, not in jest).
Usually, however, people get exactly what they deserve in terms of politics. The roots of the populist revolution go back at least as far as 1973 and have been brewing for decades now. We cannot expect that the fruits of political neglect can be harvest and discarded overnight. We are paying for our errors, and stand to likely pay a heavier price yet.
But the country has come through such things before. The Revolution itself was one, the Civil War a second.
May God grant that we get through this quickly, and with as little damage to the world as possible.
Donald Trump, graduate of the Wharton School of Business, has no grasp of mathematics or history. He's become the poster boy for questioning the intellectual value of an Ivy League education.
And very clearly, one of the things he doesn't understand is shipbuilding and naval warfare.
Fantasy class warship, probably in the cruiser class, maybe, which the Trump administration plans on building as part of a "Gold Fleet", some naval marketing genius' terms for a vanity suck up project that will never get built, but which appeals to Trump's edge of death vanity. The artwork heavily resembles a Revell model box for one of their cheaper modells from the 1970s.
2025 is the 100th anniversary of the court marital of Billy Mitchell. Mitchell, a World War One aviator, accused the Navy Department and the War Department (which was more or less the Army Department) of “incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the National Defense.” He had more than one point, but his big point was that the biggest ship could be sunk by aircraft. The battleship Navy was horrified.
The British attack on the Italian port of Taranto in 1940 proved Mitchell quite right. Pearl Harbor proved him right beyond a shadow of a doubt. Mitchell was convicted in his court martial and went on to retirement the following year, but by 1941 he had been proven so right that he was lauded as a hero and the U.S. Army Air Corps named a bomber after him, the B-25 Mitchell.
Mitchell is still right, there's only one thing that's really changed. Aircraft have evolved.
They've evolved from mannered bombers and fighters to a new class of aircraft, the unmanned drone. This event has been anticipated since late World War Two, and by the 1950s the British already assumed that the day of unmanned aircraft was about to arrive. The predictions on the speed of the evolution of such craft were wildly off, but the Russo Ukrainian War proves the day is now here, and not just in the air, but on the sea. The Ukrainians have sunk or damaged about 24 Russian ships through the use of drones during the war and pretty much rendered Russia's Black Sea Fleet a nullity.
For decades now military theorist have wondered if the pride of the US Navy, the supercarrier, is actually obsolete. The speculation began as early as the 1970s when really good long range air to surface and surface to surface anti shipping missiles appeared on the scene. The viability of such missiles was proven during the Falklands War when Exocet missiles in Argentine hands sank the HMS Sheffield and the cargo ship Atlantic Conveyor and severely damaged the HMS Glamorgan. The Exocet went into production in 1975, and while still around, it's undoubtedly the case that it's improved over the last 50 years and there are other missiles around that are just as good or better. The U.S. Navy started worrying about such missiles just as soon as they were produced, but the Navy's large supercarriers have never had to encounter them.
That is, in part, because we have not fought a peer to peer conflict since World War Two. In spite of that, it's worth noting that the U.S. military has not exactly shown itself invincible in wars less than that. The North Koreans and Chinese, the former of which only had an army from around 1946 or so, and the latter of which had just come out of a largescale civil war and which chose to deploy, to no small degree, troops who were conscripted out of the losing side of that war, fought us and our UN allies to a standstill in Korea. Starting about a decade later we fought and ultimately were defeated by an Army that was quite primitive in comparison to our own, although a lot of that defeat was a morale issue. Since that time we've fought and beat Iraq twice, but we were never able to prevail in Afghanistan, in no small part due to a major strategic miscalculation by Donald Rumsfeld, and our current Oval Office occupant ended up surrendering to the Taliban.
Now, of course, there's been very little naval action in anything that I've mentioned, but that shouldn't really give us any comfort. What naval action that has occured since 1945 shows that long distance anti ship warfare had improved remarkably since 1945. The Argentines, not wanting to be exposed to it, didn't evey deploy an aircraft carrier it had during the Falklands War.
Now, of course, people are pointing out that the awkwardly named Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has the most combat ships in the world, although its not regarded as the most powerful. That would be the U.S. Navy. The U.S. Navy, with its supercarriers, holds that title, and it should. But it can't be ignored that Ukraine has proven that sinking ships is now pretty possible with air and sea drones.
That's where the future of naval warfare is, not with vanity "battleships".
Indeed, that was proven in 1941.
The Navy knows that, but senior military officers right now know that if they want to keep their jobs they have to feed the demented monkey in Trump's brain. And that brain isn't pegging out on the smarts meter by any means. Statements by Donald Trump show him to be in the full grasp of dementia and raise questions on whether he was every very sharp.
He's also incredibly vain.
And more than a little scared.
Being vain and scared, he's quite easy to manipulate. Given the chance to name something after himself, and believe that it will be around after his body is rotting in its grave, which will be quite soon, he'll take the bait. And hence the Trump Class of "battleship".
It'll never happen.
It takes at least two year to design a warship, and often multiples of that. And then it takes another two to five years to build it. Trump no doubt plans on being living at age 90, but he won't be, and his demented brain will be reduced to complete mush should he live that long. The Navy knows that, but the Navy likes to have money and ship projects bring in money. Every since World War Two the U.S. military has engaged in acquisitions of things it didn't need for one reason or another, and the Army has proven that even a simple project like designing an assault rifle can take so long that a person who entered the overall task early in his career can retire before its done.
And hence António de Oliveira Salazar.
Salazar was the Portuguese dictator who came into power in 1932 and who fell into ill health and suffered a stroke in 1968. The Portuguese government replaced him and he died 1970. But they never told him. He was simply given glowing reports on how well everything was going and assured he was still running the show.
I'm pretty convinced that's more or less what's going on with Trump right now.
The Navy is simply going to slow roll this project. Glowing reports are going to be given to the Demented Dear Leader. The entire project will go swimmingly. Meanwhile, others will report the same on the White House Ballroom. Neither will ever be built.
Indeed, already the palace intrigue is on. J.D. Vance is gathering allies. Mike Pence is scooping up Heritage Foundation defectors. Congressmen and Senators who are too tainted with the stench of MAGA, or who don't want to be there when Trump falls and takes MAGA out with it, are abandoning their offices to go on to new pursuits, readying themselves to reemerge cleansed from the inevitable bunker scenes that are already beginning to happen.
The Defense Department hosted a Christmas service at the Pentagon.
Now, if you are an Apostolic Christian, as the overwhelming majority of Christians around the world are, or if you are a member of a Protestant denomination that is closely based on the Catholic Church, or which even thinks that they are part of it, this service will come across very strangely. But, as I've noted before, this is a Protestant country and a Protestant county in which the strains of Puritanism are deep.
The services of the Apostolic Faiths, i.e., the Catholics and the Orthodox, go back to the very origins of Christianity. The Didache was written within a couple of decades of the Crucifiction and it shows Christians doing what Apostolic Christians do right now, which isn't a surprise to Apostolic Christians but which can come as a rude shock to Protestants. The writings of the Church Fathers do the same. If you read these text and remain a Protestant, while cutting a little slack for High Church Anglicans and conservative Lutherans, it's just a wilful decision to ignore the first 1,500 years of Christian practice.
But most people don't read those things and so they're going with what they learned as kids, or what they've sort of picked up, no matter how in error or ignorant it may be. John Calvin, who influenced the Puritans, was flat out demonstrably wrong (and frankly not a nice guy) but most people don't know that if they're in one of the churches influenced by him, and for that matter they don't even know who John Calvin was.
The Puritans, because they were religious dissenters from the Church of England, which had militantly broken off from the Catholic Church in order that King Henry VIII could pursue a string of hopefully fertile bedmates, was not only pretty ignorant, but obstinately so in many ways, as it had a history of fighting with the Established Church. The Church of Scotland was somewhat as well, particularly in its American form. All of these churches have declined enormously in Europe while Catholicism has increased, reclaiming lost ground, but in the US their descendants are pretty numerous and strong.
Most Protestants aren't "Evangelical Protestants", but Evangelical Protestantism is really easy for people who want to be Christians without a whole bunch of Christian theology, want to escape the personally difficult aspects of Christian theology, or who just know that there's truth in Christianity and don't know where to go. The do it yourselfism in them is pretty strong, and some, but not all, of them are pretty good at pointing out the sins of others while simply ignoring their own favorite ones. There's a host of ministers in this camp that are personally wealthy or who are married and divorced, and who have even engaged in affairs. Flat out ignoring the Christian injunction against divorce and remarriage is pretty much the rule in most Protestant communities and it obviously is in some Evangelical ones. Paula White is on her third husband, for example. Joyce Meyer on her second. Missouri pastor Rich Tidwell is a polygamist.
The point isn't to debate on all these topics, setting aside polygamy, Protestant denominations do not have, I think, the process of annulment, which can be controversial in the Catholic Church, and their ministers do not take vows of poverty, but rather the pick and chose nature of things is a problem, and it'll turn on Catholics and is already starting to.
The New Apostolic Reformation is an aggressive backer of Donald Trump and its openly a backer of Americanism. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, is clearly aligned with the movement, and it's pretty clear that Secretary of Defense Hegseth falls in this camp. Hegesth is practically the poster boy for ignorance in this category as he's festooned himself with tattoos that recall the Crusades while not realizing at all that Crusaders would have regarded him as a heretic. But there he is, all emblazoned with sayings and symbols that properly belong to the Apostolic faiths, while living in what they'd all regard as an irregular marriage.
The same week that the Pentagon service occured Chip Roy took a direct swing at Catholics.
A lot of good Americans give their money to Catholic charities thinking they're helping people, and it turns out they're a part of a vast leftist network that is being used to undermine our country.
Whether it's the open borders, Soros DAs, Arabella, or the 'Islamification' of Texas and this country—it's organized, and this is one example. Look at the Medicaid fraud up in Minneapolis. It was going to Somalis, and it was literally billions of dollars.
This administration is rooting it out; Congress needs to do more. That's why I called for a special select committee to follow the money of these radical groups. We need to do it.
Roy, who lives in Austin Texas, is a Baptist, something that isn't surprising both because the Baptist are a large Protestant religion in the United States and because Texas is part of the "Bible Belt" where the Southern Baptist are particularly strong.
The Baptists are not part of the New Apostolic Reformation as a rule and have a very large set of differing beliefs on different topics. The reason to note this, however, is that Roy's statement really brings out a certain strain of Protestant Anti Catholicism that's very deep in the country's history. Setting aside any one thing he's complaining about, a strain of it is that Catholic charities don't seem to care very much where people come from.
And that's because Catholics aren't not supposed to view the world that way.
For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. 2 Corinthians 10:3 They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven
Letter to Diognetus.
For many years, the really strong Protestant religions in the US were the "mainline" Protestant faiths, of which the Episcopal Church was the strongest. None of the Mainline Protestant Churches was friendly with the Apostolic Churches, but they ironically all had connections to it, with the Presbyterian Church having the fewest. In truth, in spite of the Black Legends of the Reformation they'd spread, they all worried about how they were viewed by the Catholic Church, accepting large elements of the Church's views as correct, and particularly worried about whether they had Apostolic Succession, strongly suspecting themselves that they did not. People have spoken much about the decline of Christianity in the West, but they've missed two elements of that story to a significant degree, one being that the Catholic church was persistently attacked by Protestant governments during and after the Reformation, and that this yielded to attacks by left wing secular governments thereafter. The Catholic Church nonetheless endured in spite of all of it, and its' rebounding from that assault. The Mainline Protestant Churches, however, are simply dying of their own accord.
All along there's been a strain of loosely organized Protestant churches that fall outside of the Mainline churches. The Mainline Protestant Churches did not worry much about them, but as time has gone on, and the impacts of the death of the Reformation and the cultural revolutions of the Baby Boomers have played out, those churches have grown and are particularly infused with the American Civil Religion, which many barely churched Americans are as well. The New Apostolic Reformation is just a sliver of that set of beliefs, but Apostolic Christians should be concerned. The Apostolic Faiths are growing in the US right now as people turn towards the truth, but this administration is infused with the NAR which leads to events like this. Recognizing the Christian origins of the United States is fine, and saying something prayerful at the Pentagon in this season is as well. But a performance such as this, combined with rumblings from somebody like Roy, should worry us. Christianity is not an American thing.
Or, perhaps, something else is going on.
The Apostolic Faiths are growing and converts from Protestantism are part of the reason why. The Mainline Protestant Churches are dying. Evangelicalism remains strong, but things like this show the marked contrast with the Ancient Faith. This may all be part of the death of the Reformation playing out before us.
There remains a danger in all of this, however. There are prominent Apostolic Christians in the National Conservative/Christian Nationalist camp. People like R. R. Reno, Rod Dreher and Kevin Roberts are founding members, and J. D. Vance is the most prominent politician who travels in that camp. The views that the backers of people like Mike Johnson and Pete Hegseth hold are not necessarily friendly towards Apostolic Christians at all. While people in the Reno/Dreher/Roberts camp may rejoice as the seeming defense of Christian values by the administration (and I'm not sure that at least Reno and Dreher, the latter of whom has declared Trump unstable, hold that view), it's making common cause with people who are either inherently hostile to the Apostolic Faiths or, in the case of Trump himself, deeply immoral. Being such a fellow traveler rarely works out and we'll be turned on.
As its copyrighted and I don't have permission to post it, I'll merely note it, it was of German women in their children, formerly of Lodz, waiting for a train in Berlin with hopes of going to the west. One of the children is sick, and died during the photo session.
The First President of the LDS issued a postwar statement on the draft to Utah's Congressional delegation.
Press reports have for some months indicated that a determined effort is in the making to establish in this country a compulsory universal military training designed to draw into military training and service the entire youth of the nation. We had hoped that mature reflection might lead the proponents of such a policy to abandon it. We have felt and still feel that such a policy would carry with it the gravest dangers to our Republic.
It now appears that the proponents of the policy have persuaded the Administration to adopt it, in what on its face is a modified form. We deeply regret this, because we dislike to find ourselves under the necessity of opposing any policy so sponsored. However, we are so persuaded of the rightfulness of our position, and we regard the policy so threatening to the true purposes for which this Government was set up, as set forth in the great Preamble to the Constitution, that we are constrained respectfully to invite your attention to the following considerations:
1. By taking our sons at the most impressionable age of their adolescence and putting them into army camps under rigorous military discipline, we shall seriously endanger their initiative thereby impairing one of the essential elements of American citizenship. While on its face the suggested plan might not seem to visualize the army camp training, yet there seems little doubt that our military leaders contemplate such a period, with similar recurring periods after the boys are placed in the reserves.
2. By taking our boys from their homes, we shall deprive them of parental guidance and control at this important period of their youth, and there is no substitute for the care and love of a mother for a young son.
3. We shall take them out of school and suffer their minds to be directed in other channels, so that very many of them after leaving the army, will never return to finish their schooling, thus over a few years materially reducing the literacy of the whole nation.
4. We shall give opportunity to teach our sons not only the way to kill but also, in too many cases, the desire to kill, thereby increasing lawlessness and disorder to the consequent upsetting of the stability of our national society. God said at Sinai, “Thou shalt not kill.”
5. We shall take them from the refining, ennobling, character-building atmosphere of the home, and place them under a drastic discipline in an environment that is hostile to most of the finer and nobler things of home and of life.
6. We shall make our sons the victims of systematized allurements to gamble, to drink, to smoke, to swear, to associate with lewd women, to be selfish, idle, irresponsible save under restraint of force, to be common, coarse, and vulgar, all contrary to and destructive of the American home.
7. We shall deprive our sons of any adequate religious training and activity during their training years, for the religious element of army life is both inadequate and ineffective.
8. We shall put them where they may be indoctrinated with a wholly un-American view of the aims and purposes of their individual lives, and of the life of the whole people and nation, which are founded on the ways of peace, whereas they will be taught to believe in the ways of war.
9. We shall take them away from all participation in the means and measures of production to the economic loss of the whole nation.
10. We shall lay them open to wholly erroneous ideas of their duties to themselves, to their family, and to society in the matter of independence, self-sufficiency, individual initiative, and what we have come to call American manhood.
11. We shall subject them to encouragement in a belief that they can always live off the labors of others through the government or otherwise.
12. We shall make possible their building into a military caste which from all human experience bodes ill for that equality and unity which must always characterize the citizenry of a republic.
13. By creating an immense standing army, we shall create to our liberties and free institutions a threat foreseen and condemned by the founders of the Republic, and by the people of this country from that time till now. Great standing armies have always been the tools of ambitious dictators to the destruction of freedom.
14. By the creation of a great war machine, we shall invite and tempt the waging of war against foreign countries, upon little or no provocation; for the possession of great military power always breeds thirst for domination, for empire, and for a rule by might not right.
15. By building a huge armed establishment, we shall belie our protestations of peace and peaceful intent and force other nations to a like course of militarism, so placing upon the peoples of the earth crushing burdens of taxation that with their present tax load will hardly be bearable, and that will gravely threaten our social, economic, and governmental systems.
16. We shall make of the whole earth one great military camp whose separate armies, headed by war-minded officers, will never rest till they are at one another’s throats in what will be the most terrible contest the world has ever seen.
17. All the advantages for the protection of the country offered by a standing army may be obtained by the National Guard system which has proved so effective in the past and which is unattended by the evils of entire mobilization.
Responsive to the ancient wisdom, ‘Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it,’ obedient to the divine message that heralded the birth of Jesus the Christ, the Savior and Redeemer of the world, ‘. . . on earth peace, good will toward men,’ and knowing that our Constitution and the Government set up under it were inspired of God and should be preserved to the blessing not only of our own citizenry but, as an example, to the blessing of all the world, we have the honor respectfully to urge that you do your utmost to defeat any plan designed to bring about the compulsory military service of our citizenry. Should it be urged that our complete armament is necessary for our safety, it may be confidently replied that a proper foreign policy, implemented by an effective diplomacy, can avert the dangers that are feared. What this country needs and what the world needs, is a will for peace, not war. God will help our efforts to bring this about.
Respectfully submitted, GEO. ALBERT SMITH, J. REUBEN CLARK, JR., DAVID O. MCKAY, First Presidency.
I actually ran across this on Reddit, where it has been posted by an unhappy former Mormon. It might be noted, of course, that at that age a large number of Mormons go on missions, which is an effort to consolidate them in their faith, so there was no doubt some reason for Mormon's to be concerned. While I've heard it claimed that there's no pressure for them to do so, as a demographic, by my observation, they tend to marry young as well, which relates to one of the things noted in the letter, maybe more than one.
Still, the points made are interesting, and not necessarily invalid. Indeed, almost every point raised in this letter is correct.
There is actually a lot to unpack here, and my own views on this have changed back and forth over the years. In 1945, when this letter was written, there had only been a single instance of conscription into the Federal Army during peacetime in U.S. history, and that came right before World War Two. There was a history of mandatory militia service, but that had fallen by the wayside after the Civil War.
Also of note, the National Guard, in peacetime, still did not receive Federal basic training in 1945. Entry level soldiers were trained by their units by older NCO's delegated that task. Given this, the nature of the training was always local, but it obviously varied in other ways depending upon who was delivering it. In the case of this letter, the author could be assured that enlisting young men would have been trained by older soldiers of a like mind, with therefore much of the societal dangers noted avoided. I'm not sure when the training system actually changed, but I suspect it was by the very late 1940s or certainly by the 1950s. By the time I was in the Guard the Guard was incredibly integrated into the Regular Army, which is even more the case today. Enlisting men received regular Army basic and advanced training, and were in the Army when they received it.
When I was younger, I held the view that conscription was a bad thing, save in times of war, as it forced a person to serve against their will. That's a less developed point than the set of points noted above, but there is a point to it. Having said that, what I don't think I appreciated earlier is the dangers of a large standing Army, which is why the US had a militia system for defense in the first place. We're seeing a lot of those dangers come into fruition now. That's not directly related to conscription, it might be noted, but it somewhat is as we have a large, all volunteer, armed forces, which inevitably leads to a sort of military class. Armed forces with conscripts are much less likely do to that, and therefore they make a much more democratic force that's much less likely to act as praetorian guards for a would be dictator.
Additionally, as I've grown older I've noted that there's a distinct difference between people who served when asked, and those who avoided it. Our narcissist in chief in Washington D.C., who avoided serving due to shin splits, is a good example. Donald Trump would have benefited enormously from two years as an enlisted man in the military. But it's not just him, I've noted this in a lot of men who found a way not to serve. Their characters would have been better off if they had.
Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita was found guilty of war crimes in a Manila court and sentenced to death, resulting in the legal principle set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1946 of command responsibility in which a commander can be held accountable before the law for the crimes committed by his troops even if he did not order them.
Hmmm. . . wonder how that might work out today?
Tomoyuki Yamashita. . . who would like to have a word with Pete Hegseth.
The State Department announced plans to resettle 6,600,000 Germans from Eastern Europe in the US and Soviet occupied zones of Germany within eight months.
Ge. Anton Dostler, age 54, was executed for following a trial which convicted him of authorizing the execution of 15 U.S. soldiers on a commando type operation. They were in uniform, and clearly combatants entitled to protection under the Geneva Convention.
Odd, eh, that there was a time when the US cared about things like that?
The Ezra Klein show recently ran two really interesting vlog episodes on why the Democratic Party is in the dumpster, even as the Republican Party makes the entire country a raging dumpster fire. They're instructive, but in the case of the first one, not for the reason the guest likely hoped for.
It wasn't all that long ago, we should note, that political scientists had declared that the GOP doomed to demographic extinction. It was, and is, a small tent party. The party needed to reach out, it was told, and bring in all the people in the Democratic camp. Long time readers here, of which there are likely very few, will recall that I predicated that some of the demographic analysis was flat out wrong, and that Hispanics in particular would start moving into the Republican Party.
I was right.
Now we live in the opposite world. People hate the Republican Party but they hate the Democratic Party more. Really a new party is needed, one that doesn't see global warming as a fib but which opposed abortion, for example, would have a lot of appeal. But that's a post for some other time.
Let's look at what the experts have to say. First, as it was first in time, is the interview with Suzanne Mettler, a political scientist at Cornell and co-author of the new book “Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy"
The interview is here.
I could tell in listening to it that Klein thinks the book is wrong, and while I haven't read it, I know it is, if it espouses the same views that Mettler did in her interview. She looks at everything economically and that's about it. Social issues don't mean anything.
Well, I lived through this and saw a Wyoming that had a large, but minority, Democratic Party almost completely die. Most of the major active Democrats in the party started to move to the Republican Party during the Clinton Administration and that trickle became a flood. All sorts of respected "traditional" elder Republicans in Wyoming were once Democrats. They left as it increasingly became impossible to be a centrist or conservative Democrat. There's no room for a pro life Democrat, for instance, in the party anymore. Once homosexual marriages, transgenderism, and showing up at rallies with blue hair became the norm, the normal largely dropped out and won't come back.
That's what killed the Democrats in the West.
This interview with Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, is much better as Abbot is realistic and not hopelessly clueless, as Mettler seems to be:
Abbot actually admits that he isn't sure if the Democrats can come back from political exile in rural areas, but the examples he gives of people running from the outside are excellent. Nebraska equivalent of Wyoming's John Barrasso, Deb Fischer, provides an interesting example as she nearly went down in defeat to independent Dan Osborn.
Osborn's race is really instructive as he wasn't a Democrat, but called bullshit on a lot of Fischer's politics. Osborn himself is a working man, and he's pretty conservative.
And there's the real lesson.
Democrats right now can't get any traction in rural areas as frankly nobody can stand to vote for anyone they are putting up, most of the time, and then when they do put up a good candidate, the party's platform kills them. The Democratic Party became, quite frankly, the Transgendered Vegan Party, and that's going nowhere. It not only became that, it can't get away from it. Look at any protest of Trump's policies that's a public one, and you'll see the usual suspects. If there isn't a hugely overweight middle aged woman with blue hair, you just aren't looking hard enough.
Indeed, this has become so much the case that that left wing protests that are popular now are sometimes all Republican. In Natrona County the recent Radiant Energy No Nuke protests were lead by Republicans including a Wyoming Freedom Caucus member of the legislature. Chuck Gray came up and lead his support, sounding like he was Chuck Gray from Greenpeace. If Democrats can't own that issue . . . .
There seems to be a little waking up, but only a little. Public lands is what did it.
Back in the 1980s, when I switched from the Republican Party into the Democratic Party (I left the Dems with the great flood of us who couldn't hack the weirdness), public lands and attention to environmental issues is what did it. People worship Ronald Reagan now, but James Watt, his Secretary of the Interior, was an Evangelical Christian zealot in favor of ravaging the land now, as he was certain that the Second Coming was going to be very soon. That land ravaging instinct remains very strong in the GOP and recently came out in spades.
Wyoming Democrat Karlee Provenza picked right up on that and came out in front. The Democrats need to do more of that. Land issues are near and ear to Wyomingites and the Republicans are very vulnerable on them. That issue alone might, if really exploited, bring the Democrats back if their campaigns were really strategic.
Some of that strategy has to be getting really personal. Sure, Hageman is for turning public lands over for sale. . she's from a "fourth generation" ranching family, and the ranchers always believe they'll get the land, even though they won't. Same for Lummis Sure, Dr. John is for it, he's a Pennsylvanian not a Wyomingite. Did you every see him at your favorite fishing hole?
But one issue alone is a risky proposition. What they also need to do is dump the weirdness. Being lashed to transgenderism is a completely losing proposition. A Democratic candidate is going to be asked about it . . and could really make hay on it.
But only if they're willing to fight dirty, which the GOP definitely is. But they're not prepared for the same.
For instance, if a public lands Democrat was running for the House, and asked about this issue, we would expect the usually milk toast fall in line answer they normally give. But if they said, "oh gosh no, that's a mental illness and it needs to be treated that way, and women's sports and role in society needs to be protected. . . " it'd leave the Republicans flat footed.
They'd be on their heels, however, if it went further. If you added "and by the way, I constantly hear our GOP talk about being pro family. I don't know how pro family you can be if you are jacking up their cost of living and particularly their insurance rantes, but what about that family stuff? Hageman's been married for years and she ain't got any children. . nephews and nieces aren't the same thing, and Chuck Gray is 36 years old and unmarried. . .what's up with that? Why I think a decent man ought to marry a decent woman young and have some kids. . . and when that doesn't happen that's because they aren't focused on families, darn it".
Yeah, that's nasty, but how do they reply? It is the case that Hageman and her husband have never had children. Maybe there's a medical reason, but maybe it was a focus on careers and using pharmaceuticals to avoid it. If so, that ain't very populist Republican. And Chuck Gray is 36 years old and unmarried. I know that he's a Mass attending Catholic, and I'm not accusing him of any intimate immorality, but I will note that by age 36 men are usually married, or in our current society, living with some female "partner". Gray doesn't appear to fit either of these which is odd, as it demonstrates something about his character, perhaps simply an unlikeable character, that's keeping it from occurring, unless he just doesn't want to get married, which is unlikely.
FWIW, as I'm a bit connected, I know that Gray dated women while living in Casper. Obviously those relationships didn't work out. I'm not claiming he's light in his loafers.
I will say, however, that once you get out there, there are die hard right wing Republicans in this state who are subject to some unwelcome attention on their personal lives. Is that fair? Well, if you are calling for suppressing certain groups, and you are part of them, you owe people an explanation.
Which gets back to the inevitable question that comes up now, "what about gay marriage". Again, it's easy for a Republican to say "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman". A Democratic coming back with "so do I, and I believe that union arises once. . . what do you think about that Dr. John. . . and is that why you abandoned your original faith?".
Nasty. But Dr. John wouldn't have a very good answer for it.
Abortion is always going to come up. Abortion is the issue that ultimately drove a lot of us out of the Democratic Party, including me. The Democrats should simply abandon a position on it and let candidates stake out their own ground. There remain a few pro life Democrats out there, and to be one shouldn't be an anathema.
And, indeed, if that was allowed, it allows uncomfortable questions to be asked. Republicans claim to be pro life, but now their massively in favor of IVF, which kills most of the embrioes that it creates. Current Democrats can't really ask about that without hypocrisy. A pro life Democrat could.
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