I was skeptical that there would be very many of these, but in fact there are. I should have known it.
Not firings. No, Federal (and State) employees who voted for Trump, or in Wyoming for members of the Freedom Caucus.
They were always voting to fire themselves. Did they not realize it?
Well, The naiveite would be amusing, but for it being so tragic and short sighted. Somehow these people believed that the merits of their work would save them from this fate.
Why?
It's not about the quality of their work. They're MAGA cannon fodder.
GoldieSk8s @GoldieSk8sReplying to @realdogeusa
Trump voter here. Mass firing probationary employees makes no sense. Forest Service, 26 yr old exemplary 2-year veteran 'probationary' employee GIS tech let go with no warning today. Along with a timber cutter, the lowest paid, most profitable employee they have. This is stupid.
GoldieSk8s@GoldieSk8s
·
Feb 13
@realDonaldTrump
seriously, why the low hanging fruit? An EXEMPLARY 26 yr old GIS tech with the Forest Service for 2 years, intern converted to full time, one month shy of being off probation, fired on a Zoom call no warning, sent home in tears. Now I'm questioning my vote.
GoldieSk8s@GoldieSk8s
·
Replying to @elonmusk and @DOGE
You are losing some of your strongest supporters by attacking the low-hanging fruit (me, my family). 26 yo hardworking 2 yr employee of USFS let go with no warning on Zoom. My hard-working son witnessed this, and is disgusted & I am embarrassed. This is NOT how you save America.
GoldieSk8s@GoldieSk8s
·Feb 13
@elonmusk
going after the low hanging fruit? An exemplary 26 yr old GIS tech with the Forest Service for 2 years as an intern converted to full time, only one month shy of being off probation, fired on a Zoom call no warning, sent home in tears. Now I'm questioning my vote.
GoldieSk8s@GoldieSk8s
·
Feb 13
@DOGE
going after the low hanging fruit? An exemplary 26 yr old GIS tech with the Forest Service for 2 years as an intern converted to full time, only one month shy of being off probation, fired on a Zoom call no warning, sent home in tears. Now I'm questioning my vote.
GoldieSk8s@GoldieSk8s
·
Feb 13
Replying to @Bwahahahafunny and @adgirlMM
Son told me of a 26 yr old exemplary GIS tech at FS who was 2 yra into 'probationary' let go on a Zoom call. He was very depressed about it. This is not the way, taking out people regardless of performance. I don't understand why it has to be one extreme or the other.
GoldieSk8s@GoldieSk8s
·
Feb 13
Replying to @MarioNawfal
Seriously, low hanging fruit? EXEMPLARY 26 yr old GIS tech with the Forest Service for 2 years, intern to full time, one month shy of being off probation, fired on Zoom, no warning, sent home in tears. Not classy. Now I'm questioning MY vote.
A friend and I were discussing the current state of affairs and the Donald Trump assault/Project 2025's aggault/Wyoming Freedom Caucus on the government. We both are pretty conservatives fellows. We both served in the Army. We both are lawyers. Both of our fathers were Korean War veterans.
We're both horrified.
In part we're horrified as it clear that a huge portion of Trump's base absolutely hates their own government. Just hates it.
In the discussion, something occurred to me.
The world the MAGA/Populist/Project 2025 people wish for is one they've never seen nor experienced. A lot of them, quite frankly, don't have the capacity to grasp what it was like.
More than a few of them don't have the capacity to live in a world like that either.
No American born before 1932 lived in the world these people imagine as perfect. That means, in my case, as a member of Generation Jones, and even more so for the Baby Boom Generation, the last people they know who experienced it was their grandparents.
Or more likely, their great grandparents.
And our grandparents are all dead.
There's no living memory of it at all.
Nobody has one, at all.
The first President I voted for, as noted here, was Ronald Reagan in the 1984 Presidential election. I thinking of it, the first Presidential election my father could have voted in, when the voatin gage was 21, would have been the 1952 Presidential election. The first Presidential election I can remember, although only vaguely, is the 1968 Presidential election, when I was five years old. If that held true for my father, the first one he would have remembered would have been the 1936 Presidential election, at which time FDR was already well into establishing the government that Musk and Trump are destroying.
It was the Great Depression that brought the government into people's lives in a major way, although that it was going to happen was foreshadowed by the Progressive Era. Theodore Roosevelt was really the first "imperial President" who was willing to broadly act with executive orders. Franklin Roosevelt expanded the government enormously, however, in reaction to the extreme economic distress. That gave us the government we have today, but World War Two and the Cold War expanded it.
FDR, of court, brought big government in, and with World War Two proving that it was necessary to retain it, and the Cold War building on that, we've had it ever since. But we might be able to state that modern American government goes all the way back to 1900, before Theodore Roosevelt really started to bring in the progressives and the concept that the government was supposed to make things safe and fair for average people.
The generation that had lived through the Great Depression and the war were grateful for the larger Federal role and accepted it. It wasn't until the late 1960s that things began to be questioned. Even by then most Americans had no real memory of a day when the Federal Government was only active nationwide to a limited extent.
Nobody has that memory now.
What will this all mean?
Well, assuming that Must/Trump pulls it off, starting here in a few months, a real schock. And the best evidence is, so far, that Musk/Trump will have enormously wrecked the Federal Government in that time period, no matter what happens with Trump himself (and there are growing signs that Trump isn't really going to be around that long).
And the shock that will ensue will be in everything from what amounts to minor irritations to body bags.
Wyoming is going to have to pay for its own forest fires, and fight them on their own for one thing, snarky comments from Cowboy State Daily imported columnist aside. The State's going to have to pay for its own highways as well, which it can't afford. Things will just burn, and the highways decay.
And we'll be at the tender mercy of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which seemingly hates state government as well. Municipal services are really going to take a hit, to include police and fire fighting.
Education, which the WFC basically opposes, as students might learn the world is older than 5,000 years and God might not be limited to the restrictions people who can't imagine a world older than that would demand to be placed on, will be gutted.
Benefits provided to all kids of people through the Federal Government, from Veterans benefits to Medicaid, are in real danger.
A Federal and state government that makes sure your food, water, and living conditions are safe, won't be there.
Robber Barons, however, will be there once again, for the first time in well over a century.
The truth is, most people won't like living in a United States that's a third world nation. But the rich will, as the rich have always profited in the third world. And that, not some sort of rugged paradise, is where we're headed.
Calvinist believers were psychologically isolated. Their distance from God could only be precariously bridged, and their inner tensions only partially relieved, by unstinting, purposeful labor.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism
As part of that, the National Conservatives and the populists seem to outright hate government employees. That's already come up in of comments about them, one being how they'll go into "more productive" work. This group has a very Protectant Work Ethic view of life, in which your Calvinist purpose is to prove your worth by working harder and longer and for less than the value of your work, and never retire.
Many street level conservatives have hated Federal employees for years. I've heard them complain about how they're all lazy as they didn't do the correct Protestant thing and choose to go into the rough and tumble of the free market, by which they mean the corporate controlled market.
This is sometimes stated by people who actually depend on the government in spades themselves, and can't recognize it. For instance, if you are truck driver, you are living on the government dole, Mr. Knight of the Road. Fortunately, in this instance, truckers will soon be out of business as highway subsidies will end and railroads will take back over, which is a good thing.
More than one of the NC/Populist crowd who holds this view also abhor retirement. The comments are out there, people just refuse to recognize it. The push in this crowd, short term, is to raise retirement age to 69, but the real push will be just to do away with Social Security in the end. That neatly solves the Social Security crisis.
So, anyhow, like driving on Interstates?
Get used to your state funding them, and they won't.
Like safe air travel?
Notice how many air disasters there have already been since Trump took over, they're likely not his fault, but you probably ought to get used to that too.
Miss polluted air and water?
Well, it'll be back.
Come to expect the Federal government to be there if you are black, or Catholic, and can't get hired?
Well, lower your expectations.
Looking forward to retirement?
Forget it.
Injured and need assistance?
Well, you have your family to turn to. Or the church.
Lose your job and need help?
Well, move in with your parents, or your children.
Miss the days when the Marine Corps was used to make sure American economic interests weren't harmed in Central America and around the world?
Well, you'll get to live out the nostalgia.
Like living in a country where the rich get richer, the poor get dead, and the middle class are on the verge of poverty?
The past election featured a lot of really dimwitted comments by those who decided to vote for Trump about making the price of food "go down".
Dimwitted.
The government has very little ability to make the price of anything whatsoever go down. There are a few options. For one, if an item is imported and taxed at the border, you can remove the tax.
That's the exact opposite of what the Genius with Really Good Genes proposes to do. That's going to raise prices.
Another is to impact the price of something the government actually controls, such as privatizing an industry or releasing a supply of something held by the government.
Neither of those are options right now.
Trump's really good brain has so far simply proposed to the Saudis that the produce a lot of oil. The Saudis are likely laughing.
If they did, that would drop the price of oil, which drops the price of everything else. It also makes US oil completely unviable economically as its very expensive to drill for. We already know this as a few years ago there was a glut of oil, which dropped its price and stopped US drilling dead in its tracks.
One of the things Trump promised his followers that he would do, which he can do to some limited extent, is deport aliens. Hopefully they're illegal aliens, but to a lot of his supporters, any alien will do, as long as the alien has brown skin.
Donald Musk and Ted Cruz, born respectively in South Africa and Canada, can stay, which is a real shame. I'd be okay with deporting both of them.
US agriculture depends heavily on illegal aliens from Mexico. It has for decades. It's a situation which never should have been allowed to develop, but it was because both Republicans and Democrats turned a blind eye to it. Now, the US is dependent on that migrant population.
Trump promises to deport all these people as quickly as possible. That means administering a massive shock to the farm economy, which means the prices of everything at the grocery store will go up, up, up. Trump will ignore that. Consumers won't be able to, and those who knew that this would occur ought to be plastering these on self check out lines:
It won't end there of course. The economic genius has fallen in love with tariffs, something that fell out of favor as they helped create the Great Depression, bring Hitler into power, and cause World War Two.
Trump really doesn't seem to be the smartest bulb in the bunch and apparently he skipped lessons in history. Part of the reason he cited for wanting to change the name of Denali to Mt. McKinley is that McKinley, who was President before income tax was legal, used tariffs to fund the rather small U.S. budget of the time.
What a boofador.
Trump tends to think like, and talk, like a gangster. As we discuss in an upcoming post, he may have in fact learned a lot of his "art of the deal" by having to deal with the mafia on New York construction projects. The mafia operates, in fact, a lot like Trump. They make big threats, and then hurt people, until a rival gang knuckles under or regular people give in.
The problem here, of course, is that countries aren't criminal gangs, usually (Russia sort of is), and they don't behave that way. Democratic nations particularly don't. Trump is getting the middle finger from Canada and Mexico right now, but the besotted American public hasn't noticed. If Trump imposes the tariffs he threatens to, Canada is threatening to flat out cease exporting into the US. What Canada has in spades, oil and lumber, it can sell elsewhere. We can't replace what we get from them.
That'll spike the price of oil massively. We can't offset the oil deficit that would result in as we're already, in spite of the moronic "drill baby drill" comments people make, drilling at capacity. That would easily add 1/3d to the price at the pumps, if not 3 times to it.
And the removal of lumber would simply end the construction industry.
Canada is also a major exporter of hydroelectric power into the US. If Canada starts taxing that, and it can, at a rate to offset tariffs, living in New England will be extremely expensive.
As for Mexico, go to the grocery store and see how many things are "grown in Mexico". With California in trouble due to Trump's immigration policies, and a retaliating Mexico you'll get to eat what can be produced locally.
Um, yum. Canned corn will still be there.
It'd be tempting to say "people will get what they deserve, but Trump didn't even take 50% of the popular vote.
Let's say that again. He didn't take even 50% of the popular vote.
He took 49.8%, which is regarded as impressive in American politics, but in reality is not. 50.2 % of the American public voted against him.
Third parties may have put Trump in office.
In some systems, if a person doesn't take over 50% of the vote, there's a runoff election between the top two vote getters until somebody does. If that had been done, would Trump be President?
Anyhow, with about 50% voting for him, and 50% voting against him, Trump doesn't have a mandate to do squat. Quite a few of his insiders know that which is why they're rushing to put in their projects while they can, which is really only until the next mid term election when an enraged public turns on the GOP. It's going to happen.
In the meantime, the 50% of the country that didn't vote for Trump is going to endure rising prices, destroyed retirement accounts, a Federal government that won't help with local disasters, and the increasing slide of the country into a mean, childish, brutish, thugocracy.
The House Un-American Activities Committee was disbanded by the U.S. House of Representatives.
It's roots went back to 1918 and it had investigated a wide range of Communist activities in the US dating back to that time. Often missed, quite a few figures that the committee investigated unsuccessfully prior to World War Two would be again after the war. Many of those whom it suspected of Communist activity would, in fact, prove to have done just that, in spite of the reputation of the committee being tarnished during the McCarthy Era.
It's demise after the Watergate and the Vietnam War was inevitable, but it had a much better track record than is popularly recalled.
Henry Kissinger announced that the Soviet Union was rescinding its agreement to a trade deal with the United States following enactment of the Jackson–Vanik amendment to the Trade Act of 1974.
The Convention on Registration of Launched Objects into Outer Space was signed in New York. It requires the signatories to inform the United Nations of things that are launched into space.
U.S. Vice-President Rockefeller was appointed to head a committee to investigate domestic espionage by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Jackson-Vanik amendment was signed into law. The amendment was to the Trade Act of 1974 and impacted countries with non market (socialist) countries which restricted freedom of Jewish emigration and other human rights. It stated:
(a) Actions of nonmarket economy countries making them ineligible for normal trade relations, programs of credits, credit guarantees, or investment guarantees, or commercial agreements To assure the continued dedication of the United States to fundamental human rights, and notwithstanding any other provision of law, on or after January 3, 1975, products from any nonmarket economy country shall not be eligible to receive nondiscriminatory treatment (normal trade relations), such country shall not participate in any program of the Government of the United States which extends credits or credit guarantees or investment guarantees, directly or indirectly, and the President of the United States shall not conclude any commercial agreement with any such country, during the period beginning with the date on which the President determines that such country -
(1) denies its citizens the right or opportunity to emigrate;
(2) imposes more than a nominal tax on emigration or on the visas or other documents required for emigration, for any purpose or cause whatsoever; or
(3) imposes more than a nominal tax, levy, fine, fee, or other charge on any citizen as a consequence of the desire of such citizen to emigrate to the country of his choice,
and ending on the date on which the President determines that such country is no longer in violation of paragraph (1), (2), or (3).
The Soviet Union would retaliate by increasing military aid to North Vietnam.
250 square miles of the Grand Canyon National Monument was deeded back to the Havasupai people, while enlarging the part by 687,000 acres.
Danica McKellar, who became famous as child and then teenage actress for her role in The Wonder Years, was born. The series was set in the years 1968 to 1973 and ran from 1988 to 1993.
If you graduate from a U.S. college—two-year, four-year, or doctoral—you should automatically get a green card to stay.
Too often, talented grads are forced to leave and start billion-dollar companies in India or China instead of here.
That success and those jobs should be in America.
Donald Trump.
So. . . legal immigrants from Haiti who are universally regarded as hard working are bad "pet eaters" but anyone who gets a two year degree in anything can stay?
Oh that's really going to help all the angry Rust Belt Maga voters . . .
postscript
Elon Musk posted an angry twit on twitter about how he came in on the HB1 visa, which is supposed to make us think good things about it. I frankly wish the South African menace would relocate to his home country.
This is a link to a current article in the Washington Post. It has, of course, a paywall. You can find it discussed, however, on Twitter.
One of the things that has baffled me about Trump's support to some degree is that people have supported him who are very likely to get a massive dope slap over the next four years. It's clearly baffled the Democrats as well as they fairly clearly assumed that the economic underclass and those on benefits would support them, given traditional Republican hostility to their interests.
But it does make sense.
The same class discussed here is the one that was badly hurt by the exportation of jobs overseas and, frankly, high immigration rates. They have something to lose, to be sure, but more than anyone else, they hope for a return of a sort of imagined past. They can look back when they, or maybe their parents or grandparents, had good high paying jobs that didn't require any real education.
Both parties conspired against their interest. Allowing high immigration rates and basically encouraging manufacturing to move overseas could have been avoided. This class, together with the Rust Belt middle class, started signaling that it was enraged well over a decade ago and they threw their support behind, first, Bernie Sanders and then Donald Trump.
But will a government of the super wealthy really care about the plight of these people?
I don't really think that Trump thinks much beyond Trump. He cannot in any fashion be figured to be what Brands called Franklin Roosevelt, "a traitor to his class". Trump has frankly viewed some members of this demographic, namely those who serve in the military, as low class dupes.
So we now have a real test. Franklin Roosevelt, love him or hate him, like his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, proved to be massively loyal to the American middle and poor. Other 20th Century figures who mobilized populists proved to not be at all. What about Trump?
I'm not optimistic. Trump can't "lower" prices, save by accident if he causes a Depression. Populists in Congress are both hostile to spending and hostile to taxes, even though Americans are far from overtaxed by first world standards (and don't have the standard of living of other first world nations either). "Tea Party" types served up the Kool aide for populists that cutting spending and taxation would serve the interest of the average when it most likely stands just to make hit obscenely wealthy, like Elon Must, wealthier.
On the other hand, a thick massive dose of reality won't hurt certain classes. There are large demographics that basically have come to live on benefits while simultaneously complaining about the government. And an argument that some benefits were better coming from the private sector, which has an expectation of conduct, vs the government, which doesn't, can certainly be made. The "reduced and free lunch" programs locally are an example which I've cited before, which went from helping the poor with, essentially, property tax revenues, to some sort of right.
The Spanish confiscation (Desamortización española) law, authorizing the government of Spain to steal the property and lands of the Catholic Church, a popular enlightenment and Reformation despoliation that happened in many places, was repealed.
The barbarity had been in place since 1766.
Amongst other things, the law resulted in millions of acres of forest falling into private hands, being deforested, with the cost of reforestation exceeding the value of their sales. The confiscations of the 19th Century were one of the biggest environmental disasters in Iberian history.
The Supreme Court of Hungary confiscated the property of former president Mihály Károlyi for high treason. He had been convicted of negotiating with Italy in 1915 to keep the Italians out of World War One in exchange for Austrian territory, and for allowing a communist revolution to happen in 1919 by deserting his position.
The law of unintended consequences is a frightful thing.
It's possible, with things lining up the way they are, that Wyoming populists are about to get the biggest economic dope slap in the state's history.
Of course, the rest of us will get it too.
Wyomingites drank the populist kool aid and went back for more bucket sized additional helpings. Shoot, the average Wyoming voter was practically drunk on the stuff, having started imbibing about a decade ago. In going for Trump, they were voting for a return to an imaginary 1950s, sort of, combined with an imaginary 1930s, combined with an imaginary 1960s. Full employment for all "real" Americans, none of these Spanish speaking brown folks, a uniting of our economic extractive needs with a concept of science as we want it, not as it is, and the sexual morays of the mid 1970s, really.
Wyomingites don't really want to go back to the past as it really was, particularly on some of the things the way I feel they should be. Divorce isn't going to be hard to get, for example, and there's not going to be a criminal penalty for screwing around. No hyperinflation either, and no economic depressions.
Well. . .
The past so many envision, and there's some truth to the depictions, and what we imagine we want again, except with tattoos and only the laws we actually like and think we remember.
Donald Trump, fresh from his political recovery thanks to a Democratic Party that couldn't get a clue and the rise of malevolent populism is threatening to throw a 25% tariff on goods imported from Canada and Mexico and a 10% one on goods imported from China. Apparently we can p.o. the Chinese, but not as much as we can Mexico and Canada, safely.
Or maybe not p.o. the Chinese at all. During the campaign Trump talked about 60% tariffs on China. 10% on China combined with 25% on Mexico and Canada actually conveys a trading advantage on China, while raising the costs of prices at home.
The United States is the largest goods importer of goods in the world. China was the top supplier of goods imported into the United States, followed by Mexico ($454.8 billion), Canada ($436.6 billion), Japan ($148.1 billion), and Germany ($146.6 billion).
The United States is the world's second largest goods exporter in the world, behind only China. Canada is the largest purchaser of U.S. goods, around 17%.
That's probably about to change.
What do we import? Well, darned nearly everything, even food from Mexico.
What do we expert, darned near everything, including even petroleum.
We're going to be paying more for everything, and we're going to be exporting less of everything, as we get hit with retaliatory tariffs.
And that's assuming our neighbors are nice. They might not be. If I was the P.M. of Canada, I'd tell Americans living in Canada to pack up and go home. A lot of them are up there on business. And I'd end cooperation with the US on defense.
And oil? Well, the Saudis are seriously threatening to drop the price per barrel to $49.00, which would wipe out most U.S. production. Again, if I were the Canadians, and the Mexicans, both of which produce a lot of oil, I'd join them. They probably won't, but that's what I'd do.
So, Wyoming populists, even without retaliation, you are going to pay more for absolutely everything. We all are.
And a lot fewer of you are going to have jobs. Same for us all.
Well, at least you can be happy about deportation. . . and a lot of you will, at long last, be deporting yourselves to your own states. You'll have to. There won't be any work here.
When the Affordable Healthcare Act, commonly known as "Obamacare" was passed the then right wing of the Republican Party mounted a scare campaign that there would be "death panels" for healthcare.
Now, of course, the public is acclimated to the bill and the Republicans won't touch it.
Anyhow, the Wyoming legislature of the period passed a bill sponsored by an extremely conservative legislator to amend the constitution to add this text:
Wyoming Constitution Art. 1, § 38. Right of health care access
(a) Each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions. The parent, guardian or legal representative of any other natural person shall have the right to make health care decisions for that person.
(b) Any person may pay, and a health care provider may accept, direct payment for health care without imposition of penalties or fines for doing so.
(c) The legislature may determine reasonable and necessary restrictions on the rights granted under this section to protect the health and general welfare of the people or to accomplish the other purposes set forth in the Wyoming Constitution.
(d) The state of Wyoming shall act to preserve these rights from undue governmental infringement.
While it took her seemingly forever to do it, a district court judge in Teton County has ruled that Wyoming's recent ban on abortion violated this provision as abortion is "health care".
I'll be frank. I'm abhorred by abortion and its not health care. It's infanticide. But this gives us an example of the costs of paranoia. The amendment to the constitution was unnecessary. Completely unnecessary. And now its come back to defeat an issue that was a greater one to its sponsors.
Indeed, the sponsor of the amendment was quoted awhile back to the effect that he'd be horrified if his bill resulted in ongoing abortions. Well, it did. He should be horrified.
Now this goes on to the Wyoming Supreme Court where I'll guess it will be upheld. There will be an effort to repeal the amendment, but my guess is that it might very well fail. Legislators will attempt to draft bills around the decision, but they'll fail as well.
This stands to potentially be a disaster of epic proportions for the West, and the United States in general.
It also bears the huge risk of the application of the Law of Unintended Consequences. The odds of it prevailing are regarded as long, but the President could avoid the matter by withdrawing all the lands immediately and declaring them national monuments, or the U.S. Supreme Court, if it takes it up, could declare them to be unceded Indian lands.
Trump is “like a couch, bears the impression of the last person who sat on him.”
Ann Coulter, far right commentator, and former supporter of Donald Trump.
The entire time that Donald Trump has been in the news as a political figure, I've had a hard time figuring him out. I can tell what most political figures stand for, claim to stand for, and whether they are sincere or not.
And they are certainly not all sincere, as the gaggle of Republican office holders who remain from the pre Trump days now buying all in to Trump demonstrate.
But Trump's hard to figure.
I think I've come to the conclusion that Ann Coulter, whom I generally really dislike, is quite correct. As Coulter, no matter what you think of her, actually believes what she says, she grew disgusted with Trump really early, determining basically that he was a phony.
I can't tell if Trump is, or was, even smart.1
That's hard to judge at a distance. Two Republican Presidents who were really smart were often sort of assumed, while in office, not to be. One was Ronald Reagan, and the other was Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom had perfected the art of acting like they weren't all that sharp in order to use it to their advantage.
Eisenhower, as one of his biographers Carlo D'Este noted, had learned in the Army that it was often better to not appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed but to hang back, taking in the opinions, and trust, of others. By the Second World War it was obvious to all that he was in fact extremely intelligence, but part of the manifestation of that was that once he was President, he reengaged the act to his advantage. If you ever hear a recording of Eisenhower in a private speech, such as when Kennedy called him up to get advice on Indo China, it's a shock. He doesn't even seem like the same person.
That same shock has been noted by people who spoke to Reagan privately. Reagan perfected as an actor an "ah shucks" one of the crowd personality, but in reality he was extremely intelligent. People who came in to discuss a topic with him were often stunned that his grasp of it was vast, while the public, particularly the American left, wondered if he was a doddling old fool right from the onset. His mental decline by the end of his second term was obvious, but it wasn't there from the first. It served him well, however, as it was possible to believe on something like the Iran Contra Scandal that maybe he didn't really know it was happening.
Trump, on the other hand, seems to me to genuinely not have all that sharp of an intellect. That would explain some of the outrageous and stupid things he says, of which there are a plethora. Being a wealthy man his entire life, he's gotten through life being able to say stupid outrageous things and not draw rebuke from those around him, and in turn be encouraged in his own belief that he's really smart. Just as the political and economic class of current China tends to assume that everyone at the top is really smart, as they've been weeded out that way, Trump probably believes he's a genius as everyone has always told him he's a real smart guy.
If Trump doesn't have a great intellect, what he does have is another type of intelligence. He's a good salesman.
I wouldn't say a great salesman, as he's had a lot of business failures and his enterprises have been bankrupt more than once. But he is a good salesman. He knows how to sell. And like good salesmen, he can sell what he's selling. He doesn't have to believe it.
Over the years I've known several people who were good salesmen, some of whom were really intelligent. Their hallmark, however, was the ability to sell. They'd often move between one sales job and another. If you know them well enough, you'd sometimes find that they really didn't have all that great of interest in what they were selling, whether that was cars, houses, basketballs or whatever. Sometimes they personally had a massive disinterest in the product they were selling. It was the selling that they were interested in.
I strongly suspect Trump is like that.
At some point, for some reason, Trump decided to enter politics and his selling sense was that rank and file rust belt and lower middle class Americans were unhappy and disgruntled, with some very good reasons existing for that, so he sold them what basically amounted to snake oil in 2016. Once in, he needed people to run the government and they came in and did it, defeating his wildest and most dangerous ideas. People didn't buy the snake oil in sufficient quantities in 2020, so now he's turned to a new improved product.
Populist Outrage.
Populist Outrage is a dangerous cocktail in the US right now. It includes everything from the New Apostolic Movement to the Hawk Tuah Girl, all one brew. You literally have Mike Johnson quoting the Bible and some TikTok Tart describing spitting on male sex organs all in the same group. But snake oil cures what ails ya, and people are buying.
J. D. Vance, on the other hand, is the real deal.
I really haven't followed Vance until now and while his book Hillbilly Elegy sounded interesting when it was released, I didn't read it and I'm not going to. When it was released, what the general reaction was, wat that it was a well written elegy to his roots, and to the hillbilly class, now in desperate straits, from somebody who had rising up out of that class into affluence. That might in part be right, but like McMurtry's contemporarily set novels, they were not only reflecting the people he came out of, but were also a more intellectual reflection of their virtues in spite of their vices.
Vance is genuinely fairly remarkable. He came out of a real blue collar, hillbilly background and became very well educated. What was missed is that as he moved along, through education and influence, he became something other than what American liberals simply assume that education does. He didn't become an educated liberal, looking back on his drug fueled hillbilly ancestors, but rather became an educated National Conservative intellectual.
He's not a populist, and isn't even ballpark close to one.
For good or ill, he's more in the nature of a Beloocian. I.e, if you brought Hilaire Belloc back today, made him an American, and had him run for office, you'd get J.D. Vance.
That's why he comes across to many on the left, and not a few on the right, as "weird". All along he's been saying the things that National Conservatives and Illiberal Democrats have been saying. If he sounds like a Christian Nationalist, that's because all National Conservatives are Christian Nationalist, even if they aren't observant, whereas not all Christian Nationalist are National Conservatives by any means.
Vance has a lot more in common with Viktor Orbán,, Giorgia Meloni, Philippe Pétain, and Francisco Franco than he does with Trump or Mike Johnson.
More this than this.
We've dealt with National Conservatism here before, but we didn't address is how smart they've really been since 2020. Unlike the goofball hordes that go to Trump rallies wearing absurd red, white and blue costumes. It's actually fairly deep, and it early on set out it goals in print, as we've noted here:
Its founder in American politics, if not its overall founder, is Patrick Deneen and its backers can be found in the pages of R. R. Reno's First Things. Quite frankly, that puts it in the intellectual heavyweight category. It's issued a manifesto, and the signers of it include some well known conservative thinkers. Deneen has issued at least two well regarded books on the topic. Its central thesis is that liberalism has failed, in part due to its success, and is now consuming itself, and the entire culture of the West with it, by a frenzied orgy of libertine, mostly sexually focused, individualism. What needs to be done, it holds, is the preservation of democracy, but Illiberal Democracy, with the boundary lines of the culture externally enforced. It sets its manifesto out as follows:
1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people. We endorse a policy of rearmament by independent self-governing nations and of defensive alliances whose purpose is to deter imperialist aggression.
2. Rejection of Imperialism and Globalism. We support a system of free cooperation and competition among nation-states, working together through trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members. But we oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government, sows public alienation and distrust, and strengthens the influence of autocratic regimes. Accordingly, we reject imperialism in its various contemporary forms: We condemn the imperialism of China, Russia, and other authoritarian powers. But we also oppose the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image.
3. National Government. The independent nation-state is instituted to establish a more perfect union among the diverse communities, parties, and regions of a given nation, to provide for their common defense and justice among them, and to secure the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for this time and for future generations. We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers. We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values. We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.
4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.
5. The Rule of Law. We believe in the rule of law. By this we mean that citizens and foreigners alike, and both the government and the people, must accept and abide by the laws of the nation. In America, this means accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance. All agree that the repair and improvement of national legal traditions and institutions is at times necessary. But necessary change must take place through the law. This is how we preserve our national traditions and our nation itself. Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end.
6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-taking by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.
7. Public Research. At a time when China is rapidly overtaking America and the Western nations in fields crucial for security and defense, a Cold War-type program modeled on DARPA, the “moon-shot,” and SDI is needed to focus large-scale public resources on scientific and technological research with military applications, on restoring and upgrading national manufacturing capacity, and on education in the physical sciences and engineering. On the other hand, we recognize that most universities are at this point partisan and globalist in orientation and vehemently opposed to nationalist and conservative ideas. Such institutions do not deserve taxpayer support unless they rededicate themselves to the national interest. Education policy should serve manifest national needs.
8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.
9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.
10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.
And its been further developed since then, although Dinneen2 and Reno3do not seem to be leading the charge any longer, nor is Rod Dreher4, who for a while just urged societal retreat. Now Kevin Roberts5. , head of the Heritage Society, is, and he's taking the movement into a concrete action oriented direction. He's written a book, Dawn's Early Light, on that very topic. It's Amazon write up states:
America is on the brink of destruction. A corrupt and incompetent elite has uprooted our way of life and is brainwashing the next generation. Many so-called conservatives are as culpable as their progressive counterparts.
In this ambitious and provocative book, Heritage Foundation President Dr. Kevin Roberts announces the arrival of a New Conservative Movement. His message is simple: Global elites — your time is up.
Dawn’s Early Light blazes a promising path for the American people to take back their country. Chapter by chapter, it identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, to name a few.
All these need to be dissolved if the American way of life is to be passed down to future generations.
The good news is, we’re going to win.
The Swamp is so drunk on power that the elites don't realize the ground is moving beneath their feet. In Washington, they wear foreign flags on their lapels, but they don’t protect our border. They wave around the Constitution, but they don’t respect its wisdom. They appeal to Reagan, but Reagan would never put up with this non-sense.
Their decadence will be their downfall. A new day is here.
The forward to that book was written by one J. D. Vance.
That, National Conservatism in its most proactive form, is what J. D. Vance stands for.
Vance's biography really demonstrates this. He didn't go from hillbilly poverty to populism. He went from hillbilly poverty into the Marine Corps, and then into university where he met budding National Conservative type intellects and developed into one. Along the way somewhere, he converted into Catholicism, which is the oldest and original Christian religion, and which has a deep sense of the existential and a profound tradition. While its far from the case that all Catholics are National Conservatives or Illiberal Democrats, or anything like that, it is fair to say that observant Catholics are horrified by the cultural decay of the west and its unliking from an existential sense in a manner and way which protestants, including those in the New Apostolic Movement, are not, which is not to say that they are not.6
So what's with all this "cat lady" and pro natalism stuff?
It ties right into the overall world view of much of National Conservatism in its recent most radical form, and indeed in some ways is an evolution away from its original intellectual corps.
It's an undercurrent in conservatism, but there's definitely a strain of it which is genuinely intellectual that emphasizes, perhaps hyper emphasizes, traditionalism in a very definite sense, including traditional male and female roles to an extremely strong degree. They're not romanticizing the 1950s, or indeed, romanticizing anything at all, but looking back, way back, to a time and way of thinking in which this was not questioned in any fashion. Indeed, in the corners of the Internet where they hang out, you can find them discussing the social norms of the Middle Ages in comparison to those of the present, and they're serious about it. I need not and indeed don't have the bandwidth to go into all of that now, but it touches on a lot of topics, not all of which I'm not completely sympathetic to.
So is this "weird"?
Well at least some of Project 2025 is downright weird, as for example the proposal to create "Freedom Cities" in "unoccupied" portions of the public domain in the west. That is, well, Bat Shit Crazy. And its hard not to listen to the Dr. Taylor Marshall7and the Simone and Malcolm Collins8of the world and not thing, "well, that's weird".
Other stuff is more in the nature, however, of Bellocian Traditionalism and by any measure, it's certainly no weirder than the tranvestite genital organ obsessed "woke" view of much of the left, which indeed is deeply weird. And here's where, in fact, much of instinctive populism and National Conservatism meets. The MAGA crowed don't have the faintest clue who Hilaire Belloc is, or even grasp that it doesn't matter what your local Evangelical Free pastor said, divorce and remarriage is barred by Christianity, but they do grasp that in the natural order of things the Hawk Tuah girl may be gross, but she's not gender confused and something odd is going on here that needs to be addressed.
Put another way, some if it is scary James Watt Weird 9 while some of it probably seems "weird" to you if the Mantilla Girls seem weird. If they don't, it may make you uncomfortable depending on where on the social conservatism scale you fit, but its not really weird. The fact that much of modern America and all of the left find it all weird is because of how far to the left hit needle has moved in the past forty years.
Trump, on the other hand, can be really weird.
The National Conservatives, unlike the populists, are pretty deep, and pretty smart. Very smart, in fact. And they've realized what the red, white and blue populist crowds have not. Trump doesn't' really stand for anything.
They do.
They also know that they can't get a National Conservative elected into the Oval Office.
But what they've gambled on was two things. One was that the populists are too dim, and Trump too lazy, to draft his own agenda. They did that for him, through Project 2025. They bet they can get a start on a National Conservative revolution, and that's how the chief of the Heritage Foundation has put it, through a lazy Trump.
They've placed a bet on a certainty, that being that Trump won't last an entire four year term. He'll die within the next four years, assuming that old age and advancing intellectual decline doesn't get him before the election, and they gambled that they could get a Chief Executive into office who was one of their own through the Vice Presidency.
That figure is J. D. Vance. And up until Joe Biden dropping out of the race, it looked like the bet was going to pay off for sure.
Vance has been willing to play the part, while never disavowing what he's always stood for. He's sort of a National Conservatives Manchurian Candidate, with the National Conservatives waiting for age, disease, or senility to take out a sitting Donald Trump. Trump, too shallow to really bother to care about it, was willing to go along with a seemingly fawning J. D. Vance, probably never realizing that Trump's merely a temporary vehicle for them to get into office, and start their revolution.
Now those plans seem to have been disrupted, maybe.
The problem, in part, is that they wrote a 900 page book.
Project 2025 was designed to be, as noted, a blueprint for a lazy President. But once you publish a book, people start reading it, and they start asking questions about the people who wrote it. Particularly if one of those authors has written a second book about his pending National Conservative revolution.
Now, when people are distracted due to mental fog and don't touch it, that's not much of a problem. But once they do, if any of it is outside of the mainstream at all, and a lot of Project 2025 is, and if any of it is weird, which some of Project 2025 is, attention will start being paid in spades.
And that may very well spell the end of there being a chance that National Conservatives shall remake the nation via an electoral revolution. Too confident in themselves, they seem to have shot their bolt. Americans are now uncomfortable with the direction they want to take the country, which is in a direction the country's never really gone before.
Footnotes
* This thread was started several days ago, and its really worth noting that a lot of things have developed since I first started posting it, including a huge amount of attention on J. D. Vance, and discontent in Republican ranks regarding him.
**It'll be hard not to note all the references to various Catholic figures in National Conservatism, which may lead to the impression that National Conservatism is a Catholic thing. It isn't. Indeed, one of the primary figures in Illiberal Democracy is Viktor Orban, who is a Presbyterian.
What's probably notable here is that the deep intellectual history of Catholicism and Apostolic Christianity in general has lead some of those who realize how shallow modern Western Culture is into the Church. That doesn't make it a movement of the Church, and as some Catholics have feared, these movements pose a risk to Catholicism at least in the US, where it is a minority religion. Indeed, it's likely that some members of the New Apostolic Movement, thin theology that they have, do not even recognize Catholics as Christians when in fact they are the first Christians.
1. I'm hugely reluctant to opine on somebody's intelligence remotely, but at this point, it's hard not to. Some of the things Trump says are amazingly dumb. So much so that it raises a lot of questions regarding a wide variety of topics.
It's notable that Trump fairly frequently brings up his own intelligence, which is something intelligent people rarely do.
2. Patrick Dineen is a professor at Notre Dame who has written on Illiberal Democracy and National Conservatism favorably.
3. R. R. Reno is the editor of First Things, and a convert from the Episcopal Church to Catholicism. He's also on the Dineen end of things, but not as pessimistic about democracy as Dineen is.
4. Rod Dreher is a writer who wrote The Byzantine Option. He's moved to Hungary. Dreher was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism, and then converted to Orthodoxy.
5. Kevin Roberts is the main intellectual figure behind The Heritage Foundation and has a Wyoming connection, in that he was at one time the head of Wyoming Catholic College.
6. It's worth noting here that members of this movement and those on the fringe of it, sometimes the very fringe, have seen some notable conversions to Catholicism in recent years. These include Candace Owens, Tammy Roberts Peterson, wife of psychologist and author Jordan Peterson, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek.
7. Dr. Taylor Marshall, also a convert to Catholicism, is an extreme traditionalist who has come to engage in conspiracy theories about the Vatican. He's on the fringe right.
8. Simone and Malcolm Collins come across as genuinely weird. Their leaders of a pro natalist organization with Simone having indicated that she intends to have children until, basically, her uterus blows out. The Collins are atheist and frankly have somewhat of a scary Social Darwinist view of the world. They therefore fit into the really weird side of pro natalism, where Elon Musk can also be found, who have an incorrect feeling that but for massive procreation, society is going to fail, which is completely incorrect.
Showing, I suppose, how old school Neanderthal I am, Michael Collins looks so anemic, and Simone Collins so unattractive, that the thought of their fitting the bill in a basic way to create a lot of children is surprising.
Watt was Reagan's Secretary of the Interior and basically believed that as Christ was returning very soon, there was no reason not to use natural resources with a mind towards conserving them.
