Why The Trump Era Is Revolutionary - Politics Are Secondary Amidst Fundamental Changes In Ethos And Culture

Bob Muzelle gathered his co-workers in the small conference room of his non-profit offices on 9th Street.  The Democratic Party had just suffered another defeat - not just a minor one over tariffs or regulation, but a Constitutional one.  The Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Virginia had just rejected a radical redistricting plan which would have eliminated Republican electoral districts; and in so doing paved the way for conservative victory in the state in the coming 2026 elections. 

This at a time when the Party was being exposed for fraud, corruption, and intellectual chicanery.  The mouthpiece of the radical Left, Ilhan Omar, Representative from Minnesota, was being implicated in the trillion dollar Somali fraud in her state. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another of the 'Squad', a far left progressive group of foreign-born women Congressional representatives, was being exposed as Senator Kennedy from Louisiana likes to point out, 'the reason why instructions are put on shampoo bottles.'    

 

Other parodies of legislative power, Senators Jeffries, Sanders, Schumer, Warren, and Booker have in Congressional hearings outed for their duplicity, hypocrisy, and playground bullying. These senators who have been behind the lawfare, impeachment votes, and fractious innuendoes and ad hominem attacks on Donald Trump are not models of progressive righteousness, but clowns. 

Worse, the President has gone beyond the words and hopeful promises of his predecessors and taken Iran to task for both its nuclear ambitions and sponsorship of regional terror.  He has closed the border, reduced illegal immigration to a trickle, encouraged business through limiting regulation and taxation, and dismantled every one of the woke programs and policies of the Biden Administration. 

The world has caught on.  Conservative victories in the UK, France, Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe have included the same policies of cultural integrity, unity, and independence promoted by Trump.  Just recently, Reform, the ultra-conservative party of the UK won a resounding victory in municipal elections, forcing a likely stepping down of the current Labor Prime Minister. 

This movement is not just partisan politics - it is far more profound and fundamental.  Europeans who have been complicit in their governments' open border policy, have found themselves inundated with Muslims who want no part of European culture and have said basta! Sheltered by the former progressive ideology of inclusivity, Muslim fundamentalists have been allowed to create an Islamic subculture which rejects European values; and these immigrants have overrun formerly unified, peaceful, civil societies and turned them into hostile, crime-ridden places 

Everything that Bob and his progressive colleagues have done to unseat the President, to discredit him, and to remove him from the political scene has not worked; and at least in part because of these untoward attacks, worse than any in an American history of smarmy, dirty politics, the President has vowed revenge. His entire Cabinet is made up of angry, loyal, unintimidated members who stand up to the bullying of Democrats who attempt to cow them.  When called to testify on the Hill these witnesses pull no punches and when dealing with the liberal press, speak both authoritatively and 'incorrectly', shaming the questioners for their venality and faux entitlement. 

This was why Bob called the impromptu meeting in his offices.  Progressives were not only not making headway, they were losing ground.  Despite their assumptions, their convictions that Donald Trump was evil and that his policies were anti-democratic and fascist, they were on the run.  Something had to be done, but what?

The Democratic opposition has consisted of little more than Trump hatred.  They oppose, attack, and smear everything the President does without a policy response.  They are the party of 'No', the party without one reasonable, intelligent answer to conservativism.  They are an intellectually bereft party of whiners and naysayers.  This might have worked in the past, but was losing currency fast. 

Americans - even those who did not vote for Trump - are beginning to see that his invocation of foundational principals - Constitutional originalism, personal integrity, individualism, private enterprise, small government, patriotism, and federalism - is indeed a call for integration, not fractious diversity; for unity rather than identity; for honor and justice, not inclusivity. 

The cultural, moral and ethical zeitgeist is changing.  It is no longer just Democrat vs Republican or conservative vs progressive, but a sea change in world view, a return to a Revolutionary ethos, nationalism, and Judeo-Christian values. 

Progressives are increasingly seen as not only those who were promoting unusual, often outlandish ideas, but those who are out to destroy America, the one which began nobly two hundred and fifty years ago and which was now foundering, losing its way, and becoming a joke not a model. 

The recent No Kings rallies - inchoate gatherings of older white Americans with vague ideas of autocracy and centralized rule who thought Donald Trump was an anti-democratic usurper - were all progressives could muster in the way of opposition.  They were against everything and for nothing.  Their identity politics drove wedges between communities, their woke versions of sexuality made the country a laughing stock around the world, their redistributive economics smacked of the failed socialist experiments in Europe.  

They did not want to unify the country, make it a strong adversary to hostile foreign regimes, and reassemble the element of genius which had made it great but to continue to divide it, tether it to false idealism and adolescent wishes. 

There was no there there, no meat, no substantial meal, nothing but hatred, hypocrisy, and arrogant assumptions.  Hillary Clinton lost the first election of Donald Trump largely because of these assumptions.  It was not only logical and right that a woman should become President, she said, but that it was foreordained, part of destiny.  A woman ipso facto was the right choice for President, and any woman would simply have to stand for election to win.  Hillary Clinton lost badly - her empty, soulless campaign exposed for the intellectual fraud that it was.

Kamala Harris the next opposing Democrat candidate for President against Donald Trump ignored the lesson of the Clinton debacle and doubled down on it.  Not only was she a woman but a black one. Now there was absolutely no way she could lose the election; but once again the voters of America were not fooled by the woman's arrogant suppositions and she, like Hillary, lost badly. 

The Democrats had two chances to make something of a party platform, to prepare something substantial and solid; but no, they chose to run on nothing but identity; and progressives are still praying from the same missal. 

So Bob, standing before an eager group of young people looking to him for guidance and leadership, came up empty.  He hemmed and hawed, stumbled and bumbled, repeated old nostrums and reheated old chestnuts, but had nothing to say.  The train had left the station, politics were irrelevant, and Bob had nothing in his suitcase but tired old clothes.  The very ground under his feet had shifted. The old signposts  were gone, and he didn't know which way to turn.  

The meeting ended badly, with hugs and kisses but no resolve.  They hated Donald Trump more than ever, but found themselves floundering, flailing, exasperated but without a clue.  They filed out of the conference room deflated, but young as they were, not hopeless.  There was at least the rally against injustice this Saturday, the protests for peace next week, and then the summer. 

Bob went around the corner and had a beer at the Old Ebbitt Grill, the go-to place across from Treasury for the doers of Washington, the place which was his place during the Biden years.  The bartenders knew him, the crowd was congenial and happily supportive.  Now the climate, the ambience, the culture ad so changed he hardly recognized it.  

 

He quickly swallowed his beer and walked back out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, unsure now which way to walk.  He felt discombobulated, at loose ends, at sixes and sevens.  How to gin up the old enthusiasm when everything had changed? The old Trump hatred wasn't even there any more, no pulse-throbbing, heart beating animus. 

He had thrown in the towel without even realizing it. 

Bomb Them Back To The Stone Age - The Allure Of Total Destruction

President Harry Truman didn't exactly want to bomb the Imperial Japanese back to the Stone Age, but close; and so he dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and shortly thereafter the Emperor offered his complete surrender. 

 

During the Korean War, Douglas MacArthur wanted to show the Red Chinese little mercy and advised Truman to go north of the Korean border and bomb them to smithereens.  

During the War in Vietnam, General Curtis LeMay, military advisor to Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater advised LBJ's government to bomb the North Vietnamese 'back to the Stone Age'.  Johnson of course wanted to do so, eliminate the terrorist North in one fell swoop, but the 'hearts and minds' policy of the US Government - i.e. protecting civilians at all costs, thus encouraging them to switch sides and become partisans instead of Viet Cong insurgents - made that impossible, 

Instead, Johnson and his successor Richard Nixon unveiled Rolling Thunder, the air campaign in which fleets of B-52 bombers dropped massive explosive payloads on North Vietnamese positions in the South and on Haiphong harbor.  That show of might would either bring Ho Chi Minh to the negotiating table or force him to surrender. 

Truman, angered that General MacArthur went against his orders, and considering him a dangerous man, a loose cannon, relieved him of command - a bad decision as it turned out because 'The Red Menace' was exactly as the old soldier expected.  Mao and his legions became strong enough to become a serious threat to the region and to America. China went on to be the biggest arms and materiel supporter to North Vietnam, prolonged the conflict, and contributed significantly to the North's victory and the Communist reunification of the country. 

Donald Trump's hawkish generals advised the same Stone Age policy in America's war with Iran.  Regime change was obviously not enough, they said.  We eliminated the Ayatollah and mutilated his successor, but Iranian rockets keep falling on Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the trucial states. Iranian missile silos have been carefully distributed throughout the country and are hidden well underground, so surgical strikes cannot totally eliminate them.  Armed drones are similarly deployed, and despite the best CIA and Mossad intelligence, many remain undetected. 

Iran has shown resilience and no fear.  They not only killed thousands of their own civilians during street protests, but have lashed out at friend and foe alike to show their military power.  It is a hateful, brutal, totalitarian regime which knows only violence; so there is only one way to eliminate the terrorist threat of the Iranian theocracy, say the hawks, and that is total destruction, reducing every official hiding place, every arms facility, every energy stockpile to rubble. 

The problem with total war, say more moderate military chiefs, is that the Iranian people are our allies, unlike the complicit Germans and Japanese in World War II.  We cannot afford to wipe them off the map, nor would we want to. 

So what to do? There isn't a day that goes by that Donald Trump doesn't want to pick up the phone and tell the Armed Services Chief of Staff to pull the trigger and unleash hell, destroy the country, then shelter the refugees and rebuild the country in America's image. 

The same holds true for Gaza and Lebanon.  Hamas has shown itself to be a worthy client of Iran, attacking Israel, arming and rearming itself to continue its avowed extermination of the Jews.  Hezbollah in Lebanon is no different.  They are implacable enemies of Israel, faithful clients of Iran, and have vowed to continue their aggression until the last man standing has fallen.  

Israel has done the needful.  It has not reduced Gaza to rubble, but nearly.  Netanyahu has his hand on the Stone Age trigger and is ready to pull it, eliminate Hamas, its tunnels, its armories, its depots, and its barracks.  There is little hesitation in his war room, for the population like that of Nazi Germany is not only complicit but collaborating.  Blowing the whole place off the face of the earth and making the region safe for Jews and enabling Jewish expansion might not be such a bad idea. 

There seems to be no end to war, and wars have always been fought for the same predictable, expected, familiar reasons - territory, resources, and geopolitical influence, all the international expression of human nature.  From childhood to adulthood, the same ineluctable, irresistible forces for dominance and survival persist. 

What is less widely acknowledged is an attraction to the power and glory of war - the Sturm und Drang, the apocalyptic fires of devastation, the savagery, and immense godlike power of raining death and destruction down on the enemy, seeing a fireball rising to the sky, pillars of black, cumulus smoke, and bits and pieces of the destroyed target spiraling up and up and back down to earth. 

Wars could not happen unless they satisfy some primal urge  It is not enough to say the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were needed to complete a German historic circle; or that the Pope's legions marching across Europe were only to annihilate the Muslim invaders in the Holy Land, that Russia simply needed a warm water port, that Iran felt a Persian destiny to control the Middle East, that the United States feared the Communist threat in Southeast Asia. 

The allure of war is primal, primeval, responding to urges set in ribonucleic acid chains in the first homo sapiens and long before in those genetic sets of the jungle, the ocean, and the veldt. 

So not only are the generals in the war room anxious to use the magnificent store of arms under their control, they must use them.  They are just as programmed to blow things to smithereens as their counterparts in the past. 

One Vietnam War fighter pilot described his experience this way:

There was nothing like it.  I was God, Shiva the Destroyer, a master of the universe flying no more than a few feet  over the treetops, unloading death and destruction, howling in the cockpit over the roar of the engine and the explosions below, dropping napalm and seeing the forest explode in a firestorm with great orange clouds of fire, ascending to 5000 feet, looking down on the smoke and ash and burning, incinerating carpet below.  It was magnificent.

 

World War II was the first fully modern war, for it combined classic military tactics with a full complement of armaments – planes, tanks, artillery, riflery, rockets, mortars, and bombs. Soldiers had a cause – Hitler had invaded their countries and they were determined to drive him out – but they were part of a military machine, cogs in its wheels.  

Battles were hard-fought, territory often gained by feet, not miles, and battle lines shifting by the week.  It was an ordinary war until the Biblical nuclear destruction of Japan. This was the apotheosis of war. Atom bombs dropped on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed them completely in a few minutes of unthinkable power.  Wars of annihilation and Genghis Khan were back.

It was not until Vietnam that the spectacle of a fiery superhuman war again appeared.  F-16 jet fighters were Apocalyptic as they rained terror down from the skies.  The destruction was Biblical and epic.

The Founding Fathers of America were brilliant in their understanding of human nature and therefore wrote a Constitutional provision for civilian oversight of the military.  They understood that if generals had control of a large store of weapons, they would want to use it.  As importantly Jefferson and his colleagues understood that using this military might is a fulfillment of the most ineradicable male desire- to blow things up.  

Just as Hamilton argued for and got a provision in the Constitution for an intermediate legislative body to protect the nation from the will of the rabble, Jefferson insisted upon civilian control of the military - a buffer, a safe zone.  Of course both men are turning over in their graves.  The rabble rules and the military always wins out. 

'How much can we blow up?', Trump was reported to have asked his Joint Chiefs, hoping for 'A lot' as the answer, but modern warfare since WW II has always been political, complex, and often unclear.  'The fog of war' as Clausewitz said, and the President had to listen to opinions all over the spectrum. 

If Iran pisses him off, Trump is likely to unleash hell and be done with the bloody mess; but the days of the Crusades, Genghis Khan, and Hiroshima are long gone.  Still, the red button is still armed and waiting on the President's desk in the Oval Office, and only time will tell. 

Why Beauty Will Always Turn Heads - And Inner Worth Will Always Play Second Fiddle

Frances Laughton was a beautiful woman.  She had been a beautiful, adorable child, a stunning runway-ready adolescent, and a promising starlet in college.  She had been fawned over, admired, chased, and desired for as long as she could remember.  Such was her remarkable beauty that no one ever bothered to look past it and and inquire about her intelligence, moral code, perceptiveness, or creativity. She loved the attention as a little girl, but as she got older it rankled. She was nothing more than a gussied up doll, and that had to change.

 

For a while she flirted with a femme fatale persona. Her beauty, her sexual allure, and her feminine irresistibility had men wrapped around her little finger, and with that mystical power she knew she could really go places, do things, be somebody.  Beauty greased the wheels of power. 

Yet she was always bothered by the fact that if getting ahead in the world was nothing more than trading on genetics - she had done nothing to get or deserve her good fortune - then success was worthless as far as social justice, honor, or moral rectitude were concerned.  For true personal integrity and to be a model for right action, the irrelevancies of God-given gifts must be dismissed and removed. 

At Brown she had tried to become part of Students For Democratic Action, an influential campus group that took its inspiration from SDS, a radical student organization of the Sixties, strong enough to engineer the takeover of Columbia University, energize the civil rights movement, and influence the outcome of the war in Vietnam. SDS members were outspoken and never shy about the use of violent measures to promote progressive causes. 

 

Brown's SDA was a far cry from its militant forbears, but it still cause enough of a ruckus to force the administration to at least consider a quota of twenty-five percent gay, lesbian, and transgender faculty and to double the admission rate for minority students.  

Consider they did, but not much came of the hoopla.  Brown, not among the elite of the Ivy League but still an influential junior partner, had enough wealthy alumni to reject any such politically-driven, idealistic, and ultimately nonsensical moves which would further erode the academic integrity of the university and tarnish the reputation of its founder. 

Outcomes never matter to idealists who are in it for the ride, the identity, and the self-awareness; so campus activism was just as meaningful as if it actually produced results; and Frances tried to join in.  She not only thought that it would be a way for her to challenge those who underestimated her while promoting an important political agenda. 

Yet, such a wish was clearly impossible.  She was treated as someone special rather than an integral part of a group.  No woman on campus came anywhere near her stunning beauty.  She was truly one of a kind, a unique combination of classical physical perfection and a nubile, languorous sexual allure.  She was tall, naturally graceful, with an inbred, untutored elegance.  As such she was treated as the goddess that she was. 

 

Everyone knew that they were in the presence of a generational beauty - or even more, since her symmetry, litheness, and female presence hearkened back to ancient Greece and Rome.  She was Venus, Aphrodite, Helen every Roman copy, and the most beautiful women painted by Leonardo and Botticelli. 

No one was interested in her inner self, and why should they be?  They were in the presence of a miracle; and so it was that Frances, from the beginning a deeply serious, committed, and intelligent woman took the first step of redemption. She would changer her appearance and become indistinguishable from the women of The Movement as unappealing as they were. 

Progressivism in its embrace of serious things, rejects anything that smacks of the false, the superficial, the nonessential.  The use of cosmetics is tantamount to treason, both a disregard for the existential nature of the progressive cause and giving in to the predatory, misogynist male.  The more a woman can resemble her Paleolithic forbears and become a natural woman linked to nature and the environmental forces around her, the better. 

One woman, Frances thought, did look like the throwback so often limned as the progressive model - prognathous jaw, prominent forehead, narrow-set eyes - and indeed she was the leader of the campus activists, chosen to lead demonstrations, to speak at forums, and to be the image of university progressivism. 

'Brutal', Frances thought; but the woman had what Frances wanted - belonging to a group that mattered and being taken for the responsible, dedicated, committed woman that she was.  And so it was that she began her transformation from magnificently beautiful starlet to fiercely ugly partisan.  She would not - could not - go so far as to regress ten million years, but she would at least alter her looks enough to conform to those of the group. 

The transformation of course had to be gradual.  It couldn't be a sudden as a nose job, going away for the summer with a beak and coming back cute and pert. No, the change would have to be progressive - tweaking and coloring of her hair, tattoos, studs, and rings, a dismal look, bad posture, and a sobering, snarly attitude.  By the time she was finished, her classmates would have forgotten how she first came on campus, would anoint her as one of theirs, and her future of mission, identity, and political integrity would begin. 

As much as she felt at home now that her 'inner self' had been exposed, seen, and appreciated, she felt out of place and irritable.  These ugly women and skanky, brutally sexless men and the environment they enabled were miserable. She preferred the company of the best and the brightest, the most beautiful, charming, and desirable.  She loved being a starlet, a prima ballerina, a goddess. 

She graduated with honors, said goodbye to her classmates and fellows activists, and headed to Washington to take up a position and Scientists for Social Responsibility, a nonprofit which focused on the environment and climate change, but dabbled in black causes and lesbianism as well. 

It was more of the same - the tedium of good causes, serious and fractiously ugly people, and the depressing, burrowing environment of gloom.  Why progressives had to be ugly, think ugly, and worry ugly was beyond her; but she had cast her lot among them for personal reasons, flying her inner flag, and she was not ready to take it down. 

As chance and circumstance would have it, she happened to be walking on Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House and saw one attractive, young blonde woman and stage-handsome men after another walk up the drive to the West Wing.  They had nothing like the stunning beauty of her former incarnation but at least were a welcome change from the dour, misshapen lot she worked with.  

Not quite an epiphany but an eye-opener.  Conservatives take things on face value and easily fit them into a clearly defined, neatly organized policy matrix.  There is no need to probe and parse when it comes to small government, a muscular foreign policy and traditional social values.  One can be beautiful and still be taken seriously.  No dredging up of muck, no hand-wringing, no tears and flapdoodle necessary.   

Although it took a while to make the elision from stunningly beautiful woman to sloppy, bangingly unattractive progressive, it took only a morning to put back the pieces.  She emerged on Tuesday looking like what God had intended her to be. She flashed a smile at Scientists for Social Responsibility, said her goodbyes, and contacted her Republican Congressman in the hopes of moving quickly across the aisle into more congenial territory.  

The Congressman like all men was bowled over by her beauty, charm and sexual allure.  Anything she wanted was hers, and so she took it, and back in her element was adored, admired, and desired. 

Her inner self? Well, that wasn't much to write home about in the first place, so it mattered even less here, whatever it was.  She moved about as though she were born for the job, used her native skills and remarkable genetic gift to her advantage and that of the Party, and could never have been happier. 

Superficial? False promise? Ignorant idolatry?  Nonsense.  Beauty is as beauty does, beauty rules, and she was enjoying every minute.