Nominal GDP for 1Q2024 was revised down $28.6 billion in the second estimate today: What's the big picture?

 Nominal GDP came in at a revised $28.255 trillion.

Sounds like a lot, right?

Here's the big picture.

From 1947 to 2000, nominal GDP grew at a compound annual rate of 7.26%.

From 2000 to 2024, nominal GDP grew at a compound annual rate of 4.42%, 39% lower.

The year 2000 marks the US opening to China, and the great wealth transfer out of the US from the middle class under globalism, creating new middle classes there and elsewhere.

We are poorer for it, but we have lots more billionaires now and you can read all about it on your Apple iPhone made by slave labor while you eat your 40% more expensive hamburger from McDonalds since 2019.

Core pce inflation is out and shows itself running ahead of the 10-year US Treasury yield for four consecutive years 2020-2023, which is unprecedented

Jerome Powell is the biggest phony inflation fighter the country has ever seen.

He was appointed by Trump! So much winning!

Core pce inflation previously exceeded the ten year yield in 1974-75 and in 2012 (barely).

The Fed's primary inflation-fighting tool has been the Federal Funds Rate, but it let inflation run wildly out of control before even lifting a finger to stop it in March 2022 when the Fed finally acted and started raising the rate.

It is a shameful episode which has benefited businesses which hiked prices higher than inflation to goose profits, and the federal government which desperately needed to devalue its mounting debts, all at the expense of the average American.

The lack of outrage over this is a study in the depth of American servitude. Slavery didn't end in 1865 for African Americans. It became the common lot of us all.

 

 

Christmas means it's time for someone to find more evidence of Chicom slave labor in a garment

 Reported here.

The salient feature of the coming Draco will not be to enslave but to kill, to purge

Yes, he will be busy.

 

 

LOL, guy named Purple says somehow we still ended up back together even after slavery drove us into a brutal civil war

 Back together at the point of a gun isn't back together, Matt.

Abraham Lincoln made America purple.

More.

Jonathan Mitchell, the man ultimately behind the overthrow of Roe vs. Wade, is a constitutional departmentalist whose real target is judicial supremacy

Early on, Mitchell insisted that, although he personally opposes abortion, “I’m not an anti-abortion activist. I never have been.” His goal is to destroy “judicial supremacy”—the idea that the Supreme Court is the final authority on the meaning of the Constitution—a campaign with bipartisan potential at a moment when liberals and progressives have little to gain from an imposing conservative Court. ...

Mitchell disapproved of the Supreme Court’s use of “language that makes its precedents seem sacrosanct or irreversible,” even going “so far to equate its interpretations of the Constitution with the Constitution itself.” The conventional idea that courts can “strike down,” “invalidate,” or “block” statutes was, he wrote, simply wrong. A court can “opine” that a statute is unconstitutional and tell an official not to enforce it, but the statute nonetheless “remains a law until it is repealed by the legislature that enacted it.” ...

In their dissenting opinions on S.B. 8, both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor went to first judicial principles by invoking Marbury v. Madison to rebuke Mitchell’s judiciary-evading tactic. In Marbury, in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall proclaimed, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” There, the Supreme Court, for the first time, declared an act of Congress unconstitutional and “entirely void.” Because the Court implied that its own authority to interpret the Constitution is superior to that of the other branches, the case is the fountainhead of judicial supremacy. One could view it as a power grab that we have mostly accepted for more than two hundred years.

Mitchell said he found it telling that Roberts and Sotomayor treated judicial supremacy as “axiomatic” rather than as “a choice that must be defended.” From the beginning of the country, there were prominent anti-federalists who were opposed to judicial supremacy. Thomas Jefferson—who was President when Marbury was decided—believed that “each department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution.” Jefferson’s view, which scholars have called departmentalism, countered judicial supremacy with the claim that the power to determine whether acts violate the Constitution is enjoyed by each branch in its own sphere of action.

Several Presidents since have embraced departmentalism to varying degrees. Andrew Jackson explained his veto of Congress’s bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States as being based on its unconstitutionality, even though the Supreme Court had approved Congress’s authority to so act years earlier. He said, “The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.” The same year, Chief Justice Marshall held that Georgia’s regulations on Cherokee lands violated federal treaties. An enraged Jackson didn’t enforce the ruling, which enabled Georgia to disobey it.

Abraham Lincoln resisted judicial supremacy in his scathing reaction to Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which the Court declared that Congress’s prohibition of slavery in the territories was unconstitutional. Lincoln, who was not yet President, acknowledged that the Court resolved the parties’ dispute, but he rejected the idea that the ruling authoritatively answered the constitutional question of slavery. In his first Inaugural Address, Lincoln further worried that, if policy on “vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” then “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.” ...

Like other critics of judicial supremacy, Mitchell believes that Congress, rather than the Court, should have final say on constitutional meaning, even if it means rights might shift along with electoral outcomes—and the Court, where possible, should decide matters based on congressional statutes rather than judicial doctrines on constitutional rights.

That approach has recently put Mitchell at odds with other conservative lawyers.

More.

Surprise, surprise, right on schedule progressive Robert Kuttner attacks the 2 percent inflation target in favor of 4 percent

 It all sounds very persuasive, as long as you forget how inflation impoverishes the lower classes and keeps them down so that the elites can continue to milk them like slaves year after year. 4% just does it twice as fast as 2%.

The little people are an afterthought to the left.

This is the "inflation is actually good" talk you hear from lefties from time to time.

Story here.

Adam Tooze: Central bankers' hands were forced in 2010, the poor dears, they aren't the lords of easy money, no, they're its slaves, just like us

 Here, for The New York Times:

If you are worried about wealth inequality in the United States, then the solution is not to tighten monetary policy but to make structural changes to the country’s financial system, starting with the undergrowth of shadow banking. Serious taxation of wealth and capital gains would also push in the right direction.

It would no doubt help if onetime central bankers, rather than cycling in and out of private finance, spoke out seriously in favor of reform. They would be doing the public a service if they spelled out the way that their hands were forced by the current incestuous intertwining of public debt markets with hedge funds and the like. Ultimately, however, it is politics that must grasp the nettle of change.

In the current dispensation, it may be flattering for central bankers to be cast as maestros, but in practice they are less the lords of easy money than its functionaries.     

 

 

Central bankers cycle in and out of private finance raking in millions, Adam.

 

If anyone were serious about restructuring the country's financial system, the place to start would be by restoring the key missing feature of capitalism without which it doesn't really exist. It's called bankruptcy. 

People who don't care are already slaves

 There is a kind of sluggish resignation, as well as poorness and degeneracy of spirit, in a state of slavery.

-- Joseph Addison

That slavedriver Drudge wants his headline and he wants it NOW!

 

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings

... by the middle of the Second Century ... there were few Greeks and Romans left. They had destroyed themselves by miscegenation, internecine wars, and that fatuous tolerance with which they permitted themselves to be displaced by their subjects and slaves. ...

-- Revilo P. Oliver, "By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them", Liberty Bell, August 1985

To California oil is like slavery and must be banned everywhere

But Californians see Texas as a mortal threat not merely to their state’s business model and way of life but to humanity itself. Drilling is killing. Texas cannot be allowed to be Texas because if Texans get their way, the planet will superheat, destroying us all. You may think that’s ridiculous hyperbole, and maybe it is, but Californians believe it and will not be talked out of it. Hence peaceful coexistence is, for them, possible only on their terms.

The Golden State is no longer down with living and letting live but must impose its will, against the express wishes of others, in fundamentally transformative ways. There’s a word for that.

But Michael Anton can't see how this is just like Lincoln in the North imposing his will on the South in 1861. A Lincoln worshiper in denial.

California is nothing if not Lincolnesque.

Claremont Review of Books,  here.

It is now common to blame the invention of the cotton gin, a labor-saving device, for the increase in the US slave population

Can anything good come out of Oregon?

This garbage from a Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Oregon State University, is anti-white anti-capitalism rearing its ugly head, not "historical scholarship". It's what Oswald Spengler warned us about in 1934.

Infighting in the Southern Baptist Convention shouldn’t be a surprise – the denomination has been defined by such squabbles for 400 years :

 

In the U.S., Baptists formed a national organization, the Triennial Convention, in 1814. Around the same time, attitudes of Baptists in the South toward the enslavement of Africans began to harden as the 1792 invention of the cotton gin, a machine that made it easier to separate the cotton fibers from their seeds, made enslavement more profitable. By the 1830s, abolitionism took firm hold among Northern Baptists, and both they and Baptists in the South argued they were upholding Scripture through their views on slavery.

 

Blaming the cotton gin for an increase of enslavement appears to be a new, and stupid, argument of the anti-white-anti-capitalist industry, advanced since about 2009, in tandem with the advent of the Obama era when hostility to capitalism began to become more widely racialized, along with everything else.

 

The claim, as per the Wikipedia article on the cotton gin, is that "The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the cotton production figures cited don't match the population "production" facts:

 

"Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850." You are led to believe with this sleight of hand that slave population was dramatically increased by 2.5 million (357%) to accomplish that 280% production increase in cotton.

 

That isn't the case.

 

From 1830 to 1850 slave population increased by 1.2 million, from 2 million to 3.2 million, or 60%, not 357% obviously. Automation meant fewer slaves were needed, not more. The increase in slave population over the period has nothing to do with the invention of the cotton gin. 

 

Importation of slaves to the US had been halted from 1808 by act of Congress. By 1850 fewer than 305,000 had been brought to America. Slave population increased in the US naturally through reproduction over the period, by 60%, in contrast with the free population which increased in the US by about 84% (from 10.85 million to 19.99 million) through both reproduction and immigration between 1830-1850.

 

You can't even make the argument that slaves were bred to serve, however aspirational that might have been for a very small minority of white race schemers of the plantation enterprise. The data shows whatever the intentions were, they didn't succeed, and slave population increased at a rate lower than the free population.

 

You could make the argument that the invention of the cotton gin enabled slave owners to get by much longer with fewer slave laborers*, some of whom enjoyed better working conditions as a result, thus perpetuating the economics of slavery in a situation where increased supply of that labor had been cut off, but that's not the argument they are making. They aren't smart enough to make it.

 

 

*Cotton production per slave increased from 188 pounds in 1830 to 445 pounds in 1850.

A man who thinks the mere words of another man are all it takes to make him free is still a slave

House passes bill to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, sending it to Biden:

Juneteenth, which falls on June 19, marks the date that the last enslaved African Americans were granted their freedom. On that day in 1865, Union soldiers led by Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in the coastal city of Galveston, Texas, to deliver General Order No. 3, officially ending slavery in the state.

The final act of liberation came months after the Confederate Army’s surrender ended the Civil War, and more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Lincoln was assassinated on April 15, 1865, two months before his proclamation made it to Texas. ...

“I often equate Juneteenth with our country’s inability to communicate,” said House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “The failure to communicate kept them in slavery for another two and half years.”

 

 

Does Carson Holloway for The Federalist even live in America 2020, torn by $2 billion in damages from rioting and looting?

 From his essay here:

Tocqueville was certainly correct that the dire legacy of slavery would not be eliminated immediately upon its abolition. America’s path toward racial justice was long and difficult, continuing for many decades after the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, over time the process turned out better than Tocqueville expected. The country was not engulfed in a race war, and whites and black Americans gradually learned to live with each other as fellow citizens.

If you subscribe to ideology qua ideology, you can pretend that what your lyin' eyes are trying to tell you isn't true. And Holloway explicitly embraces the ideological habit of mind which blinds him to our reality:

Moreover, the northern settlers — and particularly the Puritans of New England — came to America not only with the general habits of freedom characteristic of all the English but with a peculiarly intense inclination toward self-government. They came, Tocqueville says, driven by a “purely intellectual craving,” seeking the “triumph of an idea.”

Accordingly, he embraces a sharp, ideological distinction between North and South, which is nothing but a caricature, as if neither love of lucre nor racism existed in the North: 

Tocqueville clearly regards the original southern settlers as less moral and less enlightened than their northern counterparts. The northerners came to America primarily to found self-governing communities based upon their (lofty and demanding) religious vision of a righteous society. The original Virginians came primarily in the pursuit of gain.

You will hardly find in American "conservatism" anywhere any rumination on the founding of the colonies as corporations, entities which were explicitly formed for gain for and by the English Crown in cooperation with the Bank of England. That was the whole point of Samuel Johnson's "Taxation No Tyranny", which ridiculed Americans with "Why do we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes?", which is the main reason why no one reads it. The American colonists broke the business deal with the Crown, violating their contracts. We responded by gussying up our thefts with lofty bs about freedom and equality and rights. French loans, and the French navy, helped us get away with it.

Tocqueville's antipathy toward the South is an artifact of French affinity for the excesses of those Enlightenment ideas which enjoyed a higher traffic in the American North, but also of immemorial French hatred for England which enjoyed free trade with the American South. He is hardly the guide Holloway makes him out to be. 

If there is any commonality left with the French vein in 2020 America, we have seen it in our streets with the violence, destruction, and blood-letting too reminiscent of the excesses of the French Revolution. The difference is that French republicanism sought to literally behead aristocrats, whereas now the rage is explicitly racial, focused on whites.

We have not learned to live with each other as fellow citizens. Cancel culture is everywhere, a euphemism for murder. The triumph of the ideas of BLM will literally mean the death of whitey. 

Any conservatism which pretends otherwise isn't worthy of the name.

Election 2016's dirty little secret is that 52% of nonvoters were non-Hispanic whites, a huge untapped reservoir of votes feared by the identity politicians of the left

And Pew Research did its best to lie about them in this study from 2018, saying "nonvoters were more likely to be younger, less educated, less affluent and nonwhite. And nonvoters were much more Democratic".

Pew's own graph and statements show this not to be true.

Nonvoters were more likely to be white, 52% vs. 46%, and fully 53% of them did not prefer Hillary Clinton in 2016: "37% expressed a preference for Hillary Clinton, 30% for Donald Trump and 9% for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein; 14% preferred another candidate or declined to express a preference". 

The American left fears this potential white vote, which is why it must lie about it, minimize it, drug it, demoralize it, and vilify it.

It is why you hear so much about mythical white supremacists in the news, and mythical violent white militias causing mayhem everywhere, even as media and Democrats deny Antifa is a thing or that BLM is violent. Meanwhile those leftist groups, anarchist and communist, are getting away with inciting and actually causing riots, arson, looting, injury, and murder on a previously unimaginable scale, now approaching a cost to the economy of $2 billion. Their foot soldiers are the half-educated, indoctrinated, young, poor products of America's unionized public schools.

The left demonizes whites in order to neuter them, knowing their deep-seated American cultural propensity for guilt derived from Christianity. It plays on that guilt and perverts it chiefly by outlawing religion in the schools and teaching white responsibility for slavery to your children qua white instead. Its greatest fear is whites who will no longer accept that new religion and that guilt and fight back. And it particularly fears any politician whose specific appeal is to them.

Things to remember from the week that was, Sep 19-26, 2020, and none of it is about COVID-19

Democrat Senator Chucky Schumer tweeted on Feb 22, 2016: Attn GOP: Senate has confirmed 17 #SCOTUS justices in presidential election years. #DoYourJob.

But now that they're about to do just that, he's saying Ruth Bader Ginsburg "must be turning over in her grave up in heaven". RBG is actually on ice right now, until her burial this week at Arlington. The Senate Minority Leader, like a lot of Democrats, has problems with spatial, temporal, dimensional and proportional imagination, not to mention the American idiom.  

Democrat Senator Harry Reid tweeted on Nov 21, 2013: Thanks to all of you who encouraged me to consider filibuster reform. It had to be done.

In 2013, Reid was then asked if he was worried the GOP could change the filibuster on #SCOTUS, too. His response: "Let 'em do it".

So Mitch McConnell did, sooner than Reid was imagining.

The cannibal Reza Aslan was so hungry for human BBQ he called for the whole thing to be burned down if the GOP replaced RBG, who died at home and "lied in state" according to NBC News. That's one way of putting it. Democrats threatened riots if they didn't get their way, like that was something new.

Like the George Floyd protests which were mostly peaceful, except for the $1-$2 billion in damages caused so far, most of the fires out west recently have been wild except for at least four major ones caused by 13 people arrested for arson.

Ann Coulter tweeted that Amy Coney Barrett would be a "disastrous pick" for the Supreme Court because Barrett has stated that her Catholicism would require her to recuse herself on e.g. immigration and death penalty cases. Yes, what are we paying you for? Not to recuse yourself but actually to issue opinions. Plus it would set a terrible precedent for an appointee to add to the prohibition on religious tests such a prohibition of religion itself from the public square, as if religion has no legitimate contribution to make to our public life. 

This must come as quite a shock to the Catholic integralists of the "right" who seek an explicit Catholic hegemony over the Americas, because Amy is not their man, so to speak. It's probably more disappointing to such Catholics than to the millions of US Protestants who still don't have one justice on the court, completely dominated by Catholics and Jews as it is, even though Protestants still constitute the largest, though splintered, Christian group in America.

Ann Coulter also said Trump would lose if he picked Amy Coney Barrett to fill the vacancy of RBG. I say, only if they let her talk in public. The woman's a bot. And a Karenbot to boot. I don't think she's going drinking with Brett Kavanaugh.

The New York Times is playing fast and loose with its own so-called 1619 Project, stealth-editing-out its claims that the "true founding" of America was in 1619, not 1776, after taking sustained in-coming from critics about it.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is in re-election trouble according to the polling. The guy flaps his gums about many things and so gets caught flipping and flopping quite a bit, which apparently is wearing thin down there.

Democrats like David Axelrod are basing many of their arguments for and against everything these days on what has the "popular vote" and what doesn't, saying things which don't have the popular vote create a tyranny of the minority.

In a republic like America the popular vote has always been subsidiary in order to prevent the tyranny of the majority. Representation in a republic means that you can have a voice to persuade, not a guarantee that you can get your way and impose. But rather than argue the principle head on, of course, they'd rather assert the claim that the majority wants this, the majority hates that, is what counts, as if all the republican institutions and the republican framework itself have no legitimacy any longer, almost as if they don't even exist. This is the ideological habit of mind in action: Denial of reality.

The reality is Trump won in 2016. His position in the Senate strengthened in 2018 and the impeachment trial failed in 2020, which means the voters have already expressed their assent to the president's prerogative to make judicial appointments and to Republicans' Senate role in approving or disapproving of those appointments.

The filibuster issue, however, is a fraught matter.

Some are saying about the issue of filling the current Supreme Court vacancy that the Court's legitimacy is on the line. Many of us already thought the Court lost its legitimacy in 1973 in Roe v Wade. We thought that again in 2003 in Lawrence v Texas. We thought that again in 2012 in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. We thought that again in 2013 in United States v Windsor. We thought that again in 2015 in Obergefell v Hodges. We don't think that in 2020 per se, but I mean, look at the thing. It's a mess. Liberals are only upset because for the first time in decades their ability to impose their undemocratic will on the American people is in jeopardy.

Meanwhile it's good to remember in the first place that RBG was appointed to the Supreme Court by a president who received just 43% of the popular vote. Talk about a tyranny of the minority, eh David Assholerod?

Speaking of minorities, RBG had just one black clerk in all those years from 1993-2020. A Jew practicing tokenism? I'm shocked. She was also a eugenicist, like the Nazis: "at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of."

Oh really? 

In 2014 RBG told Reuters she wasn't going to retire because she didn't trust Obama to appoint a true liberal like herself to replace her, but she thought rather that he would appoint a compromise candidate. RBG must have reckoned in 2014 that Hillary would win in 2016, allowing her to retire safely knowing HRC would appoint another true liberal. Says a lot about RBG, but also about Obama, who by the end of 2009 had already alienated the far left. Yet by 2016 the far left supported Bernie, not Hillary.

And they say the Republicans are cracking up. The Democrats haven't finished cracking up.

We learned this last week that in April the USPS and HHS were prepared to distribute 650 million face masks to Americans but that never happened because the Trump administration didn't want to cause a panic. Like we hadn't panicked already.

Senator Chuck Grassley used Twitter to identify the numbers on a tagged pidgin he found dead on his farm. Thank you, Chuck.

Video of RBG warning against court-packing emerged, but you probably won't see that.

As recently as July Ann Coulter was hashtagging #DefeatMcConnell in support of his Democrat challenger in Kentucky. In September she was appealing to McConnell to talk up someone other than Amy Coney Barrett to Trump.

Well make up your mind, lady.

In a September Quinnipiac poll McConnell has a comfortable 12 point lead and appears headed to another term in the Senate representing the Bluegrass State. They should change that to Badass State, in honor of Cocaine Mitch.

McConnell did join Republicans in voting 96-3 to confirm RBG in 1993.

Sad!

In Minneapolis a charter amendment to defund the police failed to get on the ballot. Crime is up dramatically in the wake of the riots . . . because police are afraid they'll be prosecuted for doing their jobs. Maybe next year the reality will sink in: George Floyd wasn't "killed by the police". He was killed by an overdose of illegal drugs he took.

In Seattle the Seattle Times is lying about why 126 businesses have closed downtown. The paper says it's due to COVID when it's really due to the rioters. Looted businesses are boarded up everywhere as law and order has broken down and riff raff own the streets. Who would shop there now?

"Fiery but mostly peaceful protests" has been trending but will be replaced soon by "no evidence of meaningful fraud" in the fall elections. Analysis that's a little bit pregnant from the Mother of Idiots, the media.

After ~17 weeks of $600 federal unemployment checks, a Trump executive order has resulted in follow-up checks for $300 for six weeks. Democrats filibustered a Republican relief bill for the unemployed in the Senate which would have made that superfluous. Another opportunity to make Trump appear small, squandered.

The stock market in the 20 years since the August 2000 peak has underperformed the previous 20 years by almost 68%, so No, this is not a bull market.

Joe Biden said 200 million have died from COVID so far, which makes it a good thing hundreds of millions of Americans in 57 states have Obamacare now. In 1991 he said that he'd probably be dead by 2020. Just pointing out that there's still time . . .

Not to be outdone, Kamala Harris on Friday night said 2Pac is the best rapper alive. This is the second time she's pandered on 2Pac, who was shot and killed in 1996.

Glenn Beck wants 1 billion Americans. We want fewer Glenn Becks.

The Chicoms, who have over 1 billion Chinese, are imposing Xi Jinping thought on private businesses and sending warplanes to buzz Taiwan.

We learned Hunter Biden got $3.5 million from a Putin stooge, but it's still "Trump-Russia!" 24/7.

Robert Curry pointed out that John Locke 'had made what philosophers call a “category mistake.” Property is alienable; unalienable rights are not property'. So among the unalienable rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not to be thought of as property of which you can be deprived.

We were reminded that in late August Hillary urged Biden not to accept the election result under any circumstances. Well, if Trump wins and stays in the White House, Trump won't be wrong, but Hillary already is.

An article attempting to tout the benefits of the 2017 tax bill for the middle class contained this unfortunate line: "The average tax liability of millionaires was reduced by roughly $54,000 between 2017 and 2018", which way overtops the 2018 median wage of $32,838.05, meaning your average millionaire saved a minimum of $21,000 more than half the country's workers make in a year.

If we're going to have a limitation on SCOTUS power by limiting the terms of Supreme Court justices, it had better include limitations on House and Senate power, too, by limiting their terms of office. This hamstringing of the judiciary is in the service of the present Legislative Tyranny, where representatives and senators keep seats warm forever. It is a devious end run aimed really at the executive, which appoints the judiciary, to further weaken it.

Think about it. In 1929 the Congress grabbed power by stopping growth of the US House and limiting it to its then 435 members. In 1947 the Congress grabbed power by limiting the president to two terms. In 2020 Congress wants to limit the term of SCOTUS justices to 18 years.

The Congress does a lot of limiting, except of itself.

We have $27 trillion in debt for crying out loud! Congress has picked our pockets, our children's pockets, and the pockets to the third and fourth generation of them that hate the government of the United States. Debt is servitude. Debt is slavery. Debt is tyranny. And that debt is the secret of the Legislative Tyranny's success.

A tyranny of 218.

Brutus tried to warn us in 1787:

[I]n reality there will be no part of the people represented, but the rich, even in that branch of the legislature, which is called the democratic. — The well born, and highest orders in life, as they term themselves, will be ignorant of the sentiments of the midling class of citizens, strangers to their ability, wants, and difficulties, and void of sympathy, and fellow feeling. This branch of the legislature will not only be an imperfect representation, but there will be no security in so small a body, against bribery, and corruption — It will consist at first, of sixty-five, and can never exceed one for every thirty thousand inhabitants; a majority of these, that is, thirty-three, are a quorum, and a majority of which, or seventeen, may pass any law — so that twenty-five men, will have the power to give away all the property of the citizens of these states — what security therefore can there be for the people, where their liberties and property are at the disposal of so few men?

It will literally be a government in the hands of the few to oppress and plunder the many. You may conclude with a great degree of certainty, that it, like all others of a similar nature, will be managed by influence and corruption, and that the period is not far distant, when this will be the case, if it should be adopted; for even now there are some among us, whose characters stand high in the public estimation, and who have had a principal agency in framing this constitution, who do not scruple to say, that this is the only practicable mode of governing a people, who think with that degree of freedom which the Americans do — this government will have in their gift a vast number of offices of great honor and emolument. The members of the legislature are not excluded from appointments; and twenty-five of them, as the case may be, being secured, any measure may be carried.

The rulers of this country must be composed of very different materials from those of any other, of which history gives us any account, if the majority of the legislature are not, before many years, entirely at the devotion of the executive — and these states will soon be under the absolute domination of one, or a few, with the fallacious appearance of being governed by men of their own election.

The more I reflect on this subject, the more firmly am I persuaded, that the representation is merely nominal — a mere burlesque; and that no security is provided against corruption and undue influence. No free people on earth, who have elected persons to legislate for them, ever reposed that confidence in so small a number. The British house of commons consists of five hundred and fifty-eight members; the number of inhabitants in Great-Britain, is computed at eight millions — this gives one member for a little more than fourteen thousand, which exceeds double the proportion this country can ever have: and yet we require a larger representation in proportion to our numbers, than Great-Britain, because this country is much more extensive, and differs more in its productions, interests, manners, and habits. The democratic branch of the legislatures of the several states in the union consists, I believe at present, of near two thousand; and this number was not thought too large for the security of liberty by the framers of our state constitutions: some of the states may have erred in this respect, but the difference between two thousand, and sixty-five, is so very great, that it will bear no comparison.

Trump excels at the adulation, insatiable desires, convulsions and distractions

"He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real slave, and is obliged to practise the greatest adulation and servility, and to be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind. He has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor, if you know how to inspect the whole soul of him: all his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions, and distractions, even as the State which he resembles."

-- Plato's Republic, Book IX

If it isn't obvious by now that you're an idiot, Johnny Reb tried to tell you

The Civil War was obviously a waste of time, blood and property.

For every Confederate statue now coming down at the hands of BLM there will eventually be three of a founder of America, a Yankee, or an abolitionist to match it. Eventually, the symbols of your country will be gone. That you'll just let them go shows the actual country is already gone.

This isn't a war on racism. It's a revolution against America. Racism is simply the pretext for it. It is led by the "worldly" type of communist, the black radical who:

"with the realist political outlook, hopes through its followers to destroy society, either from envy or revenge, because of the low place assigned in it to their personality and talents, or, alternatively, to carry away the masses by some program or other for the satisfaction of his own will-to-power".

Think Shaun King the "Christian", who now explicitly aims to obliterate the white Jesus from every one of America's ~375,000 congregations.

No good deed is going unpunished, but fools like Ann Coulter will still argue that blacks deserve and should be paid reparations: Those who have done no wrong should pay those who have suffered none, we are told.

140,414 dead Yankees are just chopped liver to these ingrates and fools.

Pay all you want, it won't change a thing. Still more will be required of you.

They now think they have the upper hand and are out to replace you. "Diversity is our strength" means "their" strength, not yours. Diversity means your weakness, and the unchecked riots and looting are proof of it.

Christians 244 years ago took up arms against "tyrants" like these and called it "obedience to God".

I can't imagine finding one such person among us today. And you certainly won't find one among the paid mercenaries, the cops. They're just trying to make it to full retirement like everybody else.

Instead, most Christians have become Spengler's "credulous" type of communist, who:

"obsessed by doctrine or feminine sentimentality, remote from and hostile to the world, condemns the wealth of the wicked who prosper and also, at times, the poverty of the good who do not prosper. This lands him either in vague Utopias or throws him back upon asceticism, the monastic life, Bohemia, or vagabondism, which proclaims the futility of all economic effort".

On obsession with doctrine think First Things Magazine, think Sojourners, Christianity Today, and the Patheos crowd for the feminine sentimentalists and wealth condemners, think the Prosperity Gospel movement and the charismatic Dominionists for the critics of the Christianity which is content with little, think Rod Dreher's Benedict Option or the survivalists for the separatists, and also the libertarians who "go Galt", accountable to no one but themselves. Representative all.

Perhaps the only Christians who think in robust opposition to the communists are the followers of Adrian Vermeule who envision a once and future Roman Catholic authoritarianism from North to South America with a heavily Spanish content. In other words, when white supremacy fails, replace it with . . . not black.

 

"To put through the ideal requires dictatorship, reign of terror, armed force, the inequality of a system of masters and slaves, men in command and men in obedience - in short: Moscow".

 

The answer to Bolshevism from the foremost grandmothers of Bolshevism is to double down on the Bolshevism. Pre-modern Europe was just a dress rehearsal.

 

I'm sure Black Lives Matter will be thrilled.

As usual Rush Limbaugh is full of it: He says Lincoln ran an anti-slavery campaign for the presidency

The Republicans of 1860 pledged not to interfere with slavery in the states, but opposed its expansion into the territories. Lincoln's moderation on the issue upset abolitionists.

I check in for 5 minutes just to see what he's on about, and he gets something wrong. Every. Damn. Time.

Update with chapter and verse:

"The Republican Party was actually founded in opposition to slavery, and Abraham Lincoln was the Republican Party’s president. He ran on an anti-slavery agenda, including some other things. The Civil War was waged under his leadership and presidency, and 500,000 Americans lost their lives (mostly white) to end slavery".

Here.

Rush also gets the casualties wrong. Admittedly there is variation in estimates, but 500,000 isn't one of them.

"For 110 years, the numbers stood as gospel: 618,222 men died in the Civil War, 360,222 from the North and 258,000 from the South — by far the greatest toll of any war in American history.

But new research shows that the numbers were far too low.

By combing through newly digitized census data from the 19th century, J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York, has recalculated the death toll and increased it by more than 20 percent — to 750,000".

More.