While the American left constantly argues that the right has shifted more and more extreme over the years, it’s kind of funny how they don’t seem to recognize what’s been going on in their own house.

Donald Trump isn’t Ronald Reagan, but a lot of the policies he’s advocated for since he first started running for office wouldn’t have been that out of line during the Reagan era. Sure, some are going to be different if for no other reason than the world changed since the 1980s, but a lot of them are still familiar.

Despite that, the right supposedly shifted into dangerous territory.

The truth of the matter is that while the right has probably shifted to some degree or another, the shift looks very different to the left than what actually took place. See, while the GOP moved more center in a lot of ways over the years, the left stated going farther and farther into extremist territory.

In fact, Democrats need to wake up to the fact that they can never be leftist enough unless they’re on the fringe.

Platner isn’t the Democrats’ only problem in this cycle, however. In fact, thanks to the Democratic Socialists of America and gutless Quislings like Khanna, the party has stocked up on potential toxins in this midterm cycle. In New Jersey, Democrats handed an all-but-sure House seat to a man with ties to both al-Qaeda and the Blind Sheikh in Adam Hamawy. In Michigan, Democrats are close to nominating an anti-Israeli Islamist to the US Senate ballot in Abdul El-Sayed. The DSA is making Israel a litmus test in every corner of the country and pushing radicals against incumbents in every instance – even progressive incumbents, like Dan Goldman, Diane DeGette, and Adriano Espaillat.

Darializer Chevalier unseated Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and a key appropriator for House Democrats. Espaillat was already a progressive, and as the WSJ reported yesterday, Democrat leadership is growing concerned with who displaced him:

Avila Chevalier is at the forefront of a shocking blitz by Democratic socialists that has upended Democratic politics. She was one of three New York congressional candidates who won their Democratic primaries after receiving Mamdani’s endorsement. Her victory startled party leaders more than the others. She usurped a five-term incumbent and chairman of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus who had built a well-oiled political machine in a district covering upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx.

Democratic strategists said her win signaled voters’ openness to supporting controversial candidates as long as they are viewed as bucking the system.

“This is no longer a left-versus-right moment,” said Patrick Gaspard, a former top aide to President Barack Obama and informal adviser to Mamdani. “It’s an outsider-versus-insider moment in our politics. Too many people are feeling as if systems are rigged against them and the people they have elected to these seats are way too comfortable and cozy.”

Centrist Democrats expressed frustration with Avila Chevalier’s victory, saying it offers Republicans a fresh opportunity to frame the party as far-left extremists, endangering its chances in hard-to-win purple and red areas.

“Its like a bunch of gifts under the tree for Republicans,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the moderate think tank Third Way. “She has done and said things that are so wildly outside the mainstream that it would be very easy for them to weaponize.”

Let’s remember that AOC first won by challenging a Democrat in the primary, being more leftist than he, and entering the halls of Congress, from which she’s done nothing except show how ill-equipped she is for the job.

Still, a lot of these DSA types are winning primaries in pretty blue districts, which means they’re unlikely to lose come November unless Democrats wake up and cross the lines to vote for GOP candidates. What are the odds of that happening?

And the kicker is that these aren’t people who think America is great as it was intended but it needs some work. No, they actively want to dismantle America from the inside and turn it into a new Soviet Union.

Oh, they’ll say that Democratic Socialism and communism are two completely different animals, but that’s a deflection. It’s not just expanding into universal healthcare coverage. It’s an attempt to use the democratic process to stage a revolution that would see us devolve.

No one is leftist enough to escape the purge, either, so even the DSA types that actually don’t want “true” socialism, assuming any exist, won’t hold power any longer than the mob lets them, and that will only be maintained if they move more and more to the left.

DSA candidates, though, are actively talking about how people like Marx and Stalin should be read, and not in a “know thy enemy” sort of way. They’re terrorism apologists who aren’t even trying to couch it as just concern over “genocide” in Gaza, but outright supporting Al Quieda.

These are the people who won the primaries or will soon, not fringe candidates who simply got their names on a ballot.

And it’s not going to stop, either. It’s not going to vanish into the ether after the election cycle is over.

I hate that every election feels like an existential crisis, but they’re existential crises because we have to contend with sprinkle-covered commies saying they’re “Democratic Socialists” trying to rip the greatest nation in the world to shreds.

They screwed up Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia with their bullshit, but not to worry, because this time they’ll get it right. American Exceptionalism isn’t a thing in their mind, except when it comes to getting an ideology that resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths right for the first time in human history.

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Cool story, bro.

Since these people also want to scrap the Constitution entirely, people had damn well better wake up to this threat, and I’m not talking about those of us on the other side of the aisle. We know.

Democrats need to step up and take their own party back. Of course, my unrealistic assumption is that there are that many Democrats who aren’t happy with what’s happening. If there are, I sure as hell don’t see them.

Tilting at Windmills is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for 15% off the first year or making a one-time donation here. Either would be greatly appreciated at a time when I know good and well I’m about to have some serious expenses coming.

I work in politics. It’s a big part of my life, in part because, well, it’s how I put food on the table. If I had my druthers, I’d step away from it a lot more often than I do, because it’s not good for you.

Unfortunately, we’ve gotten to the point as a country where every election feels like an existential crisis, where we either win or perish. That leads to significant problems, many of which should be obvious.

But I came across something late yesterday that, well, showed me just how bad it’s gotten.

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I’ll be the first to admit that the United States is not perfect now, nor has it ever been. Nothing created by man ever will be. I can talk endlessly about some of those mistakes of the past and why they should have been considered wrong even at the time they happened.

But, I also recognize that our nation did something that no one else had ever done before when it was founded 250 years ago. It recognized the rights of the individual. It was the first time a country was created with the concept of people actually having natural rights that the government must respect.

Yes, the application was imperfect, to say the least, but it was there, and it laid the bedrock for not just what happened two and a half centuries ago, but what has happened since then.

So, when I see someone like this, I have to think this should be automatically disqualifying for office.

Pennsylvania state and socialist Chris Rabb, the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District, has joined the growing chorus of Democrats denouncing the founding documents and core institutions in the country on our 250th anniversary. The Democratic socialist is running unopposed for Congress and will almost certainly be a member of Congress after November.

Rabb spoke at an event billed as “America at 250 — Trump Fascism, Historical Erasure, and the Battle Over Truth” at People’s Plaza on Independence Mall in Philadelphia.

He denounced the country as based on “stolen land and stolen labor.” He lashed out at the Declaration of Independence:

“Those screeds that were very lofty but were notoriously catering to a performative aspect of collective genius that purposely erased indigenous and black peoples…It created distance from an empire to help very privileged people continue that privilege and ultimately institutionalize that through the U.S. Constitution many years later. But it certainly did not provide independence to indigenous and black peoples. And we cannot talk about anything today without acknowledging that this is a nation born on stolen land & stolen labor.”

Actually, I think the Declaration did provide independence to American Indians and black people. It just took way too long to be recognized.

Lincoln cites the concepts of the Declaration in the Gettysburg Address, and there’s little doubt that many of those who worked to end slavery did so because our nation was founded on the principle that all men were created equal.

It should have been a given, granted, and I have no problem with anyone taking issue with the imperfect application of that concept, because that’s legitimate. The thing is, we fought an entire war to end slavery once and for all. As many as 750,000 Americans lost their lives in that war, and it was ultimately worth it to end that particular scourge.

Yet I find it disgusting that while socialists like Rabb will cite that imperfect application of natural rights as an evil, they completely ignore the blood price this country paid to end that scourge.

But there’s more from Rabb:

He ignores how the Declaration laid the foundation for a more perfect union. Ours was the first major Enlightenment Revolution based on the belief that our rights came not from the government but from God. It embraced the principles that would ultimately prevail in ending this shameful stain on our nation.

“Fascism is not new. These systems of harm are built into the very fabric of this nation,..You cannot kill the beast until you name it. And that is difficult for many people who want to embrace certain tropes, certain narratives, whether it’s the American dream or American exceptionalism or the Protestant work ethic or so many other myths that do us no — they are a disservice.”

Rabb is not the first figure on the far left to denounce the “American dream” and “the Protestant work ethic” as harmful “myths.”

How is “the Protestant work ethic” a myth? It’s very much a real thing, and while Rabb might be within his rights to refute the idea that it’s a good thing, that doesn’t make it mythological.

The American Dream is also real. It’s not automatic, though; hence “dream.” People have to work for it. People have to strive for it. It’s not just handed to them, nor should it be, because things that are worth anything are never free.

As for American Exceptionalism, I find his outrage here hilarious. Socialism has been tried and failed in plenty of places, but America isn’t exceptional except that this will be the one place it actually works. Sure.

Rabb has a right to his opinions, but the truth of the matter is that he doesn’t have criticisms of the status quo. He literally hates this country, as do all his Democratic Socialist allies. They despite the Land of the Free. They hate it because they have to do something in order to exist, and they believe that makes them less free.

Socialists like to call people who work for a living “wage slaves.” The idea is that they’re slaves simply because they have to work for the necessities of life.

But that’s the norm. Throughout all of human history, people have had to work to survive. Socialism presupposes that those days are behind us, but they’re not. Even in the most socialist Utopia you can imagine, someone has to do the work, and not all of it will be work people want to do. You can’t exist without labor being performed.

The Protestant work ethic is just the idea of working hard to get ahead, and it’s an affront to a group that is ultimately too lazy to want to work. The American Dream isn’t handed out on a silver platter, and for them, that’s the problem because they think the universe revolves around them.

People like Rabb hate America not because of its past imperfections, some of which were glaringly bad, but because in the here and now, we still expect people to step up and do so in order to survive, as has been mankind’s default since well before we started walking upright.

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How can someone like this want to serve a nation they despise? He’s not really looking to make it better; he’s looking to destroy the nation it is in favor of something it was never meant to be. It’s not about improving it. It’s about overturning it.

I’m still flabbergasted that “Democratic Socialism” is taking hold as strongly as it has, especially considering socialism’s track record in the 20th Century, and while I believe Rabb has the right to say whatever retarded thing he wants, I also believe the voters of this country should see that kind of rhetoric as disqualifying for public office.

Yes, that includes the Democrats.

Unfortunately, they nominated him, and he’s far from the only DSA nutball who has won their primary this election cycle.

Remember, boys and girls: You can vote yourself into socialism, but you’ll have to shoot your way out.

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Last week, I wrote about what I called a new Dark Age. Basically, data is fragile; the internet could be wiped out, and we’d be stupid to just assume that the powers that be won’t monkey with the information on it when we’ve seen them do it already.

But the truth is that this is just part of the problem we have in this country.

It goes beyond our data and into our everyday lives.

I’m calling this the American Heirloom Project.

First, America itself is an heirloom we hand down to our children. We have an obligation to make it something worth handing down. That means continuing the fight to preserve our rights, our culture, and our national identity. That’s a fight I engage in pretty much every single day here, but still…

The second thing is that we need to recognize how fragile our entire world is. Not the planet so much as everything else. While our planet matters, it can heal from just about anything we throw at it. Our world, on the other hand, exists on hard drives that are extraordinarily frail in the grand scheme of things. Even being etched on glass would likely be more durable in the long term.

We need to migrate ourselves away from everything being digital and only accessible so long as some entity beyond our control does what it’s supposed to do. This isn’t just about important records, either, but also about our entertainment. Pay for a movie that will stream, and then watch as it vanishes some time in the future because you didn’t actually own it. Electronic books supported by a bookstore are fast and easy to store, and I love my Kindle, but the reality is that if Amazon wanted my entire library to vanish tomorrow, it would vanish.

Hardcopy books, to start with. Journalist to document the day-to-day of our lives and our world. Commonplace books to document who said what and when, or to store the odd recipe you picked up from a friend, or any number of other things you want to have on hand, but would have just bookmarked in your browser before. For the record, and I are working on something to potentially help with that, but no one should trust us to do it all.

Creating new heirlooms of knowledge for our children is a key part of moving forward here, and it doesn’t take much. Just a few minutes here and there, and you get it all.

Still, that’s not enough.

We need to look at our stuff, our things, and while I love that we have cheap goods available—a sign that the free market works because the poor of today have more furnishings than kings of days gone by—we, as consumers, have an obligation and a duty to demand better from producers.

Once upon a time, even the poorest farmer, alone in the wilderness 250 years ago, may not have had the most stuff, but it was all stuff meant to last. There might only have been a single chair, but that chair was built to still be around. We deserve better than tables that sag, chairs that crumble, or bookshelves that fall apart and spill your library across half the room.

Those products are heirlooms, be they newly made or products of the past. We deserve that quality in our lives.

But there’s a problem.

See, how we should probably be living is with fewer but better-made things. People don’t want to live like that today. They might be down with having better-made things, so long as they can fit them within their lifestyles, but they won’t make do with less. That’s fair because society has marched on from that.

What the American Heirloom Project really is, at its heart, is an attempt at creating a cultural movement. It’s about crafting a better world for our children, a better life for them, and pushing back on the era of waste that has dominated the West for far too long.

And it’s about trying to find a way to do it affordably. It’s easy to have the best-made stuff when you’ve got Elon Musk’s money, but none of us do. I checked, and Elon doesn’t subscribe to me, unfortunately, so I’m confident that none of us has his bank account balance. That means we need to figure out how to do it with fewer financial resources.

It can be done.

More than that, it has to be done.

Our system’s fragility is its weakness, but our entire civilization is also at risk. All civilizations collapse, and the similarities between our own and the Roman Empire before its fall are terrifying. What I can’t say is when it will collapse. While it may not even be in my grandkids’ lifetimes, it will happen.

Our society needs to be an heirloom, which means being able to preserve it all, including ourselves. Food security, physical security, and information security are all vital aspects of this. Having houses that can endure for generations without a societal support system available for repairs, understanding simple agriculture that doesn’t need constant trips to the garden store, and the means to meet threats and end them all factor in as well.

This isn’t something you just sign off on and call it a day. This requires action. It requires it from me, from you, and from a million other people throughout the nation.

So what does this mean beyond me pontificating about stuff? Writing is easy. Doing is the hard part, and I just said it requires action. Where does someone start? How do you actually apply this yourself?

That’s why this project is more than just a post.

Every couple of weeks, I’ll be including a Saturday post. It’ll be free, at least for the short term—everything goes behind the paywall after about a month—and it’ll be guides to do some of this yourself. It’ll start simple, then expand.

I encourage you to read them, share them broadly with people, and to print them out and put them in a binder or something. Make them physical copies so you can access them no matter what.

Or copy them into a commonplace book, if you want. I’d actually be honored by that, but whatever fits your needs, just so long as it’s physical media.

Understand that I’m not an expert in every field. I cannot tell you how to take up ceramics and make all your plates, bowls, and cups from the ground up. That’s not my wheelhouse.

What I can do, though, is look at what makes some ceramics more durable than others, or guide you on how to find a craftsperson to make things for you, and I can talk to people. I can interview experts and tell you what they say about making stuff.

My goal is to give you the tools to start you on your way, with actual plans, and to do so at various price points so you can take the steps that will fit your situation best.

The truth of the matter is that, as I write this, there is a battle going on via social media about air conditioning, of all things. The mayor of New York City wants people to be uncomfortable despite having AC, all because a group decided that cheap, clean nuclear power was bad and the grid can’t keep up with the current demand without it.

How long before these same people make living our current lifestyles impossible, all because they’re convinced that the world is ending and we need to go back to living in straw huts to save it? How long until they start trying to take down the internet because it’s too resource-intensive? How long until they go from destroying the beauty of our world by installing solar and wind farms to demanding more of your very soul?

Get out of that system. Stop depending on it. Stop trusting the state to look out for your best interests. The truth is that the state should never be trusted to do anything well.

So let’s be a resilient society. Let’s make it so that it’s harder and harder for anyone to destroy our lives and our lifestyles.

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Tomorrow is our 250th Independence Day.

Let’s create a new kind of independence in honor of it. Let’s cut off much of the same world that demonizes us for living. Let’s remove China’s ability to influence American society by cutting off the flow of goods designed specifically to keep us funneling money back to them, a country that ultimately wants to supplant us on the world stage.

Let us be well and truly free.

Who’s with me?

From time to time, we hear about someone who did something awful getting pardoned. As someone who really does believe in things like redemption and second chances, I usually don’t lose a lot of sleep over it.

But there are some crimes so heinous that they should never be forgiven. They’re so vile that I’m not even able to see the offenders as human anymore. These aren’t people to pardon. They’re people to string up and leave hanging as an object lesson to everyone else.

The crimes I’m talking about are crimes against children. They’re our most vulnerable people who have an entire life ahead of them. Robbing them of that is more than I can stomach.

For “Tampon Timmy” Walz, though, I guess that’s no big deal. Screw them kids and stuff.

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I don’t have any dogs. I’m not a great dog parent, all things considered, so I wouldn’t inflict myself on man’s best friend, but I do like dogs just fine. Some more than others, but that’s true of anything, especially living things.

However, I do recognize that many people have dogs and, because of their nature, they need a place to take their dogs so they can get the exercise they need. Cats can live fine sleeping 90 percent of the day away and then running around inside the house, but most dogs need a little more.

That’s why many communities have created dog parks.

However, one Minnesota community is closing its, and the reason why is easily the most retarded one I’ve ever heard.

From The Post Millennial:

Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board voted to close the Minnehaha Off-Leash Dog Park because it is on Indigenous sacred land. The decision passed 8-1 and will end off-leash dog access at the Mississippi River site by the end of the year.

During the meeting, speakers supporting the closure described the area as a Dakota sacred site and referenced historical violence tied to colonization. One supporter, Mike Forcia, said: "Imagine that area before the white man, before the pilgrims, pioneers and settlers, the extreme white Christian terrorists."

Forcia's full comments were: “Um, we all know what's gonna happen. This park is gonna be closed. Um, it's gonna happen. … And to all you all, imagine that area before the white man. Before the Pilgrims, Pioneers, and Settlers. The extreme white Christian terrorists who showed up on this land. … That park is being closed. Sorry about that. Get used to it. But you have no say. Imagine what the Dakota were going through. Beautiful. And then they hit. Turned it into a concentration camp. And, um, you think of... Auschwitz, and Birkenau. Would you like to see a dog park in those places? Those are sacred places now. So really, you guys have no say in this whatsoever. That park is being closed. Sorry about that. Get used to it. But you have no say.

Of course, the Dakotas haven’t held that land for 160 years, and they’re not giving up the park at all, just the part that allows dogs to run off their leashes, so apparently it’s not that sacred.

This is really just an attempt to flex, to pretend you’re respecting a native culture while actually doing nothing at all.

Plus, people like Mr. Forcia here want to make this about the actions of “white Christian terrorists” from days gone by, but it should be remembered that the Dakotas didn’t just magically appear there. The Iowa and the Cheyenne lived on that land previously and were displaced by the Dakotas.

They either co-opted the previous residents’ sacred lands or created their own, but it why is it only a problem when we showed up and did what the Dakotas did centuries before?

Look, the American Indians got a raw deal, but we also have to remember that most of these people who say they are trying to right the wrongs of the past are the same people who trust the government to always do what’s right. That would, of course, be the government of the same country that screwed over the American Indians time and time again, signing treaties and making deals, then reneging on the deal the moment someone discovered gold or something else the government wanted.

Yes, American people were knee-deep in it, but rather than enforce the treaties, the government let them, and these same people want the state to have even more power, not just over the same American Indians, but over everyone.

Instead of recognizing what was done to them, though, and taking steps to make sure the government has no such power ever again, they just want to make it so you can’t let your dog off the leash in a dog park because of some prayers a few hundred years ago.

For me, the issue is the blatant inconsistency here, not just in Forcia’s attacks against white settlers, calling them “terrorists” when most of them were just trying to get a better life, but in being the same gaggle that likes to empower the same government that screwed the Dakota people over in the first place.

I’ll be the first to admit we didn’t hold up our end with a lot of the native tribes. It doesn’t change the fact that we were the ones who were victorious at a time when conquering countries was simply something you did if you were strong enough, and you didn’t have to give them back if you didn’t want to.

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Which is what most of those same tribes did to one another before we got here. The only difference was that treaties weren’t with the American government. That’s about it.

So, in honor of the sacred land of the Dakotas, if your dog is going to take a dump on that sacred land, it must be leashed versus running free. Because the problem isn’t dog crap on sacred land, but that the dog might be able to run about on its own first.

Then again, the leftists who pushed this nonsense are the same kind of leftists who don’t want any of us to be able to run about free, either.

I guess for once, there’s some consistency from them.

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We all know that the federal bureaucracy sucks. I can’t even get into all the ways it sucks, and that doesn’t count the fact that it’s still bloated, nor that Democrats fought so damn hard to keep the bloat intact when DOGE and President Trump were trying to cut back.

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump can bounce certain people who are part of that bureaucracy, namely the people who run some of this stuff, if they aren’t playing ball. They work for the president, but now he can fire some of them for refusing to actually work for him.

Some have argued this returns us to the spoils system that predated the permanent civil service system we already have. It doesn’t, but there’s a hell of an argument for doing so.

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I’ve always thought the idea of reparations was more than a little dumb. It’s not that I think slavery was a good thing or that we shouldn’t have tried to make it right at the time. My issue is very simple: None of the people calling for it were ever slaves, and the people they want to pay for it never kept slaves.

In other words, the time passed, and I’ll be damned if I support being taxed to right a wrong for people who never experienced it.

Yet it seems that a strange group of people is totally down with reparations, though I don’t think they thought this through.

African and Caribbean governments have recently adopted a coordinated strategy to seek slavery reparations that also include formal apologies, financial compensation, debt relief, and “cultural restitution” from former slave‑trading states in Europe as well as the U.S.

The demands were part ‌of a 19-point reparations plan endorsed at the end of a three-day conference in Ghana, whose U.N. resolution recognising transatlantic slavery as the “gravest crime against humanity” was approved in March despite resistance from Europe and the United States, countries which have a legacy in the sprawling human trafficking system that saw ​millions forcibly taken from their homelands.

The plan was adopted by the African Union and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Commission on ​Reparatory Justice. It does not mention which specific countries should apologise.

It calls for the establishment of a ⁠Global Reparations Fund, comprehensive debt relief and cancellation for affected countries and reforms to international financial institutions to ensure fairer ​representation for nations in the Global South.

African and Caribbean nations jointly adopt a 19-point reparations plan in Accra, Ghana.

They are calling for formal apologies from countries that benefited from transatlantic slavery, comprehensive debt relief and creation of Global Reparations Fund. pic.twitter.com/yAFx1QJbyZ

— Radar Africa (@radarafricacom) June 20, 2026

I would argue that the U.S. has already given plenty of money to these regions. A review of the numbers shows that since 1945, our nation has already spent $3.8 trillion in foreign aid, with $500-$700 billion directed to Africa and perhaps as much as $200 billion to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Americans are all tapped out when it comes to squandering more on corrupt governments and greedy, ineffective NGOs.

All of this is, of course, true, but there’s something else that needs to be remembered: The slaves who were victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade weren’t rounded up by white people. They were prisoners of war sold by African nations like the Ashanti Empire, the Aro Confederacy, the Kingdom of Oyo, the Kingdom of Kongo, and others.

In other words, if African nations want reparations for slavery, they need to look as much inward as outward.

Yes, the presence of a market for slaves was one thing, but we should also remember that Europeans had a long and storied history of enslaving their fellow Europeans before they ever took up shipping black slaves to the colonies. In fact, I suspect most of us would find a slave or two somewhere in our genealogy if we went far enough back. This isn’t to excuse the practice, of course, but a reminder that slavery was nothing new at the time and it happened all over the world. It still happens, unfortunately.

In fact, millions in Africa are still slaves to this day.

See, I don’t have a problem with acknowledging the sins of the past. I have a problem with people who were actively involved in the trade now claiming they deserve reparations. It’s bad enough when the people who were never slaves demand it from those of us who never owned slaves, but there’s something vile about the groups that sold them dismissing their own role in that while trying to hold us accountable. Either it all matters or none of it.

Africa has been referred to as the world’s PVP (player-versus-player, for you non-gamers) server, and it’s not wrong, but we’re not responsible for that. Europe isn’t responsible for that, either. The sins of the past are what they are, but the people of today are responsible for their own lot in life.

All this talk of reparations is really just Africa trying to get a handout from the West by playing on our guilt for slavery, and praying that none of us remember where the traders bought those slaves, just so the powers that be on the continent have a new source of funds to embezzle.

Frankly, I’m not interested in playing.

Luckily, there’s pretty much no way they can actually do anything to us. They can’t stand one another enough to really bond together for more than a few hours, so they’re not going to enforce anything on anyone else.

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Plus, too many of those who voted for this are, as we speak, kissing America’s posterior and pledging eternal friendship in the name of trying to get foreign aid spigots turned back on.

It’s not about righting a past wrong.

It’s about putting zeros in the right people’s bank accounts and nothing else.

Tilting at Windmills is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for 15% off the first year or making a one-time donation here. Either would be greatly appreciated at a time when I know good and well I’m about to have some serious expenses coming.

I’ve never been a fan of Obama. I started my political-writing life shortly after his election, and I had plenty of chances to criticize him over the years.

So, in some ways, nothing has changed.

As I’m sure you’re aware, his brutalist abomination that stands as a monument to one man’s ego in Chicago formally opened, and while I’ve kept most of my thoughts to myself other than how it’s a hideous piece of so-called architecture, there’s something I came across that I had to talk about.

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As anyone who has looked at the results out of New York knows, the socialists are on the march once again. I find it funny that a city associated with wealth, excess, and finance is also so enamored with socialism, but here we are.

And, as terminal moron Kyle Kulinski notes, it’s all about Zohran Mamdani.

Yeah, he’s all classy like that.

Let’s understand that Democratic Socialism is like a turd with sprinkles. Yeah, there’s something there meant to entice you, but it doesn’t change the crap it’s attached to.

Unfortunately, the world is full of morons who somehow think taking people’s private property is different when people vote for it rather than shoot someone else for it. The issue wasn’t inherently about violence, but about the moral bankruptcy that treats envy as if it’s a social good.

And yes, the Democrats are full of Mamdani clones, especially after Elon Musk hit trillionaire status. Ro Khanna and Elizabeth Warren, in particular, have talked about how it’s wrong that Musk has that much and about what they could supposedly do with that money.

Never mind that the national debt is around $39 trillion all on its own, and none of that debt was incurred to provide free college to everyone or to end child hunger. The truth is that they couldn’t do it at any price point, but they’ll say they can because they despise in the hands of anyone but themselves.

And the Democratic Socialists like Mamdani lean into that.

For years, “the rich” have been demonized as somehow being the root of all our nation’s problems, all while the people demonizing them have become wealthier and wealthier.

I mean, Bernie Sanders—the guy who got kicked out of a commune for being too lazy—has three houses and a net worth in the millions, all despite him never holding an actual job in his life. Nancy Pelosi made millions via her suspiciously timed stock trades over and over again, all while demonizing the wealthy herself, even if not quite to Bernie’s extremes.

So yeah, we know that it’s Mamdani’s party now. We’ve known it for a while. It’s been the normies who couldn’t accept that, who were convinced it was still the party of JFK and Lyndon Johnson.

Hell, it’s not even the party of Jimmy Carter.

Through it all, though, the issue isn’t that the goals of the party are wrong; it’s that they’re all predicated on envy and animosity.

I don’t care if Elon Musk is a trillionaire today or will be tomorrow. What I care about is that he built what he built, and no one is entitled to it. For me, part of that is my own self-interest. I want to build things myself, and maybe leave a legacy for my children that will last for generations. The last thing I need is for some leftist twit to see the results of my hard work and decide that it’s obscene that I’ve actually achieved something, so the state should take it.

And that’s the Democratic Party of today. It’s not some fringe group who are simply louder than the rest, but key members of the party who have been elected to high office who are, at a minimum, implying that Musk’s money would be of better use in the government’s hands.

The truth is that if they took every penny of Musk’s supposed trillion—they can’t, because it’s not in cash, but roll with me here—it would fund the United States government for less than two months.

But, because of Musk, 160,000 people have jobs with his companies. Many of those who work for SpaceX are millionaires today because of its activities. He’s solved problems all over the world and will solve others by colonizing other worlds. He’s earned his trillion and then some.

It’s unfortunate that we live in a world where greed has shifted from something that motivates people to create businesses and wealth, and has instead infested the halls of governmental power.

Only it’s not greed for their own benefit quite so much as greed for the power that comes with that money flowing in.

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It doesn’t have to be this way. We could all realize that much of our lot in life is the result of the decisions we made, and people like Elon Musk made a series of decisions that made them much better off financially than I’ll ever be. I don’t envy his wealth; I respect his dedication and hard work, doing things I never thought anyone would be able to do.

We could just worry about our own decisions, try to make better ones, and learn from the mistakes of our own past and the past of others.

But that would require admitting that we’re less than perfect, that someone else did more than we did, and the party that now belongs to Mamdani semi-officially simply can’t allow people to see it that way.

If they did, buying votes with taxpayer money would be infinitely harder.

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California isn’t the real world. Well, most of the time, it’s not, though plenty of actual people live there. Not all of them deserve what they’re getting from the state, either.

After all, this is a state that has spent $14.6 billion on high-speed rail without laying a single foot of track, and they’re still bragging about it.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, though, is a prime example of the problems with the state. Not only is he dirty as hell, in my not-so-humble opinion, but while he’s trying to tell everyone that his dyslexia makes him approachable, he’s trying to screw over decent people in favor of criminals.

And, I’m not actually complaining about the criminal justice system in the state.

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I’m a history buff. There are a few different eras that I’m fascinated by, and the medieval period of Europe is certainly one of the biggies for me. As such, one of the first things you come to understand about the medieval period is that historians don’t use the term “Dark Ages” anymore because it’s terribly inaccurate.

Technology advanced, records were kept, and life kept trucking on. There were setbacks with the fall of the Roman Empire, but no different than they’d be when any other great power falls, especially for the people who live there.

Because of my love for history, though, I understand the value of the written word. Historians call text from the time they study “primary sources,” because it’s something written about a time when things are happening, more or less. They’re fascinating, and when a historian tries to make a claim that runs contrary to the primary sources, it’s a lot harder for them to defend that claim.

And if the Dark Ages were a time when there were few records left—which wasn’t the case at all, mind you—then we are living in that era right now.

Right now, you’re reading the written word. You’re using a phone, a tablet, or a computer, and the words appear on your screen. Probably throughout the day, you’ve checked your email, where you probably had a lot of spam, but also maybe the odd correspondence from a friend or family member. Most of you read the news on the computer and don’t bother to even think about buying a paper version.

All of that information is stored on a hard drive somewhere, at least for now. We can retrieve it simply by calling up our history of sent or received emails, or look up what I’ve written here previously by taking a gander at this Substack’s archive.

And all of this technology is pretty cool.

It’s also very fragile.

The first website I wrote for was called SamePageNation. They paid me a bit to aggregate news stories, and I would write a bit about the news, much like I do now here and at Bearing Arms. I met some wonderful people there, including my friend Kira Davis (who I assume you’ve all subscribed to, right?), but also others.

But the site wasn’t long-lived. In time, it shut down. The owners stopped paying for the hosting, and now it’s pretty much lost. You can find it on the Wayback Machine, but that’s it, and if anything happens to that site, then my early work is gone forever.

See, computer files aren’t eternal. We all have things we wrote that have been lost for all time. No one figured they were important, so they got tossed. Your email account may delete emails beyond a certain date, whether you want them deleted or not. Even if you don’t want to delete them, though, there’s a cap on just how much storage your account has, so sooner or later, someone is going to remove a bunch of them.

And that’s just on a personal level.

Past blogs I’ve had are largely gone or, at best, kept on someone else’s server for as long as they care about archiving the internet. Once they decide not to, or something happens to their storage, it’s all gone.

Ages from now, historians will look back and try to learn what the early 21st century was like, and have a problem. How much of that data will be retained? Sure, we might have every cat video sent via the White House’s email network, but what about the people who aren’t in government?

While it’s easy to think that this is a problem for them, we also need to think about how this impacts us today.

As it stands, this information is still largely available, but it doesn’t stop the left from trying to pretend things we all saw never really happened. They’re trying to gaslight the public into thinking that no, they never said all white people are racists, that cancel culture never happened, or that “woke” was never an actual thing.

They’re trying to memory hole everything right now, and that’s with the information still accessible.

Years down the road, with no hard copy that can survive various things hard drives cannot, it’ll be even easier. It’ll be simple for them to pretend none of their sins actually happened, which will just let them do it all again.

That’s especially true when someone savvy enough can access the data, even on archive sites, and change it to say whatever they want it to say. That’s a lot harder with a handwritten journal telling you when and where something happened and what it felt like when it did.

Like what saved Brett Kavanaugh’s bacon, and helped Lyndsey Fifield prove her allegations about Graham Platner were true.

The written word is important, and while technology has done amazing things to democratize journalism, commentary, and writing in general, the truth is that our reliance on it means we’re building an unsustainable framework for establishing fact from fiction.

You’re deluded if you think the left won’t capitalize on it if they get half a chance.

And none of this talks about the potential pitfalls of our own “empire” falling, taking the required infrastructure for this information with it to some degree or another. Not just American society, either, but the entire human civilization, which is interconnected like no other society before. Just one domino falling in one place could, hypothetically, doom every country to a sufficient degree that all of these ones and zeros could be lost forever.

So what do we do?

I won’t tell you to ignore email or buy hardcopy newspapers—those are, thankfully, stored in some physical medium by libraries—but maybe hardcopy books are good to have along with the ebooks. Write letters to people who matter and talk about the news of the time. Encourage them to keep them and to write back. Keep a journal where you talk about not just your life, but your response to whatever is happening in the world, too.

Document your life, and not just on social media. Document it for yourself, for your children, and encourage others to do the same.

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History isn’t so much written by the victors as it’s written by those left to write about it.

I’m no Luddite. I respect technology and innovation. I just think we shouldn’t pretend that our status quo will always be as good as it is or better. Civilization doesn’t have a permanent upward trajectory, and even if it did, there are too many bad actors who need to be kept in check with documented facts.

At worst, you pick up a quirky pastime that doesn’t hurt anyone, despite what the ecotwits might think about paper usage. At best, you might be able to help stave off the barbarians at the gates.

Tilting at Windmills is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for 15% off the first year or making a one-time donation here. Either would be greatly appreciated at a time when I know good and well I’m about to have some serious expenses coming.

When Colin Kaepernick decided to take a seat during the National Anthem, outraging millions, we were told that athletes have every right to express their political opinions. As more and more athletes started spouting off about crap they, at most, barely understood and vilified the nation that made them millionaires, any criticism was seen as an attack on free speech.

But, as is so often the case, free speech for the left is a one-way street.

If you’re spouting lefty platitudes or disrespecting the nation that has done more for freedom than literally any other in the history of mankind, you’re good.

When you object to being forced to espouse an opinion you might disagree with, then it’s a problem.

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The idea of rape gangs running around any Western city is a sickening thought, and I don’t actually care about what unifies the group. It could be the freaking rainbow coalition of rape gangs, and it’ll be sickening.

But if it were a diverse gang, there would be little to gain by downplaying the problem. In the UK, though, we know about the Muslim rape gangs and how the British authorities have tried to shield them.

Now, a new report is out, and it turns out this problem is worse than we thought.

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For ages, the idea of anyone being worth a trillion dollars sounded like a four-year-old throwing out a big number for the sake of throwing out a big number. It was mind-bogglingly insane to think that one person could have a net worth greater than the DOD budget.

And yet, Elon Musk got there.

This is pretty momentous, and I’m absolutely tickled this happened in the United States. Yeah, Musk is an immigrant, but he’s an American citizen, built his wealth in America, and broke a threshold for wealth that is absolutely staggering.

It’s pretty cool.

Unfortunately, as we’ve seen over the last week, a lot of people on the left have absolutely no idea what the hell that means, and they resent Musk for having that kind of net worth.

It’s pretty clear that many of them picture him with a vault like Scrooge McDuck, where he dives in and swims in his trillion bucks, hoarding it all to himself, and keeping it away from the people who rightly deserve it or something.

And that’s more than a little troubling.

That there exists a major American party ruled by such abject economic and historical ignorance not only boggles the mind but constitutes a clear and present danger to the country. Yet Sanders came within a hair’s breadth of locking the Democratic nomination for President in 2020. He had to be torpedoed by panicky party leaders, and replaced with a dimmer — eh, more deceptive — leftist zombie. And a recent poll put AOC as the Dem favorite for President in 2028.

I could waste my time arguing why the Democrat attacks on Musk are Marxist hogwash. That Musk’s wealth is tied to company growth which has created more than a million jobs, boosting the economy. That his technological innovations, like Starlink, help protect America by surpassing those of her foreign enemies, like China. And that he saved the country from Orwellian repression by rescuing free speech, pre-X under attack by the government — as it still is across the Pond. But, like Orwell, I’m a fictionist, who prefers storytelling to lecturing.

I’m also a realist. I know Hollywood elites hate Musk’s guts for helping reelect their antichrist, Donald Trump. The fact that he advanced their dream of gasoline-free cars means nothing by comparison. Absent the Trump factor, they would be making movies and miniseries about the greatest technological pioneer of this century. Now, the Financial Times calls him a real-life Bond villain.

Now, I can get the Bond villain thing. The dude has his own space program, after all, and enough money to build a literal private army to protect his interests. The fact that he’s joked about a volcano lair hasn’t been lost on me, either.

But the thing that so many people fail to understand is that Musk doesn’t actually have a trillion dollars. He’s got companies and investments that, all totaled together, have a value on paper of over a trillion bucks.

It’s like having a very expensive house that you bought in the good times, thus technically being a millionaire, even if your car is getting repossessed because you couldn’t afford the payments. That’s entirely possible, after all, and it’s how net worth works. It’s the accumulated value of your property and money owed, minus your debts.

So, if you were to peek inside his checking account, I bet you wouldn’t see as much there as the left seems to think.

Oh, I have no doubt there’s more than I’ll ever have in mine, but it’s also probably below the FDIC limit.

Don’t get me wrong, Musk has the wealth to do almost anything he wants. I’m pretty sure he could fund a supercarrier and have it named the USS Elon Musk and gift it to the Navy if he wanted. I probably would just because I could, but then again, there’s probably a reason Musk is worth more than a trillion dollars, and I’m scribbling on Substack.

What they don’t get, though, is that while Musk is now richer than probably anyone in history, he didn’t do it by hoarding money and doing nothing with it. He didn’t follow the financial advice one might obtain from Ebeneezer Scrooge at the start of the story. He created companies and created wealth for thousands.

He started with a company that created licensed city guides for online newspapers, then moved from there into online payment processing, electric cars, solar energy, reusable rockets, social media platforms, and a host of other businesses. He’s created a satellite system that makes it so you can access the internet from pretty much anywhere on the planet. He’s achieved a whole lot, and all of that has made him insanely wealthy.

But it’s made others wealthy, too.

There was a report about a welder at SpaceX who is now a millionaire himself, all because of what Musk did with the company’s stock. Welders make good money, but having a net worth of millions usually isn’t in the cards for most of them.

He’s given farmers in the third world a chance to use the internet to discover more efficient farming techniques and to look at weather forecasts that had been out of reach beforehand. He took electric cars and made them much more viable, a lot cooler, and a lot more likely to be purchased than any company before Tesla. He’s putting payloads in space for a fraction of the cost of NASA. He’s personally taken it upon himself to get the human race to Mars, which is essential in keeping humanity from going extinct.

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At every step of the way, he’s improved the lives of others, even if that wasn’t the goal, and he’s been handsomely rewarded for it.

To pretend he’s the villain is beyond ridiculous.

I’m not saying that Elon Musk is an angel or anything. I don’t personally know the guy, and I suspect that some people who do think he’s an ass, and others think he’s an amazing guy. It doesn’t actually matter to me, not on this, because the simple fact of being worth a trillion or more doesn’t have anything to do with it.

He got that net worth because he simply created companies that made money because they offered services people wanted and were willing to pay for.

Meanwhile, let’s not forget that many of the people who are so spun up about this are actively trying to protect Somali fraudsters who bilked the government out of billions for services that weren’t being rendered.

That’s not a problem, but someone legitimately becoming the person with the highest net worth ever is.

I’d love to say this was surprising, but it’s not.

Tilting at Windmills is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for 15% off the first year or making a one-time donation here. Either would be greatly appreciated at a time when I know good and well I’m about to have some serious expenses coming.

Intellectually, I believe that anything we do should be something we do with as much excellence as we can manage, and if it’s not to our standards, we should step up our game. I say I know it intellectually because, unfortunately, I don’t always do a good job of living it.

But that doesn’t make it less true. It just means I have work to do.

Unfortunately, the idea of excellence and striving has become somewhat old-fashioned. In fact, it seems now that everything is about a push toward mediocrity, and it’s going to bend our entire society over before all is said and done if we don’t stop it.

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I get that there will always be a certain degree of effort put out by governments to shape public opinion. The White House press office tries to spin stories in a manner most beneficial to the president, whoever that may be at the moment, and other entities do similar things.

However, that’s all above board. We know they have a slant, so we can take that into account when we hear what they have to say. With the Biden administration, we might not have known who chose the official line, but we knew it was inherently lefty and thus probably not something we’d agree with.

But there’s something different going on when a government for a supposedly free nation—note that I said “supposedly”—is funding a psyop designed to manipulate what people think and feel.

While the streets of Belfast were ablaze with anti-immigration protests last week, behind the scenes a group of spies, spinners and soldiers were deploying the ‘dark arts’ to try to defuse tensions.

The name of the secretive Government propaganda unit trying to manipulate events makes it sound like an innocuous back-office operation – the Research, Information and Communications Unit, or RICU.

But the dull moniker is part of the deliberate camouflage of an outfit which uses deception and skulduggery to try to manage the ‘challenges’ of multiculturalism.

Its techniques range from planting stories in the media, using undercover operatives to lay flowers at the scene of terrorist attacks and even, in one case, sending a pop group to sing anti-extremist songs in Muslim schools.

The 22-strong unit was established in 2007 by the late Charles Farr, a former MI6 officer, as part of the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy.

Modelled on the Information Research Department (IRD), a propaganda unit established by the Attlee government in 1948 to blacken the names of communists and other political opponents, RICU operates out of the Home Office’s Westminster headquarters.

While its original purpose was to monitor and challenge the spread of Al Qaeda propaganda and to vet the language used by public officials when describing terrorism, its tentacles now stretch far across Whitehall – to the extent that critics say it risks strangling free speech.

Now, there is probably a certain amount of this that can be done completely above board. Trying to combat Islamic extremism, for example? Totally cool. You’re not trying to even tell people what to think, just that it’s retarded to blow themselves up over it.

Because it is.

Still, they didn’t stop there, and there’s evidence they’re going way beyond that in the here and now.

A Muslim commits a terrorist attack? Spread images of a Muslim woman in a Union Jack hijab. A Sikh stabs a boy to death, and the police let him bleed out? Cajole the father into releasing a soothing statement. An activist leads people in complaining about the two-tier justice system? Smear him as a terrorist.

A source said: ‘They are working with the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s C3 intelligence unit to identify those posting the online ‘calls to protest’ in Belfast and other areas, as well as giving strategic messages to the police to ensure that the protesters were portrayed as unsympathetic thugs, rather than activists, and effecting behavioural change.’

The source said that the unit had also been advising the police in Southampton following the horrific murder of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwa – who falsely claimed he had been racially abused and had acted in self-defence – saying: ‘RICU made sure that the liaison team dealing with the family were well briefed.’

It has also been claimed that the unit intervenes to write statements by the families of victims of potentially racially linked incidents to stop them from inflaming tensions further with their remarks.

The source said: ‘You can see their fingerprints all over the statements released by the families of victims in these volatile situations – they usually have a similar tone.’

It’s the sort of thing that works, until it doesn’t. You can spin things all you want, but if reality constantly contradicts the Narrative long enough and often enough, people eventually lose their tolerance for being gaslit. It can take years for that to happen, since people really don’t want to believe that their society is falling apart, and that their government is making that happen, but people do wake up.

And when they wake up, they are angrier than they would have been, because they were victimized by the perpetrators and by the people who are supposed to protect them.

What they do is, apparently, try to spin things like terrorist attacks and push atmospheres of “grief,” rather than anger, which is a perfectly reasonable reaction to a truck killing a bunch of people in the name of Allah. Angry people demand action. Grieving people, less so.

In other words, when a “migrant” in the UK does something awful, these are the chumps tasked with downplaying it and trying to frame everyone who is righteously upset as somehow being in the wrong.

They manipulate media and messaging to present cases like the murder of Henry Nowak as something no one should be angry about. A young man was stabbed, then when the police arrived, the man who stabbed him claimed he’d been verbally abused by Nowak, and when Nowak said he’d been stabbed, the cop said, “I don’t think you have, mate.”

And no one is supposed to be angry?

I have no problem with Sikhs, generally speaking. My interactions with them have been positive, but any group of people is going to have some bad apples. Had this been framed as a case of being mad at the responding officers for failing to properly assess the situation and to simply take the killer’s word for what had happened, that would have been one thing, but they didn’t even do that. They just did everything they could to try to demonize those who were angry.

A young man was murdered, was treated like the perpetrator, and could have been saved if the police had just done their damn job properly, but God forbid that people might have an opinion about the crime that the government doesn’t like.

In Belfast, a Sudanese immigrant tried to behead a man in the middle of the street. This after every other act of migrant violence—to say nothing of the entitlement of some of these people who showed up in the UK and expect the British people to provide them with everything—up to and including the grooming gangs, and is it really shocking that people are angry?

It’s one thing to try to calm them down.

It’s another to step in under the radar and try to manipulate public opinion.

The thing is, this might work, but as Hot Air’s David Strom noted above, it won’t work forever. Sooner or later, people will wake up and recognize what’s going on and work to fight back against it.

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At this rate, though, they won’t stop at just pushing back against the messaging. They’re likely to burn the entire country to the ground, and I’m not sure I can actually say they’d be in the wrong to do so.

When you push people far enough, the only thing they can do is respond in the only language likely to be heard. If that’s burning down everything, so be it. The UK government could have protected its people; it’s actual people. Instead, they’ve demonized them, attacked them, and manipulated them.

They should get what they deserve, and they should get it good and hard.

Tilting at Windmills is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for 15% off the first year or making a one-time donation here. Either would be greatly appreciated at a time when I know good and well I’m about to have some serious expenses coming.

Social media isn’t real life, but sometimes, it’s all we actually get to see. For years, we’ve been told that the whole world hates us, that we’re terrible people as a nation, that we are despised simply for existing.

This year, with the World Cup taking place on American soil, some have ramped up the rhetoric. I’ve seen people claim that the whole world will celebrate every goal scored on our national team as if it were their own team scoring; we’re just that hated.

There’s just one problem for these kinds of people: America seriously freaking rocks, and tons of their brethren are finding it out firsthand.

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I haven’t talked much about the hinky stuff that transpired with the LA mayoral primary. It’s stupid to have a jungle primary in the first place, but the way that suddenly all of the absentee ballots days after the election suddenly came in for one candidate…I’ve seen absentee ballots swing an election before, and it was because of fraud.

So, there’s no doubt that fraud transpired for myself and millions of others, all to keep Spencer Pratt out of the general election.

There are a ton of issues with the race and elections in California in a more general sense, but this one is…special.

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For the left, it’s important that you do more than view billionaires with skepticism. You have to actually hate them. You have to blame them for every ill that befa…

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