Western Europe seems to be on a death ride of their own making, especially Germany and France, followed by Belgium and other Western European members of the EU, along with the U.K. An unbending belief in “green” energy which has driven employers from Europe and has led to high energy costs plus the first German lay-offs in their bread-and-butter auto industry, while unmanaged immigration has led to thousands of no-go zones, increased violent crime and the burning of hundreds of churches as well as absolutely horrid stories of sexual grooming gangs. Meanwhile the electorate is moving to the hard right. Europe’s political center has all but disappeared with no willingness on the part of the traditional political leaders to learn that repeating failing policies is not the way to address their problems.

The article linked below gives us an overview of failed European leadership. Years ago, Europeans viewed U.S. organizations like the Tea Party and Donald Trump as movements which could ever happen in Europe. Today we see movements springing up on the conservative side of the political spectrum. They are seriously challenging the confused and clueless traditional parties who have held power for decades when times were good; today’s challenges seem to have sapped the center and left of realistic solutions to problems their policies have created.

Is there a movement or leadership with the will and courage to face so many challenges? Or will their societies continue to decay until life becomes intolerable for most Europeans and they turn to a leader on a white horse? We have seen it done before in Europe.

Brussels: Is the Capital of Europe Crumbling Before Our Eyes? :: Gatestone Institute

From the earliest moments that any Communist seized any degree of power, be it during the Russian Revolution or in China, Albania, Korea, etc., they have exhibited the will, desire, and ability to use the most barbaric tortures on real or suspected enemies. Reading of their tortures one can often look at the tortures and punishments of medieval times in Europe, the Middle East or Asia as the work of amateurs,
How many MILLIONS suffered traumatic mental injuries, maiming and death at the hands of those who supported a regime based on Marxist “science”? How few of those who inflicted those terrible tortures were ever brought to justice? When the Nazi empire was brought down, there was at least an effort to bring to justice the architects and supporters of the regimes. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said when Communist regimes fall. That is a great mistake, for the extensive list of their crimes is not brought into the light of day, to educate the next generations who may be swept away by the lofty ideals of those criminals.

President Reagan once said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Millions of individuals have placed great hopes on the new Trump administration as they believed that in four short years, our fundamental freedoms were in danger of disappearing. Those who welcome the second term of President Trump believe he will restore the DOJ, FBI and other federal law agencies to political neutrality while returning the military to its primary functions and purge itself of DEI which has weakened its ability to meet the anticipated challenges from China and others. The list goes on and on, the economy, the budget, EV mandates, the Ukraine war, the Middle East, Russia, and so on. They believe that his second term will be even more successful than his first. That is a tall order.
When he began his first term, he faced challenges that seemed large at that time; President Obama left a feeble economy, unchallenged advances in the Crimea and the Middle-East, a fast growing and aggressive China as well as various domestic issues stemming from a ballooning federal bureaucracy that was drowning small business in an ocean of new regulations. The challenges this time are much greater as he faces:
• An inflation rate that is being fed by:
• A federal national debt that grows by nearly one-trillion dollars every one-hundred days
• New federal rules and regulations which cost the American citizens about $15,000 and have a total cost of about $1.37 trillion over the past four years.
• Repairing our standing in the Middle East after the Biden administration managed to all but kill the Abraham Accords while trying to second guess our best ally in the region,
• Continue to force the European nations to increase their defense spending in the face of little or no growth in their economies.
• Proving realistic military spending after four years of budgets which did not keep up with inflation let alone provide for adequate growth.
• A national deficit and budgets which drive inflation restrict borrowing for new growth.
• The list goes on and on.
Will he and his team be able to successfully attack that list of problems and others which cover every aspect of our daily lives? Let us hope so, for we need a renaissance to free us from the trials and tribulations of the past four years and the “hope and change” of the Obama administration. The next few years shall be trying, but we all need to recognize that fundamental changes, within the limits of the Constitution, need to be made. There can be no more of the Executive ignoring the Supreme Court, no more of a back-room cabal of unknown players making national decisions and no more of a federal bureaucracy that sees the American people as an ATM machine to foot the bill for their ever expanding quest for more power of our everyday lives.
Let us, as we always should, wish our new President strength and wisdom and may an honest and fearless team surround him.

No matter how large the failure of official Communist policy, there was no turning back. In the United States, when a policy fails, we simply throw more money at it as that is obviously why the failure. In the Soviet system, increased demands came to be the obvious answer to a failed policy.

Years ago, I learned that the Soviet Union built more tons of machines in a certain category than any other nation in the world. They built so many of them that they had warehouses of those machines, all locked up and rusting as they could not sell them. Why? Well, the order had come done to build so many tons of those machines so the plant executives, all good Communists, simply made their machines heavier; so heavy that in fact a standard factory floor would crack and collapse under their weight. No one wanted those heavy machines. But it gets better as after the good Communist managers had delivered their required tonnage of machines, they built a few more useless, heavy machines and for their efforts they all received medals for a job well done. The same games were played in agriculture (dampen the wheat so it is heavier, and you exceeded your quota) and other industries as the glories of centralized planning spread throughout the entire Communist system.

As a graduate student, I had a professor who was from the Ukraine. He was a teen during the Soviet then German then Soviet occupations. During our discussions, he mentioned the “steps on the porch” and how everyone would stop breathing if, during the evening, steps were heard. Why? Because most likely, those steps were from the Soviet secret police (NKVD) or the Nazis, either SS, Field Police, or collaborators. A “visit” from any of those forces seldom turned out well as someone was either taken away for questioning which meant torture, or it was a raid for hidden food, or simply an exhibit of power, meant to keep that household or the village living in fear. In the least, one had to learn how to answer questions that played to the mind set of the occupier.
At the end of WWII, over seven percent of the Hungarian population was held in Soviet controlled camps, either in Hungary or in the Soviet Union. Throughout the Soviet era, estimates as high as thirty per cent of Hungarians were at some point arrested, deported, tortured, or seriously questioned by the secret police. A true example of the “workers’ paradise”!

By 1945, the Communist had developed the restructuring of a nation to a fine art. Why not? They had broken the peoples of the Ukraine, the Baltic nations, the Poles, and others who lived as far away as the Pacific Ocean. The formula is easy; denounce and arrest the leaders of any society. Priests and nuns? Of course, as they preach adherence to a power other than the State. Teachers? Definitely as who knows what anti-Communist thoughts they would offer to students. Former politicians, civic leaders, police officials and university professors? Why not as who will stop the new government?

But what to do with them? After nearly thirty years of practical experience, plus having watched the policies of the Nazis for a decade and a half, the answer was simple; degrade them, push them down, down, down and break their spirits. They could never be resurrected as a new, Soviet man, but they could be a living example of what happens to those who oppose the power of the new Communist regime.

During a recent trip which included Budapest, Hungary, I visited the House of Terror which was originally called the House of Loyalty by the fascist Arrow Cross party until the end of the Second World War, and then the House of Terror when it was taken over by the newly installed Communist regime. This was not the first visit to the building, but it is so stark that it merits multiple visits to begin to understand the horrors that Communism has foisted on individuals around the world.
Many years ago, my first Political Science professor was a Hungarian immigrant. He had a “life”; he was in the Hungarian army during World War II, was critical of the Germans, was arrested and thrown into a camp. When the Soviets “liberated” Hungary, they put him into the new communist government since the Nazis had arrested him. He survived the purge of Laszlo Rajk and was designated to be the Minister of the Interior by during the Hungarian revolution in 1956. When the revolution failed, he fled Hungary and ended up in Detroit in the Hungarian neighborhood. Given his background, he had an honored place in the community, but as he said, “I would be a big fish in a little pond”. He learned English, went to university in the U.S. and moved into the big pond (all of the U.S.) where he became a professor and real estate developer: a real capitalist!
He brought his real-world experiences to the class and was instrumental in making his students realize that those who believe in Socialism or Communism are not open to rational thought. Because of their religious like belief in their dogmas, compromise is not an option,
At various points in the House of Terror are excellent handouts explaining various sections and actions of the prison. I shall forward one each week so that you may better understand what the reality of life under a Communist system offers.

The Origins of the Democrats DefeatFirst published in 1942 in Italy, Luigi Albertini’s The Origins of the War of 1914 traced the political, diplomatic, and military causes of the war, going back to the consequences of the compromise between Austria and Hungary in 1867. He took the reader step by step along a path that ended in that war. The way he laid out the events in Europe, one can see with the advantage of hindsight how so many European decisions naturally led to war. When one finishes the book, one is forced to look at one’s own life while analyzing one’s successes and failings.
Today in the United States, there is much discussion over the causes of the victory by Trump and the defeat not only of Harris, but the major shift within the Democratic bloc. In looking for the causes of Harris’ defeat, numerous reasons are offered but seldom condensed into a simple, logical path to defeat. Using the system laid out by Albertini, let us consider if you will, the following steps which if viewed objectively, should have told the Democrats that they were setting up their own defeat even as they made their decisions.
1) The election victory of the Democrats of 2020: In that election, the victor was a weak, seventy-eight-year-old Joe Biden, a man who was already suffering from mental and physical weakness. He promised, recognizing his weakness, that he would be a one term President. Like Hillary Clinton before him, he was not so much nominated as chosen by the Democratic powers that be as it was “his time.” He was, according to the party, the best they had to offer.
2) Pick of a Vice President: Being a good Democrat, the President Elect chose as his Vice President, a Black female who represented the far left of the party. This painted the Democratic party into a cornet, for if Biden were to honor his pledge, his Vice President would have to be the acknowledge front runner in four years. If she were not, for any reason, the Black wing of the party would be outraged and endanger the 2024 election. Worse still, if she did not perform, she could not be jettisoned without alienating the party’s Black people. It was contingent on her to perform and do her job in a way that would allow the party to go into the 2024 election with confidence.
3) Lying to the public: As President Biden’s mental wellbeing went downhill, the truth could not be allowed to be known. Fortunately, the legacy media and much of the cable media was willingly co-opted to go along with keeping the secret. The President’s weekly visits to Delaware were represented as “working” weekends and the public was told that the President was strong, sure and at his peak. In reality, the Democratic party hoisted upon the citizens a weak man whose record as Robert Gates once said, “He has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” This put the American people in danger as Iran, China, Russia and others saw a leader who was weak and who believed that appeasement was a positive strategy.
4) A broken promise: Despite his weakness, President Biden decided to seek a second term. The party was in a dilemma: how long could Biden’s mental and physical weakness be concealed from the public? He could not repeat his campaign of 2020 which was often referred to as the “basement” strategy. Somehow Biden had to be protected.
5) The debate: The house of cards collapsed with the Presidential debate with Trump. In a few minutes, the truth of Biden’s weakness could not be concealed any longer and overnight the polls pointed to a disastrous 2024 election.
6) The Putsch: The powers that be in the Democratic party decided that they had to find a way to save the 2024 election. Their answer was the first Putsch in American history: get Biden to reverse his decision and place his Vice President, Kamala Harris in his stead. Yet only a few short weeks before there were discussions of how to replace Harris with someone who could be shown as a staunch support of a weak Biden. It had been recognized that nationally, Harris was viewed even more negatively than Biden and she brought little of positive worth to the ticket. Yet to try to replace her as the Democratic candidate would all but destroy the Black vote in the party’s coalition. The cost of DEI was coming home to roost and the party had extraordinarily little time to market Harris.
7) The Election: Despite over a billion dollars of campaign spending, Harris was not able to “close the deal.” Her total misreading of the public mood and experience of the Biden administration was shown when she said that she could not think of a single thing she would do differently. Yet at the same time she was marketing herself as the agent of change, the one who wanted to start a new page. A new page of what? If she would not do anything different than Biden, what was she changing? The campaign was a dead-end of contradictions and hype. At that point, the Democrats could have saved a lot of money if they had just admitted defeat.
My intention is not to go over all of the policy decisions made during the Biden administration that led to the highest inflation in forty years, the weakening of the U.S. militarily and diplomatically, the relentless push for an energy policy that is inefficient and too expensive, the perceived use of lawfare against an opponent, the inability to track 300,000 immigrant children who were entrusted to “authorized personnel”, etc. Rather, we are, like Albertini to view, in hindsight what political decisions turned a victory into a defeat in an amazingly brief period of time.
It is now up to the Democratic party to realize that it was their decision in 2019-2020 that all but assured their defeat in 2024. When an administration starts with a lie, such as the excellent health of the candidate, it is acting like a child or teenager who lies, hoping that tomorrow and the truth will never come. The central lie that was sold, held within itself the very seeds of its own destruction, and should be a lesson for all of us to learn.

The day after this election, I made it a point to listen to the BBC news service to hear the reaction from the U.K. I was amazed and disappointed by the comments from the British pundits and reporters to the election results. They echo the comments from American reporters and pundits such as Charles Blow, Ruth Marcus, Joe Scarborough, Nikole-Hannah Jones, and others. As Americans they openly admit that somehow, they have misunderstood the average American. I do not believe that was ever in doubt. Those reactions brought home to me what I have believed for so long, that there is a deep misunderstanding of the U.S. by those living outside of the U.S. I have also seen this in Canada. Those who are closest to understanding the U.S. reside in the former Soviet bloc countries, such as Poland, Hungary, etc. Why is that? Perhaps it is because those countries lost decades of freedom and progress, and they see the U.S. and not western Europe as the model for what they want to achieve.

In order to help the good people of western Europe to better understand we Americans, the link below might be of service. Konstantin Kisin is a conservative satirist based in the U.K., but he shows that he has an understanding of most Americans.

One of the primary results of the election, will be, as most Americans hope, the death of the racist and unproductive DEI experiment. Kisin points out the ideal of American virtues, not always attained but rooted deep in the American psyche. I know that millions across the world love these virtues as they attempt to come in their millions to our beautiful land.

https://www.konstantinkisin.com/p/10-reasons-you-didnt-see-this-coming?publication_id=746128&post_id=151272099&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=71qjf&triedRedirect=true

“The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be nothing but law”
Grant Gilmore

Recently the governor of California signed nine hundred new laws into being. Each law will carry various civil and/or criminal penalties and will be further clarified by various rules as determined by the various agencies which will enforce the new laws and rules. Do you know how these new laws will impact you, your life, your family, or business? How many of them will make your life better or easier? Yet, you will be expected to abide by these laws; ignorance of the law is no longer a defense.
In this excellent book, Justice Gorsuch gives numerous examples of how federal laws and rules can be abused by the authorities and how naked we stand before the power of the State. An example is the fisherman who was charged with violating the Sarbanes-Osley Act (instituted after the housing crash of 2007 and aimed at financial institutions) when two federal officials miscounted how many fish he had caught with the result that he lost his business, home, and retirement savings. In the end, the Supreme Court found that he was innocent, but he lived a twenty-year nightmare and received no restitution.
That ex-fisherman was fortunate for he had the nerve and outside help to fight the system, while others often charged with multiple “crimes” from multiple agencies simply plead down their “crimes” in order to try to get on with their lives. And what chance does the average person have when you take the example of new laws in California, multiply it by fifty states and then add on and average of fifty-six new federal crimes every year. In reality, no one knows exactly how many federal laws and regulations carry a criminal punishment, but it is at least three-hundred thousand and growing.

How did this type of system develop? The Founding Fathers were very fearful of a powerful centralized state for they knew from their life experiences the helplessness of the individual. Thus, they created a system of checks and balances in order to limit the power of the central government. They believed that if laws were made, it would be better to have them created at the state level where there was a better opportunity for the average citizen to see, understand and give voice to their concerns.
The system began to change under the administration of President Woodrow Wilson who believed that what was needed was a “science of administration” where “experts” could “straighten the paths of government.” What this meant was that far too much time was spent thinking about the relationship between government and the constitution, and not enough time spent looking for government “efficiency.” And what better model than the Prussian bureaucracy? The Constitution stood in the way of “efficient” government with all of those annoying checks and balances. Better to let expert bureaucrats take the reins of government so that a living, breathing constitution could be created. Despite the failure of “expert” government from the times of Plato and Aristotle, Wilson believed that this time it would be different.

The result is a system where Americans spend 9.78 billion hours to complete federal (not counting state and local) paperwork. To put it another way, “Suppose that we assembled every resident of Chicago and insisted that for the entirety of 2019, each one must work forty house a week engaged in just one task; fill out federal forms. By the end of 2019, the 2.7 million citizens of Chicago will not have come within four billion houses of the annual paperwork burden placed on Americans.”
How do we change a system where the average citizen is lost in a maze of laws and rules drawn up by bureaucrats who are not judged on their service, but rather who have a vested interest in creating new rules in order to expand the bureaucracy? The answer is not simple and must come in large measure from the average American. Justice Gorsuch points out the woefully inadequate amount of time and money spent in educating children on civics. In fact, while the federal government spends about $.54/student on education for STEM, it only spends about $0.05 on civics. The result is that only about thirty-two percent of millennials believe that it is “absolutely essential” that “civil rights protect people’s liberty.”

A more encouraging step is Proposition 315 in Arizona. Under that law, any new rule from the bureaucracy which would cost $500,000 over a five-year period would have to be examined and agreed to by the state assembly. In other words, the law makers would have to realize the impact of their laws (which unfortunately Congress gave up years ago). This proposition is strongly opposed by the League of Women Voters as it would give lawmakers a tool to block rules with which they do not agree!

In the end, we face a lopsided battle; the bureaucracy which cannot be fired nor held to account vs. the average citizen who has no idea what laws and rules they face every day. We can only thank those few strong individuals and those who support them for showing us with their struggles the leviathan we face every day.