Are Trump and Musk a Threat That "All Christians" Should Oppose?

A friend of mine keeps posting these almost hysterical posts claiming that President Trump and Elon Musk are trying to create an authoritarian dictatorship. A true Christians, he and his progressive Christian friends say, should oppose Trump's efforts to clean up the government. It's an evil trick, he says. It continually amazes me that so many "Christians" are so opposed to the dismantling of the corrupt progressive deep state; a state that has robbed taxpayers to pay for its insidious power grab. They accuse those dismantling the machinery of power of trying to create some kind of autocracy. And further confusing me, they actually believe that giving power to a pro-socialist government that is so in the pocket of the real corporate wealthy "oligarchs" is a Christian thing to do. Instead, they accuse the tiny handful of wealthy people who are actually trying to defang the oligarchy of wanting to be dictators.

If you want to be a dictator the first thing you do is enlarge the government, make it more powerful, limit criticism of what you are doing by curbing free speech, and bleed off as much money as possible from the rabble so they are so poor that you can control them easily. And you keep promising them a worker's paradise and try to convince them you will give them positions of authority in the new world order. And among Christian religions, it's no accident that the head of the church that wants us all to come back under the "mother" church's authority is a socialist pope.

Of the 40 richest men in the world who could be called oligarchs only 4 that I know of could even remotely be called conservatives. It's not accidental that so few truly wealthy men are in favor of a smaller, less powerful, less intrusive government and more freedom. All four are thoroughly despised by the progressive left. 

And why in the name of all that's holy do "Christians" believe that progressive socialism and more powerful government will give us the man-made Utopia they promise us. "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" and a large majority of us sinners have no interest in letting God make us better human beings. It's all about power and control in the end. That's what Satan said was wrong with the way God made Earth. All that free will, he argued, needed to be controlled. They needed a ruler....oh, I don't know. Someone like SATAN? Inevitably, kingdoms, empires or People's Democratic Socialist Republics are neither democratic, nor of the people, nor are they republics.They're almost never free.

Notice who sets up the loudest howl when you threaten to throw light on the corruption of any system of government. Who threatens real violence (hint - read the comments of Democrats and progressives objecting to DOGE)? Why do you think they tried to assassinate Trump two or three times already? Especially when they couldn't find a way to put him in jail. Kick over a rat's nest and watch the rats squeal and scatter. How is any of what's been revealed by Musk and Trump's teams in any way Christian? A couple of million dollars worth of condoms for Somalia or Yemen - someplace like that. . An LGBQT opera for Cuba? More millions for transgender surgery in Guatemala?.Anti-disinformation training millions for Kazakhstan to aid its authoritarian government in controlling what is said about it. How about more millions for DEI training in Middle Eastern countries? And tens of millions to terrorist supporting organizations around the world.

Meanwhile American disaster victims are left high and dry, relying on the goodness of their Christian neighbors to survive while FEMA doles out a pittance and claims to be helping. Really? We Christians should be supporting all that corruption because you say we should hate Donald Trump and Elon Musk? I far more trust those guys. They are wealthy and immune to bribes and manipulation. So, you say, we should support what - rich progressive oligarchs like George Soros and the majority of corporate CEOs who wear the progressive badge? Guys who buy corrupt district attorneys who protect them from the consequences of their actions and punish anyone who opposes them are to be our heroes? That's what you're telling me? Robber Barons who wage lawfare against elected officials. Justice Department lawyers they keep on their under the table payrolls to do their dirty work for them. Wealthy donors who buy huge tax breaks for themselves by pouring money into the coffers of pliant politicians? These are who we should trust and follow?

I remember that Jesus once turned over some tables when He found corruption in the Temple. He scattered the corrupt moneychangers with a whip! Can you say USAID? I suppose not, if you're a unrepentant Marxist progressive.

I'm not under any delusion that we'll ultimately win this fight. The Bible does not describe any such period of lasting peace at the world's end. On the contrary, we are promised that they shall cry peace peace and then sudden destruction comes upon them. "Progressives" will ultimately win their shot at Utopia and I suspect anyone who stands against them at that time will be the first (but not the last) up against the wall.

God may be sending those angels for a time to hold back the winds of strife long enough for us to complete the Great Commission and preach the gospel to the ends of the Earth. But once that's done, the rebellious choirmaster will rise in apparent victory and turn loose the armies of hell against God's children. At that time Michael shall stand up, Jesus our Savior, and He will come in the clouds to take us and the righteous dead Home with Him. As we leave the wicked remnants of Earth will destroy themselves in a frenzy of fury leaving the planet desolate for a thousand years, until the resurrection of the wicked, the final judgment and the second death of those who would be miserable living in the presence of God. And then the Earth will be made new and Christ will give our beautiful world back to us and we will live forever in peace and abundant joy.

Should Christians then attack Elon and Donald because they are upsetting progressive plans to seize more power and to create a human Utopia by fiat?

I don't think so, Skippy. Been tried too many times and left too many hundreds of millions of dead behind. Someone is coming to save us and our reward is with Him.

© 2025 by Tom King

We Bards Have Our Work Cut Out for Us!

Time for the Bards to rise up and save football!

Having unsheathed my word processor of late in the great cause of shining light on hypocrisy, oppression and outright stupidity, I find myself being called "mean-spirited" for characterizing yesterday's Thanksgiving football game here on the left coast as the San Francisco Homeless vs the Seattle Porch Pirates. I'm sure some snowflake out there must be offended by the names of those two teams. The 49'ers for whom the San Francisco Football team were, after all, money grubbing gold-diggers who certainly didn't pay their taxes. And a Seahawk is a predatory bird who kills for food - hardly an example of proper Veganinity for the youth of California and Washington. So I said we should, in the spirit of the Washington "Commanders", change the team names to something more in keeping with the image of the two great cities they represent.  

And at least such a name change wouldn't ruin the whole point of the matchup like they did by changing Texas' Thanksgiving day classic between the Cowboys and the Redskins into something that makes no sense. Everybody knows Cowboys don't pay any attention to commanders. At least the Cowboys did respect the Native Americans with whom they shared the Great Plains, mutual respect, buffalo meat and the occasional burst of gunfire. Actually, most Native Americans, at least the ones with functioning hormones appropriate to their sex, didn't seem to have a problem with the name of the Washington DC football team. 

 I'm just waiting for an expansion team to show up. I think it should be named "The Whiteskins." Every snowflake in America could root against that team and feel much superior to the redneck rubes that merely come to watch a good football game without any need to have their culture insulted. 

In ancient times, my Celtic ancestors had a tradition. Wandering and not so wandering troubadours and comedians known as bards attended the courts of the ruling class, visited the village squares and the homes of the wealthy (sort of like early social media) and they sang scurrilous songs, told scandalous jokes and because the culture protected such rogues, they poked fun at the wealthy and powerful - kind of a pressure valve that kept the peasants from rising up in the middle of the night and murdering the upper classes in their beds. 

Today, folks like me, the guys at the Babylon Bee, the late great Rush Limbaugh, Ray Stevens, South Park, Saturday Night Live (which has, of late, taken some pretty hard swipes at the omnipotent moral busibodies of the regressive left), Internet sensation Oliver Anthony and others are driven to create satire, to spoof egregious behavior by the rich and oppressive and to make fun of their foolishness. We are the bards of the 21st century. The current wave of so-called wokeness that has overwhelmed our traditional and much-loved cultural icons like Disney, the six o'clock news, and, God help us, the halls of Congress threatens us regular folks out in the heartland. Sadly, the perpetrators of wokeness have lost their sense of humor almost entirely. 

Our betters, back in the olden days tolerated the teasing of the bards and jesters for if they were too thin-skinned about being teased, people figured they were weak and someone with a big sword would come along and relieve them of their heads on behalf of "the people" that Karl Marx claimed to be fighting for. Back when Karl was unemployed, living in his mother's basement, and trying hard to come up with something that would catch on with the hoity toity set, he created socialism, which the British upper class immediately recognized as an ideal mechanism by which to re-institute the old divine right of kings nobility and hierarchy of the leader class. And that is all Marxism/communism is after all and it's why the elitist upper classes love socialism so much. They figure they will be the big dogs after the revolution comes. 

The dismal history of socialism is also why I believe it to be my duty and the duty of every brave soul with a rapier wit and an Internet website to poke fun at and let a little air out of today's over-inflated self-important unearned but self-proclaimed morally superior gasbags. It's part of our heritage. Let's face it Americans were kicked out of every decent country in the world mostly because we just couldn't keep our mouths shut. We come from long lines of sarcastic, loud-mouthed troublemakers. I consider myself a bard, the descendant of generations of bards (and like bard's of yore, I have a sword nearby just in case some over-entitled busybody takes umbrage.)

© 2023 by Tom King

Just What We Need - A "Left-Leaning" Democrat

Democrat - No relation

I live in one of those rare Washington State Republican enclaves on the edge of the Seattle liberal-dome. Our representatives, city and county officials tend to be reliably conservative. To the north of Puyallup, where I live there are enough Democrats to elect the governor all by themselves. To the south of us live Washington's version of East Texas only a skootch more conservative. My first men's prayer breakfast of my Graham SDA church ended with everyone loading up and going to the gun show. Our head deacon was buying parts to make a fully automatic AR-15. The elders often met at the gun range to discuss church budget.  

Puyallup is where the tides meet. Currently, builders here are putting up senior-living apartments as fast as they can cut down fir trees to build them. Don't worry, those things grow back fast. I counted the rings on a giant one we cut down last year and discovered that I was quite a bit older than that huge hunk of lumber. There's enough wood in one of those to build a 3 bedroom house.

Seniors are fleeing Seattle, a once lovely city, called the Emerald City by folks who loved the city and they are fleeing in droves. They are fleeing a massive influx of homeless, drug addicts and growing crime and a government that pretty much encourages it. They don't prosecute shop-lifting so long as you can stuff it in your jacket and get out the door. They do prosecute business owners who knock down shoplifters and sit on them till the police come. The "summer of love" we had up here left a whole once-beautiful section of town trashed and storefronts empty as store-owners fled. Apparently the old people followed. They are filling up senior apartment complexes as fast as builder can put them up.

Sadly, the predators who preyed on them in Seattle, seem to have followed them here. We've had a spike in car thefts, porch piracy, vandalism, arson, robberies and mugging have increased dramatically in our little once quiet neighborhood. And the bull-dozing of local woodlands for new senior housing has displaced the local wildlife. We've got a couple of deer herds roaming our neighborhood using the patches of woods around our houses for shelter. Also displaced have been coyotes, bobcats and even a bear, so much so that people's pets are coming up missing.

So into all this, the above announcement appeared on the Neighborhood app letting us know that help was on the way in the form of a "slightly left-leaning Democrat" we might have the privilege of writing in for county council "person". His post sparked a huge, sometimes rancorous debate. I have the right to remain silent but not the ability, so I jumped in on the discussion. I was polite mind you and to his credit so was he. Some folks, however did get a little nasty. I find it's a waste of time trying to communicate with delusional people, but not every leftist on the thread was unreasonable. Though Mr. King lost me at "Left-leaning Democrat", we were able to have a civil discussion about my issues with the Democrat approach to governance. 

My grocery bill doubled starting from the day Joe Biden put his hand on the Bible and was sworn in. Governor Jay Inslee is a nightmare and has presided over massive open and hidden tax increases that have essentially along with Biden's inflation made it harder for those of us on fixed incomes. Now my friend Mr. King wants an opportunity to bring "regressive" leftist notions to our local community (and no I didn't misspell progressive). The last thing we need is solid Democrat representation all the way up the chain to Washington, DC. 

These guys talk a good game, but all they've gotten us with their piles of government programs that sound good is a crime rate that's through the roof (see Seattle), a grocery and gas price increase that's no more 17%, than the moon is made of green cheese. We've suffered an explosion of drug crimes, homelessness and unpunished shoplifting, virtually non-existent borders, and a military that's being gutted and replaced with as many political radicals as they can recruit. We've had a crime wave in our neighborhood that has touched everyone. My wife's meds were stolen from our mailbox. It's so bad that a guy who set fire to the highway last year, was released in an hour, then walked down the street and tried to rob a store. Then a few months later he shows up here and was caught ripping off packages from people's porches and breaking into a car, stuffing it full of stolen packages, then trying to steal the car. Wanna bet he's out again? 

All we need is another elitist leftist trying to tell us how all us members of the proletariat ought to live, think, eat, work, play and procreate, while figuring out how to disarm us and make us subservient to the collective (see leftism = Marxism). Even the left-leaning light agenda of Democrats is riddled with bad ideas, discredited and dangerous notions.

How's that for what I disagree with about left-leaning Democrats? This thread started out openly left-leaning political so the moderators didn't delete the thread. Here in the suburbs, naked hypocrisy is a little too out there. So if the thread were deleted, we'd all know what party's doing the editing and, probably, the vote counting around here. 

Do I sound angry and disgusted with the political left. Well I do because I am. I paid attention in history class and read extensively on the subject over the past 58 years since I was 10 years old. left-leaning is not to be trusted and definitely not something we want to see running our little corner of Pierce County. Puyallup is facing an invasion from the gulag north of us as surely as the border states are being invaded from the South. I get why refugees want to leave Mexico and Seattle. The trouble is they bring the predators with them. If you read our website and count up the car theft, property theft and damage and general crime increase in our once pleasant little neighborhood, you'll see the problem.

Why is it important that government be largely local? I sat in on meetings as a reporter in Klickitat County where it was discussed whether or not to copy a neighboring Oregon county and create survey teams with Public Health officials and armed Homeland Security officers to go around and record whether or not families were vaccinated or not, and while they were at it to check for flags (like the Betsy Ross flag which has been declared a white supremacist dog whistle), whether the household possessed any guns, evidence of pro-Trump signs, religious iconography and other potential indicators of domestic white supremacist terrorism.

Fortunately the county commissioners were NOT left-leaning Democrats. When asked if she would organize such a survey team, the county public health director answered, "Oh, hell no! I don't want to get shot!" Having that sort of power at the local level is how we guard our communities from federal meddling. 

For me, it's why not to vote for left-leaning Democrats - to prevent this sort of collectivist nonsense from gaining a foothold. We don't need politicians telling us how to take care of our local problems. I was for 20 years a community organizer in Texas working across party lines. We got things done for our communities that a bunch of central planners in the halls of government had screwed up. We don't need left-leaning Democrats in power here either. We threw them out in East Texas. I recommend we do that same thing in the sensible parts of Washington State. Sorry to ramble on, but I have way too much experience with left-leaning Democrats. They're some bad juju I'm here to tell you. I don't hate them. I've even converted some of my left-leaning Democrat friends. They just have latched on to some bad ideas and run with them.

© 2022 by Tom King 

Response to "Dear White Evangelicals" Written by John Pavlovitz, January 24, 2018

Is this really like Jesus chastizing the Pharisees? Really
The progressive elites, who wonder after the progressive Beast,
say the Bible and the story of Jesus are "fake news".

An article by John Pavlovitz* from a few years ago was written to read like Christ's scathing denunciation of Priests and Pharisees in Matthew 23. It is intended to make liberal high church Protestants feel good about themselves and to denounce fundamentalist Christians who are conservatives and not progressives. Here is my response to my friend who posted it.

 

Did you get this from a DNC propagandist? TV evangelists have their bad eggs. The piece attempted to conflate naughty televangelists with all of fundamental Christianity. Well some do stray. We call it sin and roundly condemn it. And it's not as Pavlovitz claims, the sole province of white preachers. Some are white, some black, some Asian, some Hispanic. Some have stolen from their congregations. I know of a couple of guys that have even committed adultery and murder. Even the most righteous of groups, has its outliers and sinners. Just because some preachers have fallen to the lust for money, lust and power doesn't mean all of them deserve your hate speech, John. Your rigid stereotypes, blanket judgement and mind reading without evidence sounds exactly like the racist rhetoric of the Democrat party when I was a kid. If you check the clergy of the more liberal high church denominations, you'll find adultery, embezzlement, sodomy, and pedophilia taken as a matter of course. Someone once said you'd be hard pressed to find an Anglican bishop who still believes in God.

 

I'm reminded of what Jesus said about the devil your adversary walking about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. And as his time draws to a close, we are told he will become all the more desperate to seize power and control. Satan's original argument was that it was too dangerous to give people free will. And that people would best be controlled by centralized rulers, with the power to order the lives of people bound by that power to a Lord of this world. 

 

There are two basic philosophies these days and there's one that advocates that sort of powerful centralized government. The other advocates smaller, less powerful government, individual rights, liberty, equal opportunity (not forced outcomes), free speech, free press, free assembly and free exercise of religion. John is saying a lot of things that sound good but in practice for more than a century have cost hundreds of millions their lives, liberty, property and has severely curtailed their pursuit of happiness. My opinion is based on long experience with government solutions to problems that are essentially local. Programs that are designed by ostensibly well-meaning legislators and bureaucrats in Washington DC, have a nasty habit of leaving a lot of holes in the system for people to fall into and wasting much and in some cases, most of the money on paying bureaucrats to make paperwork for each other.

 

Passionate do-gooders if spread out over a large area do a lot of good. But pile them up in DC and the pile soon begins to stink. As Frank Herbert said, "Power attracts the corruptible."

 I got this response from my friend who leans solidly leftward.  "And in your view only those on the "left" are corruptible?

My answer? "Not at all."

 

There is nothing quite like a leftist for reading and confidently telling you what you think in the starkest black and white terms. I never said anything like that. Some rogue generals and commanders among the allies did some pretty brutal things in WWII, but who would you rather have won? The left wants to move to a centralized collectivist scheme of government. They have an antipathy toward religion that runs very deep. They'll allow "spiritualism" so long as, you can't exactly explain what you believe in terms of objective truth. Kinda like our new Supreme Court Justice who can't tell you what a woman is because she's not a biologist.

 

I watched a guy named Yuval Noah Harari, author of a book called "Sapiens" speak on the subject of what progressive globalist folk like Bill Gates, George Soros, Klaus Schwab and Barak Obama see as a brilliant vision for the future. It's some seriously scary stuff I'm telling you. This self-proclaimed "progressive" philosophy which heavily influences the political left, claims there is no subjective truth, only "your" truth. They say religions are obsolete; there is no free will - that's all an illusion; gender is what you say it is and teaches that to impressionable and easily confused two year-olds. They are excited about having drag queens in kindergartens. They openly say we should serve the collective (the State), rather than, as the Constitution says, the state serves the individual citizens and protects their rights.

Simply because you say you care about the working man, doesn't mean that you actually do other than about how you can deceive him into voting for the elitists that run the government. You seduce the unions for their vote and the day you get inaugurated, you throw 26,000 union guys out of work because you promised the left you would close the Keystone Pipeline. You drive up gas prices and grocery prices and try to tell us it's good for us and we're not really hurting and if we don't like gas prices, then we should buy a $50,000 plus electric car. Completely out of touch with the 80% of Americans who do care about that sort of thing.

 

And Republicans don't have clean hands either. There are plenty who appease the left in order to retain some power and to earn the praise of the media. They are as dangerous to the Republic as the most rabid BLM or Antifa rioter. CNN and MSNBC have become propaganda organs for the left, shedding any semblance of unbiased news coverage.

 

I'm just saying. We've been warned that we would see signs like these at the end.

1. Children turning on parents
2. People turning from natural affections to perversity
3. Knowledge expanding rapidly. Computer technology is expanding so rapidly that guys like Harari are proclaim the soon-coming evolution of man from organic to inorganic beings.
4. Persecution of God's people. Christians are being slaughtered around the world with nary a squeak from the press about it.
5. The papacy seeking to reunite the churches under its banner and calling for a world government with teeth to force trouble-makers like the US to conform to the global government will.
6. The pope has been invited to be the head of a new organization called the United Religions, a spiritual parallel to the United Nations.
7. Men's hearts failing them for fear - heart disease on the rise.
8. Plagues and natural disasters on the increase.
9. The nations being deceived on the right and the left and all up the middle.
10. Attacks on the church from inside and out. We've even suffered internal divisions over whether the church should be governed by a strong central administrations with investigative and enforcement powers. We know the council we received about centralizing power back in the early days of the denomination.

The devil isn't going to make it easy to spot where his most dangerous attacks are coming from. Things may seem to be right that aren't and things that some decry as wrong is being done with the inspiration and guidance of God. It's going to be confusing and whatever your current understanding, we should come together in love and brotherhood to work things out. Christ's way is loving and nuanced and tailored to the individual. Jesus doesn't bludgeon people or cram them into boxes for the convenience of church leaders. He may not have approved of what some were doing, but Jesus called them anyway and set them on a path that would lead them home.

 

It's not about left and right, although the left seems intent on checking all the end of time boxes. But I do not think the final charge by the forces of evil will come entirely from the left. Frankly I expect diversionary attacks from straight inside the congregations of the faithful.

 

Still, the very tendency to paint large groups of people with a broad brush is downright Satanic. Minorities are not culturally incapable of sharing values and beliefs with the majority. Accusations of racism aimed at all white people, for instance is as vicious as when Democrats passed Jim Crow laws, segregated schools, organized the KKK and denied voting rights to the poor. I remember all of that. It was wrong then. It's wrong now.

And lately, the meme from the left is that "There is only one race - the human race" is considered racist. This divisive philosophy has been a feature of the party that claims to be "for the working man" for two centuries (and for most of its history was devoutly racist). As Yuval Noah Harari says, "If you tell people a lie enough times, they come to believe it." In this way these progressive elites believe they can program people to believe whatever they are told since people, according to philosophers like Harari, Bertram Russel, and Gustav Flaubert, have no free will and there is no truth, only perception.

This guy pretty much reveals the devil's playbook and the man is one of their leading lights.

* I did not include Pavlovitz's article. Satan needs no help from me. Harari's screed was distasteful enough.

© 2022 by Tom King

Big Tech Colluded with Democrats to Fix the 2016 Election

This is earth-shaking testimony from someone from their own side. Even though Dr. Epstein is a big time liberal, this really shakes him up. In this exchange with Ted Cruz (R) Texas, The former editor of Psychology Today claims that we are looking at a potential 15 million votes shifted to Democrats in the upcoming 2020 election. As it is, if they use the techniques they have already shown a willingness to use, Tech giants could easily have had the effect of shifting between 2.6 to 10.4 million votes to Democrats in 2018. We could easily have a Democrat Congress as a direct result of Google, Facebook and other tech giants colluding to influence voters to vote Democrats.

Facebook and Youtube and Google directly steer users toward ideas they support and actively suppress ideas they do not. Worse yet they are protected because they claim to be a neutral platform rather than a publisher. If the Congress were to remove that protection from tech companies, they would no longer be protected from libel suits and for deceptive practices. 

We are, like families of abusive fathers, protecting them from their own actions while they merrily abuse us without consequences.

If we allow this to continue, we will lose our freedom.  Period!  Google by manipulating search results and other means that cannot be detected and which no one is aware of and which are exclusively in their hands are colluding with the Democrat party in a way that makes the worst possible version of the Russian collusion hoax look pathetic by comparison.

This was done by means that cost these guys almost nothing. In 2020 15 million votes could be shifted without a paper trail or anyone's knowledge. If Mark Zuckerberg and the folks at Google and other tech giants support the same candidate, they can, without accountability, through deceptive manipulative search methods, search suggestions, answer bots, selective go vote notices and other deceptive subliminal methods throw 15 million or more votes to the Democrats.

We are at war with the left. God help us I can see where this is going and it's not a good place. Just watch the debates. These would-be tech gods are planning to seize control and even this very progressive psychologist that testifies in this video is appalled by the implications.

IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED THIS TESTIMONY BEFORE CONGRESS, DO IT NOW. YOU NEED TO KNOW.

Watch this video.

© 2019 by Tom King

Leftist Bureaucrat's Announcement Endangers Children

This woman is going to get some kids killed.

The left is still plying it's propaganda game despite the failure of socialism virtually every time it's been tried and even where it hasn't failed it's only a little more time till they join Venezuela.  Progressives are still playing manipulation games, even in my beloved state of Texas. Their goal is to "fundamentally change America". The change they have in mind is not necessarily good for America.

So there is this West Texas public defender named Maureen Scott Franco (the scary looking woman to the right). She makes her living defending illegal aliens from the INS. To further confuse the already tense situation along the border, she just made a declaration to the media that she had no right to make nor power to enforce. But she has got her announcement out into the news media and her words will soon get out to Mexico and Central Amerca. The humanitarian crisis over illegal immigrant children will get worse. Here is what she had to say.

• "Going forward, they will no longer bring criminal charges against a parent or parents entering the United States if they have their child with them," wrote Maureen Scott Franco, the federal public defender for the Western District of Texas, in an email shown to the Associated Press.

Democrats and leftists bureaucrats are still trying to make Trump responsible for a mess made by his predecessors. Years of encouraging illegal immigration has led to the kinds of problems faced by the INS when they began enforcing the law once again. When INS stopped doing Obama-style catch and release, suddenly detention facilities were overloaded and conditions for children became dangerous. When INS followed the procedures laid down under the previous administration, children had to be removed from the adult population because we didn't have enough facilities to handle the flood of illegal aliens. 

Until the message finally gets through to our neighbors to the south, that the US has closed its borders, the rush to cross the border before the wall goes up is going to continue. Only now everyone will be sure to grab a child to bring with them in case they get caught because some public defender says that INS won't prosecute if they have a child with them.

God help the children and save them from the "kindness" of Democrats.

© 2018 by Tom King

Unions, Parties and Killing Golden Geese

I have a friend who is a union man and we tend to get into some lovely conversations. I'm a conservative as you've probably figured out. Unions are pretty much NOT conservative and union men seem to take a particular delight in vilifying the president and the Republican Party, so sometimes the conversations get lively.

Let me make this clear. I feel about Unions the way I feel about Donald Trump. They both are doing some good, but sometimes they are their own worst enemies.  The idea of unions started out to be a good thing. The railroad union, in particular, to give it credit was able to work with the railroad companies to solve some of the problems of the economic transition that occurred in the twentieth century. The railroads were dying until finally the unions and the company figured out how to work together. That's how it should be done. 

But there are unions that don't do that. They ossify procedures, hiring and firing and pay rates. Unions can become so busy protecting specific jobs (and the Union income stream from dues) that the companies they work for keep folding. Hostess Bakeries was killed because their Union refused to budge. The union dug in its heels, the company couldn't adapt and folded. Retirement plans went away. So did a lot of jobs with the death of company and along with it, our supply of Twinkies and Hostess Cupcakes. Eventually someone else bought the brand but it was a near thing. 

Unions can do a lot of good, but too often in their blind hatred for the companies they work for, they kill the golden goose. I fault Unions for being so in the tank for Democrats. They do that because as in the case of Chrysler and then GM, the unions protect their turf so vigorously they frequently play a part in driving their companies to the brink. Let's face it, if a company can't make a decent profit, why should the continue to do business? Then when the company is on the brink, unions expect taxpayers to swoop in and bail them out, saving union jobs and failing companies. 

It's the same problem with environmentalists. These people want to somehow prevent the climate from changing. Unions want an unchanging job market. We are passing through climate changes as we always have. We are experiencinga titanic shift economically, as disrupting as the shift from a largely agrarian economy to an industrial economy. We are moving from an industrial to a tech-based information economy. Rather than preserve outmoded buggy whip manufacturing jobs, we need to be finding ways to adapt to the new reality.

The climate? Climates change. Get over it. We just have to deal with it. Clean up messes - absolutely. Stop polluting as far as possible. Of course. But do we have to create some vast centrally planned economy with an attendant huge army of bureaucrats to try and manage from Washington, a nation of 350 million individuals? That's absurd. The only way to do that is to simplify everything, stuff every peg, square, round or triangular into the same shape holes. That's why Marx was so in love with the idea of a homogeneous proletariat. If everybody (or at least most of us) were treated the same the theory was that they would be easier to manage for the leader class.

A nation of individuals is tough to make steady and predictable. Things change rapidly in a free market economy. Some businesses will close. Some will adapt. We're not asking mom and pop hardware stores to suddenly sell dresses because Walmart set up shot next door. But they can adapt  maybe sell hardware items that Walmart doesn't sell. They can offer higher levels of service that Wally World cannot offer because they have to sell such a huge volume of stuff.

In a time of upheaval, we have to change and adapt. In the past 200 years the world has changed in a profound way.  Two centuries ago we could be certain that, barring an attack by the nation next door and being carried off as slaves, for the most part however it was for your parents, it would be the same for you. After the huge scientific revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries, we came to believe that our lives would inevitably better than the lives of our parents.

It's ironic that the "progressive" movement that rose up seems to be attempting to reverse that course by making "progress" stand still. By insuring that everything from the jobs we work at to the very climate we live in stays the same, progressive behavior impedes progress. It's a losing battle. The world is changing and huge monolithic organizations and governments cannot possibly keep up. The reason America has thrived in this The future does not belong to those who learn something and then do that same something all their lives. That type of job is going away. The future will require us to learn how to learn, unlearn, and relearn something different. It will call for education that harks back to the old liberal arts education where we learn basic skills like math, writing, logic and computer skills and then layer on that first skill set you need to enter the workforce.

After that the worker has to stop worrying about fairness and start looking at what works to make that worker valuable to his employers. Here unions could play a role so long as they don't become the monolithic organizations, an image to the "beast" corporations they hate. If instead of propping up dying companies and industries we let the ones which try to kill themselves go ahead and die. We could spend that same money encouraging new companies to step in and start clean. We could train workers to do the new jobs using the new technologies and to meet the needs of a changing market.

The world is changing. There was a reason Chrysler was dying in the 80s and GM in the 00s. They probably should have. Someone or several someones could have bought the good parts and started clean. If the unions had been smart they'd have focused on working with newer, smarter, leaner companies. Sadly, too often the unions over time can become about accumulating power and fat budgets for the bosses instead of what they were about in the first place - a fair shake for workers on wages and safety. So when big bad corporations fall, unions probably should let them. Practically they never will.

There's a reason Detroit is rotting away. If you keep an industry barely alive and never get beyond treading water, an industry will rot and along with it the community that depends on that industry. Can corporations become corrupt? You bet, especially when they hook up with corrupt government which protects them. If one could allow a partnership of workers and the markets to which their labors provide goods and services to work as free markets can, we could keep corporations in line. But corruption doesn't just happen in board rooms. It can be found top to bottom. It happens in board rooms, union halls and city halls.

When owners and workers finally realize they are both on the same team and we get over envying the wealth of people who risk everything to start these companies, we might just see a greater sharing of the wealth. There's a reason Ford wasn't involved in the bailouts of the automakers. Henry Ford started the 40 hour week and assembly line and took care of his workers in ways no other corporate magnate did. There were free market reasons why he did right by his workers. Oddly enough he was very popular with people like Hitler because he was a capitalist who was also something of a socialist. Fortunately, his focus on his employees and treating them well hung with the company for a long time and kept them from falling into that adversarial relationship despite Ford's folly in embracing socialism.

It's amazing to me that very wealthy people cannot do the decent thing for very long, before they look round and decide to hook up with the government to try to take some of the responsibility for being decent people off of themselves. This protects their wealth, but puts the lion's share of the tax burden on the middle class through confiscatory taxation. Back in the 50s, when the upper tax rate was like 70%, very few of the 1%ers actually paid that tax rate. The rich were famous for hiring staffs of tax attorneys who helped them navigate the loopholes that the Democrats they support put into the tax codes. In the 50s and 60s the fat cats were supposed to pay 70%, but very few paid anything near that rate and some paid almost no taxes at all. 

There is no simple solution so long as we have vast complicated piles of regulations, laws and rules that hide the true intent of the government from the governed. It's not just evil corporations, it's evil government bureaucracies.

I think the devil's purpose is to keep us divided and fighting among ourselves. And what better way than to convince us to sling slogans at one another and lash ourselves to the mastheads of our ideologies. I used to do community organizing and it's so hard to get people to look beyond their pet ideologies and listen to each other. If you can, sometimes you can figure out how to fix the problem. Usually, people that figure out solutions that make sense just get pushed aside if they start talking sense that doesn't fit someone's ideology. Leaders on both sides of the ideological divide believe they need to keep the strife going in order to keep their jobs.

It's heartbreaking to watch the land that I love destroy itself from within. So it's good that Jesus is coming soon.

© 2018 by Tom King

One More Time: The Koch Brothers Aren't Paying Off Tea Party People.

"Dangerous" Tea Partiers - tough looking group, huh?

I'm sick to death of progressive socialists and liberals claiming the Tea Party is being run by the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch.  That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. Maybe they support some conservative think tanks, some TV programs or whatever, but front line Tea Party people aren't getting a dime to support conservative cause.  We truly believe this stuff.  That completely befuddles liberals.

Liberals really do think we're all being paid off by evil corporations.  So where do I go to get my check? I don't know one single person who's ever been paid by a corporation to support the Tea Party.  

First of all there is no organized "Party". We're a loosely disorganized gang of cranky old conservatives who have a few get togethers once in a while to gripe about the liberal agenda. We all drive ourselves to those meetings on our own dime. We don't get bussed to Washington by anybody, much less the evil Koch brothers. It's such an unbelievable load of BS. 

The last time I was in Washington, however, I witnessed about 5000 people marching on the capitol with nice printed signs and everything. They were served meals by union sponsors. They rode free buses into Washington for the Rally. I went back later that day and the National Mall was a mess where they'd been.  Want to guess where their funding came from?

I also saw a "Tea Party" rally in Austin. Everyone car-pooled or drove themselves. We brought our own lunch, made our own signs and I sure as hell never saw anybody issuing paychecks to any of us. and we cleaned up after ourselves.  The Union guys left the place a wreck after the Washington rally.  The bankrollers of the event paid to have it cleaned up.

But that's how progressives do it, so they assume, since they're being bankrolled by billionaires, we conservatives all must be too. I could care less what the Koch brothers do. You can check my weblog. I've been howling about this stuff for years. I have hundreds of blog posts supporting conservative causes. Nobody EVER paid me to write them. People read my stuff because they are interested in the subject matter. I make a few bucks on Google advertising, but writing this stuff is nowhere near worth the time and effort I put into it. That's what liberals don't get about the Tea Party. We're not shills from some corporate hedge fund crook who broke the Bank of England and bankrupted small Eastern European countries after a career in WWII of collaborating with the Nazis. We're just regularly raggedy people who want to be left alone to do our business and take care of our families without interference from the government.

This Koch brothers nonsense is nothing but a smoke screeen to cover how deeply beholden the leftist organizations in this country are to funding from the likes of George Soros and his ilk. The corporate cronies of the president get all kinds of favors from him, from massive government loans to bailouts to businesses that claim to be too big to fail.  Those evil corporations pull his strings far more thoroughly than any right wing "agitator" does with conservatives.  Some of the worst of them sit on his cabinet or act as his "advisors". 

Conservatives are not, as a rule, very obedient people. Not good citizen candidates for the socialist utopia the progressives are planning.  We've been pitching the damned tea in the bay for more than 200 years now -- whenever the government gets too big for its britches. And we will not go quietly into any socialist utopia you care to design. We've seen the gulags and the gas ovens at the end of that road thank you very much.

© 2013 by Tom King

There's Nothing More Dangerous Than a Panicked Bureaucrat

In times of crisis, government functionaries
excrete massive piles of paperwork

 Government Programs Are Immortal
© 2013 by Tom King

I received an email from the Social Security Administration last week advising me that it's easier than ever to draw a disability check when you're in your 50s. This week I saw a news story reporting a sudden surge in applications for disability.

Coincidence? I don't think so.

The same thing happened about 13 years ago in Texas when local efforts by food banks and churches to provide food to the hungry through church food pantries were blamed for an $800,000 budget cut in the federal appropriation for the Federal Food Stamp program. The Food Stamp office in Texas started a $300,000 "Food Stamps are not part of welfare reform" advertising campaign and "Surprise!", food stamp apps went up again, wiping out what East Texas conservatives had seen as a tangible gain in the war on hunger.

Apparently, the SSDI folk have instructions to ramp up the number of Americans on disability.  Maybe all that Obamacare we haven't got yet has cured or prevented too much disability and the department was in danger or getting its appropriation cut.

This is why new government bureaucracies are forever. Once a government bureaucracy is created, I've yet to see one "Go gently into that good night" when it was no longer needed. And woe unto you if you threaten their existence in any way or do anything which might make them irrelevant. They will come after you.  It's not accident that people, who have made some government agency or functionary angry, will joke half-seriously about getting a vengeful tax audit. We've already learned just how likely that is with the recent IRS scandals.

We meddle... People don't like to be meddled with.
We tell them what to do, what to think, don't run, don't walk.
We're in their homes and in their heads, and we haven't
the right. We're meddlesome..   - River Tam (from Firefly)

I still maintain that part of the reason the TV series Firefly was canceled was because it criticized big government's "meddling in people's lives".  Such a thing cannot be allowed, not even by a science fiction TV show.  Look how many socialist and totalitarian countries banned the release of the followup movie "Serenity".  Bureaucrats are danged touchy when you criticize them.

Voltaire said that "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." It's a thing Joss Whedon, an avowed "progressive" and the creator of the Firefly series, seems to have difficulty getting his head around. He believes in progressive-socialist principles, but he still manages to criticize them in his TV shows and movies and to draw down the wrath of the "true believers". Whedon even has the audacity to point out how very dangerous are the true believers, who wholly and without question embrace the power of government as the only means to change people, to make them good and to create a "better world".  The true believers do not like that sort of thing. I know, having been set upon by true believers during my advocacy career. Whedon has this kind of split personality about his own beliefs and the beliefs of his characters as he approaches the idea of personal liberty. It's why his work has so many fans on the right and critics on the left, despite the fact that he keeps telling the left, "Hey, I'm with you guys."

Finally, if you don't believe in the immortality of Earthly things or you're one of those true believers, who does believe in the inherent goodness of government, try and close down a government bureaucracy sometime. It's an eye-opening experience. Bureaucrats are a mighty vengeful lot when you threaten them and they hang on to life and power with a tenacity that is breath-taking.

The plague-like almost biological persistence of government in and of itself explains why God will have to one day burn the whole place down, if He is going to successfully clean the Earth up and establish a truly better world.  I personally think God won't have to so much as strike a match. I believe the whole rotten mess will soon spontaneously combust like a big pile of oily rags in a hot garage.

Tom King