The Great Falling Away

 

2 Thessalonians 2:3 tells us, ”Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day (the return of the Lord) shall not come except there come a falling away first...” That verse and chapter continue on, bringing to light some important warnings which will be touched on in a bit, but first let me share a recent an insight regarding this “falling away” stuff.

It seems to have been happening, at least in the Western world, for more than a century. Faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ has greatly diminished in recent decades. Masses of people have been falling away.

The new insight is that this falling away was inevitable ever since Christ put His social changes into motion. In fact, this great falling away is mostly just the latest iteration of man's most common failing, that of worshiping the work of his own hands.

Jesus Christ, and those who followed in his path, initiated a spiritual and social movement that has changed the world. Male and female, slave and free, Jew and gentile, black and white, are all equally welcome in Christ's mystical body. With that intention at the base of the movement, and aided by the grace visited on each sincere believer, Christians have been able to overcome the divisions thrown at us by unregenerate human nature. With that growth in unity, fellowship and understanding, Christendom, as a culture, has risen to unprecedented heights of beauty and truth. In many ways, this cultural growth has been a centuries long reversal of the fracturing of human culture which occurred at the tower of Babel.

You remember the story. Humanity was all together at the time, and started building a tower that was to reach unto the heavens. Then, in Genesis chapter 11, verses 6,&7 it says, “and the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down , and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.”

Since the advent of Christ, that fracturing has been getting reversed, but there is a big problem with the process. The problem arises because along with sincere believers (the living wheat seed) there has also grown up a large number of evil, wicked hearted non believers (the noxious weeds, or tares). God has always known they are there, having grown up along side and in the midst of a Christian culture, and like the parable says, the angels will sort out the wheat from the tares in the last days.

Until then, we have a problem. Because of the wonderful achievements of Western culture such as science, industry, human rights, medicine, modern agriculture, and all that, many voices have been raised against continued faith in Christ and God. Their basic idea is that we don't need God anymore because we have science. They foolishly say this while ignoring the fact that science as we know it could not have arisen except in the fertile soil of a Christian culture.

Nonetheless, many boldly proclaim their faith in a Godless existence. God didn't create the universe, or the Earth, or life. They have scientifically investigated it, and even though they have no idea how to replicate creation, they are sure that everything just kind of happened; no God needed thank you very much.

We certainly don't need to rely on some bronze age fictitious character for providing rain and sunshine for food. We have irrigation, and bio-engineered crops. If people have deep emotional problems, we certainly don't want to see them as spiritual problems, but rather they are emotional problem curable by the science of psychology. Or at least the symptoms can be held in check by using the proper drugs. Most of the time.

In that way, science and the high tech culture we have built on the movement of Christ has been co-opted by the wicked hearted tares. Now we worship science, the work of our own minds and hands (gifts from God), and leave any gratitude toward or worship of God out.

Even Christian morals are seen as distinct from Christ. The ideas of equal justice, freedom, mercy, concern for the poor and working for peace have been so (nominally) accepted all over the world that Christ has been relegated to being just a good moral teacher. But the fact is that without the grace that comes with faith in Christ, most folks don't really, can't really, live those moral values out in the real world. Additionally, outside of the Gospel, those values have been merely glued on to other faiths and beliefs, and the glue will not hold in time of stress.

So that is why, in my opinion, the great falling away was inevitable, and therefore predictable. God knew that we would, in following the way of Christ, gain tremendous powers, and many would then start worshiping those powers. Now, let's consider the rest of the thought, which tells us where this falling away leads us.

2 Thessalonians 2;3-11 “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? And now ye know what withholdeth that he night be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming; even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie; that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”

Sound like anyone you know?

Solving Illegal Immigration

 

Illegal immigration has become, in this moment of American history, THE existential question upon which this nation will either sink or swim. This is similar to what happened around the issue of slavery in an earlier time, decades of letting an unrestrained problem get worse has now triggered a time of severe law enforcement. That vigorous law enforcement effort has provoked, in turn, a passionate response of protest and riot verging into insurrection. As a result the distinct possibility of civil war looms once again on our national horizon.

Before we march further along this hate and anger filled path, absorbing a possibly deadly blow to our body politic, we should step back and realize that peaceful and equitable solutions are available to us. The thing is, the only way we can get to those peaceful solutions is by identifying, confronting, and overcoming the actual bad actors in this illegal immigration mess. To get directly to it, those bad actors are two groups of rich and powerful people: Commercial interests which employ massive numbers of illegal aliens, and international criminal cartels which profit from the trafficking of both drugs and humans.

Both of those groups are politically entrenched and immensely wealthy, so they will be formidable foes. But taking them on them is the only way we can solve this illegal immigration mess, and preserve our nation.

Up to this point in the second Trump administration, the one bright side to the vigorous enforcement effort has been to reduce border crossings to near zero. Enacting and vigorously enforcing laws against illegal employment will be the key factor in maintaining a closed border and ultimately solving this mess. We simply have to turn off the jobs magnet which is attracting the workers.

The illegal employers don't want that to happen, and use devious means to oppose it. Rather than having an open debate, they instead raise a cry insisting on absolutely no form of amnesty to any illegals. This strategy at first blush seems to work against their interests, but by insisting on the impossible perfect they prevent us from ever achieving the feasible good.

To get to the heart of the issue, what we have to do is modify our hard headed, absolutely NO AMNESTY stance with some realistic compassion. This plan necessarily contains some fine nuance (it can't be a repeat of the 1986 debacle), which will be explained in a bit, but first let's look at how unrealistic, and fictional, the NO AMNESTY stance is.

As a conservative guess, there are probably at least 30 million illegal residents here today. They mostly have close attachments, via children (citizens who will remain citizens even if birthright citizenship is ended. No Ex Post Facto laws allowed, remember?), in-laws, and friends. So, at a minimum we are talking about a deportation process that will have traumatic effect on 50 or more million people. That is a lot of potential voters in the 2026 midterms.

Look at how things have actually been going. Yes, it appears that a million or so illegal immigrants have been detained and or deported, and once again, the border has been closed. That is a good start.

But most of the deportees have been the despicable criminals and gang members nobody wanted in the first place, along with those self deportees who were probably intending to leave soon anyway. In other words, they were the low hanging fruit. Even with all that going for the deportation process, the administration has still had to resort to multiple deployments of the National Guard to assist ICE, and the almost unheard of deployment of American combat forces on American soil.

To get from one million to 30 million, we will have to double that effort, and then double it again, and then double it again, and then double it again, and then double it yet again. Even now, many of the immigrant's home countries refuse to repatriate them, so we shunt them to third countries. That will work only in the short term and in small numbers. In large numbers, dumping unemployed foreigners into other nations will result in criminal gangs running amok in those countries, which will then also refuse to receive them.

It is hard to see how we can continue, let alone accelerate, down this path without resorting to martial law. So if we do continue down this path, a path dictated by a policy of “no form of amnesty allowed,” we probably will end up in either low intensity civil war, or authoritarian government control, or most probably both..

All of that will likely follow if we stick to the hard headed, absolutely NO AMNESTY approach. Or rather, our false version of that approach because let's be real here, that NO AMNESTY thing is a fiction to begin with. There is no intention of applying that hard headed logic to all the illegal employers. If NO AMNESTY were applied to illegal employers today, almost all the meat packing, construction and agri-business concerns would quickly be put out of business. Not only would they lose most of their workers, but they would be fined into bankruptcy, that is if we were serious about NO AMNESTY to law breakers.

Many will shout, “Whoa up and hold on there sport. A strict application of the law to deprive billionaires of some of their millions of dollars is a bridge too far, a tragedy too great to consider.” They will say this while smugly asserting that ruining the lives of millions of weak and defenseless workers is perfectly alright. This is extreme scapegoating in action.

So that NO AMNESTY thing will, in the fine tradition of American euphemism and equivocation, fall apart in the wink and nod, backroom dealings of the good old boy network. We all suspect that's how it will end, after we witness a time of highly publicized brutal enforcement. When immigration enforcement starts hitting the bottom line of some big campaign donors, the vigor of law enforcement will suddenly peter out, and things will go back to how they used to be. The problem of illegal immigration will remain unsolved. That is the way it has gone before, and that is how things will probably go this time, if we let them.

The pivotal issue to consider in defeating these bad actors is the rule of law, and how greatly it can benefit working people. This is THE issue that corrupt politicians (by definition) and corporate greedmeisters (by inclination) want to ignore.

As an example, think about how ignoring the rule of law effects workers in just one kind of job; janitorial work. It used to be that janitors were paid by the hour as employees, with benefits, overtime, vacations, insurance and such. These days that work is mostly subcontracted out,(largely to illegals) so the worker has no benefits and is expected to pay their own taxes. It’s still very low paid work, averaging little more than ten to fifteen dollars an hour, and the worker, as stated, is expected to pay their own taxes out of that. Hiring practices are similar in other trades, such as construction and landscaping.

Most of the illegal workers, classified as subcontractors, simply don’t pay their taxes, which maximizes their take home pay, allowing them to pay for their own benefits, if they want. Many choose instead to subsidize that pay by fraudulently relying on government services, like emergency room health care and food stamps. The only way for an American to compete for those jobs is to settle for taking home, after taxes, less than seven to ten dollars an hour, or to take the risk of not paying the taxes.

If the IRS comes after the illegal worker for back taxes, they can go underground, get a new phony ID, take a temporary deportation, or maybe just take their savings and depart for home. On the other hand, if the IRS comes after the American worker, they’re in a lot of trouble, with almost no place to hide. So the situation is that if the American is going to compete with the illegal, they tend to move to a marginalized legal status, effectively working under the table, just like the illegals. That’s how it is working today, how it has always worked when the law is being ignored, and how it will always work. Lawlessness always begets more lawlessness.

Now consider how this microcosm plays out when repeated millions of times over many years. Basically, if the rule of law continues to be ignored, (and if we allow it to continue it will only get worse) the status of illegal workers, both in this nation and abroad, will stay the same or slowly get worse, and the status of American workers (in terms of wages, protections, security, etc) will, over the course of years, be brought down to that level. This has been happening for decades now, and is a major factor in the widening disparity between rich and poor in this nation.

On the other hand, if we insist on the rule of law, requiring our government to do the will of the people and forcing businesses to obey the law, the status of the American workers (wages, benefits, and all that) will stay the same as today, and probably tend to slowly improve. The status of the low skill foreign workers, in this nation and abroad, will slowly be brought up to that level. Thus, many of the economic issues facing the masses will improve if we reject illegality and instead embrace the rule of law. Solving the illegal immigration problem by compassionately returning to the rule of law will benefit all working people, in this and other countries, and only minimally reduce the wealth of the already wealthy.

So it is easy to see why those bad actors want the border open and immigration law unenforced. The cartels obviously want an unending stream of illegal border crossings to disguise their trafficking schemes. Even more, the large illegal employers want the illegals to stay here, continue working for them, and remain illegal. All they have to do to keep this gravy train rolling, whenever the American people periodically rise up to demand an end to this mess, is to raise a howl for NO AMNESTY, demanding that the perfect remain the enemy of the good.

Up to now their plan has always worked. We are always left with this three way choice. Either keep going on this path, and risk civil war. Or get even tougher, avoid civil war by becoming an armed camp and engaging in genocidal levels of enforcement. Or, what is most probable, let it go back to the way it was before Trump tried to fix it. None of those choices is acceptable, so this time, let's look at a better alternative.

The alternative solution will first of all have to be based on keeping the border tightly closed. The first step has to be that everyone who comes into this country comes in through the front door, in compliance with our laws, whatever we decide those laws will be. That border closure must be maintained for as long as the border exists.

The next stage in the plan is to establish some date certain, in the near future, at which time all illegal employees, and their employers, are required to identify all illegal workers. This requirement will also be applied to anyone accessing government services. At that time each person will be assigned a provisional green card, with bio-metric data attached and downloaded to a data base. After that date, any worker or client without such a card, and a file in the data base, is subject to immediate deportation and the employer is subject to a fine, if not criminal prosecution if they have tried to evade this system.

Enforcement of these new immigration laws will, contrary to those defending illegal employment, be an easy task. Simply attach hefty fines to every instance of illegal employment, and make half the fine money payable, as a bounty, to those who report it. That approach would make enforcement very easy, and profoundly cost effective. In fact, that way of doing it would be so effective that it would actually threaten the economic well being of many big corporations.

Then the real world benefits of this policy would come to the fore. Rather than allowing themselves to go broke, the big corporate illegal employers would be forced to make their arguments regarding those foreign workers in transparent public debate, and not just in smoke filled back rooms. When the big business folks have to make their arguments public, we will probably soon discover that in some fields, such as agriculture and meat processing, we really do need some foreign workers, and then we would have an honest basis for establishing a fair guest worker program.

Concurrent with the assignment of a provisional green card to every illegal resident, each of them, when identified, will be entered into and subjected to a vetting process. The metrics of this vetting process will have already been established and made transparent to the public. These protocols will be designed to determine who deserves to gain permanent green card status.

These protocols will be based on things like time in country, legal record, work history, character references from friends and employers, record of family use or abuse of government services, and things like that. That way, a person who has been here twenty years, worked hard, paid their bills and kept their nose clean will be relatively assured, even before entering into the process, of gaining a permanent green card. That way, much opposition to the plan will be dissipated.

On the other hand, those who engaged in criminality, or who lived on the edge of the law, or were illegitimately brought in during Biden's open border fiasco, or who came here to game our system and take advantage of our compassion, will be filtered out.

While that vetting process is being carried out, all employees, legal or illegal, will, for the first time, have equal legal status. That means minimum wage, safety, and worker benefits laws will be in force. That alone will make it to where native born Americans will once again be able to compete for jobs in those fields. As the vetting process continues, many of the foreign born illegal workers will get deported, and even more native born workers will take their place.

Once again it must be emphasized that a closed border will have to be a permanent fact for this plan to work. From this point forward there will be no new illegal workers coming in. That will be the big difference compared to what happened in 1986.

With all those factors in place, over the course of just a few years, with our economy expanding as expected, the formerly illegal workers will be absorbed into an open, free and fair market. The problem of illegal immigration will largely be solved, and the rule of law restored. Some corporations will have slightly reduced profits, and the international criminal cartels will have much less influence. Most of us will be okay with those outcomes.

Then we can have full employment, with a dignified, legally protected and decent life for all workers. Our nation will be stronger, more inclusive, more united, and more peaceful. Isn't that an agenda we can all support?

We've Got to Get on Our Own Side

Our nation and our world are swirling in the chaos of seemingly innumerable scandals and emergencies. From the bombing of Iran, last year and next week? Tomorrow?, to the gargantuan fraud scandals that are just emerging, to ICE round ups, to the deportation of criminals and terrorists, to the deportation of upstanding family builders, to whatever the US is doing in Greenland, to Gaza, to Ukraine, to Iran's revolution, to what we just did in Venezuela, to American citizens being shot for demonstrating/ obstructing law enforcement, and a lot more issues that limited space doesn't allow to be mentioned here.

In all of these we find ourselves involved in passionate controversy. The worst part is that even though we have all this information technology at our fingertips, the truth, or at least the truth we can agree on, is almost impossible to find. Because of that we are in a time of deep and worsening division.

Here in America, the division is so stark that many are calling for a national divorce, or some kind of chaotic change in government. It is all so unnecessary because if we take the time to look at the situation with an honest eye, we can see a way to unity and national revival. However, if we do look at it with an honest eye, we will see that those on both the left and the right, Democrat and Republican, have been bamboozled. We have bought into some massive lies, lies which are going to destroy our nation if we don't reject them.

The attack on Venezuela of January 2, 2026 has raised questions about those lies; about our government, and how our Constitution is to be used. The response has been, besides the global celebration of Venezuelans, to object that President Trump should have gained congressional authorization prior to launching an attack. The first counter response is to warn that many in congress can't be trusted to keep such an operation secret, and so the President was justified in going it alone. Both sides of this argument, and the deeper arguments which follow, have some merit. We will focus on them now, because they reveal how all the whole raft of divisive issues are connected..

The legal issues come down to two clauses in Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution, wherein Congress is given specific powers. In clause 11, Congress is given the power to declare war. Those on the left say that Trump should have been bound by this clause, and that Congress should have declared war before he launched the operation to arrest Maduro. Those on the right say President Trump, as commander in chief, has the power to conduct legal and small scale operations on his own say so. What's more, they have a lot of legal precedents to back them on this, among which are American “gun boat” diplomacy of the late 1800's, Clinton's bombing of Bosnia, Obama's droning of multiple human targets, and the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya.

With all those undeclared precedents in mind, take another look at that congressional power to declare war. That power was last exercised properly at the beginning of World War II. Since then it has been violated on a regular basis by both Republican and Democrat administrations. Korea and Vietnam are glaring examples, but even the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with their Authorizations of the use of Military Force, fell far short of having proper declarations of war, even though war was definitely conducted in those nations. So squawking loudly about how Trump's actions are an unprecedented violation of the Constitution misses the real point.

The real point is that both sides are wrong, because all those unauthorized actions should be challenged for another reason, The more pertinent clause of section 8 that should guide us is clause 10, just prior to clause 11, which says, “The Congress shall have power: To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas and offenses against the law of nations.” That clause obviously covers piracy, trafficking in both narcotics and humans, and international terrorism. It does not, however, give the President Cart Blanche, but rather gives to Congress the all important power of definition. So when the subject comes up that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, it is the Congress, not the President, who is to make that call.

The way it could, and should, work is that Congress should debate the issues of foreign governments and organizations that threaten our national security. If the threat is dire enough, war should be declared. If the threat is low level, but still a threat, Congress should define who is really the bad guy, and how they should be punished. The President should then be authorized to carry out any punishment the Congress decrees. While the debate would be in public, any operational details, such as specific targets, timing and etc could be kept secret. That way, the enemy would not know when or how we are coming.

If such debates were held in public, transparent for the most part to the world, our adversaries would know that we are coming. Just having the debate might work to change their behavior and prevent war. What's more, once Congress did define some bad actor as a terrorist, or some foreign government as a violator of the laws of nations, the world would know that we, as a nation were united in our resolve, and that we mean business.

The big obstacle to our operating in that constitutional mode, and the first point of this essay, is those same unfaithful legislators mentioned earlier. Not trusting some legislators to keep national secrets is a real concern, but the situation is worse than that. Some congresspeople can't be trusted to seek the national good while debating in congress. Some of them seem to be pursuing the interests of other nations, or the dominance of some alien ideology.

Faithless legislators greatly hobble our nation. Take, for an example, how we should have dealt with Iran's growing nuclear capabilities. Even though that nation was clearly in violation, for more than twenty years, of the international treaty on nuclear non proliferation, we couldn't, due to the unfaithful legislators, do any constitutional thing about it. We should have used, Art 1, sec 8, clause 10, and given standing authorization for the president to act, forcefully if necessary, to prevent the terrorist regime in Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. However, some faithless left wing congress people would have vehemently opposed that, and due to the current hyper partisan spirit in congress, the Democrats, in lock step fashion, would have prevented that kind of constructive use of our Constitution. With that authority in hand, Trump might not have ever needed to bomb them.

Faithless legislators like that should be restrained by the threat of losing their seats in the next election. Too often, however, the unfaithful congress people are representing the wishes of their constituents back home. That then is the real crux of our problem, and one it is high time we addressed. There are a lot of people, in a lot of different groups, that don't really care for America to survive as a free and self governing nation.

All of those groups, left and right, singly and collectively, poison our national debate about the law and the Constitution; what it means, and how it should be used. For the most part, these groups use the Constitution as a cynical tool to wreak national destruction. When it suits their purpose, they embrace the most minuscule points, applying wrong headed readings of it to current issues. When it doesn't suit their purpose, they are happily capable of ignoring wholesale constitutional violations. They thus render our foundational national document into a kind of suicide pact, useful only when it degrades the national well being.

This latest incident in Venezuela shows that in action. Those on the left, which now includes Globalists, Marxists and radical Moslems, are deeply and touchingly concerned that every jot and tittle of their Constitutional misreading be adhered to in this case. On the other hand, when Clinton was bombing Bosnia, or Obama was droning wedding parties in Afghanistan, not a peep was heard from them.

This constitutional malfeasance is practiced by both left and right, Democrats and Republicans. What's more, the worst examples of this malfeasance are not minuscule, but extend to huge issues which touch every aspect of national life.

On the left, the biggest issue is how they ignore the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt, FDR, effectively repealed the Tenth Amendment in the 1930's. They will respond that the Supreme Court approved it (even though the Court was politically coerced due to FDR's court packing scheme), so in this case, the Court's word is final. This is unlike the way they receive court rulings that favor Donald Trump, such as SCOTUS approving his War Powers stance, or supporting his programs to deport illegal aliens, or the overthrowing of Roe v Wade. In those cases the court ruling is definitely up for debate, and not final.

Things aren't much different on the right. They might celebrate Trump's court victories, but their own fealty to the Constitution is suspect, especially when such doctrines as corporate personhood are scrutinized. Yes, they can point to favorable court rulings which support that odious doctrine, just as the left ignores the court approved neutering of the Tenth Amendment. What they can't point to, however, is where the doctrine of corporate personhood exists in the Constitution, or how it conforms to the vision of government the founders handed us.

Leaving the legalistic wranglings around these issues for later, the point remains that many in our nation use our Constitution as a kind of suicide pact. Then the real problem, once again, comes down to these faithless legislators, and the millions of our fellow citizens who vote for them. Simply put, there are too many Americans these days who are not sure that the United States of America is a good idea anymore, or that it ever really was.

When we see that as the real problem, the awkward misuse of the Constitution makes sense. Far too many folks in this country have an agenda other than truly working toward a more perfect union. Some are out and out Marxist globalists (Progressives and Secular fundamentalists). Some are religious zealots, ranging from fundamentalist Moslems to Christian Nationalists, and some are racists, of various stripes, that believe in their own racial group's supremacy. All of them are deluded with the notion that America was always and still is a flawed nation, not really worthy of continued existence. They foolishly think that we should just let the republic go; that anything would be better.

It is easy enough to see why some, if not most, modern Americans have come to doubt that this country should continue. From day one, we have not lived up to our lofty ideals. It isn't that our system failed, but rather that we failed our system. We claimed all men are created equal, but we didn't extend equal rights to all men. At first we kept those just for wealthy White men; and then, after some reforms, to just White men; and then, after a brutal, probably inevitable war to end slavery, nominally extended rights to all men, even Black men, that were citizens. Then we eventually included Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans, along with every ethnicity of women. So while we began with great flaws, over time we have at least been trying to perfect the union, to mend its' every flaw.

Along the way, however, while we were distracted and not being informed about it, we lost the essence of our original system. First, some powerful interests got effective control of the free press, what is today known as the media. Then, while we weren't looking or being warned about it due to that corrupted media, those same elitist interests (who never did want a nation dedicated to liberty and justice for all) got the Supreme Court to declare that corporations are persons. That really changed the basic structure of our government, because the founders, with the intention of preventing corporate monopolies, had set it up to where the states could regulate corporations. After the court made that ruling in 1886, states could no longer keep the corporations on the short leash of community control. Interstate monopolies and trusts soon thereafter (in the 1890's) came to dominate our national life. to the detriment of us all.

After that there were a couple of other massive changes to our system, which even though they were done by constitutional amendments in the 19teens, worked to scuttle the original political dynamic initiated by the founders. Those were the 16^th and 17^th Amendments, which established a federal tax directly on individuals, and set up direct election of senators. The first erected a horrifyingly unbalanced tax structure, making individuals answer, as individuals, to a distant, all powerful, and unaccountable government. The second muffled most of the voices of the states in the halls of the national legislature. Those combined moves actually reduced the influence that individuals could have on the federal government just as they gave that same federal government the power to insert itself into the most intimate details of our personal lives. The Founders would have rolled over in their graves.

A later unconstitutional usurpation of powers by the feds from the states occurred under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930's. During that decade, and in response to what he termed a national crisis, FDR moved many of the functions of government from the states and localities to the federal government. He effectively, as stated earlier, repealed the Tenth Amendment. Not only was that agenda initiated in that decade, but since then, with LBJ's Great Society and such, we have continued down that path, amalgamating almost all powers of government at that same, federal, national level.

These days almost all the functions of government, from education to healthcare to welfare to infrastructure to jobs, business, and environmental controls, functions which used to be under the responsibility and power of local communities, have been taken over by the federal government. It is then no wonder folks have come to doubt the goodness of America. We haven't lived in America for a long time, a much longer time than the lifespans of any still breathing.. We have been in a different country, a false America, for so long that the blessings, and the very feel, of liberty have been lost to our hearts and minds.

Think about how these changes (and there are others) explain so much of what has gone wrong in our nation, and how the truth of this cuts in all directions. A government which enables corporate excess and monopolies has resulted in many of us hating and fearing capitalism. That is a tragedy because the type of small scale, petite capitalism the founders embraced, and empowered the states to regulate, served the people well, and would not have led to these excesses.

Likewise, big, over-centralized government has both taken from us control of corporations, and created huge unaccountable bureaucracies which rule over the minutia of our lives. This over-centralized government has created a real dread of tyranny in the hearts of many. Ultimately, those who of us dread corporate excess have been divided from and set in battle against those of us who dread the ravages of big government tyranny. Thus our great national division is driven by our elite rulers.

Further, and most importantly, taking the powers of self government from us in our local communities has removed from us the greatest blessing of liberty which the American system previously provided. That great blessing is the kind of vibrant, involved citizenry that our system, with powers and responsibilities held in local communities, was intended to generate, and which it did generate until real liberty was lost to us.

The long term solution, not to get bogged down in specifics, is for us to think small, in terms of both government and business. We must stop thinking that big, central systems are the best, or only, way to go.

That is the gist of the problem. We know, and don't much trust, those around us. But then we turn around and place great trust in strangers, people we don't know at all, who live at a great distance and over whom we have no control. Why do we think such elites are better people who can be trusted? It is a kind of blind idolatry which we exercise toward both government and business elites, and it serves us very poorly.

We must regain the wisdom, the determination, that all government is dangerous. With that determination, we must come to see that the smaller and closer to the people a government is, the more likely we are to be able to keep it under control. The same principle holds true for business, smaller and decentralized is safer, more accountable and generally better for us than bigger and more centralized.

By de-centralizing government, empowering local and state governments, we will be able to de-centralize corporations. This would empower us to put the corporate (and technological) beasts back on a healthy short leash of community control, while retaining a system of free enterprise. That would give us the ability to deal with all the other challenges mentioned earlier, from environmental concerns to run away militarism (which has always been the illegitimate child of over-centralized capitalism).

On the other hand, giving in to the temptation to throw it all up as a bad effort, to abandon the American experiment, would just land us deeper into the clutches of the elitists bent on our enslavement. Any moves to break up, destroy, or divorce ourselves as a nation will almost undoubtedly make it easier for those same forces of bigness, that same nebulous elitism, to gain even more power over us.

When we ponder getting back to the Constitution in this country we ought to recognize that it's probably about the only time human beings, on a mass scale, ever got government right. But that is definitely not because it was mostly cooked up by just a bunch of White guys

It is true that they were the ones most involved, but the important thing to notice is that they were in a desperate bind. They were obliged to use all the (formidable) education they collectively possessed. and combine that with all the knowledge they could garner, and use all that to conceive of some form of government that would be stable enough to keep the British from eventually hanging them.

In the course of nobly and courageously protecting their own interests, the Founders accidentally stumbled upon something better than they knew. In September 1787, they knew that any government they produced would have to pass muster with the most politically astute people the world had yet seen. So they made it up the best they could, and gave the people more real power than many of them were comfortable with. Even the Founders didn't realize how powerful a popular tool it would prove to be.

In a lot of ways, our decline has been inevitable. It is just the way that nations, and republics especially, go. The thing is, and why we should strive so hard to revive our system, is that ours truly was a unique experiment in government, one that proved itself to be very empowering for the common people, and really did work to elevate the moral consciousness of the masses.

Before we allow this tremendous gift to drift away forever, we ought to realize that for all its flaws, it was still the best system of government humans have ever stumbled upon. If we choose to, our revolutionary fervor, which is legitimate and growing, could be diverted into not burning this system down in favor of some untried and probably ill intended fraud, but rather into putting our good system back together better than ever, truly empowering we the people to renew our quest to establish liberty and justice for all.

The most important question to ask is; Where are we going into the future? The alternatives to American self government that are on offer, from some kind of theocracy to some kind of totalitarian socialism, while they might be attractive to this generation of Americans, are attractive only because they, and we, all of us, have forgotten the great promise and reality of the American experiment in popular self government. We need to remember and re-imagine how well our system can work, and how well it can accommodate our diversity and our differences without causing us to devolve into mutual hatred and hostility.

What's more, we must realize that those corrupt elitist interests who deformed and mutilated our system into being repugnant are waiting in the wings to take complete control if we let them. Just throwing up our hands in frustration, just chucking it all, will play into their agenda.

There is an old saying, “Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.” This means that when one goes to clean up a big mess, don't lose sight of what is truly precious. Don't dispose of that precious baby while getting rid of the messy, objectionable crud that has gotten attached to it.

Getting rid of our precious system of free popular self government in favor of some corrupt and corruptible elitist system would be far worse than just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It would, in fact, amount to throwing out the precious baby of Liberty, and retaining what we have come to loathe, the filthy, crud filled bathwater of oppressive elitist corruption. So not only should we not throw the baby out with the bathwater, we definitely should not make the greatest mistake of all time; that of throwing out the baby and keeping the bathwater.

Charlie Kirk, MLK, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act

 

The renowned conservative leader, Charlie Kirk (may he rest in peace), said a lot of things during his all too short life. Much of what he said and argued was brilliant, but sometimes he said things that were unnecessarily controversial. One of those was when he discussed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It was not that his thinking was completely wrong on this subject, but the way he brought it up clouded the issue and prevented the kind of mutual understanding the Mr. Kirk so often achieved. I would address it differently and probably get to a deeper understanding than he did.

When Charlie brought up the 1964 Civil Rights Act he started by saying it was a mistake, and then justified that stance by focusing on the essential wrongness of affirmative action. I would instead start by saying the Act was long overdue, and addressed some historical errors that had to be corrected, but that some other parts of the Act were wrongheaded.

First among those historical errors was the establishment of equal justice and rights before the law for Black Americans. Most folks don't realize or remember that prior to that Act, in many states, Black people were often denied not just the right to vote, but in addition, they could not serve on juries, could not testify in court against a White person, or bring suit against a White person. Those, and other, legal injustices had to be ended, and were rendered illegal by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Charlie Kirk was, however, partially correct about the second part of that act, what is called Affirmative Action, but then he didn't even mention what, in this writer's opinion, was the worst aspect of it, which was the accommodations mandates.

Going back to the 1960's, I was a young teenager when I first learned about affirmative action being proposed. I had never been involved in politics up until then, but I will always wish that I had gotten involved on that issue. From the first, I was uncomfortable with affirmative action, which was going to give preference in hiring to Black folks in an attempt to make up for discrimination in hiring in years gone by.

While I was uncomfortable with, as I termed it, wading into the waters of the judgment day, I could see that making an exception in this case made good moral sense. Black folks had been denied opportunities which, in a truly free market, they would have had. So while starting into the process of conducting some kind of judgment day was, as I saw it, fraught with all kinds of pitfalls (which have come to pass), doing something to make up for past injustices to Black folks was too important to ignore.

So I came to the conclusion, back in '65 or so, that what we should do is to make it to where affirmative action lasted only one generation or so, just long enough to allow some Black professionals and workers to get a toe hold and a presence in many fields formerly closed to them. I figured a definite sunset on the programs, after twenty, or even thirty years would be fair, and prevent us going down the path of the judgment day.

Like I said, I wish I would have spoken up about this back then, because now we are more that sixty years into this mess, and lots more groups are involved than just Black folks. It HAS become a kind of secular judgment day, and the only group left out, the only group assigned the permanent role of scapegoat is White, heterosexual, conservative, Christian males. This dynamic promises to continue until the unfairness is undeniable, and then we will probably be fooled into another round of the same wrong headed policies. It seems we must allow the pendulum of injustice to swing to one extreme or the other, and no one has the sense to stop it in the fair middle.

The other wrongheaded aspect of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, something that Charlie Kirk, to my knowledge, never addressed, was the accommodations mandates. These mandated that restaurants, motels and other public accommodations could no longer refuse to serve anyone, Black, White, or whatever. While, once again, this was dealing with a real problem, it did so by slyly taking an important aspect of a free society from us, which was the freedom of association. Over time, this squashing of the freedom of association has led to cake makers and florists being prosecuted for not wanting to create works honoring actions they find repugnant.

While the denial of public accommodations was a real problem, the way to deal with that was not by using government, but rather by employing the free market guided by moral vision. Denying the right of free association to the American people has served to divide us, to inflame old social wounds, and has not brought about the peaceful unity we all desire. As Martin Luther King once said, “”They can't make a law forcing you to love me, but they can make a law preventing you from lynching me.”. The accommodations aspect of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an attempt to force folks to love each other, and it DID NOT WORK.

We should have used a different method to deal with the problem. Something that has been forgotten about the Civil Rights movement of the 50's and 60's is that the freedom riders, and other activist groups, did not operate only in the South. In the South they sat in at lunch counters and on buses as a way to change local and state Jim Crow laws. In the North there were no Jim Crow laws, but there were corporate and business policies enforcing segregation. In the North, activists sat in at lunch counters and the like, and worked successfully to change those corporate policies.

After Dr. Kings “I have a dream” speech, which started turning the hearts of White Americans toward racial justice, a national campaign to change corporate policy would have almost undoubtedly succeeded. I have long imagined some nice little motel, with picket fence and all, in 1965, with a “Whites Only” sign proudly displayed in the front of the parking lot. After some well run national campaigns calling all good hearted people to boycott one major motel chain after another, until they all, one by one, changed to accommodate Black folks, I can see in my mind that same little motel, in 1975, now run down, few customers and barely in business, going out and taking that “Whites Only” sign down.

In other words, that aspect of the Civil Rights act was deeply wrong headed, because it not only deprived we, the people, of our natural right of free association, but it prevented the cultural coming together that would, and should, have resulted from the change in heart that the Civil Rights Movement affected.

With freedom of association intact, White business owners would have been under soft but unrelenting social pressure to offer accommodations. Black folks would have been under similar pressure to be on their best behavior so as to confirm the sentiment that it was time to come together as a people. Instead, with freedom of association nullified, White business owners operated under resented legal demands, and Black folks often abused the situation, angrily threatening lawsuits anytime their eggs were not properly cooked, It might have felt like a moment of satisfying comeuppance, but it made things worse, not better.

In conclusion, I wish Charlie Kirk were still alive, so I could talk to him about this subject. Instead of starting off a conversation about the 1964 Civil Rights Act by saying it was a mistake (which he did), I would advise a different approach. Admit that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was long overdue, and that it restored some rights to Black people that had long been denied. However, parts of that Act were misconceived, and worked against the noble goals of the Act. Both the Affirmative Action, and the accommodations portions should have been rethought, and done in a better way. If we had done that, we would probably be much closer to MLK”s dream of the “beloved community” than we are today.

National Divorce Anyone ?

 

A national divorce, in some form or fashion, is once again burbling up in our national dialogue. Some talk of a blue state/ red state division, or more specifically, the coastal states and the interior states going their separate ways. Others present a breakdown by regions, with the plains, the mountains, Cascadia, Appalachia, the Great Lakes, and such divisions being proposed in some kind of national divorce.

This latest iteration of the idea, the regional divorce, caused me to remember something from years ago, which brought up this question. When considering how to divide the states, what makes people think that the individual states, once the division has taken place, will hold together as coherent political entities? They, or rather we, have not really done much governing of ourselves in our states for many decades. It is not like the world of 1787, when each state was well practiced in the art of self government.

These days, certainly since the 1960's, and more accurately going back to the 1930's (or earlier), most of the meaningful decisions about government have been made in Washington DC. Federal mandates and subsidies determine or greatly influence almost all policies. Without that guiding hand in DC, are we sure we will cohere as states?

Will the Valley in California want to be ruled by the coastal cities? The same or similar questions would come up in other states, such as Illinois, Colorado, or even such stalwarts as Kansas, Arizona, or Pennsylvania. Once we were each independent and sovereign nations, our trade, military, and foreign policies would be up for grabs, and who knows where they would end up, and who would be in charge.

We should be very careful here, because that spirit of succession, once it is loosed, can get completely out of hand, and what would there be to stop it? Even the old Confederacy was starting to break down before their defeat. Eastern Tennessee was moving to succeed from the Confederacy, as were parts of Louisiana.

No, before setting out on a course of national divorce, we should stop and think about where it might end, In fact, where it would probably end. It is unlikely to resemble the Velvet Revolution that marked the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, but rather it promises to be as bad, or worse, than the violent, war ravaged breakup of Yugoslavia.

Most importantly, some kind of national divorce is completely unnecessary. Those who call for one complain that we have become a nation that doesn't agree with itself on too many issues, especially the moral and cultural issues. We seem to exist in two (or more) different realities, red state and blue state.

The thing is, instead of divorce, the solution to these differences of opinions would be the simple and obvious move to return to our original plan of government. Return to having the level of state and local self government we previously enjoyed. In that way of doing things, going back at least to prior to the 1930's, or even all the way back to before corporations were declared to be persons in 1886, the states (and localities) had widely divergent moral and cultural styles.

That structure of government could handle all our cultural and moral differences without breaking a sweat. Accommodating and assimilating differences is exactly what it was designed to do. E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one; remember that?

Consider, as an analogy, the American flag. Those favoring a national divorce of some form or fashion imagine that they will be able to cut out a star or two from the flag, and hold on to it as their new nation. That, however, is not is what is likely to happen. If that flag starts unraveling, the unraveling will probably not stop with the stars still intact. Rather, the unraveling will likely continue until none of us has more that a single bare thread to hold onto, and that will be under constant threat from others. Or, what is also very likely, we would at some point suffer military invasion and conquest. Do you reckon that some international despot will suffer the continued healthy existence of a freedom loving people?

So before we blithely trip down the primrose path toward some kind of national divorce, we ought first to take a long hard look at where that path will lead us. That path will most likely lead us to destruction, despair, and much worse problems than we have now. What's more, if we would honestly look around, ridding ourselves of our blinding mutual hatred, we can see that a national breakup is not needed at all. The only thing we need is to revive our original way of doing things, return to the Constitution as written and amended, and we can then absorb all our cultural differences and remain a united, free and strong nation.

Are the Democrats Unfit to Govern?

 

Just prior to the '24 election, a friend asked my advice on who to vote for. I told her that the Republicans were the safer choice, because, as was shown in the Watergate scandal, they, or at least some of them, will break ranks when a vital principle is at stake. The Democrats never do that, and they wear it as a badge of honor. That is what makes them unfit to govern.

The latest kerfuffle around Jimmy Kimmel proves the point. Kimmel was suspended from his show for remarks that seemed to besmirch the memory of the recently murdered Charlie Kirk (RIP). What's more, it seemed like the Trump administration had exerted pressure to cause that suspension to happen.

Some Republican leaders, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz among them, loudly objected to that kind of censorious pressure being applied by government. That old saying from Voltaire, that, “I might not agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it?” It seems some Republicans actually mean that. Mr. Kimmel was shortly reinstated to his show.

The contrast with the Democrats could not be starker. Even though it has now come to light that many of the COVID restrictions, such as social distancing, and mask wearing, were of little to no use, the Democrats can still not find the voice to say so. More importantly, during the crisis, when it really could have counted, nary a whimper of objection was heard from that quarter.

It is not just about COVID or the latest crisis either. The Democrats seem to be under the mistaken impression that moving in lock step with each other at all times is a sign of political strength. So much so that during the last state of the union speech, they could not bring themselves to applaud a young man courageously facing terminal cancer. Not going to clap for that, not if a Republican, especially not if a MAGA Trump guy, brings it up.

This lock step mentality disqualifies the Democrats from governing for two reasons. First of all, at times like these, when they are in the minority, it causes them to unthinkingly scuttle any and every thing the Republicans try to do, even if it is a good and compassionate thing that is proposed.

For instance, with the rapidly changing situation regarding tariffs, some farmers are getting caught in the squeeze. Specifically, many farmers planted soybeans, but because of the tariff battle with China, the Chinese market for soybeans has collapsed. This is going to really hurt some farmers this year. Next year, if they are still in business, they can plant some other crop, or the Chinese market for soybeans might recover. Nonetheless, this year they could use some relief.

Given all that, it is likely that the Republican run congress will propose some short term relief for the affected farmers. Any such legislation will, however, be dead on arrival because the lock step Democrats will filibuster it in the Senate in the same way they lock step filibuster everything the Republicans propose. They remain in lock step, opposed to any Republican initiative, no matter how important, timely and compassionate it may be. That is why the Republicans had to go with the one big beautiful bill, since the extraordinary path of reconciliation was the only way to get anything past the automatic lock step filibuster the Democrats are dedicated to.

Secondly, when, and if, the Democrats ever get back in control, the situation will be much worse. It has come to light, via testimony from Mark Zuckerburg, that some agents from the FBI, (deep state operatives, since Trump was nominally in charge at that moment) pressured him to have Facebook censor any information about Hunter Biden's laptop just prior to the election in 2020. This is horrendous, 1984 kind of stuff, and yet the Democrats are remarkably silent about it. As though the threat of a king or dictator is serious only if it comes from the political right.

This has to be seen as in addition to them ignoring, at the time, the possibility that COVID grew out of our own (or at least Dr. Fauci's) misbegotten research in to gain of function. Likewise, it seems to have escaped the notice of the Democrats that the so called COVID vaccine might have caused more medical problems than it solved.

In all of that, the lock step mindset of the Democrats looms, in the minds of thinking people, as a great threat. Some will respond that we were in a crisis, so some excess in the name of unity can be forgiven. But “crisis” is always the battle cry of emerging dictators. It is at the moment of crisis that clear thinking, truth guided leadership is most needed.

It is in moments of crisis that the cries to censor “disinformation” will be the loudest. It is in times of crisis that the demands grow that the populace, for their own good, must obey the dictates of government without thinking. It is in times of dire crisis that marching in lock step (which the Democrats pretend is such a strength) becomes the most likely path to tyranny and dictatorship.

That is why this current generation of Democrats, with their lock step mode of thinking, are unfit to govern. We should keep them from real power unless and until they change their thinking.

Liberate Hemp to Revive Small Farms

 

I recently had an epiphany about all the anti marijuana hysteria we are being bombarded with lately. We have all heard the arguments. The smell permeating the air in legal states, the dangerous potency of modern strains, and all that. There might be some validity to those points, but it mostly smells like phony hysteria. Try living downwind from a feed lot, or a sewer works, or a freeway, or just on a typical downtown street. Lots of objectionable smells and fumes there, and yet no one wants to hear about it, or base policies on it..

I bought my first hemp t-shirt the other day and, unexpectedly, it launched an episode of eye opening revelations. I was surprised at what a superior cloth it is compared to the cotton or polyester shirts I am used to. It just feels better. More solid, less sweaty, and all the other things it was advertised to be. So much so that I have started to consider investing in small scale hemp cloth production.

As I consider investing in hemp cloth, some real social benefits of hemp come to mind. First of all, it could produce a lot of jobs, whether in cloth production, paper production, or a myriad of other products. That is in addition to the jobs on the farms that grow it. Most of the jobs, and money, would stay in the local region, and certainly stay in the national economy.

Another benefit would be that it could be grown in small batches by small farmers. That is if hemp were not so tightly regulated (which makes it both risky to grow, and prohibitively expensive). However, with those severe regulations, and the high cost of getting a federal license to grow it, that happy dynamic of small farm cultivation is not likely to get traction. With all the federal regulation it is rendered into just another crop that will be economically viable only when grown in large plots on mono culture agri business “farms.” So the dream of a small scale hemp facility operating in close cooperation with local small farmers will remain just that; a dream, until the reefer madness hysteria around cannabis is overcome.

The big ramification of the anti cannabis hysteria is the THC content allowed in hemp plants. It has to be no more than .3%, and that has to be measured by dry weight, with the tested sample coming from the flowering top of the plant.

To put this in context, top shelf cannabis, sold out of dispensaries in states where it is legal, tests out at between 25-30%. Low end flowers and what is known as popcorn tests out at 10-15%. There is almost no market for anything less than 5%. So .3% is a ridiculously minuscule standard, far less than just one tenth the potency of anything of marketable quality.

What's more, farmers who have tried to raise a compliant hemp crop find that the THC level peaks just at the end of the season. If, just before harvest, (when it must be tested) it goes over that standard, the crop must be destroyed in an expensive process. The upshot is that few farmers will take the risk. So those who would set up hemp processing plants are likewise put under an artificially risky government regimen, with undependable supply lines, and thus are also not likely to enter into the business.

Over the years, “deep thinking” pot heads have conjectured that it was the tobacco and alcohol industries that worked so hard to keep pot illegal, to eliminate that form of competition. Other, even “deeper” thinkers speculated that it was the cotton and lumber interests who were using anti cannabis hysteria to keep hemp from competing with their products.

All of that thinking seems conspiratorial and suspect, because those concerns are run by hard headed business people. Business will, if there is profit to be made in some alternative to their product, usually put some of their eggs in that competitive basket. Tobacco and alcohol producers could, and probably do, buy marijuana farms. Lumber and cotton growers could also invest in hemp production, and would be hyper-aware of any emerging stream of profit.

Leaving those pot induced brain storms behind, there still must be some reason behind the reefer madness hysteria, and that reason does seem to be directly tied to preventing a free market for hemp. It is asserted here the reason is that the quasi prohibition of hemp is a wicked, long term attack on the small, self sufficient family farm.

For someone with a small, self sufficient, farm the traditional practice was to grow most, if not all, of the food for your own consumption, and then sell any excess. It is a feasible plan in most places, but what is needed to make the plan work is a dependable cash crop so that cash needs of the otherwise self sufficient farm can be met.

Hemp was always that dependable cash crop. It is extremely drought resistant, and when it was legal, there was always a ready market for the crop, because paper gets used up, and clothes wear out. In many ways, legal hemp was an economic pillar of the small family farm. It truly appears that ginning up this anti marijuana hysteria has always had the nefarious purpose of making small, self sufficient, sustainable family farms not economically viable.

Which contributes to making healthy rural communities not viable. Combine that with federal farm price subsidies, which drive up the cost of land by making farming less risky for corporations, and the decline of the family farm and rural communities seems inevitable, if not intentional.

All of this seems to have had the goal, long since accomplished, of literally changing the American landscape. The mass of the people have been driven into the cities, making almost everyone dependent on corporate controlled food supplies. Much of that food is artificially unhealthy, which also drives the people into dependence on the dubious blessings of the petroleum based medicines produced by the big pharmaceutical companies. All of this is very bad for the health, of both the people and the natural environment.

We need to rethink this whole system, and we should start by rethinking hemp. Stop allowing the truly hysterical voices opposing marijuana to bamboozle us into effectively prohibiting the cultivation of hemp. Liberating hemp can be a vital first step in re-invigorating the small family farms and rural communities of America.