DAVID KRAYDEN: Happy days are here again—Trump’s victory might have saved America

President-elect Donald Trump. Have to get used to saying that again. At least for a little over two months before his Jan. 20, 2025 inauguration.

Many people didn’t believe that Trump could pull this off, losing so bitterly four years ago to a guy who spent his entire election campaign in the basement of his Delaware house. The signs of President Joe Biden’s creeping dementia were obvious even then, as obvious as why his Democratic handlers didn’t want Biden to appear at any event that wasn’t carefully controlled and choreographed.

Trump has had many detractors. The half-wits who pass for journalists on most of the legacy media continue to repeat the noxious lies about his being a Nazi, a new Hitler, a fascist, a “dictator from day one,” a racist, a rapist, etc, etc. No presidential candidate or former president has ever been subject to such a barrage of chronic abuse from morons who all claimed Biden was sharper than a tack even as he waved to ghosts and welcomed people who weren’t there at official events.

No Republican presidential nominee has had to endure the whining and distraction of RINOs and liberals pretending to be GOP faithful the way Trump has. From the Lincoln Project to failed Rep. LIz Cheney (R-WY), Trump has not just taken the punishment, he’s heartily laughed at it.

The so-called moderates who view Trump with such overweening suspicion and outrageous disrespect actually view him as a usurper who has come and taken away their political party. But ironically, without Trump there might even be a Republican Party and there certainly wouldn’t have been a Republican president after Barack Obama left office. The Republican establishment got together after the defeat of Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) in 2012 and essentially decided that there was no way a GOP candidate could defeat the Democrats in a presidential race. The numbers just weren’t there. Yes, Republicans could still aspire to take a majority of House seats and certainly dominating the Senate wasn’t out of the question. But the presidency? The Democrats had the Electoral College sewn up and there was no way go back.

Trump has destroyed that scenario by changing the party from an Ivy League frat house of rich elites obsessed with setting the world on fire with foreign wars to a conservative expression of populism that celebrates individual initiative, small government, equality not equity, freedom of speech and assembly, free enterprise and the right to bear arms. It is a party that actually cares about the working class sharing in American prosperity – not through redistribution of wealth but by creation of wealth. It has become a party that wants to tell government at all levels to mind its own business and to stop intruding into our lives to such an incapacitating degree. Stop taking my money and “investing” it in your programs that only create debt and bureaucracy. Stop telling me how to raise my children, what religious faith you think is acceptable and what I should think is normal sexual behavior. Just get out of the way.

Trump’s victory on Wednesday morning was both an exaltation of individual freedom and a repudiation of the nanny state that has encroached upon our lives and our basic freedom. Could the nation have survived a President Kamala Harris who was poised to grant amnesty to tens of millions of illegal immigrants. Could it have survived more inflationary spending that has turned the dollar into the northern peso? Could it have survived the continuation of wars in Ukraine and Gaza that seem tailor-made to provoke a Third World War and nuclear conflagration with Russia? The answer is no.

When the results came in Tuesday night and it became apparent that Trump was going to win, I thought of President Gerald Ford’s remarks upon assuming command and control after President Richard Nixon’s resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal. He merely said, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” Of course, that assessment wasn’t entirely valid, not with Jimmy Carter waiting in the historical wings, but it was a word of optimism that seems particularly real right now. As real as Donald Trump can be and as real as Kamala Harris could never be.

If you saw her concession speech, it must have been apparent that this was probably the first time this woman has ever spoken from the heart or even as an individual. She has always been scripted, not perfectly scripted of course because her words have never risen to the level of eloquence and rarely above a dismal word salad. But she seemed to grasp a moment of sincerity and I could almost believe that she really was almost happy that Trump had beaten her because now we could get back to national prosperity, a real border and trading with other nations instead of going to war with them.

It’s not that we’re only getting Trump either. We are getting the Avengers, the dynamism of political personalities like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk. This is a glorious moment in American history to confirm the truth of the Constitution and even the Declaration of Independence. The only danger we face is that the usual suspects of the Military- Industrial Complex will be slumming at the White House, looking for work. On Wednesday, I watched the new and improved former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appear on Fox to wave his resume and advertise his interest in returning to a new Trump administration. This CIA assassin can go to hell and find a job working for Raytheon. Now is the time to reduce America’s corpulent intel and security forces that continue to harass and target Americans. We may even find out who killed President John F. Kennedy.

But for the moment, let all Americans who love liberty, who are more concerned about America’s borders than Ukraine’s; who remember a United states where you were allowed to think and speak freely – let them rejoice that their country has another chance, another shot at freedom. Remember that any presidential election is evidence that the people have spoken. The people spoke loudly and clearly on Election Day. Let their will be done.

This Story originally came from humanevents.com

zerohedge
Economics , News , Politics , Science
December 7, 2024
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The Miserable Cost Of An Open Border

Authored by Seth Barron via RealClearPolitics,

The Biden-Harris experiment in dissolving the U.S. border has wrought massive changes to American society, most of which will not be understood for years, if not decades. Since 2021, U.S. border officials have had at least 10 million “encounters” with migrants, many of whom were allowed to enter the country. There is no telling how many more aliens entered the country without encountering enforcement agents. The population of the United States may have increased by as much as 15 million people in just a few years.

This massive flow of humanity crosses multiple national borders, involves every mode of transportation, accounts for billions of dollars paid in fees to smugglers, and describes a fantastically complex economy of suffering and hope. In an effort to get a handle on this human tide, noted muckraker James O’Keefe – known for his hidden camera “gotcha” interviews with abortionists, media executives, progressive nonprofit executives, and other degenerate types – traces the migrant onrush from its source, and seeks to trace the machinery of profit and influence that is conducting it from great removes.

“Line In The Sand,” the resulting documentary, is a remarkable and humane exposition, revealing perspectives and images American audiences have mostly been prevented from seeing. O’Keefe and his intrepid team begin on the U.S. side of the Mexican border, where we witness migrants crossing the border through holes that their guides have cut in a fence that serves as a target as much as a barrier. Infrared cameras show dozens of illegal aliens streaming toward “pick-up” vehicles on the U.S. side while smugglers – presumably cartel members – a few feet away taunt O’Keefe and his group. “What if I were to run up to them right now, what would happen?” O’Keefe asks his guide. “I would highly advise you against that,” he is told, in a classic understatement.

The fact that coyotes and other human traffickers are paid to assist northbound migrants with their passage is no scandal; we all know what their motivations are and why they are doing what they do. But O’Keefe documents multiple examples of U.S. Border Patrol agents standing idly by while illegal aliens cross, virtually under their noses. “Why aren’t you doing anything?” he asks. “Have a good day, guys,” a border agent desultorily responds before driving off in the general direction of the episode. Later, a migrant stands in front of a Border Patrol truck, clearly trying to alert the agents of his intention to surrender, but is studiously ignored until O’Keefe and his team call their attention to him.

There is a kind of sad comedy in the operations of U.S. border security, and O’Keefe is not unsympathetic to the absurd position that border agents have been put in. Trained to defend the national border and to serve as the first line of defense of American soil, these agents have been recommissioned as a perverse Welcome Wagon for illegal aliens, charged with making their undocumented and uninvited entrance to the United States as commodious as possible.

Looking to get deeper into the heart of this migratory avalanche, O’Keefe went deep into Mexico, to the city of Irapuato, about 150 miles northwest of Mexico City. Irapuato is a popular railway junction where thousands of migrants climb aboard “La Bestia,” or “The Beast,” a cargo train that chugs northward toward the United States. In the film’s most remarkable footage, O’Keefe and his team join with migrants, mostly from South and Central America, to ride The Beast, also known as “el Tren del Muerto,” or the Train of Death. O’Keefe talks to the migrants without condescension, asking them their destinations and what they plan to do when they get there, and their concerns about the perilous nature of the journey. We see the film crew race to jump on a moving train and clamber on top to sit in a pile of coal; O’Keefe is shocked at how truly dangerous this small element of the trip is and sympathizes with the migrants’ difficult choices. These scenes are among the film’s most affecting, along with the crew’s random encounter with a little girl who had just crossed the border after journeying from Guatemala by herself. There is a human dimension to illegal immigration, and O’Keefe does not ignore it.

However, there is also an impersonal dimension to this massive population transfer, and O’Keefe determinedly aims to uncover it – to put a face to the institutions and administrators that benefit from the rough injection of millions of people into American society. From government agents to bus companies to nonprofit resettlement groups to private contractors running huge, walled compounds housing thousands of children, O’Keefe doggedly tries to penetrate the mechanics of a system that resolutely hides itself behind a screen of silence, usually in the name of “safety” and “privacy.”

Some of the film’s more comical moments pertain to these segments, such as when the team follows some just-arrived Chinese migrants in San Diego to an employment agency, where other Chinese aliens, already in the country for several months, complain that it’s much harder to live in the United States than they had imagined. O’Keefe tries to sniff out a connection between the owner of the agency and more powerful actors, but it emerges that there really isn’t much going on; in fact, the owner asks O’Keefe if he knows of a way to apply for government grants.

Elsewhere, O’Keefe tries to get information about the operations of several huge residential centers for unaccompanied minors and tries to spin their refusal to give him access to the centers or submit to interviews as evidence of the existence of vast, government-funded child sex trafficking networks. But it seems more likely, though no less troubling, that the open borders policy of the last four years has created a tremendous humanitarian crisis of alien children roaming the continent by themselves, and the government is probably trying to keep them from becoming prey to sex traffickers while they sort out where to send them. Though O’Keefe does not uncover a salacious network of child predators, his vigorous pursuit of the truth does reveal the existence of a large, shadowy, government-funded, and lucrative system of child “welfare.”

So, “Line In The Sand” is correct in the larger sense that billions of dollars are being spent managing this human flow, and many people are getting rich off of it. The last thing these parasitical administrators of the nonprofit industrial complex want is for the border to close. O’Keefe does a great job of capturing in real time the corruption of a local New York City nonprofit called La Jornada, whose leader, Pedro Rodriguez, evidently perpetrates fraud, demanding fees for services that the city provides for free. O’Keefe also sends a Spanish-speaking reporter undercover into the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City’s main processing center for newly-arrived migrants, which offers him free housing, medical care, and even airplane tickets, even though the reporter explains that he has no identification of any sort. How, O’Keefe asks, in our post 9/11 security-obsessed era, are we to make sense of a system that admits millions of unvetted foreigners into the country, and then offers to fly them anywhere they care to go?

“Line In The Sand” is rough in parts, but intentionally so. Its subject is so sprawling and tangled that a neat and clean representation would be a lie. Even with a nine-figure budget – which this film assuredly did not have – a documentary about the border and the 30 million-footed human swarm that has crossed it would be messy and incomplete. But James O’Keefe and his small team have done something remarkable. They have taken on the decade’s biggest story, given it form, and preserved the humanity of its subjects. It is worth watching.

Seth Barron is a writer in New York and author of the forthcoming “Weaponized from Humanix.”

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/07/2024 – 17:30