Posted on 07/17/2025 5:20:21 AM PDT by MtnClimber
In half a year, the impossible became obvious: borders closed, recruits returned, Iran retreated, and elites were exposed—all because people finally said, “Enough.”
In less than six months, the entire world has been turned upside down. There is no longer such a thing as conventional wisdom or the status quo.
The unthinkable has become the banal.
Take illegal immigration—remember the 10,000 daily illegal entries under Biden?
Recall the only solution was supposedly “comprehensive immigration reform”—a euphemism for mass amnesties.
Now, there is no such thing as daily new illegal immigration.
It simply disappeared with common-sense enforcement of existing immigration laws—and a new president.
How about the 40,000-50,000 shortfall in military recruitment?
Remember all the causes that the generals cited for their inability to enlist soldiers: generational gangs, obesity, drugs, and stiff competition with private industry?
And now?
In just six months, recruitment targets are already met; the issue is mostly moot.
Why? The new Pentagon flipped the old, canceling its racist DEI programs and assuring the rural, middle-class Americans—especially white males—that they were not systemically racist after all.
Instead, they were reinvited to enlist as the critical combat cohort who died at twice their demographic share in Iraq and Afghanistan.
How about the “end of the NATO crisis,” supposedly brought on by a bullying U.S.?
Now the vast majority of NATO members have met their pledges to spend two percent of GDP on defense, which will soon increase to five percent.
Iconic neutrals like Sweden and Finland have become frontline NATO nations, arming to the teeth. The smiling NATO Secretary-General even called Trump the “daddy” of the alliance.
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
VDH ping
The wake up call came 16 years ago when Obama, the worst mistake this country ever made, was elected.
American exceptionalism grinds slowly, but it grinds fine.
Democrat policy regarding labor has not altered one iota of a degree since the Civil War. They have shown who they are; now it is time to believe them.
https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/apple-dont-fall-far-from-the-tree
The world may have woken up, but it’s still groggy, and it won’t take much (a Dem President in 2028) to get it to go back to sleep.
We need to be ever vigilant!
“Now the vast majority of NATO members have met their pledges to spend two percent of GDP on defense, which will soon increase to five percent.”
I like VDH a lot, but he’s dreaming about the above. Italy already is counting a long-discussed bridge to Sicily, which is not, in any way, considered useful militarily, as part of their “NATO Commitments”. Expect to see much more of those scams, as the other option to finance a real 5% spending level would be ridding their countries of immigrants, but the women running Europe are not about to do anything like that.
Remember, to Ike, our Interstate Highway System was a defense item.
We were living in an “emperor has no clothes” make-believe world for the last few years. The people knew establishment narratives were absurd, and our supposed experts were even more ridiculous.
But few—until now—had the guts to scream “the emperor is naked” to dispel the fantasies.
A wide look at the changes President Trump (Say It!) has wrought, by the Professor.
FR Index of his articles: Victor Davis Hanson on FR
Town Hall: Victor Davis Hanson on Town Hall
American Greatness: Victor Davis Hanson on American Greatness
His website: Victor Davis Hanson The Sword of Perseus
One of his sponsors' website: The Daily Signal
Please let me know if you want on or off this new VDH ping list.
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They’re using the modern equivalent of “But who will pick our cotton?”
And we should be throwing that in their faces every single day.
L
“Remember, to Ike, our Interstate Highway System was a defense item.”
A little different, not some international commitment, but rather for his plan to pass its “Constitutional Test”. For you Gen X and younger, grab a history book (an old one) to understand the term.
Recall that Eisenhower, as supreme allied commander in Europe, led the western crusade against Germany. In his memoir he repeatedly makes the point that success depended on a massive logistic endeavor, beyond anything the world had ever known.
He recounts that after VE day, when Soviet and Western generals had joint debriefings, the main thing that the Soviets were interested in was how we managed to supply our armies from across the water. So it would not be out of character for Ike really to see the interstate system as a logistic infrastructure for defense of the country.
Indeed.
A great point by the ever brilliant VDH. It's not just that universities for decades got grants for research that was laughable. Even with real research the universities would charge a 40% to 50% overhead fee to manage the research and provide an environment for the research to happen (i.e. facilities maintenance, utilities, network security, etc.). So if a university got $1 million to research cancer (something us conservatives might approve), still almost half of it went to overhead (with money being fungible it went to administrator salaries and DEI offices, etc.)
Trump is putting an end to that and lowering the overhead limit to something like 15% for research grants coming from the govt. IMHO that seems reasonable.
I’d argue that the worst mistakes th7s country ever made date back to the 1910s.
The seeds for this were sown back then.
The Fed, the income tax, the 17th Amendment...
Deep State is patient.
We need to remember that.
And cultivate ours.
In Ike's day, the ability to move large amounts of heavy military equipment from one location to another was very important.
They do, or rather just a handful of years prior to that.
Progressivism is America's Cancer, and 1900-1920 is The Progressive Era.
All of the answers as to when our problems began are in this era. It's exactly why I record the audio books that I do.
"The Fed, the income tax, the 17th Amendment... Deep State is patient. We need to remember that."
FBI was 1908, that's a big one in the mix as well. Additionally there's the FDA and the parks.(more generically, overbearing government land departments/policies. They keep changing titles over the years)
You guys realize that what you're talking about is domestic imperialism, correct?
To summarize, what the progressives did was the imperialism that used to be aimed at locations like the Philippines, the bossyness and so forth, the progressives rotated the cannon and turned all of that energy inward.
The US military is literally one of, if not the best, logistics “company” on the planet. Look at the US Navy, getting letters to ships in the middle of a WESTPAC, fresh cookies from home, even. During war, letters that were a week or less old made it to front line soldiers, still smelling of perfume, more or less.
Sure, we blow up stuff real good, but we put the logistics into getting everything where it needs to go when it needs to be there.
The unthinkable has become the banal.
Take illegal immigration—remember the 10,000 daily illegal entries under Biden?
Recall the only solution was supposedly “comprehensive immigration reform”—a euphemism for mass amnesties.
Now, there is no such thing as daily new illegal immigration.
It simply disappeared with common-sense enforcement of existing immigration laws—and a new president.
How about the 40,000-50,000 shortfall in military recruitment?
Remember all the causes that the generals cited for their inability to enlist soldiers: generational gangs, obesity, drugs, and stiff competition with private industry?
And now?
In just six months, recruitment targets are already met; the issue is mostly moot.
Worth reading... ping
What is likely to be the most significant issue internationally is the artificially induced mass migration that was, in 0bama’s time, deliberately grown to proportions unimaginable before, a movement nearly ubiquitous among first-world governments. The U.S. has stanched the flow and is, through deportation, reversing its effects. That has not gone unnoticed in other victim states, where establishment government - Deep State, if you like - resistance has approached the maniacal. What is next to be questioned among their electorates is why the policies were introduced in the first place and are being defended now. The New World Order is being questioned harshly and its proponents don’t like it.
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