Commentary: A Government Unrepresentative of the People

Joe Biden

We are in the midst of a presidential campaign year. It’s supposed to be the Super Bowl for political junkies like me. But it feels strange and muted, and, so far, its vibe is uncomfortably similar to 2020.

The 2020 election was strange because of COVID, which became a pretext to change the rules in order to rig the outcome. This time, there is no such excuse for a “basement campaign.” It’s true that Biden is old, feeble, and unpopular. And Trump has been sidelined, quite deliberately, by a malicious New York judge who won’t allow him to travel and conduct his signature rallies. The problem, however, now infects all electoral politics.

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Commentary: Ruling Class Disturbance

WEF

The last few months have been interesting. We have started to see some very public disagreements among the world’s ruling classes. The gathering of elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has long fascinated observers and become a lightning rod for criticism, becoming a bogeyman of the right, as well as the hardcore, anticapitalist left. It is a front-row seat to the thinking and priorities of the world’s most powerful people.

In Davos, the world’s media, academic, political, and financial elites spend a few days in luxurious surroundings, praising themselves and forming a consensus on solutions to what they deem to be the problems of the world. This includes everything from facilitating mass migration, tackling global warming by moving away from fossil fuel energy, and the need for economic redistribution to the poor and the third world, all through the corporatist idea of “stakeholder capitalism.”

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Commentary: Malicious Mitt Romney

Throughout his unremarkable political career, Mitt Romney carefully cultivated the image of the ultimate “nice guy.” Handsome and credentialed, Romney presents himself as some sort of perfect, milquetoast functionary. Governor Romney, then Senator Romney – the perfectly unexceptional, inoffensive face to serve as advocate for Ruling Class prerogatives.

But in these late innings of his public life, Mitt shows his inner malice. In his quotes provided to biographer McKay Coppins for a new book on Romney, Mitt finally went on-the-record to express his disdain for people he publicly flattered, and his revulsion for the conservative movement he supposedly represented.

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Commentary: The Danchenko Trial Is a Window on the Corrupt Ruling Class

The Igor Danchenko trial, which started this week, has already yielded embarrassing revelations about the “Steele dossier” fiasco. The FBI, it turns out, offered Christopher Steele, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s opposition researcher, $1 million to prove his claims about Trump–Russia collusion. He couldn’t do it. But that didn’t stop the FBI from using his tissue of lies to obtain a search warrant against Carter Page, a hapless Trump campaign volunteer.

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Commentary: Can’t Forget the Motor City

“In the 1950s,” writes J. Eric Wise in “The French Exit: A Detroit Love Story,” Detroit was “outwardly living well, a very healthy city, technologically advanced, with economic diversity, prosperity, peace, and civil life supporting the arts and sciences.” That is no exaggeration, as this writer can testify. 

As Wise explains, Detroit prospered enormously from World War II and attracted workers from far and wide. My father, a mechanical engineer, was among them. In 1952, he moved our family from Alliance, Ohio, to Detroit, Michigan. The Big Three automakers gave him all the work he could handle.

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Commentary: The Ruling Class’ Gaslighting on the Durham Investigation

In anticipation of Justice Department special counsel John Durham’s final report on the partisan origins of the Obama administration’s investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion, the ruling class is scoffing at his findings to date. What a yawner, they say. What a waste of time and money. Never mind that his investigation has already established that the Russian disinformation in the 2016 election came exclusively from the Hillary Clinton campaign.

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Commentary: The Elites Have Learned Absolutely Nothing

Donald Trump’s presidency has done a lot of things, but perhaps one of its most striking effects has been unmasking the contempt with which the elites view the rest of us.

By “elites,” I mean the group of people who, for decades, have rested comfortably in their Hollywood mansions, New York brownstones, and D.C. rowhouses, confident in their ability to control the media and cultural discourse, groom and anoint the “right” politicians, and occasionally tut-tut about the rubes in middle America, but who otherwise give little thought to the vast swaths of land and people outside of the wealth and privilege in their upper-class urban bubbles

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Commentary: Question the Ruling Class and Embrace Common Sense Again

by Ned Ryun   At what point do the American people wake up and realize that many of their elected officials, both Democratic and Republican, aren’t actually serving their interests? It’s staggering to watch the debate over our immigration system and the building of a southern U.S. border wall play out. But it also highlights how deeply immoral many of our leaders are and the alternate reality of Washington, D.C. In the real world of common sense, any sovereign nation would, and should, assert its right to secure its borders. It would assert that it had the right to understand who wants into the country and to ask why those people are coming. It would then make a judgment as to whether it was in the nation’s best interests, economically or otherwise, to accept any of those seeking entrance, or whether it was, in fact, detrimental. Would the new immigrants make the country better? Would they strengthen the social fabric of the country or help to tear it apart? Ultimately, every decision regarding immigration would be made to further the interests of the actual and current citizens of that nation—the ones who fund every last penny of the government and…

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Commentary: Angelo Codevilla and Revolutionary Logic

by George Rasley   In 2010, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla reintroduced the notion of “the ruling class” back into American popular discourse. In 2017, he described contemporary American politics as a “cold civil war.” Now in an essay “Our Revolution’s Logic“ that should be a wake-up call to every conservative in America Codevilla applies the “logic of revolution” to the escalating “Resistance” to the results of the 2016 election and says its sentiments’ spiraling volume and intensity have eliminated any possibility of “stepping back.” The 2018 Congressional elections are the Democratic “Resistance” strategy’s first major test. Regardless of these elections’ outcome, however, this “resistance” has strengthened and accelerated the existing revolutionary spiral says Prof. Codevilla. In an erudite review of Thucydides’ account of Corcyra’s revolution in 427 BC, the fifth year of the Peloponnesian War, Codevilla outlines a paradigm of revolutionary logic and elucidates the striking parallels with today’s American political dynamics. Revolutions, says Codevilla, turn upon the logic of mutual hate that drives them, and on their consequences, and the consequences for constitutional liberty are already driving us away from our constitutional republic’s essence: The American republic’s essence had been self-restraint toward fellow citizens deemed equals. The…

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