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In Foreign Policy, Donald Trump Is The Powerful Man Barack Obama Never Could Be
“I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.”—Alexander the Great
Some men walk into a room and the room just belongs to them. The head guy in the room. The man in charge. It doesn’t matter if it’s a room of five or a room of 500, everyone looks.
It’s not a height thing. It’s not a wealth thing. It’s not about brains or brawn or what kind of car he drives. It is simply a matter of having “it,” and “it” is a quality that few men possess.
Luckily for America, Trump has this in spades. It may be maddening to his domestic opponents in the media, but it is positively enraging to America’s enemies. And we are a lucky nation for it.
As someone who once vehemently opposed Trump (I poured my heart and soul into getting Ted Cruz the GOP nomination), so many parts of Trump’s nomination were difficult to fathom. Looking back on it, I should have known better. Every debate was all about Trump. Every TV interview, no matter the candidate, was all about Trump. The media and the moderators made it all about Trump.
In the end, for those who loved and those who hated him, the voters made it all about Trump. Because he’s simply one of those guys who create a gravitational pull around him. Wherever he goes, it’s all about Trump. Even the general election was all about him. (Granted, it helped that his opponent, Nurse Ratched, gave people little to cheer about.)
Why People Avoid This Truth
People avoid this subject for a couple of reasons. Some avoid it because it’s difficult to define. One can no more define “it” than Bill Clinton can define “is.” But most avoid it because they want to be that guy and simply do not have what it takes.
It is the natural instinct of a man to want to be “the man.” Men don’t flock to movies about the guy who never gets the girl and slaves away in middle management, unless that movie is a comedy and they’re there to laugh at him. Men watch “Gladiator.” Men revere professional athletes. Men honor the warriors of our military. A man wants to sit on a throne he just conquered and have the people chant his name. But God didn’t make many of those men.
Some men—and we all know someone like this—have been so consumed by jealousy that they hate “the man” simply because he is what they want to be and cannot achieve. We all know this guy. There are hundreds of them running around news rooms and college campuses in America. He’s the one with a journalism (or law) degree from Yale and no girlfriend.
He uses words like “assiduous” in casual conversations with friends. He knows they don’t understand that word, but soul-crushing student loan debt and big words are all he has in life and, dang it, he’s going to use them. He thinks this makes him look smart and admirable. It doesn’t. It makes him look like a snobby jerk who talks over people’s heads.
Trump Is Used to Being in Boardrooms Calling Shots
I used to scoff at Trump’s early supporters claiming he was some master dealmaker. Trump’s guiding principles may not be limiting spending or a return to constitutional government, but his guiding principle of making “the deal” sure is paying off. I once laughed at people who would throw that “He’s a deal maker!” stuff around.
Maybe—and this has never happened to me before—I was wrong. Trump’s marriage to “the deal” can and does make small-government conservatives pull their hair out when he sits at the table with Democrats after a school shooting and voices his support for limiting Second Amendment rights. That’s the bad part.
But there are plenty of good parts. The DC Beltway types who spend their lives hammering out 2,000- word essays about what a bumbling dullard Trump is (when they’re not staring longingly at their 11th grade debate team trophies), well, those guys were just plain wrong.
The truth is Trump has spent his life in boardrooms hammering out deals. And he’s used to being in charge of that boardroom. This is not a small thing, especially when dealing with male-dominated dictatorial cultures like North Korea and Iran. Trump knows how to handle himself with other powerful men, and that is worth something tangible.
Donald Is What Barack Never Could Be
Part of the journalistic angst that Trump is that guy comes from the fact their savior, Barack Obama, just could never be. There are two big reasons Obama’s foreign policy had all the staying power of raw shrimp in a hot car. His natural inclination to agree with foreign dictators that America is an evil place in need of “fundamental change,” as he put it, hurt him when dealing with them.
But what hurt him the most was his rank amateur status at anything involving the real world. He never stood in a room of powerful men used to getting what they want and trying to assert their dominance. He moved seamlessly through a world of academia, liberal activism, then politics. It’s not even reasonable to expect a man to stroll off the cushy world of liberal academia into a room of wolves and expect him to perform. He got eaten alive. Conservatives joked about that video of Obama curling women’s yoga weights, but maybe the mullahs of Iran were laughing too.
And those mullahs respect Trump. They hate his guts, but they respect him. They just recently recovered from the sore stomach muscles they got from laughing at Obama’s capitulation, just in time to have Trump take Obama’s crappy deal and rip it up in front of their faces. So, let them burn American flags and Trump posters. They do so with the knowledge they can no longer treat the American president like a piñata.
Never in my life have I been more thankful to be wrong. With so much insanity in the world today, I am happy he’s my president. Now, I am no prophet. The rest of Trump’s presidency could be a domestic policy disaster full of deficit spending and gun control. He could lurch to the left. A scandal could take him down. The market could crash.
Nobody knows. But one thing I do know is he won’t ever walk into a room too big for him. Because Donald Trump is the room.
It’s Time For The United States To Divorce Before Things Get Dangerous
“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…” — The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
Divorce is hard, but it’s easier than cutting the brake lines on your wife’s car. It is long past time for an amicable divorce of the United States of America. There is simply no common ground with the Left anymore. We are now the couple screaming at each other all night, every night as the kids hide in their room.
We cannot come together, but we do not have to live like this. The history of the world is nations breaking up and redrawing their borders. If we want to avoid this political divide turning into a deadly one, we should do likewise.
Stop clinging to the past and acknowledge where we are as a country, not where you want us to be, not where things were when your grandpa was storming the beaches of Normandy. Where we truly are.
We are a nation hopelessly divided. We are more divided now than we have ever been in our history. And before you start screaming at me about the Civil War, keep in mind that bloody conflict was fought over one major issue. In those days, take ten families from New York and ten families from Alabama, put them all in a room, and you’d find they mostly had the same values (and bad accents).
Now, fast-forward to today and do that same thing. Those families have virtually nothing in common. We as a nation have polarized and separated from each other.
Anyone who thinks this is a radical idea has an extremely narrow view of history. If you don’t believe me, go try to book a plane ticket to Czechoslovakia, or look at a map of Europe from the year 1600, then look at one today. See any differences? Borders move. Countries split and change hands. They do this for a myriad of reasons. Ours would be a major cultural shift toward the left and half the country refusing to go along with tyranny.
I have been championing this idea for a while, and it appears others are catching on. Just last week, a group of lawmakers in South Carolina introduced a bill that would allow the state to secede if the federal government starts seizing guns.
Why would those lawmakers even be worried about such a thing? Because Democrats are saying it—and not just some hippie chick with armpit hair at a vegan rally. When a former justice of the Supreme Court of the United States calls for a repeal of the Second Amendment, we should take the Left seriously.
The GOP has many problems, but the Democratic Party has turned into something completely un-American. The United States was founded on two things: Judeo-Christian values and a limited federal government. The entire platform of modern Democrats stands completely opposite both of those.
This is the party that booed the very mention of the word “God” at their 2016 convention. This is the party whose candidates openly “joke” about killinganyone who won’t turn in his weapons. Their senators joke on national TV about killing the U.S. president, and the host responds by clapping like a seal.
The 1960s counter-culture liberal protestor who just wanted free weed and an end to the war in Vietnam has been replaced by a man who hunts down Steve Scalise and tries to kill him at baseball practice. The Left is not playing games. They are getting bolder, and they are getting more violent. They have no interest in rational compromises. Like all authoritarian ideologies, they want you to bow down before them or be destroyed for daring to resist.
If you believe in God and limited government, here are the entities that now proclaim their hatred of you in full view of the public: The Democratic Party, media, Hollywood, the public education system, and now even corporate America. The GOP may have the House, Senate, and presidency, but we have completely lost the culture war.
It does not have to be this way. There is a difficult, but ultimately peaceful path that ends with everyone getting most of what they want. We divide the nation in two. We can and will draw the map and argue over it a million different ways for a million different reasons, but draw it we must. I’ve got my own map, and I suspect the final draft would look similar.
The peaceful solution. pic.twitter.com/LVZwP7h70b
— Jesse Kelly® (@JesseKellyDC) April 7, 2018
People say both sides disagree on everything, but that is not entirely true. A mass shooting happens at a high school in Florida. Both sides do agree something should be done. People on the Right think we should increase school safety. People on the Left think we should restrict the gun rights of every American citizen, and they’ll try to destroy the career of anyone who disagrees.
Illegal immigrants are pouring across the border. The Right calls for increased border security. The Left offers them sanctuary cities and protection from federal enforcement.
Every issue plays out this same way, and people on the Right will only accept this kind of abuse for so long. Sooner or later, the left-wing rage mob will start coming for the careers (and lives) of any normal American who sees things differently.
This idea of breaking up the country may seem a bit outlandish now, but you won’t think so once real domestic unrest comes to your town. Our political disagreements have become a powder keg, one that already would have blown if conservatives had liberals’ emotional instability.
Nobody is expected to cheer for this split. Cheering is not a normal reaction when couples get a divorce. We cheer for old married people on their fiftieth wedding anniversary.
But life is imperfect. Life is hard. We both now agree that living under the other side’s value system is wholly unacceptable. The most peaceful solution we Americans can hope for now is to go our separate ways. So let us come together one last time and agree on one thing: Irreconcilable differences.
Stop Using Your Status As A Veteran To Trash The Second Amendment
All veterans are not created equal. People join different services for different reasons. They do different jobs while in the service and do them for different lengths of time. There are pharmacy technicians in the Air Force and Green Berets in the Army. Some do four years in the air conditioning and then go off to college. Others spend 30 years immersed in mud and blood and sweat. They do it in backwards countries full of barbarians. They watch their friends die and they come home in silence; you wouldn’t understand anyway.
Most, no matter their service, come home and spend a lifetime as an example of what an American fighting man should be. They give back to their communities. They help others. They join the workforce, show up on time, and rise through the ranks. They raise families. And raise those families to have a love of country and an appreciation for where they are blessed to live.
Others spend a lifetime proving the last great thing they did in this life ended when they got back from Iraq at the ripe old age of 22. Service to your country is respectable. It is NOT a license to be a world-class scumbag.
— “I’m a veteran!” as you show up late to work and your boss tells you that you’re fired.
— “I’m a veteran!” as the cop puts the cuffs on you because you got drunk and hit your wife.
— “I’m a veteran!” as you treat the Constitution like a roll of Charmin Extra Soft.
For too long now, veterans have taken the patriotic respect of Americans and used it like a Get Out Of Jail Free card in Monopoly. Nowhere is this more evident than the veterans who joined high school kids at the anti-gun March For Our Lives rallies last weekend.
The Left has pounced on the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that left 17 dead because they feel they can gain ground on their ultimate goal of gun-confiscation. In the wake of the shooting, their ever-loyal media allies have paraded survivors from the school across every forum available. Is this done out of some deep care for the children? Of course not. It is because the Left loves to prop up people they think you’ll be too scared to criticize.
Which brings us to veterans. There are roughly 20 million veterans living in the United States today. There are going to be malcontents who don’t understand liberty in there. And nobody can track down society’s malcontents like the Left. So, now they use these veterans just like they use the high school kids. It’s not as if the Left holds some special respect for veterans (though they’ve finally stopped spitting on them when they return home from war). It is done because the Left knows patriotic Americans will be reluctant to criticize them.
Veterans are not sacred. Every vet takes an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That oath doesn’t expire when you leave the service. It doesn’t mean you have to carry a weapon on foreign soil fighting our enemies forever, but at least don’t return home and put the Constitution you swore to uphold through the paper shredder.
The Second Amendment is clear. It is part of the Constitution of the United States of America. It is not a partisan issue. It is not up for debate. American citizens are allowed (and were encouraged by the Founders) to have weapons of war. Those weapons were not for hunting deer. They were for hunting despots. One would hope a veteran who spent time in a place like Iraq would have learned invaluable lessons about tyrants and how they abuse powerless people.
Service to your country is not a lifetime excuse for failure and ignorance. It is a lifetime obligation to hold yourself to a higher standard.
Why A Good Father Prepares His Sons For War
“There is a beast in every man, and it stirs when you put a sword in his hand.”—Jorah Mormont
Men were made for violence. It’s part of why they were created. To protect the weak. To fight for themselves and for nations. To compete and to win.
Do you know why men like football? Why they watch boxing? Why Romans watched the gladiators slaughter each other? Because part of men was made for violence and their instincts draw them to it. We cannot suppress human nature. We cannot half-embrace who and what we are—how God made us, and how we are built.
Will Leitch wrote an embarrassing article about his experience shooting a gun, and how hard it was to find out his son is doing well in school. You can read the insanity here, but be careful your eyeballs don’t get stuck in the roll position. Here’s a little gem about Will’s dad just handing him a shotgun with no instruction and telling him to fire away:
It was a Winchester Model 37, 20-Gauge shotgun…one day I came home from school, and Dad was home early, waiting for me with that gun. ‘Time for you to learn this,’ he’d said….Unsteady and unsure of himself, he loaded a bullet into the chamber and told me to aim somewhere deep into one of the endless cornfields that make up whole swathes of this country still, the sort of vast expanse that you can fire a rifle blindly into and not worry about hitting anything anyone would ever notice. I told him I did not want to. He nodded gently and said he knew that but I had to fire anyway. I wanted to make him happy, or least not make him mad, so I held the gun out in front of me, with dinosaur arms, put my finger on the trigger and, holding my breath and biting my lip so hard that my braces started to crank and ache, pulled it.
The kickback was so powerful and immediate that it sent the weapon flying behind me, but what I most remember was the sound. The whole world screamed blinding white; I didn’t even hear my father scramble behind me to pick the rifle off the ground. He was ashen — plainly terrified, even though nothing that bad had actually happened. I must have looked stricken, too, because he put his arm around me and, for one of the few times I can remember, apologized. ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. ‘I know you didn’t want to, but I thought it was something that a man was supposed to do. It wasn’t.’ He smiled. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t really want to do that either.’
Our society has a mass failure of fatherhood. Even many of the fathers who don’t run out on their families can’t seem to figure out how to turn boys into men. That’s because most men don’t realize that is the goal for raising boys. Not to coddle them. Not to dump your insecurities on them. Not to lie to them about what life is and what life isn’t. Your mission as a father is to turn that boy into a man.
Will’s father failed him that day. No man teaches his son to shoot by handing him a 20-gauge shotgun, with no instruction on its operation, and telling him to fire away. That’s a half measure. It’s lazy parenting.
Hard parenting is sitting a son down and teaching him how to use a weapon safely. Tell him how deadly a weapon can be, then show him how to operate it with confidence and skill. That is being a father.
Actually, I Don’t Want My Child to Succeed
Leitch’s article continues:
Last year, my wife and I met with my son’s teacher for a parent-teacher conference… William was one of her brightest students, reading at a third-grade level already, and he’s diligent and patient and picks the right friends…’when you think of what you would want a kid in your class to act like, it would be William.’ It was around now that I started tapping my foot uneasily and looking warily around the room. Something about this felt vaguely wrong in a way I couldn’t put my finger on, and what she said next said cinched it for me: ‘He’s just the golden boy.’
Is he? Or does he just look the part? What makes my kid so special? Oh, and: What kind of jerk am I for questioning such a lovely compliment about my own child?
But how am I supposed to feel about my children’s success when I know, deep down, in my heart of hearts, that the world around them would be a better place if more children like them won fewer of the spoils? …I want equality, and a fair playing field, and more opportunities for people who haven’t had them in centuries past…
It’s difficult to imagine how tortured a father has to be to hear an exemplary report about his child and feel guilty about it. That is a man who has been told to fight against who he is and why he was created.
But this is a consistent theme for liberals. They have a nagging self-loathing, combined with a belief that the strong are only strong at the expense of the weak. If that’s how you want to live your political life, have at it. But for your child’s sake, man, don’t pass that misery on to your offspring.
…in a macro sense, the lessening power of men (straight and white particularly) is an unquestioned societal good. When others rise, we must fall. It will be good not just in a moral sense, but a practical one. As a patriotic American who believes our country is a better place when all have an equal chance, and who believes it is time for the historical ledger to be balanced, this is what I want for the future.
Imagine hearing your father say these words when you were a a child! Children are trying to find a way and a purpose in this life. They want to be loved and guided. A father is the most powerful influence a young man will ever have. What if dad thinks you shouldn’t have too much success because of your skin color? I can’t imagine a better way to spiral your son into confusion and depression.
Bullies Are Created by Weak Men
That brings us to the part where Will doesn’t even realize he asked and answered his own dilemma: “Thanks in part to more enlightened attitudes about gender and parenting, it is hard not to see male entitlement and aggression as toxic forces degrading our culture. But it is also hard not to notice that the world is now run by the aggressive and the bullying.”
Those “enlightened” attitudes are destroying young boys, and bullies are filling the vacuum of power. Strong men are not toxic to society. They are the protectors of society. We are not enlightening young men when we tell them to run from violence. We are setting them up for a listless, uneasy existence as they back away from bullies tormenting the weak. They’ll know deep down they should be doing something about the bully, but they won’t, because they have never been given the tools. Their dads threw those tools away.
My sons are seven and nine. They have been told their entire lives that I will bring down holy terror on them if I ever find out they bullied someone. But they also have been told it is their duty to stop bullying by any means necessary. Do not fool yourself into believing the feel-good lies society tells you about how to stop a bully. From now until forever, the best way is a punch in the nose.
If you find that distasteful, you need to get over it. You are wrong. One can no more suppress human nature than one can stop a firehose. If you do, eventually it is going to break out somewhere, and when it does, it’s going to be ugly.
Emasculating Men Never Ends Well
Maybe ugly means a lifetime of suppressing your instincts in subservient misery while seeking forgiveness and acceptance from people you haven’t wronged and shouldn’t bother with. Maybe ugly means you let all that anger out shooting up a school. Maybe you beat your wife. Yell at your coworkers. Chew out the waitress.
Obviously there are different degrees of how this manifests itself, depending on the person and level of suppression. Certainly we can agree that Ed Gein wearing people’s faces and Nikolas Cruz shooting up a school is one level, but thinking men should weaken themselves is another. Weak men may not be as violently damaging as a school shooting in the short term, but at a macro societal level, it’s worse in the long term.
A man’s nature cannot be repressed. Men were made for the intentional use of force and power. Throughout history, societies have understood this. Here in America, we have coddled and weakened our boys by refusing to embrace the very nature they are born with, then told ourselves this is progress. It is not. It’s fighting against a tidal wave that cannot be stopped. Attempting to divert the wave just results in more damage.
Embrace boys’ natural instincts. Teach them to be kind, but also to punch bullies in the face. Teach them to prefer peace, but also how to make war. There is still good and evil in this world. Strong men are needed to keep it at bay. That’s on us, dads.
Houston Survivor: Please Give. Harvey Devastation ‘Is Worse Than You Think’
You have seen Houston flood devastation on TV. I live here in a Houston suburb, and let me tell you, it is worse than you think. As I write this, I can hear rescue boats picking people up less than a mile from my house. But countless articles have already been written about the poor people displaced, the property damage, the businesses wiped out. That’s not what this is.
The only opinion I will give here is you should be very proud of your fellow man. Every day I am out in the horrible mess down here and all I see are selfless Americans giving everything they have to help. No politics. No divisiveness. Just acts of selfless love. You should be very proud of your countrymen.
The question I keep getting is, “How can I help?” Money. That’s the long and the short of it. The generosity has been so extensive with the giving of supplies that most places are pretty set for now. But lots of money will be needed going forward.
Charities are a dime a dozen, and some are more reputable than others, so here are a few I trust. Please click on the link of your choosing and give if you can.
I have seen a father holding a child as they both weep. I have seen a man risking his life to carry his dog through the water to safety, a child asking his mother about his lost toys, and a man weeping tears of joy as he finds out his father is alive. My neighbor ventured out to rescue people yesterday. He barely made it back. The truck did not. As you read this, countless families have lost everything and don’t know what tomorrow may bring. Shelters are at their capacity and the worst flooding is still to come.
Please, if you can find it in your heart, give. Anything helps. Thank you all. God bless.
Originally published:
http://thefederalist.com/2017/08/29/houston-survivor-please-give-harvey-devastation-worse-think/