Glenn K. Beaton is a writer and columnist living in Colorado. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, Powerline, Instapundit, Citizen Free Press, American Thinker, Fox News, The Federalist, and numerous other print, radio and television outlets. His most recent book is "High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen"
DJT: WELCOME EVERYBODY TO MY BIG BEAUTIFUL TURKEY DAY WHERE WE ALL GIVE THANKS TO THE HOST!!!
Joe Biden: I want ice cream.
DJT: QUIET, PIGGY!
Barack Obama: What we now call Thanksgiving presented an existential threat to native Americans, both foul and fowl. But if you like your turkey, you can keep it.
Al Gore: Lockbox. Gotta put the turkeys in a lockbox. Solar powered. Tax deductible.
DJT: AL, THAT’S SO 1996! TODAY IT’S BITCOIN BITCOIN BITCOIN!!! HERE, I HAVE A FEW YOU CAN BUY!
Bill Clinton: What’s that I feel on my leg? Is there someone under the table?
George W. Bush: This party needs more strategery. Who wants to dance? Laura, let’s dance!
Joe: Now Dancer now Prancer now Dancer now Dancer now Dancer . . . Medicare . . . I used to be a turkey . . .
DJT: I DON’T KNOW WHAT HE SAID. I DON’T THINK HE KNOWS, EITHER.
Bill: . . . moan . . . moan . . . moanica . . .
Dick Cheney: . . . . . . . . .
JD Vance: Barack, the problem with the Indians is they weren’t Christians. Indians that refuse to convert to Christianity deserve to be divor– . . . er, I mean genocide’d.
DJT: I DIDN’T WANT THEIR STUPID LITTLE PRIZE ANYWAY. DO YOU KNOW HOW COLD IT IS IN NORWAY THIS TIME OF YEAR?
Bill: Puh-leeze pass the mashed potatoooOOOO!
Elon Musk: I sense a commercial opportunity here. Turkeys are flightless birds, right? We give ‘em the gift of flight by putting a flock of ‘em on SpaceX, take ‘em up 120,000 feet, dump ‘em out the back. They’ll rain down at about 1800 mph and the air friction will roast them to perfection – and pluck them to boot. We charge money for the space-roasted turkeys and money to view the event and money for shares in the corporation that manages it all. If Tesla is worth a trillion dollars, this scheme is worth 200 billion, easy. Think of the mark-up. That’s about $1,000,000,000 per turkey, or $50,000,000 per pound. [Gives a Heil Hitler salute]
Al: Solar powered?
Elon: What?
Al: Solar powered? Which part is solar powered?
Elon: None of it is solar powered, you moron.
Al: Hard to make money without the solar power angle – that’s what gets you the tax deduction.
Barack: It’s time to end these existential threats to flightless fowl.
DLJ: QUIET PIGGY!
Joe: Let’s sing Turkey carols!
DLJ: QUIET PIGGY!
Bill, whispering:Excuse me, I’m going under the table.
Hillary: QUIET PIGGY!
Mitt Romney: . . . . . . . . .
Hillary: Not you, Mitt. In fact, you should be less quiet. Say something, Mitt!
Mitt: Well . . .
Hillary: OK, that’s enough.
Michelle Obama: QUIET PIGGY!
Hillary: Are you talkin’ to me, bitch?!?!
Michelle: Ho yo’ callin’ bitch, ho?
Hillary: QUIET PIGGY!
George: Talk about weapons of mass destruction . . .
Bill:: OH MY GAWD OH MY GAWD OH MY GAWD !!! It was Barack all along! It was Barack under the table! Feeling my leg. And . . . then . . . OH MY GAWD!!!
Hillary and Michelle: What about my leg?
Barack and Bill: QUIET PIGGY!
Melania: . . . . . . . . .
DLJ: SO, I TOLD THEM TO JUST GIVE THEIR STUPID LITTLE PRIZE TO THAT GIRL IN VENEZUELA. SHE’S KINDA HOT.
Bill [already recovered]: Yeah, she is.
Al: You need to put solar panels on the rocket, Elon. Or just something that looks like solar panels so you can get the tax break. Maybe card tables.
Elon: You’re a moron, Al.
Cha[u]ncey Billups: Did someone say “cards”?
DJT: I TOLD BLONDI BONDI TO SUE ‘EM BEFORE DINNER’S OVER – IN FLORIDA. HA!
Gavin Newsom [coming in the door]: Hair I am!
DJT: YOUR HAIR’S NOT THAT GREAT.
Hillary: I’m surrounded by deplorables.
DJT: REVERSE DISCRIMINATION. SUING THEM FOR REVERSE DISCRIMINATION.
Kamala [coming in behind Newsom]: Hey everyone, long no see time! With you here indeed that I was in the ‘hood the timing was appropitious.
Everyone: QUIET PIGGY!
Melania [muttering to herself]: Slovenia is looking pretty good. In 759 days, I’m outahere.
As a three-time Trump voter with no regrets, I don’t like this message any more than most of you. So don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.
The message is the Republicans in next fall’s midterm elections will lose the House, bigly, and probably the Senate.
If politics is indeed “war by other means,” expect the political war next fall to be bloody. Think Battle of the Little Bighorn. Think Stalingrad. Think Pickett’s Charge. Think the Battle of Midway. Think Waterloo. It will be one-sided.
Oh, I know the President has done some terrific things – at great personal risk to himself, by the way – even if they were sometimes done unartfully.
Stopping illegal immigration is near the top of the list. His crude methods were probably by design but might have been by fortuitous accident. Either way, he sent a message that transcended language barriers: The United States of America doesn’t welcome illegal immigrants anymore, and illegals who come anyway may find themselves on a one-way flight to West Africa. Due process? Mayyyybe . . . .
As a result, illegal immigration is at the lowest point in decades. The southern border in particular is more like, well, a nation’s border. All this has produced some human pain. Fixing big problems that politicians tolerated and sometimes encouraged often has that effect.
In the Middle East, the President let the Israelis beat and batter the barbarians of Hamas and then brokered a quasi-peace between the two. Even better, he prevented a nuclear Iran/Israel war by handing the Persians their biggest defeat since the Battle of Marathon two and a half millennia ago.
On tariffs, however, the President got out of his depth. His tariffs were defensible as an economic matter, maybe, but not as a legal matter. He will lose when the Supreme Court issues its decision next Spring – perhaps in a 9-0 decision – and the Court signaled as much in oral arguments a couple of weeks ago. At best, the decision will be 7-2 against the President.
The unravelling of those tariffs, which will have been in effect illegally for as much as a year, will be messy and embarrassing for the administration.
Intangibles are the most notable things on the score card for this administration. On the plus side, the President has made “woke” a four-letter word. That’s more than a stylistic change. Wokeness and all that it entails – abolition of merit, obsession with skin color and sexual preferences, the euphemizing of language, ubiquitous victimization – was highly destructive to America and the world.
On the minus side, the President has shown a tendency to say or tweet what he thinks in a way that often and needlessly offends. The most recent example was when a reporter persisted in asking yet another follow-up question during a press conference. Most reporters are loathsome creatures, but they paid to ask – nay, shout – questions in that manner.
The President could have ignored the reporter, or rebuked her with something like “let’s move on.”
Instead, he barked “Quiet, piggy!”
That may not bother you but it does bother millions of Americans, particularly women. Such people vote.
Right now, approval surveys suggest that many of them are sufficiently turned off by these sorts of crude insults that their vote will be against the GOP next fall. The outcome of the special elections around the country a few weeks ago supports that conclusion.
Forget about peace in the Middle East, the solving of the immigration debacle, and the mixed outcome on tariffs. Because the people will forget about those things.
What many of them will remember is that they dislike the President on a personal level. People vote against people they dislike. Right now, a large and growing number of people dislike the President.
That’s a fundamental flaw in representative democracy, but it’s an unavoidable aspect of human nature. We’ll see the results next fall.
Now, before you bark “Quiet, piggy!” at me, remember: I’m just the messenger and just doing my job. (And in case you think it’s relevant, I’m 6’ tall and weigh 160 pounds.)
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule” -Thomas Jefferson
The other Founders were similarly scornful of pure democracies. John Adams proclaimed:
“Democracy… while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy.
James Madison said:
“Pure democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.”
Alexander Hamilton warned:
“Pure democracy is as much a fallacy as the idea of eternal vows and permanent alliances.”
Ah, you might say, but what about the democracy of ancient Athens?
I’m glad you brought that up. Athens was indeed a pure democracy in the sense that the people voted directly on matters of governance. But not all the people.
There was no vote for slaves, women, foreigners (meaning foreign to Athens), or people who had even one parent who was a foreigner. After all the winnowing down, only about 10-20% of adult Athenians had the right to vote.
Even that limited democracy of Athens was problematic. No less than Plato complained that “Democracy . . . is continually subject to the influence of demagogues and the passions of the multitude.”
Rome was more pragmatic in governance, as in everything else, and more successful. While Athens was never more than a city-state that faded in a couple hundred years, Rome expanded its empire to embrace about 60 million people – about a third of the population of the entire ancient world – and lasted nearly a thousand years.
It’s no coincidence that Rome was never a pure democracy, but was initially a quasi-republic. The people did not vote directly on matters of governance, but instead voted (sometimes) for representatives who made those decisions.
Rome eventually morphed from a republic into an empire ruled by an emperor, a transition precipitated by Julius Caesar. After conquering Gaul, he led his army east and then south, crossing the Rubicon River to invade Italy from the north – in defiance of the Senate – and journeying on to Rome to declare himself dictator. In Rome, there was enough popular adulation for the conquering hero that he got away with his coup for a while. His great nephew Augustus cemented the role of emperor, and Rome became greater than ever.
Eventually, nearly all of Europe became Roman, and also a good part of northern Africa and England. We still see the remnants of their incredible buildings and culture. Latin is the world’s biggest unspoken language and is the root of French, Spanish, Italian and a good part of English.
Fast forward a few empires, to the American one. Benjamin Franklin was asked in the course of the Constitutional Convention what kind of government they were establishing. He famously answered, “A democracy, of course!”
Just kidding. His real answer was, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
They would be appalled by Americans today who pride themselves on tossing that republic into the ash bin of history. The people brag of being exactly what the founders feared – a “democracy.”
The Founders consciously sought to avoid that outcome by incorporating several basic buffers from the mob.
For one, the American mob doesn’t generally decide matters of governance. Rather, as in a republic, they vote for representatives who make those decisions. The thinking of the Founders was that informed gentlemen are more apt to make good decisions than passionate, uniformed mobs.
The Electoral College is another example of a buffer from the mob. Today, the Electoral College is a mere formality. In each state, they all vote for the presidential candidate that won the most votes in that state. But originally, the Electoral College was free to vote contrary to the majority of the state they represented, and they sometimes did. Again, the intent was to put a layer of sanity between the hoi polloi and the decisions of government.
Another buffer between informed decision-making and uninformed mob rule took the form of voting restrictions. As in Athens, women and slaves were not permitted to vote in early America. In the pre-Civil War south, that literally excluded a majority of the adults.
The Civil War of course abolished slavery and finally enfranchised former slaves and their descendants. But in the Jim Crow South, literacy tests were used to bar many Blacks from voting on the rationale that illiterate people lacked the necessary sophistication to vote.
In many states in early America, voting was prohibited unless the voter owned real property, the thinking being, again, that persons without property lacked the sophistication necessary to choose good representatives. Those prohibitions continued for about half a century.
Women were not enfranchised until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.
I personally am glad that we now allow voting by women, minorities and renters, though I’m not fond of renters.
But we’ve gone well beyond that. The Founders would be mortified to see the current trend toward what we champion as “democracy” and what those Founders would decry as mob rule.
For example, people are allowed to vote without presenting simple proof that they’re who they say they are.
They’re allowed to vote in many states even though they’re not citizens.
They’re often allowed to vote even though they’re dead.
They can vote multiple times – one time from their main residence, another time from their vacation home in a different state, and another time by mail.
They’re allowed to fill out ballots for their elderly grandmother, sign her name to it, and drop it off or mail it in. They can do that for as many grandmothers as ballots they can get their hands on.
This loosening of voting requirements coincides with a dumbing down of the voters. People are allowed to vote even though they graduated from public high schools in Democrat-controlled cities where they didn’t learn anything. In fact, they’re allowed to vote even though they graduated from no high school at all.
And even the ones who graduated from high school lack a basic education. A recent survey at the University of California at San Diego (ranked one of the leading universities in America) found that 25% of incoming freshmen cannot solve for X in the equation:
7 + 2 = X + 6
I wonder if they could solve for X in the equation:
7 + 2 = X + 2
Or the equation:
7 + 2 = X
Or the equation:
7 = X
These freshmen have no idea how many students make up 25% of the incoming class of 4,000. But I suspect they do know to label me a misogynist for using the term “freshmen.”
We can and should re-establish literacy tests for voting. They were outlawed generations ago on the grounds that they discriminated against illiterate Blacks, but today that objection is gone – we’re all illiterates now!
Is it any wonder that the state of the union is bad? We have a polarized government of mean girls (most of whom have penises) who don’t even try to solve problems. They just play to the mob that elects and reelects them.
And so, the minority party shuts down the government unless they get to act like they’re the majority party. They don’t really expect that to happen, but it’s great theater for a while for the mob in the nickel seats.
And there’s Epstein 24/7, as if anyone really needs to see the emails to know that Donald Trump’s relationship with a creep who exploited teenage girls might have been worth a whole chapter in The Art of the Deal.
And there’s a kooky Jew-hater who’s never had a job getting elected in a place that a kooky Black man once dubbed “Hymie-town” on a platform of arresting the Prime Minister of Israel and giving everyone free stuff paid for by the Jewish billionaires he’ll fleece on their way out of town.
And there’s a governor in California running for President on the platform “OMG, get a look at my hair!”
And 70% of the younger generation approve of socialism, while 45% disapprove and 17% aren’t listening to the survey question and 81% pick the New England Patriots by 7.
What’s the fate of our once-great republic now that it’s descended into mob rule?
History offers some lessons. Witness the mob of the French Revolution and the mob of the Weimar Republic. The path out of mob rule typically goes through despotism, and a lot of people get hurt.
The fascist who gave fascism its name came to an ugly end. Benito Mussolini was impaled on a meat hook and hung upside-down from a lamppost. Fascists don’t tolerate failure.
Democrat leader Charles Schumer is someone I don’t like, and I felt a certain schadenfreude when his Democrat “friends” blamed him for their caving on what has come to be called the “Schumer Shutdown” or, more accurately, the “Schumer Sh*tshow.”
But there’s something disquieting about the barrage of criticism from the left.
The gist of the criticism is that Schumer failed to keep all the Democrat Senators “in line.” In other words, he failed to coerce every Democrat to vote the way he told them to, despite his best efforts at coercion. At coercion, he failed.
Criticizing Schumer for failing at coercion says a lot about the criticizers. It says that they think other Democrats are Schumer’s subordinates, and he is supposed to be able to control their votes.
That sounds vaguely dictatorial to me.
It would come as news to the people of New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Illinois who elected these particular Democrats that the Senators they elected are required to vote not their conscience, and vote not for the interests of the people who elected them, but vote the way an old guy in New York tells them to.
It seems the left wing of the Democrat Party believes that the only acceptable vote for the rank and file is a vote for insanity and radicalism. When the Democrat leader tells his “subordinates” to vote for insanity and radicalism, then, by golly, that’s what they’re required to do, their conscience and their constituents be damned.
The predicament of the Democrat leader is even more precarious. It’s not enough for him to vote insanely and radically. He’s also supposed to succeed in coercing every other Dem into voting insanely and radically. Any failures in his coercion earn him a meat hook and a hanging.
Regardless of what it says on paper, regardless of Senate rules, regardless of the will of the people, the leftists in the Democrat Party have a tyrannical and bloodthirsty grip on the party.
We went to bed on Sunday and there was vague talk of a shutdown workaround. We wake up on Monday, and the Democrats have caved.
Analogies, anyone? If this were a boxing match, the Democrats didn’t come out of their corner for the 8th round. If it were a softball game, the ten-run rule got applied. If it were a war, they flew the white flag and laid down their arms. If it were wrestling, they tapped out.
If it were poker, they folded, though the time to fold ‘em was a month ago. They didn’t know when to walk away, and so now they have to run.
Feel free to add your own analogies. That’s what the comment section is for!
This all transpired because Democrats are the minority party in Congress at the moment. They consequently got outvoted on the tax bill last winter. Getting outvoted often happens to the minority party.
The Democrats’ solution to being outvoted as the minority party was to demand to be treated like the majority party, else they would shut down the government. They demanded a re-do of the tax bill, specifically the part that let expire the Obamacare insurance subsidies enacted as a temporary measure during COVID.
The Republicans’ reaction was, “Huh? Do you think that Democrats get to act like the majority party when they are, and also get to act like the majority party when they aren’t?”
It wasn’t hard for the Republicans to call that bluff.
After the biblical 40 days and 40 nights, give or take, and over a dozen votes blocked by the Democrats, eight of the 43 Democrat Senators finally broke ranks Sunday evening and voted to re-open the government.
The stock market cheered. Food stamp recipients rejoiced. Federal workers felt relieved. Holiday travelers were glad.
Democrats fumed.
Now there’s a civil war in the Democratic party. By the media reports, it sounds like the biggest one since Democrats quit America a century and a half ago to continue holding in chains some of the men God created equal.
In the resolution to both civil wars, the Democrats got hardly anything in the bargain.
At least this time, Atlanta didn’t get torched.
But Chuck Schumer did. Imagine Schumer stark naked with only a fig leaf, surrounded by ravenous dog-like Democrats looking for someone to blame. Now take away the fig leaf and let loose the dogs.
That’s the Democrat Party right now. It ain’t pretty.
Remember the virtue-signaling yard signs a few years ago? In rainbow colors, they shouted self-congratulatory platitudes like:
“HATE DOESN’T LIVE HERE”
Except that the residents of the house hated anyone who disagreed with them.
“NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL”
As if the phrase “illegal immigrant” is synonymous with the phrase “illegal human.”
“BLACK LIVES MATTER”
In view of the colossal rip-offs committed by the organization of that name, this one didn’t age well.
“WATER IS LIFE”
Except it’s not; water is a simple molecule of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Saying “water is life” is like saying “aluminum is an airplane.”
“SCIENCE IS REAL”
I’ll leave aside the irony of someone blathering something scientifically incorrect like “water is life” and in the next breath preaching “science is real.” It’s this last platitude that I want to focus on.
I have no objection to the phrase “science is real,” per se. “Science” is a methodology of observing, collecting data, developing theories to explain the data, testing the theories, and adopting the theories that pan out – while discarding or modifying the ones that don’t. That method is indeed real.
The problem with “science is real” as a slogan, as opposed to science as a methodology, is that the sloganeers don’t understand the methodology. Rather, they believe – very strongly, as believers are wont to do – that “science” is not a method but an authority. When people disagree with them, they cudgel them with “science” to shut down the debate.
Real scientists don’t do that. Real scientists instead talk about the theories that the methodology of science has developed. You would never hear a real scientist say “Science says . . .”
Real scientists don’t have nonsensical yard signs shouting “SCIENCE IS REAL.”
Over thousands of years, the methodology of science has led to immense knowledge and enrichment for humanity. From that methodology, we’ve learned that the earth travels around the sun, that many diseases are caused by living pathogens that we can control, that water is a molecule of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (none of which are alive), that we can split other atoms to release tremendous energy that may someday supply endless electricity to run artificial intelligence machines that will enable us to forget everything we learned in those thousands of years.
But along the way, we’ve gone down many dead ends.
For millennia, scientists including Aristotle thought that life was created spontaneously in suitable settings. It was supposed that tadpoles were created by mudpuddles.
Scientists believed that the earth was a static place, and resisted the concept of continental drift and plate tectonics long into the last half of the 20th century, well after the proof became overwhelming.
Scientists thought that all the great problems of physics had been solved by the end of the 1800s, until an obscure dabbler in the Swiss Patent Office unveiled theories that changed everything. Albert Einstein had a brilliant and creative mind unimpeded by the rigors of running a laboratory or raising NIH grants. In fact, he had no laboratory and did no experiments.
Einstein’s successors in physics never disproved his theories, but their theories of quantum mechanics in the infinitesimal stand awkwardly alongside Einstein’s theories of the universe at large.
His successors accepted Einstein better than Einstein accepted them. He dismissed quantum mechanics theories of uncertainty with “God does not play dice with the universe.” Late in life, Einstein was one of the continental drift deniers.
But the continents do drift, and God does seem to play dice.
In geology, scientists thought the age of the earth was maybe a few million years. Not until the middle of the last century did they theorize correctly (we currently think) that it’s more like 4,500 million years – or 4.5 billion.
At the time scientists came up with the 4.5 billion figure for the age of the earth, that figure was older than the widely accepted age of the universe. It was as if you were determined to be older than your mother. Talk about awkward.
The “science is real” crowd of non-scientists have even more reckoning ahead. Here’s a brief punch list of what the methodology of science has still left unanswered:
We don’t know why things fall. We have a name for it – gravity – and we can predict how things react to this gravity stuff (though our predictions get squirrely when we take them to a large scale and start moving things fast) but we don’t know what it is. It behaves like a force by drawing things toward one another, but we cannot isolate or identify that force. We’re left with the unsatisfying conclusion that it’s just an artifact of the shape of the universe. Hmm.
About 90% of the universe is unaccounted for. We call it “Dark Matter,” which is not to be confused with Darth Vader. Our observations say it has to be there, but we can’t find it or even describe it. Given that it’s 90% of the universe, it’s not like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s more like looking for hay in a haystack. Here we are, deep in the haystack, and we can’t find the hay.
The universe began with a bang, says our best theory. Before this big bang, there was nothing – no time, no things, not even empty space. Then everything came out of nothing. We don’t know why and we don’t know how.
Back to quantum mechanics. Scientists have experimentally proven that there can be “action at a distance.” If two protons (or other objects) are “entangled,” then a change to one simultaneously effectuates a change to the other even if it’s a million miles away.
This simultaneous action-at-a-distance would seem to violate Einstein’s settled conclusion that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light – including information. But physicists have ideas as to why it doesn’t violate Einstein. They call those ideas “theories.” Those theories will be tested, validated, invalidated, modified, remodified and, if appropriate, discarded.
I suspect that some of the great unanswered questions will never be answered because the applicable theories cannot be tested. How everything – the universe – came into existence from nothing, is one of those unanswerable questions. The nothingness before the big bang was empty of both time and events, and so it left no tracks. All we know and ever will know about the time before time and the nothing before everything, is nothing.
Which brings us back to that dice player.
The best we can say is this. Creation was created and, perforce, it was by a creator, the nature of which or whom is a question best left to philosophers and theologians.
Next time someone tries to win an argument by invoking “science,” have a little fun with them. Start with “Do you think water is life?” and go on from there.
the Aspen beat 