The Calm Before the Storm
Trump's Mandate and a Path Forward
Let’s pause for a moment to reflect on the current mood—just 10 days from the election. There’s an almost surreal sense of jubilation in the air.
For much of America, especially for conservatives and liberty advocates who’ve spent the last eight years battling the creeping totalitarianism and anti-human Woke lunacy of the Left, it feels like Christmas morning, every morning.
I would’ve been content with just a Trump victory: a closed border, an end to lawfare, and a decisive curtailing of the censorship-industrial complex. But it’s becoming clear that we’re getting far more than just the Basic Plan.
Trump has emerged not just victorious but with a vengeance—smarter, sharper, and burning with purpose. And how could he not? After surviving a deep-state coup, multiple assassination attempts, and years of unconstitutional lawfare designed to destroy him, the man is ready to get the ball and go on offense against the System. ‘Default Mode - Aggressive’, as Jocko Wilink likes to say.
And that System? The reactionary Right finally gets it—it’s a deeply entrenched, corrupt organism, engineered to maintain the status quo and repel any true agent of change. Both parties, the administrative state, and the media are aligned against meaningful reform. Trump must do whatever it takes to impose his mandate because they will fight him tooth and nail every step of the way.
Recess appointments? Do it.
Primary those RINO’s feeding at the trough and standing in the way? Absolutely.
Executive orders wielded with the precision (and audacity) of Obama and Biden? No question.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
The Mission is clear.
Close the border.
Incentivize self-deportation.
Investigate, arrest, and fire corrupt and useless administrative state political hacks.
Ignore, marginalize and bankrupt the corrupt Regime MSM.
Launch a DOJ Task Force to closely examine, audit and prosecute anyone committing election fraud or endangering election integrity.
Pass a mandatory Voter ID and Election Integrity Bill immediately.
PS: This is your reminder that 11 days after the election, there are still numerous states, cities and counties that are still ‘counting’ votes.
After Trump’s first year in office, that ends forever.
Paper ballots, Voter ID, 48 hours max to have all votes counted and auditable.
Add in a self-audit feature where you can go online and confirm that your vote was counted (and for whom).
The citizenry must be empowered to become the vanguard against further fraud.
Trump doesn’t need to play by Washington’s rules.
Run the country from Mar-a-Lago. The less "traditional Washington," the better.
America has never had a businessman, let alone one as furious and determined as Trump, running the show. And now, he’s backed by Elon Musk, the most competent man on Earth with a checkbook to match.
The reckoning isn’t just a political necessity—it’s existential. Trump and his team must excise the cancers rotting America’s institutions. Normies will be shocked when they learn how much of the federal government operates as little more than a money-laundering scheme.
Stay quiet. Vet candidates with private resources. Keep the FBI out of the picture until someone like Kash Patel takes a flamethrower to it.
The time for half-measures is over. The time for real, lasting change has arrived.
For more on the above, here’s a fantastic article by El Gato on what the real Team America is about to look like and accomplish.
Elites, It’s We That Are the Problem
Are your Democratic friends till trying to understand Tuesday’s results and Trump’s inroads across virtually every demographic? Perhaps this will help. It was written by one of my good friends. Worth the read…
Elites, It’s We That Are the Problem
I am a full-fledged member of the elite. I grew up in a well-off family, went to private schools my whole life, graduated from an Ivy League university, and have worked in finance as a member of the 1% for most of my adult life. And yet, I am a MAGA supporter.
To me, it is very obvious why Trump won, and I find the fact that it is so boggling to many of my peers as a perfect encapsulation as to why he did. Simply put, the elites have failed the American people for the last 30 years and the reckoning is here.
The scope of the elite failures is both broad and deep. While there has always been a gap between the elites and other members of society, the big bang of the modern dislocation we are seeing is NAFTA. The North American Free Trade Association (which I wholeheartedly supported) was supposed to usher in a new, more productive, higher skilled, and wealthier society. NAFTA was soon followed up with bringing China into the World Trade Organization which greatly reduced barriers to trade between our two countries. Not only was this expected to accelerate the same US transition, but it also was to have the added benefit of introducing in capitalism and democracy into China.
Both NAFTA and China’s WTO entry were based in a noble effort to raise America and Americans. To some extent and for some people it worked out great. Cheaper goods, more efficient and competitive companies, higher corporate profits, and higher incomes for the elites. Where it failed, however, was in the fact that many people and communities were left behind. As a capitalist, I confidently believed that that was the necessary collateral damage required for change (call it creative destruction). I still don’t discount this reality and necessity, but there was a significant miss in these policies. Communities were hollowed out as jobs went away and no one really seemed to care. There was no support given to the people whose jobs moved offshore. Many did not have the skills to participate in this new knowledge economy. There are many reasons for this of course. I personally think it originates with the teacher’s unions and the failure of the public school system; both of which, I think could have been solved with school choice and a prohibition on public employee unions from giving political donations or endorsing candidates. Regardless of the reasons, many people were left behind without much consideration for their plight.
Subsequent elite failures were legion as well. Iraq, collateral mortgage obligations, open borders, the pushing of opiates as safe all contributed to damaging the non-elites. Worse yet, the elites never went through any introspection nor humility when many of their “don’t question us, we know best policies” resulted in less than advertised outcomes and often outright failures. These failings were magnified by the fact the poor fought, but the elites made money off the wars. The poor lost their homes in the GFC, but the elites saw their financial assets inflate as the stock market took off because rates were cut to address the economic damage. All of which brought about the first Trump administration.
Many elites were shocked with that outcome. How could a man so flawed and uncouth rise to the presidency? I certainly was one of them and was only eventually won over because I watched what he did, rather than what he said…which admittedly often sounded like the rantings of a crazy man. However, the proof was in the pudding and the pudding was delicious.
While Trump was busy working on the economic concerns of the middle and working class, there was a blitzkrieg in the culture wars led by the elites that the rest of America was wholly unprepared for and ignored for too long. What started as fringe ideas in academia burst out into the mainstream: America as a force for evil in the world, racial essentialism, toxic masculinity, and radical gender ideology. These philosophies were able to gain traction because there was a kernel of truth at their core (America and many of the founding fathers indeed had slaves and men commit more violence than women as obvious examples), their broad and ubiquitous application struck many Americans as false. However, the elites used censorship, whether by using Americans’ sense of politeness to self-censor or outright censorship through cancel culture. Yet again, when people raised their objections to these elite concepts, they were told to shut-up and get out of the way.
And then Covid appeared. The elites who were more than happy to work from home pushed for broad lockdowns and school shutdowns. I too benefited from this so long as there were workers to deliver my food and produce the goods I wanted/needed. The same could not be said for the vast majority of Americans who needed to be present to perform their jobs, nor for the millions of parents who saw their kids suffering serious psychological issues from the isolation. When these people raised their objections, they were met with accusations about ignoring “The Science.” They were told to stop asking questions about the origins (those were conspiracy theories) and the vaccines. Big tech acted as a tool of the government and the elite and shutdown any unapproved speech thinking that if people couldn’t say it, the resistance to their policies would go away. The same people who told you they could not define what a woman is because they are not biologists, had no problem speaking forcefully and definitively about a NOVEL corona virus.
At some point even the elites could no longer hold back the truths they tried to suppress: the virus came from a lab which Dr. Fauci funded, you could spread the virus even having been vaccinated, the vaccine did not protect you from getting Covid, there were very real health consequences related to the vaccine for some people, and that kids (and most adults) were at extremely low risk of serious health consequences from the virus. Yet again, the vast majority of Americans were told to shut up and trust the elites as we know better.
The same could be said for the rise of DEI and gender ideology. Americans were told that the country was evil at its core and that whites needed to atone for the sins of previous generations. Those who never held slaves were to compensate those who were never slaves. Americans were also told to accept men competing in women’s sports, entering their locker rooms, being put in their prisons, or be called transphobes. Further, they were told the only proper response to their confused children was to affirm their dilutions and give them hormones and surgeries that would sterilize them and prevent them from ever having sexual pleasure.
All of the above ideas were taught throughout America’s universities. My dad used to say that people could be so educated that they become stupid. We saw that in spades. Young people graduated from universities with limited real skills, but with heads full of this nonsense. The gap between the college educated and non-college educated could better be described as those brainwashed with leftwing propaganda and those who had avoided it. Education no longer meant that people knew more. Indeed, they seemed to know less at least about the practical world.
Yet somehow, each failed idea or policy the elites pushed never brought about any introspection about their mistakes. For the same reason that technocrat-controlled economies of communist countries don’t work, a society in which the elites dictated every aspect, the marketplace of ideas be damned, is an equal failure.
Indeed, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc countries is a great parallel to what happened in the 2024 election. The world is too complex for any single person or small group of people to understand it and make decisions for the benefit of everyone because “we know better.” It doesn’t work for economies, and it doesn’t work for public policies either.
That was the brilliance of the founders including free speech as the first amendment. What the elites have missed is that free speech is to protect the speech they disagree with, not the speech that echoes their own thoughts as that speech by definition does not need protection.
What has happened in 2024 is that the elites have been fired. We have failed for 30 years pretty consistently and arrogantly. It is the correct decision and any of us would probably have fired employees who were so consistently and damagingly wrong. Nevertheless, a society without elites is not a healthy society at all, just like one without a middle and working class isn’t healthy nor stable. It is up to the elites to now look in the mirror and appreciate that we must be humble and understand what we know, what we think we know, and what we actually don’t know. We are not masters of the universe despite our certainties that we are. Unless and until we come to the realization that even if our intentions were good, we have made critical mistakes that have hurt many of our fellow citizens, we will be pushed aside.
There are many of the elite that believe that Trump is the disease. He is not. He is the symptom of our failures as leaders in society. It is time for us to start listening and dropping the pretentiousness that has allowed us to blindly make and enforce policies while censoring anyone who disagrees. Only then will we be able to retake what has historically been our trusted, and important role, in society.
The Cabinet Picks
Chief of Staff: Susie Wiles
Attorney General: Matt Gaetz
Secretary of Defense: Pete Hegseth
Secretary of State: Marco Rubio
Secretary of Homeland Security: Kristi Noem
Director of National Intelligence: Tulsi Gabbard
U.N. Ambassador: Elise Stefanik
Secretary of the Interior: Doug Burgum
Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy: Stephen Miller
Press Secretary: Karoline Leavitt
Border Czar: Tom Homan
And RFK at HHS?
Sign me up for all of them—with two exceptions that give me pause: Kristi Noem at Homeland Security and Matt Gaetz as Attorney General.
Noem’s candidacy raises concerns not just about her experience but also the inherent realities of gender in roles demanding aggressive leadership and command in law enforcement or military contexts. For 100,000 years, men have been the protectors—an evolutionary and historical truth we’ve only recently dared to ignore. Men possess significant advantages in physical strength, aggression, and risk-seeking behavior, all critical traits for defensive and offensive operations. Homeland Security isn’t just another department; it’s the front line of law enforcement and counterterrorism. Statistically and practically, the talent pool of men qualified for such roles dwarfs the number of women. While Noem has strengths, this role requires a protector’s instinct, forged by nature and history.
As for Gaetz as Attorney General, I admire his willingness to bring a flamethrower to the DOJ—that’s precisely the boldness we need to confront and reform these corrupt institutions. But the role of the nation’s top law enforcement officer also demands a deep understanding of prosecutorial processes. Experience matters, and while a strong second-in-command with that expertise could suffice, this appointment feels like a risk. That said, Trump has earned the leeway to make these calls, and sometimes an outsider’s fresh perspective is exactly what’s needed to restore accountability and sanity.
If COVID taught us anything, it’s that high-functioning, common-sense thinkers with first-principles logic can outperform so-called “experts” who are burdened by perverse incentives and entrenched groupthink. During the pandemic, anonymous Twitter users, tech entrepreneurs, and autodidacts ran circles around credentialed epidemiologists, doctors and public health bureaucrats in understanding and predicting the crisis. Expertise without integrity or accountability isn’t worth much.
This is why I’m optimistic about Trump’s strategy to elevate high-IQ, first-principles builders and engineers to rebuild government from the ground up.
But none of that can happen until we excise the cancers rotting away our nation’s core institutions.
For a vision of what’s possible, don’t miss El Gato’s article in the first section—it lays out the blueprint for exactly the kind of systemic overhaul we need.
It’s time to burn out the rot and start anew.
And for our Democratic friends griping about the ‘lack of qualifications’, here’s a few reminders for what passed as ‘qualified’ under the Woke Biden Administration.
These people have already thrown a hissy fit over Pete Hegseth’s ‘qualifications’ because he was a host at Fox News for some time.
Pete Hegseth is a 20-year military veteran, a decorated combat veteran, a two-time recipient of the Bronze Star, who graduated from both Harvard and Princeton. He’s the MOST qualified Defense Secretary America's had in a very long time.
And do we dare compare him to the current ‘supremely qualified’ Pentagon Lifer Lloyd Austin?
I mean, Lloyd walked off his job, told no one, and even after a medical emergency - tried to keep it quiet.
A Chinese spy ballon flew over our airspace for over a week. We purged our ranks with forced experimental shots and trans/DEI madness. We “lost” an F-35 that crashed in South Carolina. Russian and Chinese craft taunt us off our shores of Florida and Alaska. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran launch attacks on Israel. The Houthi’s closed out shipping routes and launch drone attacks on the daily. Our bases in Syria have been attacked over 160 times. And all of that pales in comparison to the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Ukraine disaster. Not sure anyone on the left has any ground to criticize Pete Hegseth. His job is to purge. Top down and ground up. Reverse everything they’ve done in the last 4 years, and make sure they can never do it again.
Snow White
Rachel Zegler, the fatally unrepentant feminist that Disney chose to recast in their Snow White reboot has ramped up her campaign yet again to alienate as much of the potential audience as possible. This time, she is viciously attacking the 75 million Americans who voted for Trump.
It seems someone at Disney finally did the math and realized that alienating a majority of the country isn’t exactly a winning financial strategy.
I can only imagine the panic in the boardroom as executives, who’ve sunk close to $100 million into this looming disaster, scrambled to contain the fallout.
Unsurprisingly, Zegler’s bravado didn’t last long. Just a week later, she returned to Instagram with a carefully worded mea culpa: “I sincerely apologize for the election post I shared on my Instagram last week.” The retreat was as predictable as the backlash.
Not a single patriot, conservative, or Trump supporter should give this movie a dime. If you’ve got kids, stick to the original—it’s timeless and untainted.
The strongest message you can send is to hit them where it hurts most: their wallets.
Cut off their financial oxygen and drive them into the void.
What I’m Watching and Reading…
From Jack Posobiec: In the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Michael Anton (who is in the running to be Trump’s Deputy National Security Adviser), under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, penned an essay titled "The Flight 93 Election." Published in the Claremont Review of Books, this piece not only articulated a stark perspective on the political landscape but arguably influenced the trajectory of the election itself. He likened the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to that faced by the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. This is the same, even more so, for Kamala Harris. The passengers, realizing their plane had been hijacked and was likely headed towards a catastrophic target, decided to "charge the cockpit or die." Anton argued that America, under the threat of progressive policies and a Clinton presidency, was in a similar existential crisis.
Here’s how Anton’s essay impacted the 2016 election:
Anton's essay framed the election not as a typical political contest but as a do-or-die moment for conservative values. This resonated with many voters who felt that the traditional conservative establishment was out of touch with their concerns, particularly regarding immigration, trade, and cultural changes. His piece suggested that supporting Trump, despite his flaws, was a necessary gamble to prevent the country from veering leftwards into what he described as "permanent progressive tyranny."
At a time when many in the right were either skeptical or outright opposed to Trump, Anton provided a philosophical and strategic argument for why Trump was necessary. This was particularly significant in conservative circles where Trump's candidacy was initially viewed with disdain or confusion. By framing Trump as a flawed but essential figure to "charge the cockpit," Anton gave those conservatives a way to rationalize their support.
The essay became a rallying cry for Trump supporters, especially after Rush Limbaugh read significant portions of it on his widely followed radio show. This exposure helped the essay reach beyond the usual confines of political commentary into mainstream conservative thought. It galvanized a segment of the electorate that felt the urgency of Anton’s narrative, pushing them to see Trump not just as a candidate, but as a last resort to save the republic.
"The Flight 93 Election" shifted the discourse around Trump, moving from discussions of his suitability as a candidate to the existential stakes of the election. It contributed to a narrative where the potential consequences of a Clinton presidency were depicted as so severe that they justified the "risks" associated with Trump.
Even beyond 2016, Anton’s essay has remained influential. It has been referenced in discussions about the state of American politics, the role of conservatism, and the dynamics of American elections. His work continues to be a touchstone for debates about the direction of the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement, illustrating the ongoing impact of his initial intervention.
Michael Anton's "Flight 93 Election" essay did not just reflect the mood of a segment of the electorate; it shaped it by providing a narrative that many voters adopted to make sense of their decision to support Donald Trump. While controversial and criticized by some for its hyperbolic tone and implications, there's no denying its role in crystallizing the fears, hopes, and motivations of Trump's voter base in 2016, thereby changing the course of that election in ways that continue to be felt in American politics today
Here’s the full essay.
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/the-flight-93-election/
This is probably fake, but it’s amusing—and honestly, it captures the essence of almost every Western European politician right now.
Best of Twitter
Memetic Warfare
Parting Words….
That’s all for this week folks! Keep the momentum and stay on offense. 💪 - MK
Spot on and excellent meme-a-thon. 💪🏼