The writer is in Australia.
Longer term readers of the Speccie will recall that back in 2015 and 2016 I thought, and argued, that all conservative voters would do better to preference Labour rather than Malcolm Turnbull and the Libs in the 2016 election. In other words, I thought we had to lose short-term to win long-term. The win would come because a Turnbull loss (rather than the incredibly narrow win he squeaked out) would embarrass the partyroom ‘moderates’/Lefties who knifed Abbott; it would take power away from them in future; it would force Labour rather than the Libs to implement Lefty policies (because try to name a single Right-leaning thing that Team Turnbull did); and as it turned out we would not have had the ‘free speech never created a single job’ Morrison Prime Ministership that lied about intending to sign up to Net Zero and that oversaw the biggest inroads into Australians’ civil liberties ever during the shameful, thuggish Covid lockdowns brought to us in part by Team Coalition. I said it beforehand and I think it still. Long term a 2016 Turnbull loss was preferable. (And yes, our preferential voting system, a protection racket for the two main parties, means that we voters cannot do what dissidents do in Britain or Canada and vote for some small third party; we ultimately simply have to preference higher either Labour or the Libs and in 2016 I preferenced Labour just above the Libs at the bottom of the ballot – not that it got me all those university grants and awards and accolades other Lefty voting academics scoop up. On that point, why can’t the Libs end all social science and arts grants skewed incredibly to Left-wing thinking and totalling tens of millions of dollars as they have in New Zealand?)
But why do I bring up the decades-old past? Because it is now pretty clear that a variant of that ‘lose now to win later’ argument is playing out in the US. Let me be blunt. The first fortnight-plus of this second-term Donald Trump presidency is the best first two weeks or so of any US President in my life. And it’s not even close. The list of what he has done in just 300 odd hours is staggering. Trump has pulled out of the WHO. He’s pulled out of the Net Zero idiocies of the Paris Accord. He has pulled out of the awful United Nations Human Rights Council and ended all UNRWA funding. He has banished all men (who have taken drugs or had surgery and want to be seen as women) from playing women’s sports, while ending juvenile sex changes. He has offered re-instatement to all US military personnel who were dismissed for not taking the mRNA vaccines, and done so with the promise of full back pay. He has ordered the removal of all virtue-signalling ‘these are my pronouns’ guff in government emails. He has used the threat of massive tariffs and the appointment of serious top people who actually want to close the border to do just that – in a fortnight the border crossings have never been lower while the deportations have started and are at record levels. He has ended the EV taxpayer scam and the wasting of myriad money on charging stations. DEI is gone from the US bureaucracy and he has threatened any universities who keep it. He has unleashed Elon Musk on the bloated administrative bureaucracy and we have already learned of corrupt USAID spending on things so Left-wing and crazy and basically corrupt – I’m looking at you legacy media around the world – that even partisan Democrats are embarrassed to see this come to light. And Musk is finding so much waste Trump may manage to balance the budget on eliminating this revealed spending alone. He has reset the Middle East world. He has nominated real conservatives to all appointments – people he knows won’t go to water because they’ve been hated by the Left for years and have stood up to it (the sole basis for all conservative appointments Mr Dutton). He has threatened the International Criminal Court over its disgraceful persecution of the Israeli PM, with strong hints as regards what would happen to any country that acted on the ICC warrants. Already US military recruitment has bounced back to record levels (who knew recruits want to fight, not be part of a woke social justice outfit?)
Trust me. Space stops me from listing everything I like about these first couple dozen Trump days. Be honest. What in the above list do you not like? Be honest. Do you think any other conservative leader in the democratic world would have done half of this? Be honest. Do a few mean and boorish tweets outweigh these sort of accomplishments in just the first 300 hours of his second term? Right now I am liking, no loving, nine out of 10 things this Trump 2 administration is doing. This is a whole new political feeling for me.
However, here is my core claim in this column. If Mr Trump had not lost the Presidency in 2020 (no doubt due in large part to the loosest of voting rules in many states, often imposed by unelected state judges under cover of Covid, including world-unique third party ballot harvesting) then he would now be finished on his second term. And he would most certainly not have taken on the administrative state in the way he is now doing. He would not have plunged himself into a full-blooded fight to win the culture wars. He would not have unleashed Mr Musk. Etcetera. Etcetera. It would have been a good second term. But nothing like what we’re seeing. Why? Because just three months ago the US political establishment was still trying to bankrupt and imprison Donald Trump. The Biden administration was still trying to saddle US voters with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. It was still weaponising the administrative state. It opened the borders deliberately. Donald Trump saw all this. He withstood it all, including two assassination attempts.
Look, unlike in 2016 with Turnbull, I wanted Trump to win in 2020. But with the benefit of hindsight it is now plain to me that his loss then allowed him to pull off the greatest comeback in US political history (we can argue about Andrew Jackson) and then to decide to implement policies many of us conservatives have been dreaming about for eons. He had to lose to create these sort of wins – wins that dwarf anything that the Stephen Harpers or John Howards accomplished (with all due respect). The Spectator Australia‘s Editor and I were two of the earliest pro-Trump supporters in print in this country. Not to blow our own horns too much but we were right. The establishment conservative commentators were wrong time and time again. But it boils down to Trump having to lose to now win.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.
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Given the number of people that still believe the elites charade of electoral democracy will fix all this, it’ll have to go pitch black before people remember light.
Excellent article by Jeffrey Tucker. And Elon Musk was right that it was “a set-up for a switch”. Remember that Biden explained his Vice-Presidential choice years ago by declaring that he was “just a Placeholder for disadvantaged ethnic minorities”. In other words, the plan was for him to stand down all along, to hand the US Presidency to an African-Indian woman, who is also an idiot, without the excuse of senility…
After watching Biden’s performance my conclusion is that he will be disposed of before the election although the replacement may not get more than about 4 – 6 weeks before voting commences. And I am not convinced the drug addicted alchy Kamala Harris will necessarily be the replacement.
“The elected portion of Government has been reduced to nothing but a veneer to be sanded down and changed from time to time, whereas the substance of Government consists of its deep, middle, and shallow layers that operate without any public control at all.”
And this certainly summarises the state of our own so-called “democracy.” We are bit players in nothing but a damned pantomime. Until somebody with a public voice starts to air this fact nothing will change, the shit show will get worse and the shyte will get deeper.
I dunno, there’s talk of him being replaced by the horrendous human/civil rights-abusing woketard psychopath, Gavin Newsom ( who reminds me of Turdeau’s ‘brother from another mother’ ), from plenty Americans on Twitter. I’m not following things closely though. But surely to God it won’t be Halfwit Harris!
Any of those 3 would be fine as it means Trump will likely win. Trump is the only western leader that will get rid of pretend to save the planet policies and that can only be good for us all. If our electricity bills are 3 times higher than Americans, then people will see the absurdity of trying to power the country on wind and sun
Anyone any idea what an ordinary member of the public can do to protect themselves and their family through these times?
If you can reduce, or better still, eliminate any debt. Move out of a city. Look to your resilience for energy supply, food and water. In the USA, buy a gun.
It’s going to get nasty.
On a practical level, invest in gold and silver leases and bonds with Monetary Metals in Arizona. I have no investment myself or vested interest, but the hope of this company is to bring back honest currency by bringing gold and silver back into use with interest paid in the metal itself.
On a deeper level, the main issue is the confusion between efficiency and intelligence that is now culminating in AI and AGI. Solve that one if you can.
It certainly looks like a set-up for a late switch. What I don’t understand is why Jill Biden would allow her husband to be humiliated like that …… she must really hate him.