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Trump, His New MAGA Critics, and the “Art of the Possible”

Image created by Grok AI.

By Selwyn Duke

When Grandma Sarah was saved from Comanchero thugs by the eponymous main character in the film The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), she wasn’t entirely happy. “This Mr. Wales is a cold-blooded killer,” she told the Indian Lone Watie, who’d been abducted with her. “He’s from Missouri, where they’re all known to be killers of innocent men, women, and children.”

“Would you rather be riding with Comancheros, Granny?” Lone Watie responded, waxing rhetorical.

“No, I wouldn’t,” Grandma Sarah confessed, seemingly having to almost pry open her own mouth to utter the words.

Ah, prejudice and expectations. Wales wasn’t the savior Granny wanted; he also wasn’t the savior she feared. But he was the only savior she was going to get — and he got the job done.

This comes to mind when pondering recent MAGA criticism of President Donald Trump over his perceived failures. You’ve likely heard the complaints. Maybe you’ve even leveled some. Where are the pre-dawn raids on the homes of swamp creatures such as James Comey (as happened with Roger Stone)? What’s Attorney General Pam Bondi doing? Is she just another Establishment plant? What of the FBI’s Kash Patel and Dan Bongino and the Jeffrey Epstein conclusion? Have “they” gotten to these guys? While I doubt this, there’s a better question:

What has gotten to the critics? What spirit, that is.

Nullification? Ignore Judge’s Immigration “Order,” Florida AG Tells State Law Enforcement

By Selwyn Duke

With “each decision … unabashedly based not on law,” the Court moves “one step closer to being reminded of [its] impotence,” warned late Justice Antonin Scalia in his Obergefell v. Hodges dissent (2015). Now, a decade later, the judiciary has just gotten a major reminder.

That is, an Obama-appointed activist judge recently “ordered” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier to halt a state immigration law’s enforcement. And the people-elected realist Uthmeier has responded, saying, in essence:

Go pound sand.

The Case for Race and Sex Discrimination

By Selwyn Duke

A few decades ago a woman I knew well, of Japanese descent, told me a story about a time she walked into a Korean restaurant. “We don’t want your kind in here,” someone staffing the eatery bluntly told her. Old prejudices die hard, and the woman promptly left. She could’ve filed a lawsuit, of course, as some people might have; really, though, the restaurateur did her a favor. How? Let’s consider an alternative reality in her situation.

The restaurant owner, fearing government anti-discrimination law and court action, could’ve felt compelled to seat my friend. Then, with the prejudice-born hatred exacerbated by resentment over having to serve someone they detest, the staff could have—and likely would have—contaminated her food with foreign matter. (Use your imagination. Yuck.) So, question:

Is it wise creating a situation in which someone who hates your guts is forced to serve you? Do you want that person preparing your meal? Are you fine with such an individual baking your cake and sticking his wrathful hands in the dough?

Does Teaching Bible in Schools Make Kids More Moral and Mentally Healthy?

By Selwyn Duke

While talking about “raising and training children” and “implanting” the proper “moral code,” a prominent politician had an interesting prescription. “The fundamental basis of this Nation’s law was given to Moses on the Mount,” he said. “The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings which we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don’t think we emphasize that enough these days.”

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state education superintendent, certainly must believe the above, too. Last year, in fact, he mandated that the Bible should be taught in all his state’s K-12 schools. Only, truth in advertising, while Walters certainly would embrace the quoted words, he didn’t utter them.

Rather, they were spoken by Democratic president Harry S. Truman in 1950. And, no, this wasn’t while speaking to the Southern Baptist Convention, either. He was instead giving an address before the Attorney General’s Conference on Law Enforcement Problems.

Well, pop goes another stereotype.

Be Like Sweden? Actually, America Beats Europe — Hands Down

By Selwyn Duke

“There oughta be a law!” goes the old frustration-born refrain. Or if not a law, maybe another regulation or mandate — one making us, perhaps, more like Europe. After all, they have “free” healthcare, maternity leave, better quality of life, and more vacation time. In a nutshell, “Europe is better,” as multimillionaire director Oliver Stone has put it.

But not so fast, says investigative reporter John Stossel. In fact, while this or that economically hobbled nation may sometimes be called “the sick man of Europe,” the reality is now different.

The sick man is Europe.

USAID Is History’s “Largest Criminal Fraud Operation,” and Here’s a SHOCKING List of Abuses

By Selwyn Duke

Ponder the following examples of your tax money at work. USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, paid almost $2 million to empower “transgender” organizations in Guatemala. It spent about $1.5 million to promote the “LGBTQ+ diversity” agenda in Serbia. It also reportedly allowed at least $151 million in aid money to go to terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank. Here’s what’s even worse, too:

Far from being anomalies, this reflects long-standing USAID abuses.

Moreover, if you want to know why the Left has been so politically and culturally powerful for so long, part of the reason is that entities such as USAID have been funding hard-left causes for decades — again, with money extracted from Americans at, metaphorically speaking, the end of a gun. And wait till you see the short list, farther down below, of the organization’s malevolent use of those funds.

The Beast Lives On: DEI Is ALREADY Being Rebranded

By Selwyn Duke

Just two weeks ago I warned, to echo Mark Twain, that rumors of DEI’s death are greatly exaggerated. While “the label ‘DEI’ is new, the product it identifies is more than half a century old,” I stated. … And make no mistake, its predicates are still embedded in our culture.”

For this reason, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) will “live on under a different guise,” I later added. For “it’s as much a symptom as a cause.” This brings us to a headline the New York Post ran just this weekend.

“No ‘death’ for diversity,” it reads: “How DEI is being rebranded — not disbanded.”

Well, that didn’t take long.

In fact, perhaps the social-engineering leviathan deserves credit. It turns out that by the time I’d written my piece, January 21, DEI had already been busy shape-shifting.

The Fakery That is the War on Fake News

By Selwyn Duke

Is it true that one man’s misinformation is another man’s salvation?

Or is it actually true that what man censors is sometimes God’s sublimity?

Author and university lecturer Nolan Higdon may not be pondering anything so ethereal. What he is sure of is that, as he wrote Sunday at Salon, the “war on fake news has backfired.” As to his meaning, his subtitle tells the tale and the Truth. To wit:

“Content moderation was never about eradicating fake news.”

Can We MAGA Without Making the Fed Bureaucracy SMALL Again?

By Selwyn Duke

Texan Michael Cargill had to endure what you might call, well, a bureaucratic colonoscopy. It was a Deep State experience he wouldn’t have had in, let’s say, 1971. That’s because his tormentor was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which didn’t exist till 1972. The issue?

They aimed to revoke his Federal Firearms License (FFL). The problem?

Will the Red-hot California Fires Red-pill Americans?

By Selwyn Duke

When all is said and done, the wildfires raging in and around Los Angeles may be the worst natural disaster in American history in terms of scope and cost. But did it have to be this way? For sure, there are factors beyond man’s control, such as the fierce Santa Ana winds and Southern California’s dry environment. Then, however, there are the controllable factors: Having quota (DEI) hires in the Los Angeles Fire Department’s upper echelons, failure to be proactive (authorities did have advance warning of extreme fire danger), poor forest management, not maintaining water stocks, and vagrancy’s normalization. (Approximately 50 percent of all Los Angeles fires are set by vagrants, according to reporter Michael Shellenberger.) But then, though it’s the hardest of ways to learn a lesson, there may be one silver lining in this very tragic cloud: More Americans may be waking up to the wages of woke governance.