Dakota Beacon

Does the law matter anymore?  

This is a legitimate question and it is directed at supposed “conservative” and “MAGA patriots”.  Because if the answer, once unreeled in real world terms is “no”, then there are no conservatives, no patriots - MAGA or otherwise.  

There seems to be an alarming off-handedness in recent years when it comes to what we have thought of as law-abiding citizens (you know, the ones who mow their lawns, trim their shrubbery, paint their houses every two or three years, pay taxes, maintain decent credit, dress well, run to their kids’ football games and are “hard-working Americans”).  This really should concern all of us.  

This is being manifest in various ways.  Not passively, either, but actively, by these upstanding American citizens.  For too long now, we have winked at laws, local ordinances all the way to serious federal offenses.  Maybe this is because we have too many regulations.  It has been said that almost anywhere in America you are already in violation of some law when you get out of bed in the morning, and this is likely true.  We do have too much involvement by government in our lives.  Now we have doubled down with quasi-legal enforcement from organizations like HOAs.  We should start by making living within the law a whole lot easier.  And then we should focus on strict enforcement of reasonable laws.

Perhaps some of this disregard of law led to a president who believes he can just make up law or policy that our Constitution has placed within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch.  And too many legislators have been more than willing to shed responsibility for governing and making policy and law.  There are a lot of temptations in DC that have skewed their loyalty to their own constituents.  Some see foreign governments as their real constituents.  So the fault is not only that of the executive but also of the legislature.  The failure on the part of Congress to do its job and meet challenges on behalf of the people has given the people excuses to call upon the president to take unconstitutional action to deal with needs.  And they are reasonable excuses.  The epidemic of fentanyl deaths would be one example, and tied to that issue, unvetted, unprecedented illegal migration across our border.  Something had to be done.  Ditto our trade deficits.

One of my clearest childhood memories was of a company picnic where the kids got to ride horses.  It was in Riverside Park, which used to be very beautiful.  Somehow the reins slipped from my grasp and I could not reach them.  My horse began to stroll down to the river bank and I was sort of terrified at the prospect of ending up with the fishes.  This is how I feel when I read about troughs of executive orders and all I see is grandstanding congressmen orating in an empty chamber.  Something is really wrong here.  

When we tell a president to do whatever he sees fit to solve one problem, he feels empowered to do whatever he wants about anything he sees as a problem.  The means no longer matter, it’s only the ends that matter.  Which is how Czar Nicholas II, or for that matter, Stalin, saw things.  We can say for certain, regardless of these ends, it is not a healthy climate for a representative, free republic.  It is a republic on the road to tyranny.  Benign totalitarianism is still totalitarianism.  And it is only benign until you get in its way with your “Constitutional rights”.  So don’t expect your Bill of Rights to stand if you want a daddy state.  

Trump’s outrageous “big, beautiful ballroom” is an example of a president gone rogue.  He felt justified in doing anything he pleased because “he could”.  And to hell with Congress and the checks and balances so carefully devised by our Founding Fathers to prevent recklessness in an executive.  Trump announced it would not “cost the taxpayer anything” because “some friends” of his were donating $350,000,000 to set him up in the style to which he is accustomed.  The hidden cost of this, of course, is that an elected official taking private money for a public project puts the public under a kind of understood obligation.  It’s better known as corruption.  Biden and his crime family had their kind of corruption - money laundering through the Ukrainian puppet government and oligarchs.  Trump’s is through amassing huge sums of money from various private enterprises - Amazon, defense contractors, who knows who all of them are?  What will Amazon want?  Perhaps data mining.  That’s lucrative.  That’s a popular commodity.  What about defense manufacturers?  Maybe keeping us eternally at war would be good for them.  The President who promised peace - such as ending the Ukraine war in 24 hours of his swearing in, and no more foreign wars - just took huge amounts of money from people whose sole enterprise is supplying the war machine.  Now, this might look like sidestepping Congress was a great idea - no “tax dollars” involved.   But is our privacy worth protecting from some of these companies?  Is a war or two actually a tax expense?  We could go on, but one law we do need while we are de-cluttering our over-regulation, is that no public official, elected or appointed, may accept private funding for a public project.  It is corrupt by its very nature.

This lack of interest in wrong-doing (and the appearance thereof) on the part of public officials, including the President, bleeds into the rest of society.  

We are all aware by now of the havoc created in our country by illegal aliens, many from places like Venezuela, whose economies have been dried up by a combination of corruption and communism, some of whom are members of violent gangs and drug cartels.  One might be surprised to learn of the incursion of these kinds of gangs into remote, hitherto supposedly “safe” areas like North Dakota.  People up here have bragged that “60 below keeps the riff-raff out”, but no more.  There have been a number of arrests, thanks to ICE raids, in North Dakota in 2025 and they have revealed the presence of gangs such as Tren de Aragua, Latin Kings and others.  These gangs are parasites, entities which bring with them deadly drugs and the concomitant range of crime - knocking over ATMs, mugging, burglary and whatever it takes to fund this kind of thing.  The aim is to enrich the gangs/cartels with money for fentanyl and similar illicit substances.  

We know how this went down in Denver and other places.  So the question is this - do we want it here?  It would seem to be a no-brainer.  Of course not . .. but, after all, illegal migrants are a source of cheap labor.  We have institutionalized the importation of cheap labor through our “guest worker” visa programs (like the one in Springfield Ohio where Haitians were imported to supply this cheap labor for a factory there).  Well, some would say, if it’s ok for some manufacturer in Springfield, why not on my construction project?  Let’s say we need to build a new hotel.  We could ask for bids from legitimate contractors or we could go under the table and seek out a supplier of cheap illegal labor.  The illegal can’t really complain about low wages so he’s the ideal workman for the parsimonious project manager.  Just hire “mercenaries” to do the work on the cheap - they don’t pay taxes and our government subsidizes them anyway, not to mention the NGOs.  It seems sort of justified.  But it isn’t.  It is illegal for the employer or party contracting for the work to be done.  But we all wink at it.  

When we let this stuff pass we are giving our permission for people to come here illegally, commit whatever crimes are part and parcel of this illicit migration and all of the other crime that comes along with it.  It all comes down to Americans’ willingness to live within the law - to have a “nation of laws rather than a nation of men”.  Just being Trump should not be enough to look away from illegal behavior.  Just finding a “need” for cheap labor should not justify employing directly or through contracted services an illegal migrant.  The crop we will reap if we keep this up is a morass of crime, the kind of crime which has destroyed great cities such as Baltimore, Detroit, Memphis, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and so many more.  There will be no difference given time.  

Ben Franklin said we have “a republic if you can keep it”; John Adams said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other," and, with our other founders, believed that absent self-restraint in our behavior, America would fall to greed and other base human frailties.  

Perhaps we are seeing just such a decline when we find people willing to break laws or admit corruption because it is expedient.  Our negligence or our immorality, whether we can cite a code violation or not, will lead us to utter ruin and a betrayal of all our forebears fought and died to endow us with.  

Whether we see corruption in off-hand financing of a White House ballroom without the involvement of Congress’s funding it - by a few “friends” of the President, or by the common practice of utilizing a form of indentured servant or dare we say “slave” class to do work Americans  supposedly “won’t do”, we are feeding the alligator that will consume us.  We are relying on government subsidies to migrants - illegal and otherwise - to undercut American labor.  Labor unions don’t care, by the way.  They long ago went the way of the herbivorous dinosaurs - they were eaten first by their own greed.  They don’t care about the worker because corruption replaced him as their meal ticket.  

If we want a country where women can walk down the street unafraid of assault or kidnapping, if we want a country where our kids can play safely in our parks or go safely to school without drugs or grooming, we can have that.  We might have to say no to illegal practices such as employing people who have no right to be in our country.  We might have to pay for our fancy ballrooms with tax dollars instead of grift from corporations who have no incentive other than their own profit to fund a ballroom.  It’s not like a charitable donation that brings with it tax relief, after all.  It’s a glittery ballroom.  

So - I put it to you.  Do you want cheap labor or safe communities?  Do you want a “free” ballroom at the expense of loss of our freedoms and the added cost and loss of unwanted war?