Dakota Beacon

I keep hearing Victor Davis Hanson telling us that our worst-ever president was Obama.  Obama, he says, is the worst because he set race relations back to Jim Crow.  He took a nation nearly recovered and mended from strife which had beleaguered it since its founding - the moral dilemma of slavery and racial inequality - and, when it had almost finally resolved into a workable, amicable, in fact, understanding and peace, Obama rekindled and restarted the blaze.  He worked on an ignorant public - taught blacks that they had something coming for sins against their ancestors; he taught weak-minded white people that somehow they bore guilt for those sins, even though they were never there.  In fact, some of their ancestors were still in Europe at the time.  It didn’t matter. If you were white you were guilty, if you were black you were suddenly entitled to something.  

Perhaps Hanson is right.  But I beg to differ with him.  While Obama’s administration encouraged racial hatred and brought back the monster we had thought was finally dead and buried, I would suggest we look at the last president’s administration and consider what we, as American citizens, lost, to that administration.  

Under Obama we obviously were putting up with managed, slanted news.  But at no time did we think we could actually be in trouble if we spoke out against Obama or his policies.  People spoke out rather freely.  Remember the Tea Party movement?  It took hold in about 2009, within the first year of Obama’s presidency.  We held rallies, we published letters to the editor, we read widely differing opinions on everything from “Cash for Clunkers” to the “Affordable Care Act”.  We openly criticized the Iran dealings.  We would have felt completely free to question the elections had there been strong evidence of fraud.  In fact, we did address the thuggish behavior of some of Obama’s Acorn activists.  

But somehow, during the reign of Donald J. Trump, we seem to have lost nearly our entire Bill of Rights.  The America we grew up in and believed safeguarded our civil rights seemed to dissolve within a period of four years.  Where was this conservative leadership?  Where was the champion of our human rights?  Of our Constitution?  With the rise of Trump we can trace the loss of all of this.  Should we be at all surprised?  I’d say not.  

One of the reasons I did not support Trump in 2016 was his belief that the Kelo decision by the Supreme Court was “the best”.  If you recall, this was a case brought by Connecticut homeowners to stop a land grab by a developer.  These homeowners had well-maintained family homes which many of them had raised their families in and had occupied for decades.  They had no interest in selling and refused.  The developer just went to the entity with jurisdiction - the county or city - and argued that his development would mean more taxes for that entity.  That served as the requisite “public purpose”.  In othe words, there need not be adherence to a demand for public purpose, only someone’s claim that the greedy county commission or city council could claim more tax revenue if citizens were deprived of their property.  In the end, the developer never did anything with the cleared land.  It remained fallow and perhaps is still so today.  The homeowners lost their homes.  And we all lost our right to own private property.  But Trump thought this was a fabulous decision.  And why not?  He spent his life being just such a developer.  

Trump has taken a very bizarre position on the Second Amendment.  He favored red-flag laws.  He believes that it is just easier to “take the guns first and then have due process later”, revealing his absolute ignorance about the definition of “due process”.  But, hey, who cares?  We can cut the showman some slack, right?  He’s a folk hero, no?  Except that when you seize property and cancel rights first and seek to impose due process later it’s too late.  This equals “no due process” and we could speculate as to what other areas this disrespect for our Fifth Amendment might bleed.  If we can dispense with due process in one case, why not in another?  That is, in a way, how the Kelo decision played out.  In the end, rights lost are exactly that - rights lost.  

Over the course of his term, we lost our First Amendment rights as well.  Should we be at all surprised that this circumstance is now being visited on Trump himself?  Why?  He stood idly by saying nothing about the censoring of social media, the silencing of physicians and other scientists who spoke out with differing views on “covid”.  He put in a position of absolute power a criminal - Anthony Fauci - who assumed the role of dictator.  He used his office to gift to Pfizer billions of taxpayers’ dollars to fund the development of the vaccine which has killed and maimed so many Americans, and he unilaterally dismantled the entire safety regulation system supposed to safeguard Americans against dangerous experimental drugs and treatments.  He allowed Ivermectin to be smeared and taken away from the people, despite its positive results in treating this virus.  He permitted egregious violation of people’s Constitutional rights as they were forced to close businesses, lay off employees, close schools, close churches.  Hospitals were incentivized to call every death a “covid” death and collect over $30,000 per death.  

The virus “pandemic” was the excuse to deprive us of our normal election process - perhaps that was its main purpose.  Trump not only signed the Cares Act which funded the election theft via mail-in ballots and drop boxes, but he threatened any congressman who dared to object to it and promised to primary them.  He passed around souvenir pens.  And then, on his last day in office, he bestowed upon Anthony Fauci the Presidential Commendation.  To be fair, he also awarded this to Deborah Birx, Gen. Mark Milley and Jared Kushner, for the same service to Operation Warp Speed.  

Trump has continued to tout “his” vaccine ever since.  When asked why, he would say, “A lot of people like it.”  Only now someone has told him that a lot of people don’t like it, because suddenly and with no warning, Trump announced that we should all refuse to comply with any more mandates.  Wow.   Two days earlier, in an interview with Glenn Beck, he was still bragging about it.  

We’ve seen Trump attack Ron DeSantis for removing CRT from his schools in Florida.  According to Trump this makes DeSantis a “racist”.  We’ve seen him attack his rival, the Florida governor, for “murdering” people by not enforcing the mandates that Fauci was insisting upon.  We’ve seen him constantly attacking from the left.  This surprises some, but not those who have been watching Trump for more than five minutes.  Trump is a big-state kind of guy.  He is not a “rugged individualist” type at all.  Remember his call for building “beautiful cities” on the “frontier”?  This is right out of the globalist playbook.  The obvious thing to do with a surplus in the public exchequer is to return the surplus to the taxpayers and allow it to make its way into the economy, not bottle it up in wild-eyed schemes of a deranged property developer.  

Trump also buys people.  How?  By endorisng them.  If he endorses someone who then turns out to have a mind of his or her own, it’s all over but the revenge part.  Iowa’s governor Kim Reynolds found this out a month or so ago.  Everyone “owes” Trump in his opinion.  Hell hath no fury like Trump scorned.  Well, DeSantis could tell us about that.

But DeSantis is too busy, really.  He is helping his state to repair itself after a major hurricane.  He is concerned with cleaning up the mess in the schools - banning the transgender agenda, the racist-based CRT, the abuse of corporations, ending the gobbling up of American land by the CCP, firing Soros-backed offiials who have been betraying his citizens, balancing his state’s budget, fighting against illegal immigration, oh - and calling upon Congress to defund the rogue agencies that are persecuting his rival, Trump.  

As Steve Deace has pointed out for us, no one else is calling for this.  Not Trump’s syophants, Kari Lake and Matt Gaetz.  Not his buddy, Ronna McDaniel, not his Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy.  No.  It seems that only one person is calling this out - the same one who refused to extradite Trump to New York.  Only one public figure is doing anything to try to protect Trump - Governor DeSantis.  

Under Trump we spent more than we had for the previous 200 years, we lost more of our freedoms than we had since the Revoluton, he created a virtual dictatorship by Fauci and lavishly funded his illicit gain-of-function and vaccine research with our money.  He allowed censorship of doctors and scientists.  He set back public eduction (who’d have thought that possible?).  He set the table for the theft of our election in 2020.  He won’t ever apologize or acknowledge that he was ever wrong.  He is too much of a spoiled brat for that.  Trump has also managed to divide the conservative wing of the Republican Party.  He has poisoned our chances of reviving our republic in his petulant, childish manner.  He has served the Democrat Party, first in 2016, by short-stopping a true conservative candidacy - Ted Cruz in that instance - and now by attacking other conservative he can find who isn’t sucking up shamelessly to him.  He is now outright lying about how various governors handled the covid pandemic.  Although he had some success in foreign policy, he left our country in a shambles.  That’s the truth.  He was never a conservative.  He was always a show-biz populist with far fewer scruples than P.T. Barnum.