The Witness Chronicles, 2/5/25

Shame on us

The Naïveté of the Shocked

A lot of Americans simply don’t care about the rest of the world

He told us over and over again exactly what he would do if elected and he is doing it with shock and awe. And the shock is hitting a bunch of people who somehow did not really understand who these people are and what they want.

I do not include myself among those at all surprised by Trump’s actions these past few weeks. We already had four years of this guy. And this time around his cadre had four years to plan for this and they hid none of their intentions, even publishing a clear roadmap, the Project 2025 plan, in book form.

Mr Trump lied constantly during the campaign whenever someone criticized the extremity of that plan, saying over and over again that he knew nothing about it. This in spite of the actual authors working in his campaign and now in the White House.

How anyone can profess to be shocked by any of this is beyond me and we need to get over this criminal level of naïveté and wake up.

Watching international coverage of the shutting down of USAID, the largest foreign aid effort by any government, has old school liberals wringing their hands in horror. Get real, these guys do not care about people starving in Africa or the spread of deadly diseases. They are racists. Again, we have known this for years.

The $40 billion doled out annually by USAID just looks like low hanging fruit to them, money they can put towards continuing the Trump tax cuts for the very wealthy, an effort that the Treasury Dept estimates will add $4.5 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years. So much for government cost cutting as their motivation. This is a cash and power grab beyond any ever seen in our history.

I’m writing this because I’m sick to death of people acting surprised at any of this. I’m one of the army of writers and journalists who have been posting this stuff out for years. And the principal reason I do this little newsletter is because I have been outraged at this level of obliviousness on the part of the Democratic side of the fence. The shame is on us as well as these political criminals. Yes, I’m throwing blame in both directions.

You’ve heard me rail on about why the Democrats are in such disarray and apparently unprepared for the obvious. After January Sixth 2020 the party should have regrouped on an emergency basis and thrown every hackneyed party cliche out, including the old guard that let us get here in the first place.

I’ve got more bad news for you. This is working for Trump right now and he knows it. It won’t work forever, which is why they are acting so fast and recklessly. Or maybe it will work, maybe they will consolidate power and eliminate opposition ruthlessly, which is very likely unless the Democrats wake up, stop crying, and start claiming the legitimate authority the Congress has according to the Constitution.

They are lying down in the middle of the road and wondering why trucks keep running them over. Stupid issues like the DEI non-issue and fear over trans people were allowed to be blown out of proportion by absurd and out of touch progressivism, and now they are the flags the right waves as an excuse for everything they are doing.

The real problem here is that Democrats thought that the old way would win out against people who simply threw the playbook out, shredding notions of decency and citizenship, even though it has happened throughout human history. The most glaring and recent example is Germany under Hitler in the nineteen thirties. It is not an outrageous exaggeration to say the roots of Project 2025 go directly back to his takeover of a country that had lost its bearings.

The Romans called it bread and circuses. When the people got restless, throw them bread, and brutal spectacles, all free, to distract them from what was really going on. I like football as much as anyone but the game this weekend has every aspect of those gladiator games on a scale even the Romans could not conceive.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I personally believe this can be changed, but it will require real opposition leadership, leadership that is willing to play hard ball. Trumpworld’s weakness is their arrogance and overreach as exemplified by Elon Musk and his massive superiority complex, not to mention his hundreds of billions which serve to legitimize him in the eyes of weak people.

Right now, Musk has young programmers with full access to the government payment systems embedding AI programs into the systems. Imagine automated routines changing whatever payments it thinks should go, without human supervision. It’s a science fiction nightmare scenario and it’s happening right now.

Maybe it will require people’s Social Security payments not showing up to wake them up and get them mad.

I turn seventy next month. It would be easy to walk away and let the next generations deal with these issues. After all, it will be their history, not mine. I don’t have children, so it would be even easier to simply shut my trap and check out. But experience gives us perspective that is desperately needed by the IG/TikTok generation. They know things are not right, that climate change, for example, has already changed the future forever. But they are not seeing anyone even talking about it.

Like any generation, a few will peel off from their limited worldview and realize there is serious stuff going on here. Most of my readers are closer to my generation, but some of this stuff will trickle down into awareness as the generations younger than mine realize things need to get done and no one else is going to do it.

Until then we need to buck up and show some backbone, set examples, and take risks. In my worldview the day you stop taking risks is the beginning of the end and I’m not done yet. And you should not be either.

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Thank you,

Martin Edic