"Decline and Fall of America? Not Yet" - by writer David Mamet

Trump appears to have broken the codependency of the woke - and averted a destructive revolution. 

 - A commentary by David Mamet, playwright, film director and screenwriter. Published in Wall St. Journal, Friday 22 Nov '24

For the past four years Israel has been the leader of the free world. The Jewish state has been the West’s sole protection against Islamist terror, fighting while reviled by the people and countries it was protecting. Its position was similar to that of Donald Trump—demonized, persecuted, targeted for violence.

Now that Israel and the U.S. will again be allies, we can hope Iran will be returned to the Iranian people, Gaza will become a wealthy city-state, and there will be that biblical peace in which each may sit under his fig tree and be unafraid.

Moses sent 12 spies to scout out the Promised Land. They returned and reported it was a good land, filled with milk and honey, but it was populated by giants so large “we must have looked to them like grasshoppers, and that is how we seemed to ourselves in our own eyes.”

David Mamet shook-up liberal fans by dissenting from
leftist shibboleths at L.A. Times Fest of Books, April '24

Moses admonished them that they had been asked for their report, which gave their people information, rather than for their opinion, which made everyone afraid. The cowardice of the spies caused the 40 years of wandering, as Moses kept the Jews in the desert until that generation had died off.

God’s promise to the Jews, their fear and his rejection is a universal human myth. The hero is given a task he rejects. In the first instance he must confront himself and choose bravery over cowardice. The mythic hero is aided by the Word of God, contemporary Westerners by heroic example. Winston Churchill inspired in his country’s populace an awareness of their own greatness. So does Mr. Trump.

Yet half of America not only abides but fervently supports a codependent decline to poverty, crime and a nascent police state. Why? The leftist politicians and their media courtiers and designated beneficiaries profited from the perks of power. But why did the everyday American endorse them and their fear mongering? The actual threat wasn’t global warming, Islamophobia, the Supreme Court, the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Mr. Trump. It was exclusion from the herd.

An existential secret is one whose revelation would destroy the group. If dad is a drug addict or a sex criminal, acknowledging it would shatter the family. The protection of the secret becomes the family’s unifying endeavor. If anyone says anything, it might reveal that everyone is in on the secret. The sick family devotes all necessary energies to collusion—to mutual and self-censorship.

During the past four years, American politics has been dominated by a coalition each of whose members, like codependent kin, has its own investment in group integrity and the power it derives therefrom. The superrich, academia, Islamists, Marxists and the media have colluded to suppress the true and impose the false.
We know that their perfidies, lawfare, slander, blacklisting and civil persecution were practiced on conservatives and Republicans, particularly on Mr. Trump. But the suppression was targeted primarily at their own voters.

To remain unthreatened by reason, the liberal populace had to be convinced to endorse various lies and fantasies: Black Lives Matter, Israel’s perfidy, unlimited abortion as a woman’s right, men’s right to compete in women’s sports, the abolition of the police, Mr. Trump’s demonic power and so on.

Why would rational people vote to destroy their borders, their cities, their jobs and their children? For the same reason the sick family must tolerate its dysfunction: The co-opted liberal electorate was terrified that any deviation would result in destruction of its protective unit. As it would.

In the energy devoted to accommodating lies, the mind puts them in the same category as truth. The codependent pays a huge price from them: his self-respect. President Biden suffers cognitive decline; the administration and the legacy media hid that fact and suppressed its discussion. They did the same with the chaos at the border, crime, inflation, the putsch of Mr. Biden and his replacement through fiat.

Before June 27, almost all Democrats and media outlets insisted that Mr. Biden was sharp and focused. On July 21, he was ousted from the campaign, and the hagiography of Kamala Harris began. Conservatives’ requests for clarification of her role as “border czar” were labeled “misogynistic.” Her catch phrases were “joy” and “turn the page.” Why would she have wanted to turn the page on four years of the Biden administration, of which she said she would do nothing differently?

To the left, it didn’t matter. “She isn’t Trump” was sufficient reason to vote for her. Trump isn’t the devil, but a rational consideration of him and his achievements was beyond the liberal’s ability. Mr. Trump was the enemy because he represented a challenge they could not accept.

The transition from party-line liberal to reasonable citizen generally involves some degree of shame. The genius of 12-step programs is that shame in them can be aired, and, so diffused, in a company each of which has undergone a similar upheaval; where confessions of complicity and shame are greeted and diffused with recognition, laughter and welcome—as among new conservatives, and new devotees to citizenship.

Why would sentient Americans vote away the freedoms of thought, conscience, assembly and expression guaranteed by our Constitution? It makes sense, as any suicide does, as an act of survival. The suicide takes his own life to stop unbearable anguish. It is the most desperate act of self-preservation.

Prosperity, interconnectivity and their attendant confusions have led to chaos, the denigration of religion, the family, law and the nations whose identity was created out of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The U.K. now is prosecuting those standing silently across the street from abortion clinics. Should they testify that they were praying, they are guilty of a crime.

Since the ’20 election I have feared a new American revolution, the leftist government proclaiming its intent to destroy parents whom it calls terrorists and citizens whom it deems insurrectionists. During the past four years Mr. Trump—raided, indicted, convicted, sued, slandered and shot—continued to grow in popularity, and attracted the like-minded into a coalition stronger than that of the left.

To command, one must have lieutenants themselves capable of assuming command and inspiring subordinates. Their absence in 2020 led to that bump in the road; but their emergence and amalgamation in the last four years is now the Republican Party. This isn’t a cult of personality, but a group of citizen-workers, Americans who adore our country. We understand ourselves not primarily as Republicans or conservatives, but as “we the people.”

The horror of the past four years—the appeasement of terror, the slavish support of our enemies, the abandonment of the state of Israel, the assaults on free speech—seemed to me the descent into chaos which has been the end of every world power.

Rome, Greece, Nineveh and Tyre, Babylon, Nazi Germany—all were eventually returned to dust. I saw the irreversible decline of the U.S. and took comfort in the scripture. The Old Testament is a record of decline of those civilizations which fall away from God; and promises that a return to his precepts will restore his grace. We know that one day America, as all things, will go one with Nineveh and Tyre. But not today.

David Mamet Calls Hollywood's Diversity Efforts 'Fascist Totalitarianism' at L.A. Times Festival of Books in April 2024

Why Trump Won - in the words of Victor Davis Hanson and Daniel Greenfield

Citizens of all ethnicities & faiths rallied regularly in '20 & '24 at the Beverly Hills Pond 
for relief from the Marxist revolution in America imposed under Democrat Party rule in CA

American Uprising by Daniel Greenfield on Daniel Greenfield.org 

This wasn’t an election. It was a revolution.

It’s midnight in America. The day before millions of Americans got up and stood in front of the great iron wheel that had been grinding them down. They stood there even though the media told them it was useless. They took their stand even while all the chattering classes laughed and taunted them.

They were fathers who couldn’t feed their families anymore. They were mothers who couldn’t afford health care. They were workers whose jobs had been sold off to foreign countries. They were sons who didn’t see a future for themselves. They were daughters afraid of being murdered by the “unaccompanied minors” flooding into their towns. They took a deep breath and they stood.

They held up their hands and the great iron wheel stopped.

The Great Blue Wall crumbled. The states fell one by one right down to Pennsylvania.  The working class that had been overlooked and trampled on for so long got to its feet. It rose up against its oppressors and the rest of the nation, from coast to coast, rose up with it.

They fought back against their jobs being shipped overseas while their towns filled with migrants that got everything while they got nothing. They fought back against being told that they had to watch what they say. They fought back against being held in contempt because they wanted to work for a living and take care of their families.

Diverse income & ethnic citizens march Beverly Hills' Rodeo Drive to "Take Back America" from the repressive, progressive culture & policies imposed under Biden, Newsom, & Harris

They fought and they won.

This wasn’t a vote. It was an uprising. Like the ordinary men chipping away at the Berlin Wall, they tore down an unnatural thing that had towered over them. And as they watched it fall, they marveled at how weak and fragile it had always been. And how much stronger they were than they had ever known.

Who were these people? They were leftovers and flyover country. They didn’t talk right or think right. They had the wrong ideas, the wrong clothes and the ridiculous idea that they still mattered.

They couldn’t change anything. A thousand politicians and pundits had talked of getting them to adapt to the inevitable future. Instead they got in their pickup trucks and drove out to vote.

And they changed everything.  (Article continues beneath video)

Daniel Greenfield addressed the left's war on non-Democrats in this talk in June 2019:

Americans were told that walls couldn’t be built and factories couldn’t be opened. That treaties couldn’t be unsigned and wars couldn’t be won. It was impossible to ban Muslim terrorists from coming to America or to deport the illegal aliens turning towns and cities into gangland territories. It was all impossible. And they did the impossible. They turned the world upside down.

It’s midnight in America. CNN is weeping. MSNBC is wailing.  It wasn’t supposed to happen. The same machine that crushed the American people for two straight terms, the mass of government, corporations and non-profits that ran the country, was set to win.

Instead the people stood in front of the machine. They blocked it with their bodies. They went to vote even though the polls told them it was useless. They looked at the empty factories and barren farms. They drove through the early cold. They waited in line. They came home to their children to tell them that they had done their best for their future. They bet on America. And they won.

They won improbably. And they won amazingly.

They were tired of seeing their America disappear. And they stood up and fought back. This was their last hope. Their last chance to be heard.

The media had the election wrong all along. This wasn’t about personalities. It was about the impersonal. No one will ever interview all those men and women. We will never see all their faces. But they are us and we are them. They came to the aid of a nation in peril. They did what real Americans have always done. They did the impossible.

America is a nation of impossibilities. We exist because our forefathers did not take no for an answer. Not from kings or tyrants. Not from the elites who told them that it couldn’t be done.

The day when we stop being able to pull of the impossible is the day that America will cease to exist.

Today is not that day. Today fifty million Americans did the impossible.

Midnight has passed. A new day has come. And everything is about to change.  (Article continues beneath page-break)

Victor Davis Hanson joins John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, after President-elect Trump's victory to explore why his direct style resonated with middle America.

Jesse Lee Peterson discusses rebuilding families by rebuilding the man at 4th Annual Fatherhood and Men Conference held Father's Day weekend

The riots should surprise no one who’s been paying attention.

The riots should surprise no one who’s been paying attention.

Courtesy: The Australian.com

Theodore Dalrymple writes 'British degeneracy on parade' in City Journal:

The ferocious criminality exhibited by an uncomfortably large section of the English population during the current riots has not surprised me in the least. I have been writing about it, in its slightly less acute manifestations, for the past 20 years. To have spotted it required no great perspicacity on my part; rather, it took a peculiar cowardly blindness, one regularly displayed by the British intelligentsia and political class, not to see it and not to realize its significance. There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy. . . . .

Long experience of impunity has taught the rioters that they have nothing to fear from the law, which in England has become almost comically lax—except, that is, for the victims of crime. For the rioters, crime has become the default setting of their behavior; the surprising thing about the riots is not that they have occurred, but that they did not occur sooner and did not become chronic.   Read it all

EuroNews shows the looters as motivated less in reaction to police-brutality, more by greed and status.



British cultural commentator, Pat Condell, indicts the British rioters - and the lax policing and penal standards which fail to thwart criminality in society.

God's Muslim Warriors - "freedom" fighters. Lacking reformation, politically-motivated Islamism targets free-thinkers everywhere

Political leaders hold-back Muslim societies' overdue Enlightenment; promote Islamism to increase own political power.

Islamic fundamentalist militantism is widely misconstrued as being socio-economic in cause, and therefore solvable socio-economically. This theory is undermined by evidence of the alleged Mata-Hari of al-Qaeda, Aafia Siddique, the MIT-undergraduate, Brandeis University Ph.D neuro-scientist. Did economic underprivilege radicalize her to pursue organized terrorist sedition through a network of American Muslim sleeper-cells? Does she intended to reduce discrimination against Muslim-Americans by unleashing an outbreak of bio-terror genocide in New York City? Is the intent of her radicalization to fight for more- or less freedom for Muslims and Americans?

Prof. Barry Rubin (director of Global Research in International Affairs Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal and Turkish Studies) writes "Crusades long-gone, but Jihad lingers on," publishes in The Jerusalem Post. Prof. Rubin clarifies a primary distinction between Middle-Eastern and Western societies - Islamic society is being denied a Reformation to modernity. Many societal leaders of Muslims (both in governments or in social / community organizations throughout the West and the rest of the world) advocate Islamism to demonize the West (similarly to Communism, Nazism, and Fascism) in order to limit the appeal of subversive ideas.

The English, Dutch, American and French revolutions were not triumphs of traditionalism, as in Iran, but of greater democracy.

Many Westerners continued (as they do today) to be religious, but more open and tolerant.

This struggle between the old and new societies characterized much of the 19th and 20th centuries, yet the trend was steady. Perhaps fascism - and arguably communism - were the final reactionary movements, and World War II was the last struggle. Yet victory required 500 years of rethinking and education.

There's no such history in the Middle East, while several additional problems block movement toward moderation and democracy here. Whatever one thinks of specific Islamic doctrine as generally interpreted, the big problem is that it remains so powerful and hegemonic. Arab nationalism is anti-democratic, repressive and statist. Islamists seek a somewhat revised version of the eighth century, albeit with rockets and mass communication.

IT IS also worse because Middle East regimes and revolutionaries know Western history. They are aware of the fact that while pious Western philosophers and scientists sincerely believed open inquiry and democracy didn't threaten traditional religion and the status quo, they were wrong.

Openness led to revolution and to modern secular-dominated society - a West with all the ills decried by those in religious, ideological and political power in the Middle East. They also know what happened to Soviet-bloc dictatorships that experimented with more freedom. And they know that accepting Western ideas makes people want to change their own societies.

On top of that knowledge, they have weapons, technology, new means of organization and communication to block any change that tries to make its way through persuasion or threat. This point applies as much to Iran's Islamist rulers as to Syria's pretend-pious ones or Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi monarchs.

FINALLY, it is worse because there's a powerful, growing movement - radical Islamism - posing an alternative to modernism. The question is not merely of tiny, marginalized al-Qaida but also the governments of Iran, Syria and Sudan; the Saudi regime; powerful mainstream societal influences, Hamas and Hizbullah; the Muslim Brotherhood, and many others...

Read "Crusades long gone, but Jihad lingers on.".