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I suppose the place to start a post with the above title is with yesterday’s dueling events on the streets of post-America. We’ll see what unspools from there.
The Army parade in Washington was what we’d envisioned - a vulgar display tailored for the gratification of the ego of the man-baby in the Oval Office. Kudos to all the service people who did what service people do - follow orders - and conducted themselves with the all the dignity possible in such an unseemly situation. It was not well-attended. Not sure why. There had been a threat of thunderstorms, but one might have thought that the die-hard among the drool-besotted would have turned out nonetheless. And the storms didn’t materialize.
The No Kings rallies around the country were the utterly predictable expression of self-congratulation from the swath of post-American society for which that posture is of paramount importance. The organizing groups were decidedly left of center:
MoveOn, the American Civil Liberties Union, American Federation of Teachers and the Communications Workers of America.
Indivisible seems to have been the main coordinating outfit. The immediate reasons for staging the rallies were the above-mentioned parade as well as the federal troops’ involvement in the Los Angeles immigration protests.
Leading anti-Israel activist groups, including National Students for Justice in Palestine, the Palestinian Youth Movement, PAL-Awda, Within Our Lifetime, and campus protesters have urged their followers to join the demonstrations, tying the unrest to Israel.
National Students for Justice in Palestine called on its followers to protest, and posted an image of Trump administration officials with a swastika, calling the administration “the fourth reich.”
“We have a duty to resist oppression wherever it manifests: from the barrios of LA to the refugee camps of Bethlehem,” National Students for Justice in Palestine said. “We will globalize the intifada.”
The long-range effect of these mirror-opposite phenomena is likely to be a nothing burger. We’ve seen so many of these stunts over the past sixty years. Allen Ginsburg’s mantras didn’t lift the Pentagon off the ground in 1967. Hands Across America, We Are The World and the Great Peace March are obscure footnotes in social history. Their main effect has been to reinforce the post-American penchant for preening.
And now it’s time for some winnowing.
I noticed that Heath Mayo, founder of Principles First, which started out as a Never Trump conservative movement, and even still burnishes those bona fides by having some Dispatch and National Review writers among its speakers and panelists at its annual summit, but has gone wobbly as hell on “social issues” type matters, is definitely on board with No Kings:
You know the No Kings protests were successful when the best the president’s defenders can come up with is that Trump is not a literal king because the courts keep blocking his unlawful actions… For those who need this spelled out: The protests are to remind the country that we have a rich historical legacy of rejecting unchecked executive power at a time when the President and his supporters believe he should ignore the courts and the laws the courts apply, including our Constitution. If you don’t support that idea, you don’t support the Constitution.
There was a No Kings rally here in my city. I gave a little thought to checking it out, but I wasn’t sure I was up for the inevitable feeling of isolation as the only inhabitant of the Narrow Sliver of Terrain on the city hall plaza.
In the end, I don’t see No Kings having legs. There’s not enough there there. In the end, it was the same old outrage about social services and demographics, with a democracy-is-at-stake gloss on top.
The issue that has driven most of the present spike in domestic post-American tension, immigration, gets sticky quickly, but must be dealt with.
I think about the forcible removal and handcuffing Senator Padilla at the DHS news conference the other day. The first thing to establish is that it, like the above performative exercises of freedom of expression, was basically a lot of excess. Padilla clearly meant to make a scene, and Noem could have said, “Senator, I’ll get to you as soon as I address the question currently before me.” These points have come up in a lot of discussion about it already, but usually in the form of attempts to defend a particular side’s behavior.
But I want to draw particular attention to Padilla’s remarks afterward:
“If this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question, if this is how the Department of Homeland Security responds to a senator with a question, you can only imagine what they’re doing to farmworkers, to cooks, to day laborers out in the Los Angeles community and throughout California and throughout the country,” he said.
Senator, I just have to go there, and ask this in response: Are you talking about those farmers, cooks and day laborers who are here legally, or all of them, regardless of status?
Because that is the crux of the whole matter. MAGA boneheads are handling this crudely, as they do all things, but they are not wrong to point out that national sovereignty is at issue, and that most countries in the world don’t put up with the kind of leaky border post-America has.
Assassinations seem to be either met with horror or giddiness, depending on who is on either end of the act.
When UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in New York, a lot of folks put the abstract ideological point that insurance companies are unwieldy bureaucracies (and the implicit premise that health care is a right) before the death of a flesh-and-blood, well-regarded executive, husband and father:
The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a midtown Manhattan hotel on Wednesday morning was a shock to the city and the nation. But as police hunted for the missing gunman in what they called a “premeditated, preplanned, targeted attack,” social media erupted with contempt for the health insurance industry he represented — and his company in particular.
“Saw mainstream news coverage about the killing of the CEO of United Healthcare on TikTok and I think political and industry leaders might want to read the comments and think hard about them,” wrote political activist Tobita Chow in a post on X, formerly Twitter. In screenshots he shared, TikTok users reacted to the story with blistering references to the costly and often unnavigable for-profit U.S. health insurance system. “Sending prior authorization, denied claims, collections & prayers to his family,” wrote one.
“As someone covered under UnitedHealthCare I can completely understand the actions taken,” wrote an X user replying to a news link about Thompson’s murder “being investigated as a possible hit,” according to a statement from law enforcement. “Did he have a pre-existing condition?” asked another. And under an ABC News TikTok on police officers’ efforts to find the killer, a user asked, “Why are they investigating this?”
“Got a push notification to exercise caution because the United Healthcare shooter is still at large,” noted standup comic Samantha Ruddy in her own X post. “I personally do not feel like I am on the shooter’s radar because I am not the CEO of a highly divisive multi billion dollar insurance company.”
Boelter, 57, is being sought as a person of interest, police sources told The Post.
He and his wife ran Praetorian Guard Security Services, an armed security company that charged $2,400 per month for its top-tier membership, which offered “8 random armed patrols each week of your property.”
He was twice appointed to posts by Democratic governors, serving on the Workforce Development Council in 2016 under then-Gov. Mark Dayton, and appointed by Walz in 2019 to serve a four-year stint on the Workforce Development Board, documents show.
In his early-morning remarks, Walz did not reveal that the suspect was his own appointee.
So folks across the spectrum, so far are, for the most part, holding their fire. (Excuse the pun.) But I would imagine the narrative that will come to dominate is the one based on his work as a pastor as well as security guy:
in a video dated February 2023, Boelter is seen preaching at La Borne Matadi, an evangelical church in Matadi, near the southern border in Congo. In one sermon he tells the audience that “people don’t know what sex they are” because the devil “has gotten so far into their mind and their soul.”
In another sermon at the church, one of three he gave from 2021 to 2023, according to Wired, Boelter said, “They don’t know abortion is wrong, many churches,” he told the audience. “They don’t have the gifts flowing. God gives the body gifts. To keep balance. Because when the body starts moving in the wrong direction, when they’re one, and accepting the gifts, God will raise an apostle or prophet to correct their course.
“God is going to raise up apostles and prophets in America,” he added, “to correct his church.”
On the now-defunct website for Revoformation, a nonprofit apparently founded by Boelter, a biography said that he was ordained in 1993 and had attended Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas, a charismatic “Spirit-filled Bible School” according to its website, that helps develop ministry skills.
Again, time for some winnowing.
The guy is clearly a revved-up kind of person, a zealot. A kook, if you will.
But he is not wrong about a basic fact: It is not okay to snuff the life out of somebody just because he or she isn’t born yet.
And the fact that the Minnesota legislators were pro-choice is probably going to be confirmed as a motivation.
File under “Why post-America Can’t Have Nice Things.”
I don’t want to wade into this one too far, as facts are still being gathered. For that matter, Boelter hasn’t been apprehended yet.
How about the federal budget? It’s created a real rift in the Trumpist and Trump-accommodating Right. As we know, Elon Musk, upon leaving his DOGE post, wasted no time decrying the Big, Beautiful Bill as a “disgusting abomination,” but there’s the fact that DOGE hasn’t resulted in any historic reversal of federal bloat, only a lot of disrupted lives and agencies. There’s also his behavior as his feud with the VSG heated up, such as threatening to decommission the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which brings astronauts back to earth. True to his erratic yay-hoo self, he reversed that position a short while later. In fact, he publicly genuflected about his whole stance, posting that he’d gone too far in attacking the VSG.
The world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful men, acting like a couple of 12-year-olds.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, after having his invitation to a White House lawn picnic rescinded because of his opposition to the BBB, says he’s “lost a lot of respect” for Trump.
A question for the Senator: Why did you ever, ever have any respect for him?
And I have to go there and state a basic truth that makes everyone uncomfortable: our debt and deficit problem well continue to get worse if we don’t grapple with the fact that the structures and indeed very natures of Social Security and Medicare will need to be changed in a major way.
So there’s another front on which nothing of consequence gets done about a matter that has a lot of folks worked up.
All of this is weighty and deserving of discussion, but the present level of peril on the world stage dwarfs it all.
Tel Aviv, the capital of Israel, the good guy in the now-boiling-over overarching Middle East crisis, has been getting hammered by Iranian missiles. Big buildings right downtown. Jerusalem and Bat Yam have come in for it as well.
"Iran and Israel should make a deal, and will make a deal," Trump wrote on his Truth Social site. "We will have PEACE, soon, between Israel and Iran! Many calls and meetings now taking place."
Ukraine, the good guy in the conflict in which it’s embroiled, has been getting in some good licks against Russia (the very bad guy) lately. Operation Spider Web was a very slick maneuver, reminiscent of the way Israel blew the family jewels off a lot of Hizbollah jihadists with the pager caper.
Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) ignited an electrical substation during a sabotage operation in the Russian city of Kaliningrad, causing $5 million in damage and cutting electricity to a military production site, a source in HUR told the Kyiv Independent.
In the early hours of June 14, Ukrainian agents drained the coolant from the substation’s power transformer before setting the facility on fire. The inferno inflicted major damage on the facility and caused a power cut, impacting nearby Russian military sites.
Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has chosen an uncanny strategy to end Russia's war against Ukraine, mostly expecting that Moscow would just stop.
In the meantime, stockpiles of American weapons, which cover nearly 30% of all Western supplies, are dwindling in Ukrainian warehouses, and the recent statement by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who announced that military aid to Ukraine would be cut in 2026, brought Ukraine into even greater turmoil.
"The president and the administration are interested in 'peace,' which doesn't necessarily mean justice, however," Federico Borsari, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), told the Kyiv Independent.
"This position obviously undermines Ukraine's negotiating capital while emboldening the Kremlin to continue with its military aggression without real consequences, for now," Borsari added.
President Trump compared Russia and Ukraine with "children fighting in the park" on Thursday and suggested it might be better to let them keep on fighting for a while.
Why it matters: Trump's remarks were another signal that he thinks Russia and Ukraine aren't ready to make peace, and that he's considering stepping back from his initiative to convince them to do so.
Ukrainian officials are concerned that retreat from Trump will only serve Russia's interests.
But Trump said the "bad blood" and deep "hatred" between the sides — combined with Russian President Vladimir Putin's commitment to hitting back hard for the surprise attack inside Russia — would make it hard to reach a ceasefire any time soon.
What he's saying: During his meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Thursday, Trump said he'd given Putin an analogy during their phone call on Wednesday.
"Sometimes you see two young children fighting in the park....sometimes you're better off letting them fight more before you pull them apart," Trump said.
He also compared himself to a hockey referee letting players fight for a bit before putting an end to it.
He didn’t get it done in 24 hours last fall or winter, but, by golly, he sure will this time!
These two situations, in the Middle East and Ukraine, are major conflicts. There are intertwining players in each, and there are players with nuclear weapons. And despite the hot air being emitted in response to them, de-escalation is not in the offing in either of them.
There’s no reality-TV level of warped amusement to be had from these situations. Not that anyone should derive amusement from the above-mentioned dilemmas, but their seriousness doesn’t have the immediately existential prospects of these.
But when you have a president who doesn’t see the great historical forces at work here, or what these situations portend for the future of Western civilization, but rather licks his chops at the opportunity to do some “deals,” the road ahead looks anything but smooth.
Let me close this latest winnowing of wheat from chaff with this bold assertion: Frank Meyer fusionism would know what to do.
