Dangerous Times and the Call of Duty

“Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out” David Horowitz

It was a heady time to come to Washington in the 1980s. President Reagan had decisively won an election that the “Rockefeller-Bush Republicans” had confidently said he couldn’t win.  

The national media assured the public that the former actor and incoming President was a dumb B-actor – in fact, stupid. And yet, the air in Washington was crackling with intellectual energy and political opportunity. The town was abuzz with new possibilities for the American experiment after two turbulent decades tab-marked by the murders of JFK, MLK, and RFK, race riots, the Vietnam tragedy, the Iranian hostage humiliation, economic chaos, and the violent communist vanguards and revolutionaries led by American campuses and inside the flailing Democrat Party, who’s leadership suddenly discovered that liberalism and socialism always turn to radicalism and violence, like a tadpole to a frog.  

Reagan conservatives descended on the nation’s Capital, poised to shake up Washington and reclaim the economy destroyed by the Democrat and Republican Uniparty while simultaneously confronting the demonic and enormous battle for human freedom and Western civilization under the relentless threat of the Soviet Union and its stated goal of worldwide communist domination.

Was it a success? Yes and no.  

The “Gipper” ramrodded a tax package through Congress that, in retrospect and without argument, unleashed an economy that took off like the Kilauea volcano. It became the gift that kept on giving year after year. Sadly, while tax money poured into Washington in record-setting amounts because of the prosperous economic growth, spending poured out of Washington in never-ending amounts. Even back then, Washington was a cesspool of corruption and shockingly stupid politicians of both parties.

Economically, it was only a partial success. President Reagan managed to turn the economy around. But, there was no appetite, other than that of the President, to reduce spending and dismantle useless agencies and departments.

Of course, Ronald Reagan’s lasting accomplishment was laying the irreversible stepping stones to the collapse of the “evil empire,” the Soviet Union. He had to ignore, run around, placate, and manipulate the worthless national foreign policy establishment, whose “word picture” of “sophisticated” foreign policy is a doormat. (He also rescued the island of Granada, to the shock and horror of official Washington, and against virulent opposition, installed medium-range missiles in Europe to counter new Soviet mid-range missiles aimed at Europe.)

He was, along with Maggie Thatcher and Pope John Paul, the executioner of the Soviet Empire and a hero of the last half of the twentieth century. And, his confrontation and stern exit from the  Reykjavík summit – trashed and ridiculed by the world media and the foreign policy establishment – stands alone in the last fifty years as one of the most courageous and far-sighted moves in post-war history.

In foreign policy, he was a success despite the roadblocks laid out in Washington. However, even before Marine One lifted off from the grounds of the Capitol Building in 1989 with Ronald and Nancy Reagan on their final ride as they headed home to California, the gears were already in motion to reconstitute “business as usual.”

Donald J. Trump is the second “disrupter” president to come to Washington to break furniture, forty years apart. Of course, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are distinct personalities with differing leadership styles and backgrounds. Yet it is uncanny how they share similar circumstances and a unique and passionate personal connection to the American psyche and public mind. That, of course, is why the ruling-class radicals and Washington elites hate them both to the point of presenting adverse mental syndromes.

President Reagan had fought hand-to-hand combat against a communist-led campaign to take control of the Screen Actors Guild and then served two successful terms as Governor of California. President Trump, on the other hand, arrived with exceptional business skills honed in the rough and tumble environs of New York City but little political experience, so he had never tasted the special kind of depravity that is post-war Washington. (Your humble scribe can attest that nothing – nothing – in the private world prepares you for the modern administrative nightmare that is our federal government.)

But President Trump 2.0 is a different man than he was in 2017. He has been through a sham Russia-gate setup by the American intel community. Two preposterous impeachments. A deliberately released pandemic by communist China. A  public health establishment run by blatantly corrupt officials, enriching themselves, and major pharmaceutical companies peddling, for untold billions of dollars, an untested and, as it turned out, dangerous “vaccine” that wasn’t.

Then, there was a dubious election, serial post-president lawsuits that were manufactured legal scenarios never used before (and one where the New York legislature rewrote a state law only to use against the former President!), which were all prosecuted in cities with 95% Democratic jury pools.

And he, like President Reagan, survived near-fatal assassination attempts.

In 2025, President Trump returned with a vengeance. Unlike his first term, he “gets” Washington now. His electoral victory, which the “party” didn’t think he’d win until he did, was deep and wide. The Congress, still a Uniparty creature, has spent the last four months fumbling around trying to keep their self-serving agenda while not enraging a majority of Americans who are increasingly aware of the con game in Washington where every member of Congress miraculously becomes a millionaire and where the actual well-being and security of law-abiding and productive citizens is “in your face” ignored, making it clear to most voters that Washington hates those whom they serve and would do away with the Constitution if possible – that piece of parchment that guards the “bitter clingers” and their “guns and religion.”   

President Trump is not your typical politician, but he never claimed to be. He told the American public that he’d accomplish a set of tasks, to which they said, “Get to it.” And he is. Like Reagan, he is nothing if not dogged and tuned in to his fellow Americans.   

However, like President Reagan before him, it seems inevitable that there is no way to avoid a confrontation with the new “evil empire,” a rouge communist China – as intent on world domination, in their own words, as was the old Soviet Union.

Today, China is a faltering Marxist economic empire that has achieved success through theft, bribery, slavery, and bullying, only to find that it can’t ignore the laws of economics any more than the Marxist Soviet Union could. The Chinese communists have also been destroying the totems of their ancient faiths and rejected the Moral Law of the universe outright  – all of which, taken together, do not augur well for peace and freedom elsewhere.

Despite China’s deep and systemic economic problems, Xi Jinping’s messianic vision of a “shared future for mankind” is working at breakneck speed to “reshape” the world under Chinese leadership, even as it crumbles at home. Yet more and harsher communist dogma, regardless of Dictator Xi’s preaching, cannot help China today. All of this makes China especially dangerous at home – and in the South China Sea and beyond. Like all megalomaniacs, Xi and his henchmen will turn overseas to distract their citizens from their own capability of economic illiteracy and domestic tyranny.

And if China’s meltdown isn’t enough, Western Europe is in chaos. Mass migration, both illegal and legal, has swamped the culture and economy of France, Germany, and Great Britain and is increasingly revealing old realities of socialism – it always turns tyrannical. Free speech is under fierce assault, and the parliamentary governments are working on anti-democratic deals with fractional parties to forestall the now majority conservative movements across Europe, or outlawing or locking up their leadership. Net-zero insanity has sent energy costs skyrocketing as companies flee to saner destinations to conduct business, leaving citizens with increasing taxes and costs and high unemployment.

What a mess.

It’s what happens when unserious people are in charge and when political systems and legal systems become mechanisms for looting treasuries, and corruption becomes a business model.

Across the globe, we are witnessing governments endorsing actions and policies that encourage the detachment of societies from their families, communities, and faith. At the same time, ordinary men and women increasingly want to be left alone to build families, communities, and faith – hence the growth of “nationalist” movements.

Dangerous times and the call of duty.