It's getting hard to keep all the streams of messaging straight now

"Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes." - Benjamin Franklin (November 1789)

Courtesy Statues: The People They Salute

The Democrats thought that "Our Democracy" was over before last Tuesday. And of course, Trump is still President. So some of them may still think it is over.

But some of them are sounding awfully feisty. On the other hand, I ran across a guy who was cheerfully enthusiastic about Mamdani's popularity in NYC.

Hard to keep up. How should we react?

So are we living under a fascist dictatorship or is democracy alive and well?? I’m just trying to keep up with the messaging😂😂 https://t.co/o2jE8Zj7as

— patriotic peach 🍑 (@patrioticpeachh) November 5, 2026

On Substack, Michael Smith has had some interesting thoughts. This is from one of his posts from earlier in the week:

James Madison’s Shocked Face

When combined with government, the only human characteristic stronger than the desire to be benevolent toward others is to do it with someone else’s money.

I mentioned yesterday how dismayed I was that in the aftermath of our shellacking on Tuesday, there are the expected people on the left and a surprising number on the right who want the U.S. government to “do something” about the price of tea in China (archaic reference alert).

It reminded me of reading about how, on January 10, 1794, James Madison rose in the House of Representatives to challenge a proposal to provide financial assistance to French refugees who had fled the violence in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti).

Setting aside the fact that Americans are still paying for benevolence program in Haiti some 232 years later, Madison did not question the suffering of the refugees or the humanitarian impulse behind the appropriation, rather whether Congress possessed the constitutional authority to spend taxpayers’ money on charity.

According to the Annals of Congress, Madison declared:

"Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."

He continued:

"It would puzzle any gentleman to lay his finger on any part of the Constitution which would authorize the government to interpose in the relief of the St. Domingo sufferers."

Drawbacks to such humanitarian relief and the ingenious way Congress bypassed Monroe's objection are summarized in a colorful manner at the link above.

Madison’s objection was evidently the last time anyone in government could be shamed about such spending since today, depending on how broadly we define benevolence, roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of federal spending now goes toward social insurance, income support, healthcare, and other programs intended to provide financial or material benefits to individuals. That seems a remarkable proportion when considered against Madison’s objection to spending $15,000 for humanitarian relief.

Which brings me to the “affordability” crisis, and how the newly anointed Democrat controlled government deigns to “solve” it.

Some of the bright ideas for extracting money from groups under current disapproval are described, along with other typical plans to increase dependency on government. Mr. Smith also mentions things that the Congress DOES NOT intend to do to improve "affordability". This is refreshing.

Did I mention we are still sending aid to Haiti 232 years later?

Madison's corpse is so pissed right now.

And others remember:

SHOULD WE TAKE A LOOK AT HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY?

Book Review reminding us of the limits of second-hand benevolence

Empathy without that troublesome suicidal empathy
(You can listen to this article in a high-quality reading at the link.)

Summary:

Decline is a choice, and self-governing citizens can choose renewal instead.

Theodore Dalrymple is among the English-speaking world’s most insightful social critics. For decades, he has written about the pathologies that have ruined our cities and resigned entire neighborhoods to the antagonist world of the state of nature. . .

Among his most important works is the 2001 book, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass now out in a new twenty-fifth anniversary edition. Drawing on his experience as a physician and psychiatrist in some of the most blighted slums of our society, Dalrymple argues that the West is facing a crisis of personal responsibility rooted in the determinist ideology that has infected the elite. As he writes in the book’s original introduction, “In the modern world, bad ideas and their consequences cannot be confined to a ghetto.”

One striking thing about Dalrymple’s work is its profound empathy. “In the course of my work over fifteen years, I spoke to thousands of people about their lives and the lives of the people around them,” he writes in the new preface. “As a result, I could not conceive of them as simply vectors of abstract social forces acting upon them.” A doctor treats persons, not statistics, human beings with real agency and life stories. Yet Dalrymple does not let his empathy calcify into excuses for their poor decisions. As much as he acknowledges how the “system” has failed his patients, he maintains that criminals bear ultimate responsibility for their crimes.

Armed with this experience, Dalrymple argues that modern liberalism’s great error is its social determinism. “The very form of the explanation offered by liberals for modern crime—from social conditions direct to behavior, without passing through the human mind—offers those who commit crime an excuse in advance,” he writes. The social scientists who attribute crime to poverty or inequality are in fact guilty of dehumanizing the very people they claim to want to help. By attributing social dysfunction to grand, sweeping trends outside of the control of any individual, they deny the impoverished a path out of squalor and delinquency.

One of Dalrymple’s most fascinating examples of how ideology disempowers people is the shockingly common use of passive voice in his sessions with British prisoners and addicts. His patients often spoke of themselves as “marionettes of happenstance,” in a dialect he calls “the psychobabble of the slums.” The fashionable relativism of academia and other areas of professional life filtered down to these unfortunates through mass culture, giving them a vocabulary to shift blame as far away as possible. Though many had “absorbed nothing at school, [they] had nevertheless absorbed the shibboleths of political correctness” and therapeutic culture. The immiserated then wield the notion of a true “inner self” to ward off responsibility, speaking as if they have no control over their actions. One man who had been guilty of stabbing someone uttered “the knife went in,” rather than acknowledge he chose to thrust the blade.

Leftist ideology adopted by Criminal:

"The knife went in."

Leftist ideology adopted by Journalist:

"The truck went up onto the sidewalk and hit five pedestrians."

Sources of social pathologies which affect the underclasses and criminal classes are described. Few of them are remedied significantly by passing bills or adopting "programs.

While these cases are depressing, the book is even more troubling when Dalrymple delves into the ideological roots of this mass enervation. He has a particular ire for insipid Rousseauian theories of the self, which cloak selfishness in romanticism. “This is the lie that is at the heart of our society, the lie that encourages every form of destructive self-indulgence to flourish,” he writes, “for while we ascribe our conduct to pressures from without, we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby awarding ourselves carte blanche to behave as we choose. Thus we feel good about behaving badly.” As a doctor, he is concerned above all with the practical effects of these theories—and his case-studies demonstrate how dangerous the lie of subjective morality truly can be.

Beyond his medical experience, Dalrymple’s upbringing under the roof of his outright communist father predisposed him to see the fatal flaws in collectivistic social theories. One essay recounts a barbaric episode in which his old man viciously destroyed a collection of old Victorian paintings on little more than a whim as a metaphor for the total cultural leveling of British society. Out of devotion to egalitarian and anti-colonial ideology, the bureaucrats of the centralizing state have graffitied or torn down the physical remains of the past. In both Britain and America, people are governed as if we were livestock, and our places are treated little better than pigsties. Is it any wonder that the prevailing mood of our age is despair?

Now I understand Dalrymple better! His early exposure to communism helps explain why he so effectively notices the destructiveness so prevalent in the Left today. There's more on specific actions of politicians, bureaucrats and ideologues at the link above.

Another interesting way to look at the actions of Trump, from Michael Smith:

The King in the North

Sometimes leading means poking the bear to see what he will do.

As an executive, I’ve always hated working on the required 1-, 3-, and 5-year plans. I worked with my teams to create them because they were required and because the analysts wanted numbers even if they were bullshit. At best, they were believable bullshit and only directionally correct.

My approach to understanding policy and politics is to define electoral politics and the subsequent governing stages with a mashup paraphrase of Mike Tyson and General George S. Patton:

“Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face, your enemy gets a vote in what you do, and a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

I had a couple of mentors during my early career who taught me the difference between a manager and a leader was that a leader makes decision and then course corrects when necessary and a manager just follows the plan because nobody ever blames someone for following “the plan”.

My first mentor told me, “Son, you already know a bear is a bear and generally know what bears do but sometimes you have to have the courage to poke the bear to find out exactly what he will do. The trick is to know when, where, and how hard to poke him and not only that, know what you are willing to do after he is poked.”

So, I guess that is my basis for supporting President Trump. He seems to poke the bear to see what the bear will do and then adjust accordingly based on that feedback.

That’s really the extent of his plan.

We need to acknowledge the difficulty of defining the problems we now face.

We need to do some bear poking.

The first step is to understand the enemy. Ours can be understood in their words, but also in their actions – so let’s look at both for a moment.

I really recommend clicking on the link for the following section of this essay, which provides examples of the behavior of our domestic opposition. Rather unsettling. Frightening, actually.

So, we already know the bear is a bear and have some insight into what that bear is going to do. They are showing us in real time.

The question we must answer is whether we have the courage to do what needs to be done.

So far, the GOP has not shown that courage and because we haven’t, the Democrats are about to give us yet another lesson in how far they are willing to go.

I’ll admit to liking HBO’s Game of Thrones – a lot - one scene that keeps penetrating my mind is the Battle of the Bastards in season 6, when Jon Snow stands alone facing Ramsay Bolton’s army. That seems to be our destiny because it is repeated again and again – when we do find a leader worthy of the fight, our army deserts him.

Right or wrong, Trump demonstrated the resolve to go shield to shield with the worst of the Democrats – but in the end, like Jon Snow, he was left alone on the battlefield.

If we want that to change, we need to field the right army.

Founders

Some of the Founders had it tough:

Statues: The People They Salute

NAME the Signer of the Declaration of Independence who was dragged from his bed and marched in only a nightshirt and breeches in freezing weather to prison by the British.

RICHARD STOCKTON signed the Declaration of Independence knowing his life, fortune and sacred honor was at risk. Four months later he was imprisoned.

Stockton had been moving his family to safety because the British were following George Washington and his army into New Jersey after the Battle of Long Island, when a treacherous neighbor of the friend whose home he had moved his family to, led a band of loyalists to Richard Stockton.

They dragged Stockton from his bed and marched him improperly clothed (only a nightshirt and breeches) in freezing weather to a common jail in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Later he was moved to Provost prison in New York City, which was notorious for its harsh conditions. It is estimated that about three times as many prisoners died in the prisons and prison ships of New York City, as soldiers in combat during the Revolutionary War years.

After five weeks of being locked in irons and nearly starved, Stockton was released. The condition of his release was that he was not to engage in American affairs during the fight for freedom. His health was compromised to such an extent, that it is doubtful he could have contributed much on the battlefield. His home had been plundered of his furniture and livestock. His extensive library had been destroyed. His monetary wealth was also gone as he had donated most of it to the cause.

Richard Stockton died before the Revolutionary War ended in 1781 at the age of 51. He is the subject of one of the two statues representing New Jersey in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol.

More at Diana Erbio's Substack

Weekend

The Week in Pictures: Electoral Degringolade Edition

Well THAT was no fun. No fun at all. But what is the Democrat plan for improving America? You can summarize it in one word—no, not “affordability,” but subpoenas. Think this is an overstatement? Let’s start here, and cheer up, this will be the Democrats’ undoing. (At least Newt Gingrich had a Contract with America with a policy agenda his House largely passed. The Democrats have no policy proposals for “affordability,” and appear instead to have a Contract on America.)

Music

Soldier's Joy

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, Halloween Miscellany

Comments are closed on the thread above so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

Follow-up

The people who asked questions about COVID early on may sometimes get a little weird, but sometimes they make some good points and point us in some useful directions, even now. Independent of the piece below, I saw a comment by Bret Weinstein stating that COVID would have been the biggest scientific investigation (or words to that effect) IF DATA HAD BEEN COLLECTED AND WERE BEING ANALYZED.

There are still some independent-minded people who maintain an interest in what happened. TWISTED Thursday, November 5, 2026 C&C NEWS

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Apologies for the late delivery— your author is navigating the nation’s airports again (ugh). Our election hangover continues, creating a challenge to report real news, since the Great Shellacking is still busy throwing its weight around. But, only 48 hours in, twists and turns are appearing and some of the numbers are paying hide-and-go-seek. Today’s roundup describes what’s causing folks to scratch their heads a little. Plus, more good news from Florida.

By the way, I’m en route to the lovely city of Chattanooga, where I’m attending the Brownstone Institute’s sixth annual conference, “The Challenge Ahead.” For two days, a crowd of doctors, scientists, journalists, and assorted heretics of various sizes and descriptions will compare notes on how to unwind the capture of our institutions, preferably before the next “two weeks to flatten the curve” arrives.