OK, Doomer

A Boomer reflects on this collapsing House of Credit Cards and the cadaver of a planet that the Zoomers are poised to inherit

By Mark Cromer

For us Malthusians, this moment of when a Corona gets its lime is merely a mile-marker on humankind’s long jog into oblivion; a population parade route that has seen for the better part of two centuries the oceans strip-mined, the forests clear-cut, the Amazon set ablaze and vast, ancient aquifers sucked dry as thousands of species are dutifully checked into the Extinction Suite each and every year even as the warheads of the human womb explode like massed artillery fire across the globe. The long con of globalization has only sped humanity’s date with destiny even as the band plays on ever louder. Legendary Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich (who I had the good fortune to speak with over the years at various conferences) was not ‘wrong’ when he published his seminal work The Population Bomb—just a tad early. Thirty years ago Greenpeace co-founder Paul Watson (and famed Capt. of the Sea Shepherd Society) told me the Earth’s sustainable human population as a viable species was around 2 billion people, and we’re now on track to hit 8 billion souls but hey, who’s counting? Well, turns out, Mother Nature is—and thus this appetizer for what ultimately befalls any herd that breeds itself past its viability. As Winston Churchill once remarked: “Now this is not the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Oh yes, this indeed is just the beginning of what Mother is sending over to our table, compliments of the house.

~ From a note to an old friend, early March 2020

All things considered, it began unremarkably enough, with a few scattered headlines and news briefs and bleeps across the print, digital and cable universes as 2019 came to a close: a viral outbreak was underway in a Chinese province called Wuhan. Details seemed obscure or conflicting, perhaps unsurprisingly so for an opaque nation like China.

But one fact was coming into focus: Far across the Pacific something had emerged from the gory horror of the country’s street-side slaughter houses where every manner of agricultural staple to so-called ‘exotic’ animals (think bats, primates and snakes, for starters) and domestic pets (ol’ Rover & Friends) are jammed into cages still alive to await their sale and on-the-spot butchering that had been cheerfully christened ‘wet markets’ in the West either as a grim goof or in the pathetic parlance of cultural equivalence and the acceptance-at-any-cost it is meant to facilitate.

The initial minimalistic news coverage seemed to suggest there was nothing much to worry about, at least certainly nothing to panic over, and yet even in those early days of the outbreak an undercurrent of apprehension began to creep across the land, at least among what remains of the thinking class, versus the iPhone-clutching consumer hordes that now populate the American casino believing they are ‘getting cash back’ and ‘earning rewards’ by rolling up five-figure balances on credit cards that charge them an APR of 16% or possibly more. Most of those hominids were lost on Amazon, foraging for new toys, selecting shipping methods and writing reviews—as everything in this era must be reviewed, rated and ranked.

But a few keen observers did sense that the proverbial canary in the coalmine had just stopped chirping.

What followed the dawn of 2020 will likely prove to be less of a story about a viral pandemic’s rampage across the globe and more of another Kodak moment that captured the cascading collapse of the American enterprise into the ocean’s of chaos that now rage around it. As January slouches toward February and the first ‘anniversary’ of the pandemic passes, the COVID-19 global body count has surpassed 2 million, with the United States on track to reach more than 24 million cases identified and 400,000 COVID-19-related deaths before month’s end. But it is still worth contrasting this death toll against historical outbreaks for at least some filter of reasonable perspective, as the Bubonic plague that swept across Europe in the Middle Ages (and consequently helped christen them the ‘Dark Ages’) killed off fully one-third of the continent’s population and sent somewhere on the order of 50 million people to mass graves in several long waves.

As COVID-19 made a low-key but auspicious landfall in the United States, it was at first greeted with something of a collective shrug before triggering a manic reaction among much of the populace that swiveled from spring break revelry to a bar-the-bunker-door mentality as the government descended into a borderline schizophrenic response at virtually every level from Washington D.C. to City Hall.

It was a collective breakdown that has once more revealed in the starkest of terms the absolute corruption-fed rot that has hollowed out the nation well beyond just ‘critical infrastructure’ and again exposed the true nature of the governing ‘elites’ of every partisan feather.

The American house of credit cards has come tumbling down with breathtaking speed and amidst the resulting vast fields of plastic debris can be seen the gnarled reality of the economic boom years—the glimmering mirage that had long fed the fantasy that an expanding economy was the ultimate diagnostic of a healthy nation, one built on a solid and sustainable foundation. The old axiom ‘What’s good for General Motors is good for the country’ had effectively been refined by the dawn of 2020 to simply: ‘Whatever profits the shareholders is good.’ The notion of a nation state had devolved into merely a geographic market of mass consumerism.

But the dizzying buzz that the economic ‘rebound’ that ostensibly heralded a nation that was once again truly thriving across all sectors was in actual fact simply illusory and the pandemic has ended the hypnotic lightshow.

At the cusp of the COVID-19 onset, unemployment had been declared to be effectively at an end (the government considers a 3-percent unemployment rate to be in practical terms a state of ‘full-employment’) but in fact the government simply continued to apply its age-old cooked-books formula of only counting workers who applied for or continued to receive unemployment benefits. The millions of working age men and women for whom unemployment benefits had expired were simply pushed off the books and into the grimly nebulous category of ‘no longer participating in the workforce.’

It’s the same cynical numbers game the government and the media have long played with illegal immigration, maintaining the masquerade that there are approximately 11 million people of every strata in the United States who have no legal right to be in the country. That figure of 11 million illegal immigrants, which has remained on the national marquee since at least the mid-2000s, is as accurate as the 3-percent unemployment figure, in that it’s accurate as long as you don’t count the other 25 million illegal immigrants currently in United States. It’s a cheap but deadly demographic hat trick that Uncle Sam is deathly afraid of revealing, which is why any and all real efforts to ascertain through legitimate but definitive means the true figure of foreigners illegally present in the United States are immediately killed in the crib by both parties.

And there is a reason for that.

In an era where the slogan ‘We believe in science!’ has taken on the desired religious tone its shouters intend, as an article of politically interpreted faith rather than a deliberative establishment of fact and a fearless exploration of meaning, the actual factual hard data of illegal immigrants in the United States—just determining the number—is simply verboten.

In the distant past and deeper still in antiquity such unallowable facts and proscribed lines of inquiry were known simply as ‘Forbidden Knowledge’ and were whispered of only among heretical intellectuals, artists and other malcontents and misanthropes who were intent to neither mildly submit nor blindly obey, however clandestine their resistance may have been.

And so it is today as the true numbers of both the American unemployed and foreign nationals illegally present in the United States have been feverishly obfuscated for decades—a bipartisan endeavor and perhaps the only consensus between the two parties in the Beltway that has held since the Reagan era.

But then came the pandemic.

And within just about six months time—or approximately the lifespan of a toaster warranty—the Great Lies have been laid bare, the neon veneer has been torn away and the facts of our situation have been irrevocably revealed.

Remember the joys of the ‘gig economy’ that were programmed round-the-clock as America struggled out of the Great Recession and remained on high volume right up to the moment the virus fires began? Who could forget the casual glory of ‘the side hustle’ that was trumpeted, pitched and sold to American workers as a viable means to earn a wage—and just a wage, one sans any of the employee protections or benefits to say nothing of the equity that once came with the traditional employment that built the middleclass in America—with all of its supposed flexibility and the sugar high of allegedly working-for-yourself, albeit under a corporate umbrella of Uber or Lyft or DoorDash or among the legions of ‘contracting vendors’ that pumped non-employee workers by the millions into warehouses and behind the wheel for companies like FedEx and Amazon? The $35-an-hour union trade jobs had long been shipped down the Wuhan Ways of the world, but America had a side hustle just waiting for those eager to self-motivate across the overnight shift for an easy net of $172 or so a week—which is more than enough to cover the rent on a shared room in a three-bedroom single-family home rented to a revolving cast of eight or nine people every month (depending if you counted the people living in the living room and the garage).

Remember all that? Sure you do, those commercials weren’t pulled until the nation was well into the pandemic. Well, it was a hustle to be sure, but there wasn’t much sideways about it at all. The so-called ‘gig economy’ was pretty much a straightforward con job.

And so the America of 2020 began just as Washington intended it to, with most Americans working harder and longer for ever-shrinking slices of the meaningful wage pie while the spread of the indentured class rebranded as ‘independent contractors’ made millionaires by the bushel on the publicly-traded markets even though nothing close to a material improvement in the life of the average American was truly being achieved. It sure looked like another banner year and decade-in-the-making for the corporate robber barons as the assembly lines of ‘human capital’ continued to be fed into the vast sausage-maker of product storage and order-fulfillment/delivery systems that have come to define the job market landscape, men and women who invariably emerge on the other side as gutted husks stumbling through habitual unemployment and succored by a government safety net that offers little more than some drinking money and a small paper cup each morning with the blue magic of Alprazolam in it to help numb Americans horrifying spiritual death that is merely prelude to their impending literal demise.

But remember, Jeff Bezos is so very grateful for everything his nearly 1 million Amazonians have delivered to him and his company’s shareholders. Well, actually, not really, in fact, not at all, but if it helps to pretend that Bezos & Co. are filled with gratitude and are focused by it, then go right ahead and think so.

At Amazon, it’s hard to believe the memo line on the paychecks doesn’t read: ‘Be thankful for even this, ye loathsome little worm. Now get back to work!’

With the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO and the rest of organized labor long knocked out and sold out as relevant advocates for working and middleclass Americans, the living wage careers those unions once embodied were shuttered and shipped overseas courtesy of the bipartisan blitz in the mid-1990s that delivered NAFTA and a host of other ‘free trade’ initiatives and all while the floodgates of mass immigration were opened ever wider still to more quickly facilitate the replacement of the American worker at what remained of the American jobsite.

According to an Economic Policy Institute brief published in August 2015, more than 5 million skilled labor jobs in the United States were gutted, fileted and delivered to tables overseas between 2000 and 2014 alone, a figure which doesn’t really come close as an accurate casualty count for the corporate looting that became a Washington & Wall Street, Inc., trademarked brand dating back to the Reagan Administration as the wolves howled their approval of the merge-gut-close-repeat formula that gave rise to real life monsters like Al ‘Chainsaw’ Dunlap, nor the ongoing bleed-out of those jobs that continued through the final years of the Obama Administration.

Eliminated along with the millions of manufacturing jobs lost in America’s estate sale was the nation’s pharmaceutical production infrastructure, which was also shutdown and offshored to increase shareholder profits and ensure the American people—to the extent and as long as they still existed in any relevant capacity—were even more deeply leveraged in and reliant upon a global economy. It’s a bitter betrayal that again speaks directly to the intent of those that carried it out: removing the capacity of the United States to manufacture its own critical medicine supply was to make its people quite literally hostage to the demands of foreign governments.

It’s an insurance policy of sorts for the shareholder-class whose imperial-grade profit margins reside solely in the pirates’ chest of globalism.

Shortly before the pandemic erupted and then arrived on American shores a few sharp pens had indeed had been sounding the alarm of what was inevitably going to happen in such situations. On July 22, 2019, The Seattle Times published an op-ed penned by Rosemary Gibson of the Hasting’s Center and author of China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine, in which Gibson spelled out in detail the depth of America’s reliance on overseas suppliers of critical medicine and particularly that of an increasingly hostile China.

Gibson ticked off a grim list of hard facts surrounding the current state of America’s pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity, noting that by the summer of 2019 “The U.S. has virtually no capacity to make generic antibiotics to treat ear infections, strep throat, pneumonia, Lyme disease and other illnesses.” Twenty years earlier, Gibson reported, the anthrax attacks on Washington forced the U.S. to buy 20 million doses of Doxycycline—an emergency order it had to place with European suppliers who promptly sourced the job to China. Birth control, chemotherapy, HIV treatments, Parkinson’s, diabetes, Alzheimers and many others are all sourced out to overseas producers and primarily those operating under the instruction of Beijing.

In her op-ed, Gibson projected that by 2030 at the latest the United States will have lost virtually all of its capacity to produce generic drugs of any stripe on any relevant scale—transformed into a vast sea of medical cases utterly reliant on the prerogatives of a foreign adversary. She closed her piece with a series of recommendations that Washington undertake with urgency.

Within a matter of months, Gibson’s warning proved prophetic and Americans for perhaps the fist time since its manufacturing lab infrastructure was shutdown and sold off began to become aware that the nation that was once the ‘arsenal for democracy’ was in no condition to even be a medical manufacturer for itself during a national emergency.

That sort of collective awareness could not be left to fester unchallenged.

In response, the globalist publication Reason attacked Gibson’s critical analysis and compelling account of the extremely vulnerable position the U.S. now finds itself with relation to its medicinal manufacturing base, or lack thereof, with Reason’s Eric Boehm dismissing Gibson’s assertion that 80% of key active pharmaceutical ingredients are produced in China as essentially a false alarm.

Not to worry, Reason’s Boehm insists, 80% of key active pharmaceutical ingredients aren’t actually made in China, just overseas, and perhaps with a plurality of that in China, just not all of it. Feel better?

The response from Reason should not have come as much of a surprise, considering editors from the publication have openly called for vastly accelerated mass immigration into the United States to spike America’s population to more than 1 billion people as a means of economic expansion, a libertarian Jonestown prescription in its own right and a double-shot of Kool-Aid not surprisingly cheered by no less a veteran schizophrenic showman as Glenn Beck who gleefully declared that the United States needed to add 700-million people to remain competitive with China.

When theoretical libertarians, rodeo clowns like Glenn Beck, the Democratic Party’s armband-wearing goose-steppers and the corporate whores of the GOP are all singing harmony on a chorus of mass immigration then, mass immigration now and mass immigration forever, well…as they say in the medical community: it’s time to get your affairs in order.

But it’s a little late for that now, isn’t it. Our collective affairs cannot be arranged into any semblance of order, for this is the era of absolute chaos, an end-stage global panic attack.

As continents across the globe buckle under the sheer weight of human masses that are watching their fate unfold in front of them and live-streamed in real time, the reality of precious fresh water supplies that are vanishing as fast as sustainable living space that provides for something more promising than a life amid an SRO human cattle car has finally reached critical mass and thus the great human herds are on the march in a desperate effort to migrate to somewhere else. Anywhere else.

But alas, the geopolitical lifeboats of Western civilization are not only sinking, the boats are burning on their way down.

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic spread like fire around the world last year, the limits of government innovation and intervention had been dramatically exceeded and were on prominent display everywhere but in the United States none more so than its Great Cities where in places like Los Angeles and Seattle tens of thousands of men and women stumble around the glittering towers of debauched corruption and financial wet market gang bangs to empty their bowels on the same streets where they sleep even as the government issues ever more ringing declarations announcing a new age of equity, justice and, uh, whatever, while waiting for refreshers of its member’s only bottle service.

If humankind in the modern age hasn’t figured out effective and socially successful birth control by now, if we can’t empower women and educate men on the global scale that is necessary to decelerate our speeding breeding rush into oblivion, do you really think our species ‘leaders’ can get their arms around the viruses yet to come? Can they end the shortages that are already at hand? Can they staunch the violent chaos that’s fanning faster with every passing day?

Yeah, me either.

An honest assessment of the global response to this pandemic can only arrive at one clear conclusion: governments in the main have no idea what they are doing and are making it up as they go along—out of an abundance of not knowing what else to do.

As vaccines for COVID-19 have arrived, wild rumors abound in various circles across all points along the political spectrum that they are actually part of a shadowy last-ditch effort at population control. Ha! The planet should be so lucky. No, there is nothing so hopefully sinister or usefully diabolical about the vaccines against COVID-19, for they are indeed as advertised and another testament to humankind’s resilient resourcefulness, an admirable trait but one that will not save us this far down the line.

As for the Zoomers, well, evidently Gen Z seems to believe if they can write enough code, play enough games, add enough tattoos and piercings and dye their hair a bright enough turquoise then maybe the unfolding calamity will not consume them as well. Or maybe they haven’t given it that much thought at all, what with all the coding, gaming, tatting, piercing and hair dye signaling in-between the fist-raising social justice afternoon prayer services before dinner back at mom’s house.

In which case, even better.

The United States in 2021 is well on its way to becoming the Cocoanut Grove on that fateful night of November 28, 1942, a swinging joint that had swelled beyond its capacity with people from all over the place just looking for a break away from a world at war. A fire found officially to be of ‘unknown origin’ swept through the fronds of the artificial palms inside the Boston club and leapt into its gaudy cloth-covered false ceilings, quickly exploding into an inferno that would devour nearly 500 people as they stampeded toward exits that were locked or blocked. The official inquest would reveal that some guests were overcome with the billowing smoke and fireballs so quickly that firefighters picking through the wreckage found their charred carcasses still in their chairs, drinks literally still in hand.

The lesson the Cocoanut Grove ostensibly taught civic officials nearly a century ago was that it’s generally ill-advised to allow a glimmering oasis of freedom, music and swinging good times to be filled by nearly triple the amount of people it could actually accommodate not only comfortably but safely—the Cocoanut Grove fire actually killed more people than the club’s maximum capacity. While the club had been given an official clean bill of health by officials only days before catastrophe broiled its patrons alive, it would later be disclosed that the club hadn’t been properly inspected, licensed or permitted in years.

As 2021 gets underway, it’s not hard to imagine bombshell Goody Goodelle tickling the ivory and singing in the Grove’s Melody Lounge where the fire began that fall night in 1942, and envisioning one of those cats sitting up front near the stage and dressed to the nines, sporting a cigarette holder cocked in one hand and a dry martini fearlessly in the other, and as the flames exploded, as the smoke billowed and as the crowd ran shrieking like damned banshees desperate for an exit, looking over at his honey for the night and remarking with a grin and a wink just as her hair burst into flames: “Well, I guess we won’t be taking a cab after all.”

So perhaps eons from now, as alien archeologists brush the sediment off our Pompeii, they will marvel at the futile mass rush for the door and the Boomers who just stayed in their seats, smiling.

Drinks in hand.

The opening and perhaps only 2020 Presidential debate was a debacle that damningly frames the fate of the nation

By Mark Cromer

Once upon a time in American politics, the vast sea of voters were for the most part a relatively middle-of-the-road bunch that presented on a spectrum of ‘liberal’ to ‘conservative’ but who were actually stitched somewhat close together through the common bonds of cultural cohesiveness and a broad stroke of general consensus that the United States was indeed a land of opportunity that made it an enviable place to live.

Sure, there were caveats and qualifiers to the popular mythology of America, but there was a fundamental underlying truth to it and Americans in virtually every station of life sensed the possibilities the nation held.

With the working class looking for some upward mobility into more comfortable environs and the middle class primarily interested in safeguarding what they had achieved, the rich were first and foremost wary of any candidate or policy from either major party that might result in some sort of sociopolitical explosion that could trigger a chain-reaction and unleash the pitchforks and torches marching upon their many fine castles and countryside estates. For the wealthy in America, the social stability provided by a broad middle class was its best defense, and likewise the beacon of possibility that middle class America provided the working class was its best hope.

And once upon a time in America wasn’t really all that long ago at all.

But the opening and quite possibly only 2020 Presidential debate highlighted in the starkest of terms just how far gone America now is and how fast her descent into the cold grave of history is occurring. For just 90 frenetic minutes the debate played like an infomercial for impending doom — and an hour and a half was all that was needed.

From the opening moments onstage in the heartland city of Cleveland, Ohio, it was a freak show—with the chief freak standing there onstage all aglow as he veered into a manic blur of surreal petulance that as the night wore on suggested perhaps Hunter Biden wasn’t really the only corrupt crackhead voters need to worry about come November. With his carnival act of a presidency buffeted by a pandemic and shaken by an orgy of organized riots replete with mass arson and wanton mob violence that has exposed Donald J. Trump’s inability or unwillingness to effectively lead an administration let alone a badly fractured nation facing disintegration, Trump used the debate to recast all of his chronic disabilities as bold strategy.

Faced with the weakest Democratic contender since George McGovern, Trump sought to conceal his own lack of preparation and the purely transactional nature of his character with high-volume bombast played in heavy rotation and supplemented by a parade of petty insults and incessant interruptions he hoped would accomplish either knocking Joe Biden into a fresh bout of incomprehensible word salad or at least keep the stage production so dysfunctional and chaotic that serious consideration of the critical issues was impossible.

Trump did manage to accomplish the latter, as more than 73 million viewing Americans were not provided with even a moment’s worth of thoughtful discourse of where the nation stands, what it is facing and specifically what either candidate seriously proposes to do about it.

Given the composition of Trump’s inner-circle, there’s little doubt that after he stepped offstage he was greeted by glowing reports of his most magnificent debate victory, though perhaps they distilled it for him to a familiar parlance that’s easier for him to understand: “No one has ever seen anything like it, to be quite honest with you, Mr. President. People from everywhere are saying you’re the best they’ve ever seen, if you want to know the truth. It’s so beautiful. So beautiful. Really, really beautiful. Very strongly so.”

But the cold, hard truth is that Trump simply blew it once again and squandered what may well have been his last best opportunity to directly connect with and convince the voters he needs if he is to be reelected. If you’re campaigning to ostensibly ‘save the suburbs’ its generally not a good idea to come across as a fast-talking flimflam man from the boroughs hopped up into a highly agitated state. No, a far more prudent course of action on the debate stage would have been to show up prepared and in a reassuringly calm and linear manner paint the very sobering picture of the future America now faces and why his leadership, however flawed it has proven to be in the past (just a dash of genuine public humility still goes a long way with most Americans) is far more desirable than the grim alternative that a Biden Administration will mean.

Engaging Biden with civility and common courtesy would have been not only very appropriate, but it also would have been the curve ball Team Joe didn’t see coming.

Letting Biden attempt to explain his positions would have resulted in only one of two outcomes: he either would have revealed that he had little to actually offer beyond platitudes and homey proverbs that were sugared with calorie-free reminders of ‘I am not Trump’ or, in the very possible alternative, he would have become lost in the fog of time that increasingly clouds his mind, leaving him to stumble and stammer as he chases his thoughts that flutter as wildly as a butterfly eluding the net. And that could well have spelled political catastrophe for Biden’s third run for the White House.

A disciplined debater working off even a mediocre moderator could have focused the audience on the true stalking horse nature of Biden/Harris 2020, challenging Biden to explain precisely why he has repeatedly denounced the very popular crime bill that he himself ushered through the Senate in the summer of 1994 and that passed with 61 bi-partisan ‘ayes’ before it was signed by President Bill Clinton? For the devil is indeed in the details and Biden would have been hard-pressed to offer any detailed analysis of what was wrong with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 — other than perhaps it came way too late for the Americans that had been victimized by vicious street predators as crime spiked and spread in the 1980s and early 1990s.

No, Biden would have been reduced to some fabricated deflection about how the watershed legislation that supplemented state-based efforts at locking down habitual criminals—such as California’s popular ‘Three Strikes’ law that played an immense role of putting recidivist violent criminals behind bars for good—had resulted in that most dubious of phrases: ‘mass incarceration.’ The specter of mass incarceration has become a key slogan among the progressive Left’s compliance squads, but like so much else that’s shouted in the streets and preached from the pulpit of Hollywood, it’s little more than agitprop served hot to the hungry mouths of the Professional Victim Inc. crowd.

So a disciplined and prepared debater could have blown that dodge to smithereens and in doing so added some vital factual nuance to the issue of so-called criminal justice reform. If one believes in science, then one also must believe in empirical data, and the data simply does not support the premise that America is effectively a prison state that hunts, kills and incarcerates ethnic and racial minorities for the sport of it.

As of spring 2020 there were approximately 2.3 million inmates serving time across the United States; from local jails to state prisons to federal penitentiaries. This figure, which also includes involuntary mental health confinements, immigration detentions and juvenile halls (or ‘Gladiator School’ as they’re more popularly known among their frequent guests), amounts to roughly .07% of the 320 million people that are living in the United States—a total population statistic that may be an undercount of 20 million or more people since a comprehensive effort to identify and quantify people that are illegally present in the United States has never been undertaken by the government.

Simply put, for a First World nation that also has the third largest population on the planet, a statistic of 2.3 million convicted criminals behind bars is nothing more odious than a benchmark of a country that was at least momentarily serious about protecting its law-abiding citizens. It’s nothing more ominous than the sign of a real national commitment to the ideal that when a jury convicts some bipedal oxygen thief with a rap sheet that could be used as a yardstick of yet again shoving a .38 into the neck of the night clerk at the corner market to terrorize his way into the cash register that such miscreants deserve to be caged to protect society and punish the criminal, not to rehabilitate anyone.

It’s rather revealing that proponents advocating for even greater levels of mass immigration into the United States and particularly in support for the caravans snaking out of the shanty towns across Central America like infantry divisions on a forced march to the frontlines under orders from their commissars cite the virtual non-existence of a functioning legal system in these states as grounds enough for entry to be granted without challenge.

The argument is that Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala have become too dangerous for people to live in and are so fundamentally broken, in fact, that they cannot be changed. As such, that argument is effectively a concession that these former countries cannot emerge from a primitive state of existence and evolve back into functioning nation-states that provide a baseline level of services, opportunities and legal protections for their citizens.

In essence, Central America has been declared a complete write-off.

And by that standard, since more than 90% of violent crimes in Mexico go unsolved and the country has collapsed into a narco-confederation replete with mass graves and public beheadings as the cartels vie for preeminence along the contraband transit routes—in July 2015 Frontline reported that between 2007 and 2014 alone the narco-cartels had slaughtered more than 164,000 Mexicans in their war to control production centers, routes and markets, a death toll higher than both Afghan and Iraqi civilian casualties following the American invasion of those nations—the vast majority of Mexican citizens should also be able to walk freely into the United States and into the constellation of social services that were once the province of American citizens alone but increasingly open to all-comers which further erases the very meaning of citizenship.

A disciplined debater could have quickly cornered Biden and revealed the real issue at hand in 2020 is that clearly visible behind Biden is a demolition team ready to detonate the base charges that will take the entire legal system down.

If Biden sputtered something about it was time to ‘reimagine’ law enforcement and the legal system in the United States, if he had blathered something about the supposed promise of ‘restorative justice,’ a disciplined and focused debater could have pounced and pointed out the actual reality in Democratic-led states and cities where tens of thousands of hardened criminals are being poured back onto the streets to effectively victimize today at will and without the nuisance of real consequence looming over their heads. A disciplined debater would have eviscerated the canard that ‘property crimes’ are essentially victimless affairs by pointing out the devastating impact home burglaries take on the residents and the deep-bleeding businesses suffer as a result of rampant shoplifting, commercial burglaries and looting that the states now effectively aid and abet.

On the issue of crime, Biden is at his most vulnerable.

But alas, letting Biden speak at any length, however plainly appropriate and politically prudent for Trump to do, would mean in Trump’s mind that people weren’t paying attention to him—and he can’t have that. He viewed the debate as just another episode of The Trump Show and he is the star. So it’s no small wonder that Trump didn’t start making fart noises and shooting rubber bands at Biden every time the former vice president tried to answer a question.

His boorish antics aside, however, Trump’s refusal to come prepared to wage a serious debate and offer thoughtful estimations of the issues that confront the nation and the best way to address them was yet another brazen betrayal of not only the Americans who cast ballots for him in 2016 but for every American citizen who should expect as much from their sitting president whether they voted for him or not. That Trump is impervious to embarrassment and possesses no self-awareness is cold comfort to Americans who were looking for substantive answers on issues such as race-relations, rising crime, the economic viability of the nation amid the patchwork of state-led responses to the pandemic and the prospects for ending American involvement in wars on foreign shores, both secret and well known.

In lieu of this, Trump decided to double-down once more and taunt Biden for signing the 1994 crime bill while boasting that he was letting convicted criminals out of jail. Trump apparently considers his disastrous embrace of the Democrats criminal justice reform narrative, along with moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and recognizing Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights, to be among his peak first term accomplishments. But even more grotesque was Trump’s declaration from the debate stage—and for the umpteenth time—that he could immediately halt the carnage that has unfolded on a near nightly basis across American cities but only if the Democratic governors and mayors ask him to do so.

Trump bragged “If they called us in Portland, we could put out that fire in half an hour” and then digressed further into puerile fantasy by declaring: “If you look at Chicago, if you look at any place you want to look, Seattle, they heard we were coming in the following day and they put up their hands and we got back Seattle. Minneapolis, we got it back.”

As American citizens all over the nation are attacked on the streets, swarmed on the highways and pulled from their cars and beaten by frenzied mobs of radical Left terror squads and the criminal savages that the progressives herd in human cattle drives like so much realpolitik livestock and as American citizens’ businesses are burned to the ground and their homes ransacked, Trump stood on that stage in Cleveland and offered a rather sadistic spoken word rendition of James Taylor’s classic You’ve Got A Friend: just call out his name and you know wherever he is (Mar a Lago, Ninth Hole) he’ll come running.

Winter, Spring, Summer or Fall, all Americans have to do is call…eh, not really.

Consider that more than 63 million Americans dialed Trump’s 900-line from the polling booths nearly four years ago and went to bed on election night feeling exhausted yet exhilarated. The hangover preceded the inauguration but less than a hundred days after Trump was sworn in the ugly truth was growing ever more clear: Trump really was just a political phone sex operator who talked a good game but expecting him to actually show up in Washington and deliver the goods he had promised on the campaign trail quickly degraded from fantasy to hallucinatory.

Still, perhaps the greatest betrayal witnessed on that Cleveland stage was Trump’s bumbling response to Fox News anchor Chris Wallace’s question about so-called Critical Race Theory that could have been a walk-off home run for the president. You could almost hear Wallace doing his best Bugs Bunny impression in the windup on the mound: “Ehhh, I think I’ll perplex him with my slow-ball.”

Instead of waiting for it and then sending it over the centerfield wall, Trump infuriatingly but unsurprisingly flailed frantically at Wallace’s changeup as it floated across the plate in front of him.

“This month, your administration directed federal agencies to end racial sensitivity training that addresses ‘white privilege’ or Critical Race Theory. Why did you decide to do that, to end racial sensitivity training?” Wallace asked. “And do you believe there is systemic racism in this country, sir?”

Trump’s answer out of the gate wasn’t so much wrong as it was a simplistic retort devoid of any of the power the question actually provided him with a chance to unload with, beginning with quick explanation of what Critical Race Theory is rooted in and then ticking off why it explains a nation that’s about as real as Wakanda.

A prepared and disciplined debater would have answered that Critical Race Theory was formulated in academia decades ago by radical racialists that worked in a fashion not unlike biochemists cooking up a deadly virus in a bioweapons lab would; with an eye on creating a social pathogen that maximizes its vector potential by turning K-12 education and post-secondary education into Hot Zones all over the nation and, left uncontained, spreads rapidly into virtually every cultural institution across the nation, mutating as necessary to gain a foothold in its host organism, survive any immune response and then overwhelming its victim.

With Critical Race Theory, the virus is engineered to kill not only the construct of the nation but the very concept of the country by reprogramming the collective memory of its inhabitants to process the present through a thoroughly malevolent lens of perspective in viewing its past. Thus the advent of ‘micro-aggressions,’ an indispensable psychoactive ingredient of the virus that convinces some and confuses many others into believing that real oppression against all racial minorities—but none more so than blacks—is so innate in America’s society and culture that as Trevor Noah has become fond of saying: “Racism is the corn syrup of America. It is in everything.”

Everything. As in the smile from the young white couple who say ‘good morning’ to their black neighbors to the white grandmother who offers a friendly ‘goodnight’ to her Latino in-laws. Critical Race Theory holds that literally everything whites do is informed and inspired by a nuclear core of racism.

A prepared and disciplined debater would have answered Wallace that among the psych-warfare techniques being employed through ‘racial sensitivity training’ based on Critical Race Theory is an exercise where white employees in federal government agencies are being coerced into writing personal letters of apology to black Americans as well as other ethnic and racial minorities. The specific confessions of the apology letters is apparently left somewhat up to each of the white employees convicted of being white while at work—hell, actually being white while breathing—but one has to assume letters deemed to have been insufficiently remorseful make their way into the employee’s personnel file for further review and action as needed at a later date.

A prepared and disciplined debater would have looked into the camera and in a calm and cool fashion reminded America that in 2008 she voted into the most powerful position on planet earth a black American who struggled and worked his way up from a single mother household and did so in a nation that as flawed as she is, made that possible. And that same nation approved of President Barack Obama’s choice of Eric Holder as Attorney General of the United States.

A black president and a black attorney general, twin facts that simply don’t align with the relentless narrative of Critical Race Theory that America is an inherently racist nation.

But Trump doesn’t possess either the intellectual depth or mental dexterity to effectively address the core components of the racial issues that Critical Race Theory has distorted into a cultural pandemic, he doesn’t possess enough command of the facts to calmly but vigorously employ the real-world data that reveals more unarmed white Americans are killed each year by police than blacks and that more white Americans are victims of violent crime perpetrated by black criminals each year than blacks who are victimized by white perpetrators, according to Department of Justice and FBI crime statistics.

No, Trump didn’t go there during the debate because he simply doesn’t know how to, all while Biden is happy to mumble some more slogans he has been taught to memorize and recite when he hears certain trigger words.

Trump’s response to Wallace’s Critical Race Theory query was typically truncated, somewhat blurred into half-thoughts and utterly devoid of the vital detail that would help him clinch the case against it: “I ended it because it is racist. I ended it because a lot of people were complaining that they were asked to do things that were absolutely insane. That it’s a radical revolution that was taking place in our military, in our schools, all over the place. And you know it and so does everybody else,” Trump replied.

But see, that’s the rub and that’s where Trump comes out sounding like the rube. No, not everybody else knows it and in fact tens of millions of Americans are still somewhat in the dark as to what actually has been occurring across academia and the media but also corporate America and throughout the government as well under the auspices of Critical Race Theory. No, most Americans were not—and are still not—aware that white government employees were being forced to write apology letters for being white.

So Wallace’s question was a perfect opportunity to lay that out for them. To get right down to it and call Critical Race Theory out for exactly what it is and indeed what it was always meant to be: relentless warfare against white Americans across virtually every aspect of American life; from white Americans history to their very own homes, from their workplaces to their recreational pursuits. Critical Race Theory is a declaration, blueprint and playbook for Total War against working white America.

But Trump couldn’t even bring himself to call white Americans by their name as he spoke ostensibly in their defense.

“If you were a certain person,” he told Wallace on the debate stage, “you had no status in life. It was sort of a reversal. And if you look at the people, we were paying people hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach very bad ideas and, frankly, very sick ideas. And really, they were teaching people to hate our country. And I am not going to do that. I am not going to allow that to happen. We have to go back to the core values of this country. They were teaching people this country is a horrible place. It’s a racist place. And they were teaching people to hate our country. And I am not going to allow that to happen.”

If you were a certain person…

That restraint or calibration actually required an amount of forethought and self-control by Trump he rarely displays and it surely attests to those around him effectively drilling into him these past four years: ‘You can stand up for white people, but whatever you do don’t say their name. Don’t call them white people. Call them ‘certain people’ or ‘some people,’ but never ever mention their name in an affirmatively positive manner or defend them by name. Never, ever-ever.’

So the progressive Left has no problem mentioning white Americans by name three times in practically every sentence as they pass judgment and sentence upon them daily, but the man for whom white Americans in overwhelming numbers put in the White House couldn’t say it even once in their defense and on the national stage as much of the nation looked on. Ivanka and Jared must be so proud of Trump.

It’s just a shame Wallace didn’t follow up by factually noting: “In fact, Mr. President, that’s exactly what you have been allowing for virtually the entirety of your presidency to-date. You signed that executive order that applies to federal agencies alone just a few weeks ago, and Critical Race Theory has been coursing through the veins of the federal government for more than a decade, so why did you wait until about a month out of the election to act? And why haven’t you acted to confront it in public schools and private workplaces all over the nation?”

But it probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference even if he had asked such a question.

Trump has declared he has secured the border and ended illegal immigration, all while the border remains effectively open and millions of immigrants have crossed illegally into the nation during his watch.

Trump has declared that he will never allow America’s heritage and history to be destroyed while he is in the White House, all while cultural Maoists and the nihilistic mobs the progressive death cultists in the Democratic Party have unleashed tear down, deface, defile and destroy any and all manner of American history and heritage that they have stumbled upon.

Trump has declared that he will not allow Big Tech companies to wage a reign of mass censorship targeting political opponents and heretical viewpoints, all while Big Tech has turned their platforms into publishing houses and enthusiastically undertaken the elimination of their opponents from the digital public square and harnessed their platforms to optimum performance for the destruction of opponents in an act they’ve hygienically termed ‘cancelled’ and all from a government provided safe-zone that protects them from the litigation or sanction traditional publishers would otherwise face.

Trump has declared that he will never allow the safety of Americans to be threatened or the nation’s streets to be overrun with crime, all while highly organized bands of street terror squads descend at will upon their victims of choice while freelance urban berserkers prowl and poach victims that they film for entertainment and Internet infamy. Trump declares himself a law and order president all while overseeing one of the largest crime waves in modern American history, with District Attorneys freeing criminals and targeting civilians seeking to protect themselves and what is theirs since the government charged with protecting them has become unwilling to do so.

And now Trump has angrily declared he will not allow the infection of Critical Race Theory to run its fatal course throughout American institutions, all while Critical Race Theory has advanced completely unchallenged and utterly unimpeded from the boardroom to the basketball court, from academia to the Academy Awards.

Trump’s bizarre performance on that Cleveland stage—cloaked as it was beneath all the bellicose bravado and bitter bickering—perhaps betrayed that he may well sense the electoral boom is about to drop and his presidency cancelled by voters as a failed mid-season replacement.

Biden’s faux friendly posing as something of a political rerun of I Love Lucy, something that can bring the whole family around the table again as long as Americans pay no never mind to the Night of the Living Dead that lurks right behind him, is looking increasingly like that programming deal may be close to closing.

Given the magnitude of the calamity now facing the nation, maybe it would have been a bit of good fun if Wallace would have closed that first presidential debate with a wink and tip of the ol’ hat to doomsday by coyly asking the candidates:

“In closing gentlemen, a question to each of you. Mr. President, if come November voters reject your reelection bid, have you given any thought as to what country you and your extended family will immediately be seeking political asylum in? For all the chatter about Russia, a plurality of the Vegas book seems to split between the United Arab Emirates and Israel, or maybe both? And to you, Mr. Vice President, if you do actually manage to prevail in November, can you share with viewers your own best guess as to just how long it will be after your inauguration that the country awakes one morning to find President Kamala Harris mournfully informing the nation that you had passed peacefully away in your sleep but the very night before? Do you think we’re talking months or perhaps even weeks? And how long do you think she’ll be able to suppress that gorgeously radiant smile of hers during the announcement that you’ve gone to heaven? What about her happy dance, will she be able to refrain?”

Considering the freak show Cleveland was and the accelerating national shit-show it surely precedes, such a question may not have been as out of line as much as it would have provided some desperately needed comic relief, as both Trump and Biden would have surely taken the bait and answered it in another argument—and that would have been worth the price of the previous 86-minutes.