Regardless of the factual nature of Epstein conspiracy theories, Americans no longer have even a base level of trust in our institutions to not betray the public interest in defense of a corrupt global elite.
Having over decades observed the many failures, purposeful and accidental, of our previously trusted institutions, Americans are now convinced these entities are corrupt or easily corruptible.
These institutions have become brittle. They have to succeed at a much higher rate or risk being viewed as instruments of failure in the minds of the citizenry. We become more and more a nation where the masses do not trust the large entities to handle, well, anything.
The National Conservatives of our age like to warn against becoming Europe, but the reality is that we are becoming more like Mexico: a nation where the mob can only appeal to a newly empowered individual to solve all that ails us.
“We Mexicans do not believe in liberalism as much as in Juárez, in order and progress as much as in Porfirio Díaz, in land reform and in the labor movement as much as in Zapata and Cárdenas...
"and liberalism, order and progress, democracy, land and labor reform do not exist if Juárez, Díaz, Francisco Madero, Emiliano Zapata and Lázaro Cárdenas do not exist.… In Mexico the adhesion to a caudillo is adhesion to a man, not a myth." - Jorge Portilla, in the late 1940s
It is rational to distrust our institutions. Only the irrational or the company man would claim to trust them after all we have seen of their texts, their tweets, their messages. We know them for what they are. And we know we cannot trust their plans.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Why do most DC thinktanks still exist when they've had zero policy successes for the past 8 years, with the obvious exception of Brookings engineering Russiagate?
As I've written previously, the policy successes of the DC right thinktanks were welfare reform (Heritage), the Iraq surge (AEI), and judicial shift toward liberty (Cato, the most successful). What have they done in the past ten years?
I can list the accomplishments from @ManhattanInst @FamStudies @NCLAlegal @TheFIREorg off the top of my head ... but their budgets are much smaller.
First, not a single candidate Trump endorsed who lost backed his fictional "no exceptions even in the case of rape incest or life of the mother". Literally zero Republican candidates think abortion should be banned when a mother's life is at risk.
Second, Trump claims the pro-life position moved large numbers of voters against Republicans. Yet the most pro-life R incumbent candidates all won! DeSantis, Kemp, Abbott, DeWine, go down the list. And all the Senate candidates who won were super pro-life too. Oops!