Once the 48-hour media freakout subsides, the number of people genuinely outraged, or even surprised, by Trump's tax returns will be smaller than the number of people outraged that confidential tax information was stolen and leaked to the media.
The public would be wise to be more angry about the leaking of confidential information. If nothing in Trump's taxes is illegal, there's no real story there. The media will try to keep it alive by manufacturing secondary stories about reactions to the original story.
They'll lavishly quote performative outrage from Democrats or whip up "THE INTERNET IS ON FIRE ABOUT TRUMP'S TAXES!" stories that quote five tweets, but working Americans just won't see anything relevant to their lives or the big issues in the election.
But this stuff about leaking confidential information? That's a real threat to you and me, Mom and Pop America. The totalitarian Democrat Party has weaponized every element of government and media to serve its political interests. That IS a big story - one of the biggest.
They can, and will, do this stuff to average working people too. Little People who become inconvenient to powerful Democrats have a way of getting crushed by bizarrely aggressive bureaucrats and mysterious disclosures of confidential information.
From Russiagate to the tax story, the Trump years have seen repeated abuses of power by Democrats in top offices, while they constantly abuse Trump of "abusing power" simply by fulfilling the constitutional duties of his office. The REAL abuses are all coming from the Left.
Then there's the inherently totalitarian idea that people from the "wrong" Party aren't allowed to take full advantage of our ridiculously convoluted tax laws, or other regulatory systems. Trump's taxes are nothing compared to the accounting tricks used by left-wing Hollywood.
We get selective outrage at people for lawfully "avoiding" taxes, but the same people would fight like wildcats to thwart any serious effort at reforming the tax system. There is zero anger at the politicians who wrote and passed the laws Trump followed.
The whole notion of "tax avoidance" as a sin against Big Government is totalitarianism in action. People who lack the proper Party credentials are attacked for following the actual written law instead of imaginary, subjective rules. Politics are held higher than the law.
That's a far more relevant danger for working Americans than vague complaints that one guy didn't pay as much in income tax as people think he should. The Politicization of Everything is affecting every American's life RIGHT NOW. It's a real threat we should be addressing.
I'm all in favor of a radically simplified tax system that would be more focused on fairly collecting the income needed for necessary government, and less on using the tax code as an instrument for manipulating America's economy and society.
I'm all in favor of a system that would save us billions in compliance and enforcement costs for an incomprehensible maze of rules and exceptions - and no, the rules don't become "loopholes" just because you suddenly decide you don't like the way someone uses them.
I would very much like to take the tax system away from the totalitarians - but no matter how loudly they complain about political infidels "gaming" the system to "avoid" paying taxes, they will never, ever surrender the vast power they gain from the system as it stands.
I would wager none of the people shrieking about Trump's taxes could name a single rule he followed that should be changed, or explain how they would reform it. Many of those rules were put there by Democrats, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
We're supposed to take the Trump tax story as a reason to vote against the guy who followed all the rules... and vote for the guy who wrote them, over the course of his half-century political career, the guy who wants to make the rules even more complex and burdensome. /end
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Among the strangest features of GOP internal battles - be it NeverTrump, or conservatives displeased with nominees like McCain or Romney - is this notion that it would be better to throw an election to the Dems and hope a better Republican nominee comes along next time.
How can anyone still seriously think that way, especially after Obama's "Pen and Phone" dictatorship and Biden wiping his posterior with the Constitution to plow ahead with his student loan vote-buying scheme? No, guys, it is NEVER safe to just toss a few wins to the Dems.
Maybe it's a form of projection, a stubborn illusion that the Dem candidate might be relatively harmless and inert in office, as GOP leaders sometimes are. Those illusions should have been utterly shattered by now.
When pundits wrote a decade or two ago that corruption would become the big story around the world, I was skeptical. People love to COMPLAIN about corruption, sure, but few electorates are prepared to take decisive action against it.
Corruption is absolutely inherent to Big Government. Repeat after me, and teach your children: THERE ARE NO CLEAN BIG GOVERNMENTS. Amassing huge amounts of power and money in a central State is like dropping sugar cubes amid anthills.
One reason Big Governments never get clean is they have so many weapons at their disposal to distract the public from anti-corruption initiatives. Key segments of the electorate get paid off, too. Big Media is easily drawn into the cesspool and made comfortable.
It is difficult to combat totalitarianism through electoral politics because the whole point of totalitarianism is to seize control of elections. They terrorize and propagandize people for years, then hold a "vote" to find out if their techniques were at least 51% effective.
Defeating totalitarianism requires spirited resistance and good humor. Mock them and make them look ridiculous. They can't stand it, because they are driven by self-righteousness. Totalitarians are small people who need to feel large by joining herds and crushing outsiders.
Defy them at every turn. Go where you aren't supposed to go, say what you're not supposed to say, and do it all with a smile. Exhaust their resources while refusing to become demoralized. Raise the price of totalitarianism by bankrupting its corporate partners when possible.
The greatest threat to democracy at present is the deliberate effort to erase nationhood and citizenship through mass migration, against the express wishes of citizens.
You don't have much of a "democracy," much less a constitutional republic, if the ruling elite can ignore voters to erase the border and shower benefits and privileges on foreign nationals. It's an explicit rejection of national sovereignty.
You don't have any kind of "democracy" if the Ruling Class can use mass migration to create a new electorate that votes the way it wants. Votes have little power if the rulers can dilute them at will.
The Democrat Party grows increasingly less interested in pretending it cares about American citizens, or feels any sense of duty toward America as a nation. The Party was never really good at this, but at least it used to make some modest efforts.
As I've written previously, every Democrat thinks their Sacred Agenda is far more important than any vestigial sense of duty they might feel toward the American people. There is no "American people" to them, just groups of favored constituents and despised enemies.
America isn't really a legitimate nation under Dem ideology, which frees them of feeling any sense of responsibility to the country as a whole, or any weight of tradition that might interfere with their quest for power. They see not one nation under God, but the Balkans.
This once again has me thinking about how everything went nuts in American youth culture during the Great Anti-Bullying Crusade, which was really more about the Left studying and adopting classic bully tactics to impose its ideology on vulnerable young people.
One element of the growing social discontent in America today is that you have an entirely feminized Mean Girls ruling class wielding increasing levels of compulsive force to impose its ideology on an essentially masculine middle and lower class.
It's like those Middle Eastern countries where a Shiite minority rules over a restless Sunni population, or vice versa. Centralized power has grown to totalitarian levels, and it's concentrated in the hands of a political elite that shares nothing of the majority's worldview.