Author: Fritz Pettyjohn

It’s been clear from the beginning that Trump is not a conservative, as that term is understood in this country.  The conservative American tradition begins with Mason and Madison, was continued by Jefferson and Jackson, and was born again in the 20th century with Barry Goldwater in 1964.  It believes, above all else, in limited government, and in the sovereignty of the States.  Conservatives like Madison and Mason wrote the Constitution, and did so with the purpose of limiting and controlling the power of the federal government.

In order to secure the support of Hamilton and the Federalists, a number of compromises were struck.  The Federalists were the Wall Street Bankers of the day.  Hamilton, their leader, founded the Bank of New York in 1784, three years before the Convention.  They wanted a strong federal government, the stronger the better.  They wanted the federal government to use its financial power to invest in vast internal improvements that the country desperately needed.  Roads, canals, an entire national infrastructure needed to be built, and only the federal government would have the ability to raise the money.

Madison and the conservatives wanted none of it.  That sort of thing wasn’t the federal government’s business.  Much of our political history is the story of these two contesting forces, often called Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians.  The Jeffersonians represent our southern tradition, and culture, which began at Jamestown in 1607.  The Hamiltonians are part of our northern culture, which began in Massachusetts in 1619.  These two forces have contested for power in this country since the beginning, and they’re still at it.

I’m a Jeffersonian, and proud of it.  Trump is a Hamiltonian, to his bones.  We aren’t destined to see eye to eye.  He wants to exercise power, and I want to restrain him.  The branch of government I am associated with, the Federal Assembly, has all the power it needs to exercise the restraint that may be needed.

David A. Lieb, the Missouri correspondent of the Associated Press, has an outstanding article on our movement.  This guy is a real journalist.  He took a serious story, did his home work, figured out what was happening, and wrote a fair and balanced account of our story.  Where have you been, David A. Lieb?  It’s about time.  I’ve been waiting for some reporter who was smart enough to figure it all out  to come along.  It was David Lieb who did it.  My hat is off.

Now that we’re out in the open, thanks to Lieb, we need to make it understood that we’re not part of the Trump phenomenon.  We’re conservatives, Jeffersonians.  Trump is a Hamiltonian, and as such we oppose him.

Actually, aside from his personal quirks, Trump is normal, and so are his fans.  It’s the media, the universities and the rest of the Ruling Class that’s weird.  For one thing, they don’t really believe in their country.

They talk about the Bill of Rights, but they don’t care about the Constitution, our history or our native culture.  We’re a coarse and vulgar people, always have been, and always will be.  We’ve been white racists ever since we got off the boat at Jamestown.  We’ve oppressed women, practiced genocide on millions of innocent Native Americans, stole their land, and imported black slaves to do the hard labor we wouldn’t do.  We stole half our country from Mexico, and have used our military power to exploit the entire Third World.

Normal Americans love their country, revere the Constitution and are proud of our history.  We think we’re the best country ever.  So there’s quite a gap between normal Americans and the Ruling Class.  Because they don’t even like the country they live in, the Ruling Class would like to do away with its sovereignty, to surrender it to the United Nations, or the World Court, or some international institution.  It’s why Obama wants to give up American control of the internet.  If they could get away with it, they would surrender our independence tomorrow.

But that’s not popular, so they do what they can.  And what they do is not represent us to the world, but to represent the rest of the world to us.  They always want us to look at things from the foreign perspective, and make allowances.  And do we ever make allowances.  We get taken to the cleaners not because our negotiators are stupid.  It’s because they’re traitors.

The last time a representative of  the people, not the Ruling Class, was President was 1989, when the Gipper left office.  That’s a 36 year span.  A whole lot of deals were done in the last 36 years, and they all need a second look.  From a strictly American perspective.  What’s in it for us?

Watching Trump and the media is like watching the final scene in the Coen Brothers Hail Caesar!   Josh Brolin is a movie studio head, and George Clooney is one of his actors.  Clooney’s been kidnapped and brainwashed by some Hollywood leftists, and is babbling some Marxist bullshit.  Brolin gets up from behind his deck, walks over to Clooney and bitch slaps the hell out of him, and tells him to go out and film the damn movie.

I hope this movie ends as well.

 

George Soros and the Koch brothers are political amateurs who waste enormous amounts of money on politics.  Neither one of them has any idea what they’re doing.  Half the time their efforts turn out to be counter productive.  With Soros, that’s a good thing.  He’s Dr. Evil.  The Kochs are conservatives, and  mean well.  They’re just dopes, when it comes to politics.

It all goes back to their Dad, and hero, Fred.  After graduating from MIT in 1922 he invented a new fracking method, which made turning oil into gasoline far more efficient.  All the major oil companies wanted to use it, but they didn’t want to pay him to do so.  So for over ten years Koch and his partners were embroiled in 44 different law suits with big oil.  He prevailed in every one of them, except for one where the judge was bribed.  In the mean time he had no employment in the American oil industry, and went to the Soviet Union to train a new generation of Russian petroleum engineers.  His four years in the USSR made him a fanatical anti-communist.

Back in the USA he got back into the oil business, and made a great fortune.  He was a brilliant engineer.  But over the course of my life I have learned one important thing about engineers.  They are, uniformly, politically incompetent.  They think in straight lines, and a solution is either right or wrong.  There are not a lot of grays in engineering.  In politics, that’s about all there is.

So in 1958 the ferociously anti-communist Fred Koch was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, and preached its doctrines to his four sons. The Koch brothers learned about the dangers of Article V sitting around the dinner table, from a man they admired above all others  — their dad.

In 1958 if you’re a chemical engineer, who thinks the Communists have infected much of American society, maybe being afraid of Article V made sense.  You really don’t even understand why Article V is in the Constitution.  Few people do.  But you do think there is an active conspiracy in this country to subvert the Constitution, and Article V would be one way to do it.  So you oppose it, period.  It must be off limits.  The communist conspirators might get control of an Article V Convention, and we’d lose it all.

But this is 2016, not 1958.  Communism, as a movement and a conspiracy, is dead.  Republicans control 2/3 of our State Legislatures, and these are conservative Republicans, every damn one of them.  I’ve met a lot of them personally, was one myself for a while, and I know what I’m talking about.  The idea that these patriotic, intelligent men and women would allow any harm to come to the Constitution is crazy.

You’d think, here in 2016, the Kochs would be willing to take another look at Article V,  but they won’t.  The reason this Article V movement has taken as long as it has is due to the Kochs.  They have resisted us, both in the open and covertly, every step of the way.  All to honor dear old Dad, and his devotion to the John Birch Society.

Utah Senator Mike Lee’s father was a big man in the Birch Society, and for a long time he opposed us as well.  But he changed his tune, and that’s how we got Utah, maybe the toughest State in the union for us to get.  The win in Utah was huge, giving us momentum, and credibility, in all the Mountain West.

Before the 2015 session of the Utah Legislature, Sen. Lee attended a Republican Caucus in Salt Lake City.  He was asked by our sponsor, Rep. Kraig Powell, if he still thought Article V should be off limits.  He told Kraig, and the caucus, that his father would be rolling over in his grave, but he’d changed his mind.  Under current circumstances, Article V should be used.

Mike Lee could admit that he, and his father, had been wrong.  Times change.  But the Kochs?  No, they’re engineers.  It’s all black and white, just like Dad told us.

If the Article V movement ever got any money behind it, it would take off like a rocket.  In the mean time, we carry on.

China is our only serious rival for power in this world.  Not Russia, or Japan, or Europe.  It’s China.  Trump just pushed the reset button in Sino-American relations, and it looks like he knew precisely what he was doing.

Today’s China news has a couple other items, and they’re both related to Trump’s call to the President of Taiwan.  Just by coincidence, Henry Kissinger happens to be in Beijing today conferring with his old buddy Chinese President Xi.  He’s actually there  as Trump’s personal envoy, to tell Xi what Trump’s up to.  Also, purely by coincidence, Trump talked yesterday with Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad about being U. S. Ambassador to China.  Branstad and Xi go way back together, to 1985 when they met a trade visit by Branstad.

Again, just by circumstance,  the first call Trump took after winning was from Japanese P. M. Abe.  And Trump also just happened to talk recently with Philippine President Duterte.  The whole world knows how well Trump and Putin are expected to get along.  They’re soul mates.

In order to have a stable relationship with a competing world power, boundaries must be established.  Trump is setting the border of Chinese power.  Taiwan is within that border, but South Korea is not, Japan is not, and neither are the Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, or Southeast Asia.   China’s northern neighbor (and natural rival for Asian supremacy) Russia is not in it, to say the least.  From our forward base in Guam (currently under construction) we will lead this informal alliance.  It will check any Chinese imperialist aggression.

And we’re not going to lose money on the deal.  We’re pulling our troops from South Korea and Okinawa, and basing them in Guam.  We won’t be subsidizing any one, and we won’t put our troops in harm’s way on some one else’s soil.  That kind of forward deployment is over.

This all sets the table for the upcoming Sino-American trade talks.  China needs to appreciate who has the upper hand, in terms of geopolitical power.   Arrayed against her are Russia, the United States, Japan, South Korea, India and Southeast Asia.  They’re not in a good bargaining position.

Kissinger’s been through this before.  This is how we won the Cold War.  We got China to ally with us, against Russia, and Russia was isolated.  All the other Great Powers were against it, and it couldn’t stand alone.  What Trump is doing is as significant as Nixon’s trip to China in 1971.

And all this can be done peacefully.  There’s nothing worth fighting over, once the terms of the relationship are established.  Besides, war is bad for business, and the Chinese want to get rich.  We want them to get rich, as well.  It can all be worked out.  Trump’s election didn’t repeal the law of comparative advantage.

Trump’s at a party tonight.  He deserves to enjoy himself.  It turns out that in world affairs, he’s a hell of a lot smarter than I am.

The Trump coalition has taken over, and I am part of a small faction within that coalition.  I’m a libertarian and a constitutional conservative, and there just aren’t very many of us.  Hell, I didn’t even vote for Trump, but that was personal. As voters, there aren’t enough of us to matter.

But because we understand the Constitution we have an important role to play.  One of us will be appointed to the open Court seat, and we’ll get all the other Supreme Court vacancies as well.  I’d like to see Cruz get Scalia’s seat.  It would be a big hearted move, and we need all of that we can get.  Regardless, we’re the ones who care about the Constitution, and as long as we get the Court we’re relatively satisfied.

I saw Steve Ballmer on Fox Business today, and he said the words I’ve been waiting for weeks for a Democrat to say.  He said, “We need to balance the budget.”  Ballmer is Microsoft, the 22nd richest man in the world, and a brilliant and well connected Democrat.  When he speaks, I listen.  That wasn’t an offhand comment.  And it could have major implications for the Reagan Project.

I haven’t heard a Democrat talk about a balanced budget in 20 years.  Democrats are the party of environmental extremists, trial lawyers and government employees.  The money comes from all three.  The greens give a lot of the cash, but the government has discovered ways that it can funnel cash to the cause as well.  When it settles a case, the federal and state governments direct large parts of the monetary settlement to favored groups, like ACORN.  Its a huge scam, and they do it all the time.

As the Party of enviros, trial lawyers, and government employees the Democrats hate balanced budgets.  The more spending, the more they get out of it.

But there are other Democrats, like Ballmer, private sector Democrats.  And they understand money.  Boy, do they understand money.  And they understand that $20 trillion in debt, with no end in sight, can not be sustained.  Because he’s a Democrat, and loyal, he kept his mouth shut during the election.  But now with Trump and the Republicans doing all the spending, he’s got no hand in the game.

So he wants a balanced budget, which means he wants a BBA, which means he’ll be in support of using Article V.

And if we can agree with him on a BBA, what else can we agree on?  Term limits, maybe?  He’d have to give up Nancy Pelosi after six more years, but by then he’ll probably  be ready to let her go.  What else could we agree on?  It would be an interesting conversation.

Ballmer thinks the internet is as revolutionary as the invention of printing, and in the same way.  The printed word, or book, was a communications revolution and led directly to the invention of science, and the modern world.  It was liberating.  It spread knowledge out from the center, dispersed it.

Just like the internet, and with the same result.  Empowerment of the individual, and the expansion of freedom.