My Grandfather was a very close friend of Tom Ayers. They worked at ComEd together. I meet MR. Ayers a few times as a child. He was a kind and nice man. He looked after my Mom after Grandpa passed.
But his trust fund kid turned into a socialist bomb maker in Madison Wisconsin. You are right about his wealth. I doubt he ever "earned" a decent living! Maybe that's part of the reason he's such good friends with barry o! Neither one of them ever did much of anything to improve the country business wise!!
I thought, perhaps mistakenly, that Ayers was Obama's mentor. Like Ayers saw something in Obama that could be molded into a velvet glove, politically speaking, over the DemoCommie iron fist.
Absolutely 100% spot on Jeff. This was the type of article that you wrote that first caught my attention and passed on to my friends. The other things in common, such as being from the Chicago area, being a trader and a U of I grad just reaffirmed that you knew what you were talking about! ;)
Perhaps an antidote is succession- not states from the union - but rather counties from states and townships from counties. Think eastern Oregon counties moving to Idaho
Happy to see this title available through my local library (Arlington Heights, Il) through hoopla. The next generations need access to alternative narratives in the founding and how to return to that spirit.
Too many generations raised to believe that we can redistribute our way to prosperity - rather than fostering value creation!
The photo is remarkable, two grinning gargoyles bedecked in their commie regalia, without a mention by the media of the damage they have done or the lie Obama told about their friendship.
As for me, I was born an Irish Catholic in Chicago--I'm sure you know many like me. But I changed. Not happy about it, but life and times change. https://pd1000.substack.com/p/vote-strategically
A not-so-minor observation from last night: did y’all notice the chants of ‘from the river to the sea… free free Palestine’ post-election from the supporters of one of the socialist winners of a NY Dem US House primary?
The socialist-Islamist coalition may have become the pre-eminent one in NYC….
Brilliant commentary Jeff! It seems every generation must learn the hard way about collectivism. It's incumbent on the most resourced to follow the lead of Elon Musk by putting their wallets, and shoulder, into fighting for freedom.
BTW, the picture of Bernadine Dohrn startled me. She was a genuine hotty when at the University of Chicago Law School. Dressed very preppy. She turned heads whenever she walked into the law school lounge.
I think it was on PowerLine (yesterday? probably not new to them) that said we are divided as much as in the 1850's. And we will see if we can survive as half-socialist/half-free.
Very long, very insightful post. It's a lot to absorb. Maybe too much in one post. Might be better broken up into two or three partsso people can better absorb the message. I know your passionate about this, but less more focussed might be better. MHO. Where you writing from. The great north woods?
Cheating in elections has been going on a long time and more than 90%, and probably closer to 95%, are never caught. My own experiences in Crook County, where threats were made by street gang members on a one-to-one basis with no corroborating witnesses, and two of my friends having the same experience, confirms that.
In the end, there will be a breakup of the country. Since the Communists will not quietly accept any free states leaving, the breakup will be in the form of a civil war that will make the first one seem like a backyard brawl by comparison
It’s a question of “when” not “if”. When the radical left Democrats come to power, they will do a lot of things to crush democracy and dissent. One of the first will be to pack the court. At that point, the rightist states would refuse to recognize the authority of the government. I expect the rightist states to ultimately win as they control the energy, most of the food supply and the geography (leftist territory would be more fractured while rightist territory is more continuous). The left would control the ports and the institutions. However, any such war would cause total financial and economic collapse which would be the real killer.
The other reason the D.S.A. is enjoying success now (in addition to the well-known and documented "long march through the institutions" by Marxist types) is that "mainstream Democrats" totally set themselves up for a fall: first, the go on and on in full hyperbole mode about how bad Trump is ("existential threat;" "Nazi" etc. etc.)...but then, they proceed to demonstrate to new voters that WE CAN'T DO ANYTHING TO STOP HIM. (2 failed impeachments; dozens of now-overturned criminal cases; lawsuits to keep Trump off the ballot; continuous legal challenges). It's like they're practically issuing a formal invitation to D.S.A.: "Things are SO, SO, SO bad right now...and WE can't do anything to stop it...so you far-lefties might as well have a 'go' at it!"
We're told the left is hopelessly disorganized, incompetent, and detached from reality. Yet we're also told it successfully spent decades infiltrating universities, the judiciary, media, and major cities in a coordinated effort to reshape the country. Which is it?
The essay repeatedly invokes the "Obama network" as evidence of radical influence. Fine. But if we're going to judge political leaders by every fringe figure who passes through their orbit, then we should be equally willing to discuss the conspiracy theorists, election deniers, white nationalists, and assorted extremists who have found a home in Trump's political network.
The criticism of Bill Ayers as a wealthy trust-fund beneficiary is also curious. If inherited wealth and economic inequality are the concern, it's hard to ignore that many of the wealthiest Americans, corporate executives, and billionaire donors overwhelmingly support Republican candidates and policies.
Then there are the claims about cheating and stolen elections. There is no evidence presented. None. Meanwhile, gerrymandering has been employed aggressively by both parties, but modern political science research generally finds Republicans have benefited more from it than Democrats. If election integrity matters, then consistency should matter too.
We often hear here about others of suffering from "Trump Derangement Syndrome" while reading today what can only be described as a lingering case of Obama Derangement Syndrome. Nearly two decades after Obama's election, he still occupies a central role in explaining everything wrong with America. The opening of the Obama Presidential Center this week must be a particularly difficult development?
Ultimately, the biggest difference between the Obama era and the Trump era wasn't ideology. It was outlook. Obama built his politics around the belief that Americans could work together despite their differences and that public life could be a force for progress. Trump's politics are rooted in conflict. There is always an enemy, always a betrayal, always a group to blame. Collaboration is treated as weakness. Compromise is surrender.
This is probably all confirmation bias on my end though.
It is your confirmation bias and lack of understanding of statistics. If you think the LA mayor election wasn't stolen, you are blind. Ayers and the insider wealthy do not have to live with the consequences of their decisions. See JB Pritzker as another example.
If the LA mayoral election was stolen, what specifically is the evidence? Not that the outcome was surprising or that the counting took a long time. What is the evidence that fraudulent votes were cast or counted?
And on Ayers/Pritzker, it sounds like we maybe agree. Wealthy people often advocate policies whose consequences they don't personally experience. Pritzker is wealthy enough that he doesn't personally need a stronger social safety net, better public schools, Medicaid, subsidized housing or unemployment insurance.
On the other side, Musk, Bezos and Theil don't have to live with the consequences when lower taxes lead to reduced public services, infrastructure spending, safety-net programs, limited retirement, healthcare, and education options.
A surprising outcome or a slow count is not, by itself, proof of theft. But that does not mean the system is healthy or beyond criticism. A voting system can be legal and still be terrible. When a major city takes days or weeks to count ballots, when late mail ballots shift outcomes, when voter rolls are bloated, when ballot collection rules are loose, and when the public is told to shut up and trust the process, people are going to distrust the result. That is not “election denial.” That is the predictable consequence of designing an election system that prioritizes convenience, partisan turnout machinery, and administrative flexibility over speed, transparency, and confidence.
The Ayers/Pritzker comparison also misses the point. The criticism is not merely “rich people support policies they do not personally need.” That describes almost every billionaire in politics. The sharper point is that left-wing billionaires and trust-fund radicals often push policies whose costs are absorbed by working- and middle-class people while the advocates remain insulated by wealth, private schools, private security, gated neighborhoods, tax lawyers, and mobility.
If Musk, Bezos, or Thiel push lower taxes, they can fairly be criticized for protecting capital. Fine. But the same standard applies to Pritzker-style progressivism: wealthy elites can demand higher spending, softer crime policy, expansive welfare states, aggressive regulation, and failing public-school monopolies while never having to live under the consequences in the way ordinary citizens do. The issue is not that rich people are disqualified from political debate. The issue is that elite progressives routinely claim moral authority while exporting the costs of their ideology downward. That is not compassion. It is luxury-belief politics with taxpayers funding the bills.
This is a clever rhetorical setup, but it collapses two very different ideas into one convenient contradiction. A movement can be strategically effective at capturing institutions while still being incoherent, destructive, and detached from ordinary reality once it governs them. Bureaucracies, universities, media shops, nonprofit networks, city governments, and legal institutions do not require genius to influence; they require persistence, ideological conformity, credentialed gatekeeping, and a willingness to punish dissent. The left’s problem is not that it lacks organization. Its problem is that the worldview it has organized around often produces failure: collapsing schools, unsafe cities, ideological universities, censorship dressed up as “safety,” and a managerial class that lectures the country while avoiding accountability for the results.
The attempt to turn this into a both-sides exercise also dodges the central point. Fringe characters around Trump are not remotely the same as the institutional pipeline that moved radical ideas from academia into law, HR departments, newsrooms, schools, prosecutors’ offices, and federal agencies. Nor does pointing to Republican billionaires answer the critique of wealthy radicals using inherited privilege to attack the very system that made their privilege possible. As for elections, the issue is not simply “stolen election” rhetoric; it is the broader pattern of selective outrage over election rules, ballot practices, censorship, lawfare, and gerrymandering whenever those tools favor one side. And invoking “Obama Derangement Syndrome” is cute, but Obama matters because his presidency accelerated the fusion of elite progressivism, racial grievance politics, administrative-state power, and cultural radicalism. Trump’s politics are combative because millions of Americans concluded, reasonably, that compromise had become a one-way ratchet: the left captures institutions, declares its preferences morally mandatory, and then calls resistance “extremism.”
Why? I learned the truth about leftism from immigrants from communist countries. I lived in a working class town and realized that the left could care less about them. Privately they exposed an agreement with eugenics. Their “educated” class was best for decision making….
My Grandfather was a very close friend of Tom Ayers. They worked at ComEd together. I meet MR. Ayers a few times as a child. He was a kind and nice man. He looked after my Mom after Grandpa passed.
But his trust fund kid turned into a socialist bomb maker in Madison Wisconsin. You are right about his wealth. I doubt he ever "earned" a decent living! Maybe that's part of the reason he's such good friends with barry o! Neither one of them ever did much of anything to improve the country business wise!!
I thought, perhaps mistakenly, that Ayers was Obama's mentor. Like Ayers saw something in Obama that could be molded into a velvet glove, politically speaking, over the DemoCommie iron fist.
There is a distinct possibility that that happened. I know barry soetoro had a lot of help up the ladder!
Absolutely 100% spot on Jeff. This was the type of article that you wrote that first caught my attention and passed on to my friends. The other things in common, such as being from the Chicago area, being a trader and a U of I grad just reaffirmed that you knew what you were talking about! ;)
Perhaps an antidote is succession- not states from the union - but rather counties from states and townships from counties. Think eastern Oregon counties moving to Idaho
And everything West of the Colorado Front Range moving to Utah. ;)
My friend Michael Lotus postulated similar in America 3.0. Good book. https://www.amazon.com/America-3-0-Rebooting-Prosperity-America%C2%92s/dp/1594036438
Thanks for the recommendation. I bought a copy with your link.
Happy to see this title available through my local library (Arlington Heights, Il) through hoopla. The next generations need access to alternative narratives in the founding and how to return to that spirit.
Too many generations raised to believe that we can redistribute our way to prosperity - rather than fostering value creation!
Thanks for the great post.
The photo is remarkable, two grinning gargoyles bedecked in their commie regalia, without a mention by the media of the damage they have done or the lie Obama told about their friendship.
As for me, I was born an Irish Catholic in Chicago--I'm sure you know many like me. But I changed. Not happy about it, but life and times change. https://pd1000.substack.com/p/vote-strategically
A not-so-minor observation from last night: did y’all notice the chants of ‘from the river to the sea… free free Palestine’ post-election from the supporters of one of the socialist winners of a NY Dem US House primary?
The socialist-Islamist coalition may have become the pre-eminent one in NYC….
The piece Thomas Wolfe wrote about the party at Lennie's comes to mind
Excellent post with some concise and clear summaries of why government planning and centralized power fail economies. Let the invisible hand rule.
Brilliant commentary Jeff! It seems every generation must learn the hard way about collectivism. It's incumbent on the most resourced to follow the lead of Elon Musk by putting their wallets, and shoulder, into fighting for freedom.
Thanks. Of course, we know shady Republicans that will go along to get along, as long as they get some
Great piece, Jeff. We need more from you.
BTW, the picture of Bernadine Dohrn startled me. She was a genuine hotty when at the University of Chicago Law School. Dressed very preppy. She turned heads whenever she walked into the law school lounge.
John Marcoux
Liberalism does that. Ha! (a joke, and yes she was a hottie)
I think it was on PowerLine (yesterday? probably not new to them) that said we are divided as much as in the 1850's. And we will see if we can survive as half-socialist/half-free.
The biggest difference is tax dollars. If you were a slave holder in Georgia, did it really affect me in New York? Slavery was a moral issue.
Very long, very insightful post. It's a lot to absorb. Maybe too much in one post. Might be better broken up into two or three partsso people can better absorb the message. I know your passionate about this, but less more focussed might be better. MHO. Where you writing from. The great north woods?
Great North Woods. We are doing a lot of stuff here so there is only so much time to jot things down
Hammer home the mountains of evidence of election fraud that Democrats have committed relentlessly since the 1800s.
The truth is there. Just needs to be told.
Cheating in elections has been going on a long time and more than 90%, and probably closer to 95%, are never caught. My own experiences in Crook County, where threats were made by street gang members on a one-to-one basis with no corroborating witnesses, and two of my friends having the same experience, confirms that.
In the end, there will be a breakup of the country. Since the Communists will not quietly accept any free states leaving, the breakup will be in the form of a civil war that will make the first one seem like a backyard brawl by comparison
Hope not. But you might not be incorrect. See ANTIFA
It’s a question of “when” not “if”. When the radical left Democrats come to power, they will do a lot of things to crush democracy and dissent. One of the first will be to pack the court. At that point, the rightist states would refuse to recognize the authority of the government. I expect the rightist states to ultimately win as they control the energy, most of the food supply and the geography (leftist territory would be more fractured while rightist territory is more continuous). The left would control the ports and the institutions. However, any such war would cause total financial and economic collapse which would be the real killer.
The other reason the D.S.A. is enjoying success now (in addition to the well-known and documented "long march through the institutions" by Marxist types) is that "mainstream Democrats" totally set themselves up for a fall: first, the go on and on in full hyperbole mode about how bad Trump is ("existential threat;" "Nazi" etc. etc.)...but then, they proceed to demonstrate to new voters that WE CAN'T DO ANYTHING TO STOP HIM. (2 failed impeachments; dozens of now-overturned criminal cases; lawsuits to keep Trump off the ballot; continuous legal challenges). It's like they're practically issuing a formal invitation to D.S.A.: "Things are SO, SO, SO bad right now...and WE can't do anything to stop it...so you far-lefties might as well have a 'go' at it!"
We're told the left is hopelessly disorganized, incompetent, and detached from reality. Yet we're also told it successfully spent decades infiltrating universities, the judiciary, media, and major cities in a coordinated effort to reshape the country. Which is it?
The essay repeatedly invokes the "Obama network" as evidence of radical influence. Fine. But if we're going to judge political leaders by every fringe figure who passes through their orbit, then we should be equally willing to discuss the conspiracy theorists, election deniers, white nationalists, and assorted extremists who have found a home in Trump's political network.
The criticism of Bill Ayers as a wealthy trust-fund beneficiary is also curious. If inherited wealth and economic inequality are the concern, it's hard to ignore that many of the wealthiest Americans, corporate executives, and billionaire donors overwhelmingly support Republican candidates and policies.
Then there are the claims about cheating and stolen elections. There is no evidence presented. None. Meanwhile, gerrymandering has been employed aggressively by both parties, but modern political science research generally finds Republicans have benefited more from it than Democrats. If election integrity matters, then consistency should matter too.
We often hear here about others of suffering from "Trump Derangement Syndrome" while reading today what can only be described as a lingering case of Obama Derangement Syndrome. Nearly two decades after Obama's election, he still occupies a central role in explaining everything wrong with America. The opening of the Obama Presidential Center this week must be a particularly difficult development?
Ultimately, the biggest difference between the Obama era and the Trump era wasn't ideology. It was outlook. Obama built his politics around the belief that Americans could work together despite their differences and that public life could be a force for progress. Trump's politics are rooted in conflict. There is always an enemy, always a betrayal, always a group to blame. Collaboration is treated as weakness. Compromise is surrender.
This is probably all confirmation bias on my end though.
It is your confirmation bias and lack of understanding of statistics. If you think the LA mayor election wasn't stolen, you are blind. Ayers and the insider wealthy do not have to live with the consequences of their decisions. See JB Pritzker as another example.
If the LA mayoral election was stolen, what specifically is the evidence? Not that the outcome was surprising or that the counting took a long time. What is the evidence that fraudulent votes were cast or counted?
And on Ayers/Pritzker, it sounds like we maybe agree. Wealthy people often advocate policies whose consequences they don't personally experience. Pritzker is wealthy enough that he doesn't personally need a stronger social safety net, better public schools, Medicaid, subsidized housing or unemployment insurance.
On the other side, Musk, Bezos and Theil don't have to live with the consequences when lower taxes lead to reduced public services, infrastructure spending, safety-net programs, limited retirement, healthcare, and education options.
A surprising outcome or a slow count is not, by itself, proof of theft. But that does not mean the system is healthy or beyond criticism. A voting system can be legal and still be terrible. When a major city takes days or weeks to count ballots, when late mail ballots shift outcomes, when voter rolls are bloated, when ballot collection rules are loose, and when the public is told to shut up and trust the process, people are going to distrust the result. That is not “election denial.” That is the predictable consequence of designing an election system that prioritizes convenience, partisan turnout machinery, and administrative flexibility over speed, transparency, and confidence.
The Ayers/Pritzker comparison also misses the point. The criticism is not merely “rich people support policies they do not personally need.” That describes almost every billionaire in politics. The sharper point is that left-wing billionaires and trust-fund radicals often push policies whose costs are absorbed by working- and middle-class people while the advocates remain insulated by wealth, private schools, private security, gated neighborhoods, tax lawyers, and mobility.
If Musk, Bezos, or Thiel push lower taxes, they can fairly be criticized for protecting capital. Fine. But the same standard applies to Pritzker-style progressivism: wealthy elites can demand higher spending, softer crime policy, expansive welfare states, aggressive regulation, and failing public-school monopolies while never having to live under the consequences in the way ordinary citizens do. The issue is not that rich people are disqualified from political debate. The issue is that elite progressives routinely claim moral authority while exporting the costs of their ideology downward. That is not compassion. It is luxury-belief politics with taxpayers funding the bills.
Exactly
Mail ballots. And paying homeless for their votes.
That's sufficient for anyone.
Don't confuse evidence required for a jail term with evidence sufficient to convince any honest person with above a room temp IQ.
This is a clever rhetorical setup, but it collapses two very different ideas into one convenient contradiction. A movement can be strategically effective at capturing institutions while still being incoherent, destructive, and detached from ordinary reality once it governs them. Bureaucracies, universities, media shops, nonprofit networks, city governments, and legal institutions do not require genius to influence; they require persistence, ideological conformity, credentialed gatekeeping, and a willingness to punish dissent. The left’s problem is not that it lacks organization. Its problem is that the worldview it has organized around often produces failure: collapsing schools, unsafe cities, ideological universities, censorship dressed up as “safety,” and a managerial class that lectures the country while avoiding accountability for the results.
The attempt to turn this into a both-sides exercise also dodges the central point. Fringe characters around Trump are not remotely the same as the institutional pipeline that moved radical ideas from academia into law, HR departments, newsrooms, schools, prosecutors’ offices, and federal agencies. Nor does pointing to Republican billionaires answer the critique of wealthy radicals using inherited privilege to attack the very system that made their privilege possible. As for elections, the issue is not simply “stolen election” rhetoric; it is the broader pattern of selective outrage over election rules, ballot practices, censorship, lawfare, and gerrymandering whenever those tools favor one side. And invoking “Obama Derangement Syndrome” is cute, but Obama matters because his presidency accelerated the fusion of elite progressivism, racial grievance politics, administrative-state power, and cultural radicalism. Trump’s politics are combative because millions of Americans concluded, reasonably, that compromise had become a one-way ratchet: the left captures institutions, declares its preferences morally mandatory, and then calls resistance “extremism.”
Yup, it's just a person in denial.
The “long march through the institutions” was not a joke. As a former lefty who grew up in the 70’s i thought it was crazy talk of all my peers.
Why did you change?
Why? I learned the truth about leftism from immigrants from communist countries. I lived in a working class town and realized that the left could care less about them. Privately they exposed an agreement with eugenics. Their “educated” class was best for decision making….