Timothy Birdnow

"Many of you wished me dead. Many of you perhaps still do. But I
hold no grudges and
seek no revenge. I
demand only this...that
you join with me in
building a new Rome, a
Rome that offers
justice, peace and land to all its citizens, not just the privileged few. Support me in this task, and old divisions will be forgotten. Oppose me,
and Rome will not
forgive you a second
time. Senators, the war is over."

Julius Caesar

I just learned an interesting little fact; despite the bad joke about Puerto Rico being "floating garbage" the good people of that Carribean island paradise actually elected a REPUBLICAN as governor - Jennifer Gonzalez Colon, who is currently the non-voting representative for Puerto Rico. Seems the U.S. protectorate is drifting to the right.

No wonder we didn't hear so much talk this time of making Puerto Rico a state; the Dems realize they are starting to lose it and are probably frightened to push for statehood now.

Also, in Florida heavily Puerto Rican areas flipped to Trump. For instance osceola county, a county that is 30% Puerto Rican and which had gone for Biden by 14 points in 2020 flipped to Trump by +1.5, signalling that many PUerto Ricans voted Trump.

So Puerto Ricans seem to be moving from blue to red. Now might be a good time to just float the idea of statehood for Puerto Rico just to watch the Democrats squirm. (Not actually do it now but float the idea to see how they react.)

I suspect the last four years have been a splash of cold water on the faces of many of the traditional Democratic groups and slowly but surely they are starting to realize their interests - and their futures - lie not with the socialist Democrats but with the more traditional GOP.

Certainly Ted Cruz' big win in Texas suggests Hispanics in general are moving to the right. (I think it is myopic to look at Hispanics as a single group; they are as vastly different as Europeans and a person from Ecuador would be insulted at his being characterized as the same thing as a Mexican, say.) Granted, it's hard to tailor a message to every variant of Hispanic, but we need to discriminate a little better if we want to pull in the major groups in that block. But they may well be turning away from the socialist Democrats and for the same reason many of them left their homelands in the first place. No Venezualan refugee wants to put in an anglo version of Hugo Chavez.

lt is often true too that first generation immigrants are liberals and Democrats; they are here with limited resources and the Democrats give them free stuff. But as they rise in the free market system they start to realize that this does not serve them well,but rather keeps them poor and ignorant and that by design. So they start to flip to the GOP as they mature as Americans. I wonder (hope) is this isn't what is happening now? Are many Hispanics growing as Americans and coming to appreciate the need to maintain a free market system and a politically diverse country? Perhaps.

Getting back to Puerto Rico many of them saw the neglect of the Democrats over the years, especially after hurricanes decimated their Island. And they saw it was under Republican leadership they rebuilt, not under Democrats. The Democrats solution was always to move them to Republican states in America and force them to live here. There was little interest in rebuilding by the Dems.

I would add the New Progressive Party is one of the two main parties in Puerto Rico and it actually advocates independence and not statehood. It is considered right of center. THIS is the party of Jennifer Gonzalez Colon. So there remains strong sentiment in Puerto Rico to NOT become a state (precisely why now would be a good time to float the idea by the GOP "if the good people of Puerto Rico so choose".)

Any way you slice it Trump is eating the Democrats lunch and in fact reinvigorating their traditional power base. That's why they so hate the man.

High time. For decades now there has been nobody to speak for Middle America, or any of the marginalized groups (and Middle America is now a marginalized group) and Trump is building a coalition that could well be nigh unto unbeatable. Oh, and the RINO wing is tiptoeing around now. If any group should not have a party it is they, not us. They never considered what we wanted but simply grabbed everything they themselves wanted and told us to like it or lump it. How's that lump taste now, eh?

Julius Caesar and later his nephew Octavius (Augustus) transformed Rome from a corrupt republic in a constant state of civil war into a reasonably peaceful empire and they did so by appealing to the populi - the average person. Caesar's enemies were all patrician types, appealing to the aristocrats and rich men. Caesar and Octavius built a lasting kingdom on the shoulders of Middle Rome. There is great power in the People and both men knew it.

Trump is the American Caesar. He's systematically ingathering the neglected peoples and wedding them to his cause. The Ruling Class - the American Patricians - have most of the advantages, and with technology at their command they seem unbeatable, but so too did the patricians at the time of Caesar. Men like Sulla, or eventually Pompey or Cato, were all from the Patrician class.

Trump, like Caesar, was gracious in victory and put many of his enemies in positions of authority after his triumph. They subsequently killed h im and for the same reasons they have been taking pot-shots at Mr. Trump; Caesar was a reformer who built on the shoulders of the People and that was something the Patricians could not allow.

Octavius would learn the lesson of that; he wiped out his enemies in a series of "proscriptions" which included Brutus and Longinus, two of Julius' assassins, and later he would finish off Marcus Antonious aka Mark Antony, as well as a host of others. He wasn't so much blood-thirsty as he understood better the kinds of vipers he was dealing with.

I wonder at all this; the parallels between the two Caesars and Trump and perhaps his Octavius - J.D. Vance - are rather interesting. Will Trump meet the same fate as Caesar? Certainly that is an attractive prospect to the Demo-Left Patricians. Will J.D. Vance step up as did Augustus? Hard to say.

But I find a striking similarity between then and now. History always repeats. The question is, will Mr. Trump be able to save America as did the two Caesars? Or will they fail and will it all come crashing down? At this stage the salvation of America is a dubious prospect and I am not at all sure it can be done. But Trump is doing everything right and it may be we will see a stronger America emerge. Oh, and Trump is no Caesar; he isn't going to have murder lists like Augustus did. But he can still drive a stake through the Left's heart.

Let us hope anyway. History repeats; first as tragedy then as farce. Let's hope it is neither.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:41 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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