Political Pistachio
By Douglas V. Gibbs
The “student uprisings” across France have evolved into full-on violent riots with buildings in flames, including historic landmarks and government structures. The smoking husks of vehicles line streets as rioters fill the roadways in a violent battle against law enforcement, and Western Civilization, about six months before the country’s next major election. News outlets indicate that inside the chaos is a “franchise of communist groups, labor unions, and global activists.” They conveniently left out the primary igniters: Muslim Migrants.
“It’s not about having more crayons in the classroom,” said Dana Perino this morning on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”
Saturday was the most violent of the days of recent civil unrest, and will likely rank high as a day of mayhem in modern French history. More than half a million people poured into the streets in what the Interior Ministry pegged at roughly 550,000 demonstrators, while the hard-left CGT union bragged of “over 800,000.”
As night fell, the mobs increased their savagery. By the time the tear gas cleared, more than 2,000 had been arrested nationwide, a figure Interior Minister Laurent Nunez later revised upward, with the Guardian reporting 2,400 across the country, including 855 in Paris alone. More than 600 police officers and firefighters were injured. At least two people were killed. In Saint-Étienne a 17-year-old boy lost his hand to a crowd-control grenade; in Mulhouse a 17-year-old girl lost an eye.
The 143-year-old town hall of Limoges, a landmark dating to 1873, was torched, its spire collapsing in flames and reviving memories of the Notre-Dame fire. In Marseille, hundreds stormed City Hall. In Lyon, the tourism office was set ablaze. Rioters pushed toward the Élysée Palace itself. The Louvre was forced to close as protesters blocked its entrance. A Rolex store was looted; Louis Vuitton was cleaned out in Bordeaux. French newspapers screamed “LE CHAOS” and “SCENES D’INSURRECTION.”
Chaos and insurrection. The very things the hard-left has been accusing their opponents of being capable of; projection, to say the least.
The mainstream press has settled on a tidy explanation: a Gen-Z “polycrisis” over the cost of living, fuel prices, and crumbling schools. “It’s the second group that has dominated the headlines,” the Guardian admitted, describing masked rioters torching cars and looting shops. Macron himself performed the ritual dance, telling the nation Sunday night that “tonight, we all feel anger and shame,” while conceding some protesters had “legitimate demands,” and then blaming “insurrectionist elements from radical far-left groups, joined by numerous criminals.”
His interior minister offered his resignation over the failure to anticipate the scale of the chaos. Macron refused it. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who described the country as at a “point of no return,” asked cities to impose “partial curfews.” Marseille banned gatherings from midday to 8 p.m.
But if you only read the legacy outlets, you’d miss the machines behind the mayhem.
A Fox News Digital investigation identified 54 organizations and movements inside France’s October protest ecosystem, and found that only 16, roughly one in three, were actually student or youth groups. The remaining 38 were adult-led communist parties, revolutionary socialist outfits, labor unions, political parties, environmental radicals, and international propaganda outlets. Among them: the CGT and other national unions, the French Communist Party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), the Trotskyist NPA and Révolution Permanente, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, the revived Gilets jaunes, Extinction Rebellion, and Palestinian-solidarity groups.
The international scaffolding is real. Communist academic Vijay Prashad, executive director of Tricontinental, funded by Shanghai-based Marxist (but American citizen) tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham, celebrated the unrest with a three-continent message: “Paris–New Delhi–Buenos Aires.” Singham’s network, including CodePink and BreakThrough News, is amplifying it. And Fox reports a coalition of 28 communist and socialist youth groups is already organizing a coordinated strike across 12 countries on November 20 under the slogan “Fight for Our Future, Not Their Wars!”
This is not a spontaneous temper tantrum. It is a franchise.
Which brings us to what Jim Simpson and Trevor Loudon call the Red/Green Axis (Which I wrote about recently, and I’ve asked Loudon to come on the air with me, with a tentative date set for Tuesday, October 20), which is a functional alliance between Marxists (“Red”) and the forces of Islamic jihad (“Green”). Simpson, a former White House Office of Management and Budget economist under Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, documented the collusion in his Red/Green Axis books: two camps with almost nothing in common ideologically, but sharing common enemies which they have aligned with each other to erase. Mass migration and refugee resettlement are their chosen tools. Loudon later expanded the framework into a “Red-Green-Blue” axis, folding in the globalists.
The French riots are a textbook case. Demonstrators marched under the hammer-and-sickle and the Palestinian flag simultaneously. In Marseille, per a report by French journalist Paul Amar on CNews (via JFeed), rioters burned and vandalized Jewish-owned businesses while leaving Muslim-owned shops on the same street untouched. And, they did it over the Sabbath. As Emily Schrader put it: “Rioters in Marseille torched all the Jewish owned shops, while intentionally not attacking the Muslim owned shops. Tell me again how this is about ‘students’?” (PJ Media).
PJ Media’s Catherine Salgado didn’t mince words: “The riots in France are not about the cost of living or education… We are watching the neo-Nazi sharia takeover of France in real time.”
President Trump did not hedge. “France is burning!” he wrote on Truth Social, before urging Paris to “Close your Borders and take control, before it is too late!” Days earlier he had been blunter still: “this isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country.” Vice President JD Vance echoed it, warning Americans that Western liberals “imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion” and “ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility.”
All of this is unfolding roughly six months before France’s presidential election to succeed Macron. The polling has Marine Le Pen’s National Rally leading the first round at 37–38 percent, with Mélenchon’s hard-leftwing LFI surging into second at 18–18.5 percent. Le Pen called the riots a “threat to democracy” and blamed a government “running on fumes, exhausted and disoriented.” Mélenchon, unsurprisingly, defended the students and warned of “events that will eventually become uncontrollable.”
Either way, the street is going to have a say.
France is not alone. Students marched in Belgium. Tens of thousands protested housing and living costs in Lisbon. Milan saw two nights of unrest and 32 arrests. Spain, Portugal, and Albania all saw flare-ups. The axis is mobile, and the November 20 European youth strike is already on the calendar.
The violence bred by the socialist-left and a rapidly growing Muslim migrant population is not an isolated French phenomenon. It is a pre-shock. It is one of the regular tremors that Simpson and Loudon told us were coming. France is simply further down the road than everyone else. And, if this continues, not only will the violence spread across Europe, but it will begin springing up in America, as well.
As the smoke rises over Limoges, the question every American should be asking is a simple one: how far behind are we? And, have we also placed kindling in the furnace with open borders and the rise of socialism?
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
Today, while at church, the pastor (though we are in Psalms 119) made reference to Psalm 32:8-9, and as he recited the verses it came to mind that the wisdom of the verses seemed to carry a parallel to a quote by Benjamin Franklin that I recite often.
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
The parallel to me seemed to be quite compelling. Two separate individual texts that essentially provide the same equation, but from opposite ends. Understanding produces liberty; the absence of it produces a bit in the mouth.
“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye. Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee.” (Psalm 32:8–9, KJV)
God offers guidance by the eye. A glance, a nod, and the barest signal. But, only to a man who has “understanding” (Heb. bin, discernment). The horse and mule have no bin, so they get the meteg and resen. Bit and bridle. A creature with no inward sense of direction must be steered by outward force. The restraint required is inversely proportional to the understanding present.
Benjamin Franklin’s quote provided the same equation, but in political form.
Substituting some of the terms clarifies what I am trying to say, I think. Understanding → guidance by the eye → liberty. No understanding → bit and bridle → a master’s hand on the rein. Franklin’s “masters” are the bit and bridle. He’s saying a self-governing and virtuous people can be steered by the Eye of God, but a vicious people must be yanked around by the jaw. Same anthropology. Same inverse relationship. Same conclusion.
Ben Franklin wrote the quote I referred to in a letter to the Abbés Chalut and Arnoux on April 17, 1787, which is worth noting, because that was the spring of the Constitutional Convention (but before the convention began), written to French churchmen. He wasn’t being cute; he was stating a load-bearing premise.
Benjamin Franklin, while likely not providing his quote about a virtuous people as a parallel specifically to Psalms 32:8-9 as I might recognize it to be, understood the basic premise of Christian principles and understanding. While those who claim America was founded as a secular system, and then point to Franklin’s deism as evidence of their claim, mean for you to believe that a deist was sort of like an atheist and that’s the kind of men who created the American System, the opposite is true. The claim of deism is a play on words that fails to provide the true context regarding Franklin’s complex religious nature. Franklin was raised in a very religious household, but as an adult never seemed to fit in with the church-going crowds. In his 1725 Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, he came across as deterministic and nearly erased the concept of free will, something that he half-repudiated later. In his 1728 Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion, his writings has him praying to “the Infinite Father.” He wasn’t orthodox, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he was not a believer. If you examine his working vocabulary, biblical references appear often.
It is important to also recognize that he proposed the Great Seal of the United States as Moses stretching his hand over the sea to drown Pharaoh, with the motto “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” When he stood up and called for prayer at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 he quoted Psalm 127:1; “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.”
His own summary of virtue, “doing good to man,” is a compression of Micah 6:8 and the second table of the law.
To Ezra Stiles in 1790, near death, Benjamin Franklin called the moral system of Jesus “the best the World ever saw, or is likely to see,” while confessing doubts about Christ’s divinity. Franklin believed in God, he believed in the biblical values and principles of the Christian religion, and he understood better than most of his contemporaries biblical moral framework – but, he had his doubts about just enough things regarding Christianity that he never totally and completely surrendered himself to be a follower of Jesus Christ.
While his faith in Christ may not have been conventional, Franklin was a firm believer that God’s Hand was on America, and he understood the teachings of the Bible. And he wasn’t alone. John Adams late in his presidency wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In Washington’s Farewell Address in 1796, the Father of the Country said that religion and morality are “indispensable supports” of political prosperity. Franklin’s quote about how only a virtuous people are capable of freedom resides in the same doctrine. It was, in a sense, in line with the overall working assumptions of the entire founding generation.
And, it’s a thread that runs through the whole Bible
The internal-vs-external law motif is everywhere: Jeremiah 31:33 and Hebrews 8:10 (law written on the heart versus tablets of stone), Psalm 119:45 (“I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts”), and most bluntly 1 Timothy 1:9 – “the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient.” Law is the bit. It’s for those who can’t be trusted to steer themselves. You also see the same principle in Judges 21:25 – no king, every man doing right in his own eyes, and then it collapsing into the demand of 1 Samuel 8 for a king “like all the nations.” Liberty without virtue decays into chaos, and chaos trades itself for a master. Israel did it, and the psalm is the warning label.
Again, while I am not necessarily convinced that Franklin was consciously echoing Psalm 32:9 in his quote about a virtuous people, the parallel is definitely present. It may be possible that he may have had Psalm 32:8-9 in mind, and it is more likely that he didn’t. Perhaps, due to his understanding of biblical text, his history of being a voracious reader, and his religious upbringing he may simply have absorbed the same biblical worldview so thoroughly that the logic came out that way. Either answer vindicates my thinking that the two (his quote, and the verse in Psalms) have a connection. And it also confirms what I said about Benjamin Franklin’s “deism” not being some sort of “atheist” as opponents to liberty might suggest. A genuine atheist deist wouldn’t reason in the same kind of grooves that Franklin did. Franklin put the bit and bridle of the psalm into the political vocabulary of the American founding, whether he knew there was a connection or not, and I believe it was precisely because he understood biblical self-evident truths, and because God may have, after all, had a Hand of Inspiration on the man.
Franklin did, admittedly, as he got older view God in ways he didn’t when he was younger. In the 1787 Constitutional Convention he presented the following:
“Mr. President, the small progress we have made after four or five weeks close attendance and continual reasonings with each other… is methinks a melancholy proof of the imperfection of the Human Understanding…
“In the beginning of the contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for the divine protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a superintending Providence in our favor…
“And have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance? I have lived, Sir, a long time; and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth – that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings, that ‘except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.’ I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.”
That passage during the convention explains it all in a nut shell. He told us about his growing conviction with age and his belief in God’s involvement in what they were doing.
And the biblical connections of that speech are amazing. The sparrow is Matthew 10:29 (and Luke 12:6). “One of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.” Franklin paraphrases rather than quotes verbatim, which is telling: he’s reasoning from the text, not just dropping a citation. “Except the Lord build the house” is Psalm 127:1. “Builders of Babel” is Genesis 11, and note he’s using it as a warning, not decoration. He’s saying a political order built without God collapses like the tower. The “superintending Providence” line refers to the Revolution itself. He’s asserting God’s hand was on the war, which is precisely a reminder to us that he believed God’s hand was on things shaping the new country after the war, as well.
The connection between Franklin’s Virtuous People quote and Psalm 32:8-9 was no accident, and Benjamin Franklin was not just some “cold deist” who believed in a secular founding. We know that Franklin was a believer, perhaps “in his own way,” and not someone that is constantly described by secular historians as some kind of secular-deist. He did not see God as being a clockmaker-God who winds the universe and walks away. A God like that doesn’t “graciously answer” prayers or govern “the affairs of men” in real time. Franklin was describing an intervening, providential God – the same God of Psalms 32:8-9.
His operating theology was thoroughly biblical. A God who hears, who intervenes, who governs nations, and who raises and humbles empires. That’s not atheistic secular deism. That’s a man who had read his Bible so long it had become the shape of his thinking.
As a side note regarding the prayer at the service attended by the Constitutional Convention delegates, Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey recorded that when the delegates reconvened the first time since Franklin’s speech, “every unfriendly feeling had been expelled, and a spirit of conciliation had been cultivated.” Two weeks later came the Connecticut Compromise. In short, when Franklin called for the convention to put it in God’s Hands, what followed was a thaw, and a breakthrough. Franklin understood that only a virtuous people are capable of liberty – and when we refuse to remain in the guidance of God’s Eyes, the bit and the bridle (an increase of government tyranny) is not far behind.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
With the news of a recent shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon, those who seek to violate our right to keep and bear arms are shouting their foul ideas of gun confiscation once again. This recent shooting reminds me of another recent event in Idaho, where a good guy with a gun stopped the damage being inflicted by the bad-guy gunman from being worse. Be it Bend, Oregon, or the In-N-Out Burger in Twin Falls, Idaho, what we have in those cases are two shootings, two good-guy civilians, and an acknowledgement of the importance of the right to keep and bear arms that predates the government that pretends to grant it
In December 2012, days after a madman murdered twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook, Wayne LaPierre said something that got sneered at for a decade: the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. It was treated as a bumper sticker. In 2026, twice in one summer and one autumn, it was proved again as a fact of physics. Both times the “good guy” was not a badge, not a department, and not a policy. He was a private man with a pistol he chose to carry.
Bend, Oregon – October 15, 2026: At 12:59 p.m., a 16-year-old named Griffin J. John II walked up to Silver Rail Elementary School carrying a 12-gauge pump shotgun. He’d already fired at a man in the parking lot, putting six rounds into the man’s truck. He threw the gun over the fence, jumped after it, and shot his way through the locked doors.
Inside, he found a special education classroom. He killed three children, ages five, eight, and eleven, and a teacher, 25-year-old Megan Lambert. A seven-year-old and a 54-year-old teacher were critically wounded. He fired fifteen shells and had forty-four more in a backpack.
Bend police arrived three minutes after the first call. Three minutes is a superb response time. It was still too slow. The killing was over before the sirens got there.
What ended it was a 36-year-old father of two named Kaylub Giamanco, standing in the parking lot with a .40-caliber pistol under his shirt. He watched the kid go in. He followed him in. He shot him dead in a classroom.
The detail that ought to be framed and hung on a wall is the fact that the Bend-La Pine School District had banned firearms from its campuses. By district policy, Giamanco’s pistol was contraband. The man who saved the children was, on paper, a rule-breaker inside a “gun-free zone.”
Have you ever noticed that mass shootings typically happen in places that are designated as gun-free zones?
Earlier this year, in Twin Falls, Idaho, August 1, 2026, at a brand-new In-N-Out Burger, open one week, a similar scene played out. At 2:29 p.m., 24-year-old Chad Williams pulled up to the drive-thru payment window and shot a manager named Ashley Garibay, 23, in the face. He parked, got out, and killed Christopher Claunch, 59. Then he traded a jammed handgun for a rifle and kept going; killing Dale Schultz, 66, at a Tesla charger, wounding seven people in all, shooting into traffic at a red light.
Three men went at him. Steve McClain, an off-duty Idaho state trooper eating inside, moved past the fleeing employees toward the window and returned fire. Austin Scott James, a former Twin Falls cop and state trooper, charged the gunman with his pistol still holstered so arriving officers wouldn’t mistake him for the shooter, and got shot for it. The round shattered his arm and severed an artery; he was treated by his wife, a nurse, in an emergency room.
And then there was Jordan Salinas, 35, of Kimberly, Idaho., He’s not a cop, and not a soldier. He fired a suppressed FN Five-seven pistol at Williams and drove him off the restaurant. The police chief’s words: their actions “helped drive the suspect away from the scene, preventing further casualties.”
Salinas, the final good-guy with a gun, had started training seriously with a handgun after the 2021 Boise Towne Square mall shooting. He’d been a bystander once before. He decided never to be a helpless one again. His silhouette shooting at the gunman ended up on stickers and shirts reading “Idaho Shoots Back.”
The natural right to keep and bear arms does not come from ink and paper. I want that to sink in. The Second Amendment did not create the right. It does not ensure anything. It is an enumeration of the right, and an order by the Constitution to the federal government that it may not, for any reason, infringe upon any part of that natural, God-given, right.
And it is not about hunting, or even being a good guy when a shooting occurs. The Second Amendment goes much deeper than that. Read the operative clause as a lawyer reads a negative command: “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that. And notice, it doesn’t say that our right to keep and bear arms “is hereby granted.” It doesn’t say your right to keep and bear arms “may be exercised subject to reasonable regulation.” Shall not be infringed. A profound and complete restriction on any federal government legislation regarding a natural right that already exists. The Amendment is a fence built around a pre-existing field.
James Madison grumbled about a bill of rights in the first place. Considering the Enumeration Doctrine, he viewed what became the first Ten Amendments as redundant. Rights already existed, and no place in the text of the Constitution was the federal government given any authority to have anything to do with our God-given rights. A clue to all of that is the fact that the Ninth Amendment sits near the end of the Bill of Rights. It is a nod at the fact that our rights are enumerated. Government, nor enumeration, is not the source. The Constitution is merely listed a handful of rights, the Ninth Amendment then adds any rights not enumerated, and the instructions are clear: hands off. The federal government has no authority to make any law of any kind regarding Natural Rights. It is not their responsibility to protect or guarantee our rights. The language is clear: Congress shall make no law, shall not be infringed, no soldier shall, shall not be violated (to borrow language from the first four amendments) – that is not language giving the federal government one iota of authority over our rights… it is language that restricts the federal government from making or taking any legislation or action regarding our rights.
When it comes to “arms,” in particular, Blackstone, writing in 1765, called the right of “having and using arms for self-preservation and defence” an auxiliary right… auxiliary to the three absolute rights of personal security, personal liberty, and private property. Understand the architecture. Life and liberty are secured by nothing but somebody’s promise unless you can defend them. The gun is not a hobby. It is the enforcement mechanism for the other rights.
The pedigree runs further back than Philadelphia. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 answered a king who had disarmed his political enemies: “That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence.” George Mason, drafting Virginia’s declaration, said plainly what the aim was with written constitutions. He understood the danger. He wrote, “to disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”
The men who ratified the documents that founded America and her States knew exactly who “the people” were. Mason, at the Virginia ratifying convention, when asked, “Who are the militia?” responded, “They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers.” Richard Henry Lee said of the issue, “the whole body of the people always possess arms.” Tench Coxe said, “the militia are the people, with their own private arms.” Father of the Constitution, James Madison, in Federalist #46, bragged about “the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.”
We are not talking about a standing army. This goes way beyond a police force. These Founding Fathers I mentioned were talking about “The People.” That is the original public meaning of the militia, and it is not subtle.
“Well regulated” means well-equipped and well-practiced. The word “regulated” meant “to put in good order.” Therefore, as per the language of the Second Amendment, a “well-regulated militia” is a militia that is in good order.
“Keep” means to have, hold, possess. “Bear” means to carry on the person, in the street, out in the world. Look up bear in the 1828 Webster’s Dictionary. One of the examples given is a “gun under one’s coat.” To keep and bear. Two verbs, two activities. A right you hold, a right you inherited.
The objection? Untrained civilians creating chaos? It is true. A stranger with a gun can shoot a bystander. He can be shot by the police who arrive and don’t know who the shooter is. Austin James didn’t draw his weapon for precisely that reason, and got shot for it. These are real costs.
Now weigh them against the alternative: a man with a rifle, forty-four spare rounds, and nobody shooting back. The costs of the armed citizen are contingent. The cost of the disarmed citizen is certain.
And the defenders who entered the picture and took care of business were “well regulated.” There weren’t necessarily trained because of some licensing regime, though. It was because of a personal discipline. Salinas trained. Giamanco trained. The permit is not the skill. The skill is the skill.
As for the “gun-free zone” problem I mentioned, let’s understand that every “gun-free zone” sign is a claim about other people’s future behavior. It is not a wall. It is a promise that nobody inside will be armed, which is only ever true until a bad-guy with a gun decides otherwise. To be honest, I don’t think bad guys are walking up to buildings, seeing the gun-free-zone sticker on the glass, and saying to themselves, “Shucks, can’t go in there, this says guns are not allowed.” Chances are, the gun-free label is exactly the reason they chose that environment to fire upon. In gun-free-zones, shooters have the best opportunity for the greatest number of unarmed mass casualties, and a pretty good chance to get out alive because chances are, nobody’s going to be firing back.
Silver Rail had done everything a modern school is told to do. Secure vestibules with background checks. Cameras inside and out. An armed school resource officer. New door-locking hardware approved after Uvalde. Every box ticked.
But. the thing that ended the shooting was a man in the parking lot with a pistol under his shirt.
The district had optimized everything except presence.
The fashionable argument is: we have police, so we don’t need citizen arms. But a monopoly on force held at a distance is a delayed response. Three minutes is excellent. Three minutes is also a hundred and eighty seconds of uninterrupted murder.
Rights are immediate. Police are eventual. In the gap between them, we are the militia.
The Founding Fathers did not see an armed people as a standing obligation discharged by government. It was a duty discharged by you. Which means the honest gun owner’s business is not a holster and a permit in a drawer. It is proficiency, and it is willingness to run toward the sound.
Salinas ran toward it. Giamanco ran toward it. James ran toward it unarmed, effectively, and paid in blood and bone for the privilege. With freedom comes responsibility.
Bend and Twin Falls are not stories about a nice thing called “a good guy with a gun.” They are stories about a good man who was already there: a father, an ex-cop, a guy from Kimberly with a girlfriend and a suppressed pistol – while the institutions that had promised to protect everyone were still en route.
And in Bend, the man who saved the children was there technically in violation of the rules. The rules were wrong.
That is what it means for a right to precede the government. The school board wrote a policy. The school board’s policy was falsified by a shotgun at 12:59 and corrected by a pistol at 1:01. Reality has a way of enforcing rights that paper forgot.
The gun-free zone is the last refuge of the man who thinks rights are granted by signage. They aren’t. They’re prior. Governments are posterior. And the right to have and use arms in your own defense, and in defense of the child in the next room, is the one natural right that underwrites all the others, because it is the only one that is presented as a duty that can be enforced in the three minutes before anybody official shows up.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
This date in history, on October 16, 1777, a British raiding force marched into Kingston, New York and put most of it to the torch. It was the day the young state of New York lost its first capital, and it happened almost as an afterthought.
Kingston was an old Dutch-founded village in a region formerly known as New Amsterdam on the west bank of the Hudson, about 90 miles north of British-occupied New York City. When the war drove the provincial government out of Manhattan, the legislature settled there. The New York State Constitution was drafted and read aloud in Kingston in 1777, and the first State Senate convened in the home of Abraham Van Gaasbeek (now the Senate House). By default rather than design, it became the capital of New York.
The raid was a footnote to the Saratoga Campaign. General John Burgoyne was bogged down and losing near Saratoga, and General Henry Clinton, commanding in New York City, finally moved north up the Hudson in early October to try to relieve him. Clinton stormed and captured Forts Montgomery and Clinton in the Hudson Highlands on October 6. Rather than push on to Albany himself, he sent a flying column under Major General John Vaughan further upriver to burn and plunder.
Vaughan’s force of roughly 1,200 regulars and Hessians landed at the mouth of the Rondout on the morning of the 16th. Kingston’s defenders were about 150 Ulster County militia, who were brushed aside quickly. The British set fire to the village, and with it some 300-plus buildings (homes, barns, stores, and public buildings). Vaughan reported destroying a quantity of American war materiel as well. He also torched farms in the surrounding countryside before re-embarking and rejoining the fleet.
Kingston was largely empty of civilians by then. Gouverneur Morris, who would become the father of the Preamble of the United States Constitution, had written a week earlier that the legislature was “hellishly frightened,” and the government had already scattered. The state government fled to Hurley, and Ulster County’s records were hauled to a stone house in Kerhonkson. Casualties on both sides were minimal.
Militarily it accomplished little. The British never occupied Kingston, so they gained no lasting control of the strategically vital river corridor between Albany and New York. Clinton’s diversion also came too late to save Burgoyne. General Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga on October 17, the very next day.
What the burning did do was gut a capital. The state government never returned; the seat of power shifted north and eventually to Albany. Kingston rebuilt on the same street pattern, and parts of the Stockade District still stand, including the Senate House, which is now a state historic site. The burning is reenacted in Kingston to this day, and a 1778 British cartoon depicting the raid is one of the era’s better-known satirical images.
So, exactly 249 years ago, a “victory” for Britain on paper, a genuine trauma for New York, and a strategic dead end for the men who lit the torches.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
James Carville once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The Democrats have decided that in this election cycle they would put forth an argument that not only do they hate Trump, but there is an affordability crisis. And, to be honest, a number of things are costing more than we would prefer, and when that happens most folks throw context out the window and blame whoever is resting their bottom on the seat of power – which, currently, is President Donald J. Trump.
Gas prices are too high, we are told, and it is because of tariffs and a war in Iran and whatever else they can pile on – hoping you’ll forget what they’ve done, what they’ve said, and what they’ve desired in the past.
Context is everything, I constantly tell folks. And if we examine the rise and fall of gas prices over recent history, one of the things that jumps out at us is that the average price of gas during Trump’s first term was about 48 cents per gallon less than under President Barack Obama. During Trump’s second term, average gas prices have been about 9 cents per gallon less than during the Biden administration.
Those are the numbers we paid at the pump, without taking inflation into account. Due to inflation, a 2010 dollar was worth more than a 2020 dollar, and the 2020 dollar was worth more than a dollar today. If we adjust the prices per gallon due to inflation, it gets even more interesting. When adjusted based on inflation, Trump’s first term gas prices were over a dollar a gallon cheaper than under Obama, and the gap becomes 46 cents per gallon cheaper during Trump’s second term when compared to the Biden administration.
Could the prices come down even more? Sure. Many factors can play into the whole calculation, from supply and demand to the cost of doing business. The Democrats claim that the military operations against Iran are to blame for high gas prices, and that the “war” has been detrimental to the United States in many ways.
Okay, let’s examine that.
Destroying Iran’s nuclear program benefits the U.S. because now the U.S. and our allies are no longer concerned about a substantial military threat. The leadership of that country has openly called for the destruction of the U.S., Israel, and anyone else they believe to be allies of the Great Satan and the Little Satan. The move also reduced the flow of fuel to our enemies, in particular, China. The blockage during this war has indeed starved the market of some of its supply, and has played a part in the price of gas. But, that flow of fuel is now beginning to move into the larger pool of international trade. More supply in the supply-and-demand-equation is a good thing, and that supply is currently increasing as the Strait of Hormuz opens up. More oil is also entering the picture out of Venezuela. And, thanks to an increase in domestic production, the global supply of oil is also on the rise. The movement of the price needle will not be immediate, but the increase of supply across the globe will result in lower prices – so when it comes to the price of gas (which is already lower than it was under Democratic leadership), the numbers will be going downward soon. We simply need to be patient.
As for the massive prices in places like California, that’s mostly the doing of Democratic Party policies – from special blends of gas, taxation, to the reality that their policies have been chasing refineries out of their states (plural because Oregon and Washington suffers from the same affliction).
Yes, over the last eight months, gas prices have risen compared to what they were at the start of Trump’s presidency. That is a reality of economics – prices and production and consumerism are all in constant motion. But, let’s also not forget other factors that are in motion. For example, more Americans are working, so demand is on the rise. Wages are rising as well. U.S. household annual incomes, inflation-adjusted, have increased more than five times the average annual increase during the Biden administration – so while for the moment gas seems to be higher than we prefer, generally overall, we also can afford the temporary and reasonable rise.
As incomes rise, the poverty rate has dropped under President Trump to the lowest it’s ever been (at least since the U.S. Census Bureau has been compiling the data), and is currently at 10.2%. The economy is growing, consumerism is increasing, wages and production are on the rise (largely as a result of the tariffs the Democrats keep crying about), and those in poverty are being lifted out of that condition.
Yes, we would all like to see the gas prices come down a little – don’t we always? But when compared to past numbers, and the growth of the economy, are we really in an affordability crisis when it comes to the price of gas or the basic cost of goods?
Meanwhile, the cost of gas-powered cars may be on the verge of dropping. President Trump approved new fuel economy standards. The new standards reduces the heavy regulations against gas engines, and terminates the EPA’s electric vehicle mandate. President Trump wrote about it: “These new Standards will take the waste out of building cars in America. That means LOWER PRICES, saving families thousands on a new, beautiful, and safe car. Far better than the Environmental Monsters that we were building heretofore. Every Manufacturer, from General Motors to Ford to Stellantis, has called me wanting to build here, and now they can!”
Diesel fuel is definitely much higher than it should be, and it negatively affects the cost of doing business. Understanding that supply and demand is a big part of the equation, President Trump made a deal with Russia to supply millions of tons of diesel fuel to the American and global market. Trump tied the arrangement to U.S. leverage in the Persian Gulf. He wrote, “Between our TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!”
The lower diesel prices ought to assist in reducing costs for farmers, ranchers, and other industries across the country, which will then influence the general price of most products.
When it comes to the so-called affordability crisis we must also remember that there is what we can see, what we don’t see, the context as I’ve provided, and then things that many of us don’t seem to notice or understand. According to Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller we are witnessing higher yields on U.S. bonds, and he says it’s a good thing. It reflects higher growth, and Waller challenged the view held by some analysts that the Iran military operations and tariff-related inflation fears were pushing up yields. “Inflation expectations are well anchored, so all of the build-up is not coming from an inflation premium,” Waller said. “That’s not where it’s coming from. So it is a factor of real growth. If you have real growth and real productivity and these investments are going to pay off, you are willing to pay more in terms of your interest costs.” Competition with AI for investment is also driving up yields, Waller said.
As for tariffs, Representative Mike Collins (GA-R) argues that tariffs make the markets more fair. I’ve argued that it also ends a global redistribution of wealth scheme against the United States. One of the results, over time, will be an increase of domestic production and manufacturing. In short, bringing jobs back to America. Whether or not tariffs are contributing to higher prices, along with the debate over the price of fuel, it’s all temporary and will level off if we just allow the processes to complete.
The affordability crisis claim by the Democrats is a false one, but they believe they can lie like they do without us considering the context, history, or how things work economically. They want you to react to what they say as we struggle to make sense out of what we see. They don’t expect you to critically think, use your discernment and common sense, and to realize that their deception is nothing more than an attempt to fool you into voting for them so that they can seek power and make any affordability worse. They hope you won’t think beyond what is on the surface based on their claims so that they can increase the madness, not because they have any plans, strategies, or hopes to end what they claim is an affordability crisis.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
The Mid‑Term Elections Are A Constitutional Reckoning
By Douglas V. Gibbs
Rahm Emanuel said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” The plan is to create “crisis,” and they’ve done a good job at it. The thing is, what is going on goes way beyond politics. Politics is not the heart of our present struggle as much as it is our culture, and preserving our system of liberty.
The coming mid‑term elections are not simply another partisan contest between Republicans and Democrats. The party’s don’t fully represent us, anymore – not that they ever truly did. The mid-term elections are also not simply some referendum on personalities. It isn’t even as simple as a clash of policy preferences. Those are all symptoms. The upcoming elections in a couple weeks represents something far more fundamental: a battle over whether the United States will remain a constitutional republic or continue sliding toward a centralized, administrative, ideological regime that no longer resembles the system the Framers of the U.S. Constitution created.
We face an unavoidable conclusion drawn from the constitutional reality of our moment. “The real threat to our republic is an unseen, lurking in the shadows, gradual erosion of those boundaries through acquiescence to an ever‑expanding swamp‑dwelling administrative state.” (Quote from my book, The Constitutional Presidency of Donald J. Trump).
The attacks against Donald J. Trump have never truly been about him as an individual. They have been about what he represents: a president who refuses to surrender executive authority to unelected bureaucrats, who challenges the unconstitutional expansion of federal power, and who insists on operating within the original boundaries of Article II. That alone made him intolerable to the progressive establishment.
The accusations: “fascist,” “dictator,” “king,” “threat to democracy,” were not constitutional arguments. They were political weapons designed to delegitimize a president who could not be controlled. As I wrote in my book, “They are weaponizing their interpretation of legal language to delegitimize a president they cannot control.”
This same weaponization is now being deployed against the American people themselves.
The forces aligned against constitutional governance today includes the progressive left, Democratic Socialists, and the Red/Green Axis (the ideological partnership between hard‑left collectivists and Islamist movements) do not merely seek electoral victory. They seek structural transformation. Their goal is not to win debates within the constitutional framework, but to redefine the framework itself.
Their vision is incompatible with the Framers’ design:
Again, from my book: “Their aim is a calculated move… to achieve precisely what [the Constitution] was designed to prevent: the subversion of constitutional processes of the republic by entrenched elites.”
This is why the mid‑term elections are not about politics. They are about whether the Constitution will continue to function as the supreme law of the land, or whether it will be replaced by a system in which unelected bureaucrats, ideological activists, and globalist institutions wield power that no voter can check.
John Adams warned, “Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.” This is a constitutional truth. Liberty is not self‑sustaining. It requires:
If the progressive project succeeds in this moment, then the administrative state consolidates its authority. If the courts continue drifting from original meaning, the court system consolidates its authority. If Congress remains captured by ideological factions hostile to constitutional limits, then the republic will be fundamentally altered.
The Founding Fathers understood that republics do not die in dramatic collapses. They erode gradually, through complacency, centralization, and the surrender of power to those who promise security in exchange for obedience.
We are living in that erosion.
This election is not about Donald Trump. It is not about party labels. It is not about personalities.
It is about whether the Constitution remains the governing document of the United States.
If the progressive establishment gains control of Congress, they will:
As I wrote in my book, “The question is not whether we agree or disagree with Trump’s policies. The real aim is to determine if he has exercised the power of the presidency… in accordance with the Constitution’s original design.”
The same question now applies to the republic itself.
If this mid‑term election is lost, the constitutional damage may be irreversible. Adams’ warning may become prophecy. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
But if Americans recognize what is truly at stake – not politics, but the preservation of the republic – then the Constitution still has defenders. The Founding Generation still has heirs. And the flame of liberty, though flickering, can still be restored.
This is not a political moment. It is a constitutional moment. And constitutional moments define the destiny of nations.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary