Political Pistachio
By Douglas V. Gibbs
The Founding Fathers were remarkably prescient in their warnings about what Samuel Adams called the “Schemes of Leveling” – what we today call socialism, progressivism, and wealth redistribution. They recognized these utopian experiments as fundamentally incompatible with human nature and liberty. Thomas Jefferson understood that when government attempts to engineer equal outcomes rather than secure our natural rights, it inevitably destroys both freedom and prosperity in the process.
This collectivist impulse didn’t originate with Karl Marx – he merely repackaged ancient errors in revolutionary language. The fundamental premise has remained consistent throughout history: that individual rights should be subordinated to collective interests, and that the state should possess the authority to redistribute wealth according to some abstract conception of fairness. What was once openly called “proletarian revolution” has been cleverly repackaged as “social justice,” “equity,” and “progressive taxation” – but the underlying premise remains unchanged.
One of the most revealing truths about communist systems is their fundamentally parasitic nature. They cannot generate wealth internally because they eliminate the very incentives necessary for production and innovation. This explains China’s economic relationship with the United States – they don’t primarily produce for their own people but export like crazy because their wealth depends entirely on our ability to purchase their products.
They claim to resolve the problem of class warfare. The Soviet Union claimed they were eliminating poverty by eliminating poor people, but what they did was make everyone equally poor (except for the ruling class, of course). Venezuela followed the same pattern. The only reason China has lasted as long as they have is because they injected a limited form of capitalism into their system – but in the end, it remains authoritarian communism that simply allows a few the chance to do a little bit more than everyone else. This parasitic dependency on capitalist systems reveals the fundamental bankruptcy of collectivist economics.
Today’s wealth redistribution operates through multiple sophisticated mechanisms:
- Progressive Taxation: This communist concept (which is listed in the Communist Manifesto) at its core pretends to reduce economic inequality by taxing the rich and giving it to the poor through various programs (a twisted Robin Hood scheme), but in reality locks people into their corner of the economic plantation and kills the incentive to crawl out while also suppressing incentive, innovation and entrepreneurial growth. As a businessman once told me, “I don’t pay taxes. When my corporate taxes go up, my prices go up. Every tax-the-rich or tax-the-corporations scheme ultimately removes the tax money from the pockets of the consumer.”
- Climate Change Policies: This represents perhaps the most audacious redistribution scheme ever devised. It essentially declares that to save the planet, western wealthier countries must bear the financial burden while transferring wealth to less developed nations. Recently, even the United Nations has admitted their climate models were wrong – something conservatives have argued all along. Climate change is a natural phenomenon where human influence is negligible, but it serves as a perfect justification for global wealth redistribution.
- Tariff Imbalances: For decades, tariffs functioned as a redistribution scheme against the United States, with America paying high tariffs while other countries paid low tariffs. This wasn’t free trade but managed trade designed to transfer American wealth abroad.
What made President Trump’s approach revolutionary was his recognition that these seemingly separate policies were all interconnected components of a globalist redistribution project. His policies represented a return to Jeffersonian principles in multiple dimensions:
- Economic Freedom: Trump’s signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act moved away from progressive taxation by lowering corporate rates from 35% to 21% and reducing individual income tax brackets. This wasn’t about enriching the wealthy but about recognizing that reducing taxes on corporations and higher income brackets ultimately benefits lower classes when those monies are reinvested into businesses, spent on services or products produced by “lower classes,” and puts more capital into the system.
- Trade Realignment: Trump’s tariffs weren’t protectionist in the traditional sense but corrective measures against a system designed to transfer American wealth abroad. He was busting up the redistribution scheme and leveling the trade playing field, forcing recognition that China’s “economic miracle” depended on unfair advantages extracted from open societies.
- National Sovereignty: By withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and challenging other international frameworks, Trump was dismantling the infrastructure of global wealth redistribution and reaffirming national sovereignty against global governance structures.
The parallels between Trump and Jefferson extend beyond policy to their very style of governance and relationship with the bureaucracy. Both men were hated by their opposition and endured diabolical attacks. Jefferson’s struggle against the Hamiltonian Federalist Party bureaucracy mirrors Trump’s confrontation with the modern administrative state, with both men challenging the notion that unelected officials should control national policy.
Both men faced relentless opposition from what Jefferson called “artificial aristocracies” – those who derive influence from government rather than productive enterprise. They understood that economic independence is inseparable from political independence. Jefferson’s embargo policies and Trump’s trade renegotiations both aimed to establish that America cannot be dependent on hostile powers for essential goods or services.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, he meant “as created” and “as their natural rights were distributed.” No matter who we are, we all possess all of the natural rights. Our ability to exercise those rights may be influenced by government, but those rights belong to us. God gave them to us, and He existed before government.
This natural rights framework stands in direct opposition to the collectivist premise that rights are grants from the state that can be revoked or redistributed according to collective needs. The Founding Fathers understood that the less interference by central planning the better – individualism and laissez faire always seemed to be at the core of everything they designed. To control through a redistribution of wealth is a rights killer.
The sustainability schemes and ideas of command-controlled economies are retreating slightly under Trump’s policies, and we must hope this continues after he’s gone. We must continue to reject and move away from these catastrophic schemes rooted in collectivism and communist ideas.
There will be winners, and there will be losers. That is simply a reality of life. Equality or equity should not be based on outcome, but opportunity. The American experiment has been successful precisely because it rejected the collectivist premise in favor of individual rights and economic freedom. This created unprecedented prosperity while also allowing for voluntary charity and social mobility – a stark contrast to state-mandated redistribution.
As we move forward, we must recognize that the battle isn’t merely over tax rates or trade policies but over fundamental principles of human liberty. The choice is between a society of free individuals who voluntarily cooperate for mutual benefit and a society where the state directs economic activity according to some abstract collective vision. The Founders chose the former, and President Trump began restoring that vision against decades of encroaching collectivism.
The question remains whether we will continue this restoration or revert to the failed schemes of leveling that have impoverished nations wherever they’ve been implemented. The answer will determine not just our economic future but whether we preserve the liberty that has made America exceptional among nations.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
The Founding Fathers issued warnings that echo with chilling relevance today. Benjamin Franklin’s declaration that “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom” wasn’t mere philosophical musing – it was a diagnostic truth about the American experiment. John Adams went further, insisting “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” while Patrick Henry warned that “A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.” These were more than mere idle concerns; they were foundational principles upon which our republic was built.
Ben Franklin developed thirteen virtues:
- Temperance
- Silence
- Order
- Resolution
- Frugality
- Industry
- Sincerity
- Justice
- Moderation
- Cleanliness
- Tranquility
- Chastity
- Humility
He systematically cultivated these virtues, admitting he was “surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined.” His humility in this endeavor reveals a crucial truth: virtue isn’t achieved through self-congratulation, but through honest self-assessment and disciplined effort.
The connection between personal virtue and political liberty cannot be overstated. As James Madison stated, “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.” The Founders understood that self-government requires self-governed individuals who embrace virtue, embrace lawfulness, and embrace order. John Adams expressed this succinctly: “Public virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private Virtue, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.”
Today we witness the consequences of abandoning this wisdom. Our political divisions reflect a deeper moral fragmentation. When we lose the capacity for honest self-assessment, when we abandon responsibility for our actions, when we reject the biblical understanding that motives matter as much as actions, we create the vacuum that tyranny fills. As Franklin warned, “As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
The biblical principle that sin is often defined by motive rather than action alone offers a path forward. Eating is not sinful, but gluttony is; speaking truth is virtuous, but speaking truth to destroy is sinful. This nuanced moral vision, rooted in Scripture, provides the framework for the kind of virtue the Founders deemed essential for liberty. It calls us to honesty without cruelty, responsibility without self-flagellation, firmness without harshness, and joy without frivolity.
Andrew Breitbart’s observation that “politics is downstream from culture” diagnoses our current crisis accurately. We cannot get our political house in order until our religious and moral house is put in order. This requires returning to the kind of intentional virtue cultivation Franklin practiced. It is a necessary foundation for freedom.
The path forward demands both personal and national renewal. We must recover the understanding that freedom requires virtue, that liberty demands responsibility, and that constitutional government depends on moral citizens. As we face increasing challenges to our constitutional order, we would do well to remember Franklin’s warning and Adams’ conviction: without virtue, there can be no liberty, and without a moral and religious people, there can be no American Constitution.
The question before us is whether we will heed these warnings from our Founding Fathers and the biblical wisdom they used as the foundation of our system, or continue down the path of moral fragmentation that inevitably leads to political fragmentation. The future of American freedom hangs in the balance – and the war is as much spiritual as it is political… if not more so.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
Spencer Pratt is a problem for the Democrats. Like Donald J. Trump, he is an outsider that refuses to play by the rules of the typical political game, and he’s unpredictable. Even worse, he has humiliated them. He’s getting a lot of attention and with that attention he’s exposing their underbelly in such a way they are scrambling to deal with him, but because they’ve never been hit this way before, they truly don’t know what to do.
The Democrats can’t win in the arena of ideas, and that’s why Pratt even cleaned the floor with L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and Nithya Raman in the last debate, to the point that they are running away from any more debates. Then, when they attack him, it backfires. They have no idea how to handle a basic exchange of ideas.
Their only ploy, at this point, is to pull on Pratt what they’ve pulled on Donald Trump. Lie, call him a fascist, and hit him with lawfare. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has already launched attacks against Pratt, but in her frustration she is realizing that the popularity of Pratt is simply a case of Spencer tapping into the electorate’s anger of the policies of Democratic politicians like Bass.
While Spencer Pratt has not yet reached incumbent Karen Bass’s numbers in the polls, he is rapidly climbing, surging up 12 points since March in the Emerson College poll.
The Democratic Party’s crisis in California has become so severe that with two Republicans threatening to win the top two spots in the gubernatorial race, there are talks that the Democrats are considering abandoning the jungle primary system, a law that’s been in place since 2010. Democrats did it to lock Republicans out of political office, and now the GOP is threatening to lock Democrats out of the 2026 November general election with the “top two” primary.
No matter how they’ve tried to cheat, the bad policies of the Democrats have come home to roost. They embraced identity and partisan politics, they spied on their opponents, they arrested their opponents, and they threw their opponents off the ballots – but voters care about results and the Democrats have none in the column of successes – and the voters have noticed.
While Spencer Pratt has a political science degree, Bass has pointed out that he has no political experience. You know, the same argument they used against Trump. Pratt is actually doing the same thing as Trump did – he’s talking to the voters in a language that speaks of common sense, and taking a business approach to governance. And besides, at this point, many voters believe that anybody that’s not Karen Bass, and not a Democrat, is what Los Angeles needs. The Democrats have made a mess of the Golden State – perhaps it’s time to stop following the same path of insanity, and actually try something different for a change.
The Palisades Fire was a tipping point. There was no water or proper personnel and equipment to stop a raging fire that destroyed roughly 16,000 homes. And since then, the policies have not changed. The lesson was not learned. Democrats after controlling the area for nearly three decades and driving everything into the ground are basically arguing, “give us a few more years and we’ll get it turned around.” How? With the same idiotic policies? Their taxation is sky high, and the money is not going to where it is needed. Meanwhile, homelessness is worsening (after Bass said three years ago that by 2026 she’d have that issue tackled), and Bass’s plan has been to give them new needles for their drug usage, and pay for them to get new teeth.
The choices are basically a failure named Karen Bass, a democratic-socialist named Nithya Raman, or Spencer Pratt who is a newcomer to politics and offers voters a genuine alternative. Win or lose, Pratt is offering new ideas, a new message, and new tools of campaigning – incredible videos, and a message that says either choose him and clean up the city or choose one of his opponents and continue to watch the city burn with a continued tumble toward bankruptcy, less reliable services, and more mass poverty.
Pratt’s message is simple. Los Angeles is worth saving, and his opponents have been letting L.A. burn and fail for decades. His campaign simply highlights the ongoing mess in Los Angeles and how they are directly related to the failed Democratic socialist policies like those of Governor Gavin Newsom and current L.A. Mayor Karen Bass.
What Pratt represents is a continuation of the movement begun by the TEA Party, and accelerated by Donald J. Trump. It’s a recognition that special interests control Democratic Party politics and that the ruling party has become parasitic, obsessed with gaining more power and profit, and guilty of using every extreme, overhyped, idiotic game to try to maintain control.
Can Pratt win? Can a Republican win in California? Perhaps. If it is going to happen, this seems like the election season that it will.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
| Tuesday Online Constitution (and history) Class |
  3:30 PM Pacific Online Constitution & HistoryClass |
| Online Mr. Constitution Class: www.mr-constitution.com Let’s talk today about early English Settlements in the New World. Untold History Channel – (locate the shows labeled “Learn the Constitution”): https://rumble.com/c/UntoldHistoryChannel |
By Douglas V. Gibbs
Those who stand against constitutional principles have normalized the very things that undermine them. We barely blink anymore when rainbow flags fly and when American culture is saturated with sermons about tolerance, diversity, and inclusion. Even when our eyes and ears tell us that morality is being inverted and that DEI has become reverse discrimination, a 180‑degree turn from judging people by character rather than skin color, we are trained to ignore what we see. We are told that real tolerance means silence, compliance, and keeping our opinions to ourselves unless they align perfectly with the rising WOKE orthodoxy. Yet the more we comply, the narrower and more punitive our culture becomes.
Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist philosopher, had a name for this: repressive tolerance. In his formulation, tolerance no longer means tolerating disagreement or diversity of thought. It means tolerating only the correct ideas while excluding the “wrong” ones – all while still using the moral language of openness. Censorship, exclusion, and punishment are rebranded as moral duties.
This is not accidental. It is a deliberate political strategy rooted in Cultural Marxism. Marcuse argued that classical Marxism failed in the West because Americans were too comfortable. A thriving middle class, economic mobility, and widespread prosperity prevented the misery necessary for revolution. So the strategy shifted. Instead of class warfare between industrialists and workers, Neo‑Marxism manufactured new divisions based on race, sex, and identity. It is divide‑and‑conquer with a Marxist twist: the battlefield is no longer factories and wages, but culture, psychology, and institutions. The question is no longer who owns capital, but who shapes beliefs, norms, and identity.
Within this worldview, neutral principles such as free speech, open debate, and equal tolerance are not liberating. They are considered obstacles. To Marxists, these American ideals protect the existing order. Voting, protest, and debate change nothing because the system itself is “rigged.” Neutrality becomes fraud. Therefore, tolerance must be redirected: ideas that support the “oppressive” capitalist system must be suppressed, while ideas aimed at dismantling it must be amplified.
Under this logic, tolerance becomes a weapon. Anything even slightly right of Marxism is treated as hateful and dangerous. Careers are destroyed, families divided, and relationships fractured over mere disagreement. Refusing to repeat ideological falsehoods becomes unforgivable. Debate is quashed so that energy policies that raise the cost of living can be imposed as moral imperatives. Socialist proposals like universal basic income are treated as settled truths rather than arguments to be examined. To disagree is to be unfair, and in this brave new world of “fairness,” unfairness cannot be tolerated.
Former California Governor Jerry Brown demonstrated this mindset perfectly. When asked about the economic harm caused by large minimum‑wage increases, he admitted the policy wasn’t economically sound, but insisted it was “the fair thing to do.” Consequences were irrelevant.
Optics were everything.
Marcuse justified this through emergency politics. Liberal freedoms, he argued, are luxuries for stable times. We are never in stable times. Climate, inequality, oppression, democracy itself: crisis is constant. Crisis suspends norms. In emergencies, we censor “dangerous ideas,” silence dissent, and enforce compliance. We saw it in full display during the COVID scamdemic. That is repressive tolerance: tolerance that means exclusion, diversity that means uniformity, and freedom that survives only for those who agree.
The First Amendment was written precisely to protect political and religious speech; the very speech now targeted by leftist activists. The founders understood that liberty requires disagreement. Without debate, one side rules, dictates, and controls.
This entire dynamic echoes George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, where language is inverted and history rewritten to serve the ruling ideology.
The 1619 Project is a perfect example. If America was founded on religious freedom, then we have achieved something extraordinary. But if America was founded on slavery, as the 1619 narrative claims, then the entire system is irredeemably corrupt and must be discarded. A communist revolution cannot occur while the American constitutional system remains intact. Therefore, it must be discredited, dismantled, and psychologically rejected. Nobody throws away something that works, so the system must be portrayed as fundamentally broken.
Never mind that America became the most prosperous and free country in history under that system. If Marxists can convince people that the foundation is flawed, then the entire structure can be torn down.
This slow‑motion revolution is not new. The Fabians taught that in the West, violent revolution would fail because capitalism had succeeded. People were comfortable. So the revolution had to be gradual, psychological, and cultural. If you can convince people to distrust their own eyes and ears, half the battle is won.
Even our political labels reveal the strategy. Anything that challenges Marxist ideology is branded “far right,” “extremist,” or “authoritarian.” But in the American political spectrum, the far left is total government control and the far right is anarchy. The Constitution sits squarely in the center. By that measure, even the most conservative MAGA Republicans, including Trump, still support more federal power than the Constitution allows. In truth, nearly everyone is left of the Constitution.
But that reality is unacceptable to the revolutionaries, so they manufacture their own. Opponents are painted as far‑right, white‑supremacist fascists – not because evidence supports it, but because the narrative requires it. The January 6 narrative, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s classifications, and the Charlottesville deception all serve the same purpose: to convince Americans that Republicans are racist because the left says so. Many voters who disagree with every progressive policy still vote for Democrats because they cannot bring themselves to vote for a supposedly “racist” Republican.
I have long argued that the Constitution contains no asterisk reading “suspended in case of emergency.” Yet emergency politics is exactly what the left depends on. COVID made this clear: sweeping suspensions of liberty, worship, movement, and common‑sense law were justified in the name of crisis.
This is the silent revolution unfolding in America, not with guns or barricades, but with redefined words, manufactured crises, and the steady erosion of the freedoms that once made this wonderful Union of States exceptional. The question now is whether we will recognize it in time to preserve what remains of our liberty.
“A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.” – James Madison
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” – John Adams
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
Tulsi Gabbard Resigns, Effective June 30
By Douglas V. Gibbs
Tulsi Gabbard, one of the most fearless members of President Trump’s national security team, has been a key figure in exposing the Deep State’s inner workings. Gabbard has announced she will resign as Director of National Intelligence effective June 30, 2026. Her departure raises an immediate and serious question: who will replace her in a Senate still largely controlled by the opposition? My concern is that the confirmation process may be weaponized to block a worthy successor. Fortunately, if necessary, that process does not have to begin until after the mid-term elections.
Gabbard released her resignation letter on X, and the reason she gave is heartbreaking. Her husband, Abraham, is battling what she described as “an extremely rare form of bone cancer.”
She did not specify the exact diagnosis, but based on her description, my mind immediately went to multiple myeloma. A close friend of mine has been fighting that same disease. Multiple myeloma begins in the plasma cells of the bone marrow and is notorious for creating lytic lesions (literal holes in the bones) that weaken the skeletal structure and can lead to sudden fractures, including vertebral compression fractures. It’s sometimes called “myeloma bone disease” because of how aggressively it destroys bone tissue by throwing the body’s bone-building and bone-destroying cells into chaos.
Other rare bone cancers, such as Ewing sarcoma, could also fit the description. Whatever the exact diagnosis, these cancers are brutal, debilitating, and life‑altering. My friend’s cancer advanced rapidly at first, but is now in remission. I pray Gabbard’s husband experiences the same mercy.
In her letter, Gabbard wrote that Abraham “faces major challenges in the coming weeks and months,” and that she must step away from public service to support him fully. “Unfortunately, I must submit my resignation, effective June 30, 2026,” she wrote.
She also expressed gratitude to President Trump for the trust he placed in her and for the opportunity to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the past year and a half.
Gabbard, once a Democrat before witnessing firsthand the rot within the Swamp, said she believes she made “significant progress at the ODNI,” including advancing transparency and restoring integrity to an intelligence community long plagued by politicization.
And she’s right. Her tenure has been one of the most consequential in modern intelligence history. She initiated a restructuring of the ODNI that streamlined operations and rooted out entrenched political actors who had weaponized intelligence for years. She dismissed, reassigned, or revoked the clearances of individuals she believed were responsible for manipulating intelligence for political ends.
She also pushed aggressively for transparency, releasing long‑buried information that exposed corruption and criminality within the intelligence apparatus, including details about the intelligence community’s role in manufacturing the Russian‑collusion narrative during the 2016 election.
Gabbard acknowledged that “there is still important work to be done,” and pledged to ensure a smooth transition. I suspect these final weeks will be intense. With the clock ticking, she may accelerate the release of information she’s been preparing. Whether that leads to handcuffs and orange jumpsuits remains to be seen.
Her resignation comes at a critical moment. The mid‑term elections are approaching, and the Senate may attempt to stall or block confirmation of her replacement. Fortunately, the law allows an acting director to serve for up to 210 days after the vacancy occurs, and longer if a nomination is pending. That means President Trump still has room to maneuver. If no nomination is submitted, an acting director could serve until roughly January 26, 2027.
Gabbard will continue to oversee intelligence operations for the next five weeks, including matters related to U.S. actions against Iran and any potential moves involving Cuba.
President Trump has already announced that Aaron Lukas, currently the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, will serve as Acting Director beginning June 30. Lukas has more than 20 years of intelligence experience and previously served under Trump during his first term. The President has called him “highly respected,” and there are indications he views Lukas as a trustworthy potential permanent replacement.
The transition is expected to begin within days.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary