Scary: Palm Tree Experts Visit Paradise Palms

I spent most of last Saturday at the botanical gardens, hosting a group from the Palm Beach County chapter of the International Palm Tree Society.

For the first time since we started the project ten years ago, the park was fully developed, or at least it looked fully developed. It looked fantastic! I was happy about that. But I was anxious about what our guests would think of it. These weren’t casual visitors out for a bucolic weekend stroll. They were palm tree aficionados. One mislabeled palm tree could provoke who knows how much scoffing!

Paul Craft, a world-renowned expert on palm trees and the man chiefly responsible for making our garden what it is, led the tour for half of the group, about 25 people that I imagined were the hard-core botanists. (I tagged along with them.) And Keith Buttry, who will be Paul’s replacement as Chief Design and Development Director when he retires, led the tour for the other half.

Paul with Eric Katz, one of the palm enthusiasts on his part of the tour 

The complete tour of the grounds, which our usual visitors typically complete in 60 to 90 minutes, took more than three hours with these people. It felt like they wanted to stop at every single one of our 550+ species. And they had lots of questions and comments, half of them too technical for me to even understand.

Afterwards, everyone assembled in the picnic and game area for lunch. The mood was upbeat, the conversation convivial, and I was soon surrounded by guests that had figured out I was the person whose project this was.

First-timers to the gardens were flabbergasted to discover that such a beautiful and substantial palm tree garden was in the middle of West Delray Beach. Others, who had been here before, congratulated me on the progress we’d made since the last time they had visited.

I decided to spend the night in the cottage on the grounds so I could take a walk the next morning to see the gardens in the early light. It was sort of amazing.

For more information about the gardens or to schedule a private tour or event, email giovanna@palimi.net.

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Why I’m a Conservative, Part III

In Part I and Part II of this longish essay, I tried to make two points.

In Part I, I pointed out that one of the reasons humans have survived for 160,000+ years is that they became sapient. And, as Yuval Harari, and many others, have pointed out, sapience, in its evolved stages, is mostly about making communal, not individual, decisions.

That’s why anthropological and psychological studies of group decision-making are so important. And when we look at those studies, we see that with all primates – and, in fact, with almost all mammals – group decision-making is not about simply following a leader. For one thing, the leader only lasts as long as his actions are good for the entire group. Plus, to effect any significant change, the leader needs the buy-in of influential members of the rest of the group.

For simplicity’s sake – and notwithstanding the problems of oversimplifying such a complex subject – I suggested the group could be divided into subgroups defined in terms of their knowledge and experience.

In Part II, I attempted to illustrate how these subgroups might interact in group decision-making by imagining how it might play out in a Native American (Indian) culture. I suggested a scene where key members of the tribe had assembled to decide whether or not to go to war with another tribe.

The inexperienced braves, I said, thinking only of the righteousness of their cause, would be all too eager to prove themselves in battle. The more experienced warriors, aware of the potential for both positive and negative outcomes for the tribe, would be cautious about going forward. The aged chief, having by far the most experience, would make the final decision. But first, he brings the group together by acknowledging the feelings of the inexperienced braves, acknowledging the specific knowledge of the older warriors, and then sharing his wisdom by telling a story.

To put this into a more real and contemporary context, I talked about how the same hierarchy exists in the modern military – with decisions made by the top brass taking into consideration how they will affect everyone from the inexperienced recruits at the bottom to the troop and platoon leaders who will be tasked with leading them into battle.

And I pointed out that this interactive structure occurs in every kind of group decision-making that Homo sapiens make – from business, to politics, to sports, education, charitable projects, book clubs, drug-rehab associations, and so on.

In other words, in every type of human interaction (that endures over time), there are three subgroups: the ignorant, the knowledgeable, and the wise. And those that make the best decisions for the group as a whole are not necessarily those that have the smartest and most knowledgeable leaders, but those that involve every member of the group in an appropriate way.

If we look at it from an evolutionary perspective, it’s about survival. Not about the survival of any one particular person or one particular gene pool. It’s about the survival of the species. And that depends, in large part, on the fact that nurturing and sharing have been imbedded in our individual DNAs.

Nature has ordained that all members of a society should have a role in making important decisions that affect the well-being of the entire group. Which ties directly to my argument that the sort of thinking that is good for us as a species is that which includes all but gives deference to the wise.

So that’s what I’m going to argue next. That we all start off ignorant and respond to external conditions with the naïveté of the ignorant. But it’s our responsibility as we move into adulthood and old age to become, as much as possible, wise.

In Part IV of this essay, I’ll tell you why most of what’s wrong with America today is due to my generation’s (the Baby Boomers’) refusal to become wise.

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“Israel! Go to Hell!”

In response to the attack on Israel by Hamas, Bari Weiss introduced Tuesday’s issue of The Free Press by saying:

“On the one hand I think: Surely this will be sufficient. Surely this amount of blood will be enough to shake the world awake. Surely no one can equivocate or justify this. As my friend Sarah Haider wrote, ‘How easy is it to simply condemn targeted violence against civilians? Can there be a lower bar?’

“And yet, across the world, people have sunk below it.”

I thought, given the scale and ferocity of the attack, that Weiss must be wrong. That most Americans, conservative and liberal alike, would be condemning the action. Especially since the attack was so ferocious and the bloodshed was so indiscriminate.

But that’s not what happened. When I forwarded the issue to a group of my friends, some thanked me, affirming Weiss’s sentiment. But some others indicated that they disagreed, and that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians over the years somehow justified the attack. One said he thought the Israelis “deserved” it.

What I know about the Arab-Israeli conflict is more or less what anyone that has been “impartially” following it in the media for 40+ years knows. I was vaguely familiar with arguments on both sides. But considering the brutality of the Hamas soldiers, I thought that those that were sympathetic to the Palestinians’ plight would at least moderate their responses.

And brutal it was. We know, for example, that they paraglided into a music festival and proceeded to slaughter men, rape woman, and kidnap children, beheading some of them on the spot, and recording and publishing many of their barbarous acts. In one instance, a Hamas soldier took a woman’s cellphone, used it to film him butchering her, and then sent the video to her Facebook page so her friends and family back in Tel Aviv could see his handiwork.

And now they are threatening to execute the hostages they have captured on live television.

This is not the first time we’ve seen this sort of barbarity by radical Muslims. But I don’t think we’ve ever seen the sort of moderate and even defensive reaction to it that this attack has generated.

“People gathered at the Sydney Opera House,” Weiss wrote, “cheering ‘gas the Jews’ and ‘death to the Jews.’ People are rejoicing in the slaughter on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York…. At our most prestigious universities there is silence from administrations that leapt to speak out on George Floyd’s killing and on the war in Ukraine.”

And among other things, she included this from a report on Oct. 9 by Olivia Reingold and Francesca Block:

“Young girls in hijabs waved Palestinian flags in the street. Men in ski masks hung from scaffolding chanting, ‘Israel, go to hell.’ And pamphlets rained from the sky, lauding the recent violence by Hamas as ‘heroic.’

“This wasn’t the Middle East. This was Midtown Manhattan, home to the second-largest Jewish population in the world after Israel, just days after Israel was ambushed by Hamas in the deadliest terrorist attack in the country’s history.”

If you have the stomach to read more, click here.

And if you’re interested in the mechanics of the attack – how and why it worked so horrifically well – click here.

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A Crisis You Probably Never Knew Existed!

I came across this in my reading yesterday: Hormel Foods is once again sponsoring what it calls the “10 Under 20 Food Heroes Awards” to honor young people working in the fight against “food insecurity.”

What is food insecurity?

The US Dept. of Agriculture’s definition is “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I went on a little Google search. I found nothing that helped me understand it any better, but I did discover that, apparently, it’s a huge crisis.

According to Feeding America, one of more than a dozen non-profit, fund-raising businesses that are enjoying the growth of this crisis, “nearly 40 million Americans, including 12 million children, faced food insecurity in 2020.”

Did you know that?

I didn’t. Nor did I know that “food insecurity can have a seriously bad impact on people that experience it.” For example, they say that…

* Food insecurity can cause serious health issues when people must choose between spending money on food and medicine or healthcare.

* Food insecurity can make it more difficult for a child to learn and grow.

* Food insecurity can lead to difficult decisions, like choosing between food and rent, bills, and transportation.

I know what you may be thinking: “Really? In America? I thought the food problem here is that so many Americans are too fat!”

Well, yes. That is true. The data (from the FDA as well as other government sources) indicate that 20% of America’s children and 30% of its adult population are obese. Another 30% of adults are just fat – too fat, in fact, to be eligible for basic training. And the lower the family income, the more likely it is that family members will be fat or obese.

So then, if you were heartless, you might wonder whether the Food Insecurity Industry’s efforts to get more food to our low-income people is the right thing to do. Because if lack of food was the problem, wouldn’t all those tens of millions of “food-insecure” people in America be skinny? Like the photos we see now and then of adults and children in third-world countries?

No. In America – and the rest of the developed world – we have the opposite problem. So, clearly, it’s not because they need more food.

Starvation and undernourishment (when people are not able to consume enough calories to sustain health) are problems that do exist. They are much less common than many people think, but they exist, usually on a temporary basis, in third-world countries suffering from famine or war.

But in America, we have neither starvation nor undernourishment. We have malnutrition caused by eating too much of foods that make you fat and sick.

Countless studies have shown that when your diet is heavy in carbohydrates and processed foods, all sorts of unhealthy things happen. One, for example, is that your insulin spikes. And when insulin spikes, you experience (an hour or two later) a craving for more junk.

In other words, low-income Americans do not suffer from not eating enough. They suffer from eating too much of the wrong foods.

And the Food Insecurity Industry is telling us it’s a crisis. If they were to say, “In America we have a crisis of Americans eating too much junk food and being fat,” I would agree. But they won’t say that because then how could they justify the billions of dollars they raise each year to “solve” that problem?

It would be a hard sell, because we all know how to solve the problem of being fat. We don’t need a thriving industry, funded by taxpayers, to figure it out.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here are four that may help.

This is what starvation looks like:

 

This is what undernourishment looks like:

 

This is what malnutrition looks like:

 

This is what food insecurity looks like:

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An Embarrassing Answer to a Simple Question

“I know this is a strange question,” JW wrote, “but how do you like to spend your weekends? I’m sure it has changed as you’ve gone through different seasons of life. But how did you handle weekends during your biggest wealth-building years? I feel good about my progress during a typical week, but weekends are my Achilles heel. Since my friends and family are off on weekends, I try to spend more time with them. While the time together is great, I also have a sense of guilt. I don’t get much productive work done. I don’t work out like I do during the week. My nutrition habits go out the window. It feels like I take five steps forward during the week and two steps back on the weekend. Do you have any advice for me?”

My weekends. I wish he hadn’t asked that. The answer is embarrassing.

My longtime partner BB worked non-stop during the week, but then devoted his weekends to building barns and reading scripture. His very unbusinesslike weekends seemed to give him the break he needed from writing and working out business problems and allowed him to exercise his body and different parts of his brain. Monday mornings, he always seemed reenergized.

I can’t say for certain that’s true. I never asked him. In any case, I’ve never had that problem.

I shouldn’t say never.

When I was in my twenties, when my family was young and we lived in DC, I adhered to the work-all-week/ have-fun-on-the-weekend idea. I jampacked our weekend calendar with things to do with the kids. That meant walks in the parks, visits to the zoo and the kids’ museums, going to kid-oriented movies, etc. I thought I was working hard and so I deserved to spend my weekends that way. That was then.

In my early thirties, we moved to South Florida and I began my career as a CEO and an entrepreneur. This made a big difference in my weekend schedule. I still loved “playing” on Saturdays and Sundays. But I realized I couldn’t possibly keep up with my work obligations if I didn’t squeeze in some work on the weekends.

In my early forties, I went harder at my work, and probably regularly worked at least six hours each weekend day. There were weekends I’d work straight through. I never saw NOT working as an option. People depended on me. I had things to do.

At 49, I decided I didn’t need to make any more money and made my second effort at retirement. I vowed that, as a first step, I would stop working on weekends. That lasted about a week. I worked harder in my fifties than I did in my forties.

When I turned 60, I tried to retire again and failed again. I continued to work weekends. Probably five or six hours a day.

Now that I’m in my 70s, I’ve really gotten control of myself. I still work on weekends, but I’ve cut the time dramatically so that I can devote as much time as possible to what matters. Which is never work.

I’m down to about four hours per weekend day. So… what do I do for the rest of the day?

Mostly, what I’m “advised” to do.

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Why I’m a Conservative, Part II

I’ve always admired the way some traditional cultures value the elderly. The older women are depended upon for advice on matters that were traditionally handled by women, including feeding, clothing, and caring for the family. The older men are depended on for advice on matters that were traditionally handled by men, including negotiating agreements.

In these societies, grandparents aren’t left alone in the houses that their children grew up in. Nor are they deposited in retirement homes. On the contrary, they move from actively participating to an equal or possibly more important role: overseeing decisions that the next generation wants to make, and sharing their thoughts and feelings about the wisdom or lack of wisdom of those decisions – often by recounting stories about similar decisions they have made.

There are many such societies – but today, I’m thinking primarily of the Indians. (Oops! I mean Native Americans!)

Six Native Americans in a Tent 

In my imaginary and very generalized picture of a traditional Native American village, I see five men – three young men in their twenties and two middle-aged men in their forties.

They are sitting in a small semi-circle, having an animated discussion. Apparently, a neighboring tribe has killed – accidently, they claim – a member of the tribe who inadvertently wandered into their territory.

The three young men are furious. They want quick, certain, and terrible retribution. Their plan is to raid the other tribe that very night, burn down their tents, kill all the men, rape the woman, and kidnap the children.

The two middle-aged men are not so gung-ho. They say they understand and agree with the younger men’s basic sentiments. But they argue that now is not the time. The other tribe will be expecting a counterattack. It would be better, they say, to catch them off guard.

Unable to agree on a course of action, they decide to ask the chief for his advice.

The chief is in his sixties or seventies. Maybe older. When they arrive at his tent, he is sitting outside, one of his grandchildren on his knee.

“We are here for your counsel,” the men say.

“Yes,” the chief says, lifting the child from his knee and handing it to his wife. “I was expecting you. Come inside.”

They enter the tent and take their places around a small fire.

“Before we begin,” the chief says, “let us smoke this pipe to bring us together as one spirit.”

When the smoking ritual is completed, the chief listens to each of the five men in turn.

“I see,” he says.

“So, what do we do?” they ask.

“First,” he says, “I have some questions.”

He asks his questions and listens to their answers. Then he picks up the pipe.

“Let us smoke again,” he says. “I have a story I want to tell you. I remember a situation very much like this one…”

How I See This Working in the Military 

In Part I of this essay, I postulated that there are three levels of learning: ignorance, knowledge, and wisdom:

* Ignorance gives one the ability to believe almost anything if it’s repeated sufficiently.

* Knowledge gives one the ability to teach and lead the ignorant.

* And wisdom allows one to teach and lead the knowledgeable.

Here’s how that applies to the military:

The Ignorant are the recruits. The young men that have never been to war, and can only imagine (like me) what it is really like. In bootcamp, they learned about the mechanics of war, but they are completely ignorant of the reality of its horrors. And it is that ignorance that allows them to be stirred into doing the most incredibly courageous and stupid things by people they trust.

The Knowledge Keepers are the men that run the training programs designed to “ready” the recruits for war. Most of them have never been in battle themselves, but they have a good understanding of the tools, skills, and strategies of war, and many years of experience in teaching them. Their advanced knowledge of using weapons, driving tanks, flying planes, and so on, allows them to pass along what they know to the ignorant recruits. But their lack of experience in battle allows them to do something even more valuable: motivate the recruits to believe in the virtue of the war and go into it eagerly with fire in their bellies.

The Decision Makers are the troop and platoon leaders. The men who lead the recruits into battle. The men who have not just the knowledge but the years of experience and, thus, the instincts to confidently make on-the-spot decisions that will determine the outcome of every conflict for every young person under their command.

And then, of course, there are The Men Who Should Be Wise. The president and other elected officials that have the authority and responsibility to make the most important decisions. (Should we go to war? And if so, what is our commitment?)

In almost any group – whether it be a nuclear family, a military unit, a sports team, or a business – there is a natural and very healthy instinct to organize authority and responsibility in terms of the three levels of learning: ignorance, knowledge, and wisdom. When those given the authority and responsibility to make critically important decisions are respected as well as being wise, the likelihood of success is the highest. When they are not, difficult situations tend to go from bad to worse pretty quickly.

In Part III of this essay, I will tell you how the three levels of learning play out in business and personal affairs.

And then, I’ll try to show you how these universal patterns operate, or should operate, in our thinking about global relationships.

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Why Cowboys and Not Cowmen?

I don’t know why cowboys are called cowboys in America. But it makes sense in the cattle country of Western Nicaragua.

There, most of the ranches produce beef. And almost all the cows are free-range. Which is to say that they are regularly herded from one grazing area to another almost every single day. This sort of herding is not what you see in the movies. It is slow and boring. It’s slow because those that do the herding don’t do it on horseback. (There aren’t enough horses for that.) And they don’t use lassos. They walk and move the cattle along by hitting them with switches.

And they’re young. When I say young, I mean 12 to 14 or 15.

It took me a while to figure out why the herding is done by boys instead of men. It’s because as soon as they get big enough to do the hard work of farming, their parents recruit them for that. Herding cattle, a much easier job, is left to their younger brothers.

I can’t explain why cowboys are called cowboys in this country. But I can share with you this interesting history of how the American cowboy came to be. Click here.

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Why I’m a Conservative, Part I

Bill Maher, who has identified (and been identified) as a typical Hollywood Liberal for most of his career, has, in recent years, felt the need to explain why he sometimes makes fun of Woke ideas and Woke ideology.

His explanation is pretty good. He says something like:

“They [the Woke mob] accuse me of abandoning the cause in recent years. Not true. What has happened is that the center of Liberal consciousness had drifted to the extreme left. My values and beliefs haven’t changed. Theirs have.”

I take that to be a fair and honest description of Maher’s personal experience. And when I first heard it, I liked it so much that I thought about using it as a response to friends and family members that accuse me of having suddenly become a “Conservative” (i.e., Fascist, Racist, Misogynist, Homophobe, etc.).

But then I realized that, unlike Maher, my political, economic, and social views have changed. And that’s because, when I was younger, my opinions were based on what I knew back then – which was, in terms of making adult decisions, next to nothing.

Work, for example. From the age of six, I had chores that I was obliged to do. And I had my first job (on weekends and holidays) at the age of twelve. So, by the time I was a senior in high school, I had a great deal more experience than most of my classmates in working hard to make extra spending money. But I had no experience with the kind of serious financial obligations I would be taking on as an adult – to meet my own needs as well as the needs of my future dependents.

I began working full-time when I was 18 and have worked full-time ever since. And during those years, I learned a great deal more about making money. I also, very gradually, learned to make smarter choices in the way I managed that money to chart a better and safer future for myself and my family.

This is what we do – what we are programmed to do. It is how we survive and prosper in an unforgiving world. It is how we propagate our species.

This takes me back to the assumption behind both the criticism of Bill Maher and his defense – that there is something good about maintaining one’s ideas, views, and values as time passes. Think about it. It’s a completely dumb idea. Having the same ideas, views, and beliefs at 50 that you had at 20 is not virtuous. It’s a form of willful stupidity.

And this takes me to my current thinking. I don’t feel ashamed of abandoning so many of my younger beliefs and ideas. I feel good about it. I feel like what is happening in both my rational and emotional brain parts is what nature intended.

Becoming conservative as one ages is good for the individual, the social and work environments one lives in, for one’s particular DNA, and ultimately for the survival of the species!

The Three Stages of Learning 

At every stage (and facet) of life, there are three levels of learning: ignorance, knowledge, and wisdom.

* Ignorance gives one the ability to believe in and be stirred into doing the most incredibly brave and stupid things.

* Knowledge gives one the ability to teach and lead the ignorant.

* And wisdom allows one to teach and lead the knowledgeable.

We are all born ignorant. We are also born with an insatiable attraction to knowledge. Every major stage of life involves learning countless thousands of wonderous things and acquiring countless thousands of small, sometimes unconscious, physical, verbal, and mental skills. This is essential for not just survival, but success in every realm of human experience.

Wisdom comes from knowledge. Wisdom is about understanding the limits of knowledge and the danger of certainty. Wisdom is about realizing and remembering how many bits of certain knowledge one had at some point that turned out be untrue – or at least not as universally true as one had imagined.

Wisdom is a critical component of group intelligence – perhaps the most critical component, because it allows the group to try and fail, but live to another day.

In case you’re wondering where I’m going with this, I am not going to make the argument that political Conservatives are wise and political Liberals are unwise.

What I’m saying here is that whatever world one finds oneself in, there is always a tension around important decisions – between those advocating for quick and significant action, and those that pull back on the reins.

In Part II of this essay, I’ll give you some examples of how these three levels of learning work their way into just about every social institution and just about everything we do.

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Good Deal or Dangerous Political Gambit? 

The US and Iran executed a deal on Monday – the return of five incarcerated Americans in return for the release of five Iranians.

That sounds fair.

But the Biden administration threw in some glicken by unfreezing nearly $6 billion in Iranian assets held in South Korea. The Iranians have agreed to spend the $6 billion for “humanitarian” purposes. And Qatar’s central bank will oversee the regulation of the unfrozen funds.

I judge that arrangement to be pure poppycock, a mutual PR stunt to subdue the obvious criticism that was likely to follow.

The US has long followed a policy of not paying for hostages. And from what I can tell, it has worked well. But now, in reversing this policy, opponents say that the US is sending a strong message to all the other anti-US terrorist countries: Just kidnap a handful of American citizens residing in or passing through your country. We can make a deal.

So why would the Biden administration make such a foolhardy deal, knowing that for the five coming home, 50 or 500 will likely be incarcerated in enemy prisons in the near future?

I can think of only one answer. Some smooth-talking foreign policy wonk convinced Biden and his backers that it would look good on the list of the president’s accomplishments in office. And it could work – at least with naïve voters – so long as there isn’t an eruption of kidnappings in the next 13 months. (Maybe that was assured with a handshake?)

For a mostly positive review of the deal, click here.

For a somewhat critical perspective, click here.

For an article on Iran’s frozen assets, click here.

And click here for a brief explanation of how the US came to its hostage policy.

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Doubling Down on My Predictions for 2024

The 70 million to 80 million voting age people in America that hate Trump – whether they be journalists, lobbyists, pundits, or voters – have always found it difficult to believe that Orange Top would ever get the large and tenacious support he has gotten.

And because of their blinding antipathy, they were never able to see how foolish a political strategy it would be to highlight their condescending animosity towards him. That is why, during the 2016 elections, Hillary Clinton felt free to call Trump’s supporters “the Deplorables.” I believe that was the single biggest factor in her losing to Trump.

Today, these same people are even more surprised to discover that – after all the allegations and indictments they’ve thrown at him for six years running – Trump has held onto his base and is still so strong in the polls. (Click here.)

I’ve been saying for at least a year that Biden will not be running for reelection in 2024. For several reasons.

For openers, Biden no longer has the mental or physical strength to compete successfully against Trump in another nationally televised campaign. His handlers skillfully protected him in 2020 by severely limiting his public exposure – particularly on occasions when he’d be expected to speak extemporaneously. But that strategy is no longer possible. In the last 18 months, Biden’s physical weakness and mental lapses have increased so greatly that even a partisan media has been unable to ignore them.

The video evidence of Biden’s mental deterioration is abundant. If you think I’m being myopic in this regard, freebeacon.com is a website that tracks and publishes it weekly. Here, for example, are three senior moments that happened the week of the 2023 G20 Summit in India. Biden forgot:

* the year of his presidential inauguration

* the name and job title of the US Secretary of Defense, and

* whether or not it’s appropriate to stroke a little girl’s face.

Click here.

But Biden’s mental condition is not the only thing Democrat insiders are worried about. They are just as worried that he is going to be criminally implicated in the Hunter Biden investigation. The proof is piling up. There is now documented evidence (including tape recordings and canceled checks) that during Biden’s tenure as vice president under Obama, China, Russia, and Ukraine paid Hunter, Biden’s brother, and as many as a dozen other members of the Biden family at least $20 million, which was deposited into various anonymous trusts.

Though the mainstream media has done a fantastic job of keeping this story under wraps, with all that incriminating evidence coming into public view, it’s become difficult for them to continue to keep their audiences in the dark.

But I don’t think that’s what’s really going on. I think the increase in news articles and editorials that are critical of Biden is being done not just with the blessing of the Democrat machine, but in response to a plan to get rid of Biden that was hatched at least a year ago.

As I’ve said before, Trump’s support is at an all-time high and growing. Biden’s support is at an all-time low. And the felony indictments are galvanizing Trump’s base and even pulling in some undecided voters that see the indictments as third-world-level political ploys.

And this, the Democrat party leaders saw as a possibility a long time ago. So, they put together a Plan B.

Plan B is to replace Biden with a stronger candidate. Someone that has the credentials, the intelligence, and the charisma to compete with or beat Trump on the debate stage and in press conferences. It seems highly likely that the politician that fits that role is Gavin Newsom. So, I’m betting that he’ll be running against Trump next year.

I also predict that we will see an acceleration of critical coverage of Hunter and then his father during the next several months. The mainstream media will begin reporting on both the Hunter laptop scandal and President Biden’s mental decline on a weekly basis. Until it is obvious to everyone, including Democrat voters, that Biden has no chance of winning and must be replaced.

At that point, Biden will have to recognize that, considering his age and his health, he would be doing America a service by stepping down so that someone else, whom he endorses, can pick up the baton.

If the campaign for Newsom is to be ready in time, it must begin with a strong push by January 2024 at the latest. That’s why I’m predicting that Biden’s announcement will come before then.

Here’s the latest (and clearest) evidence that the left-leaning media is following the plan and gradually turning against Biden. The timing is predictable.

That’s enough about this for now. Sometime next week, I’ll give you my predictions for Newsom’s running mate and the issues the Democrats will highlight in their campaign.

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