by Kurt Schlichter
It seems bizarre that a couple of guys with a few hundred billion dollars between them are the voice of America’s working class, but that’s what they are. And it’s not like they’re pretending. They’re not pulling some scam or trick. Both of them really believe in what they’ve been saying. You know it because they’ve been saying it forever. With Donald Trump, his politics are pretty much the same conservative-Jacksonian-populist (yeah, that’s a thing) politics he’s always had, even though his party affiliation has switched. The same with Elon Musk. Elon Musk is no regular conservative. He has just always believed in things like free enterprise, free speech, and small government – you know, the same things the nominally conservative conservatives always talk about but never get around to conserving.
And you know what? Working people appreciate that. These guys haven’t changed. Their old party did. It started holding the working class in contempt and has sought to silence, disarm, and disenfranchise its members. Neither Donald nor Elon signed on for that.
Working class Americans also appreciate the fact that these guys actually build things. This is important. Today, the Democrats – the party of many of the working class until recent decades – are the technocrat party. It’s the party of HR directors, consultants, unionized teachers, lawyers, government bureaucrats, welfare bums, weirdos, climate fanatics and others who add only friction as opposed to value. They never build anything. They never make anything. They barely do anything except whine, complain, make up rules, and try to boss other people around.
But Donald Trump and Elon Musk make things, and that resonates with working people. As the great Salena Zito, one of America’s last real reporters, noted in her story about her amazing scoop interviewing both Trump and Musk after the President’s triumphant return to Butlerville, normal people respect these two because they actually create tangible objects. This is an incredible insight that the regime media totally missed.
Donald Trump built buildings. They are huge buildings, enormous undertakings, put together by rough men and tough women doing hard, sweaty work. And when he’s finished, there’s a monument there, a building that will last for generations. Elon Musk is no different except for what he builds. His Tesla cars are fantastic. His Starlink system is saving lives right now in flood-ravaged Appalachia. His SpaceX rockets actually work.
These guys build stuff. And that’s what the working class does. It makes things. It builds things. It creates things besides rules, regulations, paperwork, and hassles. Americans respect that.
And Americans want more of that. We used to make things in this country. We were the Arsenal of Democracy during World War II. Sure, our soldiers and allied soldiers were brave and heroic and did remarkable things, earning our eternal gratitude. But they couldn’t have done it without America’s engine of production pumping out endless streams of beans and bullets, fuel and fighters, wheat and medicine. Working Americans not only supplied the American Army but the British Army, the Free French Army, and much of the Russian Army. The Nazis and the Japanese lost at the point of a bayonet, but behind that bayonet was a tsunami of goods. Captured Germans used to talk about how they were terrified to fire their artillery because, as soon as they did, the Americans would return fire and just overwhelm them with shells. Now we have barely enough 155mm shells to support our Army, and we’re depleting our stocks to support wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Why? Because we stopped building enough of them. The geniuses running our institutions decided the Industrial Age was over – welcome to the Age of Paperwork and Zoom Meetings. But sadly, we’re learning the hard way that you can’t blow the hell out of a Russian motor rifle regiment or a Hezbollah missile factory with a TPS report.
America doesn’t build stuff anymore, not the way it once did. The Chinese communists fill the void. They have exponentially more shipbuilding capacity than we do, and now they have more ships than we do. Did you know there is one Chinese shipyard that has more building capacity than every single American shipyard still in existence? During World War II, we put out a liberty ship every three days. We had thousands of ships, thousands of fighters, millions of well-equipped and fed troops. And we just let that manufacturing capacity go away.
Biden and Harris have done nothing but give away America to China