Enigma From an Outer Borough

Icing Manhattan

Ice, photogravure etching

Each of the five boroughs of New York City puts its stamp on the characters of its residents. Manhattan — the sophisticated fast lane, a mix of rich and poor, Wall Street next to Chinatown, Harlem next to the Upper East Side, the Bowery next to Greenwich Village, and iconic Central Park. Brooklyn — once the home of the Dodgers, now gentrification central. The Bronx — a no-go zone on the way to bucolic Hudson Valley. Staten Island — where the Staten Island Ferry goes, to a rural enclave gazing at the towers across the waters. Last and least, outer-borough Queens — an eternal low-rent district, home to immigrants, enroute to airports and Gatsbyesque resorts, where Donald J Trump is from. Crossing the East River to Manhattan, and making it there, is his driving ambition.

With garish gold-plated towers and a brand irresistible to an international new-rich clientele, he does. Trump’s business activities seem designed to mock the pretensions of the respectable old-rich, while catering to the lowest-caste varieties of mass culture in America — wrestling, beauty contests, gambling, reality-TV, a self-styled ‘university’ teaching students to be like himself, and sales of his brand to other real-estate developers. His charitable activities are murky, but one endeavor, refurbishment of the iconic Woolman ice-skating rink in Central Park, becomes highly visible. Completed in 1986 quicker and at lower cost than estimated, it showcases the incompetence of the City’s Koch Administration, which despite years of wasteful expenditures had failed to get the job done. More than any of his towering buildings, this financially minor project marks Trump’s triumphant arrival in Manhattan. His ‘can-do’ approach, turning a financial drain into a profitable enterprise, suggests he could do the same for the American economy as well.

In the 1990s, something transforms Donald Trump from a crass New York real-estate mogul into a crass public-spirited American. Perhaps the Woolman ice rink experience activates his public-spiritedness. Or the roller-coaster ride of over-leveraged business loses its thrill, as an Atlantic City gambling joint goes bankrupt, and a Moscow construction project is abandoned. In 1998 he meets Melania. Of all the women he has known, she is the most mysterious, alluringly intelligent, and sexy in a continuously fascinating way. Her influence is profound. She urges him to seek the Presidency. Understanding America as only a foreigner can do, she intuits that he can win if he will ‘be himself’.

To the Detroit Economic Club in June 2016, Trump outlines a program of tax simplification and reduction, cutting regulations, enforcing equitable international trade, U.S. energy independence, and other America-First policies. As President he does these things, to the consternation of globalists whose careers are fostered by other countries and by international bureaucracies. U.S. manufacturing jobs recover, incomes rise, unemployment hits a record low, and the United States becomes a net energy exporter for the first time since 1952. Trump has a common-sense grasp of how business practitioners respond to the complex mix of incentives and disincentives in their midst. He connects with working people, sees how their jobs had been exported to the lowest bidder, and shows them that hard times are politically, not economically, determined.

Donald Trump’s irreverent humor resonates with people who are sick of focus-group-tested talking points. His willingness — actually eagerness — to offend the politically correct is music to people not in tune with its ever-changing diktats. Trump has a talent for saying exactly the wrong thing, as if he could say what’s politely expected, but prefers the opposite. I suspect that many people, including me, have this talent, and have to suppress it, except among friends. Trump’s talent for saying exactly the wrong thing is his way of inviting his audience to be friends. Sometimes his audience doesn’t get the joke and doesn’t accept the invitation. During a press conference that touches on Russia’s alleged hacking of the Democrat National Committee, he makes fun of the allegation, adding: ‘Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing’. Nobody would really enlist Russia’s help in finding missing official correspondence, which the best efforts of U.S. investigators are unable to uncover. The humorless press corps doesn’t get the joke, and indeed the dead-serious talking-points media make it into yet another element of their Russia-collusion hoax.

Trump even jokes about the July 13, 2024 attempt on his life, in response to a question from Elon Musk about immigration. ‘As I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted’ — whereupon Musk says (about the shooter) ‘some people have no manners’ — Trump recalls the chart showing record-low immigration numbers during his term of office, and remarks ‘illegal immigration saved my life’ (because his turning to look at the chart causes the bullet to graze rather than kill him). He segues from dark humor to divine thanks for having been spared, calling it an act of God.

As President, Donald Trump’s misplaced trust in his advisors eventually causes his downfall. Warned by NSC staffer Rich Higgins about destabilization efforts as early as May 2017, he is unaccustomed to the culture of Washington DC, and declines to retaliate. After enduring nearly three years of fruitless but distracting investigations, 2020 arrives with a lab-crafted virus from Wuhan China, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers and the National Institutes of Health. You can’t make this stuff up — one reason both the general public and the cognoscenti are so slow to catch on. Under the enormous pressure of a WHO-declared pandemic, President Trump allows public health officials and drug company executives to stampede him and the ‘whole-of-government’ into a taxpayer-gifted mass injection campaign that not only does not work, but kills and disables millions of people. There is no official inquiry about lab origins of the Wuhan virus, internal Pfizer test results are kept secret, no comparison of the risks of an experimental genetic modification versus a flu-like illness, no tracking of excess deaths in relation to mass-injection rollout, no correction of false cause-of-death data, and scant case reports of vax-caused cardio-vascular, neurological, and auto-immune effects. All of that comes later, from independent private researchers, lawsuits, and FOIA demands, along withthe next Administration’s ‘whole-of-government’ censorship of anything contrary to its official narrative. Despite Trump’s assistance in launching ‘Operation Warp Speed’ to rush mass injections of experimental drugs, globalists and career bureaucrats set out to destroy his Presidency, and in 2020 succeed in doing so. Whether Trump has learned from this experience to be more skeptical of his advisors has yet to be tested.

Donald Trump’s new chief advisor in 2024 is Elon Musk, who is himself an enigmatic figure. A passionate if erratic advocate of free speech, Musk opens up the Twitter (later renamed X) files after purchasing the company for $44 billion. The files show unequivocally that Twitter banned science writer and vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson in response to orders from White House officials including one, Scott Gottleib, who serves concurrently as an FDA Commissioner and as a Pfizer Board Member. A more telling case of illegal conflict-of-interest would be hard to find, but more revelations of the covidian-pharma complex could give the Berenson v Biden case a good run for its money. Musk resists censorship demands from various countries, including Germany, and most recently (September 2024) an errant judge in Brazil. Yet he bans vaccine critic and former high-level political staffer Dr Naomi Wolf, apparently for writing with evidence about crimes committed by the Biden family. Despite such inexplicable lapses, Twitter/X is the most-viewed news medium in the world, carrying many posts that would never have seen the light of day under its previous ownership.

Musk and his Silicon Valley pals like Peter Thiel are charter members of the Artificial Intelligentsia. For them, AI is the wave of the future, and will soon — this year or next — swamp human intelligence. Reminiscent of JFK’s missile gap in 1960, the race is on to determine which nation will develop AI supremacy. As one writer puts it, ‘AI and crypto are going to happen whether we want them or not. We need to play the hand we are dealt - and use them to stop our enemies before they use them against us. I believe that's why God spared Trump. To gather a team to do just that.’ Gigawatts of electricity will be required to operate the computers to run crypto blockchains and AI industrial and military applications. Not for the first time in American history, technology is sprinting ahead of any sense of purpose, as if technological determinism had a will of its own, superseding anyone’s ability to control it. This view forecloses inquiry into the possible downside, negating in advance the possibility of unanticipated consequences, among them malevolent people gaining control of the technology.

How artificial do we want human intelligence to be? The question is never asked. For the trans cult, a complete makeover of humanity, genetic code and all, is their preferred form of deliverance from earthly woes. Curiously, given his free-speech bona fides, Elon Musk appears to come down in the same place. His Neuralink brain implants are already converting thought into words on a screen for paraplegics. The joy of one experimental subject upon seeing this miracle will undoubtedly inspire others, who are not disabled, to wish for similar extensions of themselves. As with mobile phones tracking our whereabouts becoming devices fervently desired by billions, people will clamor for Elon Musk’s brain implants. They won’t want to be left behind. And so, instead of a mobile phone merely tracking their physical locations, purchases, and Web-browsing, seekers of Neuralink brain implants will grant, to a remote operator, direct access to their thoughts and feelings and hopes and anxieties. And you can bet such access won’t be a ‘read-only’ one-way street. The brain-implant chip will surely have ‘write’ capability as well. Psychological operations (‘psy-ops’ in spook lingo) such as the covid debacle, $billions for killing Ukrainians and Russians, and the suppression of information about official criminality have proved astonishingly successful, even (or especially) with intelligent people. Yet these methods are primitive compared to directly stimulating thoughts and feelings into implant-equipped brains. How ironic that one of the foremost advocates of free speech, Elon Musk, could be well on the way to realizing global mind-control — by whoever controls the technology. If AI is really all it’s cracked up to be, it will certainly be taken over by a central government. Like the nuclear scientists who naively believed they could control ‘their’ invention, today’s AI developers will watch helplessly as ‘their’ invention falls into the hands of those who might not have the best interests of humanity at heart.

Political candidates are nothing more than vehicles for achieving societal goals. Has Donald Trump, after his sorry record of capitulation to expert advisors in the covid debacle, learned from that experience enough to keep a tighter rein on technological excess in AI and crypto? Or will he, if President again, accede to the demands of mind-control advocates, fearing that another nation will outpace America in that endeavor? In the worst case, the election of 2024 could involve a choice between an old-style Communist dictatorship and a newfangled direct mind-control apparatus. Perhaps there is hope that Donald Trump’s close brush with death, and his courageous response under fire, will augment his already formidable instincts and human judgment, which he will need for decisions absolutely fundamental to the future of human freedom. Whatever the outcome of this election, the sequel will have to be watched carefully and acted upon to ensure the survival of human freedom against the myriad forms of central control that the governments of the world are grasping.

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