The Politics of Fear is the flip side of the Politics of Strength. An autocratic or dictatorial regime can’t exist without a tool to intimidate and sow terror.

In the 15^th Century, when the Ottomans tried to invade Wallachia, the prince of Wallachia, Vlad III, terrified them with his tactic of impaling his enemies and displaying them in public for their comrades to see. Some German records claimed he ordered the impalement of between 20,000 to 80,000 victims displayed in the “Forest of the Impaled” which stretched for miles.

Impaling was the thrusting of a wooden stake through the lower part of the victim’s body, anus or vagina, pushing it all the way up to the upper part while the victims were still alive, but avoiding the head so that the victim could not die immediately. History gave him the infamous nickname Vlad the Impaler. The much more powerful and larger Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmed II was horrified, shaken, and forced to withdraw.

Scaring the enemies was a common tactic. The Ottomans themselves had already practiced impaling as punishment and a tool of control. The ancient Chinese kings used the no less terrifying “Tứ Mã Phân Thây” or “Death by Tearing The Body of a Victim By Four Horses” (a horse was tied to each limb of the victim) to deal with traitors.

In modern times, impaling was too savage a tactic even for the most cruel individuals, organizations, or groups. Even the German Nazi avoided it and opted for mass gassing and systematic deprivation. But terrifying or intimidating people, was and is still favored by the bullies.

In present days’ politics, terror is practiced in the forms of blackmailing, lawsuits, prosecutions, withholding funding, and threatening retaliation. The politics of fear has warped public opinion, silenced the voice of reason and conscience, lowered the moral level below that of a civilized society, and forced ordinary people to live permanently in fear and forfeit their right to protest against and object to the political acts they consider immoral, unconstitutional, or illegal.

Fear destroys dignity.

The vicious circle – retaliation begets retaliation – will continue forever.

Unlike all other forms of political systems, fear does not have a place in a democratic society. That reason alone is enough for Democracy to be the best system for ordinary people – and the billionaires too if they can get out of their fantasy of being in control of other people’s life – that has ever been created to serve mankind. It is the best reason for ordinary people to fight for Democracy or one day, sooner or later, they will wake up by a terrifying knock on the door or be stopped in the street while walking home and never again seeing their loved ones.

People who think that they are exempt from terror in a dictatorship are seriously mistaken, because exemption is always temporary and terror, if it can be used against one person or one group will be used against all.

Remember Lavrentiy Beria, the Executioner? For years, he was the terror of the Soviet Union’s communist society including the elites under Stalin, carrying out mass arrests, interrogations, and executions. When Stalin died, he was generally thought to be the next dictator of the Soviet Union. But terror turned around to visit him and he himself was executed in 1953.

JOHN P. LE PHONG                                                                                      (This article appears on X, thelephongjournal.com, and Facebook)

Since animals appeared on this earth, “the strong dominate the weak and the weak submit” has been the natural law until this day. It had also been the law for humans with probably a brief interruption when Thomas Jefferson issued the Declaration of Independence, which was probably the first written document declaring that all men were equal, seemingly asserting that that law was invalid: there was no divine right of kings. The Declaration and the Constitution formed the foundation of the American Democracy – in fact the foundation of many countries’ political systems – which has enabled ordinary people a say in governing their own life.

Democracy has been a political system to address the imbalance of power between the strong, the wealthy and the controllers of police power, and the ordinary people. The mass with its numbers makes up for the lack of energy due to a lack of wealth and police power. Still, such balance of power has always been in the realm of the same law, and Democracy is still trying to find a better means to enhance and protect the balance.

More than 300 years of thriving Democracy in America, and in some other places, may turn out to be a lull in the grip of the SDWS law.

Democracy was a counterforce against the law. The power of the kings was overwhelming and the populace, scattered around, did not have much. But when they came together, in the American 1776 Revolution and the French 1789 Revolution, the energy was strong enough to subvert the power of the kings and their cohorts, the privileged, and the wealthy. Democracy was a means to make ordinary people’s life safer and better.

In the Twenty First Century, immense energy, in the form of wealth and money, accumulated lopsidedly, so hugely and so fast with the wealthy and privileged getting the most of it. The balance of power is now tilted decidedly toward them, and the multitude is losing out. The law takes hold again and is enforced relentlessly and brutally. Society is again controlled and dictated by the wealthy, and the mass is again obedient servants.

That is not the only major problem for Democracy.

The backbone of Democracy, the middle class, does not seem to be worried. They say to themselves, if I am paid millions of dollars to say in writing or on broadcast media things the strong want me to say, why should I act au contraire? What does Democracy mean to me? Why do I care? When I was scratching the earth in the winter to make ends meet and the strong were frolicking in the snow on a Swiss mountain with their fur coats on, I am not idealistic, mind you, but Democracy made a lot of sense. If my job required support in terms of influence and financially, why should I betray a guy with tons of money who knocks on my door? When my stock value keeps increasing thanks to the billionaires keeping the stock market, artificial or not, at an all-time high, why should I not listen to them? What can Democracy do for me to offset the benefits the billionaires bestow on me? I, a member of the middle class, have two or three cars in the garage, my children in college, the bills paid and money left enough for a vacation or two a year, if Democracy is wounded, it is too abstract for me to be concerned. What if the strong get abusive down the line? I don’t feel like being threatened and don’t want to sacrifice my well-to-do status quo by going against the strong in anticipation of their potential abusive behavior.

What if the American Middle Class does not consider Democracy an ideal anymore because the purposes it is supposed to serve, providing a good life, safeguarding liberty with acceptable exceptions, and creating opportunities for the people to pursue happiness, are already here? What else can Democracy offer so enticing that the American Middle Class will sacrifice their status quo and fight to protect it? A political framework to prevent bullying and abuses? What if the powerful and their AIs create a world where the bullied and abused would be somebody else at somewhere else?

The MAGA U.S.A. is now run, seemingly, like a small town with a chief of police supposedly overseen by the town’s council.  The chief runs rough shots at real or perceived criminals or law violators all over town. The town’s council has so far let the chief have free rein, assuming the town “U.S.A.” has a council. He is so free to act that he does not feel obliged to give a reason or an explanation for his acts.

The most alarming aspect of the current state of American Democracy is the complete silence of the council. It did not do anything even when one of its members, a U.S. senator, was publicly tackled down on the concrete surface of the street for daring to ask one of the chief’s underlings a question. Even if the town agreed to the policy of cleaning up the town’s streets, rectifying the immigration problem, etc., the conduct of the police in carrying out the policies left much to be desired, cruel, rough, and unnecessary, the expected behavior of the bullying strong. The council said nothing.

The cruelty, roughness, and soldiers with combat gears appearing in cities across the nation are probably not unintentionally incompetent but calculated. Some fear impressed on the mind of the populace could be a good thing that pre-empt any attempt to object or protest. After more than 300 years of staying in the background honing their skills and let ordinary people run American politics, the strong, probably with the help of the best AIs money can buy, not only know how to seize power, but more importantly how to keep power – for good. Shouldn’t Democracy seek an alliance with non-MAGA billionaires with their AIs hopefully as effective as the ones possibly being used by those going against Democracy?

Many have criticized Professor Francis Fukuyama’s thesis and asked: Is Democracy really the end of history?

America is seemingly asking: Is Democracy at its end?

JOHN P. LE PHONG                                                                                      (This article appears on X, Facebook, and thelephongjournal.com)

Wishing you a better new year!

China was in a civil war between the Nationalists, supported by the U.S., and the Communists, supported by the Soviet Union. The U.S., with the fervent push from many powerful segments of American society, particularly the religious groups, sent billions of dollars to the Nationalists. Sometime before 1949, the U.S. had decided to abandon the Nationalist China.

In 1975, the U.S., again, left South Viet Nam in the lurk leading to the spectacular evacuation of the American forces and the Vietnamese who chose to leave Viet Nam. The South Vietnamese were bitter. The former Minister of Economic Development and Planning of the last South Vietnamese Government and a close advisor of the late Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, Professor Nguyen Tien Hung wrote a series of books about the experience.

After reading “Khi Đồng Minh Tháo Chạy” (When An Ally Ran Away) his most critical book on the American withdrawal from Việt Nam, I wrote an article pointing out that, besides the fact that there was not a formal alliance treaty between the two countries, the Vietnamese leadership had misunderstood the concept of Alliance. Even a formal treaty such as the France-Czechoslovakia Treaty of Alliance and Friendship was broken by France just before WWII.

Alliance does not mean a suicide pack, we fall you fall with us, and if we die, we expect you to die too. Such fictional Kungfu romantic thinking damaged the Vietnamese American Alliance. The Americans had reached a point where they realized that the war effort of such an alliance was one-sided, that the Vietnamese did not try or did not try hard enough, and for their own national security, they had to get out.

The Ukrainians have fought valiantly against a strange nation, which has continued living in its medieval dream of taking the earth for itself. If the Ukrainians lost, the party that should be blamed would be the European Union.

Since the end of WWII, Europe and now EU has not conducted itself as an ally of the U.S. but a vassal pledging unwavering support to the U.S. in exchange for its protection, which they are now discovering is optional. It has lived next to Russia, a country with a long history of aggressiveness and land-grabbing insatiability. While the world has used the computer’s power to improve the lives of its citizens, Putin’s Russia uses it to hack everybody. Other countries of the world have tried to improve the lives of their citizens by making use of the land within their national borders, Russia has sent its people to die in the hundreds of thousands so that it can take a few square miles of land from ANOTHER country while it has 6.6 MILLION square miles of undeveloped land inside its borders that could have provided immense opportunity for the deceased young Russians to produce wealth for themselves and for others.

The Europeans was probably infected with the South Vietnamese’s “alliance” virus that lures them into the state of mind of a pacifist: Let the American cowboys deal with the ugly Russians. With the American nuclear umbrella over Europe, they have focused resources on making thousands of Birkin bags selling for a million dollars apiece. Voila! Our GDP is catching up with yours, America. In fact, the European Union’s GDP has roughly been in parity with the U.S.’s GDP, especially its Purchase Power Parity adjusted for cost of living. But it has no military power strong enough to put the perennial aggressor on its east border on notice.

A cowboy does not fight for free. America knew that but was so polite as to say it out loud. Until Donald J. Trump and MAGA, who are the real cowboys, came into power. They did not know why America could not say it out loud and why America kept sacrificing its young people and spending its coffer to provide security and safety for others so that they could pursue the folly of spending billions of dollars making little bags and little bottles of perfume instead of manufacturing weapons.

EU members should provide security for themselves including other nations, which if under threat would affect its own security such as Ukraine. The U.S.A. is no longer an America of yesteryears. Then, it would send an airplane abroad to pick up a patient ravaged by kidney disease, transported them to the U.S. for treatment – for free, or send military personnel out to locate the children who were separated from their parents. The present-day America would pick up a seriously ill patient from an American hospital whom they deem not a legal American and send them abroad. Present-day America would not mind separating children from their parents.

Time has changed, but Russian nature has not. Today Ukraine could cede 25% of its land to buy off Russian aggression. Then, there would be little doubt that Russia would look to its other former satellite countries such as Poland, to invade five or ten years from now. The Domino Doctrine is as valid in Europe as in the Western Hemisphere or the Pacific Basin.

The U.S. has made it very clear: It won’t defend Ukraine. It seems the European Union has only two choices: Live on borrowed time long enough to learn how to speak and write Russian or stand up and fight to preserve its integrity, culture, tradition, and way of life. Its GDP is 10 times that of Russia and its population is three times as big. If it let Ukraine fail to protect its territory, it wouldn’t just be a mistake but a sin.

The U.S. has decided to leave Europe because it has enough worry in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific Basin. The drug trade collects hundreds of billions of dollars a year that translates into huge energy, and huge damages if the bad guys start getting ideas and use their financial resources to cause troubles.

In the Pacific theater, with time, if nothing done, Taiwan would inexorably drift toward mainland China. If that were the case, don’t expect Japan, Korea, and many other countries on the Pacific Rim to remain allies of the U.S.

JOHN P. LE PHONG                                                                                              (This article appears on thelephongjournal.com, Facebook, and X).

Marjorie Taylor Greene was born and raised in Milledgeville, once the capital of Georgia with public squares built to imitate Washington, D.C. It is rich in culture and arts and filled with historic architecture and landmarks. It is also a college town with the ethnic makeup of 48% White and 43% Black, a good ground for Progressivism. She graduated from the University of Georgia with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.

With such a background, MTG could have been a Progressive. Instead, she has become an ultra-conservative firebrand, making outlandish statements, many of them seem contrived, intended to catch attention or get credentials. She succeeded hugely in catching the attention of MAGA, and became a political star in the ultra-conservative movement. She got plenty of chances to sit at the table with MAGA big shots.

Some time in 2023 or 2024, she started going against MAGA and the president himself, saying that she never owed him anything. Then, she resigned from Congress in November 2025.

Many speculate that she positions herself to run for the U.S. Senate.

Probably.

But the fact is clear: she breaks with MAGA and Donald J. Trump. For such a colorful and energetic character as Ms. Greene, any direction she plunges ahead is a possibility. And there is one possibility worth consideration, a hypothetical one.

In one of those chances that she was sitting at a table with MAGA’s big shots, they talked past her to one another as if she was not there. Not once, they included her in the conversation. Those pretentious, obnoxious, chauvinistic men just ignored her. She was a member of Congress, but they did not consider her as a member of their club, which had been an exclusive one for white men only. She was one of, and among, important people in the room but felt alone.

And her mind wandered.

These men created a religion named after Him, which was based exclusively on His teachings; they had relied on His wisdom and been guided by Him through every step in their lives. At dinner time, they and their families, commanded by them, solemnly and humbly said thanks to Him before eating. But for more than two millennia, they had steadfastly and at times violently refused to admit His people into their club, why was she so naïve to think that they would admit her into theirs?

Suddenly she realized that she was a woman.

Biologically and anatomically, half of His people were more similar to them than she was. She was way different. She was a woman that means fetch me a beer. The difference was drastic. Wasn’t difference the basis and reason of their discrimination?

She had learned a lesson, or rather a truth. She decided to resign from Congress to show her independence and determination. Running for the Senate, or the Georgia governorship, or even a street corner groceries store, she would not beg them for help. If they did want to help, it would have to be on her own terms. She declared she owed the president nothing. That went without saying that she owed MAGA nothing. She would fight to prove her own worth. She would fight to show that she was an equal of men whether they accepted her or not.

And whether she realized it or not, MTG had become a feminist.

Gloria Steinem, give her a call immediately.

JOHN P. LE PHONG                                                                                                (This article appears on X, thelephongjournal.com, and Facebook)

Is Democracy fragile, weak, and vulnerable? During the last 10 months, MAGA has seemingly proved that it could bring down Democracy and all of its institutions.

The remarkable journalist Fareed Zakaria, one of the most astute political observers of our time, said that people have lost trust in Democracy. He must mean ordinary people, whose trust in government has been shaken by excessive policies of previous administrations. They felt threatened by the in-your-face influx of new cultures, customs, and beliefs. MAGA spoke to that fear by likening Washington D.C. to a swamp. The slogan “Drain the Swamp” was powerful and seducing. The people wanted to clean up the politicians’ mess.

Ordinary people should not lose trust in Democracy, which is their most desirable and final political environment as pointed out by the political science professor at Stanford, Francis Fukuyama. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, Democracy is of the ordinary people, by the ordinary people, and for the ordinary people.

Ordinary people know that truth by experience as well, which had been paid for with sweat, tears, and blood for centuries by the ancestors of Americans. Millions of them left their old countries for the democratic fertile ground created by the American Founding Fathers.

A little bit of interesting history: President Trump’s grandfather, Frederick Trump an ordinary German, could not fare well in the German monarchic regime ruled by the King of Prussia, later Emperor of Germany, Wilhelm I. He left for Democratic America at the age of 16 when Cleveland Grover, a DEMOCRAT, was U.S. president. Like they say, the rest is history. Frederick became a wealthy young man. True, he desired to go back to Bavaria to get married and settle there. But the clear fact remains that only in Democratic America that he found the opportunity to reach his potential and proved to the world, and his wife, who he was and what he was worth. No other political regime on this earth could boast that claim.

There are sharks lurking in any government and no doubt behind the Trump Administration’s effort to “Drain the Swamp”. Democracy is fertile ground for not just fescue grass but also crab weed, which fiercely vies for dominance. Lately, we have seen crab weed spreading wide and deep not just in Washington but all over the country, threatening Democracy. After the Civil War, America has never seen its military might set foot on American soil. Suddenly, they are everywhere, and only in “liberal” cities where the most threatening activities are sex and drug. MAGA sharks pretend that local law enforcement can’t police the cities. The nation’s chiefs of police and their officers, who have done the job all their professional life, are ostentatiously sidelined as incompetent, and the job can only be handled by the Secretary of Defense and his military.

Ordinary citizens must give the Roberts Supreme Court the benefit of the doubt that they had some other national interest consideration when they gave the country’s chief executive (not just President Trump) absolute immunity. But that ruling, regardless of their good faith in reading the Constitution or good reasons to support their decision, has wounded Democracy badly. It has moved our political system a lot closer to an Autocracy, an Aristocracy, or even a Monarchy.

We are living and functioning in a democracy. The chief executive must be held accountable for his personal wrongful conduct under our Constitution, a Democratic Constitution. To say otherwise is sophism.

Democrats have been busying themselves with the prestigious pursuit of forming world coalitions. It takes President Trump, of all people, to remind them that the enemy is within (of course his is different or opposite to theirs). To fight such enemies, they need the help of ordinary people. They need, as Mr. Zakaria hinted, to regain their trust.

That is the Democrats’ job but I, a mainstream Republican, would like to give them some advice: form coalitions with ordinary Americans that means being down to earth and divorcing yourselves from uncomfortable ideas before their time.

JOHN P. LE PHONG                                                                                        (This article appears on Facebook, X, and thelephongjournal.com)

Dinh Le picked up the napkin to wipe his mouth, took a sip of his tea, and calmly said, “It is not really important, but my first name is Dinh, and my last name is Le, L-E. I expected that Tim would go first to tell us what the president, or rather the Movement has been doing and planning to do. But since you ask a very important question, if Tim doesn’t mind, I will try to answer your question as much as I can. My answer, in fact, will shed some light on the administration’s action plan.” He stopped to finish his almond tea.

“I have dug deep to find the reason why the Movement was successful in seizing power. I say seizing power because their success is nothing short of a revolution, and I mean like the Bolshevik Revolution, which had been incubated for a long time starting with a doctrine, Marxism, a plan you may call Leninism, then the execution of the plan by Lenin and his lieutenants. We all know about that now, but like the Movement’s revolution, we know about it a little bit too late.

“The doctrine adopted by the Movement has been around for a long time, older than Marxism. You may call it Hobbesism or Burkeism or Lockeism, as it was advocated by Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke, and John Locke. I call it Elitism. These gentlemen firmly believed that average people should not be trusted to govern themselves. Even many of our country’s founders, notably James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, preferred indirect democracy, or a representative Republic. You all know that before the 17^th Amendment, U.S. senators were not elected by the people but by the state legislatures, which were controlled by the rich landowners. The most striking remnant of that elitist mindset in our Constitution is our presidential election: our presidents have not been elected by the people but by the Electoral College that has resulted, five times in the U.S. political history and twice in modern days, in a candidate being elected president even though he got fewer popular votes.”

Benedict was a little concerned that former secretary Joshua Bennett would lose patience with Le’s erudite lecture and explode with sarcastic comments. But he was amazed that he in fact was deep in thought with his eyes fixed on Le.

“I get your point,” mumbled Bennett.

“Do you have a question, Mr. Secretary?” Le asked.

“Oh, no. Please continue.”

Senator Hill reminded everyone where they were, “We are in a restaurant. Just let Dinh finish his thoughts. We ruminate over them later.”

“We now know that the Cook campaign was tinted with racism, which has never been a secret or new phenomenon in American politics. George Wallace, David Duke ran for public offices.  The Christian Republican Movement used the lowest layer of society, the racists, to form its core during the campaign. The racist emotion, if not stronger, is at least as energetic and powerful as religious fervor. They did not send out messages saying please contribute to the Cook campaign because he is a nice guy. Their messages were forceful: “Joe (or Jane), what happens to you, why don’t I see your contribution check in the mail? Are you American? Are you with us or with the woke leftists who want to destroy our country? Don’t you want to elect Zachary Cook so he can take our country back?’, and so on.

“The middle class, themselves are not necessary racist, may disagree with the Movement’s tactic. But its messages strike a chord that neutralize their ‘s sensibility toward races: us-with-our-Christian-culture-and-tradition versus them-with-their-alien-culture-and-tradition. To win the race, the Movement knew that they had to win over the middle class. They had thought about it, worked out a plan for quite some time, and meticulously implemented their plan. It would not matter whether it was under the Social Democrats’ radar or not, I am sorry to tell you this Senator Russell and Carter, their plan rendered you impotent – you cannot adopt it, and you have no countermove.”

“What are you talking about? What plan?” The former secretary asked.

“The Movement’s plan to win over the middle class,” Le said.

“Each party has always tried to get the middle class’s votes to win elections. It’s not a big secret.”

“You are absolutely right, Mr. Secretary. That is why the Movement’s strategy to win over the middle class was genius. They knew that the racist strategy would not do well with the middle class because regardless of individual cases of open racist behavior and attitude, the middle class as a whole is more sensible and more refined in their thought and act toward other races. They would loathe the coarse racist approach. The Movement modified their strategy.  They made a crime committed by one illegal immigrant, especially a recidivist, a national tragedy. They beat the drum hard and loud for years that affirmative action or health care for the poor or DEI, etc., are threats to the white race’s future, sending them into a panic. So, the middle class, a more rational and less prejudicial than the racists, was convinced to choose Cook and the Movement, the arch-conservative faction of the Christian Republican Party. They probably thought that let them solve those issues; if they strayed from the democratic norms, we would send the Democrats back in. They may be mistaken because the Movement has, of course, anticipated and prepared for such thinking.

“The past election was radically different, not in form but in what to be expected. The voters did not know that the winners, the Movement, did not maneuver to gain power to do good for the American people and the country, and wait for the next election cycle for the people to make a judgment on their performance. That has been the democratic process. The Cook administration and its backers, the Movement, have no intention of continuing to follow the democratic process or even to preserve Democracy. Their ultimate goal is to gain power in order to be able to consolidate and stay in power – for good, or until history forces them to relinquish power.

“You are so good at seeing things. Can you tell us what we can do?” The former secretary asked.

“Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I see some things going on in this new political climate. But I am not a policy maker like the rest of you. I can tell you this: the Movement’s effort to subvert Democracy has got tremendous boost from powerful quarters in the world, from dictatorial Russia to the kingdoms in the oil rich Middle East. They see the collapse of Democracy in America as a great vindication of their policy of dividing society into two classes, the have and the have-not-much, and keeping the have-not-much or ordinary people in their place.”

JOHN P. LE PHONG                                                                                              (This Excerpt appears on Facebook, X, and thelephongjournal.com)

“Can you explain to me why the billionaires seem to dislike Democracy and why they want to live in a different America?” Bennett asked.

“I don’t know for certain, Mr. Secretary, because I have never been a millionaire, let alone a billionaire. I guess they were conceived and born differently. We ordinary people love a moment of serenity on a lakeshore, or watching the sunset over the mountains, or breathing in the exhilarating breeze that blows our way in the morning, or walking on the beach, mingling with and saying hello to other beachgoers. Billionaires are endowed with extraordinary gifts of money and brains. They probably see only extraordinary things, but not the everyday pleasant things we enjoy, and therefore don’t feel close to us or comfortable with us. They don’t live in downtown New York or San Francisco. They don’t walk down the street to have a cup of coffee, mingling and shooting the breeze with Joes and Janes. They live on a yacht or buy an island to live away from the multitudes, that was why they love Oligarchy or Autocracy.

“Another explanation is that in an Oligarchy or even in an Autocracy or Aristocracy, the rich are always on top and, as history shows, have power over the rest of the populace. In a Democracy, ordinary people can call the rich by their first name, something billionaires would really dislike.”

“Huh, …” grumbled the former secretary.

“Sorry,” Le said, “I did not mean to make light of our country’s current political affairs. As a sincere apology, I would like to add some food for thought.

JOHN P. LE PHONG This excerpt appears on Facebook, thelephongjournal.com, and X