Commoners fought with blood, sweat, and tears for Equality and Freedom against the oppression of Monarchies. They sacrificed themselves for the cause, and hundreds of thousands had died over the centuries to get rid of the brutal, abusive, and oppressive regime, namely the Monarchy, to create and build a political regime that have served and protected everyone. It is called Democracy.

During World War II, we commoners died in the millions to fight dictatorships to protect Democracy.

The Unites States of America was founded on those democratic ideas and principles and firmly committed itself to them by adopting the Declaration of Independence and ratifying the Constitution. It has developed a most humane and enlightened body of law. It has shown itself to be the best political system humankind has known and lived in. It may not mean much for billionaires as they own ranch land half the size of Montana, or many skyscrapers in Chicago, or a few coal mines, or many manufacturing facilities, or assets spanning the country. They don’t even know how to spell Democracy, which may in fact interfere with their idiosyncrasies.

White folks have sought solutions for immediate short-term problems (that could have definitely been solved in a democratic, more enlightened way), and voted MAGA into office based on their aggressive promises to provide solutions. Now, it has been shown that MAGA, with the supports of billionaires, has a different agenda that could destroy their ancestors’ centuries of effort to build a long-lasting system guaranteeing freedom and happiness for their offspring – and for mankind.

MAGA and the billionaires are, amazingly, enamored and obsessed with two outmoded and condemned political systems: the dictatorship in Russia and North Korea, and the modern-day slavery policy practiced by the Arabs, the so-called guest workers system of getting foreigners (immigrants) working for them for subsistence pay without any political rights or social protection. Europeans, Canadians, Chinese, and Mexicans be damned. MAGA has made new very good friends.

The Constitution has given Americans, white or non-white, an effective mechanism to protect themselves and their descendants: the vote. In about one and a half years, that vote will decide if MAGA would still be in power, the Potomac River crowded with 700-foot yachts, Burji Khalifar II rising above the Washington Monument, private clubs and associations off limit to commoners growing like mushrooms all over the country, Russians eating caviar, drinking Vodka, and sunbathing on the Capitol Grounds. American common folks would not dare to travel abroad for fear of being stuck at the borders, would pay $3000 for a cell phone and send their children to city colleges as universities, which are being punished for being woke, lose subsidies and foreign students, and will be forced to charge exorbitant tuition to survive.

Voting right was the country’s Founding Fathers’ precious gift to the American common folks as a shield and a sword to protect a safe and fostering environment, which is a free democratic society.

MAGA has openly adopted strategies anathema to Democracy. It pursues and punishes real and perceived enemies whether they are immigrants, objectors, or bastions of high education. They have tried to get rid of immigrants as many and as fast as can be done to create a fait accompli, before the American conscience can intervene. The white majority is now 75% of the U.S.’s total population. After MAGA is done, and with the first wave of white South Africans opening the door for more white immigrants to enter the U.S., the white majority will easily reach 90% or more, soon.

MAGA’s mindset is not just making America isolated but smaller, as little connection and interaction with the outside world as possible.

When my wife and I were in Italy not long ago, we were having dinner at the Machiavelli Restaurant (or a restaurant on the Machiavelli Estate) in Florence, the entertainers of the evening was a young Italian couple. During a break, they approached our table of six or eight patrons, two Vietnamese, us, and the rest being white. They asked, “Are you Americans,” then smiled at us, the Vietnamese. They were controlled in manner and expression but obviously enthusiastic and impressed by the fact that an Asian looking couple WAS American. My wife was very happy to confirm. The rest of the evening, they performed American songs. At the end of the evening, they took pictures with us.

That is the America we want to preserve and promote. Wherever we Americans go, people welcome us with affection and admiration. The world has seen America as an embodiment of goodness, strength, and generosity, NOT of the race.

Do you think the world will now behave the same way when they see us? Does MAGA’s America seemingly look, to them, small-minded, petty, withdrawn, and scared?

This is our country, and Democracy is our legacy. Use your vote to restore, preserve and promote the EXCEPTIONALISM of America.

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

Methodically. Methodically.

MAGA won’t take the low road of Lenin. Mao, and Ho’s strategy by exhorting the multitude to rise up and storm the palace.  But exhort them they did, only to win elections. It did try the low road on January 6, 2021, and failed. It has since learned the lesson (or more likely the hot-headed ceded the lead to the thinking billionaires) and has taken the high road, first to take power while steadfastly adhering to the democratic rules.

MAGA took the risky step of exploiting racism to win power. Now in power, it will resort to a more audacious and extremely risky strategy to maintain and preserve its power: bringing down Democracy.

How will it do it? -By working from within, a marvelously cunning scheme.

The calculation is that for the next four years, MAGA’s base in the electorate will still fervently believe in its crusade to take the country back for the white race, or at least for the white race to have total control even if that means a smaller country in terms of people and more isolated in international relations. Then, during these four years, MAGA will not focus on governing but MAGAnize the country, meaning to clear up every trace of any perceived woke personnel in the government and replace them with people with two required qualifications: absolute loyalty and the ability to carry out orders without asking questions. Once it is done, the country will be a de facto Monarchy or Dictatorship.

That has already happened with the periodical “Praising the Leader” sessions where cabinet members take turn to praise the president with one said, “Since you have been in office, President Trump, your DOJ agencies have seized more than 22 million fentanyl pills – 3400 kilos of fentanyl…which saved – are you ready for this MEDIA? – 258 MILLION LIVES”. That makes the citizen in the story “the emperor has no clothes”, who proclaimed that the naked emperor was wearing clothes, seem tame.

Many years back, a news network showed a North Korean woman who, upon seeing for the first time after many years in the dark when the bandage was removed from her eyes, immediately knelt down, hysterically praising and thanking the Dear Leader for curing her blindness, never mind that the curing had been performed by a Western doctor. The irrationality and the blind obedience are strikingly similar. The difference, and most scary, is the cabinet has a lot of power.

Today the cabinet, tomorrow the country.

Politics is a People Game, but the Democrats have emphasized and paid attention more on ideology than people. When they lost a sizable chunk of demography by Nixon’s Southern Strategy, that should have been a wake-up call to adjust their pursuit to wait for the Southerners to understand and catch up. Instead, they have gleefully advocated and executed policies, which are objectionable to a huge number of people they wanted to lead and to vote for them.

Now they are on the sideline hoping for the Supreme Court to come to the rescue. Joseph Stalin (Russian again!) once asked, “The Pope? How many divisions he has?” Indeed, what power does the Supreme Court have? Where is Kilmar Abrego Garcia after the Court ruled that he must be returned to the U.S?

Little by little, methodically, MAGA has moved forth with actions or thrown out trial balloons to determine the next moves. Ironically, MAGA masters the democratic game thoroughly and has played it WITHIN the democratic system dexterously while the Democrats are still feeling their way around trying to find, probably too late, countermoves. Many billionaires and best and brightest minds, previously their allies, have either moved to the other side or kept quiet.

It is not too difficult to see that in a year and a half, MAGA will even more ardently exhort racism to mobilize its base to send more MAGA faithful to Congress and State Houses of Representatives to make its majority reach the two third level. The next step is easy to predict: changing the laws and changing the Federal and State Constitutions.

Why should MAGA and its allies care if such a result would be a catastrophe? The prospect that it could be achieved is enthralling and irresistible to billionaires and game players.

But to the common men and women, Democracy is not a game. In no other political system but only in American Democracy that our rights to live a decent life as a free common man are protected.

Our fate is not in our stars – it is in ourselves.

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

The course MAGA has taken to obtain absolute power is methodical.

To get rid of the foreign elements represented by immigrants and to “take the country back”, Democracy must be undone because Democracy is a “woke” idea, which advocates, promotes, and defends the freedom and equality of everyone that do not fit in with MAGA’s scheme of things.

It started with gaining political power WITHIN the democratic framework to avoid being crushed in the embryo. They did not look far to find the answer to the question of how to do it. MAGA is not just rednecks. Billionaires and many brightest minds are in their rank, who do not like Democracy and prefer Oligarchy or even dictatorship. They are endowed with exceptional talent and intelligence, so they are naturally arrogant, feel superior, and have little tolerance for slower or less intelligent people.  They hate being talked back. When they say do “this” they expect others to do exactly “this” no question asked. Clearly, Democracy has no good use for them.

MAGA’s brightest minds readily found the experiences of the Soviet Union and China’s proletariat revolutions useful. Mao said during the Korean War that you (the Americans) have the atomic bomb, but we (the Chinese) have the people. That sums up Lenin’s and Mao’s insight that from the people, political and even military power would be created. It is profound but simple: in the U.S. that power would come from the voters.

Because of their ideology, MAGA obviously did not expect a majority of American voters would support it especially non-white Americans, who felt themselves to be the scorn of MAGA. But white voters still held the majority. MAGA was therefore presented with the question of how to get their vote, or to be exact, the majority of their votes.

To call upon the white folks to line up behind them was difficult and complicated not only because of political correctness but also white forks did like and had had feelings and respect for other people too. They had been married into other races all over the country and had voted for woke Democrats. The hurdle MAGA had to overcome was tremendous requiring drastic and risky strategy, which had to be potentially so powerful that it would bully through political correctness and pull most if not all white into MAGA’s camp.

They found it: racism.

The clannish mentality seems normal in America. Yale versus Harvard, UCLA versus USC, it is artificial but useful. When it comes to races, competitiveness becomes extremely ferocious because the emotion is more basic and animalistic. Education and law could only help to keep it under a thin layer. With a little prodding, especially from one main political party, the beast would readily wake up. If the country was being invaded, immigrants flooded society with foreign wicked ideas and customs, another country of a different race was competing neck and neck with the white race, white people would stand up in unison to fight for their tradition and values, or more easily felt and understood by the white, or to be truthful by any multitude, for their race. That would trump any feeling white have for other racial relationships including spousal relationship, regardless of how warm it was.

Winning political races is only the means to reach the next goal. For years, MAGA worked doggedly to eradicate the legacy of a black president, so they fully expected that a woke administration would try to bring down any creation by MAGA. So, the next goal would be to stay in power for a long period of time long enough to solidify MAGA grip on the country. To do so, MAGA needed to invoke the mentality of “us” against “them” as long as possible and cause a feeling in the people of uneasiness and uncertain by creating chaos.

But sooner or later, white people would get tired of demagoguery and extremism, realize the phoniness of the race issue, and vote MAGA out. To prevent that from happening is their next goal, which is the dismantling of Democracy and replacing it with an Oligarchy or Dictatorship in the form of the Putin or Kim Jong Un regime. Or even better, an Aristocracy.

The scary thing is the Democrats and the Republicans who love and respect Democracy suddenly disappear from the American political map, withdrawing into the far side of the moon and putting all their hope in the Supreme Court – the same court with six extremely conservative members who voted for everything MAGA, including discarding a sixty-year precedent that protected women’s rights and the expansion of presidential immunity and power.

How to dismantle Democracy?

JOHN P. LE PHONG

(You can read this article on Facebook, X, and thelephongjournal.com)