NEWS ITEM: On Saturday April 5,  a “Hands Off!” rally was held at  Downtown Civic Plaza in Albuquerque with well over a 1,000 people in attendance. The rally was merely one of more than 1,000 held across the country in a mass mobilization “to demand a stop to the chaos and build an opposition movement against the looting of our country” organizers said. Similar rallies took place at the Roundhouse in Santa Fe and in Las Cruces and in major cities coast to coast all over the United States. People all over the country protested in mass in unity against President Donald Trump and  Elon Musk, the world’s riches man. They protested against the Trump mass layoffs, judicial overreach, immigration crackdowns and mass deportations, foreign wars, cuts to social security, cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, the dismantling of the federal government, the tariffs imposed on all countries including America’s closest allies and the chaos and disruption Trump has brought since being sworn in for a second term.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/global-hands-off-protests-donald-trump-elon-musk-rcna199847

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/huge-crowds-gather-hands-off-rallies-nationwide-protest/story?id=120523176

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/06/us/video/anti-donald-trump-elon-musk-hands-off-protest-digvid

https://www.abqjournal.com/news/article_2144aa8f-6e14-4704-beba-1fffbf4d05be.html

JAEMES SHANLEY GUEST OPINION COLUMN

Following is a guest opinion column written by Jaemes Shanley. Mr. Shanley gave consent to publish his guest column on www.PeteDinelli.com and he was not compensated for it. The column captures much of the sure essence of what the “Hands Off” protests were all about and what caused the movement. Mr. Shanley’s biography can be found in the postscript to his article and it reflects a person who has  worked a lifetime in the private sector in sales and marketing for various corporations in the United States, Australia, and Japan and whose work required extensive travel throughout Asia Pacific and Latin America routinely in more than 30 countries.

EDITOR’S DISCALIMER: The opinions expressed by Mr. Shanley are not necessarily those held by www.PeteDinelli.com. The guest column is being published as a public service announcement.

HEADLINE: THE AUDACITY OF CONTEMPT

BY JAEMES SHANLEY

When your head is exploding it’s hard to think straight…

We are still in only the 12th week of the Trump regime, what used to be government of the people, by the people, for the people.  The affronts are so many and so diverse as to cascade with each day’s news cycle onto our consciousness like fragments from the rapid unscheduled disassembly of a Space X Starship.  People, pundits, and Democratic Party leaders seem at a loss to know which piece to grasp. In our outrage, confusion, and anxiety we are failing to re-assemble those pieces into a coherent image of the missile that is headed straight for the heart of US preeminence and leadership of a democratically inclined world order.

155,247,302 votes were cast in the 2024 US Presidential election.  77,302,580 (49.8%) were cast for Trump/Vance.  77,944,722 (50.2%) were cast for other people, 48.3% for Harris/Walz.  That is a popular vote victory and, in this instance, a bigger electoral college victory.  It is not a “mandate” for the agenda now being executed, unless you feel contempt for at least half the country and ordained by such a narrow margin to apply every lever of power you can seize to impose on the United States its greatest national security vulnerability in more than 100 years.

CHINA’S ASCENDENCE

We have known for more than a decade that China’s ascendence has made its leaders more vocal in their resentment of US global “hegemony”.  We have heard the same from their junior partner in the axis of autocracy, Vladimir Putin. Xi Jinpeng has articulated an intention to make China the dominant world power before the middle of this century.  Moreover, instead of simply agitating his populace with sloganeering, Xi and the CCC have been acting on strategy to realize their objective.  From rare earths to batteries to EV’s to quantum computing to A.I., not to mention their military expansion and muscle-flexing (toward Taiwan especially), they are demonstrating daily their capacity to hold parity with or surpass the US.  We are naïve to believe constricting chip or other technologies will not spur them to innovate around the obstacles with their own R&D and breakthroughs.  Deep Seek and BYD’s recently announced EV battery and charging system that can deliver 400 miles of driving range in a 5-minute charge should, among other achievements, be snapping us to attention.

No living citizen of the United States has personal experience of a time when our country was not the world’s most influential power … economically, technologically, industrially, scientifically, culturally, and militarily … usually all of those at the same time. It has become such a “given” for most Americans that we forget this extraordinary state of affairs was realized by a nation with less than 5% of the world’s population living on 6% of the world’s land mass.

Though we have prevailed at the forefront through two world wars, the race to the moon, the cold war with Soviet era communism, and the first two phases of the digital technology revolution, we are confronted now by a rival of unprecedented potency.

Arithmetic is not an ideological pursuit.  There is very basic “math” defining the current US-China reality.

US	China
Geography                                     9,525,067 sq km	9,596,960 sq km
Population                                      341,963,408	1,416,043,270
GDP (purchase parity $)                 $27.72 trillion (2023 est.)	$31.23 trillion (2023 est.)
GDP per capita                              $74,600 (2023 est.)	$22,100 (2023 est.)
Real GDP growth rate                  2.89% (2023 est.)	5.25% (2023 est.)
Military Spend (%GDP 2023)        3.4%	1.5%
Active-Duty Military Personnel   1,310,000 approx.	2,000,000 approx.
Navy                                                480 ships	788 ships
Air Force                                         5,500 aircraft	4,500+ aircraft
AI                                                     ChatGPT	DeepSeek
STEM PhD’s produced a year    40,000	77,000
Engineers                                       1 million est.	4.5 – 5 million est.
Auto Production annually             10.6 million est.	30 million est.
External Debt (US$ Sept. 2024)   $25.8 trillion	$2.52 trillion

*gathered from online resources including CIA World Fact Book, Wikipedia, US Treasury Dept., CEIC Data, BCG, CSET and others

THE PACE OF CHANGE AND THE EXTERNAL DEBT

There are two points most salient:  The pace of change and the External Debt.  China’s military spending will inevitably eclipse the US and US External Debt will metastasize quickly to a debilitating economic cancer if the US loses its standing as holder of the world’s reserve currency.  It is worth recalling the former position of the British pound sterling and that Argentina was among the world’s wealthiest countries per capita prior to 1930.

Confronted by this challenge we have democratically elected a leader who is embarked on an agenda he and his enablers claim will Make America Great Again, as if looking backwards while at the wheel did not guarantee driving off a cliff.

Slip on the shoes of Xi Jinpeng to imagine a “wish list” of US government missteps and the tactical underpinnings that will propel China to sole world dominance:

1.     Disunify the US population

• Direct the frustrations and ire of Americans toward each other
• Make political division render having 1/4^th China’s population functionally equivalent to 1/8^th

2.        Undermine trust and confidence in the US as an alliance partner

• Insult, threaten, abandon or attack closest allies
• Act with more empathy toward Russia than toward NATO allies
• Dispatch the Secretary of Defense and Vice President to Europe to channel the spirits of
• Neville Chamberlain and Oswald Mosley in their debut performance for allies Bludgeon trading partners with a punitive tariff program

3.        Amplify global perception of the US as an aggressor nation

• Manufacture a new Manifest Destiny targeting allies (Canada, Greenland, Panama)
• Flatter dictators
• Manifest gross hypocrisy in contrasting stances on wars in Ukraine and Gaza

4.        Destroy or replace US programs of material assistance to third world countries

• Transform US image of life saving to life ending for the world’s most vulnerable
• Destroy the front-line force of US soft power (USAID) and watch China step in to take up the slack, starting with the earthquake in Myanmar.

5. Silence US global informational propaganda programs

•  Shut down Voice of America to clear the way for foreign state suppression of free speech

6. Exploit US global supply chain dependencies to harm the most vulnerable Americans and expand economic inequality

• Impose tariffs on essential consumer goods that trigger tariff reciprocity on essential exports

7.      Diminish foundational academic research to weaken US techno-commercial power

• Gut university graduate and institutional R&D grants
• Drastically and abruptly downsize US federal agency science & research functions Replace scientists with idealogues throughout federal government agencies

8. Exploit internal divisions and disinformation to distract US population from China’s dominance of critical future industries

• Support denial of climate science and impacts of warming
• Disorient and disrupt support for education, thus maintaining declining performance in STEM Obsessively attack and degrade the US societal diversity which undergirds its overperformance across myriad domains of human endeavor

Rewrite history by executive order to keep eyes on the past and off the future

9.      Undermine public confidence in qualified and experienced administrators and run government thru obsequious amateur political appointees lacking the competence and mature judgement to efficiently operate the country

• Under cover of a manufactured “deep state” conspiracy theory, drive independent specialists and experts out of key government agencies.
• Produce snafu’s and departmental dysfunctions that will make public more receptive to contracting of vast government functions to private companies of the “owner class” Undermine public confidence in federal support for disaster relief as climate change makes disasters more frequent
• Politicize the US military with ideologically driven firings and replacements at senior levels, gutting its core professionalism and ultimately its battlefield competence.

10.   Amplify Americans’ perception and acceptance of an oligarchic/ plutocratic drift in power concentration and government control

• Brazenly embrace and support purchase of elections (national and local; legislative and judicial) through campaign funding by members of the “billionaire class”
• Dispense (contemptuously) with any adherence to “conflict of interest” or “divestiture” conventions among elected or appointed officials.
• Fully pardon Jan. 6 insurrectionists while promising “severe consequences” for anyone vandalizing Tesla’s.
• Undermine voting rights and oversight to rig future elections

11.   Let “America First” produce “America Alone”

China is unquestionably our rival.  That does not make China our enemy.  The interests of both nations and the world at large are far better served by collaboration to overcome global challenges (climate, health, prosperity, environment, resources) than by confrontational hostility.  The commonality of interest is stitched together by the threads of intertwined economies.

As Trump’s tariffs cut those threads, the common interests and restraints will unravel.  Collaboration and peaceful coexistence will demand a degree of power parity which requires the U.S., given the basic math of our respective demographics and economics, to embrace, not alienate, our allies in order to check any rational temptation to use military vs. diplomatic means to resolve disagreements.  What should be intuitively obvious is inescapable common sense when, again, viewing “the math”.

 

	US + NATO + Japan +	China + Russia +
	South Korea + ANZUS	Iran + North Korea
Population	1,187,957,808	1,671,549,683
GDP (purchase parity $)	$67.759 trillion (2023 est.)	$38.528 trillion (2023 est.)
GDP per capita	$57,039 (2023 est.)	$23,049 (2023 est.)
Military Spend (%GDP 2023)	2.4%	2.1%
Military Spending	$1.629 trillion	$800 billion
Active Duty Military	4,238,800 approx.	4,900,000 approx.

* CIA World Fact Book

The leadership capable of guiding the forces of democracy and a benevolent world order is not that of a would-be emperor using his thumb in a gladiatorial arena.  It is, most essentially, a leadership grounded in respect, not contempt, for truth and facts.

GEORGE WASHINGTON V. DONALD TRUMP

Consider the irony that almost 250 years from our nation’s founding and first Presidency under George Washington, we are being led by a man who took such an opposite lesson from the apocryphal story of chopping down the cherry tree, so formative of the notion of truth-telling to my (and his) generation growing up. Most of us, even as children, could perceive essential virtue in the courage to speak honestly regardless of the consequences. For Donald Trump, perhaps on the advice of Roy Cohn, it was a lesson describing the path of “suckers” and “losers”.

Not that long ago it was considered an outrageous “mortal sin” for a President of the United States to lie to the American people. Since Trump’s first term in office, it is merely a routine updating of fact-checking stats. What too many of us, the audience and recipients of all this lying and disinformation, seem unwilling to acknowledge is that it is an expression toward all of us of total contempt.  We are deemed by those who purport to lead us as being so predictably susceptible to manipulative misinformation that we can be herded into acquiescence or dismissed as radical leftists.  Our information eco-system has become so fragmented, polarized, and pervasive that we occupy “bespoke realities” (as described in Renee DiResta’s Invisible Rulers), as dissociated from one another as separate planets.

WALTER CRONKITE OR STEVE BANNON

We have traded Walter Cronkite, Huntley Brinkley, Barbara Walters, and Roger Mudd for an ever-expanding information propagation complex operated by the likes of Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson, while we resist acknowledging the latter group’s primary motivation is money, influence and power, not the ideological “virtue” they would have us swallow.  In their contemptuous worldview, the relegation of facts to a category of quaint irrelevance is a core tenet.  There is heartbreaking irony in the willingness with which millions of Americans have thus embraced a new paradigm of “free speech” that draws more on the mechanisms of Putin’s Russia (described in Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible) than the intent of America’s founders.

SECOND IN COMMAND ELON MUSK

To hijack a nation, a Commander must have Captains. It speaks more volumes about Trump’s idolatry of dollars that he should choose as his de facto second in command the world’s richest man.  Again, the seeming contradictions between perceptions and behavior are confounding.

Is Elon Musk not the most visionary, innovative, courageous, and effective industrialist of our age?  That was Elon Musk: 1.0, the one whose brilliance and virtues realized the world’s first large scale Electric Vehicle manufacturing company in spite of short sellers and naysayers, who put his fortune on the line to lead a transformation of the possibilities and economics of space travel, who resigned in disgust from the first Trump administration’s advisory council of prominent business executives after Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Accord, whose satellite internet service was made available to Ukraine without hesitation to secure its battlefield communications in the face of Russia’s invasion.

Today we are living under the chainsaw of Elon Musk: 2.0. Not all upgrades are improvements. This version is not driven by the visionary genius behind Tesla, Space X, and Starlink.  It is motored by the “darkness” his biographers describe.  We all have demons.  With Musk 2.0 we are witnessing the rebirth of technocratic ideology, masquerading in a MAGA hat, unleashed from the pinnacle of economic and industrial power.  This Musk, liberated extravagantly from the constraints of money, is nonetheless servant to his grievances, ancestry, and gnawing appetite for attention and influence.  Stunted as a human being by near absence of emotional intelligence, he acquires Twitter not as a financial transaction but as a platform he can control and algorithmically manipulate to maximize his personal acquisition of followers and validation.

Musk retains the cognitive intelligence to apprehend that the doctrine of contempt for truth will be far more conducive to sating his emotional needs than any form of honesty.  He recognizes in Donald Trump today, not a climate change denier, but a purchasable pathway to prominence and influence he could never otherwise achieve.  Thus do we have the spectacle of the world’s richest man taking on, as his first target for “Government Efficiency”, not the $1.7 trillion allocated to notoriously over budget and behind schedule Pentagon weapons system programs, for which he is unimpeachably qualified by his Space X innovations to address with positive effect (better systems, faster, and at lower cost), but the less than $70 billion annual budget of USAID, the tip of America’s soft power spear, directed at life-saving health and safety initiatives for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.  Where will this rank in America’s hall of shame?  DOGE’s priority of targets and track record so far screams that it is faster, easier, and more fun to use a chainsaw than a scalpel and to hell with those who are unjustly hurt (national interest among them).

The portrait of the billionaire “tech bros”, gathered in their vassalization at Trump’s inauguration, will stand for posterity in stark contrast with John Trumball’s painting of our Founders in Declaration of Independence.   It is perhaps understandable that people, (coincidentally all men), who were able to achieve extraordinary wealth and influence because they built companies in a nation committed to free enterprise, should morph into moguls who decide they should be not only freed from fair taxation but should be elevated to greater power and influence as the Olympians of a new technocratic world order …  the same failed vision that produced fascism in the 1930’s.  The talents and predilections of wealth creation are not those required for democratic governance.  We don’t give enough credit and admiration to the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove and the long list of tech titans of yore who built companies and fortunes while changing the world, without feeling the need to control it.

NEED FOR BIPARTISAN GOVERNMENT 

If there was ever a time when national unity and functioning bipartisan government, girded by Constitutionally defined separation of powers and checks and balances, was needed it is now.  The relentless doubling down on this regime’s misguided bet of our future as a nation should, even at this early stage, clearly signal we are being unmoored not just from truth but from safety.

The situation is not improved when the other side (Democratic Party leaders and influencers) embraces a counter strategy of:

A). Defending the policies and positions that lost them the 2024 election.

B). Being unwilling to acknowledge their contribution to decades of decline in US economic and governance vitality as applied to the middle class, and

C). “Fighting” under each and every banner deemed convenient in the moment, be it “billionaires”, “oligarchy”, “fascism”, “working families” (suggesting billionaires don’t work), “reproductive rights”, “Elon Musk”, “due process”, “rule of law”, “LGBTQ rights”, “security breach”, or other marginal minutiae.

That is not to say those issues don’t matter, but they are not impacting every American and other issues are. The entire public is being held hostage to incessant partisan nitpicking over the malfeasance of the moment, like spectators at a ping pong match, while elected leaders fail to articulate a rational prioritizing of policy solutions to the existential threats to our nation and world, a credible alternative vision which can be persuasive amid this turbulence.  There are abundant blueprints available from which to build a compelling platform to pull the nation and the American people out of this morass; but the time to “get our act together” is running out.

Because the regime is just getting warmed up.

Their attention is directed at the free press.  From funding for public broadcasting, to excluding press access to the administration, to favoring the organs of the ideologically aligned or captured, we can expect every possible suppression to be exerted on truth and transparency, with the acquiescence or active assistance of social media platforms.

The rule of law as we have known it can no longer be taken for granted.  The judiciary, blue state governments, “non-aligned” law firms, universities, and opposition voices will be targeted and punished by any means the regime can manufacture.  Legal residents can be misapprehended and deported in acknowledged error before “due process” is even considered.

The mid-term elections cannot be taken for granted.  As its favorability ratings decline, efforts will be amplified and accelerated to secure the regime’s Project 2025 goal of entrenching an extreme MAGA Republican lock on power for an indefinite future, with or without the Constitution.

For those 77,944,722 Americans who did not vote for this debacle and the growing number with “buyers’ remorse”, the next 94 weeks (if we assume midterms occur) appear bleak.  Letters to our elected leaders, gatherings to protest, and especially sending donations in response to incessant solicitations from Democrats without a coherent platform, feel like pathetic hand gestures in the face of a tsunami.

The architects and functionaries of this Orwellian nightmare are counting on our sense of impotence.  They depend on our collective “shock and awe”, delivered “at muzzle velocity”, distracting us from recognition of the latent power of the “voting” each of us does daily.

Exit poll data indicates that the 50.2% of voters who did not want Trump/Vance punch above their weight economically and in their share of consumer spending.  Consumer spending is 70% of US GDP.  Perhaps it is time for us to stand up and be counted, not just figuratively but literally and daily. If the regime is willing to jeopardize with impunity our welfare and safety, individually and as a nation, then maybe we should reward their contempt for us with some applied shock therapy to the system they seek to subvert and own.  The votes we cast each day with our dollars will be counted.

WHAT WE CHOOSE MATTERS

We choose whether our dollars reward the businesses of would-be oligarchs.

We choose whether we want an unfettered free press or free shipping.

We choose to click (or not) on social media feeds that yield advertising revenue.

We choose to maintain active accounts on social media platforms controlled and manipulated by owners to amplify disinformation and distort attention rankings.

We choose to goose or gouge the economy with the amount, place and timing of our spending.

As we cower for cover from the fallout of the contempt directed toward us by our own elected leaders, we can be certain of one thing.  A house divided against itself will not stand.  No regime consumed by retribution and wanton indulgence of power at the expense of its citizens and friends can hope to stand strong in the face of a rival with the population and power of China.  No regime can make any nation “great” if it does not prioritize ensuring its own people are all fed, housed, healthy, educated, and safe.  We have a 250-year track record demonstrating the force multiplying effect of a constitutional democracy in meeting challenges set before it, but our high achievements have occurred only when the “United” part was in operation.

Absent a course correction, the United States and all it stands for and has been in the world for the past 100 years is headed for an ignominious fate, akin to her namesake ocean liner which once proudly sailed the Atlantic, still holds the record for crossing speed, and will soon be a sunken artificial reef off the coast of Florida.   At the age of 10, I sat on her aft deck with my parents and viewed the Statue of Liberty for the first time as we sailed out of New York headed for England, unaware I would not return for seven years.  That torch held aloft as a beacon to the world could hardly be fathomed in its symbolism by my pre-adolescent mind, yet I could feel its pull and potency.  It is not only to the rest of the world she is calling out “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Will we gather our wits, reconvene under the umbrella of truth, facts, and common sense, and roll up our sleeves, individually and collectively, to refurbish our nation and ensure the metaphorical light from Lady Liberty guides us back to our goodness and illuminates the world?

______________________

BIOGRAPHY

Jaemes Shanley is a resident of the Mark Twain neighborhood located in the mid heights. He first arrived in Albuquerque in August 1969, after graduating High School in England, to attend UNM from which he graduated in 1973. His parents followed a year later, and his father retired in Albuquerque after a 30-year career as a US Naval aviator.  In 1971 they purchased a home in the Mark Twain neighborhood where they resided for the remainder of their lives. Jaemes worked a lifetime in the private sector in sales and marketing for various corporations in the United States, Australia, and Japan. His work required extensive travel throughout Asia Pacific and Latin America routinely on the ground in more than 30 countries. Jaemes and his wife returned to Albuquerque in September 2006 to renovate and take up residence in his parent’s Mark Twain neighborhood home where they reside today, becoming actively involved with Neighborhood Associations.