My Books
Turn Right At Lost: Recalculating America
( June 22, 2016 : Paperback )
My first book was an exploration of the continuing deterioration of our self-reliant and patriotic American Culture, the creeping collectivist attitude of the voters, and the near pandemic of narcissism across our great country. It touched on so many of the issues that are currently scorching our society: Gender confusion, victimhood, excessive media influence, language corruption, and so many others.
President Barack Obama provided me with a ton of juicy political and cultural fodder. He was so self absorbed he never noticed his own outright racism, progressive condescension, or blatant hypocrisy. He pandered to voters, traipsing around the country promising everything to everybody. He made gaffe after gaffe, mispronouncing marine corps as "corpse", and mistakenly saying he had visited all 52 states… Obama was easy pickings.
He was supposed to bring about racial reconciliation, to smother the march of Islamic fundamentalism, to help bring inner cities out of poverty. He promised to bring America out of the funk of the attack on the Twin Towers.
But he exacerbated all of our fears, our racial anxieties, and presided over a collapse of our middle class. Because he was the first Black President, he captured the hopes of millions of minorities that were feeling increasingly disillusioned. He played on those emotional concerns but was unable to produce any tangible improvements.
Then along came the Man From New York, Mister Golden Hair Surprise. Who knew what that would lead to? I had a feeling the electorate was going to choose the outsider to right the ship of state. Obama was leaving our foreign affairs in ruins, with Islamic Fundamentalist Terror Groups running wild across the Middle East. Domestically we were experiencing racial conflict in inner cities and job losses approaching 100 million.
Candidate Hillary Clinton foreshadowed the impending cultural calamity that would occur when a rogue disrupter suddenly gained enormous power. Donald Trump ruffled the feathers of the Beltway Brotherhood. He bashed Hillary and the Clinton "Cash Machine" Foundation and her handling of foreign affairs, including the Benghazi fiasco. Then he stirred up resentment within the Republican establishment, when he trashed the various international trade deals. He threw shade on their collusion with transnational business by accusing them of deporting our middle class jobs, and encouraging illegal immigration by refusing to build a wall along the southern border. He dismissed the NATO coalition as a paper tiger that fed on American taxpayers.
Then the unthinkable happened. Mr. Golden Hair Surprise became the 45th President of the United States. I was ready to start a new book because I recognized he would have a hell of a time carrying out his agenda. He had made some precocious promises: To restore our dominance in energy, and to secure the southern border. To renegotiate terrible trade agreements and to bring jobs back to America. And to restore respect for the office both domestically and internationally.
The Rub? I thought if I put a "Pro Trump" book into the Amazon maelstrom it would eventually draw some attention, and I had an experienced publisher (the wife of a lifelong friend) to help me, so I had high expectations.
I had also befriended a publicist during the Country Club battle. He offered to help me get some notice. In September 2016, Cathy and I went to New York to pay tribute to the 20th anniversary of 911. He got me a live "report from the scene" appearance/interview on one of the local San Diego news talk radio shows.
We were there at the Memorial Services when Hillary tripped getting into her limo/van. I interviewed some amazing New Yorkers that lived through the 911 events. Everyone we met was enthusiastic about my book. I came home on cloud nine. And ready to start a follow up book.
On election night in November 2016, my publicist friend invited Cathy and I to attend the Republican Party reception at the Grand Hotel in Downtown San Diego. He suggested we first visit the Election Night Media Event held at Golden Hall Concourse at the Civic Center. Then when the election results come in, walk across the street and he would meet up with us at the reception.
It was an amazing evening. The local news media (TV, radio, newspaper) gathers in the convention hall and they have booths and tables where their reporters and anchors watch the scoreboards reporting real time results across the nation. It's like watching the Indianapolis 500 on steroids.
At about 8:30 PM we noticed some of the reports were causing quite a stir. Then it turned into a riot. I felt a tap on my shoulder and my publicist friend was standing behind me. He leaned in and screamed, "You have to write a follow up now! It looks like Trump is going to be the next President!"
By the time we made our way to the Grand Hotel it was total chaos! My friend introduced me to a few mucky mucks but he was quickly overwhelmed. The drinks were flowing and folks were acting like World War II had just ended…
The Neighbor Hood Hijacker:
The Heroic Effort To Stop The Plundering Of Our Community
(March 23, 2017 : eBook )
By Spring 2017, I had the material from my 4 years-long blog about what was happening to my community. It was easy for me to blog about the whole ordeal because I have a background in new home construction, and land development. So I understood some of the zoning issues, and how the entitlement process in the 50's and 60's was much too simple and could lead to conflicts in later years.
The Escondido Country Club community started back in the early sixties, when Escondido was primarily cow pastures and orange groves. In order to draw people to establish homes and build infrastructure, county officials were liberal about zoning. It was organized to attract builders, who then built whatever they thought they could sell quickly.
Decades later, during the Great Recession, the golf course, which was squeezed into a housing tract via a special Conditional Use Permit (CUP), fell into financial trouble. It had lost membership, because lots of people like me were struggling to keep employed while others simply lost their jobs and had to resign their memberships. The maintenance costs were skyrocketing due to a decade-long drought, and developers were waiting in the shadows drooling at the prospect of purchasing acres of flat, centrally located land in North County San Diego.
It was a perfect storm that would lead to the downfall of dozens of golf courses in San Diego and many rural areas in the Southwestern United States. Though I was unable to keep my membership, I held out hope that the opportunity might present itself sometime in the future. Either way, it was obvious to me that the centerpiece of the community was the Country Club. It was a settled neighborhood that was an attractive and integral part of the Escondido experience.
Sticking hundreds of 21st century homes in the middle of it was like painting graffiti over the Mona Lisa.
Over the years my friends accused me of working for greedy homebuilders that were ravaging Southern California, exploiting our environment for massive profits. They considered the building industry to be unconcerned about traffic and overcrowded schools, lack of water and long lines at Walmart. So they were baffled that I was so dead-set against this development.
I have always worried about giving our kids a chance to grow up in Paradise just like my generation. I hate traffic and overcrowding too, but do we want to force our kids to move out-of-state because there is no affordable housing? So I have traditionally been pro-growth.
But, the truth is, there is a right place for growth. There is plenty of open space to develop in San Diego County. Hundreds of my neighbors paid a premium for golf course frontage lots. It is a crime to remove the golf course without compensation. Our opposition claimed we all knew the course was zoned as residential, that the special use permit was only temporary. But that was never disclosed in promotional literature of the time. None of the sales agents at the time were aware of that anomaly, so they never conveyed that information to potential buyers.
The Country Club Community was developed in the early 60's, and real estate laws were not consumer oriented. It was "Buyer Beware" and technically the buyer is obligated to do their own due diligence. But the truth is at that time, it was not clear that the Conditional Use Permit was inherently temporary, so even if buyers tried to investigate the zoning limits, they would have come away with the idea that the golf course was a permanent fixture in the neighborhood.
I wrote the book to properly frame the debate, because the wealthy builder coalition of legal eagles held all the cards. They demonized the resistance group, characterizing us as Not-In-My-Backyard (NYMBies), greedy old white men who just wanted to protect their private playground, and as a generation whose time had passed.
I wanted to leave something for future generations to review when they research the history of their Northwest Escondido community. When they want to know more about the heritage of their 21st century community of radically disparate neighborhoods. As I wrote the book, it became apparent to me that there was also a much larger issue at play: Our entire country was being hijacked by powerful special interests that could care less about what the residents wanted.
Trump's Reckoning:
Bulldozing Progressivism, Rebuilding Americanism
(June 24, 2018 : eBook, Hardcover, Paperback )
I am very proud of my 3rd book, Trump's Reckoning, and the title was prescient. The man was confronted with four years of the most libelous, coordinated subterfuge and seditious resistance anyone could have imagined, yet he accomplished an astonishing number of his promises. And then some.
I have always said I have a unique perspective on Donald Trump. A point of view you seldom get from the intellectuals, the news media and the celebrity class: I spent three decades in the building industry and Trump is a builder. Builders have a unique MO: They have no patience for committees, for excuses, for cost overruns, for political correctness, for excessive burdens, restrictions, or any other government petulance. They have plans and schedules. They rely on honesty, accountability and performance. If only we could get our political class to mimic those standards, we might actually save the country!
So I hired a marketing group to get me radio interviews across the country, and they did. But none of them were mainstream personalities, and my book sales never caught a tailwind. Even with hour-long interviews in major markets like Atlanta, St. Louis and Miami, I got only a few book orders from any of those cities.
I have read several books by prominent authors about the Trump Presidency, and I will stack mine up with any of them. I correctly identified many of the undercurrents that plagued The Donald, and subsequently created the chaos that has been perpetuated by the regime of Joe Biden.
But I was wrong about one thing: I totally underestimated the evil nature of the Deep State. I had quoted former President Ike Eisenhower about the threat to our Republic (re: Turn Right At Lost) that a growing hybrid monster of self-serving Military Industrial Commercial interests joining with greedy self-serving entrenched congressional oligarchs could hijack the entire Washington establishment. I was under the false assumption that our elections were actually functional and honest. I was a prisoner of the illusion of knowledge.
The Illusion Of Knowledge:
Why So Many Educated Americans Embrace Marxism
( January 6, 2020 : eBook, Hardcover, Paperback)
As I spoke to local conservative groups about my books, I was asked one question, over and over again: Why are so many Americans eager to destroy our unique representative republic and our super successful capitalist system? Why is Marxism celebrated?
So I began to collect my thoughts about how mass media could effectively hypnotize millions of people at once. Or at least, over a period of time, manipulate their thinking in a certain direction.
My wife had recently witnessed a murder of a fellow worker at her medical building. A young housewife, who was suffering from spousal abuse, and had just filed a restraining order to keep her abusive spouse from stalking her, was shot to death as she walked from the parking lot to her office. He methodically reloaded his rifle and pumped her full of bullets.
I researched the story and realized that this form of mental illness is pervasive, and women (sometimes men, too) are murdered every day by their lovers who can't stand losing control over their body and their mind. I call it the OJ Syndrome. Less developed forms of this disease is what is referred to as Coercive Control, or Spousal Manipulation. On a grand scale, we call it Gaslighting.
Combine this social epidemic of extreme narcissism with the ubiquitous Progressive indoctrination occurring in our schools, and you have a formula for a cult of brain damaged and dangerous zombies who will stop at nothing to impose their dogma on us all. I call them the Progressive Jihad.
Now we are seeing the results of decades of this social manipulation. For anyone with any sense of normalcy, it is unbelievable. It is scary. Many politicians are calling normalcy "Extremist". For me it is like watching one of Hollywood's apocalyptic films: It seems unrealistic, stupid, and overwrought. Yet here we are, watching our major cities descend into third world shitholes. Defending our right to raise our own children without government interference. Defending our right to DEFEND ourselves!
Our so-called elected government is staffed with mentally ill crossdressers who insist on imposing their bizarre rituals and unhealthy lifestyles on elementary school children! The criminal class has grabbed the steering wheel and is driving our collective school bus into a satanic ditch…
Those that have embraced the secular view that all conservatives are right wing extremists, fascists and homophobes, are also seriously involved with the "Sharing Culture'' of personal electronic devices. They are having their minds reprogrammed to desire collectivism. Additionally they have undergone decades of Progressive school indoctrination, being taught that the idea of self determination and citizen directed government is selfish and dangerous.
We shouldn't be surprised that millions of our citizens would prefer to live under Marxism…
F'd: For Your Own Good
( May 7, 2022, eBook )
When I woke up on November 9th, 2020 to the news that Donald Trump's overnight lead had mysteriously disappeared, I knew our country was being f'd. Glued to the TV for the next 16 hours I watched the FrankenMedia make the case that all of the last minute votes for brain dead Joe ("If you don't vote for me, you ain't black!") Biden was coming in late from poor black districts, from college towns where students were preoccupied with classes to vote early, and from women who had to work to protect their families.
Then Trump held a press conference and stated flatly, "We won this election. By a lot."
In my mind it was obvious that the entire pre-election news cycle was nothing more than gaslighting: Telling the public that any idea that Trump could get reelected was hallucinating. That his vast economic and international peace initiatives were figments of an overactive imagination. That the Pandemic was a fluke of nature that just happened to come along just in time to derail the most successful Presidential term in fifty years. That the world was a much safer place now that adults were back in charge. And that the Democrats would undo the immense "damage" wrought by Trump by using executive orders, and with the near unlimited resources of the Federal Government.
They promised to "Build Back Better" for our own good.
That actually meant they would spend us into oblivion, deny us our civil rights, impose draconian social and financial controls, and drive the United States into a new civil war.
When someone tells you they are acting on your behalf, they are protecting you and all of society from "extremists" you should be "extremely" cautious. They are the stranger offering you a ride home after school...
The Rub? I hate being right…