If you are Deroy Murdoch you see Speaker Mike Johnson as a “squish” for caving on the Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan foreign aid bill.

Johnson has mastered McConnell’s art of giving Democrats what they want while getting nothing in return.

Whatabout the good old days of the “conference committee,” Murdoch asks, when House and Senate resolved their differences and sent the compromise to the President for signature? It was Obama-time when

[Harry Reid and] Nancy Pelosi torpedoed this tradition of American democracy. Instead, they drafted major bills behind their offices’ closed doors.

Why did they do this? Because they had the power to do it.

If you are Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, on the other hand, you are encouraged that 112 Republicans voted against the bill.

The GOP establishment’s actions this past week portend the end of the GOP establishment, not its survival. Conservatives will win the soul of the GOP and with it the hearts of the American people.

So, is the glass half full or half empty? I think the answer is pretty obvious. We don’t know.

I believe that populist nationalism is a political and cultural movement trying to push back against the educated-class regime that has ruled us for the last century in organic upwellings, unexpected and unforeseen by regime narrators: Nixon’s silent majority, Reagan Democrats, Tea Party, Brexit, MAGA.

And I believe that all the movements from the Left -- from the 1960s students to 2008 Hope and Change to 2012 and Trayvon Martin and the 2014 Ferguson riots to the 2020 Floyd riots to the 2024 campus protests -- have all been condoned and curated by the regime. BLM and Antifa are regime-adjacent. Of course, any regime worth its salt knows how to curate the public square -- until it doesn’t.

You don’t think that lefty activism is curated by the regime? Then why do you think the intelligence community came up with the notion of MDM -- mis- dis- and mal-information -- that is dutifully echoed by regime media? MDM is simply news and opinion that the regime doesn’t like.

When it’s all over, and the populists have won, then everyone will say that it was inevitable. If populism is defeated, then everyone would say that it never had a chance.

Back in 1989 the Soviet Union collapsed because even though leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev realized that they had a problem, it all got away from them. In China after the death of Mao, Deng Xiaoping realized that China had a problem but managed to keep the lid on the 1989 Tiananmen rebellion and end two centuries of humiliation.

I like to make things Real Simple. To me, the crisis of communism was that any top-down totalitarianism of politics, morality, and the economy does not work. Back in the 20th century communism worked out pretty well for the communist elite, but not at all for the rest of the people. Today, the crisis of the educated-class regime is that its top-down management of politics, its woke morality, and its Keynesian economic stimulus green energy transition does not work. It works pretty well for the Elite 1%, the folx with graduate degrees, earning $150,000 plus, living in urban gentry enclaves, and dining off EV subsidies, but not for the rest of us.

But here’s a naughty thought. Back in 2020 I wrote that the point of the Trayvon Martin/Michael Brown/George Floyd phenomenon was to whip the black vote into shape in even-numbered years with a racial panic. But the current campus protests have nothing to do with the black vote. If anything they are trying to whip the Muslim vote into a antisemitic panic. And this in a year when the black and Hispanic vote is coming unstuck.

Hey, strategerists and experts: I wonder if that is good strategery for 2024.

The fact is that all the balls are up in the air. Will "Get Trump" with three corrupt black prosecutors and one token white prosecutor Get Trump or elect Trump? We don’t know.

Will the pro-Hamas college protests help rally American Muslims to Biden or convert American Jews to Trump? And whatabout blacks and Hispanics? We don’t know.

Will “transitory” inflation flare up this year or not? We don’t know.

Will the green energy transition teach average Americans to Drill, Baby, Drill? We don’t know.

Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog, “Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators, and Weather-Prophet Extraordinary” understands the prediction game. He always predicts another six weeks of winter every year on February 2.

In other words, nothing changes until it changes.

Meanwhile, the way for Phil to find meaning in life and win over the love of his life is to become a good guy helping little old ladies, catching kids falling out of trees, and doing his piano practice.

You too.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Cyclical Core