About

My name is Richard Ong, your blog host.  I live in Evanston, Wyoming.  You can email me at admin@highplainspopulism.com or comment on any post. Your very first comment will not appear immediately until I’ve had an opportunity to approve it.

See my post “Populism” for what I think populism is all about.  I’ll update it from time to time as the spirit moves me.

I was born in N. Rhodesia almost 80 years ago and lived in what used to be German South West Africa but which became South West Africa after 1918.  This was during the time of Maximum Evil on Earth, namely, when colonialism was still a fact of life in a lot of places.  No doubt this warped my character so that I attained “Irredeemable” status at an early stage.

If you think colonialism was bad you should see parts of Africa where they don’t have colonialism.  For an educational dose of immediately post-colonial African realities watch the documentary “Africa Addio” which is most entertaining.  South Africa is a pit these days now that the evil apartheid regime is gone.  The parents of a schoolboy friend of mine answered a knock at the door at his home in the Cape Province one Christmas Day years ago and were shot dead by four black youths.  My friend and has family survived relatively unscathed if you count his being shot in the foot as being “relatively unscathed.”  The youths were arrested and imprisoned but “escaped” after a short while and were never apprehended.  Stuff happens.

It’s gotten worse since then with well-established murderous hostility to whites at every turn.

Still, I think it’s rather amazing that one of my law professors ended up as the president of Malawi. He was a very pleasant gentleman and my roommates and I invited him over to dinner two or three times in our senior year. Malawi is a sane place.

Namibia, the former South West Africa, was once under S. African control but it has escaped the insanity of South Africa.  It’s rather underpopulated and locals seem congenial and laid back.  Our gardener loved me as a small boy and liked to carry me about on his shoulders.  The woman who did our washing in tubs outside was a Herero and she wore their distinctive long 19th-century, German-style dresses with a cloth headdress.  Our first house when we arrived in 1946 was an old German house right across from the hospital.  The hill on the other side of the railway tracks was a residential area for blacks who worked in the mines and the refinery.  At night they’d sit outside their small quarters in front of a fire and sing the most wonderful songs a capella in their deep, rich voices.

When my father retired as the superintendent of the refinery the men gathered to sing a farewell song to him, he being a good natured, competent, and honorable man, which I like to think they recognized.

I’ve been a pump jockey, radio announcer, scuba instructor, ocean sailor, hitchhiker, proofreader, sheet metal worker, lab tech, truck driver, airborne infantryman, federal employee, computer entrepreneur, criminal lawyer, and law professor.  I was part of the Cambodian incursion in 1970 ordered by the great Richard M. Nixon.  An amazing experience.  No more NVA in the Mekong Delta after that.  Thank you, Mr. President.  God bless you.

I’m retired and involved in our Uinta County citizens’ group, Choose Liberty Now, particularly with the election integrity subgroup.  Needless to say, we’re all concerned where the country is and where it’s going.

I come by my love for this country honestly, not least because I had a fair amount of foreign travel as a kid before my father retired so I had something to compare the United States to.  Way up the line our Puritan Ong forebears landed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in February 1631 just a few months after the Winthrop Fleet arrived.  Someone on my mother’s side was the last surviving signer of the Declaration I believe.  But, regardless, I believe that if you were born in America you basically won the lottery of life.  Some think that every last person on earth has an unrestricted right to move to the U.S., treat it like it’s a land poisoned by white people, and demand citizenship and taxpayer support.  But I am not one of them.

My grandfather and great grandfather both served in the War of Northern Aggression in the 44th Volunteer Illinois Infantry, the former taking a ball in the shoulder at the Battle of Perryville and the latter suffering a serious hernia digging up the railway in the Siege of Atlanta and thereafter being unable tp work.  Their people were blacksmiths mostly but grandpa was mustered out after being wounded and became a teacher for a while and then a lawyer.  He ended up in the Colorado House in 1901 but served only one term because of small strokes that eventually killed him.  My father could not finish high school because of his father’s death in 1911 and went on to acquire his metallurgical skills by on-the-job training and correspondence courses, as was the practice in the teens. We’ve really advanced since then.

My mother’s people were farmers. Her father came up the Missouri River on a cattle boat and got off at Ft. Benton, Mont. and then settled in Great Falls.

I obtained a superficial understanding of the U.S. Constitution in law school but didn’t really understand what it was all about until I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn‘s The Gulag Archipelago, the definitive work on the execrable Soviet Union.  Do not fail to read that wonderful book!  (A yet-more-graphic account of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution and its immediate aftermath can be found in The Red Terror in Russia 1918-1923 by Sergey Petrovich Melgounov.)

In view of the insights available in those two books — and many other books about totalitarianism — it is beyond clear to me that the rule of law is not lightly to be discarded.  Which is exactly what the United States Supreme Court did in the 1930s (and forever after) when, as Judge Bork put it, it simply ceased to enforce the Interstate Commerce Clause in Art. I, Sect. 8 of the Constitution. And later went harrowing up the most lunatic doctrines imaginable out of the emanations from the penumbra of the Due Process Clause and the Spending Clause.

More on betrayal of the Constitution by our highly educated and perfumed elites later.  Spoiler alert: they trashed the basic structure of our grand experiment in self government and created the out-of-control Frankenstein federal monster that fleeces us and destroys the country.  At this very hour creeping totalitarianism is treated as nothing, a trifle, by our clueless elites who play at God true to their moronic progressive arrogance. They have chosen to lie down with the devil and their stupidity and malevolence are taking us with them.