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Believing in the Unbelievable

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We’re living in a nutty time.  Alongside the Loch Ness monster, the second gunman on the grassy knoll, free healthcare, Elvis in the land of the living, people believe in the darndest things.  Modern iterations of the same phenomena include a “two-state solution” in Palestine, a wildly popular Trump, “undocumented” immigrants, a successful Marxism, etc.  How can this be?  Do adults actually believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus?

In an aside, attaching “undocumented” to immigrant hides the reality.  This person – “undocumented” – is a citizen of another nation who trespassed our border and our laws to plant themselves in our country.  This person is illegally present in the country, period.  “Undocumented” is synonymous with “illegal”.  “Illegal immigrant” clears the air.  The people who patronize us with “undocumented” are deceptive or they actually believe the unbelievable.

One guy, Robert Malone, MD, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, deposited his pet theory of “mass formation psychosis” (mfp) as an explanation for a broad belief in the unbelievable (see #1 below). I don’t know whether I accept the idea, but it certainly is intriguing.  Malone used it to explain much of the mania during the pandemic.  It could convincingly be applied beyond Covid and right into 2024 and our roiling election-year controversies.

Gundlach says Wall Street’s suffering ‘mass psychosis’ - MarketWatch

So, what is it?  Mfp is a psychotic condition on a mass scale in a time of deep divisions when events seem monumental yet poorly understood.  Someone or some explanation arises, goes viral, and the impressionable group runs the danger of being detached from reality.  The resulting behavior is often delusional to the point of derangement, or a state of mass hypnosis.  As Malone says to Rogan,

“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.” (see #1 below)

Welcome to 2024.  Are Republican primary voters in the grip of mfp?  How else to explain the popularity of Donald Trump in the party, in spite of the clear evidence of his toxicity?  He romped to a 20-point win in South Carolina after his other big wins in Iowa and New Hampshire.  Nothing holds promise of derailing his rush to the nomination. It’s odd given the fact that, post-2016, Republicans appear lining up for a four-peat of the miserable performances in 2018, 2020, and 2022.  A very powerful constant in the previous three election cycles is Donald Trump as the face of the party.  No one scares suburban voters and women more than the prospect of Trump in the White House.  Yet here we go again.

How did the party get to this juncture?  Nothing provides more proof of the presence of mass psychosis formation in Republican ranks than an enduring faith in Trump’s electability.  The previous losses didn’t penetrate the rational faculties of their brains, or the fact that a semi-functional nursing home patient is competitive with Trump.  Clinging to the unreal, South Carolina GOP voters in exit polls believe Trump is more electable than Nikki Haley (87% to 57%), in spite of national polling showing Haley slaughtering Biden by double digits (see #2 below).  Trump’s advantage over the senescent Biden is within the margin of error.

Trump Needs White Suburban Women. His Indictment Splits Them. - WSJ
Trump needs but frightens suburban women

A record of repeated failures won’t shock these people into reality, and neither will foul behavior diminish their fervor, even among people who profess the need for moral rectitude.  Trump recently went before religious broadcasters (Christian), laced his talk with the promiscuous use of “hell” before many pastors, and was met with laughs and cheers (see #4 below).  No admonitions, not a lick.

His responses to rivals are not arguments but insults.  We were reminded of his chronic incivility when he referred to Nikki Haley as “birdbrain” and tried to be derisive by ridiculing her ethnic name.  This is par for the course for Trump.

At a rally in South Carolina, Trump mocked Haley’s husband for not being around to support his wife.  He scoffed, “What happened to her husband? Where is he?”, and added, “He’s gone.”  In fact, he’s deployed in service to his country.  This isn’t the only time that he’s reached for the use of invective in an effort to be humorous, with the target being people in uniform, and a loved one of his opponent.

There’s more.  John Kelly, Trump’s former chief staff, confirmed earlier reports of Trump bad-mouthing those who suffered in war defending our country (see #5 below).  In the inner sanctum of the oval office according to Kelly, Trump referred to John McCain and H.W. Bush as “losers”.  John Kelly again: “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’”  More incidents will remain on the cutting room floor for lack of confirmation.

Before you dismiss Kelly, remember that he was a widely respected commander prior to his association with Trump.  Suddenly, he’s on the outs with Trump and the object of abuse by Trumpkins, who just yesterday held their hats at their hearts when a soldier was laid to rest.  Trumpkins are required to sacrifice their personal integrity in an allegiance to a lout.  It’s another example of believing in the unbelievable, in the righteousness of a man who exploited five deferments to avoid military service in time of war.

The coarse disrespect from his mouth is a green light to churlishness in his supporters.  It’s a pattern now common in all his campaigns from the beginning in 2016.  For instance, during a 2016 New Hampshire rally, he was lambasting Ted Cruz, a rival for the nomination, when a woman in the audience yelled, “He’s [Cruz] a pussy”.  Trump feigned a criticism and then happily repeated it to laughter and applause.  This is unthinkingly dismissed as “Trump being Trump”, and the behavior rubs off on his followers.

Achieving laughter through invective is a recurring Trumpism of those seeking the brass ring in his wake, like Kerry Lake who has the ambition to be one of Arizona’s senators.  Trump bashes McCain – “[McCain is] not a war hero.  He was a war hero because he was captured.  I like people who weren’t captured” – so Lake piles on with, “Boy, Arizona has delivered some losers [McCain], haven’t they?”  She prefaced that doozy with, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we?”  She answered, “Well, get the hell out!”  Out Trumping Trump is considered an asset in this twisted little eco-system. (see #6 below)

Believing that it is endearing and won’t cost you elections, by someone who’s already lost one, is an amazing feat of delusion.  She’s the reason for an uptalking lefty occupying the governor’s mansion – in a state where the previous Republican governor won reelection by double digits – along with the Trump fealty claque in the party primary who put her on the general election ballot in the first place.

No wonder the party is plagued with over-the-top Trump worshippers in office in the likes of Lauren Boebert, Majorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, J.D. Vance, and others.  They embrace flamboyance as a substitute for civility, good judgment, and seriousness.  Clowns now rule the roost in the party.

The previous losses don’t seem to penetrate the fogged-up part of the logical brain. Cults of personality don’t have coattails; it’s in their nature.  The down-ballot for Trump has been a disaster.  He may win in a squeaker in November but expect a Democrat Congress to quickly impeach him.  I don’t relish the sight of the bloody aftermath of that imbroglio.  And to think that it is all due to people believing in that which ought not to be believed.  The Democrats believe in a successful Marxism.  Republicans believe in a popular Trumpism.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “What Is Mass Formation Psychosis? Robert Malone Makes Unfounded Covid-19 Vaccine Claims On Joe Rogan Show”, Bruce Y. Lee, Forbes, 1/2/2022, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/01/02/what-is-mass-formation-psychosis-robert-malone-makes-covid-19-vaccine-claims-on-joe-rogan-show/?sh=4077085d1d4c
2. “Exit Polls: Exit Poll Results for 2024 Presidential Primaries and Caucuses”, CNN, at https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/primaries-and-caucuses/exit-polls/south-carolina/republican-primary/0
3. Thanks to Philip Klein for his analysis regarding the electability question in “South Carolina Results Show Why It’s Hard to Run on Electability”, National Review, 2/24/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/south-carolina-results-show-why-its-hard-to-run-on-electability/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth
4. Trump’s speech at the convention of the National Religious Broadcasters can be viewed at https://youtu.be/x1xKn6LR5gY?si=8bAv8muBXKRwXpjI
5. “Exclusive: John Kelly goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump”, Jake Tapper, CNN, 10/3/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/02/politics/john-kelly-donald-trump-us-service-members-veterans/index.html4
6. “‘No Peace, B****,’ Meghan McCain Tells Kari Lake”, Haley Stack, National Review, 2/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-peace-b-meghan-mccain-tells-kari-lake/

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Latest Poll: Trump Up Over Biden by Four, But So What

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2024 is proving the nation to be rudderless.  Much of what is happening must seem befuddling to the mass of adults still in possession of their wits.  Our upper crust has merged with the Left, aligning with neo-Marxists without necessarily realizing it.  The reaction on the Right is a vulgar gesture in the person of Donald Trump.  Much of the media is an accelerant to both sides alongside dominant cultural institutions – the schools in particular, which are groomers of the Left.  Much of the media has become unwatchable and unlistenable.  The year 2024 is a time of the vulgar gesture versus the Left’s scheme of national extinction.

The nation’s suicide begins in the culture, especially cultural curators in the media.  It’s easy to write off much of the legacy media for their convergence with the progressive Left.  But the media on the Right has its own problems.  As stated before, I listen to Hugh Hewitt in podcast form more regularly than any other, but even he has become increasingly disappointing.  He’s a Republican booster, no holds barred, and that means a near subservience to Donald Trump if he is the nominee.  It leads to stunted conversation and information.

Let me explain.  A party is deserving of loyalty only if it remains respectable.  The vileness of Trump is beyond question; it’s part of his schtick (Trump being Trump).  Trump is disgracing the Republican Party making Hewitt’s subservience disgraceful for a now disgraced GOP.  So, this plays out on Hewitt’s show by his steering of interviews, conversations, and information away from criticism of Trump, even among guests who are well-known for blasting the mercurial man of Mar-a-Lago.  Airtime is almost exclusively filled with the monotony of anti-Biden banter to the exclusion of everything else.  Trump’s and the GOP’s complicity in many of these matters is absent.

The stance of right-leaning media is probably a commercial decision.  The talk radio audience is Trumpy in the extreme.  Speaking of suicide, it’s commercial self-murder to tick off an audience that’s mostly limited to spewing Hannity or Tucker Carlson talking points.  This crowd dominates the talk radio listenership and the GOP.  At this juncture, the party and its fellow-travelling talk radio base has made itself unrespectable and undeserving of Hewitt’s kid-gloves treatment, which only ends up soiling Hewitt as he does it.

Don’t think for a moment that the Democrats are a respectable alternative.  It used to be said that America is alone in not having a viable socialist party like the Labor Party in the UK or the social democratic party clones throughout Europe.  Wrong.  We’ve got the Democratic Party.  An American social democratic wannabe will remain a nonentity because that space is occupied by the sprawling donkey party.  Socialism has a following in the muddled brains of adolescents and among the party’s base and leadership.  Peddling an ideological poison pill isn’t a prescription for respectability.

Now, let’s take a look at the latest Marquette Law School Poll.  What does it say about the state of the race?  Trumpers are giddy about Trump being up by 4 over Biden nationally.  But Haley sends Biden packing by 16 (see #1 below).  There’s more to this race than the betting-line favorites, much more.

The poll-takers asked a push question to force more of the fence-sitters into a choice between the two leading contenders.  From the poll summary:

“These results include voters who initially said they would vote for someone else or would not vote but were then asked their preference if they had to choose one of the two candidates.  In the initial question, 13 percent said ‘someone else’ or that they would not vote.” (see #1 below)

Got it?  13% had to be cajoled into embracing one or the other.  How much of the rest of the 52% for Trump or 48% for Biden actually were facing the same dilemma but made a choice just to send the polltakers packing?  These guys, both of them, are castor oil to the public.

Age is one problem . . . for both.  In an ABC News poll, 86% of respondents say that Biden is too old to be president.  No surprise there.  It also applies to Trump.  At an age of 77 at the time of inauguration, 62% think that Trump is aged out.  Octogenarians behind the Resolute Desk doesn’t present a pleasing prospect for most Americans (see #3 below).

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The reason is obvious.  Biden is going from infirmity to dementia before our eyes, while Trump is getting cruder and more caustic by the day.  Both are exhibiting crotchety-old-man syndrome.  Biden leaves the podium in a daze after regaling us in slurred and attenuated speech and mangled memories.  Trump has mentally locked himself into a junior high locker room.

If either one gets elected, will they survive the full four years?  Biden has already had one massive stroke.  Given his current semi-functional status, another one wouldn’t be surprising.  Then, we’ve got Kamala, polling worse than Biden.  She could amaze us, but nothing in her years in the public eye is encouraging.

Trump is different. He may serve in leg irons, which will present an interesting conundrum for the Congressional Republican Caucus.  The Democrats’ lawfare stable has 91 whacks at him from Jack Smith to DAs and AGs in New York and Georgia.  Do you want to bet that at least one of them won’t be made to stick by some dim-witted jury?  A mass of the charges is despicable, agreed.  But it’s a reality.

Think of it: America not much different from Nicaragua, or taking a page from Putin’s playbook.  But I digress.

Anyway, Trump could free himself of the evil Jack Smith with a pardon, unseemly as it will be.  Federal charges are within the president’s purview. State and local actions are an entirely different matter.  We are probably on untrodden ground here.  Since legal actions began before the inauguration, or sentencing awaits, what will happen if a felonious and possibly convicted defendant were to win the Electoral College?  The Republican Caucus may have to decide if they really want to shield a convicted defendant from impeachment and removal from office.  As for the Democrats, they stand in the wings in glee.

Sir Walter Scott, 19th century Scottish author, said it best: “Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive”.  Are Democrats and the Trump gaggle in the GOP deceiving us as they make a clown car of our politics?  We may have to replace the eagle with Bozo as our national symbol.

Trump is slightly up, Haley trounces Biden, but so what.  She won’t get the nomination; Trump may serve in an ankle bracelet; or Biden will have to serve from a chronic care facility.  When you think about it, nobody is doing it to us.  We are doing it to ourselves.  It’s a democratic republic; we are responsible.

How responsible?  Each Republican primary, including the recent one in South Carolina, is proving that the rot has deep roots beyond the muckety-mucks.  The parties are marching toward a general election ballot that I will leave blank at the top, and maybe elsewhere.  No neo-Marxists and no Trumpers.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “New Marquette Law School Poll national survey finds Trump at 51%, Biden at 49% in head-to-head matchup; each leads primary challenger by more than 50 points”, 2/21/24, at https://law.marquette.edu/poll/2024/02/21/new-marquette-law-school-poll-national-survey-finds-trump-at-51-biden-at-49-in-head-to-head-matchup-each-leads-primary-challenger-by-more-than-50-points/
2. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for bringing the poll to my attention, “Oh, No Big Deal, Just a Survey Showing Haley Beating Biden, 58 Percent to 42 Percent”, 2/22/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/oh-no-big-deal-just-a-survey-showing-haley-beating-biden-58-percent-to-42-percent/
3. “Overwhelming majority of Americans think Biden is too old for another term: POLL”, Meredith Deliso, ABC News, 2/11/24, at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/poll-americans-on-biden-age/story?id=107126589
4. Thanks to Christian Schneider for additional information in “America Is Running Two Presidential Elections at Once”, National Review, 2/22/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/02/america-is-running-two-presidential-elections-at-once/

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Tucker Carlson, My Tom Hayden Memorial Emissary Award Winner

 

Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda at news conference after their infamous visit to North Vietnam in 1972
Vintage Photographs of Jane Fonda's Trip to North Vietnam in 1972, Which Earned Her the Nickname ...
Jane Fonda in the seat of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, the ones that were killing American pilots.
Tucker Carlson confirms he's interviewing Putin in Moscow
Tucker Carlson recently in Moscow to perform the same service for Putin

Tom Hayden, premiere anti-Vietnam War activist, who declared “We refuse to be anti-Communist”, made multiple trips to North Vietnam from 1965 to 1974, including a 1972 one with his future wife, Jane Fonda, whitewashing the communist Hanoi regime.  Who elected him to conduct our country’s foreign relations?  The nerve of the guy.  The American people already elected other people to do it.  He’s of the Left, and today on the Right we have Tucker Carlson.  In the Hayden tradition of pasting happy face on brutal and totalitarian thuggeries, Carlson goes to Russia and Vladimir Putin to normalize his tyranny, whether intended or not.

Watch below Tucker’s piece about his tour of the Kiyevskaya metro station in Moscow, Russia.  Watch him gush about its orderliness and cleanliness.  In case you may have missed it, spotless public spaces are a common feature of totalitarianism from Der Fuhrer to the communist Kim dynasty of North Korea.  Tucker, it’s hardly a selling point, unless you’re quick to sacrifice liberty for sanitized public spaces.

Throughout his interview with Putin, the despot betrayed his basic Marxist outlook, a product of indoctrination in the USSR from child to career KGB officer.  The Soviet Union hasn’t gone away; it’s only gone through a name change.  And you can see the shadow of the sinister past in the station.

The Kiyevskaya metro station is named after Kiyev, or the anglicized “Kiev”.  Yes, that Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.  As this station went up in the 1930s, Stalin was murdering and starving 10 million people or so, mostly in the Ukraine, in something called the Holodomor.  The murals festooning the station’s wall are propaganda images of happy peasants at work on their government-imposed communes, or collective farms (kolkhozes).  The reality was anything but joyous.

Stalin ordered industrialization, even the industrialization of agriculture, for the country.  Of course, the farmers liked their land, farms, animals, and equipment, and resistance fomented as their property was seized and they were herded onto collective farms or work camps (gulags), losing everything. Even the seed for next year’s crop which, like all the grain, was sold to purchase factory equipment. No more crop next year.  The communes were as great a disaster as the factories.  Famine spread and was exploited by the big man and his politburo to suppress Ukrainian nationalism.  The gulags proliferated and became an archipelago of gulags in Solzhenitsyn’s famous words.  The murals in the metro were designed to hide the horrors.  They were totalitarianism in art.

Spotlessness in public appearances, absolute hygienic orderliness, could be a similar sign of complete tyranny.  To keep the spaces clear of rubbish and ugliness, the Putin claque utilizes an import from the CCP: AI facial recognition tech tied to thousands of cameras.  But that’s not the only purpose of it.  Putin’s henchmen use it to pick up dissenters, dissidents, and political opponents.  Many a free thinker has been spirited away into Putin’s archipelago, many never to be heard from again.

Friday, another one of the greats of Russian free thought, Alexei Navalny, died in custody.  He joins many others in the grave.  Life imitates art, Orwell’s Big Brother.  Yep, Tucker, the last vestiges of freedom are thrown into the trash bin along with the other refuse.  But Russia has clean subways.

And cheaper food prices, cheaper for a fat and sassy westerner like Tucker as he was guided into a Moscow grocery store (see #4 below).  Everything is cheaper in the country, including the labor, which explains the lower prices. Lower incomes depress prices.  In 1930s America, during The Great Depression, the time was a buyer’s paradise . . . if you had a steady job.  The average monthly income in Russia is $787, as opposed to the U.S. monthly median of $4,568 (see #2 and #3 below).  That says volumes.

That’s not all. 60% of Russians spend half their income on just food.  22% of Russian households don’t have indoor plumbing, compared to the American .3% (see #3 below).  With a consumer base like that, Tucker could buy out the store with just pocket change, if he could slip it by customs at JFK airport.

North Korea is similarly spotless.  Over the years, we’ve seen many pictures of the pristine, purified places in Pyongyang, and thin, even emaciated people standing around.  Compare Tucker’s Moscow metro station with this video of Pyongyang street scenes in the next post.  Tucker, could we also learn a few things from the Kim dynasty?

I nominate Tucker Carlson for the 2024 Tom Hayden Memorial Emissary Award for his attempt at dignifying the indecent.

Please watch the Carlson tour below.

RogerG

Sources:
1. The full Tucker Carlson interview with Putin can be viewed at https://youtu.be/hYfByTcY49k?si=kxFsUvWJsbtKDUzl
2. “How Average Salary in Russia Compares to US”, Tom Norton, Newsweek, 2/16/24, at https://www.newsweek.com/how-average-salary-russia-compares-us-1870740#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20figures,was%20about%20%24787%20in%20November.
3. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for his comparison of Russia and the U.S. in “No, America Is Not ‘Ugly and Decayed’”, 2/19/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/no-america-is-not-ugly-and-decayed/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second
4. Tucker’s grocery store tour can be viewed at https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1758158808835125642
5. “We Need to Talk about Tucker”, Jeffrey Blehar, National Review, 2/20/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/we-need-to-talk-about-tucker/
6. “Tucker Carlson Claims Groceries Are Cheaper in Russia Despite a Russian Food Inflation Crisis”, Troy Matthews, MTN, 2/16/24, at https://www.meidastouch.com/news/tucker-carlson-claims-groceries-are-cheaper-in-russia-despite-a-russian-food-inflation-crisis#:~:text=In%20a%20survey%20of%205%2C000,more%20than%2020%25%20on%20food.

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Off Our Rocker

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Are we off our rocker?  Republicans sound like the 60s New Left and Democrats come across as Ronald Reagan (regarding Ukraine).  Both Democrats and Republicans go off the cliff respectively into a crazy neo-Marxism and blind fealty in a cult of personality.  I give you a few examples.

Right off the bat, Sen. J.D. Vance (R, Ohio) is clearly off his rocker.  He took to the conservative American Spectator to burnish proof of his bonkers state of mind (see #1 below).  In his mind, nearly everything goes down a conspiracy rat hole, particularly aid to Ukraine.  The fact that the funding goes into next year is, in the twists and turns of his brain, proof of a Democrat plot to trap Donald Trump in impeachment if he should be elected this year.  Here’s a shocker: it’s normal for funding to go beyond the fiscal year since it takes time to pass through the intestines of the federal Leviathan and make the stuff – in this case, munitions.  It’s true for the aid to Israel in the bill which Vance incongruously, without a hint of embarrassing hypocrisy, supports (as do I).

The alleged trap assumes Trump will be elected and while in office turn the screws on Ukraine and by acts of omission assist Putin’s conquest of Russia’s “near abroad” – which, by the way, is strangely reminiscent of Lebensraum from another quarter of eight decades passed.  Furthermore, it unwittingly presumes that Democrats will control the House and Senate to give us another impeachment parade, which might happen if Republicans continue to serve up candidate looniness and stage ugliness (Trump being Trump).  For a good portion of the American public, who would want to check the Democrats’ neo-Marxism with the bestial and batty?  Vance, without thinking and saying it, assumes that voters will prefer the neo-Marxists and thus they’ll be in position to oust Trump.  Vance’s reasoning inadvertently slaps himself as he attempts to slap Ukraine.

What a strange way to quietly show affection for Putin and isolationism, albeit of the incoherent variety.  What a strange way to make yourself unelectable as a party.

And in the Republican stable, more craziness awaits.  Rep. Matt Rosendale (R, Montana), a stalwart of the House Republican suicide attempt in the toppling of Kevin McCarthy (R, Ca.) from the speakership, that didn’t make a lick of sense, announced that he’d like to bring the same looniness to the Senate chamber (see #3 below).  Brandishing all the Trumpy jargon of the “establishment” drivel, he’s challenging Republican Tim Sheehy, who’s been running since summer last. So, the state Republican Party will be asked to place on the November ballot a man who lost to Montana Democrat Sen. John Tester in 2018 in a state Trump carried by 16 points in 2020.  We’ll see if the state’s Republican voters are hungry to replicate 2022 when getable seats were lost by choosing the bestial and batty to carry the party flag.  A sizeable chunk of Republican voters has proven to be the Democrats’ best allies.

Potentially Illegal Mailer Sent To Montana Voters Causes Upheaval In Senate Election | The Daily ...
Rep. Matt Rosendale (R, Montana)

In the end, ironically, after election 2024 passes from the scene, the Democrats might still be in a position to ruin the country, or make it look like the hellscapes of California and New York.  Businesses and people are fleeing these bastions of insanity.  When will we ever learn that lefty policy is a ticket to societal carnage?  These states are governed by people who hate the Second Amendment and economic activity that isn’t directed by them.  Lawbreaking, adolescent genital mutilation (“gender-affirming care” in the jargon of our time), eco-central planning, our schools as Marxist preparatory academies, the filth and crime, and the secessionist flouting of federal immigration law emanate from these metropolitan and bi-coastal enclaves.  These places are a mess.

Their favorite whipping boys are people who bring us our energy and those who produce the means for us to protect ourselves from the miscreants coddled by them.  Defund the police?  The targets, especially the arms industry, are escaping a bevy of regulations, punishing taxation, and massive state-law sponsored lawsuits.  Smith and Wesson fled Massachusetts for Tennessee.  Now, Remington is abandoning New York for Georgia (see #4 below). Ilion, upstate NY, will shrink further.

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Our newfound passion to make everyone whole (in legal eagle lingo) in the extreme is driving whole industries into bankruptcy, literally.  The fact that a wacko used a Bushmaster to kill 20 kids and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School is the excuse to squeeze $73 million from Remington and, by extension, its employees.  What of the car manufacturer of the vehicle that the killer drove?  What of the gas station that the killer accessed to get him to the school?  What of the fuel manufacturer?  What of the maker of the shoes, clothes, and food that kept him alive and well to perform the heinous deed?  What of all the hammers and steak knives that have been utilized to commit mayhem throughout history?  In states like New York, we have a web of law and a jury pool, indeed a population, curated on hostility to certain industries.  Remington became the target, less so the killer.  Well, they are getting out.  Masochism shouldn’t be expected to be a requirement for economic activity.

From the article:

“My mom worked there [Remington, Ilion].  My dad worked there.  My wife works there with me now.  My daughter works there with me now.  My second daughter works there with me now.  And my son-in-law works there,” said Brown, president of the United Mine Workers of America Local 717.  “So it’s a double-hit for me and my wife: two of us out of a job.”

Do ya think?!

In statements to the press and employees, Remington cited New York’s threatening “legislative environment” and the fact that Georgia “supports and welcomes the firearms industry” (see #4 below).  As a result, the State of New York is giving its residents much more than they ask for.

It’s much more than a shrinking tax base.  It’s a clear field of play for criminals after non-prosecution, hostility to self-protection, and suppressed bail requirements under the puffery of “equity”.  Where’s the “equity”?  Right now, some people have greater rights to steal and destroy your property than you do in desiring to keep it.  If the numbers don’t break down “equitably” by race, then hell is turned loose on the law-abiding, and good number of those are in so-called “protected classes” supposedly in need of “equity”.  It’s laughable, if it wasn’t also so tragic.

There you have it.  Current events are a chronicling of absolute lunacy.  Are we off our rocker?

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “The Republican Plot Against Donald Trump”, Sen. J.D. Vance, The American Spectator, 2/12/24, at https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-congress-is-pursuing-endless-war-in-ukraine-and-trying-to-stop-a-trump-election/
2. Thanks to Noah Rothman for the reportage and commentary on Vance’s claim in “J. D. Vance Thinks You’ll Believe Anything”, 2/12/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/02/j-d-vance-thinks-youll-believe-anything/
3. “Rosendale’s entry into Montana Senate primary sparks GOP furor”, Julia Mueller, The Hill, 2/11/24, at https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4459261-matt-rosendales-montana-senate-primary-donald-trump-tim-sheehy/
4. “Remington leaves the upstate New York village where it made guns for 200 years after a PE takeover and 2 bankruptcies”, Michael Hill and AP, Fortune, 2/11/24, at https://fortune.com/2024/02/11/is-remington-in-business-who-owns-leaving-new-york/