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Progressivism’s Totalitarian Streak Exposed: The Trump Verdict

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Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg (l)

What is totalitarianism?  Some described it this way: authoritarianism wants obedience; totalitarianism wants belief.  An authoritarian controls what you do; a totalitarian controls that and what you think, what’s in your head and heart.  Today’s progressivism is developing before our eyes the authoritarian means to pursue totalitarian ends.  The Trump verdict is the latest piece in this sordid puzzle.

The case is absurd.  The highly debatable misdemeanor bookkeeping violations in New York law were legally dead having gone beyond New York’s statute of limitations.  The “fraud” was Trump doing what Bill Clinton did: allegedly attempting to hide adultery.  The shame of adultery is not a crime.  Perjury is; nondisclosure agreements are not.  According to Andrew C. McCarthy on the principal Bragg allegation of fraud in the bookkeeping to hide a campaign expense, “… [a campaign] expense has to be an obligation that relates directly to the campaign and would not exist absent the campaign” (see #1 below).  This clearly wasn’t, which explains why the feds didn’t pursue it.  The 34 charges were one charge cloned 34 times to embellish this Bragg quackery.  The resuscitation of the defunct minor allegations, and the elevation of the flummery to felonies, was conjured by connecting these to a mysterious fraud in hypothetical and uncharged federal campaign finance violations or some other unknown and unproven derelictions, a clear and unmistakable violation of the Sixth Amendment’s right of a defendant to know the charges, even the hidden one used to leap over the statute of limitations and into a felony.  The judge’s behavior was egregiously partisan.  This trial and verdict have “reversible error” (overturned on appeal) written all over them.

But the dam of restraint on political prosecutions has been breached.  A hideous precedent is set.  Blue-state and blue-precinct soviets are quickly becoming the ruling norm in pockets around the country.  The template to be the target of this Beria brand of persecution (Stalin’s NKVD head: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”) is now established: be conservative, occupy a position of influence, be outspoken, and be a political threat to the reigning soviet, and “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” comes into play.

Lavrenti Beria – Soviet politician - Russian Personalities
Lavrenti Beria (l) and Stalin, 1930s or 40s

Stalin only carried the title of General Secretary of the Communist Party throughout his entire tenure at the head of the country.  So, a powerful party is essential to spearhead the complete revolution in thought and action.  We have one in the Democratic Party as the ideological home for this revolution.  And now they do not shrink from Beria-like actions, rule of law be damned.

The Party is not alone in the endeavor.  Their sympathizers dominate in newsrooms, academia, much of the c-suite, the media, and entertainment, almost complete domination of the cultural commanding heights, to assist the Party in building their new order.  They’re free to sexualize your kids into transgenderism, indoctrinate them in the neo-Marxism of oppressor/oppressed, shoehorn every facet of your existence into their eco-vision, and reserve the power to force not only compliance but also love for their revolution.  And this isn’t totalitarianism in practice?

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China’s CCP only replicates what Bragg achieved before a Manhattan judge and jury in the CCP’s recent arrest and persecution of dissidents in Hong Kong.  It’d be rank hypocrisy for anyone in the donkey party to complain.  The jargon of “hatred” and “incite netizens [sic] to organize or participate in illegal activities” could have easily come out of Bragg’s or Jack Smith’s offices (see #2 below).  Our soviets in New York and Washington, D.C., have no grounds to condemn Red China’s CCP after imitating them in a Manhattan courtroom.  Beijing has “courtrooms” too.

None are safe from the drumbeat.  The conservative, original-intent majority on the Supreme Court is particularly in the Party’s crosshairs.  After decades of dominating the Court, they now want to pillory the new majority that might contest the Constitutional worthiness of the Party’s designs.  From attacks on flags to accusations of “extreme closeness to his wife” (see #3 below), the Party’s minions shower invective to silence opposing voices.  In Congress, they strive to pack the Court with fellow travelers, impeach and recuse dissenters, and extend an unconstitutional executive and legislative branch jurisdiction over the Court, anything to force the Court into conformity, like everyone else.

It’s enough to turn a Trump skeptic into a Trump supporter, if for no other reason than to stop this totalitarian trainwreck.  John Yoo of UC Berkeley’s school of law put it succinctly (see #4 below): “To limit and undo that damage and restore the rule of law, Republicans may have no choice but to respond in kind.”  In order to reestablish deterrence against this kind of behavior, the revolution’s partisans must experience the sting of a political prosecution that they enunciated.  Think of it as engendering a new respect for mutual assured destruction.  Watch out Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, et al, as one red state AG or DA after another hauls you before a local grand jury and into a local criminal court before a local judge.  I can envisage criminal charges stemming from the assassination of an American citizen overseas, criminal misuse of sensitive government communications (emails), influence peddling as Vice President or acting as an unregistered foreign agent, being a middle man funneling bribes to the “big man”, inflicting harm on border communities due to willful dereliction of legally mandated responsibilities, etc.

Additionally, Republican officeholders, don’t step foot into DC, New York City, Chicago, California, any city dominated by a college campus, or any other blue bastion.  Go further.  Move all federal offices outside the reach of the Alvin Braggs and Fani Willises of the world.  If need be, Zoom it.

In the meantime, prepare for a hurricane.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Bragg Falsifies Business-Records Charges against Trump”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 3/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/bragg-falsifies-business-records-charges-against-trump/
2. “Hong Kong police arrest 6 people accused of violating the city’s new national security law”, Kanis Leung, AP, 5/28/2024, at https://www.abc27.com/international/ap-hong-kong-police-arrest-6-people-accused-of-violating-the-citys-new-national-security-law/
3. “New York Times Op-Ed: Does Clarence Thomas Love His Wife Too Much?”, Noah Rothman, National Review, 5/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-york-times-op-ed-does-clarence-thomas-love-his-wife-too-much/
4. “Trump’s Trial Has Already Damaged the Office of the Presidency”, John Yoo, National Review, 5/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/trumps-trial-has-already-damaged-the-office-of-the-presidency/

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Memorial Day, 2024

Below is a rendition of Major Sullivan Ballou’s last letter to his wife before he was killed in the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861.  It captures the loss that we must feel as we visit the graves of the fallen on this Memorial Day.  As we walk among the headstones, we realize that war took another brother, son, father, daughter, but not for nothing.  It’s a sad commentary on humanity that war has been necessary to stop the worst of our fellow man.  Someone must step forward to block them.  These graves are of those who did, at the cost of their future years.

Please remember, please commemorate, and please view Sullivan’s last letter home.

RogerG

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Next Stop for Carnage: UCLA’s Medical School

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The state’s elite medical schools, such as UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, aren’t immune from the broad carnage that has swept K-12 in California.  Let’s start off, though, with the lower grades, then move to the current ravaging of UCLA’s med school.

Overall primary and secondary education in California is miserable.  In no educational measure is the state an exemplar.  From Wallet Hub to the Nation’s Report Card, it’s a trail of tears for the state’s K-12 schools (see #1 below). Quoting one source (see #2 below):

“A new study by Wallet Hub [2015], a financial advice company, puts California schools at the bottom of the pack.  California school systems are the ninth worse in the nation.”

The above report was from 9 years ago, and it hasn’t gotten any better; though, teacher salaries have, with a top-ranked annual average of over $95,000 (see #3 below).  But that is eaten up by the humungous cost of living (see #4 below).  It’s big money when compared to other states, but that number relegates a California teacher in their prime to tenement life in LA or the Bay Area.  Forget about a coastal bungalow.

So, why the stratospheric cost of living?  It’s more than the attraction of the climate driving up demand, if that’s what you’re thinking.  The state is all into central planning, copying Lenin’s economic playbook – the state dominating the “commanding heights” kind of thing.  “Transitioning the economy” is central planning.  DEI is central planning.  Official sanctification and propagation of transgenderism is central planning.  What isn’t central planning on the progressive’s wish list?

And central planning is expensive, always has been, in more ways than one.  It’s expensive because it’ll come out of your hide in more than prices, like shortages, blackouts, and declining opportunities.  It’s a replay of the Soviet Union.

California is centrally planned into a housing crisis.  Look at your centrally planned utility bills. The high cost of fuel extends beyond the pump and into sticker prices on everything on store shelves.  The centrally planned jump in the state’s minimum wage is driving up fast food prices and driving out jobs.  Wait for the centrally planned EV mandates to slap you in the face.  Try to build anything in the state as you face the daunting gauntlet of layers of litigation and fees and approvals and disapprovals, and the state’s burgeoning activist groups.  They’ve even managed to centrally plan homelessness into a catastrophe.  The crime problem is centrally planned with “restorative justice” and “equity”.  Filth and crime join unaffordability in the state’s reputation.  For a teacher, $95,000 is as meaningful as 95,000 Weimar Reichsmarks in 1922 (50,000 marks for a pound of potatoes).

Now, what the state’s central planners have done to the cost of living and K-12, they’re excited to bring to the med schools.  UCLA is the epicenter of more than antisemitic encampments and mobs.  The med school’s newly minted admissions approach magically turned the unqualified into qualified by reliance on melanin count, genitalia, home language, and other such markers of medical excellence, sarcastically speaking (see #5 below).  No GPA in the hard sciences or MCAT for these DEI grand viziers.  But it’s one thing to have the unqualified in sociology, quite another to have one in the operating room.  Do you think I’m kidding?

Some federal judges are refusing to offer clerkships to Ivy League law students, the law being replaced by revolutionary doctrines in these law schools.  The same reaction might soon be true of hospitals and patients for graduates of the UCLA Medical School.  A big framed UCLA diploma on the wall behind the newly licensed doctor might be your cue to bolt for the door. The alarm is sounding.  The Washington Free Beacon is working the story, as are many other outlets (see #5 and #6 below).

They are finding sources in the med school willing to speak up.  The Free Beacon writes,

“In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.”

At the tip of the spear in debasing medical education at UCLA is Jennifer Lucero, Associate Dean for Admissions at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM), and the Vice Chair for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) for the Department of Anesthesiology.

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She has openly berated med school admissions committee members for raising questions about the poor qualifications of some matriculants if they happen to fall into one of her “protected” identities, this after she has stacked the committee with fellow believers.  From The Free Beacon: “Speaking on the condition of anonymity, six people who’ve worked with her described a pattern of racially charged incidents that has dispirited officials and pushed some of them to resign from the committee.”

She’s a mess creating a mess.  Staff and faculty complaints about her have been lodged with the school’s Discrimination Prevention Office.  They have much to complain about, and it goes beyond personal treatment.  Each year since her elevation to power, the danger increases that the unqualified and unmerited will slip through the school and into medical practice to the detriment of patients and the school’s reputation.  One admissions committee member recounted,

“I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything.  People get in and they struggle.”

One student assisting in an operation couldn’t identify the major artery when asked.  She then verbally attacked her professor for putting her on the spot.  One professor confessed, “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”

Anecdotes abound.  And it shows in shelf tests, the examinations administered at the end of each clinical rotation.  The failure rate increased ten-fold under her stewardship.  Almost a quarter of the school’s students in the class of 2025 have failed 3 or 4 such tests.  Another professor admitted, “… a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.”  If one of these practitioners should be supervising your medical treatment after a car accident, when you come to, demand to see their resume’ and look for an escape.

Major airlines promise to adopt the same approach for pilots.  I may not fly again.  Merit has a place, and it really has a place for 150 passengers at 30,000 feet.

The problems with California run deeper than its so-called ruling elites.  It’s more than governors, legislators, mayors, or even college deans.  All of them, directly or indirectly, owe their positions to popular choices in elections.   People vote for this stuff by electing the people who bring this stuff.  A dean of admissions couldn’t declare war on merit if she wasn’t protected by the nest of an agreed-upon agenda that can be traced back to the elected.  The war on merit is a popular choice, whether understood by the electorate or not.

I refer to H.L. Mencken once again,

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.  No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

Yes, the great masses of the plain people of California.

It’s the difference between government and regime.  Think of “government” as the outward signs of rule: offices, constitutions, its structure and institutions. In contrast, “regime” runs much deeper.  Often used to identify authoritarian systems, it nonetheless has application to democracies.  A particular approach to governance becomes a pattern – red and blue states for instance – due to pervasive and endemic cultural and social norms.  Elections occur within this social matrix, and the “regime” rears its head.

You can’t have an official nod to teenage genital mutilation without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the ideology of transgenderism.  You can’t have a broad war on merit without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the assault.  What else accounts for the ritual pattern of choosing people who bring these policies?  California’s regime, which originates with the state’s people and their tendencies, is responsible.  If anyone is to blame, blame the people of the state.

Those people are a huge part of a socio-political eco-system favoring the advancement of the unqualified.  But who has the time and resources to investigate their doctor to uncover whether they emanated out of this cauldron?  California schools are proving that they don’t come with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.  We are left with a rule of thumb.  If your doctor came out of California, and especially its med schools, play it safe by shopping around. You’ve got at least 30 or more states to choose from.  A state’s reputation now matters, and matters a lot.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. The Nation’s Report Card at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=&st=MN&year=2022R3
2. “How Do California Schools Rank Compare to the Rest of the Nation?”, Patch, 8/1/2015, ahttps://patch.com/california/santamonica/how-do-california-schools-rank-compare-rest-nationt
3. “California teachers struggle despite having the highest salaries in the nation”, Malekka Seshardi, EdSource, 5/13/2024, at https://edsource.org/updates/california-teachers-struggle-despite-having-the-highest-salaries-in-the-nation
4. “California ranks last in opportunity due to cost living: U.S. News”, Kenneth Schrupp, The Central Square: California, 5/16/2024, at https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_f06f4eec-13c9-11ef-a68c-6f1b9d775308.html
5. “’ A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA”, Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon, 5/23/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-failed-medical-school-how-racial-preferences-supposedly-outlawed-in-california-have-persisted-at-ucla/
6. “‘Shocking decline’: UCLA med school prioritized racial diversity, leading to decline, report says”, The College Fix, staff, 5/23/2024, at https://www.thecollegefix.com/shocking-decline-ucla-med-school-prioritized-racial-diversity-leading-to-decline-report-says/
7. Special thanks to Jeffrey Blehar in “DEI Will Destroy Our Trust in Doctors”, National Review, 5/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dei-will-destroy-our-trust-in-doctors/

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This Is What College Kids in America Support

3 minutes of horror – Chilling footage from kidnapping of IDF female troops aired
Screenshot of female IDF soldiers taken captive by Hamas on 10/7

Below is raw Hamas footage of the taking of female IDF soldiers at a base near the Gaza/Israel border on 10/7.  How many of them were raped?  How many of them will survive?  It’s hard to say.

But we don’t need to see American politicians and a bunch of college kids preaching to us about “genocide” and a “ceasefire”.  The only genocide occurred on 10/7 and a ceasefire is a Hamas rescue mission.

Let’s not forget that these savages took them back into Gaza for more torture amid the cheers of Gazan spectators along the way.  The savages then hunkered down among the mostly cheerleading civilians, using the population of Gaza as one big human shield, waiting for our decrepit youth and politicians to come to the rescue.

Many of our college kids are proving themselves to be underserving of the largesse showered upon them.  They are proving that much of college is toxic.

Please watch the video.  Double click or got to youtu.be/PZRlrWHHRoU?si=bsJDjkcgHOumb3mw to see the video.

RogerG

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Nutters on the Right

The Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene Traveling Freak Show is the Future of the GOP
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Ga.)
JD Vance Screens for Wokeness Among State Department Nominees: Report
Sen. J.D. Vance (R, Ohio)

I’m beginning to wonder if Reagan was right … in reverse.  In 1962, he said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.”  Well, is the Republican Party leaving me?

No, I have no intention at this juncture of jettisoning the GOP.  The other options are too horrible to contemplate.  Me, a Democrat, the party of eco-madness and neo-Marxism?  A Libertarian, or freedom gone amok?  Green? You’ve got to be kidding.  Independent?  Kinda, but there still remains many sane voices in the GOP to reject abandoning ship.

One of those voices in the wilderness is Mitch McConnell.  But sadly, he’s retiring.  Yes, that Mitch McConnell, the one with the guts to tell the neo-isolationist and protectionist right to stuff it.  The Majorie Taylor Greene/Matt Gaetz/J.D. Vance clown caucus in the party does not represent those who fondly remember Reagan and his legacy, as does Mitch McConnell.  Strangely, the circus part of the party has come full circle in support of a thuggish enemy – Putin – and those who treat NATO like it is a mirage – Viktor Orban of Hungary.  While history rhymes, it’s more than rhyming here.  It’s a replay of 1930s Europe, complete with a revival of America First.  McConnell knows it, and spoke up in the well of the Senate last Thursday (5/16) against some of the lunacy (see #1 below).

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Sen. Mitch McConnell (l) and Viktor Orban

And I quote from McConnell as he strips away the illusions about Putin as anything other than an architect of a new Axis:

“This week, Putin is in Beijing, tending to what Russia and China have called a ‘friendship without limits.’  But last week, it was President Xi who took to the road. And notably, his warmest welcome was in Budapest, Hungary.”

Yes, he brought up Hungary.  It seems to be a habit with Hungary to cozy up to thugs.  The country allied with Germany in WWII.  Orban is true to form.  Quoting McConnell:

“Viktor Orbán’s government has cultivated the PRC as its top trading partner outside the EU.  It has given Beijing sweeping law-enforcement authority to hunt dissidents on Hungarian soil.  It was the first European country to join Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, which other European governments — like Prime Minister Meloni’s in Italy — have wisely decided to leave.”

From blocking the entry of Finland and Sweden in NATO and allowing the CCP to nestle its tentacles in his country to the detriment of others (the CCP’s 5G Huawei, etc.), Orban is bent on rhyming with the 1930s.  Cavorting with clearly hostile hegemons is not what friends do, and aren’t deserving of angelic portrayals by patsies in American media and the simple-minded in office.

Why this sudden and mysterious affection for goons (Putin) and the disruptors (Orban) of a NATO alliance that has successfully shielded us from World War III in Europe?  As for Hungary, frankly, most Americans couldn’t find the country on a map, or identify Orban, or care.  Yet, lately, there has emerged a political/media industrial complex in the party built upon “no more foreign wars” and tariffs.  You can bet that where this clown car’s radar-love is directed, the complex’s Tucker Carlson will show up to sing their hosannas.  Oh, he already has, in Moscow and Budapest.

Tucker Carlson interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin
Carlson interviewed Putin, Feb. 2024

American fatigue from the Wars on Terror is understandable, but this astounding abandonment of international and moral responsibilities under the banner of the GOP?  Now, that’s an amazing turn.

You can see the rigmarole starting when Trump came down the escalator in 2015.  Trump, looking for political leverage against Jeb Bush in the party primary, bashed not only Jeb, but his brother, George.  The “forever wars” chant entered the party bloodstream to be picked up by kooks.  His breathtaking win in 2016 sent shockwaves and a green light to the easily deranged.  It was more than policies.  It was an implicit sanction for brusque presentation, personality, and policies.  Aping Trump is now a fad.  Watch Kerry Lake, Arizona GOP Senate candidate.

Making the NATO countries “pay their fair share” didn’t stop there for the batty.  For many of them, NATO made Putin an enemy.  Sound familiar?  Not too long ago, we were accused of making Ho Chi Minh an enemy.  America First of 1940 said the same thing of Hitler.  Remember?  Expansion of NATO to cover countries in the maw of a Putin anxious to reconstitute “Russia’s near abroad” (Echoes of lebensraum?) is blamed for his tanks crossing borders and seeking solace in the arms of the grotesquely ambitious like Xi and the mullahs of Iran.  And the Anglo-French alliance of the 1930s unleashed the Wehrmacht.  Right?  Sounds like pretzel logic.  Sounds like appeasement, the 1938 Munich Agreement (look it up).

Add in the Russia hoax of 2016-17 and the Democrats’ Trump impeachment soap operas, which incorporated Ukraine into the sordid tale, and we have the preternaturally disposed thug-lovers in the party leaping into Putin’s arms and assisting his conquest of Ukraine through abandonment and betrayal.  On the heels of Biden’s bugout from Afghanistan, who would want to be dependent on us?  Israel, are you listening?

The inauspicious nexus of war fatigue and Trump couldn’t come at a worse time.  Are Americans really prepared for the blowback?  Right now, the well-balanced in the party are rudderless.  Too many in the party are enchanted by almost anything that oozes out of Trump’s mouth.

One thing that dribbled out is his promise to end the Ukraine War in 24 hours (see #3 below).  How?  A Ukraine surrender. Think this thing through.  The showman of the “art of the deal” would threaten both Zelensky and Putin, as if there’s a moral equivalence.  To threaten Zelensky, he must be willing to cut off aid.  For the Kremlin thug, he promises to arm Ukraine to the teeth, something that we should be doing anyway.  He can’t do both at the same time.

The first is realistic since many in the Trump wing of the party are already chomping at the bit to have a Russian expeditionary force in Kyiv.  As for the second, aid to Ukraine up to now hasn’t caused Putin to flinch one iota, especially if “boots on the ground” is off the table.  He’s developed new alliances and markets for his fossil fuels.  He’s resorted to human wave assaults, marking as conscripts nearly anyone on two legs, including the imprisoned, not shirking from blitz tactics targeting huge civilian targets.  Cracks appear in NATO (Orban’s Hungary) and in America.  He’s got every reason to stick it out.  After all, Trump’s rise on the political scene – “no more forever wars” – and Biden’s bugout philosophy are testament to America’s longevity and dependability.  In the end, “24 hours” is a Ukraine surrender.

This is what today’s America delivers: a nutty right enthralled by gorillas and, of course, a left in ecstasy of kumbaya.  It’s the goofy right that bothers me the most.  I expect it of the left. Reagan conservatism was the counterbalance of sanity.  With the Reagan wing waxing, the right can no longer be trusted to keep the world from teetering into the arms of this new Axis.  In fact, the batty on the right thinks that we can live without the world. Remember America First?

The nutter right can’t grasp the fact that for America to be first, allies must be a close second – allies both commercially and strategically.  Allies reduce the burden on America’s sons and daughters.  It’s a simple equation.

Republicans need to park the clown car.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. You can read Mitch McConnell’s whole speech at “McConnell Remarks On Resisting Chinese Influence in NATO”, 5/16/2024, at https://www.republicanleader.senate.gov/newsroom/remarks/mcconnell-remarks-on-resisting-chinese-influence-in-nato
2. Thanks to Jay Nordlinger for bringing to my attention McConnell’s speech at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mcconnell-vs-orban/
3. “Trump describes how he could solve Russia-Ukraine conflict in 24 hours”, Anders Hagstrom, Fox News, 7/16/2023, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-describes-how-he-could-solve-russia-ukraine-conflict-24-hours

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California’s Threat to Nevada and the Constitution’s Commerce Clause

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Gov. Joe Lombardo, Nevada

The federal government is supreme in regulating interstate commerce (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3).  Fact, end of story!

But California is a law unto itself, free to screw up states that have the unhappy circumstance of sharing a border with it.  In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday 5/14, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo stated the obvious: California policies are jacking up fuel prices for Nevadans as well as Californios (see #1 below).  You see, much of Nevada’s western fuel market is fed by refineries and pipelines from California, businesses under the thumb of that state’s multifarious politburos.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom, Ca., responds to letter from Gov. Lombardo

Newsom responded to Lombardo in the lingua franca of today’s hard-left Democratic Party by saying that Lombardo is a lackey of “Big Oil”.  As if parroting the editor of the Daily Worker (1924-1941, official newspaper of the Communist Party USA), Newsom said, “. . . [Lombardo] knows full well that oil refiners are driving up gas prices and making massive profits . . ..”  There’s not much room for the CPUSA in our national political corral since that space is increasingly monopolized by the DNC, especially their California affiliate.

Apparently, according to Newsom, refiners are only greedy bloodsuckers in California, and in a few other states acting as cheap knockoffs of the not-so-golden state.  The highest retail gas prices by state are all Democrat fiefdoms.  The prices (as of 5/16/2024) range from California’s average of $5.24/gal. to Mississippi’s $3.06.  No red state rises above Idaho’s $3.83 (see #2 below).  My Montana comes in at $3.48.

May be an image of text that says 'Snack Shop Regular Plus V-Power 54 569 Gasoline SanVicente'
Gas prices at Fairfax Ave. and Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, 5/17/2024

Following the Marxist template, as usual, is the Democrat supermajority in the state legislature as exemplified in the Newsom-signed state Senate Bill X1-2.  The decree would establish a new commissariat to oversee these latest “malefactors of wealth” with power to investigate and recommend penalties to the state’s uber-commissariat, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

That’ll do the trick.  Just persecute by prosecution the people with whom you rely for your fuel.  This won’t work, unless you believe in the efficacy and efficiency of a slave economy.  Whips and chains and overseers aren’t the best way to get the most out of people.  Unlike the mid-19th century’s era of chattel slavery in the old South, no Fugitive Salve Act exists to compel a people’s acceptance of involuntary servitude to Newsom and company.  Flight is always an option, as it has been for the past few decades for the state’s middle class, families, and many businesses.  What a time to be in the moving business, one of the few growth industries left in the state.

Never do these people look in the mirror.  The state gets sanction from the federal government to exceed the Clean Air Act.  More federalism?  Not! California gets to throw around its market weight in the form of mammoth regulations, mandates, and taxes on refiners that clearly disrupts the interstate commerce in fuel.  Just think, its EV mandate alone by 2035 will force the shipment of fuel onto electric big rigs – or electric trains that don’t exist – further ballooning costs and worsening efficiencies in an already California-tortured industry.

The fuel that flows down its pipelines doesn’t fare any better.  It does so under the lash of the state’s immense panoply of eco-commissariats.  For Nevadans, what comes out the other end is bloated in cost.  Just drive on Interstate 15 up and away from California and you’ll see prices drop the more California recedes in the rear-view mirror.  Test it out for yourself.

It would be a dereliction of duty on the part of Nevada’s governor to not look out for the interests of his state.  Nevada, like all states, has a keen interest in reviving Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, and end the unwitting delegation of that power to fanatics in Sacramento, if for no other reason than the need to avoid the collateral damage from California’s suicide attempt.

Go get ‘em Gov. Lombardo.  And Congress, dump California’s exemption.  If necessary, federal marshals should seize control of all the state’s ports and repeal the state’s interference in interstate commerce by truck, railroad, plane, ship, and pipeline.  Keep California’s malign effects limited as much as possible to its residents, who regularly vote for the mess.  No state should be forced to live under the political toxicity of another.

Remember, the U.S. Constitution guarantees to each state a republican form of government, not a California government – Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.

May be pop art of the Oval Office and text

RogerG

Sources:
1. “Lombardo to Newsom: Act now before gas prices get even higher”, KTNV staff (Las Vegas, Nv.), 5/14/2024, at https://www.ktnv.com/news/lombardo-to-newsom-act-now-before-gas-prices-get-even-higher
2. “Today’s Gas Prices By State”, Kelly Anne Smith and Korrena Bailie, Forbes, 5/16/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/gas-prices-by-state/#:~:text=California%20has%20the%20highest%20price%20of%20gas%2C%20with,average%20of%20%243.09%20per%20gallon%20of%20regular%20gas.

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From Eco-Consciousness to Eco-Totalitarianism

Family Farms Continue to Power U.S. Agriculture | USDA
Georgia small farm

Please watch the 20-minute video of the current predicament of small agricultural producers in Oregon.  You’ll see how green ideology leads to totalitarianism, or complete micromanagement of a people.  It’s a lesson in how the tapestry of individual liberty is crushed under mass controls.  It’s happening across the country.  And you wonder why Trump remains popular in many quarters.

Trump is the middle finger to this ideologically driven straitjacket.  Trumpism, loosely referred to as “populism”, isn’t a refined set of beliefs so much as it is a temperament, an attitude, a posture toward the smothering of personal, mundane choices.

It’s a consequence of the ruling eco-left’s attempt to herd people into an officially preferred lifestyle, one that is easily concentrated and thus managed in urban locations.  The war on the internal combustion engine, and on fossil fuels, is one means to that end. It’s a war on personal mobility.  If you can’t make the EV work for you or your family, or afford it, lying below the surface, unstated, remains their ultimate selection for you: unaccommodating, grimy, and unsafe government mass transit.

The 19th-century Bronx

The impracticality of electric vehicles – their only choice left for you – will force you back into the equivalent of tenements anyway, exactly where the charging infrastructure is most efficiently provided.  The concomitant range anxiety will do much to keep you condensed into apartment life for the rest of your family’s existence.  No swing set or doll house for your daughter, the government’s park in all its seedy glory being the only remaining option for her.  That, or the streets.

Tenement Housing: 10+ Photos Show the Tragic Lives of New York City’s Immigrants in the 1800s ...
Tenement, New York City, undated

The desire for control doesn’t stop there.  The increasing grip on urban folk is extended to those who are scattered in places where the grip of the central planners is more tenuous, in the outback.  Small agriculture is targeted like the individual family in their individual car in their individual bungalow.  Climate-change hysteria is the ramrod for empowering the state.  Other hypothetical eco-disasters – groundwater use and pollution for instance – are similarly used to police the guy or gal with a few sheep, horses, cattle, chickens, or surplus vegetables.  The way is left open for greater concentration for the already highly concentrated operators, those big enough to stand toe-to-toe with big government.

USA_AG_BEEF_15_xs.jpg | Peter Menzel
Harris Ranch, Ca., feedlot for 100,000 head of cattle

Anyway, it’s an easy sell to ideologically domesticated urbanites once they accept the premise that cattle flatulence is a mortal threat to Gaia, or the choices of those rural “deplorables” must be made to fit the mold of their urban cousins.  Urbanites outvote the “deplorables”, so it is a popularly elected totalitarianism.  Somehow, the chant of “save our democracy” rings rather hollow.

Again, please watch the video of eco-consciousness turning into eco-totalitarianism.

RogerG

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Antisemitism Is in the Money

Soros ATM

The song – “We’re in the Money” – immediately came to mind after learning of the money trail for the misnamed Jewish Voices for Peace.  They’ve been active with anti-Israel malcontents since the October 7 massacre.  Radicalism on the Left is an ecumenical ideology not restricted to the fashionable identities.  Your physical characteristics, background, and choice of bed partner says little about what is rolling around in your head.  There are Jews who are all into self-negation as there are in any group in or out of the “protected classes”.  And a Daddy War Bucks can always be found to fund your efforts at self-negation.

Take the aforementioned Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP).  Here’s a list of the fat cats who dug deep to bankroll the extremist group (and the fellow-travelling IfNotNow) from 2019 to 2021 (see Sources below).  The Daddies War Bucks include the $650,000 from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Kaphan Foundation’s $441,510, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s $340,000, the Schwab Charitable Fund’s $654,233, the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund’s $260,705, $175,600 from Morgan Stanley Global Impact, the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program’s $98,650, and the Tides Foundation’s $75,000.  No mere chump change, lefty revolution is expensive.

No wonder the encampments seemed so well provisioned and coached.  It’s because they could sing along, “We’re in the money, we’re in the money . . . “.  Enjoy the rendition in the clip below as you view the campus chaos.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “George Soros Funds Groups Behind DNC Riot Where Protesters Assaulted Cops”, Chuck Ross, The Washington Free Beacon, 11/16/23, at https://freebeacon.com/democrats/george-soros-funds-groups-behind-dnc-riot-where-protesters-assaulted-cops/
2. “Jewish Voice for Peace’s Funding Network”, NGO Monitor, 11/13/23, at https://www.ngo-monitor.org/reports/jewish-voice-for-peaces-funding-network/
3. A special thanks to Brittany Bernstein in “Activist Groups behind Violent DNC Protest Have Long History of Defending Terrorism, Receive Funding from Major Corporations”, National Review, 11/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/activist-groups-behind-violent-dnc-protest-have-long-history-of-defending-terrorism-receive-funding-from-major-corporations/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in-tag&utm_term=second

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Those Living in an Urban Disneyland, Part II

Science is Red in Tooth and Claw: Biologists vs Physicists vs Biologists | by Paul Austin Murphy ...

Previously, I painted a picture of the mindset that gave us our urban hellscapes.  Referring to this social element as the “REI crowd”, they live in an artificial world that breeds an outlook favorable for the creation of dystopia.  Below is a touch of reality for those whose view of nature is a park.  They’d never bring a gun on the hike, and REI won’t sell you one.

This guy got off easy. Others didn’t.  Those that survived don’t look the same.

Come on, let’s get real.  Guns are handy things to have in a nature that is truly like nature.  And now, additionally, they’re really handy in those urban enclaves under threat of a new kind of apex predator, the kind nurtured under the banner of “social justice”.

Please watch the video.

RogerG

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Those Living in an Urban Disneyland, Part I

Black Lives Matter - BLM Yard Sign | Passion Works Studio

I’ve noticed it during my college years and into my 30-year stint in teaching.  Noticed what?  It is the values and outlook of people divorced from many of the very real cruelties of life.  These people live in an insulated social womb, free to think of the wilderness, for instance, as a park.  Quiet, leafy suburbs and districts of swank penthouses, and jetting from suburban high school or elite prep school to higher ed to white-collar status, allows flights of fancy and grand ideas similarly divorced from the real world.  The pampered lifestyle breeds pampered politics and pampered voting patterns.

It reminds me of my last visit to Disneyland in Anaheim, Ca., and the view of the park from the fifth floor of the park’s hotel.  Anaheim by the first decade of the 21st century had become a grimy and seedy place.  Inside the park’s fences, it was an oasis surrounded by an increasingly man-made dystopia.

Sadly, the cosseted life produces the stilted politics that abets the breakdown of civil order and broad prosperity.  The love affair with “sustainability” and “equity”, for example, is an attack on upward mobility for anyone but themselves.  It’s how just yesterday’s savagery becomes today’s victims in the minds of many on our college campuses.  It’s how the gradual warming of the climate after the Little Ice Age can be turned into a full-frontal assault on your car and home appliances, and the pursuit of single-family residential for me, but not for thee.  It’s how workers, shoppers, residents, and businesses must flee the gauntlet of the drug-addled, mentally troubled, and troops of barbarous urban youth that are allowed to congregate under the banner of “compassion” and “tolerance” and “social justice”.  It’s how the call of “rights” now includes teenage genital mutilation.  It’s come full circle: the eradication of the dangers of the real world incubated new dangers of the real world.

I’ve referred to this naïve and blinkered social set as the “REI crowd”. Recreational Equipment, Inc., (REI) epitomizes a business model for these babes in the woods.  They don’t sell guns.  They sell the great brands that keep you comfy as you walk through and sleep in nature, not a thing that’ll stop an apex predator that resides in that nature.  Forget about bear spray.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it . . . .  Well, let’s just say that at that moment nothing really matters, except a helicopter ride to a trauma center if you’re lucky.

E.g., REI recently tried to equate nature-love with “gender equity”, a trendy cause for those who devote much of their disposable income on trendy hiking paraphernalia.  Watch it below.  Then, on the accompanying post, look at nature’s reality.  The experience must be similar to the hellscape that they’ve created for themselves inside their bubble.

RogerG