Month: September 2024

Get ready. Buckle up.  The dysfunction of California is about to become the dysfunction of the United States.  Take a look at a red/blue county or precinct election map of California and you will see what lies in store for our country (see maps below).  East of California’s Coast Range, and beyond the coastal plain from San Diego to the Bay Area, extends a vast Republican hinterland that is essentially inconsequential to the governance of the state.  The same thing awaits the huge stretch of the country between the two coasts and outside the deep blue urban bubbles that dot the landscape like islands in a vast red ocean (see maps below).  Furthermore, as urbanization proceeds apace even in solidly red states, they too will increasingly resemble the quality of governance in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and California.  Today, urbanization is poison to good governance.

Who’s responsible for this sorry state of affairs?  First, the people, whether in town or country.  They vote for “wrong track”.  Many believe in the impossible, such as bountiful entitlements (unreformed Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid), papering over in trillion-dollar spending bills every grand greenie scheme, a strong national defense . . . and, amazingly, low taxes and fiscal sanity.  The tooth fairy anyone?

Second, the Democrats’ base.  They are the boosters of America’s institutional socialist party, the equivalent of Europe’s Social Democrats.  Well, let’s just call them the Social Democrats.  And third, the Republicans’ base.  They are in the grip of a psychotic personality disorder, one that emotes in bouts of vengeance, and will blindly follow the person who best captures their sense of resentment and defiance.  The result is a competitive socialism and a broad and chronic sense of post-election disappointment.

The “people”, both in their party’s primaries and in the general electorate, choose failure.  Let’s not be puerile in blaming somebody else: “elites”, “establishment”, academia, the media, or some other nebulous cabal of the beautiful and hyper-wealthy-and-powerful.  We did it; we chose it; we continue to choose it.  Period.

In more sensible times, the Democrats’ socialism should write them off as an electoral joke.  Instead, they’re competitive.  It’s much more than the wind in their sails from their much larger stable of lefty zillionaire donors and left-wing academic/media commissars who occupy the commanding heights of the culture.  Sometimes, your greatest strength arises from your opponent’s weakness.  And lately, to the great joy of the donkey party, the GOP base has decided to go bonkers.

The evidence of the Republican voters’ mental incapacity lies in a Democrat Senate (51-49) and their poor showing in the last four national elections in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022. 2016 was a squeaker (No, DJT, you didn’t win by a “lot”.) with a Republican Senate narrowed to a two-seat majority.  The 2018 midterms saw our Social Democrats capture the House.  2020 was a Trump loss and a Social Democrat Senate.  Then, we had the 2022 midterms.  Inflation gripped the country; the national debt exploded; many of our urban spaces are violent open sewers; a totalitarian COVID shutdown destroyed our economy and public schools; our educational system is a mess; housing and energy are out of reach; appeasement foreign policy has made a comeback; the Kabul humiliation; boys are taking over girls’ sports; and a new Axis is turning the international scene into something that resembles our urban spaces.  2022 was supposed to be a red wave but became a desultory mist with a paper-thin Republican House majority that is both ungovernable and too busy neutering itself.

It’s a personality type that seems to attract Republican voters today like moths to a light; that and the endorsement of their new avatar, Donald Trump.  The precursor to MAGA was the Tea Party bursting on the scene in 2009.  Within Republican ranks, a feistiness was brewing which gave us 2010 Senate candidacies of, for example, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware (the so-called “witch”) who went down in flames.  Republican voters had more electable choices at the time – including a former Delaware governor – but favored the fiery type so long as they showed sufficient belligerence.  The general election results of that year and following, however, were dismal.

Nonetheless, a truculent streak survived to remain a big part of the GOP base’s psychological profile.  It’s attractive to them but not much to anyone else.  But 2016 seemed to confirm their “wisdom” in the surprising Trump victory.  They probably thought that the rest of the country was now onboard with their war against “the establishment”.  And then along came 2018, 2020, and 2022, and repeated letdowns for the party. 2024 may yet prove to be a replay of 2022, or worse, and proof of the old definition of insanity falsely attributed to Einstein: “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting ….”

In 2022, we saw Trump endorsements in key competitive races go down in flames: Kari Lake (Az.), Herschel Walker (Ga.), Dr. Oz (Pa.), to name a few.  Trump’s pugilistic refusal to accept defeat in 2020 paved the way for Georgia to be represented by two socialists in the Senate.  Think of that: Republican governor Brian Kemp – the one who wouldn’t kowtow to Trump’s 2020 election rantings – sailed easily to victory as Walker succumbed to the Social Democrat Raphael Warnock.  Even in Georgia, cantankerousness and an “outsider” status aren’t appealing attributes once we leave the tight confines of a party primary.  It’s a lesson that today’s GOP base stubbornly refuses to learn.

The GOP base enthusiastically walks into the Social Democrats’ field of fire as the socialists throw money behind the most MAGA-like candidate in the Republican primary.  The Social Democrats know something that Republican voters willfully ignore: pugilism in a candidate may whip up primary voters but is an advantage for the opposition in the general election.  Funny thing, the Republican base wants Trumpiness and the Social Democrats are happy to accommodate them.

It is for this reason that socialism is competitive.  Social Democrats get away with hiding their neo-Marxist roots – don’t expect their ideological soul mates who dominate our media to spill the beans – while Republicans continue to ignore reality.  The Social Democrats know how to muzzle their cranks in election season.  The GOP gives theirs a bullhorn.

So, expect more boosterism for a culture of death (abortion unrestrained, euthanasia), drug legalization, fiscal stupidity, increasing dependency on public assistance, a dilapidation of national defense, the weight of the Leviathan behind teenage genital mutilation and XY “girls” in women’s spaces, a furtherance of the official pogrom against white males, and the world around you turning to crap.  Much of it can be laid at the feet of Republican primary voters for refusing to present viable alternatives.

When candidates like a stroke victim (John Fetterman) and a mentally addled senior citizen (Joe Biden) consistently best MAGA darlings (Dr. Oz, Trump, Lake, etc.), it’s proof that something has gone awry, not with the “system” or the “establishment”, but with the base.  In other words, Republican voters are making it easy for the USA to become USC – no, not that USC, the United States of California.  California is the template for the entire country, with its dysfunction, greenie totalitarian utopianism, fiscal insanity, flood of refugees fleeing the dysfunction, its feudal society of a shrinking middle class and burgeoning poor amidst the super-rich behind their manor walls.

And watch after this election for the “wrong track” number to hit the stratosphere.  The Social Democrats’ base is brainless for its belief in the impossible, such as a prosperous socialism.  The Social Democrats in their base are firmly committed to oxymorons.  For their part, the Republicans are impervious to simple campaign arithmetic.

Welcome to the United States of California.  Yuck!

RogerG

Preface:

I wrote most of the following before the release of Matt Walsh’s film “Am I Racist?”.  He stole my thunder.

After viewing the film, there are two takeaways.  First, jargon-laced pseudo-scholarship predominates in many academic fields, especially in education and the other “soft sciences”.  They are laced with the 21st-century’s equivalent of phrenology or astrology.  Much that is produced is riddled with the silliness of circular reasoning.  How so?  They use what they’ve never proven to justify major actions to defeat what they’ve never proven.  It’s absolutely embarrassing to watch the drivel take hold.

The peddlers are chasing ghosts of their own fevered imaginations.  The absurdities look compelling to the unwary as the proponents beam so confidently and arrogantly in their nincompoopery and glibness.

And this leads to the second observation: it sells to a more than insignificant chunk of the population.  Random people sign petitions to rename the George Washington Memorial after Geoge Floyd.  They are easily goaded into saying “f*#& you” to a semi-sentient allegedly racist old white man in a wheelchair.  Some people, maybe many, are easily shamed into believing the unbelievable, and paying hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars to debase themselves in what can only be described as Maoist shaming sessions.  At least Mao’s Red Guards seized, beat, and tortured their victims into the humiliation.  They had to be brutalized into demeaning themselves.  Not so with these deep-pocketed sheep.  Is this what late-stage civilizational decay looks like?

So much for the “wisdom” of the American people.  It’s enough to cause the sane to seek refuge in a hermitage.

********************

Well, here it comes.  I’m a “racist” to today’s activist-entrepreneurs who’ve turned racial oppression into a lucrative career.  If I am, so is Booker T. Washington when he wrote in 1911,

“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.  Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays.  Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

And to think that he wrote it in 1911.  He was way ahead of his time.  He was branded an “accommodationist” for lacking sufficient militance in that era.  Derisive labels are commonplace for this crowd of the race obsessed.  That way, these race hustlers don’t have to explain themselves or their political jihads, just spew epithets and force skeptics to cower.

And the hustle certainly pays well.  The hustle popularly known as Black Lives Matter (BLM) hit the mother lode on the back of the killing of George Floyd, raking in $90 million in 2020. BLM people, who before were just getting by, became celebrities with real estate portfolios, six-figure consultancies, and five-figure speaking gigs.  Self-described Marxist and co-founder Patrisse Cullors fell into the lap of luxury in the purchase of a $1.4 million, 2,370 sq/ft Malibu area home.  No more Banquet frozen dinners for this aspiring member of the Fortune 500.

No one really knows what happened to about half of that $90 million windfall from 2020.  What we do know is that friends and associates in this hustling conglomerate – now called the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation – are watching as their fortunes blossom.  Oppression pays, and not necessarily for the oppressor, but especially for the self-anointed spokespeople of the oppressed.  It once again proves that mammalian waste attracts flies.

These champions of the oppressed need to keep the pot boiling.  They covet oppression, real or imagined, like John D. Rockefeller coveted crude oil.  Into this swamp of race-covetousness dives Hasim Coates.  Who’s he?  Coates carved a Denver satrap out of this vast oppression-mongering empire.  A small fish in an ever-expanding pond, Coates joins Ibram X. Kendi, Kimberle Crenshaw, Robin D’Angelo, et al, in the CRT brigades as they swim about for fun and profit.  He’s a fixture on the Denver political scene pushing causes and fellow-travelling candidates, and himself, into the control of Denver schools and wherever he can sell the gambit.

Sometimes, people who’ve made a career in noisy hyperventilation necessitate the regular use of epithets, slanders, and smears, but inflate the balloon too much and it pops in their face.  Coates’s ears must be ringing after one Denver school principal and mom stuck a pin into his hustle.  Coates is a fan of redistributionist justice at the school level (and male prostitutes as it turns out) which translates into the same approach as the “reimagining law enforcement” of wannabe future president and Democratic standard bearer, Kamala Harris.  “Reimagining” is making a shambles of the schools like it did our streets.

Coates, a common fixture at Denver Schools’ board meetings, claimed a white woman, parent Kristen Fry, grabbed him and used a racial slur to threaten him.  He filed charges with the Denver PD; police criminally cited Fry; Coates won a restraining order against her; and the local DA accommodated by filing charges against Fry.  The problem is that there is no evidence of anyone using the “n” word or touching Coates.  Surveillance tape shows no touching and witnesses close to the encounter vouch to no use of the slur.

Coates is no stranger to the race hustle in Denver.  Now, Fry is suing Coates, one of his associates, and four members of the Denver Public Schools Board for defamation, reminding all of us that the race hustle is still a hustle and therefore open to legal action by its victims.  Not surprisingly, many hustlers end up penniless or behind bars.  Right now, though, there’s still quite a bit of money left in the game to attract half-witted academics and scammers with the right melanin count, choice of bed partners, genitalia, and pronoun diversity.

Epilogue: Please go see “Am I Racist?”.  Matt Walsh does a great job in exposing the baloney.

P.S.: Facebook wouldn’t initially approve this post because it “goes against our Community Standards”.  What exactly does?  A New York Post article on Patrisse Cullors’s real estate buying binge as one of my sources, that’s what.  I removed the source but you can access the piece by searching “Patrisse Cullors real estate buying binge”.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “After Raising $90 Million in 2020, Black Lives Matter Has $42 Million in Assets”, Nicholas Kulish, New York Times, 5/17/2022, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/business/blm-black-lives-matter-finances.html
2. “Who’s In Charge of Black Lives Matter’s Millions of Dollars?”, Robby Soave, Reason, 2/1/2022, at https://reason.com/2022/02/01/black-lives-matter-funding-millions-patrisse-cullors/
3. New York Post article on Patrisse Cullors’s real estate buying binge censored by Facebook.
4. “Radical Activists Nearly Ruined a Denver Mom with Racism Charge. Then the Evidence Came Out”; Ryan Mills, National Review Online, 9/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/radical-activists-nearly-ruined-a-denver-mom-with-racism-charge-then-the-evidence-came-out/

While listening to a recent episode of the “Victor Davis Hanson Show” podcast, I heard Hanson make reference to the Republican Party becoming a “conservative working man’s party” under Trump.  Memories came to mind of Karl Marx’s International Working Men’s Association (see #1 below).  Hanson, a renowned conservative, was adopting the jargon of the historical international Left, the same kind of rigid and simplistic homogenous-class thinking that is the hallmark of Marxian socialism – indeed, all of modern socialism and its more recent iteration as neo-Marxism.

He isn’t the only one.  Some prominent MAGA-adjacent Republicans are sounding like Eugene Debs, the last Socialist Party candidate for president to garner 6% of the popular vote (in 1912).  An enthusiasm for class warfare is one of the key pillars of so-called National Conservatism since the rise of Donald Trump.  And the dictum of class warfare brings in tow a cry for big government.  How else to prosecute the class war except with the long and powerful arm of the state?  People like Sen. Josh Hawley (R, Missouri), like a shark on alert for the blood of votes in his home state, and reneging on his pledge to support right-to-work laws, announced his opposition to the laws that would actually free the worker from compulsory union membership and payment of dues (see #2 and #3 below).  That’s what is meant by right-to-work, and now Hawley opposes it.

Somehow, Hawley’s mental gymnastics has turned the freedom of a worker to choose whether to join a union or not into an unjust imposition.  Missouri legislative Democrats, with the support of a small group of Republicans, placed a measure on the Missouri ballot which passed in 2018 to repeal the state’s right-to-work law.  As usual, a good portion of union dues were showered on political advocacy to kill the legislation, and as usual the union cash to the tune of $600,000 was lavished on a political consultancy to run the campaign, which doesn’t include all the soft contributions that unions are famous.  After which, we have Hawley joining the picket lines at a recent UAW strike against American automakers and announcing, “… I certainly wouldn’t support any federal legislation to impose right to work on anybody.”

Impose? Again, right-to-work is the exact opposite of “impose”.  Hawley’s stand against right-to-work is empowering unions to impose themselves on reluctant workers.  The rhetoric and Josh Hawley’s brain are incoherent.

Hawley isn’t the only big government firebrand in the GOP tent.  Hawley joins Donald Trump’s VP pick, J.D. Vance, in rooting around in the same mental garbage bin conjuring ways to jack up wages through government intervention.  Hawley has concocted a “blue collar bonus” to reward, and only reward this class-based constituency using the tax credit gambit to hike minimum wages to $16.50 (see #5 below).  Vance to his credit, and true to his Ohio State and Yale academic pedigree, has declared a broader, more philosophical war on “doctrinaire free market economics” to accomplish the same ends.  The guy wants to use the power of the state to imitate the Soviet Gosplan, the state economic planning agency.  How?  Throw up tariffs walls to shield American firms from competition: “You’re going to see a much more aggressive approach to protecting domestic manufacturers ….” (see #7 below).  The Soviets did the same thing.  He can’t mean all American manufacturing – it’s too big.  He’s got in mind those of his region; think Michigan to Ohio.

Vance isn’t done with state interventionism to advantage one group of workers and their select industries.  He doesn’t care a lick for the young.  Social Security is a trainwreck; it was designed that way from the get-go.  The scheme has young workers supporting the elderly.  No, in speaking truth to my elderly peers, you aren’t getting your contributions back in your benefit check.  A good portion of it comes out of the paychecks of overstretched young workers and their families who can barely afford the mortgage.  The ploy was great when 160 workers supported one retiree (1940).  It’s not so great when the ratio has been whittled down to under 3 to 1 due to a birth dearth and advances in health care stretching more people into their sunset years (see #8 below).  Vance apparently wasn’t a math whiz at OSU and Yale.

Here he is at his most calloused:

“One way of understanding the Social Security problem is, old people can’t work, young people can, babies can’t.  So people at a certain age support the babies and the old people.” (see #7 below)

If he isn’t busy working to abandon Ukraine to Putin, he’s dead set on throwing struggling young families into the maw of the AARP.

Hanson, Hawley, and Vance are all bollixed up in their heads.  They blame nebulous foreigners, billionaire left-wing techies, Wall Street, and the mysterious force of globalization.  It’s the same message peddled by Lenin and his Bolsheviks in the heady days of 1917 in Petrograd.  These befuddled firebrands of so-called national conservatism target “elites” as the Bolsheviks did the “bourgeoisie”.

19th century Marxists coined the word “capitalism” to give focus to their rantings and produce a perpetual hate figure: the “capitalist”.  Today’s national conservates proffer “neoliberalism” and the “neoliberal”.  This neoliberalism is actually the beginning of economics as a field of study.  It didn’t originate in J.P. Morgan’s den or the faculty lounge of the University of Chicago.  It came into being during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment when people applied reason, empiricism, and science to an understanding of how people organize themselves in making a living.  Best and worse practices came to light and economic liberalism was born.  Out of it came thinkers such as Jean Baptiste Say and Adam Smith. The “neo” part came about when others (Milton Freidman, F.A. Hayek, Arthur Laffer, George Stigler, et al) resuscitated these earlier insights during a dark period of government interventionism and inflation, insipid economic growth, high unemployment, and the overall social breakdown of the 1970s (see #9 below).

You’d never know that history in the way Vance, Trump and company depict the plight of American manufacturing and blue collars.  They’re victims of “doctrinaire free market capitalism” and its cousin “globalization”.  And, in their pronouncements, a cabal of bi-coastal financiers and techie zillionaires are hoarding the rewards.  Everybody else is reduced to peonage in their mind.  Anyway, that’s the story per Vance, Hawley, Trump, and company.

What they get wrong is that American manufacturing was plagued by . . . us!  Yes, we did it to ourselves.  We distorted our economy by punishing with imperial unionization, regulation, and taxation the kinds of industries that are likely to more conspicuously impact the land, water, air, flora, and fauna.  They happen to be the primary industries (ag, lumber, mining), the skilled trades, the muscular occupations, manufacturing, nearly anything that demands brick-and-mortar construction and the need for permits, approvals, reports, consultancies, and a team of lawyers on retainer.  It’s a gauntlet that other industries are less likely to face to the same degree.

Versus

We developed a love affair with “clean” industries.  In the 1980s, communities more receptive to growth would preface their support with the call for “clean” businesses.  Of course, they have a “clean” environment in mind, social and natural.  By the 1980s, a cumbersome Leviathan was erected by the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), Clean Water Act and its amendments, Clean Air Acts, Endangered Species Acts and the breeding of state-level knockoffs like the California’s Environmental Quality Act, activist court decisions to broaden the reach of regulatory agencies, etc.  Add to the anti-manufacturing legions the empowerment of local gangs of activists exploiting this flood of regulation.  It’s a wonder that we have any manufacturing left.

That’s how you clean the air in the LA basin: you regulate manufacturing out of existence.  Permissionless industries began to fill the economic space left empty by the war against “dirty” manufacturing.  Coding can take place by a teenager with a laptop and the pc was developed by a couple of twenty-somethings in a garage, all accomplished without interference from the local building inspector, state fish and game overseers, air quality district commissars, enforcers from the Army Corps of Engineers, demands for environmental impact reports, etc., etc.  What began without permission of a government employee soon occupied pride of place – tech, communications, financial industries – in our economy.  We did this, voted for it, and some of us turn around and complain about the results (see #10 below).

What’s the answer among national conservatives (natcons) to the distorted nature of our economy?  They lead assaults on the rich and free markets.  The reality on the ground, however, is that “neoliberalism” hasn’t been ascendant since, let’s say, the 1920s, maybe before.  It’s been talked about, papers filed in scholarly journals, but our government hasn’t been enslaved by it since, maybe, dinosaurs weren’t oil, certainly since the New Deal.  Have you taken a look at the Federal Registry of regulations?  Here’s a clue: it hasn’t gotten smaller.  Natcons have fits over “globalization”, as if we don’t have tariffs. Here’s another suggestion: examine the 4,392 pages of U.S. tariffs in our Harmonized Tariff Schedule.  Natcons are feverishly breeding straw men, not unlike their left-wing cousins.

Fact: free markets aren’t free in America.  Talk to anybody trying to build a housing project, frack, irrigate, open a new steel plant in a blue state, manage an auto plant with the UAW breathing down your neck.  Manufacturing didn’t disappear; they were just discouraged, and the survivors fled the worst blue-state snake pits for those right-to-work states that Hawley now castigates.  Listening to the mouthing of natcons sounds like the prescription of low-dose poison to kill intestinal parasites only in overdose amounts.

They are under the delusion that they can calibrate free markets without killing markets.  If prior government interventions are any indication, they are fools.  It’s regulation that must be carefully calibrated, not markets, much like Bill Clinton on abortion: safe, legal, and RARE.

If natcons occupy key positions in a new Trump administration, watch as they burden our economy with rising costs for consumers and producers which will translate, as it always does, in less opportunity, especially for those striving for upward mobility.  We’ll get the tariffs, but not any appreciable reduction in regulation or its multifarious mandates.  The Trump economy of his first term was a Larry Kudlow economy, one of cheap energy, tax cuts, and Congressional Review Act rescissions of some Obama regulations.  A new Trump economy promises to be a Vance/Hawley one.  Two very different beasts.

It’s sad to see Marxism take hold in both parties.  Some Republicans are attempting the trick of freeing “Republican Marxism” from the oxymoron category (a contradiction in terms).  Their Marxism won’t succeed any better than the Maduro Marxists running Venezuela.

RogerG

Sources:

1. Most mass encyclopedias such as Wikipedia or Britannica have an article on “Karl Marx: Role in the First International of Karl Marx” and “Second International” to describe the history of international socialism.
2. More on Sen. Josh Hawley and his newfound faith in unionization can be found at “Republicans For Coerced Unionization Likely To Remain A Small Caucus”, Patrick Gleason, Forbes, 12/23/2023, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2023/12/13/republicans-for-coerced-unionization-likely-to-remain-a-small-caucus/
3. An additional source of this new “conservatism” can be found at “Josh Hawley’s Pro-Union Folly”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 10/11/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/josh-hawleys-pro-union-folly/
4. Sen. Josh Hawley’s advocacy of raising the “blue collar” minimum wage can be found at “Josh Hawley Proposes Tax Credit to Raise Minimum Wage, Says Large Businesses Could Support Hike”, Newsweek, 2/25/2021, at https://www.newsweek.com/josh-hawley-proposes-tax-credit-raise-minimum-wage-also-signals-support-democrats-15-bill-1571660
5. Sen. Josh Hawley’s endorsement of raising the minimum wage can be found at “’The world has changed’: The scrambled new politics of the minimum wage”, Alex Seitz-Wald, NBC News, 3/8/2021, at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/world-has-changed-scrambled-new-politics-minimum-wage-n1259647
6. More on Sen. J.D. Vance’s embrace of big government can be found in “GOP VP Nominee J.D. Vance Is an Enemy of Free Markets”, Ilya Somin, Reason, 7/15/2024, at https://reason.com/volokh/2024/07/15/gop-vp-nominee-j-d-vance-is-an-enemy-of-free-markets/
7. “The Trump-Vance Ticket is a Repudiation of Free-Market Conservatism”, Victoria Guida, Politico, 7/16/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/16/the-trump-vance-ticket-is-a-repudiation-of-free-market-conservatism-00168578
8. “Social Security History: Ratio of Covered Workers to Beneficiaries” at https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html
9. An excellent synopsis of neoliberalism in “Conjuring Up the Neoliberal Bogeyman”, Samuel Gregg, National Review, 3/13/2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/conjuring-up-the-neoliberal-bogeyman/
10. “The Future of Innovation in the United States: Permissionless or Regulated?”, Mohamed Moutii, Econlib, at https://www.econlib.org/the-future-of-innovation-in-the-united-states-permissionless-or-regulated/
11. An excellent summary of the national conservative and neoliberal divide can be found in “Too Much Deregulation? We Wish.”, Dominic Pino, The Washington Free Beacon, 9/15/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/culture/too-much-deregulation-we-wish/.

What we saw last night (9/10) in the so-called “debate” between Trump and Harris was a fashion show.  Like in a fashion show, various designers show off their wares to please one or another niche among their clientele.  From the left, we have Kamala trying hard not to scare off the muddled middle of the electorate by hiding her neo-Marxist “values”.  From the right – well, not exactly from the right – we have Trump flailing about in incoherence.  It provides great atmospherics but, in the end, one thing is for sure, after the election, we’ll soon see another lopsided plurality in the “wrong track” column in public sentiment.  We vote for “wrong track” when we fill out the ballot.

The conclusion is inescapable.  It’s clear that Trump doesn’t prepare for debates, or maybe he does but can’t resist his impulses.  He’s an impulsive guy which his rabid fans mistake for “speaking truth to power”.  It endears him to his fans, and only them.

He does it in all of his debates.  He did it in the June Biden-Trump dustup.  Trump didn’t win, Biden lost.  Trump doesn’t win debates because he can’t or won’t do anything to appeal beyond his fan base.  He actually thinks that this stuff sells because he won a squeaker in 2016, and ever since he’s the basketball big man who made a three-pointer at the start of the game and now won’t leave the distant arc for the rest of the game.  And the Republican Party won’t yank him.  They keep choosing him in the hopes that he’ll shoot the lights out from long distance like he mistakenly seemed to do in 2016.  The party base can’t come to grips with the fact he’s a terrible shooter, and unlovable to boot.

He let Harris get away with not having to explain herself or defend the shambolic policies that are destroying the country.  He’s not geared for the general election where we find a vast reservoir of the weakly informed voter of casual interest.  They vote more on appearances and emotional appeal. There’s too little time for them to be brought up to speed, even if they would sit still long enough to be informed, which they won’t by definition.

Sure, Big Media is in the tank for the Democrats, and it showed.  No GOP candidate should ever again be drawn into any forum moderated by lefty Big Media.  But Trump could have made the best of it by forcing Harris to explain herself.  And when left-wing moderators get out of line, make them a target of the debate.  Newt Gingrich skillfully did so in the 2012 primaries and was electorally rewarded.  If you want to see how it is done, watch the video clip below (click on the link below the picture).

https://youtu.be/ygtFc3eR6So?si=ChSQRbqRqB-gAj–

Trump is incapable of doing it.  He’s too self-absorbed to do anything other than recite brusque one-liners and exhibit bouts of self-pity.  Thus, Trump’s poor performance has made it easier for the country to continue to wallow in tidal waves of illegal immigrants, crime waves, energy shortages, inflation, greenie totalitarianism, XY “girls” in your daughter’s bathroom and locker room, racialism everywhere in public policy, legislative attempts to cripple the Supreme Court, the federal judiciary flooded with neo-Marxist jurists, abortion-gone-mad, and the American dream pummeled to nothingness for your kids and grandchildren.  The Democrats are the immediate cause (sins of commission) but the Republicans made it easier for them to wreck your child’s future by nominating the weakest and most detestable candidate possible (the sin of omission).

Brace yourself for more terrors to come.

RogerG