Part of the House Republican clown caucus (l-r): Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Majorie Taylor Greene
As a public-school teacher for 30 years, I know the critical rule of classroom management. If one kid’s bad behavior is left unattended, it won’t take long for the classroom to become a zoo. A parallel is Trump’s entry into the Republican presidential sweepstakes in 2015. More than Trump entered the race, also came his personality. It has left an impression on certain adolescent-minded clusters of grownups in the Republican Party – both registered voters and some in elected office. Think of the clown caucus who engineered the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker.
“Trumpian” boils down to braggadocio, bombast, simplistic and blunt issues in a blunt style with a lot of bullying of friends and foes alike. It’s the over-the-top behavior of a person who craves the tabloid limelight. The Obama birth certificate dustup is a classic example of a simplistic and blunt issue to be exploited for personal gain, which would be Trump’s signature approach to modern politics. The only thing is, the bombast that drew so much attention ended in Trump scaping egg off his face when Obama produced the document.
Few, however, would predict that a windbag’s curtly rudeness would have an appeal among the rank and file. And the whole style seemed to be electorally validated when Trump won in a 2016 black swan event. Success can bring out the worst in people, and “Trumpian” came to be as fashionable as the John Wayne swagger in the 1950s.
While the personality type is appealing to certain party voters, it’s a big turnoff to getable swaths of the general electorate. After 2016, Trump’s appeal down ballot was a disaster. Let’s not forget 2022, at a time when the Democrats have made a shambles of the country, the Republicans could only squeak out a bare majority in the House leaving the clown caucus in a position to put their Trumpian hijinks on public display. The Republicans are proving that neo-Marxism is survivable if Trump, his political personality, and the clown caucus are the face of party.
In Orwell’s “1984”, Big Brother had a face. In today’s rendition of the Republican Party, its face is that of Donald Trump with the likes of Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Majorie Taylor Greene, Matt Rosendale, and Nancy Mace in a chorus line behind. Big Brother wouldn’t be laughed at; the picture of Trump and the Trumpkins elicits guffaws at first, followed by beads of sweat from the realization that they have actual power. To be sure, these are not the kind of people that I would trust with my kids.
Big brother from 1984
The despicability of the Democratic Party and a sizeable faction in the Republican Party is registered in polls, something that you’ll recognize if you rely on more than Laura Ingraham for your news. She doesn’t hesitate to bellow a poll with Trump ahead of Biden. Yet, the reality in the most recent Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll presents a more complicated picture (see below). Yes, among Republican primary voters, Trump is far and away the favorite with 58%. Metrics of enthusiasm for Trump are high among these voters. But – here’s the key number – among the general electorate, Biden squeaks out a tiny lead, essentially a tie.
Trump is favored on a host of issues – the border, economy, foreign affairs – but when offered a choice between Biden and Trump, it’s essentially a dead heat. What’s holding Trump and the Republicans back from a sweeping lead? Look at Trump’s negatives. He’s even more reviled than Biden in a recent NBC News poll (see below). Biden’s negative rating stands at 49%; Trump registers a 54% downside. Megaphones like Laura Ingraham of Fox News would mention a Trump lead in a poll’s head-to-head matchup, but nary a word about Trump’s unlikability. Does “putting lipstick on a pig” remind you of anything?
The Trump personality is only appealing to a sizeable portion of the Republican Party base. It’s reviled nearly everywhere else. Trumpian bluster might carry a candidate through the primary, but in places other than a crimson district, it’s the kiss of death. If you want to stop the Democrats’ neo-Marxism, first win elections. What’s a turn-on for primary voters can be poison in the general election.
Democrats know this. That’s why they’re interfering in Republican primaries to elect Trumpians. In my home state of Montana, mysterious ads are appearing that throw mud on Tim Sheehy, who’s challenged in the primary by the Trumpian Matt Rosendale. Not a word in these hit pieces about Rosendale.
The group – Last Best Place PAC – is an undercover Democrat operation (see below) to help get Rosendale the nomination and, thus, an easier challenger for incumbent Democrat John Tester. It’s the same Democrat tried-and-true tactic from 2022. It’s not out of distaste for Sheehy that drives Schumer and company to stick it to Sheehy. He knows, like everyone else who are not fans of the Trump schtick, that a Trumpian is a weaker candidate. What worked in Arizona, Pennsylvania, et al, in 2022 has a good chance of succeeding in 2024. Watch Republicans rush headlong into the trap.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Further, watch an example of a boisterous Trumpian on full display, Lauren Boebert from September of this year. After this, is she like Trump – “I could stand in the middle of 5th Ave. and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters” – and therefore immune from the voters’ wrath? Are some Republican voters that morally stunted? Is the Trumpian personality that hypnotizing?
The Trumpian personality came through the door in 2016 and has entrenched itself. At this point, the party will have to face a disaster before the malignancy can be removed. Like a classroom under the control of hellions, we have a party that has allowed this element to run roughshod. And we will pay the piper.
RogerG
Read more here:
* For deep dive into the Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll, see the full text of the poll at https://www.suffolk.edu/-/media/suffolk/documents/academics/research-at-suffolk/suprc/polls/national/2023/10_24_2023_marginals_embargoed_2.pdf?la=en&hash=ABF93DCEAAFCA91DBE9BD17A2A10E4E4A2C6189E
* The NBC News poll can be read at https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/first-read/poll-overwhelming-majorities-express-concerns-biden-trump-ahead-2024-r-rcna111347
* “Nine months before the Montana GOP primary, a mysterious super PAC is on the airwaves attacking Tim Sheehy”, Ally Mutnick, Politico, September 12, 2023, at https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2023/09/12/congress/montana-senate-sheehy-pac-ads-00115276
* More on the Democrat-affiliated PAC: “Dems Look To Meddle in Montana’s GOP Senate Primary”, Meghan Blonder, The Washington Free Beacon, September 13, 2023, at https://freebeacon.com/elections/dems-look-to-meddle-in-montanas-gop-senate-primary/
Gov. Newsom of California makes claim that Texans pay more in taxes in recent news conference.
Mehmet Murat ildan, Turkish writer and economist, once quipped for good reason, “One of the greatest responsibilities for the people of our time is to accept everything that he hears in the pro-government media as a lie and to investigate the truth from independent sources personally!” Good advice in this age of serial falsehoods from our self-anointed “betters”.
Mehmet’s point is to keep one’s wits about them. For instance, ask a few questions. Like, what is “government” in “pro-government media”? Former representative and Democratic Party poohbah Barney Frank tried to put an anodyne spin on the term: “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”
Is it really? Mehmet might beg to differ. Today, our western media, the other part of the Mehmet’s phrase, are more than organs of communication. They are part of an incestuous nexus of the college faculty lounge, corporate boardroom, legacy media, Hollywood, government down into its bowels, and a smattering of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) – a class of people peering from the top of the social pyramid and overwhelmingly leaning left. Indeed, be leery enough to personally “investigate the truth from independent sources”.
In today’s news roundup are two items that touches upon our “betters” malign influence: Gavin Newsom on taxes and the chicanery of Hamilton 68. Both stories are indicative of our modern culture of lying.
In the first one, the serial prevaricator Gov. Gavin Newsom of California mangles the truth about Texas taxes. He has to do it because he’s the used car salesman trying to unload a clunker on a weary costumer, the jalopy being the state of California. Thus, he blurted out this whopper: “95% of Texans pay higher taxes than Californians.” What? Texas has no state income tax and California has the highest one in the nation and taxes everything under the sun (and within Hubbel’s expanding universe, Hubble’s Law: v = H*r). The poor folks of California are pummeled with them.
It bodes well for DeMeco Ryans, 49er defensive coordinator, who looks like he’ll take the head coaching gig with the Houston Texans. He’ll get a leap in his salary and be allowed to keep more of it by simply making the move.
What is the basis for Newsom’s attempt at making the implausible plausible? Surely, there must be some grounding for the shocking claim. Well, the guy’s staff rooted through the publications of the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in the not-so-illustrious state. They cited a 2018 study from the group that doesn’t support the bombast. Even more embarrassing, a spokesperson for the group refuted Newsom by saying, “We do not compute a specific percentage of Californians who pay less/more tax than Texans.” Instead, the focus of the Institute’s study was to illustrate California’s “fairer” tax system, not that it was cheaper. Newsom: liar, liar, pants on fire!
To clear the air, the more reasonable Tax Foundation went through the numbers comparing Texas and California, just looking at income, property, and sales taxes, and avoiding California’s morass of regulatory and business taxes. Here’s the results using a $100,000 income in both states: the person in Texas pays $6,335 and the poor Californio’s burden almost doubled to $11,946. The biggest reason for the gap is that Texans pay $0 in state income taxes because Texas doesn’t have one. Add a lighter tax burden to the cheaper cost of living and a sensible person can understand the attraction of Texas to a California middle-class family of four or Elon Musk.
Plus, one doesn’t have to put up with the eco-nuttery, crazed and infanticidal abortion, being locked into abysmal public schools, the widespread urban decay, and their daughters having to share with boys the girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and running and swimming lanes. There’s a lot to be said for loading up a U-Haul.
Newsom has to gaslight us to cover up his mounting mess. Hamilton 68 lies to maintain its death grip on power. What is it? It’s another one of those transnational groupies of the well-heeled and people accustomed to power and influence. It’s a Who’s Who of powerful insiders. It was birthed by an entity called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) which in turn was created by the German Marshall Fund, which is bankrolled by European and the US governments. Got that? It sounds like an old fashioned, meandering money laundering scheme, like much of today’s politics when the powerful want to hide their machinations.
Former FBI counterintelligence agent and “disinformation” expert Clint Watts, the spokesman for Hamilton
Their key obsession is “misinformation”. So, they fight so-called “misinformation” with “disinformation”. It was all uncovered by Elon Musk’s clean-up crew at Twitter. Hamilton 68 was part of the cabal to tar the 2016 election as a product of a Russian skullduggery. They stuck around to be the source for the wild claims of Russia collusion for MSNBC, legacy media, and the disreputable fact-checking operations of Snopes and Politifact.
Hamilton purported to find hundreds (644) of Russian bots actively at work since 2015-16. In reality, according to Twitter execs at the time in their Musk-released emails, the Hamilton’s hundreds shrunk to the reality of 34, most of them related to RT (Russia Times). Swept up in the tarring were conservatives such as Michael Horowitz, and others with much fewer Twitter followers, for merely expressing a point of view contrary to the center-left’s transnational zeitgeist.
Apparently, they’ve been snooping Twitter accounts, not unusual since they are joined at the hip with the “intel community” and Silicon Valley muckety-mucks. Many of Hamilton’s members are well-connected to the amorphous glob. And just think, US taxpayers are forced to bankroll an operation (the German Marshall Fund) targeting themselves. Hamilton 68 is a huge con job that besmirched the 2016 election with lies and was bent on libeling anyone aligned with the result. It’s outrageous.
With Hamilton 68 and Newsom’s falsehoods, one has to wonder about the legitimacy of those preening and peering from the top of the social pyramid. Their culture of lies is smothering us.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Mehmet Murat ildan’s quote from Goodreads, “Lies Politics Quotes” at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/lies-politics , and more on Mehmet at https://mehmetmuratildanresmiwebsitesi.wordpress.com/
* Barney Frank quote from “The Intolerant State”, Matt Welch, Reason Magazine, Dec. 2013, at https://reason.com/2013/11/11/the-intolerant-state/#:~:text=%22Government%20is%20simply%20the%20name%20we%20give%20to,to%20opposite%20sides%20of%20America%27s%20bitter%20ideological%20divide.
* “Newsom says 95% of Texans pay more than Californians in taxes. But is he correct?”, David Lightman, The Sacramento Bee, 1/18/23, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article271288017.html#storylink=cpy
* “Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud”, Matt Taibbi, Racket, 1/27/23, at https://www.racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton
* More on Hamilton 68 at “The Right Underreacts”, Michael Brandon Dougherty, National Review Online, 1/31/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-right-underreacts/
* Also on my website at libertatevirtute.com
* Also in my Substack feed, The Golden Mean, at https://rogerlgraf.substack.com/
Prelude: The 19th century Progressives bequeathed to us a many tentacled Leviathan. The monster grew out of the progressives’ fundamental premise that life is too complicated to be left to individuals. We need, they asserted, “experts” to guide and assist us in achieving our highest potential. They did not see the monster developing a mind of its own with distinct interests from those it was intended to serve. You might say, a culture evolved from its peculiar ecosystem. Out of this unique culture arose a predilection for certain views, born of its circumstances and concomitant norms and expectations. The 2016 election threw back the rug and exposed the thing for what it really is. It is a living and breathing thing no longer moored to its original raison d’être. Its purpose for existence is itself, not the country and the country’s citizens.
*******
At times Tucker Carlson drives me nuts. One of his favorite bogeymen is “neocons”, which occasionally crowds out his infatuation with UFO’s. To him, free markets are “just a tool”. He completely misses the point that they are what happens when the state leaves people alone. Free markets blossom when a state is created to protect our natural rights, not the creator of them. But I have to admit that he is onto something in most things Trump. The latest Trump furor erupted over a whistleblower complaint about his phone call (later referred to simply as “the Call”) to Ukrainian President Zelensky. A CIA veteran appeared on his show to present his view of the whistleblower’s complaint. His observations should raise at least a few eye brows. Watch.
The complaint (read here) according to former CIA officer John Kiriakou reads too polished and legally suave to be a product of a single person. In his view, the complaint by the time it got to Congress had passed through multiple hands. Maybe this is normal, but today’s political environment isn’t normal. Multiple hands might mean a coordinated effort. There are concerns that the administrative state is a hyper-partisan outfit, particularly in its DC stomping grounds. Is it possible that our bureaucracies in DC are a well-oiled special interest group with a clear ideological cast? Is the “whistleblower” a pseudonym for a cabal of apparatchiks intent on removing Trump?
Details about the complaint and the complainant are only now beginning to emerge. The existence of an accusation was known to Adam Schiff (D, Ca.), chairman of the House Intel Committee, as it was gestating in the intel bureaucracy (read about it here). According to the latest information, the accuser interacted with a Schiff aide and was referred to a lawyer. Who’s the lawyer? It’s none other than one of the many revolving-door Democrat apparatchiks who populate the environs of the DC Mall, Andrew Bakaj with Mark Zaid as co-counsel.
Andrew Bakaj of Comparr Rose Legal Group, PLLC
Previously, Bakaj has been at the center of insider politics to frustrate Trump appointees. In 2018, he went after Christopher Sharpley, Trump’s nominee for CIA Inspector General, ironically a holdover from Obama’s tenure where he served as deputy IG of the CIA, and functioned as acting IG under Trump. Out of the woodwork arose a cadre of former apparatchiks to blast Sharpley for allegedly punishing “whistleblowers”. At the tip of the spear was Bakaj. They successfully torpedoed Sharpley’s nomination when he withdrew his name rather than face the Dem gauntlet. And who was retained as Bakaj’s legal counsel in this earlier jig? It was Zaid. You can read about the episode here.
It’s time to clear up this business about “whistleblowers” before we go any further. “Whistleblowing” can be more than just a sincere exposure of those of public trust who cook the books. It also lends itself to partisan political crusades. Whistleblowing at this level looks a lot like leaking. Whistleblowing has the potential to be legal cover for leaking.
The motivations of the complaining actor (or actress) can be of a partisan nature. Speaking of partisan, look at Bakaj’s political background. The guy is fully marinated in Democratic Party politics. He interned for Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton in the Spring and Fall of 2001 according to his Linkedin page. He was employed at the CIA’s IG office during the Obama years. That’s where he ran afoul of Sharpley, the CIA’s Deputy IG, at a time when Obama was petrified over leaks. Even Democrats at that time were aware of the blurred line between “whistleblowing” and “leaking”.
Bakaj is now part of the web of professional handlers who are on speed dial with Democrat officeholders with a political ax to grind. So the Call’s digestive tract might look like this: leaker > Schiff aide > Schiff? > Bakaj > Zaid. As more information comes to light, we may have to add more entrails to the guts of the beast.
The Call’s coming to light is starting to eerily resemble the sliming of Kavanaugh. At the root of that campaign was Debra Katz, the DC lawyer who represented Christine Blasey-Ford and her completely unsubstantiated allegations. Is her’s (Katz) a fully objective legal mind? Are you kidding? She once crowed not long after Trump’s inauguration, “This administration’s explicit agenda is to wage an assault on our most basic rights — from reproductive rights to our rights to fair pay . . . We are determined to resist — fiercely and strategically.” She’s a charter member of the Resistance.
Debra Katz at The Wall Street Journal CFO Network on June 12, 2018. (Photo: Paul Morse for the WSJ)
Into this boiling stew is thrown the Call. Cutting through the bombast, we find the complaint adds nothing, other than what appears to be Democrat boilerplate. Trump trumped them by releasing the transcript of the Call. The very thing that was to be the accelerant for a full blown uproar was now equally in the possession of any congregation of people at a barber shop or supermarket. The mom with a basket full of groceries knows just as much as the “whistleblower”. With the transcript, we get to compare the whistleblower’s account of what was said with … what was actually said.
The New York Times’s report on the complaint refers to it as following the released transcript of the Call. Of course it does. Dah! But there’s much more to the complaint that sounds more like a legal brief than a singe person’s recollection. In-between references to the Call are interpretations and embellishments. These could have just as easily come out of the Resistance hothouse or Adam Schiff and the worst of the Democratic caucus. Examples are in order.
Example #1: Right at the start, in the introduction, the complaint rattles off a partisan indictment: “… the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”
This is not in the transcript. It’s in the mind of the complainant, and whoever else helped him (or her) write it. As we know, Trump requested assistance from the Ukraine in our investigation of possible governmental misbehavior surrounding the 2016 election. We have treaties for this purpose, one with the Ukraine. Any reference to the Bidens is brief and offhanded, and fleetingly mentioned to make the point of possible corruption and other wrongdoing of recent vintage. As for a “quid pro quo”, to be blunt, there ain’t one. This is clear if you listen to a dramatic reading of the Call in natural conversational tones and rhythms (One was performed on the Hugh Hewitt Show, Hour 2, 10/2/2019).
Example #2: Here’s chilling reminder of the cabal within the unleashed Leviathan: “Over the past four months, more than half a dozen U.S. officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort.” Further, “It is routine for U.S. officials … to share such information with one another ….” Additonally and astoundingly, we have this admission: “I was not a direct witness to most of the events described. However, I found my colleagues’ accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another.”
“Fact patterns”? “Multiple officials”? “Share such information”? What are “fact patterns”? They are opinions usually fueled by bias. In today’s climate, there’s no hotter bias than DC Trump-hatred. As for the “sharing” and “multiple officials”, that sounds to me like “intrigue”. I would like to remind the Dem caucus that interpretation equally applies to the complaint as it does to the Call.
Example #3: The frequent appearance of the word “pressure” to characterize Trump’s request for assistance from Zelensky, president of the Ukraine, underscores the partisan bombast. “Pressure” is a very loaded verb. Once again, a natural oral recreation of the conversation conveys no such “pressure”. It is a provocative verb enlisted for the sole purpose of advancing a political agenda. The complaint has the odor of DNC press releases.
Example #4: To further the charge of Trump “pressuring” Zelensky, a quid pro quo was stitched together by the author(s). First, they attempt to paint White House officials as “deeply disturbed” as they “witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain”. The “abuse” relies on cobbling together a line from the Ukrainian president’s account of the talk on his website with the fleeting reference to the Bidens. Here’s the Ukraine line in the complaint:
“Donald Trump expressed his conviction that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve Ukraine’s image and complete the investigation of corruption cases that have held back cooperation between Ukraine and the United States.”
Attach the above with this:
“Aside from the above-mentioned ‘cases’ purportedly dealing with the Biden family and the 2016 U.S. election, I was told by White House officials that no other “cases” were discussed.”
And you have a “quid pro quo”. Really? Yeah, in the minds of those in the fever swamp. So, we are supposed to believe in the space of a limited conversation that the mere mention of the Bidens is ipso facto proof of “give me dirt on the Bidens or we’ll let you die on the vine”. The only way to get away with the accusation is to be unfamiliar with the Call. Now that we have it to read during our morning constitution, we know that the shenanigans of the intel community and the FBI in DC, along with Crowdstrike, were mentioned. “No other cases”? The Bidens were one of three, all brought up during the length of a short phone talk. The complaint’s author(s) are lying.
I could parse more of the thing by going beyond the first 3 pages of the 9 in the screed. The document is risible. It will become more of a farce as more comes to light, maybe more about the complainant. Some reports have revealed the author to be a registered Democrat. Something not unexpected given the natural affinity between the party of government (Democratic Party) and the employees of government.
Neighboring states around DC all of a sudden have a predilection for Democratic Party candidates. The federal government grows and Democrats flock to DC and its environs. Examine the map of Virginia from the 2016 election. Notice the northern state house districts on the south side of the Potomac, a few bridges away from DC?
Republicans venturing into DC are lambs stumbling into a den of wolves.
The tale of the Call is the story of the sunset of popular sovereignty. We must recognize that the government is so big that it cannot be controlled through elections. In fact, if elections go against the lunch room zeitgeist, the new officeholders will be undermined or removed from office. Welcome to modern impeachment in the age of the institutional radical left.
Stay tuned for more from the impeachment clown show.
The transcript of the “infamous” call to Ukrainian president Zelensky by Pres. Trump, July 25, 2019.
Regarding Trump’s phone call to Zelensky, president of Ukraine, an oral message put on paper and then read isn’t the same as performance of the conversation in the manner in which it was delivered: person-to-person in conversational tones. Adam Schiff’s bastardized performance is a travesty. I’m talking about taking the original transcript and vocally delivering the actual words as they occur in a natural conversation. Once you do that, the air is taken out of the Democrat’s impeachment balloon. There’s no there there.
Duane Patterson (l), Hugh Hewitt (r).
Hugh Hewitt and his producer, Duane Patterson, conducted such a reading (Hour 2, Hugh Hewitt Show, 10/2/19). If performed as it was originally delivered, certain conclusions about the call stand out:
(1) Trump is right. There was no quid pro quo. There was no use of presidential power to advance his candidacy. There was no offer, implied or otherwise, to withhold aid for purely partisan advantage.
(2) Zelensky brought up Giuliani, not Trump. Trump was asking Ukraine for their assistance in our probe of Russia-gate. Of course, Giuliani, being the personal attorney of the president, is also gathering evidence to defend his client against the Democrats’ anti-Trump jihad. Remember, Clinton had an entire war room devoted to the defense of our priapic 42nd chief executive. In fact, the conversation mostly skirts the mention of Giuliani.
(3) The aid that the US has given the Ukraine was mentioned to remind Zelensky that allies operate in a reciprocal manner, and Europe provides little help to Ukraine. We need some international help to investigate a matter of international scope, not necessarily to go after “lunch pale” Joe. We have treaties with other nations to cover these eventualities.
(4) Biden is mentioned by Trump in a brief, offhanded manner. It was mentioned to highlight the possibility of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election. The Crowdstrike reference is brought up in the beginning by Trump to make the point. That’s the context.
I could say more. It is very strange for Congressional firebrands like Schiff to rush to impeachment over this frail thread. Is this an attempt to head off Barr and Durham as they draw close to the origins of Russia-gate? If so, indeed, we have a coup underway.
In this April 25, 2006, file photo, John Durham speaks to reporters on the steps of U.S. District Court in New Haven, Conn. (AP Photo/Bob Child, File) (Washington Examiner)
Our politics has descended into a shout-fest. Trump doesn’t present reasoned arguments (argument as in viewpoint with reasons). He resorts to boilerplate and name-calling. The Dem leadership and its Squad are channeling a mix of over-caffeinated social justice warriors at a Charles Murray lecture and teenage inmates on acid in a juvenile hall cell block. Don’t expect much calm deliberation to come of it.
If you have one hour and 20 minutes – or as much as you can handle – here is an example of what civil discourse is supposed to sound like (go to here or click on the icon below).
The editors of National Review gather to discuss the issue-meltdown du jour. This session concerns the infamous call and impeachment. There’s quite a range of opinion from the hyper Trump skeptic David French to Charles W. Cooke to the constitutionally fastidious Luke Thompson to Michael Brendan Dougherty to Rich Lowry, the moderator. On the call and impeachment, French lies closer to Pelosi and Thompson closer to Trump. All are critical of Trump and the Democrats but vary in their degree and basis of condemnation
The consensus, if there is one, is that Trump behaved badly and the Dems could have possibly stepped on another rake. My take is closer to Thompson – Trump’s actions were within the historical bounds of presidential behavior and certainly not impeachable – and Cooke – what’s the standard for impeachable offenses given Andrew Jackson’s genocide to presidents making war without congressional approval to presidents with a phone and pen so as to slip the bounds of their oath of office? Impeachment, really, over this?
The transcript is a Rorschach test exposing the realities of domestic and international politics. What does it mean? Here’s my take.
(1) Politics brings out the crudity in people. Yes, Trump is crude, him being a political neophyte with all the rough edges and a huge ego. But have you watched the Democrats’ presidential sweepstakes lately? It’s insanity on parade. Their rants include more than wacko ideas but also serial insults to Trump (“punch him in the face”, etc.) and half of the electorate (“racist”, “anti-gay”, “we’re going to forcibly take your guns”, etc.). Trump is crude and the Democrats are crude and unelectable.
(2) Washington, DC, is a cesspool – not the city but the environs around the capitol. There is a Deep State and it’s in those dozens of blocks encompassing the Mall. The “whistleblower” apears to be a never-Trumper. The whistleblowing complaint apparently is based on scuttlebutt from water-cooler or social banter. The complainant wasn’t tapped into the president’s line. If he’s a never-Trumper, he (or she, et al) will have to join the hierarchy in the State Dept., Justice Dept., and intelligence community in 2016 and 2017. A partisan leak has been recast as whistleblowing.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
(3) The transcript shows the nature of politics as it has existed since political power was wedded to a human being. Trump’s call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is not unknown in history. For example, FDR’s shenanigans in going after Samuel Insull, a prominent utility CEO, just because he needed a scalp for the Depression, was sickening. After they finally got their hands on him, and after much chicanery with France, Greece, and Turkey, all FDR and the boys (girls, et al) got was an innocent verdict on all counts. Do I need to delve into the more egregious antics of JFK, LBJ, and Richard Nixon?
Samuel Insull
(4) Trump’s call has an interesting predicate: Joe Biden’s on-air boast in 2016 that he got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired. He was the same prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma Holdings for corruption at the time his son was on the Board of Directors. Intriguing, eh?
Viktor Shokin
(5) The transcript of Trump’s call shows no quid pro quo: as in, you give me the dirt on Biden and I’ll give you American aid. You could argue that it is implied, but that would be no more dispositive than Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, demanding the end of investigations critical of Robert Mueller’s probe. They demanded that he “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.” You can read about the episode here.
Yuriy Lutsenko
(6) The Ukraine seems to be as entwined in American politics circa 2016 as Russia was alleged to be. Trump’s call makes it abundantly clear. First, Ukraine may have been on helpful terms with at least Obama if not the Democrats in that election cycle. How helpful? The transcript shows Trump mentioning two things: Crowdstrike and the US ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. The ambassador was, not surprisingly, an Obama administration conduit to the Ukraine, and given the spying capers on Trump in 2016, would be involved in any Ukrainian hanky-panky. Speculation? Yep, but no different than the knee-jerk cries of “outrageous” regarding anything Trump. And there’s the mention of the cyber-security firm Crowdstrike. It was the company who was paid by the DNC to take possession of their server and examine it for evidence of hacking. It’s out of this Democrat-funded escapade that we have the Russia-hacked-our-election chant. What’s the Ukrainian connection? Well, there’s enough intriguing evidence for John Durham to be looking into it. You can read about it here.
I’m sure that more can be said and will be said in the coming days. As for me, as of right now, one more thing needs to be mentioned. The Democrats are out to reverse an election. Suburban voters in the 2018 elections handed power to a party bent on imposing socialism and removing a president. Is this what these voters wanted? I kinda doubt it, but they are getting it anyway. Indeed, they should have known this would happen because the party leadership said as much since inauguration day 2017.
The 2018 elections show one weakness of democracy. It was indicative of how an electorate can be whipsawed from detestation of presidential behavior to handing power to the irresponsible. The individuals who were elected in swing districts may not be like the core of the party, but the newcomers will help a party with statist socialism in their political DNA to gain majority status. Those 40 reps pale when compared to the 195 others. It’s simply a matter of math.
Thank you swing-district voters. Now we have an impeachment-palooza and socialism on the cusp of being the law of the land.
Kyle Smith’s review of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood compared Tarantino’s film with Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America. Tarantino adopted Leone’s technique of a singular story thread set in a panoramic and historical scene. If some future filmmaker wanted to channel Watergate’s All the President’s Men and Leone, the current unraveling of the Russia-collusion-Mueller-Comey-et al saga would provide excellent grist for the mill.
The Setting
All the elements are present. The grand backdrop is present-day DC with 364,000 federal government workers, many at the top of the federal pyramid scheming and plotting for partisan and personal advantage, and a mass of hanger-ons populating K Street and other nodes in the metropolitan area. The administrator water cooler talk must be impregnated with the expectations born of a peculiar universe’s lifestyle and norms that are divorced from the real world’s preoccupation with producing the necessities and wants of life. It’s a world unto its own, all put on steroids by the 44th president’s ideological penchant for big government as a cure-all. It is great for those seeking highly remunerative and secure employment in a highly unproductive sector, coupled with fantastic opportunities for the city’s real estate agents.
Enter stage left, Donald Trump (protagonist or antagonist depending on one’s point of view): crass, boorish, sometimes vulgar, and a champion of the pitchfork brigade. He wasn’t supposed to win. And when he did, the curtain was thrown open as in the The Wizard of Oz.
Woodrow Wilson’s government of “experts” is exposed as a charade. I can only speculate about the extent of the conniving, scheming, and plotting for personal and partisan advantage as a normal facet of life particularly in the administrative suites of the nation’s capital. Regardless, the now-bogus collusion story ripped the smiley face off the Leviathan.
Act One: Pride Before the Fall
Like many scandals, this one has at least two acts or phases: the first one peddled by the left-oriented and self-styled cultural “betters” in the media, academia, and the Democratic Party in our cosmopolitan centers, and the later, more sinister one as the initial story began to unravel.
Phase one seemed implausible from the get-go for anyone with a scintilla of adult skepticism, but it was overwhelmed by volume, both in quantity and decibel levels in our left-dominated media channels. That story is now familiar. A litany of banalities consumed the airwaves: “Russia attacked our democracy”; “Trump is a Putin stooge”; “The Russians elected Trump”; “Trump conspired with the Russians”; etc., etc., etc. You’ve heard the carnival barking.
The party of more government and big government – the Democratic Party – needs government power, and they failed to get it. Their loss necessitates an explanation, and it can’t be that their vision of the better world isn’t popular enough. The default excuse is malevolence by some unseen and nefarious forces attached to the winner. It just so happens that an expedient was readily available from their own skulduggery in the 2016 campaign. Democrat trolling for dirt – often called “oppo research” – led to the Hillary campaign > Fusion GPS > Christopher Steele > the Steele dossier > FBI/DNI/CIA spying on Trump > leaks to a salivating press. The stage is set for its continuation after Trump’s shocking victory.
A common reaction after shock is rage. Sure, Trump’s bombastic rhetoric acted as an accelerant, but that matters little. George W bent over backwards in a contortionist’s pretzel to accommodate and still earned the rant, “Bush lied and people died”, alongside efforts at his impeachment. Rage is a powerful motivator to do some really bad things, even using falsehoods to repeal an election. Remember, power is far more important to a progressive than to those more conservative since it is needed to overwhelm parents’ concerns about such things as their little daughters sharing a bathroom with boys who believe – or simply make the claim – that they can think themselves into being girls.
The ploy required a predicate. It was found in the jingle, “Russia attacked our democracy.” We don’t have a democracy; we have a constitutional republic … but I digress. How did Putin attack our so-called democracy and purportedly steal the election from her highness? A few trolling farms and $100,000 in Facebook ads, half of which were pro-Hillary and half were after the election?
In fact, the presiding judge in the trial of one of the defendants (Concord Management and Consulting LLC) indicted by Mueller chastised Jeannie Rhee, a former Obama Deputy Attorney General and part of Mueller’s team, and Mueller (and by extension Atty. Gen. Barr) for prejudicing a potential jury by reaching conclusions in the publicly released Mueller report not supported in the indictment, thereby raising doubts about the strength of the evidence linking the firm to the Russian government. Could the mantra “Russia stole the election” be a bait-and-switch maneuver with the mantra being loudly proclaimed by a partisan mob in the media and Congress as the Mueller gang switches to the thin gruel of a far lesser claim in court? Are we, the public, being scammed?
Jeannie Rhee, former Deputy Attorney General under Obama and Special Counsel prosecutor under Mueller.
How could 1/100th ($50,000) of a 30-second Super Bowl ad bend a 63 million-vote election spread over 274, 252 precincts and 113,754 polling paces? Hillary alone was awash in $700 million. Trump fell $300 million short. The charge is preposterous given the minuscule effort, and ignores the history of this kind of thing. Almost every Israeli election results in American campaign operatives tramping over to Tel Aviv to help Labor or Likud. One of Obama’s chief campaign advisers, Jeremy Bird, showed up in the country in 2015 to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu. We’ve left our fingerprints in other countries as well. The PRC helped bankroll Bill Clinton’s reelection. Soviet disinformation money seeded street protests in America and Europe throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, a godsend to Teddy Kennedy’s efforts to frustrate Reagan. Soviet efforts didn’t stop there. The Venona disclosures in 1995 and the brief opening of Soviet Communist Party archives in 1991 showed evidence of Soviet espionage and the presence of agents of influence occupying powerful positions under FDR and Truman. And today’s Democrats and their fellow travelers are carping about a few bots and Facebook ads?
Venona Project. Meredith Gardner, at far left, working with cryptanalysts, mid-1940’s.
The predicate is a farce. It’s in the DNA of international relations for nations to influence strategically important countries. In another time it was called statecraft. We would be well-served if we remembered the concept when observing the vicious mullahs in Tehran.
Oh, they squeal that the Russsians “hacked our democracy” when they were alleged to have purloined Hillary’s and the DNC’s emails and began to disseminate them through Wikileaks. Wikileaks is most certainly a pipeline for Russian (and any other nation’s) chicanery. After all, they came out of the same anti-western and anti-US breeding ground that gave us CISPES (advanced the interests of the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua), the nuclear freeze movement (supported by Soviet disinformation measures), Code Pink, today’s Antifa, and the perpetual peace-at-literally-any-price crowd. The mission statement of being the guardians of government transparency is a facade for useful idiots. They’ll take information from any source so long as it further their end, which is the embarrassment of only western governments.
What’s missing from the hacked-our-democracy charge is any semblance of context. Of course, in our intensely techie world, cyber crime is as big a thing as mail fraud was in the days before Intel. No doubt, the bumbling Hillary made it easy by concocting her own digital communication system in her basement, bathroom, closet, or what have you. She would be an easy mark for any government with nearly unlimited resources (since all governments skim off as much as they want from their citizens’ private economic activity) to play this game. The 2015 Chinese (PRC) hacking of the federal OPM data base, getting personal information on 20 million persons in the process, is illustrative.
Any system is vulnerable, including Hillary’s garage setup, the DNC, RNC, and anyone else thought to be important. The Iranians remember Stuxnet in 2010, the joint US-Israeli worm to crash the regime’s nuclear program computers. Whether through phishing or incredibly easy passwords in the case of the DNC, cyber warfare is part of statecraft. Make the best safeguards as possible, but it will remain a staple of modern life.
Was it as vice-president Cheney called it, “an act of war”? Hardly. The behavior is so common that we would be in a constant state of war with almost any nation with access to a keyboard. Cheney’s declaration is ludicrous.
But is it even relevant to Hillary’s 2016 loss? Both candidates were held in low esteem going into the election. Hillary’s negatives were 24 points higher than her positives and Trump’s were even worse (41 points). It wasn’t hacked emails that dragged Hillary down. Hillary has left a well-known slimy trail from Arkansas to DC. She’s a known quantity, and it smells. As for Trump, he was stinking up the works with his boorish rhetoric, past sexual escapades, and Access Hollywood. Could it be that a easily dislikeable candidate, 8 years of Obama malaise, a horrible campaign strategy, poor campaign management, and Trump being a fresh face had more to do with the result than Wikileaks and $100,000 in Facebook ads?
However, giving the story heft was our FBI in DC, something euphemistically called the “intel community”, and who knows how many big cheeses in the Obama administration. More than putting a thumb on the scale, they were sitting on it.
First, Comey’s gang “exonerated” Hillary after her clear violations of 18 U.S. Code § 798 et al. Furthermore, and amazingly, Comey and his courtiers somehow reached the conclusion that bleach-bitting her hard drives and servers and smashing devices to smithereens didn’t qualify as obstruction of justice. And to think that Trump had to fight through hell for two and a half over the now-dubious charges of conspiring with Russia and interfering (obstruction) with Mueller’s inquisition into a non-crime.
Go figure. Now that’s the stuff of movies.
As Comey was clearing Hillary, he was conducting a surveillance operation against the Trump campaign since at least summer 2016. A piece of Democrat oppo research – the Steele Dossier – was funneled to the FBI, Obama’s Justice and State Departments, and Obama’s intel chiefs, Clapper and Brennan. The Democrat oppo research was filled with vile falsehoods but was peddled to FISA courts to entrap people connected to Trump, no matter how loose their affiliation. Ironically, the Dossier would turn out to be the only proven instance of collusion: the cooperative arrangement between the Russians, Steele, and the Hillary campaign/DNC.
With sycophants in the media, leaks would keep the pot boiling in an attempt to delegitimize Trump’s victory up to the point when drips and drabs of FBI/Obama mischievousness start to dribble into view, and the release of Mueller’s incoherent report in April of 2019 raised new concerns about the fable.
Anyway, the 2018 midterms gave the House to the Democrats and off into impeachment land we go.
By the time of the release of Mueller’s unintelligible tome, enough was known of the gross misbehavior of Obama’s people and his holdovers in the executive branch. The rogues gallery includes Strok, Page, McCabe, Comey, the Ohrs, Clapper, Brennan, maybe Lynch, and anybody else in the Obama claque now looking to lawyer-up. Include the minor interstellar bodies who are in the orbit of Obama’s intel glob like Halper and Misfud. Also, friendly foreign intel services were more than happy to participate in the scam.
The plot thickens. With one house of our bicameral legislature in hunger pangs for impeachment, getting Trump becomes more than partisan mudslinging. It becomes institutional, partisan mudslinging on the federal dime. Subpoenas fly and the Bolsheviks took over committee chairs. Who’d have thunk it?
Jerry Nadler, chrmn. House Judiciary Comm., and Adam Schiff, chrmn. of the House Intelligence Comm.
Impeachment was juiced up. The Democrats’ electoral success in 2018, though, could possibly end up breeding their own fall. In Sophocles’s tragedy, Ajax, Ajax proudly asserts that he doesn’t need Zeus’s help. Oedipus in Oedipus Rex boastfully claims the genius to solve a murder mystery. It didn’t end well. From the Book of Proverbs, 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Warnings abounded, but the Dems insisted on pushing the issue.
The April release of the much-anticipated Mueller Report made matters murkier. Trump collusion was put to bed but he was “not exonerated” (?) of obstruction, something Hilary did blatantly. Now that’s an extremely odd concept in a prosecutor’s brief, “not exonerated”. It’s such a loose concept that anybody not charged can be labeled “not exonerated”. That’s not how our system works. Innocence is presumed, not “not exonerated”. Well, it’s enough of a kernel for Democrats blinded with rage for losing in 2016.
Then Mueller reluctantly testified after the Dems threatened him with subpoenas. Mueller’s testimony proved to be the emperor with no clothes. Bumbling, stumbling, incoherent, and ignorant of his own report made the show an embarrassment for both him and the Dems.
The spectacle raises questions about who was running the show in the Office of Special Counsel. Was Mueller merely the man running interference for the likes of Andrew Weissman and Jeannie Rhee, both leftovers from Obama’s DOJ?
The Special Counsel and his team.
Mueller’s awkward performance and his lack of familiarity with the report that bears his name would seem to indicate that the partisan inmates were running the partisan asylum. 13 of the 17 prosecutors working under Mueller were registered Democrats – and prominent Democrat apparatchiks in DC – with the remaining four unknown or unaffiliated.
Mark July 24, 2019 on your calendar, the day of Mueller’s testimony. It’s the day for all-things-Russia to exit stage left. Another angle to the story, frothing beneath the surface, is about to spill over the top.
The curtain comes down on Act One.
Act Two: The Fall
The script for Act II has not been written. Yet, key elements are present for a second generation Watergate.
The full story of the lefty nexus of the mainstream media, the Obama holdovers in the executive branch, and the Democratic Party has yet to be written. This place has the potential for a real conspiracy. Attorney General Barr, US Attorney Durham, US Attorney Huber, and IG Horowitz will have something to say in due course, though the general outlines are already present. The investigation of the investigators has just begun, the start of Act Two.
Yes, the rogue’s gallery mentioned earlier should lawyer-up. It’s a great time to be a criminal defense lawyer in DC.
Here’s a possible scenario. The story begins with the effort to remove Trump from the political scene. Comey’s in the middle of it. Comey and his claque in the FBI were eager to use the fraudulent dossier to undermine the Trump campaign and presidency as early as summer 2016, after which they would end up with 4 FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. The applications for the warrants to begin the effort were deceptions to the FISA judges. The operation (“Crossfire Hurricane”) continued well into 2017.
The media played along to perpetuate the story. They acted like a megaphone for wild and lurid claims for gross partisan advantage. It was a cooperative venture among a triad of actors: (1) big name/legacy media, (2) the DNC/Hillary campaign, and (3) an executive branch that acted like its namesake, a community organizer – which is nothing but a rabble-rousing community activist.
But surprise, surprise: Trump won. And ….. Stay tuned for the rest of the story.
I know. I know. The title engages a noun that has entered cliché territory. Still, it applies to Mueller’s tome after an expedition of the likes of Alexander the Great’s invasion of Persia to the ends of the world. In the end, after $40 million and almost 2 years, all Mueller got was indictments of a bunch of foreigners who’ll never face an American judge and questionable actions against bit players for after-the-fact infractions/crimes. The whole rectal exam was about “collusion” – even the “obstruction” barking – and, in the end, there’s no there, there.
The brouhaha proved an old axiom that if you intensely look long enough, you’ll find something – even if that something amounts to … nothing. Turn a building inspector loose on my property for 2 years and he’ll find “something”. How many violations of law did you commit after waking up (maybe before), knowingly or unknowingly? We live in a world of a straightjacket of laws and regulations.
Bottom line: no collusion, and the charge of “obstruction” is silly – so says both Barr AND Rosenstein. The point raised by Barr before his elevation to AG is dispositive. If there’s no crime, for what reason could Trump be obstructing? Key to obstruction is evil intent, something deep within a person’s mind. If there’s no outward sign of it, and if there’s no reason for doing it, why put credence in it?
The reason for the Dem death grip on “obstruction” is politics. The Dems want Trump’s scalp at any price. They’ll pour over the encyclopedia-length full report to stitch together an impeachment indictment. They’ll hang onto any language in the report to keep the issue alive. “Do not exonerate” (in the Mueller summary) is an example. “Exonerate” is a measly word when an investigator does not exonerate. Either they recommend charges or they don’t. To pass the buck to Barr as if there’s a hint of a case, in spite of the lack of evidence and sound Constitutional reasons to reject it, will stoke the Dems’ impeachment fire.
Adam Schiff and Andy Kaufman. Any similarities?
In the end, we went to the Mueller café and got … nothing. It’s the equivalent of an air-burger on an empty plate.
Watch this scene of traumatized Googlers trying to make sense of the fact that a good chunk of the country doesn’t have their “values”, and it showed by putting Trump in the White House. By all means, Googlers, don’t question the universality of your peculiar beliefs; question the motives of those who disagree with you. Heck, Googlers can’t even recognize their views as “peculiar” since they aren’t likely to rub elbows with those who think different. They get their prejudices reinforced, and reinforced ….
The leftist stream of consciousness on the Google campus stage on that November day of 2016 was littered with politicized code words. Take the word “values”, as in “our values” by Sergey Brin. The word is freighted with other words like “diversity”, and it ain’t the diversity of the opinion kind. For this monocultural groupthink, all diversity is limited to race, genitalia, and sexual appetites. Mix enough hijab-wearing lesbians into the workplace and, voilà, the only meaningful kind of “diversity” is created for this diversity-is-our-strength gang. Conservatives are tolerated … so long as they lie low. The other kind of diversity – as in diversity of thought – will be a casualty. In fact, it might be excised as “hate speech”.
James Damore, ex-Google senior engineer, after his 2017 firing for publishing on the company’s “free speech” forum an essay, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.
It’s as if Googlers found themselves rejected by the election results, and rejection is a powerful source of anxiety for those ensconced in their self-reinforced and pampered cocoons. How to make sense of it since the mind must still grapple with the reality? Well, brand your opposition as morally and intellectually deficient. The other side is said to suffer from “tribalism” and “fear”. It’s not that adversaries simply disagree, but their disagreement is a product of an unrestrained id, a libido run amok. People like our Googlers have such a high self-regard that no concession can be made to the validity of an opposing point of view. Therapy on the Google campus was reduced to fortifying the attendees’ sense of superiority and convincing them that Darwin’s missing link resides in red America.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the post-election confab.
There was an early light-hearted moment. A rousing cheer came from the crestfallen when Brin announced the success of pot legalization. Now that says something. Either intoxication is a preferred state of mind for Googlers, or many of them have all the seriousness of Animal House’s Bluto at a frat party. Or it could simply be a Brin joke. Anyway, it probably isn’t Joe Sixpack material.
The expected response came out of the Google inner sanctum after the video went viral. The declaration went along the lines of “we’re biased but trust us”. Here’s a good portion of it: “Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias [we’re biased] ever influences the way we build or operate our products [trust us]. To the contrary, our products are built for everyone, and we design them with extraordinary care to be a trustworthy source of information for everyone, without regard to political viewpoint [trust us]”.
Maybe the word “monoculture” is inadequate. The Borg of Star Trek fame is gaining relevance as the more appropriate metaphor.
The Borg or Silicon Valley/blue America?Borg drones or the Google workforce?
WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 11: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. This is the second day of testimony before Congress by Zuckerberg, 33, after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The term “monoculture” had its origins in farming with the production of a single crop. A monoculture does exist, but it isn’t a horticultural one or the type often measured by melanin counts or genitalia by hyperactive SJW’s. Socially speaking, we have a singular, smothering orientation to the world – a monoculture of the mind – chauvanistically present in the leadership and dwellers of our key social institutions: media, arts, entertainment, education, government agencies, foundations, etc., with tentacles deep into the corporate boardroom. Today’s left is obsessed over a monocultural patriarchy. Ironically, it is they, left-progressives, who have prevailed in creating an unacknowledged monoculture of the mind. In the video below, Zuckerberg admits to Silicon Valley being “an extremely left-leaning place”.
I bring this up not to parrot the crowd in the Sean Hannity zone. Heaven knows, Zuckerberg is in a difficult spot with Facebook’s problems with privacy and complaints of political censorship. Before the Senate, he looked like an exposed adulterous husband trying to keep his marriage together. Pity is only natural as he occupies the lonely seat in front of our elected publicity hounds.
Next comes the tortuous ritual of admitting the left-wing preeminence while denying any effect of it. It’s a claim of superhuman qualities once reserved for the heavenly host. Apparently, left-wing people don’t produce left-wing products. Mark me skeptical.
