Pres. Trump and Maine Gov. Mills at the White House, 2/21/2025
Trump is our era’s Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who led the effort to desert Czechoslovakia in 1938. His impulsiveness and tendency to hitch national policy to personal grudges are deeply troubling.
But the Democrats are worse. They’re crazy. They are cultural revolutionaries on a mission to force us to conform to their conceptions of the “better man [or woman, or whatever] for the better world [?]”. They refuse to define “man” or “woman”, for instance, as one part of their goal to eliminate all distinctions (look up “nihilism”) so as to create new ones of their own fancy. Consequently, women are frozen out of award ceremonies to men who imagine themselves to be women. It’s kooky beyond belief.
It’s also not surprising that it doesn’t much work the other way: a XX man robbing XY men of their track and field medals. Trump, and anyone still rooted in reality, knows this, and he’s willing to say so. Yesterday, at a meeting of governors at the White House, he confronted Maine’s Governor Janet Mills (D). Watch the clip below.
Brutal, blunt, but not wholly undeserved. Gov. Mills’s feelings are of minor concern when compared to the dashed dreams of hundreds, if not thousands, of girls – real XX girls. Their ambitions are quashed by a XY girl who just yesterday was considered a boy. Go get ‘em Trump, and every blue-state satrap that has engaged in this grotesqueness.
Trump and Zelenskyy (r)An airman attached to the 436th Aerial Port Squadron loads cargo during a Ukraine security assistance mission at Dover Air Force Base, Del., Jan. 13, 2023. (photo: DOD)
During the scare over secondhand smoke, and the flurry of smoking bans in public spaces, 60,000 annual deaths from it was frequently cited. Actually, numbers varied from 20,000 to 120,000. When it came down to it, they were numbers pulled out of a hat. Once repeated, they had a life of their own. President Trump does it too.
In yesterday’s Truth Social post, Trump blithely threw out $350 billion in aid to Ukraine. Where did the number come from? Further, where’s the source for “half of the money we sent him is ‘MISSING’”? Not the Inspector General for Ukraine Aid, not the Center for Strategic and International Studies (see #2), not the Kiel Institute which studies international aid to Ukraine. You might counter that he’s president and therefore he must know. That’s not proof; that’s an act of faith.
Going back to the U.S. inspector general of “Ukraine Oversight”, $183 billion was promised and $86.7 billion delivered (see #3). The denizens of the far-Right fever swamps have mentioned $100 billion “missing”, stolen, wasted. Applying the two known numbers, ones that can be sourced, the $100 billion is roughly the difference between what was promised and given. If true, possibly, $100 billion is “missing” because it was never delivered.
President Zelensky in an AP interview of early February cited $177 billion earmarked by the U.S. but only $75 billion sent (see #4). These might be the numbers used in a Kiel Institute study (see #5). The point is that these numbers can be sourced. Where did President Trump’s numbers originate? No source is available, leaving one to entertain the option of them bursting from DJT’s imagination, a frequent occurrence.
I suspect that the press gaggle comment from Tuesday – “You should have never started it” – and the Truth Social rant of Wednesday are connected. In the one, President Trump put his foot in his mouth, up to the ankle, and halfway down the throat. Then, he tried to repair the damage by bloviating with more inanities.
Trump doesn’t understand the first rule of holes. Stop digging!
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Jim Geraghty for the numbers and sources at “Get Ukraine into the European Union”, National Review, 2/21/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/get-ukraine-into-the-european-union/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=first
2. “Where Is the Missing $100 Billion in U.S. Aid for Ukraine?”, Mark F. Cancian, CSIS, 2/11/2025, at https://www.csis.org/analysis/where-missing-100-billion-us-aid-ukraine
3. “Funding”, Ukraine Oversight: Special Inspector General for Operation Atlantic Resolve, Promoting Whole of Government Oversight of the U.S. Ukraine Response; at https://www.ukraineoversight.gov/Funding/#:~:text=Fiscal%20Year%20(FY)%202022%2D,obligated%20and%20%2486.7%20billion%20disbursed.
4. AP interview of President Zelensky, “Zelenskyy: Ukraine received US$76 billion out of US$177 billion approved by America”, 2/2/2025, Reddit, at https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1igjyyl/zelenskyy_ukraine_received_us76_billion_out_of/
5. “Ukraine Support Tracker Data”, Antezza, A., et al, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, 2/20/2025, at https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/ukraine-support-tracker-data-20758/
Donald Trump is proof that no person is deserving of worship. Sooner or later, given enough time and opportunity, we’ll step in it. Trump is no different. The guy must have slept during his high school History classes. College wasn’t any better for him. Read this screed on Truth Social about Ukraine’s Zelenksyy. It’s mind-bogglingly stupid.
“Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and ‘TRUMP,’ will never be able to settle. The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us — We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation. On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is ‘MISSING.’ He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden “like a fiddle.” A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only “TRUMP,” and the Trump Administration, can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the “gravy train” going. I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues…..”
Trump is showing that Zelensky isn’t the problem. He is! For Trump enthusiasts, drop the cultic priestly vestments and get off your knees on your prayer rugs long enough to parse the words of a nincompoop. And to think that this guy is the leader of the Free World. Amazing.
Sentence #1 is incoherent, the rantings of adolescent rationalizations. Is this genius making the case that the $350 billion should never have been spent, or that the war never had to start? Yeah, it wouldn’t have started if Putin hadn’t invaded, and without American support naked aggression would have been rewarded. Strip away the crass, ego-inflating bloviation about himself being the block to all bad things in the world, and what remains is the reality after his loss in the 2020 election. It’s 2025, not January 2021. Now, what are you going to do? Sell out the victim?
Sentence #2 is more evidence of an all-too-human businessman rampaging way outside his lane. This blinkered person behind the Resolute desk reduced all thought and considerations in foreign relations to dollars and cents. It’s the only thing he understands, or thinks he understands. By his convoluted logic, we would have remained a part of the British empire; the South would be represented in the UN as the CSA; a good portion of France, Belgium, and Russia would be part of the German Empire under the Hohenzollerns; and much of Europe and Asia would be Axis satraps. Geostrategy is reduced to an accounting ledger. It’s stupid beyond belief.
Sentence #3 is more pablum. The idiocy is crowned with “Equalization” and “a beautiful Ocean as separation”. Yeah, Europe should pay more, but that’s not as if we shouldn’t pay anything. And that’s not to mean that Europe hasn’t contributed anything – $120 billion from 2022 to 2024 (see #1). Besides, are we going to lead as the USA or hide behind an ocean? Jihadi goat-herders with box cutters on 9/11 proved that an ocean is only a geographical feature to be crossed to get at the Great Satan. DJT, this is not the age of sail anymore.
Sentence #4 is proof that Ukraine is as flawed as DJT during his bankruptcies, or DOGE is discovering that we are. But we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Account for the aid, and keep it flowing. Don’t use it as an excuse to reward a thug.
Sentences #5 and #6 are evidence of Trump showing his capacity to fill the shoes of Izvestia, the newspaper organ of the old Supreme Soviet. They promiscuously applied “dictator” to Thatcher and Reagan. Trump repeats the same style of slander. Trump has lost his mind. Zelensky is more answerable to an electorate than Putin. Putin offs his opponents, both inside and outside Russia. From the streets of London to the presidential residence in Kyiv to outside the Kremlin, he has horrifically poisoned, disfigured, and assassinated opposition. The list is growing. Those surviving disappear in a reconstituted Gulag Archipelago. Trump adds his name to the long list of dictator-lovers going back to the Stalin-apologists of yesteryear. It’s as shameful today as it was then.
The rest is an embarrassment to adult reasoning. “I love Ukraine”, but only if it surrenders to Putin. You see, following the Trump thought-stream, Ukraine is ravaged by . . . Zelensky, by Ukraine itself, not Putin. In Trump’s twisted brain, Zelensky should have surrendered earlier. Thus, it’s his fault. A thug that invaded the country across three fronts without warning or provocation, in a typically mismanaged Russian blitzkrieg, is not to blame. The thinking provokes disbelief. And he is our president. Whew, what a mess.
There is a crazy Right, and Trump is their messiah. He is deified. Everything he says and writes is worshipped as holy script. I’m surprised that they aren’t printed in red. Watch as longstanding pundits of the Right eat their past words. Watch as they morph from Kremlin skeptics to Putin apologists in the span of a short decade, because their god says so.
One question for Hugh Hewitt: What happened to Mike Pompeo? He’s gone into your memory hole. At one time praised to high heaven; now, nothing. He seems to have descended into nothingness like Bill Barr, John Bolton, and anyone who will not make the appropriate sacrifices at the altar.
Hugh Hewitt at the mic of his radio show.
Please, people on the Right, get off your prayer rugs long enough to notice that your Prophet wears no clothes. Reality is uglier than your illusions.
RogerG
Sources:
1. An assessment of European contributions to the defense of Ukraine can be found at “Ranking of European countries by aid provided to Ukraine between January 2022 and August 2024, by type of aid”, Statista, 10/29/2024, at https://www.statista.com/statistics/1499394/european-aid-to-ukraine-by-country/
Pres. Biden, son Hunter, and an inset photo of the Biden clan
Far removed from Plato’s dream of the “philosopher king”, and his notion of politics as an avocation for the wise and godly, is the harsher reality of self-dealing in politics. Biden finally did it: he pardoned his son. Are you surprised? If so, stay off the cable buying channels. Someone else should handle your finances.
Honestly, I expected Biden to do it, or arrange some deal with the incoming Trump. Did you really expect the son to spend a dime in penalties and serve a day in jail? The charade of high-mindedness from Biden and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was for the sycophants and the “unwashed masses”, which is how the party of the masses actually views their masses. My guess is that most of us aren’t shocked.
We’ve grown used to the truth of our politics: it’s long been a lucrative (as in “lucre”) career path, especially for long-in-the-tooth politicos like the Biden clan. FDR had a well-heeled aristocratic lineage, and thus his quasi-socialism was an act of condescending patronage for the plebes. But for LBJ, politics was his ticket out of the poverty of his Texas hill-country hardscrabble life. He sold himself by using other people’s money to purchase other people’s loyalty. Imagine it, using other people’s money to reward still other people, and all of it for fun and profit. Adjusted for inflation, upon his death, he was worth $100 million, quite a haul for a coarse back-slapping politician from Texas’s version of Appalachia at the time.
The “LBJ technique” of haranguing a person to get his way.
Self-interest and greed are alive and well, particularly among people whose public platform has long been a bellicose attack on self-interest and greed. Nancy Pelosi provides another case in point. A scion of Baltimore’s D’Alesandro political dynasty, her elevated social caste helped bring her into marital union with Paul Pelosi of the moneyed class. Elite colleges, prep schools, etc., you get the picture. It’s a form of social incest. Power and money have always had a potent attraction. You don’t need feudalism or capitalism to make it happen. Quasi-socialism, as well as the unadorned kind, works too.
So, Nancy can regale us with the glories of a totalitarian lockdown by pointing to her $15,000 fridge filled with exotic, expensive, chic ice cream. No run-of-the-mill Dreyer’s for this gal. She gets her hair professionally coiffed while everyone else is shut in dealing with their zoomed children. Like the nomenklatura of the Soviet Union, the old aristocracy was swept aside to make room for the Party aristocracy. La noblesse oblige thrives under new labels. The flotsam always floats to the top no matter the political scheme.
Nancy’s refrigerator and ice cream during the lockdowns.
These paragons of equity- and equality-mongering, of concern for the poor and “oppressed”, end up rolling in the dough. So much so that they can no longer ravage Republicans as the party of robber barons. For at least the last few election cycles, the Democrats have nationally outspent the GOP by around 100%, or more. The Harris campaign had raised $2.15 billion when you add Biden’s billion in the early part of the campaign season, and still ran a $20 million debt. Trump’s paltry $338 million, about half of it from donations $200 or less, seems like an embarrassment in comparison.
The party of government is also the party of the hyper-wealthy. Their complaints about “money in politics” and their serial attacks on Citizens United were dropped from the Party’s talking points. It couldn’t be sustained when the Brahmins of wealth lined up behind them. So, the ritual excuses for the loss shifted to “misinformation” and “disinformation”. In other words, they want to censor views and information that they don’t like. It’s scandalous, but it’ll still has currency in Big Media. They demand censorship and an ongoing alliance with Big Money and Big Media. Why don’t they just come out and say it? They want Orwell’s Ministry of Truth [propaganda] and Ministry of Love [persecution] (from Orwell’s “1984”).
They don’t realize that many of their beliefs are revolting to a large swath of the public. There’s too much out there to turn your stomach. Transgenderism – the idea that you can feel and think your way into another sex – is to be assisted by taxpayer dollars and forced into anything designated “woman/girl”. The Leviathan is the strong arm for gender confusion and porn to adolescents.
They wrecked the economy, which everybody has experienced at the gas pump, utility bill, and supermarket. As for crime, they only seek ways to facilitate it, not combat it. People look around themselves and see disorder, filth, and violence. Who wants to raise their kids in that?
The fact is, they suffer the disadvantage of their own minds. Fewer want what they’re selling. It doesn’t take a genius to roll out the videotape. And they gaslight us by calling it “disinformation” and “misinformation”. They demand that campaigns keep it airy, abstract, filled with generalities. “Joy”, joy about what? Trump is Hitler, and it’s the end of “our democracy”. When you confront them with their own statements and actions, they demand a Ministry of Truth. Who’s the real danger to democracy?
Here’s the truth: big government breeds big money in politics which breeds more big government. More big government breeds more lucrative avenues for the unproductive, people who produce nothing but the myriads of ways to take money and opportunity from one group and give it to their voting blocks. Now that’s the real scandal.
In all of this self-dealing, is there any wonder that they save their own from the hoosegow? That’s a minor matter compared to what they have in store for the rest of us.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Charles C.W. Cooke’s piece in National Review provides some insight into the scam that is our politics: “The Misinformation Racket”, 11/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/01/the-misinformation-racket/
The child sexual abuse mania that began in 1984 but would stretch into the 1990s
“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved -indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be brushed aside as trivial exceptions.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“All one’s neighbours [sic] are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear. . . In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.” — Carl Jung
Was there something in the water during the 1990s? Episodes of mania abounded. Looking for causes, Bonhoeffer emphasizes a stubborn belief in things that aren’t true, a kind of stupidity. Jung looked to the role of fear in animating a broad sense of hysteria.
Either way, certain periods of history seem susceptible to a kind of mass psychosis. The 17th-century Salem Witch Trials were but one example. Throughout the Reformation period, executions by burning at the stake were frequent except in the 16th-century Dutch Republic and northern Poland-Lithuania, so much so that one historian referred to the two as “state[s] without stakes”. The climate-change frenzy of today is only the latest episode in the recurring epidemics of madness. Though, the 1990s, for whatever reason, exhibited multiple occurrences.
From the 1980s into the 1990s, across the country from California to Florida, child day-care was allegedly and suddenly plagued with the most fantastical charges of child sexual abuse. Janet Reno rose to fame from Florida DA to Bill Clinton’s Attorney General, and then her oversight of the Branch Davidian siege and inferno in Waco, riding her “Reno method” to secure many false child-abuse convictions, alongside ruined lives, numerous lawsuits, and subsequent legal judgments that nearly bankrupted many guilty local jurisdictions (see #1). It was a disaster all around.
he PBS website for “The Child Terror” which chronicled the frenzy about child sexual abuse at day care centersJanet Reno, Florida DA and US Attorney General, a key figure in child-abuse mania and the Waco infernoThe inferno at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco in 1993
Then in 1996 during the Atlanta Summer Olympics came the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. Security guard Richard Jewell was turned from hero to goat by the FBI’s fixation on him as the culprit, all recounted in Clint Eastwood’s 2019 film, “Richard Jewell” (see #2, #3). In this case, a powerful institution fell under the spell of the “somebody within” trope to single-mindedly focus on Jewell, going so far as claim that he was afflicted with a mysterious “hero syndrome” (or complex), hounding him and placing his life under a microscope only to discover the real offender a couple of years later. Organizations can suffer from a self-imposed group myopia among its “professionals”.
Credentials and training don’t immunize a person from half-baked notions taken as truth. Today, we see entire professional associations oblivious to the necessity of a block-chain of evidence that ties it to a relevant conclusion, the essence of science. Instead, we’ll see them endorse the fashionable ideas of many of their broader demographic peers and stubbornly persist in logical quicksand.
Then we have the JonBenet Ramsey murder case from 1996. The phenomenon repeats itself. Netflix has brought the incident to light in “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?”. Watching all three episodes makes clear that the treatment of the case by law enforcement has much in common with the 1990s’ day-care child abuse mania and the Jewell persecution. The case had gone cold because of the time wasted by Boulder PD detectives on a preoccupation with the parents, one or both, as the killers. If that wasn’t enough, the media played along in wild speculations about the family as they were fed derogatory leaks in order to intimidate the Ramseys into confessions. Delinked from empirical evidence, CBS’s “60 Minutes” went on a wild ride to blame JonBenét’s older brother only to suffer at the wrong end of a lawsuit.
On Netflix
Similarly, after a few years, the Boulder PD’s lead detective on the case tried to make another kind of killing by writing a book that tried to accomplish what the Boulder DA and PD couldn’t in a court of law: pin blame on the parents. Like the 60 Minutes’ smearing of the brother, this too ended in a lawsuit with the author and publisher penalized with a sizeable award for the Ramseys.
Don’t think for a moment that we have progressed beyond these barbarities of a few decades ago. Remember the 2020 summer of riots fueled by a noxious, mysterious, hidden, and unconscious racism? What of transgenderism and the assertion that one can feel or think themselves into another sex, all assisted by the rhetorical hocus-pocus of “sex-at-birth” and the invention of a separation of gender from sex? It’s hard to imagine a greater child abuse than placing our children under its spell and sanctioning chemical and surgical interventions and transgender mind manipulation. Welcome to the Island of Dr. Moreau (see H.G. Wells’s story)
The 2020 George Floyd riots in Portland, Ore.Protest in Washington, D.C., June 2020, against “racism”
MAGA has its own fancies. Tariffs are seen as a ticket to national prosperity. They want America to be great again while abandoning Eastern Europe to Putin. Reunionizing the workforce to gain the political allegiance of union bosses and boasting of a return to fiscal sanity while avoiding the trainwrecks of the entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, half the federal budget) is proof that Alice isn’t alone in her Wonderland. They like armies and navies so long as we don’t do anything with them. It doesn’t get much more insane than this.
There’s more. Climate change has the same popular pull as were charges of heresy for the Spanish Inquisition. Think about it. To get from a gradual increase in atmospheric temperatures to herding everyone into electric vehicles and the experiences of blackouts and bankrupting utility bills requires the hasty conclusion that humans are bringing an end to Gaia. The empirical relationship between the apocalyptic hucksterism and warmer weather is, to put it kindly, shaky.
Will any of the so-called remedies do any good? For every 100 electric cars sold in California, China is building a new coal-fired electricity plant. Ditto for India. Any estimates of climate improvement from the bankrupting of the California population are nothing but proof that 17th-century witchcraft is alive and well. Yet here we go with Biden bringing California absurdities to the nation.
Three decades on, we’re still as foolish as ever. Don’t go around holding your head high. Mass psychosis might be in our social DNA. Higher ed, more college degrees, greater “professionalization”, more credentials, and exuberant education spending is hardly a cure. It’s proven to be an accelerant. The country’s next mass mania is just around the corner.
RogerG
Sources:
1. An excellent rendition of this gross prosecutorial misconduct during the time can be found at “The Child Terror”, Frontline, PBS, at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terror/.
2. The Wikipedia page on “Ricard Jewell” affords a description of the basic facts.
3. “THE ‘HERO SYNDROME’”, Sergeant Ben D. Cross, Arkansas State Police, 11/1/2014, at https://www.cji.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/the_hero_syndrome.pdf
4. “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?”, now showing on Netflix; website at https://www.netflix.com/title/81705443
Case in point: Penn law professor Claire Finkelstein. In an opinion piece on The Hill news site, she lays out an excuse for left wing prosecutors to go after public figures who disagree with her and them (see #1). Ignoring all prior precedence and guidance, she’s four-square behind arming the justice system against her ideological opponents. Let’s face it, she’s another one of these tenured types in a silo of habitual left-wing partisans.
She opines that a Trump firing of Jack Smith is obstruction of justice. She writes,
“If the sole purpose of the removal of a federal employee is to immunize the president against investigations into his own wrongdoing, that is a misuse of presidential authority, and one that is unrelated to the protections that the presidency is meant to afford.”
Jack Smith
Borrowing a Biden word, this is “malarky”. It’s tantamount to open season for the left to target the right. I don’t think that she means for the same logic to be applied against anyone on the left – hint: Joe Biden, the entire Biden clan, Hillary and her home brew server and blatant obstructions, Stacy Abrams and the original “stop-the-steal” campaign. What about the retinue of New York and Atlanta prosecutors? Partisan use of prosecutorial powers is a form of obstruction of justice, also called “abuse of power”.
Hillary Clinton from around 2015
Finkelstein advocates a freebooting expedition into an elected official’s intentions, his motives, as they exercise their constitutional powers, something clearly deemed constitutionally off-limits by the Supreme Court in Trump v. US earlier this year. How else can she prove “wrongdoing” or “misuse of presidential authority”? Do intentions and motivations bedevil left-wingers? It’s odd that this kind of rationalization only seems to crop up when Trump, or anyone on the right for that matter, wins office.
Where were they on Clinton’s perjury, obstruction, and impeachment, or Obama’s autocratic use of his “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone”, or the sweetheart deals that paved Obama’s way from activist/provocateur to Senator to the White House? Not a peep. No investigations, thus no indictments, thus no trials, thus no “convictions”, all of it buried deep, deep. Her legal inquisitiveness begins and ends with Trump. For all practical purposes, the difference between the D’s and R’s in her analysis is who won the election. If the D’s win, move on. If it’s the R’s, all guns ablaze. Finkelstein is just another political hack with tenure, another reason to question the rectitude of the faculty lounge.
She can’t wrap her head around the fact that the policies of the Left aren’t popular, especially when they’re given the chance to roll out. Even that deep blue bastion, California, can only stomach so much of the consequences of its left-wing prejudices. They tossed out the criminal permissiveness of Prop 46 (in Prop 36). That mecca of the counterculture, San Francisco, previously jettisoned some of the school board and sent its social-justice-warrior DA packing (Chesa Boudin). This time, it’s mayor London Breed seeking new employment. Across the Bay in Oakland, its mayor, radical lefty Sheng Thao, and Alameda County DA Pamela Price were sent to the exits.
Screenshot of a smash-and-grab in San Francisco
Los Angeles finally had enough of DA George Gascon. Apparently, serial assault and battery, smash-and-grabs, stabbings, shootings, and overall mayhem on the streets aren’t popular, even among a left-wing electorate. Of course, the usual suspects in power gaslighted us behind deceptive stats, such as the FBI’s crime report which relies on reported crime. Who reports crime if nothing will be done about it? Think George Gascon. Rather, honestly, trust your lyin’ eyes and vote the rascals out. They did.
As a result, Donald Trump’s showing in 2024 improved everywhere. I’m reminded of the scene on the MSNBC set on election night when asked to show the precincts or counties where Harris bested Biden’s 2020 showing. It was a blank map and startled the hosts. It was no less true in California. Eight counties flipped to Trump this time around. But the state is the Marianas Trench deepest of blue so there’s ample electoral breathing room to keep alive the leftist vision of life.
Nearly everywhere else, it’s appalling. Freezing parents out of parenting is a losing strategy for adults still in touch with reality. Tinkering with sensitive, impressionable young minds with trans ideology and treatments behind the backs of parents are flat-out losers. Recommending, pushing the ingestion of chemicals to interfere with a child’s natural development, and eventual surgeries, which are irreversible, are proving that barbaric teenage genital mutilation is alive and well in a hypothetically civilized society. Is it still civilized? I kinda doubt it, so any campaign running on it shouldn’t expect election-night celebrations.
Thus, boys-turned-girls – er, trans-girls, “girls”, XY “girls”, whatever – invade chromosomal girls’ spaces and battle them in competitions. It’s a replay of the Christians versus the lions in the Coliseum. I’m confused – and understandably so – because boy/girl is now relegated to a state of mind and having no relationship to procreation. It’s social suicide. They’re crazy. Any parent ushering their child down this path is practicing child abuse. Don’t expect a ride to victory on the back of this buffoonery.
It’s as if the Democrats are card sharks and knowingly dealt themselves a losing hand. The wild spending and its wild debt aren’t winners. Climate-change ideology (or actually theology) as a cover for bankrupting utility bills and the shaming for the purchase of practical and affordable family transportation doesn’t help. Inflation was met with a Salem-witch-trail pogrom against “price gouging”.
A housing crisis didn’t just magically pop into existence. It’s been building for decades thanks to the Democrats’ fealty to mammoth environmental regulation and empowered NIMBYs. California is home to the worst of it. Is Elon Musk’s embrace of Trump a consequence of the regulatory crazies in the one-party state who nixed an increase in Space X launches at Vandenberg? That’s the tip of the iceberg: try to build a Levittown in the state. It’s a nightmare. And you wonder why your young adult children are living in your basement.
Do I need to mention the Biden administration’s open invitation for the Third World to move to the United States en masse? What a goat rope.
The Democrats love what ails us. Barack Obama’s beloved Rev. Jeremiah Wright once crowed that “The chickens have come home to roost.” Well, the chickens are roosting as GOP victories. No amount of legal scheming by partisans in the ivory tower will give the Democrats what they dearly desire: power. Power is gained through elections and, right now, they’re not fit to be elected – except in bicoastal, metropolitan, and academic pits of despair.
Claire Finkelstein, Trump will fire Jack Smith if he’s still around, and you have no legal standing to stop it. Jack Smith was on the ballot only as a Trump campaign issue. Trump won and you and Jack Smith lost. Next time, try making your side more palatable instead of inventing new ways to obstruct the voters’ desire to be protected from you.
As a side note, how do you spend a billion dollars, end the race with a $20 million debt, and still lose? $1.02 billion wasn’t enough to sell this turkey.
Update: Harris collected over $2 billion, and her campaign contests any contention of leftover debt.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Jack Smith must not drop the government’s charges against Donald Trump — here’s why”, Claire Finkelstein, The Hill, 11/12/2024, at https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/4986125-doj-trump-indictments-jack-smith/
2. “No, Firing Jack Smith Would Not Be an Obstruction of Justice”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 11/16/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/11/no-firing-jack-smith-would-not-be-an-obstruction-of-justice/
*Californization: noun, becoming more like California in the mind and NOT necessarily in its geo-spatial characteristics, such as Bozeman morphing into “BozAngeles” merely because it grows to accommodate an influx of interstate refugees. Far worse and much more troubling is the manipulation of a state’s popular biases, even their prejudices, to adopt California policy preferences.
I am fearful that America is being bribed and forced to be more like California. California used to be held in high esteem, the “shining city on a hill”. That’s certainly no longer true. The state is synonymous with dysfunction, decay, decline, and colossal misgovernance. It’s hemorrhaging refugees to other states, most of them middle class and families. Its social and economic life is feudalizing. Its electorate over decades has consistently chosen to eviscerate its quality of life. The result is a basket case, a Third World state within the world’s premiere First World nation. The question is, are electorates in other states desirous to join the “golden state” in this internal Third World?
My newly adopted home state of Montana could be getting ready to make the slide. No, the influx of new people or urbanization aren’t the culprits. It’s big, big campaign money from radical plutocratic barons in progressive bastions (Silicon Valley for instance) who have an outsized role in selling California-style dysfunction to the rest of the country, the same people who’ve made their urban bubbles and bi-coastal expanses unlivable, unaffordable, and inhospitable.
They’ve perfected a deceptive style of political packaging to pour their money into: sell California’s one-party jungle primary with a well-funded Montana ballot initiative (CI-126); sell California hedonism by sanctioning through another Montana initiative the elimination of the inconvenient consequence of sex: the baby (CI-128). Just think, in it, one human being would be legally empowered to destroy another with few, if any, restraints.
The libertine deep pockets of California and New York prop up Jon Tester. As such, Democrat Senator Jon Tester has a campaign war chest 4 times his opponent. He’s a reliable vote for his party’s main policies and leadership, the same ones that seek to remake the country in California’s image.
They try to sell this dumpster fire of thought to the “rubes” by using the rustics’ vague social and political prejudices against them. Don’t like wealthy out-of-staters? Well, figure this: Tester uses his out-of-state millions to bash his opponent as an out-of-stater. Wrap your mind around that. And put a double-hex on his challenger by attaching “wealthy” to the pejorative. Class warfare works, even in red states.
Why are these progressive billionaires and zillionaires so interested in showering millions on Tester’s reelection? Answer: he thinks and votes more like them than us.
Tester: a two-faced Janus
The numbers are astounding in the effort to keep the guy in the Senate. According to Open Secrets, Tester vacuumed up $32.6 million in contributions in the first 3 months of 2024, about 70% of it are high-dollar (over $200) and a quarter, probably more, from super zips in California and New York (See #1 below). His Republican opponent, Tim Sheehy, garnered a mere $2.1 million. Clearly, a call went down the Dems’ deep-pocket pipeline to Big Entertainment, Big Finance, and Big Tech and up gushed the dough. The Democrats’ richly endowed blue-bubble political war machine have the wherewithal to have you vote for your own demise.
No wonder streaming anything results in a deluge of Tester spots. Ditto broadcast. Tester has more cash than he knows what to do with. The estimated $315 million to be spent on this Senate race makes it per capita the most expensive in history, $487 for each one of the state’s 648,000 registered voters (See #2 below).
With cash like that available to the initiative front, they can flood the screens, your text message platform, and airwaves with a tidal wave of appeals to popular prejudices which are crafted to have you vote for California dysfunction. The license for unlimited abortion (CI-128) is couched in anti-government verbiage by people who have the rustic look, waiting to manipulate our prejudices. Bear in mind that the reality is actually about one generation claiming the power to take the lives of those in the newest. Appalling. A country appearance and mannerisms disguise the push for California debauchery.
I suspect that the gambit sells. Our blue bubbles are mired in a deep quagmire of their own making. But in vast stretches of red states lies a population with their own dark strains of thought. Protectionism in tariffs and subsidies are popular. Interstate xenophobia lurks below the surface, ready to be exploited by the dump trucks of cash from blue-state bastions.
If the Big Lie succeeds, expect your children’s fortunes to worsen, and you won’t have a clue that you had a hand in it.
*P.S.: This piece was written before the November election.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Tester outraises GOP rival in high-stakes Montana Senate race”, Jim Cloutier, 4/25/2024, at https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2024/04/tester-outraises-gop-rival-in-high-stakes-montana-senate-race
2. “Voters Drowning in Ads From ‘Obscene’ Amounts of Cash Flooding Montana U.S. Senate Race”, AP, USNWP, 10/29/2024, at https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2024-10-29/voters-drowning-in-ads-from-obscene-amounts-of-cash-flooding-montana-u-s-senate-race
In Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap”, the character of Nigel Tufnel (guitar and vocals in the faux group) divulges their secret in being “one of England’s loudest bands”. They stenciled their amp dial scales to end at 11 and not the usual 10 – not increase the actual power output, mind you. Thus, “We go to 11.” The difference between the regular Right and the most recent edition is that the newest vintage will “go to 11”, always on the lookout for new opportunities to be loco.
The New Right is content with the batty isolationism-lite, the battle against those mysterious and formless “neocons” and the “establishment”, and a zeal for protectionist tariffs. Their political darling is Donald Trump and prominent mouthpiece in the academy is Victor Davis Hanson. Hanson has twisted his intellect into knots to turn Trumpian incoherence into coherence. The old wisecrack “Give him enough rope and he will hang himself” could be rejiggered to apply to Hanson in “Let him talk long enough and reasonableness is overtaken by bunk”.
It was on full display in the October 26 podcast of the “The Victor Davis Hanson Show”. Hanson loves the term “reestablish deterrence”. I do too. In a dangerous world, bad actors need to understand that they’ll pay a heavy price for harming you: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” But it’s strange to the point of incredulity to apply it to only two of the three theaters of Cold War II: Israel and the Middle East, yes, of course; Taiwan/CCP/South China Sea, yes, of course; but Ukraine/Putin/Russia, no. What’s with that?
For Hanson, “reestablish deterrence” somehow stops when considering Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Hanson’s logic is a ball of confusion. He blathers about the “scared soil of Mother Russia” as quicksand for Ukraine and their supporters in order to justify a replay of 1967’s Vietnam War micromanagement when then-president LBJ chose bombing targets in North Vietnam and restricted efforts to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail and clean out NVA and Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia. According to Hanson, we should not be supplying offensive weapons nor should Ukraine in any way, no matter how modified, adopt the tactics of the invader. Is there at least a hint of inconsistency here? Hypocrisy?
Weapons are weapons, whether labeled “offensive” or “defensive”. Is it “offensive” to strike Russian airbases, supply depots, missile sites, command-and-control centers, or occupy areas near Ukraine’s borders that are essential to keep Russia’s murderous juggernaut rampaging in Ukraine well-supplied? That’s defensive, Victor!
For Hanson, “reestablish deterrence” only applies against Iran or the CCP. How does Putin deserve a free pass? It’s the strangest thing. Putin’s desire to resurrect the Soviet empire is somehow different in Hanson’s mind from the mullah’s ambition to bring back the caliphate over the bodies of millions of Israelis or Xi’s craving to rebuild the Middle Kingdom of earth. Putin is decimating Ukraine as Iran would like to see done to Israel. Instead, Hanson strays off into a gripping fear of stepping onto the “sacred soil of Russia”. No word about the “scared soil of Ukraine”.
Try to make sense of it. You can’t. Emotions must account for it. Angers, resentments could be swamping the brain. Col. Vidman is Ukrainian and testified against Trump. Hanson must have been grinding his teeth. (Honestly, me too!) Zelensky visits an American factory that’s viewed favorably for Biden and Harris. The Left hates Russia for magically electing Trump; therefore, the Right automatically loves the place. Putin, manly man, versus XY “girls” and XX “boys” regaled at the White House. The faculty lounge flies Ukrainian flags at their homes while blue-collars languish in joblessness and meth. Hanson is seething.
Hanson tries to use the national debt and an open border as an excuse not to have a foreign policy, at least one that makes some sense. He’s actually saying, until all our problems are solved, to hell with Ukraine and foreign affairs. We’ve done it before regarding the continent of Europe, circa the 1930s prior to the fall of France, Pearl Harbor, and the Holocaust. It’s a theater of the absurd, and Hanson is begging to play a key role in the sordid drama.
Dodger Stadium and central LA in the backgroundPiles of trash remain near 25th Street and Long Beach Avenue. (photo: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Tuning into the broadcast of the World Series (game one and two in Los Angeles), viewers were regaled with “beautiful Los Angeles”, especially centering on the weather. Shortly after landing at LAX and a chauffeured drive, one telecaster gushingly described the terrace view from atop his Beverly Hills hotel as exquisite, as sublime. Yes, the weather is wonderful, and the scene must have been handsome for him, but only so long as he remained off the surface streets and in one of the super-zip bubbles, and doesn’t actually live and work there like the average Angelino. The beautiful weather and the human reality don’t compute.
For about 15 years prior to my retirement in 2015, we trekked back and forth through 3-4 states between our then home in Bakersfield and northwest Montana during the spring and summer breaks. While crossing back into California near Barstow or Bishop, and our descent toward Bakersfield down Highway 58, a slight depression washed over me. The condition recurred every time that I made, and still make, the trip.
The two experiences say more about California than the sunny skies and the beautiful, manicured grounds of Dodger Stadium. The first one is media hype and superficial. The second one is genuine from a native Californian of 60+ years.
California is alluring . . . if you stick to hovering above the surface and/or zip through the many stretches of disarray and stay on the freeways. The state is a combination of disorder and a colossal regulatory Leviathan and over taxation of its people. It’s visible on the ground, and spreading. The disorder is a consequence of popularly elected choices. Beating enterprise into the dirt, expanding the dole in innumerable ways, and centering law enforcement on the private economy and not on the miscreants that make life miserable have made a shambles of the state. The state is at war with prudence and decency.
Piles of trash remain at the corner of East 10th Street and Naomi Avenue in downtown Los Angeles in 2019. (photo: Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
The lunacy is a result of conscious political acts, if gauged by the number of bills passed by the state’s full-time, Democrat-controlled legislature. In no year since 1993 has the number fallen below 632, and more commonly around 800 to frequently over 1,000 (see #1 below). Such bills have included the criminalization of separate boys and girls toy isles; mandatory neo-Marxism in K-12; authorizing school personnel to hide gender confusion from parents; the establishment of the state as a sanctuary of teenage genital mutilation for anybody from anywhere; a whole series of acts that have destabilized the grid, jacked up energy prices to new heights, and force the population into feeble EV’s; etc. And all of this as the state’s 60-year-old infrastructure decays and its streets and public spaces become havens of crime and filth.
Gov. Newsom signs bills
As I watch the World Series, we must realize that we’re being gaslighted by Big Media. California has wonderful weather (Mediterranean climates are like that) and natural beauty to rival anywhere, but the state’s electoral choices for decades have made it unlivable for anyone with their heads screwed on straight. Indecent public policy is popular alongside its fabulous weather, coast, and mountains.
Just driving up to a California gas pump is enough for me to sour on any of its advantages. I prefer to stay away.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “California Bills: Introduced Versus Enacted”, Chris Micheli, California Globe, 10/1/2024, at https://californiaglobe.com/articles/california-bills-introduced-versus-enacted-2/
No, but not because she isn’t unwittingly trying to be. For her, Marxists are communists who are meanies, much like Cinderella’s stepmother. Deep down inside, she, in the manner of all who rose out of the California one-party tar pit, has an abiding affection for much that lies under the Marxist rug. For her and all her delirious fans, James Lileks, essayist and satirist, has produced a concise description for Kamala and her classmates in his hypothetical history class. Here it is:
“Communism was invented by a hairy, smelly dude who sat in the library all day writing an explanation for why he was broke and ignored. He came up with some ideas that appeal to people who think they can figure out a secret special formula that explains everything and also has the totally coincidental outcome of giving them stuff they didn’t work for or deserve, at the expense of successful people with lots of friends and hot wives and steady access to a bath so that people don’t faint when they walk into the room.
“This system is utterly at odds with human nature, history, economics, and common sense, and hence it is beloved of two kinds of people: college professors who can fasten on a fat Western college like a leech on a whale, and clever sociopaths who can use it to exert power over the masses. It killed millions in the 20th century, yet we are told true communism was never tried, which is like poisoning 200 million people with a dose of arsenic and insisting they would have been fine if they’d been fed twice as much. Any questions?”
I don’t think Kamala is listening. She’s too busy passing notes.
