Former congresswoman Liz Cheney applauds as Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event at Ripon College in Ripon, Wis., October 3, 2024. (Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)Kamala Harris arrives to speak at a campaign event with former Congresswoman Liz Cheney in Ripon, Wis., Oct. 3, 2024. (Photo: AP)
Republican primary voters in ruling majorities are infatuated with Donald Trump. I am a Republican, and am not. Neither is Liz Cheney, former congresswoman and scion of the Cheney political dynasty. She, however, in searing hatred of Trump, has endorsed his opponent, who is the exact opposite of nearly everything that Liz and the Cheney family patriarch and matriarch have been saying and doing for the past half century or more. This is more than incongruous. It takes hypocrisy to another level, to a complete shredding of one’s life story. It’s a lesson in how to incinerate your reputation.
Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney belong in the same coffee klatch as a coming together of Antifa and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (if such a thing was possible). After endorsing Harris, Liz Cheney takes understatement to the point of absurdity. While campaigning for Harris, she brazenly tries to brush off the stunning incongruity in throw-away lines “[we] may disagree on some things” and “[we] may not see eye to eye on every issue” (see #1 below). Do ya think?!
Liz Cheney, in her role as the sister of Plastic Man, stretched all the way to the other far end of the political spectrum to work for and elect a person who would undo everything that she and her father have spent a lifetime building. Kamala Harris is trying to make the Cheneys’ Wyoming, and everywhere else, into . . . San Francisco, the Bay Area cauldron that shaped and gave birth to Harris’s ambitions. As such, Liz Cheney’s choice for president is more at home in Berkeley than Wyoming.
Doubt it? Look to Harris’s record as California senator in the 115th and 116th sessions of Congress. According to Mark P. Jones of Rice University (see #2 below), “Harris is the second-most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the Senate in the 21st century”. It’s true, and more than a cliché. She loses the crown to Elizabeth Warren, and only Warren, in both sessions. Going back to the start of the 21st century, 109 Democrats served in the Senate and in terms of left-wing zealotry, Harris came in at 108th in the most-left wing sweepstakes, just ahead of comrade Warren (see #2 below).
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, left, stands alongside Vice President Kamala Harris at a dinner nearly a month after the senator failed to endorse a 2024 Biden-Harris ticket. (Photo: Callaghan O’Hare / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
To get a sense of the sheer farce, and the extreme mental contortions required, look no further than the issue of abortion. Harris has repeatedly called for the restoration of Roe v. Wade across the nation all the way to “fetal viability” (superficially set at 22 weeks) and beyond (see #3 below). Where’s Cheney? Juxtaposed to Harris’s enthusiasm for aborting babies is Cheney’s 2021 co-sponsorship of the “Life at Conception Act” which would extend 14th Amendment protections to the “preborn human person” from “the moment of fertilization” (see #1 below).
Still, in spite of the flippant demurrals, Cheney fawned all over Harris by declaring that she would “inspire our children” . . . if they survived Harris’s abortion gauntlet, and once out of the womb, the exposure to gender confusion and “transition” medical interventions. Thanks to Biden and Harris, the gender-confused XY “girls” will be allowed to rip through girls’ sports in a twisting of Title IX. Thank you, Liz Cheney.
Liz Cheney is a lesson in allowing your personal vindictiveness to sell out the country to a San Francisco/Berkeley/countercultural revolution. She’s already begun her personal “transition” to the left by adopting the donkey party’s smears against states who actually made law, heartbeat laws, to put meat on the bones of what it meant to be pro-life. Now, Liz adds her voice to the left’s lie machine in her feeble attempt to make the most incomprehensible political tag team in recent memory seem “normal” (see #5 through #8 below).
It’s a scene of political self-immolation. For the rest of us, if Liz Cheney has her way, we’ll be stuck with porn in elementary school libraries and third-grade classrooms, bankrupting energy prices, DEI run amok, CRT-style “public safety” which means no public safety, no borders, Israel facing a new Holocaust, Taiwan as a new base of operations for the Red Chinese PLA Navy, tax-and-spend to national oblivion, and the crusade against babies in sanctioned/subsidized abortion up to birth. As for your personal prospects, don’t take your kids to the park. Sounds like where Kamala is from, San Francisco.
And all of this because Liz Cheney is infuriated by the presence of Donald Trump. In her mind, we avoid Trump, but in our mind, we get a country that we won’t recognize nor want to live in. Speaking of minds, Liz Cheney has lost hers.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Charles C.W. Cooke for his insights into this topic in “Liz Cheney’s Abortion Comments Show Why Stumping for Harris Was a Mistake”, National Review Online, 10/22/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/liz-cheneys-abortion-comments-show-why-stumping-for-harris-was-a-mistake/
2. For an analysis of Kamala Harris’s brief history as a U.S. Senator go to “Kamala Harris is extremely liberal — and the numbers prove it”, Mark P. Jones, The Hill, 8/8/2024, at https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4816859-kamala-harris-is-extremely-liberal-and-the-numbers-prove-it/
3. “Kamala Harris’ call for ‘reproductive freedom’ means restoring Roe”, Megan Messerly and Alice Miranda Ollstein, Politico, 7/29/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/29/kamala-harris-abortion-restoring-roe-00171657
4. “Biden Administration: Title IX Protections Extend to Transgender Students”, Lauren Camera, USNWR, 6/16/2021, at https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-06-16/biden-administration-title-ix-protections-extend-to-transgender-students
5. “Abortion Advocates Are Lying about the Tragic Deaths in Georgia”, Calum Miller, National Review, 9/24/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/abortion-advocates-are-lying-about-the-tragic-deaths-in-georgia/
6. “The Abortion Pill Killed These Women. Its Supporters Blamed Pro-Lifers”, Dan McLaughlin, National Review, 9/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/the-abortion-pill-killed-these-women-its-supporters-blamed-pro-lifers/
7. “Untreated Side Effects of Abortion Drug Killed Amber Thurman, Not Georgia’s LIFE Act”, Kayla Bartsch, National Review, 9/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/untreated-side-effects-of-abortion-drug-killed-amber-thurman-not-georgias-life-act/
8. “Kamala Goes on Sex Podcast to Lie about Georgia Abortion Law”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review, 10/7/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kamala-goes-on-sex-podcast-to-lie-about-georgia-abortion-law/
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.
Get ready. Buckle up. The dysfunction of California is about to become the dysfunction of the United States. Take a look at a red/blue county or precinct election map of California and you will see what lies in store for our country (see maps below). East of California’s Coast Range, and beyond the coastal plain from San Diego to the Bay Area, extends a vast Republican hinterland that is essentially inconsequential to the governance of the state. The same thing awaits the huge stretch of the country between the two coasts and outside the deep blue urban bubbles that dot the landscape like islands in a vast red ocean (see maps below). Furthermore, as urbanization proceeds apace even in solidly red states, they too will increasingly resemble the quality of governance in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and California. Today, urbanization is poison to good governance.
2020 election nationally by precinct
Who’s responsible for this sorry state of affairs? First, the people, whether in town or country. They vote for “wrong track”. Many believe in the impossible, such as bountiful entitlements (unreformed Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid), papering over in trillion-dollar spending bills every grand greenie scheme, a strong national defense . . . and, amazingly, low taxes and fiscal sanity. The tooth fairy anyone?
Second, the Democrats’ base. They are the boosters of America’s institutional socialist party, the equivalent of Europe’s Social Democrats. Well, let’s just call them the Social Democrats. And third, the Republicans’ base. They are in the grip of a psychotic personality disorder, one that emotes in bouts of vengeance, and will blindly follow the person who best captures their sense of resentment and defiance. The result is a competitive socialism and a broad and chronic sense of post-election disappointment.
The “people”, both in their party’s primaries and in the general electorate, choose failure. Let’s not be puerile in blaming somebody else: “elites”, “establishment”, academia, the media, or some other nebulous cabal of the beautiful and hyper-wealthy-and-powerful. We did it; we chose it; we continue to choose it. Period.
Low-information voter
In more sensible times, the Democrats’ socialism should write them off as an electoral joke. Instead, they’re competitive. It’s much more than the wind in their sails from their much larger stable of lefty zillionaire donors and left-wing academic/media commissars who occupy the commanding heights of the culture. Sometimes, your greatest strength arises from your opponent’s weakness. And lately, to the great joy of the donkey party, the GOP base has decided to go bonkers.
The evidence of the Republican voters’ mental incapacity lies in a Democrat Senate (51-49) and their poor showing in the last four national elections in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022. 2016 was a squeaker (No, DJT, you didn’t win by a “lot”.) with a Republican Senate narrowed to a two-seat majority. The 2018 midterms saw our Social Democrats capture the House. 2020 was a Trump loss and a Social Democrat Senate. Then, we had the 2022 midterms. Inflation gripped the country; the national debt exploded; many of our urban spaces are violent open sewers; a totalitarian COVID shutdown destroyed our economy and public schools; our educational system is a mess; housing and energy are out of reach; appeasement foreign policy has made a comeback; the Kabul humiliation; boys are taking over girls’ sports; and a new Axis is turning the international scene into something that resembles our urban spaces. 2022 was supposed to be a red wave but became a desultory mist with a paper-thin Republican House majority that is both ungovernable and too busy neutering itself.
It’s a personality type that seems to attract Republican voters today like moths to a light; that and the endorsement of their new avatar, Donald Trump. The precursor to MAGA was the Tea Party bursting on the scene in 2009. Within Republican ranks, a feistiness was brewing which gave us 2010 Senate candidacies of, for example, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware (the so-called “witch”) who went down in flames. Republican voters had more electable choices at the time – including a former Delaware governor – but favored the fiery type so long as they showed sufficient belligerence. The general election results of that year and following, however, were dismal.
Sharon Angle (l), Christine O’Donnell
Nonetheless, a truculent streak survived to remain a big part of the GOP base’s psychological profile. It’s attractive to them but not much to anyone else. But 2016 seemed to confirm their “wisdom” in the surprising Trump victory. They probably thought that the rest of the country was now onboard with their war against “the establishment”. And then along came 2018, 2020, and 2022, and repeated letdowns for the party. 2024 may yet prove to be a replay of 2022, or worse, and proof of the old definition of insanity falsely attributed to Einstein: “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting ….”
In 2022, we saw Trump endorsements in key competitive races go down in flames: Kari Lake (Az.), Herschel Walker (Ga.), Dr. Oz (Pa.), to name a few. Trump’s pugilistic refusal to accept defeat in 2020 paved the way for Georgia to be represented by two socialists in the Senate. Think of that: Republican governor Brian Kemp – the one who wouldn’t kowtow to Trump’s 2020 election rantings – sailed easily to victory as Walker succumbed to the Social Democrat Raphael Warnock. Even in Georgia, cantankerousness and an “outsider” status aren’t appealing attributes once we leave the tight confines of a party primary. It’s a lesson that today’s GOP base stubbornly refuses to learn.
The GOP base enthusiastically walks into the Social Democrats’ field of fire as the socialists throw money behind the most MAGA-like candidate in the Republican primary. The Social Democrats know something that Republican voters willfully ignore: pugilism in a candidate may whip up primary voters but is an advantage for the opposition in the general election. Funny thing, the Republican base wants Trumpiness and the Social Democrats are happy to accommodate them.
It is for this reason that socialism is competitive. Social Democrats get away with hiding their neo-Marxist roots – don’t expect their ideological soul mates who dominate our media to spill the beans – while Republicans continue to ignore reality. The Social Democrats know how to muzzle their cranks in election season. The GOP gives theirs a bullhorn.
So, expect more boosterism for a culture of death (abortion unrestrained, euthanasia), drug legalization, fiscal stupidity, increasing dependency on public assistance, a dilapidation of national defense, the weight of the Leviathan behind teenage genital mutilation and XY “girls” in women’s spaces, a furtherance of the official pogrom against white males, and the world around you turning to crap. Much of it can be laid at the feet of Republican primary voters for refusing to present viable alternatives.
When candidates like a stroke victim (John Fetterman) and a mentally addled senior citizen (Joe Biden) consistently best MAGA darlings (Dr. Oz, Trump, Lake, etc.), it’s proof that something has gone awry, not with the “system” or the “establishment”, but with the base. In other words, Republican voters are making it easy for the USA to become USC – no, not that USC, the United States of California. California is the template for the entire country, with its dysfunction, greenie totalitarian utopianism, fiscal insanity, flood of refugees fleeing the dysfunction, its feudal society of a shrinking middle class and burgeoning poor amidst the super-rich behind their manor walls.
And watch after this election for the “wrong track” number to hit the stratosphere. The Social Democrats’ base is brainless for its belief in the impossible, such as a prosperous socialism. The Social Democrats in their base are firmly committed to oxymorons. For their part, the Republicans are impervious to simple campaign arithmetic.
Welcome to the United States of California. Yuck!
A man walks along a section of Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles. (photo: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
BLM co-founders from left: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. Pictured at the Glamour of the Year Awards at NeueHouse Hollywood, 11/14/2016. (photo: Jordan Strauss, AP)
Preface:
I wrote most of the following before the release of Matt Walsh’s film “Am I Racist?”. He stole my thunder.
After viewing the film, there are two takeaways. First, jargon-laced pseudo-scholarship predominates in many academic fields, especially in education and the other “soft sciences”. They are laced with the 21st-century’s equivalent of phrenology or astrology. Much that is produced is riddled with the silliness of circular reasoning. How so? They use what they’ve never proven to justify major actions to defeat what they’ve never proven. It’s absolutely embarrassing to watch the drivel take hold.
The peddlers are chasing ghosts of their own fevered imaginations. The absurdities look compelling to the unwary as the proponents beam so confidently and arrogantly in their nincompoopery and glibness.
And this leads to the second observation: it sells to a more than insignificant chunk of the population. Random people sign petitions to rename the George Washington Memorial after Geoge Floyd. They are easily goaded into saying “f*#& you” to a semi-sentient allegedly racist old white man in a wheelchair. Some people, maybe many, are easily shamed into believing the unbelievable, and paying hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars to debase themselves in what can only be described as Maoist shaming sessions. At least Mao’s Red Guards seized, beat, and tortured their victims into the humiliation. They had to be brutalized into demeaning themselves. Not so with these deep-pocketed sheep. Is this what late-stage civilizational decay looks like?
So much for the “wisdom” of the American people. It’s enough to cause the sane to seek refuge in a hermitage.
********************
Well, here it comes. I’m a “racist” to today’s activist-entrepreneurs who’ve turned racial oppression into a lucrative career. If I am, so is Booker T. Washington when he wrote in 1911,
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
And to think that he wrote it in 1911. He was way ahead of his time. He was branded an “accommodationist” for lacking sufficient militance in that era. Derisive labels are commonplace for this crowd of the race obsessed. That way, these race hustlers don’t have to explain themselves or their political jihads, just spew epithets and force skeptics to cower.
And the hustle certainly pays well. The hustle popularly known as Black Lives Matter (BLM) hit the mother lode on the back of the killing of George Floyd, raking in $90 million in 2020. BLM people, who before were just getting by, became celebrities with real estate portfolios, six-figure consultancies, and five-figure speaking gigs. Self-described Marxist and co-founder Patrisse Cullors fell into the lap of luxury in the purchase of a $1.4 million, 2,370 sq/ft Malibu area home. No more Banquet frozen dinners for this aspiring member of the Fortune 500.
No one really knows what happened to about half of that $90 million windfall from 2020. What we do know is that friends and associates in this hustling conglomerate – now called the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation – are watching as their fortunes blossom. Oppression pays, and not necessarily for the oppressor, but especially for the self-anointed spokespeople of the oppressed. It once again proves that mammalian waste attracts flies.
These champions of the oppressed need to keep the pot boiling. They covet oppression, real or imagined, like John D. Rockefeller coveted crude oil. Into this swamp of race-covetousness dives Hasim Coates. Who’s he? Coates carved a Denver satrap out of this vast oppression-mongering empire. A small fish in an ever-expanding pond, Coates joins Ibram X. Kendi, Kimberle Crenshaw, Robin D’Angelo, et al, in the CRT brigades as they swim about for fun and profit. He’s a fixture on the Denver political scene pushing causes and fellow-travelling candidates, and himself, into the control of Denver schools and wherever he can sell the gambit.
Kristen Fry, left, and Hashim Coates, right (Photo courtesy of Kristen Fry, (Screenshot via Hashim Coates for County Commissioner/YouTube)
Sometimes, people who’ve made a career in noisy hyperventilation necessitate the regular use of epithets, slanders, and smears, but inflate the balloon too much and it pops in their face. Coates’s ears must be ringing after one Denver school principal and mom stuck a pin into his hustle. Coates is a fan of redistributionist justice at the school level (and male prostitutes as it turns out) which translates into the same approach as the “reimagining law enforcement” of wannabe future president and Democratic standard bearer, Kamala Harris. “Reimagining” is making a shambles of the schools like it did our streets.
Coates, a common fixture at Denver Schools’ board meetings, claimed a white woman, parent Kristen Fry, grabbed him and used a racial slur to threaten him. He filed charges with the Denver PD; police criminally cited Fry; Coates won a restraining order against her; and the local DA accommodated by filing charges against Fry. The problem is that there is no evidence of anyone using the “n” word or touching Coates. Surveillance tape shows no touching and witnesses close to the encounter vouch to no use of the slur.
Coates is no stranger to the race hustle in Denver. Now, Fry is suing Coates, one of his associates, and four members of the Denver Public Schools Board for defamation, reminding all of us that the race hustle is still a hustle and therefore open to legal action by its victims. Not surprisingly, many hustlers end up penniless or behind bars. Right now, though, there’s still quite a bit of money left in the game to attract half-witted academics and scammers with the right melanin count, choice of bed partners, genitalia, and pronoun diversity.
Epilogue: Please go see “Am I Racist?”. Matt Walsh does a great job in exposing the baloney.
P.S.: Facebook wouldn’t initially approve this post because it “goes against our Community Standards”. What exactly does? A New York Post article on Patrisse Cullors’s real estate buying binge as one of my sources, that’s what. I removed the source but you can access the piece by searching “Patrisse Cullors real estate buying binge”.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “After Raising $90 Million in 2020, Black Lives Matter Has $42 Million in Assets”, Nicholas Kulish, New York Times, 5/17/2022, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/business/blm-black-lives-matter-finances.html
2. “Who’s In Charge of Black Lives Matter’s Millions of Dollars?”, Robby Soave, Reason, 2/1/2022, at https://reason.com/2022/02/01/black-lives-matter-funding-millions-patrisse-cullors/
3. New York Post article on Patrisse Cullors’s real estate buying binge censored by Facebook.
4. “Radical Activists Nearly Ruined a Denver Mom with Racism Charge. Then the Evidence Came Out”; Ryan Mills, National Review Online, 9/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/radical-activists-nearly-ruined-a-denver-mom-with-racism-charge-then-the-evidence-came-out/
It’s election season so the truth goes into hiding. Want Proof? Watch the latest edition of the Democratic National Convention. Earlier, the GOP took their stab at forcing truth into exile at their confab, but they have the advantage of being out of power and not responsible for the donkey party’s forced death march of America to societal collapse. It accords the GOP a target rich environment, thanks to Democrat buffoonery. Yet, as it was said of the PLO’s Yassir Arafat, the elephant party will never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Want proof? Look at their mad dash to nominate their weakest candidate to head the ticket, but even he has a decent shot at the brass ring given the hash that the Dems have made of the country. Making America look like California isn’t a good look. So, what do the Dems do? They distract our gaze to some shiny object – “bad Trump” – dress up misery as glory, and tar good sense as the return of Sauron. Case in point is the bombast directed at Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
The Dems’ ideological soul mates in newsrooms are quick to paste “right-wing” all over it in dark, sinister overtones (see #2 below). But what is it? It isn’t a resurrection of the Spanish Inquisition, the return of Jim Crow or Dickensian workhouses as they would have you believe. A product of the Heritage Foundation, it’s what the group has been doing since their founding in 1973 as a counterpoint to the big-government consensus among elites from the New Deal to Nixon’s surrender to the progressive Leviathan-philosophy of government (wage/price controls, founding of the EPA, etc.). As such, they produced policy proposals with intellectual heft for a burgeoning conservatism that arose around William F. Buckley that ultimately led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Think of them as one of a constellation of think tanks (CATO at times, American Enterprise Institute) making up the loyal opposition to the center-left’s Brookings Institution or the more stridently left-wing Center for American Progress.
Project 2025 has the same philosophical roots as the ideas dating back to Reagan’s ascendancy: tax cuts; deregulation; a return of deterrence; a rollback of Soviet expansionism; missile defense; real education, entitlement, and labor reform; etc. The same outlook is evident in Project 2025, but this time its suddenly and menacingly right-wing to the young babes in the newsrooms and on The View. Has Heritage moved further right, or our chattering classes further left? It’s the latter.
Project 2025 has much in common with the same outlook advanced by Heritage’s first president in 1973, Paul Weyrich. Today’s Left, however, are neo-Marxists. For them, FDR’s Keynesianism is passé. They have revolution in their sights by sanctioning a seizure of power to eradicate the evils of heteronormativity, white and male privilege, the traditional family, global warming, the rich, capitalism, and opposition to gender ideology, alongside their compulsion to shower benefits and favoritism on an ever-growing list of the “oppressed” (“To be an antiracist, you have to be a racist”, a paraphrase of Ibram X. Kendi of CRT fame).
Roosevelt’s New Dealers would be shocked to learn of the prevalent worldview among reporters occupying cubicles at places like the New York Times. The battles over pronouns and bathrooms and the smothering and now-habitual thought-smog of the Frankfurt School’s neo-Marxism – of the Marcuse/Foucault/Gramsci zeitgeist – would seem dismaying to the likes of Woodrow Wilson or New Dealers such as Harold Ickes, Cordell Hull, Adolph Berle, Jr., Harry Hopkins. No wonder that the consistency of Heritage appears so frightening to young cadres who’ve unknowingly jettisoned their liberal forebearers and are fully immersed in a revolution for which they have little understanding. They don’t realize how radical they’ve become.
Go read Project 2025 (see #1 below). It reads like much of the 1980 GOP platform, and that’s because it adheres to a set of universal and well-understood principles: keeping the federal government in the box of its critical and Constitutional responsibilities (protection and fostering comity among its citizens) and ensuring national safety and security abroad.
The Project’s first section is a call for elected officials to once again gain control of a sprawling and increasingly unaccountable bureaucracy. The thousands of federal civil service employees in DC, just below the appointed level, can act as a disloyal opposition thwarting an electorate’s control of their own government. Think of it, cozy relationships between reporters and civil servants result in leaks to obstruct policy initiatives. Just recently, anonymous worker bees signed an open letter opposing aid to Israel in the aftermath of a rabid, barbarically gruesome killing of 1,200 innocent Jews at the hands of a duly elected terrorist group in Gaza. The administrate state is partisan and all the efforts to insulate it from politics have only protected it from facing consequences for their partisan meddling.
The Wikipedia writer(s) castigate Project 2025 for pushing a “highly controversial” view of the unitary executive. No, it is they who have a “highly controversial” view. The mammoth Leviathan that is our modern administrative state is the unmentioned aspect of our Constitutional structure since the federal government took on powers absent from the Constitution (in Article I, Section 8, Cl. 1-18). This humungous entity is a power unto itself. The Wikipedia article is shameful.
The unitary executive isn’t some novel invention. It goes back to the founding (see #3 below). The 19th century’s civil service reforms (Pendleton Act, etc.) were meant to remove the corrupting influence of patronage, the approach to governance represented by Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall in New York City. Today, the threat comes not only from pay-to-play but from a partisan, activist base in the civil service, mostly in DC. The reformers never envisioned public employees becoming a political constituency, a voting bloc with an ability to supplant the wishes of voters across the nation in an election. If you want to “save our democracy”, how about making elections matter once more?
The rest of Heritage’s proposals range from rebuilding deterrence to ending the politicization of education, our health care, to a return to a free market/sound money economy. Vintage Reagan. Of course, the Left doesn’t like it. They never have. If implemented, Project 2025 would set the country up for a second Reaganite resurgence. The Left could be out of power till future generations forget what they did to the country in the second decade of the 21st century.
The only problem is, Republicans also show signs of forgetfulness and the corresponding need to obfuscate and lie about it. Trump is fond of saying, “I made China pay billions [in tariffs]”. No, he didn’t. His new taxes on imports were paid by American manufacturers and consumers.
Trump has a blinkered focus on the “trade deficit”. He, and most Dems, believe that they can politically engineer more American manufacturing and bring the “trade deficit” into balance or positive. For one, the “trade deficit” is only one computation in ascertaining the state of the economy. If you think about it, if a positive trade balance was such a great thing, all nations should pursue it. But if so, it’s an impossibility. Some have to be negative, but that doesn’t necessitate economic despair. That’s because the trade deficit is only one part of the account balance, which includes capital flows. Deficits in one lead to surpluses in the other. Trump and the Dems don’t think that deeply.
So, Trump sends the truth into exile, and that’s where people seem to like it. But if you want to know why manufacturing isn’t the big economic draw that it once was, we elected people for over a century who taxed and regulated the people who make physical goods nearly to death. The industries that subsequently ballooned were the ones that didn’t require them to run into the EPA, the Endangered Species Act(s), the plethora of land-use and environmental regulatory bodies at all levels that have sprouted across the fruited plain. Tech/financial services/communications firms are less likely to run into NIMBYs and greenie activists with activist attorneys to block and delay at every step of the way. Coding and an app can take place on a teenager’s laptop or a garage. Taxes advantage human capital (example: coders, analysts) and punish physical (example: machinery, factories). Manufacturers face adversarial unions who are protected by labor law. The mandates – paid leave, childcare, benefits, exotic interpretations of equity rules and laws – have pounded the dynamism out manufacturing (see #4 below).
Not a word out of Trump about any of this. He only wants to slap tariffs on foreigners. Without correcting any of the above, he’s just jacking up prices and subsidizing economic sloth. Lives don’t get better on the whole, opportunities for generations to come languish, and once again we get reintroduced to TINSTAFL: there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Right now, Americans love the lie, and our political mavens are happy to give it to us good and hard. Yep, it’s election season. The Great Bamboozle is in full swing.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Project 2025: “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 2025” as a pdf at https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
2. Wikipedia encapsulates the left’s reaction under their title “Project 2025”. No doubt, the article came from left-wing contributors. The rhetoric is jarringly of the left.
3. The notion of a unitary executive was explained by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 70. A summary of it can be found at the Bill of Rights Institute, “Federalist 70 Explained | Why Does the U.S. Have a Unitary Executive?”, at https://billofrightsinstitute.org/videos/federalist-70-explained-why-does-the-u-s-have-a-unitary-executive.
4. An explication of the disadvantages of manufacturing in America are presented in “What Washington Should Learn from Tech Companies”, Dominic Pino, National Review, August issue, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/08/what-washington-should-learn-from-tech-companies/.
(Schmuck: a foolish or contemptable person; origin in the Yiddish schmok, i.e. penis)
NIMBYs, schmucks
The chant “Save our democracy”, it’s flung like so many shotgun pellets at anyone viewed as an opponent. What about the people, the people doing the flinging? The reality is that we have more “democracy” than ever before, and the dissatisfaction with our plight has never been greater. How does that compute: more democracy equals more discontent? Can the collective, also known as “the people”, act in the manner of schmucks, harming themselves? Democracy, schmuckocracy?
The level of discontent is palpable in polls. Here’s one: Gallup’s recent survey of public confidence in major institutions ranging from the governmental to the social and economic, public and private (see #1 and #2 below). 11 of the 16 measured entities experienced declines; not one turned in a sterling performance. Much of the public’s lackluster assessment of our institutions can be attributed to their current conduct. Biden’s infirmity, an engineered chaos at the border, the embarrassing bugout from Kabul, the highly destructive endeavor to shut down nearly all human activity during a viral episode, inflation, the unaffordability of shelter, the unaffordability of energy, crime, nothing seems to work, boys in girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, etc., goes a long way to heaping scorn on government, on “our democracy”, on any of our institutions that had a hand in the degeneracy.
eople running alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moved down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August, in 2021. (photo: Associated Press)An alleged transgender boxer consoles Italian boxer who quit after 46 seconds in Olympic female boxing match.
It doesn’t end there. Many private ones – “big business”, big tech, the media – get slammed, and maybe deservedly so.
The Supreme Court takes a hit as well. That might be due to another feature of a democracy: the people’s tendency to be acclimated to bunk. Since 1973 when the Court imperiously invented a provision in the Constitution that established a national right to take unborn life, “the people” grew accustomed to it. A 51-year odyssey ensued to do it. So, by today, people crave their newly minted national license to end the life of people who haven’t exited the womb. The Court’s Dobbs decision just struck the word “national” from the license, not the license itself. But don’t expect “the people” to understand such subtlety.
Combine this with the habit of the public to be persuaded by jargon, such as “assault rifle”, and therefore unwittingly consign the Second Amendment to the mercy of demagogues, and we have another journey down Alice’s rabbit hole. The Constitution stands in the way of the passion of the moment so “the people” turn on it and the Court in demanding a shortcut around the cumbersome task of properly amending it. Understanding isn’t a feature of the mob, which sadly is another trait of democracy.
We’ve injected so much unrestrained democracy into our system that our founders’ original design seems strange to anyone born after the Great Depression. Reading the Constitution must seem like a bizarre experience for a population raised on a steady diet of democracy this and democracy that. An example would be the abuse heaped on the Electoral College. Once a powerful faction loses the presidency by it, but wins the popular vote, they agitate to dismantle it and make the head of the executive branch conform to the wishes of the crowds on the two coasts and every urban center with a college campus. It’s not enough that a form of direct democracy is the operative principle of the lower house of Congress in the Constitution. The will of the mob must be made to dominate throughout.
Lest we forget, checking democracy and its mobs was an important goal of the founders. Here’s a sampling of their views:
“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.” – James Madison
“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” – Alexander Hamilton
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” – John Adams
“It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.” – George Washington
There was never a more searing indictment of democracy than that of Ambrose Bierce when he wrote toward the end of the 19th century, “Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”
“The people” aren’t cognizant of our already mammoth strides away from the founders’ restraints on the lustful will of “the people”. Even for the House of Representatives, that bastion of the popular will in the original framing, a state’s representation became determined by single-district direct elections and not by the state legislatures by the late 19th to early 20th centuries. That was only the beginning of the state legislatures’ attempt to neuter themselves in a mad dash away the founders’ wisdom.
The state legislatures were further taken out of the picture with the 17th Amendment: the direct election of senators. They would no longer have any say in the selection of the state’s two senators. Then came the initiative, referendum, and recall – “the people” make law, reject law, and reverse elections. These ideas were championed by 19th century progressives who were more intent on removing the obstacles to their rise to power. Smoke-filled back rooms were replaced by the big-government, neo-Marxist lunatics of the faculty lounge, the so-called “experts”, the constituency of our modern progressive gang, the people mostly responsible for our discontents when you think about it.
In the irony of all ironies, like the state legislatures, “the people” chose people who then took strides to remove “the people” from self-government, and thus enunciated the rise of the massive and unaccountable administrative state. This new Leviathan can make law (regulations), execute their law, and adjudicate on their law without much input of an electorate. Where’s the democracy? It’s here: “the people” elect progressives, and continue to elect progressives particularly in the populous blue jurisdictions, who then heap more layers on the mountainous administrative state like the many bands piling upward in a mature stratovolcano.
No wonder we’re in a hell of a mess. Pressure will build, and it’ll blow like a proverbial Vesuvius, but make sure that you’re not in the path of the political pyroclastic flow that follows. In 2020, a cop-beating video clip went viral and progressives seized the opportunity to dismantle law enforcement, elect DAs who won’t prosecute, decriminalize criminality, riots erupted, people and property were torched, and many cities descend into the dysfunction and lawlessness where they lie today. The only real export of LA and New York City are people as they flee the pyroclastic flow.
Seattle police at scene of riots in 2020 (photo: KOMO News, Seattle)Seattle the day after the occupation by so-called anarchists and Antifa, 2020 (photo: KTTH 770, Seattle)
One word describes the hidden potential of the “our democracy” chant: California. The taxes, the crime, the sordidness, the inner-city dysfunction, and the pervading sense of overall decay envelop the state and its “democracy”. “The people” in the state chose it, and continue to choose it. California’s “our democracy” is a Democratic one-party state.
Unfortunately, the state’s Democratic Party dominates the national Democratic Party. The socialism of the state’s ruling Dems is the guiding philosophy of the national Dems. The state’s Dems wreck the state’s economy and the national Dems work to imitate the wreckage everywhere else. Quite a tag-team duo.
The state’s Dems lay waste to social life in making a mockery of nature’s male and female. Boys rhetorically become girls and the next thing we see is that they’re in the girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and on their swim, track, volleyball teams, etc. The state’s public schools are required to disseminate the gender confusion in the curriculum. Taking his cues from California, Biden announces changes to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to include the transgendered as a protected class thereby codifying rhetorical girls and boys into everywhere (see #3 below).
The not-so-golden state’s administrative state is imperial thanks to the ruling party’s zeal for upending an entire way of life in a senseless and manic effort to modulate the earth’s atmosphere. That’s right, one state of 39 million people (and declining) is gung-ho about sacrificing its people’s standard of living on the altar of climate-change ideology, acting like they hold the thermostat to the global atmosphere. They’d like to take the suicide attempt national, and Biden is accommodating. In May of this year, the EPA issued new power plant regulations that’ll function as a death warrant to reliable, affordable electricity by mandating expensive efforts (carbon capture, etc.) to reduce emissions in fossil fuel plants (see #4-6 below). It’s death by regulation, parroting California’s lunacy, and Europe’s. However, Europe backed away, not so for the zealots in California and D.C.
Do “the people’s” government in America care? Do “the people” even have enough of a pulse to care? As for the first question, no, they don’t care a lick about your plight. As for the second, no sé. These activists in power are true-believers, with all the heart of a Bergen-Belsen commandant. They are coming to get more than your sedan. They sneer at your air conditioner, which is a lifesaver for anyone not living in Malibu (see #7 below). This is totalitarianism pure and simple. Like a rabid Marxist, their ultimate goal is to reengineer humanity, making the new man, woman, whatever. You’ll be forced to live in the world that they have created for you. And, like previous crusades for heaven on earth, it’ll be the opposite.
Watch as we relive the travel from hubris to nemesis in Greek tragedy. The hubris hides ignorance and arrogance which leads to the disaster of nemesis. Welcome to the base of the Democratic Party and the EPA.
We are living the nemesis that arose out of the hubristic arrogance and ignorance of a clan of firebrands, firebrands that we elected. Don’t like Trump, voted for Biden, maybe vote for Harris in 2024? Reality sets in: you avoid the ogre but get the greenie neo-Marxists and ruination.
Both sides decry the escalating cost of housing, the loss of the “American dream”. The problem can’t be laid at the feet of high interest rates or inflation since it predated Biden’s spiking of the money supply in trillions of new spending. No, speaking of supply, it’s a supply problem. It’s been building for decades. Look around you and you’ll hear hostility to housing construction: “The new people crowd my streets and schools”; “I’ve lost my small town”; “The new developments spoiled the scenery; they’re ugly”; “It’s destroying my property values”; “My property taxes have jumped to pay for their infrastructure and public services.” Who’s there to speak for the young’s access to the “American dream”? Nobody. The only ones filling the hearing rooms and filing the lawsuits are NIMBYs galore and eco-revolutionaries.
This method of governance was pioneered by California. Growth control incubated in northern California (Petaluma, 1961). In that instance, “the people” elected county and city officials to freeze in amber the “character” of the place. What do you think happened to the housing supply? Regulations and delays only added to the cost of whatever survives the local gauntlet.
In fact, the brutal gauntlet was extended. “The people” of California gave to the world the California Coastal Commission (CCC) in approving Prop 20 in 1972, providing more avenues to block, impede, and knock out new housing, or make it so expensive that nobody in their right mind would want to pour a foundation in the “coastal zone”, which is another one of those politically fungible concepts that prove useful to all eco-utopians and would-be social engineers statewide.
The CCC is one of many regulatory behemoths that “the people” of the state have created with their own hand in propositions or through their elected representatives to make it difficult to get the nod to nail two studs together. Eco-obsessions reign supreme. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is the mother of all hoops to jump. It empowers the California Department of Fish and Game, the various Air Quality Management Districts, anything conservation oriented, anything eco-utopian, who can only be pacified by project defeat, endless delays, and burdensome costs. It’s a veritable goat rope.
In a microcosm of the state’s protracted assault on housing, a small 4-lot housing development in Los Osos, San Louis Obispo County, was approved as per the state and the CCC-ratified Local Coastal Program (LCP) of the county. Later, the CCC discovered a sand dune on the property, declared it to be in an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA), and repealed the permits (see #8 below). The developers are fighting back in the California Supreme Court. I’m pessimistic because the state’s courts reflect the longstanding and overweening one-party state.
Gauntlets bedevil the entire state. It’s so prevalent, according to the California Association of Realtor’s (C.A.R.) Housing Affordability Index, only one in five home buyers can afford a median-priced house in the state (see #9 below). According to Zillow, of those prospective home buyers, 70% are married and 44% have children (see #10 below). Where do the underhoused with kids go instead of just another rental in a cramped apartment complex? Good question. Possibly, a U-Haul barreling east on Interstate 10 might be their best option.
But do the powerful really care? Do they understand supply and demand or possess even a rudimentary grasp of trade-offs? Eco-purity is expensive, very expensive. So-called saving the coastal zone or preserving the habitat of the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the gnat catcher, kangaroo rat, mountain lion, or whatever happens to dance across the screen of the hawkers of biodiversity, comes at the price of more than a house or rent. The price tag shows as lost opportunities for the young and generations to come. Their “American dream” will be stillborn. But who shows up at the hearings or has an army of “public interest” law firms ready to file suit in court? It’s the current homeowner who already has their slice of the dream and the eco-zealot who doesn’t care about the dream and would be quite happy with a repeal of the Industrial Revolution and upward mobility. They’d be overjoyed with the return of the Middle Ages.
All of this can be traced back to “the people”, to “our democracy”, to the four wolves deciding the fate of the lamb. The people chose societal collapse. It didn’t magically appear out of the ether. And it shows in the names on the ballot. The parties gave them to us, or, more accurately, the party bases. The political parties are more democratic than ever before, and their choices are miserable for anyone outside the “bases”. For that is what democracy led to: the rise of the “base”. Think of the “base” as a mob, an assemblage animated by jive. For the Democrats, they’re enraptured by Marx and his ideological cousins in the Frankfurt School and faculty lounges everywhere. All of this is unstated, mostly unknown to them since their beliefs never came with source footnotes. They deny it while implementing it. Anybody reaching the top of their slimy pole must sacrifice their good sense at the altar of the base’s groupthink.
Prominent Marxists – “critical theorists” (CRT, being woke) – of the Frankfurt School, who would be influential in the West. From top-left; Oskar Negt, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Claus Offe
The Republicans have discovered their own inner mob, or “base”. It’s a cult around Donald J. Trump. People were right to admire his policy successes but they were a product of Reaganism and not anything that might be construed as Trumpism. Social conservatives and free marketeers populated his administration giving the country border control, tax cuts, deterrence, a burgeoning economy, and a Supreme Court that acts like a court and not a legislature – the very essence of Reaganism.
The socialist Bernie Sanders in 2020AOC and powerful Dems announcing their Green New DealMAGA from 2023 (?)
What would a second Trump term bring? I suspect that it’ll be more like Trump and less like Reagan. In economic policy, he’ll pursue his own form of central planning which is called industrial policy with a flurry of tariffs and taxpayer-funded benefits to his own favorites. Right-to-work – freedom from coerced unionization – may take a back seat in a bid for the union vote. Trade protectionism will be combined with a new isolationism, which is nothing more than America alone. We might even see an abandonment of Ukraine. Would any of this be popular among the general public? It’s hard to say, but it sells with the “base”.
How did we get saddled with an inevitable neo-Marxist and Donald Trump when both are detested? Trump in a good week never rises above the upper 40’s in his favorability. The popularity of the Dems’ neo-Marxism is hard to gauge since it’s never exposed as such. People probably wouldn’t embrace the public pronouncements of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party platform if saw the line-by-line plagiarism from the writings of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School or the eugenics of Margaret Sanger.
As of today (8/3/2024), Trump’s favorability stands at 43.3% and is viewed unfavorably by a whopping 51.7% (according to FiveThirtyEight, see #10 below). He’s a consistent stinker. In the same poll aggregation, Kamala Harris’s standing isn’t much better with 42.4 favorable and 49.1% unfavorable. She’s about the same in the pungency factor, even with a honeymoon of media praise, near worship, after her rise to donkey-party heir apparent.
The Dems’ neo-Marxism and its espousal by its candidates is joined by the GOP’s transformation into a personality cult. For both parties, it’s the culmination of a century and a half of the democratization of their operations, and like the injection of direct democracy into more of our politics, dissatisfaction increases with the results.
Political extremists love the democracy rhetoric, aiming to recreate the Paris mob of the French Revolution. Late 19th century progressives – many of whom were socialists (ex.: John Dewey) – pushed for the direct primary to replace party caucuses. Primaries to choose delegates became routine starting in the 1970s for the Democrats and 1980s for the GOP. It resulted in mass fealty to a person or to a groupthink among the base, thus the rise of the Dems’ Bernie Bros and the woke and the Republicans’ MAGA (see #11 below), with a corresponding rise in public disillusionment.
Democratization means rule by the base, not by the franchise. Interparty rivalries get stamped out by a normally radical groupthink that captures the imagination of the party’s activist base. For Dems, the groupthink is an enthusiasm for a campaign to ferret out white/heteronormative/male privilege, to expand the unacknowledged footprint of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School’s principal creed. They’ll hide it because they have to. The stench of the “socialist” label still pervades.
It’s so widespread that party big wheels – long-in-the-tooth politicos and big donors – had to step into the breech in 2020 to sidestep the frenzy for the Bernie Bros by resurrecting the doddering Biden, and later to swap the infirmed Biden for the younger-but-babbling Kamala Harris. At least the Democrats have some adult guardrails which is a backhanded admission that too much democracy can get you into trouble.
Guardrails don’t seem evident in the GOP. Trump romped from primary to primary despite the fact that he’s the weakest candidate in a general election matchup. Trump is popular with the base, unpopular to the those outside of it. An infirm Biden managed to keep it close with Trump, and now the dullard Kamala Harris has drawn even with the man from Mar-a-Lago. Ironically, with Trump in the picture, execrable socialism is still in play, thanks to mob rule in both parties and a broad apathy compounded by ignorance.
It must be hard to admit that schmucks exist in more places than among elites. Look around you, maybe take a long hard look in the mirror. Me too! More direct democracy exposed the likelihood that schmucks have a broader presence than we’ve been willing to admit. Party bases can be full of them. The general public too. “The people” can desire things that they ought not get. The demands of half-witted utopians and adults who’ve already got theirs trample the prospects of the young and those yet to be born. The adults of today confiscate the opportunities of those too young to vote and future generations.
It’s disgusting, and brought to you by . . . democracy. Democracy, schmuckocracy.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Historically Low Faith in U.S. Institutions Continues”, Lydia Saad, Gallup, 7/6/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-institutions-continues.aspx
2. “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 7/5/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-down-average-new-low.aspx
3. “Biden Administration: Title IX Protections Extend to Transgender Students”, Lauren Camera, US News and World Report, 6/16/2021, at https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-06-16/biden-administration-title-ix-protections-extend-to-transgender-students
4. “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants”, EPA, at https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/greenhouse-gas-standards-and-guidelines-fossil-fuel-fired-power
5. “4 Things to Know About US EPA’s New Power Plant Rules”, Dan Lashof, Lori Bird, and Jennifer Rennicks, World Resources Institute, 5/3/2024, at https://www.wri.org/insights/epa-power-plant-rules-explained
6. Much thanks to Gordon Hughes of the National Center for Energy Analytics in “The EPA’s Proposals for Power Plants Satisfy the Definition of Insanity”, National Review, 5/13/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/the-epas-proposals-for-power-plants-satisfy-the-definition-of-insanity/
7. “It’s time to rethink air conditioning”, Rebecca Leber, Vox, 8/26/2021, at https://www.vox.com/22638093/air-conditioning-worsens-climate-change-ac
8. “California Coastal Commission unlawfully blocks home construction”, Pacific Legal Foundation, describing their lawsuit against the CCC in Shear Development Co., LLC v. California Coastal Commission, at https://pacificlegal.org/case/shear-california-coastal-commission/
9. “2nd Quarter California housing affordability”, California Association of Realtors, 8/11/2023, at https://www.car.org/en/aboutus/mediacenter/newsreleases/2023-News-Releases/2qtr2023hai#:~:text=Fewer%20than%20one%20in%20five%20%2816%20percent%29%20home,according%20to%20C.A.R.%E2%80%99s%20Traditional%20Housing%20Affordability%20Index%20%28HAI%29.
10. FiveThirtyEight’s Aug. 3, 2024 poll aggregation at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
11. “10.1 History of American Political Parties”, Open Library, at https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-1-history-of-american-political-parties/
I am a man of faith. There is a God. But is faith an appropriate basis for judgment in, let’s say, a court of law or a lab? Don’t facts or evidence count? Two instances bring to light the muddled thinking – the weird confusion of using the thought processes of the pew in a trial or medical experiment – in Trump’s surreal conviction of God-knows-what and Salem Media’s now-discredited “2,000 Mules”. The misapplication of faith abounds in both, and both are disgraceful.
Now, with Biden out of the picture, the Dems are pivoting to the tag line “Harris prosecutor and Trump convicted felon”. It’ll work among people who have a deep faith in the Democrats’ neo-Marxist vision, who are already disposed to believe anything that dribbles out of PBS, MSNBC, or The View. However, of what was Trump convicted in a Manhattan court, before a Manhattan jury, by a Manhattan DA who would make a Stalin prosecutor proud? The indictment’s 34 felony counts were actually one count just multiplied every time it appeared in the paperwork. The felonies were invented by injecting an ethereal and fuzzy federal election fraud charge into accusations that can’t survive the statute of limitations. All of it was hocus pocus for people who are inclined to believe in the unbelievable.
Well, the belief in the unbelievable is evident in people who regard Trump to be God’s vicar on earth, in the same fashion as that Manhattan jury’s belief in socialist prosperity, an oxymoron if there ever was one. So, if Trump castigates his 2020 election loss as fraud so will the massive supportive political complex behind him. Facts, evidence aren’t allowed to stand in the way. Salem Media’s “2,000 Mules” is a classic in the annals of political fiction.
In case you haven’t heard, Salem Media dropped Dinesh D’Souza’s “2,000 Mules” from its media platforms and issued an apology to Mark Andrews, one of the so-called “mules” (see #1 and #2 below). As it turned out, Andrews was placing in the Atlanta drop box ballots for himself, his wife, and three adult children. This is one “mule” that couldn’t be made to fit the invented profile. The narrator’s “What you are seeing is a crime” was pure poppycock. What of the other 1,999 “mules”? We get a clue when Salem Media dropped all mention of D’Souza’s monstrosity. Even diehards shrink from the prospect of having to shell out millions of dollars in compensatory awards.
Might there have been vote fraud in 2020? Possibly. Might there have been more fraud than normal? Possibly. But “possibly” shouldn’t be good enough for an electorate with their heads screwed on straight. Good sense demands a large dose of skepticism of an allegation of a secret conspiracy of 2,000 anybodies. A man with much good sense, Benjamin Franklin, once wrote, “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” Actually, conspiracy is the last refuge of the scoundrel, not patriotism, in today’s toxic political playground.
Why is it so toxic? It’s the junction of two factors. On the one hand, in true Marxist fashion, the Democrats have firmly adopted the maxim, the ends justify the means. Anything is considered proper so long as it accomplishes the desired end. On the other hand, the Democrats’ institutional heft behind the neo-Marxist revolution is confronted by their opponents’ cult of the middle finger in the person of Donald Trump. As a result, our politics are grotesque and filled with fantasies.
Welcome to a public that has been made into chumps.
December 2020:
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Publisher of ‘2000 Mules’ Apologizes to Georgia Man Falsely Accused of Ballot Fraud in the Film”, US News and World Report from AP, 5/31/2024, at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/georgia/articles/2024-05-31/publisher-of-2000-mules-apologizes-to-georgia-man-falsely-accused-of-ballot-fraud-in-the-film
2. “A Belated Apology for ‘2000 Mules’”, Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, 6/5/2024, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/2000-mules-salem-media-lawsuit-mark-andrews-dinesh-dsouza-2020-election-true-the-vote-1565ace0
California Governor Gavin NewsomA big crowd was on hand when the Murrieta Valley Unified School District board voted last August to mandate that parents be told if their child shows any indication at school of being transgender. (photo: Mallika Seshadri / EdSource)
*Please tune into the recent Radio Free California podcast, “Least Mode” (available on Spotify), particularly the second half which is a discussion between Lance Christensen of the California Policy Center (CPC), and past candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Julie Hamill, CPC attorney and parent. It should scare your socks off. It should be required listening for anyone with children or grandchildren in the state’s schools.
*************
The popularly elected governor, Gavin Newsome, and the popularly elected Democrat super majority in the state legislature passed and the governor signed AB 1955, maliciously misnamed the “The Safety Act” (see #1 below). It would require student “privacy” protections against their parents. The law requires school officials and teachers to hide gender identity issues from parents at the behest of minors. Call it a right to lie to parents. Combined with the curricular California Healthy Youth Act (CHYA), which inducts your kids into gender ideology (see #2 below), you will be in for a hell of a ride. And after indoctrination, you will know nothing about it if it produces the likely effect of gender confusion in tweens and teens already going through the tumult of puberty.
These kids are the most vulnerable, and the state of California is the chief abettor, or maybe chief molester is more appropriate. The ruling party will cast the issue in a number of humanitarian ways, but the result is the same. You are frozen out when you drop your kid off at the bus stop or school. A U-Haul may be your only way out of the grip of the public employee unions, LGBTQ+ brigades, and the popular infatuation with lefty ideology which actually runs the state. A spine to stand up to these miscreants is in short supply in the state.
Get out, get out now! Voting is inconsequential. Your only hope is to escape your popularly elected officials by appealing to someone with greater sense, someone beyond the state’s electorate – say, the federal courts. Good luck with that, with the Biden claque running interference for the state-sponsored mutilators. So much for the beauties of democracy.
What beauty is there in scarred chests and genitalia?
If you care about your kids, if you don’t relish a lifetime of surgeries, pharmaceuticals, and medical interventions for your kids, get out, get out now! I don’t know what else to say.
Please watch the report below.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Newsom signs bill banning schools from notifying parents about student gender identity”, Mackenzie Mays, LA Times, 7/15/2024, at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-15/newsom-bans-schools-from-requiring-that-parents-are-notified-about-student-gender-identity
2. “Comprehensive Sexual Health & HIV/AIDS Instruction: California Healthy Youth Act”, California Department of Education, at https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/he/se/
This piece has little to say about the Trump shooter, simply because we know so little. It’s about the common threads of political violence and murder in the history of the last century and a half.
Violence as a means of political expression has come and gone only to return. The mobs of ancient Athens and other Greek poli were legendary. The 11th century’s Islamic Order of Assassins is renowned.
Starting in the late 19th century, political murder, assassinations, the targeting of prominent leaders, appeared with greater frequency. By the first few decades of the of the 20th, the collective action of gangs and mobs reemerged alongside the more targeted approach to killing. Something entered our political bloodstream to make political discourse incendiary from the late 19th century on. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump could be another episode in this sorry state of affairs.
The chronicle of political murder beginning in the late 19th century is startling. The incidences increased with the rise of revolutionary reformist movements of the anarcho-socialist-communist bent. Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by killers of the Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), a collection of revolutionary socialists. Then, entering the 20th came a string of killings. The Russia of this period was a breeding ground for them. Aleksandr Ulyanov, the brother of Lenin (real name: Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov), was executed in 1887 for his involvement in a plot to kill Czar Alexander III. In 1911, the reformist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin was murdered by another of those revolutionary socialists of the time.
Unrest, plots, and assassinations continued apace till the stresses of World War I provided opportunities for the most radical and violent of the revolutionary socialists, the Bolsheviks, to seize power in Petrograd in 1917 and eventually exterminated Czar Nicholas and his entire immediate family, including retainers, in July 1918: Nicholas, wife Alexandra, their 4 daughters of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the young heir Alexei. Others of the extended family soon followed. Under the rule of a string of communist general secretaries, the now USSR was plagued with purges, a gulag archipelago, mass executions, and thousands of the singular quiet variety in the basement of secret police headquarters in the Lubyanka, Moscow. It’s state-sponsored political violence on a mass scale.
The king of Greece, George I, was murdered in the streets of Thessaloniki in 1913. 13 years before, the king of Italy Umberto I was assassinated by an anarcho-socialist in Monza, Italy. One year after the king of Greece succumbed, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie were murdered in Sarajevo by a greater-Serbia nationalist. All suffered at the hands of fanatics of some abstract reformist better world, most frequently of one brand of revolutionary socialism or another.
Presidents Garfield (1882) and McKinley (1901) experienced a similar fate at the instigation of a similar cast of characters. From the 1880s on, anarcho-socialists targeted business leaders and successfully bombed Wall Street in 1920 killing 40 and injuring 143. Reaching down to the middle of the 20th century, JFK was killed by a loner of the same psychological profile as Gavrilo Princip (killer of the archduke and wife) or Leon Czolgosz (the McKinley assassin). The disenchanted, alienated, radicalized, and unbalanced went after Reagan and Gerald Ford. In the 21st, a Bernie Sanders supporter attempted the extermination of the Republican House leadership in 2017.
January 6, 2021 accorded some Trump rally attendees the opportunity to flex their collective riot muscles. This pales when compared to the 2020 summer of riots, killings, lootings, and arson, all excused as a reaction to some indefinable, mysterious, hidden racism – the same so-called structural oppression that can be traced back to the doctrines of Narodnaya Volya and the assassination of Czar Alexander II.
Most political murders of the past century and a half coincided with a fervor for reformist schemes of a revolutionary socialist cast. Progressivism simultaneously arose from an associated reformist zeal: the passion to construct the “progressive” state under a class of appointed “experts” to rationalize society. For both progressives and revolutionary socialists, possession of the power of the state is the sine qua non (essential condition) for building the better world. There’s so much at stake that, for some, murder might appear excusable. Political violence is frequently the underbelly of reformist zeal.
Their zeal to seize the commanding heights, as Lenin put it, has led to an equally zealous attempt to stop them. Donald Trump isn’t an idea politician. He’s the middle finger to the establishment of those pushing the aggrandizement of state power. Trump is a gesture politician who draws strong gestures from the opposition, who happen to be the same people already in possession of excessive reformist passion.
Up to now, the hair trigger hasn’t come from MAGA. A century and a half of political violence shows that revolutionary socialism with its reformist zeal provides a much more consistent impetus for political killings and wide-ranging violence. Hitler and Mussolini were as ruthless insofar as they had their own programs of upheaval to impose on their people. Race socialism shares the same ideological DNA as the socialists’ systemic extermination of a spectral bourgeoisie, the nebulous “enemies of the working class”. They both trade in the common currency of radical social engineering and don’t shy from radical means to achieve radical ends.
Skepticism about ending political violence is warranted so long as extremist reform movements, mostly of the anarcho-socialist persuasion (think Antifa, BLM and offshoots, CRT, etc.), occupy pride of place in one of our two major political parties. For them, a state of expansive powers is essential to remake the world. This extremism seldom applies the breaks to extremist actions.
This piece has little to say about the Trump shooter, simply because we know so little. It’s about the common threads of political violence and murder in the history of the last century and a half.
Violence as a means of political expression has come and gone only to return. The mobs of ancient Athens and other Greek poli were legendary. The 11th century’s Islamic Order of Assassins is renowned.
Starting in the late 19th century, political murder, assassinations, the targeting of prominent leaders, appeared with greater frequency. By the first few decades of the of the 20th, the collective action of gangs and mobs reemerged alongside the more targeted approach to killing. Something entered our political bloodstream to make political discourse incendiary from the late 19th century on. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump could be another episode in this sorry state of affairs.
The chronicle of political murder beginning in the late 19th century is startling. The incidences increased with the rise of revolutionary reformist movements of the anarcho-socialist-communist bent. Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by killers of the Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), a collection of revolutionary socialists. Then, entering the 20th came a string of killings. The Russia of this period was a breeding ground for them. Aleksandr Ulyanov, the brother of Lenin (real name: Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov), was executed in 1887 for his involvement in a plot to kill Czar Alexander III. In 1911, the reformist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin was murdered by another of those revolutionary socialists of the time.
Unrest, plots, and assassinations continued apace till the stresses of World War I provided opportunities for the most radical and violent of the revolutionary socialists, the Bolsheviks, to seize power in Petrograd in 1917 and eventually exterminated Czar Nicholas and his entire immediate family, including retainers, in July 1918: Nicholas, wife Alexandra, their 4 daughters of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the young heir Alexei. Others of the extended family soon followed. Under the rule of a string of communist general secretaries, the now USSR was plagued with purges, a gulag archipelago, mass executions, and thousands of the singular quiet variety in the basement of secret police headquarters in the Lubyanka, Moscow. It’s state-sponsored political violence on a mass scale.
The king of Greece, George I, was murdered in the streets of Thessaloniki in 1913. 13 years before, the king of Italy Umberto I was assassinated by an anarcho-socialist in Monza, Italy. One year after the king of Greece succumbed, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie were murdered in Sarajevo by a greater-Serbia nationalist. All suffered at the hands of fanatics of some abstract reformist better world, most frequently of one brand of revolutionary socialism or another.
Presidents Garfield (1882) and McKinley (1901) experienced a similar fate at the instigation of a similar cast of characters. From the 1880s on, anarcho-socialists targeted business leaders and successfully bombed Wall Street in 1920 killing 40 and injuring 143. Reaching down to the middle of the 20th century, JFK was killed by a loner of the same psychological profile as Gavrilo Princip (killer of the archduke and wife) or Leon Czolgosz (the McKinley assassin). The disenchanted, alienated, radicalized, and unbalanced went after Reagan and Gerald Ford. In the 21st, a Bernie Sanders supporter attempted the extermination of the Republican House leadership in 2017.
January 6, 2021 accorded some Trump rally attendees the opportunity to flex their collective riot muscles. This pales when compared to the 2020 summer of riots, killings, lootings, and arson, all excused as a reaction to some indefinable, mysterious, hidden racism – the same so-called structural oppression that can be traced back to the doctrines of Narodnaya Volya and the assassination of Czar Alexander II.
Most political murders of the past century and a half coincided with a fervor for reformist schemes of a revolutionary socialist cast. Progressivism simultaneously arose from an associated reformist zeal: the passion to construct the “progressive” state under a class of appointed “experts” to rationalize society. For both progressives and revolutionary socialists, possession of the power of the state is the sine qua non (essential condition) for building the better world. There’s so much at stake that, for some, murder might appear excusable. Political violence is frequently the underbelly of reformist zeal.
Their zeal to seize the commanding heights, as Lenin put it, has led to an equally zealous attempt to stop them. Donald Trump isn’t an idea politician. He’s the middle finger to the establishment of those pushing the aggrandizement of state power. Trump is a gesture politician who draws strong gestures from the opposition, who happen to be the same people already in possession of excessive reformist passion.
Up to now, the hair trigger hasn’t come from MAGA. A century and a half of political violence shows that revolutionary socialism with its reformist zeal provides a much more consistent impetus for political killings and wide-ranging violence. Hitler and Mussolini were as ruthless insofar as they had their own programs of upheaval to impose on their people. Race socialism shares the same ideological DNA as the socialists’ systemic extermination of a spectral bourgeoisie, the nebulous “enemies of the working class”. They both trade in the common currency of radical social engineering and don’t shy from radical means to achieve radical ends.
Skepticism about ending political violence is warranted so long as extremist reform movements, mostly of the anarcho-socialist persuasion (think Antifa, BLM and offshoots, CRT, etc.), occupy pride of place in one of our two major political parties. For them, a state of expansive powers is essential to remake the world. This extremism seldom applies the breaks to extremist actions.
