Posted on

It’s the Beliefs, Stupid!

MSNBC "Morning Joe" co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough on Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024 after the election was called for Trump.
MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough called “the scope and scale” of Trump’s victory “sweeping.”

In the 1992 political war room of Bill Clinton, James Carville famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid!”  It became a cliché.  To a certain extent, it’s a key factor this year.  But more lies underneath the public’s fixation with the economy.  A troubled economy can be the product of the wrong sort of beliefs.  Furthermore, a constellation of beliefs underlies a whole range of issues as a person addresses their ballot.  At this point, it’s gone way beyond the economy.  It’s the beliefs, stupid!

While blaming the other side for economic problems can catapult a party to victory, as it did for Clinton in 1992, it can also hide disturbing party ideas that’ll only appear once in office.  It didn’t take long for Bill Clinton to uncloak the Democrats’ fetish for government control of almost everything – in this case, healthcare, 17% of the economy.  Remember Hillary Care?  People didn’t vote for this in 1992.  It brought to an end the nearly 40-year Democrat reign of the House in 1995.  Welcome to Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Forward to 2024, in the attempted postmortem of Democrat losses, donkey party enthusiasts can’t come to grips with the reality that this radical Left version of the party isn’t popular.  For instance, transgenderism swiftly took corporeal form under their tutelage and began wrecking girls’ sports, their bathrooms and locker rooms, and in tandem with the propagation of gender ideology in the schools, adolescents were exposed to porn and gender “transition”.  Gender confusion for children and Hustler-grade picture books aren’t winners.  Duh!

What were they thinking?  The Democrats chided Republicans for bringing it up as if the issue was concocted out of thin air by the GOP and Democrats have nothing to do with it.  Really?  Rachel Levine (born Richard) as Asst. Health Secretary, Biden’s “God bless you” to Dylan Mulvaney after his endorsement decimated Bud Light, a transgender celebration at the White House, and the manipulation of Title IX to sanction XY “girls” in every place with a Girl/Woman identifier are but a few eyebrow-raisers while parents watched their daughters losing to girls of the XY variety in women’s sports.  A hard volleyball smash to the face by an XY “girl” changed a real girl’s life forever.  Women’s track and swimming were distorted beyond recognition.  Women’s Olympic boxing was nearly turned into a murder scene.

May be an image of 11 people
Transwoman Rose Montoya, who bared her/his breast implants at the June 2023 White House pride event.

May be an image of 2 people, people playing voleyball and text

The muddle of broad American sentiment on transgenderism began to crystalize into general opposition, particularly when asked about specifics.  The view hardened as we approached the November 5 election.  In 2024, after discussion intensified and baleful stories of the ill-effects of transgenderism accumulated, support for the reality of sex at birth increased to sizeable majorities (65%) (see #1).  In 2023, almost 70% of respondents to a Gallup poll viewed biological sex to be the determinant of athletic participation (see #2).  YouGov in February 2024 chronicled large majorities opposing the “transition” (“gender affirming care”: psyche control, chemical and surgical interventions) of their children by authorities.

Not only were their daughters threatened by the donkey party but government was herding them into cars that they didn’t want and delivering bankrupting energy costs all around.  It seemed that the worst of California had come to their neighborhood, their garage, their schools, the intimate spaces of their homes, in many more ways than the price of eggs.  The border was erased and the illegal immigrants were rewarded with plane and bus rides to the interior.  Towns and cities and schools and housing and streets were flooded with foreign nationals who simply walked across without our approval (violating our laws).  Crime spiked.  Who voted for this in 2020?

But somehow, much of the after-election analysis skips all of this and wonders into incoherence.  Typical of the foolishness was AP’s Matthew Brown in his “An influx of outsiders and money turns Montana Republican, culminating in a Senate triumph” of 11/22/024 (see #4).  He essentially blames newcomers and outside money for Montana Democrat Sen. John Tester’s loss and the state turning red.  In fact, as of October of 2024, the Tester campaign had outspent Sheehy $69.6 million to $19.7 million.  Groups external to the candidates’ campaigns, all of it outside money, broke roughly even between the two.  Adding it up, Tester had the money advantage (see #5).

May be an image of 1 person, dancing and crowd
Supporters cheer at election night watch party for Republican Tim Sheehy
May be an image of 2 people
Sheehy delivers his victory speech

It showed.  Sitting on my perch in northwest Montana, I watched 4-5 Tester ads for every Sheehy one, whether streaming or broadcast.

And what of those “newcomers”?  “Newcomers” don’t automatically turn a state red.  “Newcomers” attracted to Santa Fe/Taos ambience and the “Rocky Mountain High” turned New Mexico and Colorado reliably blue.  It’s also quite possible that the migrations of the 1990’s and the early 2,000’s (to NM and Colorado for example) are politically and philosophically different from those of the last decade and a half.  The bulk of recent relocators could be classified as “refugees” fleeing the shift to the radical Left on the west coast, myself included, to outposts in Idaho and Montana.  Once again, it comes down to beliefs.

The west coast shifted hard Left after the end of the Cold War.  The state of Governor Ronald Reagan began to resemble today’s Venezuela more than the Beach Boys.  The counterculture rose to prominence as the governing philosophy.  The phenomena spread to Oregon and Washington State.

What was true of the west coast simultaneously occurred in metropolitan areas and college campuses across the country.  Our cities became hotbeds of grime and violence.  Blue states became infatuated with climate-change ideology and its attendant central planning.  Taxes, regulation, and misgovernance spread like wildfire, including the literal wildfires.

Colleges morphed into satraps of the Frankfurt School.  What’s that?  Marxist academics in the 1920s and 1930s coalesced in Frankfurt, Germany, and formed a “School”, a Marxist think tank hewing to the reformulated Marxism of the Italian Antonio Gramsci.  It came to the U.S. as its advocates fled Hitler and took positions in America’s elite colleges such as the University of California, Harvard, NYU, etc.  Thus, “woke”/critical theory/CRT/DEI arose as a rigid orthodoxy throughout academia.  It’s everywhere, unquestioned, inescapable.  It passed down the social digestive tract from faculty to student to K-12 to the commanding heights of the culture.  You can’t watch an ad, or most anything from Disney, without exposure to it.  The c-suite is consumed by it which explains why, for instance, Wells Fargo ads are filled with their various ways to reinflate the housing bubble of 2007-8, and Big Sports’ infatuation with the oppressor/oppressed schtick.

This Leftist groupthink is manifest in urban nodes where we also find the training schools – the colleges – and corporate headquarters.  When put into practice, the orthodoxy drives people away.  The consequences overwhelm any initial surface appeal.  Local economies are warped as sensitive groups like the middle class, the skilled trades, and manufacturing flee to more hospitable states.

Media people such as the AP’s Matthew Brown, infected as they are with the orthodoxy, don’t get it.  The dynamic of push/pull is as evident in politics as it is in economics.  People are pushed every bit as much as pulled in a particular direction.  Maybe “pushed” is more powerful this time around.  Could it be that voters were more repelled by the what the Democrats have become than any great affection for Trump?  In other words, has the Democratic Party become repugnant?

If so, well, we’re back to, “It’s the beliefs, stupid!”

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'RANIRZ 20240GREACAS.COLAEWASHISIO 202 STEEAS TEAASEEVI REVW JOURRAL THE WASHINGTONE TAET FOST 20240 DAKRIS CREATORS. coM BIG GOVERNMENT SOFT Regulations FAR cn OPEN VICTIMHOOD LEFT CRIME BORDEA RAMA 4.0 RAISE PROGRESSINVE TAXES DEFUND 太太太太大地 HOW it olicies EQUITY IT'Sthe ThE EVENPOSSIBLE EVEN CONO 材 LOSE to TRUMP? STUPIL iture NAR POLICE 大 EQUALITY MANDATES BIDEN2.0 EXTREME GREEN TEACHERS UNIONS ONER PARENTS GENDER THEORY DE! IDENTITY POLITICS SPEND BIDENOMICS 島口 PK WAIZ VOTE FILDISIER STER WOKE PRONOUNS TAM ۷ X@Ramireztoons Ramireztoons michaelpramircz.com'

RogerG

Sources:
1. “Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election: 5. Gender identity, sexual orientation and the 2024 election”, Pew Research Center, 6/6/2024, at https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/06/gender-identity-sexual-orientation-and-the-2024-election/
2. “More Say Birth Gender Should Dictate Sports Participation”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 6/12/2023, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/507023/say-birth-gender-dictate-sports-participation.aspx
3. “Where Americans stand on 20 transgender policy issues”, Taylor Orth, YouGov, 2/16/2024, at https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48685-where-americans-stand-on-20-transgender-policy-issues
4. “An influx of outsiders and money turns Montana Republican, culminating in a Senate triumph”, Matthew Brown, AP, 11/22/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/montana-republicans-wealth-democrats-8a1fdd90ef328701127d8a21ebb82dd3
5. “Montana Senate race shatters spending records at $309 per registered voter”, Aubrie Spady, Fox News, 10/24/2024, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/montana-senate-race-shatters-spending-records-309-spent-per-registered-voter?msockid=287a0b967a9564c61c991f537b2f65ee

Posted on

Jon Tester is a Democrat. Don’t Forget That.

May be an image of 7 people and text
en. Jon Tester (D, Mt.) at the far right and Sen. Chuck Schumer (center) at the lectern

Sen. Jon Tester is a Democrat, duh! As a Democrat, and after the great national ideological sorting by party that has taken place over the last few decades, that says a lot about him.  Where are the conservative Democrats?  They’re gone!  He insists on being a Democrat while one is left groping for a reason.  He runs as a Trumper when running for reelection back home, and he absolutely fits the MAGA-clichéd look: grizzled, flat top, overhanging belly, pickup truck with gun, white farmer.  But he votes as a national Democrat, which is nearly identical to being a California Democrat.

Being a Democrat today (California or otherwise) ranges from taking on the policy preferences of Europe’s Social Democrats – i.e., socialist – and enviro-extremist Greens – i.e., socialist – or the UK’s Labor Party – i.e., socialist – to the neo-Marxism of AOC, Elizabeth Warren, etc.  His ads stress the part of the far-Left agenda that will sell in Montana: class warfare, interstate xenophobia, and abortion, abortion, and more abortion.  If a person ever sat down to actually give them some thought, they’re a collective hot mess.

For instance, an endless Tester spot plugging his support for abortion-and-more-abortion shows him gently touching a baby in her mother’s arms.  Think about it: pushing abortion and a mother with baby. It’s the logical equivalent of joining matter and anti-matter.  The baby can’t understand how close she came to not being in her mother’s arms, or anywhere.  The baby’s existence hung by the delicate thread of whether her mother would use her “right” to end her existence.  The scene is so bizarre.  But it sells in a state hung up on the freedom of the individual to exterminate the next generation.

It’s more than this.  He takes the party line on January 6th, which is as close to a party sacrament as one can get.  Babylon Bee satirizes it as “January 6: The Most Deadliest Day” [sic].  What did Tester say on its anniversary in 2021?  He released on his website the following: “January 6, 2021 was one of the darkest days in our nation’s history . . . .” (see the full statement here: https://www.tester.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/pr-8833/)

Please watch the Babylon Bee’s parody for counterpoint and perspective. Go to the link:

Jon Tester is a California Democrat in muddy boots. Looks great but people like him are destroying our way of life.  Montanans have a guy in Washington who looks like Montana but votes to turn us into California.

*P.S.: Facebook doesn’t like the Babylon Bee or the New York Post, which included a story on Tester raking in Lefty California campaign cash.  A quarter, maybe more, in his treasury came from California.  You’ll have to search “Montana Democrat Sen. Jon Tester rakes in cash after California soiree, New York Post” to get the story.  Censorship is alive and well on Facebook.

RogerG

Posted on

A Blue-Collar Command Economy, or The Blue-Collar Suck-Up

Trump Hard Hat
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump (photo: Mark Lyons/Getty Images)

Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, first verse:

“I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she would meet her connection
At her feet was a foot-loose man
No, you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime, you’ll find
You get what you need”

Needs and wants, there’s a difference.  Mick Jagger knew it.  Needs are fundamental; wants are desires, the things that we would like.  In normal times, the two are mangled beyond recognition, doubly so in election season.

Both parties – one a neo-Marxist enterprise, the other a personality cult – are in a mad dash to pander to the so-called middle and working classes, non-college educated.  By so doing, the two parties in this time of voting advocate a command economy for the benefit of this general mass of people who work by the clock, do contract labor, and own small businesses.  Here’s a splash of cold water: command economies don’t work, no matter their alleged beneficiary.  Why?  They’re commanded by the government, it’s employees and politicians.  Any goodies granted one group come at the expense of the others, not just the rich, and will include many in the middling ranks of the socioeconomic pyramid.  It’s the philosophy of beggar-thy-neighbor.  That’s all that governments can do.  Any bennies for blue collars – or the middle class – will come at the expense of the gradual negation of their own jobs and the futures of their children as future growth is diminished by “fair share” demagoguery against the rich.  We’ll pay in more ways than one, not just at the checkout counter.  The economic math is inexorable.

Though, to be real, today, the college-educated aren’t any more cognitively advantaged than the non-college educated.  Many BAs, maybe most, are just proofs of indoctrination in claptrap.  Indoctrination is not education.

The claptrap may help explain the broad acceptance of economic nonsense.  A belief is deeply embedded that our specie of unionization is good, that you can wall off the country from foreign competition, hike taxes on the rich, and ignore the rest of the world, and everything will be hunky-dory.  That isn’t a realistic game plan.  It’s merciless, incremental national suicide.

Anyway, such is the political fashion of the time.  Warning: fashionable politics and economic good sense don’t mix, like drinking and driving.

Profoundly galling is the demagogic blue-collar suck-up from both parties in the form of a love affair with “coerced” unionization, for that’s what we’re talking about, coerced.  Of course, “coerced” is a yucky word, so they want to leave it at simple “unionization”.  But honesty demands that we realize that the NEA, AFL-CIO, SEIU, the Teamsters, the entire litany of labor monopolists, actually demand “compulsory” (coerced) membership for everyone in the workplace.  These folks aren’t into “voluntary”.

Their political word play doesn’t clarify squat.  More of the word play clouds the picture even more.  Coerced unionization comes in something referred to as “collective bargaining”.  The question is, for them and everybody else, how to make a “collective” out of an inchoate mass of workers of divergent individual interests and beliefs?  Answer: set up a system of legal protocols to force everyone into the thing, that’s how.  A monopoly of labor under one set of masters, that’s how.  Use the power of the state to impose one man, one vote, one time, since it’s harder than hell to decertify the labor monopoly once it’s established.  After the initial certification vote to create the thing, you might be able to opt out, but you’re still going to have to pay for the thing (in California, “agency fees”).  And don’t underestimate the organization’s creative bookkeeping to vacuum as much as possible out of every employee’s paycheck into the union treasury.

And guess what the dues-fueled slush fund goes for? Politics and more politics.  These unions realize that their very existence is dependent on the power of the state to create and enforce the protocols that create them.  Their existence and power are dependent on the state.  Limited government, on the other hand, by definition, leaves little opportunity to hobnob with politicians to make law to squash dissenters at the workplace.  That’s the reason for the unions’ hearty distaste for our constitutional republic.  By definition, a constitution limits government power to what’s written.  Big Labor demands what’s not written and therefore legally impermissible, and progressivism obliges.  Progressives (in today’s parlance, neo-Marxists), as the unions’ chief political benefactors, simply interpret The Constitution out of the way by calling it a “living constitution”.  How convenient.

In the end, these politically privileged labor monopolies cannibalize their own industries and morph into pillars of radical cultural revolution, ready to join their lefty comrades at the parapets. Industries flee their self-destructive grip; opportunities decay for upward mobility; many of its members discover their daughters sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with XY “girls”; and their schools, streets, parks, and downtowns are dangerous pits of despair. So much for “look for the union label”.  This ain’t your grandpa’s UAW.

In fact, the UAW eyes richer fields to plow in organizing tomorrow’s cultural revolutionaries in the growing cadres of college teaching assistants.  Imagine it, your son or daughter might be taught or their papers graded by a Hamas-loving activist who can’t be removed due to the protective political and legal force field provided by the UAW.  It’s happening in California.  The UAW has jumped on board the organizing gravy train of public employment, the very thing that has rendered California irredeemably ungovernable.  California’s one-party state has turned itself into a clone of the Islamic Republic of Iran or the CCP with the guardians of the revolution, like the mullahs or the Party politburo, being the cabal of labor mandarins who were empowered by the very same state government that they now dominate.  For the worker bees, they mostly approve of this arrangement so long as the pipeline of bennies keeps flowing, a glaring example of stage one thinking.

“Most thinking stops at stage one.” — Thomas Sowell in Applied Economics

17 Best images about Thomas Sowell on Pinterest | Sociology, Economics and Liberalism
Thomas Sowell

Stage-one thinking?  Sowell defines stage one as a myopic concern with only the immediate consequence of a proposal or action.  Then a sharper mind, in response, forces the person to address, “Then what?”  After a series of then-whats, the person quickly realizes that their great idea is buffoonery.  But don’t expect much stage two or three among most of those without a BA, and many of those walking around with one.  According to a Pew survey from 2019, those with less than a college degree are four-and-a-half times more likely to view our participation in the global economy as a bad thing (see #1 and #2 below).  Blue collar support for a wide range of foreign engagements has been waning for years.  But then what, after the tariffs and abandonment of Ukraine?

You see, a stage-one buzzword of the Left has entered the lexicon of the Right: industrial policy, which basically translates into raising the economic drawbridge in international trade.  It parallels Lenin’s infamous “central planning”.  In central planning, the government manages, or directs, the economy to mold the “better society”.  Whose better society?  Of course, it’s the one in the mind of those perpetual obsessives who’ve spent their adult lives in fevered hatred of the existing patterns of life.  The mental pathology infects the Left, and now the virus has come to the Right.

Quote of the Day: Hayek on Knowledge | Learn Liberty

The scheme runs four-square into Hayek’s “knowledge problem”.  Their end state of bliss – America First – demands great power in the form of more government interventions to direct the lives of millions of economic actors acting both as buyers and sellers, consumers and producers, taxpayers and beneficiaries, in the whole range of possible economic activities available to each one of these participants.  Such knowledge and wisdom are beyond human capacity, let alone the people manning the controls of the massive administrative state, the Fed, congressional committee staff, local planning commissions and boards of supervisors, a state’s Dept. of Fish and Game, Coastal Commissions, or the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the people who’ll enforce Trump’s tariffs.  It’s a fool’s errand, but one, today, the Right seems anxious to pursue.  Read J.D. Vance’s or Donald Trump’s speeches.

The people who don’t like you driving a Toyota are the same people who see no reason for NATO, an independent Ukraine, protecting Taiwan and its Taiwan Semiconductor, or preventing the oil-rich Middle East from becoming the playground of the mullahs.  For stage-one thinkers, anything beyond our borders places an out-of-sight second to the extortionate goodies made possible by a cozy relationship with accommodating politicians.  Don’t expect stage-one thinkers to have a grasp of the world war stage-setting in the 1938 Munich Agreement.  Aggression was rewarded and soon we were embroiled in a total war of 80 million deaths, civilian and military.

Iwo Jima Photo Taken 70 Years Ago Today - David Hume Kennerly
Scene from the Battle for Iwo Jima, Feb.-March 1945

We could have stayed out as the first edition of America First in 1940 demanded.  It took a brazen surprise attack to shock stage-one thinkers into realizing that events an ocean away can lead to Americans dying in large numbers.

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” — G. Michael Hopf in his novel Those Who Remain

Though, are we the same kind of people who could tolerate the bloody storming of the beaches of Iwo Jima and D-Day’s Omaha, or show persistence in the horrid conditions of Okinawa, the Hürtgen Forest, or the Battle of the Bulge?  One has to wonder.  Our elections are a barometer of the public psyche.  Look at the pitches, now from both sides.  Our elections are looting expeditions.  Republicans promise not to touch our bankrupting entitlements while delivering on all manner of goodies to the middle class and blue collars.  Ditto for the donkey party, only by a factor of ten. It’s all billed as fair-share justice when in reality it’s just targeting the successful to bankroll their pet social engineering schemes.  Being spoon fed from the public treasury isn’t a promising approach in preserving a hardy people.

The Democrats used to be the party of government command and control. Not any longer.  The Republicans offer a similar farce.

Think about it. What’ll happen in this command economy of the Right is a replay of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (Simpson-Mazzoli) signed by Reagan.  We got the amnesty but little of the other component: enforcement.  Trump will get his tariffs – something the Democrats are already giddy about – but won’t get much regulatory relief, the very thing that makes us uncompetitive with the rest of the world.  The blue-collar suck-up in the form of compulsory unionization also awaits.  We might get some reprieve from the greenie totalitarianism, but NIMBYism remains a populist obsession.  Republicans have no stomach to fight hikes in the minimum wage, nor the other humungous host of mandates that raise the cost of doing business in the U.S.  The tariff wall goes up and we will wallow in our own petri dish of fiscal and regulatory incontinence.

Prices will rise, and we may not even notice it.  Higher prices only become apparent if there is a point of comparison.  Where’s the comparison after walling off the competition?  However, we will see an economy frozen in amber, limping along, with accountability and the essential force of creative destruction limited to those smaller firms without an intimate relationship with powerful politicos.  The big government of the command economy necessitates big business.  Big government and big business are Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum.

The Toxic Relationship Between Big Government and Big Business - Cecil County Conservative ...

Welcome to the cesspool of the blue-collar command economy and an electoral choice between detestables.  That’s our choice this time around in the presidential sweepstakes: a California totalitarian with a velvet glove or a self-absorbed panderer.  Oh, the panderer is “tough”, but only tough on foreigners and not to some within his own ranks who unwittingly demand undeserved and extortionate privileges.  Which one of the offerings do you dislike the most?

For me, I’ll put on the hazmat suit and vote for the bombastic panderer.  Somehow, a cultural revolution of porn to grade schoolers, teenage genital mutilation, XY “girls” everywhere in women’s spaces, eat the rich, carte blanche abortion inclusive of pedicide (killing of children), and greenie totalitarianism seems to be more Orwellian than the tariff buffoonery and blue-collar suck-up.  There, I made my choice.

May be an image of text

RogerG

Sources:

1. “6. Views of foreign policy”, Pew Research Center, 12/19/2019, at https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/12/17/6-views-of-foreign-policy/
2. “Majority of Americans take a dim view of increased trade with other countries”, Pew Research Center, 7/29/2024, at https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/29/majority-of-americans-take-a-dim-view-of-increased-trade-with-other-countries/

Posted on

The United States of California

Bye-bye California: More and more golden state residents are deciding to move away for good. (photo by ©SFGate)

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.

May be an image of map and text
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.

National Donors Keep Tea Party Losers Angle, O'Donnell on Political Stage | Fox News
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.

May be pop art of text

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.

May be an illustration of text

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.
A man walks along a section of Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles. (photo: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

RogerG

Posted on

Republican Marxism

J.D. Vance projected to win GOP Senate primary in Ohio

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

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

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

President Joe Biden AND Sen. Josh Hawley join striking UAW picket lines?
Sen. Josh Hawley (R, Missouri) on picket line in support of striking members of the UAW in Wentzville, Missouri, 9/25/2023.

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

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

May be an image of text

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

Here he is at his most calloused:

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

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

Opinion/Cartoon: Social Security Funding

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

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

Neoliberalism: Political Success, Economic Failure - The American Prospect
The national conservatives’ heartily disliked “neoliberals” of 20th-century America and Europe, from left: F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher.

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

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

Global climate strikes, environmental protests in July 2022
Climate activists, 2022

Versus

5 Keys To Building Strong Environmental Portraits | Construction & Industrial Media: Photography ...
The skilled trades

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

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

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

Reducing Red Tape in the public service 2 legislation – Parliament of Australia

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

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

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

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

May be an image of text

RogerG

Sources:

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

Posted on

Biden’s Decline Is Part of a Bigger Story

No photo description available.
Illustration from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

Biden’s decline is part of a massive swindle, at once intentional and in other ways stupefyingly unintentional, and involves much more than a single person’s descent into senility.  We are constantly confronted with demands to believe in the unbelievable.  Many of us do.  It’s as if we want to be swindled.  It’s become routine, and we are shocked when the list of unbelievabilities turns out to be, just that, falsehoods and fiascos.

Of course, the story begins with the revelation of the not-so-revelatory story of Biden’s mental deterioration.  It should have been clear to anyone observing Biden’s 2020 “basement” campaign.  It succeeded.  We elected a basement president.  In that protracted war room of the left, which is composed of the natural alliance of the legacy media and the Democratic Party, all of a sudden it’s now safe to say that the president is a cognitive mess.

May be an image of 1 person and the Oval Office
President Biden from the 6/27 debate
May be an image of 1 person, the Oval Office and text
More of our president

They even admit that they buried the story and knew for quite some time.  The leader of Biden’s praetorian guard, Ron Klain, only feeds the news in the President’s Daily Briefing that won’t trigger explosions of anger in the president.  According to Politico, dealing with Biden is like coping with an unstable mental patient (see #1 and #2 below):

“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official.  “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing.  Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed.  It’s very difficult, and people are scared s***less of him.”

The dean of the left’s war room, the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein, spilled the beans.  On CNN he divulged (see #3 below),

“[Thursday’s debate] is not a one off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed [the debate].”

Those around Biden knew and the media’s co-conspirators knew.  They gaslighted us, till 50 million people tuned in last Thursday night (6/27) and saw the glaring reality.  Shame on them, and shame on many of us for our willingness to keep Biden in the game.  Actually, get real, they’re torturing the poor guy.

It doesn’t end there.  There’s a popular belief in the government’s ability to rescue us from all of life’s travails.  Speaking of the belief in the unbelievable.  Why is it that no one will mention the looming catastrophes of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid?  Not Trump, not anybody.  If you do, the left’s war room will descend on you like a flock of buzzards.  The programs were built with a design flaw: demographics.  Increasing numbers of old folks will clash with proportionally fewer working young folks.  Taxes going in don’t cover benefits going out, and the national debt continues to balloon.  This won’t end well.  It never does.  The root of it is our preference for the unbelievable.

Let’s move on to the pandemic and our misplaced faith in government employees in the administrative state.  Doctors all, and, as it turned out, not to be trusted.

Look at what they gave us.  You’ll still see people masking themselves in public when before the triumvirate of Fauci/Collins/Birx rose to prominence, they wouldn’t dream of it.  The new paralyzing fear of the simplest public engagement is combined with children still trying to cognitively and developmentally recover from the isolation of Zoomed screens and closed playgrounds.  The rush to forcibly vaccinate all of humanity came with a suffocation of the production of therapeutics even as the virus mutated and continued to spread.  They even tried to blot out the ingrained human tendency to produce for oneself and family.  It was an assault on our very nature.  The waterboarding of society lasted longer in blue states, those places with a particularly gripping faith in government “experts”.  We’re still living with the consequences in endemic inflation and a stubbornly low labor participation rate.

Who would have thought that they could destroy what makes us human?  They tried really hard.

Our stunted nature is evident in a whole line of other unbelievabilities.  How did we ever get to the point of assassinating our standard of living in the eco-fantasies of “sustainability” in the span of a decade?  Somehow, energy density no longer mattered.  Physics no longer matters.  Extensive forests of windmills and floodplains of solar panels wrecking the landscape are billed as the salvation from the left’s wet dream of an apocalypse.  Suddenly, our finely honed sedan is to be junked in favor of an obese array of batteries, or something else that doesn’t even exist.  The already strained grid is to be burdened further.  All the while, we’re chained to a chronological escalator to a new world order that resembles something conjured from the imagination of Salvador Dali or Hieronymus Bosch.

XY-people get to pretend that they are XX-people, and vice versa, and the rest of us are ordered to play along.  The insecurities of tween and teen girls and boys are used as proof to herd them into the same pretend world.

It’s astounding, our willingness to believe in the unbelievable. Hans Christian Andersen meant more than he intended in his story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (see #4 below).  In the tale, two shyster weavers convince the emperor that they will produce raiment that only a fool cannot see.  Fearful of being thought stupid, the emperor and his ministers see nothing but go along and pays them for their services.  Then, with his new “clothes”, the emperor parades out in public to greet his subjects.  No one in the crowd wants to be thought a fool till a child blurts out the obvious.  See the parallel?

Fear of being thought a fool makes dunces of us all.  People of the left believed in Biden’s sharpness so as not to be called MAGA.  A challenge to Fauci/Collins/Birx was said to be proof of the existence of neanderthals among us.  Ibram X. Kendi and the rest of the CRT cabal were made into geniuses to avoid the epithet of being called a closet racist.  Fear of being labeled an implicit bigot in the c-suite has led to a rush call for the “marginalized” and quasi-obese in advertising campaigns.  Anything less is a demand for more shaming sessions in the corporate world.  Having an EV in the garage is proof that you’re not a denier, that you’re “smart”, despite the fact that you are afraid to venture 40 miles from your home charger.  You’ll have to hide the essential internal combustion engine vehicle parked next to your four-wheeled symbol of virtue.  We’re made to pretend that we’re not fools, as we prove that we are.

From Biden to California’s eco-nuttery, we are encouraged to pretend that we’re not making fools of ourselves.  Ironically, our enemies are the child in the crowd who isn’t afraid to laugh.

May be an image of clothes iron and text

RogerG

Sources:

1. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for the analysis and sources in “So Now It’s Okay to Talk about Biden’s ‘Cognitive Decline’”, 7/2/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/so-now-its-okay-to-talk-about-bidens-cognitive-decline/
2. “‘We’ve all enabled the situation’: Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum post debate”, Eli Stokols, et al, Politico, 7/2/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/02/biden-campaign-debate-inner-circle-00166160
3. “‘Not a one-off’: Bernstein’s sources say concerns about Biden have been growing for a year”, Anderson Cooper interview of Carl Bernstein, CNN, video on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhFmaAMC1_Q
4. “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, complete story by Hans Christian Andersen, at https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-andersen/short-story/the-emperors-new-clothes/

Posted on

Do People Understand that Progressivism Is the Problem?

What Happened to California Republicans? | THAT'S WHAT I'M SCREAMING

We don’t have to look very far for the cause of our discontents.  California is the template for what ails us.  It’s the Vatican of new wave progressivism, a movement with the mental genetics of Robespierre, Lenin, and every visionary with the ambition to make an entire population’s thoughts, actions, and way of life conform to their dream.  Woe be to you if you refuse to fit in.  Nothing is allowed to stand in the way, not our institutions, standards of decency, or principles of fair play.  Yep, California is our future . . . if we let it.

This progressivism is monstrous.  It’s an agent of desolation.  Watch them as they go after Trump, or Steve Bannon, or your kids which, in their clutches, are radicalized or placed under the care of the transgender coven.  Watch them as they lay waste to prosperity, your prosperity.  It’s a ticket to Sheol (Hell).

All of us are living it.  The Trump trial and verdict is a hot mess.  As for the Bannon conviction and sentence, it’s technically correct, but also a clear example of politically advantageous prosecution.  Forget about equal treatment before the law, treating like cases alike.  The progressive’s Lady Justice lifts the blindfold from one eye.  If you’re Bannon, you get a broadside.  If you’re Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, sail on.

holderfastandfurious.banner.reuters.jpg
Pres. Obama’s AG, Eric Holder, testifying before Congress at the time of the Fast and Furious scandal
May be an image of 5 people
Steve Bannon sits during his appearance at New York Supreme Court after a hearing in New York City, January 12, 2023. (photo: Steve Hirsch/Pool via Reuters)

Compare the two.  Eric Holder in 2011 falsely testified before Congress that he had been aware of Fast and Furious for only few weeks prior to his testimony.  He’s contradicted by the facts.  Justice Department emails to Holder from underlings discussing Fast and Furious date back to July of the previous year.  Holder slow-walks congressional subpoenas for more information and President Obama puts the kibosh to any more cooperation, shielding his AG from congressional oversight under a blanket of executive immunity.  Shortly thereafter, tired of all the nonsense, the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Holder in contempt of Congress.  What happened to Holder’s contempt charge?  Nothing.  It fell into the abyss (see #1-3 below).

Not true for Bannon.  For Biden’s DOJ under AG Merick Garland, it’s full speed ahead.  Bannon is accused of obstructing a congressional investigation, like Holder, because he falsely believed that he was covered by President Trump’s claim of executive immunity.  I say falsely because Bannon wasn’t a presidential aide to be covered by executive immunity, nor was the information in the subpoena probably protected by presidential immunity.  Technically, in accordance with law, Bannon is guilty.  So, don’t blame the judge for sentencing him to jail time.  But Holder should also be wearing an orange jumpsuit if America is still a nation that adheres to basic principles of fair play.

We aren’t that kind of nation any longer.  Thanks, progressives.

Progressives rabidly wanted to get their man, Trump and any person around him, by creating in 2021 a bogus committee, the J6 Committee, to target Trump and his people.  The committee was not legitimate since the minority party (Republicans) weren’t allowed their choices to be on it.  Instead, the thing was stacked with zealous Democrats and a couple of carefully selected Republicans with a publicly announced hatred of Trump.  Any legal actions taken by it were tainted by over-the-top partisanship.

It parallels the Democrats’ other shambolic distortions of justice in the Democrat Jim Crow South.

A Ku Klux Klan rally in Frederick, Maryland, 1980.
A Ku Klux Klan rally in Frederick, Maryland, in 1980. They’re the Democrats’ version of civil society in the old Jim Crow South.

Hanging judges and juries and jury nullification were the stock and trade of Democrat white southerners in charge of the deep South. It’s in the Democrats’ DNA.  Like the couple of whites accused in the torture and murder of Emmitt Till standing before a bigotedly sympathetic jury, Trump and Bannon were similarly hauled before a stacked hearing.  No apologies, just convictions.

Emmett Till's mother, Mamie, weeps as the body of her slain son arrives at a Chicago Rail ...
Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie, weeps as the body of her slain son arrives at a Chicago Rail Station, Sep. 1955

The sad saga doesn’t end there.  Desolation is the consequence of progressivism. Look at the poster child of progressivism, California, its cities, combustible wildlands, teetering grid, collapsing infrastructure, broad assault on the retail trade, fleeing middle class and businesses, overall sense of ugliness and lawlessness, burgeoning public indebtedness, failing schools, eco-fanaticism, etc.  It’s a mess, and some of the progressively minded are beginning to notice it to their chagrin.  They didn’t sign up for this.  Who would?

A mom is still a mom without regard to her party registration.  The progressive agenda is well and good . . . until it places her child in its maw.  It happened to Erin Friday whose daughter was gender transitioned behind her back by public school authorities.  A progressive, Democrat, and supporter of much of the LGBTQ agenda, she was so incensed by this affront to her basic parental authority that she helped organize the Protect Kids Initiative to prevent this from happening to another mother and child in the state (see #6-7 below).

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'RESERVED SB SB107 107 Wiener GENDER-AFFIRMING HEAL AL TH CARE GENDER AFFIRMING HE California State Assembly 농의만합전'
Erin Friday testifying before the California State Assembly

Then she ran into another maw, the new wave progressives who run the state of California.  Their shenanigans killed the Protect Kids Initiative.  How?  Simply make it difficult to collect the required number of signatures.  The antics of state Attorney General Rob Bonta was a dagger to its heart.  State law gives power to the AG to provide a title and summary for the initiative.  The “Protect Kids Initiative” became “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth”.  The attached summary asserted that the initiative “prohibits gender-affirming health care for transgender patients under 18, even if parents [sic] consent or treatment is medically recommended”.   It’s hard to gain support from an ill-informed California electorate when having to face frowns after reading “Restricts rights” and “prohibits … health care”.  The AG’s hostile language was upheld by a California court.  The thing is dead, dead.

7th California School District Adopts Policy to Notify Parents of Child’s Gender Status Change ...
Rob Bonta, the radical left-wing attorney general of California

On top of everything else that the popularly elected progressive ruling class is doing to the state, parents can’t protect their kids from mental and medical interventions that will scar them for life.  This state is just hostile to children from aborting them up to and including their passage down the birth canal to mutilating them for life, all at public expense.  It’s a malevolent state that has become an Auschwitz for children.

Electing progressives is an invitation to disaster.  For some, they think that their only recourse is Trump, or some such acolyte, which they find distasteful.  Well, how distasteful is our ruined constitutional order or our kids scarred beyond belief?  If California is our national future, flee, flee now to some lonely and isolated outpost in Australia’s outback.  Get out, or vote against any Democrat before they get a chance to bring California to your town.

May be an image of camel and text that says 'RANTR 2021 @CREATORS CON REVEN The NEXT SUPREME COURT CURSING CHEERLEADER CASE. SO, THEY are to ALLOW BIOLOGICALMALES ALMALES BIOLOGIO INTOtheGIRLS INTO ガ GIRLS BATHROOMS... ಕಣ್ಬರೆಕೆ පෙප් #%A?!!! 1% ၃!!! 22 ಉಕಾತೊಯಂ್ಕ್ವರ தூரு မန်မ naAoTTb 4EETEE 美三三 @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Steve Bannon’s Remand Is Consistent with the Law”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 6/8/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/steve-bannons-remand-is-consistent-with-the-law/
2. “Why Eric Holder Will Regret His Recklessness”, John Yoo, National Review, 9/25/2014, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-eric-holder-will-regret-his-recklessness-john-yoo/
3. “Fast, Furious, and Loose with the Facts”, The Editors, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/fast-furious-and-loose-facts-editors/
4. “Eric Holder, Once Cited for Contempt in Fast and Furious Probe, Criticizes Barr for ‘Protecting the President’”, Matt Naham, Law and Crime, 5/1/2019, at https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/eric-holder-once-cited-for-contempt-in-fast-and-furious-probe-criticizes-barr-for-protecting-the-president/
5. “Eric Holder’s Contempt Case Trends Amid Bannon Sentence ‘Double Standards’”, Newsweek, 10/21/2022, at https://www.newsweek.com/eric-holder-contempt-case-steve-bannon-sentence-double-standards-1753963
6. “California Parents Are Afraid of Losing Their Kids | Erin Friday”, California Insider (video), with Siyamak Khorrami, at https://californiainsider.com/california-news/videos/california-insider-show/california-parents-are-afraid-of-losing-their-kids-erin-friday-5608600
7. “Parent Group to Sue California Official Over Alleged Misleading Ballot Title, Summary”, Brad Jones, California Insider, 1/9/2024, at https://californiainsider.com/california-news/parent-group-to-sue-california-official-over-alleged-misleading-ballot-title-summary-5560682

Posted on

Progressivism’s Totalitarian Streak Exposed: The Trump Verdict

May be an image of 2 people
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg (l)

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

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

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

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

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

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

May be pop art of text that says '٢ βΑΝH BANANAREPIBU BIDEN REPUBAC KEиBИe BIDEN Y0 AKan OZ9ANDREWS mome ει comics.com EMAIL: hpayne@detroitnews.com'

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

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

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

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

In the meantime, prepare for a hurricane.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'BIDEN,XI, KHAMENEI X1, KHANXI & PUTIN ไพ Attorneys fare Against at our Political opponents -PHEO ©24ANBRew #KaAиeBorabKaи ew S moeel comics.com EMAIL: hpayne@detroitnews.com'

RogerG

Sources:

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

Posted on

From Eco-Consciousness to Eco-Totalitarianism

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

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

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

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

The 19th-century Bronx

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

Posted on

Tucker Carlson, My Tom Hayden Memorial Emissary Award Winner

 

Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda at news conference after their infamous visit to North Vietnam in 1972
Vintage Photographs of Jane Fonda's Trip to North Vietnam in 1972, Which Earned Her the Nickname ...
Jane Fonda in the seat of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, the ones that were killing American pilots.
Tucker Carlson confirms he's interviewing Putin in Moscow
Tucker Carlson recently in Moscow to perform the same service for Putin

Tom Hayden, premiere anti-Vietnam War activist, who declared “We refuse to be anti-Communist”, made multiple trips to North Vietnam from 1965 to 1974, including a 1972 one with his future wife, Jane Fonda, whitewashing the communist Hanoi regime.  Who elected him to conduct our country’s foreign relations?  The nerve of the guy.  The American people already elected other people to do it.  He’s of the Left, and today on the Right we have Tucker Carlson.  In the Hayden tradition of pasting happy face on brutal and totalitarian thuggeries, Carlson goes to Russia and Vladimir Putin to normalize his tyranny, whether intended or not.

Watch below Tucker’s piece about his tour of the Kiyevskaya metro station in Moscow, Russia.  Watch him gush about its orderliness and cleanliness.  In case you may have missed it, spotless public spaces are a common feature of totalitarianism from Der Fuhrer to the communist Kim dynasty of North Korea.  Tucker, it’s hardly a selling point, unless you’re quick to sacrifice liberty for sanitized public spaces.

Throughout his interview with Putin, the despot betrayed his basic Marxist outlook, a product of indoctrination in the USSR from child to career KGB officer.  The Soviet Union hasn’t gone away; it’s only gone through a name change.  And you can see the shadow of the sinister past in the station.

The Kiyevskaya metro station is named after Kiyev, or the anglicized “Kiev”.  Yes, that Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.  As this station went up in the 1930s, Stalin was murdering and starving 10 million people or so, mostly in the Ukraine, in something called the Holodomor.  The murals festooning the station’s wall are propaganda images of happy peasants at work on their government-imposed communes, or collective farms (kolkhozes).  The reality was anything but joyous.

Stalin ordered industrialization, even the industrialization of agriculture, for the country.  Of course, the farmers liked their land, farms, animals, and equipment, and resistance fomented as their property was seized and they were herded onto collective farms or work camps (gulags), losing everything. Even the seed for next year’s crop which, like all the grain, was sold to purchase factory equipment. No more crop next year.  The communes were as great a disaster as the factories.  Famine spread and was exploited by the big man and his politburo to suppress Ukrainian nationalism.  The gulags proliferated and became an archipelago of gulags in Solzhenitsyn’s famous words.  The murals in the metro were designed to hide the horrors.  They were totalitarianism in art.

Spotlessness in public appearances, absolute hygienic orderliness, could be a similar sign of complete tyranny.  To keep the spaces clear of rubbish and ugliness, the Putin claque utilizes an import from the CCP: AI facial recognition tech tied to thousands of cameras.  But that’s not the only purpose of it.  Putin’s henchmen use it to pick up dissenters, dissidents, and political opponents.  Many a free thinker has been spirited away into Putin’s archipelago, many never to be heard from again.

Friday, another one of the greats of Russian free thought, Alexei Navalny, died in custody.  He joins many others in the grave.  Life imitates art, Orwell’s Big Brother.  Yep, Tucker, the last vestiges of freedom are thrown into the trash bin along with the other refuse.  But Russia has clean subways.

And cheaper food prices, cheaper for a fat and sassy westerner like Tucker as he was guided into a Moscow grocery store (see #4 below).  Everything is cheaper in the country, including the labor, which explains the lower prices. Lower incomes depress prices.  In 1930s America, during The Great Depression, the time was a buyer’s paradise . . . if you had a steady job.  The average monthly income in Russia is $787, as opposed to the U.S. monthly median of $4,568 (see #2 and #3 below).  That says volumes.

That’s not all. 60% of Russians spend half their income on just food.  22% of Russian households don’t have indoor plumbing, compared to the American .3% (see #3 below).  With a consumer base like that, Tucker could buy out the store with just pocket change, if he could slip it by customs at JFK airport.

North Korea is similarly spotless.  Over the years, we’ve seen many pictures of the pristine, purified places in Pyongyang, and thin, even emaciated people standing around.  Compare Tucker’s Moscow metro station with this video of Pyongyang street scenes in the next post.  Tucker, could we also learn a few things from the Kim dynasty?

I nominate Tucker Carlson for the 2024 Tom Hayden Memorial Emissary Award for his attempt at dignifying the indecent.

Please watch the Carlson tour below.

RogerG

Sources:
1. The full Tucker Carlson interview with Putin can be viewed at https://youtu.be/hYfByTcY49k?si=kxFsUvWJsbtKDUzl
2. “How Average Salary in Russia Compares to US”, Tom Norton, Newsweek, 2/16/24, at https://www.newsweek.com/how-average-salary-russia-compares-us-1870740#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20figures,was%20about%20%24787%20in%20November.
3. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for his comparison of Russia and the U.S. in “No, America Is Not ‘Ugly and Decayed’”, 2/19/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/no-america-is-not-ugly-and-decayed/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second
4. Tucker’s grocery store tour can be viewed at https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1758158808835125642
5. “We Need to Talk about Tucker”, Jeffrey Blehar, National Review, 2/20/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/we-need-to-talk-about-tucker/
6. “Tucker Carlson Claims Groceries Are Cheaper in Russia Despite a Russian Food Inflation Crisis”, Troy Matthews, MTN, 2/16/24, at https://www.meidastouch.com/news/tucker-carlson-claims-groceries-are-cheaper-in-russia-despite-a-russian-food-inflation-crisis#:~:text=In%20a%20survey%20of%205%2C000,more%20than%2020%25%20on%20food.