CNN anchors with Brian Williams of MSNBC (l)MSNBC anchorsFox News anchors
Let me be clear, I’m not tarring everyone in our punditry and governing classes. Not everyone is this stone cold stupid. But much of the chatter is hooey, and the hooey is only getting worse.
First on the list of buffoons are the folks in legacy media and all those swirling in their social circles. You know, the people at CNN, MSNBC, the networks, and the big metro newspapers and magazines. They’re hooked on soiling themselves daily, and have for quite a few years. They are the PR department of the left-wing revolution.
Next, we’re confronted by the primetime lineup on Fox News who, along with certain elements in the Republican Party, have resuscitated the Charles Lindbergh wing of foreign policy. If you’ll recall, Lindbergh was the mouth of isolationism before the Fall of France and Pearl Harbor put the kibosh to the whole smear.
Charles Lindbergh speaking at America First Rally in 1941.
Tucker Carlson is an out-and-out isolationist. In a quip during one of his recent shows, he said, “Oceans matter”, or something to that effect. Yes, they do if you have to cross them. No, they aren’t if you want to kill Americans. Why do you think North Korea and Iran want ICBM’s? Why do you think the Russians and the CCP have them? Even if you can’t get your hands on one, box cutters at the throats of airline flight attendants and flight crews will suffice. Voilà, you’ve got a mammoth cruise missile that has the range of an ICBM. Bin-Laden showed the way. Oceans only become another geographic feature on the way to killing Americans.
If the fanatics are more interested in a hands-on approach to the mass killing of Americans – and since I don’t think Tucker is willing to drive the airlines, cruise lines, and shipping companies into the ether by cutting us off from the outside world – trying to keep out the goons at passport/visa checkpoints won’t guarantee anything. More overpaid TSA government workers aren’t reassuring. We’ve already experienced the government efficiency that resulted in flight training for foreign nationals not interested in landing.
After Tucker, Sean Hannity jumps in with his program of Trump-love. Nearly everything Biden does – agreed, most of it is horrible – is condemned with the follow-up, “Trump wouldn’t have done that.” It’s not just that Biden is dreadfully wrong. He is! It’s that Trump is a god to Hannity. Biden bad, Trump good. It’s that simple to the man from New York City, and soon to be living in a Florida seaside estate maybe next to Trump.
Batting third is Laura Ingraham. She was once a Reaganite in foreign policy but now has enlisted in the Lindbergh brigade. In her on-air confessional, she’s on the Trump train to paint “forever war” on any foreign engagement that might get sticky.
All of this buffoonery came to light in the days since our screens were awash in the abominable scenes in Kabul. Yep, this disaster is 100% Biden’s. No doubt. He carried out a Buster Keaton pullout. But don’t forget, they all wanted a pullout: Biden, Trump, and the telegenic celebrities in primetime Fox News. The left was preconditioned to be a booster of the bugout from W’s Bush-lied-people-died wars. This is something for which there is kumbaya between Code Pink and the Lindbergh wing at Fox News.
Biden concocted a dastardly bugout. Trump and his Trumpkin brigades, aping Trump’s “forever wars” lingo, wanted a nicer bugout. Either way, the timetable and the smoothness of the bugout will end in the same place: mass-casualty events.
In the end, as we’ll soon learn, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are a revolving door. Regardless of Bush’s asinine and airy rhetoric about the universal aspirations of mankind and our efforts to export wokeness, we were in Afghanistan to kill terrorists, the kind that’ll cry “Allah Akbar” as they spray bullets in a night club.
Omar Mateen, the Orlando Pulse Nightclub killer.
The mission demands 10,000 troops on the ground, bases in-country and outside, roving special forces, Afghan allies, intelligence operations par excellence, and an Afghan government that won’t stand in the way. That indigenous government doesn’t have to be Switzerland, just functioning enough to stay out of the way.
Yes, kill ‘em before they get a ticket to the Iowa State Fair. That’s a real America First strategy.
If you’re worried about our sons and daughters in harm’s way, well, any place is in “harm’s way” if these fanatics get a haven to slaughter us. If we can tolerate 35,000 troops in Germany, we sure as hell can put up with 15,000 to kill those who would kill us, and have done so.
Taliban soldiers killed in a fire fight with US troops.
How’s that for speaking truth to power, media power?
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (center) and major Taliban leaders in Doha.
Larry Elder said it best: “We have forever wars because we have forever enemies.” The aphorism is lost on many talking heads and politicians across the political spectrum, including Biden and . . . Trump.
Last night, I couldn’t take it anymore. The Fox News primetime lineup were all in for a bugout. The only difference them and Biden on the abandonment of Afghanistan is the pace. They wanted a scheduled bugout and Biden carried out a precipitous one. Lost in all the barking was something Elder quickly understood. Our forever enemies hate us, want to extinguish us, and are in it for the long haul to construct a worldwide caliphate. The belief is central to their identity. Taliban/Al-Qaeda leaders have repeatedly said, even during the negotiations,
“One day mujahedeen will have victory and Islamic law will come not just to Afghanistan, but all over the world. We are not in a hurry. We believe it will come one day. Jihad will not end until the last day.”
They won’t be satisfied till we are like them in burqas, beards, prayer rugs, sandals, and the 8th century. I was so disgusted that I flipped to the Smithsonian Channel.
Let’s clear away some deadwood to logic. One is the chimera of the Taliban and A-Qaeda as distinct entities. They aren’t for practical and operational purposes. One 2020 UN report put it succinctly:
“Relations between the Taliban, especially the Haqqani Network, and Al-Qaida remain close, based on friendship, a history of shared struggle, ideological sympathy and intermarriage. The Taliban regularly consulted with Al-Qaida during negotiations with the United States and offered guarantees that it would honour their historical ties.”
I’m not a fan of much that comes out of Turtle Bay, but this got it right, probably because it’s too well known in intelligence circles to refute. Think of Al-Qaeda as the Taliban’s Quds Force (of Islamic Republic of Iran fame, and once headed by Soleimani, now dead, thank God).
That’s who the Trump people were negotiating with. Many of the people sitting across the table from Trump’s negotiators in 2018 to 2020 were Al-Qaeda under the Taliban flag, which was well known throughout. Many of our adversaries wear two hats than can be switched with a flick of the wrist.
Taliban/Al-Qaeda fighters in Kandahar, August 13, 2021.
Good faith gestures in negotiations with people who want to kill, convert, and replace you is the height of folly. Leading up to the Trump/Taliban/Al-Qaeda “peace” agreement in Doha on February 29, 2020, was an officially-sanctioned jailbreak of 5,000 Taliban/Al-Qaeda prisoners. All returned to the fight to kill Americans and friendly Afghans. Two examples among many should suffice. The Taliban commander of Helmand province, Mawlavi Talib, was one of those set free. Even worse, the Taliban head, Abdul Ghani Baradar, was in custody for years in Pakistan till Trump asked for his “good faith” release in a bribe to the Taliban to let us bugout. Today, word is that Baradar is residing in Kabul’s presidential palace.
Mawlavi Talib (center) in Kabul, August 15, 2021? I can’t tell.
Trump consummated the diplomatic abortion, and Biden carried it out precipitously and with gusto. Despicable, absolutely despicable.
Most despicable was the collective amnesia over the real reasons for the 2001 invasion. It wasn’t only as our incontinent president put it yesterday when he limited the justification to removing the Taliban from power and the killing of Osama bin-Laden. Preemption was on the lips of officialdom in DC in the heady days after 9/11. Preemption means to forestall this from happening again: take over the rats’ nest, clear it out, and continually hunt down those foolish enough to be later recruited to kill Americans. Like them, we have to be in it for the long haul, something not well understood by our last two presidents, if not the last three if the myopic Obama is included.
So, we’ve come to this pass. The Taliban/Al-Qaeda are back in the seat of power, ready to continue their bloody evangelism. India, Taiwan, our allies, the signers of the Abraham accords, and Israel must be wondering if they’re going to be the next victim of an American bugout. The goatherders-with-a-cause will be emboldened, and get fresh video for recruitment of the next generation of suicidal killers.
Thank you, Biden . . . with Trump as your enabler.
RogerG
*Thanks to the reporting of Jim Geraghty and Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review.
Politico-speak on the stump is a crock. Not always, but it happens often enough for many to avoid politician interviews like an evasive maneuver to escape an encounter with one of the many homeless madmen wondering the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Trump prattles on about the Chinese paying “paying billions and billions of dollars” in US tariffs, apparently not knowing, or not caring, that businesses don’t pay business taxes – of which tariffs are. We do! Biden and his Democratic Party coterie babble on about the “rich paying their fair share”. It’s all just stupendous nonsense. But, apparently, a block of the public eats it up.
No more accurate indictment of the current state of journalism, the schools, and media can be found than the popular currency of pure tripe. Since Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer currently possess the lion’s share of power, their balderdash takes center stage, because they now have the reins to foist it on us. Conversely, the job of the Republicans is to stand athwart history and say “Stop!”
So, what of this “fair share” blabbering? Simply put, it ain’t true. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) numbers don’t support the popular fiction of the rich escaping the taxman while the little guy and gal gets punched in the gut by the tax code. It’s class pandering reminiscent of the kind perpetrated by Marxists – or in its newest incarnation in the race-pandering of Kendi’s or Deangelo’s Systemic Racism.
Let’s take a look at the numbers. Fact: U.S. income taxes in terms of who pays what are the most progressive in the world (Thank you, Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity). I don’t see how they can be made more progressive without the targets turning over their entire income receipts to the U.S. Treasury. The top 1 percent of wage earners account for 40.1 percent of all federal income tax receipts in 2018, and this after Trump’s so-called “gift to the rich” in the Republican tax reform bill. The Tax Foundation found that the richest of the rich – the top 1 percent – paid a greater share (40.1) than the bottom 90 percent (25.4). Average paid tax rates tell a similar story. The Dems are engaging in the old gambit of the Big Lie, and it’s that simple.
Why do they lie? Well, they share with Marxists the same hate for the rich – and like Kendi and Deangelo of CRT fame grovel in a hate of “whiteness”. The hate is tied to the Marxist flimflammery of systemic class oppression. Marx called it Scientific Socialism in the same manner of all demagogues who seek to monopolize the word “science” to magically turn their dictums into imperial truths. But if the well-to-do are in the catbird seat according to the hucksters, who are the uber-rich politically supporting? You’d be forgiven for assuming that the greater the wealth, the greater the propensity and power to bend the state to further the material interests of those who own the greatest share of the national wealth. Oh, how shocked you’d be when the reality is uncovered.
Three of the Dems’ big underwriters: Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros
Point of fact, it was disclosed in various reports. In 2020, The eat-the-rich crowd under Biden overwhelmingly got the backing of the billionaire class. According to Forbes, Trump got 133 billionaires to throw some cash his way. Biden benefitted from 230. In raw numbers from the Federal Election Commission, Biden was drowning in $1.074 billion in his basement as Trump garnered $812 million.
What’s with the super-rich? Why invest in your own demise? Many answers are possible. Certainly, Trump is a lightning rod who instills profound love in some and manifest hate in others, in equal measure. Trump-hate played a role. Also, it could be that these people are so well-heeled that they’re insulated from the consequences of their beliefs to such an extent that fantasies can be seriously entertained. But I think that something more profound is afoot.
Somehow, it’s gotten into the heads of the Zuckerberg-to-Bloomberg crowd that to be considered well-rounded smart and sophisticated means to be a lefty. Lefty is fashionable. Esteem within the group won’t be acquired if you’re driving into the parking lot of your effete soirée in a pickup truck flying the Gadsden flag. A chauffeur-driven Jaguar and the spouting of lefty drivel will earn the necessary style points.
But in the end, it’s all pure poppycock. The Marxism-without-saying-so is still ruinous. Systematized envy, the very essence socialism, is never a path to prosperity. Similarly, the never-ending hunt for white racism will never be a path to social peace any more than it was when Jim Crow was a popular socio-political menu choice. The real Jim Crow 2.0 isn’t the Georgia election law. It’s what is arising out of the growing CRT industry.
Once again, it comes down to pure poppycock, but this poppycock isn’t some knock-off little innocent thing. This time, it’s got the backing of some very deep pockets. Watch out, America.
Social psychosis: noun, a widely-spread mental disorder characterized by disconnection from reality which results in strange behavior in mass, often accompanied by a mass perception of stimuli (voices, images, sensations) and other hallucinations.
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Progressivism as a political movement is based on one overriding assumption: history is a long march toward a more sophisticated, rational, and all-round better existence. The problem is, it isn’t. There are fits and starts, technological improvements, yes, advances in science, yes, and well-meaning attempts, but not all “improvements” are improvements. Some are a product of hysteria and periods of intense social psychosis that represent a step backwards to our more atavistic side. Our bestial nature never went away, and four years in college classrooms won’t eradicate it. We are probably in another one of those spasms of flight from reality.
Don’t expect our recent crop of elected leaders to appeal to the better angels of our nature. They haven’t been especially good at filtering the nonsense. Indeed, some have stoked it. President Obama was famous for admonishing his opponents for being on the “wrong side of history”. It’s the same stilted form of thinking. What he shows is that he is fully marinated in the same “march of history” stuff that warped the minds of Karl Marx, Marcuse, and today’s Ta-Nehisi Coats, Ibram X. Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo of critical race theory fame. The last three took Marcuse, and by extension Marx, to give us another one of those iron laws of history that handcuffed their minds, as it did many of their 20th-century predecessors who constructed some of the worst tyrannies to the unremitting disgrace of humankind.
The current phase of frenzy was 30+ years in coming. From the child sex-abuse witchhunts of the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s through the nexus of the election of Donald Trump and aftermath, the resurgence of a revised Marxism and its manifestation in street violence and indoctrination into nearly every corner of the culture, to our current COVID panic, we seem to have lost our marbles. Events can be a catalyst, but so can personalities. These episodes can be linked because they have so much in common: they are manifestations of a social psychosis.
One factor boosting this mental dysfunction is an unfortunate byproduct of the ubiquity of electronic media in the form of tv in an earlier era and today’s internet. Thoughts and paranoias move at light speed. Today, social media and our instantaneous interconnectedness intensify an already powerful stimulant. Thanks to the ever-present electronic social communion, the unease spreads like wildfire, taking form in loose theories, unquestioning faith in media-grabbing public personalities, radical activism, and government coercion.
What sparks these episodes? The angst can be rooted in a little-noticed alteration in family chemistry. The shift from the social ideal of a single breadwinner to two working parents may have elicited a broad anxiety about the care of children, a lingering discomfort waiting for a trigger. The trigger came in the 1983-4 McMartin Preschool case in Huntington Beach, Ca. Child-talk to public officials, and that common staple of our times, the degreed “expert”, took the banter of children to place seven adults in the dock. It took six years of litigation to exonerate the defendants, at the expense of ruined reputations, the lingering emotional scars of the innocent at the hands of public officials and their lackeys, and millions of dollars of public and private money.
The outcome of the McMartin Preschool case didn’t staunch the jihad. As it was working its way out, the crusade waited for an avatar in the person of Dade County DA Janet Reno (future AG for Bill Clinton) to concoct a formula to turn the child-talk into convictions. The Miami Method, as it was called, relied on university-trained child therapists to extract the stories, physical evidence that was spuriously associated with the tales, and multiple witnesses in the form of children who went through the child-therapist mill. Three people would be railroaded – the Fusters and Grant Snowden – until Reno ran into 16-year-old Bobby Finjnje. He refused to plea-bargain, went to trial, found others who could expose the Method’s gross errors, and was exonerated. The fever broke in Miami.
Bobby Finjnje at age 16Janet Reno and assistant as State’s Attorney for Dade County.
It still raged elsewhere. In such far-flung places as Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Washington State, Martinsville in Saskatchewan, Canada, and New Zealand, the illicit holy war persisted. Then, like magic, the hysteria disappeared by the mid-1990’s. Odd thing: fantastic tales of satanic rituals of sodomy and bestiality have a date-certain shelf life. Poof, it’s gone.
But the emotional virus was mutating below the surface.
Sometimes, the frenzy can grow out of other emerging socio-economic circumstances. Many have noticed the current divide in our country between the winners and losers in the new society emanating from the rise of our time’s latest edition of the global free market. Mind you, the global free market isn’t necessarily composed of free market societies. It’s just that all countries, whether free or unfree, are to be treated alike, no matter the impact on any one nation.
The winners in this brave new world are concentrated by geography. Urban centers became the epicenter of a new transnational commercial elite. They are concentrated in certain zip codes for work and residence. Allied to them are the elite prep schools and universities who help create and perpetuate an incestuous petri dish of culturally homogeneous elite social pools in these nodes.
What of the losers? They’re everywhere else. They reside in flyover country. They are found in places that have been caricatured in city-centered media as overrun with uncouth and ignorant oafs. For the beautiful people, they are the flotsam to be ignored on the way to the ascendancy of the “better” people, meaning them.
BigTech’s oligarchs
The bifurcation seldom ends well. If it persists, and resentment simmers, it won’t take much for a media-savvy personage, speaking in the right tone and tenor, to lead a counter-revolution. In 2015, that person arrived in the form of Donald Trump. He was combative, seemingly spoiling for a fight at every turn. He spoke for the forgotten, for the people who bore the brunt of the new prejudices and bigotry of the narrow set of elites coalescing at the commanding heights of the culture.
Remarkably, he won in 2016 and spent 4 years at war. The nouveau culture’s self-anointed vanguard elite spent 4 years at war with him and everyone associated with him, including his supporters, which culminated in the 2020 election and Trump’s single-minded crusade to undermine the results at the expense of everyone else in his party. The January 6 capitol riot erupted as 800-1,000 of his enthusiasts stormed Congress.
Trump at his January 6 rally
What did the party get for all the tumult? It’s a mixed bag. The Republican Party managed to squeak by with some victories down ballot as well as the loss of two Senate seats in Georgia.
What makes people perform unspeakable acts, such as rampage into the capitol, based on the drumbeat of an influential figure? The well-spring is the anxiety from stressed lives that was evident in prior witchhunts. Sometimes the underappreciated rally to an avatar who stylistically gives voice to their resentments. It’s not his ideas so much as it is his demonstrative qualities, the pugnaciousness. He’s deeply admired for these personality traits, not his brain. At this point, the movement reflects rabid fandom more than an exaltation of possible statesmanship.
The zealotry of the fan is evident in Trump’s famous line from the 2016 campaign trail:
“The polls — they say I have the most loyal people … I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Judging by the shenanigans on January 6, maybe not going so far as to turn a blind eye to murder, still, his most rabid followers would become a mob for him.
Though, it’s not as if Trump supporters had nothing to complain about as election day unfolded. The election laws in many places were contorted by partisan activism arising out of the urban/academic petri dish of our progressive jet-set. Standards of accountability were set aside in such a way as to get their bête noire, Trump. Legal, yes, in that no court has overturned the count. Disreputable, yes, in that nobody knows what happened in many locales when ballots were scattered in the mail, mysteriously made their way to a multitude of unsupervised drop boxes, and then on to their unobserved processing in counting rooms. Ballot harvesting was rampant in many places; honest verification was non-existent; and the vote-counting saga continued for weeks. Who wouldn’t at least scratch their heads at this circus?
The pandemic was the crisis too good to waste in order to make a hash of the election. It was used not only to create an election monster but, as it turned out, to introduce all-encompassing state control to a frightened populace. The pandemic proved to the nouveau elite an excellent opportunity to conduct a grand socio-political experiment testing the popular limits to a great expansion of government power.
Our ideological and social sorting by geography showed a distinct difference in submission to this new regime. An entire segment of our population, the urban part, who are routinely dependent on government services, have a preternatural tendency to accept authority, especially if it comes from the much-ballyhooed “expert”, many with the same credentials in tow as the influential residents in uptown high-rises and the outlying well-to-do ‘burbs. In other words, these new potentates have the additional advantage of being respected for having the same social qualifications as a sizeable portion of the governing coalition. Social comradery goes a long way in instilling fealty to “experts”.
The chief commodities of the “expert” are safety and a shield from risk. The notion of trade-offs – something is given up to get something else – is an alien concept to people who have lived their lives in the protective womb of uniformed and credentialed experts. Insulated from realities, citified people become easy marks for hysteria. The zero-risk myopia of administrative agencies, taken as the voice of God, can be easily transmuted into instances of personal bullying in the public square.
The true-believers’ public threats and denunciations for not wearing a mask in outings to the grocery store are not unusual.
The obsessive penchant for outdoor mask-wearing, even while strenuously exercising, and alone, is common. Being absolutely petrified about sending their children to school in an unthinking response to a threat that is smaller for the kids than the flu pre-COVID is a prevalent reaction. Mask-wearing became a totem of God’s mark of saintliness. All crazy, all unhinged.
Wearing a mask while jogging.
The panic and hysteria show in polls. Rural areas are more hesitant in regards to COVID mitigations and more reluctant to get the vaccine. Urban areas, just the opposite. Yet, the vaccinated, the vast majority in municipalities, show a greater degree of fear about a return to normal and engagement in public activities than the unvaccinated. It’s not exactly a vote of confidence in the vaccine. Or, more importantly, is it evidence of something more troubling in the urban mind: a deeper, irrational dread of any risk not countenanced by the beloved “expert”? These people are naked on the barricades without their departments of public health, sanitation, public safety, transportation, urban planning, and water and power.
The strong sense of exposure in times of stress leads to anxiety and the anxiety leads to a population always on the brink of hysteria. It’s pure irrationality. COVID provides the latest example of a population pushed to the event horizon of public madness. Early on, prudence dictated strong measures till knowledge and treatments were discovered – not necessarily a vaccine. Within a few months, vulnerable populations were identified and treatments developed. While COVID isn’t the flu, it certainly is for a sizeable chunk of the population: the healthy and the young. Protective measures should have quickly focused on the aged and those suffering from chronic conditions. They should have been quarantined, not the whole of society in massive stay-at-home orders. It was a sledge hammer to fix a watch, and now we are paying the price.
For a people without a sympathy for risk, and in possession of an abject faith in the protective shield of the “expert” in government posts, they are extremely hesitant to leave the bubble of corseted “protections”. Their life will soon become as distorted as the late 19th-century female body after being bounded for hours by a corset. The mental and emotional capacities of self-reliance and confidence of urbanites will atrophy, like ladies’ abdominal muscles in a bygone era, after 18 months of universal mask-wearing, business closures, stay-at-home orders, social distancing, and distance-learning. The horror at the thought of cutting the apron string is palpable.
One of the unintended consequences of the smothering is that the isolation may have primed people on the emotional brink to fall headlong into fanaticism. Confined to Zoom and reluctant to venture outdoors, some were cramped in a prison of their own mind and pre-selected media preferences. In such a rarified and enclosed atmosphere, unacceptable ideas and actions may move into the realm of the acceptable. It’s a fused magazine of powder waiting for a spark. Enter George Floyd and Derek Chauvin.
The miscreants subsequently hitting the streets and passersby, and torching the downtowns, always a demographic speck, weren’t evidence of a popular uprising, but preposterous ideas, still preposterous, were starting to be taken seriously by our influential trend-setters. Big Everything – sports, media, Fortune 500 – began to sing a radical tune. Unable to prove actual racism, faculty-lounge extremists opted for mysticism. Amazingly, it caught on. The scientifically unprovable charges of systemic racism and the unscientific theorizing of critical race theory (CRT) were treated as physical realities on the order of the sun, wind, and earth. With their finger in the air of an artificial gale from a faculty-lounge wind machine, the culture’s hegemons repeated the chants of the new cult.
The normal check for sanity of broader social interactions in a normally functioning society were knee-capped. Normally, an ounce of good old-fashioned scientific skepticism would be enough to put the kibosh to the nonsense. In these times, not so fast.
Diangelo and Kendi, chief propagandists for CRT
CRT isn’t so much a real theory as it is a kind a Nicene Creed for race-hustlers. It starts with the conclusion – we’re a racist nation – and moves to condemnation – “systemic racism” and “white privilege”. It can’t be proven in any meaningful sense. The use of statistical disparities is “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” run amok. Racial statistical differences aren’t proof of much of anything, least of all a society who has it in for blacks. No tie can be made between the evidence – the variance in numbers – and the conclusion – systemic racism. The variances can be explained in many ways without “racism” ever rolling off your lips. It’s jump-to-conclusions time.
The hustler’s gambit of “equity” is simply a cover for vengeance. Those of lighter skin shades are expected to pony up with racially-based benefits till the numbers come up equal, in a statistically artificial state of “equity”. In a more rational time, this was good old-fashioned reverse racial discrimination, and patently and justly illegal. Not for today. Not in today’s climate of dysfunction-induced hyper-aggravation.
2020 riots in NYC
This isn’t progress. It’s a mania that happens so often that a person has to wonder if it is a built-in feature of the modern banality that we happen to call “progress”. Are we really that much better than the past’s socially psychotic behavior in the pogroms, witch trials, India’s anti-Muslim riots, the Ottoman’s second-class status for Christians, Rwanda’s Tutsi genocide, or today’s inner-city street thugs who routinely target Asians and anyone with a lighter complexion? There’s good reason to believe that the beast is always at the gates.
Jefferson’s faith in education as the cure-all is illusory. It can’t be if it is as corrupted as the malady it was meant to heal. Human failings are as persistent as is our willingness to believe in the unbelievable. They are everywhere, even in our “progress”.
Yesterday, my family and I went to Kalispell, Mt., (gateway city to Glacier National Park) to do our monthly shopping. While on the way, Jared (my son) was driving and all of us were listening to XM Radio’s “80’s-on-8” and, lo-and-behold, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” blasted through the speakers (see link below). The song is a good rocker, but who listens to the lyrics? Right? I paid closer attention to the words and gleaned their meaning. It struck me as a Trumpian anthem: the struggles of a young couple in tough times regardless of identity.
Life sometimes is a “fight”, or perseverance in the face of challenges. America has been beset by decades of neglect, permissiveness, maladministration, and the reemergence of evil ideas that should have stayed dead. Today, the worst of all of it was exposed by the pandemic, and, I suspect, more is to come. Still, we fight on, as we should.
Who can’t identify with that? What young couple, starting fresh in life together, hasn’t struggled to get a foothold into a better life? Some times are more demanding than others, but as the song title says, all of us were “Livin’ on a Prayer”.
Coach John Mosley of the East Los Angeles Community College basketball team, and a focus of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Basketball” (highly recommended), stated, “Rules without relationships are rebellion.” When you think about it, he’s onto something. Rules in the absence of an interpersonal connection can easily be received as a cold and blind force, and frequently are. In a related fashion, I remember counseling young teachers against angling a troubled kid into a corner with no escape because he or she might violently lash out. When rules box people into corners without escape, expect rebellion.
Coach John Mosley of East Los Angeles Community College’s basketball team
The makings of a serious national rupture are happening as I write. The near complete monopoly by the Left in our society’s centers of power and influence is forcing an unpalatable choice upon the many dissenters. Right now, the safety valves of free speech and thought are being closed by the Big Tech oligarchy as the Democratic Party pursues a redesign of elections to keep themselves in power for generations, emasculation of our borders to chronically expand the critical mass of their supporters, redesign of our schools into their indoctrination centers, and removal of the last symbol of citizen self-reliance in the neutering of the Second Amendment. What will the loyal opposition do if this new Borg leaves the people with no recourse? My guess is that it’ll no longer be loyal. Don’t box people into corners.
In a relatively brief span of time, the hegemony of a narrow set of beliefs has descended upon us. For some, the deplatforming of Trump “for life” by the tech oligarchs was the omen of a new Dark Age of absolutist control of thought and conscience. The contradictions are glaring and instructive. Twitter bumps Trump but must be forced by a to Department of Homeland Security to take down a video of her son’s sexual assault. Amazing.
Hardly does Trump deserve much of a defense for some of his actions. I’m not in the Hannity world of Trump-worship. But neither am I in the habit of blinding myself to the first real exercise of raw power to erase a prominent figure from the world stage; though, it’s been happening for quite some time to the less notable. It’s raw power and used in a brazen manner.
Mark Zuckerberg famously stated before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. He’s got that right. “Left-leaning” means a techno-utopian ideal of gauzy socialist-egalitarian, libertine, and greenie bliss brought into existence by universal techno-connectivity. It’s certainly a way for them to feel good about themselves by the self-elevation of the importance of their work. For the people who aren’t caught up in this romper room of the mind, they get cancelled.
Brandon Eich
It’s unapologetic censorship, like what happened to Brandon Eich, the brief (for 11 days in 2014) CEO of Mozilla. He was “forced” out by something loosely called the “Mozilla community” – a more accurate term would be “mob” – for daring to support traditional marriage (2008’s Prop 8 in California). Key to any mob’s “cancellation” is the recognition that there aren’t other legitimate points of view to be tolerated.
An excursion into the functioning of tech central’s totalitarian mind was provided by Forbes magazine in 2014 when it republished a Quora piece by Ian McCullough, “consumer tech”, of San Francisco, on the forced resignation of Eich. McCullough’s defense of the disposal of Eich pivoted on two claims: Eich’s opinion is beyond the pale and an extremely odd notion of freedom of speech.
Unbeknownst to McCullough, the unpopularity of opinions frequently depends on location. Eich’s opinions on marriage aren’t fashionable in Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”, and in McCullough’s San Francisco – thus, beyond the pale – but neither are McCullough’s and those of Zuckerberg’s left-leaning place as popular in the vast stretches of flyover country. There is a difference, though: McCullough’s support for gay marriage won’t by itself result in his forced resignation if he stated his views in Arkansas, at least as far as I can determine. If it does happen, there’d be a groundswell of opposition for making a person’s employment status contingent on rectitude with an area’s popular slant on a contentious issue. No, that kind of thing is routinely reserved for Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifying before the Senate on April 10, 2018.
In that “left-leaning place”, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech is contorted out of all recognition. In McCullough’s twisted mind, the freedom of speech of a mass can be used to intimidate a single person’s exercise of free speech. In a way, ironically, he’s right. Every single person in the mob has freedom of speech individually, but the bigger question involves self-control. Ought we to practice it in that manner? Arkansas is much more into “ought” and Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place” is all into gang-style suppression; that’s the difference.
And even more importantly, does the First Amendment have any practical relevance if an opinion is more popular in other locales but is unpopular in the little node where we find the oligarchic power of Big Tech to blot it out everywhere? By what legitimate right should one locale and their nest of opinions have the power to censor the opinions about traditional institutions in the communities that hold these traditions dear? McCullough, no one should have that power. No one, not you nor anyone like you, or me for that matter.
Today, Big Tech has the power and they use it. It does so by banning information that doesn’t comport with their socio-political prejudices. Look at what happened to The New York Post’s Biden family corruption story just before the election. In an informal, or formal (?), alliance of interest, Big Media and Big Tech shut out the story. No such forbearance was granted Trump regarding the grand smear that went by the name of “Russia collusion”. The fiction had a 3-year lease on life despite the fact that it was predicated on a demonstrably proven pack of Democrat-funded lies.
Another alliance member – the upper echelons of DC’s permanent Fed Administrative State – were giddy at the possibility of dragging Trump through the mud and only ended up with a two-year $40 million probe that was led by a doddering Robert Mueller and his band of partisan hacks who produced . . . nothing.
What did we get for $40 million? We got 3 years of hair-on-fire, a perpetuation of the smear, unsuccessful impeachments, and conservative websites hidden on page 5 of a Google search. Like the Biden corruption story, uncooperative sites go down the memory hole. Of course, initially, Google feigns that it’s due to their software “protocols” or “algorythms”. Then they dropped all pretense by calling it “misinformation”. It’s still a crock.
Big Tech’s “misinformation” campaign targeted the pesky Breitbart media operation. Breitbart News noticed clicks on Google dropped 99% from 2016 to 2020. Their entire website was given the NYPost treatment.
And if that’s not enough, complete platforms were deplatformed. Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was destroyed by Big Tech’s near-Gang of Eight. Like Trump and Breitbart, it was steamrolled by the big wheels of Big Tech. Read this quackery of a write-up on Wikipedia:
“Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. It has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.”
Not a word about the charlatanism of the Green New Deal and the buffoonery of its eco-apocalypse and the 30-something adolescent mind from New York’s 14th congressional district behind much of it. Not a word about the potential for descent into Venezuela-land from socialism’s new found popularity. Not a word about the buffoonery of “settled science” since real science means a real scientific method that is operative all the time. Not a word about the provable unsustainability of “sustainable energy”. Not a word about the scientific backlash to the “settled science” of Fauci and World Health Organization. The paradox is that the most frequent purveyors of “misinformation” are the people combatting “misinformation”. Franz Kafka looking at our time would see abundant evidence of life imitating art, his art.
What will people do if they come to conclude that there is no recourse to submission? If the Democrats have their way, elections will have the legitimacy of loan sharking and only keep the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Democratic Party) cemented in power for the foreseeable future, thereby proving the Marxist revolutionary’s maxim: one man, one vote, one time. Voices are to be silenced by a formal unity of purpose among entrenched elites at the commanding heights of our society. The kids are to receive no respite in the assault on their minds from every quarter in entertainment and the schools. Traditional institutions and the morality of self-defense are systematically upended. For those standing aghast at this turn of events, some may sadly seek redress in more violent means, no other option having been left open to them. Boxing people into corners has dangerous consequences.
Friedrich Hayek had many reasons for the failure of socialism, but one was the “knowledge problem”. Big government’s attempt to manage the many affairs of its people requires a level of knowledge that no one person or small group of individuals can possess. Crap happens and human existence enters a dark place.
Coach Mosley and his team experienced the consequences in the state whose governing elites are infatuated with government’s top-down management of its residents, but aren’t, and can’t be, as knowledgeable and wise as they think themselves to be. After completing a 29-1 season and surviving the first round of the state championship tournament, and after loading on the bus to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore for the Final Four championship round, Coach Mosley received a phone call to announce the cancellation of the tournament due to COVID. It was part of a state of California lockdown that proved to be no more efficacious than states who left their residents free to live a more normal life. A season of hard work, trials, and tribulations was ended just as the prize for going through all the trouble was near at hand. And it was all for naught.
The spirit of resistance in California, April 2020. Protesters to the lockdown blocked traffic around the state’s capitol in Sacramento.
Coach Mosley properly acceded to the state’s decision. What else could he do? But what’ll happen when the one-party state of California is transferred to DC and the one party blocks all avenues of civil opposition to the ruling ideology? The Democrats are playing with fire.
CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 15: A man walks with a stroller as people stand in line outside the Martin B. Retting, Inc. guns store on March 15, 2020 in Culver City, California. The spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has prompted some Americans to line up for supplies in a variety of stores. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
New York election workers coping with a deluge of absentee ballots, November 3, 2020.
No, I can’t leave the 2021 election alone, nor should anyone else. As of now, though, it is, as per Churchill’s quip about the Soviet Union, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Analysis varies so much and is often infected with wishful thinking and partisan bias. Maybe it’s just that it’s too soon to tell. Maybe we’ll just have to wait for analytical competence. I don’t know.
Part of the problem lies in our affection for generalizations. Generalizations stray into oversimplifications. Many Republicans ask themselves the question, can we have Trump without Trump? Meaning, can we have Trump’s good parts and not his bad parts? The answer frequently swirls around stats that compare his numbers with R’s down ballot in an attempt to measure his toxicity. And that picture is murky. He did better in some places and worse in others. In the battleground ‘burbs, the scene is equally cloudy. The plain fact is that the numbers are all over the map making general conclusions difficult.
In addition, the raw vote totals for Trump don’t paint a clear picture. He added to his vote totals in some states, counties, and precincts, but in many of those places so do did Biden. In Texas for instance, Trump added 1.2 million more votes, but Biden added 1.3 million. In other locations, he didn’t. Thus, the percentage differential between him and Biden fluctuated wildly. Post-election boasts from either side is probably pablum.
Processing ballots in Michigan, November 3, 2020.
Two factors missing from the analysis are secularization and the weird election system that was concocted this time around. Secularization is a trend that predates Trump. Broadly speaking, it has been on the march long before Trump, even in places that have been Republican strongholds. How much has it weakened the strength of the elephant party? As of yet, I haven’t seen any numbers for this election. I suspect – and suspicion is all that I have at this point – that it has continued its onward march. Religiosity has been known to have a clear relationship to political affiliation and voting patterns. The trend has been going ill for Republicans.
2012 Secular Society march.
And then there’s COVID. The virus was destructive, and so was our reaction to it. The economy, the schools, our social life was laid waste. Elections weren’t spared. Distance voting joined social distancing and distance learning and distance working in our lives, with equally deleterious effects. It was imposed by purely authoritarian means, and out the window went voter authentication at the point of voting, which was the precinct polling place in normal times. Not this time. The point of voting happened to be a home with any number of people to fill them out, cajole, harangue. The person alone with their conscience became a social affair.
Increasingly conducting an election by mail is fraught with serious credibility problems. In many states, the simple authenticating act of presenting an ID to a precinct worker in normal in-person suffrage was replaced by county registrar worker bees functioning as graphologists. I didn’t know that handwriting expertise could be so easily performed by temporary, underpaid, and overwhelmed election workers. Software can help, but I wonder about its efficacy. This and other mutilations of our vote system resulted in mail-in votes accounting for over 60% of the total cast. This election system was weird, very weird, making comparisons highly suspect.
What would never have been tolerated in prior elections was done with zeal in this one. In some states, ballots were shot-gunned through the mail from voter registration lists littered with inaccuracies. Absentee ballots laid in clumps beneath mail boxes in apartment complexes in some documented cases. Forget about voter verification; forget about knowing what happens behind a home’s four walls to the four ballots that arrived. Out the window went the secret ballot. The normal election system was completely upended in many states.
The process so skewed the vote numbers that this election stands as a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, hardly analogous to any other. The process dictated the outcome to a great degree. The Democrats have long maintained the advantage in the suspicious kind of voting that doesn’t require your presence. Combine this with their longstanding vetoes of voter authentication measures and efforts to clean up the voter lists and you have an election system that feeds into their wheelhouse. They now have a legalized means to round up the large cohorts of the uninterested and ill-informed in their potential fan base. Their numbers were inflated in ways that hopefully will be never replicated again. All numbers were artificially inflated, with COVID-panic as the underlying excuse. As a result, once again, any comparisons with earlier elections to draw out trends will be fraught with misperceptions.
Since vote-by-mail asks so little of the voter – after all, the ballot comes to them so they don’t even have to go get it – it places premium on the uncaring and moron voter. In normal times, they won’t get off their couch. I intuit – and intuition is all that many of us have at this time – that a large increase in the moron vote in this election had some effect. To whose benefit? Can’t say. I have my suspicions.
Then we have the person of Trump, a third underappreciated element in this campaign season. How did his outsized personality affect the results? The spectrum of reactions to him ranged from repulsed to merely tolerated to loved, with not much between the markers. The personality-driven election may have made it possible for Biden to run his “not Trump” campaign from his basement and thereby hide his mental incontinence by simply laying back to garner the repulsed, something easy to do with ballots scattered by mail and postage-free voting. Trump here, there, and everywhere may have altered the normal election landscape.
In so many ways, this was an election like no other. It stands alone, and may not be comparable at all. So, when I see talking heads make bold claims, I shake my head in wonder at the silliness. They take the black swan election of 2020 and place it in a line with previous ones. But that’s like bringing onto the stage the 7’2” Kareem Abdul Jabbar and then claiming that he’s proof that we’re getting taller.
To the editors of publications of the literary set: 2020 was a huge black swan event which mangled everything within its calendar. Please exercise caution before you spout.
Wayne County (Detroit) poll worker covers the windows after poll watchers were evicted on November 3, 2020.
Justice Alito ordered Pennsylvania election boards to segregate late-arriving ballots. The order is important to be sure, but there are two kinds of possible corruption in this virus paranoia-stoked election: misbehavior in the processing of the ballots and the abuse in the production of them. Alito’s order deals with the former.
Right now, we are in the processing phase and, rightly, much attention is focused on the much rumored, historical, and serious irregularities in Democrat one-party fiefdoms. Yet, let’s not forget the altered system that produced the ballots, delivered them, set the conditions for which they were marked, and played footsie with the deadlines for their arrival for processing. It’s the production side of the equation wherein lies the greatest difficulty to prove widespread criminal abuse, beyond what has been dismissed as just anecdote, but which naturally draws into question the legitimacy of elections. The biggest threat to our democracy (actually, citizen republic) is the Democrats’ long-held desire to conduct monkey business with the franchise.
The setup before the ballots get to the counters makes it possible for all the other suspicious activity in processing them. That setup was due to COVID, which was the expedient to turn our elections into a Third World affair. The virus has been exploited to mutilate our way of life. The COVID panic was used to repeal the First Amendment – unless you’re going to march in the streets for a neo-Marxist revolution, erase our history, loot, pillage, and burn – construct authoritarian regimes in the states, and dismantle livelihoods. The COVID scare was used to destroy the education of our children, social life, and our self-concept as we move about disguised in masks. Children will grow up knowing people only from the cheek bones up. Now the ginned-up madness has tainted the foundational element of a citizen republic, the vote. Among those other things, COVID became the pretext to construct a Rube Goldberg election system; one mostly designed by Democrats to cook up Democrat victories.
Election challengers watch poll workers count absentee ballots for the city of Detroit, Nov. 3, 2020.
Are elections in the COVID and post-COVID era to be limited to rubber stamping Left/Democrat proclivities? The collectivism gang distorted our established ways while Republicans tried to put a break on Democrat designs with ballot integrity measures, to no avail in the era of the COVID panic-as-excuse. The Democrat dream of expanding the franchise to include the living and the dead, the non-citizen and citizen, the uninterested and grossly ill- or non-informed, and the ineligible and eligible was made real.
In many states, particularly blue ones, ballots were sent hither and yon by mail using voter rolls dirtied with many who cannot legally vote and those who would not if left alone. Where did the ballots go? They went to an address to then be marked by God-knows-who. A kind of cattle roundup in the form of ballot harvesting was authorized by the usual suspects to milk every last vote out of the uninterested, ill- or non-informed, living or dead, and ineligible and eligible.
Ballot harvesting.
What was happening behind the closed doors of those addresses? Who and how were the ballots filled out? I don’t know, you don’t know, they don’t know, which now elicits healthy suspicions that the entire process is a sham.
Then deadlines became meaningless, all in order to keep the ballot boxes open so they could be later stuffed to produce the Democrats’ preferred result. Another healthy suspicion. This jerry-rigged system encourages such misgivings. Is this what is meant by the risible chant “count very vote”? Pardon me, after this contrived and mockery of a system, for having my doubts about the results. Reagan said it best, “Trust but verify”. He said it in reference to the Soviet general secretary; many of us are saying it to the people of a party with many similar beliefs.
If Trump loses, nonetheless, Trump will have pulled the makeshift bandage off a fetid wound. He brought out of the interstices all the harmful bacteria that are present in the open wound of our modern politics and system of government. Thanks to a dossier, Mueller, and a coup that was disguised as impeachment, we now know of the existence of the dark influence of a new, pernicious, and burgeoning social class: an American nomenklatura. Sometimes referred to as the deep state, it’s an interweaved and integrated social class of government-associated non-profits and government workers, both appointed from the world of DC and ensconced in the civil service.
The nomenklatura
They have allies in the culture in the Democratic Party, Big Media, corporate boardrooms, the uber-rich, people with haute couture pedigrees and pseudo-prestigious degrees from our campuses-turned-indoctrination centers. It’s a vile socio-political ecosystem that Trump has exposed by his presence and persona.
Out of this milieu came the 2020 election. Biden is the quintessential creature of it. He might ride into office on a river of this socio-political slime. These next four years might be very interesting ones.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks in Tampa, Florida on September 15, 2020 during a roundtable discussion with Tampa-area veterans and military families. (Photo by JIM WATSON / AFP)
First, let’s stop referring to “election night” on Nov. 3. It’s actually election month or . . . longer, thanks to the COVID craziness and the Democrats’ success in turning our election system into Silly Putty. It’ll be Christmas for lawyers.
If in the end the flamboyant circus mimics the current polls, the American people will get more, much more, than Trump moving out of the White House. They will get Venezuela: Trump out and Maduro clones in. The electorate can’t say that they didn’t vote for the clones. Of course, they voted for the socialists. Not voting for the antidote means the stampede of the toxin. Simple. Sooner than they might wish, they will experience the toxin, socialism.
Socialism offers what no society can deliver: free stuff for everyone all the time. The whole schema is made possible only by deception. Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” is the Democrats’ “The Art of Deception” in their campaign for things that aren’t true. Let me count the ways.
Take tax cuts. Democrats don’t like them. Being socialists-without-the-label, they have a near-genetic tic to spasmodically attack the rich in grasping lurches to seize assets; though, they must admit that there’s simply not enough there to fund their laundry list of inanities. That $400,000 DMZ for their beloved tax hikes is horse feathers. There isn’t enough above that DMZ either. And so, capital flees, and we get to relearn the old fact that capital flight is job flight, and another generation living in their parent’s basement way past their prime.
Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
The Republican tax cuts of late 2017, and Paul Ryan’s and Mitch McConnell’s congressional vetoes of some of the worst of Obama’s 8-year regulation spree, boosted the economy out of Obama-slumber. Now we might vote ourselves back into the induced coma. The Democrats will hide any of this from adult reasoning because they might be exposed for actually believing in this batty stuff. There are few things more dangerous than the deadly true believer. The problem is, we might learn sometime after Nov. 3 that we turned over the gavel to a bunch of them.
Take the COVID panic that never ceases. This one’s easy. Everyone makes mistakes when you don’t know, and can’t know till later. Take the prima donnas of the donkey party. The top Democrat foghorns were boosting tourism and brandishing the xenophobia canard like a drunk loosens his bank account on the Vegas strip as the virus was slipping into US ports. Their attacks don’t offer anything new but the worst of what had already been tried, and without end. This line of gibberish is the rhetorical equivalent of pond scum. It’s a crime to logic. But don’t expect the party head honchos to let you in on the dirty little secret.
People wait in line as a food bank hands out 1,600 food bags at a pop-up pantry in San Francisco, Calif.ornia, on April 20 amid historic work furloughs and layoffs caused by the coronavirus pandemic. (Scott Strazzante/The San Francisco Chronicle)
Oh, and then there’s The Green New Deal. Now here’s a bad high school science term paper that was heralded as a serious idea by a college graduate who shouldn’t have graduated who happened to get into Congress from a district that would sooner vote for Fidel Castro than a Republican. Got it? Well, we should know where this is headed. Blowing up the US economy based on the giddy mental burps of a group plagued by an absence of mature discernment won’t end well.
The whole idea is preposterous. Dynamiting a lusty portion of the US economy, promising a gargantuan federal jobs program that past experience has shown won’t work, the Sovietizing of the US economy under central planning, and the resultant shrinkage of our economy, will drag down millions.
Look into what happened to the California north coast after the expansion of the protected lands for redwoods in the 1990’s. The lumber mills evaporated. Go, look at the meteoric rise in those counties of welfare participation and every other social pathology that would presage the meth-addled existence in the decaying hulk of the old rust belt. At that time, the easy-out for Clinton and the gang was re-training for tourism, like today’s re-training for coding. It’s the same old song, and with the same old results.
Again, don’t expect the Democrats to come clean. They hide behind the rhetorical legerdemain of “we’ll phase it out” (Biden) or “managed decline” (Newsom). It’s all meant to make you feel good about them destroying your livelihoods. It’s all meant to have them avoid the use of the word “kill” – as in kill fracking or kill fossil fuels. Even the flighty-headed representative from NY’s 14th congressional district wants a “phase ” out. It’s all word games with your future in the chopping block.
New York’s 14th Congressional District representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
And then there’s the line of attack on Republicans for having the temerity to repeal Obamacare’s colossal boondoggle. Remember the lost insurance plans, the lost doctors, many states relegated to one plan on Obamacare’s exchanges, skyrocketing rates because of mandated coverages so that, for example, men must pay for pap smears, the $250 penalty for refusing to buy what Obama and his crew cooked up, and the creation of a panel of unaccountable czars to pass judgment on the medical futures of seniors?
Into the current maelstrom come the millions of dollars of ads accusing Republicans of threatening the coverage for preexisting conditions. The interesting fact is, the repeal would still allow those policies and grandfather existing ones. All repeal proposals of which I am aware guarantee protections for those people with preexisting conditions. Trump repeatedly stated that he wouldn’t accept any repeal and replacement without it.
So, on what is the assault based? Nothing! They need scary stories to get people to vote for them. Just shower enough money on the lie and it magically becomes true.
A photo of discarded ballots taken the weekend of May 9, 2020 in Las Vegas, NV. Want to vote . . . 11 times? (Photo: Las Vegas Review-Journal)
I’m not sure any of this will matter. 50 million (maybe more?) have already voted by mail. We’ve just experienced the end of ballot integrity, the secret ballot, and new openings for enterprising miscreants in a growing black market for votes. We are well on our way to the sunset of public deliberation and rational discourse. It’s all about power, no matter what. We’ve found a new way to join the ranks of Venezuela. We choose it.
Detroit unemployment office sometime in the 1970’s.
Degringolade: noun, a rapid decline or deterioration (as in strength, position, or condition); downfall.
Opinion polls in October show the Democrats are on the cusp of one-party rule, as in California. Are Americans so hot for a recap of the 1970’s? I know that it’s a 50-year-old saga but it should reside in the memories of a sufficient number of people to have some influence on younger relations. Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be true.
The ingredients for a replay are present. A poorly informed public seems ready to reregulate the economy, retax the population (hypothetically, the rich), pursue disastrous social engineering crusades, adopt a near-totalitarian refashioning of life in the quest for a fantasy future that was drawn up by non-scientists who mangle science for ideological ends, and gargantuan fiscal and monetary policies that will financially grease the skids for the degringolade.
To vote Democrat is a vote for the degringolade. To ignore what a person says in the hope that they won’t do it is the height of folly. Their announced positions are frightening. Medicare for All is socialism for your healthcare. The Green New Deal is totalitarian central planning. Ending fracking is one part of the campaign to kill fossil fuels and destroy supply chains which will escalate the price of everything. Tax increases ostensibly on the rich will atrophy investment capital, the mother’s milk of an economy and your children’s future. “Reimagining” policing is playing with fire since it will result in more miscreants on your streets, fewer repercussions for misbehavior, fewer armed police officers and more poorly-educated social workers dabbling in the mystical arts of human psychology – bottom line: neither you nor your property will be safe. Free college is a budget-busting escapade to produce more ill-informed people with degrees. The codification of infanticide will become a legal fact, at taxpayer expense. Forget about a border meaning anything. Even “modified” doses of any or all of this is the feeding of poison at only a slightly slower drip rate.
It took awhile after 1960 for violent crime to spike by the 1980’s. Vox reported in September 2020 that homicides surged 53% and assaults 14% across 27 US cities this summer when compared to the same period last year. Is this a harbinger of things to come as it was in 1965?A Chicago police officer picks through debris at the crime scene where a number of people were shot, including a 3-year-old child, in a city park on the south side of Chicago, Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013. (AP Photo/Paul Beaty)
To chisel all of the above in granite, your constitutional republic will be refashioned to make the entire program a permanent end-state. With the emasculation of the Electoral College, red states will be neutered and all of us will be governed by the ignorant follies emanating from the big cities and the coasts. Once in power, the Democrats will gerrymander the Senate’s rules while packing the body with four more sure-Democrat seats, in addition to packing the Supreme Court. The courts as neutral arbiters in the application of the laws will cease.
FDR’s court-packing scheme from the 1930’s.
If you expect the midterm elections to provide a corrective, you’re going to be very disappointed. The above changes will reduce the impact of any negative blowback after the Democrats have already been in power for two years to implement the revolution. All that California has come to represent will be a national experience.
To see where we are heading, we need to go back to the 20th century and relearn the fact that history is a battle of ideas. Those ideas take us in different directions and have real world consequences. This fact is a central theme of the accompanying video, “Commanding Heights: The Battle of Ideas”. The program appeared on PBS in the early 2000’s, and while it begins with a focus on 9/11 and globalization, it centers on a century-long debate between free markets and government control of the economy. Two individuals take center stage: John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek.
Friedrich Hayek (l) and John Maynard Keynes.
Keynes will become the only true prophet for all things economic to Democrats and British Labourites. Hayek won’t achieve his due till he wins the Nobel prize for economics in the late 1970’s and his ideas are adopted by insurgent Republicans and Tories who would be led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They would end the economic mess left by Keynes and his political handlers mostly in the Democratic and Labour Parties.
Grab a cup of coffee, take some time (a couple of hours), and educate yourself on the real stakes in this election. Don’t go to the polls with only Trump in mind. The candidates carry with them much more than personalities. They also bring a set of programs overlaying a contentious philosophy that will have serious effects on you and generations thereafter.
