I asked a question of Never Trump that I’ll never get answered: what is the positive result obtained by getting Trump out? What’s better?
Nothing, of course – and, indeed, everything is worse. There isn’t a single real metric of American life you can point to where there has been an improvement. Everything is even more shot through with lies, the economy crumbles, our enemies around the world rejoice…and in response to all this, the government is trying to censor dissent.
Somebody put up a Tweet yesterday condemning Pence for his 1/6 actions and one of the blue check Never Trumps rose to Pence’s defense. Naturally, of course; what you expect. But I pointed out that if Pence had provoked a crisis by refusing to certify the four contested States, we’d be better off today. Sure, it would have cause a blow up. Probably riots in the streets. But, we got the riots anyway. And if the House had ended up electing the President, it would have been according to the law set in place for precisely this situation: where there wasn’t a candidate whom the overwhelming majority believed had legitimately obtained 270+ electoral votes. The Founders weren’t stupid – they knew that things like this could happen.
To be sure, Pence should have said he’d do that by mid-December – to force the issue. To force, that is, some bi-partisan action that everyone could trust to determine who really got to 270 or, failing agreement on that, let everyone know that on January 6th, the House was going to vote State by State to determine the next President while the Senate voted to determine the next Vice President. It probably would have been Biden, folks. Even with the GOP controlling a majority of the House delegations, deals would have been struck to get Biden to 51 House delegations voting for him…with guarantees in place about certain steps Biden would take once in office. And even though we on the Right would still despise Biden, we’d swallow it – because it would have been done according to law (and one of the things in such a deal would be election security going forward; it would have to be – some very solid assurance that such a thing couldn’t happen again).
The whole problem of our modern times is precisely this: a refusal to follow the law. Now, don’t get me wrong – you’ll find reams of legal briefs and court decisions which make it seem like we have laws, but we really don’t. We almost never follow the law anymore. Too inconvenient. Oddly, it was Trump who was the first President probably since Coolidge to really try to follow the law – and in so doing he got badly burned by lawless people pretending to use law against him (for instance, those ridiculous lawsuits – which were ratified by the SC in the sense that they weren’t just tossed out as obviously stupid – against the President reversing the orders of the previous President).
I date the rise of official lawlessness to the Roe decision. You can probably go back further, if you like, but that is a nice catch-all for it. In Roe, the SC simply ignored the law and said it meant something that it didn’t. It was absurd – if any government action was to be taken about abortion, it had to be on the State level as the Constitution was silent on it and had nothing in it remotely relating to the practical or moral aspects of a procedure which didn’t exist in 1787. The federal courts from the get-go on it should have said, “take it up with the States or Congress, we simply have nothing to say here.”. But, they didn’t – because some judges wanted it legal and knew it wouldn’t be made so nationally by either Congress or the 50 States. Same thing, later, with same sex marriage and a host of other issues…things which simply aren’t covered by federal law being placed into federal law by judicial fiat.
But that isn’t the end of it. It isn’t just the Courts ignoring the law – the government, as a whole, ignores the law. Team Pudding Brain is trying to get Facebook to censor “misinformation”. This is obviously against the law. But they’re doing it and Facebook will go along with it. And even if we get a Republican President into office in 2024, neither the Biden people pressing for this illegal action nor the corporate executives carrying out the illegal action will be arrested. The law doesn’t matter. The censorship thing is just the latest, of course.
A couple days ago I saw an ad for an upcoming movie. Looks like a tear-jerker about this guy, brought illegally to the US as a child, who now faces deportation. It was obviously made to stick it to Trump and his supporters. And, of course, we’re all supposed to feel sympathy for the guy and then agree that the law should be set aside. That’s the key thing. I can’t say for certain that the producers of the movie knew that’s what they were doing, but that is what it is all about: a demand that the law not matter. We’re so shot through with lawlessness that we have whole bunch of people who just assume that if the law says you can’t, then the law must be wrong and simply ignored. This is the path to not merely national suicide, but the end of civilization (which we can see when we watch those videos of assaults and brawls which pop up regularly on social media these days).
We can’t allow that. As I watched the ad, it occurred to me to ask the character, if he were real, two questions:
- Why is your problem my problem?
- Why should I ignore the law for you?
The first question might seem a little heartless, but it really isn’t. It is a clarifying question. The problem the guy in the burning house has is my problem if I’m in proximity and can render aid. The problem of the guy in the burning house a thousand miles away isn’t my problem. For me to consider that I have to act for someone, there has to be a reason I am morally obligated to do so. I did not bring the child in illegally. I did not advocate for a system which would permit a child to be brought in illegally. So, what is my concern with the individual in question? The lawless always try to make out that all of us must do something in the setting aside of law – that if we won’t agree to the exception (which immediately becomes the rule) then we have failed morally. That isn’t the case.
The second question is the far more crucial. Laws can, of course, be set aside. It is why we give the Executive the power of pardon and why we allow for prosecutor discretion. There may be a case to allow the law to be set aside – but these will always be on a case by case basis. The cannot be blanket – they cannot be, that is, to merely ignore the law. The law is the law. It was placed on the books for a reason. Maybe it was a bad reason. Maybe it no longer serves the reason it was created. But however it got there, until it is changed according to law, it must be enforced with only the rarest exceptions allowed.
The Rule of Law is civilization. End of discussion. You either have law and civilization, or you have lawless barbarism. Right now, we have lawless barbarism. If the actual, physical barbarism hasn’t come to your locality, then that is simply because the barbarians haven’t got to you. Yet. We must restore absolute respect for the law, as written, or we are doomed.
Kicker: it may take a revolutionary overthrow of the system for us to be able to make laws.
Blogs For Victory 
I asked a question of Never Trump that I’ll never get answered: what is the positive result obtained by getting Trump out? What’s better?
Nothing, of course – and, indeed, everything is worse.
Let’s hope tens of millions of voters come to the same conclusion on their way to the voting booth on November 8th, 2022.
Pence could have stated, early on, that there is an actual formal definition of the word “certify” and that there is the expectation that any legislature that certifies a vote count has a strong reason to believe that it is accurate—that is, “certifiable”. That is, if there is strong evidence that the legislature truly cannot say with certainty that it knows who got how many votes, it cannot legally certify the count it was given.
He wouldn’t have had to say anyone had to determine who got which votes, and the straw man of “it wouldn’t change the outcome” wouldn’t matter. It should always have been a serious approach to certification, not just an automatic rubber stamping of a tally for political reasons or because of laziness or cowardice.
He would not have had the authority to refuse to accept a certification if a legislature dared him to by providing “certification” of blatantly uncertifiable vote counts, but a strong enough statement from him and Barr about the legal requirement to be certain of the accuracy of something before “certifying” it would certainly have gotten the attention of a lot of legislatures and their secretaries of state and their attorneys general.
The time to start talking about the moral and legal requirements for certification, and its legal definition, and the penalties for false certification, should have been around November 10 when the witness testimonies of fraud started to be made public and the affidavits started being sworn. And every single time the diversion tactic of “it wouldn’t change the outcome” was dragged out it should have been shot down for what it was—-an effort to change the focus of the problem.
…it may take a revolutionary overthrow of the system for us to be able to make laws.
Why?
Let’s just take a series of actions that, while unlikely, are not impossible—and they might even be defined as “a revolutionary overthrow of the system” though I would consider it a revival of the system.
1. A strong Republican is elected to the presidency, and Republicans have not only a pretty strong majority in both houses of Congress but the kind of leadership that can keep squishes like Romney and Sasse in line.
2. Congress votes to make the oath of office binding, considered to be equal to an employment contract, meaning that a blatant violation will result in losing the position and all associated benefits.
3. The President finds and appoints an Attorney General with the huevos and backbone and integrity to stand up for the law, and the law enforcement agencies across the country, starting at the federal level, are held to the same standard.
4. Indictments start to cascade, from Hillary Clinton for her violations of national security laws to every federal agent and employee who lied to Congress and so on. There is no consideration for party affiliation or anything but the letter of the law.
At this point every attorney general must follow the letter of the law or be replaced. Ditto for every judge. It would be chaos, there would be screeching and wailing and gnashing of teeth. There would be a flood of hysteria from the Complicit Agenda Media, but it would be accompanied by indictments of its own members when and if they received classified information or otherwise participated in illegal activities. People would be lining up to work out plea bargains, and that would be fine—-we wouldn’t need to put a 65-year-old man in prison for lying to Congress if we can saddle him with a felony record, take his job and hit him with a massive fine.
5. Governors, mayors and state attorneys general and district attorneys would have to choose between letting people get away with criminal activities or losing their own jobs. Ditto for judges. So just as politicians and bureaucrats are getting the message that they won’t be getting away with crimes any more, so will the thugs on the streets.
Riots? Tag the instigators, track them to their money sources and indict them all for federal crimes of crossing state lines to commit crimes, paying people to cross state lines, etc. Don’t tell me that we don’t have the technology or brains to be able to do this.
Once again, it is a political problem, and can be solved with a political solution, though it would have to be a radical solution applied relentlessly.
We didn’t need “a revolutionary overthrow of the system” to deal with Organized Crime in the 20s—we needed an Elliot Ness mentality.
For all the screeching about Trump, on either side, and all the swooning over all that he accomplished, the fact is that he did tiptoe when, looking back at the time, he should have stomped through the federal agencies like a rogue elephant and swept aside great swathes of corrupt bureaucrats and agency appointees.
Seriously, what’s the downside? A year of political bloodshed, followed by a year of explaining to the public what happened and why to save Congress from a panicky rebound, and two more years to let the results settle in and pay off.
Of course not a single element of any of this could be possible without a strong media platform to present our message to the country, so it’s all just wishful thinking because as far as I can see the only person capable of putting something like that together is working on his personal political future instead of a Big Picture approach.
Of course not a single element of any of this could be possible without a strong media platform to present our message to the country, so it’s all just wishful thinking
So, it really would be a whole lot easier to just shoot them all and let God sort it out.
There are some who seem to think so.
However, I think it could be done even with the limited media access we have now, though that would result in losing Congress in the first midterm unless a surge of public support for the reinstatement of a lawful society resonated with enough people even in the absence of a large network-type media presence.
# 1 already happened, in 2016. We thought the first part of #3 happened—it was clearly a goal of the President, he just chose the wrong man, leading to the failure of #4.
So go back to the weakest link in my scenario, aside from the communications issue—that of forcing elected officials and bureaucrats to do their damned jobs and not use them as platforms for their social justice fantasies, in defiance of the law and the Constitution..
If anyone has a better or faster or easier way to make sure these officials have skin in the game and something to lose if they defy the law and spit on their actual jobs and violate their symbolic oaths of office, I have yet to hear of it. All I hear is objections to the idea of giving the oath of office some heft, some real meaning, but never an alternative.
I’m kind of with Spook on this one lol. No surprise
I’m betting, if Democrats lose 100 House seats and a half dozen or more Senate seats next year, that the violent, extremist elements of the Democrat Party will go off the deep end and not give us much of a choice. I’m not wishing for it, but when they say, “by any means necessary,” I take them at their word. It’s about the only time I do.
If you men are talking about kicking rioter ass and not bothering to take names, I’m all about that and always have been. I liked Mayor Daley’s edict to shoot to kill when engaging rioters and looters.
But as far as “armed revolution” going farther than that, I don’t see it. I don’t see Leftist militias challenging the Right, or any other scenario in which this whole ‘spilling blood for patriotism’ thing would fit in. Aside from the cannon fodder of Antifa and its paid agitators and instigators, and a few recreational rioters who will pee down their legs and run home to Mommy when bullets start flying, I still don’t see any opposition that will spill the blood of patriots in their zeal to protect the nation, or that would even call for armed opposition.
For all this impassioned rhetoric about “civil war” and breathless volunteering to be on the front lines, I still don’t see who we would be fighting with guns.
We could kettle the violent rioters in every city and bundle them off to places no one knows about, and very quickly the violence in the streets would stop. We could track their funding back to Soros, et al, and shut them down as well, drying up funding for these kinds of street theater. (We could, by the way, do that now—but we don’t. We could strip Soros of his American citizenship for inciting violence and overthrow of the government and then deny him the ability to fund political candidates and campaigns and so on in this country. But we don’t.)
We could lock up and deny bail to looters, and ditto. Then what? Who’s going to be fighting? Who’s going to be shooting?
These are not rhetorical questions. I am serious. Is there a Leftist army no one knows about that will come out of the shadows and call for Americans to pick up their guns? Does anyone think China or Russia is going to send in troops we would have to battle?
For all the macho chest-thumping about being ready or even eager to bleed for the nation, I still have no idea of who is going to cause the bleeding, unless it takes place in riots. Are there “…violent, extremist elements of the Democrat Party …” that we think might pick up guns and go after the Right? Aside from the rioters I mean? Again—-a serious question. I see a lot of verbal violence from the extremists on the Left, but don’t know of any factions likely to do more than bomb some buildings or engage in violence that doesn’t put them face to face with actual armed people.
For all this impassioned rhetoric about “civil war” and breathless volunteering to be on the front lines, I still don’t see who we would be fighting with guns.
I don’t know how serious Cluster is, but most of my comments have been tongue-in-cheek macho guy talk. That said, I do believe the Left’s desire is to do away with traditional law enforcement and create a national police force. Obama said as much.
I don’t see that happening any time soon, especially if Republicans take back Congress next year, but Democrats have owned violence as a political tactic for my entire adult life, and I just don’t see them tucking their tail between their legs and slithering back under their rock if they get their political asses kicked next year. There’s a lot of rage building up in flyover country, and I know a lot of people who are just itching for the Dems do something stupid.
I agree that “Democrats have owned violence as a political tactic” but it has always been by proxy. That is, the fat cat elites and the urban voters haven’t been out there risking themselves. They’ve depended on paid agitators who have been successful at stirring up easily manipulated young people, and neither of these groups poses much of a threat. The numbers are small, the motivation is either money or ignorant immature angst, and this is a threat that can be quickly and easily dealt with.
Go back a few decades, to the 60s and groups led by people like Barack Obama’s good friends, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn. She killed people: He tried to kill people. The Weathermen planted bombs and killed a few people—and a few of their own, when a bombmaker messed up and blew them up. These people were seriously violent, they wanted to kill people, sometimes they did kill people. And then they, and their movement, disappeared. Ayers got off on a technicality, bragging on the courthouse steps “Guilty as hell and free as a bird” and though they did go on to infect the nation with their ideology in ways ranging from their roles in academia to their friendship with and promotion of Barack Obama, they were no longer posing physical threats. Some were arrested and a couple were scared into hiding under assumed names and living like normal people.
Democrats have depended on guerilla tactics of small paid forces inspiring a few gullible and unbalanced youth to add to their numbers. I contend that a shoot to kill policy in police departments would take care of this in short order, not requiring any additional participation from the citizenry. I also contend that preventing political Leftists from prosecuting citizens for acts that are clearly self defense and not criminal would add to the reluctance to go out and create violence in the alleged name of some political movement. Promoting and defending the right to defend property and people will do more to quell urban violence than any outside militia. What do you think the effect would have been on rioters if they knew business owners were inside those businesses, armed and with the support of law enforcement if they defended themselves and their property? How many amped-up vandals posturing as protesters are going to run up to smash a window knowing there might be a shotgun on the other side?
The violence we see can easily be contained and stopped, when and if there is the political will to do so. The three communities I can think of in Colorado where Antifa types tried to create problems dealt with them quickly, with nonviolent force and the promise of violence if called for, and they drove the wannabe rioters out of town. Literally chased them out of town. But they had the backing of local law enforcement and didn’t have to worry about being arrested if a wannabe anarchist stubbed his toe running away from a bunch of guys on horses herding them to the city limits. (That’s what they did in Berthoud, Colorado, and it was a thing of beauty—-a wall of horses ridden by stern-faced ranchers implacably marching toward the wannabe rioters and then literally herding them down the street.)
We have the ability to deal with the problems we have been seeing—we simply lack the political will. Is there any circumstance lending itself more to the ability to surreptitiously plant a tracker on someone than in the close quarters and random physical contacts of a riot? We could have been tagging and arresting agitators all along, but we didn’t have the political will. We could have been setting high bail amounts to keep them in jail, or at least to make their masters pay a lot to get them out—and knowing you will be left to rot in jail if caught will cool the ardor of a lot of mercenaries–but we lack the political will to do so. We could be putting pressure on these people to lead us back to their funders, and if any lead back to Soros we have the legal mechanism to strip him of his US citizenship, limiting his ability to buy US elections. But we lack the political will.
It’s emotionally gratifying to imagine some scenario in which a citizen can stand up and bravely shed his blood for his country, but short of a foreign invasion I don’t see anything like this being necessary. I think a shift in political will would allow citizens to deal with individual acts of Leftist violence, with the help of police allowed to actually do their jobs, and while some of them might bleed or even die in the process this whole “revolution/civil war” thing seems quite hyperbolic to me.
Yes, there will be a revolution, but it will be a quiet one, with skirmishes like shop owners taking out a couple of rioters with shotguns. Yes, there will be a civil war, but it will be one of words, with those infected by Leftist cant being surly and resentful and spouting Leftist nonsense going up against rational people standing their ground in school board meetings and the public arena.
I hope you’re right. As I’ve said before, the last thing I want to do on this earth is kill another American, but the Left is so close to their ultimate goal that I just don’t see them giving up without a fight. I don’t know what form that fight will take, and, as you say, it kind of depends on whether society as a whole can muster the political will to stop it before a lot of people die. We are up against some really evil people with lots of money at their disposal. The fact that Trump didn’t go after those people using RICO or the Patriot Act speaks as much to the mentality of the leadership in senior federal law enforcement as it does of Trump, IMO.
I’m not exactly a pacifist. I could easily write a script where infiltrators in riots slap little infrared dots on the backs of active agitators to give snipers good targets. I have zero patience with the type of violence the Left routinely employs. After a phone call scam effort the other day I thought “If that guy walked into my office right now I’d just shoot him”. As a rancher, I accept the need to dispose of predators, and I can easily apply that to the two-legged kind.
I just don’t see the kind of armed conflict where opposing sides engage in firefights.
I think the Trump calculation was that he would win reelection so would wait till his second term started to bring down the hammers that were waiting in the wings, allowing his administration a few years before his successor would be running and hopefully running on a successful record of reinstating law and order.
I also think that the Left recognized this which is why they had to pull out all the stops to get him out of office before these plans could be implemented.
I think Barr would have acted, in a secure administration with Trump prodding him energetically—he only folded when he didn’t have any backup. Ditto for Durham.
Now we are back where Trump was in 2017—-looking at beginning a whole new administration in 2025, with the election cycle of 2028 looming over us. The advantage is that we now know what has to be done, and have a lot of the pieces in place and will have either Trump or someone inspired by and energized by and even advised by Trump to hit the ground running on Inauguration Day. And who knows? Maybe a strong Republican Congress in 23/24 can do some important advance work, alongside some strong Republican governors.
This is a long article and well worth the time it takes to read it all. It is the latest in a very rational and detailed examination of the Arizona audit.
https://redstate.com/stu-in-sd/2021/07/17/a-u-d-i-t-of-elections-arizona-edition-the-roof-was-just-blown-off-n411830
And she said it out loud:
Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious diseases specialist with the University of California San Francisco said it. “I’m recommending one dose after natural infection, not because of any evidence I can find,” explained Gandhi, “but because of emotion.”
I think an underrated weapon we have on the Right is the simple statement, in response to so much of the nonsense spouted by the Left, of “That’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard”. It brings people up short when they are confident they are spouting some great accepted wisdom.
Scorn and ridicule can and should be dished out in small increments, but whenever possible. We don’t need to get into big battles: A quick “I’ve never understood how so many people can believe something so wrong” will sometimes do. I’m not talking about a situation where an argument can ensue, but the kind of thing you can toss off when the guy on the next treadmill says something stupid, or someone in a meeting.
Instead of defending Trump, I now just say something akin to “I’ve noticed that some people can’t talk about ideas so they default to personality, and that lets them complain about Trump”.
These people live in their little bubbles, where they smugly assume that they are not only right, but that others agree with them. I suggest poking holes in those bubbles whenever possible. We can’t blow them up, but we can start to deflate them.
I was having a stimulating conversation with a guy next to me on the treadmill at the Y the other day. The wall in front of the main line of treadmills has a half dozen or so large screen monitors tuned to various venues, and the CNN and Fox News monitors are separated by one that has a loop presentation of all things relating to the Y. This guy commented on how differently CNN and Fox were both covering the same topic, and we started talking politics. At some point the topic of political parties came up, and this guy said something that I’m going to adopt as my go-to line. He said, the main difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans occasionally do something that I disagree with while the Democrat Party STANDS for everything that I disagree with. That pretty much says it all.
That’s a great observation and I think I will start to use it as well
It’s short, concise, would almost fit on a bumper sticker.
If there ever was a large, organized armed resistance to what our ruling class is currently engaged in, I would certainly join but like most of you, I don’t see that happening. What I do hope begins to happen across the country is that karma takes a large bite out of the Left’s ass in a meaningful way. And by that I mean in a harmful and destructive way when necessary. I think it is time we see a couple dead Antifa members lying in their own blood in the city streets they are currently destroying and I am a little surprised that that hasn’t happened. I would like to see some liberal “Karen’s” get a taste of their own self righteous medicine, I would like to see more open and hostile protests against masks and lockdowns, I would like to see Dr. Fauci fired and indicted, and I would like to see some politicians become increasingly uncomfortable and fearful while in public. But most importantly, I want to see Trump come back, which he will. The 2020 election was stolen and our country is currently being hijacked by incompetent communists … but they wont get away with it again, particularly if we physically intimidate them, scare the shit out of them and be fully prepared to back it up. That’s what it’s going to take. Never forget. Trump won and we are the majority.
Just got back from Montana and there is a reason why everyone is moving there. It is still, what America use to be.
I don’t think there is a video clip yet of Mark Levin on Hannity last night or the night before but when there is, I think you will like it. He was wound up as tightly as I have ever seen him, and that is saying a lot, and he talked about the same thing we —especially you, Cluster—-have been talking about here.
I’ve always liked Mark and will definitely look for that segment today.
Montana, though, is changing, mostly due to the influx of California rich people. I have seen some distressingly Liberal politicians and ideas coming out of Montana, and hope that trajectory can change.
That’s true, but I think and hope the trajectory will change. Once again, conservatives are the vast majority up there but like us, they are the vocal minority. We need to be loud
I think it is time we see a couple dead Antifa members lying in their own blood in the city streets they are currently destroying
I agree—-though when it happened, the young man who killed one thug and injured another in a vivid and recorded example of self defense is accused of murder and is fighting for his freedom. When home owners merely showed a gang of rioters that they had the ability to defend themselves and their home they were prosecuted for doing so.
In other words, much of this is a political problem which has to be resolved first.
It is nice to see progressives take themselves out though. Broad daylight fatal shootings are occurring daily in the dystopian inner cities as is rape, assault, vagrancy, drug addiction and as a result many store closings, so soon the inner cities will be littered with dead or dying progressives … so we have that to be thankful for.
We have much to be thankful for, not the least of which is watching our adversaries kill each other. And if you think this is lost on traditional Democrats who value law and order, think again.
Well, as I have often said, if you keep your head up your rear end the view never changes. So don’t expect the more committed Dems to see what is happening, or at least to relate it to their own policies. More and more, as I consider the Right’s inability to establish a wider-ranging communications platform, I see our failure to relate the problems we are seeing to the decisions made by the Democrats in charge.
To be a Democrat is to be someone who has never connected any of the dots, and furthermore doesn’t see a reason to think a pattern would emerge if doing so. So your average Dem in California is going to think “OK, Newsome is a disaster, so we need to get rid of him and elect a different Democrat”. There doesn’t seem to be the thought process of “While Newsome himself is a disaster, his policies are in line with general Democrat policies, and we need to dig deeper and change those policies, not just the name on the state letterhead”.
And I blame this on the emotional malleability of the average Dem, who is so easily emotionally programmed to just reject and resist anything that is not Dem. It’s not true ideology because most of them have no idea of what the true ideology of the Left IS, but it is the emotional ideology of tribalism. They are bonded to the “US” with permanent resistance to the “THEM” and that’s all they need to make their decisions.
I speak as one who was there, who was one of that tribe, and I clearly remember the knee-jerk rejection of anything to do with
“THEM”. What changed me, or at least opened the gate to the path of change, was exposure to different ideas—more to the point it was the challenging of my own ideas.
As I have said, I started listening to a radio talk show. Sorry to step on some Limbaugh fan toes here, but I think Limbaugh’s show was more of a lecture series. It had value, as it explained things to people, but I found it very one-dimensional. The host of the show I listened to would actually engage Leftists, and encourage them to explain their belief systems and their thought processes, and that is what engaged me. I had ideas, things I strongly believed, but they had no foundation, so when someone would call in and echo my own convictions I would be thrilled and would listen carefully because I was so eager to have someone explain to me why I thought what I thought. And what changed my life was learning that they couldn’t explain anything.
Very smart-sounding, articulate and often erudite people would call in to the Mike Rosen show and he would give them all the time they wanted to explain their positions and evangelize about their politics, with one caveat: When he asked a question it had to be answered, and then the caller could ask a question. It had to go back and forth, addressing one idea or topic or policy at a time.
And what I learned from listening to Leftists, smart and articulate Leftists with the motivation to call this show to talk about their beliefs, was that they simply could not defend them. They could not answer the questions. They would try the trick of “answering” with their own questions, which educated me very well on the Leftist tactics of distraction and diversion. But Mike never let them get away with it—he would calmly explain that if the caller would not address the single question put on the table he would engage Mr. Hold Button until the caller agreed.
What I learned what that a smart and focused host could disengage the tactics of Leftist discourse and force a caller into the kind of discourse the rest of us take for granted—that is, an orderly give-and-take of questions and answers, an answer to a specific question leading to another question to clarify it or expand upon it. And I learned that a Leftist, no matter how smart or determined, can’t communicate in that kind of structure—he has to have room to dance around, confuse the issue, toss out non sequiturs and avoid questions by asking other questions, and so on.
On his side, Mike could and did have succinct and accurate answers. So an exchange would start with a Lefty making a claim with absolute certainty, and then try to build upon it until told he would have to explain the first allegation before going on, or Mr. Hold Button would step in. So there would be an effort to explain or defend the original contention. Then Mike, using his own rules of taking turns, would ask a clarifying question about what had been said, and hold the caller to an answer to that single question before going on.
The imposition of a linear structure of discourse DESTROYS Leftist efforts to propagandize.
What this did for me was make me realize I wanted to be on the side that has the answers, not the side that has to frantically tap dance around the questions because it does not have answers. And that led me to doing my own research, which is why I am where I am now.
I believe that exposure to this kind of awareness that the Left doesn’t have answers, and has to frantically try to divert and distract when asked the hard questions, will open a lot of eyes on the Unexamined Left.
We can lecture people, like Limbaugh did. We can harangue people, like most talk show hosts do. We can endlessly repeat the same thing over and over again, like Hannity does, and we can produce well-researched information in tiny bits and pieces like Ingraham does. We can make people laugh when we make fun of the Left, like Gutfeld does, and we can educate people with an abundance of true hard-hitting journalism like Tucker does. But I never hear any show which does what Rosen’s show did, which was to encourage Leftists to explain themselves—which they really want to do because they are so fervently convinced of their inherent rightness—-and calmly, respectfully, with no name calling or insults, just hold them to a linear form of discourse in which they were allowed to ask questions (one at a time) but had to let the host answer uninterrupted and then answer the host’s questions, one at a time, uninterrupted. There were a few rules, like no veering off into personal attacks on public figures, but in general the format appeared to allow a Leftist to explain his positions but in reality showcased the superficiality of those positions.
I contend that nudging people into changing their own minds instead of beating them over the head with what we think they should accept is always more effective. Good parents understand this; good managers understand this. But for some reason our media people don’t.
The imposition of a linear structure of discourse DESTROYS Leftist efforts to propagandize.
100% true, but you can’t teach a 1st grader to apply advanced physics, and you can’t teach a Democrat to apply logic.
100% true, but you can’t teach a 1st grader to apply advanced physics, and you can’t teach a Democrat to apply logic which basically says “I agree but I don’t agree”.
I pointed out that a linear structure of discourse eliminates the semantic tricks used by Dems. And it does. Whether or not you are right in saying that Dems can’t learn to apply logic is a completely different thing.
Just as the Left refuses to see individuals and only sees blocks, or demographics, sometimes we tend to do the same thing and see all Democrats as a single monolithic entity defined throughout by the same characteristics. It’s bigotry, just the flip side of the coin that ascribes characteristics to races or says all Republicans are racist.
We know, when we think about it, that many if not most who vote Democrat do so for a couple of emotional reasons, neither of which is based on an objective commitment to an actual political ideology. One of the things that contributes to this is the constant reinforcement of these reasons inside the bubble, and I contend that challenging those reasons can pierce the bubble enough—not in everyone but in some—-to allow reason to start to seep in
One of the driving motivators for voting Dem is not support for the ideology of the Democrats but voting AGAINST the Invented Other they have been taught, from the cradle, to fear and even hate. This is Identity Politics on steroids. And how do we respond? With Identity Politics on steroids. They cherish their ISSUES so what do we do? We attack those issues. They defend their people, so what do we do? We attack those people.
My observation, based on my personal experience and then on experiments in talking to Leftists, is that when identity and personality are removed from the equation, and there is nothing left to talk about but ideology, cracks open up. I don’t mean discourse on the merits of Marxism when I say “ideology” but simple concepts like the dangers of consolidating power in the hands of a few. I’ve only met one person who argued that power SHOULD be concentrated at the top, and that states and local governments should not have much authority—when I said I thought each state should be able to decide on its own approach to helping people pay for health care, and on how it wants to educate his young, his argument was that this would not be “fair” because some states would have “better” programs than others, and the argument that people would then have the freedom to choose where to live to get the programs they preferred fell on deaf ears. But this is unusual. When getting away from big-picture stuff clearly labeled as POLITICS most people are happy to talk about the little stuff, and most people agree that it is silly to have the same rules applied to Rhode Island and Texas when the problems and issues of each state are so different.
But that’s just my approach. I don’t think I have to bludgeon someone with my ideas till he crumbles and gives up and agrees that I am right. I am fine with slipping in small poison pills like considering the dangers of massively powerful top-down government and hoping they start to percolate through the system.
Despite the White House’s deal to keep Hunter Biden’s potential art buyers anonymous to avoid any appearance of conflicts of interest or undue influence, the son of the president is going to meet with potential purchasers in person.
Of course he is. How else can he broker the sale of access to the presidency?
Right now some bald headed ugly piece of male shit is on MSNBC all excited about Democrats “civil disobedience” and declaring that this is the “right action for the moment”
Let’s show them our disobedience … in a very loud and aggressive manner. Time to rattle some cages and scare the shit out of people.
How aggressive? What kinds of disobedience? Got any examples?
I’m sworn to secrecy
You never want to violate the pinky swear of the clubhouse or they might take away your secret decoder ring and pull up the ladder when they see you coming
All true except it’s a ground set clubhouse
Probably a good idea