Over on X yesterday a mutual noted that he was watching Band of Brothers for the umpteenth time and he was wondering – even though he was a combat vet, himself – if he could have done what those soldiers did. I think everyone does wonder when they watch that. And it gets you also thinking of the men who took Tarawa, who sailed the USS Johnston into certain death. Of all those who have done incredible feats of arms in our past.
It is good to point out here that courage is the strongest desire to live combined with a complete willingness to die. It is a paradox; you’re only way to safety is through death. A soldier pinned down in a murderous crossfire has the choice: try to hide and hope he gets missed (unlikely as time goes on) or charge at the enemy and stop him from shooting. Of course, you do present a much better target when you’re charging. But if it works, the danger is over. He who would lose his life shall save it. You remember suddenly the men of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment who crossed the Waal river in canvas boats under murderous fire…and when they got ashore the Germans pretty much ran away, terrified at these demons who seemingly couldn’t be stopped. Do we have that any longer?
Well, another thing which crossed the time line was a report from 2014 that 41% of the newly commissioned Marine officers did not meet the minimum requirements – mental and physical – for being commissioned in World War Two. I can only assume it has gotten worse since then as Woke demands have further infested the military requiring an ever lowering of standards so that various demographic boxes can be checked off. Given this, it is almost a certainty that we do not have an officer like Julian Cook who led those men in the canvas boats…we don’t have officers who can take regular people and turn them into killers that battle-hardened Waffen-SS troops would run away from.
But it gets worse than just the fact that we’ve got substandard officers. There is such a thing as esprit de corps. This is the collective memory and ability of an organization. It isn’t dependent upon any single person but it is dependent upon the overall organism remaining true to itself. If you watched Band of Brothers you know that Captain Herbert Sobel comes off pretty poorly overall as an officer – and in truth he was roundly disliked by his men and appeared to lack combat leadership ability. On the other hand, he made Easy Company into what it became. The intensive training and stern discipline – which Sobel himself learned in officer training – turned civilians into tough as nails warriors who simply would not quit. After the war even some of the men who hated him as a CO acknowledged his part in making them into warriors. Sobel learned his trade from a man who learned his trade who in turn learned his trade and on and on back…and the men Sobel trained passed that corporate knowledge on down and they, in their turn, also passed it on and so the American military organism – in spite of individual failures – retained its ability to engage in combat effectively. But that chain has been cut; at some point fairly recently, the mental and physical requirements of being an infantry officer were dispensed with in favor of other criteria. It is gone; or, at best, almost gone. It is highly likely that our average company commander these days hasn’t the foggiest notion of what being a warrior is, nor how to impart that capability to subordinates. They might know the books; that is, they might know the mechanics of having a company assault a fixed position…but that technical knowledge is worthless if the officer can’t, with a scratch force, improvise an attack and be certain that the soldiers will carry it out.
And it is not just the military. Every area of expertise has suffered a dumbing down. A lowering of requirements in order to make certain demographic boxes are checked off. Have you noticed it? When I went to a doctor with my bum knee the doctor pretty much had no idea what might be the problem even though I described clearly what had happened and offered my informed amateur opinion that it was likely soft tissue damage. Nope. She just went to her checklist – and I was sent to get an x ray even though it was obvious no bones were broken. And after that I get sent for physical therapy. Huge sigh. I mean, I’ll have to do it because that is the way it works these days but what isn’t happening here is an actual physician thinking about my problem and coming up with a likely solution (and there may be no solution; I might just have a bum knee). I’ve heard of people watching their doctors Google their stated symptoms to see what might come up.
We’re breaking the chain. That is, we’re severing ourselves from our collective knowledge because mastering that knowledge is a difficult task which not everyone is suited to perform. But the deal the modern Left offers is that you can be whatever you want. And once the chain is broken it can’t be restored. You have to forge an entirely new chain. That is what the Dark Ages were – it wasn’t that people got stupid; but the late Roman world simply stopped transmitting corporate knowledge to successor generations. Everyone got more concerned with the latest avant garde art, their position at court, the acquisition of money. This is why the Romans pretty much stopped building their famed aqueducts and bridges by the Third Century and when Constantine built his triumphal arch in Rome during the Fourth Century he had to steal parts from monuments built in the Second Century. The Romans had forgotten how to do things. Side note; they also forgot how to build and maintain an army and pretty much as soon as the barbarians worked up the courage they overthrew the form of Roman power which had long since vanished in actuality.
And then they had to start all over again. The barbarians admired the Roman world and were astonished at what they saw around them. But they didn’t know how to maintain it. Neither did the Romans. It all had to be learned again and it took a thousand years to do it. We’re heading right to that. We haven’t entirely lost the ability but those who really know how to do things are rapidly aging out. Before too long there will be no resource to turn to…and people won’t even look for the resource because they won’t know that they don’t know. It could get very bad very fast; and worse than last time because the population has not only lost their skills, but they’ve also been taught that lying and laziness are ok. At least the barbarians who took over Rome knew that you had to put some work in and at least try to tell the truth.
I do think we can arrest this development. I’ve mentioned how in the past – keeping in mind that to love means to will the best for the beloved, the primary way for us to love our neighbors right now is to start punishing – sometimes with exceptional violence – the lazy and the dishonest. They have to be forced to do the right thing. To work. To keep their word. To be brave. Of course they don’t want to. Right now in America you can be the definition of a lazy, cowardly liar and you’ll still get enough food to get fat…and still have your ample leisure time filled with the products of pop culture. But we can’t allow it to go on. It doesn’t work unless nearly everyone works. Nearly everyone is brave. Nearly everyone always tells the truth. The decent can survive deviancy, but a society of deviants will kill the decent.
Blogs For Victory 
What the Nazis and Communists did: these people will do if they think it necessary and they can get away with it. There is no restraint on them except opposing force.
This comment is exactly right. Democrats are no longer a political party, they are Cosa Nostra, aka the Mafia and the only way to defeat them is to act with the same vigor. A great line from The Untouchables was “if they put one of ours in the hospital, we put two of theirs in the morgue” and that’s the mentality needed.
So why are the systems breaking down in this country? Why is it noticeably more dangerous and more expensive to be an American? Because we have a government now run by weaponized college graduates, who have never built anything in their life and only know how to hate and destroy, For the last 23 years (9/11 was the beginning) weaponized college graduates have populated government, media, and academia and we’re now seeing the results. Combined with the emergence of social media, the agenda media has become nothing but propaganda perpetrated by completely partisan hacks who simply demonize their opposition and continuously create strawman arguments of which their mouth breathing white suburban female base laps up. Rinse and repeat. We can not properly address the myriad of problems in this country until we vanquish the Cosa Nostra.
The campaign of Donald Trump thus far is really that of an incumbent and it’s working. Next week all other candidates will be debating each other while Trump delivers a speech to the UAW members, and that will go over well and his poll numbers will go up. Trump is the President we need.
The Coup We Never Knew
Did someone or something seize control of the United States?
By: Victor Davis Hanson
What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?
Since when did borrowed money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?
When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent of dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?
Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then, and with impunity, did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d—s”?
Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?
How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?
When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked? Was it suddenly legal for one presidential candidate to hire a foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?
Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete in female sports? Did Congress enact such a law? Did the Supreme Court guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with biological women? Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had championed?
When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during a pandemic? In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or declare loan payments in suspension? How could it become illegal for mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during a quarantine but not so for Walmart or Target?
Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their ballots on Election Day? Was this revolutionary change the subject of a national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of state legislatures? No, of course not.
What happened to Election Night returns? Did the fact that Americans created more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to tabulate the votes?
When did the nation abruptly decide that theft is not a crime, assault not a felony? How can thieves walk out with bags of stolen goods, without the wrath of angry shoppers, much less fear of the law?
Was there ever a national debate about the terrified flight from Afghanistan? Who planned it and why? And today, the current administration (Biden) is blaming former President Trump for that disaster!
What happened to the once-trusted FBI? Why almost overnight did its directors decide to mislead Congress, to deceive judges with concocted tales from fake dossiers and with doctored writs? Did Congress pass a law that our federal leaders in the FBI or CIA could lie under oath with impunity?
Were Americans ever asked whether their universities could discriminate against their sons and daughters based on their race? How did it become physically dangerous to speak the truth on a campus? How did that happen in America?
How did a virus cancel the Constitution? Did the lockdowns rob us of our sanity? Or was it the woke hysteria that ignited our collective madness?
We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare of a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we neither knew about nor recognized.
This all happened in the last 20 years … and it’s all “indirectly” our fault. While we were working, running businesses, and raising families, we deferred to our elected “representatives” to have our back, to promote conditions that will help us thrive, and to be good stewards of Constitutional freedoms and governance. WE WERE BETRAYED. They sold out our manufacturing jobs under the guise of “free trade”, they dumbed down our education in the name of fairness, they disrupted the nuclear family by promoting welfare, they stole our honor and wealth through needless overseas wars, and now they are threatening our stability through open borders.
America needs a new political coalition and a new direction.
America needs a new political coalition and a new direction
OR….America needs to clean out the clutter from an existing political coalition and re-establish its political philosophy of allegiance to Constitutional governance.
One of the things I am seeing is that a lot of the new blood in the party has that allegiance but is being attacked on personal grounds by the opposition, with a few Church Lady types supposedly on “our side” joining in on the scolding. I’d much rather see some leadership that would work with these people to help orient them and integrate them into a unified force.
Well I don’t thin we, or other conservatives have ever strayed from the Constitution. Trump was the most Constitutional President in my lifetime, that’s why I want him back in there. We’re not in a debate though, we are in a fight. A fight we can not afford to lose.
Well, it’s kind of a debate if one of us says we need a new coalition and one says we just need to clean up the one we have. It comes down to putting new tires on the car or getting a different car.
As far as whether we, or other conservatives, have strayed from the Constitution, isn’t that what you are talking about? The belief that the party purportedly the party based on constitutional governance isn’t acting on those principles? If that’s not your argument then why would we “need a new coalition”?
Trump was a constitutional president. He is not the only candidate likely to run the Executive Branch according to the Constitution. I’d like to have him back in office but more for what I think would be accomplished than for wanting HIM, personally. But if he isn’t going to be the winner then I would be just as happy, maybe happier, with DeSantis. I think the goals would be much the same, the outcome much the same, but the execution different, from a bulldozer approach to a scalpel. The first is by far the most entertaining and emotionally gratifying to a lot of people who are just pissed off and want a fight with political blood in the gutters, and the second more orderly and structured without the melodrama. A carefully wielded scalpel, in the right hands, can accomplish the same thing as a chain saw.
A fight we can not afford to lose. Got it. Got it the first few hundred times or so that point has been made and agreed every single time. I see no benefit in acting as if this is something that we don’t understand and need to have constantly repeated. But as a stand-alone statement it is no more than a platitude. We need to identify the kind of fight we think will be most effective, and then evaluate our ability to engage in it, and then strategize on how to do it.
For example, while on the surface it seems that attacking Joe Biden is a good fighting strategy, I think it is too tightly focused, because once a different candidate is announced most if not all of the ammunition collected to fight Joe Biden becomes mere historical artifacts, which may or may not at some future date result in some kind of prosecution. So, while I can’t argue with the need to make it clear to the nation just how corrupt Biden was and is, I think a narrow focus is counterproductive because it can’t be shifted to another candidate.
This is why I think everything we throw at Biden needs to tied very closely to the structure, the system, that enabled it. That is, to the system that uses the power of the State to attack and destroy political opponents. Because any Biden substitute is still going to represent that system, that structure, that political philosophy. We are dabbling in building cases against the FBI and the IRS and I can only hope that the people doing this have a long range plan to tie it all in together with the Leftist model of consolidating power in the hands of a few elites who then exert power over the rest of us.
Put another way: How can all the evidence and proof surrounding the Biden Crime Family be used in a campaign against Gavin Newsome? Against Michelle Obama?
I was listening to podcasts today and started to listen to one called The Whistleblowers. I turned it off in disgust but I know I need to listen to it, just not while driving so I can take notes. The author/reader is basically bragging about being part of the Trump administration and working within it to undermine it, and he says some call him a traitor for this but he prefers the term “whistleblower”—evidently he sees his sedition and efforts to mount a coup on the Trump administration as noble exposing of …..something.
He evidently goes on to list others who did the same thing, as the title is a plural, and I think these people should be prosecuted with a lot more vigor than people whose efforts to petition the government to do one single thing and have been sentenced to decades in prison for it.
#RESIST—the true insurrection effort in this country.
If the current trends continue, there’s going to be a whole lot of resistin’ going on in the months and years to come.
The dam is breaking …. truth be known “traditionally liberal” Democrats are MAGA and we have more in common with them, then we do with establishment Republicans, and this is how we win. This is how we restore this country, and if we nominate someone like Pence or Christie we will lose the once in a lifetime opportunity. Not saying we have everything in common, but enough to build on … it’s the love of our country that needs to come first.
Liberal actor John Cusack says Democratic Party elite ‘sold out the working class for decades’ and accuses them of not having ‘moral and intellectual honesty’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12543797/Liberal-actor-John-Cusack-says-Democratic-Party-elite-sold-working-class-decades-accuses-not-having-moral-intellectual-honesty.html
I wouldn’t be too impressed by what Cusack says—he is complaining that the party has not gone far enough to the Left and calls Trump “a ‘mentally ill, virus-spreading, child-abducting Nazi rapist'”
Check out this headline
Zelensky holds secret NYC meeting with private equity bosses at JPMorgan, Google and Blackstone to discuss rebuilding war-torn Ukraine
This is part of the reason why America is falling apart and in such chaos. These companies are not proposing to rebuild Ukraine out of kindness and generosity. They are in it for themselves, as is Ukraine, and the American taxpayers will be the ones who suffer. This headline should read …
Eric Adams holds “public” meetings with private equity firms to discuss rebuilding New York.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12542905/Volodymyr-Zelenskyy-secret-NYC-meeting-JPMorgan-Google-Blackstone.html
Let the private sector “rebuild” Ukraine if that’s what they want to do. If they are motivated by the prospect of gaining some kind of ownership stake in the county, as long as they are focused on Ukraine and not here I really don’t care.
But it’s not private money. How many bailouts have these companies had? How many tax concessions given to them? They’re playing with tax payer money.
And how about this headline
Poland’s Prime Minister announced yesterday that his country was ending arms shipments to Ukraine. Instead of sending military support to Kyiv, Poland will be upgrading its own military capabilities with more modern weaponry
So de we all still believe that Putin will “not stop in Ukraine” and is seeking world dominance??? If this doesn’t wake some people up, I give up. F**K Ukraine. NO MORE MONEY
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2023/09/21/poland-ends-arms-supplies-to-ukraine-n579509
There’s been a movement in Russia for the past 40 years or so, since the collapse of the USSR, to rebuild it. The acronym stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and to many hardliners that was the ultimate identity they cherished. To them, losing the other republics was a harsh blow and they have plotted for decades to re-establish that union because to them it represented the glory of Russia, the unity of Russia with its satellite nations that had broken away from the motherland.
We coexisted with the USSR, and if Russia were to succeed in forcing all of those separated republics back into a renewed USSR I don’t see that having much affect on the United States—as long as we understand the potential dangers of having a massive and powerful entity and are prepared to deal with it, as we were for so long. I don’t think they will ever be able to reunite Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan into one union, but I’m fine with them spending their human and financial capital chasing that dream. I haven’t seen any indication that the leaders in Moscow have ambitions for world dominance, just the revival of the USSR.
It was always an unwieldy and unstable union, spread across far too much geography and trying to incorporate too many individual cultures into one Russian culture, under the governance of an inherently defective political and economic system. A revived USSR will always face internal conflicts, as it always did, and I’m fine with the prospect of Russia having to constantly face challenges from within. And now, after nearly half a century of independence from Russia, most of not all of these nations will react to Russian efforts to conquer them in much the same way Ukraine has.
Let those nations, neighboring nations like Poland and the Czech Republic, et al, figure out how to deal with Russia.
Here’s a perfect opportunity for a GOP political candidate to campaign in downtown Chicago and let the residents know just exactly where the Mayor’s priorities are … residents of Chicago have been voting Democrat for generations, and if the GOP doesn’t seize on this and fracture that coalition, then they are simply not up for the fight. Never let a crisis go to waste
Chicago mayor enrages locals by quietly paying $26M to build migrant camps across the Democrat-led city – as buses carrying hundreds of border crossers continue to arrive
I’d love to see this but I think to campaign in downtown Chicago one would have to have a heavily armed professional security team in place willing to engage attackers even knowing they would be prosecuted for doing so.
The only way to reach people in encampments like much of Chicago is by unconventional means—-mass mailings, pamphlet drops, something like that. You can hardly canvass door to door, or hold a rally. In the USSR it took infiltrators passing along information from one individual to another.
https://x.com/GuntherEagleman/status/1704880826628886967?s=20
Nothing new here.
‘Sh*tter’s FULL‘: John Fetterman takes advantage of new ‘dress code’ and comments on his attire are GOLD
Fetterman looks like he’s about to tell you that he found half a cat in the air conditioner he was working on yesterday.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F6jnlLbXQAE9XLK?format=jpg&name=medium
LOL, read a great comment on X on how conservatives just don’t seize these opportunities. He said “why aren’t GOP members now wearing MAGA t shirts, or better yet, how about t shirts with slogans like Close the Border, or defund Ukraine”? I would bet the dress code would be put back in place rather quickly.
Conservatives just need to be bold. Trump won the 2020 election and we need to say that loud and clear and not shy away from it. And my prediction is that Trump will win 2024 in so great of numbers they won’t be able to cheat. The only reason all counting was shut down in swing states in the middle of the night, was so they could figure out how many more fake ballots they needed to win. That’s a fact.
The dam is breaking and more and more evidence of establishment corruption comes out every day. And nominating establishment people like Pence or Haley, would set our cause back 50 years. DeSantis and Trump are the only two options, and right now Trump is running away with it. At some point soon, we need to coalesce and present a united front.
I like the idea of the whole Senate showing up in jams and flip-flops and message T shirts. Maybe responding to press questions with that wiggly finger thing Shrek did. Messages could be like “10% for the Big Guy” or just “The New Face of Senate Decorum”. Or pictures of illegals flooding the border. Something that would ridicule the Left and irritate them. How about “Election integrity 2024—for a change?”
I still like the idea, for any state sticking to mailed ballots, of flooding them with bogus envelopes. Any that are accepted in spite of no signatures or obviously fake signatures or no postmark or with the wrong date on the postmark would contain ballots marked with ink that only shows up under black light, so they could not be included in the vote tally and contribute to the vote count, but merely stand as witness to the inability of mailed ballots to preserve election integrity. It would be pretty funny to get a vote count giving Biden a 5,000 advantage and then run all the ballots through a scanner and learn that 8,000 ballots in obviously bogus envelopes had passed muster and been accepted. If that is too sketchy, then add a step and have all accepted envelopes run through scanners before being opened, to separate the ones that should not have been passed, Basically send the message that just accepting every envelope that comes in won’t work any more. Imagine the stress of being in charge of vetting all mailed-in ballots knowing that every one you pass will then be scanned to see if it is legitimate before being opened. Takes all the fun out of cheating…..
I haven’t seen any movement in any state to toughen up election rules, and we’re running out of time. Just rescinding rules passed in violation of state constitutions would be a start. So would removing the ability of any state to block open examination of ballots and chain of custody,
I also think we should start referring to cheating deniers as just plain stupid. Make fun of them. Is it that they just aren’t smart enough to process the information, or that they are comfortable supporting cheating because they know they won’t be prosecuted for it?
So much for not having a platform:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F6ej7iDXwAAAbDX?format=jpg&name=medium
Always remember, Democrats ARE saving the planet, because that’s how smart they are, and that’s how much they care …
Devastating risks of transitioning to ‘green’ energy: Mining for electric-powering minerals has left 23 million people exposed to toxic waste, 500,000km of rivers polluted and 16 million acres of farmland ruined
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12545855/Devastating-transition-green-energy-metal-mining-23-million-people-toxic-waste-rivers-polluted-farmland.html
If you’ve ever seen the movie, Elysium with Matt Damon, that’s exactly where the Left is taking planet Earth.
I will never understand why the masses (with or without the “m” being silent) persist in electing the elites who want to control them and diminish their quality of life while they, the elites, live in on an entirely different level.
You can see how that happens by force as in the old Soviet Union, but we have not an insignificant number of Americans who are voting for it voluntarily. Mass Stockholm Syndrome?
Most of the citizens of the old USSR had a cultural history of government by a massively powerful Central Authority, such as the czars of Russia, so deeply ingrained that the Communist Party was just a new iteration of accepted tyranny. The concepts of individual liberty and self government simply did not exist, making it easier for the Party to assume complete control, which it maintained through force. It’s easier to understand a centuries-long concept of government control extending into the 20th Century (where it finally started to crumble as modern communications allowed Russians to learn how others live) but as you say, it is hard to understand why so many whose cultural and political history is one of personal liberty and self government vote for the political model that is the antithesis of these concepts.
I always come back to the brilliance of Leftist propaganda, which is a combination of disguising the true nature of its government model, which is the consolidation of power in the hands of a few controlling elites, and the courtship of the naïve by assuring people that their political party (not their ideology, but merely their IDENTITY) offers a shortcut to the Higher Moral Ground.
Most people who aspire to the Higher Moral Ground do so because they see themselves as good, moral people who want to do the “right thing”. This makes them vulnerable to any appeal to this self-identity by telling them that supporting a certain political party will be proof of their inherent morality. This is shored up by the balancing act of carefully portraying its opposition as the incarnation of evil, making the decision of who to vote for not one of analysis of how best to govern but a simple either/or choice of GOOD vs EVIL. The true outcome of their choices is carefully disguised as the heat is gradually turned up, while the messaging is that the increased temperature of reduced liberty, reduced buying power, reduced opportunity for advancement and increased government controls is an essential aspect of being the Most Moral People. It’s all presented as evidence of overcoming the evils of that Invented Other.
In other words, it’s all an elaborate illusion, based on emotional need and held up by a framework of lies and constant reassurance that these people are fighting the Good Fight.
Look at the resident trolls here. Every now and then I use what is left of my much-vaunted administrative powers to look at deleted posts and I see, particularly from forty, a truly amazing litany of what comes across as a frantic effort to appear morally superior. Every post I bother to look at reeks of desperation to appear entitled to occupy that Higher Moral Ground. And this is consistent. The howling harpies shrieking about abortion “rights” are never openly talking about love of seeing tiny babies poisoned and dismembered—they have been lulled into the deception of thinking they are fighting for the nobility of “choice” or “rights” or “freedom”. Every theme of the Left is couched in terms of morality, while the actual results of Leftism are immoral and at their extremes inhumane.
And we on the Right are oblivious to the fact that the Left is fighting a different war than we are. The Left is fighting the war of emotional superiority by creating a false paradigm of Dem (GOOD) vs Republican (EVIL) and surrounding it with so much confusion and playacting and posturing that the underlying truth of Leftism is buried in the noise, while we on the Right are fighting the war of pointing out the problems created by their political decisions. Their position is, at heart, “Being a Democrat makes me feel good about myself” while ours is “Being a Democrat means supporting extreme government control”. Feeling is easy, thinking is hard, and we are asking them to set aside feeling for a while and do some thinking.
So, back to your observation, I think we may need to get farther down the rabbit hole, where more Dems start to realize what they have really been voting for, and more Dems are willing to step away from the superficial concept of morality based on “feeling the right things” and realize that their chosen political model is based on the inherent immorality of desire for power and dishonesty and even force to achieve and keep it.
I’m always reminded of the impact on society of the failure to read. Literature has always had the power to educate, to prompt thinking and analysis, and real education has developed that. Young people today will never even hear of Don Quixote, much less have a competent teacher explain the symbolism of tilting at windmills in the belief of striking at a real danger.
One of the most influential books of my childhood was an obscure novel called “Mistress Masham’s Repose” about a sad lonely little girl living on a decrepit old English estate with a cold and indifferent guardian who discovered a whole population of Lilliputians living in the woods. Through its description of the developing relationship of the girl and these tiny people the message of the evils of dominance of others made possible by size or other forms of power became clear, as she never consciously thought of herself as a dictator but gradually assumed the right to impose her wishes on others.
From expositions of the harsh and ugly reality of Leftist governance shown in books like “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold” to the fantasy of “Mistress Masham’s Repose” to the story telling of “To Kill A Mockingbird” literature has opened thought processes that, in our current culture, remain closed off or distorted by the clumsy heavy-handed lecturing of Leftist “entertainment”. And I think it is the shutting off of these thought pathways that allows the dominance of the Left, as it controls what is allowed to penetrate the culture.
This is just too good not to post:
This is exactly how I viewed the Hunter indictment.
Cluster, remember when you noted that yesterday’s “conspiracy theories” are today’s headlines?
Here’s a perfect example of how the Deep State, the Bureaucratic State, runs the country by fiat from unelected political appointees using the power of federal agencies to accomplish the same things as legislation, but without the participation or even oversight of Congress:
An oversight hearing by the U.S. Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources gave U.S. Rep. Harriett Hageman, R-Wyoming, a window to again grill Bureau of Land Management leadership about a policy in which the agency won’t allow oil and gas drilling to proceed on any leases on the lands it manages if those leases are involved in litigation with environmental groups.
This was not a policy ordered by any courts, but allows those groups to maliciously stop oil and gas projects simply by filing lawsuits, whether they have merit or not, Hageman said.
…………………..
Rick Whitbeck, Alaska state director for Power the Future, an energy advocacy group that does work throughout the American West and Wyoming, told Cowboy State Daily that Hageman’s questions in the hearing showed real leadership and were what the Biden administration needs to hear.
The administration’s actions, Whitbeck said, will damage the national economy and make the United States less competitive as a worldwide power on the national stage.
I disagree with the statement “what the Biden administration needs to hear ” as the Biden administration already knows this. As the article notes, “Joe Biden and his administration fully understand the consequences of their policies – and are intentionally driving up the cost of coal, oil and gas in order to make it appear that wind and solar are economically competitive,” Hageman told Cowboy State Daily.
I hate to see important issues like this, that go the very heart of the tyranny of the Left as it methodically works to undermine every foundation of this nation to make it more susceptible to takeover, be eclipsed by focus on the old crimes of Joe Biden. These are current, ongoing, crimes against the nation, and they get no notice. Bureaucratic interference with oil and gas exploration and extraction is not a sexy dramatic issue, but it affects the pocketbook of every single American who drives a car, heats a home or in any way depends on sources of energy, and it is also a means of controlling the people, which gets no notice at all.
The word “convoluted” is too mild a term for the elaborate, purposely confusing, shell game of words and numbers employed by Congress to get trillions of dollars of new debt approved—basically, to get the keys to the treasury while hiding what they are doing in a barrage of verbiage.
The national debt is now an eye-popping $32.5 trillion (roughly $250,000 per household), and out-of-control deficit spending is one of the main reasons why families are struggling with inflation.
In May, Congress passed a bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for reforms that would supposedly reduce spending levels.
Some parts of the deal were good, but as we learn more about the details of the package, it looks more and more like a raw deal for current and future taxpayers.
Rather than simply living with lower spending levels, Congress is going to extreme lengths to hide spending within the limits. Not only does this reduce the amount of inflation-fighting deficit reduction, but it could ultimately mean more spending when this year’s appropriations process is done.
The best example of that is an obscure, strangely worded provision tucked into the debt limit deal that provides $11 billion for a “Nonrecurring Expenses Fund” within the Department of Commerce.
This article is one of a series by David Ditch, linked above, who has done an amazing job of analysis of the trickery of Congress as it robs the public blind.
When we see that the unemployment funding during the Covid plandemic resulted in A combination of individual scammers and organized crime rings using identity fraud bilked the federal government for at least $100 billion, with upper-end estimates of $350 billion to $400 billion are we really supposed to believe that this was just an “oops”, a wholly unforeseen manipulation of a stupid bill, with none of the proceeds ever finding their way back to the bill sponsors? Even if none of them profited by the bill, none of them paid a price for incompetence that allowed the public to be robbed.
As with the unemployment insurance fraud, we will never know the total amount of money wasted on “relief” payments to state and local governments.
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In the wake of the spending spree, the national debt is now more than $33 trillion, or an average of $253,000 per household.
Ignoring the dangers of such an incomprehensible amount of debt, and ignoring the ongoing damage that elevated inflation is having on family finances, many in Washington are still determined to keep the federal gravy train rolling.
The pending set of appropriations bills are loaded with pork, including goodies for left-wing activist groups and frivolous recreational projects.
These bills also contain tens of billions in fraudulent budget gimmicks that hide spending.
Several other measures that would or could increase spending are also looming on the horizon, including the so-called farm bill (where most of the money goes to welfare programs), and supplemental appropriations that would throw tens of billions more at Ukraine and to leftist nonprofits that encourage illegal immigration.
The last two posts of yours are great examples of why we need to defund our government. We have all seen what happens when the government is funded, and it’s not good, so now is the time to defund Joe Biden’s government. No more money for politicians in both American and Ukraine.
It’s not your morals I object too, it’s you’re gullibility and stupidity. How many covert FBI agents incited the chaos? Even the FBI is unsure of the number because there were so many. Why did Pelosi not respond to Capital police chief Sunds requests for additional security? I could go on and on but you are impervious to logic. I’ll bet you believe in climate change
I see less “gullibility and stupidity” than simple malice and dishonesty. It’s as if there have never been studies on the psychological effect of mob violence on otherwise peaceful people caught up in the energy of the moment. No, these people know that this is a common and well-studied phenomenon, seen many thousands of times as large groups of people already energized by some event such as a shared commitment to a cause being protested or just a sports victory suddenly become violent, with just a few in the crowd engaging in serious violence but the others acting badly in what is most accurately described as vandalism.
It’s not just how many FBI (or other federal agents such as DHS) agents were in the crowd, but what they did to actively incite violence. We saw one, Ray Epps, energetically urging people to break the law, “go into” the Capitol, even to start a move to push aside police barricades. There is no way to know how many other agents provocateurs were in the crowd, stirring up emotions and actively inciting violence. For that matter, we have no way of knowing how many of them not only incited others to act badly but did so themselves before slipping away to let others take the fall for what they did.
Sociologist Dr. Mina Cikara has written extensively on the phenomenon of social contagion and mob violence, and among her conclusions are A group of people will often engage in actions that are contrary to the private moral standards of each individual member of that group. Otherwise decent individuals can be swept up into “mobs” that commit looting, vandalism, even physical brutality.
Finally, acting in a group may cause individuals to lose touch with the moral standards that would otherwise guide their behavior. A number of researchers have proposed that acting in a group facilitates a loss of private self-awareness and increases sensitivity to group identity relative to personal identity . People may also get swept up in the excitement of acting in a group undermining individuals’ ability to evaluate on-line whether their behavior coheres with their privately held standards.
But rational explanations for how normally peaceful people with no history of violence or anti-government behavior or beliefs became part of a mob of irrational behavior with small pockets of actual violence simply do not serve the narrative of the radical Leftist. Rather, any element of what happened on January 6 that fails to support the fantasy that tens of thousands of peaceful middle aged Middle Americans got into their RVs or Chevrolets or Greyhound buses and went to their nation’s capital with the intent of violently overthrowing the government is simply discarded, ignored as if it does not exist. The fact that these people openly and publicly, for many weeks, had stated their desire to act in accordance of their 1st Amendment right to petition the government for redress of a wrong has been so bizarrely distorted and deformed that to the radical it was really to “overturn an election” or to “overthrow the government”.
We will never have accurate numbers. We will never have the number of federal agents infiltrating a peaceful gathering of patriots who took seriously not just their right to petition the government but a sense of civic duty to do so. We will never have the number of other law enforcement agents infiltrating this assembly, asked by their president to proceed peacefully and patriotically. We will never have the number of professional Antifa-type anarchist agitators infiltrating the gathering with the goal of turning it into a riot. We will never have the number of those infiltrators who verbally incited lawbreaking, and more importantly we will never have the number of infiltrators who personally engaged in the kinds of violence the Left now screeches, at the top of its collective lungs, were committed by “Trump supporters”.
All we will get is the fantasies and delusions and outright lies of the radical Left, whether they are ideologues or just rabble-rousers who get off on being nasty and spiteful, claiming that every bad act that took place on January 6 was far worse than in reality, and done by Trump supporters, in an effort to overturn the election and/or overthrow the government.
It may have been Senator Kennedy I heard in an interview on the evening of January 5, 2021. It was a long-standing Southern Senator, anyway, who talked about being in the Senate for many years and developing friendships with many Capitol police officers, taking them barbeque and visiting with them when he had a chance.
He said that one of these officers had told him that in advance of the Trump rally scheduled for the next day all leave and vacations for Capitol police had been canceled and they had been warned of potential violence from agitators infiltrating the crowd.
This was not a secret. Everyone associated with DC security in any capacity knew this. Trump realized it would probably happen, and requested a large enough security force to prevent or at least contain it, and when Pelosi refused this it was clear that a violent mob was what she wanted. I will always believe that Trump made what was probably the biggest blunder of his political life when he did not alter his original plans for a march on the Capitol and keep his crowd isolated at the other end of the Mall, where he gave his speech.
There are so many unanswered questions. One is who emptied the trash cans after the riot ended? We have seen video of men taking off black jackets and hats and shoving them into trash cans, most notably near the body of Ashli Babbit, and then blending into the crowd in red clothing. Isn’t it funny that “professional investigators” evidently never thought to look at what had been discarded that day? Or should we just go with the more obvious theory that this information was buried because it would rebut so much of the Leftist narrative?
And what about those supposedly super-super-secure doors to the Capitol building? The massive doors that were electronically locked with magnetic tamper-proof locks that could only be unlocked from within a “secure” booth in the building?