The Chicago Bears may become the Gary, Indiana Bears soon – part of this is just the usual pro sports team looking for taxpayer handouts for a new stadium…but part of it is that Chicago is becoming unlivable. The Bears, as an organization, want a first rate stadium which is in an area where families are happy to come watch a game.
Gary is, of course, part of the large Chicago metropolitan area but as it is in Indiana, it has a government run by sane people. Huge difference! Add in lower tax rates and you get a massive incentive to bail out of Chicago. We’ve mentioned this before – Democrat governance is getting worse and worse and people are starting to notice…and I mean really starting to notice. The failures of the Blue model are becoming an albatross around the Democrats’ neck. New York City will simply put this perception of Democrat insane failure on steroids.
Both the Canadian and European militaries are working up plans to recruit large numbers of foreigners into their armed forces. The official reason is to increase diversity – the actual reason is they want a new Waffen-SS which will have no problem with shooting Europeans and Canadians who get out of line…and who will have a vested interest in making sure the regimes they serve never fall. Things like this plus Spanish and French plans to legalize hundreds of thousands of illegals so they can vote give the game away – the Western Ruling Class knows it is doomed unless it can find some way to oppress Western people. It is sad. I hope the Canadians and Europeans rise up and overthrow their governments…but as they are unarmed and sunk into sloth and cowardice, I don’t think they will.
On the other hand, Rupert Lowe has founded Restore Britain – a new political party explicitly committed to kicking the migrants out and making Britain British again. Naturally, everyone is calling him a racist – including the guys over at Reform. Gotta keep in mind that when the MSM called Reform “far Right” they really meant “not totally Leftist insane”. Reform does have some good elements in it – but like the Tories, they are still Labour-lite. That is, like the old line GOP, merely committed to slowing down the death of the country. Restore is the British MAGA. They are growing by leaps and bounds as they are actually speaking what has been on British minds for decades (the British people never, not even once, voted for the foreign invasion of their country)…what we’ll find out at the next election is whether or not there are enough patriots in Britain to form a government…or overthrow the current one if voting fails to get the job done.
Former Prince Andrew got arrested – and I really can’t imagine why. The British government just refused to investigate foreign grooming gangs because it would cause offense…so why do they care what Andrew was up to? I can only figure they want this as some sort of distraction from how catastrophically unpopular the Labour government has become.
The 79th person was just indicted in the “feed our children” welfare scam…Trump Time is bizarre and one thing crowds out another…but always keep at the back of your mind that Team Trump is remorselessly grinding away even when the cameras are pointed elsewhere.
Blogs For Victory 
I just finished doing my taxes. Last year I was surprised by a substantial tax bill because it was the first full year following my wife’s death and having to file single instead of married/filing jointly. I adjusted my withholding accordingly, but this year I’m getting a huge refund. Thanks President Trump!
Over 240 million gallons of raw sewage has flow into the Potomac River since Jan. 19 when a 72 inch pipe broke. This problem doesn’t look to be fixed anytime soon. Want to guess who’s in charge?
Dr. Unique Morris-Hughes was appointed as Chair of the DC Water Board by the Democratic Mayor of Washington D.C. Muriel Bowser, despite lacking expertise in wastewater management or engineering.
Though Morris-Hughes has an extensive background in administering federally-funded workforce programs, that experience has done little to mitigate the effects of what may be the largest sewage spill in U.S. history.
Accusations of DC Water being more concerned about meeting DEI goals than with actual expertise are tough to dismiss when DC Water General Manager David Gadis has gone on the record complaining about “too many white men in charge” and the idea that utility “executives should reflect the city.”
So there you have it. Once again, too many white men in charge (who know a thing or 2 about preventing / fixing problems like this). Strange how all of this “inclusion” is turning into a rather exclusive club. What are the chances people who voted for these fools will connect the dots? Or will it take a bunch of more disasters, ones that affect them directly, before they wake up? Not holding my breath.
https://amgreatness.com/2026/02/18/disaster-on-potomac-what-role-dei-played-in-worst-sewage-spill-in-u-s-history/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=act_eng&seyid=
I nailed that as soon as it happened – told the Mrs: “I bet the people running that system haven’t a clue how it works”.
“Former Prince Andrew got arrested – and I really can’t imagine why. “
Because he was part of the Epstein Pedophile group. He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last.
The point is the Brits clearly don’t care about protecting children from predators.
It is possible that they don’t feel they have jurisdiction outside of England, except in matters of national security.
And Andrew wasn’t charged with sexual assault on a minor. Rather, he was charged for allegedly passing on classified investment information to Epstein.
The Trump administration has recovered over 70,000 missing children from Bidens border disaster, many of whom have been sexually abused and trafficked, and there is a reportedly 200,000+ remaining missing children.
We won’t hear a word about this from Casper, or the other morons, because it doesn’t work into their Trump obsessions. These children are being trafficked and abused by POC’s … the sacred group.
It is kind of fascinating to see the Left’s minions focus on the one thing about Epstein that they can understand, or at least think they understand. Strip away all the confusing details of the whole Epstein mystery and then narrow that to a tight focus on “pedophilia” and then fix it in a static snapshot that is easy to understand (even if inaccurate) and they have their talking points ready to hand out to the DMB (drooling mouth breather) base.
There is so much more to Epstein than sexual contact with minors, and as illegal and immoral and downright wrong this contact was, including trafficking said minors to others, it is only a small aspect of the saga. For one thing, the Left does love love LOVE the word “pedophilia” and gives it the same treatment it does so many other emotion-laden words like “fascist”. That is, they define it incorrectly, use it incorrectly, toss it around like confetti because of its appeal to them, and generally use it to clutter up any issue.
(The success of the Semantic Manipulation by the Left can be seen by all media outlets and authors now using the word “pedophilia”.)
There was never evidence or testimony that Jeffrey Epstein ever had any contact with any children below the age of puberty. There was never evidence or testimony that any children below the age of puberty were exposed to or involved in, in any way no matter how remote, with any Epstein “group”. So take the word “pedophile” and toss it in the grab-bag of other Bad Scary Words the Left will rummage through when it needs some emotional ammunition.
One of the many aspects of the Epstein saga is his involvement with young women, obviously well past the age of puberty, past adolescence, young enough to be considered “girls” but not past the age of legal consent. He recruited them, groomed them to appeal to and attract older men, and made them sexually available to these men. This is profoundly immoral, and it is illegal. It should be condemned, as it is, and it is the core of the charges against his partner in this, who is now serving time in prison for her participation in this.
Any man who took advantage of any of these girls broke the law and should be prosecuted, Andrew among them.
But as immoral and illegal and vile as this sexual aspect of the Epstein story is, it is only a part of it. Maxwell’s father was a highly placed Mossad officer, and there is evidently a lot of evidence not made public yet that her introduction of Epstein to Mossad and by extension the world of espionage is the true core of the whole thing. Rather suddenly Epstein was presented, internationally but mostly in New York, as a billionaire investor with extensive contacts in politics and business, and also with a side gig of running a small and rather elite brothel.
And once he was placed in this position he could, and did, roam freely through political and business populations, operating as a “fixer” who made the right connections and made the right introductions. This takes us back to my same old-same old question: QUI BONO? Who benefits? So far I haven’t seen evidence of Epstein himself making bank on those connections, those introductions, but he very busily went about inserting himself in society, politics and business, getting himself invited to big society events in New York and London, events where he could get introduced to people like real estate mogul Donald Trump and member of the British royal family Prince Andrew. He got himself photographed with all the heavy hitters he could find, got his name in all the society pages, and became accepted in high levels of politics and business as well as society.
And he had great parties. He had luxurious airplanes to fly people to exotic islands or private resorts and he pushed these perks heavily on the men in his targeted areas of interest, and of course there were always the pretty girls there—serving drinks, chatting, giving neck massages (and more) and then, sometimes, being made available for more.
Now if you are seeing this from 30,000 feet, or as a movie, it’s all quite clear. Epstein doesn’t seem to be making money from all the effort he is putting into getting introduced to these heavy hitters, worming his way into the upper elite levels of commerce and politics. He seems to have tons of money, vaguely explained as “investments” but he doesn’t seem to have much of a track record of personally taking advantage of stock tips, etc. What he IS doing is weaving webs of involvement of powerful men in illegal and immoral activities. He is setting up “honey traps” using pretty girls as bait, luring middle-aged men into compromising activities that, if known, could end careers and marriages and even lead to prison. (Again: Why? To what end?)
But all the simple-minded, the willing lemmings eager to be handed some salacious talking point to dump onto social media, can see is the “honey” part, made even tastier by tacking on the inaccurate label of “pedophilia” (because they don’t understand that, either). And they salivate over the prospect of seeing certain names linked, however ambiguously, however faintly, with their singular focus of illicit sex.
In the meantime, the adults in the room can see the problems associated with just dumping all the Epstein files into the public domain. He has been collecting information for years from men of commerce, from politicians, from highly-placed people like Andrew. Someone has to sort through it all to figure out who spilled what beans, where that information was sent, the end result of that information being provided, and how many names are associated merely by being in the neighborhood, so to speak, etc. How many people just took advantage of a flight on a luxury private jet to lie around a pool drinking mai tais, merely noticing that the serving girls are pretty, vs how many went because of the “services” of the girls? But this is all complicated, involving the intelligence offices of who knows how many countries, as well as who knows how many sources of information.
And in the meantime the panty-sniffers are giggling about “pedophile groups” and eagerly waiting for some other name to be tossed to them.
Does this sound way too far-fetched and unrealistic? Well, what can you expect from someone who thinks it possible that a British aristocrat, educated at Cambridge, could really be working for the Russians and end up as the head of MI6, the British intelligence office for international affairs? Or be part of a ring of five such Communist moles in British intelligence? Or that he went on to become an officer in the KGB?
It is all very odd, isn’t it? Side note, another possible Mossad thing was with Otto Skorzeny…the once very famous Nazi commando who rescued Mussolini in 1943. He was arrested by allied forces after the end of the war, interrogated a lot and then, with the help of former comrades, escaped to Spain…where he was found to be massively wealthy. The wealth, as was found out much later, was via a bank heist in 1945…sort of a Germans only Kelly’s Heroes. As the Russians approached the edge of Berlin a group of Waffen-SS soldiers, fully armed for battle but including a Gestapo accountant, entered the Reichsbank and made off with untold millions in currency, jewels and gold coins. The guys made it to Bavaria where they divvied up some of it and then hid most of it. Naturally, these men were all picked up after the war and, gosh darn it, they just felt they had to give up the cash so they lead the Americans to cache after cache of money…ultimately equaling to maybe a third of the amount stolen.
So, they ripped off their own government and then gave American intel a snow job on just how much they had stolen (not like anyone could successfully audit the Reichsbank after the war). All of them ended up well off after the war…but Skorzeny, as noted, ended up fabulously rich. He went into arms dealing of the most shady sort, helped fellow Nazis escape to South America…and allegedly worked for Mossad as an insurance policy (Skorzeny never apparently engaged in any direct anti-Jewish actions but he did, of course, know quite a lot about it).
I bring this up because the guy was juiced in everywhere after the war…who the heck would want a Nazi commando on staff? Just about everyone, as it turned out…because he knew things and could do things. This is sort of how I view Epstein – he knew things and he could do things; and among the things he could do was probably get people to cooperate on this or that thing desired by…well, whomever was pulling the strings. And just as we can’t be sure who pulled Skorzeny’s strings post-1945 (there are also hints of working with other intelligence agencies around the world), so we probably will never know all the string-pullers for Epstein.
Keep in mind, also, that most of the Jewish money looted by the Nazis never got back to its owners or their heirs. It was untold billions in 1945…and to this day its all sort of lost on the balance sheets, everyone pretending they just can’t figure out where it went. My guess is that very large amounts of it – especially that stashed away by Himmler in Swiss and Swedish banks in the last year of the war (a gigantic sum) – wound up under the control of various intelligence agencies around the world…a sort of slush fund they could use to, say, pay a guy who get rich and powerful men to have a neck massage from an underage girl. Don’t think Epstein was the first or only such! I’ll bet there’s a whole raft of them past and present.
There isn’t a Global Conspiracy…but there are conspiracies around the globe…the confluence of interests and money with everyone knowing their lines, undirected as it were. But also determined to keep their place at the trough…and defend everyone else at it.
Just read the Supreme Court has ruled against some of Trump’s tariffs. Not sure how this will play out but on the surface it seems this will harm the US and will certainly make a mess out of the current situation.
It seems a pretty narrow ruling on one particular part of the law…Trump has lots of tools in the toolbox on tariffs still.
I’m sure his team anticipated this and has Plans B-W in place.
Completely new topic, but one that some of you might have been thinking about. That is, the emergence of AI and its effect on us and our day to day living.
I keep trying to get CoPilot off my computer and get tired of rejecting its demands that it rewrite my stuff, and everyone I talk to about this has the same reaction to it. You can’t just read a quick couple of sentences online about, for instance, a rare Roman coin found in a British cow pasture, but instead are faced with a long and obviously AI-generated tale of how foggy the day was when Sarah Jane decided she was tired of milking goats and ran to the creek, blah blah blah, to finally (if you have not given up) discover that a tree blew over and unearthed a buried coin. A three sentence “story” blown up into a breathless narrative of family relationships, weather and some history or geography. All of these canned “stories” sound the same, even after just a couple of months of finding them everywhere.
We have wondered how many people really believe that that eagle really did pick up a puppy (for some reason no doubt explained several AI-generated paragraphs later) or that bear/wolf/deer really did carry its injured/frozen baby into a hospital/school/police station asking for help.
My recent AI experience is just kind of weird. I use Blink cameras in my properties, and all but the Florida ones are offline now because of the horrendous winds in Colorado and Wyoming. The Florida system keeps rearming itself in spite of constantly being turned off because, well, I am living here now and don’t need hundreds of video clips of me doing so.
So yesterday I saw a list of video clips of activity here in Florida, but instead of just a few seconds of me in my kitchen I got a narrative: “Woman removes cup from microwave while calico cat enters the kitchen”.
Yeah. Specifically what I was doing, and identifying my cat by its coat. A woman, a cup, a microwave, a calico. Going through the recordings of my life, I saw narratives describing every recorded action including lots of the cat: “Calico cat walks on back of sofa” etc.
I called a friend who said her barn’s Blink has started to do the same thing, and she also finds it creepy: “Woman carries bucket of grain to Stall Number 4”.
I have a heated garage in Colorado now home to two retired old barn cats and a new feral cat who found the cat flap and think she’s hit the jackpot—a big heated bed, tolerant residents and an automatic feeder. When I get the garage cameras running again I wonder if, for example, the AI will recognize the occasional raccoon who thinks maybe THIS time he can break into the feeder (only if you bring a chainsaw, you little thief!) and accurately reports the effort or will report things like “Fat cat takes another nap”.
Is this level of detail a good thing? I have a neighbor whose parrot has turned on Alexa but that is more acceptable to me than having my camera system turn itself on and then give details of what I am doing in each room and knowing that my cat is a calico.
Your comment made me smile, especially the part about the raccoon and a chainsaw, and only because I’ve seen your ingenious automatic feeder.
I’ve resisted AI so far, having only broken down and used it once (Grok) to diagnose what happened to me last June when I ended up in the hospital for 8 days followed by another 8 days in rehab. And I only did that because the dozen or so doctors I saw at the time couldn’t agree on what happened to me.
I’ve used AI for various things, mostly to reduce research time and clarification. For example, I was looking for rules clarification on basketball rules. Searching online took quite a bit longer and details were more vague or lacking into the specifics I was looking for. In another situation there were some youtube comments made by well known Protestants who used some deceptive claims both for Protestantism and against Catholicism. Because the people making these claims were well trained in certain historical areas, the general public appeared very receptive of whatever they said. AI helped me to quickly get relevant data to help refute those claims. Now, I’ve heard of several circumstances were AI will not provide any info on certain topics or provided distorted details, like in the areas of Catholic faith or conservative politics. The area of my request was more along the lines of historic specifics that could be found in other sources and in general knowledge categories where it seems AI’s responses were in line with my recollection / expectations.
That being said, I’ve read several accounts of a rather large slew of electronic gadgets that were equipped with “features” that could perform various tasks that were totally separate from it stated / intended use. For example, a simple charge cord being equipped with the ability to use your Wi-Fi, capturing what was being transmitted. Or, your cell phone / computer being able to use the speaker to hear and transmit sound / data that was not prompted from you. Given that a significant amount of the electronics we use comes from China, its anyone guess at to the extent of this privacy invasion and the ulterior intended use.
Perhaps I’m reading into this wrong, but in this morning’s press conference when talking about the Supreme Court’s ruling on the tariff subject, a reporter asked; “Mr. President, you mentioned multiple time of foreign influence over the Supreme Court. Do you have evidence of that?” His response was; “You’ll find out.” While he certainly didn’t say yes, there sure seemed and implication.
If it comes to light there’s been ANY collusion / influence / collaboration between member(s) of the Court and foreigner(s) complicit in working against the President, this would seem a clear case of treason of the highest order. This would have far reaching implications and cause damage to unknown extents. It could even be a catalyst for a much greater degree of both civil unrest and major fractures in international relations.
Regardless of specifics, it is just a plain fact that plenty of people and institutions in the USA are under foreign influence – add in things like Roberts’ obvious dislike of Trump and you get this.
He might have to go Old Hickory on them.
I’ll have to see if I can find it, but I even once posted about an elite secret club of jurists that meets regularly and discusses cases, etc. Included in the membership are Roberts, Jackson and Boasberg, among many others.
And no matter what, we aren’t ruled by judges. Our Constitutional system isn’t based upon judges – the Judiciary is Independent not to be the final stop for law, but to make sure the Executive and Legislative can’t use it to jail political opponents for disagreeing.
The Court gets it wrong at times – sometimes, quite spectacularly. Plessy vs Ferguson, anyone? Dredd Scott ring a bell? Roe? Oftentimes the people of the USA have to expend immense resources and time (and sometimes lives) correcting a bad Court decision. We need to ditch this concept that just because the Court says a thing, that is it. The the Court upheld Obama’s signature desire – Obamacare – even though it was in obvious violation of the written law while striking down Trump’s signature issue – even though it it well within the written law – just shows that the Justices simply don’t like MAGA. Don’t like Trump. Want to keep the old and dying system in place not because it is good, but because it is theirs.
I don’t know exactly how Trump will work around this – but I am confident he will, and he’s right to do so.
There’s been an ongoing series of revelations of serious criminal activities that drag on with long drawn out investigations that ultimately seems to disappears from any discussion of justice or repercussions. This repeats so often people wonder if justice at any serious level will ever happen. Continuous lack of prosecution just seems to embolden more of the same, with ever escalating stakes. Theft of millions only a few years ago has given way to tens of billions today. It seems every week a new massive scandal is uncovered. We know it takes time to gather evidence before indictments can even begin. We also know extensive efforts are being applied by very powerful entrenched entities complicit in working together to block investigations, hide or destroy evidence, tamper with witnesses (including mysterious disappearances), distort media, judicial interference, run out the clock on the statue of limitation or any other method that will block exposure & prosecution. Many of these issues were know in Trump’s first term and many more have turned up since.
Trump has always delivered very powerful national speeches. With the State of the Union national address is just a few days away, something that will be viewed around the world, what do you think the chances are he will use this time to blow the doors open on any one of these scandals? There are so many areas he could expose whether these were directed personally at him or against the people of the US. Does “proper decorum” require these things to be handles in a different fashion without such intense international public humiliation? Not that they don’t deserve it. I’ve no doubt Trump’s speech will be a masterful piece, but I await the day when the house of cards comes tumbling down on the evil perpetrated against good people.
Jeff Childers devoted nearly his entire post today to the tariff issue. Lots of good points.
Lots of good stuff in there – and as Varad over on X is pointing out, this ruling was never going to be the thing the Left and RINOs thought it was. The next bit rulings are VRA and birthright citizenship. We’ll see how they come out.
Birthright citizenship is going to be the bomb going off if the ruling is correct, that it applies only to those whose parents are not under the jurisdiction of any other country when they are born here. And I think the ruling would have to grandfather in the error, as I don’t know if we could rescind the citizenship of so many people who honestly thought they have been citizens their entire lives.
I think it would have to touch on Natural Born Citizen as well, as if there is a ruling that merely being born in the United States does not convey citizenship it would naturally follow that it could not convey Natural Born Citizenship. In other words, if one has to be born to a citizen parent to be a citizen, then that person is by definition also a Natural Born citizen, eliminating that limbo that exists now between those considered to be citizens merely by the location of their birth and those who were born into citizenship because of the status of their parent or parents.
Logically, the Founders never considered geography as a condition of citizenship because it does create that limbo, that murky area where one might be considered a citizen but with a different category of citizenship other than Natural Born or achieved through a process (naturalization).
I hope they rule sensibly on birthright citizenship – but we also need a serious overhaul, via Amendment, of what it means to be a US citizen. For instance, it has recently emerged that Chinese men are having children – sometimes scores of them – via surrogacy in the USA. Allegedly this is because of a desire of these rich and powerful men to have lots of children for prestige reasons. That may be part of it…but, if so, it would be much easier to get it done via a Thai lady…cheaper by a lot. But if you want to have a corps of men who are legally US citizens – born of an American citizen living in the USA at the time of birth – then this is what you do…and you do it because you have a long term plan to destabilize the USA. Apparently, the earliest examples of such children are now approaching 18. Born in the USA, sent to China right after birth…and now able to return to the USA with no questions asked. If it is an intel op – and I am confident it is – then I’ll bet they’ve maintained official US residencies for these kids and have taught them American English. They’ll be impossible tell apart from a native born person. Every document will be in order. And they can hold any office we have.
Our laws and our Constitution just aren’t built for this. Well, they are, actually – if we had a genuine Constitutional order where what is plain as a pikestaff is treated as such. The President should be able to decree that such persons are not US citizens…not even legal residents of the USA and every Court in the land should uphold the President’s order because American citizenship isn’t a loophole. But what we’ll get is a tortuous argument and probably an eventual Supreme Court decision saying they’re Americans because of course men in 1787 fully envisioned surrogate motherhood (an immoral abomination in all respects). We’re going to have to figure this out, though.
I don’t know what could be done about the US citizens seeded in the country if they are born to US citizens. I guess the only thing that could be done would be a search for fathers who have never lived here, who were not here at the time of insemination, to flag those offspring—or, if we ever get a Congress with a brain, to pass a law making it illegal to act as a surrogate mother for the purpose of conveying citizenship to a foreigner.
There are some moves by Team Trump in that direction – as well as possible criminal investigations on those providing the surrogacy services…it is illegal to sell human beings, after all…and surrogacy is supposed to be a last ditch attempt by the infertile to have children, not a baby factory for rich foreigners.
And they need photo ID and SS cards to be hired to move snow in NYC
Congratulations to the U.S. men’s and women’s Olympic hockey teams. Both won the gold medal by beating Canada in overtime. For the men it’s the first gold medal since the historic “Miracle on Ice” in 1980 when the U.S. beat Russia.
It is so awesome!
Heh!
I like how the Canucks are all “we outplayed you!” and, hey, they did – totally dominated Team USA through the last 40 minutes…but then they lost on a beautiful 3 on 1 in OT and we’re just laughing and laughing and laughing…
I loved that when I saw it
Senator Kennedy; “Congresswoman AOC categorically denies she’s a moron. She says she’s never even been to Utah”. And there you have it.
To be fair, Kennedy did admit he was repeating a joke. It’s just that it COULD be true, given her IQ. As Kennedy also said, she’s the reason they need directions on a shampoo bottle.
I haven’t seen anything about help for Americans stranded in Mexico
They are entire lying hypocrites…just completely dishonest, power and money grubbing sacks of…stuff…
Doctor Malone has a book review today that I think could form the basis of some discussion.
He has some conclusions that I don’t agree with but has cited some aspects of the book, 22 Cells In Nuremberg A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals, that strike me as particularly relevant to today’s political climate. The book is about psychiatric evaluation of some of Nazi Germany’s leaders as they awaited trial and punishment in Nuremberg after the war.
These are the conditions that jumped out at me as descriptive of the Left’s strategy in today’s politics.
” the manufacture of an existential enemy”—in this case, Donald Trump, who has repeatedly been described by the Left as an “existential threat” to “democracy”, to the United States, to freedom, even to the world.
” exploitation of popular anxiety,” which we see in the incessant drumbeat of doom and gloom and impending disaster, while ignoring or denying the benefits, successes and advances which have made life safer and more productive. The howling about the alleged dangers of “climate change” are the most obvious examples, with vivid and lurid examples of flooded cities, food deserts, rampant famine and other disasters including “the destruction of the planet”.
“suppression of rational evaluation through emotional saturation” This is a perfect description of what we see on the Left—total suppression of rational evaluation and complete emotional saturation. Defense of felonious actions to protect dangerous criminals from justice is the most blatant recent example, but I’ve also been seeing a classic example of this in efforts among a few to have a rational online discussion about the recently exposed defects in the Georgia election process. While these issues have been made public by the election officials in Georgia, any effort to see them as examples of potential weaknesses in our system which have to be corrected to make elections secure and establish confidence in their outcomes there is a contingent which simply screams that only “cultists” consider these factors to be real, or important–no doubt because to acknowledge their existence in the 2020 election might be seen as an acknowledgement that the election was not legitimate. This amounts to defending the existence of these defects in the security of elections in Georgia (and wanting to preserve them) because to address them would cross an emotional line that dominates their thought.
That last observation can be made about other things as well: “factual questions about immigration law and enforcement are almost impossible to evaluate publicly on their merits. They are absorbed into tribal identity frameworks, where evaluation is replaced by affiliation.” Ditto for “climate change” “election fraud” and all the current social engineering projects of the Left, such as the “trans” movement. The key phrase here is “evaluation replaced by affiliation.“
Which I have been referring to as Identity Politics, as this transfer of evaluation to affiliation drives voting as well as other aspects of our lives.
Suddenly reminded of an interview of a “regular German” for the World at War series: he remarked how liberating it was to be conscripted into the Army. That is, in the Army he wasn’t bombarded every minute with Nazi propaganda and for the first time in years could actually think about things. That is how it really works – just saturate a mind with propaganda until the latest bit of BS just slides in without question.
I’ve always liked Walter Kirn when he has been on Gutfeld!. I just ran across an interesting interview with him, which I need to watch, but the partial transcript has some interesting ideas.
Kirn actually became a close friend of the man who claimed to be Clark Rockefeller but who was really a German immigrant named Christian Gerhartstrie\ter, who killed two people. In the transcript Kirn talks about discovering that there really is such a thing as true evil.
Kirn was talking about visiting this man in prison after he had been convicted, and the experience of facing him there, and discovering that evil simply EXISTS, without some “explanation” for evil behavior like childhood trauma.
Kirn says “I moved to a whole new thesis about human evil, which is that it is an affirmative thing. It’s not just the lack of goodness. There are people who— beings who actually want to frighten, want to control, have inverted every ethic and moral principle such that they have taken on this kind of power, and to describe it as demonic is probably not inaccurate.“
And also…
the idea that we’re just in some kind of terrible social psychology experiment in which some people act out and other people are more functional doesn’t seem to describe the situation anymore. I think that the dark and light battle is starting to be very easily perceived and it requires you to line up.
You shall be as gods…the first and last lie of hell. People have been convinced that they are total free agents…that they can do whatever they set their minds to…the bad news is that you can’t and when that doesn’t work out, some people go to evil as a means of expressing their anger with reality.
I put this into my books – the Jerome character explaining what it was like being evil: it was fun. If you go into it, it seems to be awesome – do whatever you want! Whack anyone who looks crossways at you! Total domination! And your victims? Got what they were asking for…they didn’t see that they, too, could do it. Jerome is, of course, fictional…but I built his character after long study of history and the great evil people of history. They all got their jollies out of it…Nero and Caligula enjoyed doing what they did. So, too, Hitler and Himmler. And if a person really goes all the way into it, repentance becomes less and less likely (not harder: it is the easiest thing in the world…Hitler could have done it on April 30th, 1945…just walked out of the bunker, announced to the world that he had been wrong and awaited whatever justice was given)…but very much less likely. And this is because the worse you do, the more you talk yourself into believing it was good. After a while, I think a person even starts to think it is good (though, always, I believe that the voice of God is still in there, pricking the conscience).