Now that we’ve had most of 24 hours to sort of absorb it all and think it over, gotta say I think Trump’s SOTU was an unqualified triumph. He’s really getting very good at this – he even managed a bit of Reaganesque rhetoric in there, especially at the end.
He laid out a vision of a powerful, growing America…finally ditching Jimmy Carter’s “era of limits” which, to one degree or another, had been adopted by everyone, Right and Left, in the United States. The idea that we’ve peaked and all we can do is manage the decline and, hey, enjoy the time you’re in because the successor generations will have it worse. It doesn’t have to be like that. Never has to be for any nation.
People choose to decline – as Will Durant put it, no nation is destroyed from without: it is only from within that a nation can die. You think about the Poles and the Irish…for centuries under hostile, foreign rule. With their national identity often made illegal. But they endured and waited and worked and fought, and once the hostile foreign power withdrew, there was the nation. To be sure, Ireland over the past twenty years has opted for national suicide, but that is the choice of the people now…the people of the past felt the nation was worth preserving. The peoples we see today entering national degradation have chosen it as the easier course of action. No longer having to fight for their daily bread, they are ok with their nations dying as long as there’s free food in the fridge and something mindless to watch on TV or the internet. It is sad, but it is a choice – and they can choose at any time to reverse course.
What we did when we voted Trump in 2024 was reverse the course. 2016 was more of a last effort to just stop the decline – we’d allow things to be as they were as long as they didn’t get any worse. We found out that our Rulers insisted on things getting worse…and we also found that we can’t stand still. It is either advance, or retreat. In 2024 we chose to advance. The Left often asks us “is this what you voted for?” as they show us something that is supposed to make us feel bad. But we’re over here going, “I didn’t vote for that, exactly, but some months back Team Trump stopped doing what I voted for and started on things I wish I had voted for.”
The Democrats were walked to the chopping block by Trump in his SOTU and they eagerly did exactly what he had scripted for them. They could have easily taken the wind out of his sails had they just stood up and applauded when Trump said the primary purpose of our government is to serve the American people, not the illegal aliens. They didn’t. They couldn’t – or, at least, they felt they couldn’t. Everything they have done in their lives – all the lies, the insanity, the theft – compelled them to sit on their hands…or even shout their disapproval over this sentiment, which is probably a 90/10 issue among the American people. It was their chance to actually fight back against Trump…but it would also be good for Trump, so they refused: and set themselves up for defeat here in 2026 and 2028.
We’ll have to see how the vote goes, but I just can’t imagine a world where the American people vote into power those who clearly show they hate the United States. There is no offer of a better tomorrow from the Democrats…just a return to the past, but made worse. They promise us more illegals. More fraud. More freakish sociological experiments. More hatred. More death – all accompanied by spreading poverty as they sell the last of our capacity to China. The Democrats lack the physical capacity to cheat their way to victory…they have already secured all the power they can with voter fraud. If they don’t have a message that resonates, they’ve got nothing.
Having shrieking, hate filled aliens who are clearly on the take as the face of the Democrat party also doesn’t help them. The United States is not that – we don’t care about your homeland’s stone age barbarism and the complaints they make about being treated like barbarians. We see you up there, clearly hating our country and we know: you aren’t legitimate. You didn’t secure power by merit or by the vote…you were engineered into office by a corrupt political system which feels it must reserve a certain number of seats to your like. The broad majority is repulsed…and will punish the party which thinks it is good to have anti-Americans in Congress.
This still won’t be easy – the Democrats are still hoping their rhetoric will set off so many lunatics that one will be able to do the deed…both to Trump and Vance. The Democrats will still use their bogus federal judges to defy the law. They will still have the MSM lying for them 24/7. But I do believe we will win – that we ripped the bandage off in 2024 and we’re now healing, with the true America gaining strength and confidence by the day. We now know that we don’t have to just put up with it…we can actually stop it, reverse it, replace it with something better. And I believe the American people will just want more of this as time goes on.
Blogs For Victory 
Laugh for the day.
BREAKING: Canada awarded gold medal after receiving two late mail-in goals at 3:00am
From Coffee & Covid this morning: (I laughed all the way through, as it seems the Donkey party has adopted the Casper strategy.)
I saw a small part of a clip of the twerking giraffe who must be a poster boy for “Least Talented Performer”. It was an embarrassing display of total lack of self awareness, and from Jeff’s article the rest of the event was equally classy.
After reading Jeff’s article I was thinking how the Left not only has no sense of humor, they don’t even recognize humor. The entire concept of this bizarre event is so tone-deaf and unfunny, it is amazing anyone thought it worth promoting.
But bless their hearts for so generously providing brilliant contrast between adults running the country and morons having temper tantrums. Turtle suit? Rubber sex toys? Some dude in what looked like a home-made “giraffe” costume croaking stupid nonsense and profanity? And what is funny is the feeling that this is the best they have to offer.
The USA hockey team players are seriously getting asked the question, “why did you laugh?” about Trump’s joke on the congratulatory phone call…nothing better exemplifies the modern Left than this….”that’s not funny” might as well be their new motto. And I can’t imagine the American people will warm up to these humorless scolds (side note, it looks like the ladies didn’t attend at the White House mostly because of scheduling conflicts…a couple of the girls seem Lefty scolds, but most aren’t … however, regardless of why, it was monumentally stupid to not attend. I honestly did not know we had a female professional hockey league…this was their chance to put themselves on the map and start to grow their league…seems like that would be worth having a cheeseburger with Trump).
And it is all so manufactured – I’m sure after Canada won the Four Nations Challenge last year Vegas Golden Knights team captain Mark Stone (Canada) endlessly ribbed superstar Jack Eichel (America)…now, it will be Eichel’s turn to trash talk Stone. It is all fun. It was a game. If Canada has anything to be upset about it was their inability to score on the lengthy 5 on 3 powerplay the Canucks got. OTOH, just about nothing was getting past Hellebuyck so maybe it didn’t really matter? Some times a goalie is just locked all the way in.
Well, I have a standard for evaluating the competence of any movement to opine on what is funny. If the people in that movement think Jimmy Kimmel is funny and Kathy Griffith’s severed-head routine was “comedy” that movement has completely disqualified itself from being considered an authority on what is funny.
It’s like Jill Biden offering advice on style, or Joy Behar giving lessons on civility.
“a new, albeit bizarre and often crass, way to push back.”
OK, I’ll agree with bizarre and often crass, though lately I think the modifier “often” can be dropped. But “new”? They have been bizarre and crass for years now, and as for “pushing back” I’m not sure what frog suits and sex toys are “pushing back” against. Rationality? Good taste? Intelligence? Maturity?
OK, message received.
Hey Spook, Looks Trump is looking to shake things up in your state’s legislators.
https://bigleaguepolitics.substack.com/p/trump-unleashes-primary-endorsement?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=560996&post_id=189253484&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=15i322&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
It’s one of the main reasons we have primary elections. Redistricting when your party is in power is an unfortunate fact of American politics. If it were the Democrats doing it, there would be NO congressmen or state senators who would oppose it. If I have one criticism of the GOP, it’s that they don’t understand how (or don’t have the desire) to wield political power when they have the majority. The party of the jackass (what an apt piece of American political symbolism) has never had such a problem.
Yep – the RINOs are a vanishing breed, but they still wield power and are determined on their way out to help Democrats as much as they can. IMO, they are just Democrats who became GOP because of voter registration in their districts. They’ve always loathed GOP voters and now they add TDS to the mix.
For those who haven’t read it, Matt has a really good post about the self-inflicted damage the Dems imposed on themselves during the SOTU. It won’t let me copy the link for some reason, but it’s on the right side of the screen under Matt’s Substack.
Speaking of the “modern left” … they plan to go full fascism if they win, per Susan Rice. They have no intention of furthering policies that benefit the country, they plan to attack the people the hate. That’s it. That’s their entire agenda. NEVER vote for people like this ….
“A very prominent public figure, who has served at nearly the very highest levels, once told me … “Revenge is best served cold,” and the older I get, the more I see the wisdom of that.
…..When it comes to the elites, you know, the corporate interests, the law firms, the universities, the media … it’s not going to end well for them, for those that decided that they would act in their perceived very narrow self-interest, which I would underscore, is very short-term self-interest, and, you know, take a knee to Trump.
…They’re going to be held accountable by those who come in opposition to Trump and win at the ballot box.
And I can tell you, Preet, as I talk to leaders in Washington, leaders in our party, leaders in the states, if these corporations think that the Democrats when they come back in power are going to, you know, play by the old rules and [say] “Never mind, we’ll forgive you for all the people you fired, all the policies and principles you violated, all the laws you’ve skirted.”
I think they’ve got another thing coming … they’re going to be surprised. Democrats have had a bellyful, and we’re not going to play by, you know, the old set of rules.
“We’re not going to be suckers … there will be an accountability agenda.”
“we’re not going to play by, you know, the old set of rules.”
They have NEVER played by any set of rules, always just making new rules as they go along. (How many election rules were changed in violation of state laws or constitutions, right before the 2020 election? How many other election laws were broken when ballots without signatures were accepted, or accepted after the legislated deadline, etc?) When I hear this kind of rhetoric I wonder if she truly believes in this sunny image of Good Guys Being Victimized or if she is fully, callously, aware that it is all just a script, a line of bull to try to advance an agenda. (I have an opinion on that.)
Look at her examples:
“we’ll forgive you for all the people you fired”—overlooking or trying to obfuscate the fact that those people were part of a Dem plan to subvert the Constitution by replacing the legislative powers of Congress with a de facto extra-Constitutional fourth branch of government, and that removing them was a vital step toward reclaiming actual Constitutional governance.
“all the policies and principles you violated”—such as? “Policies” implemented by this same de facto fourth branch of government, that of unelected political appointees imposing politically-motivated rules and regulations, without the participation or even oversight of Congress? Those “policies”? Which “principles”? Maybe the “principle” of “precedent”—that is, if you have managed to get away with something for a while it has become carved in stone and must remain in place and in action indefinitely, even it is based on an error?
“all the laws you’ve skirted” and here she finally gets to the punch line she has been building up to, the implication of actual illegality. She started with fretting about people being fired, escalated to imaginary violations of vague “policies” and “principles” and finally got to the core message, which is just a lie. And even then she has to waffle, unwilling to come right out and say laws were broken, because that could be disproved by fact. So she sticks with the weasel-wording of “skirting”.
“Skirting” a law: That is, the feeling that someone possibly considered, maybe, approaching a decision to violate a law but didn’t even get close enough to it to actually brush it, just close enough to create little breeze as he passed by. But then, if this is enough of a foundation for an impeachment hearing, why not drag it into a setup for a vendetta?
Spot on
MAGA needs to get rid of our own version of “Democrats” … I am thinking Lauren Boebert, MTG, and Thomas Massie as a few. Yesterday Boebert shared a pic of Hillary in the hot seat, a clear violation of the rules and it shut down the hearing. Who does that??? What a grandstanding moron. That’s what democrats do, get rid of her.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15596743/hillary-clinton-epstein-deposition-photo.html
I’ve watched Lauren Boebert since she first announced she was running for the House, so I have paid a lot of attention to her ups and downs as she has been learning the ropes.
She is a small-town girl, who ran a little cafe in a little town in Western Colorado, where they celebrated the 2nd Amendment by letting all waitstaff do open carry. Her election to the House was her first exposure to politics, and as we rustics like to say, it was basically the first time she got to go to town with the egg money. And she was in way over her head.
Her learning curve was steep, and brutal. In the meantime her husband was unfaithful and her marriage ended, one of her kids acted out and got in legal trouble, she was hustled by a Dem guy who set her up for an embarrassing episode at a play in Denver, and she kind of wandered through the House looking for a place to land. She flirted for a while with what seemed like a couple of like-minded people like MTG, but veered away.
Dems seemed scared of her, so much so that they dumped a ton of money into the next election cycle in her tiny district, and she was sure to lose. At this time she had to feel beat up and overwhelmed, but she did not give up. She looked across the mountains to Ken Buck’s newly open seat in a sold red district, moved, and got elected there. And since then, she has been doing solid work for her constituents, working hard at the unglamourous work of the House like pushing bills on water for her ag district.
I’m not going to hold it against her if she decided to try to move up in the pack and used some bad judgment to do so. But she is not a glory hound like MTG, she is not a RINO, and I’m not ready to kick her to the curb. The move from Rifle, Colorado to the cage match that is the U.S. Congress is a demanding one, and hard on someone still working on the nuances and speed bumps involved.
Lauren Boebert, unchagrined, “tensely” pointed out, “No US ambassadors were harmed in the taking of today’s photo.” She really said it:
Later, in response to a rude C-SPAN reporter’s question while she was strolling her son, Lauren added, “I just returned to my hotel room and installed the BleachBit software, and took a hammer to my iPad. So, I guess, in regards to taking photos, I do not recall.”
Had Boebert not smuggled the tense photo out, the Times would have called Hillary “defiant” instead of “tense.” (While Boebert admittedly broke the rules, it’s important to note that Hillary’s team wanted the proceedings live-streamed, and it was Congressional Republicans who demanded the closed-door context. Just saying.)
I am not a fan of hers but will be patient.
She’s better than her press indicates
I think the Senates reluctance to pass the SAVE act, tells you everything you need to know about past elections and the strength of the Lefts influence. No bueno. Who in hell can object to needing photo id and proof of citizenship to vote???
The Senate is STILL not working for the American people. Thune should be ashamed of himself.
Just saw a quote from Thune saying “he wouldn’t be surprised if a TX Senate seat flipped and turned blue”
WTF??? He’s the guy we hired to keep the Senate. Time to flip Thune.
Every major AI chatbot operates according to hidden instructions called a system prompt, a set of rules, values, and constraints built into the model before a user ever asks their first question. These prompts determine what the AI will and will not discuss, how it frames controversial topics, which sources it treats as authoritative, and what kinds of answers it defaults to.
This is not inherently sinister. Some restrictions exist for defensible reasons: preventing genuinely harmful outputs, reducing legal liability, or reflecting broad social consensus about dangerous content. But it raises a serious question about whose values are encoded in these systems and whether those values consistently favor particular political, ideological, or commercial interests. Research suggests that most major LLMs lean toward socially liberal positions on cultural questions, which is unsurprising given that the people building these systems are disproportionately drawn from coastal tech culture and academia. More importantly, asymmetries in how AI handles similar questions from different political perspectives reveal the shape of encoded bias more clearly than any simple ideological score.
At sufficient scale, these asymmetries matter enormously. An AI system interacting with hundreds of millions of people daily, consistently framing issues in particular ways, is not merely answering questions. It is shaping the cognitive terrain on which those questions are understood. That is, by any reasonable definition, a form of influence and, under some conditions, a form of propaganda. The question is not whether AI systems encode bias, because all editorial systems do, but whether those biases are transparent and in whose interests they operate.
When we talk about a new “civil war” we tend to refer to political differences, but I and my fellow ruralists have always commented on the fact that in a Zombie Apocalypse we will probably do very well, knowing how to hunt and preserve food and build shelter and solve the problems of the new age, while the elites would not be able to cope without food delivery, electricity and someone to take care of them.
That is why I appreciated this article. The term “autodidact” is not commonly used, but it describes characteristics I, personally, associate with those visionaries who designed our national identity and many if not most of the people driving advancement today. Elon Musk literally taught himself rocket science from reading books. Self-educated people have always designed, created, built and operated some of the most complex systems in our world. Teenagers with nothing but fierce determination and excitement at being trusted to use their intellect have been able to unearth billions of dollars of fraud and waste the credentialed class evidently did not even know existed. (And boy, are they mad about it!)
And now we are seeing the rise in smug assumption of moral and intellectual superiority based on nothing but “credentials” and identity. “The credentialed class keeps telling us to wait: wait for the next degree, the next certification, the next expert-approved path. “ And the rubes, the rednecks, the innovators, the creators, the inventers, the autodidacts, stand back and ask “And how’s that going for you?”