Author: M. Noonan

Thinking About Rules and Politics Open Thread

M. Noonan22 Comments

When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws. – G K Chesterton, 1905

That’s why I like Chesterton – he was mostly writing a hundred or more years ago, but almost everything he wrote is applicable today; especially as prophecy.

We have so many rules these days – Hulu got hit massively yesterday because they Tweeted out their desire that no one “culturally appropriate” in their Halloween costumes. The pushback was good (and hardly anyone defended Hulu: a possible indicator that very few are still afraid of violating PC demands), but the real problem is that Hulu felt it had to say something like that. To follow PC demands on costumes we’d probably need a thick book of rules which lays out which costumes are acceptable and which not, and who can wear which acceptable costumes: and given the vagaries of race and gender these days, we’d need really granular detail on that. Or, we can just stick to the old Big Law of “don’t be vulgar”. True, in that old Big Law there was a lot of subjectivity and someone could show up at the costume party looking like a fool, but it was certainly a lot more convenient than worrying if the use of a sombrero is racist.

The thing about Rules is that only enforcers really like them – which is why most of us prefer a few clear, simple rules that everyone knows and understands. God has Ten Commandments – and Jesus really boiled that down to two. The Constitution of the United States is amazing for its brevity. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof”: that covers religion. On the other hand, Title IX rambles on for quite a bit, and that’s before you get into the mountain of words in the regulatory and judicial aspects of it. In the end, you don’t really know what Title IX means – it doesn’t even really define what “discrimination” means. This sort of thing is, in my view, deliberate. Make a long, rambling law that no one can fully understand and, presto!, you’ve got your mechanism for doing whatever it is you want as long as you have the power to enforce it. Of course, it should be noted, that only tyrants like this sort of thing.

A CNBC poll, of all things, discounts the possibility of a Blue Wave. OTOH, I’ve seen some worrying for the GOP polling data out of Pennsylvania. On the Other, Other Hand, the Democrats are sending $3 million to New Jersey (!) in an attempt to save Menendez. My guess: no one really knows what will happen on the 6th. Both sides are fired up and donating. I’m pretty sure we’ll see a very high mid-term turnout. I’ve noticed that the Democrat ads out here in closely-fought Nevada are turning away from attacking Trump and getting more general, as well as dragging out the time-worn “The GOP will take away your social security” accusation. Not sure if this means the Dems feel they’ve locked down their base and are now stretching for older voters who tend GOP, or if they have lost part of their base and are now trying to get it back. Guess we’ll find out soon enough. One thing you can rely on: if it is reported in the MSM, it is almost certain to be a lie in one fashion or another…the MSM, at the orders of the Democrats, will try to suppress GOP voter enthusiasm and boost Democrat voter enthusiasm. All political stories (with possible rare exceptions) will be pitched with this in mind.

Meanwhile, the weirdness of having a Democrat represent North Dakota in the Senate since 1960 might be coming to an end.

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Open Thread

M. Noonan20 Comments

Let’s talk a minute about race.

It’s meaningless.

Warren’s idiocy on the Native American thing merely highlights how stupid the whole issue has become. Why did she take her 1/1024th Native Blood and emphasize it? Because we’ve created a racial spoils system where you can parlay any bit of non-white blood into victim status, and thus reap unearned rewards. The really sick and twisted thing about it is that our liberal race-mongers are essentially agreeing with National Socialist ideology: that your ethnic heritage determines your worth and some ethnic groups are superior to others. That Hitler made out that the Germans were best is irrelevant: the concept remains the same. All Hitler was doing was saying that his ethnic group was best – which is what every race-baiting grifter says.

The pragmatic facts of life are that human beings, as such, are monotonously the same. Take a fit, young man and women from different ends of the Earth – entirely different ethnic backgrounds – and put them in a room together, throw on some Barry White and leave a bottle of wine and what you’ll get 9 months later is just another human baby. A grand thing, but genetics, outside possible defects, will have nothing to do with the ultimate adult you get out of it. What sort of person anyone winds up being depends not in the genes of their parents, but on what they learn as they grow. Recently a prince was born in London and, rely on it, right around the same time a peasant was born in Nigeria. Take the kids and switch them and what you’ll get 20 years later is a black Prince and a white Nigerian. What mom and dad provided won’t matter – what the parents who actually raise the kid provide will be crucial.

We create an issue about race – and we always create the issue because we’re trying to run a con. Back in the past, the con was that non-white people couldn’t compete and so had to be kept down as drawers of water and hewers of wood. Right after we ditched that drivel, someone came up with the idea that non-white people are inherently superior and that the only reason that any white person is on top is due to an unfair advantage. The earlier myth allowed some people to exploit cheap labor; the current myth allows some people to exploit affirmative action (writ large). I am sick to death of it. Racism, as a concept that non-white people are inferior, is just about dead as a door nail. Maybe a few score thousand people in all of the United States believe it. But the New Racism is alive and well and has a vastly larger constituency than the old racism ever had. I’m glad that Warren is being roasted over her absurdity: I hope it leads to the whole racial con we got going being ditched. We are people; we are what we learn and do…not what genetics we are.

Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit against President Trump was dismissed – and in such a way that the buckets of liberal money she got via Gofundme may end up being transferred to Trump. I like that. It has been noted that this may be the first time a prostitute paid a politician.

In addition to Kanye, the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten has gotten on the MAGA bandwagon. Has everyone started to notice that Trump and his people are starting to have lots and lots of fun? This is important. The side that’s having fun is the side that is winning.

Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat running for Senate in Arizona, has had a bad couple weeks. Things keep coming out about how much she, apparently, hates Arizona, hates America…but now she’s gone full weird: seems she called on witches for aid once upon a time. Its been said that the best thing about the Trump Era is the way he’s forced the left to take off the mask. It isn’t actually surprising that a Democrat – Party of Science, yo! – is ok with witchcraft. Lots and lots of Democrats believe that stuff, even if they call it some other name to not look obviously like idiots. But they are also relentlessly anti-American and hold their own people in contempt. The more the mask slips, the better for us.

We’re supposed to care deeply about the Khashoggi murder. I’m still trying to figure out why. I mean, sorry it happened, and all…but I don’t get why the big heartache about it.

Generic ballot in the battlegrounds is R+1. Don’t get cocky. Get out and vote.

More from Salena Zito about the upcoming mid-terms. She was the reporter who was right about 2016, all along.

Never Trump Joins the Anti-American Left

M. Noonan18 Comments

Back in 2004 when this blog had a vastly larger audience than it does today, it occurred to me that the sure-fire way for us to become instantly rich and famous would be to pick a day and announce we were switching sides. Remember, that was the heat of the 2004 election season and this blog was originally built to support President Bush’s re-election effort. Had we, say, announced our switch in September of 2004, it would have made a splash – quite a large one. The specific issue to break over would have been the war, and the follow up would have been our denouncing the racist dog-whistles Bush was using to stir up white voters and get them to the polls. Naturally, we did no such thing: honorable people don’t set about lying to just to make a buck and get famous. Dishonorable people take a different view of the matter. And that brings us to Max Boot.

He’s written an article – part of a marketing effort for his book – in the Washington Post explaining his rejection of the Republican Party. Here’s the flavor:

…it’s obvious that the history of modern conservative is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism. I disagree with progressives who argue that these disfigurations define the totality of conservatism; conservatives have also espoused high-minded principles that I still believe in, and the bigotry on the right appeared to be ameliorating in recent decades. But there has always been a dark underside to conservatism that I chose for most of my life to ignore. It’s amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed!

What he means by that is that the GOP embraced things like limitations on federal power, muscular opposition to the Soviet Union and its agents in the West, not wanting the power of the United States tied to the approval of the relentlessly anti-American UN and such. And that is fine: it is ok to be in favor of expansive federal power and to desire that the US get in step with the UN, but Boot doesn’t stop there. Our views are not informed by a different, rational view of the world…but in Boot’s view are the mere result of our ignorance, bigotry and racism. I said that the longer a Never Trumper remains Never Trump, the more likely that person will adopt outright Progressive views. And there you go.

Boot goes on to note that the Conservatism of modern America emerged not just in opposition to the Democrats’ New Deal liberalism, but also against Eisenhower’s moderate Republicanism. And in that he does have a point. Eisenhower – and the “Rockefeller Republicans” who followed him – was a disaster for the United States. Nearly as much as he was a disaster as Supreme Allied Commander in WWII (don’t get me started – but anyone who wants to argue against me will first have to justify the dead at Kasserine and the Bulge). The New Deal wasn’t an organic development of American politics, but an affront to the very ideals America was founded upon: the idea that a remote, federal bureaucracy can dictate the actions of people thousands of miles away is simply un-American (it is also immoral). It was (and remains) the ultimate duty of all right-of-center Americans to seek the undoing of FDR’s work and all that resulted from it. People like Ike – who seems to only have chosen the GOP out of convenience – wanted none of that. They made their peace with FDR and only asserted they would manage his un-American federal behemoth better than the Democrats would. But, what is the point of that? Why even have an opposition if it won’t, you know?, oppose what the other side is doing?

We’ve seen the result of having an opposition which doesn’t oppose: in the time since Buckley first raised the Conservative banner in opposition, we’ve gone from (officially) wanting to roll back the New Deal to being within an ace of having single-payer healthcare. And let’s not forget the rest of it: overall, it seems that about half of America’s births are out-of-wedlock. This didn’t just happen. We didn’t just slide from Social Security to Obamacare, nor did we accidentally forget to get married before having kids. This was deliberately advanced by the left – they wanted these results. Yes, even the out-of-wedlock births were desired by the left. Don’t fool yourself: the left hates the traditional family. The left sees it as a mere vehicle for the transmission of cis-hetero, patriarchal norms which perpetuate injustice.

There’s a book out there worth your reading: The Good Years, by Walter Lord. It covers American history from 1900 to the start of the First World War. This was America at flood tide. We were free. We were little taxed. Little regulated. The federal government took most of the Summer off each year. We only had a small standing army. We had no alliances with anyone in the world. We were growing richer and more powerful by the minute. There were problems and injustices, of course, and Lord notes them. Certainly the most egregious injustice in the United States in those days was the increasingly bad treatment of the African-American minority. But even that injustice was being effectively attacked. There was no doubt given time that America’s innate sense of fairness would have eventually cured the problems – and there was also no doubt that America was already the most powerful nation in the world.

The left essentially looked at that America and said, “it has to go”.

One of the events Lord goes over is the murder trial of labor leader Bill Haywood in 1907. Haywood was a far-left labor activist and the former governor of Idaho was murdered (via a bomb) by a man connected to Haywood’s organization. Now, during the trial, the American left went it’s usual full-blown nuts over the issue, asserting that justice couldn’t be had and that America was an oppressive, Capitalist dictatorship and that only socialist revolution could save us. They were rather deflated when the jury came back with a not guilty in the matter (it seems that while it was clear Haywood wasn’t opposed to blowing people up, the jury couldn’t find any evidence that he had a hand in the particular explosion which killed the former governor). But the main thing to understand is that even way back then, the left hated America and everything about it. The left was already ok with using violence to achieve its ends and it was already saying that America was irredeemable short of socialist revolution. Nothing has fundamentally changed from that day to this – and from that day to this, the efforts of the left have been directed at getting rid of America as it was back at flood tide.

Not just parts of it: the whole thing. That is what must be grasped. The left really is revolutionary. They might moderate their tone, but they never moderate their ends, and their end is a complete revision of the American order. Nothing which existed in, say, 1910, is to remain in place once the left has completed its task. Not the family. Not Christianity/religion. Not the free market. Not federalism. Not the Constitution. Not dissent from leftwing views. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zippo. Not one thing is to remain. In its place the left has been erecting what they view as the correct morality. You and I say that, on the whole, it is better to get married first and then have kids. The left says otherwise, and has worked diligently (and with remarkable success) to impose its view. And, once again, this is all fine: people are allowed to press for the views they think best. But there are a couple things which aren’t ok:

1. Not actually opposing the left even though you say you are opposed to the left.

2. When you give up and switch sides, start using all the slanders of the left against your former compatriots.

The first is treason, the second is dishonest. I don’t know why some people said they were on a side, but not really and I just don’t know how anyone can simply insult – with lies they know to be lies – the people they were lately allied with. Because I’m not buying this “I now see they are racist” nonsense. It is a stupid lie on the part of people who are switching – but it is also integral to the switch. Remember, they are going left and the left is opposed to everything that is or was America – including such things as adherence to truth. The Never Trumpers have been told the price of admission, and it is to become opposed to everything they used to say they support. As part of a package, giving up being a truth-teller probably seems like small beans.

The truth of the matter is vastly different, as you’d expect. While the left – and their brand new, Never Trump adherents – are floating nonsense about “dog whistles” and such, the reality is that we on the right haven’t a racist bone in our body. In fact, as Conservatives, we can’t be other than opposed to injustice in all its forms. We’re American Conservatives, for crying out loud – what we’re trying to conserve is America. You know, all that bit about all men being created equal and government of, by and for the people shall not perish from the Earth? That’s us – that is what we want. To be sure, the left twists that around because that is what the left does. Because we want the laws obeyed, the left says this means we want a return to unjust laws of the past. You know: “you only want to be strict constructionists because then you can consider black people to be 3/5th of a person”. Garbage takes like that – which only a nitwit unversed in history could believe. No: what we want is the system of self government which allowed us to continually remake America into a place where ever large portions of the people had an equal say in government and were ever more able to work and build for themselves. The left rejects that; and so we oppose the left.

Remember what I said: the left wants all of what America was destroyed. Including those bits which you’d think everyone would like. You know: the ability of the people to change things. The left hates that aspect of America as much as any other and may, indeed, hate it the most. You think the left wants people to retain the ability to remake things? That once they have enacted their vision fully into American law and custom they’re going to allow people to come up and change it again? Give me a break! The purpose of the left allegedly championing the rights of oppressed minorities is not to get those minorities to be free and independent people, it is merely to use their plight to de-legitimize the United States (“how can you say America is good when Injustice X is allowed to exist!”). As far as that goes, leftists don’t give a tinker’s dam about what happens to black people or any other people: the fate of any individual person is inconsequential in the left’s view. The left, in power, wouldn’t hold a black man down because he’s black, but they’d sure in heck hold him down if he decided he didn’t want leftism. You might want to argue that it is better to be oppressed on account of opinion rather than race, but I don’t see the difference…and as I’m in favor of allowing everyone to be free regardless of race or creed, I think I’m on firmer ground here.

To give you an idea of how far the left is willing to go to change every last thing about America, the city council of Madison, WI recently voted to remove the gravestone atop the graves of Confederate soldiers who died in Wisconsin as POW’s. Click the link: it isn’t a heroic statue. Its nothing but a gravestone with the names of the dead inscribed. I’ll bet not one in a thousand Madison residents even knew it was there. But some leftist found it and made an issue about it. Because every, last thing which was America has to go. The dead, if they are the wrong dead, shall not even have a marker letting you know where they are. America is the left’s Carthage and it is to be destroyed and the ground sown with salt to ensure it never revives. And the Never Trumpers are ok with this. And, in truth, they likely always have been.

And I’m betting they are feeling relief. I’ve seen some Never Trump social media comments. They very much sound as if they come from people who, for years, heard their liberal friends shout “racist” at any dissenting voice and in their minds they were going, “I wish I could do that!”. It is hard to stand against the current – especially if your milieu is the media, where almost everyone is a leftist. I mean, think about it: you’re at a party or social gathering and 95 out of the 100 people there are of one view while you and four others are of a different view. Are you really going to stand tall? Or are you going to concede to the views of the overwhelming majority? Likely, most of them conceded…and now they’re just doing in public what they long ago did in private.

To be sure, for a while the Never Trumpers will make mild statements in favor of some vestigial, conservative view the left (temporarily) allows them to retain. You might get a rumbling about low taxes here and there; a small bit about de-regulation; maybe even a mild defense of freedom of conscience from these guys. But, it’ll be muted and, eventually, gone. They won’t be permitted to have it otherwise. Their new friends are not interested in hearing dissent, at all…and they certainly won’t put up with a Boot or a Nichols disturbing the waters with a heterodox view. Remember, the left is at war with all of America; and you can’t be friends with the left, for long, without subscribing to the whole lot of it.

It really is good riddance, here. Upon reflection, you start to realize why we on the right failed to make a strong appeal to minority voters: because making those appeals would involve speaking some truth. Truth is always denounced by the left, but they denounce with especially fury anyone who questions the left’s dogma about matters of race. Nothing scared these now-Never Trumpers more than an accusation of racism. We, on the other hand, ceased caring about such accusations long ago. Once you’ve been falsely called a racist a few hundred times, it loses it’s sting. For some years, now, we’ve wondered where is the bold plan to help lift up all those Americans who have been crushed by the imposition of leftism. Freed from any need to worry what hang-wringing do-nothings will say, we’ll be able to advance a much more bold series of proposals to reverse the errors of this past century. In return for this new-found freedom, the only downside is a few more braying asses on the left shouting false charges at us.

And, so, off we go into the future. It amuses me to watch these Never Trumpers. They are like people rushing to get the last ticket on the Titanic. Don’t worry, guys, the new CNN poll shows Democrats winning in a blowout next month! You’ll be fine! CNN is never wrong, you know? It’ll be fun to watch them realize they’ve joined the losers. And, of course, they will be welcome back, if they so choose – we don’t hold grudges over here (be careful, Never Trumpers: you’re liberal friends never let go a grudge). But we will require an apology, I think. You know: for lying about us.

Open Thread

M. Noonan7 Comments

Still lots of predictions out there about how the mid-terms will go – I was fiddling around with an interactive prediction site and as I ran thru it, I realized what was wrong: the Experts are rating a huge number of very Red districts as toss-ups. I realized it was the only way they could make out that the House is in play…by pretending there’s this massive Blue wave coming which will convince Red (not purple – bright Red) district voters (who almost certainly voted overwhelmingly for Trump) to place Pelosi back in control of the House. I’m sorry, but that’s stupid. There’s no indication that the GOP is abandoning Trump as it essentially did with Bush in 2006 (and continued to abandon the GOP in 2008 when McCain ran). To be sure, anything is possible – but I think the most unlikely thing in politics right now is Trump 2016 voters turning to the Democrats. Once I figured that out, I can through the prospects with my perception and I get the GOP to 220 House seats, at least…that is, if the Democrats have a good night. If the GOP has a good night, 236 GOPers come January. A one seat gain (getting gains above the current 235 is difficult because the districts are all so carefully drawn for maximum partisan advantage).

On the Senate side, I can’t see us coming away with less than 53 GOP Senators if the Democrats have a good night – that’s if they win FL, AZ and NV (with AZ and NV being two seats flipped from GOP to Dem). Now, if the GOP has a good night…well, let’s just say it can be good, great or gosh darned phenomenal, depending on the breaks. 59 is Great. Gosh darned phenomenal isn’t to be spoken out loud…it would be too good to be true. But there is a non-zero chance of gosh darned phenomenal happening.

Do remember to vote next month. Its pretty important.

In case you were wondering, Democrats are assessing their loss in the Kavanaugh fight and they seem determined on a change in tactics. They are promising to start getting aggressive and mean. No, seriously: they are whining on social media about how they were too nice during the Kavanaugh battle. Get ready for one heck of a poop storm – and if the Democrats have a bad night in November, board up your windows.

There were rumors Trump was getting ready to fire Rosenstein but Trump scotched those and now says he and Rosenstein are best buddies. Which leads me to believe that Rosenstein was told by Trump that Trump was the boss (a completely correct statement) and Rosenstein agreed with that assertion. Rosenstein is swamp through and through…but the thing about draining a swamp is that you need the cooperation of at least some swamp dwellers (they know where the drains are, after all). We’ll see how this pans out. I’ve learned enough this past couple years to trust Trump’s judgement.

Allahpundit has fallen very far in the Trump era – now he’s rehashing biased polls to make what he thinks is a point. He’s slobbering in the link over a CNN poll of 1,009 adults (not registered voters, not likely voters, but adults…nearly half of whom won’t even vote in November). It naturally over-samples Democrats and under-samples Republicans. But, that is the old line of Conservatism all over…looking for reasons to surrender. A poll like this is designed to give a squish a reason for surrendering. “Look! There’s a poll saying we’re unpopular! Abandon ship! Ahoy!”. Yadda, yadda, yadda. As if any of that means anything. I’m so glad we’re giving these people the boot. It was long overdue.

A memo apparently went out saying that it is just wrong for the GOP to gloat over the Kavanaugh victory. It was all over the MSM and Social Media…naturally with the Never Trump weenies joining. We’re not supposed to win and when we do win, we’re not supposed to feel joy. Think about this – the left tried to win by claiming a boring, married judge was some sort of serial monster and they lost. And we’re supposed to bow our heads and be ashamed. Seriously: why did we put up with this garbage for so long?

Don Surber notes that Trump did the right thing – he apologized on behalf of the United States to Kavanaugh and his family.

51-49 Open Thread

M. Noonan21 Comments

I’d like to see #PopAColdOne trending on Twitter by the time they vote tomorrow. I saw that a group of GOPers showed up at Cocaine Mitch’s house this morning to drink PBR in favor of Kavanaugh. And I have floated the idea of having a National Kegger for Liberty in DC at some future date.

Jokes aside, it is still a bit up in the air. I do rate Kavanaugh’s chances as very good, but we’ve got a day for the left to go to work on the squishes. I doubt they’ll move Manchin because a vote for Kavanaugh is crucial to his re-election chances. But they still could find two GOPers willing to knife us in the back on this. We’ll just have to wait and see. But, come what may, the GOP is on fire over this – and, maybe, a Kavanaugh defeat would just energize the base even more. GOP fundraising has skyrocketed since this began, Trump hit 50% in Rasmussen and one generic ballot shows that the Democrat advantage among women has dropped from +22 to +1 (which, given polling bias, works out to the GOP having a polling advantage). The Democrats may have only awakened a sleeping giant.

Getting into the details of the mess, we’re starting to see the outlines of how it was created…and that those who did so might have placed themselves in legal jeopardy. Democrats have been acting over the past two years as if the levers of power weren’t in our hands. I think they are about to have a rude awakening.

The Chinese appear to have inserted a hacker chip into phones and computers shipped to the United States. This surprises no one with any sense, at all. Of course they’ll do that. They are a totalitarian dictatorship and nothing happens in China without the government being involved…and it would have been insane of the Chinese government to not avail themselves of this fantastic opportunity to spy on all of us with ease. There is no doubt in my mind that every phone and computer manufactured in China can be accessed immediately by the Chinese government at will. And this is likely just the one we caught – they are sure to have installed backup hacks in case one fails. I’ve been saying it for years: do not trade with tyrannical regimes. Do not have relations with them. All you do is weaken yourself when you do.

I’m going to wait for the votes over a couple election cycles, but there are some indications that African-Americans are questioning their long time support for the Democrat Party. I’ve always said it will happen – but I thought we’d have to do far more for it to occur. But, you know, maybe massively improving prospects combined with clear attempt by white liberals to tell black people how they have to think are doing the thing for us?

Open Thread

M. Noonan28 Comments

Some SJW types painted nauseating graffiti all over a GOP office in Illinois. Not at all surprising. This is what the left is building – on purpose and maliciously. They want people at a fever pitch of hate. And they are hoping for confrontations – I’ve seen the comments all over social media, including from “respectable” people on the Left. Trouble is, eventually someone is going to shoot back (we’re already past the “someone is going to get shot” phase, as Congressman Scalise can testify). To be sure, the MSM will try to paint the first bit of return fire as some unique outrage…but no one is really listening to the MSM any longer. I hope it doesn’t come out like that – but if you get in people’s faces enough, you will get a direct reaction.

Meanwhile, Cocaine Mitch says he’ll hold a vote on Kavanaugh this week.

Georgetown University says it is committed to Social Justice. This is what Social Justice is, in practice:

C. Christine Fair, an associate professor at Georgetown in the School of Foreign Service, tweeted Saturday, saying white Republican men should die and an added bonus would be if women “castrate their corpses and feed them to swine.”

The University blew off complaints about this by saying they like free speech…which someone should test by holding a pro-life vigil on campus with the participants wearing MAGA hats.

Professor produces a study showing that, just perhaps, the lack of women in physics is based on something other than sexism…and, of course, promptly gets un-personed and his research consigned to the nearest Memory Hole.

Don Surber: smart guy:

The Marxist Mob’s attack on Judge Brett Kavanaugh is part of a multi-decadal plan to eliminate the Constitution — which Marxists slander as a a slave document.

Yep.

Trump should make this his 2020 theme song:

Some Thoughts on the Left

M. Noonan24 Comments

What we’re dealing with in the Left is a few things, all mixed together in a bad way.

First and foremost, the Long Peace. Even though we’ve engaged in near-continuous warfare since 1941, the American people haven’t really felt the affects of war save for the 9/11 attacks, which were limited in area affected. Our homes have not been bombed; our women and children murdered; our farms and factories destroyed, by foreign invaders. All of us are, to a certain extent, a bit blind to the some times cruel realities of the world. But the people of the left have plain forgotten that the barbarians are right out there, waiting for their chance, and only eternal vigilance keeps us safe.

Secondly, the gigantic prosperity of the United States. This not only means that Americans don’t know real want – real privation – but we actually have so much extra wealth lying around that we can support millions who do nothing and many more millions who do nothing useful. When you look at leftists, you’ll find a gigantic portion of them either work in fields where concrete results are not expected, or don’t work at all. Sure, you can find some who do work…but usually on the lower end of the leftist movement and almost always as union workers who think that the left still cares about working people (and I think that more and more such people are becoming disillusioned with the left; I’m not talking about government employees, but people like those in the SEIU). We’re so rich that we can afford massive waste – especially the sort of waste which essentially pays the left to tear down our civilization. But, trouble is, you know when you’re doing something useful and when you’re not. A plumber comes home at the end of the day knowing he fixed some leaking pipes…but what does a Gender Studies Professor think about at the end of the day? “I wrote another screed against the Patriarchy!”? People who don’t do useful things, tend to get defensive and want to justify themselves…getting mad and hateful is the easiest way to do so.

Third, we’re in a moral crisis in this nation. Remember the people who pushed to have us pass out condoms in middle school? They are the same people marching in the #MeToo movement. The left sold people on the idea of complete immorality (predicted, I should note, by Chesterton a century ago when he said the next great heresy would be an attack on morality, as such, and especially sexual morality) and when people tried to live immorally, they found out why the priests and philosophers had been saying for 2,000 years that you can’t do that. In short, people got suckered into living lives of hedonistic dissipation, found that it sucked, and then got mad about it…but without repenting what they had done. What we’re seeing is very often someone pissed off that they didn’t have a nice life after they lived like dogs in heat and they are blaming the elements of society which said, “don’t do that” for the failure of their experiment.

All of this has been mixed together and what we have are bitter, spiteful people who have become merciless, shameless liars. And I mean really shameless. Over the past couple days the accusations and insinuations against Kavanaugh have actually gotten worse. Avenatti’s accusations are now getting too tame for the left to pursue! By Wednesday, Georgetown Prep will probably be accused of holding demonic sex orgies…and the shameless liars of the left will just eat it up.

A bit ago a Twitter friend and I engaged – a moderate to the core, he was delighted that Flake had, supposedly, tried to cool things off. I pointed out that while Flake may, personally, be a good man, he promoted sheer evil by going along with the Democrats demand. And not just evil to us, but evil to the left, themselves. You see, by indulging them this way, we’re allowing them to get worse…and no decent human being should set up a situation where our fellow people are able to wallow in filth. We can’t stop such things, but we certainly must do all we can to limit them, if at all possible. Flake didn’t see his duty – and I don’t know if it was cowardice or stupidity which moved him, but it doesn’t really matter: the damage was done.

What we have to keep in mind is that we’re in a fight of Right v Wrong – there’s no compromise. Any concession we make from this point forward will merely be seized upon by the shameless liars to indulge in yet more shameless lying. Our duty to ourselves – and to them – is to stand firm and give them not an inch. We’re not like them – meaning, we’re not shameless liars; nor are we merciless – so we won’t do to them what they very much want to do to us, but we must do all we can to stop them and remove them from power. Only once they are completely bereft of power will some of them, at least, wake up from their nightmare, see what they have done, and repent. They could still remain liberals, but they’ll at least have learned not to be evil. And that is important. Being wrong is fine: we’re all wrong on some things, frequently…but as long as we’re not evil, we’re at least not subtracting from the overall civilization.

Stand firm. There is not much reason to engage them in debate (it just allows them more opportunity to shamelessly lie, after all) and work as hard as you can for your side. We have a real chance over the next two years to win a revolutionary amount of power. So much power that we can impose a settlement on the political debate (meaning, not that there won’t be debate, but that we’ll be back to where we were from 1865 to 1965: conducting our debates in an agreed framework and with a sense of fair play for each side). Or, perhaps, we’ll be the side which is crushed. So be it: but let’s not help them crush us.