Author: Mark Noonan

Open Thread

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As expected, Warnock won – and a lot of people are down on our prospects in Georgia in general. And there is much to be worried about. But I don’t think we need worry quite as much as some urge.

Yes, I do realize that the metro Atlanta area is getting a huge influx of northern voters who are ancestrally Democrat and so they are tilting the State Blue. But that same sort of people moved to Florida and look how that turned out.

Message and messenger: that is always going to be key for us. And they both have to be good. Walker has a past – a past not in any way as bad as Warnock’s (who seems a grade A jerk), but it must be kept in mind that our molehills will be made into mountains and the Democrat mountain will be hit with the SEP Field. I bet that just enough GOP voters were demotivated by Walker’s past. Meanwhile, ninety percent of Warnock’s voters – being consumers of the MSM – never even heard of the bad stuff about Warnock. So, our guys have to be first rate. I do, as an aside, think that even someone with a past can get around it – but only by being forthright about it. Get it out early and openly and don’t leave the least detail out. Once it is out and you can credibly show that it was a long time ago, you may have inoculated yourself: you’ve certainly lessened the effect of October Surprise stuff.

But it isn’t just candidates, messages and our ability (ala’ Florida) to eventually turn Democrats our way – that won’t be enough. No: we need more voters. Turns out, I know where they are.

Chicago.

“But, Mark: are you nuts! Biden won Chicago overwhelmingly!”

He sure did. But turnout in Chicago was 73 percent. More than 420,000 of Chicago’s voters didn’t vote. This isn’t residents or citizens – that is registered voters who didn’t vote. And that is just Chicago – not the rest of Cook County and surrounding areas which are the Democrat strongholds in Illinois (outside the Chicago area, Illinois votes like Alabama). And I’ll bet in the other Blue areas around the county we’ll find similar numbers.

So, there’s the votes: they are right there, waiting to be picked up. They are in the low-propensity voter and in the person who has never voted. Democrats area already doing a bang up job with some of these people. We can, too. And not just in getting Deep Red to turnout more…but going into Deep Blue and stealing some. You have to figure if you live in Deep Blue and don’t vote, you’ve gotta be disgusted with the system. That is fertile ground for us…if we can find the right message and messenger. Zeldin seems to understand this best, but others are coming around to it. The millions of votes we need to win are just waiting for us to ask for them. And, look, it isn’t about carrying Chicago and Los Angeles…it is about picking up enough votes in Deep Blue to lock down States like Georgia and North Carolina and put us in striking distance in places like California and New York.

But there is a catch. There always is, isn’t there? You’re not going to get these people with a traditional GOP message. They don’t even know who Madison is and aren’t at all concerned about tax rates or the problem at the border. They’re worried about their own poverty…their lack of safety. They feel they should be given more help.

And you’re going to have to give it to them. Sorry, guys, but the days of small government America are gone and they ain’t coming back any time soon. Right now, we’re just trying to preserve liberty and property, as such. It is either buy their votes and use the power to preserve your liberty…or stick to your small government ideals, lose, and have Communism imposed on you.

Senator Tom Cotton told woke Kroger corp to take a hike: that is one of those “first step” things we need to do. We can’t defend corporations which hate us and fund our enemies.

James Baker was an FBI guy who played a key role in the Trump-Russia drivel. When the heat came on, he was eased out of the FBI (rather than, say, being shot for treason) and got a job at … Twitter! Where he most recently was (briefly) in charge of vetting documents for Musk before they were released to the press. Well, someone pointed out that this probably wasn’t a good idea – so Musk fired him. I was wondering why in the first batch of documents, no names were being named. Now, I know: the Deep State had their finger in the pie. But now that finger is out – what comes out now may prove very interesting.

Trump’s Opponents Miss the Point. Again.

Mark Noonan56 Comments

Over on Truth Social, Trump made a statement asking if we should overturn the 2020 result. This has made lot of people very angry – with many saying it is disqualifying for any future office.

To be sure, it is an amazing thing for a former President to say. But I cannot see how it is a morally wrong thing to say.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that there was no voter fraud in 2020. Let us further stipulate that the laptop story would not have altered the result. In other words, lets pretend that it still would have all come out the same, laptop or no laptop. You are still left with the fact that elements of the Department of Justice conspired with Big Tech and the MSM to hide a story which would have been devastating to the Democrat candidate. This is election interference writ as large as you can write it. What it is saying is that if the people want the “wrong” candidate, then the top echelons of the American Ruling Class will conspire together to do whatever they think necessary to thwart the will of the people. As a side note, please remember that the DOJ had the laptop in 2019; this means they also interfered with the 2020 Democrat primary. The Democrats were not able to properly assess their candidates because the DOJ withheld crucial information from them.

Hate to break it to you, but a Republic cannot survive with that sort of thing going on. Even assuming that this time it didn’t work, the mere fact that such entities would make the attempt proves that the Constitution – the rule of law, itself – is a dead letter in the United States

There is no mechanism in American law for a do-over on elections. Once the result is entered into the books, it is what it is. So, Trump’s call for a re-vote or what have you is going nowhere even if the overwhelming majority would like it. But what we cannot do – what we dare not allow – is for this to go unanswered. Even if you’re willing to move on from Trump, you have no assurance that the same and worse won’t be done to the next candidate. We already know that people in high positions in Congress, the bureaucracy and the MSM are willing to assert the most fabulous lies about their opponents – now we know that those in charge of law enforcement are willing to ignore the law and help the liars make the lies stick. If they get away with this, they will do it again. Anyone running for office who doesn’t meet Ruling Class approval will simply be destroyed. So, while Trump’s call for a re-vote can’t happen, something must be done. People must go to jail. People must lose money. The victim must be compensated.

This is the turning point. There is no going back from this. If this sort of thing is allowed to happen unchallenged, then our votes will become worthless…our candidates will be destroyed, or will merely be tools of the Ruling Class from the get-go. What we, the people, may want, will no longer matter…we’ll get what the Ruling Class wants.

But it won’t just end with our corrupt and stupid Ruling Class living forever. That is what the Roman Ruling Class thought once they had disposed of the Gracchi. The people’s champion was destroyed and the people to all appearances knuckled under…and then once fine day Octavian, Antony and Lepidus issues proscriptions of hundreds of members of the Ruling Class and the people were entirely indifferent. What I’m saying is that if the people cannot elect their champions, then they will passively support the person who kills the people who destroyed their champions. If the law is dead and its just a competition to see who can hold power, then the winner of that power struggle is invariably the person most willing to kill those the people hate.

Just a cautionary word. I hope people figure this out fast – because it is either some DOJ people doing 20 years, or it is eventual civil war followed by a tyrant.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan40 Comments

Elon Musk announced that he was going to release the info about how the Hunter laptop story was suppressed on Twitter and everyone got al excited. Except me.

The crucial thing we need to know – the only thing we need to know – about how Twitter suppressed the story is who outside Twitter ordered it done. Now, do I have proof that someone outside Twitter gave the order? Of course not. But the bottom line is that as soon as the Post released the story federal law enforcement, almost all the MSM and all major social media platforms suppressed it. You don’t get that sort of uniformity of action without coordination – and you can’t coordinate that sort of action on the fly. People way up high in power in the USA were aware at least some days in advance that the Post story was coming and they swung into action to make sure it had as little effect as possible. They had their talking points all lined up – it was Russian disinformation. They got 50 former intel guys to sign a letter stating it was a Russian op. Doing this sort of thing takes a few calls, ya know?

So what I want to know is who called Twitter. Someone did. There’s no way it didn’t happen. If I can find out who made the call then I can find out who was ultimately behind the suppression effort by working backwards from that person and seeing who they did or do work for. And I called it before Musk released the info – 100-1 against us getting that crucial bit of information. And, sure enough, when the data was dropped, it lacked that. All it told us was what we already knew – that Twitter came up with an absurd excuse out of the Safety group and the story was gone.

Now, to be sure, they did say that political operatives – including some Republicans – had made various requests to suppress this or that account. But they still didn’t name any names. Likely because if we had an idea who had been calling before Laptop, we could eventually figure out who called for Laptop. Because as far as that goes, it had to be someone who knew about it – so, likely DOJ and/or Team Pudding Brain made that call.

And keep in mind that even if you want to say that fraud played no role in 2020, the suppression of this story did. It is absolutely hideous. Had it been about Don, Jr then Trump would have been lucky to crack 40% on election day. China Joe’s son is hip deep in federal crimes based on info on that laptop…and the pictures are downright disgusting. It was a candidacy-killer. Had it been given the normal play a story like that gets, these days Joe’s lawyers would be arguing he’s senile and so isn’t fit to stand trial. It was killed because to save Biden and get Trump out, it had to be killed. And, yes, this does make it even money that senior GOPers played a role in suppressing the story.

Until we get that info, its all pretty pointless. Musk says there is more to come – so, let’s hope. But I have my doubts that the truth will come out…because, remember, a lot of laws get broken in campaign offices and law enforcement agencies when you coordinate with media to favor one party over the other in a political campaign. A lot of well-placed people will be in jeopardy if it all comes out.

Apple CEO Tim Cook dodged questions about Apple’s relationship with China – because what else could he do? You do business in China and the Chinese own you. They have your factory. They control your labor force and supplies. If you don’t toe the PRC line, you’ll lose everything. And that is before the PRC gets you in-country, indulges any perversions you have and gets it all on video.

I’ve thought for decades that America having relations with tyrannical regimes is a huge mistake – we poison ourselves when we do that. Either we believe in our Declaration or we don’t. If we do, then we can’t hold that the PRC is a legitimate government – it is a mafia with an army. And you can’t make honest deals with the mob. We should, step by step, de-couple ourselves from all unfree nations.

How Did We Get Black Nazis?

Mark Noonan15 Comments

Kanye West pretty much ended his career today by speaking up for Hitler. Pro tip: not a good idea. But we shouldn’t just condemn Kanye and move on. This needs to be thought about.

Why would any person – especially a black person – in 2022 have the least kind thing to say about Hitler?

Ignorance.

But not just like we might think of it – for a long while, we all figured that it was just ignorant fools who kept the Nazi flame alive. But I’ve been looking into it and pondering it for a while now and it isn’t just that simple.

The origins of this particular problem – pro-Nazi attitudes – stems from the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Hitler was dead and his movement banned and most Germans, having the utter shock of the exceptionally violent (and cruel, on the part of the Russians and French) invasion of Germany in mind, dropped Nazism like a bad habit. This is why almost every Kraut you talked to in 1945 would say he wasn’t a Nazi. Of course, most of them were – from worker to nobleman, most of them had signed on for the ride, especially by the summer of 1940 when Hitler reached his pinnacle. It was, as I have noted before, a pagan carnival – as long as you obeyed, things were great for you…and even as the war ground on and defeat loomed, most retained their faith until an American or Russian boot kicked the door in. But even in that spring of ruin in 1945, there were those who kept the faith.

People like the Belgian Leon Degrelle, Luftwaffe pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Waffen-SS General Paul Hausser never stopped being Nazis. Of course, law and public opinion kept them from overtly being Nazi. What they did was far more subtle: playing on popular sympathy for combat veterans, they first latched themselves on to Wehrmacht generals trying to get pensions for German soldiers and with this sympathy, they started to whitewash the Waffen-SS. It was just a multinational military force against Communism! The War Crimes either didn’t happen, or where it was incontrovertible, that was carried out by Himmler’s people, not the Waffen-SS! And it was all BS from start to finish – the Waffen-SS were beasts in human skin who carried out massacres all over German-occupied Europe. But, it worked – especially as the Cold War came in and we felt we had to make nice with the Krauts, this drivel about the Waffen-SS being somehow apart from the SS gained purchase. This effort, along with later developing efforts to first downplay and then deny the Holocaust suckered lots of people in – the Germans in WWII weren’t that bad and the Holocaust was exaggerated if not false.

This, in turn, was seized upon by various Muslim organizations which had an interest in delegitimizing Israel. They broadcast these concepts far and wide – and also attached them to anti-Imperialism…the Germans fought France and Britain, after all: the colonial overlords of most of the Muslim world prior to WWII. And now this is where it gets interesting.

Because while these lies were gaining purchase around the world the teaching of history ceased in any meaningful sense. Sure, the kiddies these days probably have a lesson plan where they are told Nazis were bad people but I highly doubt they fully explain why the Nazis were bad or who did the most to stop them. A recent poll showed that only about one in five British youth have a favorable opinion of Churchill, the prime scourge of Nazis from the moment they rose out of the gutter. Churchill, you see?, was just a racist imperialist. But you can’t teach that Churchill was a racist imperialist unless you downplay or ignore Nazism. There is no real upside for the modern Left to talk about the Nazis in detail – because if you do, you eventually have to get around to pointing out that a bunch of straight, white, male Christians played the primary role in putting them down. Talking about them in general – calling them White Supremacists, for instance – is very useful because that fits with the Narrative. If you started pointing out that they were German-supremacists it starts to get complicated and doesn’t fit the Narrative.

But what this boils down to is that you have a couple generations by now rising to adulthood with no real knowledge of the Nazis but who can easily access on line the white-wash drivel about the Nazis. This is how a black man, just as well as anyone else, can be suckered in.

I’m sure West in his wanderings came across various sites where all or part of the Nazi whitewash is available. And more often than not, probably also tied to anti-Israel websites which will hold to the seemingly reasonable “we just want to stop the Israeli occupation” position…without, unless you deep dive, telling you that they consider all of Israel to be “occupied territory” and that the dream is to push the Jews into the sea. But at places where you can learn about how horrible the Israeli “occupation” is you’re going to be exposed to people who will downplay the Holocaust, assert that while there are good Jews, look at how many of them are in banking and entertainment…and doesn’t it seem funny that we give money to Israel? Laced with a bit of “hey, I’m no anti-Semite, but I am anti-Zionist”.

Additionally, West and his generation likely were never taught much about the Abolition movement. Nor given any instruction on just what Madison and Jefferson were up to besides being slave owners. What they have been given is a two-dimensional, cartoonish view of America where white Christians are always wrong and anything worthwhile was done by non-whites/non-Christians in spite of oppression. They are primed for drivel – it just so happens that the particular drivel that West latched on to was pro-Nazi. But other kids are out there banging the Maoist drum as if the Cultural Revolution never happened – which, for them, it never did because they were never told about it.

It is a huge problem. It is fixable – and in just a few years if we gain control of school boards and force them to so much as teach some basics. But regardless of what we do going forward, we’re going to have some millions of people who will always be open to lies beause they were never told anything true. People like West are navigating through lies traveling at warp speed with no underlying knowledge to bounce against those lies. So look for more people to come out and earnestly assert bizarre falsehoods.

Our Grim New World

Mark Noonan25 Comments

So, it turns out the bald guy in a dress that Team Pudding Brain hired to look after nuclear waste is a weirdo who steals women’s luggage.

Who could have guessed!?!?!?!?

Saw an ad for a clothing store or maker – didn’t look to closely at that aspect of it – which was lauding assisted suicide in Canada. It is really bad up there – basically, if you’re a depressed teenager or a soldier suffering from PTSD, killing yourself is offered early on. Part of this is driven by bureaucratic cost-saving: each dollar spent on treatment is one less dollar in the health budge for pay and benefits, after all. But it is also the Culture of Death writ large – and they are trying very hard to bring this to the United States. It is, of course, already here in various States and localities…but if we ever get single-payer, offing yourself will quickly become part of the basic plan.

It must be kept in mind that forgetting about God doesn’t make you a happy pagan doing blow off a hooker’s a**…it makes you eventually into a miserable, greedy, narcissist who hates everyone who can’t bring immediate comfort. That is the thing about God. Or, more accurately, what God cannot be – He cannot be your salvation in sin. Only your salvation out of sin. If you live in sin – and I mean really wallow in it, like our Leftists do – then you find that all you have is sin. God is good – He is Joy, Hope, Charity, Courage…all that. If you reject God then you reject what God has to give…and what’s left? Sorrow. Despair. Greed. Cowardice.

I know that various Saints have told us they have seen visions of Hell and most of them accord with the popular vision of fiery pits and, of course, Our Lord used words about burning to describe Hell. But I think it may be a bit different front that. The damned will, indeed, burn. But they’ll also freeze. They won’t be able to move. Or see. Or remember joyful things. All these things are good and all good things come from God…and if you are completely absent from God, you can’t possibly have the least good thing. All those who have completely separated themselves from God have is what God isn’t – hate, fear, loneliness, crushing cold, burning fire. It is very sad to contemplate – and more sad to contemplate those who are still alive and day by day are separating themselves from God. Damnation isn’t easy to obtain – salvation is easy, damnation is hard. You just have to ask for salvation, but you’ve got to work at being damned. And all these people with their assisted suicide, abortion, tolerance of objective evil, their thievery and lies…day by day building hell for themselves.

But that need not concern us directly: as far as salvation or damnation, each person is ultimately on their own: you will ask God for it, or you won’t. But it seems to me that we do approach a breaking point. Another thing I saw recently was this head of marketing for some fancy clothing line and the images this person uses are clearly of a sexually abusive nature towards children. It has caused some controversy…but not a lot of people dropping their contracts with the clothes maker. Lets not get silly here, right? Sure, Nike (or whatever) had to drop Kanye like a bad habit…but he said Bad Words. How can you compare that to gross images of abused children? Kidding aside, we’re seeing our Ruling Class clearly out to normalize sexual activities with minors. Partially this is to get ahead of possible indictments…but it is mostly, in my view, the final progression from the Sexual Revolution. Once disconnect sex from marriage and children – once, that is, stop having it for what it is – and you’ve pretty much removed any argument against any sort of sex. One commentator asserted that in ten years Disney will have a movie featuring and adult-chlld relationship and I won’t bet against that. The only taboo left is against forcible sex…and that will be a high hill to climb, but the Left will gamely do so…because its the last step in normalizing adult-child relationships. Remember, they don’t have to square the circle: they’ll just assert that normal male to female sex even with consent is always rape but anything else, consensual or otherwise, is just part of a person’s sexual identity. Think I’m kidding? They’re already on the assertion that you can’t have free speech if people are able to speak freely.

Depressing, huh? But I’m really not depressed. Concerned! Very much so. But mostly because I know that the collapse and reaction on such things tend to be exceptionally violent. I’d rather we didn’t have that – but with Congressional GOP getting ready to sell us out on amnesty and Ukraine aid, I don’t think we have in place a mechanism to even put the breaks on the Culture War at the federal level. Betting is that the weirdo luggage thief won’t see jail time – probably won’t even have security clearance pulled. The Ruling Class can’t risk having their first non-binary (or whatever) in that position come a cropper, right? Desantis fights against it. Abbott a bit, as well…but this is hardly enough to really turn the tide. And we’re running out of time to turn it!

On the plus side, I am starting to see even a few on the Left realize that it has all gone too far – San Francisco is ok in its place, but when you try to shove it into Omaha, it can get very dicey. We’ll see, I guess!

Open Thread

Mark Noonan39 Comments

Elon Musk admitted that he voted Biden in 2020. A lot of people are taking this as a bad thing but for the first time I think we might have something here. Like most rich people, Musk moves in circles that are heavily liberal and he also, being rich, doesn’t have to worry about things…so, to such a person, the grand plans to “save the world” both sound good and are cost-free. Rich people are the easiest people to get on board with liberal ideology. But every now and again a rich guy has a wake-up call.

Think about what Musk has seen in the past few weeks: the liberals whom he thought of as the good guys are now trying to get Twitter deplatformed on the Ap store. Team Pudding Brain is threatening investigations. Liberals who viewed Musk previously as some sort of demi-god are turning on him viciously. In and amongst all that, Musk has obtained a first-hand look at how Twitter has operated. As CEO, there is nothing that anyone at Twitter gets to hide from him…and from what he’s saying on Twitter, my guess is that he did ask…and found out that Twitter’s “safety” staff were nothing more than Stalinists looking for any excuse to stifle dissent. These people were all let go by Musk. About 90 percent of Twitter’s staff was let go…and its still running just fine. What all this boils down to is that Musk might be, for the first time in his life, really getting a look at the mentality of a liberals and finding that it is ignorant, self-centered and cruel. I doubt that Musk will ever go MAGA, but he might become someone we can rely on in the fight for liberty.

Musk is also growing disillusioned with the MSM, and that’s a good thing. The trouble is that plenty of people – including some on the right – still believe the MSM to one degree or another. At this link you’ll see that someone put together a bunch of local news broadcasts with the subject of disinformation and the threat it poses to “our Democracy”. The MSMers all say the same thing. It is a script – and it must come out from a central source. Someone orders the MSM what to say and it gets said. With this, what they count on is that nobody sees the other broadcasts – and, of course, most won’t. So it will seem to be something that your local news guys all thought up on their own…but in the modern world, that sort of thing can get found out. Trouble is, we lack a genuine national Conservative broadcast/cable outfit that can give max exposure on such things. This sort of rank propaganda would have made Goebbles blush. It also, shows, in case you weren’t sure, how entirely mindless the news readers are – their only qualifications are the ability to look and sound good on TV. If a thought ever passed through their heads it would be the first time. And it is something we do need to take action on – can we really hold that the First Amendment was designed to protect that sort of thing? Is it really free speech – freedom of the press – when mindless drones are just repeating the talking points a political party handed off to them? Shouldn’t that at least count as an in-kind political donation? Shouldn’t they have to disclose they aren’t news organizations but merely party propagandists?

WEF’s Klaus Schwab declares China to be a role model. The same China building concentration camps – allegedly for Covid quarantine but that’s just the cover story: dissent is growing in China and the ChiComs are building places to put dissidents. I did a little looking into Schwab and he’s just a rich guy. He comes from an exceptionally privileged background and he’s certain he knows how to fix us. Not make us happy: he doesn’t care about that. But he does want us to cease being an inconvenience.

Been saying for a while now that I really do understand the Jacobins. Some people just earn a trip in a tumbril.

NASA says we’ll live on the Moon by 2030. I think we might be hanging out there for periods of time – as with Mars, we can’t live there: too much radiation and too little gravity. We just sent our first capsule to the Moon since Apollo – unmanned whip around the Moon. Which I don’t understand in the least – seems a complete waste of money and a perfectly good spacecraft. We’ve already been there. If we’ve got a ship that can do it, send people. But, anyways, unmanned – as will the next couple. Then we send people in a flyby. The plan is to put people back on the surface in 2026.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan50 Comments

Stochastic terrorism is the coming thing! If you’ve never heard it then the explanation is simple: it was just made up. Far as I can tell, less than six months ago. The claim is that when someone says something mean, it triggers the violent – so, when you say you don’t like minors going to Drag Queen Story Time, you are a stochastic terrorist…someone may hear you say that and go on a shooting spree!

Now, if a Leftist says that Trump and his supporters are Nazis and this causes Antifa to attack Trumpsters that is not stochastic terrorism. Do keep that clear in your head – it is only stochastic terrorism when you say something the Left doesn’t like. When the Left says something you don’t like, that is just Speaking Truth to Power, or whatever drivel phrase the Left is using these days. What they are trying to do, of course, is get us to shut up – but don’t think it is just to get us to voluntarily shut up. They are calling our words terrorism for a reason: because terrorism is illegal. They very much want arrests to be made of the “stochastic terrorists” who are the root cause of mass shootings.

Don’t underestimate the Left. They are not merely wrong – they participate in evil. Even that nice Leftist guy you know – he’ll denounce you to the police if given the opportunity. And he’d think he was doing you a favor. The basic Leftist is the sort of person Solzhenitsyn was talking about when he wrote, “you won’t understand it until they hiss at you, ‘you’re under arrest'”. They don’t understand where it all leads – that the path their on leads to Civil War…and if the Left wins, it eventually means that everyone gets arrested because the Woke dare not run out of enemies…there will always be people who weren’t with them fast enough.

There is much discussion of the 2024 GOP Primary season – mostly falling into the two Trump and DeSantis camps…but the DeSantis camp perceives a real problem: a whole bunch of also-rans are talking about getting in and they are afraid that a splintered anti-Trump vote means Trump gets it.

That is true, of course. But the way the anti-Trump people frame it shows they still haven’t learned anything. Trump can be beaten for the GOP nomination. And not just by DeSantis. In theory, any potential GOPer can beat Trump. But only if they out-Trump Trump. This has been true since 2015 and it will remain true until Trump withdraws from politics. At least 45% of the GOP base is Trumpster – and in some States, it is far higher. Plenty of Trumpsters are willing to move on and find someone else. Even my MAGA-from-the-elevator brother is willing to go for DeSantis. But you know what will happen: it will be Trump vs whomever and Team Trump will highlight the Establishment backgrounds of all other GOP contenders. For the most part, in most States, this will be an unanswerable argument – unless a GOPer proves not just that they have left the Establishment, but that they are actively at war with the Establishment. I’ve been saying this for a while and it remains true: the best first move of any Trump challenger is to take up the cudgels for the J6 detainees. Not even Trump has really done that. But if done, it proves that you don’t give a darn what the Establishment wants…and, rely on it, any GOPer voicing support for the detainees will be condemned by all Establishment people. Does DeSantis want to beat Trump? We’ll find out not in attacks on Trump. Not in attacks on Trumpsters. We’ll find it out in a relentless war against the Establishment.

Word is that Warnock is favored next month in the runoff in Georgia. But, I don’t care what Experts are saying. We’ll see how it comes out – what we’ll find out is who can turnout the base. I doubt that anyone is terribly enthusiastic at the moment – it was a long, exhausting 2022 campaign season. So, dragging people to the polls will tell the tale.

FTX is enormously funny to me. Even more than Theranos was. Just more proof that our Ruling Class is corrupt and also rather stupid. But not all of it is stupid – there is zero chance FTX got that far without the active cooperation of Money and government. It looks to be that a Ponzi scheme was used to finance political payoffs. Pro tip: if you’re buying nothing and hoping to make money by selling your nothing for even more money to someone else….give me a call: we should play poker.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan38 Comments

After Trump has his announcement speech, quite a bit of Catholic Twitter had a debate about Trump’s call to execute drug dealers. As you might recall, I long ago decided to oppose the death penalty. My grounds for that were that mercy should always triumph over justice and that I don’t really trust the government with the power to execute citizens. I’m still of that opinion but the debate got me thinking.

A hundred thousand people died of drug overdoses in the USA in the year ending April of 2021. That was a big jump – more than 25 percent – from the year before. But lets say the jump was temporary and in a normal year 70,000 die. That’s still a lot. More than 190 a day. And that doesn’t cover all the drug deaths – we’d also have to include all murders related in the first or second degree to drugs (ie, drug trade people killing each other over drugs as well as drug addicts who commit crimes – including murder – to support their addiction). Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of stiffs.

How many people would die of drug overdoses next year if this year we hung a thousand drug dealers?

It needs to be thought about. A lot of people are in the drug trade because it is a low-risk, high profit enterprise. They start tuning in each day to see a couple drug dealers were hanged, it might make them seek other lines of work. Can anyone know for certain that we wouldn’t immediately get a thousand replacements for the thousand we hung? No. But suppose we did so and it made it 50 percent less likely that a druggie can get his drugs at any given time? Hang 1,000 criminals, save 35,000 lives?

What it comes down to is how we will view both Justice and Mercy. I have my growing suspicion that softness on crime is neither Just nor Merciful – and not only unjust and merciless to the victims, but especially unjust and merciless to the criminal. I do believe it is crucial to provide a way out even for the worst criminals…but by the time we’re on a guy’s fifth arrest for drug dealing, I think we might be dealing with someone rather incorrigible. It is something to think about.

Looks like the House will be a 222-213 split. The GOP is pledging investigations of Biden and we’ll see if they really do it or just go through the motions. Meanwhile the bed-wetters are upset with us – saying that we should ignore Biden’s crimes and get legislating! Morons. The last thing we want is legislation – though we do look forward to zeroing out the budget for the Special Counsel Garland just appointed to investigate Trump for the millionth time. Also those 87,000 new IRS agents. The Special Counsel was appointed, by the way, to give the MSM something else to report about if the House investigations of Biden prove to have teeth.

Maricopa – it was either cheating or the most fabulously incompetent election ever held. And don’t think that people won’t be purposefully incompetent. It is nearly as effective as box-stuffing and if done right it keeps you away from any legal jeopardy. Bottom line: cheating or incompetence kept Kari Lake out of the governorship. And as the person running the election was Lake’s opponent…kinda makes you go with cheating-via-incompetence. Certainly Abe Hamadeh coming up just short after late ballot drops is highly suspicious…but if you’re cheating the new governor in you’d better make sure you cheat in your guy as AG. No doubt things are screwy – the good news is that Hobbs is a zero and her legislature will be GOP controlled.

Elon Musk is conducting a poll on Twitter about reinstating Trump – as of this moment, 3.9 million votes, 56 percent for reinstating Trump but that is down from 60 percent earlier.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan82 Comments

Trump announces for 2024, McConnell gets re-elected as Senate GOP leader, the GOP takes the House.

A lot of people are saying a lot of things about what this means and making their stout assertions of what will happen. Spoiler: nobody has the first clue. If the election we just had didn’t tell you that you can’t predict things, then nothing will. As for me, I predict nothing. I will pay no attention to any poll. I will pay no heed to the Experts telling us how it will go. It will be as it will be and we’ll find out after it is over how it went.

That said, there is still much we can say. And of course I’ll say it!

Trump’s speech last night was rather low key, wasn’t it? I’ve never subscribed to the view that Trump is unscripted: I’m pretty confident that he plans everything out to the last detail. So, that was the effect he wanted to present. Why? Could be because after last week’s disaster, being too rah rah would look ridiculous. Could also be that he’s trying to overall strike a new tone: “look, guys, it is bad: we can fix it, here’s how”. Could also be influenced by the potential GOP field…you know, look weak and see who strikes first and then your response is a counter-attack which, no matter how blistering it is, always seems fair turnabout by regular folks.

As for myself, I have decided not to commit myself to anyone this early on. I’m going to see how it plays out. As we get to the end of 2023 I’ll probably decide who my candidate is but even that is subject to change based on circumstances. I really don’t think anyone is wise to commit this early. Once you start getting invested in a thing, you start to blind yourself to possible alternatives. I’m keeping my powder dry.

A lot of Never Trump is now gleeful thinking that the Bad Orange Man is done. He may be! But don’t count on anything. Certainly don’t count Trump out given what we’re getting in the Senate. The bottom line is that a huge portion of the GOP base despises the GOP leadership – and the Senate GOP leadership in particular. I have had a lot of respect for McConnell but I do believe his time is done and he’s making a mistake by hanging on – and if it starts to look like he only hung on thwart Trump, then Trump’s stock with the GOP base will only grow and solidify. McConnell is very much the past presiding over the councils of the present – and his post election statement about finding ways to work with Biden caused immediate outrage. We didn’t send GOPers to Congress to pull Biden’s chestnuts out of the fire! McCarthy, set to be Speaker, seems to at least understand this a bit. He’s a squish, but he also doesn’t hold the base in contempt the way McConnell does. With Mitch there making deals with Biden, Trump will have the perfect foil for a GOP primary – and his opponents will be faced with the stark choice of denouncing McConnell or being seen as Establishment tools.

I make no predictions but I’m working on the assumption that we’re going to lose 2024. Always hard to pry the incumbent Party out of the White House, no matter. Absent a complete economic meltdown (a 50/50 prospect at the moment), let’s just say we’re gonna lose. This, first off, will make any defeat feel less bad – and it can also impel us to try things. Zeldin is pushing to be RNC chair and he has it right: you fight in every precinct. You don’t resign any of the board to the enemy. I think that if we discard the worn out notions of the past and simply try new things we might get some remarkable results. As we can’t change the early voting laws in Blue/Purple States, use them (it is already being done to great effect in NY and CA – and Newsom, the Democrat’s rising star, is way underperforming what was expected because of it). Find a guy or gal to run in the Deep Blue. Mike Garcia is apparently the Giga-Chad: I guess he won a Biden +8 district in 2020 so the Democrats decided to get rid of him by making his district Biden +12..and he still won easily. While voting in the House like he represents Alabama! One jokester said “its 2032, Democrats redistrict Garcia into downtown Los Angeles and swear they’ll get him this time!”. Mostly what it shows is that if you try and find the right message and messenger, no place is really off the table.

That is the attitude I want us to carry into 2024: lets just fight. Do our best. Try something new. It can’t possibly go any worse than it just did!

What I’m also thinking is that DeSantis should think carefully here. I don’t go with the Trumpsters who think he’s just a GOPe mole. He came out of the GOPe, but his fights against woke Corporations show that he’s learned the lesson. Mitch and Co might think that RDS is their ticket back…but they may find that, as the GOPe did with TR, that they just made that damned cowboy President. My concern is that if 2024 is a loser, then we don’t want to expend RDS in a bruising fight to beat Trump and then have him lose the White House. If I were an RDS advisor, I’d be thinking long and hard about telling my guy to back away from 2024. Or make only a token run and then get behind Trump. It works like this:

If you get behind Trump and work your tail off for him, you’ll build up huge goodwill with the Trumpsters. They won’t forget: they’ll be in your pocket for 2028. This works out even if Trump loses. If, however, Trump were to win then its still just 4 years, Trump can’t run again and you’ve not only got the Trumpsters in your pocket, you’ve got the President clearing your path in the primaries in 2028. Plus if we do win in 2024, we’ll almost certainly be coming in during a time of severe economic pain that will take years to dig out of. Might be better to let Trump tackle that: he’ll be free to piss people off, after all.

Anyways, that is mostly where my thinking is right now. I will add one last thing: the only people I’ll pay no attention to at all are those who say they won’t back the GOP nominee unless it is their choice. Such people – and there are Trumpist and Never-Trump people like this – are not only useless, they are destructive. I’ll vote in 2024 for whomever is on the GOP ticket because that person will always be the moral and intellectual superior of the Democrat. If a person can’t commit to that, then get out: we got better things to do.

The Death and (Possible) Rebirth of Civilization

Mark Noonan63 Comments

There is, as you might expect, a lot of dooming and glooming going on right now. Conservatives are a bit shell-shocked: this was not the result we hoped for or expected. There is a sense that this was our last chance and whether you want to assign our defeat to cheating or to failure, the bottom line is a sense of hopelessness: that we’ve shot our bolt and now our nation – our civilization – will die. Well, I’ve got some news for you on that score: our civilization will not die as the aftermath of this failure. So, you can feel better about that.

Now, for the bad news: our civilization is already dead. Been dead for a while. Our country has been dead for just as long.

When Alaric and his Visigoths entered Rome in 410 is wasn’t the end of Rome. It just told everyone what was obvious to the perceptive for a long while: Rome was dead. And, man, was it ever dead. It is estimated that at the time Rome’s population was still about a million people and Alaric’s army probably numbered in the tens of thousands. So, the Romans could have put up a fight but simply chose not to – deciding that, in the end, it was safer to be sacked than to fight for hearth and home. The city which had once defied Hannibal after Cannae simply gave up and that showed that whatever Rome had once been, it was long dead by 410. If you had to pinpoint a time when it died, it would probably be about the time Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to all free adult males of the Empire – he did this for tax purposes because certain taxes only applied to Roman citizens. This indicated that Roman citizenship was fundamentally meaningless – and so Rome was meaningless: just a collection of people held together by force of habit and doomed to fall to pieces at the first serious outside pressure.

Sound a bit familiar?

If I had to identify the time when our civilization threw in the towel I would say it was when the French – with our approval – gave up in Algeria. I’ve talked about this before but to really nail it down, let us note that prior to that surrender, the West had fought two world wars – at a cost of about 80 million deaths – to uphold the principle that you can’t shoot your way to power and wealth. The basic sin of Kaiser and Fuhrer was this: a determination to use unlimited force to obtain national ends. Hitler was, of course, vastly worse in degree from the Kaiser but no worse in kind.

Whole forests have been used to print the books trying to explain – or explain away – the causes of WWI but the bottom line is that no matter what else was going on; no matter what stresses and fears were operational in that terrible July of 1914, Germany had absolutely zero cause to go to war against France, Belgium and Luxembourg. None of those nations has offered the slightest threat to Germany. France hadn’t even offered to come to Russia’s aid in her looming war with Germany’s ally, Austria. But Germany attacked, determined that unlimited use of force would be to Germany’s benefit. Britain and, much later, America voluntarily joined in the effort to thwart that idea. And, it worked: Germany was defeated. But didn’t learn her lesson. And so Hitler tried again, this time willing to be even more brutal in the application of unlimited force than the Kaiser ever was. And at very high cost the United States and our allies thwarted this ambition.

And it was a good thing and a fine principle and a principle, moreover, which was not only successful, but morally correct. Whatever had happened before in the long trail of human crimes – all the conquest and colonization and other uses of force to gain wealth and power – the West had now risen above that and set the new standard. The good standard: the assertion that civilization would conduct itself properly. That if there were differences, they would be composed by fair negotiation between the parties and all civilized people would unite against anyone who sought to change the situation by force. It was a human peak and it should have ushered in a Golden Age. But it didn’t.

Pretty much as soon as the guns of WWII fell silent, other people took up the guns and started trying to shoot their way into power and wealth and this great Western Civilization which had just spent so much just to stop that…wavered. It hemmed and hawed. It made, at best, half-hearted efforts against the violent barbarians and tried to accommodate them rather than destroy them.

Oh, lots of reasons were advanced to explain why we couldn’t or shouldn’t destroy these new purveyors of violence, but none of them stood up to any sort of scrutiny. It was all a mere coward’s dodge: a simple unwillingness to fight. And that, to me, was why Algeria was such a pivotal event. Sure, the French could be (and often were) amazing SOBs in how they treated the Algerians. There were genuine grievances to be addressed…but it was also France doing this. It wasn’t Nazis or other brutes – the French were civilized and even when they were doing their worst, voices in France were calling for different ways of doing it. At the end of the day, a free press and a democratic system of governance would ensure that the Algerians got a fair shake. And as proof of this – proof that France was trying – tens of thousands of Algerians volunteered to fight to keep Algeria French. Some estimates are that more Algerians fought for France than for independence. But they and everyone else were tossed aside – and power was transferred not to civilized Algerians who simply wanted fair treatment, but to beasts in human skin who’s main tactics were the torture of Algerians who didn’t support them and the murder of French civilians in their cafes and shopping centers. That France – the very center of Western Civilization – signed off on this showed that the Civilization was, if not dead, in its death throes.

In and among all of this, whispering poison into the soul of the West, were the Marxists. You can call them what you like as they went by many names but the bottom line was that curled at the breast of the West were her own sons and daughters who had taken up the Marxist philosophy and come, in various ways, to despise their own civilization. They harped upon its flaws – real and imagined – and sought to demoralize and disarm the people of the West, claiming that if we could just get rid of it – get rid of civilization – something better could take its place. But all they were and remain are barbarians – people who shook off the West didn’t have another civilization; they just had a new barbarism and one worse than any others. Worse because not only were they hate-filled vandals, but because in pursuit of their ideology they proposed to abolish the two things which lay at the foundation of any decent civilization: the worth of the individual and the primacy of the family. They, in their various ways, wished to reduce the human to a mass of atoms with no faith or loyalty – only appetites to be filled and with the filling determined by a person’s place in an ever changing, but rigidly enforced, social hierarchy.

As we surrendered again and again to the armed barbarians we became, as a people, demoralized: blood was expended as was treasure but no victory was won, no destruction of the wicked. In fact, usually the wicked emerged triumphant and often lauded by those supposedly in charge of sustaining our civilization. The thought crept into the public mind that all effort is pointless, that patriotism is folly, that the family is oppressive and that justice never triumphs. All became a crazed desire for more goods and comfort…a frenzied pursuit of toys and sex combined with public posing about morality.

It took from 1960 to 1970 to accomplish this – since then, what good we have has been mere leftovers from what was built before. And it is getting rather tattered and threadbare, isn’t it? Kinda like it is dead, or at least very near death.

Can it be fixed?

I think so. But not by trying to uphold what is. We’ve got the hollow shell and what occupies the shell is overtly hostile both to the old, dead civilization as well as any attempt to revive civilization. I think a recent poll of British youth indicated that less than 1 in 5 have a positive view of Churchill. The slayer of Nazis is felt to have been an old racist that nobody can possibly like. So, no, we’re not going to just win an election and, presto, party like its 1949. It will take much more than that. It will take a Revolution.

The good news is that as bad as things are, the basic structure of the old system is intact. Especially here in the United States, our written Constitution, often only honored in the breech, still exists. It is a handhold – a lifeline. Something we can refer to and cling to as both a roadmap to what we want and an unanswerable argument in our favor (any application of the Constitution as written works in our favor). We can, that is, via Constitutional means obtain the perfectly legitimate power to impose our views on society (don’t go thinking that you can’t impose morality – all law is an imposition of morality: we’re just arguing of which morality will be imposed). But do to it will take a view-shift: it isn’t just enough to win nor is it enough, victory secured, to tinker about the edges. When we obtain power in whatever form and for however long, we must ruthlessly use that power to advance our cause to the maximum limit. We must crush our opponents and build up our allied. We must play favorites. We must become convinced that Party over Country is really Civilization over Barbarism. We are the only people who can restore civilization: everyone not on our side – witting or not – is on the side of the barbarians. We must become the miracle Army of Caesar showing up as Alaric lays siege to Rome and changes the course of history by sending the barbarians packing.

In this the only people we can count on is ourselves. The broad mass of people must be convinced to back us even when they don’t fully understand what we’re attempting. This will require tactical adjustments. Never a lie! Barbarians lie; civilized people don’t. But it does mean that if securing power requires us to go along with some particular stupid idea, then it is worth it if by so doing we gain the power and then use the power to advance our real goal: a reborn West. A civilization of educated, moral, truthful and hardworking families. A people of self reliance and uncomplaining patience in the face of adversity. A people like our grandfather’s who endured far more hardship and trial than any of us ever have.

It can be done. Mostly because barbarians, as wickedly destructive as they are, remain stupid and cowardly. They’ve only won because we surrendered to them. They will be put to flight by any army of civilized people who are wiling to stand up for themselves. The real question is: will we stand?