Open Thread

Mark Noonan41 Comments

The polls are tightening! Biden is surging!

Or, so goes the conventional wisdom. And, hey, there might be some tightening as the primaries end and everyone sorts themselves out on partisan lines. But, there also seems to be in the latest raft of polls some significant oversampling of Democrats. Maybe the earlier polls oversampled Republicans? Could be. But as we’ve said here for years now, don’t put your faith in polls. 2016 was the definitive year on that – wasn’t it something like a 97% chance Hillary would win based on polls? This, I think, is far more decisive:

Except for a very slight uptick in Colorado (which was probably out of reach for us all along), this is a catastrophic collapse for the Democrats. And keep in mind that this shift happened while the GOP was largely run by anti-Trump GOPers who were diligently trying to finish off the whole MAGA movement. This is registration gains in spite of deliberate RNC incompetence. This is people looking at their nation and saying, “we’ve got to do something!”. Not that the GOP is great, but it is the only way to stop the increasingly insane Democrats.

I think that the Biden vs Trump rematch will revolve around the fact that here in 2024 there is no longer any mystery about Biden. Even discounting cheating to get him into the White House, the thing about him was supposedly boring and conventional. That there would be no massive policy changes and we’d coast along in peace and quiet after the alarms of the Trump years. That might have been the plan – in his lucid moments, it was probably what Biden wanted – but given that he is increasingly senile, his aides are running wild, imposing ever more far Left lunacy without a shred of legal power to do so. Biden can’t hide behind a Narrative any longer – he sucks. And the price of food and gas are through the roof. I expect at this moment a 49% to 47% Trump victory. Keep in mind, of course, that anything less than a 3+ point Biden win in the popular vote works out to a Trump electoral victory. Basically, Biden has to get above 50% to win because I can’t see Trump getting less than 47%.

Team Pudding Brain has pretty much abandoned Israel. They tried for a while to triangulate support for Hamas and Israel but the Muslim voters they count on aren’t having it – they demanded abandoning Israel and that’s what they’re going to get. Nothing matters to the Democrats more than winning and if they have to hate Israel to get a win, they’ll do it. Don’t put too much stock into this for us as a Party – most Liberal Jews are Liberals first and last…they are just Jews by descent for the most part; they’ll swallow the insult. Orthodox Jews were already moving towards us. This will accelerate that and it might mean a House seat or two but nothing decisive for 2024.

And it is just disgusting what they are doing. Hamas already has a plan written up for what comes after they kill all the Jews of Israel. Plans for what happens to Jewish property. All neatly typed up and ready to go. There are genocidal maniacs in this conflict; its just that they’re all Muslims. I do worry that Israel is losing the will to finish the job. Anything short of the total destruction of Hamas will be an Israeli defeat, and perhaps an ultimately fatal one. A nation can’t afford to have something like Hamas as a living enemy. I did hear the theory that they are just hunkering down and waiting for November’s result. This could be true. Biden’s people do have a lot of control over deliveries of war materials to Israel and so can exert a lot of pressure…pressure the Israeli’s know will end with Trump’s victory. But that is also a long time from now. Its all very murky at the moment.

Did you notice that the MSM was 24/7 eclipse for a while? I did. Lots of people did. Personally, I think it was to deflect attention away from Trump’s statement on the abortion issue. This is crucial. What he said did upset some pro-Lifers but the pragmatic facts of life are that a majority of Americans currently want abortion legal, at least through the first trimester. We just can’t get around that. Took 50 years of relentless pro-abortion propaganda to get us here and we won’t undo that in a day. It will take decades for us to build a culture of life – and we can’t do that if for purity’s sake we turn all power over to the fanatic pro-abortion Democrats. We have to take what we can get – that was Trump’s essential message. And it is a message Democrats want to bury because their whole Fall campaign is going to be “Trump wants to ban abortion” as a means of scaring upper class urban/suburban white women. Trump does need to get out in front of this – my view is that our failure to do so in 2022 cost us at least 3 Senate and a dozen House seats. Failure to address abortion squarely turned a Red Wave into a Red Trickle. Trump is doing the right thing here; nobody likes a coward so lets be a bit brave and say what we want.

Team Pudding Brain is also cooking up more illegal plans to annul student debt. You can get mad about it, if you like, but it is what it is. They’re playing to win. Those on our side who are all “pay your bills” are simply not getting it. In 2024, some votes have to be purchased. As I said years ago we should have been out in front on this one – and casting it as “Democrats enslaved you to college debt and we freed you from it”. If not cancellation, then at least make it dischargable in bankruptcy. And put the colleges on the hook for at least some of it. Tax college endowments to pay for low income college. So much we could have done and we just blew it. I’m hopeful that Trump comes up with something along these lines. There’s already indicators that youth is prepared to abandon the Democrats…we just need something to tip them.

Just Some Thoughts on Government

Mark Noonan4 Comments

I’ve always been a Monarchist at heart. Ever since I was a kid and I read things like The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights and The Lord of the Rings, the concept of the Lord’s anointed has appealed to me as the most logical method of human government. Anyone who reads my books can easily tell that there is Monarchism deep at the heart of it all. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, Christ is King, right? Heaven isn’t a Democracy; and Heaven is hierarchical. It is said that there will be greatest and least in Heaven…of course, even the least in Heaven has it better than the greatest on Earth; and given that it is Heaven, there isn’t a matter of jealousy or ambition. The least will be pleased that the greatest in Heaven are the greatest. I can imagine myself – certainly not the greatest – living in one of the very small mansions in my Father’s house, and gladly serving the greatest. I honestly can see in my mind’s eye a heavenly abode for me; it is made of stone and set in a meadow. With eternity, imagine the stories I could eventually tell? My joy would be complete.

There have been many kings and queens, good and bad, in history. Descent does have a bit of the luck of the draw in it. But if you look at the royal lines over time, what you see is that for the most part, most monarchs were trying to do the right thing. Sometimes ably, sometimes less so. Only rarely was a real idiot or criminal raised to the throne. Democracy is far more apt to raise the unfit on the simple fact that anyone who aspires to power is predisposed to be an idiot or criminal. What fool, after all, would really want to be in charge? To seriously have the fate of a nation in your hands? The wise person flees from such a burden, if he can. A good example of this wisdom is a scene in the 1956 movie of War and Peace. Natasha (Audrey Hepburn) tells Pierre (Henry Fonda) that she would give him absolute power over Russia because his heart is pure…Pierre is asked what he’d do and his answer is, “I’d hesitate”. That is wisdom, as such.

To be sure, as I’ve said before, I am also the last democrat left on Earth. Maybe not exactly the last, but certainly there aren’t many like me. That is, people who really do trust the people. But one must keep in mind what “trust the people” means. It isn’t taking a public opinion poll of dependent people who have been relentlessly lied to by an overwhelming popular culture. It is simply accepting the decision of people who are free and as independent as society can make them. A mature man or woman who owes nobody making a decision: I ratify it, even if I think its wrong. I do think that voting is crucial, even in the most venerable of a Monarchy. The king does need to know the desires of the people; and the only way to really assess that is to ask them. But just as Monarchy is highly dependent upon the quality of the Monarch, so Democracy is highly dependent upon the quality of the People. Garbage in, garbage out is ineluctable.

We are, as we all know, in a complete mess right now. I saw a video clip of a young lady wrapped in a Palestine flag saying she was terrified that climate change would kill her. Just think of the amount of lies she had to be fed over years to get to such a pathetic state. And in our current system, she gets a vote. That is, she gets to cancel me out – not that I’m any great person, but I have at least some knowledge and so I’m not supporting the massacre of Jews nor am I afraid of the temperature rising a couple degrees over the next 100 years. The bottom line is that getting out of the current mess is going to be a problem as long as people like that poor girl get a say. She’s simply incapable of making a valid decision – even about her own life (though we will always remain wary of interfering in the personal choices of even the greatest fool). We must find a method to nullify the votes of fools – because if we don’t, then we’ll never be able to get at the liars who make the fools.

Because that is the crux of the matter: the lies. If we didn’t have quite so many liars, we wouldn’t have nearly so many problems. But the liars lie because lies work – and in a system where only voting matters, then the best liar is going to usually prevail. Only rarely will someone even partially moored to truth rise to the top in a Democratic system. Our riddle is how to preserve freedom while making sure fools serving liars can’t destroy freedom.

The Cowardly West

Mark Noonan12 Comments

Team Pudding Brain is putting massive pressure on Israel to let Hamas survive. They feel Michigan and maybe even Minnesota slipping away – they want this war to end quickly. They don’t, of course, care about the lives involved. Israeli or Palestinian. Lives invariably mean nothing to Leftists. Power is the only thing that matters and Israel’s campaign in Gaza places at risk Leftist power, so it must stop. The bottom line here is that the Democrat base – poisoned by a couple decades of anti-Israel/Zionist propaganda – has become overtly anti-Semitic. Democrats can’t pivot away from this because it would turn possible 2024 defeat into catastrophic loss. They got on the Der Sturmer train and they can’t get off.

Now, will the effort by Biden work? It might. The Israeli people still seem pretty determined to see this thing through but there is starting to emerge domestic opposition; naturally from the Israeli Left who are starting to see in the horror of burned babies and raped women a path back to power in Israel. Around the globe, opposition to Israel has become rather ferocious. The world has also decided that hundreds of murdered Jews are simply not worth it: better to condemn Israel so that sweet, sweet Arab oil money continues to flow (you’d be surprised at how much influence the Arab States have bought…just a few million in grants can get people who will practically join the SS to keep the cash flowing). In the end, I’m going to fault Israel here. I know, that seems unfair: but in matters crucial to national survival, it is up to the nation to take care of business.

The Battle of Okinawa pitted the US military against the 100,000 men of the Japanese 32nd Army – who were dug in, well supplied with munitions and determined to die to the last man. It took us 12 weeks of very hard fighting to exterminate the 32nd Army. Cost us 12,500 deaths to do it. It was a very tough fight; the Marines Golgotha as one writer (who was there) described it. Units engaged suffered up to 70 percent casualties. But the job got done. It was one of the most vicious battles in history.

Gaza is most emphatically not Okinawa.

At most, Hamas started with 20,000 active fighters. They were not dug in (hiding in hospital basements is not “dug in”). The Israeli Army, fully mobilized, is about 525,000 troops; fully equipped with the very best weapons available and having absolute command of the air and sea. Leaving sufficient troops to guard the West Bank and against an unlikely thrust from Lebanon, the Israels could have easily disposed a force against Gaza that would have outnumbered Hamas 10 to 1. In ground forces at Okinawa we had about 3 to 1 superiority; the usual disposition for the attacking force. They could have totally overwhelmed Hamas with superior numbers and firepower. This campaign should have been over in 30 days, tops. And no matter how many died in a completely ruthless application of power, no matter how many complaints would have been made about it…it all would be over now. It would have faded from the public mind. Of course the Islamists would still be shouting “war crime!” at every turn…but nobody cares about what isn’t happening at the moment.

And Hamas would be destroyed.

Israel has dithered. Worried about the hostages (they should have been presumed dead on 10/7). Fussed about with negotiations for a ceasefire which would only be a breather for Hamas to plan their next 10/7. Nothing fails like success. Israel is too rich and too infected with the Leftist mind virus to really take care of business here. You’d think Israeli women being raped to death and babies being burned alive would wake every inch of Israeli manhood…but it clearly hasn’t. Just as 9/11 didn’t really wake it in us. Nor has Russia knocking on the door in Ukraine gotten a rise out of the Europeans.

We’re in a lot of trouble here – in two areas.

First, of course, the lack of will to survive among our people and the peoples of the larger West. The life has gone out of us. We just want to be left alone. Peace is preferable to war, we all know that: but peace is only preserved by people who are willing to pour out gallons of blood to defeat an enemy. Unless you have a people and military willing to literally wade in blood to secure peace and freedom, you’ll soon have neither. Foreigners who are willing to kill are now going to be vastly more encouraged.

Secondly, this supine population is ripe for a dictator. For a Caesar. Pretty much all we’re waiting for here is someone to simply have the guts to seize power. Wouldn’t take much. Ten or twenty thousand armed followers and a willingness to kill would do the trick. Far less in the European nations. You think the people who sit by while a woman is beaten on a subway will rise up in defense of the government? Ain’t gonna happen.

And it will be a right thing to do. Cowards deserve to be slaves. The only free people there have ever been are people who can kill with a steady stomach. Who don’t fuss over a dead enemy. Who defy tyrants with a clear mind and stout heart. My guess is not twenty percent of the American people will really fight for liberty – that is, fight for it like the Founders where lives and fortunes were 100% at risk and defeat meant losing everything. I hope I’m wrong…but I fear I’m right.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan44 Comments

We were all wondering when it first came out if it were an April Fool’s joke, but it does appear that Biden is denying he proclaimed trans visibility for Easter. Now, to be sure, one must think carefully about this: the Party Line on it now is that the day has been around since 2009 and it just happened to fall on Easter…and, hey, isn’t this just as important as the observation of the resurrection? So, it might be just on that level that Biden is denying he made it happen – that he was just rote doing what you’re supposed to do on national observations that we all participate in. Because, you know, we all can’t wait for trans day of visibility to roll around each year.

That, of course, is actually damage control: someone decided that Biden and the rest of the Democrats would make a to do about trans on Easter as a malicious insult…and they thought that our outrage would get blowback that would work to Democrat advantage. When it was actually done – when the thing was in the public square – they suddenly realized how absolutely hideous it was and now they’re trying to back and fill.

My advice: forget the polls. They are going to fluctuate a bit back and forth. Carter had a 7 point lead in Gallup in April of 1980. Dukakis was down 2 in April of 1988, up 16 in May. On and on like that. This is what I think is the real dynamic of 2024: that people are just getting sick of it all. The trans on Easter thing is just another element in a large tapestry of things people just don’t like about the Biden years. The biggest thing will remain the price of gas and groceries but in all respects, just nothing is going right. That is why Democrats are now pinning their hopes on abortion: they just managed to get a pro-abortion amendment on the Florida ballot. They’ll do that in as many States as they can. Trust me on this: by September it’ll be 24/7 abortion. It did work partially in 2022. Will it work again? I doubt it. If it does then it means we never had a chance, anyway: if America returns Biden to office just to make sure children can be killed, then we’re out of the political market altogether. But outside a desperation move like that, there’s nothing Biden and the Democrats can do – any policy that would actually fix the problems they’ve created (notably reducing spending to cut inflation and closing the border to stop illegal immigration) is opposed by too large a part of the Democrat base. They are caught in a bind and can only hope that something else gets them out of it. Abortion is something else. So, too, things like trans day of visibility…but that has already backfired.

People are tired. Biden was supposed to be a placeholder. The Not Trump. He wasn’t supposed to do anything but end Covid and then let things coast until someone else got in. But they forgot he is senile – and when not senile, stupid. He isn’t running the show. He lacks the wit or will to ride herd on the far left like Obama and Clinton did. Thus the far left is setting the policy – but nobody ever voted for the far left. The more they do, the worse it gets for Biden.

Louis Conter, the last survivor of the USS Arizona, passed away. He was 102. God bless the man. Almost all the WWII vets are gone. Korean vets, too. The old soldier you see these days is likely a former 19 year old Marine from Vietnam, 1967.

Happy Easter

Mark Noonan12 Comments

On the first day of the week,
Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning,
while it was still dark,
and saw the stone removed from the tomb.
So she ran and went to Simon Peter
and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them,
“They have taken the Lord from the tomb,
and we don’t know where they put him.”
So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb.
They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter
and arrived at the tomb first;
he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in.
When Simon Peter arrived after him,
he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there,
and the cloth that had covered his head,
not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.
Then the other disciple also went in,
the one who had arrived at the tomb first,
and he saw and believed.
For they did not yet understand the Scripture
that he had to rise from the dead. – John 20: 1-9

Just a side note: Joe Biden’s egregious insult is designed to provoke us to hatred. Don’t let it. We do win in the end.

Slowly and Then All at Once

Mark Noonan62 Comments

The bridge collapse was probably just an accident; nothing specifically nefarious was done. That said, my bet is that maintenance on the bridge was skimped in favor of paying out graft…and those hired to maintain the bridge were deeply infected by DEI hires who weren’t skilled in bridge maintenance. Also, my bet is the merchant ship crew is also substandard. The world doesn’t really make sailors any longer – that is, people who really know how ships operate given all the variables they encounter in a voyage. The real problem here is that we are rapidly losing the ability to maintain an advanced society – all up and down the line and all around the world considerations of ability are swept aside in a quest for the “correct” social outcomes and squeezing the last penny of profit out of any activity.

This has happened before. The Romans are justly famed as great builders, both in terms of art and in practical things but by the third century the skills were starting to atrophy and it became a long, slow decline into ruins. Keep in mind that later generations of Romans didn’t have to create the infrastructure – it was already there. Aqueducts sufficient to supply a city of a million people with fresh water. Sewers to carry away waste. Art and architecture which stands with the greatest achievements in history. Just maintain it. They couldn’t. They lost the ability – the skill, that is. We, too, are losing our skills. So, too, the entire world.

The actual racists like to complain that you can’t make Americans by getting foreigners on to the “magic dirt” of the USA. This is true; but then the racists go on to say that a functioning society is an outgrowth of being white. This is patently untrue. The flip side of this is the anti-white racists who are asserting that all good things white people have done were actually done by black people and the fruits of that labor was stolen. The actuality is far more prosaic: over a thousand years with often painful trial and error, European thought was applied to the problems of life. Now, all human history is the application of human thought to the problems of life but the difference for the Europeans is that as they emerged from the Dark Ages (say, 500 to 1,000 AD), they were deeply Christian and so were the first widespread people (the Jews were always insular and confined to a very small land) who believed the world was intelligible. That is, it was created by a God who was Reason; that every riddle we encountered had a solution. That it all fit together into a logical whole. Because of this the quest became not one looking for a pat answer to all problems (which, in any case, for a Christian was resolved by the Resurrection), but incremental answers to individually small problems. Presto – as it were, because it took a thousand years – the modern world came to be and Europeans found themselves possessed of skills far beyond any other people on Earth. The difference is that in 732 Charles Martel had to fight a desperate battle in central France to keep the Moors out. In 1757, Robert Clive with 750 British soldiers and about 2,000 Native allies defeated an Indian force of 50,000 troops and secured British mastery of India for two centuries.

And now we are losing all that. The bridge is down and we all know it’ll be many years before it is back up again. The nation that built 50 Casablanca class escort carriers between November, 1942 and July, 1944 is going to have some trouble building a bridge. Just as we have trouble building a jet that doesn’t fall apart in flight. Or getting a rocket ship to the Moon when we did that once in less than 7 years back in the 1960s. Think about that. Shepard’s sub-orbital flight was in May of 1961. Say what you want about JFK, but it took some real brass to look at that barely-a-spaceflight and say, “hey, we’re going to the Moon” in September of 1962. But, we did it. With time to spare. We established the Artemis program to return to the Moon in 2017 and we’re hoping for an Apollo 8-style Moon flyby in 2025. If everything goes very well. We hope to land on the Moon with Artemis 3 in 2027. Maybe. With luck. Guys: we did this before. We know how to do it. We should be able to do it with a year’s prep, tops. We won’t because we can’t.

Civilizations die very slowly and then all at once. If you were a Roman in, say, 390 AD you probably felt pretty good. The Empire was still massive and seemed to stand tall. Twenty years later, Alaric sacked Rome. We’re just about at the end of “slowly”. “All at Once” is right around the corner. Unless we change. Unless we get very serious about things and start compelling civilized behavior and standards. It is our choice. We will choose to live, or we will choose to die.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan29 Comments

I have this friend whom I’ve known since 1971. When we were kids, we liked science fiction (heck, we both still do) and so we’d ponder in, say, 1978 what the future might hold. We came up with some pretty fantastic ideas of what humanity might achieve but among the possibilities, cannibalism wasn’t one of them. Now we’ve got alleged cannibal gangs in Haiti and there was this train accident in California the other day where a leg was thrown clear and a guy apparently picked it up and started snacking on it. We seem to be devolving at an increasing pace.

Gas prices are starting to rise again and this is putting downward pressure on Biden’s poll numbers. In response to this, Team Pudding Brain has asked Ukraine to not blow up Russian oil facilities which would put even more upward pressure on gas prices. So, we’re paying for Ukraine to fight the Russians while also doing what we can to ensure Russia has money to fight the Ukrainians. Got a call from Zombie Kafka and he asked that we knock it off.

That terrorist attack in Moscow was of the quite horrific variety. Moscow is, of course, tightly protected and gun control is universal in Russia but this terrorist squad managed to get there and accessed a pre-positioned cache of some pretty heavy weapons. You can’t stop determined lunatics. Aside from that, what’s it all about?

Nobody knows. Very good chance that nobody will ever really know. US government word is that ISIS took responsibility and that is a possibility: ISIS has a gripe against Russia over the Syrian Civil War where the Russian- and Iranian-back Syrian regime fought ISIS. The Russian government is clearly indicating a Ukrainian connection and even if that wasn’t true, the Russian government would be keen to make it true. If any element of the Ukrainian government was involved – even rogue – the US will do all it can to suppress that information. We’re in for a raft of conspiracy theories on this one, guys.

Could Ukraine have had a hand in it? That is a distinct possibility. The Russians are advancing again; not very fast or far, but definitely moving the line westwards. There was a massive Russian missile strike against Ukrainian electricity production a couple days ago. Ukraine is having ever more trouble filling its depleted ranks (there are stories that French combat units are moving into Western Ukraine; don’t guess wrong here…this is probably more to prevent Russia from moving too far west in the event of a Ukrainian collapse; the French don’t want a shooting war with Russia; they don’t have the army for it). Could desperate times in Kiev lead to desperate, even foolish, measures? They could.

Bottom line: a messy situation just go messier – and if the Russian government can pin this on Ukraine, even with bogus evidence, it will strongly motivate the Russian people to take a pound of flesh from Ukraine.

Biden’s people are pushing very hard to stop Israel from hitting the southern part of Gaza. This is because of polling in Michigan and Minnesota with their large Muslim populations. But it is also rather disgusting that our government is increasingly aligned with Hamas against Israel. I don’t think the Democrats really come back from this – once you start down that road, it ends at Der Sturmer; they’ll be repeating blood libels by 2028.

The Evil Must End

Mark Noonan23 Comments

Got my heart broken a bit today – saw this story of an 18 year old kid from backwoods Mexico who was abandoned by the traffickers because he couldn’t keep up. The good news is that he was found and got help – and will be returned to his mother in Mexico, as he tearfully desired. And, you guessed it, there was Cartel involvement: it looks like in some way the kid and/or his family owes the Cartel money and his journey was to get work to pay them off. Just in case anyone out there really thought all these people were just coming for themselves. They’re not: huge numbers are just walking ATMs for the Cartels. We can guess how many are successful in paying off the Cartels: almost certainly it is zero.

He’s just 18. Sure, a legal adult but think back a moment to when you were 18…if you had just been ripped from your family and left to die in a foreign desert. How scared would you have been? How many tears would you have shed? How desperate for your mother’s love would you have become? This was just a slight peek into the immense human tragedy Joe Biden and his puppet-masters have created…and created with callous disregard for human life.

I struggle mightily, my friends. A Catholic cannot support the death penalty. Various official Church pronouncements have condemned the practice. But I admit that I want those traffickers who abandoned the boy to die. Of course they won’t, at least not from official hands. And, yes, if they were at my mercy, that is what they would receive. I’m built for it; God made me this way. I am deeply flawed as a human being but I am ready to forgive.

But this must stop. All of it. All of this ruination of human lives. It doesn’t have to be this way. Kids do not have to be transported across continents to work for the Cartels. Drug addicts do not have to die in our streets. We do not have to put up with mobs looting stores. Public brawls over nothing. Anti-Semites marching through our cities. None of this is tolerable. It all has to go. This all must end. If you ever think we shouldn’t, or if you ever feel sorry for those we will punish, then you just think of an 18 year old kid left to die in a desert. Steel your hearts. The evil must end.

The Lies are the Problem

Mark Noonan22 Comments

Today the Supreme Court heard a couple cases related to government efforts to suppress dissenting views of Covid information. It is a rather big First Amendment case and how the Court rules will be important going forward. During the back and forth Justice Jackson expressed concern that allowing people to speak completely freely could restrict the government’s power. This was ripped into because of course the purpose of the First Amendment – as well as all others in the Bill of Rights and plenty of other provisions in the Constitution – is to limit the power of government. It seemed to shock people that a Justice on the Supreme Court could say such a thing.

To which I said: why in heck are you surprised?

Ketanji Brown Jackson is the completely conventional product of the American education and judicial systems. We need not trouble ourselves about whether or not she was affirmative-actioned into her positions; it doesn’t really matter. Whether she did it on merit or by box-checking, the result is the same. And anyone else who is a product of the American education and judicial system is going to be the same unless somewhere along the line they stepped out of it and learned something they weren’t supposed to. The small percentage who get off the ranch are the “conservative judges” that we pin our hopes on – only to all too often find that for all their ability to some times get it right, their default position is still the Establishment (only Clarence Thomas, the late Antonin Scalia and a very few others up and down the judicial line have completely freed themselves from Establishment orthodoxy). The Establishment Mill turns out Establishmentarians. It is what it is for; if there was a happy time when we had colleges and judges who were for thinking, that time is long past.

With all the back and forth about the First Amendment today, something occurred to me early on: there is a crucial issue at stake here. Two questions, really:

  1. Do lies have First Amendment protections?
  2. If not, who determines what is a lie?

I’ve talked about this before and I have come to the very firm conclusion that lies are not protected speech. In fact, can’t be protected speech. That we’re downright stupid if we think that we should fight and die for the right of someone to lie to us. But I’ll also note that no matter how you answer those questions, you are on treacherous ground. If you say “yes” then you’re plagued with liars. If you say “no” then you have to figure out how to suppress lies while retaining liberty.

In the end, there is no 100% “right” answer. This is pretty common in human affairs, actually. Hard and fast rarely works out that well no matter how stable you might think it is. It is rigid and rigid things tend to collapse. But balance is also precarious as you might recall from the last time you tried to walk on a narrow beam – there is just that perfect position where you don’t fall but just a little bit off either way and over you go. But, not being rigid, you can continually adjust yourself as you go along and so navigate the peril. Just as an aside, we are not here discussing the Laws of God, which are immutable. We are discussing human affairs; that is, how to we twist and weave with the mass of contradictory humanity towards an approximation of Justice?

To get back to Justice Jackson. As noted, she’s Establishment. In fact, bi-partisan Establishment. Uniparty, that is. When she was first put up for the Federal bench, she was introduced by Paul Ryan. She’s related to him by marriage. Ryan praised her character, intellect and integrity. And she’s been praised like that her whole career. And, hey, don’t get me wrong: maybe she’s the nicest person in the whole, wide world. I don’t know: I’ve never met her and probably never will. But her intellect and integrity? So, what Ryan was telling me back in 2013 was that he knew her, loved her, respected her…and never got around to finding out that her reading of the First Amendment was 180 from the intent of the Amendment? That’s a kind of crucial thing, don’t you think? This isn’t a variation on an obscure aspect of law. This is the First Amendment. Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech. Pretty clear, no? But Ryan never had that discussion with her? I mean, with the family. Over Thanksgiving. Little back and forth about differing views…she being a liberal jurist and he (at the time) being a Conservative House member. Never came up?

I guess that is possible but, honestly, figure the odds. Could it be that Ryan was that incurious about her views? Well, then why was he out there touting her as being this excellent person if he didn’t know anything about her? He was either lying out of ignorance (saying good things about her that he had no idea about) or lying out of malevolence (he knew she was a judicial Maoist but didn’t want to alert the people to this fact). In either case, when Ryan introduced her in 2013, he was lying. And so, it turns out, was she: she went through the confirmation process many times in her trek to the Supreme Court and never did she let us know that she felt there was a legitimate reason for the government to censor speech. That, in fact (per her questions today) she felt that it was wrong to stop government censorship because that would make us all unsafe. This is a rather crucial bit of information, don’t you think? Its also not an opinion you arrive at all of a sudden…either you thought about it for years or it was drilled into you for years. There is no way you just suddenly look at “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” and go, “know what? Congress shall make that law – I don’t care what the Constitution says, in certain instances I think that freedom of speech should be abridged all to heck and gone. And if Congress won’t, then the President unchecked by any authority can go ahead and do it.” It doesn’t matter that nobody asked her directly about it: we have an obligation to tell the whole truth. You are a liar if you leave crucial information out as much as if you relate false information. If a bank robber said “I went to the store and then came home” when he actually went to the store, robbed the bank, and then came home, then he’s a liar in addition to being a bank robber.

If Ryan had said, “Kentanji is a very nice lady and a wonderful part of my extended family but, my goodness, she’s a commie fanatic; don’t let her near a court”, then he would have told the truth. And it is what he should have said in 2013. But that would have made her mad. Other parts of Ryan’s family, too. And, of course, the larger Establishment which was already clearly grooming her for the judicial heights, if not the Supreme Court at that time. And when she did her first confirmation hearing, she should have told us that her judicial philosophy was warmed over Leninism with a side of Maoism. That her judicial view was to rule in conformity with her desired ideological outcome, law be damned. Had she done that, though, she wouldn’t have been confirmed. But it is more than that.

The Senate reviewed her several times, right? Plenty of time for people to dig into her background; find out her views. And as she advanced, we even started to have judicial actions and rulings showing where she was heading. All of that should have been brought to the floor of the Senate. On both sides. Friends and enemies should have been completely forthright about just who she is and what she’d do. That didn’t happen. A gigantic conspiracy of silence was created about her philosophy so she could coast into one position after another…and now she’s got a lifetime seat. She’s 54. Twenty years from now she could be part of a 5-4 Court eviscerating the First Amendment. And all because starting in 2013 everyone lied about her.

Do you start to see it? How bad lies are? And the lies to get Justice Jackson are just tiny, little lies. Mostly of omission. But, my friends, we are awash in lies. There is an ocean of lies infecting very aspect of modern life. We here on the Right perceive them pretty well (the Left gleefully engages in lying) but even we don’t really see how overwhelming it all is. Everything is shot through with lies. And it is very hard to face up to: as the late Neil Peart put it in his song Distant Early Warning:

Who can face the knowledge
That the truth is not the truth?

That is what we’re really facing: for most of the people, a pack of lies is the truth. They’ve been told for so long and so incessantly that, just as Hitler said it would, the lie has become the truth. To see that – to react to it – is very hard. It is to give up a lifetime of certainty. But we must see it. We must react to it. And we must stop it. If you wonder why we’re such a mess these days, it is because almost everything we do is based to one degree or another on a lie.

We’ve got rafts of laws on the books based upon lie after lie after lie. What we saw today was that raft running up against something true – that is, something written by the Founders more than 200 years ago. It is written in very simple English. Anyone even barely literate can understand it. The modern Establishment looks at it; they are puzzled and then angry. It doesn’t fit! If someone can say I’m wrong about mask wearing, then people might not wear masks! How can this be endured? So, they want it gone. Justice Jackson just said the quiet part out loud today. Make no mistake about it, they all feel like that. And don’t forget that a least a majority of the GOP/Conservative “leadership” also wants it gone. When McCain denigrated us as silly Hobbits he was also speaking the quiet part out loud: why can’t you dumb peasants just do as you’re told? He, too, looked at the First Amendment and found it an obstacle (remember, he of McCain-Feingold campaign finance law). And as lies have been piled up to get us to where we are today, they’ll just use more to get rid of the last threads of truth…they’ll simply lie one day and say, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” doesn’t mean what it means.

All our problems, every last one of them, is based upon a lie. We have found out over the past 50 years or so what happens to a society when it says that lies are protected speech. All that did was allow lies to worm their way in, take over and now go after Truth, as such. It has to end. Whatever is required, we must do it. We must find the means – judicial and social – to utterly destroy those who lie. We must make lying a shameful thing again; something that mortifies the liar when caught and causes all to reject the liar and the lie. This could take some very stern action, my friends. Liars won’t go quietly. But we have to do it.

It is either that or drown in lies.

Angry and Hopeful

Mark Noonan26 Comments

Where are we? Here:

A man was just charged with 20 counts of sex abuse with minors. Teacher at a church school. That is bad, but it does get worse: the man is an illegal immigrant deported multiple times. You know: someone who isn’t supposed to be here but who keeps coming back in because, why not? Why shouldn’t he come back? It is clear we don’t enforce our laws – that deportation is just a bureaucratic checklist which has no baleful affect. Just go, and then come on back…if we get around to it, we’ll deport you again. Maybe; but mostly only if you let us deport you…because if you run off, its not like we’ll chase you down. Heck, you can even get a job – even though everyone who gets a job in the United States has to fill out an I-9 form where they state their citizenship/residency status under penalty of perjury.

Has anyone ever been prosecuted for lying on an I-9?

But it also just get worse than that – with Israel still reeling from the 10/7 attacks and Christians, Jews and homosexuals routinely oppressed/murdered by Muslims, all our Democrats noted that today is something like the international day to fight “Islamophobia”. As if that is a problem. Yeah, the poor, little Muslims out there being phobia’d all day long! Hey, Nigerian, your congregation was massacred by Muslims? Better not get Islamophobic about it! That would be bad.

Do I sound a little bitter here? There’s a reason: our Ruling Class hates us. Wants us gone. Is trying to replace us with illegal immigrants. Is kowtowing to our enemies. There’s just no other way to put it – Pudding Brain’s social media intern put out a lying statement in support of a “non-binary” kid who killed herself but still no mention of Lanken Riley, murdered by an illegal immigrant deliberately and maliciously allowed into our country. Oh, and let’s not forget that as cannibal gangs are allegedly roaming Haiti, Biden’s people are flying in thousands of Haitians…one of whom just raped a 15 year old girl. Can’t wait for the cannibals to get here!

The good news – and there is some good news – is that voter registration trends are still favoring the GOP. Even with the previous weak RNC leadership and a Congressional GOP knifing the base at every turn, people are turning to the GOP. Not because of love, but because it is the only way to stop the Democrats who are determined to destroy the nation they hate the most, the United States of America. Now with Trump people in charge, I expect this to continue – they’ve hired Scott Presler who has spent years, unpaid, registering GOP voters. They’ve pledged to legal ballot harvesting. They killed the old phony minority outreach team and they’ll replace it with some people who actually go and talk to minorities.

Then there are the polls; no matter how you slice it, if the election were held today, Trump would get 312 electoral votes. That’s low end; could be higher if a couple of light blue States flip his way. People are starting to look back on the Trump years as a good time…mostly because they were. Until the CCP and the DNC manufactured the Covid drivel, everything was going very well. People want that; peace and prosperity, that is. Someone said that Trump was first elected to make sure Hillary didn’t get it and then Biden was elected to make sure Trump got out. Maybe – but Biden’s people went on a radical left bender…and the more they do that the more people realize that some mean Tweets aren’t all that bad.

But, also, I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that the “chaos” of the Trump years was manufactured – by Trump’s enemies. With the supposedly non-partisan federal bureaucracy leading the way. That is, people are understanding that Trump got a raw deal. That the current charges are nothing more than political theater. It is now doubtful that any of Trump’s trials will take place before November…and even if they do, any guilty verdict is likely to boomerang. Probably most sensible Democrats are hoping the trials just go away…but the Resist nitwits aren’t having it. So, Democrats are stuck on this ride they’d rather get off.

So, I am angry. I think that came through here. But I’m also hopeful. Just maybe we can save our nation; not that Trump is the answer, but if we can get him back in, it’ll break the system for good. There will be no more cobbling it back together. And with people like Fetterman, we might even see the Democrats start to wake up to the fact that the people don’t want unlimited illegal immigration and medical mutilation of minors. We might become sane again.

Let’s hope.