Open Thread

Mark Noonan31 Comments

The Trump vs DeSantis war is heating up – but I do caution that a lot of it does seem to be driven by terminally on-line people looking for social media clout. But there is a worry in that it is getting people not just to stake out positions, but really dig in their heels on it…which is likely orchestrated by Democrats with the intent of getting people to hate the other guy. As I said before: I will support the GOP nominee and I urge everyone to dial it back. From Trump to the most neo-con shill, all GOPers are the moral and intellectual superiors of Democrats. Whatever we get it is better than Pudding Brain or anyone they might replace him with.

Memorial Day is Monday and people are posting a lot of military stuff. This is appropriate but one which popped up for me was not about a man who died in combat, but who did a small deed of decency in the hell of war. It was Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds – taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge he was the senior non-com at his POW camp and when the commandant ordered all Jews to identify themselves – likely for at least hideous treatment, if not murder – Edmonds ordered every man to identify as Jewish. The commandant backed down. It was a small thing, as I said. In the grand scheme of things, it at best saved a couple hundred lives out of the millions who perished. But it was still important. And it took some guts. It is easy to look away, after all.

But that then brought me to Yad Vashem and the Righteous Among the Nations: these are gentiles who have been honored by Israel for helping Jews during the Holocaust. It is quite a list of heroes but something rather sticks out for me: that they were all just regular folks. There weren’t highly decorated soldiers who charged into the enemy – these were just people who saw what was going on and did whatever they could, no matter how small, to just throw a wrench in it. And then you realize two things: if every decent person had just thrown a wrench, the Holocaust could never have happened…and since all the wrench-throwers were regular folks with no special, inside knowledge everyone could have been a wrench thrower. They all knew – but most chose not to act on the knowledge. Many out of ideological commitment, of course, but the regular run of people simply because they didn’t want to be bothered.

And so it has been since then – we’ll likely never see the unique evil of the Nazi regime ever again, but we will certainly contend with evil until God in His good time brings it all to an end. Evil does walk the world today – ever more openly. And it is able to do so because most of us, most of the time, are just hoping it passes us by. The drug addicts rotting in the streets. The illegals being abused. The children being groomed. We for the most part pretend we don’t see it – pretend it isn’t happening. Because if we see it, we have to act. So we talk ourselves into believing that we don’t see it.

But, take heart: some times evil is so brazen that it wakes everyone up. And I think we have now reached that point. The Pelosi Democrats knew when to tap the brakes and allow people to continue to not see until it was too late. The modern Democrats are driven by ideological commitment and they are pressing forward on a variety of fronts to implement their evil. And so brazen is the attempt that regular folks can’t miss it…and just here and there but in my view in growing numbers, people are standing up and saying, “I will not participate”. No, none of us will have a chance to be as brave as Edmonds…but we are increasingly brave enough to say out loud that we will not participate. Sure, we still risk social opprobrium and our jobs are at risk…but none of that matters. We see it. We must say it is wrong…and as more of us do so, others gain the courage to stand up and be counted.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan34 Comments

My view on the GOP Primary is: I will support the nominee. I will not engage in nasty fights with fellow GOPers or GOP-leaning voters.

With RDS now officially in, the shape of the race is clear; it is mostly Trump vs DeSantis with Trump enjoying a huge amount of loyal Trumpster support while RDS is looking for a way to draw some of that vote over to himself. The rest of the pack is probably kidding itself about getting the nomination and, on balance, they probably help Trump by splitting up the anti-Trump vote. Of course, some of these also-rans likely won’t make it to January…the money battle is important right now. Not for Trump and RDS who functionally have unlimited amounts, but for the rest…any of them who want to be around past South Carolina had better come up with some hefty bucks. Those who can’t will likely bow out before the Iowa caucuses.

Do keep in mind that the Democrats are very likely paying for GOP division. We have seen over and over again how relative peanuts will get people to alter their views. It would cost only, say, $100,000 to get a prominent Trumpster pundit to start going “only Trump” as a means of keeping Trumpsters home if Trump doesn’t get the nomination. It wouldn’t cost any more to pay a DeSantis pundit to start going “only DeSantis” for the same reason. The Democrats very much need a divided and weakened GOP for 2024 because that is the only way they drag Biden’s senile carcass into a second term.

As I’ve said for a while, I’m not at all confident of GOP victory in 2024 – because of those divisions being diligently fostered. But I have had a little bit of a mental shift; there is a chance. What I see is that Biden – who has never been loved – is losing what popularity he had. Inflation continues to bite as does overall economic anxiety. We’re already in a recession which is being hidden by number juggling. And now the Culture War has taken an interesting turn. From Biden on down, they are all-in on the transgender thing especially for kids…but outside a few lunatic Blue enclaves, parents are rejecting this. What we might have is a perfect storm brewing where Democrats are set to become unpopular both on economics and social issues…hammering on abortion just barely scraped them by in 2022…that issue is a lot less salient for 2024 while other social issues are coming to the forefront. It could be a very interesting year.

CNN Headline: “Minorities, immigrants and now members of the LGBTQ community are being warned of the risks of visiting Florida after the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group issued a travel advisory following newly passed laws and policies”

Reminder: this lie is not pitched at you. They don’t care about you. They know you’ll never vote Democrat. This lie is for Democrats. And it doesn’t require them to actually believe there’s tyranny in Florida…but what it does tell them is that this is what they have to say is happening in Florida. This is to keep the conversation within the Party Line. That is, to keep them voting Democrat no matter how bad it gets.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan35 Comments

Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) announced his Presidential bid and one of the first questions the MSM asked him was, “are you a virgin?”. Just absolutely flabbergasting. Until I heard that, I didn’t know if Scott was married or not – but as it turns out, he’s 57 and unmarried and has no kids. This does, especially in 2023, bring up the prospect of homosexuality but this does not appear to be the case for Senator Scott. But, whatever: who’s danged business is it? Unless you have some solid information of inappropriate sexual activity, it is nobody’s business. But there goes the MSM – and you know why: they’re hoping he is homosexual or at least hope they can get people thinking he’s homosexual because you know us bigoted, hill-ape inbred MAGA morons would hate that. For goodness sake.

I don’t know Senator Scott’s personal life. No whiff of scandal along those lines has come up and you gotta figure that something would have by now. Is he chaste? I don’t know. Not my business. But it isn’t impossible for him to be chaste, you know? Not everyone even in 2023 is an animal. Some people remain civilized…and if Scott is a real believer in God and he is trying to follow his Christian faith then he might remain chaste because for the true Christian, sex – any sort of sex – outside of marriage is immoral.

There is the meme out there which goes, “you think you hate the media as much as you should, but you don’t.” There is no bottom for these vile and disgusting people.

Now, as for Scott’s ambitions: everyone assumes he’s auditioning for the VP slot for whomever gets the nod – likely Trump or DeSantis at this point. He’s kept friendly with both sides. But never count anyone out. I know that plenty of MAGA folks have problems with Scott but he’s a pretty good guy. Sure, he is close to the Establishment and that is a worry…but he also seems to be his own man. We could do a lot worse. If he does emerge, he gets my vote.

Target has been marketing “tuck friendly” clothes for little children. If you don’t know what they’re “tucking” then just think about it for a minute: it’ll come to you. And I mean really little children. Like 5 year olds. That is how far this insanity has gone. There has been good pushback on this and we’re winning lots of victories in Red States…but the overall American Establishment is still fully committed to making medical transition of minors the norm. We have a long way to go here. Victory comes when major retailers won’t even think about making “tuck friendly” clothes for kids.

LA Dodgers invited the anti-Catholic hate group Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to “pride night”. Then uninvited them when everyone pointed out that, hey, they’re bigots. But now has re-invited them because when it comes to bullying, the LGBTQ community has that nailed down. Corporate America is simply too weak. I know that the basic principle we have is free markets…but in order to win this battle, we are going to have to forcibly instruct Corporate America that non-Lefists also exist.

Debt battle is rather boring but I am pleased that McCarthy is at least showing some backbone. The problem is that we can’t forever keep printing up new money so we can borrow it. It does come to an end. It might actually be better long term if it came to an end right away. We don’t have any money left. Its all gone – blown on wars and graft over the past 70 years as America’s industrial, agricultural and mining base has been destroyed. Go broke and start all over again.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan23 Comments

Over on Twitter @ZubyMusic asks, “What is the most damaging popular myth?”. Getting a lot of responses, some of them jokes of course. But it did get me thinking.

And I think that the most damaging popular myth is the history (so-called) of the last 100 years. That is, what we’ve been told is the history.

I’ve yammered on quite a bit over the past couple years about aspects of our received beliefs which don’t hold up to scrutiny and I’m coming to the conclusion that just as we have Narrative-Drivers for our politics (ie, story lines created – often in advance – to drive opinion in certain directions desired by those in charge) so we’ve had History-Drivers: that is, gatekeepers in the production of history who make certain that the historical Narrative only rolls into accepted grooves.

Just as in the MSM and the larger popular media the ability to be seen and heard largely depends on your ability to do as you’re told, so too is it likely to be this way in all disciplines. Do we really want to think that there is some institutional aspect of our society which isn’t controlled? That the people who have crafted Narrative after Narrative for our immediate political debates would let slip something as crucial as how history records things? That in a world of overwhelmingly conformist thought, they’d let independent thinkers have a place all to their own?

I’m just reminded of a story I heard some years back – it involved a moderately famous man but I can’t remember exactly who at the moment, but no worry as that isn’t fully relevant here. The key thing is that this man’s father was a British colonial official at the tail end of the Empire and upon a time this man pointed out to his son a ragged ship heading north from coastal east Africa and said, “that ship is filled with slaves, and I’m under orders to do nothing about it”. The British were leaving, as were all the colonial powers and with them went any impetus to stop the slave trade…and what had been firmly suppressed was now rising to the surface as the anti-slavers quite the scene. And then, 40 years later, we were all told that the British Empire was nothing but racist colonial oppression. Of course, a true history of Africa since the end of colonial rule would rather harp upon the breakdown of services, the rise of oppression and ethnic murder, the return of slavery…but, we can’t have that, can we? Doesn’t fit the Narrative. Oh, sure, when some particularly hideous thing happens, the world takes notice (like, say, the Rwandan genocide) but it is never placed in context. If any context is given at all, the problem is ascribed to “the legacy of colonialism”, as if the people today had no agency. And then we move on, not noticing until the next outrage occurs. Meanwhile, South Africa is slipping back into Third World status as the millennium promised with the end of Apartheid breaks down under the weight of bribery, incompetence and a raft of anti-white laws and rhetoric.

Just a little bit of the actual history of Africa and none of this would have had to happen. But just as in everything else, all we got was the Narrative history…and it is sustained in spite of any contravening facts.

Pudding Brain’s Secretary of Education said the quiet part out loud – asserting that teacher’s know better than parents what is best for kids. It is absurd and evil, but they really do think that way. They believe, that is, that someone with credentials is inherently superior. No surprise there: they all rise based on their credentials and so they hold credentials as supreme. None of these people – either in government or corporation – has ever had to produce. To actually make something happen or come into existence by their own efforts. Its all just reviewing plans and picking among them based upon the Current Thing and where the strongest pressure is coming from. And they are never tossed out, never jailed, never wind up in poverty. What we’re going to have to do is change laws to require first of all real world experience before you can take a government position and, secondly, entrance exams…really tough exams. Like, say, if you are seeking employment at the Department of Transportation, one of the questions should be along the lines of, “what is the per mile cost of moving a ton of goods from Long Beach to Denver?” and “if fleet average MPG is increased by 10 percent, what will be the average annual cost to an American consumer?”. Guarantee it will weed out these credentialed morons and allow room in there for people who actually know how things work.

See that little flap of metal up the pole there that everyone is smiling about? That was a shade installation to make travel by bus more equitable in Los Angeles. No, seriously; that little bit of metal is supposed to provide shade. I guess when its high noon and if you can stand right under it. It cost $10,000.00 to install. The Progs are seriously proud of this.

How about some fun stuff, now?

You Should be Terrified of What They Did to Trump

Mark Noonan21 Comments

Greg Gutfeld went on a bit of a tear about the latest revelations in the Trump-Russia hoax; click the link and give it a watch. His point is that the Democrats (in the largest sense – including the MSM and RINOs) built up Trump as the New Hitler and so justified any action against him. Because, after all, if you are really stopping a Hitler – a guy who proposes to kill every single person he hates and start a world war – then you really can justify just about any action to stop it; work up a phony Trump-Russia scandal or commit election fraud, you see?. This dovetails with the point I made about the latest revelations: the the same people who assure us that 2020 was legitimate were also all in on Trump-Russia even though they new from the get-go that it was a lie.

This does not prove that 2020 was stolen but because of this situation there is nobody on God’s green Earth who can credibly assert that 2020 wasn’t stolen. Everyone you can possibly rely on to tell you what happened in that strange election is tainted as a known liar or part of a system which repeatedly rewards known liars…and you’d be worse than a fool to rely on their assertions about anything. But even that isn’t really the issue we’re confronted with here. It is much larger than that.

Throughout political history there have always been shenanigans. From the lowliest mud hut village to the most impressive Imperial capitol, people have always tried to rig politics. Some of the most famed people in history are essentially famous for their ability to back the winner and then fix the race to make sure (Kaunitz of the Holy Roman Empire and Bismarck of Prussia probably stand at the top of this heap..but they are just part of a legion). What I’m saying here is that some of the things done to Trump are not new – hardly remarkable in and of themselves. But what is new – at least in the American experience – is a political party, the intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the media and a significant portion of the politician’s own party combining to destroy the politician. And not only combining to destroy the person but doing so with complete fabrications. This I don’t think has ever happened before – and it should terrify everyone.

Step back a moment and think about it: nothing Trump has ever been accused of has been proved. Even the ridiculous civil case over rape still amounts to no more than “he said/she said” without the slightest scrap of evidence that the event could have happened. But they still got a jury to nod along with at least part of the allegations. How? Because for the past 8 years, the accused has been the target of an intense series of allegations making him out to be worse than Hitler. The people in the area the trial was held do not avail themselves of unapproved media. They live in a world where the New York Times is considered the gold standard of truth. And that New York Times – and all the media, including the tiny parts not far-Left in outlook – had all been repeating the allegations for all those years over and over and over again. So, when the guy (as it were) shows up in Court, the jury knew what it had to do…it was “known” that the Orange Man is Bad and so they acted accordingly. This is actually staggering; it is the end of any concept of law in our society if it is allowed to stand.

When I said earlier that nothing against Trump has been proved, I mean nothing. For instance, we don’t even know if Trump ever had sex with Stormy Daniels; and if that happened it wasn’t against the law and in today’s post-Christian world it hardly even counts as a scandal…but we can’t even say with certainty that it happened. And yet even to this day the accusation counts against Trump and various aspects of it continue to wend their way through courts and public opinion. For goodness sake, the lawyer who led the way in bringing the allegation forward is in jail for fraud. Maybe Trump did have the affair. Billionaires are known for that sort of thing. It is certainly plausible: but neither you nor anyone you know can say for certain it did. The only people who know for certain on it are Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels…Trump denies it categorically while Daniels says it happened. And, guys, don’t forget that Stormy is on the hook for about $350,000.00 in legal fees she owes to Trump…not the sort of thing a credible accuser gets hit with.

And yet I bet that if we did a poll then we’d find north of 90% of people certain that Trump and Daniels had an affair. This is not just what a smear can do: it is what can happen when just about everyone conspires against you. Just a bit of detective work on the part of the MSM and we’d know pretty certainly if Trump and Daniels were at that Tahoe resort at the same time in 2006 and if there was a time frame in which the two could have got together. I mean, there would be hotel and room service receipts, witness statements from hotel staff…Trump being pretty well known there would be lots of people who would be keeping an eye on him and following his movements, including paparazzi (this happened when The Apprentice was hot on TV, after all). But all I can ever find about it is Daniels’ claim that it happened. Seems a little thin…and the dog that doesn’t bark here is the MSM not getting us all the lurid background details which would be available if the affair happened. So, like I said: not proved. But absolutely believed.

And so is everything else to one degree or another. And here’s the kicker: the Daniels accusation is the most credible of all the accusations. And she owes Trump hundreds of thousands of dollars for making it! Everything else Trump is accused of has even less evidence that it happened and the main accusation against him (that he’s an agent of Russia) has just been proved completely false. But, once again, people believe.

The terrifying thing here is that if they can do this to Trump – a media-savvy billionaire who can hire first rate legal talent – they can do it to anyone. Suppose Joe Blow in your town offends the Ruling Class…and then there shows up a story in the local news claiming that Joe did This Horrible Thing and that sparks an investigation and you’re sitting there watching this or that dark hint of terrible deeds by Joe leaking out and your mind starts to go, “maybe there’s something to it?”. But the truth is that Joe did nothing wrong other than offend the Ruling Class and is now being destroyed. And he’s being destroyed as an example, just like Trump is. They are letting us know that anyone who doesn’t toe the line will be destroyed. And if you’re thinking that the calm and pleasant Ron DeSantis is immune…well, they’re already calling him worse than Trump (who is, of course, worse than Hitler) and they’re lining up allegations that DeSantis had inappropriate relations with female students when he was a teacher and that he supervised torture at Gitmo. I rate these accusations as entirely non-credible. If any of them had been true, the Democrats would have broadcast them far and wide during the 2022 campaign. But we just learned that an accusation doesn’t have to be true to be effective…it just has to be backed up by all or at least most of the Powers That Be. Rely on it that Biden’s Justice Department will open an investigation into allegations of criminal activity by DeSantis if he’s the GOP nominee. It won’t matter if they’re true – they’ll simply make up whatever they think is best and you’ll see everyone – including the RINOs – swing in behind the investigation.

To be sure, maybe RDS can weather the storm. Maybe, that is, such an obviously personally pleasant person with a great family can get the public mind on his side. But you can’t be sure – and even if RDS can survive it, the problem remains that it can be attempted by the Democrats because they know that the DOJ, the CIA, the FBI and the MSM will fall in line to back up whatever RDS is accused of.

We really must dismantle this system brick by brick. Sure, the FBI and CIA need to be abolished, but it goes far beyond that. We have to find a way to punish the MSM, as well. To make them pay through the nose so they’ll learn the lesson: don’t be part of a political op. This is not something amenable to small reforms and it cant be allowed to continue; we need sledgehammer-like destruction of the institutions which created or fostered the anti-Trump effort. Because it isn’t about Trump: it is about you and me and our ability to remain free. It is either destroy them, or they’ll destroy us.

The Left is at War Against Humanity

Mark Noonan20 Comments

Saw this report which says that the Chinese government is hiring 87,000 special cops to destroy family farms. Highlighted there is the destruction of a small pig farm – the Chinese government prefers the workings of large agri-business concerns. You might think that what they’re after here is economies of scale or, perhaps, greater safety…and that will be the justification used. But what is really happening is an assault on small holding. Private wealth, you see? You might be thinking, “then why don’t they go after the Chinese billionaires?”. Because, by and large, the rich of the world are in favor of this – either from conviction or from a “I’ve got mine so to heck with everyone else” attitude. Plus, if the super rich ever decided to go truly independent, the government can squash them like bugs…when you have that much money you are immediately vulnerable to a host of civil and criminal penalties any time the government decides to turn its wrath on you. There are so many laws on so many books in so many countries that it is impossible to be fully law-abiding. And if in addition to this the rich guy in question has cut corners from time to time, then the jeopardy is even greater. You might also recall the recent conflicts in the Netherlands where the government is forcing the sale of huge numbers of farms…with the explanation being that farms cause global warming.

This sort of thing was also seen during Covid (which was massively revealing!) where they allowed the big retail chains to remain open while shutting down all the mom and pops. Wal Mart and Amazon Prime uber alles! I remember during the worst part of it that people here in Vegas has to buy their vape juice on the street corner like a drug deal because the Powers That Be had decreed that the little tobacco stores (all operating on incredibly thin profit margins) had to close.

But it is all about destroying any source of wealth or independence among the citizenry. The phrase, “you will own nothing, and you will be happy” may or may not have been uttered by Schwab…but it is the intent all the same. With the caveat that they don’t care if you’re happy. In fact, they’d probably prefer you to be unhappy because you need to be punished for all those centuries when cretins like you thought that you had a right to your own property. You were wrong, you see? And now you’ve got to pay the piper.

But what, really, is property? It is the human thing – we’ll once again refer to G K Chesterton on this:

Now if we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay the simple spiritual foundations of the idea. God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination of creation with limits. Man’s pleasure, therefore, is to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them; to be half-controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. The excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditions will stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write an immortal sonnet on an old envelope, or hack a hero out of a lump of rock. But hacking a sonnet out of a rock would be a laborious business, and making a hero out of an envelope is almost out of the sphere of practical politics. This fruitful strife with limitations, when it concerns some airy entertainment of an educated class, goes by the name of Art. But the mass of men have neither time nor aptitude for the invention of invisible or abstract beauty. For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions—the idea of property. The average man cannot cut clay into the shape of a man; but he can cut earth into the shape of a garden; and though he arranges it with red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternate straight lines, he is still an artist; because he has chosen. The average man cannot paint the sunset whose colors be admires; but he can paint his own house with what color he chooses, and though he paints it pea green with pink spots, he is still an artist; because that is his choice. Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of heaven. But because he is not God, but only a graven image of God, his self-expression must deal with limits; properly with limits that are strict and even small.

The most natural and human manner of living is for each person (family, really) to have a bit of the Earth to call their own and do with as they will for their own support. In our modern world, of course, it isn’t possible or even practical that we should all become small farmers…but we should still be striving for personal or family control over the primary means of wealth creation which sustain us. This is the ideal. At least it is the ideal for me, and so I’m a Distributist.

But the ideal of the Global Elite is to eliminate property (except the Elite’s, of course; though they may, as in the old USSR, just change the title of their private property to their “personally assigned” property). They do want us to have nothing. And that means, grasp this!, that they want us to cease being human.

We are human when we hold what we own – what we acquired by our labor and/or fair trade. That it is ours to do as we wish recognizes the inherent dignity of humanity and makes us all equals under law though we clearly are not equal in fact. The war on this concept began in the Reformation when the Lords temporal stole the Commons (to be clear, I don’t blame the Protestants, as such, for this: but the primary reason the British upper class went Protestant was so they could steal: the common lands used by all, the monasteries which were the hospitals and schools of the poor, etc, etc.). It went on and on with things like property and inheritance taxes and rules and regulations and fees and licensing…all patiently explained to us at the time as something only to affect the rich and merely to facilitate the improvement of society…but now we arrive at a time when if I don’t pay a tax I can’t keep my house and when I pass it on to my granddaughter the government will have its hand out; and I am plagued by a host of costs and requirements just to “own” my house, my car…and now they propose to place further restrictions on my ownership of my home and to force me to buy a sort of car I don’t want and probably can’t afford…with their noxious bus waiting for me when I can’t keep up with their demands.

How free am I, really? A serf on a 12th century farm would lose his farm if he didn’t pay his Lord on time. If I don’t pay the government on time, away goes my house (I’ve read some horror stories of late where some poor folks have lost their houses due to trivial tax arrears…and when the houses were sold at auction, the government kept 100% of the proceeds even though the tax bill might have been mere hundreds of dollars…and this is happening most often in Deep Blue jurisdictions). And how free can I ever be if I cannot stand on my small corner of Earth and set everyone at defiance? If you can usurp my property, then I am your slave.

And then you think about what they are also doing with telling us that men can get pregnant and children should be able to get abortions and medical transitions in defiance of parents…and our nation is being invaded by aliens with the active assistance of our own Ruling Class. What is all of this but a program to completely remove all that makes us human? To make us alone, alienated, dependent…as well as cruel and greedy as we grasp for any small advantage at the trough with the other slaves.

Live in your Life Pod, east your bug paste…

No, thanks. I prefer to remain human. And this is why I say we must utterly destroy the Left. It must be pushed out of power. It must have all of its money confiscated. It must be prosecuted for its crimes. It has to go; the poison pill invented by Rousseau and perfected by Marx must become no more, as if it had never been. We have to do this, just to remain human.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan30 Comments

The legal defense fund for Daniel Penny has raised a million dollars so far – its only been up for a day, maybe two, so that’s good. Its getting to enough money to really pay for some top flight lawyers. Couple things about it:

The Left is relentlessly pointing out that Penny is white and the man who died was black. Race, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with the incident. But inflaming race hatred is a key component of the Left’s program…its been part of it since the mid 1970’s but it went into overdrive when an increasingly failing and unpopular Obama needed a tool to keep his troops in line. It has just gone thermonuclear since then. Do keep in mind that this isn’t a mistake. This isn’t an unintended consequence. This is deliberate and malicious: it is just like Julius Streicher and his Der Sturmer in Nazi Germany: it is intended to otherize us and make us legitimate targets for violence.

Meanwhile, I’ve noticed on the Right far too many people trying to split the baby: deploring the indictment of Penny but also making statements to the effect of, “he took it too far”. This is why we lose – and it is because we have forgotten. Nobody is ever allowed to act out in public. Not even once and not even a little bit. It is impermissible to accost people; to yell at them; to threaten them in any manner. All Penny did was what a man is supposed to do in that situation; stop the guy. It is unfortunate – and was clearly unintended – that he should die. But his death is on his hands, not Penny’s. It was the raving nutter who deliberately placed himself into a situation where any decent man would have to take him down…as gently as possible but with whatever force proved necessary. If Penny had deliberately killed the man, it would still not be a crime: because, once again, nobody is ever allowed to be a raving lunatic in public. Doing that is a complete breakdown of the social contract wherein we all agree to be polite and reasonable for the benefit of all. Start allowing people to at will ignore that rule and social chaos ensues – as we already see in New York, San Francisco and many other places.

Team Pudding Brain has manufactured a border crisis and is flooding America with what may be many millions of illegal immigrants – with of course untold thousands of vicious criminals mixed in with them. The official numbers are staggering and probably aren’t 50% of what is really coming in. Now, why should they do this? I think they believe that the resulting chaos will help them short and long term: as communities get overrun with illegals, the Democrats will claim their “common sense immigration reform” (ie, amnesty) will fix the problem but Republicans are obstructing it (this is why they are dumping lots of illegals in deep Blue areas) while, long term, they figure these illegals they’ll eventually turn into citizens will be grateful and vote Democrat for a couple generations. The crime and social chaos is just a bonus in this plan – keeping in mind that your basic Democrat (whether conscious of it or not) is a Marxist who believes that our wealth and security are the result of an evil system and we must be punished for taking what was never ours. But I have noticed that the deep Blue areas become illegal dumping grounds aren’t the high end deep Blue areas. They aren’t moving these people to Malibu, ya know? It is poor urban areas mostly made up of POC who are getting the shipments…and it is infuriating these people. There is a huge opportunity here…and the person best able at the moment to take advantage of it is Trump…though RDS can also make the pitch very well: that we GOPers will save low income communities from being overrun.

Biden is congratulating himself for appointing lots of women as judges – our Matt asks how can he tell as he’s not a biologist?

CNN is trying to tell us that it isn’t the bums, looting, feces and crime driving retailers out of the big Blue cities. It is something else. Lots of stuff. Complex social changes. But not the bum sh***ing on the street. It isn’t that. Trust them!

Elon Musk hired his new CEO for Twitter – a lady names Linda Yaccarino who checks off just about every Left SJW nutjob box you can think of. This has caused a lot of negative comment on Twitter and, yeah, it is worrying. OTOH, Musk is still saying he’s committed to free speech…to troll the Left he even Tweeted out a Pepe the Frog meme (if you don’t know – Pepe is a frog used in rightwing memes and it is hated by the Left). So, I don’t know. I can see on the face of it why Yaccarino was picked – she’s apparently first rate at generating advertising dollars and Musk does want Twitter to be profitable. But there is the worry that the Safety Council will come back, by one means or another, and Right comment will start to be throttled again (towards the end of the old Twitter regime it was getting really bad). I’m going to wait and see, myself: some of the people Yaccarino follows are accounts the Left hates with a white-hot passion. She might be one of those few Commies who is actually ok with the free flow of ideas – they are very rare, but they do exist. We’re going to find out.

Trump and MAGA Won’t Go Away

Mark Noonan60 Comments

I didn’t watch the Trump town hall on CNN because, well, it was on CNN and I’ll be dead and in the cold, cold ground before I give them any ratings. But I did monitor the reactions on Twitter.

The MAGA folks were, of course, entirely thrilled with Trump’s performance. Discount that: that could easily be just partisan confirmation bias.

Never Trump: from the first minute were calling it an unmitigated disaster. Discount that: just as easily confirmation bias. But I did notice something…as the night wore on, the later Never Trump comments about it were “well, he talked too much about the 2020 election and nobody cares about that” and “Trump is doomed because everyone cares about January 6th.”

That was all extreme wish-casting. I don’t know how many people actually care about the 2020 vote…but even those who don’t care, if they aren’t committed anti-Trumpers, all pretty much agree that there was quite a lot of illegality and impropriety in the vote. People believe this because it was obvious. As I’ve asked people (and never get a response on), “they covered up the windows in the counting rooms because ____?”. They can’t answer it. They never will answer it. Because the only answer to “why did you hide the count?” is “because we were stuffing the ballot boxes”.

Nobody cares about January 6th. The Democrats and their MSM lapdogs (seconded by the chihuahua-like yapping of Never Trump types) tried to make the J6 hearings into another Watergate and nobody cared. Mostly nobody cares because nothing really happened that day save for the unfortunate shooting of an unarmed and peaceful demonstrator (which, of course, the J6 boosters never talk about). At the end of the day, with a little bit of rowdiness early on, the Establishment got what they wanted on J6: Pudding Brain certified as the winner. You’re not allowed to complain about things going your way: and the complaints they make about J6 merely seem like pathetic whining.

But it was the Left comments which were most telling: they were ballistic over it. I mean completely unhinged. It was like their world was coming to an end…because Trump, to all appearances, was calm, cool, collected, funny and made some really telling points in response to the gotcha questions of the host.

Pay attention to that: if the Left is pissed off about it, then it worked out well for Trump.

I’ve said for a while now – and it remains true – and plenty of Trump voters are willing to move on. DeSantis is the obvious first choice with Vivek Ramaswamy being the surprising second choice. There is a rational case to make for dropping Trump in favor of some other tool we think may be better suited to break down the Establishment and restore America. But as I’ve also been saying – and I’ve said it since 2015 when I was opposing Trump for the nomination – that the only way to beat Trump is to out-Trump him.

One very particular thing came up in that town hall which is getting little play is Trump’s proposal to pardon most J6 detainees. This has caused monkey-screeches from the Left, of course, while the DeSantis people are (very reasonably) pointing out that Trump could have done that January 7th. But the really crucial thing about it is Trump rising to the defense of the J6 detainees. If DeSantis really wants to break down Trump’s core support – and DeSantis will have to do this to beat Trump – then it should have been DeSantis calling for this first. And that, in my view, is the breakdown in the DeSantis effort: for all the good things he’s doing (and they are fantastic, with the education reforms holding the most long-term potential for us), he’s yet to show to the Trumpsters that he will go to war with the Establishment. Going after Disney: Great. Going after Drag Queen Story Time: Wonderful. But these are fairly run-of-the-mill GOP positions now (being anti-Corporate has actually been taking hold on the right for about ten years). DeSantis needs to pick out a position which is so Trump-y that Trump hasn’t got there yet. The J6 people were the easiest. Now he’ll have to find something else.

What can DeSantis do? That will be up to him but if I were in his position, I’d announce that if elected, every person who illegally crossed the border after January 20th, 2021 will be deported regardless of circumstances. No refugees, no Dreamers: no nothing. I’d announce it as the only means to tell these people that they can’t take advantage of an Administration too corrupt to control the border. That no matter how well they try to blend in before January 20th, 2025, they will be deported. Alternately, DeSantis can call for a suspension of American aid to Ukraine by X Date unless Ukraine agrees to peace talks with Russia. The main thing here is to take something that the Establishment wants very badly (open borders, endless war, etc) and propose to take it away. That demonstrates a willingness to fight: and that is what DeSantis must do if he wants to transfer the love the Trumpsters feel over to himself.

Because that is the key to it all and so far nobody gets it. They call the Trumpsters “MAGAts” or “Trump Cultists” or what have you. They don’t realize that for these people, supporting Trump is an act of love. A pledge to America and to future greatness. You’ll only get them over to you if you give them a reason to love you more. And, hey, maybe they are misguided. Maybe they’re not seeing some crucial things. But anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can’t talk someone out of it…you bend with it. But it is also important to understand that love – real love – is a matter of loving the beloved before they are lovable. The anti-Trump people keep trying to make Trump seem hateful when all that does is make those who love him love him even more. They see the flaws. They are not blind. But that doesn’t deter the lover. In fact, it makes the true lover even more devoted. You can’t break that by shouting insults. You can only break it by loving even more than they do.

This is why I pointed out to various people who have recently been calling for Trump to back out over his legal troubles that they are making a huge mistake. They aren’t helping their cause, at all. They are, in fact, shooting themselves in the foot. And in two ways:

  1. First off, they are essentially going along with a Democrat op. A “get Trump” effort which has entirely divorced itself from law or any sense of decency as it seeks to destroy Trump by any means necessary. Calling for Trump to back out is merely to play along with a smear. And if it actually worked, then that smear would then be turned on the next guy and the next and the next and the next.
  2. It is alienating Trump supporters. Every time a Never Trump Conservative calls for Trump to back out or be pushed out, it simply tightens up Trump’s support. It makes his supporters ever more willing to stick with him. The proper tactic to take here is to relentlessly attack the Democrat effort as the illegal, unjust and cruel effort it is. That way when you talk to Trumpsters, they’ll listen.

I don’t know how this will come out. I’m still very certain that we’re going to lose next year. But this is primarily because I see the divisions in the Right. They are fostered by the Left and they are setting MAGA and anti-Trump at each other’s throats and convincing them to take Only Trump or Never Trump positions, respectively. Blood is getting up and heads are getting down and whomever emerges with the GOP nomination will find a fractured GOP going up against a united Democrat Party with endless supplies of money, the MSM and a paid army of influencers at every level. I think it will still end up a close race (Pudding Brain is monumentally unpopular), but I do believe that they shove him over the finish line…even if it once again takes some manufactured votes in key States (there will be less of this in 2024 than in 2020 because no Covid and some law changes…but there’s still just enough wiggle room in just enough States to allow some last-minute vote creation to tip the scales).

But however it comes out, the key to victory in 2024 or any future race will have to be the anti-Trump people making their peace with MAGA. This means ditching entirely all MSM talking points about Trump (after all, what the Trump haters hate about Trump is all stuff the MSM told them without having a shred of evidence to back it up). It means talking positively about MAGA. It means acknowledging – without any hedging – the good things Trump accomplished while at the same time agreeing with the obvious: he would have been able to do to a lot more if the GOP leadership and pundit classes had backed him up, as they were morally obligated to do.

Trump isn’t going away. His supporters aren’t going way. You can’t win without Trump and MAGA. It is just the plain facts of life. You can’t “move on” from Trump in the sense of ditching him and pretending he didn’t happen and that his voters will get back into the Neo-Con, Globalist loser fold. You have to show MAGA that you love them; that you want them; that you care about them and will do your best for them. This will require the adoption by everyone in the GOP of large aspects of Trumpist policy and attitudes. Or you can cope and seethe about it as you lose.

The Empire of Lies

Mark Noonan49 Comments

I’ve talked about this before but it is really getting into my mind: just how long we’ve been under a dictatorship of lies. My latest round of thinking about this was a Tweet where the “without the USSR, we couldn’t have won WWII” assertion was made – and not by a Leftist and not by someone unfamiliar with history. It was a highly educated Right person making the statement. It is just an accepted thing: it is the way it was, no doubt about it.

400,000 jeeps and trucks

11,400 aircraft

7,000 tanks

4.4 million tons of food

2.6 million tons of oil

That’s just us, and only a very partial list of what we sent to the USSR. The Brits provided the Red Army’s boots and at least a quarter of their medium tanks (it wasn’t a Soviet miracle of producing the T-34 which got the job done…it was British and American workers: the Soviet films show the T-34’s rolling into Germany…but this is simply because they didn’t film the Sherman’s and Valentine’s which probably made up nearly half their medium tank strength – and on film, especially if moving and a bit out of focus, easy to mistake a Valentine for a T-34). But when you think of all we sent to the USSR keep in mind that at the same time we were raising and splendidly equipping 12 million US service members…and building for ourselves thousands of planes, tanks and ships.

The reality is that the USSR could not have survived without American and other allied aid – and that the USA and Britain vastly outnumbered and outproduced the AXIS powers. And this is even if you take away the fact that we got the Atomic Bomb in 1945 – supposing that didn’t work and the USSR was, say, knocked out in 1943, the Anglo-American alliance would still have rolled into Germany. Might have been 1947 before they did, but it would happen. Germany (Japan, the whole AXIS) has no business going to war with us. It was stupid. Suicidal. And while the USSR killed more Krauts than we did, those Krauts were doomed to die…if not in the snows of Russia, then in the fields of France.

Once you think about it for even just a few minutes and access some readily available information, you can see that it is a lie to say the USSR was vital to Allied victory. It wasn’t. For heaven’s sake, while we were invading Africa, Italy and France and bombing German cities to smithereens and sending massive supplies to the USSR, we were also fighting the Japanese! And while the Japanese never had a command structure like that of the Germans and while on the assault they were often tactically mishandled, we found that one the defense and dug in, the Japanese were harder to fight than the Germans…the Germans would eventually quit. The Japanese kept at it until exterminated. It is like people ignore the Pacific Theater – as if in some way it wasn’t happening at the same time. But once you put Europe and Pacific together and see what the USA did, it is obvious that the USA needed nobody’s help. It was nice to have the help. It ended the war a lot faster and so saved lives…but we never needed a single Russian bayonet on the line.

And when you start to think about it, you just go on: what other bull have we been fed? After a while, you then arrive at your final destination: is anything we’ve been told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

I don’t think so. I believe that our government – our institutions overall – got into the habit of lying to us so long ago that it became entirely ingrained. They lie not as a last resort to deflect blame, but as a first resort to make certain the Narrative supports them no matter what happens. In other words, when they get ready to tell us something, they’ve already thought it out a few steps ahead and so figure out which lie to tell now which will best deflect blame a few steps down the road. Like after 9/11 when we were all told early on that there was no way to prevent it. Well, turns out it could have been easily prevented and the government was presented with chance after chance to prevent it. They knew, of course, that eventually the truth would come out…but they also knew that if they just bald-faced lied about it from the get-go, then by the time the truth emerged it would all be too late. Those responsible would be retired or transferred and “why dig up the past?” would make certain nothing happened.

I mean, for goodness sake, for years we were told that USSR GDP was just a tad behind USA GDP and that they were a serious, first world nation which we had to coexist with. After the USSR fell, we saw what a complete mess the whole thing was with there being a real chance that per-capita Russia wealth was lower in 1991 than it had been in 1913. Right now, Russia’s GDP is on par with South Korea’s…you know, that tiny half-country with no resources and 1/3 Russia’s population.

Fifty former intel people signed a letter stating they were certain Hunter’s laptop was disinformation. You think that was the first time they lied? And, once again, they knew it was a lie when they said it. They didn’t care. It got Team Pudding Brain over the hump and now that Biden’s people are in charge of Justice, nothing will actually happen…and by the time a GOPer gets in, it’ll likely be dropped for statute of limitations reasons and/or “it is time to move on”.

I guess all I can say here is trust nothing. Oh, you can find some facts – they are available. But don’t let anyone interpret those facts for you. And find out which facts they didn’t include. Think about it. Who went to the Moon 8 years after “go”? So how close, really, was that Space Race? Why didn’t we use the USSR’s desperate need to import American grain to force concessions from them? How in heck does a zillion tons of drugs cross our border? Once you start thinking, it really becomes a lot clearer of what has happened – a cabal of the corrupt and stupid have been running a self-perpetuating Oligarchy designed to bind the American people hand and foot. To make us scared. Unsure of ourselves. Unwilling to flex our real power…and all the while allowing the cabal to steal and abuse to their heart’s content.

Wake up. Think. Learn.

And then destroy them all.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan20 Comments

Twitter started a “Community Notes” function which allows third parties to attach a statement to Tweets making certain claims of fact. As far as I know, any account can be subjected to such notes and there is a process for doing so…and then everyone can comment and vote on the Community Note. The main thing is that its beautiful – after years of Right Twitter getting banned for posting facts, Left Twitter is now finding that when they make the egregious lie, someone puts a Community Note on it – and the best are when they quote back to the Lefty their own previous words! The Left is, of course, going ballistic about this; often with the usual threat of leaving Twitter but as we on the Right found over the years, there’s nothing better than Twitter for fast-paced commentary with a big reach. It is still a relatively small thing – it doesn’t stop them from lying – but it does put out there the fact that they are, indeed, liars.

The newest St George Floyd of Fentanyl has dropped – a lunatic named Jordan Neely. He was, as per usual in such, a bum and drug addict with a long rap sheet (42 priors and when he was killed he was wanted for assault). On the NYC subway he started acting like an aggressive, lunatic drug addict and so a former Marine did what any decent man would do – he took him down. Because Neely was a drug addict this ended up killing him. Naturally, the Usual Suspects are all out there shouting “racism” and “no justice, no peace” while the MSM – pretty much all of it, including the parts you might think aren’t far Left fanatics – are trying to paint Neely as some sort of street artist beloved by all; failing that, they are trying to work up sympathy over the fact that Neely’s mother was quite brutally murdered some years back – as if that excuses being a violent, drug addicted lunatic. We’re all waiting for the Manhattan DA to charge the Marine with murder…and its 50/50 on conviction. A lot of Manhattanites are getting fed up with the rampant crime and disorder in NYC but they also know that if the Powers That Be want to punish a jury for coming to the “wrong” verdict, it will be done; their names and addresses would be “leaked” so that lunatics could hound them.

Joe Manchin looks ever more like electoral toast next year in West Virginia. He’s nobody to blame but himself. He could have triangulated himself into a life seat by ditching the Democrats to become an independent who caucuses with the GOP. He’d have had to do this some years back, but if he had done it the Senate would still be split and none of Biden’s legislative agenda would have passed. But instead he stuck with the Party and in return for just some really small time pork nobody in WV cares about, he empowered the far Left in the Biden Admin to totally screw over blue collar West Virginia.

Joe Biden is monumentally unpopular. I’m starting to wonder if now so unpopular that even a weak and divided GOP might have a shot next year? I’m still doubtful – especially as the MSM will prop Biden’s corpse up if they have to. I’ll use as my marker this: if RFK stays in and score 20% or more in the NH primary, then Joe is done. And it would be funny as heck if its a like father, like son replay of 1968.

Jesse Kelly has been ringing the alarm bell on what the Establishment plans for Trump – the Manhattan indictment is just the start. They are going to go nuclear on him with all the really bad stuff pouring on if he wins the GOP nomination. Now, if Trump fails in the primary, nothing to really worry about but if he emerges then its a problem. And not just an electoral math problem: if they can really destroy Trump with a series of bogus indictments, then they will destroy everyone who challenges them. Hate Trump all you want, but you must stand up for him in this matter…the charges are all lies. He’s being persecuted, not prosecuted. And it may come down to we have to nominate and elect him just to make sure their effort fails.