DeSantis

We Lost: Victory Beckons

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Nothing fails like success, you know? To take a couple examples from history:

Chancellorsville is rated as Lee’s greatest success as a general. Historians tend to use it as the justification for calling Lee a commander of genius and stand in awe of his decision to split his smaller army in the face of a larger enemy and slip around the Union flank to roll up a stunning victory. There’s only one problem with it: it was stupid.

It was only Hooker’s indecision which allowed Lee to pull it off. If the Union commander had pretty much just ordered his army forward any time during Lee’s movement to the flank, Lee would have been utterly crushed and his army totally destroyed. No really great commander gambles; great commanders rig the game so they can’t lose no matter what the enemy does. And if they can’t rig it at the moment, they don’t move. Lee’s move was daring – but reckless and no officer training school would ever teach a cadet to do that.

And it was also Lee’s eventual undoing: just two months later at Gettysburg, Lee, memory of Chancellorsville still fresh, sent his army into an attack which his primary subordinate told him was impossible. But his great victory gave him an entirely overinflated idea of what he and his army could do, and too high a level of contempt for what the Union army and its commanders were capable of. The doom of the Confederacy was sealed with Lee’s defeat: any chance of fighting the Union to a negotiated peace was lost when Lee’s foolhardy charge kicked the guts out of some of his best fighting units.

Next example: the German invasion of France in 1940. Once again, it is rated as a genius move by the Germans to send their main force through the Ardennes in a move to cut off the Anglo-French armies in Belgium. Manstein, the architect of it, is credited as a genius – and the fact that it worked tends to obscure the plain fact that it shouldn’t have worked. And I mean not at all. And while Manstein was the man who drew up the plan, he wasn’t the only general who noticed the Ardennes. In fact, nearly everyone did: German, French and English. And everyone discounted it: and not just because of the rough terrain. It also entailed sending a massive, mechanized force on a pencil thin drive supported by secondary roads. Any significant French of English drive against the flanks of such a force would quickly destroy it.

But, the Krauts got lucky. Very lucky. Half a dozen times. The French had plenty of opportunities, and forces in hand, to wreck the German plan. They unfortunately had generals who thought in terms of days rather than hours for response time. The German gamble worked only because a failure of French leadership. Especially in the first 48 hours of the breakthrough, just about any energetic French general at the Corps or Army level could have won the most stupendous French victory since Austerlitz had they just moved.

But it was also the German undoing. The success of their Ardennes gamble gave all of them, from Hitler down to the last Fritz, a massively overinflated idea of what they could accomplish. When Hitler turned his sights on Russia the following year, even the German generals who hated him figured six to eight weeks would be enough to finish off Russia. And it would have been – had the Russian leadership crumpled under pressure like the French leadership had. Stalin and his henchmen were rat bastards…but when the Germans were pounding at the gates, they stayed in Moscow and put up a fight rather than run away. And thus the Germans discovered that Luck isn’t on the side of the Master Race, but (as always) on the side with the biggest battalions.

So, why the history lesson?

Because our success was 1980 and 1984 and I think we sort of expect it to just happen again. That we have the right ideas and so we’ll just win if we get our ideas out there. We’re forever looking for the next Reagan to carry us to victory. We think that politics is just matter of finding the right message alchemy – instead of the hard work of getting voters to vote for us. Our too easy success against feckless opponents never prepared us for Clinton and Obama opponents…nor for the political machine they built and which elevated a senile degenerate to the White House in 2020.

To be sure, some get it: Scott Pressler is the most shining example of the youth of the GOP getting out there and doing the work. You should know: back around September when all of us were expecting a big win in 2022, he pointed out that while he was having some success in certain areas (most notably Florida), in lots of places there was little enthusiasm for the GOP…he was expecting what, in the end, we got: a small and incomplete GOP victory. We need more like Scott and we might just get them. People who are willing to do the hard work of registering voters and talking to them, to find out what might be on their minds.

We need to jettison Reagan. And it might be time to jettison Trump. Without for a moment elevating DeSantis or anyone else to demi-god status. Might RDS be our guy? He might. We’ll see. But if he turns out to not be the best tool to break down the Democrat door, then he gets discarded, quite ruthlessly, in favor of someone else. On and on like that – all the while working at the local level to shore up the real strength of the GOP. In each success is the seed of failure – but in each defeat there is the seed of victory. Our problem is that since 1984, we’ve only haltingly looked for the lessons our defeats are teaching us, and so we’ve lost all along…even during the times we officially came out on top of the vote. It is no good to simply get the office: we have to get all the offices, all at once, and with a firm commitment to certain actions. We can’t coast on Reagan, nor rely on a Trump to win our battle for us. It is time for us, all of us, to fight anew.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan50 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Thread

Mark Noonan38 Comments

Of course sending the migrants to Martha’s Vineyard was a stunt – but it was a very good stunt. So was sending some to the VP’s official residence. Governor Abbot had been sending migrants to sanctuary cities for a while…but it took DeSantis to figure out how to make it really noticeable.

And that was the point of the exercise – to get the issue in front of the American people. Since Pudding Brain took office, our borders have been open and illegals have been flooding across…and Pudding Brain’s people were shipping these people all over the country…often at night and usually to Red States. Nobody really knows how many have come across since January 20th, 2021, but it has got to be in the multiple millions by now. And nobody is checking on who these people are – in and amongst the people just looking for a job and a better life are likely scores of thousands of hardened criminals and terrorists. And the MSM simply wasn’t covering it – the border States knew about it. Those of us on the Right knew about it…but the mass of the American people did not know about it. Now, they do.

It must be kept in mind that if we had a media – even a liberal media – which merely told the truth, then the whole world would be different. What is reported and how it is reported – even before you add in the outright lies – largely determines what is in the public mind and thus how the public decides. The mere truth and Trump would have won 70 percent of the vote in 2020. If people were really informed just what sort of utter scumbag Joe Biden has been his entire adult life – and if they hadn’t been fed a steady diet of lies about Trump – then only the most mindlessly partisan people in America would have voted for Pudding Brain. And not only would Trump have won in an epic landslide, but the GOP would have likely won Constitution-amending majorities in Congress.

The problem the GOP has is twofold:

  1. An unwillingness to point out what the other side is really like.
  2. A media system which has as its primary focus hiding what the other side is doing.

Take the abortion issue – supposedly, the GOP will now lose (or only barely win) because in getting the Dobbs decision, an infuriated mass of female voters will show up to smack the GOP down. This ignores that at least half of women are pro-Life. It ignores the tens of thousands who showed up every year, for forty years, in often freezing temperatures, to March for Life in DC since Roe came down. It ignores that when NARAL and PP get a mob together, it is paid, professional organizers renting a mob to shout for the cameras. It ignores the fact that as the overtly pro-Life party, the GOP has done better since Roe than before. The media says abortion is popular and they’ll produce an endless string of polls to buttress their assertion…but in actions and votes, the whole strength is on the pro-life side. And the GOP simply never pointed it out while the MSM was hiding that the Democrats position on abortion is federally funded on demand until the moment of birth.

So, too, on immigration. The Democrat position is open borders – and the MSM hides this by simply not reporting on what is going on at the border. When the MSM does talk about immigration, it is some pull-the-heartstrings story about some poor guy getting deported…not the tens of thousands flooding in at the hands of ruthless drug cartels. They don’t mention the illegals raped and murdered along the way. Fifty illegals show up in Martha’s Vineyard and the media is all over it, fifty suffocate in a truck because their coyote screwed them over…crickets. What DeSantis and Abbot did was to find the most effective way to point out the Democrat position…and show them up as hypocrites because when it became their community, they called in the Army and bounced those migrants in less than 24 hours.

With the possibility that DeSantis might be the GOP nominee in 2024 the MSM has now decided that DeSantis is worse than Trump. Because of course.

But we’re all worse than Trump, aren’t we? Essentially, to be in opposition to the Democrats is to be an Enemy of the State. The circle is complete – the Democrat party, infiltrated by Marxists since McGovern’s campaign in 1972, is now de-facto Bolshevik. This is very bad – because Enemies of the State are to be destroyed. We still have a window of opportunity to stop this, but only if we ruthlessly exercise power when we win it.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan20 Comments

Representative Henry Cuellar (D-TX) is sounding the alarm about Democrat chances in November…but, there’s an odd wrinkle here: Cuellar’s office was raided by the FBI a little while back and he’s embroiled in a scandal. OTOH, we know that Democrats use the FBI and DOJ to punish political opponents and the last thing Team Pudding Brain wants right now is a Latino Texas Democrat warning that they’re going to get destroyed in November because Latinos are going to vote GOP…and a lot of the reason will be Biden’s Border Crisis.

Democrats are getting alarmed here in Nevada, as well. All 4 of our House seats are up along with 1 Senate seat and the governorship. 3 of 4 House seats are currently Democrat as is the Senate seat and governorship. Democrats thought they had this sewn, don’t you know? With total control of the State government it was Fun Time! Part of their fun was redistricting and the Democrats took their Life Seat (NV-01) which was packed full of Democrats and broke it up a little bit to provide more Democrats in other House districts. That was before gas prices sky rocketed and polling started to show a big shift of Latino voters to the GOP. But now they’re kinda stuck…NV-01 is still a high hill for the GOP to climb but in a Red Wave year it could easily go GOP. Meanwhile, Senator Cortez-Masto (D-Zombie Reid) is a nonentity running against Republican Laxalt who is proving an excellent campaigner and the GOP has two good prospects to run against Governor Sisolak (D-Whatever the DNC Tells Him to Do). Could be some very good news in Nevada this November.

Ron DeSantis does it again. No, not smacking Disney down. Not stopping grooming in kindergarten. No: this time, its limiting tenure as public universities. This sort of thing is small but crucial. Progressives get themselves deep inside and then change everything … and one of the best ways to be “inside” is to be tenured in a university. You are practically untouchable. Its like being a made man in the Mafia. There is a huge argument about whether we should go Trump or DeSantis in 2024. I don’t care which one of them gets it – either is going to be a fighter for us.

Remember the lunatic conspiracy theories about people having their organs removed for transplants? Well, looks like the Conspiracy Theorists were just ahead of the curve. Again. But, really, this is bestial what the Chinese are doing – all very Soylent Green which, along with Rollerball and Network are the three 1970’s movies to most accurately predict the future.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan19 Comments

Some are saying the Omnicron variant is our off ramp: that it is, apparently, a mild version and it will allow the Democrats to declare victory and move on – but, I don’t think so. All I can see is that they seem to be quadrupling down on it.

We can assume part of this is mere stupidity – our Ruling Elites are simply not very bright. But in addition to that, I think they believe they can’t back off on it now. It would be too much of an admission they were wrong. And, of course, the more Covid fear they keep up in the Deep Blue areas, the more voter fraud they can justify…and there are indications of an extremely toxic political environment for Democrats. They aren’t doing well anywhere. Can’t remember exactly where it was, but it was a State legislative district in New England which the Democrats held in a special election last week…but their margin of victory dropped from something like 20 points last year to 3 or 4 this year. Meanwhile, quite a number of these specials are going our way.

To give a real idea how it is going for those who are keeping up the Covid fear – Boris Johnson’s Tories lost a by election in Shropshire a couple days ago. The seat has been Tory held for nearly 200 years. The swing against the Tories was 37 points. Lots of things are going on, but 99 Tories just voted in Parlaiment against Johnson’s vaccine mandates – it only became law because Labour backed it. A Tory government dependent upon Labour votes is a Tory government on the ropes.

Science guys say they found water in a canyon on Mars – frozen, naturally, but apparently quite a bit of it and right below the surface. This is important – we know there is a lot of ice in Mars polar regions but human colonization of Mars, if it ever happens, will be vastly easier in the central regions of Mars. Finding water in such a place makes it a prime location for human exploration. Still, though, the real problems remain: radiation and gravity. Mars has no magnetic field and so solar radiation hits the planet at a vastly higher rate than the surface of Earth and, of course, Mars has a much lower gravity and we simply don’t know what long term low gravity will do to us.

Wikipedia is getting set to purge entries on Communist mass killings – I’ve long said that Wikipedia, if the information is in any way political, is an unreliable source. The Commies who run it hate that people can tell the truth about Communism and so they’ve long edited things to downplay Communist atrocities. This is something we can fix: all we need do is make our own Wikipedia.

A Lutheran church is having drag queen prayer time – because, of course. It is astonishing how fast this all came about. I mean, figure the odds that biology would result in anything more than, say, 0.0001% of people having a divergence between their biology and their perception of their gender. But now something like 20% of youngsters are claiming to be at least somewhere on the trans spectrum. It is now fashionable – and this means it will recede, but not before a lot of people are permanently screwed up because at the age of 6 they decided to play with a doll instead of a fire truck.

Governor DeSantis is trying to ban CRT in Florida. This is the way. The bottom line is we can keep the USA or we can keep CRT: the two are incompatible. It must be remembered that the right to free speech is an individual right, not a government right. The government only has the right to say what we tell it to say through laws enacted by our representatives. A government-funded school is the voice of the people, not its own voice. If any teacher wants to teach something the people don’t want taught, they are free to start their own entirely private school…but we, the people, have the right to demand an end to Communist indoctrination in the schools we own.

Some cops proudly put up a picture of $100,000 in cash they had seized and it is causing a stir: the woman they took the cash from wasn’t charged with any crime and she isn’t, as far as we can tell, the target of any criminal investigation. She was merely carrying the cash – and the cops took it. This is civil asset forfeiture…and if the lady wants her money back, she will have to sue the police: there is no mechanism in the law to merely return seized money.

To be sure, carrying a hundred grand around is a bit eye raising – but it isn’t illegal and the police must not have the power to seize an asset unless a court of law has determined it was used in a criminal activity. I can barely go along with freezing assets of someone accused of a crime but the authorities must not be able to take a red cent until after a conviction. What the law allows at this time is mere theft by the cops – and while 100 grand is a lot, they seize any amount they can get their hands on and use the flimsiest excuses for doing it. I’ve read that in some jurisdictions the average amount seized is just a few hundred dollars.

The concept behind forfeiture was that it would be a telling blow against drug lords – but I don’t think we’ve run out of drug lords. Meanwhile, I’ve read many cases were innocent people had their property taken. It is past time to end this farce.

Portland, OR has been ruined. The Left destroyed it. On purpose. Because they believe that anything good in the United States is the result of theft and oppression by a systemically racist/sexist/homophobic Capitalist-Imperialist genocidal system. But most people still aren’t understanding the on purpose part of it. More and more are, but there’s still a pretty steep learning curve. The Left wants chaos and destruction because that will bring down what they view as an evil system…and upon the ruins they will erect whatever warmed over Marxist drivel they believe at the moment. This isn’t an accident. This isn’t a failed policy. This is what is desired – and until we fully internalize this fact, we’re always going to be at a disadvantage fighting the Left.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan24 Comments

May Day – the day the Commies get together on Social Media and get #SocialismIn5Words trending…only to have it hijacked by we on the right, making merciless fun of them. I hope they enjoy!

The Democrats are terrified of Ron DeSantis – and with good reason: he’s staying friendly with Trump without falling under Trump’s shadow, he’s pushing base-pleasing policies, he’s showing how it’s done in handling the ‘Rona…and he knows precisely how to tell the MSM to stick it where the sun don’t shine.

For now, 2024 is Trump’s for the asking – but, will he ask? He’s not going to tell us until after the 2022 mid-terms. If he doesn’t run, then right now Ron DeSantis is the man surging to the front because he’s the guy doing it right. So, expect the MSM/DNC to simply go ever more ballistic against him over the next couple years. They don’t want Kamala facing off against him in 2024.

How did Senator Scott’s response to Biden’s speech go? Well, to nutshell it – the Democrats have let their inner racist out in attacking him.

I and many others have noted that the people who are saying to follow the science are also using the phrase “pregnant people.” Sorry, girls: in order to complete the liberation of women, you’re being erased.

Republicans are starting to turn on the corporations – and it is way past time. They are woke and they are our political enemies.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan28 Comments

Sorry I’ve been out! Been sick the past week. Much better now.

So, Stumbles McGramps can’t climb stairs. What’s the over/under before the Democrats push him out?

We were utterly humiliated by the Chinese in the Alaska meeting – this was the CCP telling Taiwan, India and Japan that, at least for the next four years, America is of no account in the world. We’ll see how the nations of Asia react to this – I suspect we’ll see even more arms buildup amongst them.

In the long term, I don’t mind that. As it turns out, it was a mistake for the United States to attempt to be the security guarantor for east Asia. It is the Pacific which is our concern as it is the moat for us – our concentration should always be on keeping the sea lanes open. Actually pushing back against China is the responsibility, primarily, of India and Japan. I do believe we should maintain our alliances, but we should make it clear to our allies that it is their responsibility to build sufficient military force to defend themselves. I actually urge Japan and Taiwan to build nuclear weapons.

As for us: I’ve become a peacenik quite a bit over the past few years – I’m tired of the American Empire. We gain no benefit from it and the cost in blood and treasure is high. But the worst long-term aspect of it is that the necessity of a National Security State has been turned against us – our police and intel agencies are now being used against domestic dissent. Abandon the Empire. Return the Army to its proper number and functions (and revive the State militia) and abolish the FBI, NSA and CIA.

Ron DeSantis continues to ride high – mostly because he was the first big State governor to buck the lockdowns. The Democrats are, of course, hitting him hard but the bottom line, no matter how you want to slice the data, is that Florida is no worse off (at least) than any other State as far as infections and deaths while their economy is booming. DeSantis has also learned how to push back against MSM lies nearly as much as Trump did. So, he’s got a leg up right now for 2024 (presuming he wins next year – which looks pretty certain).

Democrats in the House are working on annulling the results of the IA04 House race. I’m really a bit perplexed on this one. Sure, Democrats always grab whatever they can get away with – but it is just one seat. And the blowback they’ll get in Iowa and around the country if they seat the Democrat who lost could be horrific for them. I’m not sure if it is mere bloody mindedness, or they’ve got some internal polling showing that they could lose the House majority in special elections between now and 2022.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan24 Comments

Did you know that Amazon got a $600 million contract from the CIA in 2013? Looks like they got another juicy one in 2020, as well. There’s nothing wrong with getting government contracts, of course – but when a monster company like Amazon is getting them, it makes you wonder just what happened to get that contract? Who talked to whom? We’ve got this multi-trillion dollar government spending money like mad and contracts like $600 million to Amazon barely create a ripple. This is the first I heard of it. It just illustrates, in my view, that we’ve created a monster and nobody really knows what it is doing.

Mexicans, being sensible and civilized people, are going with coal power. I’d prefer we all went with nuclear power, of course – but what we’re finding out is that we can’t rely on solar and wind.

Democrats are moving to censor all non-Left speech. I guess they figure if they don’t, they’re doomed. This is probably true. There are many moves being made in the Battleground States to fix the election vulnerabilities as was done in Florida. My view remains that they went all out to steal it for Biden, knowing that it would be obvious but calculating (correctly) that no one would really try to stop them. This doesn’t mean, however, that the GOP wants to lose forever. Just a few minor changes in election law will make it vastly more difficult to cheat. So, losing that option, Democrats are going to try to suppress our speech so that no one can campaign outside the Party Line.

The Democrats are in full court press against Governor DeSantis – because Governor DeSantis is doing Covid correctly and thus would be a strong candidate in 2024.

The Muppet Show has been labelled offensive content.

Trump will speak at CPAC – note that it is in Florida. Likely because Covid but I doubt it’ll get back to DC any time soon. Let’s face it: DC is enemy territory. He’s refusing to tip his hand on whether he’ll run in 2024 and that is entirely unsurprising. I suspect he won’t run, but it’ll be foolish of him to tip his hand before the 2024 mid-terms.