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“Did Trump Really Save America From Socialism?”

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For the moment, yeah.

Americans need to understand that the shocking refusal by a major political party to accept the results of the last election and the onslaught of verbal, legal, and physical assaults the Democrats have engendered, are not specific to Donald Trump. In other words, it is now clear plans were made by Obama to exploit federal power during his presidency to give the Democrats control of our nation — perpetually. It really didn’t matter if Trump was the GOP nominee or not. In other words, the chaos we are witnessing today would not have been much different had, for example, Ted Cruz won the presidency.

Sure, the issues and the phony narratives would be different but the intensity of the attacks would be the same and the illegal politicizing of Federal agencies would probably still have occurred. There is little doubt the Dems would have created phony narratives customized for whoever the nominee was, similar to how they customized the Russian collusion hoax for Trump. This is what the establishment Republicans and the Never-Trumpers don’t understand. Long before Trump’s candidacy, total war was declared on the GOP when the Obama administration strategically created the conditions to make its progressive revolution a permanent one. Or so they thought.

First, let’s dump the naivety. Obama has been fully in charge of both the pre- and post- election attacks on Trump. He is the leader of the resistance. The idea that his appointees at the FBI, DOJ, IRS, CIA, State Department, etc., would risk committing multiple felonies without direction from him or his henchman is simply not believable as many long-time political leaders and observers have stated.

Obama’s goal was to weaponize his agencies so as to create the conditions to make it impossible for any Republican to win the presidency again. The circumstantial evidence over the last ten years strongly suggests that Obama was determined to make the 2016 election the last real free election, meaning one in which legal citizens elected the president. Based on his actions during his presidency, it is difficult to not conclude otherwise.

Indeed, Obama even did an interview with actress Gina Rodriguez in which he made clear that illegal aliens who vote won’t be investigated by his administration because the voting records are not cross-checked against the immigration databases.

This is also why Obama ally and socialist billionaire George Soros funds a network of Obama-aligned groups to carry out much of the dirty work. For example, Soros funds a plethora of groups that promote open borders, attack ICE, and make it easier for illegals to avoid arrest.

These groups also fight all efforts to implement any kind of voter ID system that would make it difficult for illegals to vote. Indeed, the current DNC Chairman, Tom Perez, worked with “Casa De Maryland,” a Soros-funded group that successfully convinced the city of College Park to allow illegals to vote in local elections.

But Soros plays an even bigger role in the Obama-led resistance. The House Intelligence Committee reported that Soros and seven to ten other heavy hitters spent $50 million trying to convince people that the phony intel contained in the Dossier was authentic. Soros also funds Media Matters, a leftist group that works to convince social media companies to censor conservatives, a necessary tactic in order for Obama’s soft coup to be successful. And Google, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook appear to be dutifully following the left’s demands.

Are you getting the picture yet? It’s a nifty formula: Register illegals and felons to vote but suppress the votes of conservatives and those who serve our country. Add up all these actions and it’s difficult to not conclude Obama and his leftist allies in various states were engaged in a massive conspiracy to use the power of federal and state governments to influence the electoral process. And much of this occurred before Obama knew Trump would be the GOP nominee.

But let’s bring this conspiracy up to the present. All of this flows nicely into Obama’s plan to use his intelligence agencies as an appendage of the DNC. There is now little doubt that Obama’s appointees involved themselves in a scam to purchase phony intel and then used it as the basis for an application to the FISA court so they could spy on Trump’s campaign. This plot had little to do with Russia and everything to do with creating a damaging narrative about “treason” and “collusion” that was to be spoon fed to their media allies and used to try to remove Trump from office.

But something happened on the way to socialist utopia. Trump won. That was not supposed to happen.

To be blunt, the plan was for Hillary to win and continue the destruction of the American system of limited government, the rule of law, and the free enterprise system. A Hillary victory would have continued Obama’s agenda of open borders, government control of many industries, a cradle to grave welfare system, and emaciated military and socialist policies that would continue economic stagnation. Future elections would appear to be legit but they wouldn’t be.

Under a Clinton presidency, she would continue the Obama immigration policies, thereby allowing a few million more illegals to enter the country and would also massively increase Third World refugees who vote heavily Democratic. Indeed, in 2016 she announced that as president she would increase Syrian refuges alone by 550%. Add to this the aggressive federal/state/private voter registration programs targeting these groups and the result would be a boost of Democrat vote numbers probably large enough to keep winning the White House on a perpetual basis, essentially invalidating the will of the legal majority.

Elections would just be a formality to make the masses feel like they still lived in a free country, but the only free elections would be between Democrats in their own primary. The result would be the transformation of America to a full blown socialist country within a decade. Just as Obama had promised.

Nor should there be any doubt about Obama’s socialist vision for America. This is important because his ideology explains why he is leading the resistance: socialists believe in the Marxist theory that capitalism cannot coexist with socialism, hence they are obligated to destroy the free enterprise system and all the cultural traditions that go along with it. It was not a coincidence that the attacks on traditional marriage, the undermining of religious freedom, the promotion of transgendered “rights,” and other issues challenging traditional mores came to a fore during the Obama years. Obama and the progressives seek to undermine America’s cultural traditions because they are linked to America’s Christian and capitalist heritage. Their socialist ideology explains the chaos we find everywhere we look today. Historically, socialists detest free speech, free press, freedom of religion, and other constitutional rights we all take for granted. Just walk down any big city street with a Trump hat on and you will witness the attacks for yourself. Start getting used to it.

This one is long, it’s deep, and covers one hell of a lot of ground, with a ton of supporting evidence to back up the premise. Nonetheless, I still have a few problems with it. For starters, I can’t buy Obama as the evil genius behind it all. For all his narcissistic arrogance, he’s a stuttering, shambolic, inept moron, and it’s always been my contention that he was never much more than a puppet, with darker, more clever and obscure players pulling his strings from way offstage. Moreover, our descent into socialist darkness started way before he came along anyway.

On the other hand, the ineptness and slow implosion of the Klown Kar Koup does seem to provide some basis for the argument that he was more than just a figurehead, at that.

I also have a problem with this bit:

If the GOP cannot unify to pursue a scandal this deep-rooted and consequential, then they don’t deserve to win in 2020 and will not likely survive as a viable party. It’s as if the Republican establishment wants the Deep State to prevail, Trump to be removed, and America returned to the socialist path it was on under Obama. Are they really that naïve that they don’t understand that once we go down that road, it’s unlikely the damage can be undone?

Dude: the Republican establishment IS the Deep State. Are you really that naive that, even after decades of being betrayed again and again by them, you don’t understand that yet?

Moreover, AG Jeff Sessions needs to take back control of his agency. It is alarming that he appears to be not involved in any DOJ investigations concerning anything remotely related to Russia or Hillary, because he was advised to recuse himself by career DOJ attorney Scott Schools, even though the legal case for Session’s recusal was non-existent. Not surprisingly, Schools was hired by Obama official Sally Yates who was fired by Trump for refusing to support his travel ban. Sessions needs to reverse this silly recusal, hire new staff who are actually loyal to him, and get back on top of investigating the biggest political scandal in American history.

I advise all and sundry not to be holding their breath waiting for it. Whatever he may once have been, Sessions is just another Swamp rat now. His nonchalant willingness to sit idly by as the rogue agency he is supposedly in charge of attempts a blatant overthrow of the legitimately elected government is proof enough of that. This next is certainly right enough, though:

This is do or die time. Failure to act now by the GOP will cost the country dearly. Obama and his progressive allies have an aggressive multi-prong plan to survive congressional investigations, win back the White House in 2020, and resume their effort to take America down the socialist path. This is war, and the Democrats know it, but it’s not clear the Republican leadership understands this moment in history.

Occam’s Razor tells us that they understand it’s war well enough. It’s just that they’re on the other side.

Anything can happen, of course, but I really don’t see the Democrat Socialists winning the White House back in 2020. They might well have “an aggressive multi-prong plan” sure enough. But it’s going to take somebody other than Lieawatha/Fauxcahontas, Crazy Bernie, Sick Hillary!™, or Gropy Joe Biden to implement it. Unless they’re willing to enrage their base by reining in the lunatics; dialing back the howling Marxism and tacking a bit to the middle; and can dig up a complete unknown untainted by scandal, corruption, youthful indiscretion, sexual deviancy, or the kind of greasy, unctuous smarm that oozes off of almost every Democrat-Socialist candidate like oil out of a cracked transmission case, I tend to think their chances of ever selling their chaotic flea circus to Mainstream America again dwindle with every AntiFa assault, Muslim terrorist attack, transgender parade, BlackLiesMurder riot, and accidentally-honest expression of hatred and loathing uttered by one of their bumbling, ignorant Flavors of the Month.

I could be all wet about that, I admit. But in any event, it’s what comes after Trump that we need to be concerned about. And we admittedly have a recruitment problem of our own there. Unless we can somehow find another battle-ready Trump-ish outsider to put forward, it’s going to be a return to DC business as usual when the professional-politican vultures waiting in the wings make Mordor On The Potomac their exclusive domain once more, probably for good.

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The Great Unmasking

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Ooooops.

Thanks to the election of President Trump, we are in the midst of a process I call “the great unmasking.” American leftists and progressives have, until President Trump, gone out of their way to hide their disdain for this country and its (mostly) free-market economy. They are enraged that everything is not perfect by their lights and imagine that they could produce a much better system if only they had absolute power.  

Because the deplorables out there in the American public still cling to patriotism (ever since Karl Marx, the left has disdained nationalism as obstructing worldwide proletarian class solidarity), progressive politicians have hidden their disdain.

But Donald Trump’s election has engendered a mass neurosis we call “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which has engendered a frenzy to be rid of him. Frenzied is never a good mode of action, for it blinds one to obvious pitfalls.

That’s why yesterday, the governor of New York, speaking to a friendly group, let slip a genuine gaffe, in the meaning of Michael Kinsley’s definition: accidentally telling the truth. Nobody could ever state in public that America “was never that great” unless he believed that. That’s why the expression has a ring of sincerity when Cuomo uttered those words.

He’s a Leftard and a Democrat-Socialist (BIRM), so the only surprising thing is that he was stupid and politically maladroit enough to slip up and express his true beliefs right out loud. And even that ain’t much of a surprise, given how completely Out about such things so many of them are since we smacked ’em right in their filthy gobs with President Donald J Trump.

They hate America. They hate the white guys who founded it. They hate the white guys who held it together and made it work all along. They hate the very idea that anybody might believe it’s great (or ever was). They hate the fact that we’re no longer willing to sit meekly back and tolerate their abuse. Most of all, they hate the deeply-buried, subconscious knowledge that they’re a bunch of pussified parasites whose very existence as peurile, neurotic, self-loathing, eternally-complaining, shit-stirring brats would be measurable in minutes in the Marxist shitholes they so admire.

Nemo provides a few worthy ripostes over in Bill’s comment section. As for Koo-mo, naturally he got busy backpedaling and non-apology apologizing, for all the good it’ll do him anywhere outside NYC—where they won’t see what all the fuss was about anyway.

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Buried

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Well, well, well, well, well.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – The remote compound in Amalia, New Mexico, where five adults and 11 children were found after a raid by law enforcement earlier this month has been razed to the ground.

Property owner Jason Bader said there was a court order allowing the seizure of a stolen trailer that made up part of the compound.

The compound – where authorities found the remains of a still-unidentified child in a post-raid search – had stood vacant since being raided by Taos County deputies on August 3.

MOST danged curious, eh? And convenient, too. As is the fact that most everybody has gone silent about its being a jihadi training facility all of a sudden. Ace says:

We’re now destroying active crime-scenes before trial?

So… the site is so dangerous it must be destroyed before trial, and a judge decided these men posed no threat and should be released on signature bond?

Can these two things make sense at the same time?

Actually, they can. But none of us ought to be too happy about the reasons why.

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MORE collusion!

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You just gotta love these gormless, hapless clowns. For certain values of “love,” natch.

A coordinated campaign by more than 100 newspapers Thursday will see publication of a wide variety of editorials, all condemning President Trump for his attacks on the press and pretty much anything and everything. (Update: Reported number now over 300.)

This is what fellow recovering journalist Kerry Dougherty so astutely calls “briar-patch-level genius.”

Here we have a president attacking the mainstream media as lying “enemies of the people” and “fake news” trying to bring him down. And over there we have a significant chunk of the mainstream media publishing a nationwide coordinated campaign of collusion to bring him down.

Trump was not elected despite his often outrageous behavior and statements. He was elected because of his outrageous behavior and statements.

They promised drastic change and profound offense to so many establishment types, especially in the East and the media, who in their self-satisfied position of power and comfort had for so long patronized and ignored the complaints and pleas of that plurality.

Had those elites of both parties paid genuine attention to flyover country’s concerns, frustrations and fears, as silly and stupid as they seem to disconnected Beltway know-it-all’s, they would not be in today’s baffling, powerless position. There would have been no need for a Trump. And by the way, isn’t it strange how a billionaire from a New York high-rise could detect the heartland’s hurt better than those elected from that region?

Actually, it isn’t strange in the least; since they are the authors of that hurt, and the perpetuators of it, it’s no more than obvious and inevitable. It’s not so much that they can’t detect it as that they hope like hell we can’t detect their disinterest in it, and most especially their role as creators of it.

Trump did not invent many Americans’ visceral dislike of the media. He’s using it, exactly as these 100+ newspapers will use their readers’ visceral dislike of Trump to influence a large audience on this day. It’s all fair game in a free society, even one as bitterly splintered as ours these days.

Many silent Americans see a Washington paper, for example, chronicling in excess of 4,000 Trump exaggerations and lies. Fair enough.

Where was that passion for lie detection during Obama’s endless reign of error when he spewed serial untruths about, among others, Solyndra, Fast and Furious, the IRS scandal, Benghazi’s video roots and how Americans could keep their insurance, doctor and about $2,500 in savings under Obamacare?

Oh, we all know well enough where that “passion for lie detection” was—which is a YUGE part of their problem now. Limbaugh knows it too:

Now, let’s go to this media-coordinated effort started by some editorial writer at the Boston Globe to have America’s major newspapers unite and run anti-Trump editorials today while maintaining that they are not united in opposition to Trump! While trying to maintain that they are not the enemy of the people — which, by the way, Trump has never said. He said fake news is the enemy of the people.  He never said the media in toto or the media at large. My point is they’re proving everything Trump’s alleged about ’em with this little scheme that they’re trying.

But here’s the thing about this: They’re not gonna persuade anyone. This is gonna backfire on them because you know what it’s proving?  It’s proving something very simple. It’s proving the media is biased — and of course, they maintain that they aren’t. But you can’t get a more classic definition and illustration of media bias than this.

Trump has always said the fake news is the enemy of the people, but not all the news, not the entire news media. But for some reason all these news people think that he is talking about them. Now, from a couple of days ago Little Brian Stelter at CNN: “More than 100 Newspapers Will Publish Editorials Decrying Trump’s Anti-Press Rhetoric — [Marjorie] Pritchard said. ‘We have some big newspapers, but the majority are from smaller markets, all enthusiastic about standing up to Trump’s assault on journalism.”

I can’t tell you what a majority of the American people — how big a majority — agree with Trump on this. I cannot tell you how many Americans are fed up with the media, with the unfairness, with the bias. You know it as well as I do. Maybe even better. Trump is more accessible than any president has ever been.  Trump talks to the media more often than any president ever has. Trump lets them into cabinet meetings. He lets them into little meetings that go on in the Oval Office when foreign leaders are in town.

He sometimes conducts entire meetings at the White House with the media present. He stops on the way to Marine One — the helicopter or wherever. He stops, and he’ll talk to the press for 15 or 20 minutes. He just happens to call ’em out on their BS! Trump has not spied on them the way Obama did.

All of which adds up to make their fearful caterwauling and indignant protestations over Trump’s bluntly accurate characterization of them all the more amusing. Back to Malcolm for the closer, whose own contempt for Trump is apparently uncontainable:

As part of their drift off into monopoly arrogance, newspapers in general and editorial pages in particular somehow came to think and lecture like they knew better than the readers who paid good money to read their words. They were pharmacists handing out a daily dose of the news they prescribed. Not a good attitude for any business to have toward customers, especially in an era of expanding free choices.

And now these same editors and publications will again lecture the country about the dangers and evils of the man they didn’t like 646 days ago, who punches back and got elected by millions who didn’t read those lectures then either. Other media, righteously nodding their heads, will cover it conscientiously and copiously as if it’s important medicine and of no self-interest.

By Friday, those pages will be in the bottom of recycle bins and bird cages. And in their cozy, mutual isolations, millions on both sides will feel sure once more that they’re in the right.

Ahh, but there’s the rub, see: one side IS in the right. And it ain’t the side trying to bring down a duly-elected President with lies and skullduggery, however one Andrew Malcolm (or anybody else) may feel about the guy.

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RIP, ‘Retha

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Another great one gone, after a long, tough illness. I sometimes use a quote for these death notices—”May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,” from Hamlet, if I remember right. But it’s most especially poignant in this case, because now that she’s joined the choir, Aretha Franklin will surely be handling all the lead lines from here on out.

Kinda spooky that the King of Rock and Roll and the Queen of Soul died on the same day, ain’t it?

Everybody knows “Respect,” of course, but this here is one of my own personal faves. The original version is great too, but this one is just so danged much fun. Note ye well, too, that this vid also features Matt “Guitar” Murphy, another legend we lost not long ago.




Rest ye well, Miz Franklin, and may God eternally bless you.

Update! Damned good obit from Kass:

The death of Aretha Franklin should remind us that great singers are more than just the soundtrack of our lives.

They lived their own lives, sang their own songs, but the thing is, it is through our own lives that we remember them, marking passages: The feel of the city on a hot night in August, that beautiful brown-eyed Sicilian girl in your car on the first date, smiling at you, the windows down, Aretha belting out “Chain of Fools.”

“I sing to the realists,” Franklin once said, “people who accept it like it is.”

And so, to be real about her passing, we know that recordings will save her voice for us. We can always find her when we need her. She’s just a click away.

But now that she’s quiet and gone, and the news is full of memories and the tributes flow and her greatest hits are playing, something happens. At least it happened to me, and if you loved her voice, maybe it happened to you.

Like a pin withdrawn from a wheel. It rolls and spins away.

A man I know who has made a success in the ruthless business of American popular music once told me that there are many great voices, but far fewer great writers.

“There are a million girls with great pipes,” he said. “But there aren’t a million songwriters who can write the music that you’ll always remember.”

Maybe so, but I think Aretha Franklin’s voice transcended all that. Hers was America’s voice, so fine, so strong, so female, a natural woman.

Amen to every word of it. Even wearing what my grandma called “house shoes” and a tatty old sweater—as in the vid above—she was nothing but pure class, and as fine as they come in every way that matters.

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AT LAST: Russia-collusion/election-rigging smoking gun FOUND!

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And it’s pointed directly at the head of the Grand Wizard of the Coup Cucks Clan himself.

In his online appeal for money after being fired this week, disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok credited an unlikely source to vouch for his victim status: The Weekly Standard.

At one time a leading conservative magazine, the Standard declared last month that Strzok’s plight was merely an “overwrought tale of bias” and the case against him is “just sound and fury.” The article brushed off Strzok’s actions as “several bad judgment calls” and blasted Congressional Republicans for continuing a criminal investigation into the now-unemployed G-man.

Strzok is following only 32 people on his newly-verified Twitter account. Bill Kristol, the editor-at-large of the Standard, is one of them.

So, what’s with the fanboying between the Standard—an allegedly serious publication dedicated to advancing conservative principles—and a corrupt government bureaucrat who embodies everything the conservative movement fought against for decades?

Julie Kelly has done some excellent journalistic work here—REAL journalism, not the kind we’re all too accustomed to. I’ll quote from it extensively here, because…because…well, because I just can’t help myself, dammit.

I found an article in the Standards archives this week that might explain why. On July 24, 2016, just days before Strzok helped launch a counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign, Kristol gave Strzok and the Obama Justice Department a big assist from the anti-Trump Right by posting a flawed and questionably-sourced article. “Putin’s Party” is compelling evidence that Kristol and the Standard were far from mere sideline observers as the Trump-Russia collusion scam took shape in the summer of 2016.

At the very least, the timing of the article suggests there was careful coordination between the central players—including the Hillary Clinton campaign—and Bill Kristol to derail Trump’s candidacy just weeks before the election. But the article’s content also serves to raise alarming questions about the claims by many Republicans that “conservatives” had no knowledge of or involvement with the Christopher Steele dossier.

Kristol’s article hits on every single one of the Simpson-Steele talking points: Trump forced the GOP to water-down language on the Ukraine in the party’s platform (it didn’t happen); the Russians were behind Wikileaks’ release of the DNC’s hacked emails (unproven); Trump encouraged foreign powers to interfere in the election (he didn’t); and Trump would not honor U.S. commitments to NATO (an overblown assessment of Trump’s NATO criticism nearly all the Republican candidates made). He listed a handful of unknown Trump campaign associates who would soon become household names, including campaign manager Paul Manafort; national security advisor, Lt. General Michael Flynn; and foreign policy aide Carter Page. (Strzok and the FBI formally opened their investigation into the three men—and campaign aide George Papadopoulos—on July 31, 2016.)

The content of Kristol’s piece closely mirrored reporting by other news outlets at the same time. (Lee Smith wrote about how the Fusion-planted media echo chamber evolved before the election.) But despite the flimsiness of the accusations, Kristol took his advocacy a step further.

Did he ever. Which oughta be enough to send you off with a quickness to peruse the rest of it. Bottom line:

Unfortunately, there are still some conservatives who trust Kristol and the Standard fairly to report on the Trump presidency and Republican Congress. It’s important that the public fully understands what role Kristol and his publication played—and continue to play—in fueling the biggest political corruption scandal in American history.

Kristol asks a lot of questions on Twitter. It’s time for him to answer some now.

Meh, why bother? He’ll only lie about his key role in the most damning and damaging political scandal in American history. Hats off to Kelly anyway, for her truly great work in digging up this whole bait-shop’s worth of worms.

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Social media is death

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Ye Olde Vodkapundit spells it out:

The beauty of the pre-social media internet is that it was flat. That is, anyone could publish a website, and every website existed on the same plane as every other. The hyperlink held us bloggers to account, by directing readers to the source material which they could judge for themselves. A one-man blog could go toe-to-toe with major publications, simply by the blogger’s ability to write well enough to attract, maintain, and grow an audience. See: Matt Drudge, Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, and many, many others.

Social media killed that.

Instead of a flat plane populated by millions of websites, each social media platform is a silo, designed to keep readers and users clicking away inside the same platform… day after day, minute by minute, like hamsters in a Habitrail. On Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc, your ability to go toe-to-toe with the majors is limited by the platform’s reach — and more importantly, by the platform’s tolerance of you and of what you have to say.

Hence, deplatforming, and the stultifying unpredictability of developing your audience in someone else’s silo.

As somebody who got started back in those early halcyon days of the relatively level playing field that existed back then, I can flatly say that Stephen has his finger dead on it here.

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Relentless

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At what point do we draw a line under this and call it what it truly is: government-endrosed and -abetted harrassment and persecution of a member of a hated religion to deny his Contitutionally-protected (supposedly) right to freely practice and express his beliefs?

In June, the Supreme Court decided the case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, issuing a powerful rebuke to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for its “religious hostility” toward Christian baker Jack Phillips. Phillips had refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, and the commission had compared his decision to religious arguments in favor of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazism.

Now, the commission is again going after Phillips for declining to create a custom cake — this time a cake celebrating transgenderism. On Tuesday night, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Christian law firm that represented Phillips before the Supreme Court and helped him gain an important 7-2 victory, filed a federal lawsuit against the commission to forestall action against Phillips.

“The state of Colorado is ignoring the message of the U.S. Supreme Court by continuing to single out Jack for punishment and to exhibit hostility toward his religious beliefs,” ADF Senior Vice President of U.S. Legal Division Kristen Waggoner declared in a statement. “Even though Jack serves all customers and simply declines to create custom cakes that express messages or celebrate events in violation of his deeply held beliefs, the government is intent on destroying him—something the Supreme Court has already told it not to do.”

On the very day the Supreme Court decided to hear Masterpiece Cakeshop (June 26, 2017), a caller asked the bakery to make a cake with a pink inside and a blue outside, celebrating a gender transition from male to female. The shop politely declined, but Phillips believes that the same lawyer, on other occasions, requested that he create other custom cakes with messages that violate his faith — a cake celebrating Satan and a cake with Satanic symbols. The lawyer, a man identifying as a woman, goes by the name Autumn Scardina.

Shortly after the Supreme Court gave Jack Phillips his win, denouncing the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for “religious hostility,” the state began to investigate Phillips again, finding probable cause that he had discriminated against the transgender lawyer who Phillips believes placed the call.

In other words, the horribly-misnomered Colorado “Civil Rights” Commission—a mangling of language so staggering in its grotesquerie as to shatter credulity—is nothing more than the exclusive plaything of a single obssessive psychotic freak.

That’s your tax dollars at work, Colorodans. Which means that now, it’s your move.

To forestall a second round of litigation, ADF filed suit against the commission in federal court. Jeremy Tedesco, ADF’s senior counsel and vice president of U.S. Advocacy and Administration, told PJ Media his firm would “preemptively file a lawsuit in federal court to try to stop what the commission is doing.”

“We think the circumstances are uniquely aligned to do that,” Tedesco explained.

All well and good, I guess. But it couldn’t be more clear at this point that when it comes to getting these odious fascists off our backs and out of our lives, the only thing that’s ever going to do the trick is to start killing them in job lots. At the very least, this Autumn Scardina creature in particular should be doxxed, terrorized, robbed of his/her/its livelihood, surrounded by screaming, fist-waving protesters every minute of his/her/its day, and generally hounded until he/she/it breaks down into a blubbering, trembling pile of disagreggated protoplasm.

And in case anybody out there persists in making the mistake of thinking this is about cakes in any way, shape or form:

While the commission — and some liberal Supreme Court justices — argued that Phillips had discriminated against the same-sex couple in 2012 based on their sexual orientation, he constantly argued that he merely wished to opt out of creating a cake to celebrate an event he did not consider a true wedding. This was not the first time Phillips had turned town such cake orders, either. He has always refused to bake any Halloween-themed cakes, which are consistently in demand every October.

Furthermore, when Craig and Mullins requested their cake, Phillips offered to sell them anything else in the store, but they refused. Phillips was not engaging in discrimination against them — he was refusing to bake a cake that would convey a message he disagreed with.

Ironically, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission actually defended another baker who refused to bake a cake that would convey a message. In 2015, the commission declined to take up an appeal involving Azucar Bakery, which refused to bake Bible-shaped cakes with messages against homosexuality. The bakery’s owner, Marjorie Silva, said she refused to bake the cakes because the writing and imagery were “hateful and offensive.”

The very same commission that defended Silva’s free speech rights trampled on Phillips’ free speech rights. This was one major reason why the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Phillips. (The Court was also persuaded by the commission’s outrageously offensive comparison between Phillips’ religious refusal to bake the cake and a defense of Nazism, which was particularly egregious because Phillips’ father fought in World War II and liberated a concentration camp.)

If all the freak actually wanted was a goddamned cake to “celebrate” his/her/its dementia and depravity, he/she/it could have gone to who even knows how many other bakeries and gotten one easily enough, up to and including the above-mentioned Silva’s shop. No, this self-loathing abomination’s true goal is the suppression of the right to practice one’s religion freely and in peace. Bottom line:

“The most common misconception amongst people generally and people who care about religious freedom is that you can win a case and then walk away,” Tedesco, the ADF lawyer, explained. “We always tell our friends that our opposition doesn’t rest. I don’t think there’s any better example of that principle than this same commission taking up essentially the same case against the same man.”

“The Left and progressively-minded commissions like this will never rest,” Tedesco warned. “It’s just a matter of eternal vigilance.”

“If we tire out, if we become weary in defending these things, we will ultimately lose these freedoms for the next generation,” he added, ominously.

Taking this and every other God-given freedom away from those who desire only to be left alone is precisely the goal of Leftist swine, and they will never tire or relent in pursuit of it. They will rise from their own noxious ashes again and again and again, as many times as it takes, until they get what they want.

Repeat after me: they will not stop. They will have to BE stopped. Lawyers and lawsuits won’t do it. Angry op-eds won’t do it. Listening to Rush Limbaugh every day won’t do it. Voting certainly won’t do it. Nothing short of actual physical confrontation and violence will.

Well, so be it then. Kill ’em all. Let God sort ’em out. Try as I might, I can no longer see any way this restart of the long-stalled Darwinian-selection process doesn’t begin soon. As dismal as I once considered the prospect, I can no longer honestly say I give a damn. Let them reap what they’ve sown; may they have joy of their foolish, fascist choice.

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No more cheeks to turn

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What he said.

If you’re not ready to go to war, you’re not paying attention. The war is already on. It is escalating with or without your participation. Although it’s not a shooting war, more Americans are being caught in the crossfire as the stakes continue to rise.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat who doubles as police commissioner, prohibited Portland Police from providing additional resources to federal officers begging for assistance (during the anti-ICE “protests” in Portland).

It wasn’t just federal authorities that Wheeler imperiled. Brianna Hakes, a food cart operator, was confronted by masked thugs who “threatened to hurt her and burn down the cart,” but police did nothing. One 52-year-old local artist photographing the scene had his camera slammed into his face by protesters. Charles Williams, a 62-year-old man, was threatened with an allegedly “AIDS-infected needle” by protestors. Lisa Leonard, a 53-year-old disabled woman, told reporters that “occupiers hit her on her head, disabled her electric wheelchair, and lifted her in the air when she complained about loud drumming.” Police made no arrests.

Nor did police respond when protestors yelled racial slurs at ICE agents. One black agent was called the N-word, a “blood traitor,” and an Uncle Tom. Nor did police respond when ICE agents were followed home. One agent “was trailed in a car and confronted when he went to pick up his daughter from summer camp,” reports Ngo. “Later people showed up at his house.” Another agent “had his name and photo plastered on flyers outside his home accusing him of being part of the ‘Gestapo.’”

The time has come for those on the right to dig in to the culture war against the Left. There can be no compromise with an enemy whose triumph comes at the cost of the legitimate institutions that represent the sovereignty of the people of this nation. There can be no compromise with the Left about who may rightly rule. Compromise is victory for the Left. Compromise, for the Left, is reculant pour mieux sauter—drawing back to take a better leap.

In March 2016, three men in Georgia threatened a homeowner with a gun over a Trump campaign sign in his front yard. In May 2016, a Trump supporter in California needed a half-dozen stitches after a mob of illegal aliens and their supporters bashed open his head. In October 2016, a GOP office was evacuated in North Carolina after a bomb threat was received. In the month President Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, a Georgia man was murdered after joking he had voted for Trump. Again that November, a man in Massachusetts was punched in the back of the head, knocked unconscious, suffered a fractured eye socket and broken nose, because he had a discussion with friends about Trump that six thugs overheard.

The following month, Justin Barkley, a former New York state employee, murdered a 52-year-old UPS driver who he confused with the president in a fit of unhinged rage. “I shot and killed Donald Trump purposely, intentionally, and very proudly,” he said.

Also that December, a man was stabbed in the throat in Washington for openly supporting the president, and a 69-year-old woman was nearly beaten to death with a chair for the same. In February 2017, a gay Trump supporter was beaten unconscious in Texas after pulling out a lighter with Trump’s picture on it in public. Again in February, a man in Ohio was sent to the hospital after being jumped in a parking lot by anti-Trump thugs. In March 2017, a man in Florida waspunched in the face at a red light for having a Trump sticker on his car, sending him to the hospital for five stitches.

None of this violence, however, has encouraged the Left to police its own. Rather, the Left calls for more violence, with encouragement and support from Democratic Party leadership.

Understand, the political leadership of the Left isn’t instigating a war, they are calling for the escalation of a war that is already underway.

Bingo. This next bit is brilliantly perceptive:

Trump has offered us the opportunity of a lifetime by winning over independents, Democrats, and Republicans alike. Long divided along the folds of party lines, but increasingly unified now by a common cause, these Americans can agree that America comes first, that citizens should be at the center of American politics, and that there is a right way to live. The Trump Era is one of cultivating the necessary national consciousness to fight and win.

But in order to fight, let alone win, the first step is understanding that the war is already on. The next step is understanding that we are first and foremost fighting to overthrow something that is already upon us, not necessarily to conserve something of which we have some nostalgic memory. Our way of life, our traditions, all of the things we want to conserve. But to do that, we must overthrow the Left’s hegemony.

Everything that the Left touches turns to ash, and if winning is the objective, then Americans should become intolerant of leftists like Mayor Wheeler.

It’s the emphasized lines above that really struck me, although long as I’ve been arguing that the Left has already won the culture wars and remade America into something it was never supposed to be, the concept really should have occurred to me too before now. In any event, he’s perfectly correct: the time for truly “conserving” anything is behind us. It wouldn’t be possible anyway without forcibly removing these vicious jackals’ fangs from our bloody necks first, then pulling their teeth and declawing them for good measure.

Judging by their obvious frothing lunacy, we’re all gonna need rabies shots too.

(Via Ol’ Remus)

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Slavery, re-branded

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Socialism 101.

It is important for people to learn the connection between property rights as being directly protected by liberty, and how this connection ensures life. To help picture this clearly, think of yourself as Robinson Crusoe. Or Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Or if you’re talking to the very young, Matt Damon in The Martian.

These fictional characters illustrate this bond between property and life. When these castaways were shipwrecked alone, the only choices presented to them is either to survive or to perish. In order to live, they will have to employ the use of their mind and direct their body to produce the necessary requirement of survival: shelter, water, food.

A socialist will bring up the example: imagine if a year later, another castaway is stranded on the same patch of land as you. Don’t you have the moral obligation to share your shelter, water and food with him? The answer to this is not “yes you’re obligated morally to share” nor “no, you’re not obligated morally to share”, but rather, the correct answer is: “you shall decide”.

Why is “you shall decide” the right answer? It is because the shelter, water and food you’ve created is a product of your mind and body, which is an extension to your very life.

The laws of survival which applies to you when you were first shipwrecked applies to the new castaway, as well. He too must employ his mind and body to ensuring his own survival. Because if he did produce the requirement for his survival, you yourself do not have the right to take the product of his labor from him against his will in the case where you fail to produce what you need to survive.

Naturally, logic obliges, that if another person is shipwrecked, you’d want to help him, because he will in turn, be a useful addition to your life. You could request that he help you plow your land in exchange for food. In this case, both parties engage in the exchange of value for value. No one is required to involuntary give up their property.

This is capitalism. This is the reason why socialist despises the defining of liberty as being tied to property rights, and want to do away with property rights completely, by condemning the profit motive in capitalism. It is because capitalism isn’t slavery.

A bit awkardly-written, shall we say, in spots—but let he who is without sin cast the first etc…ahem. I suspect maybe English is not her first language, not that there’s anything wrong with that. No biggie, of course; all in all, she lays out the core philosophical case defining socialism as slavery simply and well, I think, without resort to the practical argument reciting the litany of its sure-thing-every-time failure. How useful her argument might be in terms of persuasion is open to question at best, sadly enough, since the blockhead Left isn’t listening anyway.

(Via Insty)

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Strozk out!

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Good riddance. And about damned time.

In tweets celebrating news that FBI agent Peter Strzok was fired from the FBI Monday, President Donald Trump called for the reopening of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, declaring the original investigation led by Strzok a “total fraud.”

Which it most certainy was; it has that in common with Mueller’s Klown Kar Koup shitshow.

Strzok was one of the lead agents in the criminal investigation into whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton violated federal law by storing classified information on a private email server. The FBI under Comey declined to prosecute Clinton for any possible violations of the Espionage Act. In Comey’s statement, he said Clinton had acted with “extreme carelessness.”

Usually described in the accompanying indictment (absent here), by investigators with actual integrity (also absent here), as “negligence.” To wit:

An earlier draft of Comey’s statement used stronger language, saying Clinton had been “grossly negligent” — a term that would have carried legal meaning under the Espionage Act. In July 2018 congressional testimony, Strzok admitted that metadata shows that Comey’s statement was edited in June 2016 on his computer, but he claimed he cannot remember making the edit.

Uh huh. But Comey’s initial (and temporary) lapse into honesty wasn’t going to help Hillary avoid being frogmarched off to prison like she should have been, so adjustments had to be made—and were.

It’s beginning to look as if claims of monstrous collusion between Russian officials and U.S. political operatives were true. But it wasn’t Donald Trump who was guilty of Russian collusion. It was Hillary Clinton and U.S. intelligence officials who worked with Russians and others to entrap Trump.

That’s the stunning conclusion of a RealClear Investigations report by Lee Smith, who looked in-depth at the controversial June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between officials of then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign staff and a Russian lawyer known to have ties with high-level officials in Vladimir Putin’s government.

The media have spun a tale of Trump selling his soul to the Russians for campaign dirt to use against Hillary, beginning with the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting.

But “a growing body of evidence…indicates that the meeting may have been a setup — part of a broad effort to tarnish the Trump campaign involving Hillary Clinton operatives employed by Kremlin-linked figures and Department of Justice officials,” wrote Smith.

Which it most certainly was. Read all of this last link; it’s so chock-a-block full of good, thorough reporting and right-on truth it’ll make quite a refreshing contrast to the stinking codswallop Fake News Media keeps right on desperately shoveling.

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“They Are Not Never Trump – They Are Never You“

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Lots of folks still seem not to like the term, but for my money there’s never going to be an epithet that cuts more directly to the chase than: cuckservatives.

They hate you because you refuse to honor and respect them, to validate their cheesy status within the Beltway hierarchy, and to acknowledge them as your betters. Your pig-headed uppityness has disrupted their scam. The old paradigm, the model of go-along/get-along and feed the crackers out there in America articles about lib outrages to keep them writing checks, no longer cuts it. You’ve stripped them of their status by holding them accountable for their failure to fight for conservatism, and for us.

And it is such a pathetic status – maybe they are fighting so hard because the stakes are so low. For some, it’s a mention on the masthead of an anorexically thin magazine that now publishes only because some zillionaire keeps handing its boss wads of cash, the actual subscribers to the cruise-shilling brochure having abandoned ship after the seven hundredth “Trump Is Icky!” expose. For others, it’s the chance to be the nominal conservative voice on Morning Joe, ready to pretend that actual conservatives concur with the ideological stylings of the Mick Jagger of flaccid, self-indulgent momrock.

Then there are those lucky few who get the “Here, boy!” to come live inside the house, collared and lying at the feet of their masters by the fire. What’s horrifying is that this is their dream, their sad, sad dream. Take the current occupant of the non-David Brooks prissy poodle position at the New York Times, Bret Stephens. He eagerly accepted the iron discipline of his new job after his first column hinted that the weird weather religion of the ruling class – the one that demands you Normals sacrifice your money and your sovereignty for the sake of the elite’s virtue – might not be, you know, totally a thing. He thank-you-sir-may-I-have-anothered, learned to heel, and pleased his masters by coming out hard against the Second Amendment like a good boy. Having got a taste for biscuits, he is still seeking treats – and gets them – like when he praised the firing of Rosanne and then praised the non-firing of actual racist Sarah Jeong.

Hypocrisy, thy name is True Conservatism™.

Read the rest of it, wherein Schlichter scorches ’em good.

Update! Movement Conservatism=Kabuki Konservatism.

I’ve addressed the programmatic Left in my two most recent books, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace—a study of the eternal battle between good and evil, centered on the moral nihilism of the Frankfurt School of 20th-century Communist philosophers—and The Fiery Angel, a series of interlocking essays regarding some of the touchstones of Western art and culture, from the Greeks through the 20th century, and how they provide the antidote to the spiritual poison injected into Western veins by the Frankfurters and their fellow travelers in academe and now journalism.

Now, does everything from the Oresteia to Wagner’s Ring cycle form a coherent, intellectually and emotionally consistent “conservative” program, by which we can live our lives? Clearly not.  The great works of art are and must always be non-didactic. Politicized art is worthless; but art that has political resonance generally stands the test of time.

To my ears, then, the constant harping in some quarters on “movement” conservatism is reminiscent of everything I’ve ever heard from the Left, or experienced in East Germany and the old Soviet Union. I’m not suggesting that “true” conservatism involves replacing one (transient) set of “preenciples” with another one, albeit far older. Rather, my argument is that conservatism isn’t a movement at all. Nor should it be. Rather, it’s a simple acknowledgement of timeless verities and a willingness to defend them against malevolent faddishness masquerading as “progress,” whose object is the destruction of our culture and its replacement with… well, nothing.

In short, it’s a recognition of great cultural peril, and the willingness to do something about it.

And that we did, by rejecting the “movement” phonies in favor of an obstreporous outsider eager to step over the supine Repukes to duke it out with the Deep State swamp-dwellers toe to toe. Now, after Kid MAGA’s having landed some solid haymakers on the Left’s glass jaw, the shattered sissy-marys are flopping around on the canvas in conniptions, their manager belatedly trying to rig the fight by bribing the judges with a few “candid” pics of Nancy Pelosi in the shower. Meanwhile the GOPe Fauntleroys, having been roused from their slumber by heavy administration of buckets of ice water and smelling salts, wander around the arena trying to pick fights with members of the crowd, enraged over being heckled by them.

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Best of times, worst of times

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Unbearable thoughts.

Anti-Americanism has the same psychological dynamic as anti-Semitism. When the anti-Semite launches into his harangue, we instinctively recoil. We recognize that he is a troubled soul. We understand that he is obsessively tracing the inner contours of a mental cage that exists beyond the reach of rationality.

The insights of Revel and Rangel suggest that the Americans who suffer from anti-Americanism must also be afflicted by an unbearable thought.

What unbearable thought? The answer is ready at hand. The Progressive project has gone from strength to strength politically in America – and everywhere it has brought ruin in its wake. Detroit was once an economic powerhouse, and San Francisco was once America’s most beautiful city. Decades of one-party rule according to the Progressive project have wrecked Detroit, and San Francisco is becoming something truly strange, a modern city overwhelmed by human excrement in public places.

Hm. Must be a coincidence, right?

How did these three beautiful and prosperous American cities morph from the best of cities to the worst of cities in only a couple of generations? Let’s look at who is in charge.

San Francisco has not had a Republican mayor since 1964, the height of Motown music in one of the other cities we are discussing. For the past fifty-plus years, San Francisco has been led by a procession of Democrats.

Detroit’s last Republican mayor finished his term in 1962, around the time the Supremes were singing “Where Did Our Love Go?” Now they would be singing, “Where did our city go?” Since the early 1960s, Detroit has had a succession of Democrat mayors, including Coleman Young and their famous hip-hop mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, now serving a long prison term. Michigan, similar to Illinois and California, has two Democrat U.S. senators.

Anyone see a common thread here? Cities run by liberal Democrats, implementing liberal policies, with predictable results. These are certainly not the only American cities ruined by Democrat governance – there are also Newark; New Orleans; and Washington, D.C. to name a few others.

Back to my first link for the only rational conclusion:

The Progressives’ failure is not a failure to enact their agenda. They have dominated America politically for the past century. FDR gave us really big government, and the federal government has become a scandal of fraud, waste, and abuse – a scandal that even the Big Government Press cannot keep hidden from us. LBJ declared War on Poverty – and that war was lost. Instead of eliminating poverty, the War on Poverty has made poverty more pathological, creating an underclass, often now described as “permanent,” living on government handouts. Even the Progressives’ anti-Americanism was given free rein with the election of Barack Obama, who shared their obsession with “fundamentally transforming” America. Yet wave after wave of electoral victory has not made American Progressives happy.

Whenever the voters put the Progressives in charge, the result is governmental metastasis and social catastrophe – by necessity. The left is simply wrong about how things work. It is easy to come up with programs that defy common sense. It is also possible to use governmental power to impose those programs on society. But the power of government can’t make them work.

As I always say: their argument isn’t with us. It’s with reality.

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Who and what we’re fighting

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Hate to say it, but he’s right. For now, anyway.

At this moment, Ohio Democrats and their Beltway masters are diligently working to steal the state’s 12th Congressional District from Republican Troy Balderson. Balderson’s Democratic opponent, Danny O’Connor, refused to concede after narrowly losing the special election and a few hours later — the county where he works — miraculously “discovered” 588 uncounted votes in a “routine audit.” When they were counted, Balderson’s lead shrank by 190. Similar skullduggery will accompany the count of provisional and absentee ballots, which will inevitably lead to an automatic recount, which will ultimately lead to an O’Connor “victory.”

What does this have to do with conservative confusion?

It’s a timely reminder that the Democratic Party is little more than a criminal conspiracy and that any conservative who sits at home during the midterms, griping about “GOPes,” will be complicit in the destruction of the republic. If this sounds over the top, think about who will take over the leadership of crucial committees if the Democrats flip enough seats to regain a majority in the House: Adam Schiff will probably become the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee — Adam Schiff! Before we go any further, think about that. This buffoon is still braying about Russian collusion even as he covers up the crimes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Schiff’s first order of business as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee will be to halt any ongoing investigations into Obama administration abuses of power — particularly the illegal deploymentof the FBI, CIA, and IRS against domestic political opponents of the Democratic Party, including the Trump presidential campaign. Schiff will likewise close down all inquiries into Mrs. Clinton’s copious catalogue of crimes. Having thus enabled Obama administration officials to escape justice, Schiff will then pivot to his primary goal — destroying the Trump Presidency.

OH-12 shouldn’t have been close enough for the Democrats to steal. The razor-thin majority by which Balderson won is the result of absent suburban voters who have forgotten that, after 2006, the Democrats nearly destroyed the U.S. economy and set the stage for the Obama era with all its trademark criminality. The Democrats are crooks and liars. Even worse, they are incompetent. If they are allowed to get their tentacles on the levers of power again, they will ruin everything they touch, and it will probably require more than mere votes to get rid of them next time. Conservatives can save the republic from all this by showing up for the midterms.

I repeat: he’s right. The GOPe is certainly overdue for a serious reckoning itself, as I’ve long argued here. But with Trump making serious progress hacking away at the Deep State, the first order of business right now has to be the total destruction of the Democrat Socialist Party as anything resembling a nationally-viable organization. There’s never going to be a better time; their collapse into a degenerate, hysterical horror show has provided normal Americans with an appalling picture of what they really have in mind for them.

All that said, though, I can’t quite agree with the assertion of the subhed that “the worst Republican is better than the best Democrat.” I’d posit that the worst Republican IS a Democrat—a stealth Democrat, that is. Which means that, now that the Dem-Soc bastards are letting their freak flag fly openly, they’re actually the more honest of the two. Nice thing is, as the Vichy GOPers lapse deeper and deeper into abject Trump derangement in their own right, they might just end up destroying themselves without further active measures required from us.

So yeah, we hold our noses this one last time and go vote GOP. Till now, that was a frustrating and infuriating exercise resulting only in a tacit endorsement of the endless DC circle-jerk. Now, we can do so contentedly, secure in the knowledge that the nullification of the greatest threat to whatever’s left of the American way of life might at last be on the horizon. After that, we kick Leviathan’s other leg out from under him and bring him down in a sodden heap.

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Etha—NO

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I do believe I’ve mentioned it before, but one of the moments from the Republican primary race when I was least happy with Trump and Cruz earned my somewhat grudging respect was when they were in Iowa…and Cruz flatly said the ethanol subsidies were going the way of the dinosaur if he was elected, while Trump pandered to the corn lobby. Trump was wrong then, and Cruz was right. Period.

Amid all the media hoo-ha over President Trump’s latest tweets, tariffs and the Russia investigation, you might have missed a significant report — the Environmental Protection Agency says ethanol made from corn and soybeans and added to our gasoline has become an environmental disaster. So why do we continue to make it?

The devastating report — based on, yes, actual “science” — shows that the forced addition of ethanol to the nation’s gasoline is making our air dirtier.

The irony, of course, is that ethanol’s entire rationale is that it would make our air cleaner.

Why do we keep doing this? The farm-based ethanol lobby not only wants current standards of up to 10% of our fuel made up of ethanol (the “E10” standard), but would like to see it rise to 15% (E15). And, unfortunately, President Trump seems open to the idea.

Is ethanol really that bad?

Yes. Yes, it damned sure is.

Well, never mind that there’s a significant amount of evidence that it’s bad for your car, boat or motorcycle engine. That’s bad enough.

But the damage isn’t just from using the ethanol in our fuel; it’s in the entire process involved in radically altering our agricultural sector from growing food to growing an energy supplement.

As it turns out, this is not “green energy” at all, as its proponents say. It’s “brown energy.” The only green is the money that lines the farm lobbyists’ pockets.

As American Enterprise Institute fellow and economist Mark J. Perry noted in IBD all the way back in 2015, “countless independent studies have shown that corn ethanol is far worse from a greenhouse-gas emissions perspective than traditional fuels.”

Private researchers and economists have known this for a long time. What’s new is that the EPA is recognizing it for the first time.

One could hardly imagine a more perfect example of everything wrong with American government than the ethanol scam. It achieves none of the benefits claimed for it, and does damage far afield, in ways not anticipated; it amounts to little more than a near-naked bribe for a powerful lobbying group; its assumed benefits are based on smoke, mirrors, and brazen political manipulation; aside from those benefiting financially, there is little or no public demand or market for it; it continues in seeming perpetuity based not on the merits but on inertia, skullduggery, and outright payola; it is ruinously expensive, and opens the door to yet more strangling regulation, bureaucracy, waste, and graft.

If Trump’s EPA finally does away with this nonsense, it will be yet another win for the American people, whether Trump himself is fully on board with it or not.

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Sympathy: limited

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More cheese to go with all that whine, stat!

The media keeps claiming that President Trump is encouraging violence against them. But the media are not the true victims here, and they will largely have themselves to blame if violence does befall them.

Talking about Trump, MSNBC’s Katy Tur said last Friday: “Yeah, we get it, you don’t like us. Fine. But do you have to put our lives in danger?”

The New York Times’s Bret Stephens even wrote a piece over the weekend titled: “Trump will have Blood on His Hands.”

“I warned that this inflammatory language [by Trump] is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence,” said New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger. CNN’s Jim Acosta echoed that warning: “I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in the conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt.”

The solution, of course, is very simple: they can stop being out-and-out Democrat-Socialist propagandists and start working as actual journalists. Unfortunately, that appears to be another of those jobs Americans, or American liberals at any rate, just won’t do. But Lott has another angle to cover here:

Mass public shooters may begin to realize that shooting up a liberal media outlet would create a publicity firestorm. These shooters crave attention and pick targets where they can cause maximum casualties and gain maximum notoriety. Let’s hope that people don’t get to thinking that killing people in the media is a special ticket to notoriety.

Of course, this is no different than the impact that the media has on these attacks by continually mentioning these killer’s names.

Reporters decried the Capitol Gazette shooting as “one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in US history” and said it “may be the worst mass shooting of journalists in the country.” While understandable from the media’s perspective, giving so much excited coverage creates an incentive for someone else to come along and try to cause an even bigger sensation.

Compare for a moment the news coverage given to the Republican congressmen who were shot at last summer or the threats of violence against the daughters of Congressmen Jason Lewis (R-MN) or Lee Zeldin (R-NY) with the coverage that the media gives to vague threats of violence against them. In Lewis’s case, the threats against his daughters came immediately after completely dishonest attacks by CNN and others in the media that he was disappointed that he could no longer call women “sluts.”

If you were a killer who craved attention, who would you attack? A Republican congressman or someone in the media?

There is surely no symmetry here. The media doesn’t acknowledge any responsibility for threats on congressmen and the attack on Republican congressmen last year.

There was also no similar mainstream media outrage when President Obama accused Fox News of being “destructive” to the country or said that his administration needed to “pretend” that Fox is a “legitimate news organization.” The Obama administration even spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen and also CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson. But the mainstream media acted like it was Fox News’s fault for being in Obama’s crosshairs and they ignored Attkisson’s case.

Obama expected the mainstream media to be nice to him. In 2008, he kicked newspaper reporters from the Dallas Morning News, New York Post, and Washington Times off his campaign plane because their coverage wasn’t favorable enough.

Obama could have clapped half of the whores of the White House press brothel in irons and tossed them into a dungeon and the rest of them would have gone right on fellating him just as enthusiastically as before.

With the mainstream media’s constant false claims about supposed lies by Trump (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) and the frequent allegations that he is a racist, one can only marvel at the media’s self righteousness and thin skin. Many reporters have made it their jobs to lie about Trump, and when he calls them out for it they accuse him of endangering their lives.

Last I looked, I saw no mention whatever in the Constitution of any right to constantly, relentlessly lie about a sitting President in the hope of bringing him down or making it impossible for him to govern according to the will of the people as expressed by their having elected him. Nor do I recollect any right to pose as impartial reporters of the day’s news while acting as shills and cheerleaders for one party.

When Trump calls the media out for being exactly what they are, we Normals out here in bitter-clingerland enjoy it tremendously and consider it no more than their due. Then, when the pompous blowhards tremble and quake in fear, whining about being “endangered” after having shamelessly encouraged hatred and violence against us for so long, we find it amusing.

Somehow, I seem to recall an old saw about the inadvisability of sowing the wind, as well as the unpleasant consequences of having gone aheand and done so anyway. Maybe some shitlib journo-hack could look that one up for us sometime, in between bouts of making stuff up about Trump, then jizzing himself over the weekly “OH, WE GOT HIM NOW!!!” ploy. Failing that, we can all just sit back and watch as certain chickens come home to roost.

Frankly, if anybody’s ass just HAS to be beaten and/or shot, I’d just as soon it be them instead of us for a change.

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Lost cause?

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Yet still they persist.

Placing all of this into context, the actions of the Obama State Department and the lawsuits by the Democrat attorneys general have merely demonstrated once again the utter futility of gun control. DD’s software is only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. Not only is it and other similar software already in the public domain and readily available for use by one and all, there is no way to recall it. That fight was over in 2013.

Moreover, individuals have been making their own firearms in this country since the founding of the Republic. Today it is possible to make high quality, fully functioning lower receivers for firearms such as AR-15s, AK-47s, and handguns using simple hand tools. As long as they are not sold to others, it is perfectly legal to make firearms with no serial numbers and no means of tracing them. This state of affairs exists because there is no way that the government could ever hope to effectively regulate or prevent such private manufacture of firearms that is ongoing in homes, garages, and machine shops across the nation.

While DD sells a so-called Ghost Gunner computer-controlled milling machine that will speed up the process of making lower receivers for AR-15s and model 1911 pistols, the same job can be and has been done using hand tools such as routers, drill presses, and electric drills. The number of such privately made firearms is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

But the private manufacture of firearms is the least of the challenges facing gun control advocates. They must contend with the fact that there are over 90 million law-abiding Americans who legally possess over 300 million firearms and who pose no demonstrable threat to their fellow citizens.

In addition, there are untold millions of firearms in the hands of our very large criminal population. These individuals don’t undergo FBI background checks to buy their guns. They use straw purchasers with clean records to do the buying. Or they get them in back alleys or on street corners from other criminals. In many places, they can even rent a gun to pull a job or commit a murder. Neither restrictions on the ownership of guns nor their traceability through serial numbers are of concern to these predators.

The bottom line is this: there is and can be no such thing as effective gun control. Just as there is no way to recall and quarantine DD’s software, there is no way for the government to meaningfully restrict possession of the millions of firearms in civilian hands. Not even a governmental decree to confiscate all firearms is feasible. Putting aside the mandate of the Second Amendment, are 90 million Americans to be turned into outlaws by legislative fiat? And how are these newly minted criminals to be stripped of their firearms?

If even a fraction of that 90 million were to resist confiscation of their weapons, does the government have the police, military, judicial, and penal resources to search, disarm, arrest, prosecute, and punish that vast legion of otherwise law-abiding citizens? Would the law-enforcement establishment willingly undertake such punitive actions? We have already seen substantial numbers of gun owners in Connecticut and New York openly defy hastily enacted antigun laws imposed in the wake of the Sandy Hook school tragedy. Faced with other more pressing threats to public order, police and sheriffs’ departments in those states have wisely elected not to risk the mayhem that could very well result if they attempted to arrest and disarm defiant gun owners. And, even if the government somehow managed to confiscate all 300 million legally owned firearms, what about the uncounted millions of firearms already in the hands of the underworld?

The gun control advocates may not realize it, but they lost the fight long ago. It’s all over but the shouting.

Well, if they can just arrange things so that shooters can expect to be arrested for ever actually USING a gun in self-defense (more on that later, perhaps), or doing much of anything at all with them besides burying them in the backyard, they’ll consider it a win. And they won’t be entirely wrong about that, either. Nor can we quite say they’ve lost, given the thousands upon thousands of gun-control laws already on the books.

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Down Under rocks the world!

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What IS it about Australia that produces such great rock and roll, anyway? These guys have been around awhile, but I only just recently found out about ’em, and I’m glad I did.




And then there’s this, which truly is the Living End:



Nothing but badass, in three pieces and with upright bass. Of course, I’m sure I don’t even have to mention…



Couldn’t find a vid of the Howlin’ Moondoggies’ best song (“Still Alive”), but this one will certainly do.



Four sterling examples of pure, powerful Oz-rock, and you just know there’s plenty more where that came from too. So how do they do it? Maybe it’s all the deadly flora and fauna contributing to the fatalistic, cocksure, devil-may-care recklessness all good rock and roll requires. Maybe it’s their nation-of-convicts-and-rejects history. Maybe it’s all the beautiful girls. Or maybe it’s just all that strong beer. Whatever the cause, it’s wonderful…and damned near uncanny.

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Trump vindicated again

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SO, howzabout that horrible Trump and his unconscionable, racist, bigoted Muslim travel ban, eh? Why, the very idea that we should be wary of Muslims at all is offensive to its very…uhhh…ummm…

Never mind.

The father of a missing 3-year-old who was arrested at a New Mexico compound linked to “extremist Muslims” last week was training children to commit school shootings, court documents filed on Wednesday revealed.

Prosecutors allege Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, 39, was conducting weapons training on the compound, where 11 children were found hungry and living in squalor. They asked Wahhaj, who appeared in court on Wednesday, be held without bail.

Wahhaj is the son of a Brooklyn imam, also named Siraj Wahhaj, who was named by prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the New York Post reported.

The story goes on to get even more disgusting from there, if you can believe it.

Update! As always, the motive of these killers remains a complete mystery. Thankfully, though, CNN and AllahPress are doing the right thing to guard against our famous American Islamophobia, lest some poor innocent Mooselimb become the latest of the thousands to suffer a violent attack. Ace reports:

CNN and AP are now censoring the story to exclude the sheriff’s report that the compound is one of extremist Muslim belief.

Of course they are.

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The Tyranny Party

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Tell me again all about how Trump’s the “authoritarian,” libtards.


One of the nice things about a core curriculum—sadly disappearing from most of higher education—is that it forces you to read books you would otherwise have skipped. Although this can be painful in the moment, it often pays off in unexpected ways.

Sigmund Freud is not a writer I would have picked up had he not been assigned. But I’m glad he was. The older I get, and the more of the Left I see, the more useful becomes Freud’s concept of “projection,” an unconscious defense mechanism that protects the ego from guilt or anxiety. It has amazing explanatory power and can help one make sense of a trove of recent books by left-wing writers, and one disgruntled former conservative, that blame Donald Trump for “authoritarianism” in American politics.

What, according to the authors reviewed here, is authoritarianism? They all attempt definitions, which are more or less similar. We may therefore take one as representative. The authoritarian, say Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die,

1) Rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game,
2) denies the legitimacy of opponents,
3) tolerates or encourages violence, or
4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.

Gee, none of THAT sounds familiar at all, does it? Final analysis:

The most certain way a once-stable republic gives way to tyranny is when the republican spirit of its people is eliminated or undermined. All such regimes decisively depend for their success and longevity on a foundation of virtue in the people. How’s that going in our time? None of these books has anything at all to say about the family, the bedrock of representative republicanism. Only Mounk treats religion at any length, and then mainly to lambaste figures and societies to his right for being insufficiently deferential to Islam. Nor do these writers even mention the government-driven erosion of Alexis de Tocqueville’s “mediating institutions,” another bedrock of American democracy. All of these goods—and more—have been under persistent left-wing attack for at least two generations. The health of democracy seems not to have improved during that period. The connection seems obvious enough but these authors glide right past.

In any event, it’s rich to read the Left fret about the end of “democracy” when they have spent so much conscious effort undermining its necessary preconditions. They have done so, I think, for two reasons. First, they long ago came to equate liberty with license. Philosophically, once nature was discarded as the standard by which to guide and judge human life, the satisfaction of appetites became the only conceivable end. Hence in matters of personal morality, the contemporary Left is a curious combination of libertine and censor. Any physical—especially sexual or pharmaceutical—act that does not draw blood or pick a pocket is permitted. There are no mores that are simply necessary to society or to personal well-being. If you’re not directly harming someone else, then no one has any business even passing judgment on what you do. But you deserve to be crushed for thinking or saying the wrong thing—especially for passing judgment! Witness the recent massive freak-out over Penn Law professor Amy Wax’s praise of the once-commonplace concept of “bourgeois norms.” How dare she!

The second is that the Left has internalized, mostly without realizing it, the classical case that the only truly legitimate regime is the rule of the wise. For them, it comes dressed up in its modern guise as Hegelian historicism, but either way, it’s ironic that in today’s cisgender Euro-bashing fiesta, their whole political philosophy rests on two quintessentially dead white male arguments. But, hey—they believe they are the wise. Not those dumb rednecks. When the pieces start to fit together in your mind, you begin to realize why the modern Left wants to make America more like those South American countries with a pale upper class, a darker lower class—and no middle of any shade. Because they get to be in charge. Uppity low-income, middling-I.Q. whites are troublemakers. They think they deserve a say. Trump gives those nettlesome, red-hat-wearing proles a voice. What else do you need to know to grasp that Trump is bad?

The greatest factor in hastening the end of American-style democracy over the past 125 years (at least) has been increasing government centralization and administrative rule. To answer the question posed by Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein’s edited volume: it already did happen here! The project all along has been, and still is, to end politics. That is, to foreclose as illegitimate public debate and disagreement on issues allegedly settled by science and administered via expertise. As our personal freedom to abuse our bodies, sate our appetites, and neglect our duties ever expands, our actual freedom to govern ourselves and determine our collective future radically contracts. The people writing these ostensible democratic laments are all in the intellectual lineage of those who brought us to this point. Their aim is to complete the project. Trump’s aim—however inchoate or implicit—is to reverse it. Who’s the real anti-democrat?

It’s Michael Anton, so there’s plenty more between my excerpt blocks, all of which you’ll want to read.

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Playing with matches

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Little sparks can sometimes grow into huge conflagrations.

Since the election, the Left has been dreaming up scenarios in which the results of the election are overturned. For a long time they were sure Trump would be impeached, but that seems to have faded. Last year my left-wing office manager was deep into the impeachment scenarios. Now the talk is of revolution, which probably fits better with their conception of themselves as the heroic resistance. They imagine Trump as a strong man, against whom they must resist until the system cracks, and then the revolution begins.

On the other hand, there are limits to everything. As the outrages from the Left stack up, the average white person in American grows more angry. Talk to anyone sympathetic to this line of thinking and they will tell you they have grown far less tolerant of their remaining liberal friends. I know I’ve lost touch with quite a few former friends, because I will not tolerate their nonsense. I have friends who just a few years ago thought Ben Shapiro was edgy and now think the alt-right is too soft. There is a reaction brewing in the country.

The question is what would it take to move people from yelling at their televisions over the latest liberal outrage to marching in the streets. This is never easy to know. Sometimes, the smallest spark sets off the biggest fire. The reaction to Alex Jones getting purged from the internet has been surprising, given that he is not a serious person. I got questions from people, who never heard of him until yesterday, angry over his banishment. My guess is the percentage of people thinking fondly of Pinochet is at an all-time high right now.

As far as the spark, a move against Trump is good bet. The glue that keeps things from flying apart right now is middle-class white people, who still have faith in the political system. These are the middle American radicals Sam Francis wrote about 30 years ago during the Reagan moment. They will tolerate just about anything, as long as they think they can fight the other side within the system. An effort to remove Trump or even silence his advocates, could be a spark that gets these people into the streets.

It is tempting to think this will all blow over. I was in the camp until recently. Now, I just don’t see how it will ever be possible to make peace with the Left. They hate us and will use any means necessary. The lack of code is the critical part. How does one make peace with someone that will never abide by the rules? Whether this results in revolution, counter revolution or civil war is hard to know, but the number of people thinking the gap cannot be bridged is growing every day. Now we wait for the Cossak’s wink.

The gap CAN’T be bridged, as I’ve said for a long, long time now. The conflict is between people who want total, unquestioned control (“We have to regulate every aspect of people’s lives“) and people who insist on their right to be left alone—between people who believe in the Founding vision of limited government and people who want no limits on government whatsoever. How can anyone possibly imagine that those positions are reconcilable? As I’ve asked before: if you’d prefer to see Constitutional government reinstated yet also favor “compromise” with the Left, exactly which parts of the Constitution are you willing to see thrown out?

As for Alex Jones, I kinda don’t get the high dudgeon over his “deplatforming.” YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, et al have been doing the exact same thing to both strident Dissident Right types and far milder and more innocuous “conservatives” for a long while now without nearly this much ballyhoo over it. Now all of a sudden people are willing to draw a stark line around a nut like Jones? Not saying they shouldn’t, mind; if it had been done long ago, maybe we wouldn’t be where we are now. It just seems kind of weird to me that Alex Jones ends up being the Bridge Too Far, that’s all.

But it’s easy enough to explain. The Left has stayed frenziedly on the attack for so long now that people are fed up with them. Seeing as how they still show no sign at all of being willing to dial back on the cray-cray one little bit—on the contrary, they’re doubling down each and every day, seemingly incapable of perceiving the mainstream’s rapidly eroding forbearance not as the warning it is but as further incitement—it almost doesn’t matter WHO it was they went after this time.

And then the spark ignites the dry tinder, it blazes up and out of control, and everydamnedbody winds up getting burned.

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Site news

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Be advised that I’m gonna be experimenting with some new ad-server code for a day or three here. If things go wonky, be sure and let me know about it, mmm-kay? Also, these ads are a pay-for-clicks deal, so any time you hit one of the ad links you can take pride in having done your bit to keep this hogwallow ruining your day and elevating your blood pressure in the future. It’s all highly experimental, so your patience during the shakedown period will be much appreciated. Thanks, folks!

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Culture war?

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Nope. Call it culture vandalism, culture takeover, or…what this guy does, which is more apt than just about anything else.

Liberals, similar to but reputedly more reasonable than progs, always notice the single MAGA hat in a crowd but never the destructive prog behavior raging all around them. And it’s liberals who write the columns and tweets next day, dripping venom about the hateful normals. Yet any objective, disinterested observer would notice that it’s progressives who regularly run out of control in angry, violent spasms of incivility and ugliness.

This isn’t “culture war.”  Culture has nothing to do with it. It’s war on normality by Brownshirts, incited or paid for by the likes of George Soros and Tom Steyer. It has now graduated from street-fighting to trying to take down the U.S. government.

I will never understand these people’s hatred of America. They are unreachable by reason. 

Nobody should be squandering any effort on the attempt. As I keep saying: it wastes your time, and annoys the pig.

Get woke update! Schlichter gets down to the nut-cuttin’:

Some of you need to cease the denial and accept the harsh reality that the left hates you. It’s a fact, as much as the liberal gaslight gang and the conserva-sissy weakhearts deny it. You can tell that leftists hate you by the way that leftists tell you that they hate you.

Leftists don’t get to pull this garbage and just get away with it. Cut the nonsense about “outrage mobs.” Regardless of the principles of True Conservatism™, it’s perfectly okay under actual conservative principles to protest the liberal elite’s public embrace of outright race-based hatred. Hell, it’s mandatory. And this imbroglio is a perfect weapon for us, because it perfectly encapsulates our enemy’s hateful view of us in a way every midterm voter between the coasts is going to understand. We need to wield it like a sledgehammer in anticipation of the upcoming election.

You soft boys can pivot back to your “We’re better than that” pose and go AWOL, again, like you always do. But I say the Sarah Jeong/NYT love affair is a suppository, and I say we start curing the hemorrhoid that is liberalism by giving the left a double dose good and hard right up the progressive tract.

We need to accept the harsh reality that a substantial number of our fellow citizens hate our guts. All the simpering blabber about civility, all the clichés about unity, are all just comforting lies. A bunch of them hate us. They hate us. Hate. And we need to stop pretending the truth right in front of us is not right in front of us.

What do we do? We fight. This is not going to be a single skirmish. This is a campaign, a long and difficult one with the objective of destroying the ideological cancer metastasizing through America’s body politic. Step One: We must ruthlessly attack any manifestation of their hate using all the political and cultural tools at our disposal. We need to make liberal racism painful, so they are incentivized to abandon it. We’re not here to win moral victories. We’re here to win victory victories.

He has suggestions for actions that need taking in the right-now so as to be prepared for all the ugly eventualities, and he’s right about all of it.

Settling things update! Francis mulls it over:

I shall say this: ordinary private citizens are now being hunted and attacked by other private citizens for differing with them politically. Members of the latter group call their targets “Nazis” and attack them physically when they believe they can get away with it. A recent case of this has caused me to wonder, like the author of the linked piece, when actual fatalities will occur.

There have been cases, earlier in American history, of violence over political disputes. We fought a rather large war over one such dispute. It says something about such conflicts that the Civil War did not resolve the question it was fought over, namely whether the states remain sovereign: i.e., whether a state has the right to withdraw from the United States as defined by its Constitution.

It’s untrue that “violence never settles anything.” But it’s appallingly true that violence cannot settle any abstract question. It certainly can’t settle a question over rights.

Probably not. But it would settle the question of how long Normals will allow themselves to be used as punching bags for the Violent Left quite nicely. And it’s looking more and more as if it’s the ONLY way the problem of ever-escalating Lefty violence will be resolved.

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“We Have to Regulate Every Aspect of People’s Lives”

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Any questions?

A Santa Barbara city councilman inadvertently let slip the primary purpose of progressivism in 21st century America.

The city recently criminalized the use of plastic straws. Speaking to that issue, Councilman Jesse Dominguez said, “Unfortunately, common sense is just not common. We have to regulate every aspect of people’s lives.”

Got that? “We” are smarter than you and know what’s best for you better than you do.

Go read his stumbling, shambling walkback and non-apology “apology” after realizing how badly he’d let the iron fist backing the liberal smiley-face show. It’s pathetic. Moran follows up:

Lately, individual liberty has been getting squeezed by a cadre of statists who believe they have been born with the right to tell everyone else what to do and how to live their lives. To enforce this belief, they have hijacked the enormous power of the state, nibbling away at individual rights in the name of “community.”

They couch their tyranny in soothing words, but the result is catastrophic for liberty. 

Which of course is the plan, and was all along. Steven Hayward at Powerline holds out hope that the people of Santa Barbara might turn the Mark-1, Mod-0 liberal out of office in a sudden, unprecedented show of perspicacity, but Moran has the right of it: it ain’t even remotely likely.

Forget it, Steve, it’s Cali-town.

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“Democratic socialism” and equality before the law

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Incompatible and contradictory.

Observing the media hijinks and economic moronity of Democrat hopeful Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is prepared to increase taxation to unsustainable levels to pay for the socialist dream – “universal health care, tuition free higher education, and the 100 percent use of renewable energy, among other programs” – I could not help but reflect that infinity can be measured only by the extent of human stupidity.

Ocasio-Cortez, a lightweight even on the Bernie Sanders scale, is merely the latest in a long line of what we call today “democratic socialists” or “social justice warriors.” They are oblivious to the proven fact that socialism never works, that it has failed wherever it has been tried, that a centralized state and a command economy inevitably lead to rampant inefficiency, reduced incentive to compete and innovate, diminished production, economic stagnation, and ultimately to one or another version of the police state, whether the “velvet totalitarianism” that John Furedy speaks of or sheer brutal repression – in current terms, the Venezuela option. Socialism is the enemy not only of human flourishing and individual freedom, but, as we will note shortly, of the concept of equality before the law.

“Democratic socialism” is a contradiction in terms – or it is democratic in the same way as death is, reducing everyone to the same level. Socialism is no less a grim reaper than mortality. Similarly, “social justice” has nothing to do with the Western legacy of equality before the law. Clearly, people are not equal with respect to character, intelligence, aptitude, moral fiber, personal responsibility, and motivation, but they should be equal before the law. “Democratic socialism” ignores the complexity of human personality by reducing difference to a lowest common denominator just as “social justice” is dismissive of individual contributions to the well-being of the state. What such fantasy-laden constructs call “equality” is nothing but the dispensation of unearned privilege to the masses, culminating inexorably in the imposition of a featureless collective.

Socialism is a perversion of both equality and justice, the weaponizing of the law in the service of an unfeasible ideal and the progressivist legalization of outright theft, which can result only in the eventual destabilization of the state. It terminates in the society of Harrison Bergeron, in which everyone is equal only in the sense that everyone, apart from an echelon of exploiters, is equally poor, equally deprived, and equally miserable. This is not what Amos would have conceived as justice.

But it is what the Ocasio-Cortezes of the world – and they are legion – would in their risible ignorance inflict upon the rest of us, if we are lunatic enough to allow them. Florida candidate for governor Ron DeSantis is on the mark when he points to the utter folly of Ocasio-Cortez “running around saying, well, capitalism is going to die and…that socialism is the wave of the future. And as somebody who lives in Florida, I can tell you, we probably have more refugees from socialist countries – Cuban-Americans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans – then just about any state…and certainly they can tell you socialism doesn’t work. It’s a failed philosophy.”

Or, to go back to the Powerline meme collection:


Fleeing-capitalism.jpg


If socialism really IS “the wave of the future,” the future is gonna really, really suck.

Update! OG blogger Stephen fisks the living hell out of a socialism-pimping Reuters propaganda piece.

First the headline, which reads: “Once oil wealthy, Venezuela’s largest state struggles to keep the lights on.”

That headline gives the impression that Venezuela has run out of oil, but nothing could be further from the truth. The country still possesses the world’s largest oil reserves, so there’s plenty of oil wealth. It’s still right there in the ground. It hasn’t gone anywhere. The problem is that Bolivarian socialism has ruined the country’s extraction industry, but you wouldn’t know that from anything in the entire story.

Here’s the second graf:

The rolling power blackouts in the state of Zulia pile more misery on Venezuelans living under a fifth year of an economic crisis that has sparked malnutrition, hyperinflation and mass emigration. OPEC member Venezuela’s once-thriving socialist economy has collapsed since the 2014 fall of oil prices.

When Hugo Chavez took over the country in 1998 and began imposing his socialist regime, oil prices were at around $18 a barrel. Twenty years later they’ve “collapsed” to… about $70, with some temporary lows around $40 or so.

That is to say, oil prices since 2014 have averaged about triple what they were in 1998. And from ’98 to 2014, oil was mostly on an upward trajectory and routinely went for well over $100. So the question isn’t how this “crisis” was caused by a “collapse” in oil prices. The question is: What the hell did Maduro and Chavez do with all the damn money?

Here we have a story detailing Venezuela’s economic collapse, and every single problem can be explained by two words: Because socialism. And yet the only time reporter Mayela Armas uses the word socialism, it’s in the context of a “once-thriving socialist economy.”

It never WAS a “once-thriving socialist economy”—because when they went socialist, the economy stopped thriving. Just like they all do, every single time. One thing Stephen gets wrong, though: he calls this propaganda “malignantly uninformed,” but it’s more like MISinformed. Or, to be more precise, dezinformatsiya.

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