Sorry, don’t care

Let’s try something a little out of the ordinary here: a fisking done entirely via FIFY (Fixed It For Ya).

A man who allegedly entered the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 is being persecuted by the patently illegitimate system without ever having committed an actual crime, is now being accused of conspiring to kill FBI agents Ordnungspolizei thugs.

Edward Kelley, 33, has been charged with conspiracy, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, and other charges committing acts of patriotism and righteous justice, according to a criminal complaint ginned up pack of risible lies unsealed on Dec. 16.

“Today’s allegations ineptly-contrived falsehoods that individuals sought to attack and hurt or kill FBI personnel jackbooted Stasi goons are sickening heartening and encouraging to any right-thinking Real American. FBI employees honorably insidiously perform their duties lawless acts of intimidation, violence, and soulless perfidy against guiltless Americans protecting the American public and upholding the Constitution oppressing the American public and flouting the Constitution and they should be able to execute these duties without threats of violence must be resisted at every possible turn, by any conceivable effective means,” FBI Amerikan Gestapo Director Christopher Wray said in a statement another of his regularly-scheduled attempts at misdirection, blame-shifting, and deceit.

It still just galls the living hell out of me that Trump ever hired this asshole in the first place, it really does, another of his myriad self-damaging bad decisions that both puzzles and infuriates at once. As for Herr Wray’s obnoxious, self-serving whine, I’m with Bill on that.

Yeah, yeah. Nobody believes your crap any more, Director Liemore. Anymore than I believe this faked up arrest has anything to do with the way you are reporting it.

You cloud people want a low trust society? Well, you’ve got one.

Indeed. May they have joy of their choice, and that right soon.

3

Of tautology, coercion, mafiosi, and…bad drivers?

Peters pulls all that together for us.

If they can’t get you “vaccinated” via a mandate, maybe they’ll be able to get you using the mafia. The insurance mafia.

How?

By citing a “study” – you know, The Science – published by the American Journal of Medicine, that associates not taking whatever drugs the government/corporations order you to take with…a higher likelihood that you’ll wreck your car.

Fortune cites the study, which claims that the un-drugged (the proper term to use, as these drugs are not vaccines since vaccines prevent infection and stop transmissions – and these drugs do neither) are “72 percent more likely to be involved in a severe traffic crash in which at least one person was transported to the hospital” than those who have been drugged.

The premise of this claim is not, however, evidence that being un-drugged has a negative effect on driving competence. It is an oily assertion of correlation with not-following-the-rules (as regards traffic rules) and not following orders, as regards the taking of drugs.

“The authors (of the study) theorize that people who resist public health recommendations might also ‘neglect basic road safety guidelines.’ “

Meaning, they assert a causal link between “resist(ing) public health recommendations” and “neglec(ting) basic road safety guidelines.” It is as “scientific” a theory as the one that insisted others must wear a “mask” to “protect” those who are already wearing one.

Or two.

It presumes that both “public health recommendations” – which are no such thing, since the “recommendations” carried the de facto force of law – and “road safety guidelines” are correct, ipso facto.

In fact, the “public health recommendations” (sic) were entirely wrong – and it was therefore sensible to “resist” them.

“Masks” – and maintaining a space bubble around you six feet feet in radius – did nothing to “stop the spread” of anything. In fact, they spread alienation and fear. They helped to instill millions of cases of pathological hypochondria. The drugs all-but-forced on the population were not vaccines, though people were deliberately misled to believe they were. Those who just took them, just trusting them, are discovering their trust was abused. Those who didn’t just trust – who “resisted” the “recommendations” – have been proved right to have resisted them.

Man, no way could I not include that image, it’s just too perfect. Read it all, it’s one of Eric’s best yet.

3

Baby, it’s politically-incorrect up in here

VP calls for a fresh look at a great old song.

It’s Time to Rehabilitate ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’

It’s been nearly two decades since “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” earned the ire of our finger-wagging, no-fun, culture scolds.

This week I saw the first sign that might finally be happening.

The heat was probably never more intense than it was four years ago when GenZ got into the act and demanded that radio stations stop playing it. The Wall Street Journal had the details in a piece headlined, “‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ Heats Up Culture Wars.

The actual history of the tune is that Frank Loesser wrote it for himself and his wife to perform as a duet. And not just sung, but to be performed, perfectly staged, live at parties. The Journal spoke with their daughter, Susan, who said that “the reference to what is in the woman’s drink was common at the time, signifying only that having an alcoholic beverage was cool.” When I was a young boy in the ’70s, I can remember on many occasions my grandmother asking the very same thing when my grandfather had poured her a stiff one, and him replying, “Nothing I didn’t make for you last night,” or words to that effect. The same generation as the Loessers, middle age didn’t make them any less playful with one another.

Dean Martin recorded the song in 1959, and his daughter Deana told Fox News on Tuesday that she’s “flabbergasted” by the controversy. “It’s just insane. When I heard it, I said, ‘This can’t possibly be.’ You know, it’s a sweet, flirty, fun holiday song that’s been around for 40 years.”

No real conundrum or cause for bafflement here, I’d say. Sweet, flirty, fun—can it really come as any big surprise to saner sorts that pinched-faced, juiceless, joyless liberal bluenoses have so worked hard to do away with it?

Susan Loesser backs up that interpretation, telling the Journal, “The female singer’s repeated insistence that she needed to go was halfhearted, as she too wanted to stay.” Which is exactly how every female performer in every version of this song has sung it. She isn’t threatened or out-of-control drunk; she showed up at his place knowing exactly what she wanted. Or as Loesser explained: “She’s flirting like crazy. She’s wanting to stay, but she’s worried about what people will think.”

In other words: a nice girl with a naughty side. Just what I wanted for Christmas!

Better watch your step there, Stephen; they’ll be coming for you next, if you keep it up.

1
1

Not “stupid,” not “weak,” not “clueless”—COMPLICIT

None so blind as those who will not see.

What Moves the Voters Republicans Lost?
Unless there is a major turnaround in the culture, the Republicans will have to deal with a strong and vocal opposition in future elections.

In “The Republican Struggle with Defeat,” Conrad Black lays out the situation that the Republican Party confronts after its unexpectedly disastrous midterm elections. Despite Joe Biden’s unpopularity and the range of problems he and his party have caused—from broken borders and inflation to the cultural radicalization of both the military and public education, and debacles abroad—the Democrats did unexpectedly well at the polls. Unlike during the Obama Administration, Biden’s party won the Senate, several governorships, a number of state legislatures, and held its defeats in the House to a minimum.

Black avoids exaggerating the Trump factor in the defeat of Republican candidates. One can point to some worthy Trump picks, including Kari Lake, Blake Masters, Adam Laxalt, Lee Zeldin, and J. D. Vance, even if other picks, such as Herschel Walker and Doug Mastriano, were duds. But there is no convincing evidence that Trump’s support for a candidate was the decisive factor in any person’s defeat. Other circumstances, as Black points out, led to those candidates’ losses. If the United States now “plods on with a one-and-one-half party system” and “veers harder to the left,” we should look elsewhere for the most decisive reasons.

A major cause for the midterm results, argues Black, “is the apparent inability of the Republicans to master the harvested ballot. Trump correctly warned in 2020 this would be used to rig the election, but he was completely inadequate in the counter-measures he took to prevent that.” In my view, one can’t stress enough the games that the Democrats have mastered in changing electoral procedures. From vote-harvesting and voting without personal identification to election outcomes being determined by insecure mail-in ballots sent in more than a month before scheduled in-person voting, these Democratic “reforms” should have met unrelenting Republican resistance.

Unfortunately, they didn’t, which raises the question: How would the elections in Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania have turned out if these states had the voting laws that are in force in Florida?

An utterly pointless debate, an exercise in abject futility, perhaps even outright misdirection, at least in some cases. Those laws are NOT in force; the Vichy GOPe did NOT resist, and only a delusional fool expects that they ever will. If they had any interest in such piffling bagatelles, they would have done so already. Get your head around it already, ferchrissakes, and deal with current reality at long, long last.

For obvious reasons, Republicans are hesitant about contesting questionable ballots.

“OBVIOUS reasons,” is it? Name three for me, please. Don’t strain yourself, I’ll wait.

They quake at the thought of being accused of election denial or suppressing minority votes. This hesitancy puts them at a disadvantage against a radical leftist party that shows no compunctions about cheating or election denial.

Not hardly, amigo. What actually makes them quake at the thought of it is the prospect of upending a comfy, too-familiar applecart, thereby disrupting a wholly rotten system in which they’ve long since accepted their assigned role—a system which has made them rich beyond the dreams of avarice, despite their demeaning status as junior partners therein.

This hesitancy puts them at a disadvantage against a radical leftist party that shows no compunctions about cheating or election denial. The fact that Democratic Party organizers and politicians can engage in their legerdemain with unfailing media protection makes them even more brazen.

That lack of compunction and brazenness is a very, very old story, told from deep within a very crowded memory hole.

Democrat Voter Fraud: A Brief History
This is a “brief history” because the complete history of Democrat electoral malfeasance reaching back to Tammany Hall and Tweed would require four volumes or more. (I’m running into the same problem with a new book I’m outlining analyzing the Democrats as a criminal organization, much like the Mafia or the Camorra.)

So a brief history it is, limited to the past thirty years or so. Believe you me, there’s no lack of cases even in that short span.

The Dinkins Magic Voting Machines

Just days before voting in the 1993 David Dinkins/Rudolf Giuliani election, the New York Times reported that a number of voting machines had been found in a closed Manhattan school. All the machines were loaded with votes for Democrat incumbent David Dinkins.

Voting proceeded without the help of those machines, and of course Rudy was elected. But that was the end of it. As far as I’ve been able to learn, there was no investigation, no inquiries, or, for that matter, any further reportage on it.

Votes from the 8th Dimension

The 2004 Washington state gubernatorial contest between Republican Dino Rossi and Democrat Christine Gregoire ended with Rossi up by 261 votes. A machine recount left him still ahead by 42 votes. The state Democrats paid over $700,000 for a hand recount, and whaddaya know… Votes started appearing from any and all conceivable sources. A bag containing votes here…  an electoral official’s car there… it’s surprising they didn’t start falling out of the sky like the frogs in Magnolia.

By the end of the year Gregoire was ahead by 130 votes and was inaugurated on January 12. Rossi, God love him, continued fighting, taking Gregoire to court over the blatantly illegitimate votes. A Pierce County judge tossed the votes out, only to be overruled by the Washington State Supreme Court. A final decision didn’t come for six months, when Judge John Bridges, a Democrat appointee, tossed aside the concept of “chain of custody” to find in favor of Gregoire. Rossi should have continued on to the U.S. Supreme Court – after all, a critical legal concept was being overthrown – but he does get an E for Effort, since he did more than any other Republican in recent memory.

The Washington case enshrined the concept that all Democrat votes, whether they emerged from a portal into hyperspace or were discovered in a 2000 B.C. Sumerian temple, had to be counted no matter what the circumstances. GOP votes… not so much.

Goshdarnit, People Liked Him

A similar chain of events occurred in the election of Al Franken in Minnesota in 2008. Incumbent Norm Coleman originally prevailed with over 700 votes, which were mysteriously whittled down to 200 in short order. Franken called for a recount, and begorrah, the votes suddenly started appearing. Some, anyway — an envelope of votes from one county simply disappeared, but were counted regardless, the totals evidently being read out from tea leaves. By the time it all ended, Franken was ahead by 312 votes. Coleman, a Republican gentleman of the old school, made perfunctory efforts at protest, but was undercut by the GOP itself, led by former governor Arne Carlson, a RINO to rule them all, who had refused to endorse Coleman during the campaign.

Shortly after the election, it was discovered that at least 1,099 illegal votes had been cast by felons, and this had been known during the vote count, but had been ignored. Franken exchanged his diapers for a suit and spent the better part of two terms voting the way he was told and embarrassing his party before being forced out during the “MeToo” craze.

Lots more where that come from, and remember, these are contemporary examples only. Back to the AG piece for the sad, sorry denouement.

The solution to these problems for Republicans is to ignore the righteous accusations and to challenge unwaveringly suspicious ballots.

It isn’t a “solution,” it’s their sworn and sacred duty, or would be in a better, less ruinously-crooked system than this one is.

It would make even more sense to get voting to take place on election day and in a precinct station under bipartisan surveillance. It is just plain dumb for conflict-averse Republican leaders to tell their constituency to learn to do mail-in voting months ahead of Election Day. Most Republican voters cast ballots, as they should, in the assigned places on Election Day.

Fine suggestions all, not a single one of which has a ghost of a chance of ever being implemented. The larger problem?

Even more problematic for the Republicans are the large voting blocs they are losing by ever larger numbers: 18-to 29-year-old voters, in which the proportion of college students is rising. In November, unmarried women voted 70 percent for the Democrats, and in Pennsylvania they helped significantly in electing the brain-injured radical John Fetterman. More than 70 percent of college students voted, and 63 percent of them broke for the Democrats. Although the Republicans have made modest inroads among black voters and while the Hispanic vote has increased for the GOP by 10 points since 2018, they are losing badly key constituencies. These blocs are mostly on the woke Left and not likely to be won over by appeals to “conservative values.”

Heh. “Not likely,” he says. Understate much, pal?

Further, there is no indication that the electorate cares about Democratic scandals and failures. Republican attempts to call attention to such issues or to the damaged brain of our new Pennsylvania senator or to Joe Biden’s obvious decrepitude fall on deaf ears with these voters. Unrestricted abortion rights count for them far more than broken borders or the venality of the Biden family.

That’s because more and more of us are being brought around to the grim realization of the uselessness, the hopelessness, of Voting Harderer!™ at them to provide a way out of this stinking bog for us. The cynicism and disgust at the wholesale, systemic corruption of “elections” in Amerika v2.0 is growing by leaps and bounds, which I take as a positive sign. The more of us who acknowledge the farcical nature of the whole shit-circus, however unpleasant a reality it might be to confront, the sooner something meaningful might actually be done about it, I believe.

6

Just another phony war

For Aesop: seen this one yet? Asking for a friend, that’s all.

Merkel Spills Beans on How U.S. and NATO Partners Planned War in Ukraine Against Russia

It is becoming irrefutably clear that the United States and its NATO partners have been planning for many years for the current war in the Ukraine against Russia. That fact makes the prospects for peace all the more elusive. How to negotiate with a mindset that is so deeply invested and ingrained with belligerence?

Western governments and media accuse Russia of “unprovoked aggression” against Ukraine and are clamoring for Moscow to hand over eye-watering financial compensation as well as face war crimes prosecutions.

The bitter irony is that the war in Ukraine, which is dangerously escalating and could spiral into a nuclear cataclysm, was sown by the United States and its accomplices. It is the West that bears ultimate responsibility for this abysmal situation, not Russia.

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel (2005-2021) is the latest Western source to come clean or let their guard down. She disclosed in a recent interview with Der Spiegel the real roots of the war.

Merkel’s reprehensible revelation is inadvertent. She refers to appeasing the Ukrainian regime as a way to eventually build up its fighting strength against Russia. She invokes this reasoning as a way to justify why she objected to Ukraine’s earlier membership of the NATO alliance in 2008. The fact of membership wasn’t wrong, it was just a matter of wrong timing, according to Merkel.

As respected independent military analyst Scott Ritter points out, Merkel also knew that the Kiev regime installed by the CIA-backed coup d’état in 2014 was not interested in a peaceful resolution of the civil war in that country.

The unspoken policy in Berlin was all about buying time for the anticipated aggression against Russia. This was in spite of the fact that Germany along with France was supposed to be a guarantor of the Minsk peace agreements negotiated in 2014 and 2015.

In other words, Ukraine was primed for war against Russia from 2014 onwards.

Merkel’s admission is therefore really a confession of Western duplicity towards Russia, as Ritter astutely notes.

Plenty more at the link, all of it damning for the unabashedly evil Western manipulators running this whole shitshow. While I do have sympathy for the workaday Ukrainians suffering through this, I still don’t give a rat’s patoot about the fate of Ukraine’s current kleptocracy, given how it has functioned for many years now as basically a Democrat Party ATM. And though I harbor neither affection nor allegiance for Pooty-Poot (as the ridiculous George W Bush called him), if he takes Zelensky and his corrupt cabal down hard, I won’t be shedding any tears over it.

(Via Dave Renegade)

1

Pedophile story hour

Maybe it’s time we just start calling a spade a spade here.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, and self-control. But the fruit of public libraries is faux diversity, drag queens, and rejection of the sexes — which is why the taxpayer-funded cesspools are “not interested” in giving Kirk Cameron a storytime slot to read his new children’s book on the fruit of the Spirit to kids.

The actor, writer, and producer “has not gotten a single ‘yes’ from the 50-plus public libraries his publisher has contacted so far,” Fox News reported in a Wednesday exclusive. According to Cameron’s publisher and Fox’s scouring of the libraries’ websites, “Many of the same libraries that won’t give Cameron a slot…are actively offering ‘drag queen’ story hours or similar programs for kids and young people.”

It’s not only drag queen story hours, where adult men derive pleasure from strapping on prosthetic breasts, painting theatrical contour all over their masculine faces, and sporting fishnet tights for an audience of children. These libraries reportedly host queer book clubs, a series called “Every Month Is Pride Month,” and so-called “get free help” events where attorneys and other volunteers help patrons fill out legal paperwork to change their names, record themselves as the opposite sex (or sexless entirely), and alter birth certificates, Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, IDs, and passports. But if you want to read to kids about gentleness, goodness, and kindness, it’s a hard no.

The self-important and self-appointed “principled conservatives” have expended much energy lecturing right-wing culture warriors who resist this debauchery. When conservatives took offense at libraries using their tax dollars to sponsor sexualized events that spit in the face of their deeply held religious beliefs, The Principled Conservatives™ were there with a finger wag and a condescending, First Amendment! Tsk! Viewpoint neutrality!

Barring people from doing sex shows for kids in publicly funded venues is not against the Constitution, and it’s specious to argue that if you insist there are constitutional limits on speech and this is precisely one, that you’re somehow a proponent of “big government” or “against the free market.” There is no free market for children. And there are ways to establish reasonable and constitutional limits on speech — such as withholding government funding from events and venues that peddle books and activities about sex for children — something many conservatives are striving to do even if the self-described principled wing is too lazy or too cowardly to do that intellectual and ground-game work.

At this point, the only way Cameron stands a chance of equal access to public libraries across the country is if he dresses up like a prostitute, gyrates around a reading room, and prods children to shove singles in his underwear.

The thing people like Cameron — or Jack Phillips or Barronelle Stutzman or Lorie Smith — understand but many establishment Republicans and “principled conservatives” don’t is that the left hates us and all the values we claim to be conserving. They don’t care about playing by a certain set of rules because their method is lawlessness (see: unpunished Black Lives Matter riots, brazen election meddling, illegal student loan bailouts, or unconstitutional vaccine mandates, to name a few). They scoff at viewpoint diversity because their aim is groupthink (consider: Big Tech suspensions for dissenters on a number of topics, or mass firings of health-care professionals who held unfavorable opinions about the jab). And they laugh at appeals to the First Amendment because they abandoned it long ago.

As my colleague John Daniel Davidson recently wrote in these pages, “[A]ccommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips. The left will only stop when conservatives stop them.”

Standing athwart history, yelling “stop” — or “viewpoint neutrality” or “free speech” — might have been enough to preserve liberty in the ’50s, but it’s almost 2023. If you want to know how well it’s working today, ask Kirk Cameron.

Or, y’know, anybody else who’s been paying attention and has even half a lick of sense.

1

Doing in diesel

As fossil fuels go, it just might be the most “problematic” of them all.

The $5.25 Per Gallon Canary in the Coal Mine

There may not be a shortage of diesel fuel yet but there is something else that amounts to the same:

Unaffordable diesel.

A gallon currently sells for about $5.25 per gallon on average.

Interestingly, this is about $2 more per gallon than the current cost of a gallon of regular unleaded. The Biden Thing has succeeded in temporarily tamping down the cost of the latter by draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – but diesel prices have not come down appreciably from their spring/summer high of about $5.70 per gallon.

Diesel cost less than half as much two years ago – just before the Biden Thing was selected president.

If you have a diesel-powered car (such as the excoriated-anathematized VW Jettas, Golfs and Beetles equipped with the TDI engines you can’t buy anymore) with a 15 gallon tank, you’re currently paying about $80 to fill ‘er up.

That’s not very affordable.

But not many people are driving diesel-powered cars – chiefly because the car companies haven’t been selling them for about seven years now, ever since the federal government sicced itself on VW for selling them. In italics to emphasize the true nature of VW’s “crime,” which was not “cheating” on government “emissions” certification tests anymore than Matt Strickland’s restaurant, Gourmeltz, was Hut! Hut! Hutted! the other day for supposedly selling alcoholic beverages without an ABC permit.

Alternatives always present problems for those who do not want others to have alternatives.

And now, they don’t.

Diesel-powered vehicles are problem vehicles – from the point-of-view of those pushing the electrification of vehicles. Not only because they go farther than gas-powered vehicles and  much farther than electric vehicles – but particularly because it is possible to keep them going independently of a centrally controlled distribution apparatus.

Gas-powered vehicles require gasoline to keep on going. If there’s none at the pump, it is hard to refine your own. Gas does not store very well for very long, either.

Actually, it used to, but not since FederalGovCo foisted the ethanol-based shite on us all, which worthless crap will reliably convert itself into so much sugary glop in about, oh, an hour and a half or thereabouts.

So even if you thought ahead and stored 50 gallons in a drum for just-in-case, its shelf-life is limited.

Electricity is hard to generate independently in the quantity needed by electric cars. Even on 120v grid power, it takes a day or more to instill a charge in a 400-800 volt electric car battery. If the grid goes down, it will take much longer – unless you have a seriously mighty solar array on your roof or on your backyard.

Diesel, on the other hand, stores almost indefinitely. And many diesel engines can burn bio-diesel, which is “diesel” not made from petroleum. It is made from vegetable oil, animal fats and restaurant grease. In other words, almost anyone can make it.

Themselves.

This presents a dangerous alternative to those pushing “electrification,” which is really more about centralization.

Annnnnd BINGO. In other words, for our Deep State lords and masters, this is really about exactly what it’s always about: Power, and Control.

Update! Ernie drops a most interesting and informative comment.

Eric, you have a bit of a technical error. Natural fuels are refined using fractional distillation, the light stuff comes off first, then some gasoline, then kerosene, then progressively heavier grades of fuel oil, down to bunker fuel and asphalt/tar. In a barrel of crude oil there is inherently a lot more diesel fuel of various types than gasoline. Diesel fuel is inherently far more abundant and used to be far cheaper than gasoline- thus its use in heavy haulers like rigs, trains, and ships.

Also, old school mechanically injected diesels are inherently cleaner than gasoline engines until the 90’s closed loop engine management. As usual, pinheads saw occasional puffs of soot and assumed they had to be dirty, leading to a lot of prejudice against Rudolph Diesel’s “black mistress.”

Man, I’m so old I can remember back in the Olden Thymes of the late 70s/early 80s, when diesel was in fact so much cheaper than regular gasoline that people all over the country were dumping their old rides for diesel cars because of the savings they could realize from making the switch. My, how times have changed.

2

Just following orders

Didn’t fly at Nuremberg, shouldn’t oughta be expected to fly now. Tough noogies, Offissa Pup.

 

The ugly backstory:

More details:

A Fredericksburg restaurant that has repeatedly made headlines for defying Virginia’s COVID mandates during the height of the pandemic and battling to maintain its licenses was subject to a search and seizure by the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority (ABC) Friday morning.

A search warrant was issued for Gourmeltz’s sales records and any information related to “possession of alcoholic beverages without a license, maintaining a common nuisance and the illegal sale of alcoholic beverages.”

Gourmeltz owner Matt Strickland had his license to sell wine/beer/mixed beverages on and off-premises suspended in September 2021, but ABC put a stay on enforcing the order to give Strickland time to appeal. In November 2022, a final ruling was issued and ABC ordered Gourmeltz to halt selling alcohol for 90 days. The agency said it would reduce the suspension to 15 days if Strickland paid a $4,000 penalty and more than $6,400 in investigation costs.

But Gourmeltz did not comply.

The details matter here.

Strickland lost his liquor license for refusing to shut down, mask up, and destroy his livelihood at the behest of a government making illegal orders that did absolutely nothing to stop a respiratory virus that was largely only lethal to the elderly.

The state then tried to strong-arm Strickland into admitting his guilt and assuming financial responsibility for the fiasco by telling him it would only slap him on the wrist if he paid the government $10,000.

When the media tells you he “did not comply,” understand the framework of abject tyranny that surrounds the situation.

Back to the Hodge Twins for their perfect followup:

“We have a court order”

To our brothers in blue, it’s time to start speaking up when you know something ain’t right. This man put his biz and family on the line when the tyrants shut him down and tried extorting money from him.

“I’m just doing my job” won’t work anymore.

Well, it damned sure shouldn’t, at any rate. Let the last word be Strickland’s.

More context on Strickland from a 2021 article written by my coworker Daniel Payne when he was writing for Just The News:

Like many restaurateurs, the Stricklands shut down in the early months of 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic spread. Strickland said he attempted to do carryout-only but the restaurant was unable to generate enough income to maintain operations. In June, he said, he opened up his storefront again under Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s reopening guidelines, among which were numerous dining regulations and capacity limits.

“We followed all the governor’s mandates when the COVID stuff first happened,” Strickland said, “because I didn’t know what COVID was about just like anybody else.” After reopening several months into the pandemic, however, he said the new spate of restaurant regulations “were about something else other than our health and safety” because “they just made no sense.”

“Nobody could sit at a bar, but you could put a table up next to the bar and sit,” he said. “You had to wear a mask just to walk in but when you sit down, you can take it off. [The] regulations made no common sense.”

The state was “starting to strip away the constitutional rights and freedoms of myself and my customers,” he said. “And I wasn’t going to be part of that.”

Fuck the Virginia Waffen SS officers in the liver with a rusty railroad spike for their disgusting role as tyranny-pimps, attempting to ruin an honorable and entirely blameless small-business owner struggling to provide for his family under their godawful yoke. One must hope that there’s an especially warm corner of Hell waiting to welcome their sorry asses for all eternity when their time at long last arrives.

Update! I consider the above story more than adequate confirmation of the truth of Divemedic’s contention:

People need to have a belief that the police are not just another criminal street gang. The more I interact with and see how police work, the more I come to believe that we would be better without them. I have only called them a few times, and each time they did nothing more than write a report. It was a waste of time.

I have said before: the police need to clean up their ranks. I don’t think you can, because I believe that the bad cops far outnumber the good ones. The police have become just another group of criminals who prey on the people in this nation who actually produce wealth. They are a street gang with badges and qualified immunity.

He was writing in regards to another matter altogether, yes, but the core principle holds across contexts.

Updated update! More Matt Strickland, who knows all too well what the fuck time it is.

The Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority (ABC) on Friday raided a popular bar and grill that violated the state’s COVID-19  guidelines early in the pandemic. Matt Strickland, the owner of Gourmeltz in Fredericksburg, is an Army veteran who says it’s important to stand up to tyrannical government edicts, so the next generation doesn’t have to.

“You’re part of the problem, I want you to know that,” Strickland told an ABC officer during the raid. “Every one of you is part of the problem.” The Army vet argued that “just doing my job” is not an excuse for “shutting down a man’s livelihood” over mandates “that didn’t do anything to prevent COVID” and were “detrimental to the community.”

Strickland told the ABC officers that the mandates were also detrimental to the nation’s children. “It set our kids back so many years, it set small businesses back so many years,” he lamented. “It destroyed small businesses, it destroyed families, it destroyed our community,” he added, as the officers stood around, stone-faced and silent.

“What the state of Virginia just did is they took my livelihood away from me right before Christmas,”  Strickland later told Fox 5 DC.

In a video posted on YouTube at the time, he told customers that he would not close down his place of business.

“Bottom line is the governor said so – so you have to comply with these mandates,” Strickland said in the video. “I told him politely – I said I’m not in the military anymore, I’m not gonna do something just because you tell me to do it. I’m a civilian now and if you want me to do something it needs to make sense and it needs to not infringe on my constitutional rights and it needs to be lawful.”

“I’m not paying any fine. I’m not serving any suspension, and the reason for that is because I did nothing wrong,” said Strickland, who is planning to run for State Senate in 2023.

“I’m not concerned whatsoever,” Strickland replied when asked if he was worried the state could take further action against his business. “I’ve been ready to die for my country since I was 17 years old, and I’m willing to fight as long and as hard as it takes to make sure that this fight that I’m in right now, this fight that we’re all in right now, doesn’t get passed down to the next generation.”

Good on ya, Matt. Nothing but best wishes and good thoughts to you from here.

1
3

Broken

Methinks Tablet editor in chief Alana Newhouse and her correspondent Ryan are definitely onto something with this idea.

At one point last year, Ryan said something that struck a nerve. “I don’t know what I identify as these days, because everything has gotten so scrambled,” he noted. “I’m not a Democrat or a Republican, I don’t even think I could define myself narrowly as either a liberal or a conservative anymore. The one thing I know that I fundamentally do believe is the premise of your piece, that the dominant institutions of American life—in education, in the arts, in politics—are either totally broken or so weak or corrupt that they’re becoming irrelevant. In a way, the only thing I know that I believe in is…brokenness.”

Ryan went on to explain that, when he gets into political debates with friends and acquaintances these days, those on the “other side” aren’t all liberals or all conservatives or in fact all from any other previously recognizable camp. Instead, they are the people in his life who, regardless of how they vote or otherwise affiliate, remain invested in the institutions and political ideologies that now leave Ryan cold. Many of them acknowledge that there are problems, even serious ones, with universities, newspapers, nonprofits, both political parties, what have you, but they see these as normal, fixable challenges, not signs of fundamental brokenness. To them, the impulse to consign weighty institutions to the dustbin of history feels impulsive and irresponsible—like arson. To Ryan, staying committed to decrepit structures, and insisting to others that they are fundamentally safe when they’re clearly not, is what feels reckless.

Most Americans don’t fall squarely into one of these two camps. Around 40% don’t even vote. But among the people who do engage in debates about this country’s future, the ones doing it most compellingly are not those still stuck in the battle between “Democrats” and “Republicans,” or “liberalism” and “conservatism.” The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America, and that it’s an emergency, and those who do not.

…Many people understandably see our current moment as a wave of change that can be ridden successfully—without overblown diagnoses or radical solutions. These are status-quoists, people who are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled. Status-quoists believe that any decline in quality one might observe at Yale or The Washington Post or the Food and Drug Administration or the American Federation of Teachers are simply problems of personnel, circumstance, incompetence, or lack of information. Times change, people come and go, status-quoists believe—this outfit screwed up COVID policy, yes, and that place has an antisemitism problem, agreed. But they will learn, reform, and recover, and they need our help to do so. What isn’t needed, and is in fact anathema, is any effort to inject more perceived radicalism into an already toxic and polarized American society. The people, ideas, and institutions that led America after the end of the Cold War must continue to guide us through the turbulence ahead. What can broadly be called the “establishment” is not only familiar, status-quoists believe; it is safe, stable, and ultimately enduring.

On the other side are brokenists, people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country. Proof of this decay, they argue, can be seen in the unconventional moves that many people, regardless of how they would describe themselves politically, are making: home-schooling their children to avoid the failures and politicization of many public and private schools; consuming more information from YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and podcasts than from legacy media outlets; and abandoning the restrictions, high costs, and pathologies of the coasts for freer and more affordable pastures in the Southeast and Southwest.

Brokenists come from all points on the political spectrum. They disagree with each other about what kinds of programs, institutions, and culture they want to see prevail in America. What they agree on—what is in fact a more important point of agreement than anything else—is that what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.

Worse, the people for whom it IS still working are the selfsame nefarious wreckers who broke the whole damned system in the first place, intentionally and with malice aforethought.

(Via WeirdDave)

4

The making of a martyr

Mike’s Iron Law #873 remains in effect: They will NOT stop. They will have to BE stopped.

Third Time’s a Charm For Merrick Garland
Would Merrick Garland have wheeled out the old special counsel wheeze absent Trump’s announcement that he was running for president again?

Of course he would’ve. As I’ve said till I’m blue in the face, the Swamp will hound and persecute Trump until they can finally get him behind bars, the better to close out the books on him by Epsteining the poor schlub shortly thereafter.

Sure, this will be the third special counsel assigned to harass Donald Trump, the most investigated American president in history. It would be nice if Garland could lure Robert Mueller out from his Golden Pond activities to take on the attack against the once and possibly future president once more. I suspect, though, that Mueller is too deep in Bidenesque (or Fettermanesque) mental twilight to mount that steed again. Maybe Garland can harness up the despicable Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s brain and primary dogsbody in the now thoroughly discredited “Russian collusion” delusion.

The predicates for the new special counsel are not too promising. One has to do with Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021, when some of his supporters, along with lots of FBI plants masquerading as Trump supporters, marched on the U.S. Capitol. The other has to do with what classified documents Trump may have sequestered at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving the presidency.

The first is unpromising because, notwithstanding the exertions of loopy Liz Cheney to demonstrate his culpability for the January 6 jamboree, Trump had nothing to do with the almost entirely peaceful Capitol breach. His last two tweets that day (just a day or two before he got thrown off the platform) cannot have pleased the future CNN or MSNBC hostess Cheney:

I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order—respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!

Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!

Not much to work with there, Liz, but as a famous Russian once said, “Show me the man and I will find you the crime.”

“Unpromising,” Kimball says, as if AG Lavrentiy Garland cared one whit about what’s true and what is demonstrably not. As if the “American” “Justice” Dept had anything whatever to do with anything even remotely resembling justice. As if the FUSA still had any kind of “rule of law” in place to check such evil skullduggery. I have to believe that, deep down, Kimball knows all this.

We do know, however, that when it comes to government harassment, “the process is the punishment.” The state has unlimited resources with which to torment people it doesn’t like, and on that list of people it doesn’t like, Donald J. Trump gets star billing.

It has long been clear that America now operates under a two-tier judicial system. Notice that I did not say a “two-tier system of justice.” Absent the virtue of impartiality, there is no justice. There is a flagrant absence of impartiality in the contemporary American judiciary. How else could Joe Biden, who obviously profited from his family’s foreign connections in China, Ukraine, and elsewhere, go uninvestigated? How else could Hunter Biden escape any serious scrutiny? You can add Hillary Clinton and a large cast of Democratic apparatchiks from the FBI and our intelligence services to that list.

But let’s say you were wandering around the grounds of the Capitol on January 6, 2021: Pow! you are caught up in a nationwide dragnet and tossed into a Washington gulag for many months before you are treated to a biased trial. If you are Steve Bannon and you refuse a congressional subpoena, you are indicted, convicted, and given jail time. If you are Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s “wingman” and attorney general, exactly nothing happens to you.

The establishment hates Donald Trump for many good reasons. He did a lot to wreck their concessions during his first term and, should he again win the presidency, the gloves would be off and their gravy train would be over.

I suspect that Michael Anton is right: They can’t let him back in because Trump’s attack on the regulatory “deep state” with all its globalist affiliations would bring their elitist party to an abrupt end. “The people who really run the United States of America,” Anton wrote, “have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again.”

He most certainly will NOT be. And even if Trump somehow miraculously manages to slip by them as in 2016, he will be stymied exactly as he was the first time out. By many of the very same people who put the arm on back then, actually.

There IS a bright side to all this, however, even if it won’t be a lot of help to one Donald John Trump in the interim: martyring him could well prove to be the proverbial spark that sets off a long-smoldering powderkeg of righteous rage and retribution at long, long last, leading to a potential grassroots uprising that would make the phonus-balonus J6 FBInsurrection look like the debutante’s cotillion it so truly was. In which case, scoundrels like Garland and the rest of the Swamp rats might finally get what’s coming to them, and Justice will finally be visited upon them.

Update! As should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his reliably brilliant work, I couldn’t resist a look at the Mike Anton piece linked above by Kimball, which had somehow gotten by me when it first appeared back in July.

Love him or hate him, during Trump’s presidency, the economy was strong, markets were up, inflation was under control, gas prices were low, illegal border crossings were down, crime was lower, trade deals were renegotiated, ISIS was defeated, NATO allies were stepping up, and China was stepping back (a little). Deny all that if you want to. The point here is that something like 100 million Americans believe it, strongly, and are bewildered and angered by elite hatred for the man they think delivered it.

Nor was Trump’s record all that radical—much less so than that of Joe Biden, who is using school-lunch funding to push gender ideology on poor kids, to cite but one example. Trump’s core agenda—border protection, trade balance, foreign restraint—was quite moderate, both intrinsically and in comparison to past Republican and Democratic precedent. And that’s before we even get to the fact that Trump neglected much of his own agenda in favor of the old Chamber of Commerce, fusionist, Reaganite, Conservatism, Inc., agenda. Corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and bombing Syria: These are all things Trump’s base doesn’t want, but the oligarchs desperately do, which Trump gave them. And still they try to destroy him.

Again, why? I think it’s because, while Trump’s core MAGA agenda is decidedly not outside the historic bipartisan mainstream, it is well outside the present regime’s core interests. Our rulers’ wealth and power rise with open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. Trump, at least in principle, and often in practice, threatens all three. The old America—the one in which Republicans cared about the heartland and weren’t solely valets to corporate power, Democrats were pro-worker and anti-war, and Bill Clinton and The New York Times could advocate border security—is in the process of being replaced, if it hasn’t already been, by one in which there is only one acceptable opinion on not just these, but all other issues.

Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.

Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base. It doesn’t help stabilize our already twitchy situation that those who bleat the loudest about democracy are also audibly and visibly determined to deny a real choice to half the country. “No matter how you vote, you will not get X”—whether X is a candidate or a policy—is guaranteed to increase discontent with the present regime.

Yep, Anton is bang on point yet again. From there, he rolls up his sleeves to delve right into the real nitty-gritty of the whole shebang, and as usual, it’s a wonder to behold.

3

Worst. “Elite.” Class. EVAR

A fuse that forever smolders, without igniting a goddamned thing.

Thirty-seven billion more dollars for Ukraine? (That’s thirty-seven thousand millions of dollars, by the way.) Bringing the total this year to a click-or-two over ninety billion (ninety-thousand millions), on top of whatever Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX company funneled through that sad-sack international money laundromat — soon to be the darkest backwater of a European failed state since Field Marshal Melchior von Hatzfeldt of Westphalia left Bohemia a corpse-strewn wasteland after the Battle of Jankau (1645).

It really doesn’t matter how much more money we pound down that rat-hole, you understand, because by the time various parties — the weapons-makers, Volodymyr Zelensky, sundry members of the US House of Representatives, the Biden family, the World Economic Forum — are finished creaming off their fair shares, poor Ukraine won’t have enough cash-on-hand to replace six fuse-boxes in Zaporizhzhia.

Against this backdrop, the USA enters a holiday season near-death spiral as unspooling scandals battle a collapsing economy for supremacy of the alt news sites. Case-in-point: the aforementioned FTX monkey business, a metastasizing tumor of the body politic. This complex fraud will smolder for a few weeks before it explodes into an extinction-grade event for the Democratic Party.

Uh huh, I’m entirely confident our brand spanking new Repugnican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy will get RIGHT ON ALL THAT. Who knows, we may even see Miss Lindsey Graham start another of his “blue ribbon panels” to get to the bottom of the whole shit-circus.

The Bankman-Fried extended family is the quintessence of Woke aristocracy. Dad Joe Bankman and mom Barbara Fried are both law professors at Stanford. She also acted as a money-bundler for the Democratic Party and ran two non-profit “voter registration” orgs (against the IRS laws which only permit non-partisan organized voter registration). Brother Gabe Bankman-Fried headed a non-profit named Guarding Against Pandemics (funded by Sam), which lobbies Congress to construct new platforms for medical tyranny. Aunt Linda Fried is Dean of Columbia U’s Public Health school, and is associated with Johns Hopkins, which ran the October 2019 Event 201 pandemic drill (sponsored by the Gates Foundation) months before the Covid-19 outbreak.

Sam’s girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, ran the Alameda Investments arm of the FTX empire (that is, FTX’s own money laundromat). Her dad, Glenn Ellison, is chair of MIT’s Econ School. His former colleague on the MIT Econ faculty, Gary Gensler, who specialized in blockchains there, is now head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency that Sam Bankman-Fried was attempting to rope into a regulation scheme to eliminate FTX’s crypto-currency competitors. Caroline’s mom, Sara Fisher Ellison, is an MIT econ prof specializing in the pharmaceutical industry (fancy that!). Caroline Ellison is currently on-the-run.

The sum total of all this professional and academic accomplishment is also the quintessence of Woke-Jacobin turpitude in service to a political faction that seeks maximum moneygrubbing while acting to overthrow every norm of behavior in the conduct of elections, and perhaps in American life generally. That’s some accomplishment. It’s also a lesson in why the managerial elite of our country are no longer trustworthy. They have gotten away with crimes against the nation for years, which has only made them bolder and more reckless.

And concomitantly, more “elite” too, in a Ruling Class circle-jerk that never, ever ends. As George Carlin once quipped: It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. Moar Carlin, from that same routine:

[Transcript]  “There’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.

Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the REAL owners, now. The REAL owners, the BIG WEALTHY business interests that control things and make all the important decisions — forget the politicians.

The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. YOU DON’T.

You have no choice. You have OWNERS.

They OWN YOU. They own EVERYTHING.

They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations; they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State houses, the City Halls; they’ve got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.

They gotcha by the BALLS.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying — lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want — they want MORE for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They DON’T want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.

That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting FUCKED by system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that.

You know what they want?

They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passably accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

It’s a big CLUB. And YOU AIN’T IN IT.

You and I are NOT IN the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe.

Good honest hard-workin people — white collar, blue collar — doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-workin people CONTINUE — these are people of modest means — continue to elect these RICH COCKSUCKERS who don’t GIVE a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you, they don’t GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU.

THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU — AT ALL. AT ALL. AT ALL. You know?

And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care… that’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day.

Because the owners of this country know the truth — it’s called the American Dream…‘cuz you have to be asleep to believe it.”

More words of wisdom from another old white dude.


Update! It’s turtles Ruling Class corruption, all the way down.

GOP establishment leader and Speaker of the House pretender, Kevin McCarthy used FTX cash to defeat conservatives in 2022, as the corrupt, globalist-tied crypto exchange funded the establishment wings of both parties. Now, McCarthy is feeling the heat, as conservative members of Congress, and the voters they’re accountable to, are demanding answers for the GOP’s failed “red wave,” which looked more like a pink trickle.

Throughout the midterm campaign season, GOP establishment leader Kevin McCarthy (CA-23) used his Congressional Leadership Fund political machine to inject massive amounts of cash into House races nationwide. In doing so, he targeted GOP primary races and even general elections vs. Democrats, in which America First conservatives, aligned with President Trump, were on the ballot.

Millions of dollars worth of the campaign money came straight from corrupt crypto exchange FTX and its top executives.

Along for the ride on McCarthy’s scheme were GOP lobbyist Jeff Miller, described as one of McCarthy’s “closest friends,” and Brian Walsh, an establishment strategist who McCarthy brought in to take down Madison Cawthorne after the young Representative blew the whistle on DC drug use and Capitol Hill pervert parties.

As they often do, over a month ahead of the 2022 primaries, The Washington Post, notoriously used for decades as a uni-party communication rag, openly admitted that McCarthy was using left-wing oligarch money to “sway” the GOP field in favor of his establishment agenda.

Conveniently for McCarthy and the establishment, the piece wasn’t published until after the last of the GOP’s nominating primaries had ended.

“Conveniently.” Well, I guess that would be one word for it, yeah. I can think of several much-less-polite others, right off the top of my head.

4

Making sense of the scam

Wayne Allyn Root says it’s time to admit the patently-obvious truth.

You’ve Been Gaslighted – Democrats Just Stole Another Election

Well, I mean, y’know, DUH. Wasn’t the first time, won’t be the last. Say it with me one time, folks: They will NOT stop. They will have to BE stopped. Learn it. Know it. Live it.


Annnd onwards.

It’s time to admit we’re all part of a massive experiment in fraud, theft, brainwashing, and gaslighting to a degree never seen in world history.

Think of all the times in just the past few years you’ve been gaslighted. They lied to you about open borders…they lied about Hillary’s 30,000 deleted emails…they lied about spying on Trump…they lied about Russian Collusion…they lied about a perfectly fine Ukrainian phone call…they lied about massive Biden corruption in Ukraine and China… they lied about the Hunter Biden laptop…they lied about the origins of Covid…they lied about the need for lockdowns and masks…they lied about the need for Covid vaccines…they lied about the vaccines being “safe and effective”…they lied and covered up all the deaths and injuries from the vaccine…they lied about the success of miracle drugs Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin…they lied about the stolen 2020 election…

You’ve been the victims of nonstop severe gaslighting for a decade now. You’re all part of a human psychology experiment in the limits that government and media can go in propaganda and brainwashing…while you can see they’re lying right in front of your eyes.

And these are the exact same people now telling you Democrats just over-performed, and stopped a GOP red landslide, against all odds, without cheating and stealing the midterm election.

Historically, every president in history facing his first midterm experiences a tough day with automatically 20 to 30 House seats lost…and 4 or more Senate seats lost…but this terribly unpopular President Biden is brain dead with severe dementia, and can’t put 3 coherent sentences together…Yet Biden defied history?

While also facing the worst economy in modern history…and the worst inflation in America’s history…and out of control crime…and open borders…and failing schools…and polls showing 75% of Americans believe the country is going in the wrong direction…Yet Biden beat all of that?

If you believe Democrats made a miracle happen, without cheating, rigging and stealing…I have a bridge to sell you, over the Atlantic Ocean, in the Vegas desert.

Ahh, but we don’t have to take Root’s word for it. He has proof.

But the real proof the midterm was rigged and stolen is…FLORIDA.

In Florida the GOP won a landslide. DeSantis and Rubio and everyone else in the Florida GOP won in a red tsunami. The same one the polls showed was happening in the entire country.

Guess what Florida has? Florida has strict Voter ID, strict laws against voter fraud, severe prison terms for anyone caught trying to commit voter fraud, no mail-in ballots sent to every voter, no ballot drop boxes, no ballot harvesting, no ballots accepted for days after Election Day, no counting for days until the desired result is achieved by the Democrat Party.

Isn’t it a funny and strange coincidence that in that state, with all of those strict rules against cheating, the GOP red tsunami happened as predicted? But everywhere else, where there are no strict laws against voter fraud, and they allow all that cheating, the red tsunami fizzled.

And that under-performance is being blamed on Trump? And on conservative MAGA candidates?

Yet in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis is the most Trump-like, MAGA, America First, anti-woke, anti-trannie, in-your-face, ultra conservative politician in all of America. And with that ultra MAGA message, plus strict voting fraud laws…the GOP swept to a landslide victory.

And in most other places, they didn’t. Coincidence?

Hey, sure. And with that, Wayne, maybe we could get together soon and go take a look at the bridge you mentioned? Because I’d be all in on a good bargain like that, you betcher.

Update! In addition to all the things Florida had going for it mentioned above by Root, there’s another.

These Counties Experiencing Election Issues Have One Thing In Common
It suffices to say that Election Day didn’t go as planned for some polling places that experienced and are still experiencing ballot-counting issues. Despite the varying election-related difficulties, multiple jurisdictions share one foreseen commonality. There’s a common thread connecting five counties spread across several states that were in disarray on Election Day: federal “monitors.”

On the eve of the elections, the Biden administration’s Department of Justice announced Monday it would be dispatching such monitors to as many as 64 jurisdictions in almost half of U.S. states on Election Day to oversee federal election law “compliance.”

According to the DOJ’s watch list, Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County, Texas’s Harris County, Arizona’s Maricopa County, and Pima County, and Nevada’s Washoe County all had the feds there “monitoring” polls. The nationwide deployment is a notable expansion. Nevada wasn’t on the DOJ’s roster two years ago during the presidential election cycle in 2020. Still, it was on the DOJ’s radar this time, and Pima County—Arizona’s second-most populous, which holds Tucscon—is among the new additions.

These five jurisdictions supposedly under in-person DOJ supervision throughout Tuesday suffered major muck-ups.

Hurricane-hit Florida, which was able to count all votes on Election Day even as parts of the Sunshine State were evacuated in preparation for another tropical storm about to make landfall, kicked the DOJ’s hall monitors to the curb, barring any regime operatives from entering its polling places on the basis that outside monitoring is not permitted under the state’s statutes.

In a letter addressed to DOJ elections coordinator John Russ, the state’s general counsel Brad McVay wrote: “Department of Justice personnel is not included on the list. Even if they could qualify under ‘law enforcement’…the presence of federal law enforcement inside polling places would be counterproductive and could potentially undermine confidence in the elections.”

Florida’s State Department invoked its authority under section 101.58(2) of the Florida Statutes to send its monitors to the jurisdictions “targeted” by Biden’s DOJ to monitor the federal monitors and ensure there is “no interference with the voting process.” After the 2022 midterm elections, the DeSantis administration declared that the letter was “successful,” the DOJ obeyed Florida’s declaration, and no federal personnel violated state law prohibiting entry, Florida’s Voice reported Thursday morning.

Well whaddya know about that. Why, it’s almost as if the federal goobermint itself was trying to give the DemonRats a leg up on their usual fraud, hoodwinkery, and outright theft. But nah, that can’t be right. Can it…?

6

Another “Red Wave” that wasn’t

Heather Mac Donald seems to think of this as a good thing. Me, I’m not so sure about that.

Well, that was a dud. Not the abortive “red wave,” but the Democratic expectation (read: ill-disguised hope) that “election deniers” would disrupt polling places on Tuesday with violence and intimidation. In October, a national security bulletin had warned that poll workers were at physical risk from homegrown election terrorists. The Justice Department let it be known that it was monitoring threats against election employees. Illinois officials installed panic buttons and security locks in election offices. People using ballot drop-off boxes were said to be at risk of violent intimidation from crazed MAGA supporters. Michigan anticipated that right-wing poll watchers would disrupt ballot tabulation in Detroit. Election-deniers who had run for office and lost would allegedly refuse to concede defeat, putting “democracy,” in establishment parlance, at further risk. “We could be six days away from losing our rule of law,” warned historian Michael Beschloss, who wondered “whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”

None of these predictions panned out. There was no electoral violence or intimidation. No one mobbed ballot boxes or election offices. As of this writing, political election-deniers who lost their races have accepted defeat.

We have been through this hysteria before. Predictions of right-wing violence are now a standard feature of Democratic rhetoric. In the lead-up to January 6, 2022 (the one-year anniversary of the 2021 Capitol riot), the media, politicians, and the Biden national-security apparatus warned that “domestic violent extremists” were likely to strike again. Washington, D.C., was reportedly on edge in anticipation of the MAGA rebels. As it turned out, January 6, 2022, was notable only for the maudlin theatrics of newly patriotic Democrats, who softly sang “God Bless America” in a candlelight vigil on the Capitol steps, as calm engulfed them.

During the previous year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security had issued regular warnings about election-denying terrorism. The summer of 2021, August 2021, September 2021—all provoked a satisfying increase in alerts and in precautionary barricades and bollards. And still, the right-wing terrorists did not strike.

This is where Mac Donald, quite disappointingly, lapses into some garden-variety Swamp-establishment boilerplate decrying the “loathsome, despicable mob violence of January 6, 2021.” We’ve all seen all too much of that garbage by now; I see no need to include any more of it here, no matter who says it or how much I may think of them otherwise. Onwards.

The “violent election-deniers” narrative is a subset of the larger white supremacist conceit so beloved of President Joe Biden. Biden has regularly speechified about the enduring strain of white supremacy in the American character and about its salience for contemporary street violence. In September 2022, for example, the president convened a White House summit against racism and right-wing hate. His portrayal of U.S. history consisted of one dispiriting atrocity after another.

No matter. The fiction of a white-supremacist, election-denying terror threat has allowed an expansion of government power and a wide-ranging assault on merit and speech. Biden boasts that on his first day in office, he directed national security officials to develop a strategy for countering domestic terrorism, focused exclusively on white supremacists. His since-discontinued Disinformation Governance Board would have surveilled and censored social media users who challenged the validity of elections—something that remains the prerogative of every American, even if those challenges are baseless. The right to free expression is not contingent on the truth of one’s speech. Private companies, whether in media, finance, or tech, routinely censor speakers they deem bigoted. The idea that white Americans can’t stop discriminating against people of color, even to the point of violence, has unleashed an avalanche of merit-destroying race and sex preferences throughout science, medicine, law, business, government, and education. Voting procedures are being recklessly loosened on the false theory that voter-identification requirements represent a ploy to disenfranchise minority voters. The focus on fictional white-supremacist, election-doubting violence allows Democrats to deny the real source of street violence in the U.S.: inner-city criminals, further emboldened by post-George Floyd depolicing, decriminalization, and decarceration.

Yet somehow, you choose to take Biden & Pals’ equally-specious J6 narrative as Gospel truth…WHY, exactly?

The lack of electoral violence this week will have no effect on the dominant Democratic narrative.

No, it most certainly will not. Anyone who objects to the dominant DemonRat narrative, however mildly, peaceably, or respectfully, will continue to be smeared, vilified, and bunged into the Gulag-Garland Archipelago indefinitely, just as they have been right along. Which tells me that it may be time, and past time, to re-instill an appropriate and becoming fear into these ersatz “public servants,” however that needs to be accomplished.

4

Notes on the passing scene

Diplomad weighs in.

Big waves of either color have proven rare events in our history. We have a very large, complicated, and diverse country, its politics, as a consequence, vary considerably from one region to another. What’s important in Arizona, does not necessarily register as an issue in New York, for example. Our wise founding fathers saw this, even in 1789, and created the electoral college, three co-equal branches of government, and a federal system with considerable power left to the individual states and the people; they were willing to live with a certain amount of national political deadlock or, let’s say, ambiguity for the sake of restraining the central government’s power. It’s a good system. It’s system of checks-and-balances generally has worked well for us for nearly two and a half centuries.

Today, however, we have serious trouble in America. We see that young people, ages 18-29, can be and are bought and swayed by the ludicrous promises and policies of the increasingly authoritarian Democratic Party–since its founding an odd mix of thugs and so-called intellectuals. This party, the world’s oldest, promises, and ensures, no consequences for bizarre and destructive personal behavior. Our cities are a horrific mess. Our educational institutions have become a nightmare under Democratic rule. They produce credentialed, smug, lazy, ahistorical, illiterate and silly brutes with strong self-esteem, an overwhelmingly sense of entitlement, and disconnected from the real economy. These stupid brutes basically add nothing to our material, spiritual, and intellectual wealth. They are ripe for manipulation and exploitation by the lords of the new left, and its billionaire allies in the mass media, high tech, and Pharma industries. They are the lemmings of the woke movement.

Appeals to patriotism, historical practice, and just common sense, make increasingly less headway with this mass of stupid voters. These electors now respond more to emotional appeals, often relying on fake science–e.g., men can become women, men can get pregnant, global climate “crisis,” the COVID “crisis”–promoted by cynical social media “influencers” and politicos, among others. They deny the existence of a crime wave–you are racist if you point it out–and any inflation concerns are dealt with by government subsidies, e.g., COVID payments of various types, student debt “forgiveness,” etc. They hate children and want to see them tortured or dead. They spout off a distorted version of history, which demands that America and the West atone for sins with reparations and open borders. They hate our country and the Western civilization from which it springs.

All that, of course, is quite apart from the corruption of the electoral process itself. Stealing elections is a well-honed art by the Democrats. In the last few election cycles, the Dems have become evermore cynical, and less and less worried about keeping what they do out of view.  They have no shame in using the bureaucracy and law enforcement to harass and intimidate the political opposition. They are aided in this by, as mentioned, a complaint and actively complicit media complex and the high lords of high tech. Dem officials in government have no hesitation in using the bureaucracy to torment and silence opponents.

I have to laugh/cry when I see conservatives arguing among themselves over we should run Trump or DeSantis in 2024. The Dems are quite happy to see and foster this silly debate. They run a mummy for President, a human vegetable for the Senate, and a DEAD guy for a State assembly seat, and they WIN! Their candidate for governor in Arizona just happens to be the person in charge of ensuring electoral integrity in Arizona. Yet, despite all this, we get labelled election deniers, get censored, thrown off media platforms, and ridiculed as conspiracy theorists if we express doubts about our election system. It simply doesn’t matter how good your candidates are if the system is rigged to ensure they lose.

In any nation whose “election” system is as demonstrably, flagrantly corrupt as ours has become, questioning said “elections” is much more than merely reasonable; in truth, it’s every patriotic American’s sacred duty.

1

No harm, no foul, please keep moving along, thank you for your compliance

Divemedic says he, for one, is relieved at this most reassuring news.

The agency that is in charge of ensuring that our elections couldn’t be tampered with, the CISA, has declared that our election systems were, once again, completely secure. There were no shenanigans in this election. No siree, we are on the job, and can assure you that everything is in tip top shape over here. Everything is just as secure as it was in 2020, when it was revealed that the CISA was working with leftist lobbying groups and leftist corporations to lock down the most secure election ever. Ever.

If you don’t believe this, you are a threat to US security.

Think of that “threat” designation as the signal honor it so truly is, DM.

2

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CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

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