Clarifying counterbattery

Tucker fires back at his maleficent Deep State detractors.

TUCKER CARLSON: We knew there was a reason leaders hid the January 6 tapes

One of the hallmarks of people who are telling the truth, in case you were wondering how to tell the difference, is that people who are telling the truth are calm. (They) don’t wave their hands around and make wild accusations. They don’t need to do that. It’s enough to say what they know and if honest people turn out to be wrong about something they have claimed, they’ll admit it. They don’t double down on false. They made a mistake and that’s okay. It’s not like they’re claiming to be God.

Liars behave differently. Liars are touchy, sometimes to the point of hysteria. They’re hiding something. That’s the whole point of lying and they’re worried you’re going to find out what it is. Liars are fragile because over time, lying makes you weak and afraid and has the same effect on countries by the way.

We’re living through one of those clarifying moments. Actually, we’re thankful for it, where we’re learning exactly who the liars are. On Monday, we showed you unreleased videotape from January 6. It proved, that tape proved, that three of the most important claims our leaders have made about that day were untrue. Their claims were lies. We were not shocked to discover that. We knew there was a reason that congressional leaders had been hiding the tape and that reporters in Washington weren’t demanding to see it. They were lying to us, obviously. That’s why you hide things.

But what was actually surprising, what we can’t quite get over even now, is how they responded when they were caught lying. They didn’t seem embarrassed. They didn’t apologize. They weren’t even curious to learn more about what actually happened on January 6. Let’s see the tape. No, they don’t want to see it. They exploded in rage. And then as liars tend to do, they doubled down.

They told the same lies they’d been caught telling, but with even greater aggression this time. Shut up. It’s midnight, they said, as the sun rose behind them. Who acts like that? Well, sociopaths do and in this case, the sociopaths turned out to be both Democrats and Republicans. The commitment to lying in Washington is far deeper and more bipartisan even than we realize, and we follow this stuff for a living.

Well, sure. Of COURSE they did. I mean, what else would they do? This is who they are, this is what they do.

Now, you sometimes hear people say that the whole partisan system is an illusion and that underneath the manufactured debates, the leaders on both sides are, in fact, secretly united in a common love of money and power and the deception required to get them. And honestly, we can never really bring ourselves to believe that. It’s just too dark. But now we do believe it because we have seen it.

And now—thanks to you, Tucker, and a dogged determination in pursuit of the truth that does credit to the values falsely proclaimed by pretty much everyone else in your fallen, badly-degraded profession—many, many more of us all across the nation have been forced to confront that raw, bruising truth themselves. No small thing, that.

And yet, here’s the thing: Leaders in both parties, the party that (“QAnon shaman” Jake) Chansley voted against and the party he voted for, have said nothing, not one word about the implications of this videotape, the implications not just for Chansley, but for our Constitution and our country going forward.

Instead, oh, how dare you show this? What is clearly exculpatory evidence! Again, it’s not just Chuck Schumer, it’s Republican senators Kevin Cramer, Mike Rounds, Chuck Grassley, John Thune, Lindsey Graham, of course, Congressman Dan Crenshaw, needless to say, Kelly Armstrong, all went after us. We’re not whining about that. We don’t care, actually, but it just tells you everything about the way things actually work. They’re not loyal to their voters. They are loyal to each other, and they’re willing to lie, really lie and crush people. Mitch McConnell, Thom Tillis and BLM superfan Mitt Romney, all weak men – and like all weak men, vicious men – were especially angry.

We invited Schumer on, McConnell, anybody is always welcome to come on our show. If we got something wrong, tell us how. If you think we altered the tape in some way, tell us how.

But they won’t, nor will they answer the most basic question, which is: why should a non, demonstrably nonviolent man, who literally said a prayer of Thanksgiving for police officers on the Senate floor, how was that man ISIS? How was he a domestic terrorist? How is he a threat to the republic? Why is he in jail for four years? Shut up. Pull that show off the air. 

They won’t answer any questions, but we have a question, which is: How, in a free country guided by the Constitution, were these people allowed to withhold evidence from Jacob Chansley’s lawyer? How could that happen?

The answer is simplicity itself: first, “fundamentally transform” said country into one no longer anything remotely resembling “free,” via, among all too many other things, rendering said Constitution entirely impotent and irrelevant—incrementally, over not just years but decades. Once that’s done, the rest will surely follow, as night follows day.

Which is precisely what happened. After what I’ll henceforth be referring to as The Carlson Revelations, none but a co-conspirator, a willful ignoramus, or a straight-up, insensate goddamned fool can plausibly deny it any longer. Not without discrediting themselves—fully and for all time, beyond any hope of reform or redemption—as one or the other of those three things.

Bottom line: the facts are in, the evidence before us clear, comprehensible, and abundant. Unpleasant though they are, further debate about those facts is worse than a waste of time—neither necessary, nor desirable, nor even excusable. Such bootless distractions are now the exclusive province of either the ill-intentioned or the just plain stupid, and nobody whatsoever else.

It’s clobberin’ time.

Telltale timeline

Commenter regitiger over at Sundance’s hang gets down to the real nitty-gritty.

I think most (not all, but a large number ) of people are totally missing what happened…and why this happened on jan 6.

I am going to try my best to outline the events that day…blast past the commonly held assumptions and get right down to the core corruption.

I will present this as a series of questions and answers.

q1: how do you prevent congress from delaying the certification of state electoral votes?

a: it requires a crisis. A crisis that creates an “emergency”…An “emergency” that invokes special house rules.

facts: remember, carefully…focus please…remember…just moments..literally 3 minutes before two representatives issued a vote for motions to suspend the certification the House members were “informed” by capitol police and other “agents” that a protest was about to breach the chambers. It was at this time that key people: pence, pelosi, schumer, mcconnell can be seen being walked out and escorted from the chamber. This effectively halted the Entire Chamber Process.

q2: why was it necessary to halt the chamber process

a2: the crisis was created to eliminate the motion challenges to halt the certification and to begin voting to look into voting irregularities and fraud.

facts: the two motions were completely legal and constitutional under at least two constitutionally recognized procedures…procedures that would REQUIRE the house to pause the certification and then vote to determine whether the motions of suspend could move forward.

q3: what was so important to refuse this motion and the subsequent votes to suspend the electoral certification

a3: it was important to remove that process entirely and continue the fraud and certify the fraud with no detractors on record. This effectively gives no standing for a scotus ruling appeal! understand this. If those two motions, even just one had successfully been voted EVEN IF THE MOTIONS were DENIED IN VOTE, this gives those who presented them with STANDING FOR A CONSTITUTIONAL LEGAL ARGUMENT BEFORE SCOTUS. Understand this.

q4: could this have been done some other way other than creating a crisis/protest?

a4: unlikely…In order to prevent those two motions, requires that speaker of the house, minority leaders, and the president of the congress (vice president of the united states: pence), to NOT BE PRESENT IN THE CHAMBERS. Once the capitol police and other “law enforcements agents” informed the speaker and these three other individuals, pelosi UNILATERALLY UNDER EMERGENCY RULES, suspended the business of the congress. This protest was necessary ..the crisis was created..because there is no other way to suspend the business of certification UNILATERALLY. By creating a crisis…invokes emergency procedures. No other circumstances other than war or mass simultaneous explosive diaahrea can create such unilateral speaker delivered suspension of the certification.

q5: Why did the motions, once that the speaker RECONVENED congress, move forward back again to the floor for votes? Why were members dissallowed to even consider putting forward ANY motions to the floor in when the chamber business was reopened?

a5: the speaker initiated the NEW sessions under special emergency rules. These rules abandon and make it clear that the ONLY purpose of the new session was to EXPEDITE the certification and dismiss all prior regular session procedural rules. This is why those two motions to table votes to consider a debate and pause to the certifications of state vote electors never happened later that evening when the house business was reconvened!

q6: Other than new rules, emergency rules, what other peculiar things occurred when the speaker reconvened?

a6: members were allowed to “vote” in proxy…remotely…not being present…(you can use your imagination about what conditions were placed on ALL members during this time to prevent anyone from “getting out of line”. Also clearly, it was at THIS NEW SESSION that VP Pence, President of Congress, would also have no ability to even consider pausing the electoral certification…because there was no motions of disagreements on the matter. So in a technical legal claim, he is correct that he had no constitutional authority to address any issues of fraud or doubts about electoral irregularities. But this completely dismisses the FACT that congress created rules in this crisis/emergency that never allowed them to be floored!

understand what happened in jan 6…don’t get hung up on viking impostors, stolen pelosi computers, podium heists, and complicit capitol police.

understand the process and what happened and what WAS NOT ALLOWED TO HAPPEN.

this was a coup….it was a very organized and carefully planned coup. VP Pence without a doubt as well as most members of the house were quite aware of how the certification was going to be MANAGED.

it would require new rules to prevent the debate clause from occurring!

new rules that ONLY AN EMERGENCY CRISIS COULD CREATE!

so they created an emergency.

noting: I understand why many people have great interest in debunking the j6 event…I get that. I think it is important to dissect and examine the events of that day.

but please…step back and understand WHY these things happened…examine the chain of events in congress…why those two motions that would have at least paused the certification THAT WOULD GIVE VP PENCE THE CONSTITUTIONALLY RECOGNIZED POWER TO MOVE TO SUSPEND THE ELECTORAL CERTIFICATION AND THEN EXAMINE THE IRREGULARITIES AND CLAIMS OF FRAUD!

at the very center of this coup stands Pence…the same individual who also spoiled President Trump’s first opportunities in the earlies hours of his Presidency just 4 years prior, when he created and facilitated the removal of LTGEN Flynn. I will not spend much time on this thread explaining why LTGEN Flynn was so important to President Trump and why the IC was so afraid he would have advisory power to the President. That I will leave for another day, another time. But understand this clearly: MIKE PENCE WAS AND IS WORKING FOR THE MOST CORRUPT CRIMINAL TREASONOUS PEOPLE IN GOVERNMENT.

protip: if you really want to get a true understanding of this matter videos of protesters walking in the capitol is not going to address them. Actual video and time line records of events and the specific actions taken by the speaker just moments before TWO MAJOR ELECTORAL ALTERING MOTIONS WERE ABOUT TO BE FLOORED. This crisis was developed just in time with a precise coordination to prevent those two motions to be entered into the chamber record. The two motions do not exist. The emergency powers established in the new session made sure they never could be entered. The emergency powers could never happen without a crisis…

I tried to find a way to just run an excerpt instead of lifting the thing wholesale, but couldn’t without disrupting and diluting it too badly for it to make any kind of sense. Seeing as how I think Tucker’s J6 expose amounts to one of the most important acts of True Journalism that’s occurred in my lifetime, I offer no apology for making that call. This needs, nay demands, the widest exposure we can possibly give it; as a blogger of twenty-plus years’ standing, I am pleased and proud to make whatever little contribution I can to this effort.

Yes, it really is, as I said yesterday, a Big Fuckin’ Deal.

Avast, ye scurvy dogs!

Kunstler demonstrates his prowess as a wordsmith with as masterful a display of writerly chops as I believe I’ve ever seen.

Imagine that on an April evening in 1912, the captain of the RMS Titanic had announced a grand ball at which the male passengers were asked to wear their wives’ clothing and vice-versa…. That was approximately the condition of Western Civ verging on springtime in 2023: preoccupied with silliness while the iceberg awaits.

But who would have thought the sinking of civilization would occur with such fantastic comic ornamentation? Men, in more ways than mere costuming, pretending to be women…incompetence honored, feted, even worshipped…intellect reduced to anti-thinking…anything of value thrown overboard in some weird post-modern potlatch ceremony of twisted moral righteousness…? But the hour is late, the party is near its end, and the iceberg is struck. The rest of the story will be you holding onto a few valuables, including your life, while the lifeboats get lowered.

What can one say, but…

Ain’t it, though. Ain’t it just. But hold onto your personal flotation devices, folks, there’s more where that came from.

Look no further than the fiasco in Ukraine, engineered by geniuses of the US foreign service in some daft exercise to show the world who’s who and what for. And, remind me: what was the basic idea there? To hamstring and hogtie Russia so badly that her people would overthrow the only rational head-of-state in Christendom, a figure who makes the presidents, chancellors, and prime ministers of Western Civ look like a troop of gibbering mandrills, with painted faces and blue butts, the ass-clowns of geopolitics.

Something tells me that this gang will not make it to the lifeboats.

We must hope they don’t, must in fact see to it that they don’t, if only as a matter of seeing justice visited upon them and nothing else. The wreckers, egotists, and purblind fools who sank the ship apurpose deserve no such consideration or forebearance. Let them tread the dark, icy waters until, at last exhausted, they sink all the way down to the very bottom—a most apt retribution for their innumerable crimes against us. They can plead their case for lenience to Davy Jones; there’s no market for it here, I’m afraid.

James carries on from there in like fashion, mining this rich allegorical vein for all it’s worth. It’s a gem—a genuine 24k pleasure to read, for anyone who gives even the limpest, soggiest damn about skillful writing. Best of all, its lustrous sparkle is untarnished by the usual backfilling calls for Voting Harderer At Them™ and bootless Congressional “investigation” meat-beatery at the close. Awestruck kudos to Kunstler for this one.

How to fix it

Endorsed, wholeheartedly.

College Should Be More Like Prison
The inmates I teach are serious, disciplined, hard-working students, eager to engage with ideas.

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men’s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.

Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet. Cyber-cheating, even assuming they wanted to indulge in it, is impossible. But more important, they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones. My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.

If prison inmates, many of whom have committed violent crimes, can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another’s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same?

Most of them, yes. They won’t, because they can’t. Never having been subject to much in the way of self-discipline or respect for any sort of authority, up to and including parental; possessed of little to no interest in actual education or self-betterment; born, weaned, and raised sucking down the bitter milk of self-indulgence, unearned praise, overentitlement, and low expectations—it is indeed too much to ask. They have been spared the rod, yielding the results predicted by the old biblical homily. That shouldn’t come as any big surprise, to any parent worthy of the name.

(Via VP)

Whither “governable”?

Are America’s big cities ungovernable? And if they are, do those of us who don’t live in them give a shit? SHOULD we? If so, WHY, exactly?

In the wake of the failure of failure Lori Lightfoot to gain admission to the Chicago mayoral runoff, The Atlantic, a left-inclined publication, has decided to salve her wound, though not the wound her mayoralty has inflicted upon Chicago, with an article proclaiming that “Big Cities Are Ungovernable…”

If that thesis were put to a for / against debate among scholars of urban history and dynamics, how do you think the discussion would go? Myself, I expect the participants would squabble endlessly over the definitions of “big,” “cities,” and “ungovernable.” (That would consume them so completely that they’d have nothing left for “are.”) Thus they could evade all discussion of the actual proposition until the last of the audience had drifted away.

Robert A. Heinlein was no fan of the big city:

“As a thumb rule, one can say that any time a planet starts developing cities of more than one million people, it is approaching critical mass. In a century or two it won’t be fit to live on.”

And so my own preference is clear, though it might have a Mae West feel, I shall add this: I’ve been a country dweller and I’ve been a city dweller, and honey, the country is better. But that’s all to the side.

It’s hardly a state secret that America’s largest cities are in bad shape today. They’re overrun with social pathologies, consistently underperform at “public services,” and cost a fortune to live in. Yet that was not always the case. Indeed, during the mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani, New York City returned from an abyss of squalor to a quality and livability it hadn’t known since Fiorello La Guardia. The Di Blasio and Adams mayoralties have dissipated that. Los Angeles during Ronald Reagan’s governorship over California was equally a beautiful, highly livable place. It’s not enough to say sic transit gloria mundi and pass on. We must discover the reasons for the changes and what “governability” or the lack thereof has to do with them.

Large numbers of people cannot be “governed,” in the original sense of the word, by a discrete “government.” (If that statement mystifies you, look up the function and operation of a steam engine’s governor.) They must ultimately “govern” themselves, which destroys the usual interpretation of governable and governability. Moreover, the “large number” doesn’t need to be in the millions, as The Atlantic would have it.

Today, sufficient fractions of the populaces of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and other major cities simply refuse to be governed. They do as they please, aware of the potential consequences but willing to risk them. That has rendered those cities ungovernable, in the sense generally understood by private citizens. But clearly it was not always thus.

The residents of Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, New York City, Chicago, and other homeless capitals have elected to tolerate the public degradation that their homeless populations impose upon them. Conditions there have made them resemble “closed systems” de facto where homelessness is concerned. They would rather tolerate huge homeless camps and what comes with them than strict code enforcement. The homeless find the results congenial to their filthy and dissolute preferences. What the city governments could do, they will not, for fear of electoral backlash.

And day by day, their entropy increases.

Is this a verdict on whether “Big Cities Are Ungovernable?” I don’t think so. History speaks to the opposite effect. But it does cast an interesting light on whether large groups of left-liberals are governable.

Well, I think the answer to that ever-more-pressing question has been made plain enough by recent history; anyone still in doubt is encouraged to take themselves a nice, long stroll around downtown Detroit late at night for further education, if they dare. Wear full Class-III body armor with ceramic plates, that’s my advice.

Governable or not, the libtards can damned sure be suppressed. Nobody seems much interested in talking about that option right now, even sotto voce. Nevertheless, it’s a conversation we’re going to need to get started on sooner rather than later.

Chin up

I been rasslin’ ‘round in my head all day with how I might present this next without confusing the hell out of everybody, but I haven’t been able to come up with anything. So steel yourselves; gonna be a lot of jumping back and forth betwixt posts on this one. Instead of just providing one link for each excerpt as and when it’s first referenced, as is my usual wont, each time I shift to a different post I’ll re-link where it comes from. That’s the best expedient I can think of.

The Democrats Have Already Won the 2024 Election, Regardless of Who Either Party Runs

We don’t need to recap what happened in 2020, when Sundown Joe* campaigned from his basement and drove enough enthusiasm to have 81 million votes counted for him. The Democrats did a spectacular job of making their stolen votes completely unverifiable. “OK”, I thought. “The GOP has learned their lesson and won’t let this happen again, right?” Wrong.

Jump to 2022. We were ready for the Red Tsunami, which turned out to be a red trickle. Yes, there were factors. I pointed out that the Roe V. Wade victory was worth any temporary losses. Could we have had stronger candidates? Sure, Hershel Walker & Dr. Oz were far from perfect, but spare me that talk as an excuse. The Dems “won” with Raphael “Slum Lord Preacher Millionaire” Warnock in GA, Katie “Abortion Mouse” Hobbs didn’t even make any freakin’ effort to hide the election fraud that she committed! And don’t get me started on Uncle Festerman in PA. The dude got elected despite that fact that he is so clearly brain damaged that he couldn’t utter a single coherent thought! Even more so than the dementia patient who was installed as President after the 2020 election! No, a bigger problem is that the GOP Establishment didn’t want solid majorities in the House & Senate. Cocaine Mitch witheld funding for any candidates who would not kneel and kiss his ring, while barely veiled double agent Lindsey Graham decided to offer the Dems some great Get Out the Vote fodder by introducing a bill (that had ZERO chance of passing) to completely ban abortions immediately after the Roe ruling.

Then in the aftermath, the GOPe decided to spit in the faces of the Normals who they pretend to represent, with Cocaine Mitch proclaiming that sending billions of dollars with no accountability to Ukraine was the top priority of the GOP base. And in a head scratcher, the party decided to reward Mitt Romney’s niece, Ronna McDaniel as GOP Chair. I can see her appeal to the GOPe, as she is great at raising a lot of money from big donors while carefully avoiding producing results with that money (And no, I have no idea why Trump’s people whipped votes for McDaniel on election day).

So what can we expect in 2024? At the top of my post Iinked to my anti-Trump take. There was a lot of disagreement, both in the comments and on various boards where I posted, and most of the disagreement was well articulated. But on top of everything I had to say, it looks like Biden* is trying to use Merrick Garland’s corrupt Department of Justice to go after Trump to keep him from being able to run. This wouldn’t be unprecedented – Tuca recently made a strong case that the Justice Dept. railroaded Nixon out of office. So let’s say that we end up having a bruising GOP primary that toughens the eventual winner, and whoever loses decides to put the country ahead of any personal disputes and endorses the winner. And in this scenario DeSantis is the winner, and we have a simple case of what too many pundits have called, “Trump without the baggage” and the GOP cruises to victory, right?

Well, no, not necessarily.

The first and most important angle to consider when analyzing this stance is the present reality of American elections. President Trump’s seemingly insurmountable election night leads in 2020, which were significantly larger than his leads throughout the night in 2016, somehow vanished into slim Biden victories. In other words: Without our corrupt election systems being corrected, it doesn’t matter who runs since the winner is predetermined. Trump didn’t cost us; the election was stolen. But for the sake of this discussion, we’ll say that our elections are free and fair.

Despite his alleged loss, Trump gained more than 12 million votes from 2016 (and likely more,) the largest increase in vote total for any sitting president in American history and the highest vote total by any presidential candidate ever, aside from Biden’s highly suspicious 81 million votes that same year. So, the media-manufactured Trump baggage has not had any negative impact on voter enthusiasm for Trump. Based on his vote increasing by millions, you could make the argument the baggage led to more people rallying to support him.

Prior to 2016, Conservative voter enthusiasm in the previous two presidential elections was abysmal. John McCain and Mitt Romney both lost convincingly to Barack Obama due in large part to their politically correct, low energy approach to politics when conservatives were looking for the exact opposite.

The “Trump baggage” can be summarized as a combination of his brash style of politics and the never-ending war waged on him by the media. Ironically, Trump’s style was the change America sought, and his exposure of the corrupt media is what has kept him so popular. In essence, Trump is a product of the corrupt environment the media has created, and their hatred towards him makes him more popular. The “Trump baggage” is what was needed to move the needle enough for Trump to win states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that Republicans had not won since the 1980s.

Most of the baggage from the Trump presidency was completely manufactured by media with the purpose of doing exactly what it is accomplishing to an extent now: Diminish enthusiasm for Trump at any cost, no facts needed. The goal was never to prove any of the false accusations against Trump. They knew this was impossible; they created them.

If those examples are considered “too much baggage,” could you imagine the media frenzy with issues of actual substance? Enter Ron DeSantis. To this point, it is obvious why the Florida Governor does not seem to have much baggage, and it isn’t because he has a squeaky-clean past. He currently has not declared a run for the presidency which is when most baggage is exposed (or manufactured.) There already are accusations ready to be weaponized when the time comes. Important to note, as seen with Trump: truth and facts are not needed to create baggage.

It’s a crucial distinction, since the list of DeSantis “baggage” is much ado about the exact same style of deceitful, ginned-up nothing the AmThink author dismisses with Trump. But, as Brother Bob notes, that ain’t the point.

Personally, I thought that the anti-Desantis shots in the post I just linked didn’t have much substance to them, but that’s not the point. To The Radical Left, charges don’t have to have any substance or facts behind them. Lefties will happily believe any lie if it supports their beliefs, and just look at the stupidity they believed about Trump. I could write a few thousand words, but can sum it up with the most egregiously unbelievable example that they all swallowed: Pee Tape, anyone? Of course, in this scenario The Radical Left will also forget their seething hatred for Trump, as one trait they’ve always shared is that they obediently march in lockstep to whoever their leadership labels their latest Emmanuel Goldstein. Ace lays down a few of the ways thet they will delude themselves that they actually like Trump compared to DeSantis. And of course, unless voter fraud gets addressed, pretending any nominee can overcome it is a trap.

Since you brought it up, let’s talk about traps for a sec.

DeSantis 2024 Is a Trap

If voter fraud is not addressed, it doesn’t matter who the candidate is, because democracy in America won’t exist.

Stop trying to take Ron DeSantis away from Florida. Just stop it. I understand the rationale, but it’s wrong. It may be quite reasonable to be jealous of Florida for its governor—the only governor in the nation to win my coveted “competent” rating on every major issue. But before we encourage DeSantis and Donald Trump to have a falling out that splits the party (or, rather, before we let the RINO simps do it at the behest of Democrats and lots of Chinese money), let’s review a few salient points.

First, governors really matter now. The worse Washington gets—and it gets bigger and worse no matter who’s president because the bureaucrats never change—the more important states become. We need to stop thinking of the presidential election as the be-all and end-all of politics. It was never supposed to be that way. States were once so powerful that the federal government had to fight a Civil War to smack them down. States formerly regarded themselves as coequal partners in the nation, not as subservient entities bowing to federal dictates. Whatever else the Civil War achieved, it did immeasurable damage to states’ freedom of action and, by extension, our own.

States have it in their power to undo this damage by protecting their citizens from federal agents who operate outside the law. (Case in point: ATF agents showing up without warrants at peoples’ homes, attempting to entrap gun owners.) But that would require boldness and courage on a level I don’t expect from any governor. Maybe Kari Lake would have done it. But she had her election stolen. DeSantis is the only sitting governor who could conceivably have the strength of purpose to lead a great reawakening of states’ rights. As I say, I don’t expect it. But he’s the only one who could do it—and he won’t do it if he’s busy trying to get himself elected president.

And here’s the other thing about DeSantis. We can call it “the main thing”: DeSantis isn’t going to win in 2024. No Republican is, unless voter fraud is addressed first. That means voting in person, on Election Day, and with a valid picture ID, not voting by mail over the course of a month. If we don’t fix that—and we’re not fixing it—it does not matter who the candidate is: Trump, DeSantis, or any other Republican. None of them have a chance in hell. It has nothing to do with who they are.

I’m going to say this again, simply because far too many “conservative” writers are ignoring it: Trump did not lose in 2020. Republicans did not lose in 2022. If we think we can win with a broader “big-tent” message or with someone who does less mean tweeting, we, in our innocence, are actively helping to destroy this country.  

Pretty much, yeah. Back over to Brother Bob for the Big Question.

So what do we do now? We’ve already heard talk about the GOP adopting ballot harvesting techniques, as has already been successfully done in California. While I get the idea of using their tactics against the Lefties, that only goes so far, as the moment it becomes truly effective for us Normals is the day we get FBI raids on the homes of every Republican participating. If you don’t see that happening, look no further than all of the BLAMtifa domestic terrorist walking free while the victims of the January 6th Reichstag Fire rot away in the Garland Archipelago. Even if that threat didn’t hang overhead, I still don’t like it. For one, it gives a huge advantage to the GOPe versus any grassroots Republicans given the monetary and organizational advantages. Second, and more importantly, why should we Normals have to surrender a huge tactical advantage to The Radical Left? And if we become over reliant on harvesting, how soon until Democrats figure out that it’s a great way for them to measure how many fraudulent votes they need to find on election night? On this tactic, I share the brief, profane opinion toward Heinecken that Dennis Hopper offered in the movie Blue Velvet. Side note, but why aren’t any of us Normals pushing how ballot harvesting takes away the right of the secret ballot?

At this point you might be wondering if I’m going to offer anything remotely constructive, assuming you haven’t already put your fist through your screen hoping it will reach my nose. Adam Mill lays out the interesting scenario of boycotting the 2024 election.

I don’t completely agree with this sentiment, either. Completely sitting out the election means an electoral bloodbath downticket and wipes out representation for us Normals at the state and local levels, as well as in the School Board fights, where our base has shown new life. What if we still voted, but all voted a write in for President, such as John Galt? I’m sure that many of you disagree with me, but if I’m right (and I sincerely hope I’m not), how many rigged elections and tyranny at the hands of the Democrats do we put up with before we realize that we’re fighting the last war, and that we lost it years ago? Are we at that stage? I don’t know. Can we avoid reaching the stage where our election process has gone full banana republic, or was 2020 our Pearl Harbor, and 2022 was our Phillippines? I’d like to say that our Midway will be 2024, but based on what I wrote here I don’t see it. Calling out the regime’s illegitamacy is only a starting point, and things will get worse before they get better. But America remains the greatest country to ever exist, warts and all. My uncle didn’t get shot up by Rommel’s Africa Corps to return and live a productive life, while my great uncle didn’t get gunned down on the beaches of Normandy for me to squander what they sacrificed.

We will win this fight, as tyrannies always fall eventually. Some take longer than others. But if Germany could overcome being ruled by literally Hitler, and most of Eastern Europe could throw off Russian tyranny, there’s no reason we can’t do the same. And while we’re not as far along the road as those nations wound up, it’s impossible to ignore the path we’re on. But I’m not giving up.

Nor should you, nor should anybody else. Whatever the answer might turn out to be—and like Bob, I don’t claim to have any good ones myself—there is in fact one out there, just waiting for us to find it. Hope is only ever lost when it’s been abandoned. And that we must not, we cannot, do.

State of (perpetual un)readiness

PopMech takes a look at yet another disastrous multi-billion-dollar boondoggle from the once-mighty US military—a bigger one, probably, than even the F35 Turducken.

How the World’s Greatest Aircraft Carrier Became a $13 Billion Fiasco

Can the military save the USS Gerald R. Ford?

Wrong question. The real question is: should it?

The late 20th century was a time of supreme American confidence and rapid innovation. The Cold War was drawing to a close, the digital age was around the corner, and the Pentagon saw an opportunity to capitalize on peacetime and begin preparing for future conflict. With few diplomatic or military distractions, the United States ushered in a revolution in military technology.

Out of that boom period came ambitions for a new class of aircraft carrier headlined by the transformational USS Gerald R. Ford, a ship featuring an expanded flight deck, a boosted power plant, and support for almost two dozen emergent technologies. Expectations were high. The Ford’s nuclear reactor and propulsion system would triple the electrical power of the preceding Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. Its state-of-the-art weapons elevators would move 20,000 pounds of munitions at speeds of 150 feet per minute compared with the Nimitz‘s speed of 100 feet per minute. Its new launch-and-recovery system would be able to handle 270 planes in a single day. From bow to stern, the ship’s innovations—designed to save time, costs, and crew—would revolutionize the way the U.S. military built and used carriers. The Ford would be a symbol of American superiority, one that would project power to American adversaries for five decades of dependable service.

Well, they got the “transformational” bit right, anyway; the Ford definitely IS that. It’s just that it’s part of a decidedly wrong-way transformation: from a capable, powerful military—along with fighters that can’t fight; tanks that can’t tank; rifles more prone to jamming than a pimply, teenaged Stevie Vai wannabe at Sam Ash on a Saturday afternoon; and battalions of mincing, simpering dick-choppers who only signed up so they could get their bulbous naughty parts lopped off by an Army surgeon for free—into a hapless, bumbling, incompetent one.

“There was this thinking of, ‘We are so far ahead of everyone else that we can afford to take a strategic pause and take risks on our acquisition and try new and untested technology,’” says Eric Wertheim, a defense analyst and expert with the U.S. Naval Institute, of the nation’s mindset after the Cold War. “And there was this feeling that the rest of the world is at least 20 years behind us.”

But after two decades of development and delays, the audacity that conceived the Ford seemed to usher its doom. Expected to save the military $4 billion during its life span, the Ford has actually cost billions more than initial estimates. First expected to deploy in 2018, it has been projected to deploy as far out as 2024. When the ship reached the Navy after construction, it was already two years behind schedule, with work outstanding on thousands of items. In 2015, Sen. John McCain, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former Navy aviator, called packing all that tech onto the Ford “the original sin” that damaged the program.

Even the Navy’s top officer acknowledged the problems that have plagued the carrier. “We had 23 new technologies on [the USS Gerald R. Ford] which, quite frankly, increased the risk of delivery on time and cost right from the get-go,” said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday at a virtual talk before the Navy League’s 2021 Sea Air Space exposition. “And I think industry’s in full agreement with this: We really shouldn’t introduce more than maybe one or two new technologies on any complex platform like that, in order to keep risk at a manageable level.”

Meanwhile, naval advances by U.S. adversaries have added urgency to the Ford’s troubleshooting. The ship’s critics point to its expanding budget and timetable as evidence that the U.S. military should reconsider developing massive nuclear carriers as a foundational element of its naval program. Military advisor Norman Polmar points out that America’s most recent conflicts in the Middle East didn’t even use the Nimitz class to full capacity. “Look what we did in Iraq,” he says. “We launched [just] 20 or 30 strikes a day from a carrier that has 70 airplanes.” And Rep. Adam Smith, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, has questioned whether the Ford’s price tag justifies its utility. During a 2021 Brookings Institution discussion, Smith asked if there are other ways “to get unmanned systems closer to the fight that don’t cost $12 billion.”

All part and parcel of the truism that generals and admirals are always preparing to fight the last war, in this case WW2.  Out of the myriad mistakes, flaws, and failures of the Ford, this one remains the most jaw-dropping to me.

One standout feature of the Ford—albeit a troublesome one—is its state-of-the-art Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG). Prior to Ford, American carriers used a hydraulic arresting system to slow and stop landing aircraft, but the AAG uses an electric engine and a water twister to accommodate a broader range of aircraft—including unmanned aerial vehicles. Engineering and manufacturing of the AAG began in 2005, with 2009 the targeted end date. But a 2016 Pentagon Inspector General report noted that developmental testing for the AAG would continue through 2018; the system still hadn’t proved capable or safe enough to test on the Ford. Between 2009 and 2012, the AAG’s power conditioning system failed across multiple tests, and both its inverter system and cable shock absorber required redesigns. The setbacks ballooned the AAG’s development cost from $143 million to more than $1 billion, according to a report from Sen. McCain’s office.

(Now-retired Navy captain Talbot) Manvel says he resisted AAG on the Ford as early as 1998, wanting to push it onto the subsequent ships in the class after its design had matured. He had his way until Rumsfeld stepped in with his transformational vision. “This was transformation run amok,” Manvel says.

That it surely was, sir. Which, once the temptation of it is yielded to, is what usually tends to happen.

It all makes for a depressing read for anyone who grew up believing that the American war machine was nigh-invincible, without Earthly peer or parallel amongst its adversary nation-states. That’s simply no longer the case, if it ever really was. Which, given certain harsh realities of life on this here planet, it almost certainly wasn’t.

Mad messaging skillz

As ever, the Left runs rings around the Truth while the poor, dear old thing is still trying to get its boots on. And that, friends, is but one of several diabolical stratagems that explain how it is they keep winning.

Did You Ever Wonder How and Why the Left Is Able to Push Their Narratives Almost Unhindered?
Aren’t you sick to death of the Current Message? I know I am.

If you aren’t concerned about climate change, or whatever name The End of the World is going by this week, it doesn’t matter because you will be made to see or hear it. Or maybe the current message is Pride or Acceptance or Eat Bugs and Like It.

Actually, Eat Bugs and Like It is so January. The Current Message is Your Gas Stove Is Killing You, Your Dog, and Mother Earth, Too.

Did you notice that something that had never been an issue before, gas stoves, suddenly popped up everywhere all at once? That’s how it works. One message is repeated, amplified, repeated again, and reamplified, across every available medium.

Whatever the Current Message is, your favorite TV show will include it in a plotline. The network that airs it bombards you with similar messaging in its promotional spots. The search engine you use — and it doesn’t matter which one — promotes pages selling the same pablum and squelches dissenting views. Social media algorithms void your shares and silence your comments. TikTok, social malware unleashed by the CCP, fuels division and discontent by serving up the most dopamine-friendly content.

Normal people — that excludes you and me, gentle reader — who get their news the way normal people do, are suddenly questioning their gas cooktops. Because the ever present Current Message pounded it into their heads.

Throw in near-total control of the Shadow State bureaucratic apparatus, and…well, hey, there’s a reason I started calling it the shitlib/Progressivist Megalith a good while back, y’know.

The final straw

It’s now official: Trump really IS a moron. Either that, or he’s a damned liar, a useful idiot playing right into the hands of the Evil Left, willingly acting as their cat’s paw in his completely futile, vainglorious quest for the US Presidency. Either way, another thing is now official: I’m all done with him, and will neither endorse nor support him in said fore-doomed quest.

For God’s sake, Soros did not “endorse” Ron DeSantis
George Soros wants to destroy the Republican Party. He’s made that very clear many times. So when Trump loyalists started spreading a video of remarks he made recently purporting to show Soros endorsing Ron DeSantis over Trump for the Republican nomination I knew there was something very fishy going on.

Soros did express hope that DeSantis is the Republican nominee, but not because he thought the governor would make a good president.

He hates DeSantis just as he hates Trump. What he wants is a 3-way race for president, which would guarantee a Democrat victory.

He is convinced that if DeSantis wins the Republican nomination that Donald Trump will jump into the race as a third-party candidate and lead to a Democrat landslide in the 2024 election.

Seems obvious enough, doesn’t it? Ace spells it out even more directly:

I really do not like this level of low dishonesty. Superficially the lie works — you watch the video, you see Soros say the words.

But then two days later you see the full clip and you see you’ve been duped. Now you know the guy who put the video together is a liar, and you have a bad taste in your mouth about the candidate he’s supporting.

It’s just so stupid and it winds up boomeranging back against the candidate it’s supposed to be helping. People remember when other people try to trick them, and when other people act as if they’re fools.

Treating people as if they’re fools to be duped is treating them with disrespect.

And no, that doesn’t mean Trump is treating people with disrespect. He didn’t create this meme. (I assume.) He has nothing to do with it…unless he retweets it.

I hope he doesn’t retweet it.

Sadly, that hope turned out to be every bit as vain as Trump’s “Presidential” ones, because the idiot Trump did precisely that:



Actually, it ought to have told you something, genius. As Rand Paul once famously put it: “THEY endorsed ME, but I didn’t endorse THEM.”

But who even knows anymore, maybe the fucking stupe is just hoping we’re all too blind and/or stupid to catch onto the grift, as his newest bestest buddy Soros does. Umpty-bazillion-dimensional chess, anyone? Meh. Whatevs.

Back to Ace.

Well, I was hoping that Donald Trump wouldn’t retweet the stupid lie that George Soros had endorsed Ron DeSantis, because that would just force his supporters to defend this lie, but of course he did just that today. Of course. How could he not?

Ah, I’m sure he’ll do the right and honorable thing and retract when he finds out it’s bogus.

(LOL.)

T’ain’t funny, McGee. I’m with BCE, fully and firmly.

Art makes a good point that they’re setting (“Nikki” Haley) up for the 2028 run, as it’s looking like (for now) Orangemanbad vs Floridaman. Personally, I just want Orangemanbad to go the fuck away. He makes me tired… weary…his ‘flash in the pan’ moment is OVER and he dropped the fucking ball on ‘cleaning up the town’ like a motherfucker. He’s also too fucking old and a member of the Geriatric Brigade that seems incapable of stepping aside and enjoying all that “me!me!me” money that they sucked out of the system. If there ever was anyone who symbolizes the Degenerate Yuppie/Boomer Scum, it’s “The Donald”.

DeSantis, man I pray that he’s not running.

He needs to stay in situ, and become Dictator of GeorgiFloriBama when the wheels come fully off.

Yes indeedy, right down the line.

As I’ve said here before, when I was living in NYC I considered Trump to be little more than a tiresome annoyance, what with his constant appearances on the TeeWee, promoting himself and his various endeavors, pimping for the Clintons ceaselessly as he did back then. I changed my mind about the guy when he started saying all the right things in 2015 as a long-odds-against candidate for Prexy, and was behind him all the way even when, as President, he reneged on his oft-repeated campaign vows to “drain the Swamp” by “hiring only the best people” (*coughcough ComeyPenceSessionsBarrMattisGarlandetcetc ad infinitum ad nauseam coughcough*).

“So much winning you’ll get tired of all the winning”? Yeah, about all that…

No longer. Enough, at long last, is enough. At least, for me it is. YMMV, of course and as always.

In sum, then, to hell with Trump. And, even though he’s accomplished more of real, lasting import in his tenure as Governor than Trump managed in his one and only term as PoTUS, should DeSantis go back on his previous declaration that he wouldn’t be running, to hell with him too. NeverTrump, OnlyTrump, whatthefuckever—a pox on ALL their houses, I say.

Just keep on keepin’ on

Gonna have to “excerpt” damned near all of this one, I’m afraid, since it expresses my own thoughts on DeSantis the Destroyer pretty precisely.

We Need to Talk About Mark Levin’s Interview With Ron DeSantis Last Night
On Sunday night, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appeared on “Life, Liberty, and Levin” on Fox News, purportedly to promote his new book, The Courage to Be Free, which comes out this week.

While DeSantis has not yet declared that he’s running for president, he certainly sounded like a man who’s making the case for his candidacy. Or, if not, he’s making a case for conservatism as the path to American success and prosperity— the subtitle of the book is “Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”

As my colleague Stephen Green pointed out earlier today:

DeSantis isn’t traveling to early presidential primary states like Iowa or New Hamphire, at least not yet. Instead, his most recent tour was through three struggling Deep Blue cities to tout what he’s done differently in Florida… DeSantis is calmly but quite publicly holding up his state as a model for the nation, just like a governor running for president would do. Except that he has yet to announce that he’s running. He hasn’t even formed one of those exploratory committees that allows a not-yet candidate to fundraise.

I don’t see how it’s a bad thing for DeSantis to wait to announce, if he does indeed plan to run. Does anyone really think the primary season is too short and needs to be lengthened? The 2016 primary seemed like it would never end—and the personal attacks and circular firing squad did nothing to help spread the message about the benefits of conservatism.

To the best of my knowledge, contra the ceaseless nattering from Vichy GOPe blowflies seeking to play Da Guv off against Trump for their own purposes, the one and only thing DeSantis has said to date about running for Prexy in ’24 is that he ain’t gonna. He’s perfectly free to run if he wants, just as who even knows how many other ambitious governors have before him; there’s nothing especially sinister or shameful about that, really. That said, I still very much hope he won’t. For me, it all boils down to this:

Whether or not DeSantis decides to run for president, he’s demonstrated over and over again that it’s possible to stand up to the woke mob and The Swamp and win. He stood up to Disney and won—depriving the woke company of its special tax breaks and self-governing authority. He noted in the interview that on his first day in office, he sat down and read what authority the governor had and then went to work. He fired a George Soros-backed DA when he refused to enforce the law; remade a failing Florida university in the image of Hillsdale College; went after venues hosting perverts performing drag shows with little kids in the audience; and banned sexually explicit materials in the classrooms of children in grades K-2. He was one of the first governors to re-open his state during the covid pandemic and he ordered children and teachers back into their classrooms. He also refused to force vaccine mandates. Unlike Trump, who stood mutely next to Dr. Fauci while he stood at the podium and spewed his lies about the origins of the covid virus, masking, and the vaccine, DeSantis did his research and decided for himself what was best for his state.

And those are just some of the highlights.

There’s been an effort by some to portray DeSantis as a Swamp creature, beholden to Paul Ryan (who?) or something, but that’s laughable on its face. This guy is fighting the liberals and WINNING. Who cares if he ran into Kevin McCarthy in a men’s room once, or whatever it is the Twitter bots are saying this week? All I care about is winning and taking back the country. If the GOP elites want to pour money into his campaign, let them. You can’t win the presidency without money. There’s more than enough proof to indicate that DeSantis is his own man and not beholden to special interests.

Noticeably absent from the interview was any mention of Trump’s recent attacks on DeSantis. Levin mentioned that the book, which DeSantis actually wrote himself, doesn’t contain any of the gossip or attacks on other politicians that tend to be a staple in political books. Instead, it focuses on DeSantis’s biography and his policies and principles.

“It’s like if you and I would have had a private conversation three years ago, why should I regurgitate that and put that out there when you were talking to me in confidence?” the governor explained. “And so I try to focus on the policies. What does it mean to be a leader in this day and age because, as you know, Mark, when you’re standing for our values, you come under assault in American society.”

“If you’re standing for the right things, you’re going to have to show courage under fire if you ultimately want to bring this stuff in for a landing, and so we had to do that so many different times. And I just felt that’s something that people are gonna be more interested in than any kind of dishing about private conversations I may have had with somebody.”

If there’s one thing we all should have learned since 2016—the last two nightmarish years especially—it’s that the President is nothing but a figurehead, a dumbshow put on for the edification and/or entertainment of the flyover Great Unwashed rubes by the Men Behind The DC Curtain. Do yourself, your state, and your nation a solid, Ron: don’t fall for it. You’ve accomplished some truly worthwhile, significant things as governor, something no real outsider or reformer will ever be permitted to do in Mordor On The Potomac so long as the Barad-Dur still stands.

Let the Swamp players keep playing, the manipulators keep manipulating, the Beltway Bandits keep up their banditry; they’re going to, no matter what you or anybody else does or says. As we saw with the Agony of Trump, no one man can possibly fix all that’s wrong in the Garden of FederalGovCo. You’ll do much more good where you’re at than you will under siege in the White House—ineffectual, beset on all sides, while we look on in despair as the jackals strip yet another carcass clean to the bone.

Do not take this cup from them, no matter how passionately it’s urged on you. Stay the course. And for Christ’s sweet sake, stay right where you are.

RINOs not RINOs

“Our sacred democracy” is…neither.

Keep in mind who essentially founded the Republican Party and was its first president. That would be Abraham Lincoln. He loved war, especially when waged to put an end to “democracy.”

Unless, of course, you are a typical Republican – who believes the South had no right to depart from the “union.” No right to form a government of its people, by its people and for its people.

Spare us, please, the cant about “slavery.” Lincoln and his Republicans enslaved us all. What do you own, exactly? Is it your home? The one you must pay the government forever in order to be allowed to continue living in it? Your car? Which you must also pay the government in order to be allowed to use? On roads you must also obtain the government’s permission to use? Can you open a business – or do business – without the permission of your massa?

Lincoln waged war upon democracy without mercy, against civilians explicitly, sending the mid-19th century equivalents of SS-Obergruppenfuhrers marching into the South to literally scorch the earth, so as to teach the recalcitrant Southerners all about “democracy.” The same kind of “democracy” that the same blue-suited Obergruppenfuhrers – Sherman and Sheridan and Custer – brought to the Indians of the American plains, after they were done with the South. The same “democracy” that Biden – and Graham – seek to further in eastern Europe.

In everywhere.

For there is nowhere on this Earth that is to be left free to decide its own course. The only course is that of modern American “democracy,” which is a philosophy both the Left and the Republican “right” agree upon. It is a philosophy that says Our Way is the only way and if you do not like it, tough. And if you resist, we will destroy you.

Even if it means destroying the world, for their world is one of unassailable power that, if lost, costs them everything. And that is why they are willing to make sure no cost is spared to preserve it – and that all of us pay it.

The take-home point here is that Republicans such as Lindsey Graham are not Republicans in Name Only (RINOs). They are the most authentic and faithful Republicans. The truest expositors of the philosophy imposed at bayonet-point upon the United States (North as well as South) that “democracy shall not perish from this Earth.”

That’s why some of us refer to it as the Uniparty—and why we really could use a true second party alternative to it.

Compromise? NEVER

To the Evil Left, that word does not mean what you think it means.

To My Sorrow, There Can Be No Common Ground With the Left

Having been raised a liberal who became a conservative, I have long been an advocate of dialogue. Of finding the middle way. Of reaching a consensus. Knowing both sides of the aisle as I do, I had thought that there might be some point at which our two sides might find common ground or a way of living with one another.

I will now finally admit that is simply not a possibility. I take no joy in that, but there comes a time when one must admit that compromise is impossible, and that to search for it involves capitulation with alleged human beings who have blinded themselves to all but the basest of pursuits and desires. There comes a time at which hope ends, and one realizes that we can no longer live with one another. It is a sad realization, but one that is based on a harsh, unforgiving reality. Long had I hoped that cooler heads might prevail, that we could see eye to eye on something. But whether it is because of the internet, our feckless leaders, or the inherent sinfulness of mankind, we must admit that the breach between the insanity of the Left and the rest of the world is simply too large and wide to bridge. It would take an act of God to bring about reconciliation. And for better or worse, He has chosen to leave us to our own devices. The Old Testament prophets warned that those who sought their will above all else would reap the whirlwind. And the people in power have done just that. How long they evade the chaos that they have seeded will be up to the Almighty.

Well, from another point of view it isn’t cause for sadness, not really. For any sane, upright American who still holds the ideals of our Constitution and Founding dear to his heart, the very notion of “compromise” with soulless totalitarian thugs can only be anathema—a consummation not devoutly to be wished, but to be eschewed.

The unbridgeable chasm between Us and Them is inevitable, right, and above all, necessary. What we have here is nothing whatsoever new; this is a conflict as old as that between Good and Evil itself, amounting to the same exact thing throughout the ages, really. We should all be grateful to God that He’s seen fit to grant us the opportunity to resist them with all our might, to our last dying breath if that’s what it takes. To my way of thinking that’s cause not for mourning, but for celebration and joy.

The results are in: masks and lockdowns are the BUNK

Don Surber’s title really says it all.

Masks worked. They just didn’t stop covid
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens pointed out what was obvious three years ago: masks don’t stop viruses. Nothing short of a hazmat suit does. Viruses make their rounds every few years, eventually deteriorating into a strand of the common cold. They are deadly at first. Indeed, this manmade concoction has killed 1.12 million Americans.

But that is less than 1% of the population; in fact it is 1/3rd of 1% of the population.

And even that “1.12 million Americans” number is the bunk as well, grossly inflated to include as it does deaths by gunshot wound, traffic accident, cancer, flu, random misadventure, and anything else the lying liars of FederalGovCo could misattribute to FauxVid and hope gullible panic-ninnies would gulp down whole.

I was sanguine about the virus. The masks and social distancing were medical theater just as TSA is security theater. Both make the public feel safer, and as an added bonus they give the Karens on the left a reason to feel morally superior to those of us who realize it is all for show.

At the height of the mask hysteria, Kyle D. Killian wrote in Psychology Today, “This week, on social media, I reposted a photo of a white woman carrying a sign that reads ‘I’d Rather Bury My Family From COVID Than See Them Enslaved to the Fear of It.’ Why? I was curious about others’ thoughts on it.”

He wrote, “Highly educated intellectuals—people literally paid to type and talk—must resist the urge to make fun of this person or to lecture down to them about virology, science, etc. What is key, crucial in fact, is not dismissing or mocking this person, but interpreting the signage as an indicator of a fear-based response.

“In this case, masking requirements have been equated in this person’s mind to a fundamental loss of freedom or liberty.”

ANALYSIS: True. Because that is EXACTLY what they were, and ALL that they were. The real problem for Killian and his ilk is that a small handful of us still give a damn about that, rather than being not just willing but eager to surrender essential liberty in exchange for a false sense of security and safety, like the vast majority of gutless pussies here in the Land of the Skeer’d and the Home of the Slave.

…”Fear has clouded this person’s thinking; instead of seeing social distancing and masks as a way of caring for others, putting the Golden Rule into action, or acknowledging that some folks feel just fine but are actually asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus, she sees them as a threat.”

Fuck you and your ersatz Golden Rule all to death, pusnuts. Quite the contrary, in truth: fear has clouded panic-ninny thinking, to the extent that it has made THEM a threat—a credible and serious one, which is going to have be dealt with mercilessly because better men and women than your kind will ever be have permitted you to get away with this creeping paternalistic incrementalism for far too long.

Which brings me to Mister Stephens, who occasionally is an isle of sanity in that Sea of Craziness that calls itself the New York Times. He has taken shots at the Pandemic Panic amid the screeching of the baboons who run that zoo.

On April 24, 2020, barely a month into the two weeks to flatten the curve, he wrote, “America Shouldn’t Have to Play by New York Rules. A national lockdown is bad medicine and worse politics.”

He was half-right on the second line. It was bad medicine, but it was excellent politics for the opponents of Making America Great Again who wanted to get rid of President Trump. Stephens’s heart was in the right place in 2020.

He wrote, “I write this from New York, so it’s an argument against my personal interest. But I don’t see why people living in a Nashville suburb should not be allowed to return to their jobs because people like me choose to live, travel and work in urban sardine cans.”

Okay, then. I’m in no wise a huge fan of Bret Stephens myself, but I do have to admit that last bit was damned well-reasoned and -expressed.

The lesson learned is never trust Washington. The American people can be fooled — but only once. It is time to live the words of General Stark, who fought for the freedoms we have. There are worse things than covid. One is masks. Another is suffering the self-righteousness of the ignoramuses who pushed masks.

Annnnd whoot, there it is. As some of us said from the very beginning of this shameful, endless fiasco, the primary issue was never about masks, (anti-)social distancing, or even public health in general. It was about liberty, no more nor less. And once you’ve traded that priceless jewel away for a mess of “safety” pottage, there’s one and only one way you’ll ever get it back again. However many of their despicable progeny have long since either forgotten, willfully abandoned, or outright rejected that fundamental truth, our Founding Fathers knew it well enough, and some few of us still do today.

So be it, then.

The questions keep coming

Sundance asks, JB Shurk answers.

A Great Awakening Decades in the Making
What you will find is a compendium stretching all the way from before the Second World War to the present day, in which ordinary people describe jarring, face-to-face experiences with institutional corruption, malice, cover-ups, cognitively dissonant government propaganda, intimidation, sanctioned lies, and public betrayals. Some of those experiences are well known events: the perplexing details surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of President Kennedy, followed directly by Jack Ruby’s unbelievable live on-air assassination of Oswald; the Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the Vietnam War; the FBI’s massacres at Ruby Ridge and Waco; the mysterious disappearance of the FBI’s John Doe No. 2 after the Oklahoma City bombing; the explosion of TWA Flight 800; the FBI’s and CIA’s failures leading to 9/11; the use of predominantly Saudi hijackers to justify wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq; the PATRIOT Act; Obama and Holder’s redirection of the PATRIOT Act into a political weapon for targeting American civilians; the 9/11/12 Benghazi attack; IRS, DOJ, and FBI harassment of conservatives; the conspiracy among Obama’s FBI, Hillary’s presidential campaign, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and a morally corrupt media to frame Donald Trump as a Russian spy; statistically inexplicable vote totals after the introduction of security-free and fraud-prone mail-in-ballot elections; COVID-1984; the persecution of J6 prisoners; and dozens of events in between. These high-profile matters prompted people to question government “narratives” with much more scrutiny.

Alongside such historical nodes are numerous personal experiences in which normal Americans observed members of the U.S. government engaging in unethical, immoral, and at times criminal activities that shocked the formerly oblivious from their states of relative complacency. Some were military brats stationed all over the world who saw events as they were and not as they were reported. Many witnessed firsthand how news media distorted events right outside their doors. Others watched as federal authorities got away with outrageous lies. Most encountered some form of government corruption that was unmistakable yet covered up to this day.

Truly, this has always been the most disheartening aspect of our current reality — that Americans who have given their all to their nation and would do so yet again are the very people targeted today as “extremists,” “terrorists,” spreaders of “disinformation,” and purveyors of “hate.”  Well, they are none of those things. They are truth-tellers, honest historians, keepers of liberty’s flame, righteous warriors, and the generational glue still somehow preventing society from breaking in two. When a nation not only turns its back on those most critical for its survival but also denigrates their service, commitment, opinions, and personal loss as somehow contemptible and undeserving of respect, that nation will not endure many more days. Read the responses to Sundance’s question, and you get a prophetically penetrating glimpse into any future answer should the depressing question one day be asked: why did America fall? Should America disappear from the map, it will be because decades of government corruption and abuse were never addressed until it was simply too late.

In fact, this growing collection of personal accounts from ordinary Americans, in which they take to task not only the inherent failings of any system of government, but also the specific train of abuses and usurpations choking too many Americans under the yoke of petty despotism, should be regarded as one of two things: a stark warning that decades of government lies and betrayals must rapidly come to an end, or as an autopsy report preserved in time capsule form for future generations to one day study and comprehend. Either more and more Americans will use forums such as these to stomp out the cancer before it finally takes the host, or the blessings of liberty will skip over several generations, until a time when those of principle and resolve rise to clear a space of Earth free from the evils of State tyranny once again.

Do not let the stories of so many thousands of passionate, patriotic Americans be this country’s swan song, when they can just as easily be the accelerant spread across the land waiting for a divine spark. Do not assume that evil and pain presage more of the same, when they can just as effectively open up minds and hearts to the coming of a better age. People who find the courage to exercise “free will” will free themselves.

It is crystal-clear that more and more Americans (and Westerners generally) are awakening to the dispiriting reality that successive self-serving governments have turned our most cherished rights and freedoms on their head. This process, far from taking place overnight, has been many decades in the making. After so many generations have endured harms at the behest of Constitution-betraying bureaucrats and self-loving proto-tyrants, we are on the precipice of real change. It is a choice. It belongs to you. Do not be misled. Seize the day.

Indeed. As long as life remains, hope remains also. So howzabout another wild and rude punk-rock anthem from my misspent youth, you say? Why, I thought you’d never ask, sez I.



Okay, two of ’em then. No need to thank me, always happy to help my readers out like that.

Wargaming Civil War v2.0

A little theorizing on how it all might go down, and what it might look like if/when it does.

The 1860s US Civil War was primarily an economic paradigm war. The Southern agrarian plutocrats backed the Black manned slave labor system. The Northern industrialist plutocrats favored debt-wage slavery powered by European mass immigration.

Given that the first US civil war was an oligarchic conflict, what would today’s US-based oligarchs fight over in a 2.0 civil war? Slices of cherry pie. Control of population centers. What would the hoi polloi fight over? Trans bathrooms. Abortion. Race issues. School prayer. Whatever else oligarchs don’t care about.

Any civil war discussion needs to factor in the Pentagon. They control the soldiers and weapon systems. If the MIC split into two factions, I imagine we’d see something like “woke” Pentagon vs “family values” Pentagon, with Raytheon owning both sides.

I don’t see any intentional Battle of Antietam mega-army fighting mega-army scenes. Unlike Springfield rifles and Gatling guns—F35 fighter jets, stealth bombers, and ICBMs cause serious damage to infrastructure and oligarch holdings. Mushroom clouds spouting up across America is bad for business. The rules of engagement would need to be carefully controlled. An internecine US nuclear war is scarier than Black Jesus.

Like ancient Rome, the US is a multicultural empire. To keep Rome’s diverse groups from splintering, Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official state religion. In America, Whites, Latinos, and Blacks make up the bulk of the population. All are predominantly Christian- at least by birth. America’s remaining unifiers are football, smartphones, Google, and the threat of state violence. Mushroom Cloud Jesus might be the empire’s last bottle of Elmer’s Glue. I prefer Hippie Jesus over Mushroom Cloud Jesus.

Restoring school prayer, filling up prosperity gospel mega-churches, and outlawing “gayness” won’t restore America’s manufacturing base, rebuild its decayed infrastructure, or clean up the poisoned rivers. Nor will it prevent the upward transfer of wealth that comes from corporate governance, endless MIC war, and a Fed owned by 8 banking families.

Christian (Zionist) Nationalism might keep the dying empire on life support for a little while longer, but collapse is inevitable. All empires crash—pathologically corrupt ones sooner than later. If Christian Nationalism failed to keep the food rations above starvation level, WW3 seems like the next logical play. If the international bankers remained on top and human civilization stayed intact after WW3, I suppose the next phase would be One World Government dystopian dictatorship.

If oligarch-managed civil war could prolong the empire’s lifespan, it also holds the potential to shorten it. As demonstrated by Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine, neocon/neoliberal ventures turn into massive clusterf*cks. What if a civil war went sideways and started whipping around like a live electric cable in a windstorm? A case of controlled chaos turning into uncontrolled chaos.

Where a civil war gone sideways winds up is hard to say. I suppose it could turn out really good or really bad. Anything from a new and improved American republic to Mad Max.

The above-excerpted analysis is certainly, well, different, to say the least. That said, it seems to me that the latter option might be a safer bet. But I’ve never been the betting type, so what the hell do I know. The history of human warfare shows that the one safe assumption we can make, in all times and all places, is that we can’t possibly know beforehand what will happen, nor how the thing will all shake out, until it actually, y’know, does shake out.

Throughout the duration of the actual conflict itself, we can reliably count on widespread horror, misery, and deprivation as the stuff of everyday life, carrying on far longer after the war’s outcome has been decided than is generally expected. As Gen Wellesley lamented after the Battle of Waterloo: Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

War can be conclusive or inconclusive; destructive or productive; justified or not; those things, and many more besides. It is a cruel, ravening beast with many faces, all of them terrible to those caught up in its toils. War is also a permanent fixture of the human landscape, as unpredictable as it is inevitable. Wracking and painful as it surely is, human nature itself mandates nonetheless that the awful scourge of war will be with us always.

Oddly enough, though, war can sometimes be a good thing, even a desirable thing when the sole alternative is submission, slavery, and degradation at the hands of a ruthless despot. It has been described as a crucible in which irrelevancy is burned away, leaving only personal honor intact. It should never be rushed recklessly into; likewise, it should not be rejected out of hand when it has become obviously necessary. Just as war can be the plaything of greedy, over-ambitious potentates, it can also be the last desperate resort of men too long preyed upon by them.

In the somber, cautionary words of a wise and noble warrior who certainly knew whereof he spoke: it is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.

(Via Wes Renegade)

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