Cheap shot

Trump steals a page from Florida D卐M☭CRATs to take another wild, pointless, ill-advised swing at Ron DeSantis.

Watch: DeSantis Responds Directly to Trump Sharing Photo Accusing Florida Governor of Being a ‘Groomer’

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis likely is aware of the notable quote by Mark Twain: “Never wrestle with a pig. You’ll both get dirty, and the pig likes it.” Though Trump has already started the mud-slinging, DeSantis has chosen to stay above the fray.

Previously, DeSantis referred to Trump’s attacks as “noise in the background.” Trump’s most recent attacks, which included unsubstantiated claims that DeSantis was guilty of grooming underage females with alcohol, did not seem to rattle the governor.

On Wednesday, DeSantis said: “I face defamatory stuff every single day I’ve been governor, that’s just the nature of it. I’d also just say this. I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden.”

The governor, inferring there is a better way for Trump to spend his time, added: “That’s how I spend my time. I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans.” The audience erupted in cheers.

As well they should have.

This week, Trump posted a low-resolution photo of a man he alleged was DeSantis, standing next to several young women at a party. Trump captioned the photo:

 “Here is Ron DeSanctimonious grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher.”

Trump added provocatively: “That’s not Ron, is it? He would never do such a thing!”

The New York Times reported the photo was originally part of an attack ad published by a Democrat super PAC. The article noted the two females were former students who attended a party where DeSantis happened to be, and that the party “took place after” they had graduated.

Bold mine. With this apparently compulsive harrassment of DeSantis, Trump is allowing his ego and natural combativeness to walk him right into a trap set for him by D卐M☭CRATs, whether he sees it or not. Stooping to recycling old D卐M☭CRAT smear campaigns against somebody who of right ought to be an ally? Puh-leeze.

Love him or hate him, Gov DeSantis is not by any rational calculation the main enemy here; the D卐M☭CRATs are. Trump of all people ought to know that at least as well as anybody by now. It’s a damnable shame, and I for one really wish he’d just knock it the fuck off already with this self-defeating crap and move the fuck on. This sort of blue-on-blue flailing about does nobody any good, up to and including Trump himself.

Peace through strength

Or chaos through senility.

It is worth remembering that during Donald Trump’s first term as president (note that I say “first term”), America and indeed the world was a more pacific place. Russia did not invade Ukraine. Iran was bottled up. The Abraham Accords brought peace to the Middle East. Amazing.

How did he do it? By taking a page from Ronald Reagan’s playbook. Next to “Make America Great Again” (and perhaps laments about “fake news”) the phrase that one heard most often from the Trump campaign and, then, the Trump Administration was “peace through strength.” It was born of Trump’s understanding that weakness is provocative and destabilizing while recognized strength encourages peace and social order. 

Biden has depleted our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, shuttered the Keystone Pipeline, and put the kibosh on fracking. He has gone a long way towards transforming the United States military into a gender fluid sensitivity camp while also undermining the U.S. economy by incontinent spending and by pursuing other inflationary policies. Biden and his puppet masters tried to stymie Trump by turning his catchphrase “MAGA” into a negative epithet (and if “MAGA” is bad, how much worse is “Ultra MAGA”?). As Julie Kelly remarked, “if the balloon was an unarmed female veteran, the government would have shot it by now.”

But it didn’t work. So-called MAGA policies really did “make America great again”—richer, more secure, more confident and patriotic.

Which is precisely why they so desperately, fanatically hated it. And him, and us.

Kavanaugh disappoints again

Divemedic offers the misguided fool a primer course on what the Constitution actually says, and how it’s supposed to work.

This past week saw a huge win for gun rights, in that SCOTUS struck down a part of the GCA that was added during the Clinton administration- making prohibited persons out of people who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders. AWA over at GunFreeZone did an excellent post on the ruling, and I won’t attempt to recreate that here.

My opinion on these DV orders is that they are bullshit aimed at men in an attempt to give women another arrow in their lawfare quiver. About ten years ago, I was the subject of one of those orders. It was sought and granted without me even being present, with the initial order not even having my correct name on it, by a woman that I hadn’t even seen in months, and in that order she alleged that I did things in stalking her that were impossible because I was not even in the country when they were alleged to have happened.

David Letterman was once subject to a DV order that was obtained by a woman who lived thousands of miles away, after the woman alleged that they were in a secret affair and that Letterman was sending her secret messages using his top 10 lists as a code. Using accusations of domestic violence has become a common tactic for women who wish to win divorce and child custody cases, as well as angry girlfriends who wish to get back at former boyfriends. Men have no legal recourse against women who are proven to be lying.

The decision that is the subject of this post fixes some of that. That isn’t how the left, or apparently Brett Kavanaugh, sees it. Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion, making the case that sometimes we have to weigh in on whether or not a law is a good idea.

That’s where he is wrong.

The Amendment says “shall not be infringed.” It doesn’t say “…unless you have a really good reason to do so.” The Supreme Court isn’t there to decide whether or not a law is a good idea. The court is there to decide whether or not a particular law comports with the Constitution. All of the authority of the government derives from the Constitution. Any power or authority that the government takes upon itself that is outside of that authority is nothing more than tyranny, an unconstitutional power grab that is based upon the principle of “might makes right” that flies in the face of the principles upon which the “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” was built upon.

There are those who would try and make the case that there is some balancing act to be done, but that isn’t how our government is supposed to work. Thomas sees that. Scalia, although a pragmatic sort of man, saw that as well. Kavanaugh does not.

So it would seem. With “conservative” Justices like Kavanaugh and Roberts for (putative) friends, the Constitution will never want for enemies. Sadly, it ain’t as if it doesn’t have enough of those already.

Update! Just read it myself, and DM is right: the above-cited Gun Free Zone post is indeed well worth a look. The Salon one he also linked, on the other hand, is precisely the kind of intellectually-tortured, logic-pretzeling codswallop we’ve all come to expect from the hoplophobic Goosesteppin’ Left.

So how is Biden’s War On Russia working out so far?

Not too good.

The point of the war, you recall, is “to weaken Russia” (so said DoD Sec’y Lloyd Austin), even to bust it up into little geographic tatters to our country’s advantage — that is, to retain America’s dominance in global affairs, and especially the supremacy of the US dollar in global trade settlements.

The result of the war so far has been the opposite of that objective. US sanctions made Russia stronger by shifting its oil exports to more reliable Asian customers. Kicking Russia out of the SWIFT global payments system prompted the BRIC countries to build their own alternative trade settlement system. Cutting off Russia from trade with Western Civ has stimulated the process of import replacement (i.e., Russia making more of the stuff it used to buy from Europe). Confiscating Russia’s off-shore dollar assets has alerted the rest of the world to dump their dollar assets (especially US Treasury bonds) before they, too, get mugged. Nice going, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, and the rest of the gang at the Foggy Bottom genius factory.

All of which raises the question: who is liable to bust up into tatters first, the USA or Russia? I commend to you Dmitry Orlov’s seminal work, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects, Revised & Updated. For anyone out there not paying attention the past thirty-odd years, Russia, incorporated as the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991. The USSR was a bold experiment based on the peculiar and novel ill-effects of industrialism, especially gross economic inequality. Alas, the putative remedy for that, advanced by Karl Marx, was a despotic system of pretending that individual humans had no personal aspirations of their own.

The Soviet / Marxist business model was eventually reduced to the comic aphorism: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It failed and the USSR gurgled down history’s drain. Russia reemerged from the dust, minus many of its Eurasian outlands. Remarkably little blood was shed in the process. Mr. Orlov’s book points to some very interesting set-ups that softened the landing. There was no private property in the USSR, so when it collapsed, nobody was evicted or foreclosed from where they lived. Very few people had cars in the USSR, so the city centers were still intact and people could get around on buses, trams, and trains. The food system had been botched for decades by low-incentive collectivism, but the Russian people were used to planting family gardens — even city dwellers, who had plots out-of-town — and it tided them over during the years of hardship before the country managed to reorganize.

Compare that to America’s prospects. In an economic crisis, Americans will have their homes foreclosed out from under them, or will be subject to eviction from rentals. The USA has been tragically built-out on a suburban sprawl template that will be useless without cars and with little public transport. Cars, of course, are subject to repossession for non-payment of contracted loans. The American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies. These items can’t be grown in home gardens. Many Americans don’t know the first thing about growing their own food, or what to do with it after it’s harvested.

There’s another difference between the fall of the USSR and the collapse underway in the USA. Underneath all the economic perversities of Soviet life, Russia still had a national identity and a coherent culture. The USA has tossed its national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which is actually just a hustle aimed at extracting what remains from the diminishing stock of productive activity showering the plunder on a mob of “intersectional” complainers — e.g., the City of San Francisco’s preposterous new plan to award $5-million “reparation” payments to African-American denizens of the city, where slavery never existed.

As for culture, consider that the two biggest cultural producers in this land are the pornography and video game industries. The drug business might be a close third, but most of that action is off-the-books, so it’s hard to tell. So much for the so-called “arts.” Our political culture verges on totally degenerate, but that is too self-evident to belabor, and the generalized management failures of our polity are a big part of what’s bringing us down — most particularly the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their blunders and turpitudes.

As for the “which will fall first” question, with America now entirely in the inept hands of its own homegrown Marxists and their pretend “opposition,” well, the answer ought to be obvious. Russia already went through that cataclysmic teachable moment once; soon, it will be our turn.

And yes, Kunstler’s reversion to his by now Standard-Form surfeit of unfounded optimism concerning “investigations” and such tripe in the final ‘graph remains in full rose-tinted effect. Y’know, just in case any of you were wondering about that.

Trust: who do ya?

The Empire Of Lies is building a trust-free society for its hapless subjects. Let’s see how that works out for ‘em in the end.

You Can Trust ’Em

Survey after survey shows that trust in American society and institutions is at an all-time low. To paraphrase the poet songwriter Bob Dylan, “who can ya trust, besides yourself?” 

Since trust ensures the stability of society and its myriad of institutions, when it evaporates, what’s left? Chaos, polarization, perhaps violence. When you review all the markers of the loss of trust you get a headache and considerable heartburn. 

Politicians are trusted least, at just above zero percent. Business leaders a bit more and lawyers a tad less. Teachers and professors used to rate high but no longer. Pastors, rabbis, and priests have fallen to new depths. With marriages in disrepair, relationships superficial at best, and even families at war (thanks, Spare “Haz“), what are we going to do? 

Would you trust the FBI, given the bureau’s known duplicity and fabrications? 

Would you trust the IRS, with or without guns, after Lois Lerner and all the tax scams and political audits? 

Would you trust Sloppy Joe with any classified documents, foreign cash earmarked for the “Big Guy,” and all that predatory behavior? 

How about social media after the Twitter files exposed how they worked with the deep state to throttle back conservatives and actively spread disinformation? 

Would you trust any of the medical-health players, the CDC or FDA, let alone Big Pharma, to tell us the truth about anything after COVID and the harmful experimental vaccines and unnecessary lockdowns? How about the godlike master bureaucrat Fauci? 

What about mainstream media? We all know of their inherent structural bias and failure to engage in any form of accurate and fair journalism. That’s why they wear the moniker “fake” so well. 

The woke and eco-terrorists who go on and on about the end of the planet every year surely shouldn’t be trusted. We are still here, after all, and so is the polar ice cap. Al Gore and John Kerry are arch-hypocrites. Do you trust them one bit? 

You should be able to trust the local school system to educate your children, no? Now they won’t even award merit certificates to those who earned them for fear of disappointing those who didn’t. Teachers’ unions are clearly in it for themselves, not the children. No trust working there. 

Nor anyplace else, near as I can determine. Which sad, sorry fact is gonna cost all of us very dearly before it’s all said and done. It’s impossible to Fundamentally Transform™ a high-trust society into a no-trust one without destroying it utterly.


Lying, or just delusional?

With Pedo Joe, it’s damned near impossible to know for sure.

Joe Biden believes he is honest, and that anyone who disagrees with him is lying, or is ignorant, or has been deceived by liars.

So deeply convinced is Joe Biden of his own honesty that he thinks his very name is synonymous with truth-telling:

“I give you my word as a Biden: I will never stoop to President Trump’s level.”

— Nov. 20, 2019

“I give you my word as a Biden: If I am elected president I will do everything in my power to protect our children from gun violence.”

— March 10, 2020

“I give you my word as a Biden: When I’m president, I will lead with science, listen to the experts and heed their advice, and always tell you the truth.”

— March 18, 2020

When I first noticed him using this “my word as a Biden” phrase during the 2020 campaign, I was puzzled. Has the Biden family been so prominently associated with honesty that when Joe says this, most Americans say, “Well, that settles it”? Of course not. In fact, Biden’s first presidential campaign, in 1988, collapsed in disgrace specifically because of Joe’s dishonesty, when he was caught plagiarizing others — most notably British Labour leader Neil Kinnock — in his speeches.

Joe Biden lies about a lot of things, including his own biography. It is fair to say he is notoriously dishonest, and yet he seems to believe that nobody knows this, and that he enjoys a reputation as a truth-teller.

“My word as a Biden”? It is to laugh. And laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

(Via Ed)

This one’s for EP

For reasons which shall soon become obvious.

Go Inside the New Tesla Semi: Features, Screens, Seats, and More

We visited Frito-Lay to find out what the Semi’s interior looks like, and how it drives and charges.

Expect no surprises, that’s my advice. Because it’s gonna shake out exactly as anybody who’s been following this EV foofaraw already knows it must.

Tesla fans with Ruffled feathers over perpetually delayed products can finally Lay off the brand. After much waiting (only four years late), the electric Tesla Semi’s first customer, PepsiCo, has taken delivery of its first examples of the big rig. The beverage and snack food conglomerate’s Frito-Lay division will take center stage in the company’s Tesla truck rollout plans at its Modesto, California, factory and distribution center, so we visited the upgraded 80-acre zero-emissions facility to experience the Tesla Semi firsthand and talk to its drivers about what it’s like to drive.

Frito-Lay’s 15 new Tesla Semis made their debut at an event celebrating the Modesto factory’s transformation into a zero-emissions pilot project for Pepsi as it aims to achieve zero emissions across its operations by 2040. The revamped facility is massive: 500,000 square feet dedicated to turning potatoes and corn into Lays, Ruffles, Doritos, Cheetos, and Fritos chips, powered by a massive onsite solar facility and local renewable energy projects, both backed by 2.7 MWh of onsite battery storage. Helping the factory distribute its snacks throughout the American west are three electric BYD 8Y yard tractors, six Peterbilt 220EV electric box trucks for local last-mile deliveries, 38 natural-gas powered Volvo VNL trucks for long-distance slogs, and of course, six (and counting) Tesla Semis, used for out-and-back trips across the region.

Making “three times the power of the average diesel semi,” according to a media-trained Tesla rep, the electric Tesla Semi effectively sports a lightly modified Model S Plaid tri-motor powertrain spun around backward. The Model S’s front motor drives the Semi’s rear axle, functioning as the “highway drive unit,” while the Plaid’s dual rear motors are mounted on the Semi’s middle axle. These motors feature a Rivian-like clutch, allowing them to be used for acceleration and to decouple once at speed for improved efficiency. Considering the bestselling semi in the U.S., the Freightliner Cascadia, sports 350 hp in its basic form and that “three times” that figure is 1,050, we’re fairly confident in saying the Semi matches the Model S and Model X Plaid’s 1,020 hp, and possibly its 1,050 lb-ft of torque, as well.

As for its battery—well, logic dictates we should look at the Plaid again. The few PepsiCo Tesla Semi drivers present during our visit said the truck has a 1,000-kWh battery pack, or 1 megawatt-hour (MWh), which equals 10 Plaid battery packs daisy-chained together. That jives with Tesla’s claim of 500 miles of range and company chief Elon Musk’s claim of the Semi using 2 kW per mile traveled. In real-world use, Frito-Lay’s drivers told us the Semi’s routes are much shorter. A typical day for them might have them leaving Modesto in the morning with a load of chips (weighing less than the truck’s 82,000 gross combined vehicle-weight rating) and running an out-and-back loop to places like San Jose or Concord, both about 85 miles away.

Hey, that oughta work out great. After all, over my years of driving big rigs, I can’t really recall hearing of ANY trucker EVER being expected to cover more than 170 miles in a single day. But wait, it gets even better still.

The out-and-backs are crucial because at the moment there are few places to charge an electric Tesla Semi. Frito-Lay installed four Superchargers onsite in dedicated “Tesla Semi” parking stalls, all of which feature a unique squarish plug incompatible with any other Tesla we’re aware of. The chargers are capable of outputting 750 kW, far exceeding the 250-kW peak rates of Tesla’s passenger vehicles and existing Supercharger network. That, says Frito-Lay, is good enough to charge its fleet of Tesla Semis from nearly empty to 70 percent in about a half hour (good for 400 miles), and to 100 percent in about 90 minutes.

Interestingly, the four Tesla chargers are positioned in such a way that the Semis must unhitch their trailers and back in to plug into each one’s charge port, which is located on the driver’s side, just forward of the middle axle.

Ohhhh yeah, the truckers are gonna just LOOOOOVE that. “Extended” range, for certain values of the word “extended,” plus the added hassle of having to drop the trailer every time you need to “gas up” the useless hunk of junk too? I ask you, what’s not to like here?

And believe me, hassle it is: first, scramble underneath to pull the handle on the fifth wheel and unlock the kingpin. Then, sweat yourself into a lather winding down the rusty, stiff, recalcitrant landing gear on the trailer. Which in itself can be quite damned hazardous, actually: several years back, my brother knocked himself near-unconscious when a landing-gear handle kicked back on him and whacked him upside the haid. Ended up having to get stitches, that’s how severely it laid him open.

And yes, the same damned thing has happened to me plenty of times too sans the stitches part of it, along with every other unfortunate soul cursed to the trucking life, guar-on-teed. It’s just one of those things you gotta deal with, y’know?

Yep, sounds like those Frito-Lay/Pepsico boys have themselves a lot to look forward to with these fine, fine machines.

Admissions of error

They seem to be going around of late.

The Biden Administration Finally Admits Its Mistake in Canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline

At long last, the Biden administration is admitting what experts have always known: reckless energy policies have disastrous consequences. This time, the Department of Energy quietly released a report highlighting the positive economic benefits of developing the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, an energy project canceled by President Biden in the hours following his inauguration. 

But the DOE’s report is a proverbial day late and a dollar short. The cancelation of the Keystone XL pipeline has already cost the United States thousands of jobs and billions in economic growth while families suffer under the weight of record high energy prices. It’s time for lawmakers to make American energy independence a top priority. 

Released without a formal announcement, the DOE’s report points out that the pipeline would have created between 16,149 and 59,000 jobs and would have had an economic benefit of between $3.4 and 9.6 billion. That’s no small impact. Yet with one stroke of his pen, Biden slashed the project and instead focused his efforts on costly “green energy” goals. As a result of his executive action, 11,000 pipeline workers were promptly laid off and told to “go to work to make solar panels” instead. 

But Biden’s green energy efforts are bound to backfire sooner rather than later. That’s because today, more than 70 percent of the energy produced and consumed in America comes from oil, gas and coal. That’s not likely to substantially change anytime soon. In fact, the International Energy Agency predicts that oil’s share of energy production in the United States will only fall 8 percent in the next two decades, from 31 to 23 percent. And that’s assuming a sustained commitment to green energy policies. The forecast spells bad news for the Biden White House. At his political peril, Biden ignores the lessons of Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush, who both lost elections due to spiked oil prices and accompanying recessions.

Oh, I’m beginning to suspect, strongly, that Old Joe is going to die of Suddenly™ well before the next sham “election” season rolls around. But Joe’s Folly isn’t the only mea culpa to be found out there.

Pro-Vaxx Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Admits Profusely “The Anti-Vaxxers Win”

Mark Twain is often misattributed as saying, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” The sentiment is definitely Twainesque, but he never said it. Nevertheless, it’s still true and demonstrable time and again in our post-truth society.

As more “normies” have started waking up to the reality that the Covid-19 “vaccines” are ineffective and dangerous, a lot are finding new ways of defending their decisions to get jabbed rather than admitting it was a mistake. Conservative comic Scott Adams, who is most famous for creating the Dilbert comics, is not one of those people. He’s now admitting that “anti-vaxxers won” in regards to their decision.

In fact, he admitted it over and over again.

“All of my fancy analytics got me to a bad place,” he said. “All of your heuristics — ‘don’t trust these guys’ is obvious — totally worked.”

Blindly trusting the US government and its horde of bought and paid-for faux “experts” never does work out too well, not for anybody.

Expert me no experts

Jeff Goldstein tears Sam Harris and Scott Adams a new one.

If you haven’t yet encountered it, here’s the new orthodoxy on vaccine hesitancy from self-styled public intellectuals Sam Harris and Scott Adams (paraphrased): the science as it unfolded suggested that the vaccine hesitant had no valid rational basis for that hesitancy; while those who promoted mandates were wrong only accidentally, given that they were basing their position on the science as it had been reported to them by those most credentialed to do so.

For instance: Harris argues that had certain pandemic variables been changed, no room for a debate on vaccination programs would have been allowed — and that under those hypothetical circumstances his would-be authoritarianism would have been perfectly justified, while others’ hesitancy would have been rightly demonized, and their cooperation in a mandatory vaccination regime properly and morally commanded by force.

The position Harris and Adams hold is at root that accepting uncritically (or to the extent criticism is deemed valid) the “expert” scientific consensus in a potential doomsday emergency is both required and righteous —making those who do not do so outliers whose arguments hold no persuasive weight; and that because the data refuting a worse case scenario wasn’t immediately available except through limited observational studies and anecdotal evidence, the proper position to take was to act as if the worse case scenario were indeed taking place, and that the “experts” were entirely unbiased and had no incentive other than the reliable interpretation of data to reach particular set of conclusions.

Except that they did have incentives to reach certain conclusion(s). Hospitals most certainly and provably were incentivized to diagnose Covid; to admit people based upon that diagnosis; to treat the virus in a way that was institutionally enforced; to secure a course of treatment using Remdesivir; to ventilate patients; and to reject — and demonize — any care that didn’t pursue this specific course of treatment. So it was not “accidental” that some people saw this early on. Similarly, it was not an accident that some people early on determined that the long history of acquired immunity’s providing protection against a virus wasn’t all of a sudden scientifically untenable simply because Anthony Fauci began insisting it was. That’s not how science works. So when public health agencies and their experts must literally change an established definition to create the conditions for a therapeutic to continue its claim to “vaccine,” one would be entirely negligent to dismiss such linguistic maneuvers as innocuous, or their purveyors as well intentioned. And yet that’s exactly what so many self-styled public intellectuals did.

In this case, both Harris and Adams fell for the Eric Stratton gambit (“You fucked up! You trusted us!”), and they simply cannot accept that anyone without their public plaudits and claims to genius could have rationally rejected the credentialed narrative, save by pure blind luck. If the unwashed, conspiratorially-minded anti-vaxxers somehow got it right this time, the argument goes, they did so not by distrusting this particular science, but rather by adopting a conspiratorially-minded worldview that in random instances may align with reality as it comes to be revealed later on. Whereas those with Big Brains, while they may have gotten this one wrong, did so only because they used the best evidence available to them to reach their initial conclusions. They were wrong only because their process was both correct and unimpeachable!

Not only is this affected argument presumptuous (and not a little elitist ), but worse still, it’s just plain wrong. Plenty of credentialed experts who were being deplatformed and silenced by the government / media / big tech fascist troika sounded the alarm early on about a campaign of mass vaccination: vaccinating into an active pandemic is bound to give those mutated variants that resist the vaccine an evolutionary advantage toward dominance, prolonging the pandemic; that repetitive vaccinations — boosters — could lead to immune exhaustion or even antibody-dependent enhancement; and that within the mRNA program itself, unproven in humans and at best unreliable in laboratory animals, plenty of viable potentialities — many of them negative — needed to be examined, especially given the very early signal of serious adverse reactions to the shots, be they cardiac or neurological. Covid didn’t occur in a vacuum. Historically, our health agencies have established certain benchmarks for vaccine harm that would require a specific product to be halted and removed from the market. In this case, those previous benchmarks were ignored — and those who pointed to them demonized as anti-science.

In short, both Harris and Adams have nestled themselves into the welcoming folds of the Tom Nichols Fallacy: credentialed experts often know the most about a subject in which they are credentialed, therefore those same credentialed experts are likely to be correct in their assessment of anything that falls within the purview of their credentialed field.

As Mitch Hedberg once noted, “every book is a children’s book, if the kid can read.” A comic’s quip, sure, but one filled with a profound insight about the nature of meritocracy. To those who were able to read studies on their own, or even have them filtered through credentialed experts whom they’d come to trust, nothing being revealed today relating to the inefficiency of the Covid vaccines, their potential (current) adverse effects, and their potential future long term effects, is new, surprising, or “accidentally” understood. In fact, those are the people who predicted every step of the way how this pandemic would resolve itself.

Why, thanks, Jeff, I’ll take that as a direct personal compliment. Although seeing where all this was headed early on wasn’t all that difficult a feat to pull off, really. Anybody even halfway cognizant of the true nature of despotic government, as explicitly described by America’s Founding Fathers—its innate tendencies and ambitions; its usual go-to methods in consummating them; its essential ruthlessness, amorality, and arrogance—could have easily foreseen what was coming at us.

Update! OHHHH yeah, I’m sure the intentions behind this terrifying development are completely pure and good.

The US Meat Supply May Soon Be Widely Contaminated With mRNA Proteins From Biotech “Vaccines”
Editor’s Note: The reason we launched an organic freeze dried chicken company last year was anticipation of what you’ll read in the article below. They’re attacking our food supply from multiple fronts. It behooves my readers to use promo code “jdr” whether buying long-term storage chicken or a premium protein bucket. With that said, here’s Mike Adams…

There’s soon going to be another reason to either choose vegetarian food options or get your meat from local, trusted sources: mRNA vaccines are about to be heavily implemented across the meat industry, with cattle, chickens, pigs, goats and other livestock targeted for regular mRNA injections.

As we’ve seen with human beings, mRNA injections can:

  1. Circulate throughout the entire body and end up in blood and organs.
  2. Cause the body to produce toxic proteins which can cause toxic effects.
  3. Clog arteries and end up killing or harming people from strokes or heart attacks.
  4. Alter chromosomes and cause permanent genetic changes to the organism.

Hypodermic needles, it turns out, aren’t the only way these mRNA instructions can be introduced into the human body. They can also be swallowed, or they can enter through skin contact. Merely handling raw meat contaminated with mRNA products is likely the equivalent to being exposed to “shedding” from vaccine recipients. And even though stomach acid likely destroys mRNA sequences, there is absorption that takes place in the mouth, under the tongue, which is why many medications and supplements — including CBD oils and zinc — are often best absorbed under the tongue rather than being swallowed.

Thus, merely introducing mRNA-vaccinated animal meat products into your mouth, if not fully cooked, may expose you to a kind of “food shedding” of mRNA products that can be absorbed into your blood and circulated throughout your body. This can include proteins which are alien to the human body.

Don’t worry, you can trust them. And if you don’t believe it, hey, just ask ’em.

Whether they bought into the hype and hysteria over the “threat” posed by the Coof or not, it ought to be obvious by now to even the meanest intelligence that the Plandemic has pretty much run its course. Yet still, The Power remains absolutely determined to get this dangerous gene-altering chemical introduced into as many circulatory systems as they can possibly manage. At this point, every rational person must ask him/herself: WHY?!?

STRONG HINT: Knowing what we know about them, we can quite safely assume it is NOT because they love us, care deeply about our welfare, and just want us to be happy.

Questions, I has a few

So does Mark Jeftovic, who has narrowed his down to just two.

They Promised “Safe And Effective”; We Got “Sudden And Unexpected”

I want everybody reading this to think of two numbers from asking you two questions:

Question #1) How many people do you know who died of COVID?
I first started hearing rumblings of a new Coronavirus emerging out of China in January 2020 (although it looks now like COVID was already circulating throughout the world by mid-2019).

When I got wind of it, I was emailing friends and colleagues to get N95 masks and to stock up on groceries and medications. It looked bad. By February I was probably one of the first people seen around town wearing an N95 mask. In March I started running a spreadsheet using R0, fatality rates and case-doubling times that were coming out of the CDC, the WHO, and shrieking hysterics like Eric Feigl-Ding.

When it was all unfolding, I was initially afraid. My rough model posited that by the end of May we’d have 442,368 cases with as many as 22,118 fatalities and that was just in Toronto. By the end of July, 1.7 million cases and 88,473 fatalities.

I laid out previously what happened and what turned me into a lockdown skeptic: every day I’d plug in the new case and fatality numbers from the city, the province and federal levels and by the end of May I realized that my model was bust. By fall I knew that case numbers were bullshit (it didn’t matter how many people tested positive on a PCR test) and that lockdowns were a bigger problem than the virus.

There weren’t going to be 88K fatalities across the entire country, let alone Toronto (the official fatality count now for all of Canada is 49.5K – and we also now know that most of those, upwards of 90%, were with COVID and not from COVID. Toronto had about 3.7K total fatalities in over two years).

I naively thought this was good news. Surely everybody was looking at the data and surely everybody could see by mid-summer, that even adjusted for seasonality and expecting another wave in the fall, this was nowhere near the THERMONUCLEAR LEVEL EVENT certain prognosticators were promoting.

We all know what happened instead: by fall it had become a full fledged religion and well on its way to mass formation psychosis.

On January 1st, 2022 I surmised that the pandemic was mostly over. During the main run of COVID I did lose about four people within my social circle, none from COVID or even with COVID. That figure doesn’t count another two people I knew about in my area who committed suicide under lockdowns.

So without diminishing the tragedy of any of those 49K Canadians who succumbed with COVID, my number for the first question is zero.

How can anybody be faulted for not knowing what to believe or who to trust?
With the conventional narratives being so ephemeral and one “conspiracy theory” after another being validated (lockdowns, lab leak, vaccine passports…) is it any wonder people are becoming skeptical or outright distrustful of our institutions and media?

Given how many years they’ve been lying to us, about nearly everything under the sun, it’s dismaying that they’re only just now figuring it out.

Read it all…and weep.

(Via Wes Renegade)

The law is a ass

So the Houston taqueria shooter has foolishly contacted Houston Homicide, exactly as I hoped and prayed he wouldn’t, rather than heading across the border into Mexico and laying low for awhile as he should’ve done. The case has been referred to a grand jury for further investigation. Legal Eagle Andrew Branca, whose email list I’ve been a subscriber to for a good while now, deep-dives into Texas self-defense law and the facts as we know them from the vid, and comes up with the likely outcome.

SPOILER alert: it isn’t pretty.

Although the shooter initially fled the scene, along with all the other customers, he has now reportedly retained legal counsel and is cooperating with the authorities investigating this event. It is reported that the case will be presented to a grand jury for consideration. The shooter has not been arrested, and as a result the authorities are allowing him to remain anonymous.

The question now, of course, is whether the shooter’s use of deadly defensive force to stop Washington’s armed robbery was justified on the legal merits.

The answer? Yes, maybe, and almost certainly not.

Confused yet? Let’s clarify.

BASICS OF LEGAL JUSTIFICATION FOR USE OF DEADLY FORCE UNDER TEXAS LAW

Shooting someone dead is, of course, normally a crime. Under Texas law, and the law of every other state, however, the use of deadly force upon another might be legally justified, and not a crime, if it meets the conditions for deadly force defense of persons—meaning either defense of self or defense of others.

Additionally, and unique to the Lone Star state, the use of deadly force upon another might be legally justified even in defense of mere personal property—again, if the required legal conditions have been met.

Importantly, the legal conditions for justification must be met for each individual use of deadly force in the encounter—meaning, in this case, for each round fired by the shooter–and that’s where we arrive at the “yes, maybe, and almost certainly not” nature of whether this shooting is lawful.

The bottom line, of the nine rounds fired by the shooter at Washington, the first four were almost certainly legally justified, the second four may be legally justified, and the ninth and final shot almost certainly was not justified, based upon the only evidence currently available to us, which is the surveillance video of the encounter.

For purposes of this commentary and legal analysis, I’ll be addressing the shooter’s use of force as three distinct use of force events, each needing their own legal justification in order to be lawful.

Use-of-Force #1: The first four shots fired, roughly from the start of the video to 0:10 seconds.

Use-of-Force #2: The second four shots fired, roughly from 0:10 to 0:14 seconds in the video.

Use-of-Force #3: The ninth and final shot fired at about 0:16 seconds in the video.

The verdict? Based on Branca’s meticulous legal analysis, that ninth shot will probably doom RS in court, and I concur with utmost regret. But Branca being a modest sort (“But I’m just a small-town criminal defense attorney…”), he proffers a small caveat:

So, given the apparent lack of legal justification for that ninth and final shot, potentially an unjustified unlawful killing, does that mean the shooter in this case will be indicted, prosecuted, and convicted?

The answer is: Who knows?

What I’ve shared above is a legal analysis of this shooting, and it’s one I have great confidence in the legal merit of that analysis.

Questions about indictment, prosecution, and conviction, however, have considerations beyond legal merit.

A prosecutor’s office will typically be asking two distinct questions in evaluating how to handle such a case.

First:  What can we do, based on legal merit.

Second: What do we want to do, based on political considerations.

It’s not at all uncommon for prosecutors to use their discretion to give a break to an otherwise law-abiding armed citizen who may have been a bit sloppy in their use-of-force from a technical legal perspective.

The danger, of course, is the use of that discretion is far outside the defender’s own control–he’s now put his fate, potentially the rest of his life, in the hands of other people.

Perhaps they’ll use their discretion in a way favorable to the defender…but perhaps they won’t.

Political considerations are bound to loom particularly large here, given the rioting, burning, and all the usual trimmings amongst Houston’s large Feral Dindu population which giving RS any kind of “break” will almost certainly touch off in its wake.

Bottom line: thanks to an incomprehensible, disastrous decision to come forward and place his fate on the dysfunctional, out-of-balance scales of “justice,” RS will wind up spending the rest of his natural life behind bars for the heinous crime of defending himself against a vicious thug. In a post-Constitutional Amerika v2.0 bereft of law; any semblance of fairness or propriety; interracial comity; and any sense of the overriding urgency of maintaining civic order, only a blind fool would ever do such a thing. RS’s apparent faith in the badly-broken Amerikan “justice” system to do right by him might be touching, but in the end, said misplaced faith will be his undoing. I hate it, really I do, but he’s well and truly fucked at this point.

Update! As it turns out, and to the surprise of exactly no one, Evil Perp had already claimed the life of one innocent victim in the course of yet another of his habitual crime sprees.

Court documents also confirmed that Washington was released on parole in 2021 for a conviction of aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, for which he had been sentenced to 15 years behind bars. Washington had been convicted in 2015 in connection to the murder of 52-year-old Hamid Waraich, the owner of a Boost Mobile cell phone store, who was fatally shot in the back during a robbery. He was paroled in 2021 after serving six years. One of the victim’s sons, Sean Waraich, called Washington ‘an evil criminal that took joy from harassing and robbing innocent families.’ He called the taqueria vigilante a ‘true hero,’ and said he ‘did the right thing in stopping the robber and protecting the community from a dangerous perpetrator.’

Aman Waraich, another son of Hamid, said: ‘If the guy who stopped Eric was around 10 years ago, maybe I’d still have my dad.’

Precisely so, tragically so. The simple truth of this young man’s plaintive, heartbroken words will resonate for years to come, in stark condemnation of a warped and upended system of revolving-door “justice” that would even dream of prosecuting Righteous Shooter. Washington was (sub)human detritus—garbage, nothing more nor less. RS is “guilty” only of taking out the fucking trash, a bit of housekeeping which was long overdue.

The REAL crime here is that EP was freed to walk the streets robbing, assaulting, and killing, instead of being behind bars where he should have been, and belonged. When might we expect to see that referred to a grand jury, I wonder?

Righteous shoot redux

Been halfway hunting around for the unexpurgated vid of the takedown of a feral niglet trying to rob everybody in a Mex restaurant in Houston with a fake gun, but no joy.

Until now.


Bill follows up:

The usual suspects are whining about the number of shots the hero expended into the armed robber, but the solution to that is to revise the law, not blame the shooter for protecting himself and the folks around him. Anyway, nobody ever prosecutes cops for shooting till their magazines are empty, even if the victim ends up looking like a pile of hamburger.

To which I responded in comments thusly:

BUT…BUT…BUT…BUT…why didn’t he just shoot the gun out of his haaaannnd?

Oh, how I just LOVE getting advice on proper use of firearms from people who have never even been in the same room with a gun, much less fired one, much less in a stress-shoot situation against a lawless, feral predator exhibiting malicious intentions towards them. Idiots.

Nice find, Bill. The feel-good video of the year.

And it surely is. Let the candy-ass Progtard hoplophobes and the “parents” of this no-longer-dangerous Dindu weep and wail away; for me, it’s exactly as the original poster of the vid said: Fuck around, find out. Kid didn’t wanna get his sorry ass ventilated, he shoulda stayed the hell home and kept away from better men than he’ll ever be. It was HIS decision to take a toy gun and do a little wil’in’ out ‘n’ sheeit, and his alone. Didn’t work out the way he thought it would, and that’s entirely on him. Tough shit for you, punk.

Hope springs eternal

However manifestly forlorn it may be.

The exhausting toils of the holidays are behind us; the mischief that could be done by the lame ducks in Congress has been done ($1.7 trillion Omnibus Spending Bill); and the time has come for the citizens of this land to get some answers about the escalating trips laid on them by their own government. The House of Representatives is in new hands. You’ll know in pretty short order whether they are capable, trustworthy hands, or just a blur of fast fingers running another three-card-monte table.

The most pressing questions abide around justice, and the gavel of the Judiciary Committee passes from the barely-alive Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) to the very animated Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). He needs to ask FBI Director Chris Wray how it came to be that the Bureau sat in possession of the Hunter Biden laptop during the impeachment of January 2020 and did not offer up to the defense the exculpatory evidence it abundantly contained in the way of business deal memos between the Biden family and officials in several foreign lands, Ukraine in particular. After all, the impeachment hinged on a telephone inquiry Mr. Trump made about just those matters. Was there a good reason for that phone call, or not? Obviously, there was, and Mr. Wray’s conduct looks like obstruction of justice in the highest degree.

Rep. James Comer (R-KY) comes in as chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. He announced months ago that he would hold hearings on interesting issues such Hunter Biden’s taxes and exactly who has paid to support his new career as an “artist.”

We’ve got national security concerns with respect to Hunter Biden. We want to know if you remember who bought that expensive artwork when he was an artist for about three days and sold the artwork for half a million dollars. We want to know why the Russian oligarchs who paid Hunter Biden money were mysteriously left off the sanctions list when Joe Biden started putting sanctions on Russians and Russian oligarchs. We’ve got a lot of questions about shady business dealings that Hunter had and whether or not they impacted the Biden administration.

Next Mr. Wray has to answer for the FBI’s infiltration of social media. How did the top lawyer at the FBI, Jim Baker, come to be employed as the right-hand to Twitter’s chief censor, Vijaya Gadde? How did all those former FBI agents land at the company along with Jim Baker, and what did Mr. Wray have to do with the FBI demands to censor news and persons on matters of critical national importance such as vaccine safety and election fraud? How did more than a hundred former federal agents land on Facebook, Google, and other platforms? How did Mr. Wray decide to shut down the avenues of the First Amendment to the Constitution?

Next up: Attorney General Merrick Garland. On what grounds are pre-trial January 6 Riot suspects being held in the decrepit DC federal lockup without bail on rinky-dink charges two years after the event? How does that square with American due process of law? What did he know about the existence of the Hunter Biden laptop and the evidence it contained? What is he doing about it? How did Mr. Garland happen to target for prosecution parents protesting school board policies on race and sexual matters? Of course, Mr. Garland is going to evade answering by using the ploy that all these questions “pertains to ongoing investigations.” Mr. Jordan had better hire a gutsy chief counsel with some brains to penetrate that bodyguard of lies.

If the Special Subcommittee on the January 6 Riot is disbanded, turn the matter over to the Andy Biggs’ Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. Let’s hear from Nancy Pelosi’s staff as to why her office (of the Speaker) turned down offers from the Trump White House for national guard protection that day. Let’s also hear from the then-chief of the Capitol Police, Steven Sund, who resigned from that job two days later — in consternation or disgrace? Bring back Mr. Wray and Mr. Garland. How many federal agents were circulating in the crowd the night before and on the day of the January 6 riot? Why was one Ray Epps never indicted for his much-recorded incitements to enter the Capitol? Who opened the magnetically-locked doors from the inside of the building? Stuff like that. What was the decision process for not charging officer Michael Byrd in the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt?

I hope it’s not too impertinent to suppose that the January 6 Riot was engineered by our government to embarrass and punish its political opponents — taking advantage of the First Amendment “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” which was what that crowd had come to do in Washington DC that day. Interesting how a little tweaking here and there turned that into a convenient fiasco. Entrapment, anyone? And how government control and interference over social media and corporate news reinforced the narrative that the stage-managed riot was “an insurrection” — one of many actual “big lies” of our time nurtured by our government against its citizens.

A few other inquiries in this new Congress that need to commence ASAP: Can we hear from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as to how come the US-Mexican Border is absolutely wide open; why his employees are transporting illegal aliens all around the USA; why he is running a program in Mexico to give Venezuelans and other select alien nationals “advanced authorization” and “two years parole,” then sneaking them into the USA through regular ports-of-entry?

Hey, I have an idea: maybe Miss Lindsey “Talk-talk” Graham can empanel another of his vaunted Blue Ribbon Commissions™ to “get to the bottom” of this extensive litany of corruption, malfeasance, and dysfunction again!

Christmas ruined by panic-ninnies

An awkward little Christmas.

Have Yourself an Awkward Little Christmas…
Christmas will never be the same again. For the same reason that America will never be the same again. Millions of us will never be able to look upon some of our fellow Americans – including some of our friends and family members – as we once did, ever again.

The ones who turned their backs on us – and worse – for questioning what we rightly identified as a mass hysteria they embraced. Who feared and loathed us, because we would not wear a “mask” – which we didn’t because we knew that putting it on only fueled the mass hysteria. We didn’t wear the things for their sakes as well as our own. For the sake of calm and common sense. To show normality rather than “masked” insanity. For doing that – often at the cost of being denied not merely service but our ability to earn a living – we were abused as pathologically selfish, granny-killing ne’er do-wells.

They told us we weren’t welcome in their homes at Christmas. That we weren’t welcome, period. Unless, of course, we bought in to their hysteria and played along.

We who questioned – and disobeyed – were cast out, by those who did not question and mindlessly obeyed.

Some of these friends and family members would have supported more than just excommunicating us from their  homes and lives and from society, generally. When the drugs that aren’t vaccines were rolled out, many were in favor of everyone being forced to take them. Tens of millions of people were effectively forced to take them, being under duress. They were told to take the drugs – or take a hike. Lose your job – or lose your bodily autonomy and your self-respect, having bent knee to a violation of your body for the sake of grubby money.

Some of the most hysteric wanted (and no doubt still want in their secret hearts) to see everyone forced to take the drugs they took, perhaps for the same vicious and ugly reason that some people resent people who “get away” with not being made to do what they were made to do.

They then blamed us when they got the sickness they’d been “vaccinated” against. The illogic of that escaping them.

Logic? What is this “logic” of which you speak? Shitlibs and Fauxvid panic-ninnies (BIRM) know not of this phantasmagorical “logic.”

Now we are supposed to pretend it all never happened and sit down for Christmas dinner with these people. It is not quite sleeping with the enemy but it’s not that far from it, either. For, no matter the superficialities, the feigned pleasantries of our previous association, they regard us with suspicion and contempt.

Just as we so regard them.

They know we know what they did, just as we know they know what we didn’t do. They perhaps feel ashamed, some of them. In which case, it would help things greatly if they were to say so – and ask our forgiveness for what they did to us and supported being done to us. We might then be able to forgive them.

But can we ever trust them again? Would George Washington have given Benedict Arnold another command, if he’d apologized for betraying Washington’s trust? Only if Washington were an idiot.

Are we?

Quite the thorny little conundrum, I’d say. Sadly, we have our answer already, and for all too many of us, that answer can only be: Yes. Yes, we are.

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.

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"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
GK Chesterton

"I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free."
Donald Sensing

"The only way to live free is to live unobserved."
Etienne de la Boiete

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
Dwight D. Eisenhower

"To put it simply, the Left is the stupid and the insane, led by the evil. You can’t persuade the stupid or the insane and you had damn well better fight the evil."
Skeptic

"There is no better way to stamp your power on people than through the dead hand of bureaucracy. You cannot reason with paperwork."
David Black, from Turn Left For Gibraltar

"If the laws of God and men, are therefore of no effect, when the magistracy is left at liberty to break them; and if the lusts of those who are too strong for the tribunals of justice, cannot be otherwise restrained than by sedition, tumults and war, those seditions, tumults and wars, are justified by the laws of God and man."
John Adams

"The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglass

"Give me the media and I will make of any nation a herd of swine."
Joseph Goebbels

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
Ronald Reagan

"Ain't no misunderstanding this war. They want to rule us and aim to do it. We aim not to allow it. All there is to it."
NC Reed, from Parno's Peril

"I just want a government that fits in the box it originally came in."
Bill Whittle

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