They're Not Confessing. They're Bragging.

I am on record as saying that the Left was shocked by their loss in 2016 to Donald Trump.  They were so certain of Hillary's inevitability that they didn't bother to turn on the fraud machine.  It was in the bag.  The World's Most Qualified Woman against a reality-TV orangutan.  As Roger Kimball put it in a recent Quote of the Day:

The central fact to appreciate about Donald Trump is that he was elected without the permission, and over the incredulous objections, of the woke oligarchy that governs us. 

I am further on record as saying that in five years or so, someone will complete a highly detailed, meticulously researched and footnoted recounting of just exactly how the 2020 election was stolen - yes, stolen.

Time Magazine has published Chapter 1 already.  The story is entitled "The Secret Bipartisan Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election."  The title alone tells you all you need to know, but the story goes into detail.  The Woke Oligarchy wasn't going to lose again.  

I haven't done one of these in awhile.  Let us Fisk.

A weird thing happened right after the Nov. 3 election: nothing.

The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.

Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump’s ouster.

"The response was not mass action, but crickets."  Left unspoken is the fact that, had Trump won reelection, cities would have burned.  You're not supposed to realize that.  What you're supposed to concentrate on is that the "Right-wing militias" didn't do anything.  The Left was prepared to "protest."  "Mostly peacefully" I would imagine.  But "right-wing militias" would have been violent!  The pertinent phrase however, is "Trump's ouster."  They'd been trying for more than four years to achieve that, and now they had.

A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

In a way, Trump was right.

Tell me something I didn't know.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

"...an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner" was not right "in a way," it was completely accurate.  But the pertinent line is this one:  "There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes...."  Conspiracy.  Their word, not mine.  We can officially take off our tinfoil hats now.  Time has admitted there was a conspiracy.  You can argue that the purpose of the conspiracy was to prevent the torching of major cities across the United States, but it was still a conspiracy to ensure Donald Trump did not win a second term.

This next paragraph is where it starts getting really interesting:

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

"...an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted."  Lie #1, admitted to later in the piece.  Everything possible was done to "win the vote," and to hell with fairness, credibility and corruption.  Winning was everything, and you can't count on the voters to do the right thing.  Remember, the goal was to SAVE THE ELECTION.  Conspiracy.  Shadowy groups manipulating things behind curtains.  For our own good, you see.  And it was bipartisan!  Because Orange Man Bad!  But, while they brag about their success, they cannot come out and simply say "We defeated Orange Man!"  No, they have to wrap the conspiracy in wholesome cloth - the thing they were trying to prevent was "an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all"! 

So they destroyed the system in order to save it.

Let's take the next paragraph line-by-line:

Their work touched every aspect of the election. 

AKA:  They cheated as hard as they could.

 They got states to change voting systems and laws...

Unconstitutionally, but they didn't care about that.  That wouldn't be decided until AFTER the election was settled.

...and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits,

Hundreds of millions of dollars to steal the election for the conspiracists paid for by the conspiracists and the public coffers.  "Voter suppression lawsuits" is code for "making sure only eligible voters vote."  Can't have that.   But here's the kicker:

...recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. 

"Armies of poll workers."  Poll workers who shared one ideology - Orange Man Bad.  And millions of people voting using a method well known and recognized for its vulnerability to fraud, if the poll workers were so inclined.

They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. 

"Disinformation" like the Hunter Biden corruption story. demonetizing anyone who didn't toe the Leftist line, cancelling anyone who threatened The Narrative™.

They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. 

Like the story of the Red Wave, of how - at first - it would appear that Trump was winning by a landslide, but after all that mail-in vote was counted, the Right People would ensure that Trump lost!  This is known as Propaganda, and also "laying the groundwork."  See?  We predicted this!  Nothing odd about it at all!

After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. 

They'd had four years to prepare, after all.

“The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

Norm Eisen wouldn't know "democracy" if it bit him on the ass, developed lockjaw and was dragged to death.  Conspiracies and Shadow organizations have no part in democracy.

For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election.

That is, "not have it stolen from them" by conspirators bent on that very task.

The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.” 

And it was.  And Time Magazine is telling us how.  Conspiracies, voting rule changes, massive influx of mail-in voting, recruiting ideologically compatible poll workers, control of the flow of information, and millions of dollars in public and private funds. 

His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics.

I love the Left's control of the language.  Isn't it fascinating that Trump has "henchmen," but the "conspirators" who opposed him were merely people of good intention, pure as the driven slush?  That his lawsuits were "spurious," but here's a list of the lawsuits brought and their results.  Note how very few were decided on the merits, and how many that were were decided in favor of the Republicans. 

Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.

No explanation of how Trump "plotted to block a legitimate vote count," just the assertion that he did, while this piece details a conspiracy of shadowy oligarchs intent on the very same thing.  Oh, and "violence at the Capitol."

The Capitol, aside from the razor-wire topped fencing and the armed National Guardsmen, looks a lot better than downtown Portland, Oregon.  What, a couple of broken windows and someone appropriated Nancy Pelosi's Speakers lectern?  One unarmed protester was killed by a Capitol cop, several more protesters died of natural causes, and the one cop who died after apparently being struck by a thrown fire extinguisher apparently showed no signs of blunt-force trauma.  Some coup attempt.  How many died in Portland?

The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. “Every week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,” says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. “We can look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.”

There's that control of language thing again.  Our heroes were "democracy campaigners."  "Pulling off" the election meaning "making sure Trump loses."  Because they knew if he won there was the strong possibility of "a real dangerous moment of unraveling" as the extremist members of their side would go stark-raving. 

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

Again, who's a conspiracy theorist?  And language once again - saving the 2020 election.  From Donald Trump: "...how close the nation came to disaster."

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.

 

They weren't rigging the election!  Oh no!  Changing voting rules, implementing vote-by-mail, recruiting ideologically pure pollworkers, controlling The Narrative, silencing dissent, that's not "rigging the election" it's fortifying it!  

Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.

I'm not going to fisk the rest of the story line-by-line - it's far too long for that, but I will comment on excerpts like this one:

The usual tools of data, analytics and polling would not be sufficient in a situation where the President himself was trying to disrupt the election, (Mike Podhorzer, senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO) wrote. “Most of our planning takes us through Election Day,” he noted. “But, we are not prepared for the two most likely outcomes”–Trump losing and refusing to concede, and Trump winning the Electoral College (despite losing the popular vote) by corrupting the voting process in key states. “We desperately need to systematically ‘red-team’ this election so that we can anticipate and plan for the worst we know will be coming our way.”

And this is the paragraph that gives lie to the claim that it was "...an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted."  It is also an absolute psychological projection, as he accuses Trump of "corrupting the voting process in key states" when that was precisely what they were doing.  Refusing to concede?  Didn't Hillary tell Biden not to concede under any circumstances?  And winning the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote is how Trump defeated Hillary.  It's why the Electoral College exists.

The chief difference between the U.S. and countries that lost their grip on democracy, he concluded, was that America’s decentralized election system couldn’t be rigged in one fell swoop. 

No, that required that "Their work touched every aspect of the election."  Not just one.

The first task was overhauling America’s balky election infrastructure....

That has worked just fine unless a Republican gets elected.  Especially when the wrong Republican gets elected.

...Fox News surprised everyone by calling Arizona for Biden. The public-awareness campaign had worked: TV anchors were bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately. 

TV anchors "bending over backwards" and "framing" is also known as "Controlling the Narrative."  And it's nothing new, but was brought to new levels.

RTWT.  Try to keep your blood pressure down.  For all the high rhetoric, democracy in America is dead.  The Oligarchy is in control, and they're not giving it up.

No Widespread Evidence of Fraud?

Over on the Book of Face someone linked to this report of the forensic examination of the Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan.  Pullquote:

We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that The Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified.

(Bold my emphasis.)  In this video (since deleted by YouTube for "violating Community Standards."  Here it is from Bitchute, thanks to my readers.) Fulton County, GA, Elections Director Richard Barron reported that they had scanned 113,130 votes, and adjudicated 106,000 - almost 94% of the votes cast. It would appear that the Dominion machine "problem" was not limited to Antrim county, Michigan. (Is it a "bug" when it's been designed to do that, or a "feature"?)

Where else did this occur?  I am reliably informed that there is "no evidence" of "widespread election fraud."  Apparently because no one was willing to allow anyone to look, or publicize it when some did.  Goes against The Narrative™ you see.

Where are We Going, and Why are We in This Basket?

Here's hoping this post makes it past the Google censors.  

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.” ~Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993

Add nearly three more decades to that record.  

(C)onservatism is not so much based on ideas, but on simply observing what works, and then generalizing from there. - Dr. Robert Godwin

After the preceding sixty years, I am now an almost perfect "enemy of the Left."  I'm an old(er) white cisgendered heterosexual male who drives a pickup truck and owns guns.  The only checkbox I don't tick is that I'm not a Christian, but then I am not an "anti-theist" either.  Because I'm in favor of maximum individual liberty and minimum government power - what used to be called a "liberal" - I am now labeled a member of the "Alt-Right," which (deliberately) carries with it ominous implications of "White Supremacy." And I'm a Donald Trump voter, so I am Evil Incarnate.

If not for my heresy of voting for Trump, I might be redeemed - but I would never be trusted.

I started blogging in May of 2003 after spending time in the trenches of Usenet, on bulletin boards, and as a contributor to a failed experiment known as Themestream.  Why?  Because I was pissed.  I forgot to mention that in my CV.  I'm a pissed off old(er) white cisgendered heterosexual male. 

If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know that this pissed-off white cisgendered heterosexual male is also a Debbie Downer.  I'm a pessimist by nature.  I've said that being a pessimist is generally a pretty good way to go through life - you're seldom disappointed and occasionally pleasantly surprised.  I've had very few pleasant surprises recently.

This post is no different.  You've been warned.  Logorrhea to follow.

Don't #WalkAway.

A recent piece at The American Conservative by Rod Dreher, Joe Rogan World vs. NPR World contains these two quotes:

...NPR sounds like Vatican Radio from the Church of Secular Progressivism, ...The New York Times reads like L’Osservatore Romano of the same pseudo-religion.

Do read the whole thing.  This is not surprising to me, but it is beautifully expressed.

Back in 2008 I wrote The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation, a review of media bias as seen through the lens of Professor of Communication Brian Anse Patrick's (PBUH) book The National Rifle Association and the Media:  The Motivating Force of Negative Coverage.  That the media has a bias is undeniable.  Both sides of the current political conflict believe that.  But what Professor Patrick exposed was that the bias is both Left and Right (one more than the other), but it is exclusively about control:

That elite media may be biased for or against a particular issue or topic is interesting, and this knowledge may help an interest group rally indignation or manage its public relations; however it tells little about the overall functioning of media in society. This latter concern is the broader and more important idea, with larger implications.

The larger concept that lies behind the consistent ranking is a broad cultural level phenomenon that I will label an administrative control bias. It has profound implications. Administrative control in this usage means rational, scientific, objective social management by elite, symbol-manipulating classes, and subclasses, i.e., professionalized administrators or bureaucratic functionaries. The thing administered is often democracy itself, or a version of it at least. Here and throughout this chapter terms such as "rational," "objective," "professional," and "scientific" should be read in the sense of the belief systems that they represent, i.e. rationalism, objectivism, professionalism, and scientism. Scientism is not the same as being scientific; the first is a matter of faith and ritualistic observance, the other is difficult creative work. William James made a similar distinction between institutional religion and being religious, the first being a smug and thoughtless undertaking on the part of most people, the second, a difficult undertaking affecting every aspect of a life. The term scientistic administration would pertain here. Note that we move here well beyond the notion of mere gun control and into the realm of general social control, management and regulation.

He explained that people who migrate into journalism believe that problems should be solved by the people already exercising the power.  That journalists see themselves as the clergy of the Church of State, acting as intermediaries between the High Church of government - Federal, state and local -  and the laypeople who make up the rest of the nation.  Which is why I found Mr. Dreher's description of NPR and the NYT to be so poetic.

As the political divide comes to a crashing head in this country on Tuesday, November 3, I thought I'd try to pull together the various threads that have been gathering in my head and try to weave together something coherent before (maybe) this whole thing gets ripped apart.

Why are we at this point?  I have pointed at public education as the great enabler, but it goes deeper than that.  John Taylor Gatto illustrated convincingly that the public education system was initially established by the Great Industrialists (aka "Robber Barons") of the 19th Century to create a two-tiered system: A lower tier for the workers who would labor, do what they're told without question, and buy the products they themselves manufactured, and an upper tier for the children of the Great Men and any who showed exceptional promise.  It was, after all, only natural - "Social Darwinism" was the phrase associated with it, except that philosophy quite easily slides into racism and eugenics (which it did.)  

No, a kinder, gentler philosophy was needed, and that was Marxism - the promise that all men (they were sexists in the late 19th century) would eventually be equal, would suffer no privation, would have all they needed, but never any more or less than their neighbors.  It was a beautiful dream, but Marx insisted that it was an historical inevitability!  So a lot of people adopted that dream and began working towards achieving it, hopefully in their lifetime.

These people were better than the average Joe or Jane.  They cared more.  They took jobs in government, in education, in media, because Utopia could not be consummated with the average prole!  Regular people cared only about themselves and a few people in their close circles.  For Marxism to work, people had to care about everyone else, and that required that they be trained, (nudged in the modern vernacular) into becoming a human being that can care more for a stranger than they do for themselves.  

I believe my readers can see the flaw here.

Instead of schools churning out capitalists, they started churning out sort-of-Socialists, and among them the Scientistic Administrators referred to by Prof. Patrick.  Part of that change was the secularization of the Western world, but the human mind seems to require some sort of spirituality.  There appears to be a portion of the brain pre-wired for a belief in some higher power.  In the face of a growing secularism, that inherent need for "spirituality" still needs to be filled.

Socialism, its accompanying Scientism and the promise of Marx's utopian vision seems to do so nicely, and generation after generation has been infected and affected by exposure to that horribly flawed idea.

From a now-banned 2017 Reddit essay:

Blue Team Progressivism is a church, offering you moral superiority and a path to spiritual enlightenment. As a church it's got a lot going for it. It runs religious programming on television, all day every day. Every modern primetime program is like a left-wing Andy Griffith show, reinforcing lessons of inclusion, tolerance, feminism, and anti-racism.

Watching a 90-pound Sci-Fi heroine beat up a room full of giant evil men is as satisfying to the left as John Wayne westerns were for the right.

The Blue Church controls the HR department, so even if you don't go to church, you have to act like a loyal churchgoer in every way that matters while you're on the clock. And off the clock, on any kind of public social media platform.

Jon Stewart and John Oliver are basically TV preachers. Watching them gives the same sense of quiet superiority your grandma gets from watching The 700 Club. The messages are constantly reinforced, providing that lovely dopamine hit, like an angel's voice whispering, "You're right, you're better, you're winning."

Hollywood award shows are like church talent shows - the skits and jokes aren't really funny, but it's fun to look at the pretty girls, and you're all on the same team.

If you oppose the ideas of the Left, as I have said in this forum repeatedly, you aren't merely wrong, misinformed, misled, ignorant or in error, you're evil.  As Eric Hoffer explained in his 1951 book The True Believer:  Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements:

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealosies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. (Heinrich) Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: "No.... We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one." F.A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: "It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can't, because we haven't got any Jews."

But we have had Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and now Donald Trump, each one inspiring greater and greater derangement to the point where it's actually been called that - [fill in the blank] Derangement Syndrome, each new mutation more virulent than the last. 

Of course, we've still got Jews, too. 

Those Presidents, and the people who voted for them, have been called deplorables, bitter clingers, racists, sexists, misogynists, homophobes, Islamophobes,  pretty much every -ist and -phobe you can think of.  But what they're really saying is "heretic."  Note how viciously they go after the apostates - the former members of the Left who #WalkAway.   They know better.  They're better educated, better informed, more intelligent, and therefore should be in charge of everything.  As the quote on the masthead of this blog from Sultan Knish explains:

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem.

Hoffer, in a 1967 television interview with Eric Sevareid, was asked about the Intellectuals - our "betters" in society and (most importantly today) government.  He responded:

Hoffer:  I talk of a specific type of person when I talk about an intellectual. [...] To me an intellectual is a man of some education who considers himself a member of the educated elite, who thinks he has a God-given right to direct affairs. To me an intellectual doesn't even have to be intelligent in order to be an intellectual. He looked down upon the masses as if they were dirt.

Sevareid: It's their attitude toward ordinary people that is the dividing line in your mind?

Hoffer: That's right.

--

Hoffer: In this country the intellectuals aren't in power. Mass movement hasn't a chance for the simple reason that they aren't started by the masses. They're started by intellectuals.

In America the intellectual has neither status, nor prestige, nor influence. We, the common people, are not impressed by intellectuals. We have a disdain for pencil-pushers. We actually define efficiency by the small number of pencil-pushers. If you asked me what I consider an efficient society I'd say the ratio between the office personnel and the producing personnel.

The smaller the amount of supervision the better, the healthier, the more vigorous a society. The highest supervisory personnel is where the intellectuals are in power - in Communist countries. There half the population is supervising the other half. The intellectuals have a tremendous contempt for the masses. Intellectuals can't operate unless they're convinced that the masses are lazy, incompetent, dishonest; that you have to breathe down their necks, and you have to watch them all the time. We in America are sitting pretty because the masses perform only if we leave them alone. That's where we are at our best.

--

Eric Sevareid: You seem to have a fear about the rise of intellectuals in political life and power. Why are you so frightened of them?

Eric Hoffer: First of all, I ought to tell you that I have no grievance against intellectuals. All that I know about them is what I read in history books and what I've observed in our time. I'm convinced that the intellectuals as a type, as a group, are more corrupted by power than any other human type. It's disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals.

In my new book I elaborate on this and I offer an explanation why. You take a conventional man of action, and he's satisfied if you obey, eh? But not the intellectual. He doesn't want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there's soul-raping going on.

And here we are, 53 years later with a society full of three more generations of college-educated intellectuals.  We have a mass movement started by those intellectuals on college campuses where they teach and are taught to loathe their nation and their fellow citizens.  We're in not a civil war over control of the government, but a RELIGIOUS war over the control of our souls.  

57 genders. Free speech is violence, but violence is speech, but silence is violence.  There should be an equal number of female Fortune 500 CEOs but not an equal number of female brick layers, roofers, plumbers, or auto mechanics.  Tear down all the statues.  Rename all the streets, schools and other public buildings.  Burn down Federal buildings, preferably with Federal agents inside.  Raise your hand and say "Black Lives Matter" or we'll beat you.  Defund the police, but call the highway patrol when a Joe Biden campaign bus is surrounded by Trump supporters in pickup trucks, and on, and on, and on.

And so far we deplorables have acquiesced, gone along, kept our mouths shut and tried to stay out of it.

That choice is not going to be viable much longer.  The Left is like the Terminator - it doesn't sleep, doesn't eat, and absolutely will not stop unless it is stopped.  It's time to stop them.  This election is only the first step.  If we don't take it, we may not get another.  It's time to #StandUpandFaceThem, and damn the backlash.

 

So This Popped Up in my Facebook Feed....

 

Am I concerned about right-wing extremists?  No.  I'm concerned about the LEFT-wing extremists.  They've already trashed and burned down major portions of several cities, they've announced that they'll really get violent if Trump wins re-election, they're threatening Trump supporters with retaliation, etc.

Am I concerned about right-wing extremists?  No.  But LEFT-wing extremists should be.

A warning letter from the niece of Osama bin Laden

 Yes, seriously.  Excerpt:

Though I am an unlikely messenger at first glance — rest assured that the name that I carry is antithetical to the values I hold — my heart is in the right place: with you. The level of urgency coupled with the platform afforded to me by my circumstance compel me to speak up and warn you before it is too late.

Read the whole thing.

Quote of the Day - Angelo Codevilla Edition

From his review of Michael Anton's new book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return in the Clairmont Review of Books, The Election to End All Elections:

They (the Ruling Class) do not believe they have to worry about controlling their own violent troops because they are sure that they have nothing to fear from conservatives. That is because conservatives have continued to believe that the United States’s institutions and those who run them retain legitimacy. Conservative complaisance made possible a half-century of Progressive rule’s abuse. 

When the belief in that legitimacy goes away, they're going to get a hell of a shock. 

As always with Prof. Codevilla, read the whole thing.

The Hunter Biden Revelation that Bothers Me Most

 ...is this one:

If Hunter "gave" his father half of everything he got paid, Burisma, the Chicoms, the Russian oligarch's wife, what are the tax implications for his father, not to mention the foreign influence questions?  That should be the real story.  And when was the last time Joe Biden got audited by the IRS?

READ. THIS. ESSAY.

Suicide of the Liberals, by Gary Saul Morson.

Pullquotes: 

Between 1900 and 1917, waves of unprecedented terror struck Russia. Several parties professing incompatible ideologies competed (and cooperated) in causing havoc.

--

Instead of the pendulum’s swinging back—a metaphor of inevitability that excuses people from taking a stand—the killing grew and grew, both in numbers and in cruelty.

--

How did educated, liberal society respond to such terrorism? What was the position of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and its deputies in the Duma (the parliament set up in 1905)? Though Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures, and did not themselves engage in ­terrorism, they aided the terrorists in any way they could. Kadets collected money for terrorists, turned their homes into safe houses, and called for total amnesty for arrested terrorists who pledged to continue the mayhem.

--

One sometimes hears that “the pendulum is bound to swing back.” But how does one know there is a pendulum at all, rather than—let us say—a snowball accelerating downhill? It is unwise to comfort oneself with metaphors. When a party is willing to push its power as far as it can go, it will keep going until it meets sufficient opposition.

Seriously.  Read it.  History doesn't repeat, but it very often rhymes.

Them's Fightin' Words (Quote of the Day - Glenn Reynolds Edition)

 I have said repeatedly that some time beginning in the 1960's the Left's infiltration of education, media and politics kicked into high gear.  A few years later, they had control of all three.  That was the period when the Right stopped being their "loyal opposition" and became "The Enemy."  Opposition to Leftist ideology and policy wasn't from ignorance or misunderstanding, not because those on the Right were too stupid to understand (though that was part of it), it was because the Right was evil.  Only an evil person could oppose such obviously correct thought.

What do you do with evil? 

You don't debate with evil. You don't negotiate with evil.  You certainly don't compromise with evil.

You placate evil while you look around for a rock sufficient to bash its head in.  You DESTROY evil.

We're past the placation stage.

The Left has been "Othering" the Right for at least the last forty years, basically since Reagan was elected.  The evidence is everywhere.  Here's an example:

There's lots more.  Andy Ngo, Aaron Danielson, Bernell Trammell, Adam Haner, and many others have been the recipients of the tolerance, caring and acceptance of the Left, and I imagine that after November 3 there will be a whole lot more.  

Today at Instapundit was this post by Stephen Green comparing 2020 America to 1917 Russia, but Prof. Reynolds tacked on the QotD:

I don’t think it’s 1917. But in 1917, it’s obvious in retrospect that the only moral and practical thing to do was to kill Bolsheviks, starting at the top. An unparalleled human tragedy could have been prevented, had the Czarists, or the Mensheviks, been willing to act appropriately.

Tough History Coming, Part XX

In re: The Left's response to the Trumps testing positive for COVID-19, Charles Krauthammer, 2002: "To understand the workings of American politics you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil."

You do not debate with evil. You do not negotiate with evil. You do not compromise with evil.  You do not tolerate evil. You destroy evil. It’s a religious crusade.

The Right is "The Other."

I'm reading Evan Sayet's new book The Woke Supremacy. In it he relates the story of Jimmy Fallon as host of the Tonight Show having a guest on the September 15, 2016 episode:

"Fallon, whose show was number one in the ratings at the time, did what late-night talk show hosts do in a normal society and booked one of the biggest names and most entertaining guests he could find. He then did what late-night talk show hosts do by being engaging, fun and funny. Fallon was warm and welcoming as he treated his guest in exactly the fashion he'd treated all of his other guests, and in the style that had made him number one in late-night in the first place.

"The trouble was that the guest was Donald Trump.

"By the next morning, Variety, one of the two uber-powerful trade magazines for the entertainment industry, came out with a hit piece that set the tone and let all of Hollywood know what the Powers-That-Be in the (Woke) Supremacy expected them to do.

...

"The word most often used by (Fallon's) attackers for the "wrong" he had committed was that, by treating Trump in the way the TV show host treated any and all other people, Fallon had served to 'humanize' the Other." 

The Trumps aren't human to the Left. No one who isn't Progressive is.

This will not end well.

Well They Obviously Just Plan to Cheat Until They "Win"

See my previous post "Endgame."

I was wrong. They just plan on stealing it and depending on the Right not to react violently. Or maybe they do. Marx did tell them that violent revolution was needed to free the proletariat:

“The Pentagon has built its entire advanced weapons on Chinese quicksand,”

In relation to my previous post, read this article from the South China Morning Post.

Excerpt:

After China’s 2010 strong-arm tactics against Japan, some in the West raised warnings but were soon drowned out by economics, a supply glut engineered by China and limited political will. “The Pentagon has built its entire advanced weapons on Chinese quicksand,” military consultant James Kennedy wrote in a Defence One commentary in 2016.

China controls the market of refined rare earth minerals crucial to the defense industry for advanced electronics and metal alloys.  The United States has one (1) active rare earth mine, and its entire production is sold to a Chinese state-owned refinery.

So if the SHTF and China simply cut us off, our military technological superiority will shortly be eliminated.

I've been just a fountain of joy recently.

 

Endgame

This blog has been, for me, a seventeen-year exploration of other people's ideas.  If you've been here long, you'll know that I use short quotes and long excerpts from other people's writings to make the points I write about.  Like most people, I am not an "original thinker."  I try to expose myself to as much as I can, and weigh it against my experience and reason to determine truth.  Then I put it down in pixels to help me get my head around it.

Over these past seventeen years (hell, over the last 25), I have slowly come to some conclusions that I'm not happy about.

Remember that last nearly 10,000-word überpost?  I told you that so I could tell you this.  Hopefully I won't be as long-winded this time.

Quote of the Day - Victor Davis Hanson Edition

From his recent piece Year Zero at NRO, but do read the whole thing:

Gun sales are at record levels. I supposed the revolutionaries never investigated the original idea of a police force and the concept of the government’s legal monopoly on violence? It was not just to protect the law-abiding from the criminal, but to protect the criminal from the outraged vigilante.

Only police can stop blood feuds such as the ones we see in Chicago or like the medieval ones of Iceland’s Njáls saga, or the postbellum slaughtering of the Hatfields and McCoys. We are already seeing a counterrevolution — as the Left goes ballistic that anyone would appear on his lawn pointing a semiautomatic rifle to protect mere “brick and mortar.”

Without a functioning police force, do we really believe that the stockbroker is going to walk home in the evening in New York City without a firearm, or that the suburbanite in Minneapolis in an expansive home will not have a semiautomatic rifle, or that the couple who drives to Los Angeles with the kids to visit Disneyland will not have a 9mm automatic in their car console? The Left has energized the Second Amendment in a way the NRA never could, and for the next decade, there will be more guns in pockets, cars, and homes than at any time in history.

Truth

Metastasized Marxism

"An empire toppled by its enemies can rise again.  But one which crumbles from within?  That's dead... forever." - Col. Zemo from Captain America:  Civil War

There is often truth in fiction.

Nation: (n) -  a large body of people, associated with a particular territory, that is sufficiently conscious of its unity to seek or to possess a government peculiarly its own - Dictionary.com

Margaret Thatcher once observed, "Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy." 

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." - Declaration of Independence

Of all the philosophical ideals ever committed to paper, "the pursuit of Happiness" must count among the greatest, but "all men are created equal" ranks a close second. Of course, these ideals were untrue in practice, but the character of Death expressed another truth in fiction in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather, "You need to believe in things that aren't true.  How else can they become?"

We have been a nation often described as a "melting pot," but more accurately as a "salad bowl" - the individual bits not melted together, but working (more or less) in harmony to be more than the sum of their parts. 

We have never been perfect.  No nation ever has.  But we have been good, a beacon to the peoples of other nations, the "shining city on the hill" as Ronald Reagan put it.  But not perfect by a long shot.

Advisory:  This is my first überpost in quite a while.  You've been warned.

Quote of the Day - Ed Driscoll Edition

Of course, as with all previous revolutions, eliminating statues of dead people is merely the precursor to eliminating living people deemed by the left to be, as Hillary would say, “deplorable.” And as her former colleague Susan Rice recently added, deserving of being placed in “the trash heap of history.” Recent events would imply that Rice was not speaking metaphorically.

Link.

Quote of the Day - GeekWithA.45 Edition

From the Wayback Machine:

Societies Gone Mad

To the people of my parent's generation, World War II was a reality that they had lived through, and not a bunch of black and white movies starring John Wayne.

Books upon books were written on the subject, to help them digest and understand just how it was that something of that magnitude could actually happen, how it was that an entire European society could go insane and do what it did. (As for the Japanese society, it was insane to begin with, and thus more easily understood)

Yes, as politically incorrect as it is, I stand by what I just said:

"Entire Societies Can and Have Gone Stark Raving Batshit Fucking Insane."

Welcome to 2020.

Analysis: Probable

Pyramid of Subversion

Update:  BLM leader says group developing highly trained "military" arm for "war on police"

I guess we're closer to Tier 3 than I thought.

Seen at Facebook:

This is the sudden exposure to the fact that the police HAVE no "Duty to Protect." Now someone needs to introduce people to the Killhouse Rules: