Category: Current Events

By My Accounting Antifa Just Lost Biden the Election

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So long COVID-19, hello domestic terrorist manhunt.  The electorate is a complicated jigsaw puzzle of competing priorities.  Race, ethnicity, age and sex factor into the calculations that parties and candidates have to make as to where to invest time and money trying to pick up votes and where not to bother.

As I mentioned yesterday, I think Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey just threw Minnesota firmly into the Trump camp.  Going beyond that I wouldn’t be surprised if we pick up a House seat or two.  I’ll explain why I said that.  President Trump has always had a difficult time garnering the votes of upper middle-class women.  The women I mean are office workers and middle managers who have families but also have feminist friends at work who constantly harangue them on the evils of President Trump.  And so even if they themselves are not man-hating harridans, they are sympathetic to the narrative of the evil patriarchy keeping down the virtuous and brilliant women of the world.

Because of this the President’s numbers have always been skewed toward men.  It is true that in 2016 he did win the white-woman-vote.  But in 2018 the republicans lost a number of seats because the white women’s vote turned sharply against them.  That was why so many women were in the 2020 Democrat Presidential field.  And that is why someone as crazy as Elizabeth warren is still in the running for Democrat VP.  Warrren is catnip to the angry woman’s vote.  I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if Warren was selected, although all things considered I still consider it more likely that another woman, Kamala Harris, will be the pick.  And that’s because Kamala also ticks off that exciting African-American box that is also so important to the Democrat coalition.  In this sense she’s a twofer.

And up until the COVID-19 debacle the Democrats had the added headache of an economy that was dropping African-American unemployment to all-time lows and boosting paychecks too.  Despite the recent public cases of celebrity African-Americans embracing President Trump such as Kanye West there is no danger of that vote shifting decisively to him.  But if there is no particular anger toward the President the danger for the Democrats is that the African American vote won’t show up in large numbers at all.  And that would more or less cook their goose.

But now we have a new wrinkle.  The rioting that Antifa has sparked after the death of George Floyd looks like it might cause the black vote to come out strongly for the Democrats.  But what it also will most probably do is push the white-woman-vote to the Republicans.  And the reason is quite simple.  No matter how you feel about President Trump’s relations with women if you’re a woman who works in a city or suburb seeing the rioters burning, looting and beating the inhabitants of your local metropolis and promising on social networks that they’re headed out to your suburb to finish the job you are probably plenty scared.  And since this is all going on without your local Democrat Mayor or Governor stopping it, you’re probably looking for a man who will.  And guess who that is?  That’s right, America’s most reviled patriarchal alpha male President Trump.  And all of a sudden, his strutting and posturing doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.  When that loser Mayor Jacob Frey abandoned the local police precinct to the looters and the arsonist and the area devolved into bedlam President Trump said that if the Governor didn’t bring in National Guard troops right away then he’d have to do it instead.  That probably sounds pretty reassuring to someone in St. Paul who hears that the rioters have crossed the river and will be in striking distance that night.  So that’s it in a nutshell.  The race riots will probably throw the black vote to Biden but it almost surely will throw the white-woman (and hispanic-woman) -vote to President Trump.  That’s a trade the Democrats can’t afford.

Combine that with the some of the revelations that are probably going to come out of the Russia-gate investigations and the improvements in the unemployment numbers that should begin to unfold in the third quarter and it looks difficult for Creepy Uncle Joe to keep up.  And one other thing should be interesting.  What will come out of the Antifa investigation?  Antifa is a guerilla organization that has been causing great harm but getting a free ride.  If some of their members are linked directly to the violence in Minneapolis that will make them Public Enemy Number One.  Antifa gets funding from Left-Wing sources such as George Soros.  If any of these sources turn out to be friends of Joe Biden or even Obama that would truly cook their goose.

Congrats to Elon Musk for Resurrecting the US Space Program

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Space-X successfully launched US astronauts back into space on an American spacecraft for the first time in ten years.

Regardless of whether any practical goals for our space program currently exist it’s a morale boost for Americans to know that we still have the right stuff when it comes to technology.  As an American who as a boy who watched the Apollo 11 landing and saw it as science fiction coming to life I’m thrilled to see a visionary like Musk making technological breakthroughs reality.

At least a small victory amid the chaos and stupidity we are surrounded by.

The Long Hot Summer Begins

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The riots, looting and arson in Minneapolis have spread to other Democrat cities.  It’s a tricky proposition for the mayors and governors in those jurisdictions in terms of how far they let it go.  The Mayor of Minneapolis was willing to let the closest police precinct burn to the ground along with all the stores and even banks in the area.  Now that the anarchy has spread to nearby St. Paul it’s probable that state officials are in a panic to put a stop to the chaos.  I don’t know enough about Minneapolis politics to know if the Mayor there is immune from voter outrage.  But even a city like New York back in the late eighties with a very large minority population finally reached a point where law and order problems created a backlash that brought in Rudy Giuliani.  Whether Minneapolis is simply too liberal to ever retreat from the appeasement of crime approach is about to be seen.

And all the usual suspects are on tv stirring the pot.  The Mayor of Chicago somehow blames the President.  It should be interesting to see whether Lori Lightfoot’s city ends up burning down too.  To her credit the Mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Bottoms, addressed the senselessness and stupidity of the rioters destroying their own city.  In a small ironic twist, the rioters have smashed some parts of the CNN headquarters in Atlanta.

The manufactured nature of the riots is so blatant that even the left-wing press has acknowledged it.  The inner-city population is looting the stores but wherever the damage is worst you can see some blond-headed twenty something at the center smashing a store window or lighting a Molotov cocktail.  This is Antifa’s show.  They ignited it and they’re keeping it going.

The bigger picture is what will be the political fallout from a spasm of violence and lawlessness running through the cities of the United States during an election year.  President Trump has to very carefully choreograph his response to the events on the ground.  He’ll profess anger for the death of George Floyd but he’ll have to condemn in the strongest terms the evil madness of the rioters.  And if finally, the governor in Minnesota fails to take control of the chaos the President will have to step in.  Taken all together I think this chaos will hurt the Democrats.  It’s reminiscent of the street violence in 1968 that helped elect Richard Nixon president.  Even voters in Democrat controlled states fear the violence and destruction that a mob unleashes when it riots.  It wouldn’t surprise me if this increases President Trump’s margin when he flips Minnesota in November.  And looking down the road it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that both Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey get the boot in a few years when they’re up for re-election.

And one last consequence of this madness is what it will do to the COVID-19 situation.  I predict that we’re going to hear a lot less about the “pandemic.”  I noticed that a lot of the rioters weren’t social distancing as they looted the various stores and offices and I assume that when you’re running from a mob or a National Guard riot squad that a face mask will be too hard to breathe through.  A lot of citizens may figure if it’s good enough for the mob it’s good enough for them.

Politico Thinks the Rebounding Economy Will Be a Disaster for Biden

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When I see an article from Politico I usually avoid it like the plague.  But when the title is “The General Election Scenario That Democrats are Dreading”  How can I resist?  It seems that the rebound of the economy will come along just in time to make the November election a bad time to be Joe Biden.

The upshot is that a V-shaped recovery will relieve the anxiety people have suffered under the COVID-19 crisis at exactly the right time to convince Americans that President Trump knows how to handle the economy best.

“On Election Day, we Democrats need voters to ask themselves, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ Republicans need voters to ask themselves, ‘Are you better off than you were four months ago?’”

And knowing how humble the President is I hope he remembers to remind Americans that he was the one pushing to re-open the economy while the Democrats wanted it to remain shutdown for up to a year.

My Fellow Americans

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One of the things that separates me from the Dissident Right is their perspective on the United States.  They correctly point out that many unconstitutional laws have been enacted that deprive us of our freedoms supposedly guaranteed under the Bill of Rights.  But from this condition they deduce that the United States no longer exists.  Now to me that’s defeatism that seems unwarranted.  And I say this because reversing some of these infringements of our rights would only require the Supreme Court to recognize that the harm that these unconstitutional laws cause outweighs any supposed social benefits they provide.

I admit that all these problems have endured for an enormous length of time.  Going all the way back to the 1960s the affirmative action agenda has afflicted us.  But it’s fair to mention that for almost all this time both political parties have contributed to the support that these laws flourished under.  It’s only since the Trump Administration that the Supreme Court has come close to a working majority of constitutionalist justices. Even now John Roberts is an unreliable conservative vote with nothing in the way of actual courage to address unconstitutional laws.  But assuming that nothing can be done about present circumstances seems very short sighted.  What is necessary is electing presidents that actually want the country to be conservative.

Look at the difference between George W. Bush and Donald Trump.  W was supported by the whole country going into Afghanistan.  Even going into Iraq, the country still put their trust in him.  But after he had done all that could be done to eliminate the threat of a militant Iraq, W decides to go on a democratic nation building crusade in a primitive hell-hole filled with our worst enemies.  He bled our military of the finest young men on the face of the earth.  Then he tried to put Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court but settled for saddling us with John Roberts.  And finally, his multiple national disasters guaranteed that Barack Obama would torture us for eight years.

Compare this with President Trump.  No foreign wars, a tax cut, low unemployment, high economic growth, reduced illegal immigration, manufacturing jobs returning to the US.  And finally, on the Supreme Court he gave us Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.  Not to mention the tough fight he had to wage to get Kavanaugh confirmed.  And that’s the key point.  Fight!  Expecting to gain any ground without fighting our enemies is delusional.  But what you notice is that if you do fight, it improves things on all fronts.  The progressives aren’t all that tough, they’re just in charge.  If you push them hard enough, they give ground.  They’ll shriek about it but they’ll give ground.  That’s what’s so amazing to watch with the Trump Administration.  They’ve been harassed at every turn and started out with no reliable allies but through sheer dogged determination they’re finally bringing the fight to the Deep State and even something as staggering as the COVID-19 crisis hasn’t broken their spirits.  Can you imagine if every Republican administration showed the same resolve and courage?

So that is my rationale for not giving up on America.  Abandoning a thing as great as the United States to weirdos and bureaucrats seems cowardly and lazy.  Getting involved and knowing who you’re nominating is how a republic works.  It’s going to take a coordinated effort to vet the ambitious men who want to run this country.  They need to prove that they are willing to get results and ignore the Left when they call them racists, homophobes, misogynists, etc., etc., etc.

All that being said, that doesn’t mean I think that the United States is functionally the same country it used to be.  I won’t pretend that I feel that everyone walking around are “my fellow Americans.”  There are a few ideological tests that I administer to determine if someone is an American or just a pod masquerading as one.

  • If someone tells me that America is a racist country, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks that restricting immigration is racist, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks that free speech isn’t our right, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks that guns should be banned, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks that the government should tell me who to associate with, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks that the government should tell me who not to associate with, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks Barack Obama was a better President than Thomas Jefferson, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks Barack Obama was a better President than Donald Trump, he’s an idiot.
  • If someone tells me that women need to be advantaged in college or industry, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks Michael Brown was an innocent young man targeted by the police, he’s a pod.
  • If someone tells me that I should have to pay money to people whose distant ancestors were oppressed in the United States before my ancestors even got to this country, he’s a pod.
  • If someone tells me that marriage can be between anything other than a man and a woman, he’s a pod.
  • If someone tells me that there are more than two sexes, he’s a pod.
  • If someone tells me that a man in a sundress is a woman, he’s a pod.
  • If someone tells me that a mother should be allowed to put her little boy on hormonal therapy prior to castration because she thinks it will hurt her ex-husband, he’s not a pod, he’s a monster.

Any of these tests will identify people walking around the United States that are in no way my fellow Americans.  They are dangerous people who have rejected the Constitution of the United States as the valid law of the land.  They are working to undermine the best designed government that has ever been devised by the minds of men.

So, in this sense I agree with the Dissident Right that the United States as formerly understood doesn’t exist.  It has been overrun by people who are hellbent on destroying it and should not be considered Americans no matter what their ancestry says about them.  Some of the most dangerous of these are people whose ancestors came here on the Mayflower.  To me there are legal first generation Chinese and Mexican Americans who love this country and believe in all the things that make this country great and are therefore more American than these degenerate descendants of the Standishes and Bradfords.  Sure, there other immigrants who don’t appreciate the great gift they’ve been given to live here.  But I’m talking about the ones that do.  They believe in American exceptionalism and want to be Americans in every sense of the word.  They’re not looking for America to become Mexico or China.  They left those countries for a better place.  They never heard of white privilege or patriarchy or transgender anything.  They just want to raise their families and live in peace.  To me they’re more American than some Boston Brahmin whose family descends from the Pilgrims but disparages America as a racist, sexist, homophobic place that must be taught a lesson and deconstructed to suit the multicultural tastes of his fellow Cloud People.

But I disagree with the Dissident Right in the sense that we can fight to restore this country.  We are not outnumbered and we are on the side of common sense.  Our mistake has been to follow behind some other of these Cloud People who claimed to be on our side.  The Bushes and the Romneys are no different from the Clintons and the Obamas.  All of them are the enemy.  We need to find competent men who will fight for us and use them to change this country back to what it was.  We don’t even have to change the rules.  The Constitution hasn’t been changed.  Only unconstitutional laws have been allowed to stand.  Knock those laws down and we get back our country.

And the first thing I’d do is go after affirmative action for women.  There isn’t even a bad excuse for it anymore.  There are now more women than men in colleges and graduate schools.  Women have been advantaged for so long in corporate America that claiming they need affirmative action is a joke.  Ending the protected status of women needs to happen now.  Women can be shamed into admitting that they are taking advantage of unfair laws.  It’s an easy win and would be a good first step in cleaning up our unconstitutional mess.

Well my fellow Americans, that’s enough ranting and raving for now.  I hope you had a pleasant Memorial Day weekend.  Hopefully by the Fourth of July we’ll be past most of this COVID-19 nonsense and enjoying a real barbecue instead of the cut rate version we’ve had today.

25MAY2020 – Memorial Day Quote

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I have one sentiment for soldiers living and dead: cheers for the
living; tears for the dead.
Robert Green Ingersoll

If you had seen one day of war, you would pray to God that you would never see another.
Duke of Wellington

The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it.
Thucydides

Memorial Day isn’t just about honoring veterans, its honoring those who lost their lives. Veterans had the fortune of coming home. For us, that’s a reminder of when we come home we still have a responsibility to serve. It’s a continuation of service that honors our country and those who fell defending it.
Pete Hegseth

The Glorious Paradox That is Biden

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In 1 Corinthians 9:22 St. Paul says “To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.”  To some extent, a presidential candidate must do that.  He must be all things so that all the various special interest groups can buy into his story.  And for a Democrat candidate that’s a very diverse group of special interests.  He’s got the black vote and the feminist vote and the Latino vote, the gay vote and the lesbian vote and now he even has the trans vote.  Well, that’s their shtick after all.  But this year threading that needle is going to be extra tricky for Creepy Uncle Joe.  Take for instance the feminist vote.  Tara Reade has made that sale interesting.  Although several feminists have openly said that even if they believe Joe Biden sexually assaulted Reade back in 1993, they would still vote for him in November.  Columnist Katha Pollitt puts aside all doubts about whether morality is involved in her election calculus.  She stated, “I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them.”  Well that’s refreshingly honest.  Another woman, Lisa Bloom, flatly states that she does believe Reade’s claim but she’s endorsing Biden anyway.  And she’s a women’s rights attorney!  Ain’t that a kick in the head!

What all this tells me is that Joe is not going to energize the feminist vote.  And if the feminists aren’t feeling it, they’re not going to be very effective proselytizing their less strident sister in the next cubicle over.  I mean how persuasive is an argument that ends with, “So you see Joe Biden has many fewer rape allegations against him than his opponent.”  I think a lot of women will feel that argument leaves them a little underwhelmed.

Now let’s look at the black vote.  A few days ago, Biden had a video interview with a black social media personality who calls himself, and I kid you not, Charlamagne tha God (CTG).  On his radio show called the Breakfast Club he tried to pin down Biden on what gimmees he would promise to the black community.  But Biden resisted saying “You got more questions, but I tell ya, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

Now this comment raised howls of anger from the African Americans on both the Left and Right.  But Biden’s supporters aren’t actually offended by the patronizing remark.  But they want him to know they haven’t signed on the dotted line.  They want a black woman as his running mate and they want money.

CTG stated, “If you created legislation that hurt [the black community], then you have to create legislation that helps. It’s just that simple. Like, the whole system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt,” McKelvey said in a Friday interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett. “He’s been a very intricate part of that system, whether you’re talking about in ’84 with mandatory minimum sentences for drug dealers, or you’re talking about ’86 with crack laws that gave you more time for crack cocaine than powder cocaine, or you’re talking about the ’94 crime bill, like he really was one of those people on the front line when it came to the war on drugs and mass incarceration.”  “If he wants to be president, he needs to fix that. He needs to really, really help the people that have helped Democrats all of these years,” he added.  And on another interview, he added he wants details on Biden’s “slavery reparations” stance.

To me it’s pretty clear that Biden’s support in the black community is extremely conditional.  To tie it up he will have to promise some extremely expensive programs.  And chances are he really can’t deliver on those.  And even more problematic, if he makes those promises it is going to jeopardize his support from other parts of his fractious coalition.

Now the final piece of the puzzle has less to do with the special interest groups and more to do with self-preservation.  Over the course of the last six months Joe Biden has made so many verbal gaffes that everyone including the republicans has stopped paying attention to them.  He not only commits factual errors like forgetting what state he’s in or what office he’s running for but he has on occasion lapsed into spouting gibberish in an attempt to finish off some thought that he’s lost the thread of.  It’s gotten to the point that even his own constituency has stopped denying that he’s becoming senile.  So, if you’re an independent and even if you’re not a Trump fan you’d have to hesitate before voting to put a man as intellectually compromised as Biden in charge of the largest thermonuclear stockpile on the face of the Earth.

So, there we have it.  The Democrats had to anoint Biden because otherwise Bernie Sanders would have been the candidate and he’s a Communist Loon.  But Joe is essentially a lying, plagiarizing, sex predator suffering from advanced senile dementia.  Oh, and he allowed his son to cash in on his political connections to the tune of about a billion dollars from China and the Ukraine.  It seems to me even taking into account the equivalent of the Great Depression descending on us after the COVID-19 debacle it’s going to be mighty hard to lift Joe Biden into the White House.  Even in these benighted times that may be too much to expect from the American people.  We’re nuts but we’re not Biden nuts.

With Friends Like These

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How do you know when your side is winning the public opinion battle?  Based on the last fifty years of American politics I’d say it’s when all of a sudden you find that you have a whole bunch of new friends who want to straighten you out on who the real conservatives are and straighten you out on what you should believe.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s we had the Buckleyites running that scam and then in the 2000s the Neo-Cons got their turn.  Each time we go around in this circle they play the same game.  We hear about the conservative majority that will be unleashed if only we embrace x, y and z.  During our latest intervention our new friends want us to know that good old conservative institutions like gay marriage, open borders and offshoring American jobs to China will win us a coalition of newly minted conservatives if only we’re willing to denounce all those deplorables in the Rust Belt for the racists, xenophobes and homophobes they are.  Boy, it’s good to have friends willing to straighten you out.

These political sages are all twenty somethings, newly minted from Ivy League schools with the wisdom they’ve accumulated in their post-modern literature and intersectional philosophy seminars fairly sparkling off their faces.  I can just see the rainbow coalition of the LGBTQ and illegal aliens locking arms with libertarians, vegans, greens and other newly minted republicans as they stride shoulder to shoulder into a glorious new future of unrecognizable conservatism.  Ever was it so.

But, as stated, when your “friends” want to save you from your agenda then you know that you’re winning.  If you were losing, then these people wouldn’t be calling themselves conservatives and they wouldn’t be interested in talking to you.  There wouldn’t be any money in it for them.

I was reminded of this by a spate of recent articles discussing esoteric writers and schools of thought that would set us straight and allow us to give up our needless crusade to confirm constitutional originalists to the bench and abandon our hopelessly old-fashioned obsession with the first and second amendments.  When I read these articles, I get the same feeling that came over me when one of the neo-cons like Jonah Goldberg would explain why objecting to full acceptance of homosexuality as a legitimate alternative to normal sexuality was hopelessly outdated and a fool’s errand.  The angle he provided was that of an older and wiser head giving good advice to a country cousin who wasn’t smart enough to see that times had changed and all the smart people knew better and had moved on.

Back then it confused and depressed me to think that the conservative leaders had allowed themselves to be convinced by the arguments of the moral relativists.  But of course, there hadn’t been any arguments.  It was just a matter of the pundits going to some dinner parties where their liberal friends told them that only mouth breathers refused to acknowledge the highly conservative nature of buggery.

So here we go again.  Against all odds Donald Trump unites social conservatives, patriots and everyone who despises the hypocrisy and stupidity of the social justice warriors.  And because he is seeing success and his enemies are afraid that their policies are in danger, those on the Left immediately look to co-opt the movement.  Their first targets are always the young elite intellectuals.  They will dangle the prospect of an alliance of the moderates.  The libertarians can be fooled into thinking that the “less crazy” progressives will band together with them to oppose the enemies of free speech and truth.  All these libertarians have to do to seal the deal is purge the social conservatives who can’t be reconciled with their new pals.  And to justify these delusions the young intellectuals spin a fantasy about the solidarity of the Classic Liberal coalition.  Never mind that the Left has replaced principle with identity power politics for more than a century.  Never mind that even while the “moderate” crazies are being harassed by their even crazier lunatic fringe no one on the Left ever misses a chance to kick someone on the Right if the opportunity presents itself.

Knowing all this I can only laugh at the pretensions of these brilliant moderates and their castles in the clouds.  But more important than derision is pointing out to the young and impressionable that an alliance with the “saner” elements of the Left is a pipe dream that only leads to compromise and splintering of the factions on the Right.  The Left is your mortal foe.  They want to destroy all the things in life that make it worth living.  They’ve already destroyed the majority of the institutions that made this country great.  Compromising with them is just cooperating with them while they push you off the cliff.  Moral relativism always leads to accepting things that are wrong.  Instead, push in the direction of what is inherently good and you’ll make progress and you’ll attract like-minded people.  Those are the friends you want, not the ones who look exactly like enemies.