Tag Archives: #TrumpDerangementSyndrome

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My local Bishop really, really doesn’t like Donald Trump

The Most Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington

While I cannot say that I am friends with His Excellency, the Most Reverend John Stowe, O.F.M. Conv., Bishop of Lexington, we are at least acquainted with each other. The Bishop at least recognizes me when he sees me, though I cannot be certain he remembers my name. We have had some pleasant conversations the few times he has visited our small parish.

I have written about him, or at least mentioned him, on this poor site, in 17 previous articles, not always charitably. Bishop Stowe is an excellent homilist, one who can really connect with a congregation, and I have no doubts at all about his faith. But, as a Catholic priest, he chooses the wrong things far too often for me.

Kentucky prelate calls lack of election response from American Church ‘disappointing’

by John Lavenburg | Tuesday, December 3, 2024

NEW YORK – In the month or so since former President Donald Trump was elected to occupy the White House for a second term, the majority of American bishops have either not commented on the election publicly, or issued a generic statement about the importance of civility, unity, and democracy.

That extends to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where – outside of responses to Trump’s stated plan for mass deportations – not much has been said. Bishop John Stowe, in a recent conversation with Crux, said that reality isn’t surprising considering how American Church leaders have handled the presidency of Joe Biden over the last four years.

“It was not surprising coming from the USCCB. What was surprising was the attitude when Joe Biden was elected, a Catholic president four years ago, and there was such an uproar in the conference about that election, and because of that, I really had no expectation that there would be much said about the Trump election,” said Stowe, the bishop of Lexington in Kentucky.

His Excellency the Bishop does not like former and future President Donald Trump. Speaking in August of 2020, before the 2020 election, the Bishop let us know, let all of his Catholic parishioners know, that he was opposed to President Trump’s re-election. Bishop Stowe was appalled by Mr Trump’s anti-illegal immigration policies, calling them “anti-life.” Continue reading →

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Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and hate!

It is entirely possible that I have been, believe it or not, too charitable to our friends on the left. In my recent article, Will Bunch uses his Freedom of Speech and of the Press to tell us that he hates Freedom of Speech and of the Press, I mocked The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch for his tirade against MSNBC’s (supposed) journalists, Joe and Mike Scarborough for having gone to Mar-a-Lago and meeting with former and future President Donald Trump. Mr Bunch told his readers about the brave “journalists left who do plan, in a moment of increased risk, to keep asking the tough questions in this muddled new era,” but trashes two (purported) journalists who have gone to cover a story about the next President of the United States as somehow “supplicants,” showing fealty and making obeisance to him. Uhhh, you can’t “keep asking the tough questions” to Mr Trump if you are unwilling to talk to him in the first place.

I would have thought that a journolist, oops, sorry, journalist like Mr Bunch would appreciate freedom of the press and the willingness of journalists to go into hostile territory, to get their stories, to report the news, even from people who didn’t like or respect them. Continue reading →

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MSNBC worried that their talking heads’ #TrumpDerangementSyndrome will be exposed even more

MSNBC was widely mocked after they sidestepped their AM show, Morning Joe, on Monday, due to fears that one or more of hosts Joe Scarborough’s and Mika Brzezinski Scarborough’s guests, or perhaps the couple themselves, might say something just boneheadedly crazy following the assassination attempt aimed at former President Donald Trump. That fear was hardly unreasonable, given that Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok has shown us dozens of statements the haters have posted on social media lamenting that the would-be assassin failed. Miss Raichik succeeded in many regards, as some of these #TrumpDerangementSyndrome-addled people have now found themselves unemployed. The bosses at MSNBC knew that Mr and Mrs Scarborough were deeply affected and infected with that disease, as many of their guests are as well. Continue reading →

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The American left go full neo-con!

I always expect the neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin, none of whom ever met a war in which they did not want American involvement, to be pushing to fight, fight, fight, but I’ll admit to some to surprise in seeing Salon’s Amanda Marcotte going full-neocon!

Zelenskyy visit exposes a GOP rift — between actual fascists and everyone else

Too many Republicans still refuse to stand up for Ukraine — and for democracy — against their MAGA brethren

by Amanda Marcotte | Friday, December 23, 2022 | 6:00 AM EST

It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter biography photo was taken in a bar.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is widely popular, both in the U.S. and around the world. You’d have to be the most churlish asshole alive not to feel moved by his resolve to protect his nation’s sovereignty against the egomanaical supervillain impulses of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been waging an unprovoked war against Ukraine for nearly a year. Zelenskyy’s Wednesday night speech before a joint session of Congress wasn’t just moving. It was also persuasive on the brass tacks arguments. Military aid to Ukraine is “not charity,” he argued, but “an investment in global security and democracy.”

I’ll admit it: I checked Miss Marcotte’s Salon archive on December 26th to see if she’d written yet another “I hate Christmas” screed. When she wrote, in 2019:

For me, it’s personal. My family is mostly a bunch of Trump voters, sucked up into a vortex of propaganda and lies, unable even to admit basic facts about the world that run contrary to what their tribal politics dictate. That sort of thing is stressful on a normal day, but makes a mockery of the idea of familial love and harmony.

I just shook my head, because the idea that I’d simply give up my family over politics is simply beyond my understanding.

Oh, well, back to the original:

As Fred Kaplan at Slate argued, the speech “was a resounding success” that circumvented Republicans who previously had made noises about cutting aid to Ukraine. The Senate approved $44.9 billion in military, humanitarian and economic aid to Ukraine on Thursday afternoon, as part of a $1.7 trillion government spending bill that passed 68-29, and is expected to pass the House as well.

Zelenskyy’s argument that Ukraine’s victory is necessary to protect global democracy is hard to argue against. Especially in recent years, Putin has not hidden his contempt for Western-style democracy or desire to see it collapse around the globe. Even with all the caveats and nuances one could possibly inject into this, the “bad guys” and “good guys” are crystal clear in this scenario.

Winston Churchill famously said, “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” But perhaps, just perhaps, a ‘favourable’ reference is all the difference.

Except, that is, to some Republicans in Congress and a number right-wing pundits. That world is not just anti-Zelenskyy, but imbued with such vicious sentiments that even the most jaded political watchers were shocked. This isn’t just about arguments over whether aid to Ukraine is being well spent, or about whether Ukraine is strategically crucial to U.S. interests. This was about full-on vitriol, to the point where even Republicans who are open to cutting aid to Ukraine were made uncomfortable.

There’s one major reason things got so ugly so fast. The debate over Ukraine, at least among Republicans, is a stand-in for the largely unspoken but very real debate that’s roiling the party: Do they still believe in democracy? A faction in the GOP has decided that they don’t, and now supports authoritarianism, or the F-word. Many other Republicans feel uneasy about this direction, but don’t seem able to stand up to the fascist faction.

It has to be remembered: Mr Zelenskyy is President of Ukraine only because legitimately-elected President Viktor Yanukovych was deposed in the so-called Революція гідності, “Revolution of Dignity,” in 2014, in large part because he opposed joining the European Union and NATO. But, for Miss Marcotte, it’s the evil reich-wing Republicans who don’t believe in democracy, and who now support authoritarianism.

There follows another several paragraphs of mixed and questionable assertions, which you can read for yourself; I cannot simply quote every one of Miss Marcotte’s 1,370 words.

Most Americans support Ukraine, with 65% agreeing that the U.S. should send arms to Ukraine and 75% supporting sanctions against Russia, even as those have driven up oil prices around the world. This onslaught of pro-Putin propaganda on the right has softened conservative support for Ukraine, but even so 55% of Republican voters are in favor of military aid.

This tension between America’s overwhelming pro-Ukraine sentiment and the far right’s caustic hatred was reflected in the behavior of congressional Republicans at Zelenskyy’s speech Wednesday night. Most Republicans, even those who have expressed doubt about more funding, at least showed moral support for Zelenskyy, standing to applaud his speech and telling reporters they believe in his cause.

There has been a whole lot of World War II thinking applied to the Russo-Ukraine War — or perhaps I should call it Russo-Ukraine War 2.0, considering Russia’s seizure and annexation of part of Ukraine in 2014 — with the logic that pushed the United Kingdom and France to declare war on Nazi Germany two days after the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland, but that is such superficial thinking that I am amazed no one has realized it. In that event, the UK and France could not and did not actually do anything to liberate Poland; the liberation of Poland came in 1944, when the Red Army pushed out the Germans, and ‘liberation’ by the Soviet Union hardly freed the Poles.

And there’s that biggest of differences: no one in Europe, or anywhere in the world, had in 1939 what Russia has now: a strategic and tactical nuclear arsenal. As he was losing the war, Adolf Hitler tried everything he could, used every weapon he had, but, other than the V-1 and V-2 terror rockets, had no power to strike at his enemies. We do not and cannot know what Vladimir Putin will do if, in the end, he sees Russia really losing RUW 2.0, but we do know that he could cross that nuclear threshold, and use tactical nukes against Ukrainian troop concentrations and other targets. And once that nuclear threshold is crossed, who can know when things will stop? And if the United States and NATO nations are supplying Ukraine from bases in Poland, how are those bases not legitimate targets if Russia has the weapons to reach them . . . and Russia does.

We have had proxy wars with the Communists since the 1950s, in Korea, in Vietnam, and in Afghanistan, but in none of those wars were we fighting Russian troops, nor was there any danger of strikes into the USSR itself; Ukraine has already struck inside Russia during this war. The New York Times reported, “The United States and Ukraine have agreed that Kyiv will not strike targets in Russia with American-provided weapons,” but that does not mean that Vladimir Putin will care about that distinction. If Ukraine can strike targets inside Russia, than Russia can strike targets outside Ukraine which are supplying the Ukrainians. War and escalation have their own logic.

Skipping to the end of Miss Marcotte’s article, we find:

One could quibble over whether supporting Ukraine and believing in democracy are the same thing, although Putin’s behavior tends to override any effort at nuanced debate. But within Republican ranks, there’s no doubt that the issue of Ukraine’s independence and self-determination has become is a proxy for the party’s internal debate over American democracy. Even the most stalwart authoritarians in the GOP know better than to come right out and say they’re against democracy and it’s time to do away with it. So they gaslight the nation instead, clumsily repackaging Donald Trump’s desire to be installed as a dictator as a narrative about a “stolen” or “rigged” election, and concerted efforts to undermine democracy as measures to ensure “election security.” Rooting against Ukraine is a way to advance the anti-democracy agenda, without quite openly embracing it.

Ironically, all the Republican game-playing on Ukraine only ends up reinforcing the argument Zelenskyy made in his speech on Wednesday: Protecting his country against Russian tyranny is ultimately about protecting democracy. Whatever criticisms could be made of his leadership or his imperfect nation, Zelenskyy’s biggest opponents in Congress hate him because they hate democracy.

Philadelphia’s transplanted Texan is honest enough to tell us her real message: the left must attack Republicans, and RUW 2.0 is just a vehicle with which to do that. Honestly, I expect no wider-range thinking from her. But in doing so, she has made arguments pretty much indistinguishable from those of Mr Boot.[1]Mr Boot, whose parents fled a strongly antisemitic regime in the USSR under Leonid Brezhnev, once said, “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump,” even though the … Continue reading Mr Boot, who dearly loves having American troops all over the globe and has been a student of military history and strategic studies but has never served in the military himself, fretted that it would be a disaster for the United States to pull out of Afghanistan, though what more could be accomplished in that fetid and festering sewer that we hadn’t been able to accomplish in the 19½ years we had already been there he could not articulate.

Even the Editorial Board of The Washington Post went full neo-con on Ukraine. But, as is the case with Miss Marcotte, all I see is a tremendous desire to be anti-Trump in all of this. President Trump raised the legitimate question of European participation in NATO, and how the European nations were not paying their fair share of the burden of maintaining the alliance. I went further, and asked if Americans really like the idea that the North Atlantic Treaty would require us to go to war with Russia if Russia sent the tanks rolling into Riga. Just how many American cities are worth defending the Baltic States? And Ukraine isn’t even a NATO member.

Miss Marcotte was very much opposed to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though we were actually attacked by al Qaeda, which was hiding in Afghanistan. Those wars, of course, were started under George W Bush, a Republican President, so there’s that. But today, she’s conflating an attack by Russia, on a non-NATO nation, with Republicans in the United States, and telling us we have to fight, fight, fight Vladimir Putin and Russia, to preserve democracy in the United States. #TrumpDerangementSyndrome has managed turn so much of the American left into the new neo-cons.

References

References
↑1 Mr Boot, whose parents fled a strongly antisemitic regime in the USSR under Leonid Brezhnev, once said, “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump,” even though the USSR under Comrade Stalin might well have sent Mr Boot and his family to a concentration camp; the Soviet leaders really didn’t like Jews very much.
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Neocon off the deep end!

As we have previously noted, the old ‘neo-conservatives‘ turned #NeverTrumpers like Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and Jennifer Rubin have shown themselves to be very much on the political left in the United States, moved to the Democrats due to their #TrumpDerangementSyndrome.

Crime has shown up as one of the major issues in the upcoming election, so naturally Mrs Rubin has made a silly claim trying to blame Republicans for crime, due to the rather odd attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, by a Canadian nudist hippie who somehow has morphed into an evil reich-wing extremist.

The tweet to the left is actually a screen capture; when someone like Mrs Rubin tweets something dumb — which is fairly frequently — I always assume that she might decide to delete it, but, alas! the internet is forever when there are [insert plural slang term for the anus here] like me around.

As we have reported previously, Pennsylvania’s firearms control laws are pretty much uniform across the Commonwealth; state law prohibits municipalities from imposing restrictions which are stricter than those provided for under state law. In 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

It got worse last year: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.

The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Dana Pico Schools Jen Rubin (But Trump Derangement Syndrome Is Incurable)

In 2020, Philadelphians gave 81.44% of their votes to Joe Biden. The Mayor, Jim Kenney, is a Democrat, as have been every Mayor since Harry Truman was President. The George Soros-sponsored District Attorney, let ’em loose Larry Krasner, is a Democrat, and won re-election in 2021, by a landslide. Philadelphia is by every possible measure, a heavily Democratic city.

It’s more than that. Those 65 counties other than Philadelphia and Allegheny? They gave 54.98% of their two-party votes — meaning: third party candidates excluded — to President Trump! It seems as though those evil, reich-wing Republicans whom Mrs Rubin claims are “inciting violence” are inciting it in heavily Democratic areas!

I’m far less familiar with our other murder capitals, like Baltimore (87.28% of vote in Baltimore City to Mr Biden) and St Louis (80.85% of vote in St Louis city to Mr Biden) and New Orleans (83.15% of Orleans Parish to Mr Biden) and Chicago (74.35% of vote in Cook County to Mr Biden), but it seems like most them are not exactly Republican strongholds.

It’s clear: Mrs Rubin somehow sees the assault on Mr Pelosi as somehow a far, far, far worse thing than the 441 murders in Philadelphia so far this year, or the 562 who were killed in 2021. I suppose I can only fault her partially for that, because that’s pretty much the way the Democrats as a whole see things.

 

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Brynn Tannehill and the American left love them some freedom of speech and of the press . . . for themselves. For conservatives? Not so much!

I will admit it: I had not heard of Brynn Tannehill before seeing this tweet from my good Twitter friend Robert Stacy McCain. Now I don’t know what Mr McCain tweeted to her that she found blockworthy — though blockworthy seems to have a pretty low threshold among many on the left — but, as I frequently do when I see something like that, I checked out the blocking author.

It didn’t take too much scrolling down to find this tweet in Miss Tannehill’s file. She is exercising her freedom of speech and of the press to tell us why other people ought not to have the same rights. That is, sadly, far too typical of the American left!

Why Elon Musk’s Idea of “Free Speech” Will Help Ruin America

Twitter without content moderation—and with Donald Trump and others reinvited—means that lies and disinformation will overwhelm the truth and the fascists will take over.

by Brynn Tannehill | Wednesday, October 26, 2022

After months of legal wrangling, Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter appears to be finally going through. Musk and the right see this as a great thing because it will restore “free speech” to Twitter. Any suggestion that the sort of “free speech” they envision can have highly undesirable consequences is met with howls of “Libs hate free speech” or other accusations of fascism. Similarly, warnings that unfettered free speech results in dangerous misinformation spreading are derided with “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” and the libertarian belief that in the marketplace of ideas, the best will always win out.

These theories will be tested quickly. It is being reported that after the sale is finalized, Musk plans on laying off nearly three-quarters of Twitter’s staff and that one of the first things to go will be any corporate attempt at content moderation and user security. Musk also plans on restoring the accounts of high-profile sources of disinformation and violent messaging who were previously banned, most notably former President Trump.

Well, of course it’s all about Donald Trump, who has been living rent-free in the heads of the left since before he was elected, and still now, after he’s been out of office for 21 months. We have often noted how some of the major organs of the credentialed media, including those who have so vigorously defended their own freedom of speech and of the press, have advocated censoring other people’s freedom of speech and of the press, all as the left scram that evil reich-wing Republicans are the fascists! That Miss Tannehill has previously accused Republicans of wanting to ban books only makes it more hypocritical, and more humorous.

OK, at this point, 9:41 PM EDT on Friday, October 28th, I need to make a serious correction. When I originally wrote this article, I made a huge, huge error: I failed to check the author’s biography, and did something silly like use the feminine honorifics and pronouns. Commenter 370H55V I/ME/MINE notified me of the error, and now I need to correct it. It turns out that Bryan Tannehill was a 1997 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, and began to ‘transition’ in 2010. I left the above part of my article in place, as written, but shall now correct the rest of it.

The pro-Musk arguments are complete nonsense, and there are innumerable historical and modern examples of why social media platforms with nearly unlimited freedom of speech produce horrors. The Supreme Court decided free speech isn’t absolute long ago, when Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes noted that you can’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, for obvious reasons.

As happens so often among the anti-free speech crowd, Miss Mr Tannehill wholly missed the point. From Schneck v United States, 249 US 47 (1919), internal citations omitted:

But it is said, suppose that that was the tendency of this circular, it is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Two of the strongest expressions are said to be quoted respectively from well-known public men. It well may be that the prohibition of laws abridging the freedom of speech is not confined to previous restraints, although to prevent them may have been the main purpose, as intimated in Patterson v. Colorado. We admit that in many places and in ordinary times the defendants in saying all that was said in the circular would have been within their constitutional rights. But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. Aikens v. Wisconsin. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force. Gompers v. Buck’s Stove & Range Co. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

The entire opinion is short, and can be easily read in just a couple of minutes, but what Miss Mr Tannehill and others have so often forgotten is that while Associate Justice Holmes — he was never Chief Justice of the United States, as Miss Mr Tannehill claimed, though he was once Chief Justice of the Massachusetts state Supreme Court — said that the First Amendment does not protect a man from the consequences of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater and causing a panic and, presumably, a stampede for the exits, he never stated that the worry that someone might do such, without solid information about a specific, real, and credible threat justifies the law disallowing him from entering a theater in the first place. Miss Mr Tannehill and the like-minded left are basing their desire to shut down access to the most important organs of free speech these days to those they fear might shout “Fire!” in that crowded theater.

First, freedom of speech has caused untold death and suffering when used to disseminate hate or spread disinformation. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a fabricated antisemitic text that purported to expose a global baby-murdering Jewish plot bent on world domination. Mein Kampf was Hitler’s autobiography, which blamed Germany’s post–World War I woes on a global Jewish conspiracy. Both were readily available in the Weimar Republic, which had no First Amendment per se but guaranteed freedom of speech. They were key contributors to the fall of German democracy, the rise of the Third Reich, and the Holocaust itself.

Godwin’s law, also known as Godwin’s rule of Hitler analogies, “is a statement maintaining that if any online discussion continues long enough, someone will almost certainly compare someone else to Hitler. Typically, the comment likens someone to Hitler or calls that person a Nazi, and the individual described in that way is often a participant in the discussion. The law is thought to apply to conversations about any conceivable topic.” Miss Mr Tannehill leapt to that in just four paragraphs!

In modern times, lack of moderation on social media sites has repeatedly contributed to mass murder. The Christchurch, New Zealand, shooter killed 51 Muslims at two mosques after being radicalized on YouTube, 4Chan, and 8Chan. The shooter who killed 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh had been radicalized on the social media site Gab, which advertised itself as the “free speech” alternative to Twitter. Dylann Roof killed nine people at the historically Black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, after he self-radicalized online. Investigations revealed that Google searches steered him further and further into extremist propaganda and hate.

Conservatives might just as well have stated that the free dissemination of the unfortunate death of George Floyd during a legitimate arrest helped lead to 2020’s summer of hate riots under Antifa and #BlackLivesMatter, though I suspect that Miss Mr Tannehill might disagree with that. If the freedom of speech and of the press are to be restricted because they might lead to harm, it has to be remembered: the speech that will be limited depends upon who is doing the limiting. Had President Trump been the horrible fascist that the left told us he was, he might have just suppressed the freedom of speech and of the press of the left. Oddly enough, the proposal for having Nina Jankowicz to lead a Ministry of Truth “Disinformation Governance Board” under the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security never occurred under President Trump; that was a (quickly trashed) idea of the Biden Administration. Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz was aghast that it had been torpedoed:

But within hours of news of her appointment, Jankowicz was thrust into the spotlight by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating. The board itself and DHS received criticism for both its somewhat ominous name and scant details of specific mission (Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said it “could have done a better job of communicating what it is and what it isn’t”), but Jankowicz was on the receiving end of the harshest attacks, with her role mischaracterized as she became a primary target on the right-wing Internet. She has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse while unchecked misrepresentations of her work continue to go viral.

Of course, Miss Lorenz being appalled that the “Disinformation Governance Board” was a flopped idea, was somewhat hypocritical, given that Miss Lorenz had been most recently famous for her investigation and doxing of Chaya Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate saleswoman and creator of the Twitter site that the left hate, Libs of TikTok. Freedom of speech is for the left, not the right.

There’s a lot more at Miss Mr Tannehill’s original, trying to tell us all about the horrors that freedom of speech has caused, and telling us that the “libertarian fairy tale” of the “free market of ideas”, that “truth will inevitably conquer demonstrably false narratives” but then she he concludes with a strange paragraph:

As far as the free market goes, people forget that the usual result of completely unregulated markets is monopolies. Ideas within social media are no different. “Free speech” competitors to Twitter such as Gab, Parler, Truth Social, and GETTR (which exert little to no moderation) are uniformly conservative monocultures full of the worst kinds of misinformation and hate outside of 4Chan and Kiwifarms. Parler’s former CEO has begged liberals to join the site and even offered people $20,000 to do so, without any success. Musk himself has made it clear that he plans to follow down the path of Parler and Truth Social, posting a meme of himself, Donald Trump (owner of Truth Social), and Ye (formerly Kanye West and now owner of Parler) as the Three Musketeers.

It’s also true that Gab and Parler and the rest are simply not very large; begun to compete with Twitter, they can’t hold a candle to Twitter’s success. However good or bad they are, they are not winners in the competition for customers. Liberal Twitter has been winning, in part because conservatives like Mr McCain, and me, have been using Twitter because it allows a far more widespread dissemination of what we want to say.

The problem with the oh-so-noble left is that they just can’t handle the truth! Allowing, gasp! conservatives to speak freely on Twitter might just challenge the left’s thinking, and that simply cannot be allowed.

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The Democrats are running on everything except what matters

The House of Representatives silly “January 6th Committee” held it’s last pre-election meeting, another meeting broadcast on television, as the credentialed media have teamed up with the Democrats to try to maintain their slender majorities in the 2022 elections. The trouble is that the Democrats have no current issues that are important to the voters. The Capitol kerfuffle, a three-hour demonstration of unarmed people, caused a few million dollars in damages — something far, far less serious than the #BlackLivesMatter riots of the previous summer and fall — and they were then over.

The real current issues are the economy and inflation, but the Democrats don’t want to talk, at least not truthfully, about that!

Democrats’ failure to make 2022 about the threat to democracy

Analysis by Aaron Blake | Tuesday, October 18, 2022 | 11:29 AM EDT

Utah voters who tuned into Monday night’s Senate debate were treated to something relatively rare in the 2022 election: a candidate putting Jan. 6, 2021, front and center in his closing argument. Independent Evan McMullin seized upon texts Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) sent to the White House indicating a willingness to help President Donald Trump contest the 2020 election results, saying Lee “betrayed your oath to the Constitution.”

Despite the well-publicized Jan. 6 hearings, including the likely final one, held last week, the insurrection has not been an overarching focus of Democrats’ 2022 campaign messaging. Politico reported last week that Jan. 6 has featured in less than 2 percent of ads run for House Democrats.

Maybe, just maybe, the actual Democratic candidates, as opposed to ‘pundits’ like Amanda Marcotte or formerly Republican #NeverTrumpers like Bill Kristol and Jennifer Rubin who have former President Trump living rent-free in their skulls, need to do something really, really radical like win votes, and they are a bit more in tune with what concerns voters most.

Even President Biden’s handlers minions recognize that truth, not that there’s anything they can do other than lie about it. Yeah, most families are focused on putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads, but the ability of the working class to do just that has suffered under President Biden. Most Americans are not better off today than they were in 2019.

This lacuna in their messaging comes even as most House Republicans supported Trump’s baseless last-ditch election challenges that led to the attack on the Capitol, and even as a majority of the GOP’s most prominent candidates have either denied or questioned the 2020 election results.

Indeed, a new poll reinforces that Democrats haven’t really driven the argument home. Many Americans view Trump as a major threat to democracy. But the Republican Party more broadly? Not so much.

Of course, many Americans view that Democrats as a far greater threat, as the far-left wing has pushed ‘transgenderism’ in the schools, in ways that a lot of parents see as personally threatening to their children, which is why Glenn Youngkin rather than Terry McAuliffe is now Governor of Virginia, and Republicans control the state House of Delegates as well. Mr Kristol’s The Bulwark has gone all out pro-transgenderism, to show you just how far the #NeverTrump former Republicans have gone. The Republican neo-conservatism of the Bush years has moved wholly toward the Democratic Party, including their foreign interventionism when it comes to the war between Russia and Ukraine.

A New York Times/Siena College poll shows that 45 percent of Americans regard Trump as a “major” threat to democracy, while just 28 percent say the same of the GOP.

That 28 percent figure is actually smaller than the percentage who view the Democratic Party as a threat to democracy (33 percent) — despite there being no comparable example of Democrats trying to overturn an election. (And no, Stacey Abrams and Hillary Clinton aren’t analogous.)

Actually, yes, they are. When you consider the definition of analogous, “similar in a way that invites comparison : showing an analogy or a likeness that permits one to draw an analogy,” it’s not difficult to see how those two ladies’ reactions to their electoral defeats were attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the victors.

Some of this is partisanship — along with Republicans’ successful attempts to play up the issue of voter fraud, despite the utter lack of evidence that it’s a major problem in American elections. Polls have long shown Republicans and Democrats view the other side as a threat to democracy, but for very different reasons.

But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see that isn’t the full story: It’s also the case that many Democratic voters haven’t been convinced that the problem goes beyond Trump.

The poll shows that 71 percent of Trump 2020 voters regard Democrats as a major threat to democracy. But just 52 percent of Biden voters say the same about the GOP.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Denial is not a strategy

Despite his rent-free residency in the brains of the far left, Donald Trump simply isn’t immortal; he’s 76 years old, and will be 78 by the time the 2024 elections come around. He’s significantly overweight, and, despite his wealth, eats garbage. Even if he were elected in 2024, he’d be constitutionally limited to just four years in office. But the policies of today’s Democratic Party, mandating plug-in electric vehicles that most Americans cannot afford, pushing drastic social changes that many Americans dislike, and ignoring increasing violent crime rates, would last a lot longer than that.

After several paragraphs, some of which reveal the author’s clear bias in favor of the Democrats, we come to his conclusion:

But the integrity of the democratic process is something Democrats and the Jan. 6 committee have pitched as being of the utmost importance — going to the core of who we are as a country. Yet at this point, with just half of Biden voters and one-quarter of independents saying the GOP is a major threat to democracy, it’s clearly not something they’ve convinced voters is truly at stake in 2022.

Why do I, personally, believe that the Democrats are the far greater threat? Their responses, primarily by Democratic Governors, to COVID-19 were heavily weighted toward dictatorial control and the blatant abridgement of our constitutional rights. That the government can order churches closed, or restrict our First Amendment right of peaceable assembly, ought to be anathema, but Democratic — and sadly, a few Republican as well — Governors did just that, and thanks to the unreasoning fear instilled by the government, millions and millions of people accepted that as reasonable and legitimate.

At least here in the Bluegrass State, Republican state legislative candidates ran hard against Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) authoritarian dictates, and the voters rewarded the GOP with an additional 14 seats in the state House of Representatives, and two more in the state Senate. I’d like to see that be more important to other voters, but I guess that we’ll see in 20 more days.

Well, who knows? The poll numbers favor the Republicans, but the only poll which really matters will be taken on November 8th, and surprises have been known to happen before.

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“There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them,” said no Republican leader, ever.

Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, an extreme supposed champion of the working class in 19th century France, purportedly said what serves as my headline, which came to my mind when I read this from Robert Stacy McCain:

Cast your mind back to November 2012, when you went to the polls to vote for Mitt Romney. Chances are, Mitt wasn’t your first choice for the GOP nomination. Probably, he wasn’t your second or third choice, either. You probably weren’t too excited to go vote for Mitt on Election Day 2012, and might not have been too optimistic about his chances of beating Obama, but you voted for him anyway, because he was the Republican nominee and you’re a Republican voter. If millions of conservatives could vote for Romney — who has always been a moderate, if not indeed a liberal — then why couldn’t moderate Republicans support Trump? Why is it that the demands of party loyalty seem to be a one-way street like this? And, by the way, shouldn’t it matter that Trump was far more popular and successful than GOP Establishment choices like Romney and John McCain? The Republican presidential candidates got about 60 million votes in both 2008 and 2012, but Trump got 63 million in 2016 and 74 million in 2020. Why such hatred from “Republicans” toward a man who increased the GOP vote by more than 10 million?

Think about what Donald Trump advocated to win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. He advocated control of our borders, something every other Republican candidate did. He differed in one respect: he actually proposed a way to do it, building a wall along our border with Mexico, to make simply walking across the border far more difficult. He took strongly pro-life positions, as almost all of the other Republican candidates did. He advocated tax cuts, as all of the other Republican candidates did.

What was different about Mr Trump? He spoke in terms that the Republican primary voters saw as not just mouthing platitudes, but believed that he would actually do something to achieve the goals he set forth.

The result? We saw thousands of supposed Republicans marshal against him, including both the elder and younger President Bush, the ‘neo-conservatives’ like Bill Kristol, Max Boot, the subsequently scandal-ridden “Lincoln Project,” and, sadly, Patrick Frey. Mr Trump used strong, strong, language, and he wasn’t a particularly nice guy, but the great mass of Republican voters saw in him someone who would actually fight for the things he advocated. It helped that Mr Trump was running against the wholly uninspiring Hillary Clinton, and he flipped stated like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin red. The Keystone State, despite normally being called a ‘battleground state,’ had not been carried by a Republican presidential candidate since 1988.

The nation was stunned, and the Republican ‘leadership’ were most particularly stunned. How could this boorish brute win the presidency? I mean, the guy couldn’t even be bothered to button his suit coat during his inauguration!

The Republican ‘leadership’ would have been much happier had they lost the election with Jeb Bush as the nominee, than win it with Donald Trump. My guess is that they’d have rather lose the election with Jeb Bush than win it with Ted Cruz as well, because Mr Cruz can be a bit on the bull-in-a-china-shop side himself.

But the Republican voters loved Mr Trump, even if the ‘leadership’ did not.

And so we come to Representative Liz Cheney Perry(R-WY). Mrs Perry, who did not respect her husband, Philip Perry, enough to take his name, but to whom I will not show a similar disrespect, decided that President trump should be impeached, even as his term was coming to an end, due to the college-keg-party-gone-wild that is the Capitol kerfuffle. More, she allowed herself to be appointed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to the committee to investigate the kerfuffle, when Mrs Pelosi would not accept the Republican members nominated by the House Minority Leader. Mrs Pelosi wanted a kangaroo court, and got one, with a couple of pro-impeachment Republicans for window dressing.

In 2020, not only did President Trump carry Wyoming, but by percentage of the vote, the Cowboy State was his strongest state; he defeated former Vice President Joe Biden 193,559 (69.94%) to 73,491 (26.55%). The same voters who gave the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney 68.56% of the vote in her 2020 re-election campaign gave Mr Trump even more votes, 193,559 to 185,732.

Back to Mr McCain:

Tuesday, I said that Liz Cheney might lose by a 30-point margin, which was wrong — it was 38 points! She lost more than 2-to-1 and didn’t even get 30% of the vote in Wyoming’s Republican primary. Her contempt for the electorate — her fathomless hatred for Republican voters — was expressed quite clearly in her concession speech:

“The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and House before he won the most important election of all,” she said before an audience of what few supporters she has. “Lincoln ultimately prevailed. He saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”

Hardly finished with her delusional Civil War era comparisons, Cheney went on to equate her ongoing fight with former President Donald Trump to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Battle of the Wilderness.

“As the fires of the battle still smoldered, Grant rode to the head of the column. He rode to the intersection of Brock Road and Orange Plank Road, and there, as the men of his army watched and waited,” Cheney said. “Instead of turning north back towards Washington and safety, Grant turned his horse south toward Richmond and the heart of [Confederate Gen. Robert E.] Lee’s army. Refusing to retreat, he pressed on to victory.”

That scene, portrayed vividly in Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, indeed captures what made Grant different from any of his predecessors commanding the Army of the Potomac, who had a habit of getting into a fight with Lee, losing thousands of men in a battle, and then retreating to the fortifications of Washington. But how does it function as an analogy for Liz Cheney’s defeat? That is to say, who is the enemy she proposes to defeat if she presses “on to victory”?

Do you get the point? The enemy is you, the Republican voter!

This is the part that’s important: the Republican Party, like any political party, is made up of the mass of Republican-registered or identifying voters, but for Mrs Perry, for the (supposedly) Republican #NeverTrumpers, for the disaffected neoconservatives, what the vast majority of the Republican Party want is not only not what they want, but what is anathema to them. As I said, they’d rather lose with a polite milquetoast than win with a strong fighter.

The problem for them is simple, even if they don’t understand it: the mass of the Republican Party have moved beyond them. Mrs Perry has made noises about running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, but look how the left view them:

As I have noted previously about Bill Kristol and the “Lincoln Project”, the left may look upon them as useful for the moment, but they’ll never actually trust them, while Republicans will never trust them either. Mr Kristol destroyed the opinion magazine he founded, The Weekly Standard, by refusing to allow any articles which supported President Trump, thus alienating a significant portion of his readership, still supports a few, few! conservative positions, positions which are anathema to the Democrats. Given the opinions of some of them, like Max Boot and Mr Kristol, to force people to take the COVID-19 vaccines, the Libertarian Party won’t want to have anything to do with such authoritarians, either. They have nowhere to go!

This is, in the end, a good thing. The mass of the Republican Party have moved toward populism, an ideology which holds that the great mass of the people are not being seriously listened to by the political elites. There’s some of that in the Democratic Party as well, as exemplified by the ridiculous “Occupy Wall Street” movement and some of their far-left but nevertheless back-bench politicians like the anti-Semitic squadristi,[1]The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the Italian names given to … Continue reading but, at least thus far, the left of the Democratic Party have nevertheless fallen into line with the (purportedly) more moderate elements to support President Biden.

The Republican elites are looking for their people, so they might lead them, but the mass of the party have no interest in being led along the garden path of squishy go-along-to-get-along Republicanism. They want leaders who will fight, who will fight the left, and that’s why Mrs Perry lost.

References

References
↑1 The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the Italian names given to Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, his paramilitary/thug force in fascist Italy. I think referring to the ‘Squad’ as Squadristi is completely appropriate.
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Living rent-free in their pumpkin heads 4½ years after Mr Trump left office, #TrumpDerangementSyndrome still reigns large in the left

I recently mentioned my good friend Amanda Marcotte, and suggested that she might have a case of #TrumpDerangementSyndrome. Miss Marcotte, ex- of Texas and ex- of Brooklyn, now resides somewhere in South Philadelphia,[1]No, I don’t know her exact address, and wouldn’t publish it if I did. but, for all of her voluminous writings on Salon, never seems to mention the goings on in her home town. People in Philly are outraged over the senseless murder of Christine Lugo, but not a word about it did I see on her Salon page or in her Twitter feed.[2]Miss Marcotte has blocked me from seeing her tweets, but it’s really simple: all that I have to do is log out of Twitter, and then I can see anyone’s feeds I want.

Donald Trump has been out of office since January 20, 2021; that’s 4½ months ago, but Miss Marcotte just can’t let him go. Her last five stories, as of 8:30 PM EDT on Wednesday, June 9, 2021, when the screencap to the right was taken, were All About Trump. You can click on the image to enlarge it.

But it isn’t just Miss Marcotte who has The Donald living rent-free in her head. Toni Williams of The Victory Girls wrote about Mara Gay’s traumatic, traumatic! encounter with, horrors!, American flags!

Mara Gay is a member of the New York Times Editorial Board and writes about New York City for that publication. She is also an MSNBC contributor. Memorial Day weekend she ventured out to Long Island and saw, gasp, pickup trucks, Trump flags and, the horror, American flags. The experience left her overwrought.

What is it about the women of MSNBC? Nicolle Wallace, Rachel Maddow, Yamiche Alcindor and Mara Gay are all seemingly hateful and bitter women. Andrew Sullivan called Maddow condescending and smug. That’s the kindest thing you can say about any of these women.

I happen to love this time of year. We have Memorial Day (the last Monday in May), Flag Day (June 14) and Independence Day on July 4th. I get jazzed by flags, parades and John Phillip Sousa marches. Growing up, even my Liberal friends loved the flag. We all ran to the parades. Our parents, regardless of their politics, all flew the flag. Remember how after the September 11, 2001 attacks everyone flew our spectacular American flag? Five years ago on Flag Day, our Nina wrote a beautiful post about the flag. You can read it here. That beautiful flag covered my Dad’s coffin. When someone you love, who served his country, lies under that flag, maybe you have a special passion for it.

MSNBC has their Morning Joe program with Joe and Mika. That is where contributor Mara Gay started off talking about the continued threat of President Donald Trump and ended up talking about her fear of pickup trucks, Trump flags and the American flag:

Here are some portions from Real Clear Politics and my commentary:

The reality is here that we have a large percentage of the American population — I don’t know how big it is, but we have tens of millions of Trump voters who continue to believe that their rights as citizens are under threat by simple virtue of having to share the democracy with others. I think as long as they see Americanness as the same as one with whiteness, this is going to continue. We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table in this democracy, but how to separate Americanness, America, from whiteness. Until we can confront that and talk about that, this is really going to continue. . . . .

I was on Long Island this weekend, visiting a really dear friend and I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with expletives against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases, just dozens of American flags, which is also just disturbing, which essentially the message was clear, this is my country. This is not your country. I own this.

Miss Gay saw American flags, being waved by people, on the Memorial Day weekend. That’s kind of a time when we would expect to see the flag displayed, right?

Miss Gay, like Miss Marcotte above, is being triggered by the flag, and by President Trump, and by the fact that there are a few people, yes even in New York, who voted for him.

On June 7th, Washington Post columnist Max Boot, screamed in his headline, “Too many people are still underestimating the Trump threat.”

People, Donald Trump is out of office. Even if he runs for President again, the next election is 3½ years away, and he’ll be 78 years old by then, if he’s still alive.

The obvious question now is: will Mr Trump really be living rent free in these people’s head for another four or eight or twelve years to come?

References

References
↑1 No, I don’t know her exact address, and wouldn’t publish it if I did.
↑2 Miss Marcotte has blocked me from seeing her tweets, but it’s really simple: all that I have to do is log out of Twitter, and then I can see anyone’s feeds I want.