Apparently, everything we knew about the science before Covid turns out to still be right. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t cancel, intimidate, censor and lie enough to create a narrative that changes that reality.
Just another open-thread comment about something I read.
At his substack site, Ed West has written a good, brief article about the magnitude and effects of recent immigrants (https://tinyurl.com/4zku83ep). West is English, so his essay’s focus is on Britain, but everything he says is relevant to the US.
Here’s what West says about the United States:
“It’s why the Brazilianization of the US into a super-diverse society with low social capital, very high inequality and higher risk of political instability is now unstoppable.”
Thomas Sowell has written about the same problems with the same cause.
I believe that the disintegration of our constitutional republic is the goal. Obama’s mentors, Ayers and Dohrn, wanted to bring about communism by destroying America in a firestorm of race wars. Cloward-Pivin advocated making the federal government fiscally unstable until it collapsed in crisis leading to a communist replacement.
Obama in college called himself a marxist revolutionary. Hillary had close ties with revolutionary communists in law school and since.
Is there any possible defense to the Soros prosecutor strategy of facilitating violent crime? Or should we conclude that the obvious results are the intended ones?
At what point do we start listening and believing when their words and their actions all point to deliberate destruction?
What’s behind the Gate? A mysterious Garden? A path to something to be explored? A Road to be Taken?
Will has become a caricature of himself. One gets the distinct impression that he finds regular people simply too “icky”.
More importantly, he used to craft arguments that had the benefit of making sense. Snark is no substitute for logic. It’s an Obama style and it’s not attractive.
Stepman makes a critically important point about conservative anger. Conservatives are right to be angry. Conservatives NEED to be angry. Our constitutional republic will not survive if we don’t get angry.
I can understand the aversion that old codgers like Will and Rove have about anger. Anger isn’t attractive. We’d all rather be sunny and happy. Can’t we all just get along? Let’s all return to the happy times that exist in our memories (even if they were never even real). Anger is exhausting. It’s unpleasant. It’s bad for the blood pressure.
Stepman is right. Rove and Will have chosen to ignore the enormous differences between the state of the union when Reagan was president and today. Four decades ago Democrats weren’t promising to pack the Court, eliminate the electoral college, cancel dissent, and impose rule by Big Brother. Democrats stole elections whenever possible, but they hadn’t yet perfected the art of the theft. They hadn’t radicalized the FBI, CIA, NSA, Dept of Defense, IRS, and Dept of Justice into the gestapo/stasi wing of the Democrat party. Forty years ago, political prisoners weren’t being held in a DC gulag for trespassing and taking selfies. People weren’t being labelled terrorists for voicing concerns at school board meetings. They weren’t being censored by order of federal government goons. They hadn’t seen their businesses destroyed by government dictators. And the list of other outrages is too long to continue here.
Only 1/3 of the colonists were angry enough to revolt against Britain. I think the fraction in the US is growing ever closer to that third.
Once they destroyed truth the foundation for liberty was lost. All that remains is a battle for power without restraint. And only one side is willing to be ruthless and violent to seize that power.
On my COVID xcel sheets, the day count hit 1000 today. I can’t believe I’m still doing this, but I’ll continue until the various governments stop all the nonsense.
Brief overview: nationally case counts have been flat for over a month, but there are signs it may be starting to increase. Not surprising as COVID is now more like the seasonal flu. One sign is that the percentage of serious cases has been rising for over 2 months; now at about 0.15% compared to over 1% at peak. Daily deaths for all the states I monitor are around 2-3/day which is well below the daily death count from all other illnesses.
As I warned, they won’t give it up. LA seems to be leading charge to return to all the old COVID restrictions:
Reparations will be the next really big thing for the Dems to push. CA is leading the way. Will the White, Asian and Hispanic communities like paying their taxes for this give away?
“Obama’s mentors, Ayers and Dohrn, wanted to bring about communism by destroying America in a firestorm of race wars.”
America’s destruction is as likely to result in a dictatorship as in communism.
“only one side is willing to be ruthless and violent to seize that power”
In the face of tyranny, the reluctance to resort to ruthless violence has an expiration date.
Will has become a caricature of himself. One gets the distinct impression that he finds regular people simply too “icky”.
Or, he is who he always was. A combination of mild cognitive decline and the stimulus of Trump induced a sort of defoliating tactlessness.
Keep in mind about Will that he has despised the majority of Republican presidents who have held office in the last sixty years. Of Nixon, Ford, Bush I, and Trump he was openly contemptuous. In regard to Bush II he was cold and critical from about 2004 onward. The exception was Reagan, and he was not above supercilious cuts at Reagan. The one column he ever wrote about Sarah Palin was dishonest and disdainful. He despises Newt Gingrich. He praises McConnell. Here’s the clue: for 30 years or more, George Will has been the voice of the salons of political Washington, perhaps since the day his 1st wife dumped his personal effects on their suburban lawn and decorated the pile with a sign that said “Take it Somewhere Else, Buster”.
That sounds relatively quick and painless – not the grueling and drawn out affair they are notorious for. Good for him.
Does Will still write about baseball? That would be of comparative value.
Elon Musk tweeted 2 hrs ago: “Here we go!!”, linking to Matt Taibbi, who has been handed the “Twitter files” to research and expose. Taibbi then began to post (piece by piece) the following thread, only the beginning of the story, so, more to come tomorrow: https://mobile.twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598853816874831872
Obama’s mentors, Ayers and Dohrn, wanted to bring about communism by destroying America in a firestorm of race wars.
–stan
Guilty as charged when it comes to communism.
But Bill, Bernardine and the Weatherfolks were New Left, which as neo points out is pretty Old Left now, and as such they were small-c catholic when it came to achieving the revolution. Opposing racism was part of the plan, but by no means the main course or the only course.
Here’s a quote from the Weather Underground’s “Prairie Fire” manifesto. Their highest priority was anti-imperialism. They supported all forms of leftist organizing, with a particularly keen eye to armed revolution, not necessarily race war.
____________________________
PRAIRIE FIRE is written to communist-minded people, independent organizers and anti-imperialists; those who carry the traditions and lessons of the struggles of the last decade, those who join in the struggles of today. PRAIRIE FIRE is written to all sisters and brothers who are engaged in armed struggle against the enemy. It is written to prisoners, women’s groups, collectives, study groups, workers’ organizing committees, communes, GI organizers, consciousness-raising groups, veterans, community groups and revolutionaries of all kinds; to all who will read, criticize and bring its content to life in practice. It is written as an argument against those who oppose action and hold back the struggle.
PRAIRIE FIRE is based on a belief that the duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution. This is not an abstraction. It means that revolutionaries must make a profound commitment to the future of humanity, apply our limited knowledge and experience to understand an ever-changing situation, organize the masses of people and build the fight. It means that struggle and risk and hard work and adversity will become a way of life, that the only certainty will be constant change, that the only possibilities are victory or death.
I’m sure Elon isn’t perfect, but he is doing a bang-up job with Twitter as far as I am concerned.
_______________________
This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.
–Elon Musk
For some contrast, scroll down to see NBC “reporter” Ben Collins and his tweeting interlocutors and their thoughts on the meaning of the TwitterFiles story and concomitantly the messenger, Matt Taibbi: https://mobile.twitter.com/oneunderscore__
Pulling a few Tweets, from a Twitchy post, that I hadn’t seen elsewhere (most people copy the same set from Taibbi’s thread – thanks for the unrolled version, sdferr). They are dated to “tomorrow” because I’m in an earlier time zone, I think.
And, BTW, why did Elon choose Matt to be the Messenger of Doom?
I think it was a good decision, but didn’t know they were buddies.
If you’ve read the thread, you can appreciate Musk’s first Tweet here.
If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 3, 2022
It ?% is, collusion between govt. and big tech to violate the First Amendment
— Hodgetwins (@hodgetwins) December 3, 2022
Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 3, 2022
(the ??? is due to a lack of “fire” emojis here – kind of ruins the joke; ?% is 100%)
If you don’t know the Hodge Twins, they’ve been referred to in Neo’s Salon from time to time:
@ huxley > “I suggest that understanding the Left, as it really is and was, is helpful, if one is serious about defeating them.”
Understanding the left is a good first step, but it isn’t enough.
From the “Prairie Fire” leftist manifesto: “It means that struggle and risk and hard work and adversity will become a way of life, that the only certainty will be constant change, that the only possibilities are victory or death.”
One recurring “meme” is that conservatives haven’t taken over all the institutions of government and society because they have day jobs.
For leftists, taking over IS their day job.
Hard to fight back against that without putting out some serious cadres to match — and then they get labelled “domestic terrorists” or “right-wing extremists” and attacked by the suborned government forces and BOTH political parties.
“This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead. Elon Musk”
Wow! Good men often come from unexpected places. This is earthshaking history being written.
Musk is doing a great service for this country.
@ Shirehome > “Reparations will be the next really big thing for the Dems to push. CA is leading the way. Will the White, Asian and Hispanic communities like paying their taxes for this give away?”
Probably not.
And it could come back to bite the Democrats big-time.
If you squint closely enough, you can detect Gavin Newsom edging ever so slightly to the right in preparation for running for president in 2024.
…
I wonder how Newsom is going to react to the news that the commission he set in motion to study whether California should pay reparations for slavery has reported in with a recommendation that all descendants of slaves in California should be granted $223,200 per person, at an estimated total cost of $569 billion. This at a time when California is suddenly facing a $25 billion budget deficit (though I predict it will double to $50 billion or more by next spring). I wonder how Newsom will distance himself from this recommendation. And how will California hispanics, Vietnamese refugees, and other minority groups feel about being made to pay for reparations for one single class of people who have faced racial hostility in America’s past? I can think of few things that will drive more hispanic voters to Republicans than this proposal.
And how much would this proposal cost if it went national? I”ll need to do some math, but an easy conservative guess is that it would cost several trillion dollars. That’s a winning platform for 2024! But just how would Newsom back away from a national reparations scheme if he embraces it in California?
@ stan – “This is an interesting look at the schism that is often the underlying issue for discussions here” & “Stepman is right. Rove and Will have chosen to ignore the enormous differences between the state of the union when Reagan was president and today. Four decades ago Democrats weren’t promising to pack the Court, eliminate the electoral college, cancel dissent, and impose rule by Big Brother….”
Ah, but they had started working on many of those, along with the other things you listed. They had to get enough young people suitably indoctrinated to weigh against the older people who still believed, and knew why, America was “a shining city on a hill.”
“Once they destroyed truth the foundation for liberty was lost. All that remains is a battle for power without restraint. And only one side is willing to be ruthless and violent to seize that power.”
See my comment on the Prairie Fire Manifesto that huxley referenced, and the Musk Wweet about freedom of speech and tyranny.
Stepman’s take is similar to your observation:
It’s the elites who are our age’s Jacobins. They are the ones overturning and perverting American institutions. They are the ones who’ve accepted that America was built on a legacy of “white supremacy” and justify racialized policies under the false idea that the system is “rigged” by institutional racism.
It’s our elites who say nonsense like “free speech is a danger to democracy,” and suppress the truth because it doesn’t conform with their approved narratives.
It’s our elites who not only stood by while our history was being torn down by mobs, but also often openly embraced and furthered the project. When the National Archives is reorienting itself to portray celebration of the Founding Fathers as “structural racism,” that should be a DEFCON 1 alert that there’s something fundamentally wrong.
To push back against these forces, a daunting task, requires conservatives—if they want anything decent left to conserve at all—to recognize what is arrayed against us and fight back, not to mindlessly pledge loyalty to the exact program that made sense in 1983 while looking contemptuously at voters pointing out the five-alarm fire in our midst.
A little populist anti-elitism and anger at the destruction of the American way of life may be exactly what our ailing republic needs.
We’ve lost some battles, but the war isn’t over yet.
In the aftermath of the Republican Party’s recent midterm elections debacle, Right-liberal sharks are circling. These devoted acolytes of what a prominent 2019 First Things manifesto called the American Right’s “dead consensus” think they see blood in the water. Indeed, the “dead consensus” Praetorian Guard has apparently decided that now is the time for a counterattack against the more nationalist- and populist-inclined forces of what has broadly been dubbed the “New Right.”
…
Republicans’ midterm election disappointments present, for beleaguered right-liberals, a perfect opportunity to turn the tables and go on the offensive.
This cynical strategy must not succeed. A return to the “dead consensus” status quo ante would be a disaster for the American Right and the Republican Party—and thus for the nation as a whole.
Trump’s manifold personal flaws and recent headline-grabbing self-inflicted wounds aside, there is still much to learn from his dominance of the 2016 Republican presidential primary field.
…
there are only two electorally significant states one can point to that are notably bluer now than they were a decade or two ago: Georgia and Arizona. That is pretty much it.
A basic empirical assessment of the American citizenry’s stipulated policy preferences confirms the intuition that a more nationalist- and populist-inflected GOP is better suited for electoral success. In June 2017, political scientist Lee Drutman used 2016 election data to plot out voters in a standard scatterplot quadrant, with an X-axis of “economic dimension” of “liberal” to “conservative,” and a Y-axis of “social/identity dimension” of “liberal” to “conservative.”
The upshot: Those who lean “right” of center on social/cultural issues comprised a 51.6% majority, but those who lean “right” of center on economic issues made up a paltry 26.5% minority. (As has been frequently noted, the oft-discussed “economically conservative, but socially liberal” voter comprised a minuscule 3.8% of the 2016 electorate.)
There is exceedingly little political appetite for the kind of laissez-faire absolutism, free-trade maximalism, and fiscal austerity that long dominated the pre-Trump GOP, and which still dominates its American Enterprise Institute-donating, Wall Street Journal editorial page-reading donor class.
In fact, the key above all else to Trump’s 2016 triumph was his exploitation of the gap between the GOP’s realist, working-class base and its ideological, business-centric donor class—a gap Trump was able to exploit due to his personal wealth and the ubiquitous unpaid media he generated.
From an American national interest perspective, the era of globalization has long since reached what economists refer to as the point of decreasing marginal returns.
…
The voters are correct to intuit this reality, and the Republican Party is now a working-class party, whether or not its own elites accept that fact.
Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a highly successful one, but many of his would-be successors have fundamentally botched his legacy, retconning the Gipper as some sort of obstinate libertarian dogmatist. But Reagan, who once slapped import quotas on Japanese automakers to stimulate America’s own auto production, was no such thing.
Above all else, the man who defeated the Soviet Union was a winner. And time and time again, the market-idolatrous, culture war-shirking “dead consensus” Right has been shown to be a loser. Therein lies the rub.
Shifting topics a bit – Powerline Picks recommended this post, and the information in it is very important with regard to just how far the Chinese Communists are infiltrating
The Case for Blacklisting a Chinese Tech Firm Tied to Crackdowns on Uyghurs and Iranian Protestors
China remains the undisputed leader in developing and fielding technologies that enable government control and manipulation of foreign and domestic populations, otherwise known as techno-authoritarianism.1 The firms that produce these technologies consist of both Chinese state-owned companies and China-based private entities susceptible to Beijing’s pressure to censor and surveil. One of those private firms is Tiandy Technologies Co., Ltd.
…
Both Tiandy testimonials and Chinese government press releases advertise the use of the company’s products by Chinese officials to track and interrogate Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang province.2 According to human rights groups, Chinese authorities also employ Tiandy products, such as “tiger chairs,” to torture Uyghurs and other minorities.3
The Chinese firms that equip Beijing’s surveillance state market facial recognition software, emotion-detecting artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, surveillance drones, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) capabilities to other autocratic regimes, including Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran. According to Tiandy Iran’s website and Instagram account, the company has sold surveillance equipment to Iran’s security, police, and military services.4 The Internet Protocol Video Market (IPVM), a U.S.-based security industry research group and trade publication, also obtained documents that report such sales.5 The products reportedly sold to Iran include network video recorders that digitize and store surveillance videos, using microchips that Tiandy produced in partnership with U.S. manufacturer Intel.6
At present, Tiandy is not subject to U.S. sanctions or export controls. In light of Tiandy’s operations in both Xinjiang and Iran, policymakers should consider moving quickly to target Tiandy’s global operations to cut the company and its owner, Dai Lin, off from the international financial system and global supply chains.
…
In 2021, according to contract documents obtained by IPVM, a research group and trade publication, Tiandy reportedly supplied Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), police, and military with several of its products.36 Tiandy’s partnership with Iran is overseen by its eight-person office in Tehran.37 In addition to the IRGC, Tiandy’s Iranian clients include the Qom and Zanjan Social Security Organization; Iran’s Armed Forces Social Security Organization; the Criminal Investigation Department of Khomam City’s Police Force; Iran Electronics Industries, an Iranian government organization affiliated with Iran’s Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Support; as well as other Iranian security and military entities.38
Tiandy reportedly supplied the Iranian military with networked video recorders to digitize and store surveillance videos, according to a since-deleted Tiandy Instagram post. These recorders, including Tiandy’s K2000 “all in one” video management server, are powered by microchips produced by U.S. manufacturer Intel.39
Tiandy’s products are available commercially in Iran. On Tiandy Iran’s website, Iran-based customers can purchase all of Tiandy’s surveillance offerings, which are distributed via Faragostar Persia Electronics Co., an Iranian firm.40 These include dozens of models of AI-enabled dome cameras, networked camera solutions, facial recognition terminals, and thermal imaging cameras. Tiandy Iran sells Video Management Systems that integrate with cameras, encoders, recording systems, underlying storage infrastructure, client workstations, gateway systems, and analytics software, mainly by providing a single interface for video surveillance infrastructure management.
Very long post, very detailed, very foot-noted.
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Masks don’t work. Shocking. https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/highest-protection-rigorous-international-study-n95-masks-upends?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter
Apparently, everything we knew about the science before Covid turns out to still be right. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t cancel, intimidate, censor and lie enough to create a narrative that changes that reality.
Just another open-thread comment about something I read.
At his substack site, Ed West has written a good, brief article about the magnitude and effects of recent immigrants (https://tinyurl.com/4zku83ep). West is English, so his essay’s focus is on Britain, but everything he says is relevant to the US.
Here’s what West says about the United States:
“It’s why the Brazilianization of the US into a super-diverse society with low social capital, very high inequality and higher risk of political instability is now unstoppable.”
Please consider reading the whole thing.
Recommended by Arnold Kling (https://tinyurl.com/y387j2vp).
Cornflour,
Thomas Sowell has written about the same problems with the same cause.
I believe that the disintegration of our constitutional republic is the goal. Obama’s mentors, Ayers and Dohrn, wanted to bring about communism by destroying America in a firestorm of race wars. Cloward-Pivin advocated making the federal government fiscally unstable until it collapsed in crisis leading to a communist replacement.
Obama in college called himself a marxist revolutionary. Hillary had close ties with revolutionary communists in law school and since.
Is there any possible defense to the Soros prosecutor strategy of facilitating violent crime? Or should we conclude that the obvious results are the intended ones?
At what point do we start listening and believing when their words and their actions all point to deliberate destruction?
What’s behind the Gate? A mysterious Garden? A path to something to be explored? A Road to be Taken?
This is an interesting look at the schism that is often the underlying issue for discussions here. https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/12/01/what-george-will-and-karl-rove-get-wrong-about-populist-conservatism/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=ODI0LU1IVC0zMDQAAAGIcXk5_muM9UA1S9VP-OH49tr8p7vHKrCv9Ao4MSYtgS90zVq05uMMjjQk7TNJOmmv-C9fN9r7l_-10dZadNf3XCrLCQgtsTns8VWMtoE_sya6HA
Will has become a caricature of himself. One gets the distinct impression that he finds regular people simply too “icky”.
More importantly, he used to craft arguments that had the benefit of making sense. Snark is no substitute for logic. It’s an Obama style and it’s not attractive.
Chesterton’s fence? (https://tinyurl.com/y3k9yamd)
Trump’s wall?
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall? (https://tinyurl.com/mrxnv7kv)
Sometimes a cigar (wall) Is just a cigar (wall)? (https://tinyurl.com/2rjdvvyz)
Stepman makes a critically important point about conservative anger. Conservatives are right to be angry. Conservatives NEED to be angry. Our constitutional republic will not survive if we don’t get angry.
I can understand the aversion that old codgers like Will and Rove have about anger. Anger isn’t attractive. We’d all rather be sunny and happy. Can’t we all just get along? Let’s all return to the happy times that exist in our memories (even if they were never even real). Anger is exhausting. It’s unpleasant. It’s bad for the blood pressure.
Stepman is right. Rove and Will have chosen to ignore the enormous differences between the state of the union when Reagan was president and today. Four decades ago Democrats weren’t promising to pack the Court, eliminate the electoral college, cancel dissent, and impose rule by Big Brother. Democrats stole elections whenever possible, but they hadn’t yet perfected the art of the theft. They hadn’t radicalized the FBI, CIA, NSA, Dept of Defense, IRS, and Dept of Justice into the gestapo/stasi wing of the Democrat party. Forty years ago, political prisoners weren’t being held in a DC gulag for trespassing and taking selfies. People weren’t being labelled terrorists for voicing concerns at school board meetings. They weren’t being censored by order of federal government goons. They hadn’t seen their businesses destroyed by government dictators. And the list of other outrages is too long to continue here.
Difference. Differences worth getting angry about.
Only 1/3 of the colonists were angry enough to revolt against Britain. I think the fraction in the US is growing ever closer to that third.
Once they destroyed truth the foundation for liberty was lost. All that remains is a battle for power without restraint. And only one side is willing to be ruthless and violent to seize that power.
On my COVID xcel sheets, the day count hit 1000 today. I can’t believe I’m still doing this, but I’ll continue until the various governments stop all the nonsense.
Brief overview: nationally case counts have been flat for over a month, but there are signs it may be starting to increase. Not surprising as COVID is now more like the seasonal flu. One sign is that the percentage of serious cases has been rising for over 2 months; now at about 0.15% compared to over 1% at peak. Daily deaths for all the states I monitor are around 2-3/day which is well below the daily death count from all other illnesses.
As I warned, they won’t give it up. LA seems to be leading charge to return to all the old COVID restrictions:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2022/12/02/a-return-to-mask-mandates-theres-more-covid-mess-coming-out-of-la-county-n2616662
Reality begins to bite. Switzerland will ban electric cars during energy emergencies.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11494991/Switzerland-BAN-electric-cars-roads-power-shortages.html
Reparations will be the next really big thing for the Dems to push. CA is leading the way. Will the White, Asian and Hispanic communities like paying their taxes for this give away?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq4KA0mUnC8
Morgan James.
Cover of Aerosmith’s Dream On.
Piano and string quartet!
This lady has one powerful voice and amazing breath control. Cute too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXZpFOq0JOc
More bossa nova
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/12/democrats-tried-to-enlist-irs-to-attack-conservative-nonprofits.php
This is the Democratic Party.
I like the way the yellow-ochre lichen works with the blue-gray stones.
Obama in college called himself a marxist revolutionary. Hillary had close ties with revolutionary communists in law school and since.
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/citation_needed.jpg?w=300
stan,
“Obama’s mentors, Ayers and Dohrn, wanted to bring about communism by destroying America in a firestorm of race wars.”
America’s destruction is as likely to result in a dictatorship as in communism.
“only one side is willing to be ruthless and violent to seize that power”
In the face of tyranny, the reluctance to resort to ruthless violence has an expiration date.
Will has become a caricature of himself. One gets the distinct impression that he finds regular people simply too “icky”.
Or, he is who he always was. A combination of mild cognitive decline and the stimulus of Trump induced a sort of defoliating tactlessness.
Keep in mind about Will that he has despised the majority of Republican presidents who have held office in the last sixty years. Of Nixon, Ford, Bush I, and Trump he was openly contemptuous. In regard to Bush II he was cold and critical from about 2004 onward. The exception was Reagan, and he was not above supercilious cuts at Reagan. The one column he ever wrote about Sarah Palin was dishonest and disdainful. He despises Newt Gingrich. He praises McConnell. Here’s the clue: for 30 years or more, George Will has been the voice of the salons of political Washington, perhaps since the day his 1st wife dumped his personal effects on their suburban lawn and decorated the pile with a sign that said “Take it Somewhere Else, Buster”.
Art Deco; stan:
A post I wrote about George Will.
In Iran, a suicide by celebration:
Iranian Forces Kill Man Who Honked Car Horn to Celebrate US Victory Over Iran
Iranian man who honked his horn to celebrate US soccer team’s defeat of Iran at World Cup shot and killed by local authorities
That sounds relatively quick and painless – not the grueling and drawn out affair they are notorious for. Good for him.
Does Will still write about baseball? That would be of comparative value.
Elon Musk tweeted 2 hrs ago: “Here we go!!”, linking to Matt Taibbi, who has been handed the “Twitter files” to research and expose. Taibbi then began to post (piece by piece) the following thread, only the beginning of the story, so, more to come tomorrow: https://mobile.twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598853816874831872
It’s some 41 individual tweets long (compiled), so here’s a link to a Thread reader of the same: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1598822959866683394.html
Obama’s mentors, Ayers and Dohrn, wanted to bring about communism by destroying America in a firestorm of race wars.
–stan
Guilty as charged when it comes to communism.
But Bill, Bernardine and the Weatherfolks were New Left, which as neo points out is pretty Old Left now, and as such they were small-c catholic when it came to achieving the revolution. Opposing racism was part of the plan, but by no means the main course or the only course.
Here’s a quote from the Weather Underground’s “Prairie Fire” manifesto. Their highest priority was anti-imperialism. They supported all forms of leftist organizing, with a particularly keen eye to armed revolution, not necessarily race war.
____________________________
PRAIRIE FIRE is written to communist-minded people, independent organizers and anti-imperialists; those who carry the traditions and lessons of the struggles of the last decade, those who join in the struggles of today. PRAIRIE FIRE is written to all sisters and brothers who are engaged in armed struggle against the enemy. It is written to prisoners, women’s groups, collectives, study groups, workers’ organizing committees, communes, GI organizers, consciousness-raising groups, veterans, community groups and revolutionaries of all kinds; to all who will read, criticize and bring its content to life in practice. It is written as an argument against those who oppose action and hold back the struggle.
PRAIRIE FIRE is based on a belief that the duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution. This is not an abstraction. It means that revolutionaries must make a profound commitment to the future of humanity, apply our limited knowledge and experience to understand an ever-changing situation, organize the masses of people and build the fight. It means that struggle and risk and hard work and adversity will become a way of life, that the only certainty will be constant change, that the only possibilities are victory or death.
–“Praire Fire: The Politics of Anti-Imperialism: Political Statement of the Weather Underground” (1975)
https://archive.org/details/PrairieFireThePoliticsOfRevolutionaryAnti-imperialismThePolitical
____________________________
Perhaps I’m being pedantic. I suggest that understanding the Left, as it really is and was, is helpful, if one is serious about defeating them.
Here’s New York Post’s reaction story tonight concerning the stifling of their Hunter Biden Laptop story back in Oct 2019: https://nypost.com/2022/12/02/elon-musk-releases-twitters-files-on-censorship-of-post/
Great links, sdferr!
I’m sure Elon isn’t perfect, but he is doing a bang-up job with Twitter as far as I am concerned.
_______________________
This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.
–Elon Musk
For some contrast, scroll down to see NBC “reporter” Ben Collins and his tweeting interlocutors and their thoughts on the meaning of the TwitterFiles story and concomitantly the messenger, Matt Taibbi: https://mobile.twitter.com/oneunderscore__
It’s a hoot.
Glenn Greenwald also noticed the NBC gang and screenshot a few of their (bullshit) tweets: https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1598852100548489217
Pulling a few Tweets, from a Twitchy post, that I hadn’t seen elsewhere (most people copy the same set from Taibbi’s thread – thanks for the unrolled version, sdferr). They are dated to “tomorrow” because I’m in an earlier time zone, I think.
And, BTW, why did Elon choose Matt to be the Messenger of Doom?
I think it was a good decision, but didn’t know they were buddies.
If you’ve read the thread, you can appreciate Musk’s first Tweet here.
https://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2022/12/02/elon-musk-explains-what-really-happened-with-the-hunter-biden-story-suppression-wow/
(the ??? is due to a lack of “fire” emojis here – kind of ruins the joke; ?% is 100%)
If you don’t know the Hodge Twins, they’ve been referred to in Neo’s Salon from time to time:
https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/07/10/i-the-hodge-twins/
I ? the Hodge twins (there’s a heart emoji in there, in case it doesn’t come through)
Here’s a sample of their, ahem, black humor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wth3h_ORl8
“How Do I Tell My Liberal Parents I Am Republican Now?”
https://www.youtube.com/user/hodgetwins
(new stuff is below the old “classics” listed)
@ huxley > “I suggest that understanding the Left, as it really is and was, is helpful, if one is serious about defeating them.”
Understanding the left is a good first step, but it isn’t enough.
From the “Prairie Fire” leftist manifesto: “It means that struggle and risk and hard work and adversity will become a way of life, that the only certainty will be constant change, that the only possibilities are victory or death.”
One recurring “meme” is that conservatives haven’t taken over all the institutions of government and society because they have day jobs.
For leftists, taking over IS their day job.
Hard to fight back against that without putting out some serious cadres to match — and then they get labelled “domestic terrorists” or “right-wing extremists” and attacked by the suborned government forces and BOTH political parties.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/12/02/geoff-duncan-of-georgia-what-a-guy/#comment-2655900
“This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead. Elon Musk”
Wow! Good men often come from unexpected places. This is earthshaking history being written.
Musk is doing a great service for this country.
@ Shirehome > “Reparations will be the next really big thing for the Dems to push. CA is leading the way. Will the White, Asian and Hispanic communities like paying their taxes for this give away?”
Probably not.
And it could come back to bite the Democrats big-time.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/12/reparations-time.php
@ stan – “This is an interesting look at the schism that is often the underlying issue for discussions here” & “Stepman is right. Rove and Will have chosen to ignore the enormous differences between the state of the union when Reagan was president and today. Four decades ago Democrats weren’t promising to pack the Court, eliminate the electoral college, cancel dissent, and impose rule by Big Brother….”
Ah, but they had started working on many of those, along with the other things you listed. They had to get enough young people suitably indoctrinated to weigh against the older people who still believed, and knew why, America was “a shining city on a hill.”
“Once they destroyed truth the foundation for liberty was lost. All that remains is a battle for power without restraint. And only one side is willing to be ruthless and violent to seize that power.”
See my comment on the Prairie Fire Manifesto that huxley referenced, and the Musk Wweet about freedom of speech and tyranny.
Stepman’s take is similar to your observation:
We’ve lost some battles, but the war isn’t over yet.
https://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2020/10/26/reagans-shining-city-on-a-hill-speech-reinvented-today-america-is-good-n2578760
Josh Hammer’s post is a good companion piece to Stedman’s.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/12/02/returning-to-pre-trump-dead-consensus-gop-would-be-big-mistake/
Shifting topics a bit – Powerline Picks recommended this post, and the information in it is very important with regard to just how far the Chinese Communists are infiltrating
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2022/12/01/targeting-tiandy/
Very long post, very detailed, very foot-noted.