The truth is, the electric car is an unworkable solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.
Steve notes this morning
Donald Trump is politically battle-tested in ways that no other presidential candidate has ever been. In 2016, before he could ever get to the part where he deposed Hillary Clinton, he faced a concerted effort by the Republican establishment to deny him the nomination that he had rightfully earned via the primaries. That was still happening at the convention.
Yeah, well, notice that the GOP establishment tried to do the same thing with Ronald Reagan. You may recall how that worked out. We’ll get back to that
Despite the unceasing efforts to wear him down and destroy him, Trump keeps showing up to work. His haters aren’t getting any of the results they want. In fact, Trump’s poll numbers are on steroids now.
True, that. And I take it as a sign that the American people including a lot of Democrats are beginning to realize just how corrupt the establishment of both parties is.
The question now before us, and it’s a large one, is will the establishment of both parties except the choice of the people? The answer of course is no they will not given that they’re still fighting tooth and nail against somebody who according to RealClearPolitics, is the odds on favorite to win both the nomination and the election.
So says the New York Post in what amounts to a bit of a puff piece.
All I can do is shake my head at the irony here…. It is irony indeed that Portman doesn’t recognize the connection between being an industry driven by far leftist ideals, and an industry which shamelessly sexualizes children. Perhaps it has something to do with Portman being a flaming leftist herself, who is thus forced to compartmentalize such matters?
What she doesn’t see, or even if she does, she will never comment on, is that it is those leftist ideals which complained bitterly about the morality involved with Epstein’s Island, and yet still work feverishly to keep the consequences of participating there, off the Nations agenda.
So, we find at Hot Air:
Have you noticed that Republicans have been losing a lot lately?
This, in an environment where most Americans think that Democrats are screwing up the country. Why do you think that is?
Sure, hatred of Trump has something to do with it. Abortion politics has something to do with it. A lot, actually. Each of you can name an issue where Republicans are in bad odor with ordinary people, but add them all together and one thing becomes clear: propaganda works.
Why is Trump so unpopular? Was it because things got worse under his presidency? Uh, yeah, no. Things got immeasurably better, and even a lot of people who hate him will say that.
Is abortion such a drag on Republican prospects because people don’t agree that late term abortions are immoral, except in extreme circumstances? That’s not what the polls say.
Why do people think Republicans are all-in on banning books? Has anybody suggested making the publishing of any books illegal? Of course not. Democrats actively campaign to prevent the publication or sale of books they don’t like, but Republicans don’t.
So what is it?
It is the steady drumbeat of propaganda portraying Republicans as Nazi White Supremacists who want to force 11 year-olds to birth babies, schoolmarms who hate gays, and White Supremacists who hunt minorities in the dead of night. We wanted to kill grandma and deserved to be put in camps.
You can’t escape the propaganda. It is everywhere. In the schools, in the classrooms, on every university campus, and in the MSM.
And it works. I had a conversation with a friend who hates Trump and asked him what Trump actually did to make his life worse, and he stared at me. He is Trump!
January 6. Russia. Muh democracy. Orange man bad!
Honestly, he admitted things were better under Trump, but he bought every lie the Left pushed about Trump. The propaganda worked.
Well, yeah, no kidding. And as Paul Harvey used to say,
Advertisers in the United States are going to spend $249.3 billion this year — and, by the way, that’s 5 percent more than last year — telling us all of the good things, real and imagined, about their respective products. Isn’t it a rotten shame that with noisy, distressing, depressing news hour after hour, day in and day out, by our own emphasis on all of the bad things, crime and inflation and pollution and floods and fires and discords and disaster and discontent, by our persistent preoccupation with negatives, we tend to unsell ourselves and our impressionable offspring on a way of life, which is the envy of the rest of the worlds. And repetition is effective. Repetition is effective. Repetition is effective.
Bob Barker asked a game show contestant, “For five hundred dollars, name two famous brothers who made it possible for men to fly.” Without a moment’s hesitation the contestant replied “Ernest and Julio.”
We’ve had 10 years of anti-Trump propaganda being pushed by the left and by the mainstream media, and aided by the never trumpers amongst the establishment GOP. But, I repeat myself. The politicized law enforcement organizations helped enforce the falsehoods.
When the truth eventually leaks out, nobody’s paying attention anymore so in effect they’ve already won, at least in the short term. But each of these lies is costing the government credibility, and eventually we will get to the point where nobody trusts the government anymore.
Mind I don’t consider that to be a bad thing.
The truth is that even Democrats have begun questioning the narrative. It is however an open question whether or not that shift has come in time to save us.
Go ahead and read the link. I’ll let you decide this one yourselves.
It’s as I’ve been saying for as long as this website has been active….
Real peace is not obtained by negotiations or grabbing hands around the campfire and singing kumbaya. Real peace obtained by overwhelmingly winning the war they’re bringing against you so convincingly and brutally that they don’t try it again.
I will add that it is absolutely impossible to be a peacemaker with people who absolutely refuse peace. Is such is the dedication of the iranian-backed “Palestinians” to the destruction of Israel. As a direct result of ceasefire that Owens is calling for will only lead to greater bloodshed.
Just as unrealistic however is Sarah Hoyt over at instapundit who is calling on Hamas to surrender.
Well, sarah, that’s a nice thought in all that, but let’s imagine we started hearing come on making noises that they were going to surrender. Would anybody believe them?
Consider also the question of how many militants Hamas were escorted over the border as part of Israel’s response to calls for humane treatment of so-called Palestinians?
Like it or not, those militants now comprise sleeper cells which are now ready to rise up again and commit acts of terrorism against Israel. And if we follow Candace Owens advice on these matters, that’s precisely the outcome we’re going to get, more exuberism against Israel.
Consider also the idea that with our porous Southern border we now have Iranian sleeper cells here in these not so United States.
Even on general terms, much less with these specifics in play, a ceasefire is not how the achieve peace. Even assuming that Hamas surrenders we should keep pursuing them and wiping them out. Given their history it’s the only way to achieve peace going forward. Sad, but true.
The problem for Candice, and it’s quite understandable, is that she has yet to wrap her mind around the idea that when you’re fighting a terrorist band there is no winning unless you’re willing to get as dirty as they are.
The British found that fact hard to swallow when they were fighting our revolution. Painful though it was we learned the same lesson in Vietnam. World history is replete with other examples of this. You simply cannot fight the war you wish you had. You have to fight the war that’s been brought to you.
And Candice, as for your quoting the beatitudes, allow me to point out that when you consider what Jesus would do in a given situation, chasing people around with a bullwhip, overturning tables and being anything but peaceful is within the realm of possibility.
And here’s something else, if you’re buying power is going down in direct proportion to government spending, why are you demanding more wages from employers who are suffering the same fate as you are? Record profits? But the numbers also show that because of inflation they’re buying power is going down too.
The problem is government.
Under those conditions it’s pretty much a guarantee that the American people are not going to be well served by such an agreement.
That combination is precisely why the American voters nominated and elected Donald Trump who was neither of those things. And why the government, at least parts of it, are working so feverishly against him. They know if he gets back in the gig is up
Once you get that through your bean, the rest of this is going to make sense to you.. but not until.
The most obvious implication is that Biden has been a disaster. That’s the kind interpretation.
Somewhat less obvious is the implication of a total lack of understanding of why Biden is a disaster.
The truth of the matter is, Biden is not a screw up. That’s far too easy, making Biden a scapegoat at need.
The country is not in trouble because Biden screwed up the implementation of Democratic party policy, but rather that he perfectly implemented Democrat party policy. That’s something to rank and file Democrats understand but won’t admit to, even the true believers. And THAT point, my friends, is the most frightening thing of all.
BABIES ARE BEING BEHEADED AND BURNED ALIVE, but the real threat is “Republican ‘Christianism.’”
To which one of his commenters pipes up and says:
But enough about the abortion industry…
At the risk of being obvious, that too, is outside the realm of “Republican christianism”,
And there seems to me there should be a rather embarrassing equivalency there. But that’s going to be the topic for another post.
Fair warning, the link leads to an Andrew Sullivan column. I gave up on the excitable boy (with apologies to Warren Zevon) several years ago, and I don’t think I’ve linked anything he’s posted since.
Not that there was anything official about that, just my perception that the guy had lost his mind. At the very least a couple of his mental connections were less than solid. Apparently that hasn’t changed.What Sullivan refers to here as “Republican christianism” , he’s referred to as ‘christo fascism” in the past… And it’s something he certainly comes close to in the linked article.
I’ll give you an example:
The fusion of Trump and Christianism is an unveiling of a sort — proof of principle that, in its core, Christianism is not religious but political, a reactionary cult susceptible to authoritarian preachers.
A few years ago I wrote an article suggesting that culture is what overrode communism in the former Soviet union. Cultural pulls are stronger and longer lasting than any political movements. Indeed political movements are in my view subsets of cultures. A reflection of them.
I also wrote a few years ago,:
When Jefferson wrote that “WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT” he was not speaking a universal truth at all. The operative word in that phrase is “WE”.
Rather than talking about a universal point of view, a universal truth, if you will, he was instead talking about the point of view of WE, the new American culture. With this angle, many of the long-held myths about rights tend to disappear.
Consider; if it was in fact a universal truth that all men were created equal, it wouldn’t have been such a radical idea, for the time, much less then to now. Last I checked, it is quite true that a vast majority still do not consider these as any kind of truth, universal or otherwise; they consider them to be anything BUT self-evident. Royalty still exists, as do class structures, and slavery, as well.
Take communism, as an example. Communism attempts to over-ride the culture and basically outlaw many facets of it.
But, (and this is important) everywhere you saw Communism.. Russia, Cuba, Korea, East Germany you saw the same treacherous *political* ideology, not the cultural values of those societies. And in those places where communism has been overthrown, the former USSR for example, the original culture invariably springs back to life.
That said, Sullivan has never understood that both Trumpism, as well as Christianity, tend to rise above the political. Indeed, i suggest that labeling what Sullivan calls “Republican christianism” as a political movement is exactly the kind of fundamental misunderstanding you would expect from somebody that considers government to be the center of all things.
Their origins never have never been political. They are instead cultural in nature as Americanism itself is, and therefore more powerful than any political movement within America.
That cultural point is what Donald Trump tapped into. It isn’t something he created, it was a value structure that was already there and was being ignored by both the Republican establishment who really doesn’t care about American culture so long as they get to rule over the ashes of it, and the Democrat party who actively seeks to overthrow it.
Parting shot: why would Sullivan attack Republican christianism? Because without it America would have never been founded. Can you imagine an America being founded with Islam as its philosophical center? Any of the pantheistic religions? Socialism?
The answer is that attacking republicanism and Christianity has a goal… Removing the foundation from the building.
“It is doubtful that the efforts of the Mahatma would have succeeded
except that he was appealing to the conscience of a Christianized
people”— Bertrand Russell
So here we have, posted in the home of a Buddhist, the words of a militant atheist, extolling the virtues of Christianity.
So much for the argument that the judeo-christian ethic is not Central to
Western culture. The constant claim that the judeo-christian ethic is an
evil to be overcome is similarly bombed out of existence.
Aristotle was the one that brought the concepts of virtue and thereby right and wrong to the fore.
It was Alexander the Great, (who was probably Aristotle’s best-known student) who gave those concepts practical application.
Now while those concepts as Aristotle laid out came very close to the
truth, the trouble was, he never had anything to hang those concepts of
right and wrong on. Aristotle had no concept of a higher power in his
philosophies. He understood that anything created by man can be and
usually is, destroyed by man.
And since in his philosophy there
was no God, it ended up being that there was no morality, either.
Certain men began to be perceived as Gods. Great cities were built.
Great accomplishments, great power….but you have no morality, no right and wrong, eventually you end up with no great cities, no great culture, because metaphorically there was no Foundation under the building.
It was the Hebrews who brought the idea of a higher power forward. A
lawgiver. The concept that there was a being more powerful than men.
Those those two concepts are at the basis of Western Society, Western
culture, and that melding of philosophies resulted in America.
I have stated several times over the years in these spaces that an America
simply could not be created without those two philosophies being at the
root of it.
Can you, for example, imagine in America created with Islam as its philosophical root? I certainly cannot. Any of the pantheistic cultures? We both know better. Atheism? No…. Obviously no.
The fact is we would never have lasted as long as we have absent the judeo- Christian ethic.
Why?
Because it is that ethic, that philosophy, that recognizes the primacy of the individual.
And now we begin to see the reason behind the anti-Semitic sentiments of the anti-American left. I suggest to you that that anti-semitism, that jew hatred is a tacit recognition that the judeo-christian ethic is the basis of America as it was founded and it’s what has made it great.
I would further suggest that America has lessened itself the further away from that perception we get.