From left, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Cori Bush, D-Mo.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., are among the lawmakers who signed the letter. (Getty Images)Donald Trump delivers remarks in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, on Sept. 28, 2024.Rep. Maxine Waters (D, Ca,) in June 2018 advocating public intimidation of Trump administration officials
Maxine Waters (D, Ca.) advocating mob intimidation of Trump administration officials and their families in restaurants and other public settings in June of 2018: “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them! And you tell them that they are not welcome, anymore, anywhere.” (see #1)
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC, D, NY) on the eve of Trump’s second inaugural, January 20, 2025: “Well, we are on the eve of an authoritarian administration. This is what 21st century fascism is starting to look like.” (see #2)
Vice President J.D. Vance’s response to Jon Favreau, former Obama speechwriter, who questioned his account of the sniper attack on immigration officers in Dallas: “The gunman had anti-ICE messaging carved on the bullets he used. What, precisely, did I get wrong, dips***?” (see #3)
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In Freud’s schema, the human mind is a bureaucracy divided into three departments. At the base level, we have our id, our basic drives and primal desires. It is checked by the ego, the rational department that ties us to reality, and the superego which is our moral conscience. If our politics today is anything like Freud’s theory, our id has free reign and the other two are atrophying due to lack of use.
“Dips***”? Vice President Vance is all of 41 years old, an adolescent among officeholders (Sen. Grassley, 92). His crassness can be attributed to his youth, but not completely. The young are very impressionable. His mentor is Donald Trump. Our president has a well-rehearsed schtick of public coarseness. We’ve even invented a word, “Trumpian”, to soften our squeamishness about language and behavior that would have led our mother to send us to our room without dinner. Then, watch the rest of the Trump entourage in and out of his inner circle indulge in sycophantic loutishness.
Vice President J.D. Vance
Hold on, though. The Left, meaning the Democratic Party (the institutional Left) and its street militias, Antifa and their tans-militant allies, even pre-Trump, had nearly cornered the market on linguistic and behavioral incivility. They’ve been doing it for years. “Bush lied, people died”; “No blood for oil”. The Weather Underground. The spiked trees to injure lumbermen. Of late, recall Ferguson, Kenosha, George Floyd, the entire 2020 summer of riots, torched downtowns, the killings, the statue toppling, defacements of our founders and those who died in our wars? Recall the invention of new words to castigate those who disagree – nearly anything with a “phobia” suffix and the boundless use of racist, patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, “settler colonialism”, et al? Recall The 1619 Project, the attempt to implant revolution in the minds of young people? The 2023-4 cancel mobs and antisemitic hostility on campuses? Sen. Chuck Schumer’s threat to Supreme Court justices?
This is not “both sides-ism”. It’s my survey of the political landscape. What the Right has done in being “Trumpian”, the Left was already there and upped the ante. There was nowhere else for the Left to go but mayhem. Bellicosity is a territory they already occupy.
As such, some on the Left’s fiery id edge have added firearms to the Molotov cocktail in their arsenal. Convinced of the truth of trans ideology, children were targeted in Minneapolis and Nashville as well as a Supreme Court justice or two or three. Let’s not forget the murder of Charlie Kirk. In 2017, a Bernie Sanders supporter decided to try and veto with a rifle the lives of Republican congressmen practicing for a baseball game. In a state with an electorate already overwhelmingly oriented to the Left, California, mobs rampaged to stop the enforcement of federal immigration law. It happens wherever a Democrat one-party state is firmly entrenched.
The Left’s assault on law enforcement is resplendent in Texas, an epicenter of the chaotic and flagrant and massive illegal immigration of the prior administration. Reminiscent of Fidel Castro’s cadres in Cuba’s outback, leftists orchestrated ambushes of law enforcement. The recent sniper attack in Dallas on ICE vans (by Joshua Jahn) is just the latest episode in a string of armed “resistance”. It’s the unrestrained id expressed through the barrel of a gun.
Joshua Jahn, the 29-year-old behind the deadly Dallas ICE shooting on Sept. 24, 2025.
Again, that bastion of the Left’s id, California, in their latest effort to harm federal law enforcement officers, passed a bill and signed into law by Gov. Newsom (SB 627) to forcibly unmask them and expose them and their families to the same people who are inspired like Joshua Jahn. Let’s be clear, California votes to secede, not once but continually, in so many ways. It’s a state in rebellion. SB 627 is unconstitutional, and cannot be enforced, and if it is, state officials should be arrested and charged with treason. It’s happened before, 1860-65.
Clearly, Sacramento’s performance politics is meant to appeal to the id of the one-party state’s large base. Throwing red meat is the tactic of the id feeding the id. On the Right we have Donald Trump and his followers doing it in the language of the schoolyard or locker room. Counterpoised are those on the Left and their trigger-happy id practitioners, some content with complete ruination and ostracization of their opponents while others veer into filling body bags. Our politics is a coarse, crude, and violent hot mess.
Where’s our collective ego and superego? Could it be in the person of Erika Kirk in her supreme act of grace and forgiveness? We couldn’t find a better way in the rediscovery of the better angels of our nature than following her lead. God bless her.
Erika Kirk at her husband’s memorial, 9/21/2025
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Watchdog says Maxine Waters inciting ‘mob violence,’ presses ethics complaint”, Adam Shaw, Fox News, 7/5/2018, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/watchdog-says-maxine-waters-inciting-mob-violence-presses-ethics-complaint?msockid=287a0b967a9564c61c991f537b2f65ee.
2. “AOC in total ‘fascism’ meltdown on evening of Trump inauguration”, Kelly Garino, Daily Mail, 1/20/2025, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/galleries/article-14303887/AOC-total-fascism-meltdown-evening-Trump-inauguration.html.
3. Vice President J.D. Vance X post at https://x.com/JDVance/status/1970897642361135146.
People attend a vigil at Timpanogos Regional Hospital for Charlie Kirk, the CEO and co-founder of Turning Point USA who was shot and killed, Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025, in Orem, Utah. (AP Photo/Alex Goodlett)
* Gaslighting: a form of psychological abuse and manipulation where one person, the gaslighter, tries to make another person doubt their own perception of reality, memory, and sanity. The term dates back to the play/film, “Gaslight” of 1940. In the story, a man dims the gas lights in his wife’s bedroom and blames her as part of a plot to drive her into insanity to steal her wealth.
Can we know the truth of something? Yes, truth exists. If not, we would be rootless, and so would our world. Life would be chaos, no verities to guide us. While technology has greatly expanded our field of vision, so much of the information is filtered. If we receive it in its raw and unfiltered state, our modern education has handicapped us in making sense of it. The dispensers of all that comes our way are just as blind as the recipients. Primordial herd instincts kick in and things go viral, poorly understood and unrestrained. Example: George Floyd.
We are adrift at the mercy of those who have need to gaslight us to salvage the last vestiges of their failed worldview. Theirs is an ideology of recent origin and consequence, single-mindedly corseting all human experience into a story of victim and victimizer. It grew out of and found a home in 19th-century Progressivism, the militant socialism of Karl Marx, the softer socialism of today’s Democratic Party, the New Deal, mid-20th century neo-Marxism, and today’s environmentalism. The government became the repository of great power, so long as its enthusiasts controlled it as well as the cultural buttresses of the edifice, the cultural commanding heights.
“The long march through the institutions” of the 1960s radicals began in earnest, and they succeeded. They dominate the schools – K through grad school – entertainment, the faculty lounge, much of the government work force, huge swaths of organized labor, the c-suite, many white-collar demographics, swaths of college-educated single women, the big foundations, the legacy media, much of the new media. Their adherents swarm on social media. Their blinkered view is a manifest failure, and thus the need to gaslight us.
Rudi Dutschke (with bullhorn) speaking to student protest from the late 1960s or 1970s. He was at the time the “chief ideologist” of Socialist German Student Union and a leader of the massive and disruptive protests that erupted all over Europe in 1968. He was a longtime advocate of the Left’s “long march” to dominate the culture. The “long march” is a reference to Mao’s 1930s “long march”, or military retreat, to remote Shaanxi province during his communist revolution.
They need not know that they are gaslighting us. They are acting out the disquiet and anxiety of their philosophy crashing down. Belief smashes into reality. Reaching for excuses, they end up manipulating our perception of reality, and themselves.
In the progressive redoubts of our media and broader culture, the tactic is acute. Their reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk is a case in point. I’m reminded of the five stages of grief: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. Where is our progressive media? Mostly, somewhere between denial and anger.
They deny any complicity in birthing and propagating the mindset of a person who could gun down a husband and father of two. Their refrain: “It wasn’t us.” They additionally turn to bargaining with “The other side is as bad or worse” and “He deserved it”, and anger in “How dare you”. At this juncture, depression is nowhere to be found, but acceptance takes a disgusting turn.
Throughout, gaslighting is used to throw up a smokescreen to obfuscate their connection to the mind of the shooter. “It wasn’t us” took the form of “He’s MAGA”. They hang their hat on superficial identity characteristics, not the suspect’s mind, the essential cause of the killing. His parents were described as well-to-do Republicans, his father a sheriff, the family well-acquainted with guns. Democrat political consultant Joel Montfort wrote on X (see #1),
“Raised in the stereotypical All-American white conservative family with a sheriff for a father, Tyler grew up around guns and knew how to use them. It’s the guns.”
He found room to shoehorn the Democrat shibboleth of gun control into his gaslighting.
Regurgitating the same line was Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of the Democrat-adjacent Meidas Touch media outfit, who said on X (see #1), “So after days of Republicans blaming and vilifying Democrats and trans people for Kirk’s murder despite having no clue who the person was, we find out it’s a white guy from a Republican family in Utah who loved guns.” It appears to be a nervous tic on the Left to distract attention away from the shooter to the inanimate object that he was holding on that rooftop. Classic gaslighting.
Then facts tumbled out contradicting that dry run at gaslighting. The shooter was the black sheep of the family. Shell casings were engraved with transgender and Antifa messaging, first debunked by the leftist bastions in the media, then relegated to the memory hole when that dodge was exposed. Heck, now, it appears that the guy had a transgender lover.
MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd moved right into the bargaining part of the grief liturgy, “He deserved it”. You see, according to Dowd, the victim is “hateful”. Speaking about Kirk, Dowd insisted (see #2), “I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”
Matthew Dowd comments on the death of Charlie Kirk.
Other moral miscreants on the Left jumped to a sick form of acceptance. A MIT researcher wrote (see #3), “I really want to see that video of Charlie Kirk dying again because it works better than my anti-depressant.”
The crowd in the staff room at TMZ was caught cheering when the news of Kirk’s killing was broadcast (see #4). The co-hosts of the live program jumped into damage control by saying a video feed of a rather mild car chase in LA caused the outburst of adulation, but others discounted the hastily devised rationale. One disturbing fact: the timing of the news announcement and cheers doesn’t match the excuse. The cheers align with the appearance of the news of Kirk’s killing during the car chase video feed. Classic gaslighting.
Chesterfield Public Schools board member Dot Heffron mirrored the left’s joy in her Instagram post (see #5): “Call me old fashioned, but I remember when we used to be okay with shooting Nazis.” She was forced by her colleagues to resign. Dean of Students at Clover Hill High School, Alana Hartman-Hall, decided to taste her foot like Heffron when she posted (#5), “When you promote violence and advocate for a percentage of teachers and students to be sacrificed to school shootings … You reap what you sow.”
Bargaining proceeds apace in “They are just as bad, if not worse”. The shambolic attempt to compile lists of political violence to match or exceed anything from the Left was concocted to disguise the reality. The definition of “political violence” was fudged and instances excluded and included to fit the preordained conclusion. The only indisputable act of carnage by the Right is Jan 6. The rest are . . . bizarre. The confrontation in the Pelosi home was by a deranged homeless man, for instance.
However, an entire 2020 summer of riots (“mostly peaceful” riots?) is somehow missing from the left column. What about the run of memorial defacements and statues throughout that same year? Do you doubt the existence of the free-range leftist student mobs on college campuses for the past decade or more? Oh, don’t forget, what about the antisemitic elements that shut down swaths of college campuses and made life dangerous for Jews throughout much of 2023-24? The LA mobs that attacked and threatened ICE and CBP officers this year? The ambushes of ICE officers outside their offices in Texas (see #6)? When the Left does political violence, they do it big, really big, and often. Gaslighting has to be a go-to in the Left’s toolkit.
Anyone’s news feed is littered with examples of a media intent on hiding its fingerprints on a mode of thought that is all-too-easily a greased slide to revolution and violence. Just lather on the gaslighting to hide the fact. Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk is dead, his wife a widow and children fatherless, many of our colleges remain unhealthy to mind and body, large precincts of our media spew a skewed version of reality (gaslighting), and many denizens of these spaces are intellectually and morally crippled and unhinged.
Putting aside the gaslighting, we have a lot of shoring up to do to, as the Democrats and the Left are fond of saying, “save our democracy”. We can start by dethroning the Left and unplug their gaslighting.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Liberals Hype Tyler Robinson’s Conservative Roots After MAGA Backlash”, Nick Mordowanec, Newsweek, 9/12/2025, at https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-murder-tyler-robinson-maga-liberals-2129055.
2. “MSNBC’s Shameful Breaking News Coverage on Charlie Kirk”, Becket Adams, National Review, 9/14/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/msnbcs-shameful-breaking-news-coverage-on-charlie-kirk/.
3. X post by John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine, 9/12/2025, at https://x.com/jpodhoretz/status/1966474553049092170.
4. “TMZ’s X/Twitter Inundated with Demands for Firings After Staff Heard Cheering During News of Charlie Kirk Assassination: ‘F**k You,’ ‘You’re Done’”, Warner Todd Huston, Breitbart, 9/12/2025, at https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2025/09/12/tmzs-x-twitter-inundated-with-demands-for-firings-after-staff-heard-cheering-the-news-of-charlie-kirk-assassination-fk-you-youre-done/.
5. “Update: Chesterfield School Board member resigns after uproar over social media post”, Michael Phillips, The Richmonder, 9/14/2025, at https://www.richmonder.org/chesterfield-school-board-member-asked-to-resign-by-peers-youngkin-after-social-media-post/.
6. “Left-Wing Militants Charged with Attempted Murder After Ambushing Officers Near ICE Facility”, James Lynch, National Review, 7/8/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/left-wing-militants-charged-with-attempted-murder-after-ambushing-officers-near-ice-facility/.
Charlotte mayor Vi Lyles speaks during a press conference in Charlotte, N.C., December 17, 2019. Inset: Surveillance footage shows Iryna Zarutska (in black hat) and Decarlos Brown Jr. on a Charlotte light rail train shortly before the attack. (Jeremy Brevard-USA TODAY Sports/via Reuters, Screenshot via Charlotte Area Transit System/via WBTV News)
A thought experiment that’s approaching two centuries old, or maybe longer? The Jacobins of the 1790s thought that they could toy with a culture and civilization like a lab biologist splicing genes (The Cult of Reason, The Reign of Terror, revolutionary tribunals, the guillotine). Marx thought he could bring about a new world order by reshaping every person’s mind, marriage, and family, all the way to the totality of life’s arrangements (thus, totalitarianism). 19th-century Progressives injected into the mainstream the thought that a class of credentialed “experts” would lead us to nirvana. Are people with sociology degrees the arbiters of our existence? And then, today, some amongst us contrived a more robust Marxism, tied to progressivism, and infecting those “experts”, that swells the membership of victimizers and victims so as to perpetuate the revolutionary churn (being “woke”).
What are the results? The zealots become divorced from reality as the world collapses around them. Anarchy reigns, lives destroyed. They are experiencing the death throes of their thought experiment and can’t bring themselves to apologize.
Witness the grotesque word salad of Charlotte’s mayor, Vi Lyles, as she attempts to rationalize the unprovoked murder of a young lady on her city’s public transit system. She wants us to understand the killer, as he plunges a knife into the young woman’s neck, all caught on a surveillance camera (see #3). The release of the videotape occasioned a press conference by the mayor where she referred to the murder as a “a tragic situation that sheds light on problems with society’s safety nets related to mental healthcare.” “Problems with society’s safety nets”, you’ve got to be kidding.
It’s the “root causes” mumbo jumbo of today’s progressives. The huge caravan throngs swamping over our border once Biden took the oath of office, it was said, could not be addressed by enforcing the border. It’s the same as Lyles’s (see #4) “we will never arrest our way out [of] issues such [as] homelessness and mental health.” We must somehow cure poverty in the Third World before we can have border security. An administration spokesman said of VP Harris’s approach to Biden’s border crisis (see #1), “The vice president’s work and what we’re focused on this afternoon is thinking long term and getting at the root of the problem as the administration simultaneously addresses the immediate challenges at the border.” Then, Trump takes the oath and within a few months, we have a cure.
Chicago’s mayor Brandon Johnson is all into the “root causes” mantra. He adds a hostility to constitutional federalism and the Second Amendment to the political liturgy. According to Johnson, other states are responsible for Chicago’s inability to control violent crime. He charged on X (see #2),
“Chicago will continue to have a ‘violence problem’ as long as Red states continue to have a gun problem. The endless flow of illegal guns into Chicago can be traced to Red states like Mississippi, Indiana, and Louisiana.”
Johnson wants every state to have Illinois gun laws, and until they do, the residents of south and west Chicago will have to tolerate the killings of their loved ones. The question never occurred to Johnson: Why is a good portion of his city a war zone and not these other places? Is it because of the relative prosperity in these places from all the gun running to Chicago gangs? When you have to defend the indefensible, you sound like Harris, Lyles, and Johnson.
We are witnessing the death throes of a thought experiment. It can’t stand under the weight of its failures. Not holding people accountable, a fruitless campaign to eradicate all vestiges of poverty and personal anxieties everywhere, and social workers as substitutes for cops leads to, well, Charlottesville, Chicago, the 2020 summer of riots, statue toppling, and Washington, D.C. For that matter, throw in New York City, good chunks of California, the entire urbanized west coast for that matter, almost any place run as a Democrat one-party fiefdom.
And to think that New York City may be on the cusp of electing an out-and-out Marxist. Will we ever learn?
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Harris’ mission to tackle migration root causes scores big money support but border crossings remain high”, Priscilla Alvarez, CNN, 2/6/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/06/politics/kamala-harris-migration/.
2. “Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson blames city’s violence problem on ‘red states’”, staff, Washington Examiner, 9/3/2025, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/3790926/chicago-mayor-brandon-johnson-blames-red-states/.
3. “How Long Will We Tolerate the Madness in Our Streets?”, Rich Lowry, National Review, 9/9/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/how-long-will-we-tolerate-the-madness-in-our-streets/.
4. “What the Hell Is Charlotte’s Mayor, Vi Lyles, Talking About?”, Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review, 9/8/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-the-hell-is-charlottes-mayor-vi-lyles-talking-about/.
No, the title is not a reference to the likes of Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson joining the ranks of Antifa or the crowd behind Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy. But they are unknowingly thinking like a Marxist.
The emergence of this new mental orientation on the Right begins with being “woke”. Specifically, it’s jargon for a hypothetical state of awareness, a capability of perceiving the deeper reality that is concealed to all but the most discerning. Facts are optional. The idea is traceable to Karl Marx, and therefore central to the “woke” Left with all their “critical theories” of oppressor/oppressed and the beleaguered “marginalized”.
Marx was not satisfied with a call for revolution. That’s too simple. His thought is more robust than that. He sought to explain the stream of all human experience since the dawn of time. For him, we are socialized into our status as oppressors or the oppressed. To set the world right according to him and Engels, the complete human, not just society, minds and all, need to be reshaped to be truly “free”. We must be cleansed of this filth of past and present socialization. He’s advocating totalitarianism pure and simple.
Marx called the malign socialization of traditional society “false consciousness”. In Marx’s fevered imagination, almost everything in our existence trains us into accepting our condition, like our language, family, marriage, faith, traditions, etc. Marx wanted all of it junked and refashioned at the behest of his woke “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. For anyone with an ounce of humanity, this should send shivers down your spine. We now have generations trained in the gibberish. It shows, look at the young.
Neo-Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt School in 1920s and 1930s Germany (technically, the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research) – Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, etc. – fled Nazi Germany, landed in the West, most notably the U.S. The virus spread in the academic “soft sciences” throughout the 1950s to today, waiting on the gullibility of Robin DeAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, BLM, Occupy Wall Street, the college campus mobs, statue topplers, the faculty lounge, and the looser canons of the Democratic Party such as AOC, Mamdani, the surviving Squad, Bernie and his “bros”, the DNC.
Herbert MarcuseMax HorkheimerTheodore Adorno
What infected the Left has spread to the Right in what the French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye referred to as The Horseshoe Theory: both Left and Right come to mirror authoritarian tendencies, but actually more than that. A woke Left leads to a reaction in the rise of a new woke Right. Marx has his bourgeoisie bogeymen; Fascists have their liberals (classical liberals, that is), “cosmopolitans”, Jews, or anyone that they see as undermining national solidarity. Parts of the new Right have copyrighted their own hobgoblins.
The woke bookends: JD Vance, AOC
All claim to have the gift of seeing the clandestine threat, the hidden structure of oppression, and are thus awoken. An element of the Right shows symptoms of the “woke” infection. It starts with a unique vocabulary for the Right, words that remind a person of the allegedly hidden cabals and insidious networks not seen by the average person. Establishment, elites, neocons, globalists, warmongers, the deep state, for instance, all generalities, litter their harangues. Only they are awoken enough to expose it. QAnon appears, the alleged Epstein/Israeli cabal, the swamp, etc. Similarly, Marxists forever after 1917 were in a constant state of vigilance against “wreckers”, underground churches and worshippers, samizdat free thinkers, kulaks, saboteurs. Now the Right has joined the thought-fad by listing their own scapegoats.
Tune into Candace Owens and her tirades about the pernicious influence of Jews bordering on blood libel (the medieval canard about the murder of Christians by Jews to use their blood in religious rituals). Coming to the defense of the emotionally unstable Kanye West and his rant against the Jews of Hollywood, here’s Candace:
“What if that is what is happening right now in Hollywood? If there is just a very small ring of specific people who are using the fact that they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism, it’s food for thought, right? And I think, again, there have been enough people that are speaking out about a ring in Hollywood, also a ring potentially in DC, that we should start to ask those questions.” (see #1)
Sounds innocuous? The talk of a “ring of Jews to shield themselves” in Candace’s punditry smacks of the same shadowy forces occupying the minds of the Left. She said in the manner of Marx and Lenin when speaking of the bourgeoise, “They will kill people before they allow that ring to be exposed.”
The stark language of generalized and shadowy forces is strikingly similar to the bombast of the evil machinations of the bourgeoisie coming off the pen of Lenin in 1919: “The bourgeoisie and their agents in the workers’ organisations [sic] are making desperate attempts to find ideological and political arguments in defence [sic] of the rule of the exploiters.” (see #2)
For some on the Right, like their “woke” soulmates on the Left, antisemitism is making a comeback. Since the memory of the demonic Holocaust, though fading, still haunts us, their antisemitism is prefaced by disclaimers, versions of “Oh, no, not me” and “Some of my best friends are . . .” and “I love . . .”. It’s rhetorical maneuvering to engage in antisemitism by angling the Jewish identity into a cabal working against the interests and will of the American people.
Tucker Carlson and Candace Carlson traffic in antisemitism
The influential Tucker Carlson drinks at the same trough. Recently, he has been consumed in anxiety over the nefarious influence of the powerful, who just so happen to be Jews. On Zelensky, the president of Ukraine of Jewish ancestry, Tucker defames him and the leader of Blackrock in a two-fer, “Sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock.” Blackrock, the investment firm? It is led by Larry Fink, also Jewish. Compare this to some of the things in Völkischer Beobachter (National Socialist official newspaper, “People’s Observer”). (see #3)
He throws aspersions at Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, for being insufficiently devoted to the U.S., for having divided loyalties with you-know-who (Israel). Remember, Carlson has tirelessly expressed mortification about the post-9/11 wars, the “forever wars”, and warmongers. His argument, taken to its obvious conclusion, demands no foreign policy till we have solved all our problems. It is isolationism. Our special relationship with Israel, a country under constant threat of annihilation, is a regular source of annoyance to him.
The Jew thing crops up in his head. In response to Shapiro and other conservative commentators, he insists, “. . . so many of these people don’t seem to have the same level of actual care for American citizens.”
Contrasting himself with the allegedly rootless Shapiro, a Jew, he is unflinchingly American:
“I’m from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. I’m shocked by how little they care about the country.” (see #4)
You see, this new online Right is immersed in the old bigoted trope of the “cosmopolitan” Jew, a people who cannot be trusted to have patriotic monogamy.
As for Americans who sign up for the IDF, Carlson ranted,
“There are a lot of Americans who’ve served in the IDF — they should lose their citizenship. You can’t fight for another country and remain an American, period.”
It is lost on him that Americans joined the Canadian Air Force to fight for Britain in WWII, that Americans for a century volunteered for the French Foreign Legion, and to fight communists in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, Angola, etc. Should they be booted from the ranks of citizen?
Carlson traffics in the Epstein/Mossad conspiracy story. More tales of the unhinged. He ruminates (see #5):
“. . . I think the real answer is Jeffrey Epstein was working on behalf of intel services, probably not American [Mossad]. . . . Now, no one’s allowed to say that the foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that’s naughty.”
There seems to be no grand mystery where a Jew cannot be found to be in the middle of it.
All such thought-fads that become embedded in the culture have a catalyst, usually a combination of events, mercurial personalities, and a potential reservoir of acolytes anxiously looking for a leader who can personify their angst. In 2015, a leader appeared in the form of Donald Trump and his coalescing MAGA movement. No, he’s not Hitler. No, he’s not an anti-Semite, far from it. He’s of the ilk of Theodore Roosevelt, a man who always wanted to be the “bride and every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every Christening” (according to TR’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth). Many people at the time became infatuated with TR as a force of nature (many still do). Specifics mattered little. Ditto for Trump and MAGA. Democracies are susceptible to enchantment.
His acolytes in the media and administration speak of him and his words with such reverence. His words carry the divine sanction of the Gospels. Yet, honestly, the yearning on the Right is based on real and pressing concerns. Our government is so big that it is no longer answerable to us. Our public spending and debt spiral out of control. Our education system has become the Left’s prep school, a training ground for future hordes of malcontents. The terms “boy” and “girl” are forcibly muddled making sexual privacy and safety meaningless. Genital mutilation of minors (“gender-affirming care”), really? Crime is seen as a call for therapy. Public barbarism in roving gangs of youth and ramshackle tent encampments sprawling across our cities have made salient parts of them unlivable.
This is the low-hanging fruits of the Left’s long march though the institutions. The Left’s cultural sickness spread to other countries in our foreign policy. Pride flags unfurled at our embassy in Kabul, really? The reaction did not stop there. The long twilight struggle against international terrorism in the 9/11 wars of Afghanistan and Iraq was fodder for “populists”, first by the Left (“Bush lied, people died”, “No blood for oil”, Code Pink) and now by parts of the Right, to take the indictment further to include “forever wars”, “warmongers”, “neocons”, the Bushes.
Trump and MAGA gave the angst organizational form. Trump and his movement produced the “populist” Right’s vocabulary and targets of derision. Everyone and everything in the newsfeed get sucked into the new Right’s vortex. Unwittingly, Trump and MAGA are the catalyst and accelerant for the new woke Right. Intentionality is irrelevant. Gadflies on the fringe, from tiki-torch machers in Charlottesville to Trump foolishly having lunch with the antisemite Kanye West and the far-Right blowhard Nick Fuentes, are attracted to a burgeoning movement with real concerns.
Without the rise of Trump populism and its disparagement of “elites” and the amorphous “establishment”, it’s hard to conceive of a wokeness on the Right. Real misbehavior – the Russia hoax, lawfare, “the resistance”, higher ed’s neo-Marxist cultural revolution, etc. – invites ruminations of a conspiratorial underworld. The Left sees it in “whiteness”. The Right might see it in the Jews, “neocons”, an intersectionality between the two, globalists, a conspiratorial “deep state”, etc.
Some on the “woke Right” end up sounding like their brethren on the Left in a condemnation of capitalism, or free markets, as nothing more than an abstract ideology and not the product of government simply leaving people alone. Both ends of the spectrum are enthused about government and its politics manipulating the economy to benefit some oppressed class.
Poster of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) showing the hidden hands of capitalism. Some on the right sound like the PSL.
Let our vice president, J.D. Vance, in his own words, illustrate the union of the Left and Right in their “wokeness”:
* The Left’s Mother Jones magazine quoted Vance’s endorsement of the 2023 UAW strike when Vance said he was “[r]ooting for the auto workers across our country demanding higher wages.” (see #6)
* Vance supported Biden’s “bigness in business is badness” FTC chair Lina Khan by saying, “A lot of my Republican colleagues look at Lina Khan … and they say, ‘well Lina Khan is sort of engaged in some sort of fundamental evil thing.” Further adding, “And I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.” (see #7)
* Vance champions the Democrats’ spendthrift rationale for entitlements, reducing a looming disaster for the young to the blasé, “One way of understanding the Social Security problem is, old people can’t work, young people can, babies can’t.” And curtly concluding, “So people at a certain age support the babies and the old people.” (see #8)
Between bashing business for exploiting workers and praising lefty economists/lawyers and boosting bankrupting entitlements, Vance exemplifies something more than “populism”. He signifies that coming together of the woke Left and Right in embracing the union extortion racket, socialist economics (an oxymoron since socialism is all about government, not economics), and the old getting the chance to pillage the young. It’s abominable.
The French writer, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, in 1849 once quipped, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, or “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. Or at least, the two ends merge into the same mass over time, all “woke”, all sounding like each other, all sounding Marxist.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Candace Owens Goes on Bizarre Screed About ‘Ring’ of ‘Quite Sinister’ Jews in Hollywood”, Alex Griffin, Mediaite, 3/8/2024, at https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/candace-owens-goes-on-bizarre-screed-about-ring-of-quite-sinister-jews-in-hollywood/.
2. Lenin’s opening line in “Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, March 1919, at https://old.iclfi.org/english/wv/935/qotw.html.
3. “Tucker Carlson called Ukraine’s Jewish leader Zelenskyy ‘rat-like’ on his Twitter show, repeating a well-worn antisemitic trope”, Haven Orecchio-Egresitz, Business Insider, 6/8/2023, at https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker-carlson-calls-zelenskyy-rat-like-antisemitic-trope-2023-6.
4. An excellent piece on Tucker Carlson’s darker manifestation of late was made by a former friend and colleague, James Kirchick, in “Tucker Carlson’s Dark Turn”, 7/24/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/09/tucker-carlsons-dark-turn/.
5. “Tucker Carlson Claims Jeffrey Epstein Was Working for Israel to Blackmail American Politicians”, Michael Luciano, Mediaite, 7/11/2025, at https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/tucker-carlson-claims-jeffrey-epstein-was-working-for-israel-to-blackmail-american-politicians/.
6. “J.D. Vance Really Wants You to Believe He Supports Striking Autoworkers”, Noah Lanard, Mother Jones, 9/19/2023, at https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/09/donald-trump-jd-vance-josh-hawley-uaw-strike-biden/.
7. “Vance: Biden FTC chief is ‘doing a pretty good job’”, Rebecca Klar, The Hill, 2/27/2024, at https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4491363-vance-biden-ftc-chief-is-doing-a-pretty-good-job/.
8. “The Trump-Vance Ticket is a Repudiation of Free-Market Conservatism”, Victoria Guida, Politico, 7/16/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/16/the-trump-vance-ticket-is-a-repudiation-of-free-market-conservatism-00168578.
Pres. Trump and Maine Gov. Mills at the White House, 2/21/2025
Trump is our era’s Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who led the effort to desert Czechoslovakia in 1938. His impulsiveness and tendency to hitch national policy to personal grudges are deeply troubling.
But the Democrats are worse. They’re crazy. They are cultural revolutionaries on a mission to force us to conform to their conceptions of the “better man [or woman, or whatever] for the better world [?]”. They refuse to define “man” or “woman”, for instance, as one part of their goal to eliminate all distinctions (look up “nihilism”) so as to create new ones of their own fancy. Consequently, women are frozen out of award ceremonies to men who imagine themselves to be women. It’s kooky beyond belief.
It’s also not surprising that it doesn’t much work the other way: a XX man robbing XY men of their track and field medals. Trump, and anyone still rooted in reality, knows this, and he’s willing to say so. Yesterday, at a meeting of governors at the White House, he confronted Maine’s Governor Janet Mills (D). Watch the clip below.
Brutal, blunt, but not wholly undeserved. Gov. Mills’s feelings are of minor concern when compared to the dashed dreams of hundreds, if not thousands, of girls – real XX girls. Their ambitions are quashed by a XY girl who just yesterday was considered a boy. Go get ‘em Trump, and every blue-state satrap that has engaged in this grotesqueness.
Pres. Biden, son Hunter, and an inset photo of the Biden clan
Far removed from Plato’s dream of the “philosopher king”, and his notion of politics as an avocation for the wise and godly, is the harsher reality of self-dealing in politics. Biden finally did it: he pardoned his son. Are you surprised? If so, stay off the cable buying channels. Someone else should handle your finances.
Honestly, I expected Biden to do it, or arrange some deal with the incoming Trump. Did you really expect the son to spend a dime in penalties and serve a day in jail? The charade of high-mindedness from Biden and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was for the sycophants and the “unwashed masses”, which is how the party of the masses actually views their masses. My guess is that most of us aren’t shocked.
We’ve grown used to the truth of our politics: it’s long been a lucrative (as in “lucre”) career path, especially for long-in-the-tooth politicos like the Biden clan. FDR had a well-heeled aristocratic lineage, and thus his quasi-socialism was an act of condescending patronage for the plebes. But for LBJ, politics was his ticket out of the poverty of his Texas hill-country hardscrabble life. He sold himself by using other people’s money to purchase other people’s loyalty. Imagine it, using other people’s money to reward still other people, and all of it for fun and profit. Adjusted for inflation, upon his death, he was worth $100 million, quite a haul for a coarse back-slapping politician from Texas’s version of Appalachia at the time.
The “LBJ technique” of haranguing a person to get his way.
Self-interest and greed are alive and well, particularly among people whose public platform has long been a bellicose attack on self-interest and greed. Nancy Pelosi provides another case in point. A scion of Baltimore’s D’Alesandro political dynasty, her elevated social caste helped bring her into marital union with Paul Pelosi of the moneyed class. Elite colleges, prep schools, etc., you get the picture. It’s a form of social incest. Power and money have always had a potent attraction. You don’t need feudalism or capitalism to make it happen. Quasi-socialism, as well as the unadorned kind, works too.
So, Nancy can regale us with the glories of a totalitarian lockdown by pointing to her $15,000 fridge filled with exotic, expensive, chic ice cream. No run-of-the-mill Dreyer’s for this gal. She gets her hair professionally coiffed while everyone else is shut in dealing with their zoomed children. Like the nomenklatura of the Soviet Union, the old aristocracy was swept aside to make room for the Party aristocracy. La noblesse oblige thrives under new labels. The flotsam always floats to the top no matter the political scheme.
Nancy’s refrigerator and ice cream during the lockdowns.
These paragons of equity- and equality-mongering, of concern for the poor and “oppressed”, end up rolling in the dough. So much so that they can no longer ravage Republicans as the party of robber barons. For at least the last few election cycles, the Democrats have nationally outspent the GOP by around 100%, or more. The Harris campaign had raised $2.15 billion when you add Biden’s billion in the early part of the campaign season, and still ran a $20 million debt. Trump’s paltry $338 million, about half of it from donations $200 or less, seems like an embarrassment in comparison.
The party of government is also the party of the hyper-wealthy. Their complaints about “money in politics” and their serial attacks on Citizens United were dropped from the Party’s talking points. It couldn’t be sustained when the Brahmins of wealth lined up behind them. So, the ritual excuses for the loss shifted to “misinformation” and “disinformation”. In other words, they want to censor views and information that they don’t like. It’s scandalous, but it’ll still has currency in Big Media. They demand censorship and an ongoing alliance with Big Money and Big Media. Why don’t they just come out and say it? They want Orwell’s Ministry of Truth [propaganda] and Ministry of Love [persecution] (from Orwell’s “1984”).
They don’t realize that many of their beliefs are revolting to a large swath of the public. There’s too much out there to turn your stomach. Transgenderism – the idea that you can feel and think your way into another sex – is to be assisted by taxpayer dollars and forced into anything designated “woman/girl”. The Leviathan is the strong arm for gender confusion and porn to adolescents.
They wrecked the economy, which everybody has experienced at the gas pump, utility bill, and supermarket. As for crime, they only seek ways to facilitate it, not combat it. People look around themselves and see disorder, filth, and violence. Who wants to raise their kids in that?
The fact is, they suffer the disadvantage of their own minds. Fewer want what they’re selling. It doesn’t take a genius to roll out the videotape. And they gaslight us by calling it “disinformation” and “misinformation”. They demand that campaigns keep it airy, abstract, filled with generalities. “Joy”, joy about what? Trump is Hitler, and it’s the end of “our democracy”. When you confront them with their own statements and actions, they demand a Ministry of Truth. Who’s the real danger to democracy?
Here’s the truth: big government breeds big money in politics which breeds more big government. More big government breeds more lucrative avenues for the unproductive, people who produce nothing but the myriads of ways to take money and opportunity from one group and give it to their voting blocks. Now that’s the real scandal.
In all of this self-dealing, is there any wonder that they save their own from the hoosegow? That’s a minor matter compared to what they have in store for the rest of us.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Charles C.W. Cooke’s piece in National Review provides some insight into the scam that is our politics: “The Misinformation Racket”, 11/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/01/the-misinformation-racket/
The child sexual abuse mania that began in 1984 but would stretch into the 1990s
“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved -indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be brushed aside as trivial exceptions.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“All one’s neighbours [sic] are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear. . . In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.” — Carl Jung
Was there something in the water during the 1990s? Episodes of mania abounded. Looking for causes, Bonhoeffer emphasizes a stubborn belief in things that aren’t true, a kind of stupidity. Jung looked to the role of fear in animating a broad sense of hysteria.
Either way, certain periods of history seem susceptible to a kind of mass psychosis. The 17th-century Salem Witch Trials were but one example. Throughout the Reformation period, executions by burning at the stake were frequent except in the 16th-century Dutch Republic and northern Poland-Lithuania, so much so that one historian referred to the two as “state[s] without stakes”. The climate-change frenzy of today is only the latest episode in the recurring epidemics of madness. Though, the 1990s, for whatever reason, exhibited multiple occurrences.
From the 1980s into the 1990s, across the country from California to Florida, child day-care was allegedly and suddenly plagued with the most fantastical charges of child sexual abuse. Janet Reno rose to fame from Florida DA to Bill Clinton’s Attorney General, and then her oversight of the Branch Davidian siege and inferno in Waco, riding her “Reno method” to secure many false child-abuse convictions, alongside ruined lives, numerous lawsuits, and subsequent legal judgments that nearly bankrupted many guilty local jurisdictions (see #1). It was a disaster all around.
he PBS website for “The Child Terror” which chronicled the frenzy about child sexual abuse at day care centersJanet Reno, Florida DA and US Attorney General, a key figure in child-abuse mania and the Waco infernoThe inferno at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco in 1993
Then in 1996 during the Atlanta Summer Olympics came the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. Security guard Richard Jewell was turned from hero to goat by the FBI’s fixation on him as the culprit, all recounted in Clint Eastwood’s 2019 film, “Richard Jewell” (see #2, #3). In this case, a powerful institution fell under the spell of the “somebody within” trope to single-mindedly focus on Jewell, going so far as claim that he was afflicted with a mysterious “hero syndrome” (or complex), hounding him and placing his life under a microscope only to discover the real offender a couple of years later. Organizations can suffer from a self-imposed group myopia among its “professionals”.
Credentials and training don’t immunize a person from half-baked notions taken as truth. Today, we see entire professional associations oblivious to the necessity of a block-chain of evidence that ties it to a relevant conclusion, the essence of science. Instead, we’ll see them endorse the fashionable ideas of many of their broader demographic peers and stubbornly persist in logical quicksand.
Then we have the JonBenet Ramsey murder case from 1996. The phenomenon repeats itself. Netflix has brought the incident to light in “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?”. Watching all three episodes makes clear that the treatment of the case by law enforcement has much in common with the 1990s’ day-care child abuse mania and the Jewell persecution. The case had gone cold because of the time wasted by Boulder PD detectives on a preoccupation with the parents, one or both, as the killers. If that wasn’t enough, the media played along in wild speculations about the family as they were fed derogatory leaks in order to intimidate the Ramseys into confessions. Delinked from empirical evidence, CBS’s “60 Minutes” went on a wild ride to blame JonBenét’s older brother only to suffer at the wrong end of a lawsuit.
On Netflix
Similarly, after a few years, the Boulder PD’s lead detective on the case tried to make another kind of killing by writing a book that tried to accomplish what the Boulder DA and PD couldn’t in a court of law: pin blame on the parents. Like the 60 Minutes’ smearing of the brother, this too ended in a lawsuit with the author and publisher penalized with a sizeable award for the Ramseys.
Don’t think for a moment that we have progressed beyond these barbarities of a few decades ago. Remember the 2020 summer of riots fueled by a noxious, mysterious, hidden, and unconscious racism? What of transgenderism and the assertion that one can feel or think themselves into another sex, all assisted by the rhetorical hocus-pocus of “sex-at-birth” and the invention of a separation of gender from sex? It’s hard to imagine a greater child abuse than placing our children under its spell and sanctioning chemical and surgical interventions and transgender mind manipulation. Welcome to the Island of Dr. Moreau (see H.G. Wells’s story)
The 2020 George Floyd riots in Portland, Ore.Protest in Washington, D.C., June 2020, against “racism”
MAGA has its own fancies. Tariffs are seen as a ticket to national prosperity. They want America to be great again while abandoning Eastern Europe to Putin. Reunionizing the workforce to gain the political allegiance of union bosses and boasting of a return to fiscal sanity while avoiding the trainwrecks of the entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, half the federal budget) is proof that Alice isn’t alone in her Wonderland. They like armies and navies so long as we don’t do anything with them. It doesn’t get much more insane than this.
There’s more. Climate change has the same popular pull as were charges of heresy for the Spanish Inquisition. Think about it. To get from a gradual increase in atmospheric temperatures to herding everyone into electric vehicles and the experiences of blackouts and bankrupting utility bills requires the hasty conclusion that humans are bringing an end to Gaia. The empirical relationship between the apocalyptic hucksterism and warmer weather is, to put it kindly, shaky.
Will any of the so-called remedies do any good? For every 100 electric cars sold in California, China is building a new coal-fired electricity plant. Ditto for India. Any estimates of climate improvement from the bankrupting of the California population are nothing but proof that 17th-century witchcraft is alive and well. Yet here we go with Biden bringing California absurdities to the nation.
Three decades on, we’re still as foolish as ever. Don’t go around holding your head high. Mass psychosis might be in our social DNA. Higher ed, more college degrees, greater “professionalization”, more credentials, and exuberant education spending is hardly a cure. It’s proven to be an accelerant. The country’s next mass mania is just around the corner.
RogerG
Sources:
1. An excellent rendition of this gross prosecutorial misconduct during the time can be found at “The Child Terror”, Frontline, PBS, at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terror/.
2. The Wikipedia page on “Ricard Jewell” affords a description of the basic facts.
3. “THE ‘HERO SYNDROME’”, Sergeant Ben D. Cross, Arkansas State Police, 11/1/2014, at https://www.cji.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/the_hero_syndrome.pdf
4. “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?”, now showing on Netflix; website at https://www.netflix.com/title/81705443
MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough called “the scope and scale” of Trump’s victory “sweeping.”
In the 1992 political war room of Bill Clinton, James Carville famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid!” It became a cliché. To a certain extent, it’s a key factor this year. But more lies underneath the public’s fixation with the economy. A troubled economy can be the product of the wrong sort of beliefs. Furthermore, a constellation of beliefs underlies a whole range of issues as a person addresses their ballot. At this point, it’s gone way beyond the economy. It’s the beliefs, stupid!
While blaming the other side for economic problems can catapult a party to victory, as it did for Clinton in 1992, it can also hide disturbing party ideas that’ll only appear once in office. It didn’t take long for Bill Clinton to uncloak the Democrats’ fetish for government control of almost everything – in this case, healthcare, 17% of the economy. Remember Hillary Care? People didn’t vote for this in 1992. It brought to an end the nearly 40-year Democrat reign of the House in 1995. Welcome to Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Forward to 2024, in the attempted postmortem of Democrat losses, donkey party enthusiasts can’t come to grips with the reality that this radical Left version of the party isn’t popular. For instance, transgenderism swiftly took corporeal form under their tutelage and began wrecking girls’ sports, their bathrooms and locker rooms, and in tandem with the propagation of gender ideology in the schools, adolescents were exposed to porn and gender “transition”. Gender confusion for children and Hustler-grade picture books aren’t winners. Duh!
What were they thinking? The Democrats chided Republicans for bringing it up as if the issue was concocted out of thin air by the GOP and Democrats have nothing to do with it. Really? Rachel Levine (born Richard) as Asst. Health Secretary, Biden’s “God bless you” to Dylan Mulvaney after his endorsement decimated Bud Light, a transgender celebration at the White House, and the manipulation of Title IX to sanction XY “girls” in every place with a Girl/Woman identifier are but a few eyebrow-raisers while parents watched their daughters losing to girls of the XY variety in women’s sports. A hard volleyball smash to the face by an XY “girl” changed a real girl’s life forever. Women’s track and swimming were distorted beyond recognition. Women’s Olympic boxing was nearly turned into a murder scene.
Transwoman Rose Montoya, who bared her/his breast implants at the June 2023 White House pride event.
The muddle of broad American sentiment on transgenderism began to crystalize into general opposition, particularly when asked about specifics. The view hardened as we approached the November 5 election. In 2024, after discussion intensified and baleful stories of the ill-effects of transgenderism accumulated, support for the reality of sex at birth increased to sizeable majorities (65%) (see #1). In 2023, almost 70% of respondents to a Gallup poll viewed biological sex to be the determinant of athletic participation (see #2). YouGov in February 2024 chronicled large majorities opposing the “transition” (“gender affirming care”: psyche control, chemical and surgical interventions) of their children by authorities.
Not only were their daughters threatened by the donkey party but government was herding them into cars that they didn’t want and delivering bankrupting energy costs all around. It seemed that the worst of California had come to their neighborhood, their garage, their schools, the intimate spaces of their homes, in many more ways than the price of eggs. The border was erased and the illegal immigrants were rewarded with plane and bus rides to the interior. Towns and cities and schools and housing and streets were flooded with foreign nationals who simply walked across without our approval (violating our laws). Crime spiked. Who voted for this in 2020?
But somehow, much of the after-election analysis skips all of this and wonders into incoherence. Typical of the foolishness was AP’s Matthew Brown in his “An influx of outsiders and money turns Montana Republican, culminating in a Senate triumph” of 11/22/024 (see #4). He essentially blames newcomers and outside money for Montana Democrat Sen. John Tester’s loss and the state turning red. In fact, as of October of 2024, the Tester campaign had outspent Sheehy $69.6 million to $19.7 million. Groups external to the candidates’ campaigns, all of it outside money, broke roughly even between the two. Adding it up, Tester had the money advantage (see #5).
Supporters cheer at election night watch party for Republican Tim SheehySheehy delivers his victory speech
It showed. Sitting on my perch in northwest Montana, I watched 4-5 Tester ads for every Sheehy one, whether streaming or broadcast.
And what of those “newcomers”? “Newcomers” don’t automatically turn a state red. “Newcomers” attracted to Santa Fe/Taos ambience and the “Rocky Mountain High” turned New Mexico and Colorado reliably blue. It’s also quite possible that the migrations of the 1990’s and the early 2,000’s (to NM and Colorado for example) are politically and philosophically different from those of the last decade and a half. The bulk of recent relocators could be classified as “refugees” fleeing the shift to the radical Left on the west coast, myself included, to outposts in Idaho and Montana. Once again, it comes down to beliefs.
The west coast shifted hard Left after the end of the Cold War. The state of Governor Ronald Reagan began to resemble today’s Venezuela more than the Beach Boys. The counterculture rose to prominence as the governing philosophy. The phenomena spread to Oregon and Washington State.
What was true of the west coast simultaneously occurred in metropolitan areas and college campuses across the country. Our cities became hotbeds of grime and violence. Blue states became infatuated with climate-change ideology and its attendant central planning. Taxes, regulation, and misgovernance spread like wildfire, including the literal wildfires.
Colleges morphed into satraps of the Frankfurt School. What’s that? Marxist academics in the 1920s and 1930s coalesced in Frankfurt, Germany, and formed a “School”, a Marxist think tank hewing to the reformulated Marxism of the Italian Antonio Gramsci. It came to the U.S. as its advocates fled Hitler and took positions in America’s elite colleges such as the University of California, Harvard, NYU, etc. Thus, “woke”/critical theory/CRT/DEI arose as a rigid orthodoxy throughout academia. It’s everywhere, unquestioned, inescapable. It passed down the social digestive tract from faculty to student to K-12 to the commanding heights of the culture. You can’t watch an ad, or most anything from Disney, without exposure to it. The c-suite is consumed by it which explains why, for instance, Wells Fargo ads are filled with their various ways to reinflate the housing bubble of 2007-8, and Big Sports’ infatuation with the oppressor/oppressed schtick.
This Leftist groupthink is manifest in urban nodes where we also find the training schools – the colleges – and corporate headquarters. When put into practice, the orthodoxy drives people away. The consequences overwhelm any initial surface appeal. Local economies are warped as sensitive groups like the middle class, the skilled trades, and manufacturing flee to more hospitable states.
Media people such as the AP’s Matthew Brown, infected as they are with the orthodoxy, don’t get it. The dynamic of push/pull is as evident in politics as it is in economics. People are pushed every bit as much as pulled in a particular direction. Maybe “pushed” is more powerful this time around. Could it be that voters were more repelled by the what the Democrats have become than any great affection for Trump? In other words, has the Democratic Party become repugnant?
If so, well, we’re back to, “It’s the beliefs, stupid!”
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election: 5. Gender identity, sexual orientation and the 2024 election”, Pew Research Center, 6/6/2024, at https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/06/gender-identity-sexual-orientation-and-the-2024-election/
2. “More Say Birth Gender Should Dictate Sports Participation”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 6/12/2023, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/507023/say-birth-gender-dictate-sports-participation.aspx
3. “Where Americans stand on 20 transgender policy issues”, Taylor Orth, YouGov, 2/16/2024, at https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48685-where-americans-stand-on-20-transgender-policy-issues
4. “An influx of outsiders and money turns Montana Republican, culminating in a Senate triumph”, Matthew Brown, AP, 11/22/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/montana-republicans-wealth-democrats-8a1fdd90ef328701127d8a21ebb82dd3
5. “Montana Senate race shatters spending records at $309 per registered voter”, Aubrie Spady, Fox News, 10/24/2024, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/montana-senate-race-shatters-spending-records-309-spent-per-registered-voter?msockid=287a0b967a9564c61c991f537b2f65ee
Get ready. Buckle up. The dysfunction of California is about to become the dysfunction of the United States. Take a look at a red/blue county or precinct election map of California and you will see what lies in store for our country (see maps below). East of California’s Coast Range, and beyond the coastal plain from San Diego to the Bay Area, extends a vast Republican hinterland that is essentially inconsequential to the governance of the state. The same thing awaits the huge stretch of the country between the two coasts and outside the deep blue urban bubbles that dot the landscape like islands in a vast red ocean (see maps below). Furthermore, as urbanization proceeds apace even in solidly red states, they too will increasingly resemble the quality of governance in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and California. Today, urbanization is poison to good governance.
2020 election nationally by precinct
Who’s responsible for this sorry state of affairs? First, the people, whether in town or country. They vote for “wrong track”. Many believe in the impossible, such as bountiful entitlements (unreformed Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid), papering over in trillion-dollar spending bills every grand greenie scheme, a strong national defense . . . and, amazingly, low taxes and fiscal sanity. The tooth fairy anyone?
Second, the Democrats’ base. They are the boosters of America’s institutional socialist party, the equivalent of Europe’s Social Democrats. Well, let’s just call them the Social Democrats. And third, the Republicans’ base. They are in the grip of a psychotic personality disorder, one that emotes in bouts of vengeance, and will blindly follow the person who best captures their sense of resentment and defiance. The result is a competitive socialism and a broad and chronic sense of post-election disappointment.
The “people”, both in their party’s primaries and in the general electorate, choose failure. Let’s not be puerile in blaming somebody else: “elites”, “establishment”, academia, the media, or some other nebulous cabal of the beautiful and hyper-wealthy-and-powerful. We did it; we chose it; we continue to choose it. Period.
Low-information voter
In more sensible times, the Democrats’ socialism should write them off as an electoral joke. Instead, they’re competitive. It’s much more than the wind in their sails from their much larger stable of lefty zillionaire donors and left-wing academic/media commissars who occupy the commanding heights of the culture. Sometimes, your greatest strength arises from your opponent’s weakness. And lately, to the great joy of the donkey party, the GOP base has decided to go bonkers.
The evidence of the Republican voters’ mental incapacity lies in a Democrat Senate (51-49) and their poor showing in the last four national elections in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022. 2016 was a squeaker (No, DJT, you didn’t win by a “lot”.) with a Republican Senate narrowed to a two-seat majority. The 2018 midterms saw our Social Democrats capture the House. 2020 was a Trump loss and a Social Democrat Senate. Then, we had the 2022 midterms. Inflation gripped the country; the national debt exploded; many of our urban spaces are violent open sewers; a totalitarian COVID shutdown destroyed our economy and public schools; our educational system is a mess; housing and energy are out of reach; appeasement foreign policy has made a comeback; the Kabul humiliation; boys are taking over girls’ sports; and a new Axis is turning the international scene into something that resembles our urban spaces. 2022 was supposed to be a red wave but became a desultory mist with a paper-thin Republican House majority that is both ungovernable and too busy neutering itself.
It’s a personality type that seems to attract Republican voters today like moths to a light; that and the endorsement of their new avatar, Donald Trump. The precursor to MAGA was the Tea Party bursting on the scene in 2009. Within Republican ranks, a feistiness was brewing which gave us 2010 Senate candidacies of, for example, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware (the so-called “witch”) who went down in flames. Republican voters had more electable choices at the time – including a former Delaware governor – but favored the fiery type so long as they showed sufficient belligerence. The general election results of that year and following, however, were dismal.
Sharon Angle (l), Christine O’Donnell
Nonetheless, a truculent streak survived to remain a big part of the GOP base’s psychological profile. It’s attractive to them but not much to anyone else. But 2016 seemed to confirm their “wisdom” in the surprising Trump victory. They probably thought that the rest of the country was now onboard with their war against “the establishment”. And then along came 2018, 2020, and 2022, and repeated letdowns for the party. 2024 may yet prove to be a replay of 2022, or worse, and proof of the old definition of insanity falsely attributed to Einstein: “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting ….”
In 2022, we saw Trump endorsements in key competitive races go down in flames: Kari Lake (Az.), Herschel Walker (Ga.), Dr. Oz (Pa.), to name a few. Trump’s pugilistic refusal to accept defeat in 2020 paved the way for Georgia to be represented by two socialists in the Senate. Think of that: Republican governor Brian Kemp – the one who wouldn’t kowtow to Trump’s 2020 election rantings – sailed easily to victory as Walker succumbed to the Social Democrat Raphael Warnock. Even in Georgia, cantankerousness and an “outsider” status aren’t appealing attributes once we leave the tight confines of a party primary. It’s a lesson that today’s GOP base stubbornly refuses to learn.
The GOP base enthusiastically walks into the Social Democrats’ field of fire as the socialists throw money behind the most MAGA-like candidate in the Republican primary. The Social Democrats know something that Republican voters willfully ignore: pugilism in a candidate may whip up primary voters but is an advantage for the opposition in the general election. Funny thing, the Republican base wants Trumpiness and the Social Democrats are happy to accommodate them.
It is for this reason that socialism is competitive. Social Democrats get away with hiding their neo-Marxist roots – don’t expect their ideological soul mates who dominate our media to spill the beans – while Republicans continue to ignore reality. The Social Democrats know how to muzzle their cranks in election season. The GOP gives theirs a bullhorn.
So, expect more boosterism for a culture of death (abortion unrestrained, euthanasia), drug legalization, fiscal stupidity, increasing dependency on public assistance, a dilapidation of national defense, the weight of the Leviathan behind teenage genital mutilation and XY “girls” in women’s spaces, a furtherance of the official pogrom against white males, and the world around you turning to crap. Much of it can be laid at the feet of Republican primary voters for refusing to present viable alternatives.
When candidates like a stroke victim (John Fetterman) and a mentally addled senior citizen (Joe Biden) consistently best MAGA darlings (Dr. Oz, Trump, Lake, etc.), it’s proof that something has gone awry, not with the “system” or the “establishment”, but with the base. In other words, Republican voters are making it easy for the USA to become USC – no, not that USC, the United States of California. California is the template for the entire country, with its dysfunction, greenie totalitarian utopianism, fiscal insanity, flood of refugees fleeing the dysfunction, its feudal society of a shrinking middle class and burgeoning poor amidst the super-rich behind their manor walls.
And watch after this election for the “wrong track” number to hit the stratosphere. The Social Democrats’ base is brainless for its belief in the impossible, such as a prosperous socialism. The Social Democrats in their base are firmly committed to oxymorons. For their part, the Republicans are impervious to simple campaign arithmetic.
Welcome to the United States of California. Yuck!
A man walks along a section of Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles. (photo: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
BLM co-founders from left: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. Pictured at the Glamour of the Year Awards at NeueHouse Hollywood, 11/14/2016. (photo: Jordan Strauss, AP)
Preface:
I wrote most of the following before the release of Matt Walsh’s film “Am I Racist?”. He stole my thunder.
After viewing the film, there are two takeaways. First, jargon-laced pseudo-scholarship predominates in many academic fields, especially in education and the other “soft sciences”. They are laced with the 21st-century’s equivalent of phrenology or astrology. Much that is produced is riddled with the silliness of circular reasoning. How so? They use what they’ve never proven to justify major actions to defeat what they’ve never proven. It’s absolutely embarrassing to watch the drivel take hold.
The peddlers are chasing ghosts of their own fevered imaginations. The absurdities look compelling to the unwary as the proponents beam so confidently and arrogantly in their nincompoopery and glibness.
And this leads to the second observation: it sells to a more than insignificant chunk of the population. Random people sign petitions to rename the George Washington Memorial after Geoge Floyd. They are easily goaded into saying “f*#& you” to a semi-sentient allegedly racist old white man in a wheelchair. Some people, maybe many, are easily shamed into believing the unbelievable, and paying hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars to debase themselves in what can only be described as Maoist shaming sessions. At least Mao’s Red Guards seized, beat, and tortured their victims into the humiliation. They had to be brutalized into demeaning themselves. Not so with these deep-pocketed sheep. Is this what late-stage civilizational decay looks like?
So much for the “wisdom” of the American people. It’s enough to cause the sane to seek refuge in a hermitage.
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Well, here it comes. I’m a “racist” to today’s activist-entrepreneurs who’ve turned racial oppression into a lucrative career. If I am, so is Booker T. Washington when he wrote in 1911,
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
And to think that he wrote it in 1911. He was way ahead of his time. He was branded an “accommodationist” for lacking sufficient militance in that era. Derisive labels are commonplace for this crowd of the race obsessed. That way, these race hustlers don’t have to explain themselves or their political jihads, just spew epithets and force skeptics to cower.
And the hustle certainly pays well. The hustle popularly known as Black Lives Matter (BLM) hit the mother lode on the back of the killing of George Floyd, raking in $90 million in 2020. BLM people, who before were just getting by, became celebrities with real estate portfolios, six-figure consultancies, and five-figure speaking gigs. Self-described Marxist and co-founder Patrisse Cullors fell into the lap of luxury in the purchase of a $1.4 million, 2,370 sq/ft Malibu area home. No more Banquet frozen dinners for this aspiring member of the Fortune 500.
No one really knows what happened to about half of that $90 million windfall from 2020. What we do know is that friends and associates in this hustling conglomerate – now called the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation – are watching as their fortunes blossom. Oppression pays, and not necessarily for the oppressor, but especially for the self-anointed spokespeople of the oppressed. It once again proves that mammalian waste attracts flies.
These champions of the oppressed need to keep the pot boiling. They covet oppression, real or imagined, like John D. Rockefeller coveted crude oil. Into this swamp of race-covetousness dives Hasim Coates. Who’s he? Coates carved a Denver satrap out of this vast oppression-mongering empire. A small fish in an ever-expanding pond, Coates joins Ibram X. Kendi, Kimberle Crenshaw, Robin D’Angelo, et al, in the CRT brigades as they swim about for fun and profit. He’s a fixture on the Denver political scene pushing causes and fellow-travelling candidates, and himself, into the control of Denver schools and wherever he can sell the gambit.
Kristen Fry, left, and Hashim Coates, right (Photo courtesy of Kristen Fry, (Screenshot via Hashim Coates for County Commissioner/YouTube)
Sometimes, people who’ve made a career in noisy hyperventilation necessitate the regular use of epithets, slanders, and smears, but inflate the balloon too much and it pops in their face. Coates’s ears must be ringing after one Denver school principal and mom stuck a pin into his hustle. Coates is a fan of redistributionist justice at the school level (and male prostitutes as it turns out) which translates into the same approach as the “reimagining law enforcement” of wannabe future president and Democratic standard bearer, Kamala Harris. “Reimagining” is making a shambles of the schools like it did our streets.
Coates, a common fixture at Denver Schools’ board meetings, claimed a white woman, parent Kristen Fry, grabbed him and used a racial slur to threaten him. He filed charges with the Denver PD; police criminally cited Fry; Coates won a restraining order against her; and the local DA accommodated by filing charges against Fry. The problem is that there is no evidence of anyone using the “n” word or touching Coates. Surveillance tape shows no touching and witnesses close to the encounter vouch to no use of the slur.
Coates is no stranger to the race hustle in Denver. Now, Fry is suing Coates, one of his associates, and four members of the Denver Public Schools Board for defamation, reminding all of us that the race hustle is still a hustle and therefore open to legal action by its victims. Not surprisingly, many hustlers end up penniless or behind bars. Right now, though, there’s still quite a bit of money left in the game to attract half-witted academics and scammers with the right melanin count, choice of bed partners, genitalia, and pronoun diversity.
Epilogue: Please go see “Am I Racist?”. Matt Walsh does a great job in exposing the baloney.
P.S.: Facebook wouldn’t initially approve this post because it “goes against our Community Standards”. What exactly does? A New York Post article on Patrisse Cullors’s real estate buying binge as one of my sources, that’s what. I removed the source but you can access the piece by searching “Patrisse Cullors real estate buying binge”.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “After Raising $90 Million in 2020, Black Lives Matter Has $42 Million in Assets”, Nicholas Kulish, New York Times, 5/17/2022, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/business/blm-black-lives-matter-finances.html
2. “Who’s In Charge of Black Lives Matter’s Millions of Dollars?”, Robby Soave, Reason, 2/1/2022, at https://reason.com/2022/02/01/black-lives-matter-funding-millions-patrisse-cullors/
3. New York Post article on Patrisse Cullors’s real estate buying binge censored by Facebook.
4. “Radical Activists Nearly Ruined a Denver Mom with Racism Charge. Then the Evidence Came Out”; Ryan Mills, National Review Online, 9/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/radical-activists-nearly-ruined-a-denver-mom-with-racism-charge-then-the-evidence-came-out/
