Posted on

Gaslighting and the Murder of Charlie Kirk

May be an image of text that says 'THAT GASLIGHT KEEPS FLICKERING! IT LOOKS FINE TO ME. YOU MUST BE SEEING THINGS!'

May be an image of 6 people
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
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.”

MSNBC Fires Hideous Hack Matthew Dowd After His Victim-Blaming Remarks About Charlie Kirk ...
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.

May be an image of ‎text that says '‎PEACEFULPROTEST PEACEFUL PROTESTS 4K מרוה ب George GeorgeFLOYD FLOYD 星山红 ganypanyedl ©9/25 CREATERS. COM Charlie Kirk garyvarvel.com‎'‎

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/.

Posted on

A Dying Thought Experiment

May be an image of ‎2 people and ‎text that says '‎CHAF MLS ZEP ILS H F1 כ" LOTTE MIS MLS‎'‎‎
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.

May be a doodle of text that says 'TREAT MURDERERS WITH TUE SAME COMPASSION ASA CANCER OR HEART PATIENT. MAYOR LYLES ganrgpanyel ©9/25 ©9/25CREATERS.COM CREATORS.COM garyvarvel. com'

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?

May be an image of ‎1 person and ‎text that says '‎LASTEGNRENIEN-JOURINAL 2025@CRFATORS.COM WOULDLIKE WOULD LIKE 松 INTRODUCE MY KOMMISSAR ዓ REDISTRIBUTION... YOUR MONEY?!! ខ!! NO NOSIR!! ΑΤ'ς MY MONEY!!! NOW, HAND NOW,HANDit 汁 OVER!! م f Philtes ZOHIRAN for NEW YORK CITY *MAMDANI2025 MAMDANI 2025 X@Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com‎'‎‎

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/.

Posted on

A Marxism for the Right

May be an image of text that says 'ΟκΕ Photoillustration Photo illustration'

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.

Die kritische Theorie der Frankfurter Schule | Oeconomicus

123 anos de Herbert Marcuse - Contrapoder
Herbert Marcuse
Goethe-Universität — Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
Max Horkheimer
Theodor Adorno, quem foi? Biografia, conceitos principais e obras
Theodore 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.

May be an image of 2 people
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.

May be an image of text that says 'arthat.ctad rtho det detectad THE THEDEE THEDEEPSTATE DEEP STATE'

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.

May be an image of 2 people, television and newsroom
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.

May be a doodle of text
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.

May be pop art of 1 person and text that says 'AWRZ AF ASVFGABRENIEW-SOURNAT. 2023 ©CREATORS.COM DiSNEY D Snow Polychrome and SEVEN VERTICALLY VERICALLYCHALLENGE CHALLE CHALLENGED BUT BUTSOCIALLY CONSCIOUS CLIMATE CLIMATECHANGEa CHANGE amo GENDER ADVOCATES I DON'T KNOW WHY WE'RE LOSING MONEY. Loities รู่กุนพมา 生來で WOKE @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

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.

Posted on

Car Enthusiasts, Your Life Is About to Change for the Worst

May be an image of 3 people, snowplow, car, jeep and text
Ford 2021 Bronco SUVs on the assembly line at the Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Mich., June 14, 2021. (photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters)

Sometime in early 2027, President Trump will probably be impeached . . . again. Why? When the party in power botches things, they’re normally punished at the polls — “It’s the economy, stupid!” Inflation, shortages, business closings, people thrown out of work, recessions/depressions, etc., won’t make for a winning message. That bodes ill for the already impeachment-prone Trump, leaving aside the question of the legitimacy of any effort to remove him from office.

People are already lining up to do the favor, or predicting it. The reliably extremist Democrat Al Green (the one removed for disrupting President Trump’s March 4 speech to Congress) announced in February (see #1), “This president is unfit.” Further in the well of the House he said, “I rise to announce that I will bring articles of impeachment against the president for dastardly deeds proposed and dastardly deeds done.” Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon agrees. Four days after the November 4 election, Bannon augured (see #2),

“Hakeem Jeffries could be, will be, the speaker of the House in two years. And the first thing he will do in the early days of 2027 is move to impeach Donald Trump. Trust me. They’re gonna put $10 billion in back of him [to take the House]. They have nobody else.”

Trump is behaving in ways to prove them right. People vote their pocketbook. It’s more than a cliché. It’s true. Stake out a position that leads to harming the voters’ children and personal fortunes and they will send you packing. Biden and Kamala Harris, et al, are proof of concept. Trump is determined to join them.

I can’t think of a more politically self-destructive act than laying waste to a good portion of the economy just in time for the 2026 midterms. His tariff war – 10% across the board, 25% on our neighbors, potentially sky high on everybody else, and the concomitant uncertainty from all the flip flops – will wreak havoc on everything, maybe with the exception of most food processing. We’ll have food, but to hell with an affordable car, or truck, or SUV, or van, or 18-wheeler, if you can find one. Expect long lines at the grocery store filled with people holding food stamp (SNAP) EBT cards.

To bring home the consequences of the Trump foolishness, let’s just take a look at the rear undercarriage of an “American-made” SUV as it passes from the U.S. to Mexico, to Canada, and back to the U.S. The inputs for just the suspension strut towers go from Pennsylvania to Coahuila, Mexico, to Livonia, Michigan, for final assembly. The differential gearbox begins with aluminum from Quebec, then to casting in Coahuila, then for machining in Ontario, Canada, and then to North Carolina for assembly. The rubber bushings for the control arms starts with synthetic rubber from Monterrey, Mexico, and then to Iowa for their attachment to the control arms. The suspension’s cradle is from Kentucky, and other pieces such as the trailing blades and brackets emanate from Kentucky, Ontario, and Puebla, Mexico.

May be an image of text

Assembly of the various parts into a rearend occurs at Vaughan, Ontario, and Detroit. Then it is rushed to Kansas City, Mo., Fort Wayne, Ind., and Windsor, Ontario, etc., for attachment to the final product. Under Trump’s tariff regime, the final product will be hemorrhaging blood from his tariffs. It’s insane.

Why the circuitous route? Doesn’t it seem unnecessarily complicated? Those questions would arise from your typically myopic and autarkic central planner, people like Peter Navarro and Donald Trump. This process pencils out in terms of value-added and cost-benefit according to the people with skin in the game. That’s what a market does when allowed to operate freely.

Why not just disentangle the various paths and make it all occur in the U.S.? Go ahead and try. Uprooting the suppliers and their plants will come at a terrible cost and take years. In the interim, people will be going to the polls to vote against the wreckage. The complexity of disentanglement was nicely expressed by Flavio Volpe, president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, when he compared it to an omelet: “You can’t unscramble it once it’s done.”

Trump is Don Quixote charging windmills. Biden wanted to shove us into very expensive golf carts masquerading as family sedans. With Trump, even that screwball option may not be available. I don’t know about you but I’m keeping my 10-year-old Tundra and 9-year-old Venza. Buying new ones is likely to be a nightmare. Expect the entire auto industry to pull back as well. Now that’s the making of economic hard times.

Will the Democrats finally succeed in adding Donald Trump’s scalp to their lance this time? Well, as they say, third time is the charm.

May be pop art of 1 person and text

May be an image of text that says 'SVEGASREVIE LABTEGABREVIEN-BOURNAL JOURNAL 20240CREATORS.COM 20240 CREATORS COM 6＃?！！ # TRADE WAR CONSUMER U.S. BIZ HAWLEY SMOOT. X@Ramireztoons RETALIATION michaelpramirez.com'

RGraf

Sources:

1. “Donald Trump Faces New Impeachment Bid After Speech to Congress”, Martha McHardy, Newsweek, 3/5/2025, at https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-impeachment-al-green-2039765
2. “Steve Bannon Warns of Potential Third Donald Trump Impeachment”, Aila Slisco, Newsweek, 11/8/2024, at https://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-warns-potential-third-donald-trump-impeachment-1983079
3. Thanks to Ryan Mills of National Review for his piece “North America’s Auto Supply Chain Took Decades to Build. Trump’s Tariffs Could Crush It” at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/north-americas-auto-supply-chain-took-decades-to-build-trumps-tariffs-could-crush-it/

Posted on

The Hunter Biden Pardon: Politics Produces Hypocrites (Or Hypocrites Produce Politics)

May be an image of 6 people and beard
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.

1960s Pop Culture: Lyndon B. Johnson: The Most Interesting & Crazy of Them All
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 Vacay On Taxpayers Dime: Shows Off 2 Huge Fridges & Tons Of Ice Cream | Opinion
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.

May be a doodle of text

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/

Posted on

It’s the Beliefs, Stupid!

MSNBC "Morning Joe" co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough on Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024 after the election was called for Trump.
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.

May be an image of 11 people
Transwoman Rose Montoya, who bared her/his breast implants at the June 2023 White House pride event.

May be an image of 2 people, people playing voleyball and text

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).

May be an image of 1 person, dancing and crowd
Supporters cheer at election night watch party for Republican Tim Sheehy
May be an image of 2 people
Sheehy 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!”

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'RANIRZ 20240GREACAS.COLAEWASHISIO 202 STEEAS TEAASEEVI REVW JOURRAL THE WASHINGTONE TAET FOST 20240 DAKRIS CREATORS. coM BIG GOVERNMENT SOFT Regulations FAR cn OPEN VICTIMHOOD LEFT CRIME BORDEA RAMA 4.0 RAISE PROGRESSINVE TAXES DEFUND 太太太太大地 HOW it olicies EQUITY IT'Sthe ThE EVENPOSSIBLE EVEN CONO 材 LOSE to TRUMP? STUPIL iture NAR POLICE 大 EQUALITY MANDATES BIDEN2.0 EXTREME GREEN TEACHERS UNIONS ONER PARENTS GENDER THEORY DE! IDENTITY POLITICS SPEND BIDENOMICS 島口 PK WAIZ VOTE FILDISIER STER WOKE PRONOUNS TAM ۷ X@Ramireztoons Ramireztoons michaelpramircz.com'

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

Posted on

The Election Was a Rejection of California

May be an image of 1 person
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks on Oct. 7, 2022, in Sacramento, Calif. (photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

Why the focus on California?  Simple, California is the head of the progressive snake.  Its ideological tendencies permeate the national Democratic Party.  Our Vice President, and their losing candidate for president, was politically bred in the specialized, socio-political one-party petri dish of – you guessed it – California.  California Democrat muckety-mucks populate Biden’s executive branch posse with a left coast view of the world.

Let’s take a look at California’s election results to get a hint of the chaos and what could have been in store for the rest of us.  Wait, they aren’t finished counting in the golden state, and won’t be till Dec. 3, maybe not even then.  Speaking of chaos.  The state has turned itself into a model of election incompetence, and the national party has adopted it, seizing the COVID panic as an excuse to nationalize the falderol.  Much vote fraud was legalized, or made easier to go undetected.  Mail-in ballots, election season instead of election day, ballot harvesting, a profusion of provisional ballots, failure to clean voter rolls, and, here’s the kicker, the “curing” of ballots, were pioneered in California.

What’s the “curing”?  “Curing” is how the entrenched party discovers new votes.  First, the state’s Democrat honchos know the state’s blue precincts, for there are many, and target the “curing” on them.  “Curing” refers to seeking out a voter who didn’t properly submit their ballot – missing signature, unmatched signatures, wrong envelope, etc. – and is allowed to correct the mistake (Hmmmm!), and, all of a sudden, a Republican victor on election day wakes up to their loss a couple of weeks later.

Millions of dollars in Democrat war chests exist to fund the cherry-picked treasure hunt.  Gov. Newsom has millions left over from his recall treasury to devote to combing blue precincts for more votes.  Interesting question: Why vote in elections that have more in common with the shams in Maduro’s Venezuela?  California, Californezuela.

If Venezuela’s lefty caudillo, Nicolas Maduro, was California’s governor – no, it’s not as crazy as you think – he’d probably adopt Gov. Newsom’s appropriation of John C. Calhoun.  Remember the nullification crisis of 1832?  South Carolina asserted the power to prevent the enforcement of federal law (the tariff) within the state at the urging of the influential John C. Calhoun.  That’s “nullification”, and blue state fiefdoms in the mold of California have been doing a form of it for decades regarding immigration law.  Newsom doubled down on nullification-lite when he blustered after the election (see #1 below), “The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack [after Trump’s victory] — and we won’t sit idle.”

What freedoms?  The “freedom” to obstruct immigration law by blocking the cooperation of state and local authorities?  The “freedom” of government employees (teachers, administrators) to hide from parents the porn curriculum in third-grade classrooms or the transition of their daughter into a son, all backed up by the Democrat AG Rob Bonta?  The “freedom” of XY “girls” to occupy girls’ spaces and sports?  The “freedom” of the state to undermine out-of-state parenthood by its self-designation as a transgender sanctuary state for minors from anywhere?  The unlimited “freedom” of a woman to end the life of her baby up to the exit from the birth canal, maybe after, who knows?  The “freedom” of the state to force you onto government mass transit or into dopey EVs?  The “freedom” to experience bankrupting utility bills, blackouts, brownouts, and hypothermia after the nuking of nuclear power and fossil fuels?  The “freedom” of the state to be the missing link in the supply chain from ship to shore at its ports by mandating EV 18-wheelers and locomotives, something that doesn’t exist or is impractical beyond measure?  The “freedom” of the state to run you out of business?  The “freedom” to pay more for everything and fewer jobs to accomplish the feat?  The “freedom” to be harassed on everything you say or do, especially religiously?  Thanks, Newsom, for the “freedoms”.

Biden followed the California script.  Biden’s version of fiscal responsibility is additions to the national debt going from $1 trillion every 100 days in 2021 to today’s $1 trillion every 200 days.  Either way, your kids are being robbed.

California is tax-happy and adores the issuance of gobs and gobs and oodles and oodles of bonds.  Propositions 2 and 4 (school building, water/flood/drought projects) on the California ballot appear to be headed for approval. It’s astounding that the state’s current budget of $311 billion and its panoply of taxes, taxes everywhere aren’t enough.  $25 billion in more debt will be added to the outstanding total state bond debt of $79 billion, and more than $1.6 trillion if you combine state and local obligations (see #3).

California pulls out its credit card, and so does Biden/Harris/DNC; only the feds have a much more robust one, one without limit.  They can gin up the money supply by making dollars appear out of thin air.  They’ve got a Federal Reserve.  Thus, they borrowed California’s fiscal philosophy to achieve new heights of inflation.  The old Keynesian adage of spending in bad times and saving in good times was jettisoned.  It’s just the spending now, no need for the saving.  With the pandemic over and recovery well under way in 2021, and Biden filled with delusions of FDR grandeur, the Democrats jumped at the chance by piling $6.17 trillion of new debt onto the backs our kids (see #5).  What did we get for it?  Problems . . . and a few EV chargers.  Sounds like California.

The country became a goat rope in the manner of California.  Every celestial grouping in the radical-left progressive universe was hyped up on taxpayer dollars and deficit spending.  It was enough to make drunken sailors appear judicious.

They were doing everything but the bottom-line function of government’s existence.  Namely, safety and security.  We have a Vice President who personally gave money to bail out rioters, under the euphemism of “protesters”, who were responsible for making hell zones of our metropolitan downtowns.  It did nothing but cause the price for out-bounded U-Hauls to skyrocket.

All kinds of bedlam were celebrated on Capitol Hill and the White House.  Gatherings of the transgendered were held at the White House with participants exuberantly baring their surgical scars and implants to the world and the assembled press.  In the midst of the 2020 riot season and later, the Democrats went full neo-Marxist in Capitol kneelings, calls to defund the police, “reimagining” policing, and full DEI racism.  Hiring practices throughout the executive branch were altered as part of the war on merit.  A candidate for air traffic controller was golden so long as they exhibited the appropriate intersectionality.

As for the border, it became the apex of bedlam.  Not only was the border patrol turned into the Welcome Wagon, but the border jumpers were rewarded with gifts and jet flights to the country’s interior to the chagrin of local officials.  Certainly, in this instance, crime does pay.  And to think that there’s an entire wing of the Democratic Party devoted to California’s favored position on immigration law, which is decriminalization.  They’d like it to be the equivalent of a jaywalking ticket.  Harris, their choice to accelerate the misrule, tried to hide her own calls for California-style immigration chaos but failed.  Chaos, chaos everywhere, from girls’ bathrooms to the border.

This election was a repudiation of the worldview of 60-65% of the California electorate.  The rest of the country rejected the state’s favorite daughter and its approach to governance.  When the donkey party decided to go full California, the rest of the country said, “Whoa, whoa there!  We won’t sign onto a California neo-Marxist revolution.”

There, that’s my take on what happened November 5.

May be an image of 1 person and text

May be an image of text

May be an image of laundromat and text

RogerG

Sources:

1. “‘We won’t sit idle’: Newsom goes on offensive against Trump”, Wes Venteicher, Politico, 11/7/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/07/newsom-california-legislative-session-trump-resistance-00188119
2. “2023-24 State Budget”, State of California, at https://ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2023-24EN/#/Home
3. “Overview of State Bond Debt Service”, California Legislative Analyst’s Office, 2/27/2024, at https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/798
4. “California State and Local Liabilities Total $1.6 Trillion”, Edward Ring, California Policy Center, 2/28/2022, at https://californiapolicycenter.org/california-state-and-local-liabilities-total-1-6-trillion/
5. “U.S. debt by president: dollar and percentage 2024”, Annabel Burba in Consumer Affairs, 11/7/2024, at https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/us-debt-by-president.html

Posted on

Is Kamala Harris a Marxist?

Kamala Harris is an ‘airhead’ | Sky News Australia

No, but not because she isn’t unwittingly trying to be.  For her, Marxists are communists who are meanies, much like Cinderella’s stepmother.  Deep down inside, she, in the manner of all who rose out of the California one-party tar pit, has an abiding affection for much that lies under the Marxist rug.  For her and all her delirious fans, James Lileks, essayist and satirist, has produced a concise description for Kamala and her classmates in his hypothetical history class.  Here it is:

“Communism was invented by a hairy, smelly dude who sat in the library all day writing an explanation for why he was broke and ignored.  He came up with some ideas that appeal to people who think they can figure out a secret special formula that explains everything and also has the totally coincidental outcome of giving them stuff they didn’t work for or deserve, at the expense of successful people with lots of friends and hot wives and steady access to a bath so that people don’t faint when they walk into the room.

“This system is utterly at odds with human nature, history, economics, and common sense, and hence it is beloved of two kinds of people: college professors who can fasten on a fat Western college like a leech on a whale, and clever sociopaths who can use it to exert power over the masses.  It killed millions in the 20th century, yet we are told true communism was never tried, which is like poisoning 200 million people with a dose of arsenic and insisting they would have been fine if they’d been fed twice as much.  Any questions?”

I don’t think Kamala is listening.  She’s too busy passing notes.

May be an image of ambulance and text

RogerG

Posted on

A Blue-Collar Command Economy, or The Blue-Collar Suck-Up

Trump Hard Hat
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump (photo: Mark Lyons/Getty Images)

Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, first verse:

“I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she would meet her connection
At her feet was a foot-loose man
No, you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime, you’ll find
You get what you need”

Needs and wants, there’s a difference.  Mick Jagger knew it.  Needs are fundamental; wants are desires, the things that we would like.  In normal times, the two are mangled beyond recognition, doubly so in election season.

Both parties – one a neo-Marxist enterprise, the other a personality cult – are in a mad dash to pander to the so-called middle and working classes, non-college educated.  By so doing, the two parties in this time of voting advocate a command economy for the benefit of this general mass of people who work by the clock, do contract labor, and own small businesses.  Here’s a splash of cold water: command economies don’t work, no matter their alleged beneficiary.  Why?  They’re commanded by the government, it’s employees and politicians.  Any goodies granted one group come at the expense of the others, not just the rich, and will include many in the middling ranks of the socioeconomic pyramid.  It’s the philosophy of beggar-thy-neighbor.  That’s all that governments can do.  Any bennies for blue collars – or the middle class – will come at the expense of the gradual negation of their own jobs and the futures of their children as future growth is diminished by “fair share” demagoguery against the rich.  We’ll pay in more ways than one, not just at the checkout counter.  The economic math is inexorable.

Though, to be real, today, the college-educated aren’t any more cognitively advantaged than the non-college educated.  Many BAs, maybe most, are just proofs of indoctrination in claptrap.  Indoctrination is not education.

The claptrap may help explain the broad acceptance of economic nonsense.  A belief is deeply embedded that our specie of unionization is good, that you can wall off the country from foreign competition, hike taxes on the rich, and ignore the rest of the world, and everything will be hunky-dory.  That isn’t a realistic game plan.  It’s merciless, incremental national suicide.

Anyway, such is the political fashion of the time.  Warning: fashionable politics and economic good sense don’t mix, like drinking and driving.

Profoundly galling is the demagogic blue-collar suck-up from both parties in the form of a love affair with “coerced” unionization, for that’s what we’re talking about, coerced.  Of course, “coerced” is a yucky word, so they want to leave it at simple “unionization”.  But honesty demands that we realize that the NEA, AFL-CIO, SEIU, the Teamsters, the entire litany of labor monopolists, actually demand “compulsory” (coerced) membership for everyone in the workplace.  These folks aren’t into “voluntary”.

Their political word play doesn’t clarify squat.  More of the word play clouds the picture even more.  Coerced unionization comes in something referred to as “collective bargaining”.  The question is, for them and everybody else, how to make a “collective” out of an inchoate mass of workers of divergent individual interests and beliefs?  Answer: set up a system of legal protocols to force everyone into the thing, that’s how.  A monopoly of labor under one set of masters, that’s how.  Use the power of the state to impose one man, one vote, one time, since it’s harder than hell to decertify the labor monopoly once it’s established.  After the initial certification vote to create the thing, you might be able to opt out, but you’re still going to have to pay for the thing (in California, “agency fees”).  And don’t underestimate the organization’s creative bookkeeping to vacuum as much as possible out of every employee’s paycheck into the union treasury.

And guess what the dues-fueled slush fund goes for? Politics and more politics.  These unions realize that their very existence is dependent on the power of the state to create and enforce the protocols that create them.  Their existence and power are dependent on the state.  Limited government, on the other hand, by definition, leaves little opportunity to hobnob with politicians to make law to squash dissenters at the workplace.  That’s the reason for the unions’ hearty distaste for our constitutional republic.  By definition, a constitution limits government power to what’s written.  Big Labor demands what’s not written and therefore legally impermissible, and progressivism obliges.  Progressives (in today’s parlance, neo-Marxists), as the unions’ chief political benefactors, simply interpret The Constitution out of the way by calling it a “living constitution”.  How convenient.

In the end, these politically privileged labor monopolies cannibalize their own industries and morph into pillars of radical cultural revolution, ready to join their lefty comrades at the parapets. Industries flee their self-destructive grip; opportunities decay for upward mobility; many of its members discover their daughters sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with XY “girls”; and their schools, streets, parks, and downtowns are dangerous pits of despair. So much for “look for the union label”.  This ain’t your grandpa’s UAW.

In fact, the UAW eyes richer fields to plow in organizing tomorrow’s cultural revolutionaries in the growing cadres of college teaching assistants.  Imagine it, your son or daughter might be taught or their papers graded by a Hamas-loving activist who can’t be removed due to the protective political and legal force field provided by the UAW.  It’s happening in California.  The UAW has jumped on board the organizing gravy train of public employment, the very thing that has rendered California irredeemably ungovernable.  California’s one-party state has turned itself into a clone of the Islamic Republic of Iran or the CCP with the guardians of the revolution, like the mullahs or the Party politburo, being the cabal of labor mandarins who were empowered by the very same state government that they now dominate.  For the worker bees, they mostly approve of this arrangement so long as the pipeline of bennies keeps flowing, a glaring example of stage one thinking.

“Most thinking stops at stage one.” — Thomas Sowell in Applied Economics

17 Best images about Thomas Sowell on Pinterest | Sociology, Economics and Liberalism
Thomas Sowell

Stage-one thinking?  Sowell defines stage one as a myopic concern with only the immediate consequence of a proposal or action.  Then a sharper mind, in response, forces the person to address, “Then what?”  After a series of then-whats, the person quickly realizes that their great idea is buffoonery.  But don’t expect much stage two or three among most of those without a BA, and many of those walking around with one.  According to a Pew survey from 2019, those with less than a college degree are four-and-a-half times more likely to view our participation in the global economy as a bad thing (see #1 and #2 below).  Blue collar support for a wide range of foreign engagements has been waning for years.  But then what, after the tariffs and abandonment of Ukraine?

You see, a stage-one buzzword of the Left has entered the lexicon of the Right: industrial policy, which basically translates into raising the economic drawbridge in international trade.  It parallels Lenin’s infamous “central planning”.  In central planning, the government manages, or directs, the economy to mold the “better society”.  Whose better society?  Of course, it’s the one in the mind of those perpetual obsessives who’ve spent their adult lives in fevered hatred of the existing patterns of life.  The mental pathology infects the Left, and now the virus has come to the Right.

Quote of the Day: Hayek on Knowledge | Learn Liberty

The scheme runs four-square into Hayek’s “knowledge problem”.  Their end state of bliss – America First – demands great power in the form of more government interventions to direct the lives of millions of economic actors acting both as buyers and sellers, consumers and producers, taxpayers and beneficiaries, in the whole range of possible economic activities available to each one of these participants.  Such knowledge and wisdom are beyond human capacity, let alone the people manning the controls of the massive administrative state, the Fed, congressional committee staff, local planning commissions and boards of supervisors, a state’s Dept. of Fish and Game, Coastal Commissions, or the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the people who’ll enforce Trump’s tariffs.  It’s a fool’s errand, but one, today, the Right seems anxious to pursue.  Read J.D. Vance’s or Donald Trump’s speeches.

The people who don’t like you driving a Toyota are the same people who see no reason for NATO, an independent Ukraine, protecting Taiwan and its Taiwan Semiconductor, or preventing the oil-rich Middle East from becoming the playground of the mullahs.  For stage-one thinkers, anything beyond our borders places an out-of-sight second to the extortionate goodies made possible by a cozy relationship with accommodating politicians.  Don’t expect stage-one thinkers to have a grasp of the world war stage-setting in the 1938 Munich Agreement.  Aggression was rewarded and soon we were embroiled in a total war of 80 million deaths, civilian and military.

Iwo Jima Photo Taken 70 Years Ago Today - David Hume Kennerly
Scene from the Battle for Iwo Jima, Feb.-March 1945

We could have stayed out as the first edition of America First in 1940 demanded.  It took a brazen surprise attack to shock stage-one thinkers into realizing that events an ocean away can lead to Americans dying in large numbers.

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” — G. Michael Hopf in his novel Those Who Remain

Though, are we the same kind of people who could tolerate the bloody storming of the beaches of Iwo Jima and D-Day’s Omaha, or show persistence in the horrid conditions of Okinawa, the Hürtgen Forest, or the Battle of the Bulge?  One has to wonder.  Our elections are a barometer of the public psyche.  Look at the pitches, now from both sides.  Our elections are looting expeditions.  Republicans promise not to touch our bankrupting entitlements while delivering on all manner of goodies to the middle class and blue collars.  Ditto for the donkey party, only by a factor of ten. It’s all billed as fair-share justice when in reality it’s just targeting the successful to bankroll their pet social engineering schemes.  Being spoon fed from the public treasury isn’t a promising approach in preserving a hardy people.

The Democrats used to be the party of government command and control. Not any longer.  The Republicans offer a similar farce.

Think about it. What’ll happen in this command economy of the Right is a replay of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (Simpson-Mazzoli) signed by Reagan.  We got the amnesty but little of the other component: enforcement.  Trump will get his tariffs – something the Democrats are already giddy about – but won’t get much regulatory relief, the very thing that makes us uncompetitive with the rest of the world.  The blue-collar suck-up in the form of compulsory unionization also awaits.  We might get some reprieve from the greenie totalitarianism, but NIMBYism remains a populist obsession.  Republicans have no stomach to fight hikes in the minimum wage, nor the other humungous host of mandates that raise the cost of doing business in the U.S.  The tariff wall goes up and we will wallow in our own petri dish of fiscal and regulatory incontinence.

Prices will rise, and we may not even notice it.  Higher prices only become apparent if there is a point of comparison.  Where’s the comparison after walling off the competition?  However, we will see an economy frozen in amber, limping along, with accountability and the essential force of creative destruction limited to those smaller firms without an intimate relationship with powerful politicos.  The big government of the command economy necessitates big business.  Big government and big business are Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum.

The Toxic Relationship Between Big Government and Big Business - Cecil County Conservative ...

Welcome to the cesspool of the blue-collar command economy and an electoral choice between detestables.  That’s our choice this time around in the presidential sweepstakes: a California totalitarian with a velvet glove or a self-absorbed panderer.  Oh, the panderer is “tough”, but only tough on foreigners and not to some within his own ranks who unwittingly demand undeserved and extortionate privileges.  Which one of the offerings do you dislike the most?

For me, I’ll put on the hazmat suit and vote for the bombastic panderer.  Somehow, a cultural revolution of porn to grade schoolers, teenage genital mutilation, XY “girls” everywhere in women’s spaces, eat the rich, carte blanche abortion inclusive of pedicide (killing of children), and greenie totalitarianism seems to be more Orwellian than the tariff buffoonery and blue-collar suck-up.  There, I made my choice.

May be an image of text

RogerG

Sources:

1. “6. Views of foreign policy”, Pew Research Center, 12/19/2019, at https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/12/17/6-views-of-foreign-policy/
2. “Majority of Americans take a dim view of increased trade with other countries”, Pew Research Center, 7/29/2024, at https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/29/majority-of-americans-take-a-dim-view-of-increased-trade-with-other-countries/

Posted on

The United States of California

Bye-bye California: More and more golden state residents are deciding to move away for good. (photo by ©SFGate)

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.

May be an image of map and text
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.

National Donors Keep Tea Party Losers Angle, O'Donnell on Political Stage | Fox News
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.

May be pop art of text

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.

May be an illustration of text

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.
A man walks along a section of Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles. (photo: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

RogerG