The Smallest Minority

I ran across this yesterday, but forgot to post it when I got home. Mea Culpa: I Was Wrong About 2020 by Capt. Seth Keshel from his Substack.

I’m going to quote the whole thing here for future reference:

Humility is never an easy thing to display.  No one likes to admit fault, and that task gets increasingly more difficult as time marches on especially if you’ve invested countless hours, interviews, speaking appearances, and conversations into a cause.  As you’ve surely noticed, very few medical personnel who invested so heavily in the COVID-19 lies and propaganda have set aside hubris and come out with their own mea culpa.

Given that five out of every eight American likely voters distrust the results of the 2020 presidential election, my previously expressed positions don’t exactly put me in rare company; however, Reuters, The New York Times, NPR, and an endless list of assorted global, national, and regional publications have done everything in their power to run me off the road since 2021.  I’ve spent plenty of time ripping them in return, correcting their careless and novice mistakes, and rubbing their faces in their perpetual misery, even though they control practically all levers of power in our governments, federally and in the states.  Even though this has brought about cause for fun and camaraderie, it is important for me to finally own it…

I was wrong about 2020.

Sure, there are always some issues with elections, and with over 150 million ballots counted, it is inevitable that someone somewhere will vote twice – but no state was decided by closer than 10,457 votes.  At some point, we must move on.

For enabling distrust of our government and its election systems from her own citizens, I owe a great debt I fear I cannot repay.  After all, government officials would never preside over a system of elections that would potentially oust them from their positions of power, which provide prestige, access, and a career of notoriety.

Pennsylvania may have voted for Trump in 2016, after three decades of not backing GOP presidential nominees, and in its first evaluation of him as president seen the Republican Party out-register the Democrat Party by a ratio of 21:1, but clearly it was time for Joe Biden, five decades into his political career and as sharp as ever, to overtake Barack Obama’s record vote total in the Commonwealth the same year Donald Trump did the same.

In Wisconsin, we were only convinced something was wrong by our own desires to see Trump win.  It is perfectly normal, after watching Trump cruising to what appeared to be an inevitable landslide win on Election Night, for a ballot dump 85/15% in favor of Biden at 3:45 a.m. to take place, affording Biden a narrow victory after mail voters were allowed to get around identification requirements if they belonged to a category of voter called “indefinitely confined,” which just happened to be four times larger in 2020 than it had been in the previous election.

Election workers in Detroit were most likely impaired from tabulating ballots by some sort of glare pouring in through the windows of the TCF Center, requiring them to put up obstacles that supposedly blocked the operation from view of an unruly mob outside the facility.  Even though one of the Republicans tasked with certifying Wayne County’s results reported being coerced to sign off on them, it doesn’t mean we can just raise holy hell for three years and never take strides to get over it.  We were so unruly, Attorney General Dana Nessel had to threaten to use the police against those who were upset over the way the people expressed their political will.  That is not what the Republican Party is about.

Nevada has it in the law that they don’t need to count drop box ballots for a week after elections, and not only did those two counties who are most effected by that ruling provide the margin of victory for Biden, they did it again in the 2022 midterm U.S. Senate race, even providing the exact percentage split Adam Laxalt found unlikely and went to great lengths to advise his social media followers of.  We must accept laws that provide counties that contribute a disproportionate percentage of a state’s vote an opportunity to overcome small counties, or we are no better than the left who cries “foul” at every turn.

Georgia was primed for a blue turn, especially after the largest Republican gain in two decades in a state that Biden didn’t campaign in.  While Barack Obama gave it his best shot and came up short twice, it was Biden who truly motivated Atlanta’s black vote to get out to the polls in numbers that overcame a deficit of more than 300,000 votes near the end of Election Night.  Mistakes happen, and Brad Raffensperger is allowed to make them, too – even if it meant saying Georgia had 4.7 million votes cast on live TV the morning after the election, just weeks before it certified 5.0 million.

Arizona perplexes many, but just because every Republican but one had won the state since 1952, including Trump in 2016 when he won Maricopa County with fewer votes than Romney had in 2012, doesn’t mean that the Republican incumbent setting single-cycle record vote gains in both the state and in Maricopa County is going to hold it.  All it took was a gain 2.5 times larger than the largest Democrat vote gain in one election ever to pull off, and our friends at Fox News knew it with less than 1% of the vote counted.  Arizonans simply missed the normalcy that comes from not having John McCain in the Senate lobbying for the next place to send young Americans to valiantly serve their nation.

I could go on and on.  The case was there, and in some cases, it was made in front of courts who have affirmed Joe Biden’s half century of public service was honored with 81 million legitimate votes.  That ship has sailed now.   Just because it takes weeks to count votes in some states, but only hours in others, doesn’t mean we need to discourage others from participating in our democracy.  Instead of being selfish and wanting people to leave their homes to vote, we should deliver the disenfranchised the ballots ourselves – or better yet, lobby the government to allow everyone to text in their ballot choices.

If Republicans want to win – then the choice is clear…

Ballot harvesting will clearly change the game.  Government may close down the economy to alter the rules to win elections, use large pools of funds on personal largesse, promote diversity over real skill, crack down on some forms of speech but permit all others, weaponize the agencies of government against political opponents, and destroy every financial setup that is created in the name of security, but they will certainly tabulate ballots accurately for candidates who seek to vanquish everything they have ever created.  To believe anything else is un-American, and quite frankly, un-Democratic.

All the Republican votes you ever dreamed of lie just beyond the gated entryway of a secluded, upper-middle class neighborhood in Lampeter, Pennsylvania.  Sure, they couldn’t be bothered to vote with the fate of the country on the line in 2016 or 2020, but they are there, damn it.  Just because ten activists harvesting a single project for two hours in Philadelphia may net hundreds of votes in Democrat margin doesn’t mean we shouldn’t redirect our efforts elsewhere to find a dozen members of a sleeping Republican voter base that will surely be ready to vote now that Automatic Voter Registration has taken the headache of registering to vote away from them.

It’s not the system that needs an overhaul.  It’s us.  Why complain about Joe Biden winning Automatic Voter Registration states 18 to 2 (243 electoral votes to 9), when we can rub it in their faces that they’ll never have West Virginia, and will need to wait at least a decade to have a crack at Alaska?  We need to stop finding negative in everything and look for how to see the glass as half full.  The left has their loud voices, sure, and we tend to paint all of them with the same brush.  Imagine this situation:

Joe Biden is President in 2020, up for reelection, instead of Trump.  He wins 18 of 19 counties nationally that have perfectly aligned with every election winner since 1980, wins four states that, when won together, have gone to every winner since 1896 (thirteen times), and by virtue of having the fourth highest share of party primary vote of all time, clearly possesses the full support of his party, destroying any narrative that there is a mutiny from within the party that will doom him.  From coast to coast, his base is organizing miles-long car parades and spontaneous boat parades in even the reddest of states.

He romps to an apparent massive victory, not only grabbing up the swing states, but giving Trump a run for his money in Texas, Ohio, and South Carolina, of all places.  Suddenly, after Americans have gone to count sheep expecting another four years of building back better, they wake up to find that it was Trump who miraculously turned the tide in Michigan and Wisconsin, flipping them immediately.  Within days, Trump also reversed his deficits in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, winning them narrowly.  When the counting is done, despite a gain of more than 20% in total votes, Biden becomes the first incumbent president to gain votes from his previous election and lose since Grover Cleveland in 1888.

The left would accept this, just like they peacefully accepted George W. Bush’s eyelash margin in Florida in 2000, which had to be greenlighted by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Despite their palpable anger over every hot-button issue, such as the George Floyd riots in 2020, no American cities would be burned to the ground in protest of Trump assuming the controls at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Why?  Because of our democracy.  Trump may have had the yard signs, the boat parades, and the rallies that filled entire stadiums and left a nearly equal population outside the stadium watching on overflow screens, but 2020 was just the perfect storm in that Americans were hungry for Biden’s third presidential run and enthused by his list of accomplishments in the Senate and Vice-Presidential offices since 1972. Never has China had such access to our leadership before – now that is building bridges, not bombing them.

If you’re reading this, I hope you understand why I’ve decided to walk back three years of commentary and own it.  You may be shaking mad, or maybe you’ve come to grips with how we are finally going to turn the tables and win these elections if we beg the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors not to shut down our voting machines on Election Day, and perhaps prepare for it like hostages by voting early. 

But most sincerely, I wish all of you a…

HAPPY APRIL FOOLS’ DAY!

Let’s do it again THIS YEAR!

In the 1980’s Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov gave a series of lectures and interviews where he warned what the Soviet plans were to basically overthrow the West. One of them is here. I recommend you watch the whole thing, but the key of it starts at 1:08.00. It’s the four stages of Ideological Subversion to defeat a nation from the inside.

As he put it, Ideological Subversion is “To change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, that no is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country. It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow, and it’s divided in four basic stages, the first one being demoralization. It takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of their enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism.”

Note that in the 1980’s he put the timeline as already having brainwashed “at least three generations,” or 45-60 years. Here we are 40 years further on, and as he says, you can see the result.

So step one: Demoralization – to literally destroy the moral foundation of the target nation through its children. He said that this process was basically complete at that time. We’re five or six generations along, now. When this began the “useful idiots” went for the movers of culture – entertainment and education – where they could spread their ideology into those soft heads. It has spread exponentially until they control the newsrooms, universities, school boards, and Tinselgrad.

Step two: Destabilization – It takes 2-5 years to destabilize a nation, he says. “What matters is essentials: Economy, Foreign Relations, Defense.” What he left out was cultural division. This has been achieved. We’re $34 trillion in debt and climbing rapidly. Our allies don’t trust us, and our enemies believe us weak. Our defenders have been demoralized and severely weakened, but are constantly spread thinner and thinner, not to mention all the frontline weapons we’re shipping to a foreign nation with little willingness to replace or upgrade it. We pulled disastrously out of Afghanistan without even informing our ally Britain. Under Obama, officers that showed patriotism, excuse me, extremism, were purged. Under Biden the enlisted class has suffered the same. Our military leadership is more concerned about transphobia than being able to fight a war. The U.S. military cannot meet recruiting goals, and for the first time in history a significant percentage of military families are telling their children that the military is not a good career choice.

Step three: Crisis – a violent change in power structure and economy. And here we reach Election 2024. A significant portion of the population – the real victims of the demoralization stage – are convinced that 100 million Americans are their enemy and want to vote for a dictator they’re doing everything short of assassination to keep off the ballot. And failing. The 100 million Americans in question are finally beginning to recognize that the brainwashed can’t be reasoned with, and literally want to “fundamentally transform” America into “Their Democracy” – unchallenged rule by Democrats. At a minimum, they believe that some very hinky things happened in 2020, they’ve seen the blatant Lawfare against Donald Trump both civil and criminal, and listened to the wild rants accusing Trump of everything from (literally) sucking Putin’s penis to his desire for “a bloodbath” if he loses. They’re learning that the Democrats really do hate America and want to “fundamentally change” it. And not in a good way.

Assuming Trump lives that long, when the polls close Tuesday, November 5, 2024 it’s going to get interesting. I certainly don’t expect the contest will be decided that night. The Left has already figured out how to delay the counting as long as it takes to “find” enough votes to win. The question is, what happens when the dust settles? Regardless of who wins? Will either side accept a win by the other? Or will we get a crisis that precipitates that “fundamental change”?

I’ve concluded that what we’re approaching is what the Left has patiently pursued since the 1960’s – destruction of our Constitutional Republic. And they very well might get it.

So Illinois passed Public Act 102-1116 that went into effect January 1, 2024. Basically, the convoluted language of the bill requires Illinois gun owners to register their “assault weapons,” any .50 caliber rifle or cartridge for said .50 caliber rifle, and “attachments” for their assault weapons which include:

(i) a pistol grip or thumbhole stock;
(ii) any feature capable of functioning as a protruding grip that can be held by the non-trigger hand;
(iii) a folding, telescoping, thumbhole, or detachable stock, or a stock that is otherwise foldable or adjustable in a manner that operates to reduce the length, size, or any other dimension, or otherwise enhances the concealability of, the weapon;
(iv) a flash suppressor;
(v) a grenade launcher;
(vi) a shroud attached to the barrel or that partially or completely encircles the barrel, allowing the bearer to hold the firearm with the non-trigger hand without being burned, but excluding a slide that encloses the barrel.

Anyway, all Illinois FOID holders who own said weapons or accessories were to register them online by January 1, 2024. Failure to do so is a Class 2 felony, punishable by 3-7 years in prison.

According to this YouTube video, here’s how that’s going:

So compliance seems to be about 2% at best.

Good on ya, Illinois. I wonder how soon there will be an arrest and prosecution under this law?

And I note, if you don’t possess an Illinois FOID card, but do possess a firearm, you won’t be punished under this law. So the gang-bangers who are doing almost all of the shooting are unaffected by this latest “gun control” measure.

Typical.

I pulled the trigger, so to speak, tonight and reserved site 57 on the berm for Boomershoot 2024. This will be my third trip. My first was 2009 and second 2016. I’ll be taking the .300WM Remington 700 5R, and probably my Ruger Precision in .308. Possibly the Power Tool again, too.

I’m right next to a friend on site 58, so we can spot for each other, but there’s space available if you want to join me.

The shoot is May 3-5 in Orofino, Idaho, and it starts off with a BOOM!

The dictionary definition of “existential” is “relating to existence,” so an “existential threat” to something is a threat to its existence. Another Chicxulub meteor impact is an existential threat to most life on Earth.

An existential threat justifies extraordinary actions, including but not limited to lawbreaking, violation of mores, etc. An armed robber is an existential threat to you. Killing that robber is justified by the seriousness of the threat. It’s homicide, but not murder to defend yourself when threatened.

“Global Climate Change” is pushed as an existential threat to all life on Earth, so apparently gluing yourself to a roadway or splashing tomato soup on classic paintings is wholly justified. So is sabotage and arson of construction equipment.

Jeffery Epstein was an existential threat to a lot of very powerful people.

So when you see headlines like this, you have to wonder what people will be willing to do to stop that existential threat:

Trump Movement Poses ‘Existential Threat’ to America: NYT Editorial Board – Newsweek

Biden argues Trump is an existential threat to America – ABC News

Donald Trump Is an Existential Threat to America and the World – Time

Why Donald Trump poses an existential threat to the future of the Republican Party | CNN Politics

Trump Is an Existential Threat – New York Times

Trump an Existential Threat: Messina on 2024 Polling – Bloomberg

Public intellectual Sam Harris, who is a philosopher, neuroscientist and author, was on a podcast wherein he defended the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. This man who advocates for Truth and Reason argued that it was a good thing that the story was suppressed, but he went even further:

Absolutely it was. Absolutely. But I think it was warranted. I don’t care what’s in Hunter Biden’s laptop. At that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared.

“He then pivoted to an outlandish analogy that compared keeping Trump from winning a second term to working to ‘deflect’ an ‘asteroid hurtling toward Earth.'” (Source: New York Post.)

See what I mean?

So, SWAT raids on his home? Warranted.

Treason accusations? Warranted.

Rape accusations? Warranted.

Bogus prosecutions? Warranted.

And none of this is apparently working. He gets more popular every day.

Trump takes significant polling lead over Biden in presidential race

So, if he’s an existential threat and none of that is working, what’s next? Who’s willing to do what to deflect this asteroid?

I guess those Sweet Meteor of Death memes were kinda right.

In August of 2010, just two years after America’s housing bubble collapsed taking world economies with it, Boston University Professor Emeritus of international relations Angelo Codevilla (PBUH) published his essay, America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution. It was, I think, a crucially important piece, and not just for the United States. I urge you to read, as they say, the whole thing, but for the purposes of this piece, I’m going to limit myself to a couple of excerpts.

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use.

This is fairly new in the United States, but I think relatively common in many other nations where there has always been a Ruling Class that often acts against the wishes of the majority of the population. And I want to concentrate on the universality of this Ruling Class as it exists in the Western world and beyond. Codevilla again:

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

Again, this is new to the U.S, but what has changed is that the Ruling Class elites of other nations, not limited to the West, were also formed largely in that same educational system. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and such, and not only nationally but internationally our Ruling Classes exhibit very similar attitudes and ideologies. For example:

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

This “Saviors of the Planet” attitude is hardly limited to the U.S. The divide here is more pronounced now that I can remember, and I’m approaching 62 years of age. I suspect it’s larger in other nations than ever before, as well.

I’m going to skip most of the rest of the piece, but again I seriously recommend you read it all. What I want to get to is this:

Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg’s tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences “undecided,” “none of the above,” or “tea party,” these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate — most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class’s prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans — a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents — lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority’s demand for representation will be filled.

(Bold emphasis mine.) Remember, this was written in 2010, long before Brexit and Donald Trump. Now we have:

• Brexit vote in June, 2016
• The election of Donald Trump in November of that year
• The Trucker’s Convoy in Canada
• The rise of the Farmer’s Party and of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands
• The overthrow of the Sri Lankan government
• The election of Giorgia Meloni in Italy
• The election of Javier Milei in Argentina
• Irish anti-immigration riots

As of this writing, Donald Trump is the leading candidate for President of the U.S. come 2024. Voters in many other nations are voting “Other” such as the example of the Farmer’s Party in the Netherlands, Meloni and Milei.

It would appear that what Codevilla termed “The Country Class” worldwide has decided to start demanding representation.

Whether that turns out well or badly depends on how the Ruling Class responds.

So far, it’s not looking good.

• Mass surveillance of the populace
• Systemic censorship
• Indoctrination and propaganda in the schools and media
• A One-Party state, with control of elections
• Criminalization of dissent
• Suppression of religious liberty
• Political prisoners

Back in 2004 blogger TheGeekWithA.45 wrote in his post “The Surreality of it all…“

When I was perhaps nine or ten years old, I envisioned that the world in general and the government in particular was run by enlightened, virtuous men and women who proceeded forward in a wise and principled manner, striving to uphold lofty ideals, placing the interest of the People before the interest of the State.

{Pause to allow catcalls, smirks and hooting to die down….tapping feet….waiting patiently….looking at watch….beseeching heaven….ahem. Now I’ll continue.}

Obviously, the experiences of my life have taught me otherwise, but nonetheless, I do not begrudge my younger self’s naivete. That experience, even illusory, provided me with a precious and irreplaceable gift, something that far too many people will never have. For a few brief shining years, I was old enough to understand high ideals, and inexperienced enough to see how their implementation falls short in the world. In that state, I saw America not as it was, but as it should be, its promise completely and utterly fulfilled. The dazzle of its full glory will never fully leave my eyes.

I was right there with him. But then he also wrote:

We, who studied the shape and form of the machines of freedom and oppression, have looked around us, and are utterly dumbfounded by what we see.

We see first that the machinery of freedom and Liberty is badly broken. Parts that are supposed to govern and limit each other no longer do so with any reliability.

We examine the creaking and groaning structure, and note that critical timbers have been moved from one place to another, that some parts are entirely missing, and others are no longer recognizable under the wadded layers of spit and duct tape. Other, entirely new subsystems, foreign to the original design, have been added on, bolted at awkward angles.

We confer amongst ourselves, comparing what we see with the original blueprints, and the massive stack of tomes that are the revision manuals. We scratch our heads, and wonder if the self-corrective mechanisms, dimly seen deep in the interior maintain enough integrity to actually work. We step back, and squint, and watch the thing at work. Yes, gears are spinning, and cogs are turning, and there are interesting whoomphity whoomph sounds coming from it, but it seems that the output is pale and inferior, like grocery store branded cola.

That is not all that we see. As we pry our eyes from the shed in which our beloved old machine wheezes and coughs through the day, we notice that there is an assemblage of parts and subassemblies scattered about the green. Some of them are old, bits of flotsam and jetsam from history, and some are relatively new, having been hauled onto the commons to deal with recent events. Some of them are already turned on, and are spinning away, while others churn over only occasionally.

We’ve seen them there before, but we’ve never really SEEN them in quite the way that we see them now. Lately, they’ve been shuffled around a bit, as if to be assembled into something new. The way they have been shifted around suggests a purpose. The way they lay they all line up in a certain manner.

We who understand the forms and shapes of these things are alarmed. We recognize those shapes, and what they would become if pushed together, connected, and powered up.

We’ve seen them before.

We know the tools and mechanisms of oppression when we see them. We’ve studied them in depth, and their existence on our shores, in our times, offends us deeply. We can see the stirrings of malevolence, and we take stock of the damage they’ve caused over so much time.

Others pass by without a second look, with no alarm or hue and cry, as if they are blind, as if they don’t understand what they see before their very eyes. We want to shake them, to grasp their heads and turn their faces, shouting, “LOOK! Do you see what this thing is? Do you see how it might be put to use? Do you know what can happen if this thing becomes fully assembled and activated?”

RTWT.

Hopefully you’ll be able to view this Facebook video by Virginia State Congressman Nick Freitas. I can’t find it anywhere else. It’s well worth your three minutes and fifteen seconds.

Update: Reader Miles copied it to YouTube:

(But of course, they won’t.)

Quote of the Day:

The real conspiracy is the same one you see everywhere. Government officials always assure us that we should hand over control and authority to them because they are “experts” who have our best interests at heart, but in reality, they are often clueless or inattentive to the bread and butter issues that can make or break a community.

Government is not and never will be some omnicompetent savior, and we have to abandon the idea that it is or can be. That doesn’t mean abandoning government agencies that can help, but it does imply that we shouldn’t rely on them and certainly shouldn’t take their word on anything. – David Strom

Maui Response is a Disaster

In 2020 I wrote this:

In 2021 Time magazine published this piece:

Excerpt:

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted.

—

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.

Today we get this:

Excerpt:

A “rigged” election is not the same thing as a stolen election; stealing requires changing votes. “Rigging” is about changing the rules, the information landscape, or other factors that can influence voters using illegitimate means. Spreading misinformation can be a form of rigging, as of course censorship or “debunking” of true information.

I couldn’t say if the 2020 election was stolen–there certainly were irregularities as there always are in elections–because any vote changes or illegal ballots have to be in the right place in the right numbers, and no evidence has been accepted by courts indicating that enough illegal votes to change the results were cast.

And of course now we have lawfare against the leading candidate for the Republican side just as the 2024 campaign season is spooling up.

So, in honor of all that, let me present the new flag for the People’s Democratic Republic of America!

I’m not sure how long it will last, but it promises to be unpleasant.