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Is DEI really gone with Claudine Gay’s departure from Harvard?

So embattled plagiarist and Mein Kontext-touting DEI diversity-hire Claudine Gay resigned from her crazy person high perch at Harvard University on New Year’s Day 2024. Good. Apparently Harvard University’s board decided that setting their reputation on fire to save this incompetent buffoon was not such a good idea.

Interesting how those “reasonable man in the street” trade-off decisions work when unfettered free market forces are at work, right? I mean, Harvard could have decided that Claudine Gay was the ultimate symbol and pinnacle of American academic achievement, notwithstanding all of her now oh-so-public failures of scholarship and loooow moral character, and then staked the school’s reputation on their choice to keep her in place forever after.

But what Harvard faced with Claudine Gay as president was receiving eternal dismissive sneers of 90% of the America that Harvard deigned to sneer at. Being on the receiving end of moral judgment and intellectual mockery is not where Harvard’s caretakers see the institution or themselves, and so they had to cut loose the anchor that was dragging them down into the depths. Bye-bye Plagiarist President Claudine Gay, you will not be missed.

Is her dismissal the sign that normal, healthy, honest, hard working, tax-paying, meritocracy-loving America has been waiting for? You know, the beginning of the end of the evil DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) fad that bizarrely swept across America? DEI, the racist, mean spirited, violent, anti-intellectual, Neo Nazi anti-meritocracy belief system touted as the utopian solution to all of the ills that America never experienced, was what Claudine Gay represented and symbolized most. And with her sudden departure, DEI has taken a big hit.

Others are pointing out the delicious irony of Claudine Gay having in effect been “canceled,” because she, Ms. Gay, was the ultimate canceler of innocent people at Harvard. She of low quality and even lower achievement was the destroyer of their hard-earned careers and lives, and the brutal enforcer of the arbitrary and subjective standards for which DEI is best known and despised.

If Harvard University had at one time been best known for rigorous intellectual debate and achievement, and academic scrutiny, Der Fuhrer Ms. Gay took the school back to the Stone Ages with her implementation of DEI’s racism and savage cruelty. It was one way or the other, and Harvard was definitely going backwards at rocket speed under her watch.

Whether or not DEI is now on the chopping block remains to be seen. My sense is that rumors of its sudden demise because Harvard’s Wicked Witch of The East is now gone are greatly exaggerated, because if there is one thing the Left does not like doing, it is going backwards in their Long March against Western freedoms. Claudine Gay may be gone at Harvard, but look to this so-called “school” to select someone just as horrible as Ms. Gay, or even worse, to make their point that they and they alone now own Harvard.

Harvard U is fake, no longer “Harvard”

The plagiarism scandal around Harvard University’s low quality, diversity-hire president Claudine Gay has now destroyed not just Gay’s personal and academic reputation, but Harvard’s as well. Harvard is no longer an academic institution based on rigorous intellectual debate and merit, it is a nakedly and proudly political activism site motivated by far left wing ideas and values.

In her PhD dissertation (the subject is useless nonsense and subjective fluff), Claudine Gay plagiarized material from a number of authors and academics, not the least of which was her own PhD dissertation advisor at Harvard. Her plagiarization has led to a lot of discussion across the Harvard University campus, some academic advisory boards, the Harvard University board of trustees, academics, racially-based groups, and American society. Understandably so, because Harvard University has been the flagship educational institution in America since its founding nearly four centuries ago.

Harvard’s reputation has always rested upon two simple things: 1) The highest intellectual rigor for its students and its educators, 2) the most exclusive and competitive screening of its students and its educators. For hundreds of years, to either teach or be taught at Harvard has been the gold standard for academic achievement in America and worldwide. The cold and uncaring application of logic, reason, proofs, and meritorious capability have winnowed the desirous from the truly stellar there for centuries. Well, no longer and not any more, as Inspector Clouseau said as he smashed the priceless Steinway piano into splinters.

The debate about whether or not Claudine Gay has the academic merit and the necessary high character to remain as the university’s president has torpedoed Harvard’s reputation. Simply because the widespread formal response by Harvard University to Gay’s failures of judgment and moral character, and to her academic cheating, has been to not only allow her to stay on as now a really, really blatantly incompetent diversity hire (no white man or white woman in that position would have ever made it beyond the first few minutes of this multifaceted crisis), but to also literally allow Gay to cheat even more, only this time in public.

Claudine Gay is now being allowed to retroactively amend her PhD dissertation with the necessary citations and quotation marks that were missing when her doctoral thesis was approved. This is like the judge allowing the robber to go back to the bank and put the money back in the vault, in order to avoid being charged and held accountable for the original crime of robbing the bank, now that the robber has been caught.

Gay is being allowed to do this re-crime so that her detractors are no longer empowered with the truth, so that they can no longer accurately accuse her of academic cheating. And for those who don’t know it, academic cheating is an automatic FAIL on every real academic report card, and it is usually the means for ejection from whatever school the cheater is enrolled at.

Harvard University’s board of trustees and the academics behind this brazen sleight of hand have basically told everyone in academia, in research and development, in the business of important ideas, and in the competitive world of merit that some animals are more equal than other animals, and that there are harsh rules for everyone, except for those few special people who some remote, self-anointed elite group has artificially determined should not be judged by the same standards as everyone else.

No society can sustain itself with this kind of fake justice system, or this kind of fake educational system. With this decision to both allow Claudine Gay to retroactively amend her already finalized dissertation, and to retain her as president, every single internal brake and decision-making system designed to ensure that all of Harvard University’s outputs are the best possible on Planet Earth have failed.

It has been determined by the powers that be at Harvard that the institution is now a (leftist) political activism center with no intellectual rudder, no universal standards for behavior or achievement, no universal code of conduct. Only subjective political decisions will be used henceforth to run the school, and we now see that certain skin colors and certain Marxist outlooks will be the preferred choices.

There are a lot of things I did not expect to see in my lifetime. I did not expect to see a presidential election fraught with so many wild irregularities across so many states and jurisdictions. I did not expect to see the entire media establishment and the entire political establishment not only fail to address those electoral irregularities, but to jointly sweep everything under the rug, declare a winner who had not even campaigned in public, and to accuse those who questioned the election results as “election deniers.” I did not expect to see the force of law be used against the “election deniers” for questioning the outcome and legitimacy of the questionable election, and who have since become persecuted political dissidents and outright political prisoners in their own “democratic” country. I did not expect to see the rule of law fail as widely and as quickly as it has, and I did not expect to see the rise of a totalitarian federal bureaucracy as fast as it has happened.

I also did not expect to see America’s flagship academic institution (the school now formerly known as Harvard University) gleefully burn down its own reputation in a public bonfire of vanities.

With all of these spectacular and unbelievable failures, Harvard’s just being the latest, we are seeing the severe cultural rot America has been experiencing since the 1960s finally come to fruition. All of the cultural safeguards, institutions, and legal infrastructure designed to keep America functioning as a constitutional republic are failing and being failed on purpose and in front of our faces. We are told by the agents of these failures that we must accept these outcomes not as failures, but as inevitable changes necessary to re-make America into the socialist utopia it was always meant to be.

It now seems possible not just that the Hamas loving racist academic fraudster Claudine Gay will be retained by Harvard as its president, but that she could be forcefully installed by the federal bureaucracy and its media wing (not elected by the people) as the next president of the United States “for our own good.”

Symbols have now officially become more important than facts in America. We all see that Harvard is fake, and we are told that it is still Harvard.

 

Speaker Johnson’s religious behavior

Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson is being widely criticized in the mainstream media for kneeling in prayer while on the job the other day. I watched one mainstream media TV personality take Rep. Johnson to task in an interview, about minding the supposed “separation of church and state,” and “keeping prayer in private,” and not letting it out into the public sphere.

Pretty curious approach, given that across America and Europe hordes of bloodthirsty primitives have also recently knelt in prayer in public spaces, promoting baby butchery, baby baking, and gang rape with a huge helping of subsequent mutilation and torture on Israelis, to the great joy of mainstream media. Why all these sincere people, just look at them, bless their hearts. Get them some brown shirts and night sticks.

The Left’s love affair with radical Islam is no secret, and it is just and fair to say this love affair exists because both the Left and radical Islam seek absolute destruction of Western Civilization with a resulting dominion over everyone and every thing on Planet Earth. The Left and radical Islam have a common cause, and whatever differences they have will be settled between one another once people like Rep. Johnson and his religion are out of the way. Keep this foremost in your mind as the drumbeat about Rep. Johnson’s Christian practice goes on.

Couple of things about this Mr. Smith Goes To Washington’s religiosity.

First, Christianity is the founding belief system of America, albeit that was a nascent and broad minded Protestantism that immediately resulted in the anti-slavery abolitionist movement. America’s pilgrims and Founders also identified strongly with the Jews’ quest for freedom from evil tyrant Pharoah, and with the Torah’s value-laden story of that quest. And so thousands of towns and locales across America are named after Biblical places like Hebron, Shiloh, Judah, Bethany, and Zion. Christianity’s sacred Judaic touchstone places, and their inherent unspoken values, are interwoven into the cultural fabric of America from our very beginning.

Second, Christianity is still the main and largest repository of morality and right action in America. This is a cold numeric fact, not a defense of or advocacy for Christian theology. As sad and deflated as American Christianity is right now, it is nonetheless still the biggest single force for all things good and for  learning about good values in our nation.

You oppose Christian theology? OK, so what is your suggested substitute in its absence here in America? Atheism? Well, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Stalin are all great advocates for atheism and horrible, unjust places to live. Judaism? You think 200,000,000 Americans are going to convert to orthodox Judaism? Never! There would be an immediate and everlasting shortage of pickled herring, and so the rabbis would never allow it. Radical Islam will cut your throat, cut off your head, or throw you off a roof, sometimes all three, so nah, hard pass on that, right?

So, I say an occasional annoying knock on the door by some nice church ladies is a small price to pay for living happily in the most successful nation in the history of humanity.

The Left’s attacks on Christianity are strategic. If they can brow beat, shame, drown, flood, and eliminate Christianity, they will eliminate America’s renewable, sustainable, organic cultural source of opposition to the Left’s tyranny, immorality, and evil.

The Left has gotten really creative about their attack on Christianity, and they have only succeeded to date because of the long flaccid acquiescence of American traditionalists and Christians, and by the Left’s official enablers, the GOPe. By accusing Christians of establishing religion when they merely practice it, a la Rep. Johnson, the Left has appealed to the First Amendment’s clear prohibition against establishing a formal state religion for America. And yet, the truth is Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims all are merely expressing their First Amendment rights when they pray in private or in public. None of their public prayer behavior establishes any of these religions as the de facto state religion of America.

What the Left really objects to is anyone actually seeing the Christian religion practiced in public. Their message is it’s a dirty practice that people ought to keep to themselves behind closed doors.

Rep. Johnson’s public prayer on the US House of Representatives floor is an in-your-face to the tyrants and cultural Marxists in the mainstream media. And of course history is on the side of Rep. Johnson, because the US House of Representatives opened with public prayer for I don’t know how long, but for the vast majority of the chamber’s existence. And when inaugurated in 1789 as America’s first president in Manhattan, New York, George Washington led a grand procession to Trinity Church on Wall Street, where he led an hours-long prayer service.

It is only when America now finds itself in the throes of hypercoagulative materialism that its own long and deep religious roots, and religion’s fruit-bearing shading branches, become anathema. So what a breath of fresh air is this Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, this cherubic Rep. Johnson.

Don’t stop, Rep. Johnson, for all our sakes, I pray you, do not stop and do not back down, and may you shine as a beacon light to Christians everywhere, and may that rallying light shine and defeat the cruel darkness that is swallowing my civilization. I may not agree with you on the particulars, but by God I will defend your right and our collective necessity to have you pray in the US House of Representatives.

Either Christianity will save America as a free constitutional republic, or America and western civilization will die.

May God bless you, Rep. Johnson.

Racist, violent, weird New York Times has to go away

When I was a kid, and we are talking over half a century ago, the New York Times newspaper was a daily thing, a weekend-long hit, a week of solid reading starting on Sunday morning, and a year-long fixed institution of America’s cultural and political landscape.

The NYT Sunday Edition was about six to seven inches thick starting around ten in the morning, and included incredible analyses of real estate markets, emerging technology, strange and interesting people and places in America and around the world. The Sunday Times Magazine had a fashion section that even a young boy could relate to, not because I liked fashion per se, but because the female models were beautiful to look at. And occasionally only semi invisible behind their colorful shmatas. Its real estate section was so good that even as a kid I enjoyed reading about stairs, table tops, and bars inside Long Island homes.

The NYT Sunday Edition had enough information for an entire week of fascinating reading on every subject known to modern civilization – science, technology, medicine, history, politics of course. Especially the obituaries and the wedding announcements, all of whom involved who’s-who people who we may not have even realized were major players in whatever given field they were in. Brilliant nuclear engineers who lived quiet lives in New Jersey, but who had invented something awesome that ended up powering all of suburban America suddenly had their great last reveal in the Sunday Edition obituary section. Who knew? He (and she) was a who’s-who!, we exclaimed to each other across the room. So much fascinating and rare information was contained in that one section among a dozen such amazing sections.

In our family, people grabbed their favorite section of the hot-off-the-press NYT Sunday Edition around 10:00AM and, with a plate full of lox and bagels, knish, and maybe some creamed herring with crackers, then grabbed a corner of a couch or a chair at the dining room table and sat and read deeply. Occasionally to exclaim something fascinating to the room full of other lox-and-bagel eaters equally entranced by their own compelling subject, pages turning with a rustle almost like a Fall wind rustling dry sycamore leaves in Central Park. And this weekly ritual involved kids and adults alike. Which I still think is a pretty fascinating statement about the complexity and value the NYT brought to the American table at one time. It was a real repository of valuable information, even if its fashion models occasionally had a nip-slip that intrigued a couple hundred twelve-year-old boys across America once a week.

To say that fifty years ago, and heck even thirty-some years ago when I was in grad school, that the NYT was the acknowledged and designated curator of American culture, literature, movies, arts, food, politics, etc. was no big thing. Conservative icons like William F. Buckley had no problem admitting the NYT’s supremacy, and he also admitted he was merely nipping at the NYT’s heels with his own National Review magazine.

While just a newspaper, the NYT was a massive institution with hundreds of intellectually curious people working in its busy beehive on just about every subject known to modern humans. While the NYT always had some sort of liberal-left tilt, it was mostly nuanced; that was rarely put on public display. Because to do so would be to reveal a deep bias at the great institution that would undercut the paper’s acknowledged claim to being the curatorial keeper of the American flame.

For the NYT to do a Big Political Reveal would be to alienate a large part of its audience, if not all of it. Because while traditionalist Americans did in fact revulse at the NYT’s hideous partisan caricature that greeted them especially in Sunday opinion essays in the 1990s, they still could find bits and pieces of meaning and value here and there in the capacious rubbish heap. Not so in the 2000s, when liberals-with-a-brain-and-a-conscience also began to recoil at the NYT’s ever more brazen partisanship, as seen daily in its “news reporting” that read like an English version of the Soviet Union’s daily Pravda: One political party was always bad, the other was always good. Republicans were always mean and stupid, Democrat politicians were always witty, smart, enjoyed the NYT cross word puzzles, and well intentioned if occasionally murderously drunk or rape-inclined.

You did not have to be a conservative to see the very low value in an outlet that makes no effort to tell the other side of the story. Every intellectual wants to know the full story, and while the NYT catered to people who saw themselves as intellectuals, they no longer (if ever) behaved or thought like intellectuals (curious people open to new information).

Well, well, well, how have times changed. No pun intended, the NYT has indeed really fallen badly since its heyday of the 1940s-1980s. Today, the NYT is a shell of its former self. In every way, including the slim to non-existent and almost meaningless Sunday Edition. Its owners and publishers have so garishly embraced a single corner in the boxing ring that they are in essence burning the wood from the NYT’s walls to keep their lights on and heat going, acting as their own termites gutting their own home to stay alive while simultaneously causing the home to collapse. They make no apologies for telling blatant lies and abusing their remaining readership.

Having avoided almost all things New York Times now for several decades, I still receive the paper’s emails. But what have we here in these digital missives, but cheap traders hawking an embarrassing array of cheap and weird goods: Sleep aids, insect repellant, protein bars, the Mediterranean diet available at a click here or there, and of course, everything imaginable that could be construed or cobbled together to be negative about President Trump.

However, if the once mighty NYT now stoops to deal in tawdry middle class diet aid clickbait and 100% fake news political red meat for its dwindling, clueless, bubble-and-silo’d ultra partisan readership, it has finally gone one too far: Yes, the New York Times supports calls for racial genocide against white/ European farmers (and everyone else who has white skin) in South Africa.

South Africa may have been a fundamentally unfair place for black Africans to live for a few hundred years, but at least it was highly functional and its quality of life for most people was a hell of lot better than the nomadic hunter-gatherer cannibals the Boers encountered in the 1600s. South Africa is now a dysfunctional, dystopian, genocidal racialist state that purposefully discriminates against the European people who grow the country’s food and who cater to the valuable safari tourist trade. South Africa is following in the steps of former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, its neighbor, where racist and genocidal Africans tortured, murdered, and drove out the European people who grew all of the food and did all of the engineering stuff for the entire nation. Zimbabwe sucks. Its public water supplies have dangerous parasites. Its corruption and lawlessness are legendary. So this is where South Africa is headed? And the NYT is cheering it on?

I look at the NYT now with more than fifty years of readership under my belt. Where I used to count the Sunday Hirschfeld comic Nina names hidden among the artist’s slashing style (my own middle child is named Nina in large part because of my childhood-into-adulthood fondness for the Hirschfeld comic search each Sunday) as a kid, I now see not-so-hidden Nazi swastikas and revolutionary torches and pitchforks. How far this institution has fallen. It is a crumbled ruin, a shadow of its former self. It isn’t even a Pravda, whose grinning grotesques at least openly acknowledged the 100% lying propaganda fake news. No, this is a ramshackle, collapsing shell housing a few dozen racist maniacs pounding feverishly away at their typewriter keys, raw and hell bent on a violent and bloody racist revolution across the planet. The once curious and magical place is really gone.

The New York Times deserves to be canceled. Don’t drink water out of the toilet and don’t read the New York Times. Anyone  subscribing to this garbage is a shameful person. An outed dingbat, a dumbkopf, a kook, a Nazi or at least a Nazi collaborator.

For shame.

An aggregate of Al Hirschfeld cartoons where his daughter’s name Nina was often hidden, the number told in the artist’s signature. This was the height of the NYT’s more innocent times

 

Trump is you, Trump is America, Trump is a canary bird

No one person in politics better embodies America’s best qualities, such as equal opportunity for anyone willing to work hard, than President Donald J. Trump. He really captures and represents the good things that America has stood for at least since World War Two.

Yes, the man has his weaknesses, and who doesn’t. His swagger and gregarious personality repulse the faint hearted and attract the confident. His one juvenile locker room-type comment caught on tape is lame, and it also pales in comparison to the violent rapes committed by Bill Clinton. But Trump’s detractors don’t really care about Bill Clinton’s actual sexual assaults, or Obama’s gross homosexual locker room liaisons, or Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia and sexual assaults of children along with his long list of ultra wealthy donors from just one political party.

Nope, to his opponents Trump is just a bad guy, the one and only bad guy, and he is all they can talk about, think about, and rail against. And in response, I say all criticism must be made in context to others in the same position. And on that count, Trump is like a ten year old kid on his bicycle with training wheels earnestly challenging a 1957 Corvette to a road race. It’s laughable to compare him to sincere criminals and deviants like Clinton, Obama, Joe Biden, and Epstein. Trump has the cleanest hands of any person in American politics in many decades.

In fact, Trump is such an outsider to American politics that nearly everyone in American politics hates him and fears him, because he just can’t be bought, and he refuses to buy into their anti-America-money-is-everything arrangement. A second term of President Trump threatens to overturn at least fifty years of cozy Uniparty corruption and misallocation of American taxpayer public dollars. And so the 2020 election had to be stolen from the American People right in front of our faces, and now that the 2024 election looms, the entire DC Beltway is at war with Trump. He is literally the ham sandwich that got indicted.

Trump has been indicted for things no one in America has ever been indicted for. He has been indicted for things that other people, like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden have all done or are actively doing right now without any legal or even social repercussion. Official documents in Biden’s garage? Whatever. Tons of documentation that the entire Biden family is a treasonous influence peddling scheme? Whatever. But apparently Trump must die in prison for having taken his own documents home after leaving the White House.

A friend of mine, albeit a lobbyist, recently said to me that Trump is surrounded by “too much drama.” Yeah, well, war is drama because war is hell, and Trump is at war with the forces of evil because they declared war on him and you and me.

President Trump is not just some guy. He is not just some guy who bucked “the system.” Trump is THE guy who tore the mask off the criminally corrupt vampires illegally feasting on the American taxpayer and draining the American body politic down to a hollow husk that can then blow away in a faint breeze blowing from the East. And so he now faces a horde of vampires trying to kill him one unholy way or another so that they can go back to doing the horrible crap they were doing (e.g. illegally making money off of you the American taxpayer while simultaneously molesting children). This is a historic showdown, and Trump represents the light, the good, the sunshine, the promising dawn breaking over a gory battlefield. He represents you.

We are in a holy war, folks. It is good versus evil, and Trump is the good.

Trump represents you, the forgotten American taxpayer, the forgotten American worker, the forgotten American parent of small children, the white Millennial or purposefully impoverished black person taken for granted and used as cannon fodder in the Left’s war on freedom. At this point, Trump represents all that was a free America.

He is also the proverbial canary in the coal mine, because if he goes down under the weight of the vampire horde, then a free and fair America goes down with him. If the wave of illegal and unconstitutional and unfair and double-standard lawfare assaults on Trump prevail, then America will die, because there is no one strong enough or brave enough or patriotic enough to follow through on what Trump unwittingly started in 2016. None of the other Republican candidates have the strength of character Trump has. No one else can right the ship and set it on course again.

And this is why we must all band together and support President Donald J. Trump now. We are in a holy war not for Trump, but for America, for our children, our homes. Get in this fight and roll up your sleeves. Everyone is needed to return America to a government Of, By and For The People, and not of, by, and for the corrupt bureaucrat and special interests, like China, who now clearly own Joe Biden’s very soul and America’s wide open southern border.

 

 

 

I stand with President Donald Trump to whatever end

Since 2016, we have all watched an unbroken stream of political, personal, and legal lawfare attacks on Donald J. Trump by the entire political and cultural establishment. Despite every single attack proving to be false and therefore a failure, the attacks were nonetheless maintained, like a pack of rabid dogs circling a stoic man who refuses to give up.

So today, the District Attorney for New York City Alvin Bragg brought an indictment against President Trump for reasons that remain hidden, but by all accounts it is about a private payment of money to a private citizen. Many years ago. With a non-disclosure agreement. Something that is done every day in America. If this is a crime, then half the country is due for an indictment. But we all know this is not a crime, this is the old Beria approach: “Show me the man and I will give you the crime.”

In other words, this indictment is nonsense. It is also way way way outside the norm of how America has been run for 250 years. First time a presidential political candidate has been indicted. By the opposition party, no less. This fake indictment is how dictators in Latin America and eastern Europe and China operate, in order to stay in control and artificially suppress their challengers. It is an attack on democracy like all the others that have been tried.

This is all being done by one particular political party that cannot stand being without power. If the Republican Party culture is all about money, the Democrat Party culture is all about power. Tons and tons of centralized, unstoppable, non-democratic, tyrannical power. Stopping President Trump is how they think they will hold onto power, especially in the corrupted federal agencies.

I will stand with President Donald Trump to whatever end comes of this. If evil people have to resort to this kind of lawlessness in order to try to hold onto ill-gotten power, then it is obvious Trump is the man to save America. And I hope that DAs around America take note here of how power is truly wielded, and I hope they use their own offices similarly to indict brazen criminals like Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, etc et al. Do it. Don’t hold back. Don’t think that some Good Fairy will sprinkle pixie dust on you and make you all shiny if you are a good little boy and make nicey-nice with these bad people. You cannot make nice with Alvin Bragg or any other elected Democrat Party official. Those days are over. They are coming for you next, GOPe weaklings. Better fight back while you still can.

If American DAs across America do not fight back and use the same method and legal theory as DA Alvin Bragg is using against President Trump, against Democrat Party criminals, crooks, liars, and cheats, then they are essentially giving up the battlefield and walking off.

Which raises the other question, which has been much discussed the past month. That is the “national divorce” between conservative patriots who believe in the Constitution and the rule of law on one hand, and the lawless, rabid, violent communist revolutionary left on the other hand. One group can live in one place, and the other group can live in another place, but it is clear that both groups cannot live in the same place, together.

In the 1850s “Bleeding Kansas” became a symbol of the growing national disagreement between Republican abolitionists and Democrat slave owners. America is there again, right now. We are at each other’s throats, although the problems are all coming from just one party and one cultural direction. It is time to figure out how we Americans can all go live with people we like, and stay away from people we don’t like, before we end up resolving this disagreement the primitive way.

Why RINOs keep on RINOing

Despite my working out in the boondocks, I still cannot get away from the politics of presidential campaigns and Washington, DC. Not only do I pay attention because EVERY American should pay attention to politics – it is the lifeblood of our constitutional republic, and without the involvement of The People, it dries up and blows away – but I pay attention because this 2024 election is the last gasp we Americans have for freedom and free air. We are ever so close to losing our freedoms to the DC Swamp.

Two particular forces are at work against We, The People and our freedoms. One is the Left, which includes the entire Washington, DC, professional establishment, including federal employees at every agency and commission, the media, and the Democrat Party. The second force is the Republican Party establishment, or the GOPe, which includes Conservative, Inc. and conservative establishment media.

Members of this second group are often referred to as “RINOs” because they are “Republican In Name Only.” They are not politically or culturally conservative, and they usually stop well short of doing anything that actually challenges the Left. Some people call RINOs controlled opposition to the Left, but I think that is just an occasional role that the GOPe must play in order to advance what they think their own interests are. More than anything, the GOPe RINOs are deeply self-interested people, with their own values, their own visions and views, and the truth is, their views are truly unique.

Not that being selfish, unprincipled, and lazy on a battleground where if the Left wins, everyone loses all their freedoms tomorrow, is such a uniquely cool thing. But it is true that the GOPe is made up of people who in their own minds believe they occupy some unusual and well-considered ideological place. And while the rest of us can’t see it or understand it, and while the GOPe in all their ideological purity seems to be really no different than the Left, practically speaking, the truth is, we average Americans are dealing with a group of people who think very differently than we do.

Someone recently commented online that Florida governor Ron DeSantis can never understand a President Donald Trump, or even Trump’s voters, because DeSantis is a product of elite educational institutions (Yale, Harvard), while Trump is a product of street work and street smarts and making deals to make everyone on the street a winner in some way. I think that comment is a true insight, because it gets at the roughly 20% “White Wine” voters in the GOP who really like DeSantis and identify with him. They are elites, or at least see themselves as elites, definitely as superior to the rest of us unwashed beer drinking “deplorables” who work for a living. And thus, they feel none of the raw fear of failure that everyone else in America is feeling right now. RINOs don’t see Trump as a lifeline in a storm, they see him as blocking them from getting the control they want (and which they are very good at getting even from an inferior force and position in Congress).

And so political careerist DeSantis is going to keep trying to claw his way up the political ladder, whether he makes a good impression or not as a presidential candidate (few Republicans doubt his good abilities as governor of Florida). He has the backing of the GOPe, the RINOs, the Republican “elites” who are not ever ready to rumble to win. Someone quipped that the RINOs are the people who always show up with a bag of golf clubs and a little white “I surrender” flag, and while they are not quite that useless and fickle, there is more than a seed of truth in it. They are not brawlers.

So why won’t the RINOs support President Donald J. Trump, who already gave us the best four years America had enjoyed in a very long time? Because RINOs can afford the economic downturns that destroy most other people, and like the Left, with whom they are almost always in bed, and which is committed to communist revolution, the RINOs are just as  ideologically committed to being “moderate” at any cost. Makes no sense, but it works for them in their heads.

So RINOs are gonna RINO and there is very little hope of persuading them to join the ranks of the people who clean their pools, maintain their golf greens, and work on their cars. The GOPe RINOs occupy their very own little place on the political map, and they intend to stay right there. Just like they tried and failed with neon-green RINO Dave McCormick in the 2022 PA senate seat race, the RINOs are trying to get a very similar Ron DeSantis into the White House in 2024. DeSantis has more of a good track record to run on because of his successes in Florida, so he is a real candidate for president, but as we have seen in the past few days, DeSantis on the national stage is like a deer in the headlights.

And that is because RINOs cannot ever have the genuine answers to the critical questions that real Americans want to hear. They can’t, by definition; they just don’t see the world the way the rest of us do. RINOs are neither leftist revolutionaries nor conservative pragmatic survivalists. RINOs are self-limited by their self interest, and by their belief that they alone should be in charge of running things, and when pressed to explain this in public, they bumble and stumble like Ron DeSantis has done the past few days. RINOism only makes sense to RINOs.

So count on Ron DeSantis staying in the presidential race, no matter what, even though he has a snowball’s chance in hell (assuming Trump survives the efforts to assassinate him) of winning. It is because DeSantis is the RINO protest vote against all the Deplorables and their leader, Trump. This is all they got, and they are gonna play it. RINOs gonna RINO…

So to all the Deplorables out there, move on and expect nothing but protest after protest from the GOPe. They are not on America’s team, they are on their own team. We are going to have to win 2024 without them.

 

Russia & Ukraine & the West a year later

A year later after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a few realties emerge.

1) Massive scale wars with massive landscape-scale complete smoking rubble destruction and muddy trenches did not end after World War One (“The War to End All Wars“), or World War Two. Now, our entire beautiful blue and green planet appears to be on the edge of World War Three, and the carnage in Ukraine that right now seems so unimaginable is just the beginning.

2) Russia may harbor grievances against Germany for two back-to-back invasions in the past hundred years, but there is no avoiding the fact now that Russia is the aggressor here with Ukraine. No one likes a bully, and Russia cannot reasonably claim to be any sort of a victim while behaving this badly. No, sorry, few people in Europe or America accept the silly notion that Russia is entitled to invade and subdue and rule with an iron fist every nation near it. It is not right and it should not continue.

3)  As rotten as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin may be, there is no denying that he loves Russia and he believes in basic European/ Western values. Yes, it is easy to lose sight of the value of these facts in the face of so much Putin-led barbarism and destruction. But very few European/ Western leaders love their own countries; in fact most of them seem to be at war with their own countries and with their own countrymen, and the West is collapsing as a result. Isn’t it an oddity that of all places on Earth, Russia actually looks like one of the more stable places to live and raise a family?

4) Ukraine became America’s corrupt whore during the Obama administration, and Ukraine was being run by the Biden family when someone named Donald Trump came along in 2017 and shined a bright light on the disgusting mess. Hence all of the stops being pulled out by the corporate media and their Democrat Party masters to stop Trump at any cost, even the price of stealing the 2020 election and turning the American federal government against the American people. All of the fake Russiagate hoax, the Ukraine phone call hoax, the two fake impeachments, were to keep President Trump from digging into the really bad and illegal American corruption farming operation in Ukraine. And now, corrupt Joe Biden is dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into Ukraine to prop it up to keep his corrupt operation from being fully exposed.

5) Ukraine isn’t really about defending a small, innocent country from a big bully neighbor. It is mostly about American politicians hiding and protecting their political and financial equivalent of a “black ops” country from further scrutiny. At least this war did not start out this way. Like all wars, this war is becoming about other things now.

6) The other thing that the Ukraine war is becoming is a firmer and much more organized alliance between Russia, China, and Iran as they seek to destroy the West. For those of us who love America, freedom, lots of delicious food and beer and easy weekends and endless entertainment and fun fun fun after a hard work week, this emerging alliance aimed at our throat is a really big problem. But as much as the Russia-China-Iran challenge to the West is more visible and threatening, a huge proportion of Americans ignore it and still take America and their safety for granted, still have their heads in the sand, and still want to keep voting for people who are aggressively undermining America from within. A weak America is how Americans will suddenly lose everything they enjoy and take for granted right now.

This war in Ukraine and how Americans understand it is how empires and cultures end. No, America is not too big to fail. But our own nation’s failure is beginning to happen right in Ukraine.

And isn’t it strange that the American Left, which spent 100 years undermining the American military and our national security in the name of “peace” is now hell bent on starting World War Three?

Another past war in an obscure European nation, and more dead beautiful young men with grieving parents. The yellow caption on this is incorrect. See the more accurate description below. It is heart breaking.

I dug around the Internet to find this bit of obscure history to help our own generation understand what is happening now in Ukraine. The parallels between 1912 Serbia (which became Yugoslavia) (does anyone today even remember that country?), the resulting World War I, and the current war in Ukraine are eerie as hell. History often repeats itself, but it doesn’t have to…

Roe v. Wade was never about abortion

Like so many other far-reaching court decisions, or laws, or executive orders emanating from Washington, DC, Roe v. Wade was originally cast publicly as something it actually wasn’t.

Yes, on its face Roe v. Wade was about abortion, the termination of human life while still inside the mother’s body. But in fact, the way the court’s decision was structured, it was the exuberantly creative legal theory behind the Roe decision that was most important. And it was that legal theory that laid the ground work for so much of the openly political activist behavior we see emanating from way too many judges and federal bureaucrats across America.

Roe v. Wade was decided within a time of great social turmoil and cultural change, and a lot of the contemporaneous political activism pressure from the Left is visible in Roe. Especially the twin evil sisters of moral relativism and intellectual relativism. One example is the in-artfully creative use of the word “penumbra,” a sort of shadowy shadow that reputedly lay over so many different amendments to the US Constitution that clearly listing them all was just too tiring to Roe’s authors. Yes, the Court majority invoked aspects of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and went on to stitch together a pseudo- logical framework for legal decision (then using the 14th Amendment) making that is still with us today.

Vagueness as a reason for heavy handed policy is now the Left’s standard. “Because we told you to do it” is the way that is spelled out.

Every professor who taught me constitutional law was a liberal, and every single time any one of them delved into Roe, a smirk was on their face. Lots of eye rolling and chuckling accompanied these professors’ analysis of the poor legal reasoning behind the decision. Which meant to me then, and even more so now, that no one with real constitutional law training believed Roe was a legitimate legal decision based on actual logic, law, and fundamental constitutional principles. Rather, all the liberals who exulted in Roe did so because it backdoor-attained a policy goal they could not achieve through the legislative process, and because it established a mush-headed standard for all future legal decisions.

So today, some fifty years after Roe v. Wade-type legal analysis has wafted its way throughout the legal profession, the courts, and the bureaucracy, we see the ultimate and inevitable result of such a “creative” legal approach: Although the Second Amendment says crystal clearly that citizens may both keep and publicly bear firearms, and that this right shall not be infringed, a zillion policy makers and courts blatantly ignore 2A’s plain wording and just start throwing anti-gun policy ideas into the pot. These judges give no respect to what the Constitution actually says; rather, they use their court rooms purely for writing policies that fit their political views. Same goes for ATF bureaucrats.

I blame Roe v. Wade for where our court system is now. And where it is now is not just political policy shops in black robes, but we have defiant leftist activists in black robes, who simply ignore the Supreme Court’s precedents and make their own damned ruling. Even if their damned ruling is totally contrary to a US Supreme Court decision from just weeks or months ago. This approach is junk law, and it calls into question the entire field of jurisprudence. It highlights in just one more way how the Left is hell bent for leather to implement its political policy goals, at whatever cost to America’s legal and cultural fabric.

In case you don’t know it, when a lower court openly defies the Supreme Court, the entire court system is thrown out the window. We then have nothing but anarchy.

So, when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two weeks ago, it was not surprising to see the Left melt down, as if their ability to kill babies had in fact been fully deprived of them. After all, when a person sees every branch of government as nothing more than a policy shop devoid of logical process, then everything becomes about winning or losing the policy war. Here the Left feels they have lost, when in fact, all this recent Court decision did was turn the issue over to the various states (No, Barack, there are not 57 states). Where actual voters get to choose how they want their state government to address what should be a sensitive subject.

(The same 1960s and 1970s people who had just protested against American soldiers as “baby killers” in Vietnam then became the biggest champions of killing babies…go figure).

To its proponents and supporters, Roe v. Wade was never really about abortion or babies, it was about introducing a weak-minded, unprincipled, grab-what-you-can “by any means necessary” approach to forming government policy. And in fact one of the main reasons I left my US EPA policy job in Washington, DC, was because I personally witnessed many regulations and rules being formed exactly this way, where (liberal/ Left) agency staff would literally just imagine a bunch of shit and put it in the regulation or rule. Justified or no, or extra cost to industry and consumers be damned. It is a terrible way to run representative government. But it is the way that Roe taught liberals and Leftists to think about government.

As a proponent of good government, where transparency and accountability are everyday occurrences for the taxpayers, I am glad that Roe is gone. Now the politically difficult part of democracy is upon all of us: Figuring out how many babies people can kill, when, and where. Based on my principles, I would expect this democratic process to follow a certain logic path. But we are not dealing with principles here, but rather a passion on the Left for absolute control. And they don’t like losing control. Or thinking hard. Or debating issues with evidence and cross-examination and due process.

Should be interesting going forward.

 

Celebrate Independence Day with A Month of Defiant Acts

Today is July 4th, America’s Independence Day, founded immediately upon the heels of the United States’ successful civil war with Great Britain, from 1775 to 1781. What we call the Revolutionary War was actually a civil war between American colonists loyal to the British monarch, King George III, and his Redcoat soldiers on the one hand, and American colonists loyal to a new idea of democracy and representative self-government, on the other hand.

As we celebrated today, individual freedom, individual liberty, and individual choice won out against and over King George’s tyranny. As a result, America has enjoyed roughly 245 years of unparalleled  prosperity and opportunity for even the poorest and least educated human beings from around the planet.

In 1818, then-past-President John Adams wrote that the actual revolution had already occurred among the American citizens and frontier colonists, years before the actual fighting began in 1775. The people’s then-revolutionary views on power sharing among humans, governmental legitimacy through consent of the governed, government transparency and accountability, and a kind of loose and very broadly defined Christian brotherhood united by loyalty to ideas and shared values had already taken hold on the frontier, united more than enough individuals to stand up against what was then the greatest military power in the world.

Today there is without question a formal tyranny afoot in North America. Both Canada (Trudeau) and America (Biden) are presently run by people who are openly and aggressively at odds with the fundamental rights and freedoms the peoples here have lived by for a very long time. It is an effort to consolidate official power over The People that knows no bounds, and official malfeasance and abuse of official positions against innocent but uppity citizens are now daily occurrences in both Canada and America.

Here in America the Department of Justice and the FBI have set land speed records for false accusations and the corrupt detonation of individual due process rights, whereby the criminal prosecutorial process is in and of itself the punishment. Even if an innocent individual is eventually cleared of wrongdoing, the government will have bankrupted them, destroyed their good name, and perhaps destroyed their family, their career, and taken their home, too.

These public employees and agents are pretty much double dog daring everyone to try to hold them accountable within the realm of America’s legal system. And they have access to just enough corrupt and politically partisan activist judges to get the Crackerjack Box search and seizure warrants they need to spread fear and political retaliation under color of official law. But we citizens have a duty to resist this tyranny.

In the spirit of Independence Day, let us all engage in a month of defiant acts against this political corruption and destruction of our rights. You know, live up to those 1970s bumper stickers that said “Question Authority,” which at that time were aimed at the many traditional institutions the Left had not yet captured, corrupted, or destroyed. Of course, if we begin to question the authority of our Usurper in Chief and his minions, they will immediately recoil in horror: “No, don’t question THAT authority! OUR authority you must unquestionably obey!”

If the Left did not have double standards, they would have no standards at all.

Some acts of defiance and questioning authority that you should do:

  • Write a letter to your county sheriff, and ask him or her to begin assembling a significant number of armed deputies, to be able to resist illegal invasions or lawless acts in the county by federal troops or agents.
  • Write a letter to your county sheriff, and ask him or her to formally communicate with the Department of Justice and the FBI that their partisan corruption is now so great, they are no longer welcome in the county, and their agents encountered in the county will be arrested and held without bail.
  • Write a letter to your state Attorney General, and ask him or her to formally communicate with the Department of Justice and the FBI that their partisan corruption is now so great, they are no longer welcome in the state, and their agents encountered in the state will be arrested and held without bail.
  • Write a letter to your governor, asking about the possibility of re-assembling the state’s Home Guard, or some similar armed civilian force, that is capable of quickly reacting to and resisting federal troops and agents.
  • Write a letter to your state Attorney General, and ask him or her to issue and execute arrest warrants against individual federal agents who have clearly broken state (and federal) laws against illegal searches and seizures, illegal search warrants obtained under false statements by said agents, etc. Most state constitutions have similar limits on government action and safeguards of individual liberties as the US Constitution, so this is not just a federal issue.
  • Buy a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and then return it to the store for a refund, because it tasted “off.” Or you can remove the pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream from its freezer at the store, and then kindly leave it in the chips and pretzels aisle. Yes, it will melt and be lost there. But that’s not your problem. What is your problem is a Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream that is actively working overtime with its corporate influence to deprive you of your individual liberties and rights. Show them you don’t care for their anti-democracy meddling.
  • Write a letter to your local school board and demand they issue a clear statement that you and other concerned taxpaying parents of school children are not domestic terrorists.
  • Etc. Just stand up and be heard for the next thirty days, in the spirit of July 4th Independence Day. Be a naturally defiant American who is naturally suspicious about official authority, who sees himself or herself as part of a citizen brotherhood united against corrupt power, and resist Biden’s tyranny, even in small ways.

Happy Independence From Government Tyranny Day!