Posts Tagged → conservative
Spoiled brat Republican kids, wth
Next installment of cane-shaking at spoiled American kids, this time directly at the so-called conservatives and Republican young people.
Why are you young people, with so much promise, so much potential, so much energy, so many options, also so negative and living the flip-side of the grievance culture that the Left has used to nearly destroy America?
You will say that America is ganging up on us, which is true, and that much of the ground rules, that your parents made you live by while you were growing up, are not being followed by anyone else, which is also true.
True, all of it, but irrelevant. Let me ask you a question:
When our forefathers founded America, what kind of conditions did they face? Not very good, right? Bad, right? Overwhelming odds, right?
Were the British fighting fair, while trying to stop the young republic from gaining independence and succeeding as a new nation run by its people, instead of its nobility and aristocracy? No, the British did not fight fair. In fact, they very often took no prisoners on the battlefield, and “dispatched” with bloody bayonet anyone who was wounded, and then executed by firing squad anyone left standing.
And yet, General George Washington and his brave troops fought, and fought, and fought. They were undeterred. They bled and fought, day after day. Yes, it was tough, but what option did they have? To lose was to lose everything, and become slaves.
You young conservative Americans are not weak, and you are not pathetic, and you are not sad losers, so STOP ACTING LIKE THAT.
My advice, or rather my request, is that you look within yourself/ yourselves and find and use that same strength and ingenuity that our Founding Fathers had to draw upon to survive and create the great country we live in. It is in you.
And yes, America is in survival mode right now, no arguing about that. Our beloved America is in terrible shape because of anti-Western ideology on the Left and complacent cowardice on the Right. The Democrat Party is crazy and the Republican Party is lazy, and the crazies are winning.
So do not mimic the Left and begin whining and bitching about how unfair things are. Do not do that. Rather, band together and pursue positive goals. Like: Recruit American Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian Indians into the Republican Party, and make the Republican Party a truly conservative institution that promotes the basic principles of America’s founding, like meritocracy and equal opportunity for everyone.
And like: Create your own institutions, if the current ones are corrupted.
Years ago, my son was one year away from being an Eagle Scout, and he dropped out of Boy Scouts because of the massive assault on the institution. The demand to include girls in his troop was one problem, because he could no longer hang out with just boys and talk about Boy things in a safe environment. And then came the gay thing, where everyone had to talk about being gay, and acting gay, with older gay men hanging around, in what had been a non-sexual environment where talking about sex anything was generally frowned upon. It was this new form of sexual harassment that drove my son out of the Boy Scouts, and broke his will as a Boy.
Hugely sad for our family, who had all cheered on our son in his many years as a Boy Scout.
And I experienced something similar while in graduate school, back in 1990, when I was matter-of-factly told that White men had a bleak future in academia. My dream of being a college professor was blown up, because I had the wrong skin color. I felt sold out, and betrayed by the institutions I wanted to be a part of.
And in fact, when I went to work in the Federal government in Washington DC, instead of finishing my Phd and becoming a college professor, I discovered that the federal workforce was only a few years behind the racial and anti-man gender assault well under way in academia. My career turned into a white guy running like hell, trying to stay out ahead of the pack of dogs chasing us down (how ironic that the people running those packs of hunting dogs were and still are all White Liberals, who long ago destroyed the American Black family).
So I know of what I speak, and of what you feel. Your groups, organizations, institutions have almost all been corrupted, and you find yourself overwhelmed and surrounded by attackers. All of this is factually true, it is not just a feeling. But do not live by your feelings, live by your intelligent brains.
Be like George Washington when he fought the British, and retreat and re-form and re-organize in safety, again and again as much as you must, in order to fight effectively another day.
But fight you must, as men, as American men, as George Washington men, because if you little bastards sit around sucking your thumbs and bitching about how unfair life is, you will indeed lose this fight and lose America and all of its beautiful promise, and your adult lives will be a horrendous leftwing Marxist hellscape of slavery and oppression. And tough guys like me will either be dead or too old to fight for you.
So fight, dammit, fight smart and out-flank the enemy. Out-organize it, and defeat it. And once you have your enemy defeated on the battlefield…do not leave it alive to come back and attack you again later on. Make Marxism and treason absolutely illegal in America… by making it terribly punishable.
So Job #1: Form a stronger, better, harder, more popular, leaner, less elitist Republican Party, and go out and win elections with a majority of the country supporting you. You can do it, if you but will it.
Two Hollywood legends I will actually miss
Normally I am not a fan of Hollywood in any sense. In recent times, including just days ago, America lost two Hollywood legends, two actors who personified Hollywood at its best and maybe its worst, but also at its most colorful. I will miss them both, for very different reasons.
First up is Rob Reiner, apparently murdered two days ago by his own son. Both Rob and his wife Michelle were found deceased in their home by their daughter. Their throats had been slashed. Their son Nick has been arrested and charged with their murders. Apparently Nick has had a long history of drug abuse and all of the resulting relationship challenges that come with it. We now see the gruesome result, and can easily imagine the victims disbelievingly pleading with their own son not to harm them…
…their murders are a tragedy on its face, as well as a statement about the unworkable culture that is “inside Hollywood.” A mix of libertine excess and constant parental indulgence and allowance followed by inexorable failure. What a symbol of the whole place.
Rob Reiner really began his Hollywood career as “Meathead,” the abrasively sanctimonious know-it-all liberal son-in-law of appropriately named American workingman archetype, Archie Bunker, in All In The Family TV sitcom.
Relying on a well-scripted, well-played political and cultural tension between old guard Archie Bunker and Hippie “Meathead,” Rob Reiner gave effective voice to his generation’s anti-war, anti-tradition, anti-religion, anti-America liberalism.
The show captured the “generation gap” of my 1960s-1970s childhood, where older Americans held the traditional values that built a fully functioning nation, and the younger Americans were utopian meatheads with unrealistic, unsustainable expectations guaranteed to derail the nation.
Confusingly, Rob Reiner never grew up or let go of his Meathead persona, nor his destructive goofball political views. I suppose to his credit, in a way, neither have nearly all of his contemporary eldering-in-place fellow ever-child meathead Hippies. I will miss his entertaining online rants against Trump, MAGA, conservatives, Republicans, regular working Americans, essentially against everything outside of the tiny bizarro world Hollywood bubble that Rob Reiner inhabited.
Rob Reiner created the living liberal strawman that conservatives easily use to prove their points. In essence, Meathead grew up proving that Archie Bunker was right, decade after decade. And so, as much as he was strange, he also contributed well to the American political discourse. Rest in peace, Mr. Reiner. I am genuinely sorry you left us in this horrible way.
The other Hollywood person who recently left us is actor, producer, film maker Robert Redford. Easily the best looking man in American history, and also the one Hollywood actor least addicted to plastic surgery as he aged, Redford inhabited a very different cultural place than Reiner.
Famous for playing a variety of all-American hero and anti-hero roles, from gritty to suave, from cowboy to playboy, Robert Redford was a fixture in Hollywood for a really long time. He also fueled the Sundance Film Festival, an alternative to Hollywood, where low-budget art films and documentaries could gain audience and funding outside of Hollywood’s metrics and politics.
One of my favorite Redford movies is Spy Game, with Brad Pitt. Redford plays the role of a CIA spook and patriot, who in a former job as Cold War spy went so far as to unilaterally murder/ execute a known American traitor in Europe. This role alone sends a loud message about Redford’s politics: He was no leftist, no Hollywood commie, but rather he was a true American patriot in every conservative sense of the phrase.
But Redford also promoted environmental quality, and public lands, two things that are close to my own heart and not always present in the conservative movement. Not that Redford followed the leftist doctrine of heavy regulation and anti capitalism, but rather, he simply said that these things are important. And of course, they are important. And there are other ways of achieving environmental quality and public lands conservation without following leftist doctrine. Such a moderate stance is unheard of among Hollywooders.
Redford played very well a famous, iconic role that still speaks to men of my generation, that of historic mountain man Jeremiah Johnson. Filmed right before the 1976 American Bicentennial, Jeremiah Johnson captured the spirit of the American frontier, Westward expansion, Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism, self reliance, urban vs rural, and the European-American conflicts with the western Indian tribes (Crow, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Lakota and others) in the Rockies.
Many of these themes and character traits are still central to the American identity that us older Americans have. Including Archie Bunker.
Jeremiah Johnson promoted the now-underappreciated but still central role of undeveloped American open lands in forging the tough American frontier spirit and Yankee ingenuity that built our nation. That conservatives miss or ignore this link, or misunderstand it, is just as much a crime as leftist attempts to essentially shrinkwrap public lands and make them off-limits to humans.
Robert Redford represents an image and political philosophy almost at the other end of Rob Reiner’s place on the political bell curve. Both men played important parts in shaping American culture, and I appreciate them both. However, Robert Redford will forever be an aspirational icon, whereas Rob Reiner represents a dead end on the political evolutionary tree.
Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson, iconic American frontiersman
The Hangover Part 27: The Trump Effect
Welp, that didn’t go well yesterday, did it…
Like a lot of other conservatives, I am sitting here with a political hangover, trying to make sense of the ass whoopin’ we got at the nationwide polls yesterday. Looks like I woke up with a freaky Democrat-shaped tattoo across my face, and a set of tire tracks across my back.
Couple of things jump foremost into my mind:
One lesson is that Leftists / Democrats care about winning, period, end of story. Winning at any cost, with any candidate is their Job #1. Anyone with a “D” after their name gets Democrat Party support and votes. Heck, the entire Democrat Party is openly devoted to protecting and supporting illegal alien invaders, violent criminals, and drug cartels, at enormous cost to American citizens. And yet…they do it.
One successful Democrat candidate in Virginia had openly fantasized about killing Republicans and their children. He is now the Attorney General-elect there. His voters did not care one whit or one bit about his violent fantasies. They wanted him in power. In fact, many Leftists probably share his violent fantasies.
Lesson #2 is Rule #2, Republican activists and voters and politicians care waaaay too much about public perception. Even manufactured perception. The Democrat Party media (AKA establishment media ABCCBSNPRBBCNBCNYT etc) knows this and aggressively preys upon it. When a Republican anywhere sneezes out of place, the establishment media is all over it, critical of it, magnifying it. Had a Republican candidate for dog catcher, much less AG, anywhere in America similarly written his fantasies about murdering Democrats and their children, his career, not just political career but his life supporting career, would be over. Finished, kaput, done, canceled, terminated. The (far-left) media sees to it every time, even as it protects Democrats from legitimate scrutiny and criticism.
Why Republicans / conservatives / normies continue to play by this rule is a mystery to me. And in fact, I do think that many in the conservative base are tiring of the political “professionals” foolishly playing by this rule, and that is why we have such a strong swing among some towards truly extreme and evil views. It is probably why treasonous bullshit artist Tucker Carlson and angry closet homosexual Nick Fuentes enjoy any support at all. Plenty of voters on the Right are just sick and tired of playing by the Left’s rules, and losing, and so they are beginning to make up some rules of their own. Not all of these rules are wholesome or pure American goodness.
Lastly, lesson number three, for better and for worse, the Trump Effect was in full force yesterday. The Trump Effect is a double-edged sword. On the one hand when Trump’s name is on the ballot, voters come out in droves to support him. On the other hand, when his name is not on the ballot, those same people stay at home and sit out the election. They think “Why should I vote? Trump is in office and he is kickin ass and getting things under control.”
Which is a fatal mistake, because while he is in office kickin ass and getting law and order re-established, Trump is also up to his eyes in lawless alligators afraid of being turned into hides on the wall. Trump threatens the political Left unlike any prior Chief Executive, all of whom, including Ronald Reagan, were content to play by the political establishment rules, written and enforced by the political Left. And so Trump invigorates the political Left through fear, and pushes them to the polls, while his own voters think everything is just hunky dory and stay home.
Add to this a lethargic and largely moribund Republican Party establishment, or an aggressively insular and inward-looking state GOP like we have here in Pennsylvania, and we can see that it does not take much effort for the political Left to win elections.
I will tell you that we did have some wins yesterday. One was in Lycoming County, where the No Butts on the Bench campaign did eject the county’s sitting president judge, Nancy Butts. Judge Butts had once run and won on a campaign of law and order, but had then become the usual backsliding leftist activist Americans have come to expect of establishment Republicans once she got on the judicial bench. She is now uninvited, disinvited, ejected and soon to be no longer a judge.
Another win reported to me by a friend in Schuylkill County is Christian Lengel, who becomes a Magistrate District Judge. A good candidate surrounded by fierce volunteers, Mr. Lengel now becomes Judge Lengel, to the advantage of western Skook citizens.
And that is a wrap. I am out of words and not quite yet out of feelings. It is time now to crawl back under my bed with a bottle of Jack Daniels.
Me, this morning, and possibly you, too
Tucker Carlson, dingbat mean girl
The past two years of Tucker Carlson’s life have been devoted to attacking Israel and everyone who supports it, as well as revisiting essential Adolf Hitler messaging, like “the Jews” control media, banking, government etc. One of the pro-Israel groups, AIPAC, is one of his special whipping boys. Tucker accuses AIPAC of forcing American politicians to “obey” and thus AIPAC “controls” American government. He says.
Tucker ignores the truly vast amounts of money spent lobbying and influencing American government and decision makers at all levels by China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and many others who are definitely not American allies. AIPAC’s pipsqueak budget doesn’t compare, but if you are looking for a scapegoat, nothing beats “the Jews.”
Another thing Tucker has repeatedly said is that Iran is not America’s enemy (even though it very much has been since 1979), Iran is only Israel’s enemy, and that any real war against Iran’s nuclear bomb program, by either Israel or America, will automatically result in WORLD WAR THREE.
In this way, Tucker became the chief Iran First advocate in America. Given his open, unhidden, unapologetic personal animosity towards Jews and Israel, Tucker probably supports a nuclear-armed Iran as some sort of counter-balance to Israel’s longterm survival, and thus the survival of the Jewish people, if not an outright threat with a high likelihood of succeeding in turning Israel into smoking rubble.
But the problem is, if you are Iran First, like Tucker is, then you are America Last, and yet Tucker claims to be a MAGA America First guy. He cannot have it both ways. Iran’s record of hostility towards its “Great Satan” America runs the gamut from holding 66 American hostages for 444 days, to multitudes of bombings that have killed Americans around the world, to holding weekly rallies declaring “Death to America” in Iran and in countries it has exercised control over, like Syria and Lebanon. Iranian leaders have said countless times that its nuclear bomb program is intended to destroy both Israel and America. Iran has openly bragged about having terrorist sleeper cells here in America.
And yet, Tucker has done all one person can to protect Iran from military intervention by its likely victims. He really is Iran First, and so it logically follows that Tucker is okay seeing American cities go up in mushroom clouds if he also gets to see Israel destroyed. And while Tucker harbored anti Jewish sentiments in the past (e.g. his initial FOX News report on Sam Bankman Fried’s felonious Ponzi scheme dripped with personal animosity towards Jews), it was given rocket fuel by huge payments from both Iranian businessman Omeed Malik and Qatar. Reportedly over ten million dollars.
Yes, the same Qatar that has been funding the destruction of American college education in the pursuit of destroying American culture and borders.
So, Tucker may have been a kind of mean girl in the past, but his dislike for Jews and Israel really took off after he left FOX News. Left to himself and his anti-Western, Islamo-supremacist financiers, Tucker’s anti-Jew stuff ballooned into an open movement, a greater-good willingness to sacrifice America on the old Adolf Hitler altar that also destroyed Germany.
To this neo-isolationist banner Tucker attracted a whole posse of fellow MAGA conservatives, like open Jew hater Candace Owens, Alex Jones, Jack Posobiec, Patrick Bet David, even Charlie Kirk, who I thought would have had the common sense and honest Christian charity to stay away, and a whole bunch more. Some of these people have embraced Jew hatred as a business, and honestly, they seem to be doing OK at it.
Led by Tucker Carlson, this posse of mean girls has subsequently greatly shaped the public debate, the internal MAGA debate, and President Donald Trump administration’s policies about Israel, Iran, and American foreign policy in general. To intervene or not, to get regime change or not, to support an underdog ally, or not.
My opinion is that Tucker’s posse of mean girls has elevated non-interventionism and neo-isolationism into a graven image, an idol to be worshiped at any cost. Really guys, no regime change in Iran now, when probably 80% of the Iranian people want it? When we can most easily achieve it? You have a solid argument for this? I don’t see it.
Imagine being so “pro freedom” that you violently argue for ninety million Iranians to remain under the jackboot of the evil Shia mullahs. Because regime change is supposedly always bad. Again, I don’t see the logic or sound reasoning of this argument by the posse of mean girls. The blood of this week’s Iranian victims, civilians right now being rounded up by IRGC soldiers, is on your hands.
For the record, I have been MAGA since 2015, when Citizen Trump descended the escalator to announce his candidacy. Max campaign donations (even still on a monthly basis), all of the MAGA/ Trump tee shirts, boxer shorts, socks, hats, signs, banners, memes, you name it, I paid top retail to show my support for the one person I believe can save America. This blog is a record of my absolute commitment to President Trump at every turn over the past ten years. His America First policies are everything I believe in.
And for the record, I was a huge Tucker Carlson devotee when he was at FOX News, because he asked all the right questions about the right things, policies, and people. His goal was freedom and his aim was true. Tucker’s unintentionally comedic WASPy hostility towards Jews at the end of his Sam Bankman Fried report was tolerable, because who the hell doesn’t dislike Leftist Jews? They are a pox on America, as are most Leftist Catholics, Leftist Protestants, Leftist Muslims, Quakers et al.
Yes, Leftist Jews should know better than anyone else about how evil Leftism is, because of all that the Jewish People have been through, especially at the hands of arch Leftists. But Tucker has made it openly clear, most recently in his interview with US Senator Cruz (where Tucker revealed that he is a deliberately fake Christian), that he maintains an animosity for all Jews, including the politically and culturally conservative ones who are devoted to America and Western Civilization. The same people a politically active conservative would normally share the political trenches with.
World War Three never happened after the apocalyptic genocidal death cult running Iran was brought to heel, and America and Israel successfully defended Western Civilization together without America losing one military person or citizen. And thus is Tucker revealed as a destructive dingbat, and not a serious thought leader about real policy issues.
Israel is defending Western Civilization, say thank you
Forgive my long absence. Last week I had a careless tired body-tired mind workplace accident where I got to watch my body’s hydraulic fluid spray out like a hose from my leg. That scared me, and I drove myself to the ER forty minutes away, dodging possums, porcupines, rattlesnakes, and deer in the roadway the entire way. I got stitched up and am moving around, but one thing I am beginning to accept is that while I am still very strong, I am no longer forty or even fifty. And when I feel tired now, after working hard all day, it is time to put down tools and step away from the work site.
It is a pretty good reason for being a week overdue here on the blog. Really, you should have seen my place. It looked like a murder scene…blood everywhere. Took me hours to clean it up.
So, Israel is defending Western Civilization from Iran’s nuclear hungry genocidal Islamofascists, and all of a sudden I am surrounded by the “woke right.” As if genocidal dictators who have stated for almost fifty years that their intention is to force convert or blow up, destroy, and kill America and Israel, as well as the rest of Western Civilization, all infidels, should have nuclear bombs.
“If Israel has nuclear bombs, why can’t Iran?” goes a common question. Finding moral equivalence between one of the world’s few free democracies, Israel, and one of the world’s most oppressive, cruel, destructive, war-mongering, terrorism-exporting, deceptive theocracies, Iran, requires a person to make a huge leap in rational judgment and factual observation, and do so with a healthy boost of ridiculous raw Jew hatred.
Turns out the woke right, the fake Christians like Tucker Carlson, Patrick Bet David, and Candace Owens, understand that hating Jews is a good business. They get lots of online clicks and a decent angry support mob to follow them around. To win a policy argument about nuclear proliferation among genocidal regimes, versus the democracies being targeted by them, all the woke right people have to do is malign all Jews (not just the leftist ones, who we all must admit are especially aggravating because they are especially destructive when they of all people should know better), or ascribe malice to all things Jewish and Israel.
“America must stop fighting the Jews’ wars” or “Israel’s wars” goes another refrain, as the woke rightsters strut and preen, puffing up their supposed anti war chests, pretending to be superior while our Western Civilization is burning to the ground from within and without.
Never mind Iran’s (and China’s) public plan to destroy America, the Great Satan, which they could easily do with all of the jihadis they have hidden here in America. No, apparently all wars are started by “the Jews” because you know… it’s simply just “the Jews.”
Not Iran itself. Not jihadism. Not Islamofascism and Islamosupremacism as witnessed through a tremendous amount of violent jihadism focused on Israel and Jews worldwide. No, according to Tucker Carlson and his fellow woke rightsters, we are supposed to believe that a population of maybe ten or twelve million Jews total on the entire planet is manipulating and victimizing the two billion Muslims and one and a half billion Christians and one billion Hindus and one and a half billion Han Chinese who own everything and run everything. And so, accordingly these Iran Firsters say Iran must have nukes. Because the Jews.
This is humiliatingly lame Neanderthal stuff. It is intellectually indefensible. While I am proud to be MAGA since 2015, and I have all of the MAGA hats, tee shirts, socks, underwear etc of Trump MAGA Land, I am embarrassed to have to share one inch of ideological space with these woke right people. They are making common cause with true evil, and spreading evil and hate, while claiming to be real Christians, real Americans. Tucker Carlson is a fraud, I hate to say. I had been a huge fan of his for all of the right reasons (he was an excellent journalist who asked the right questions), and now I detest the guy, for all of the right reasons.
For the past year, Tucker Carlson has been warning that an Israeli war with Iran will result in World War Three and the end of the world. In the past few days his anti Israel scaremongering has been proven wrong, but he has not relented. He wants Iran to have nukes so Israel can be bullied and blackmailed and forced out of existence, if not blown out of existence. Never mind what happens to America in the process. Carlson is a Jew hating America hating Iran Firster.
If you hate Jews, you hate Jesus, and if you hate Jesus you hate Christianity. If you hate Israel so much that you are willing to sacrifice America, like Carlson, you are not MAGA, and you are not pro America. Being an America First conservative, as I am, means putting America before all other countries. But it does not mean crawling under a rock and hiding and pretending that the world outside is not happening. That is childish.
If you are that much of an isolationist, then you are a fool and you really do hate America, because you want America to fail. America is part of this world, and we must live within it, we must engage it. That means having alliances and relationships with other countries, and occasionally defending ourselves from other countries. The planet is a chess board on which we must occasionally project power. Failing to project power means that others will project power onto us, and America is not too big to fail.
War does not need to be conducted with American boots on the ground, or even by Americans. Being anti war does not mean just laissez faire letting things happen randomly, like letting Iran get a nuclear arsenal and then them bringing America-ending nuclear war directly to us. To every thing there is a season, a time for peace, and a time for war. Sometimes we just have to give war a chance. Smart Americans can define or implement war however they want, so long as our national interests are protected and our precious military personnel are not squandered.
In 1979, Iran openly declared war on America and Israel, and they and their allies have never missed an opportunity to burn our leaders in effigy and our flags in public. Iran’s war with Israel did not start a few days ago, it started in 1979. Now on the cusp of confronting nuclear powered maniacs who hate all of us Westerners, Israel is taking huge risks and making huge sacrifices to ensure that Americans sleep comfortably at night. Israel is taking a beating to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program.
If you are truly MAGA, and truly American, then you appreciate hard work and risk taking. Say Thank You to the Israelis, who did the heavy lifting that no one else was brave enough to do. Don’t be a mean spoiled brat, like Tucker Carlson. His behavior is not American.
Anatomy of a primary election
On May 20th, Pennsylvania held its primary election. Mostly local seats and judgeships were on the ballot, which are definitely important, but the real prizes were the PA Commonwealth Court and the PA Superior Court. As has come to be usual here and in many other states, the conservative/ independent-minded grass roots fielded their candidates and the state Republican Party fielded its candidates.
And as usual, the PA Republican Party was directly involved in the selection of the primary election candidates, their endorsements, their negative attacks, funding, etc. When a political party gets in between The People and their choice of candidate, the party always loses in the long run. When The People believe the party does not share their views or values, and is only pursuing the selection of certain candidates who will be malleable and loyal to the party, then The People lose faith in the party.
Here in PA there is real animosity between grass roots conservatives and the PA GOP establishment.
This election we had grass roots candidate Maria Battista vs. PAGOP candidate political establishment-endorsed Ann Marie Wheatcraft for Superior Court judge. Battista had run before as the GOP endorsed candidate, and had lost to the grass roots candidate. This time around, for whatever reason, she was on the outs with the PAGOP and on the in with the grass roots groups, like Lycoming Patriots. Wheatcraft had the PAGOP endorsement and money.
For the Commonwealth Court we had well known Second Amendment attorney Josh Prince vs. unknown state bureaucrat attorney Matt Wolford. Bureaucrat Wolford was mysteriously endorsed by the PAGOP, even though he has worked most of his career at the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection, an agency that no matter which incarnation it embodies, and regardless of which political party is running it, nonetheless is associated with heavy-handed regulations and lawless bureaucrats who routinely beat up on private landowners and businesses. Not exactly a likely place to give birth to a solid Republican candidate for any office, much less a judgeship.
The long and short of these two races is that Battista the outsider defeated Wheatcraft the moneyed insider, and Wolford the party endorsed yet unknown bureaucrat and mystery “Republican” defeated grass roots favorite Prince. Moreover, Prince was endorsed by numerous organizations, like Gun Owners of America, Firearms Owners Against Crime, etc.
These are strange results.
Normally voters align with outsiders or insiders, but not with one candidate here and not that one over there. And yet that is what happened in this election. Normally, big endorsements gain big traction for candidates, but we saw no evidence of that in the Prince vs Wolford race. Despite his many big endorsements, Prince was utterly crushed even in very conservative rural counties, like Lycoming and Elk, where he was known, liked, and should have won handily. And yet, in these same counties, Battista blew off Wheatcraft’s doors.
Aside from a crooked vote tallying scheme, I have no explanation for this odd outcome that defies all odds and conventional thinking. Except for one possible variable that tends to get overlooked these days, and that is ballot position. That is, where does the candidate’s name fall on the ballot – top, middle, or last.
Studies have shown that ballot position does matter, or it can matter, but much less so when voters feel compelled to look up candidates on the internet. With its easy information access, the internet has been the great leveler of campaigns everywhere. Big campaign money cannot always defend a candidate’s bad record, which will be all over the internet, visible to the voters who but follow a few clicks on a search engine.
Battista had top and Prince had bottom on their respective ballots. Meaning that the 3/4-4/4 super voters who make up the primary election electorate, were unsure of who to vote for and simply and superficially chose the first name they saw for each position. That could explain the opposite results we got for both candidates, Battista and Prince.
As we see here, the voters have to want to know something about the people they are voting for in order to defeat the ballot position factor, as well as overcome often superficial campaign advertising. And so we learned a hard lesson here: The vaunted and lauded super voters did not necessarily do super research into the candidates. They apparently did not bother to look up the candidates before walking into the voting booth. They simply saw a name at the top and made their choice.
And that is the gory anatomy of Pennsylvania’s 2025 primary election, God help us all.
Does ballot position really determine who a lot of primary election super voters choose? From this election, it would seem so.
Elk County is a very conservative rural place where DEP bureaucrats are hated like poison ivy. The 2025 results there make no sense, unless ballot position is the primary factor.
Doesn’t it seem mean spirited to not even mention candidate Josh Prince? Doesn’t it further alienate his supporters? What is that all about?
I have never seen election results like this. If conservative rural Lycoming County super voters feel so strongly about conservative candidate Battista, they for sure would have felt just as strongly about conservative candidate Prince. And yet…the results seem to prove that ballot position is the most important determinant
Dauphin County
Dauphin County
Should individual federal agents be held accountable?
Should individual FBI/DOJ/ATF/DHS agents be held personally accountable for the federal government’s Gestapo war of terror inflicted on innocent Americans over the past four years?
This question has been on my mind daily, for the past four years, because I was a law-abiding J6 peaceful protestor who was nonetheless visited and then interviewed by FBI agents, with all that that portends. These FBI visits and interviews with people like me, who they said up front had done nothing criminal, had committed no crime, were done for the sole purpose of political intimidation, with the intimation that a violent early morning FBI SWAT raid through your front door could be the next outcome (as was done to hundreds of innocent Americans).
Now this question of individual federal agents has become a ripe policy subject, because on Friday the acting DOJ secretary demanded a list of all FBI agents and DOJ staff who “worked” on prosecuting January 6th victims.
Yes, I am using a lot of language here that is probably unfamiliar to a lot of Americans, including people who consider themselves politically involved or at least politically educated on both sides of the spectrum. So here are some important facts that will guide your understanding of where people who share my thinking are coming from:
- January 6th, 2021, was overwhelmingly a peaceful protest that I personally participated in, peacefully, non-violently, non-destructively.
- January 6th’s peaceful protest was eventually marred by some violence that was aggressively instigated by the police, Antifa, and a lot of now known federal agents who have been videotaped and identified.
- Using video footage solely from the West Plaza and a couple doorways, January 6th as a whole, as an entire day start to finish, has been purposefully mis-described by the Democrat Party-owned mainstream media, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, and other Leftist-aligned information outlets and social media companies. The purpose of their deliberate misinformation and censorship of rebuttals was to create a political narrative they could and did use against their political adversaries.
- This false narrative about J6 served as a sort of “Reichstag Fire” moment that the incoming Biden Administration siezed upon to justify its unconstitutional draconian assault on anyone and everyone who was remotely involved with protesting at J6. Including peaceful people like me, who simply happens to hold non-Leftist views about government, governance, etc.
- Much of the DOJ/FBI/DHS/ATF draconian abuse of their American political adversaries involved hyper-violent early morning no-knock raids on families in their homes. These outrageous raids have been widely reported in the non-legacy media, and almost completely censored in the establishment press.
- Over a thousand non-violent Americans were violently scooped up in these dragnets, where dozens of heavily armed federal agents from FBI, DHS, ATF and DOJ would conduct military-style home invasions backed by armored cars and helicopters. Small children, pregnant wives, the targeted husband, grandmas, grandpas, were all handcuffed, taken outside in freezing winter conditions in their pajamas, abused, homes destroyed in unnecessary searches, etc. Families and homes and businesses were turned inside out because some protestor maybe committed a trespass violation.
- The legal justification and basis for literally every one of these cases was one gigantic procedural violation and deprivation of constitutional due process after another after another. Illegal judge shopping, false affidavits, blank search warrants, false accusations, planted evidence, home security cameras turned off… if there was a potential violation of individual rights, the Biden DOJ/ FBI committed it almost as a signal of their lawless impunity and unaccountability.
- Hundreds of innocent J6 political prisoners have languished in prisons and solitary confinement as a result of this lawlessness, including the lawlessness of corrupt federal prosecutors conspiring with political activist judges to deprive these victims of their due process rights.
It is in this context that I ask the question if all of the federal agents who engaged in these violent home invasions should be personally held accountable. After all, they must have known that they were not searching for some drug dealer or violent criminal. And yet they inflicted unbelievable and wildly unconstitutional harm on innocent American citizens.
As we learned at the end of World War Two, the whiny excuse “I was just following orders” doesn’t cut it, doesn’t excuse uniformed police and soldiers from their personal responsibility when committing crimes against unarmed civilians. And I believe there should be no excuse for the many federal agents who carried out these patently illegal raids.
Yesterday I emailed the FBI agent who came to my house in 2022, asking him who at FBI or DOJ had directed him to target me (screen shot of our email chain and his picture at our front door are below). His name, as he represents it on his business card, is Patrick Armor. Patrick and another FBI agent subsequently interviewed me in an attorney’s office. Despite stating up front that they believed I had done nothing criminal on J6, they quickly went for the jugular, trying to get me to say anything or give them pictures or photos that would incriminate me.
It was clear they were trying to get me to say anything they could later purposefully misconstrue as “lying to a federal agent.” Even though I had nothing to lie about and therefore would not lie. It was simply a procedural ruse to catch an innocent person on a “process crime.”
All in support of the establishment’s false J6 political narrative, to help them implement a full takedown of America.
These FBI agents were willfully, knowingly, aggressively trying to entrap innocent Americans like myself, so they could deprive us of our liberty, and then take away much, much more from us. Over the past four years many other FBI agents around America raided bank deposit boxes and private precious metals caches, pocketed the valuables, and rode off into the sunset, with no accountability. These public employees have been the tip of the spear aimed at destroying America’s democratic institutions and norms, our rule of law.
For four years thousands of Americans like myself sat waiting for our front door to be blasted open in the middle of the night, our homes to be violently raided, over at most a trespassing charge.
This unchecked lawlessness is pure evil, and it must be held to account. The people who both enabled and implemented this evil must be held accountable. Every single federal agent who was involved in hunting down J6 protestors must be investigated, prosecuted, and held accountable through the criminal law process. Same for their bosses and the judges who signed off on dubious warrants.
America has just endured four years of a sort of Rwanda, albeit I grant you not yet involving the outright mass butchery and genocide that the full Rwanda experience involved. But America was being set up for that to happen next, because the political enemies of the Democrat Party – concerned parents of school children, conservative Latin Mass-only Catholics, critics of transgender ideology, conservative Christians, political conservatives and constitutionalists and patriots and US military veterans…were all deemed to be “deplorable” and demonized and targeted.
So that our eventual liquidation would be acceptable and normal to everyone else.
In August 2022 I wrote here that America was going to need a truth and reconciliation commission. Well, we are hopefully about to begin that process. Holding the lawless and violent individual federal agents fully accountable will be just the beginning.
And one final thought: Every American should reject the Gestapo fascism that was being inflicted upon at least half of the country these past four years. While America’s borders were being purposefully left wide open and an illegal invasion was under way. And billions of taxpayer dollars were granted to American organizations aggressively and treasonsously trying to destroy America from within. If you are not mad about this, then you either are not paying attention, or you are part of the problem.
FBI Agent Patrick Armor speaking with my wife and daughter, at our home’s front door, June 2022
Forgive Me for Asking, But I Must
Forgive me, it is not my intention to cast cold water on our collective rejoicing at having President Donald Trump re-elected, again, and thus at having dodged the Democrat Party’s communist anti-democracy bullet aimed at America’s heart. It is true that Trump’s election gives us hope that our constitutional republic is not over. However, I feel like I am watching a repeat of 2016-2017, where highly qualified conservatives and Republicans were mysteriously bypassed, overlooked, left untouched by the then-new Trump Administration.
Well do I recall someone of real stature writing publicly then (2017-2018) about how mystified he was that no one from Team Trump had contacted him about any of the unique policy strengths he had, and how the new Trump Administration seemed disinterested or lost on whatever that policy subject was. Well, here we go again, from where I sit.
Trump supporters have learned to forgive the 2016-2017 lapses, missteps, failures, and missed opportunities as due to Trump’s unfamiliarity with government, his natural reliance upon long established and unreliable DC Beltway insiders, his understandably misplaced trust in deep staters and other bad actors, his misplaced faith in the weight of federal employees’ oaths of office.
We watched as Trump’s first term slowly, painfully, peeled away the mask from the hostile administrative state, generously bankrolled by American taxpayers and yet also so openly at war with us. We grudgingly learned to accept the stolen 2020 election as the cost of doing business within the parameters set for us by the establishment media, the administrative state, and its constellation of hostile non-government organizations, who then worked furiously from outside to undermine the very rules they set.
And so we miraculously prevailed in 2024, and America as founded yet lives again. And now we have earned the right to say openly, can we please not make the same and very avoidable mistakes again, this time around?
While President Trump is indeed appointing strong leaders who are willing to assertively implement his bold vision for a better government that is closely attuned to America’s founding documents and principles, one question has not been addressed: Who exactly is going to carry out these deep reforms?
With few exceptions (the US Dept. of Commerce being one), nearly the entire federal workforce was already openly insubordinate to President Trump the last time around. And there is no reason to believe that these public employees are going to honor their oaths of office this time. And if Trump follows through on the DOGE promise to eliminate entire federal agencies, and greatly streamline those that remain, then which law-abiding civil servants will there be to carry forward in those same agencies the Trump Administration’s policies?
Put another way, if President Trump installs leaders who, for example, change the name of the radicalized US Environmental Protection Agency, then which of the old USEPA staff will there be to then follow through with the systemic change through every artery and vein inside the old institutional body? If the federal government is going to aggressively do compliance checks or reel back in billions of dollars in Biden grants to far-left NGOs, then who exactly is prepared to hit that ground running? The current federal workforce is almost entirely unreliable, and if left in place, each and every federal employee will become a road block of one. The DOGE people had better be collecting lots and lots of names of prospective civil servants who are prepared to take the place of existing staff, who should end up fired from federal service for any number of good reasons.
House cleaning is promised, but who then moves into the house to give it new life?
Ending where this essay began, it is my turn to publicly complain: No one from Team Trump contacted me, way back in 2016-2020, or now, about my unique area of expertise. I am one of a very small handful of truly conservative Republicans nationwide with extensive hands-on experience with public land issues and wildlife habitat/ land conservation policy. No Trump staffer has called to ask my experienced opinion on federal appraisal standards, especially related to eminent domain, or on rights-of-way issues surrounding federal properties. To my knowledge, none of my few colleagues have been contacted, either. I am not looking for a job. I already run a small business that I really enjoy. But I am willing to volunteer my precious time to help shape sound federal policy that is a significant deviation from the longstanding horrible status quo.
President Trump has the loyalty of so many talented and experienced conservatives, any and all of whom will jump at the opportunity to simply help this one man (and his administration) who can save America. This is the big chance to get America back on track.
So why then do I feel like America via President Trump is once again missing easy opportunities to make lasting, good policy? If the right people do not identify and help fix these longstanding horrible policies, the civil servants will keep them in place, and we will miss a once in a lifetime opportunity for good government.
Three Gay Men Saving Western Civilization
If you don’t already know it, you should know that three gay men of particular note are actively saving Western Civilization right now.
We bring attention to them and to this subject for a bunch of reasons, mostly because one tires of hearing the same nonsense accusations and stereotypes against conservatives and gays alike, and also because Western Civilization is under crushing assault right now. So it is important to document that gay men are a prominent part of the conservative movement for individual freedom, free speech, and freedom of conscience, all of which are anathema to the political Left.
If you think you are standing tall for freedom by having an NRA sticker on your pickup truck, a Trump hat on your head, and occasionally donating to conservative candidates, get a load of these three guys. Take note; these three gay guys are really moving the freedom ball down the field, more than anyone else.
Douglas Murray – defender of and advocate for modern Western civilization, Christendom, Judeo-Christian values, intellectual freedom, you can find him at https://rumble.com/c/DouglasMurraySpeaks and at https://x.com/DouglasKMurray. Douglas is the incisive, witty, friendly intellectual warrior on the general civilization scene. He clashes frequently with Muslims who openly hate and deride Western Civilization, and yet who love living in Western nations like Britain and America. Douglas is an international hero.
Scott Presler – Stop the Steal, conservative organizer, powerfully motivating speaker, he can be found at https://earlyvoteaction.com/ and at https://x.com/ScottPresler. I met Scott in November 2020 at the Stop The Steal rally at the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg. He was justifiably fired up, and got everyone else fired up. Scott has persistently shown the moribund, lackadaisical, lazy, unperturbed, uninvolved, sleepy GOP how to get the work done that can win elections. In fact, Scott is more trusted by more grass roots conservatives than is the GOP. He has been really active in Pennsylvania the past couple months, leading incredible voter registration efforts everywhere. When he was in my home county of Dauphin, our own county GOP made no mention of him, or of his work. Probably because he made us look bad. The guy is a national powerhouse for conservative ideals and individual freedom.
Last but not least is Brandon Straka, founder of the #Walkaway movement. He can be found at https://www.walkawaycampaign.com/ and at https://x.com/BrandonStraka. Brandon sells “I Used To Be A Democrat” tee shirts that are selling out lately. A former gay liberal, Brandon realized – like Douglas and Scott – that regular Americans care not a whit about his sexual orientation. We may not want to hear about it all the time, but we also just don’t care. Gay? OK with us. Just pay your taxes and work like the rest of us. Brandon has been chipping away at the bizarre cult fixation so many well meaning people have on the Democrat Party, and for that we all owe him a big Thank You.
One person I deliberately leave out here is the politically ambiguous, or disingenuous, Glenn Greenwald, whose Jew-by-birth anti-Semitism automatically disqualifies him from carrying the freedom banner. No friend of freedom, this guy is against the underdog minority. Yuck.
In sum, being gay doesn’t automatically mean you have to be a Leftist. I know a lot of gays who feel welcome in broader society realize this, and they see the destructive results of leftist/Democrat Party policies. They are not only welcome in the conservative movement, many of them are leaders in it. Here are three. Maybe you know of others.