Posts Tagged → steve bannon
Who is MAGA? What is MAGA?
Quite a bit of debate going on about the Make America Great Again movement started by candidate Donald Trump in 2015. Now that the movement to get Donald Trump elected succeeded a third time, and his policy goals are being implemented, the next question becomes “Whither MAGA?”
The question of why any American opposes the mere concept of Make America Great Again is beyond me. Why an entire political party has defined itself as opposing everything that a president does, including pledging to demolish the privately funded ballroom addition he is overseeing on the White House, is a question more for psychiatrists than political scientists. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real, it is measureable, it is quantifiable, and it is probably operationally definable, if some enterprising PhD student wants to contribute something useful to an otherwise useless, politicized, and anti-ideas moribund academia.
Americans suffering from TDS have a real problem, and I hope they get it treated professionally. On the flip side, conservative patriots like moi viscerally despised impostor Barack Hussein Obama, but not to the point of irrationally opposing even the occasional good things he did. You know, throwing out the baby with the bath water. Not that I can recall good things that Obama did, but probably there were some, like adding new acreage to a national park somewhere.
More to the moment are the questions of who is MAGA and who runs MAGA and what will become of this political movement when Preisdent Trump terms out of office. Who in the world of politics will pick up Trump’s mantle, his movement, and reassemble the successful team for future campaigns?
Right now a bunch of professional pundits have claimed the MAGA gatekeeper role for themselves. Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Roger Stone, maybe Alex Jones, and a few other public opinion figures who make their living from speaking into a microphone and to a camera continue to make strident statements about MAGA, as if they own it, define it, speak for it. Other political pundits, like Dinesh D’Souza, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, et al, certainly speak to and about MAGA principles, but they make no open claims to actually own or represent MAGA.
I reject all of these people, and anyone, frankly, from claiming this role. Even President Trump no longer really “owns” this movement that he created ten years ago.
This whole question, raging though it may be, reminds me of the whole predecessor Tea Party movement that began in 2008-2009 in Central Pennsylvania. No sooner had someone, and I won’t bother to research who it was who dubbed this grass roots voters backlash against the woeful Republican Party establishment and its hand-holding big brother Democrat Party, but immediately, anyone involved in conservative politics, conservative political activism, issue activism, or donating to conservative or GOP political campaigns, was awash in Tea Party related emails, appeals, mailers, brochures.
Quite a few so-named “Tea Party” 501(c)(4) groups were formed in 2008-2012. Even more related LLCs were formed. All were run by aggressive business people who sensed an opportunity to make money from politics yet again, and who appealed to voters and activists as being leaders who best captured and represented Tea Party ideals and principles. Many of these people claimed to be moral leaders, leaders of morality and ideological purity. Most of these people and their groups and organizations were shams, frauds, fakes, and did not stand the test of time. They are found few and far between today as part of the MAGA movement or cause, having been exposed as simple opportunists.
On the opposite end of this spectrum sits people like yours truly, my past political campaigns, and this blog, who have never made a net gain penny from politics, but who instead continue to hemorrhage personal money in the cause of political dialogue, policy debate, individual freedom, small government, accountable government, constitutional principles, our nation’s founding principles, etc.
I can also think of a few tireless, devoted political advocates here in Pennsylvania, who I will not name in full, who continue to donate their personal time and money to the cause of First Principles, without hope or expectation of remuneration. Dean, Ron, Jim, Jeff and others have all stood the test of time since our collective political arousal in 2008-2009. Yes, others have risen up to contribute their voice to the cause of freedom, and honest elections, but they also seek to make a living doing it. That is a business endeavor, not a selfless devotion.
Despite plenty of political activism in the 1980s, as a conservative Central PA Democrat, my own first personal try at elected office was in 2009-2010, when I ran as a Tea Party conservative Republican candidate for US Congress here in Central PA. I ran for state senate in 2012 and 2015, eventually removing myself from a great race for state senate in late 2015, due to a severely injured knee obtained while bear hunting. Back-to-back surgeries on what had been my “good” knee in January 2016 eliminated my ability to do what I enjoyed and did best, going door to door and meeting voters. It marked the end of my interest in elected office. But not the end of my interest in politics.
In 2015 I became full-blown MAGA, despite plenty of mockery from establishment Republicans serving on county GOP committees. Their 2016 “Dump Trump” slogan failed, as their shallow RINO candidates failed.
2016 marked the end of the Tea Party, as it morphed from a broad, ground-up, grass-roots-led freedom movement into the MAGA movement led by one Donald Trump. Trump used that movement of First Principle America lovers to get elected to office. Now that he succeeded, I do not think anyone can justifiably claim to lead it, or own it, or speak for it. Not even Trump.
I now look at people like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson the same way that I looked (sideways) at the people who came out of the shadows in 2008-2010 to claim un-earned leadership roles and money-making opportunities in the Tea Party. That populist movement may have finally found its footing under a new name, MAGA, and it may have elevated some people who spoke or occasionally speak our language, but it is wholly owned by you and me, citizen voters.
The strength of the Tea Party and its MAGA incarnation is that we Americans spoke to each other in town halls and municipal meeting rooms and at rallies. This was the most authentic voice and debate possible.
Each of us has an equal voice in this. People who make money and a living from this movement are automatically suspect in my eyes. They can’t possibly be in this for the right reason.
And like the big family we American citizens are, you and I can argue and bicker and sometimes disagree with one another about policy and candidates. But not one of us is a gate keeper for our collective movement, and no one we might want as a spokesman, would have the ridiculous arrogance to claim such a role.
Supreme Court’s recent decisions reveal deep DC Beltway Bandito mentality
While all other American institutions – private, non-profit, for-profit, our entire military, the Cat Ladies Survival League, the Backyard Bird and Squirrel Protective Association, the Republican Party, the Democrat Party, the media, Hollywood, professional sports, the medical profession and its various Medical Associations, the legal profession and its various Bar Associations, and the entire federal government apparatus – have been Borg captured and bent to the Borg Left’s purposes, completely against the will of the vast majority of the American citizenry, there has remained one lone institution that has appeared to resist the capture:
The US Supreme Court.
Against the decades-long tidal wave of berserker Democrats and somnulent Republicans only the US Supreme Court has appeared unbroken, pure, un-woke, and integrity-bound to the US Constitution backbone and nervous system that binds all American citizens together as a living, breathing, functioning One Nation Under God.
And yet, with its recent holdings we repeatedly see not so much glimpses into the Court’s true soul, but rather flashes of the oft hidden but actual volcanic fire seething beneath our collective feet. For as much as the Court has tried to appear united and above the frightening political fray, it too is subject to the worming rat-gnawing effects of leftist wokeism. For as much as it has placed several unanimous holdings before the American citizenry in recent months as evidence of the level headedness of the Court’s members, it also holds a growing threat of Borg tyranny.
Three stalwart Borg leftists – Kagan, Sotomayor, and Katanga – maintain a unified beachhead on the shores of the US Supreme Court and America’s last residual semblance of the rule of law. Regardless of how obvious the legal question, these three ardent Marxists always vote for more, bigger, and more powerful government at the expense of We, The People as a people and as individuals whose rights are supposed to be protected from government overreach by the courts.
There is not one single public policy issue or individual rights question that does not get the Marxist treatment from these three members of the bench. And so one cannot really be surprised to see them vote against presidential immunity in the case of Trump. Because like all of the other politicians on their Borgian Marxist Democrat side of the aisle, Kagan, Katanga, and Sotomayor also lust for the blood of the one person who stands in their way, Trump. This morning’s holding by the Court reveals that such a simple question of presidential immunity (having none would result in a president being unable to do his job) can only hold naked political interests for three of the nine justices.
If left unchecked, in a simple matter of time, that number will grow to four and then a majority of five, and then American citizens will have no individual rights left under the federal jackboot.
This skepticism is justified by other recent holdings and indecisions by the Court: The First Amendment is not violated or even infringed by the Biden Administration’s active coercion of social media companies to conduct the censorship-by-proxy of American citizens’ speech critical of the Biden Administration. Subpeonaed political activist Steve Bannon must go to jail for failing to appear before the incorrectly convened J6 Committee, while lawless AG Merrick Garland flaunts all legal procedure, including precisely that which has ensnared Bannon, to hold onto and cruelly wield an unbridled official monopoly on violence.
The list of outright fraudulent decisions and spineless indecisions by the Court reveals that the three Borg Marxists are not just a beachhead, and not just a taste of things to come for our rights. Rather, the insular, disconnected, corrupt, and self-serving DC Beltway Bandito culture is seeping through all skin pores and lung tissue and hearing and tasting orifices of the supposed five or six “conservative” justices on the other side of Kagan, Katanga, and Sotomayor. We cannot trust or rely on the US Supreme Court to guard us, because this institution is also being captured, just in slow motion and in our sight.
It may be that if or when the American People sort out this constant assault on our rights on their own terms, that only Justices Thomas and Alito will remain fit to form the core of the new Supreme Court. The rest? Well, what does any assertive free people do with traitors?
Steve Bannon: Good, bad, or ugly?
Steve Bannon has been a hero to so many of us in the conservative/ patriot/ constitutionalist movement. In 2016 he fought like hell to get President Trump a win that exposed what is really happening in America (federal bureaucrats, the bipartisan Uniparty, and globalist billionaires tearing America away from the citizens who own it), and even after he was booted from the White House for covering Trump’s back (and neither Trump nor anyone else but Bannon understood the game that was going on there until too late) he continued to be an advocate for America First and President Trump.
And for the past several years he has maintained a radio/TV show called Steve Bannon’s War Room that is like so many other political radio/TV shows. Every day, Bannon discusses the zeitgeist of political issues and personalities from his political perspective. Which is a perspective I share.
That’s the “good” Steve Bannon.
Then there is the “bad” and even possibly “ugly” Steve Bannon. And we are not talking about looks here, folks. I don’t comment on people’s looks, because that is irrelevant, immaterial, and often just shallow cheap shots. Rather, we are analyzing one of Bannon’s public activities and statements, and wondering WHISKY TANGO FOXTROT is going on in that War Room of his.
Below is a screen shot from Bannon’s War Room show as it appears on Rumble a week ago or so. As you can see from this screen shot, Bannon is actually lauding Pennsylvania GOPe careerist-political weasel-hack Jake Corman. This makes no sense, because it isn’t warranted because it’s not true.
Corman is a catastrophe for Pennsylvania, for the Republican Party, and for America in every single way. Corman’s many flaws are well known (directly associated with deep corruption, nepotism, RINOism, failing his constituents in favor of big money Democrat donations etc), and his opposition to a forensic audit of the stolen 2020 election is both public and subject to a behind the scenes battle. As leader of the PA senate, Corman stripped PA state senator Doug Mastriano of his senate staff. Because Mastriano has been working hard to fix the blatant election fraud that occurred here in Pennsylvania in 2020.
All of this and much much more (like Hey Jake, do you know what happened to Centre County DA Ray Gricar? Do you know what happened to his body? How did his mysterious disappearance help you? What criminality were you at risk of having Gricar expose?) makes Corman someone that a “good” Steve Bannon would naturally oppose.
Like, fiercely oppose, call out, expose, and challenge when Corman appears on his radio show and engages in totally obvious dodges and solipses. After all, we are all in the fight of America’s life right now. There is zero room for anyone like Jake Corman to be anywhere near politics or anything else that is important. Bannon is a political gate keeper and should be acting like one.
But instead, we get Steve Bannon actually heaping unearned and laughably incorrect plaudits on Corman on his show, and pitching him bizarre softball questions.
It is difficult to know if Bannon is just kind of playing along with Corman, so he can spring on him later, or if Bannon is bamboozled, or, in the worst and ugliest case, if thirty pieces of silver changed hands to buy Bannon’s fire. And it is this last possibility that strikes both fear into the hearts of constitutional warriors, and also deep resentment and anger. If Bannon has been bought by the enormous and enormously corrupt constellation of bad actors orbiting around their investment Jake Corman, then Bannon is not just “bad,” he is “ugly.”
So which is it, Steve Bannon? Are you good, bad, or ugly? If you are truly good, then you will side on the right side with the good people who are resisting the evil bipartisan takeover of America by the likes of Jake Corman and George Soros. You won’t post ridiculous headlines like this on your show. You will push back against bad people, phony people, dangerous people like Jake Corman.
Whose side are you on, Steve Bannon? Jake Corman’s side, or We, The People‘s side?
Steve Bannon actually wrote this laughably false headline.