Posts Tagged → truth
Why I do not have a podcast, and won’t
Couple years ago, a longtime older friend, financially successful and politically active, asked me why I do not have a podcast.
“I see all these podcasts online, and I think, Wow, Josh would be great at that You should do it.”
And to me, even though I am not going to be a podcaster or have a podcast, what a great and appreciated compliment that is, for several reasons.
The most important being that discerning thinkers — people who more carefully consider the information they consume — are increasingly tied into podcasts. Both Left and Right, and a lot of Americans in the middle, are hungry for information that breaks from the worn out, politically partisan, and openly fraudulent mainstream legacy media outlets like the New York Times, ABC-CBS-NBC-CNN-NPR-BBC, Washington Post, LA Times, etc.
These mainstream legacy media organizations are not fair-minded arbiters of accurate information. Rather, they are highly tuned political activism outlets. And it is no “conspiracy theory” to say this; they proudly flaunt their partisanship every single day. At this point, there is no material, substantive difference between the New York Times and Mother Jones magazine, other than the NYT is living off the fumes of its once great reputation and the closed circuit dopamine high that leftists live in (“I only read information sources that align with my values” said an old friend to me several years ago, deliberately not self-aware about how self-defeating such a non-diverse, mono-syllabic approach to information is to those people, especially, who pretend to consume only the very best and purest of information).
The NYT masquerades as a serious place, whereas Mother Jones has been a gleeful juvenile bomb thrower for decades. Both are far-left America-hating Marxist activism proponents who abuse their masochistic audiences.
And yes, I have the hands-on experience with both of these outfits to speak authoritatively about them. Suffice it to say that we all have a family…
And so, in this general vacuum/absence of accurate news i.e. mainstream media’s deliberate misinformation fake news, podcasts have opened up huge opportunities for people genuinely interested in learning the actual factual truth. And market demand has been met by market supply; podcasts are now such a thing that plenty of Americans run for office or commit public displays of strangeness, just to get enough of a following to launch a podcast.
Today, there are an awful lot of podcasts available. It seems like every would-have-been college professor and wingnut and ex-CIA officer and ex-combat veteran with loads of ink on his arms has started a podcast. A podcast is what serious would-be “influencers” do. The actual “influencers” just seem to post brief TikTok videos of themselves in various stages of undress, or eating messy sandwiches in an expensive car while wearing expensive clothes.
I would say most of the podcasters on the right are pretty careful thinkers, not all, but most. People who kind of defined conservative podcastistan for a long time (long by podcast terms), like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, have largely discredited themselves by abandoning facts and rigorous thinking for nonsense only slightly better packaged than the trash at the New York Times or Mother Jones.
This is the beauty of the podcast world today: Dip your toe in the water and check it out. Jump in for a swim and lap up all the many flavors of individual opinions you like. It is a much richer, more diverse, more interesting, more informative place than all of the monosyllabic legacy media outlets put together.
So given my positive view of podcasts in general, why did I not start a podcast of my own? Several simple reasons: I do not have the time to do it; I am not narcissistic enough; though I am a very strong public speaker, I enjoy writing much more than talking; and I do not know how to do the necessary selfie videos, which feel socially awkward to me.
Too many podcasters really scramble to stay on top of the wave, every day, which can lead to some humorously foolish, or sophomorically high schoolean, dis-believable grasping at straws. Publicly. Which I am old enough and old school enough to feel self-conscious about. So, no thanks. This blog is a satisfying enough outlet for me. And I am not in the information “business” or in this for money, i.e. note the absence of advertising on this website.
I write because I feel compelled to write. It is an undeniable energy that wells up inside me all the time, and it is part of the reason I had at one time aspired to be an academic. If you do a search of “Josh First Harrisburg” outside of Google (which is not an honest broker about accurate information, but rather has made itself highly politicized with inaccurate search results), you will find dozens and dozens of essays and articles I have written over the past 25 years, as well as news reports and interviews on my various land projects and on some of the political races I have run in.
What emerges from that resulting morass of printer’s ink, I think, is the clear image of a guy who has strong opinions about a lot of subjects, who enjoys public speaking and writing, and who has several feet in several different worlds simultaneously.
And I am most happy limiting that all to writing one or two essays a week in my blog here, which fits in with my busy work schedule. No podcast necessary. No podcast desired.
But I will give credit to the conservative podcastistanians, whose overall grand number, high volume, interesting topics, and really wide intellectual diversity shows us just how important the First Amendment is, even as the legacy media try to hog that all to themselves, and to discredit and take it away from anyone who does not march in lockstep with their leftist narrative.
I recommend that anyone with an ounce of interest in starting a podcast do so. Explore it. Be your best self. And if you fail, that is OK. At least you will have checked it off your list. Take comfort from knowing that I will not be able to do that, because I am just too lazy.
racist white liberals railroad Black candidate
Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson is running for governor of North Carolina. That this high-energy, articulate, charismatic, passionate Black candidate scares the hell out of racist white liberal Democrats is evident. Mark Robinson is being Roy Moore’d.
Remember Judge Roy Moore? He was a judge in Alabama who ran for the US Senate a few years ago, and whose popularity attracted ridiculous lies from the Democrat Party mainstream media and its proxies. Ridiculous though the lies were, the good hearted and honest Republican and conservative Christian voters of Alabama gave just enough credence to them to undercut some of Judge Roy Moore’s support. Voters giving credence to ridiculous lies just barely cost him the election and saddled Alabama with a communist Democrat Party senator for several years.
Enough Republican and conservative Christian voters bought into the crazy lies about Judge Roy Moore that they had misgivings and did not vote for him. Thus did the leftist Democrat candidate, Doug Jones, barely eke out a win. In red blooded Alabama of all places.
It was shameful all the way around, because the crazy lies about Judge Roy Moore were so obviously crazy lies that anyone with half a brain should have said “Ah yes, the mainstream media, which is an arm of the Democrat Party, is attacking a Republican again” and then voted accordingly for Judge Roy Moore.
But conservatives are sometimes too open minded, too willing to be played by leftwing fake news, because they want to do what is right.
Doug Jones lasted just whatever was left of the uncompleted term he filled, like a year or two, and then Coach Tommy Tuberville whooped his anti-America butt and took that US Senate seat and gave it back to Americans. Alabamans had had enough Democrat Party communism in that short amount of time and sent Doug Jones packing. Although Judge Roy Moore went on to win his defamation lawsuit for the crazy lies he suffered, he was significantly damaged, and he unfortunately stepped out of politics.
So here North Carolina voters are now faced with an incompetent and arrogant governor, Roy Cooper, and Roy Cooper’s would-be replacement, Josh Stein, on the one hand, whose hands-off handling of the Hurricane Helene destruction has been an epic and highly documented failure, and on the other hand Lt. Gov Mark Robinson, whose energetic presence in American politics is a breath of fresh air and thus also a real threat to the Democrat Party stranglehold on American Blacks.
The Democrat Party and its propaganda ministry aka the Establishment Media like CNN, NPR, PBS, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, ABC et al, have thus gone after Lt Mark Robinson with the only criticism they can throw at him: Crazy lies.
Lying is the only way the Democrat Party can win in the North Carolina governor election, and of course the proven liars at CNN / CNNLOL are enabling the lying. And even if this fake “scandal” (a few non-PC posts on a website from 14 years ago) stupid attack on Lt. Gov Mark Robinson were true, it would be so stupid, so ridiculous, so meaningless that no one with half a brain should spend any time thinking about it.
Dear North Carolina voters, please do not fall for the crazy lies against Lt. Mark Robinson.
Do not allow the bad guys to pull a Judge Roy Moore against Lt Mark Robinson.
Do not allow the highly damaging Democrat Party to undeservedly hold onto power in North Carolina. As you can see with your own eyes, Governor Roy Cooper and NC AG Josh Stein have failed the victims of Hurricane Helene because they don’t give a damn about you in your hour of greatest need (in one video above you can listen to Roy Cooper lie while flanked by huge liar and failure DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the left and huge failure crooked Joe “Bribem” Biden on the right).
Josh Stein is absolutely nowhere to be seen.
You North Carolinians can only do better than Roy Cooper and his cookie cutter substitute Josh Stein, you cannot possibly do worse than them. Roy Cooper and Josh Stein are such a disaster, such a failure, that people are asking if it is done on purpose because most of the victims are rural people who would not vote for leftist Josh Stein under any conditions, anyhow.
Stand up for truth, stand up against crazy lies, stand up for yourselves, vote for truth, vote for Lt. Mark Robinson to be North Carolina’s next governor.
Lt. Gov Mark Robinson, another victim of attempted White Liberal Democrat lynching
Racist fake “journalist” attacks Trump in broad daylight
President Trump stepped onto the stage of the National Association of Black Journalists (what if there were a National Association of White Journalists…? Are white journalists not allowed to join the same group as black journalists? Isn’t that exclusionary racism? This whole racial skin color division thing eludes me) the other day, and patiently rebuffed a blatantly racist attack by the openly hostile host, Rachel Scott of ABC “news“, whose unprofessional, disrespectful and confrontational attitude is why the establishment media has lost the American people.
So-called “journalist” Rachel Scott behaved so poorly from the get-go that she left no question in anyone’s mind if she is a politically partisan activist. She is. She is also a white-hating racist. She rapidfire threw lie- bomb after lie-bomb at Trump, and then harshly interrupted her guest whenever he tried to answer her.
To put Rachel Scott’s aggressive behavior in perspective, had the skin colors been reversed, she would have been immediately drummed out of whatever atoms remain of journalism as a recognizable profession. Her hostility was palpable, his disrespect was measurable, and there is no other way to ascribe this unprofessional conduct than sheer hatred. If it would be unacceptable for a white person to treat a black person as Rachel Scott did, then the reverse is also true.
Racism is bad, it is un-American, and it cannot be allowed in polite society. What an embarrassment this event was for the National Association of Black Journalists. Not a professional group, evidently.
For his part, President Trump was incredible. He patiently responded to his vicious antagonist, and quite personally addressed her points head-on. Speaking of skin color, one of the intriguing things that President Trump brought up is how Kamala Harris never identifed as “black” before. As Harris is descended from Asians, whites, and possibly American Indians, with maybe some black Africans in the distant past, and her one ancestor owned the most slaves on Jamaica out of every other slave holder in that island’s history, it surprised Trump to hear the political activist ABC fake news person Rachel Scott call Harris “black.”
And he said so.
Kudos to Trump for being forthright and honest. And he also spoke the truth about having been the best president for American blacks since President Lincoln. When Rachel Scott yet again interjected that it was Lyndon Johnson who signed the Voting Rights Act, Trump was too much of a gentleman to point out that President Lyndon Johnson was a notorious southern racist, and his policies were openly designed to keep American blacks enslaved on the Democrat Plantation for generations to come. Which they have. And it was the Republicans who voted then for civil rights and voting rights for American blacks, while the Democrats voted against them.
What interests me about President Trump’s appearance on enemy territory is how the vast majority of Americans do not give a fig about skin color. I myself have loved women with brown skin, black skin, red skin, white skin, and olive skin, and I have to say that all of my friends feel the way I do – skin color is the least useful indicator of anything important. And yet, racists like Rachel Scott keep trying to whip up racial animus between Americans, all of whom simply want to live in harmony with one another.
Similarly, other racist “journalists” (Democrat Party activists who work in the news business) have accused Trump’s VP nominee JD Vance of being a racist, despite his wife having brown skin and their kids looking quite brown.
It’s weird, to borrow a word from Kacklin’ Kamala, how liberals and Democrats are always racists at heart, and how they just cannot tell the truth.
Thank God America has Donald Trump to say the facts as they are!
Thanks to Mothers Everywhere
Today is Mother’s Day in America. It is a day in which we give thanks and show our appreciation to our mothers, most of whom have sacrificed their own interests to ensure that we, their children, get the care and support we need to reach our basic goals. Some have done more than others, some have been better at it than others, but almost all mothers have sacrificed so that their child/children can do OK.
Today, beautiful, wholesome, gentle motherhood and the mothers who do it are celebrated.
At odds with this ancient, simple, and universally acknowledged beauty is the modern Western sexual insurrection against all traditional human norms, including motherhood and mothers. For some odd reason, there are adult people in America who actually disclaim knowledge of how to define a woman, who is the mother of all life. Katanga or Kitanji Jackson, whatever, recently appointed to the US Supreme Court on the sole qualification that she is a black woman, is one such odd adult.
For those hard of understanding, let us provide some basic guidelines for today:
Mother: Definition 1, a woman who conceives, gestates, and then gives live birth to a human child through her uterus and vaginal canal. Definition 2, a woman who gives live birth to a human and then nurses it on naturally produced breast milk from her body lactated through her breasts.
Motherhood: Definition 1, the nursing, nurturing, caring for, raising, and general sacrifice of her own needs and desires by a mother for her child. Definition 2, general aphorism for unconditional love and nurture of young animals and humans by a female of the species. Definition 3, the source of all life; all that is good; wholesome; healthy.
In a world of deliberate confusion and outright lies and the damned liars who tell them, like Injustice Kitangy Jackson, let’s rally around absolute truths that can and always will withstand momentary cultural fetishes and weird blips on the radar of human existence. Motherhood and mothers are one such absolute truth, along with the womanhood that makes them possible. There is no substitute for motherhood and there is no faking it. You can’t simply put on lipstick and a pair of high heels and declare yourself a mother.
Thanks, Mom.
Will DNC repay SBF illegal donations?
Sam Bankman-Fried (“SBF”), the badly misnamed would-be crypto Ponzi schemer who now will not be freed by the Bahamian court because he is a flight risk, was arrested two days ago because of his many criminal financial acts. Among the many criminal acts with which he is being charged are the tens of millions of stolen dollars he illegally donated to Democrat Party politicians.
SBF bypassed all kinds of well known and highly placarded legal restrictions on political donations so that he could be the number two largest donor to the Democrat Party. He was only slightly behind international villain George Soros, who reportedly donated about $40 million to Democrat Party candidates and causes in 2021.
SBF made his mega political contributions despite knowing that his Ponzi scheme FTX company was going down the drain. And many of his recipients accepted the tainted donations, despite knowing that the money was dirty and that something was gravely amiss with the baby-faced kid who had never made an honest dime in his young life, but who was now slinging mega cash like chipped beef hash at a greasy spoon diner.
And yes, SBF accepted all of the public accolades, speaking opportunities, awards, and mainstream media interviews even while he knew that FTX was dying and would soon be declaring bankruptcy. Sam Bankman-Fried is not just a criminal liar and evil destroyer of people’s hard-won savings and retirement funds, he is the extremely disappointing heir to a 3,000-year legacy of telling the truth, being straight in your business dealings, and living a clean and blameless life. It amazes a lot of people how so many of SBF’s ethnic kin have also recently fallen down on the job #1 of being a Light Unto The Nations, and instead traded in their inspiring religious heritage for a “mess of bank-note colored pottage.”
The danger SBF and his fellow financial rapists pose to the rest of the otherwise blameless members of the tribe is huge. SBF’s victims will be many for a long time to come, not just financial but also people who had absolutely nothing to do with him in any way. Such is the judgment received; as unfair as it is, so has it always been. What a huge piece of sh*t SBF is, as are those who enabled him in the first place.
What is intriguing is whether or not the Democrat Party will repay its ill-gotten gains blood money from SBF. Will the illegally donated money be given back to SBF’s creditors, so that they might be made whole? That would be the right thing to do.
*apparently Sam Bankman-Fried donated to some RINO Republican candidates, people who make a career-long living working hand-in-glove with the Democrat Party. To the working American taxpayer citizen, there isn’t a hill of beans difference between these RINOs and their chums the Democrats. Practically speaking, SBF’s political donations were 100% made to people who are either directly implementing the Democrat Party’s Marxist agenda, or who are enabling its implementation.
Samuel Bankman-Fried in handcuffs in custody of the Bahamas police. Soon to be extradited to America, this pasty faced, pudgy piece of crap deserves to spend the rest of his grotesque life behind bars for the incredible damage he has done
Tamper Resistant Language, Bomb Proof Love
When I was at Penn State in the 1980s, one of my Spanish professors was an older gay man. How did we know he was gay? It seemed evident to us students that this small, shy, demur, effeminate, carefully dressed man was probably a homosexual. That he also lived a quiet life with another man in a beautiful old stone house with perfect lawncare and meticulous flower beds on the historic north end of campus pretty much cemented our conclusion.
We did not care about his sexual identity, and he did not demand or expect that we did care. He never mentioned it, and instead lived and taught in dignity. We gave him our loyalty and respect because he was a phenomenal teacher, who taught 400-level Spanish language literature from a place of deep passion and personal resonance. He could easily have been an English literature professor quoting Shakespeare, exhorting his students to comprehend the subtle nuances The Bard emanated from the stage to his audiences. But instead, he taught us The Aleph, among other deep and inspiring masterpieces of the Spanish language. This professor did not only teach us the most complex spoken and written Spanish, he also taught us to think carefully. About symbols, potential meanings of words, and the whys of writers of all languages; the reason for the idea-conveying purpose of literature, in any language.
His courses required real contemplation and reflection, and they strengthened our brain muscles. As a result, our professor lived on in our lives as a great teacher who greatly rounded us as individuals.
Fast forward to today, and every aspect and angle of human sexuality is daily artificially and forcefully thrust upon all of us, regardless of our age, with demands that we embrace all of it and simultaneously abandon thousands of years of shared human culture, religion, and biological science. This brutal, crass sexuality is the dominant subject of just about every subject, be it science, math, or language. This is a shock-and-awe, beat-you-over-the-head, we-will-destroy-you, revolutionary assault being led by people whom reporter Salena Zito calls the curators of culture. That is, people with careers in academia, education, and journalism. As in, writers of fact and fiction, reporters of human behavior, the (historically speaking) diligent and careful chroniclers of human culture.
Contrasted with Dark Ages monks carefully preserving the written word and human knowledge behind stone walls, and even with academics of the recent past like my gay Spanish professor who was devoted to the rules of Spanish language, these modern day curators of culture are neither diligent nor careful nor deep nor meaningful. Rather, they are rampaging intellectual rapists and murderers, leading a grotesque attack on what had been one of humanity’s most tolerant, productive, and vibrant cultures, ever, America.
The biggest of their sexual assaults is the demand for new pronoun uses, for which the English language, like all languages except Esperanto, is unprepared and thus will never naturally accommodate. For example, you could not write a literary masterpiece using the bastardized pronouns now hobnailed onto daily English usage, except maybe as a farce to highlight the ridiculousness of the self-appointed pronoun police and culture-raping revolutionaries. Like all languages, and probably more so than most, English is a mix of different languages (German, French, Celtic), and has its own long-developed unique rules that render it tamper-resistant.
If you try to communicate in English using the revolutionary pronouns (e.g. they for a woman who self identifies as both man and woman), you fall flat on your face, because this attempt to bodger English just doesn’t work. It can’t possibly work, because all languages are designed to help humans maximally communicate with one another. All languages have rules that maximize their effectiveness so that people may fully comprehend one another.
Which means that this sexual revolutionary assault via pronouns is not really about erasing lines between people and bringing people together. Rather, it is about erecting barriers and causing confusion. Religious Americans have identified the new pronoun mis-use as a modern day Tower of Babel situation, just begging for divine intervention. It certainly seems to be that significant to me.
However, whatever linguistic rules of English may be daily axe-murdered by woke pronounsters, my primary objection to them is that they fail the one universal language spoken by all humans: Love. While deliberately sowing confusion and fierce disagreement about the most elementary aspects of science and human relationships, the revolutionary pronounsters are also trying to destroy (not expand) the concept of love. Love, the truest, most pure universal language which can bind all humans to each other in the truest of relationships, and has been known humanity-wide since the dawn of our species by fidelity, commitment, and truth, is now being exploded by this sexual assault by mispronoun. Every human culture has sanctified love through marriage and commitment, family, honesty, and truth, baseline values all now being thrown out the window and publicly burned at the stake by the wokesters.
Love is a simple thing, and it is the one thing that all humans around the globe immediately understand. Love is bomb proof and it will get us through this turmoil, misused pronouns notwithstanding. Dear child, I am your parent, I created you, and I will always always always love you, no matter what f**king asinine pronouns you have been disinformed and misinformed to use by evil people who are misusing you as cannon fodder in their inglorious revolution against God knows what.
Holding news “reporters” accountable
Liberal news propaganda outlet Politico attacked a guy who is a part-time actor and full-time lawyer. He appeared in a political ad. That was his sole exposure to politics. Politico’s Jonathan Martin called him a pornographer, but the movie is an intentionally Z-rated horror film.
Since when do private citizens get treated like politicians?
How do we hold accountable reporters like those as Politico?
It’s doubtful that reporters want to be held to the same standard they apply to their victims.
Today I got into a back-and-forth with yet another liberal reporter. He wrote a story about carrying concealed guns, and I was quoted. I objected to his obvious bias. He would not accept the truth that he is a political activist, and not a news reporter. Nice enough guy, but like so many in the news business, he’s dedicated to his version of the truth, not to accuracy, not to giving all sides equal opportunity.
At some point, we need to start digging around on the private behavior of activists who represent themselves as objective reporters. Let’s hold them to the standard they hold everyone else to. Or they can begin to provide truth in advertising, and be honest about their personal views that shape their writing about other people they usually disagree with.