Posts Tagged → X
September 22nd, 2025
Conservatives are treated to a daily barrage of “Can You Believe This Person” reports about awful responses to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. These reports emphasize the worst of the worst, which is always a statistical outlier, in order to get more clicks and keep the audience whipped up. I do admit to being surprised at how much open mockery and sneering has been done towards Charlie Kirk, his wife, his friends and followers, as well as the steady flow of outright lies and hate.
These are not appropriate or responsible responses to a political murder. Especially of someone so young and so gentle.
This makes me curious, because in my innocent naivete I cannot imagine so many big-hearted Americans deliberately lying about or hating someone they do not know. The very same people who openly pride themselves on being open minded, kind, nice, tolerant, factually correct… right? Their professed qualities seem to be starkly contrasted and at odds with their lousy behavior in this instance.
Made me wonder How are American liberals experiencing Charlie Kirk’s murder?
Since Kirk’s 9/10/25 assassination, I have spent a fair amount of time with liberals in two locations. Generally, they are either unfazed or not thinking about the murder. It does not appear to be foremost in their minds one way or another, unlike conservatives, who are understandably talking about it 24/7. Liberals are not socially talking about the murder in any way that I can see. If the subject is raised, it catches them by surprise, and the moment is uncomfortable.
One half day was spent with a gathering of people from around south central PA, the day after Charlie’s murder; the other was three days with liberals from all around the country in southwest PA last week.
These people did not watch Charlie as fans, or listen to him out of curiosity, as far as I can tell. If they did, their response was negative and they filed it away with the “not this guy” stuff. No one I encountered said anything like “Yeah, I have watched some of his videos and I like his style but disagree with his policies” or anything like this.
My impression, and that is all I am reporting here, is that the opinions of liberals I was around run the gamut from Charlie Kirk earned his murder because he said things Leftists strongly disagree with, to something like There are bad apples and violent radicals everywhere and on both sides; today it was Charlie Kirk, tomorrow it will be a liberal leader who gets whacked.
Again, my impression only, but liberals are experiencing this political assassination very differently than conservatives. This is obvious to anyone who reads the news at any site, but I had to see it for myself to believe it.
More broadly, it looks like there are two different languages being spoken in America, one language spoken by one political side and the other language by the other political side. It’s why firing late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was important to both sides: The Left needs these big sources of partisan disinformation like Kimmel to hold onto their inaccurate political narrative, and the Right wants to break the Left’s stranglehold on disinformation flow, so that Leftists are forced to seek out new sources and, hopefully, encounter new information.
But the Left seems to be like crack addicts over this information sourcing thing. They really really do not like to give up what they like, nor do they want to hear anything different than what they are comfortable with. Thus, they are mad as hell about Kimmel being fired for what he said, but they are not all that upset about Charlie Kirk being murdered for what he said.
One thing I saw (again, it is the same as I have observed over my past lifetime) past two weeks was liberals get their information second hand. Happily. A newspaper or tv channel they trust or like tells them something, and they accept it.
Alternatively, dueling podcasts and websites are huge on the political right. The political Right’s information ecosystem is wildly diverse and raucous. Because there is so much source competition and diversity on the right, so much hands-on/ eyes-on/ street-level reporting, so much direct fact checking or argumentation, the political Right thinks it has better answers to political questions. There is real dynamic debate on the right, and it attracts people comfortable with debate.
On the other hand, leftists seem allergic to debate or questioning their narrative. “Fact checking” by legacy media only started when the truth started coming out from new media sources, like Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit, and the legacy media needed a symbolic way of stopping it. Legacy media fact checks are just as ridiculous and innaccurate as the original spin-narrative they put out in the first place.
Liberals formed BlueSky as an alternative to Twitter/X, not because they were being censored on Twitter/X, but because conservatives were not being censored there. Liberals fled from inconvenient truths and uncomfortable facts on that platform, and have done all they can to suppress, censor, and chase off different points of view on every other platform, too. Is it any wonder, then, that they seem generally unaffected by Charlie Kirk’s assassination?
So, Charlie’s murder is not on the Democrat leftist radar except as a distant, cold data point. Not an emotional thing. He did not speak to them or for them. He scared them.
Said a friend to me, “Which is why even those Liberals who know not to comment about Charlie’s murder really dont care about it. Most have been completely lied to about him, and the far leftists who are the ones lying about him are happy. Godless people dont care about this type of thing.”
That is one way of describing it. I don’t disagree, and I also believe these leftist people have been heavily programmed for a very long time. They think they are godly. To them, God is pacifism, appeasement, open borders and endless spending on the government credit card. They believe that Americans who do not share their policy views are mean, heartless, unkind, un-Christian, etc.
Two really different languages are being spoken, and neither side understands the other. And while the political right has had to learn the language of the left over the past fifty years (due to not controlling the means of information production), the left has never had to learn the language of the right.
Obviously the left is resistant to hearing our point of view. They do all possible to censor, suppress, punish, and stamp out ideas contrary to their own. They do not want to think about this huge political assassination, except in ways that are strategic. Like, how can they beat it, and defeat it, so they don’t lose more power.
America, you are in big trouble.
June 9th, 2025
You should go see the latest Mission Impossible movie. You will not regret it.
About once per year I get to see a Hollywood movie. Not because of limitations on time, or money, but because 99% of what Hollywood produces is dreck, garbage, stupid, juvenile, destructive amoral nonsense. So sifting through the many no-go movies usually results in one that I will see, per year, and this year I went and saw the latest, and supposedly the last, Mission Impossible movie, starring Tom Cruise.
About Tom Cruise: I like him, because I like the values he showcases and promotes in his movies. His movies have plenty of action, and also pit good vs. evil, honesty vs. dishonesty, tradition vs. popular modernization, etc. Very few of Hollywood’s actors or movies are about good values. Most Hollywood movies are about silly, superficial entertainment, performed by actors who in their private lives lead silly, vacuous, superficial lives full of ridiculous childish drama and bad decisions. They make their money doing dress-up and make-believe. Then these same people are quick to tell working Americans how to live, what to value, and so on. They are disbelievable.
Tom Cruise is the complete opposite of 99% of the Hollywood goofs. He communicates his values and beliefs through his movies, and rare interviews, and leaves us peons (who are also his paying audience) alone the rest of the month.
For example, his movie The Last Samurai is the improbable but beautifully done story of a white dude roundeye who is captured by racist Samurai during the quite real Satsuma Rebellion. It all comes down to Captain Algren (Cruise) talking with Lord Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) around a campfire after escaping a false arrest (please accept my dialogue paraphrase that is close to the actual script):
Algren: “So That’s it. You will now just end it all, by your own hand, because of some supposed failure?”
Katsumoto: “Yes. It is our way of keeping our honor.”
Algren: “Honor? What better way to show honor than to live a life of service and sacrifice, as you have done your whole life?”
Instead of beating us over the head with political speeches on X Twitter, in just a little bit of movie dialogue, Tom Cruise shows us he values tradition, service, sacrifice, and personal honor. For all the people who dislike Cruise’s association with Scientology, why can’t you just accept him for who he actually is, and not what you merely suspect him of thinking? Based on what we see, the guy is A+ material.
His Mission Impossible series never failed to entertain, not the least reason being that Cruise does most of his own incredible stunts. Reportedly, he routinely breaks ribs, fingers, and damages all kinds of other parts of his body doing these stunts. How many other Hollywood actors do any stunts, much less real stunts that are really dangerous?
Ummmmmm… probably none.
And, how many other Hollywood actors bother to stay in great enough physical shape that they could do their own stunts, if they wanted to?
Ummmmmm.. probably a small handful. So I give Tom Cruise all of the credit he deserves for all of the rare stuff he does. He gives his all to his movie audience, which is much more than can be said for most actors who just stand in front of a green screen and pretend to fight an imaginary foe.
This last Mission Impossible ties together all the past ones. Kind of a high-tech version of the Sherlock Holmes movies mixed with James Bond. But also give Tom Cruise real credit for taking a huge risk with his pro-America, physical adventure-loving audience: His movie cast is a racial- and gender-diverse mix of people, who do not simply appear on screen because they have a certain skin color or boobs. Rather, Cruise has selected exemplars of each: The reliable old black guy sidekick is a tech genius, who goes down fighting, and whose genius level tech work saves the world. The lady SEAL looks like the unique lady SEAL would have to look, very muscular and tough. And so on.
Cruise’s movie-wide racial & gender diversity is not painfully unrealistic and crammed down our throats. Rather, it is realistic enough for us not to have to suspend belief. This is exactly the kind of diversity that Cruise’s audience can accept, because we see it to some degree in our every day lives (not that any of us see world-saving superhero acrobatics play out, ever, but rather we see people like us doing exceptional things sometimes).
For example, I found myself alternately painfully gripping the poor Princess of Patience’s thigh, arm, and hand at different points in the underwater scene. Because in my youth I was a Water Safety Instructor, waterfront lifeguard, and very active SCUBA diver, I had experienced quite a few saves as well as close encounters. On one night dive in the Florida Keys in the mid 1980s, I had to tow my exhausted dive partner to the surface and back to the boat, which was marked only by a single underwater strobe light in the pitch blackness. Leaving my spear back on the bottom, and using an adapted rescue maneuver, I fought the same strong current that had caused him to run out of air in his dive tank, and run out of energy to do anything but slowly drown as a limp rag. Eventually I reached the boat just as I too was running out of energy, weighed down as I was by a tank, regulator, wetsuit, buoyancy compensator, and various kit.
It was a very close call that was suddenly brought back to life by watching Tom Cruise’s realistic near-drowning scene in the sunken nuclear submarine. With the jumbled torpedos laying and falling all about. As he is running out of air and time and body heat. Swim, Tom, swim up!
Anyhow, a bunch of Cruise’s acrobatic stunts in this unbelievably entertaining movie have gotten him Guiness Book of World record recognition, as well as Most Dangerous Stunt Ever, Most Ridiculous Stunt Ever, Stupidest But Coolest Stunt Ever, Most Incredible Stunt Ever…especially for a sixty year old white guy.
You gotta go see this movie, even if the rogue computer / rogue Artificial Intelligence plot has played out at least since War Games (1983), Dune (1984, based on the 1960s book), Terminator movies from 1984 to 2019, and many others, where humankind is almost the fatal victim of our own ridiculous curiosity. Mission Impossible is so good that we forget all that and buy deeply into the premise that our AI foe “The Entity” is about to destroy humanity, and so we must engage in or at least tag along on an impossible mission to destroy it and save humanity.
And one more thing about Tom Cruise: If he is actually deeply into Scientology, then it is treating him really well. Everything about the guy looks like success and contented happiness. We hear no stories about poor choices or destructve behavior. Most of Hollywood is a-religious or non-religious, and most of Hollywood’s people are morally relativistic and quite lost on this planet. Their private lives are a complete mess, and very few of them have any sort of moral compass or true north. Scientology may sound weird, but I think all religions and belief systems sound weird to some degree. Even if it is weird, wow, is it ever working for this super successful, happy guy, Tom Cruise….one of the few real working actors left on our entire planet.
By Josh • Posted in
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November 6th, 2024
Some take-aways from President Donald Trump’s historic win last night:
ONE: “Too Big to Rig” turned out not to be only a campaign slogan, but a very real and measurable goal. In swing states, including my own Pennsylvania, registering new Republican voters (hero Scott Presler registered something like 110,000 Amish) and getting them to vote made the difference between winning and losing. Getting regular “super voters” and new voters alike to bank their votes before Election Day via absentee and mail-in ballots also helped hugely. That way, when the Democrat Party tried to cheat, as they did last night with secret ballot dumps in Philly and Detroit, the votes were already in and counted, and …
TWO: Staying on top of the battlefield, so to speak, with hundreds of lawyers and poll watchers everywhere documenting everything across Pennsylvania (and other swing states) prevented the “enemy” from doing sneak attacks. Too many eyes and cameras watching in 2024, something we lacked in 2020.
When Centre County tried to stop vote counting last night, with promises to come back in the morning and pick up again, Republican National Committee lawyers were present and threatened to sue if Centre County violated state law. And so Centre County staffers put on their big boy pants and continued counting votes like every other professional polling place is supposed to do. This prevented Centre County (where I grew up, and which is home to Penn State University’s bazillion communist faculty and spoiled brat students) from sneaking in a bunch more secret ballots hidden somewhere and padding the vote results in favor of their preferred candidates, which happened a lot with the stolen 2020 election.
THREE: Mainstream legacy corporate media e.g. Reuters, ABC CBS NBC NPR PBS NYT CNNLOL WaPo MSNBC etc are now on the losing side of the info wars. No matter what these outlets say now, a majority of Americans do not trust them. Rather, a majority of Americans openly mock them because of their patently false and easily disprovable assertions and narratives. A big indication of how weak MSM sources have become is that they ALL have deleted their comment sections. No way for their readership or viewership to visibly fact-check them real time!
For decades these establishment fake news disseminators of malinformation, disinformation, and misinfornation have been the supposed “go-to” sources for accurate information. But as everyone now sees so clearly, these are not fair-minded arbiters of accuracy and truth. Rather, all of these outlets are plugged into one particular and very politically partisan source, probably Media Matters, from which these giant networks take their daily talking points and narratives. Watch one compilation of all the MSM personalities saying the exact same things on the same day, and you have seen all of the compilations done for decades now.
FOUR: As a result of the MSM’s willful if suicidal media malpractice serving as the open propaganda arm for the Democrat Party (and serving as the Kamala Harris campaign), the rise of the citizen journalist and alternative media is really just beginning. New they may be, these people are really effective, and they gave Trump a pathway to get around the MSM blocks and attacks on him.
Go to Rumble and meet some of the many political refugees kicked out of YouTube or FaceBook for the simple acts of violating leftwing political orthodoxy. Rumble’s political ecosystem is super rich and diverse, and you will hear a hundred or a thousand different opinions about the day’s events from funny people, smart people, scary people, people in their underpants, people wearing their underpants on their head, but frankly, any and all of them far better and much more honest and interesting and accurate than anything you will hear on CNN or ABC or NPR.
And don’t forget all of the bazillion podcasts on Apple, Spotify, etc., and all the talk radio shows, and the new newspapers like Epoch Times. Or Breitbart or Gateway Pundit.
In sum, the rise of the citizen journalist directly correlates with the fall of corporate media. I will bet the R2 of these two axis are probably 99% correlated. By consuming alternative sources of information in a free market place, Americans are showing their belief in the old Thomas Paine adage about the best antidote to bad information is not to shut it down, but to get more information, so that a person can make up their own mind about what is true, and what is false.
People who read and listen to alternative media are naturally curious individuals. People who drink out of the toilet and consume MSM like CNN and NPR are not intellectually curious people. It is a badge of honor to listen to diverse voices.
And for all the MSM lovers out there, if the MSM had simply done their job of reporting just the facts and all the facts, regardless of where they fell, then there would have been no need or demand for talk radio, or citizen journalism, or podcasts. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the New York Times is one gigantic, ridiculous, embarrassingly buck naked vacuum.
Truth is like water, it will keep moving around to find the lowest place, no matter how much you try to dam it up.
FIVE: Working polling places is effective. For many years I have compared the polls that I worked at on Election Day to other polling places, especially those with no one working, to see if my friendly outreach to voters coming in to vote has any real effect. It does, and I encourage everyone of any political party or interest group to participate in Election Day as a poll watcher. Not only does it give more information to prospective voters, it also brings more eyes to the polling place, which is the number one way to prevent vote fraud on Election Day.
SIX: Kamala Harris was not a compelling candidate when she ran in the primary last time, and she was not a compelling candidate yesterday, either. That she was hand-picked by party elites without one vote being cast for her by one citizen indicates a huge problem with American party politics. Do not kid yourself this is only the Democrat Party’s problem, this need for elites’ control is also big among the GOP. I.e. note how Trump was treated by the GOPe right up until a couple days ago, when it became clear he was going to win. They STILL hated him, for being his independent self.
SEVEN: Americans do not trust their government. For good reason. When your own government has abandoned you the lifelong taxpayer, in favor of flying in and letting in tens of millions of unvetted illegal aliens, and telling the truth about this invasion is treated harshly by the government created to protect you, the citizen, your government has become your enemy. Everyone sees it now.
And so, my own decision to abandon the US EPA in 1998, after seven years in Federal service there, becomes even more understandable to me now. Back then, I did not like what I was seeing, hearing, writing, saying, but I could not really put my finger wholly on the problem. Now, we all see the problems in both federal and state governments, and buddy, the meat cleaver must fall hard on the gangrenous parts. This was a big part of yesterday’s vote results.
EIGHT: Never underestimate the strength of well intentioned people determined to correct wrongdoing. When Elon Musk turned Twitter/X into a pretty free market of ideas and information, a huge pathway around the MSM and Silicon Valley tech media chokehold on information flow was disrupted. The rest of that is beautiful Robin Hood history. And when Scott Presler decided that he could not allow the stolen 2020 election to go unanswered, he devoted himself to tirelessly registering Republican voters in Pennsylvania and other swing states. The outcome of his incredible work bore obvious fruit last night.
Moral of this story: Fight, Fight, Fight for what you believe in. Never relent, never stop, never give up, no matter how sad or demoralized you might feel at any point.
America is worth building, and it was worth saving yesterday, whatever the cost.
August 4th, 2024
Elon Musk might own X (formerly Twitter), and he might believe in free speech, and he might have tried to eliminate those former staff who are most visibly anti-conservative and anti free speech, but he is still failing. Every time I get onto X/Twitter, my account is unfairly hamstrung in some way or another, some of my posts are flagged for mysterious reasons and causes, and eventually my account is either locked or shadowbanned.
The latest just occurred tonight without any warning. And of course there is no recourse, no appeal process.
Apparently my account is now flagged as a source of “spam.” It is a ridiculous claim, because I hardly use X at all. And when I do I post my own unique content, repost a few other essays or memes I like, maybe put a new joshfirst.com blog post there, make a few salty comments along with all the other salty commenters there. For spam to occur, something has to be done a lot, and all I do is post my blog essay and then hit the re-post button a few hours or days later. This is both allowed by X and is done by virtually all content creators.
What I do is what X/ Twitter was created to allow.
My X censorshp experience is shared by many conservatives, whose sole violation on X is posting while conservative. As we all know well, liberals/ socialists/ woke/ communists cannot withstand competition in the marketplace of ideas, because their ideas are bad and hurt people. Vast majority of people reject hurtful leftist ideology and policies. So the left always have to artificially censor and suppress their opponents.
Thank God we have TruthSocial to rely on for actual free speech.
First X made me go through ten “Arkose challenges”, which is a deliberate waste of time and a form of harassment
My account met zero of the conditions X says will trigger an account lock or flag. This is just targeted harassment because the account is politically conservative
