Political Rants & interesting thought pieces

[ccp]

I have cousin who worked for FTC in I think the late 90s.
Now at SEC prior to retiring I think at end of this yr.

[Crafty_Dog]

What if it’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?

It’s up to Americans to take action

By Andrew P. Napolitano

What if the government is a myth? What if it doesn’t produce what we pay it for? What if it fails to safeguard our lives, liberties and property from its own agents? What if nothing changes after these failures and after elections? What if we’re stuck with it?

What if the National Security Agency — the federal government’s 60,000-person domestic spying apparatus — has convinced Congress that it needs to cut constitutional corners in order to spy on every person in America?

What if Congress has bought that argument and enacted a statute that puts a secret court between the NSA and its appetite for all electronically transmitted data? What if that secret court — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — is supposed to protect personal liberty but instead has become a wall behind which the NSA can hide and a tool for its insatiable spying appetite?

What if the courts have ruled that electronic surveillance constitutes a search and seizure within the meaning of the Constitution? What if the Constitution requires warrants for searches and seizures and permits only warrants that are based on probable cause of crime? What if the Constitution requires that all warrants for searches and seizures specifically describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized?

What if the FISA court issues warrants based on a lesser standard than probable cause of crime? What if that standard is probable cause of speaking with or knowing someone who has spoken with a foreign person? What if this is such an absurd and loose standard that it violates the Constitution, permits spying on anyone and ends up protecting no one except the spies who pretend to employ it?

What if the NSA has convinced every president since George W. Bush that it needs to spy on everyone in America to keep us safe, no matter what the Constitution says? What if those presidents have bought that devil’s bargain?

What if NSA spying is really done without any warrants? What if this spying captures in real time every keystroke on every computer and handheld device — as well as the content of every email, text message, telephone call and fiber-optic cable transmission — in the United States 24/7?

What if NSA computers have direct and unimpeded access to all mainframe computers of all telecommunications and computer service providers in the U.S.? What if the acquisition of all this data is known in the intelligence community as bulk surveillance?

What if the Constitution is the supreme law of the land? What if the Constitution, requiring warrants based on probable cause of crime and specifically identifying targets, expressly prohibits bulk surveillance? What if bulk surveillance is unconstitutional and useless because it produces information overload — too much data to sift through in a timely manner?

What if the FISA court is a facade? What if one FISA court judge signed an order authorizing the NSA to spy on all Verizon customers — at the time, all 115 million of them? What if that included the White House, Congress, the federal courts and the issuing judge himself?

What if Mr. Bush and his successors have unleashed the NSA to acquire all communications data about everyone in America even though it’s obvious that the NSA cannot possibly sift through it all in a timely enough manner to keep us safe?

What if Mr. Bush’s government was asleep at the switch on 9/11? What if 3,000 civilians died while the government slept? What if the government’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were perpetrated to divert our attention from its sleeping on 9/11? What if these invasions targeted civilians and constituted war crimes?

What if Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government knew of the attack on Pearl Harbor before it came? What if it looked the other way, knowing that Americans would react furiously, and thus, America could enter World War II, which Roosevelt desperately wanted? What if 3,000 sleeping sailors died because the government looked the other way? What if looking the other way in the face of a certain attack constituted murder?

What if liberty is a personal birthright? What if it cannot morally or legally be taken away by the government without a guilty verdict by a jury?

What if the genius of the Constitution — if followed — is not only its protection of privacy but also its requirement that the government confine its searches and seizures to persons whom it has reason to suspect are engaged in criminal activity and about whom judges have ratified the government’s evidence to support those suspicions? What if the Constitution requires the government to leave the rest of us alone?

What if the government is a failure at preserving liberty but a champion at stealing it?

What if bulk surveillance is about power and control and not about safety? What if the NSA has selectively leaked what it knows about some folks for political purposes? What if former President Donald Trump himself and Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser, have been victims of those leaks? What if the government’s bulk acquisition of private data makes us less free?

What if using intelligence data for political purposes is a profound danger to democracy? What if the government can’t keep us safe? What if we falsely think that it does keep us safe? What if that delusion makes us less safe?

What if exposing the government generates its wrath? What if the government hates being caught spying and lying? What if it humiliates and frustrates and falsely charges and seizes the passports of those it dislikes and fears? What if the government dislikes and fears our freedoms? What if the government works not for us but for itself? What do we do about it?

[Body-by-Guinness]

What if it’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?

It’s up to Americans to take action

Grr 😠 

Source? Want to chase down the URL.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=135f19ff9d1195b688f32a0bade754fa_66742825_6d25b5f&selDate=20240620

[Body-by-Guinness]

https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=135f19ff9d1195b688f32a0bade754fa_66742825_6d25b5f&selDate=20240620

Ah, “WT” = Washington Times….

[ccp]

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=190+5+pelee+volcano&mid=7101E1AF92FC73120FAF7101E1AF92FC73120FAF&FORM=VIRE

THIS applies to the Politicians of today.

[Crafty_Dog]

Cast Away Illusions and Prepare for Struggle
A response to old guard conservatism
N.S. LYONS
JUN 27

 




Last fall the Claremont Institute’s venerable Charles R. Kesler published a lengthy essay critiquing National Conservatism and the “New Right” for, essentially, departing from the polite constitutionalist rhetoric of Bill Buckley-style American conservatism for a more definitive popular-nationalism. I was among those invited by Claremont to respond as part of a thoughtful symposium published last month. I’ve decided to republish my short contribution here (though I encourage you to go read the original essay and the full symposium). My argument is brief (and “nearly dismissive” according to Kesler, which I suppose is true): for decades old guard conservatives have for the most part completely failed to conserve anything, institutions of the republic included, no matter how frequently they’ve bandied about the Constitution and appealed to American exceptionalism; it will avail us nothing to continue in the same vein. Because of all this context and the intramural nature of the dispute I hesitated to bother posting this here at all. But given the “conservative”-leaning Supreme Court’s tragic decision yesterday to roll over and allow the gutting of the First Amendment (as predicted), the moment now seemed more appropriate to do so. – N.S. Lyons

“Cast away illusions and prepare for struggle.” Perhaps it’s unorthodox for a conservative to quote Mao Zedong, but he did know a thing or two about politics. For one, he understood that politics is not a debate club. Or, as he might as well have put it: there comes a time to know what time it is.

What time is it in America? The hour is already very late. We are ruled by a regime that deeply hates and fears the bulk of its own people, and is demonstrably willing to do whatever it takes to retain power. A regime that characterizes its political opposition as “extremists” and “domestic terrorists,” and uses its security services to surveil and intimidate even the most ordinary dissenting citizens, treating them as enemies of the state. One that wields the law as a weapon, flagrantly showcasing a two-tier legal system as it routinely seeks to arrest, humiliate, and destroy its political enemies while shielding its friends and foot soldiers from accountability. A regime that now holds hundreds of political prisoners. That has turned the tools of its military counterinsurgency apparatus on its own people. That colludes with the world’s most powerful technology and media companies to establish vast systems of mass censorship, propaganda, and reality distortion. That has successfully corrupted nearly every public and private institution with a distinctly totalitarian state ideology. Surely no one should already better understand the situation, and the stakes, than those who follow the work of the Claremont Institute. The affectation of an “extremely untimely” Buckleyan conservativism dedicated to losing with gallantry is doubtless pleasant in the moment, but is ultimately suicidal.

Mao instructed revolutionaries to seize power by struggling to control the “pen,” the “knife,” and the “gun” (that is, the propaganda and administrative institutions, the intelligence and security services, and the army). By this measure the progressive Left has already achieved near total victory. By contrast, old-guard conservatives have—for almost a century now—utterly failed to conserve much of anything, republic included. And none of their habitually muttered invocations of the Constitution’s sacred text have turned the tide in the least. Sadly, theirs is a god that failed—whatever regime we live under now, it is not the U.S. Constitution.

Meanwhile, this struggle is hardly confined to America’s shores. All across the Western world, regimes are converging on the same form of authoritarian managerial technocracy, treating popular sovereignty with disgust and brooking no dissent. New legislation in Canada proposes life in prison for “hate speech.” Britain already arrests hundreds of people per year for holding the wrong opinions. Germany’s interior minister says right-wingers who “mock the state” will be preemptively ejected from the financial system, have their business licenses revoked, and be banned from traveling. At the behest of the E.U., Poland’s new “centrist” government has cast aside the rule of law in order to arrest political enemies and purge the Right from all institutions.

Some of these countries have written constitutions, others don’t—it hardly matters. What they all share, along with the United States, is a near-identical ruling class of transnational managerial elites who believe they alone possess History’s mandate to reengineer society. And what they hate and fear above all else is the nation: the existence—and yes, the very idea—of a distinct and sovereign people that lies beyond the reach of their totalizing hunger for conformity and control. Hence, they hate and fear democracy, too—the self-governance of a nation. This global battle between transnational managerialism and sovereign democratic nationhood now defines 21st-century politics.

When a government deliberately abets an invasion of some 10 million foreigners across its borders, ordinary citizens recognize this isn’t merely a violation of the rule of law. They correctly intuit it as something far graver: it is treason. Against the Constitution? Against rules written on a page? No, it is treason against the nation: an assault on the very body politic, which preexists the government and transcends its form. Ordinary Americans understand this just as the French or Irish do.

The Constitution was a very fine document, successfully codifying the unique character of the young Anglo-American nation. Many of us dearly hope it can yet be restored and re-enforced, in spirit and law. But the time for conservatives’ hubristic habit of quibbling over American exceptionalism or the precise meaning of America’s founding has well and truly passed. Now is the time to cast away illusions and prepare for struggle.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://voxday.net/2024/07/05/fake-democracy-the-admission/

[Body-by-Guinness]

From his lips to Yahweh’s ears:

What the Dementia-ocrats fear
JUL 10, 2024

Vice President DEI is the only hope Democrats have left. Switching candidates four months before the election shoots a party in the left foot. Suddenly dumping the woman they put a heartbeat away from the presidency shoots the other.

CNN reported, “Kamala Harris is the only viable alternative for Democrats.”

The column by Bill Burton said, “African Americans make up about 14% of the American population, yet in 2020 nearly 20% of Biden voters were black, according to Pew Research Center. In what is anticipated to be a close election this year, the depression of a crucially important community within our party by denying Harris the nomination in a crisis scenario is not only contemptuous and degrading but also politically stupid. Passing over our first black vice president — who is literally in this job for the specific reason of being ready to step into Biden’s place should the need arise — would create a level of anger and disappointment from the black community that would completely disrupt our ability to keep together a coalition of voters who could make it possible to beat Trump.”

Pandering has its price. Live by the DEI, die by the DEI. Kamala truly Didn’t Earn It but there she is.

Democrats are soiling themselves over this because they realize they must stop him now because they will not get the Nice Guy Let’s Cut A Deal Donald in a second term. President Trump stands ready, willing and able to play hardball this time.

In 2016, Obama misled his supporters with his peevish and ultimately self-destructive resistance. He made sure his party would never cede control of government to Trump. This allowed the public to see how rotten the government is. The FBI — once supported by conservatives — has earned MAGA scorn.

The RINOs had Trump right where they wanted him with two-faced Pence, Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo keeping Trump in check. Had Democrats allowed him a second term, he would be on his way out to be succeeded by a Democrat more capable of destroying America than Biden.

But out of power, Trump has learned and he is more deadly than ever before. His enemies both within and without his party do not suffer Trumpophobia because a phobia is an irrational fear. This fear is very real and deserved. Cue Ozzy Osbourne.

Now the time is here
For Iron Man to spread fear
Vengeance from the grave
Kills the people he once saved

What did you expect? Donny Osmond?

The DC dimwits tried to destroy Trump and failed. They are lucky that he is not a king because the penalty for regicide that fails is death. He does not have the power to have them drawn and quartered or even as the Romans did, cutting off their hands. But prosecution is possible, provided he can find any trustworthy prosecutors.

This they know.

They also know that having slow-walked and otherwise resisted the first Trump presidency, they face a Trump who is about to unplug the enemy-from-within-the-government. These fleas on the dog are about to meet Mister Flea Collar.

Count on Trump to attack the administrative state — a polite term for deep state — which is where in modern America the power is.

Project 2025 is as phony as the FBI’s Patriot Front. Trump is not going to mess with Social Security or abortion. The people have spoken. Karl Rove had the second President Bush waste all his political capital on a dopey plan to turn everyone who pays into Social Security become an expert in the stock market.

As for abortion, Dobbs turned the issue back to the states. The federal government should not meddle.

Liberals have seized on the Heritage Foundation’s dopey Project 2025 to strike fear in voters but the problem with that is voters have already seen Donald Trump as president. Most of them preferred The Donald over Obama, er, Biden — and that was before Biden’s dementia became so obvious that the press could no longer hide it.

This cheapfake agenda forced The Donald to release his real agenda. It is nothing like the grab-bag of unpopular and unworkable items Heritage put out there. See for yourself.

But Trump aims to keep the media focus on Freeze Frame Joe.

Never Trumper Jim Geraghty tweeted, “Trump was keenly aware of the muted mics and cameras locked on him. He took great care to maintain a stoic appearance that inspired confidence.

“The world saw a man content with letting Joe trip all over his own words.

“Trump didn’t interrupt a Biden train of thought, because that one already left the station years ago.”

Other Biden supporters whine.

David Axelrod tweeted, “Trump’s not talking much about Biden's bad debate. Trump’s campaign is not blitzing ads about it. And Lara Trump said last week it would be an affront to democracy if Biden were not the nominee. Question: Why do you think they are uncharacteristically holding fire?”

Napoleon answered that two centuries ago: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Inadvertently, Democrats have made Trump appear more relaxed, more mature and more statesman-like than in the past.

The lefties really want Trump to interrupt because they know that if he wins, he has the power to cripple them for decades.

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, founders of Axios, wrote, “Behind the Curtain: Trump's dream regime.”

I am left wondering how two lefties got anywhere near the curtain, but they explained well what the fear is. Lefties have ruled through the agencies. A favorite trick is sue-and-settle, in which a lefty group sues a lefty agency and instead of fighting the demands by the lefty group, the lefty agency settles out of court, acquiescing to the demands.

Trump is about to take control of the agencies.

The Dementia-ocrats fear that most of all.

VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote, “The Court, in a series of rulings but most notably the reversal of the Chevron decision, handed Republicans a massive triumph in a 40-year war to weaken independent agencies. It basically ruled that individual bureaucrats and independent agencies can no longer set the rules for business regulation.

“Purge hostile federal employees. Right now, a lot of the nitty-gritty of governing is handled by full-time civil servants who aren't political appointees and often operate outside the full control of the president. But Trump has threatened to fire tens of thousands of these civil servants and replace them with pre-vetted loyalists.”

My advice to Trump is to not waste time trying to get agencies eliminated because that will be blocked by a Congress that is run by people who please the deep state first.

You will never get rid of the Department of Education but you can lay off 3,000 of its 4,000 employees which will not only save money but slow the expansion of regulations by this bureaucracy.

Oh yes, by all means, halt the publication of the Federal Register, without which bureaucrats cannot impose regulations. Just find an excuse to stop publishing it.

The Axios founders said, “But the biggest long-term victory for the conservative agenda (although not necessarily presidential power) is the Supreme Court's end to independent agencies or officials dictating everything from securities laws to toxin levels in food or water.

“It’s not hyperbole to say this Supreme Court did more to weaken agencies and federal bureaucrats in a few days than previous courts did in decades.”

Thank you, Chief Justice John Roberts and the conservative majority.

Trump is getting a lot of bad advice from the very media that wants him dead. From the Street of Wall, Sir Rupert Murdoch’s Journal demanded, “Now leading in the polls, Trump doesn’t need an attack-dog VP or someone to rally his core voters. He needs a choice who shows mature judgment and has the ability to appeal to anxious and undecided voters.”

WSJ just described Mike Pence. No thanks. Loyalty matters to The Donald and America.

If he wins, it will be up to President Trump to follow through and Make Liberals Cry Again like they did on Election Night 2016.

Make their fears real, Mr. President.

https://donsurber.substack.com/p/what-they-fear

[ccp]

Yahweh’s

I was taught in Hebrew School NEVER to speak that name.
Only refer to "God".

[Body-by-Guinness]

Yahweh’s

I was taught in Hebrew School NEVER to speak that name.
Only refer to "God".

Though I’m told there are Jewish fore bearers in my ancestry, I was raised a Christian, so I’m not sure the rule applies…

[Crafty_Dog]

America’s Jacksonian Turn
The assassination attempt gives new power to an old political tendency.
Walter Russell Mead
July 14, 2024 5:36 pm ET



Donald Trump was only glancingly wounded on Saturday, but the effects of the attack and of his courageous response will be profound. His chance of victory substantially increased, and the movement he represents will continue to be a powerful force in American policy regardless of November’s result.

Mr. Trump is part of a strain of American politics that Andrew Jackson brought to power in 1828. In domestic politics, Jacksonians are skeptical of big business, hate the political and social establishment, and demand “common sense” solutions to complex problems. They support the military but not an officer class seen as distant from the values and folkways of the nation—West Point stuffed shirts in the 19th century, “woke generals” today. They assume the political class is deeply and irreformably corrupt.

In foreign policy Jacksonians feel no need to spread democracy around the world. Instinctively realist, they view the United Nations and international law that would bind the U.S. with fear and contempt. Absent serious threats against America, Jacksonians have little interest in foreign affairs. But when the U.S. is attacked, they believe every measure is justified in its defense. Jacksonians don’t regret assaults on civilian targets during World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Relentless warfare against terrorists is justified; most Jacksonians support Israel’s war in Gaza and believe the U.S. should respond to terror with the same vigor.

Sept. 11 was one of the moments in history, like Pearl Harbor, or the British attacks on Lexington and Concord in 1775, that ignited a Jacksonian firestorm across the U.S. and mobilized previously isolationist and almost pacifist Americans for war. Other such moments are the publication of the 1917 Zimmermann Telegram (in which Imperial Germany offered to help Mexico regain the territories lost in the Mexican-American War if it joined Germany’s side in World War I) and the destruction of the Maine in Havana (allegedly by Spain) in 1898.

What Jacksonians regard as the unsatisfactory outcomes of the “endless” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led them to sour on the U.S. military presence in the Middle East. That didn’t change their attitude toward international politics and the need for a strong defense. In recent years, China has replaced jihadist terror as the prime enemy, but new terror attacks in the U.S. could easily reignite the fires.

For most Democratic policymakers, the presence and power of Jacksonian America is a national liability and a political danger. At home, Jacksonian hatred of educated elites and contempt for their policy preferences is a potent source of opposition to Democratic cultural and social policies. Abroad, Jacksonians’ skepticism about international organizations and law, their resistance to global climate policy, and their indifference to ideological crusades threatens essential elements of what most Democratic policymakers believe are sensible policies required to save the world.

Jacksonian America likes strong leaders, even those like George Washington and the two Roosevelts who come from elite backgrounds and whose policy preferences don’t always align perfectly with Jacksonian ideas. Jacksonians are deeply skeptical of most politicians; Jacksonian faith and loyalty, once given, can be enduring. This gives Jacksonian leaders flexibility on policies; the base will often follow where they lead.

READ MORE GLOBAL VIEW
Asia’s New ‘Game of Thrones’July 8, 2024
A Presidential Debate Heard ’Round the WorldJuly 1, 2024
Saturday’s events made America more Jacksonian and gave Mr. Trump an unbreakable hold on Jacksonian America. On the one hand, the assassination attempt reinforced the sense that Jacksonian America is under siege. On the other, Mr. Trump’s fist-waving defiance and determination quieted any doubt about his personal courage. Attacks on him from the political and journalistic establishments will only boost his standing with his followers and inflame Jacksonian hatred of elites.

The more Jacksonian America becomes, the harder it is for Democrats to win elections and to govern. Team Biden sought to tamp down the Jacksonian fires, but the most important fact about American politics in 2024, even before Saturday, was that these efforts have fallen short.

Democrats hoped that the superior wisdom of elite-guided policies would generate results that would convince the peasants to lay down their pitchforks and torches. Bidenomics would make Americans feel more prosperous at home as an enlightened foreign policy—wise, focused on alliances—would make the world safe again. In that atmosphere, Team Biden hoped, Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and promise of disruption would resonate with fewer voters and alarm more. The strategy was failing even before the debate. Bidenomics isn’t having the desired effect. Inflation and the high interest rates required to suppress it have infuriated voters, as have the administration’s controversial stands on immigration, gender, crime and climate change. The sense of growing international danger has made Mr. Trump’s attacks on the administration weakness resonate with worried voters who don’t see a world returning to stable normalcy.

The Butler, Pa., attack exposed another problem with the Biden strategy. Making Mr. Trump toxic has been the core theme of Democratic campaign rhetoric all year. Comparing him to Hitler and calling him a coward, a traitor and an existential threat to democracy have been Democratic talking points. This strategy boomeranged in spectacular fashion as, post-Butler, Democratic anti-Trump rhetoric looks like irresponsible demagoguery recklessly pushing the nation into crisis to serve President Biden’s political ambition.



After Butler, America has suddenly become a more Jacksonian nation. The shadow of Old Hickory looms larger than ever, and Donald Trump stands taller as his undisputed heir.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-gunman-and-the-would-be-dictator/ar-BB1pXKZO?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=451607c30a604040ae097d533f127502&ei=76

[DougMacG]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-gunman-and-the-would-be-dictator/ar-BB1pXKZO?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=451607c30a604040ae097d533f127502&ei=76

What caused minds to run wild about Paul Pelosi was the pattern of journalism protecting Democrats and their families, like the silence over Tara Reade and her locked up personnel records, like the silence and disinformation over the Hunter laptop that implicates 9 family members, like the adulterous way Joe and Jill got started.  The ex knows they didn't meet and start dating 'later', 'after her divorce'.

Trump and his supporters don't see this as one 20 year old, one time, with a gun.  They see this as maybe the thousandth attempt to take him down, spying on Trump tower, the whole Russia collusion era and the conspiracy of media and agencies in that, kicking him off social media, posting "false" on his posts, 2 phony impeachments, 91 felony charges, judges not allowing legal experts in to defend him, sex charges in a department store, don't know what year it happened, half billion ordered to a porn star, everyone told he is Hitler, is fascist, threat to democracy, false insurrection charges, and THEN someone shoots.

And there was Biden's comment last week summarizing his campaign strategy,
 "It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye." 
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw0y9xljv2yo

It wasn't a shot out of the blue.

Trying to jail and shoot your political opponent is the "threat to democracy". Same for ballot drop boxes, mailing out ballots indiscriminately, changing election day to election months, handing over voter rolls to Left groups with taxpayer money to support them.

No, we aren't going to take it anymore.

But it's different for the wackos on our side, you can't shoot at Leftism.  They have a voice that won't quit everywhere.

They have to be defeated in free and fair elections.  We should have one.

That the violence is on the right is a complete joke to the survivors of Antifa et al In Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle etc.  That wasn't the right rising up.

As was said about so-called January 6, if that was an armed insurrection of the right, you would know.

[Body-by-Guinness]

I could quibble with elements of this piece. With that said its sweep and breadth are impressive:

Great Men and Small Minds

The assassination attempt and delusional responses to it are really bound up in the issue of greatness

JUPPLANDIA

JUL 16, 2024

Once again Trump is the lightning rod, the point in the world where the energy strikes and we see a flash of light showing everything. Whether called to it by Fate, or by God, or whether it is simply the case that nobody else stands tall enough to serve this purpose, Trump and reactions to Trump tell us more about what is happening and what matters than a million pages of erudite commentary or a million lectures in the halls of academia would.

Let’s start with the level of derangement and delusion in our culture today, which is the most obvious point. Assassinations and attempted assassinations occur at points of cultural crisis and change, intended to prevent or speed that change depending on the motivations of the assassin.

The change which is occurring today is the realignment of the People towards populism, and the Elite towards globalism. The gap between the ruling class and the rest of us has widened. It has, rather obviously, widened materially. There’s been a squeezing of the middle class and huge profits for the billionaire class, rapidly speeded by corrupt wealth transfer projects like COVID and Ukraine. But there has also been a huge gulf develop spiritually and morally, a gulf in how we see the world and what we consider to be good or evil. This gap is now so vast that the moral attitudes of the Elite and the People are directly opposed.

What they consider good, we consider evil. And what we consider good, they consider evil.

This is a sincere difference. It is not a slight disagreement, or even a large disagreement on methods still united by a shared moral understanding of what good is. The shared understanding of the Judeo-Christian heritage is gone. The false consensus of the ‘Free World’ is gone too. The countries we still see as the West are not aligned on shared moral principles and ethical standards regarding democracy, freedom, individual rights, the importance of free speech, the independence and integrity of the free press or the honesty and standards of free elections. All of that is gone.

The western world is now aligned by the interests and power of Globalists. These nations say the same things and enact the same measures because they are all controlled by globalists, not because they have ‘shared values’ that were inherited and as comprehensible to the average citizen as they are to the average politician. In almost every case, the inherited shared values directly contradict the things now being done in their name.

Globalism represents the world view of an elite who have broken with those inherited shared values, and now worship and conduct the opposite whilst still pretending to adhere to the things they have betrayed. Populism represents the world view of those who have not moved away from the old inherited values and the real, true moral responses that their parents or grandparents could understand.

It’s not just a material gulf. It’s not just about a disparity of wealth and power. It’s about a moral and spiritual gulf where the things we value and the things they value are diametrically, fundamentally opposed.

What happens when the rich and powerful adopt a new religion, or a new world view, that is diametrically opposite to the religion or values of the general populace? They use their existing power to try to force conversion on their subjects. In some ways the scale of change from the worldview of Christian nations to the worldview of Post-Christian nations is as vast as the change from a Pagan West to a Christian one. That’s the scale of cultural shift we are talking about.

Those worrying about geopolitical international shifts away from the petrodollar or towards a Chinese and BRICs dominated future or a ‘multi-polar’ future rather than an international order secured by US superpower dominance, are right to acknowledge those hugely significant changes. The US is in decline and China, India and Russia are rising. But that’s not the biggest change we face.

Those worrying about the growth of technologies which pose a potentially existential threat to human life, technologies that would fundamentally reshape our experience of life and our basic freedoms like a social credit system does, or technologies which contain within them species level threats the way geoengineering does, or technologies that could replace us as a species the way AI could, are also right. Untrammelled and unwise technological development, development controlled by the malign or the shortsighted, poses an enormous risk to us as a species. But that’s still not the greatest threat and the biggest challenge.

It is moral revolution that is the truly great threat and the truly great challenge. Because ultimately the decision of every individual to conform to evil or fight against evil is an individual moral choice. If our morality is successfully altered, WE are successfully altered. And if our morality is wrong, or indeed delusional and twisted to be the exact opposite of true morality, then we will not only submit but do so gladly. And everything that is truly dangerous to us as a culture and as an entire species only comes about by moral revolution, by enough people considering evil to be good.

How does all of this relate to Trump and the assassination attempt on Trump? Why is Trump the lightning rod?

Well look at the moral responses to the assassination attempt. Look at them as moral issues, not merely political ones.

The reality is that possibly millions of Democrat voters would have been delighted if the assassination succeeded. They would have celebrated it, and they would have celebrated it exactly the same way that much of the Muslim world celebrated the Oct 7th torture, rape and murder of Israeli Jews. Some may consider such a comparison crass, but it really isn’t. It’s a considered comparison talking about how these people would respond and who they remind me of (note too that Democrats voters overwhelmingly favour the ‘Palestinian cause’, even Jewish Democrat voters).

On the other side, MAGA voters and Trump supporters of course see the assassination attempt as a terrible indicator of how bad things have got, how dangerous and extreme the situation now is, and can look at and read thousands of tweets and posts from Democrats lamenting that the attempted murder failed or offering insane commentary trying to find ways to blame Trump for political violence aimed at Trump.

Those two sets of responses are not political differences within an overall shared moral understanding. They are totally opposed moral attitudes, irreconcilable moral worldviews that are the direct opposite of each other.

For the Democrat, you can only support Trump if you are morally compromised yourself. Trump is an evil, wicked person and you are an evil, wicked person. Trump is a racist, a bigot, a demagogue, and a potential Hitlerian dictator.

That’s what the shooter believed. But that’s also what mainstream media has been telling us for nearly a decade. And it’s also what the entire Democrat Party leadership and a fair chunk of the Republican Party leadership have been telling us for a long time. The hate that the shooter had for Trump is a hate that large numbers of Democrat voters and all of the Democrat leadership have as well. The hate that inspires someone to try to murder Trump is a hate they spent nearly a decade creating.

For half the shooters life, he was hearing that Trump was an existential threat. That Trump was pure evil. That Trump must be stopped. Here is Joe Biden on Trump:

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic….there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country….
 
MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.  They do not believe in the rule of law.  They do not recognize the will of the people.
 
They refuse to accept the results of a free election.  And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.
 
MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.
 
They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”

In a 2019 article ‘An American Fuhrer: Nazi Analogies and the Struggle to explain Donald Trump’ Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Cambridge University Press laid out the then already extensive history of people hysterically comparing Trump to Hitler. The article is clear both on the extent of these comparisons and shows that the author shares some level of prejudiced agreement with them:

“Ever since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the US presidency in June 2015, journalists, scholars, and other commentators in the United States have attempted to explain his political success with the aid of historical analogies. In so doing, they have sparked a wider debate about whether the Nazi past helps to make sense of the US present. One group in the debate has contended that Trump's ascent bears a worrisome resemblance to interwar European fascism, especially the National Socialist movement of Adolf Hitler….As Trump continues to violate democratic political norms, and as instances of right-wing extremist violence continue to erupt, concerns over the future of US democracy remain high. Comparisons with the Nazi past thus remain more relevant than ever.”

Thus, and rather typically given the enormous leftwing dominance of academia, the scholar tasking himself with describing how many others have used the Hitler analogy towards Trump, himself considers such an analogy at least partly justified.

The reality, of course, is that the Global Index of Terrorism shows that the most common form of terrorism is (surprise, surprise) Islamic in nature. The second most common is from leftwing groups. The leftwing Antifa have been involved in more violent incidents over the last decade than any rightwing group in the US. Several Trump supporters have been murdered over the past ten years, some by the authorities (Ashli Babbitt for example) and some by Antifa or similar leftist activists (Aaron Danielsohn). Other Trump supporters have been driven to suicide in custody or while under investigation by the Biden administration and ‘justice’ system (Mark Aungst, Matthew Perna).

Far more people have died for supporting Trump than for opposing him, if ANY have died in that direction at all (one might say that the Antifa members who were killed by Kyle Rittenhouse might qualify, but they were trying to kill Rittenhouse when he shot them).

When it comes to the violence levels of their respective supporters, the objective historical record is that the people who hate Trump are more violent than the people who support him and you can also find more violent rhetoric from their leaders than you can from Trump.

The situation is similar with regards to an administration acting in an authoritarian and dictatorial manner, either at home or abroad. Trump did not launch any new wars or extensive military engagements. All of his Presidential predecessors and his successor did so. Trump and the justice system under Trump did not launch criminal proceedings against any political opponents. Trump did not have a militarised inauguration with close to 30,000 troops present. Trump did not deliver any Presidential address demonising Democrat voters whilst flanked by military personnel. Trump did not even enact the worst authoritarian measures during the COVID scam, which were all enacted by Democrat governors. Trump did not impinge on civil liberties or invoke emergency measures or send in the National Guard against political opponents and protestors even after months of rioting encouraged by his Democrat rivals. Throughout his term he kept strictly within the limits of Presidential authority, and the means by which he challenged a stolen election were strictly within normal democratic bounds (by challenging in the courts, by holding rallies, and by seeking to persuade relevant authorities to show due investigatory diligence).

When violence was provoked by tear gassing the crowd on Jan 6, and as soon as Trump was notified of violence, he added to previous calls for peace. Before the rally he urged peaceful assembly. After the violence he asked for peaceful departure.

So every count on which we can consider whether Trump acted dictatorially when in power, we find that despite enormous provocation and violence directed at his supporters, he chose to limit himself to lawful responses.

By contrast, multiple Democrats encouraged violence whilst Trump was President. And by contrast when in power, the Biden administration swept up hundreds of people for minor offences or no offence except political protest and put them in prison for years without charge, with multiple claims from those prisoners of torture. That is a fascist, dictatorial action. Similarly, direct comparison of political violence through rioting and violent civil disturbance, when we compare pro and anti Trump protests, shows a huge preponderance to such violence from ANTI Trump forces.

Rioting and political violence did not occur from Trump supporters when Trump was raided by the FBI. It did not occur when political witch-hunts were conducted against him. It did not occur when Trump supporters were held for years without charge. It did not occur when Trump was put in court, or photographed as a common criminal, or indeed when Trump was shot by an assassin. It has not occurred when Supreme Court rulings or lower court rulings went against Trump. All of the evidence shows that Trump and MAGA are the least dictatorial and the least violent movement in US politics today, not the most violent or the most dictatorial.

Comparisons of Trump with Hitler, which were already widespread enough to be the focus of academic articles in 2019 and which only continued and escalated from 2020, are proof not of Trump’s perfidy, extremism and contempt for democracy, but of all three qualities in his opponents who are prepared to indulge the most reckless political rhetoric imaginable in doing everything in their power to prevent the People electing or re-electing a populist President.

The 2019 article is instructive on how early and how insane these Hitler comparisons were. Talking about 2015, before Trump had even won an election or held any power whatsoever, we had this level of delusional fear mongering and hysterical and demonising rhetoric about Trump:

“The former Republican governor of New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman, rejected Trump's comments as “the kind of rhetoric that allowed Hitler to move forward,” while the Mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, said Trump had “taken a page from the playbook of Hitler.” Several months later, two former Mexican presidents echoed these comments: in February 2016, Vicente Fox responded to Trump's crude criticism of Latino immigrants by saying he “reminds me of Hitler,” while his successor, Felipe Calderon, accused Trump of “exploiting [popular] feelings like Hitler did in his time.” Similar comparisons flooded the mass media and popular culture. Already in the summer of 2015, journalists unearthed a 1990 Vanity Fair story in which Trump's ex-wife, Ivana, reported that her husband kept a book of Hitler speeches in a cabinet near his bed. Other reporters discovered the disturbing fact that Trump's signature phrase, “Make America Great Again,” resembled Hitler's slogan, “Make Germany Great Again.” Trump's alleged similarity to Hitler also found expression in political cartoons and comments by comedians, such as Bill Maher, Sarah Silverman, and Louis C. K., who told the New York Daily News: “It was funny for a little while. But the guy is Hitler.”

Pure fantasies, like Trump having a bed time penchant for reading Hitler, are treated as authoritative fact even by an academic discussing all this hysteria, with the basic principles of objectivity and evidence based scholarship of course ignored (even the idea that an ex wife might lie about an ex husband not occurring to minds predisposed to hate Trump). Anyone who has actually read Hitler knows just how turgid that writing is, that one might read him for reasons other than agreeing with him, and that Donald Trump is about the least likely person to go to that effort (this is a man who extemporises in all his speeches and prefers bullet point treatments and factual summaries rather than long explanations. There are no short Hitler speeches).

What the 2019 article shows us though, even from someone who shares the kind of globalist prejudices that react to a populist President or candidate in this hysterical way, is that there has been an unprecedented degree of demonisation of Donald Trump, that the mainstream opponents of Trump have devoted huge media and publishing resources to this demonisation, and that this is the kind of treatment that prompts assassination attempts.

The comparison of Trump with Hitler is a direct incitement towards the assassination of Trump, since once you have conditioned enough people to strongly believe this comparison then one or two or more of the people you have programmed to think this way will be already damaged and dangerous enough to act on that comparison and consider it normal and good to try and kill that person. The very people who talk about misinformation and dangerous rhetoric have been wildly (or more cynically, deliberately) reckless in their hysterical and delusional commentary on Trump. Whether they were spitting that malice from hyperbole or from genuinely sharing the delusion they were advocating, this Globalist hatred of a Populist figure and this pretence that a person who acted moderately in power is a nascent dictator builds the conditions of assassination.

Mainstream politicians and mainstream media and mainstream academics all loaded the bullets of that assassination attempt, and ANOTHER innocent Trump supporter (Corey Comperatore) died because of it.

The important thing here, morally, is to acknowledge that death. To acknowledge all of the Trump supporters already dead merely because they wanted a populist political approach instead of a Globalist one. To acknowledge that ‘Trump is Hitler’ rhetoric is at least partly responsible for those deaths, and certainly far more responsible than Donald Trump is. These are deaths that probably would not have occurred if mainstream media and mainstream opponents of Trump had confined their language to rational limits.

If the Globalists still shared the same moral hinterland as the Populists, if those shared inherited values were the same, they would have morally judged their own side long ago, they would have morally known too how absurd and irrational and untethered from reality their attitudes to Trump and his voters had become.

Today, the Democrat leaders who partly put the hate in the shooters heart, pretend to be horrified by the end result of their own actions. They pretend to condemn what they helped to create. But it’s a very insincere reaction. The hate they showed before the attempt to kill Trump is a far truer reflection of them and their attitudes, and of how Globalists generally think of Populist opposition. These are the people who were prepared to label concerned parents ‘domestic terrorists’. It was never aimed solely at Trump, that level of insanity. It was aimed at all of us who peacefully and democratically oppose Globalist policies and power.

The moral gulf is not going to be papered over by these temporary and dishonest sops to moderation and restraint, offered by the most cynical with the least sincerity. The Globalist project of recasting good as evil and evil as good has been too successful with their own supporters, which is why so many of these people can go online and celebrate assassination attempts that kill innocent bystanders.

This is what happens when you set about scrapping everything once considered normal. Ironically, in the same speech where Biden spoke about how MAGA threatens everything, Biden said that what we are seeing isn’t normal. Which is true. But the departure from normality, the trajectory towards tyranny, the kind of society in which people celebrate or support assassinations, ALL came from the fact that Globalists decided that a total moral revolution was going to happen and then decided that any Populist pushback would be stopped by any means necessary.

THEY broke the shared values and the shared norms and the peaceful transfer of power and the rational limits on what people will believe or how they will act in a civilised society. THEY injected insane levels of hate and delusion into our political discourse without any thought of the consequences. Trump did not do these things. They did in their determination to prevent Trump or destroy Trump and what he represents.

Trump acquired greatness by responding to the moral revolution that told us that loving your own nation was evil, and that murdering your own child in the womb was good. Trump could only emerge at the moment that the People looked for a champion when the Elite have already gone insane. What Trump was and is about, what Populism is about, is restorative justice and restorative normality. Populism isn’t a call for radical extremism, it’s a call for non-radical sanity, a return to sanity. The mainstream went radical and extremist, and under Globalism will inherently always be radical and extremist in terms of traditional morality and traditional understandings of good and evil.

The Elite, and those lower down professional groups entirely dependent on the Elite and desperate to ape them (like academics, or paid for scientists) all set off on this radical extremist journey towards a utopia where the people never ‘get the chance to elect a Hitler’. In doing so, they all became the authoritarian fascists they claimed to be preventing. They all adopted Hitlerian methods, while making videos warning that Trump would adopt Hitlerian methods (such as Robert Reich’s How Trump is Following Hitler’s Playbook, available on YouTube if you want to see one of the worst examples of Democrat and Globalist psychological projection).

The anti-racists became the most virulent and vicious of racists. The LGBTQ+ lesbian feminists became the strongest supporters of patriarchal Islam. The Marxists became fans of huge corporations, and the huge corporations became fans of the Marxists. Business hopped in bed with radical leftism. ‘Progressive’ anti-fascists started chasing Jews across campuses. The Be Kind people became the people hoping that a rival politicians child would be raped in prison. Cutting off children’s genitals for profit became affirming their gender. Up is down, and down is up, male is female and female male, and the most empathetic and caring people, apparently, want their political opponents murdered.

All of this is where moral revolution AND elite attempts to prevent democratic power transferring to people they don’t like gets us.

Here’s the final secret in all this. What was it about Trump that they hated the most? What was it about his populism that is such a threat to them that they will do anything at all to stop him. After all, Trump wasn’t always successful in opposing them. He was fooled by the ‘expert advice’ on vaccines. He let a large number of Globalist traitors like Mike Pence and Bill Barr get close and ultimately facilitate his removal by theft in 2020. Is just being populist, is just opposing perpetual war and other wealth generation for the Elite at national expense enough for the level of hate it generated?

Or is it that vast moral gulf, in which for all his flaws (and his moderate liberalism is the most dangerous of those flaws) Trump has greatness, and they do not? Just as our moral visions are opposite ones, our view on what constitutes greatness is opposite too. Where they see a man as degenerate as themselves, a man of multiple divorces, a man of greed and hunger for power, a man of racism and pure ego, we see a man with human flaws who has overcome those weaknesses to be a father, a leader, a symbol greater than himself.

They lament the assassin’s failure. We see the Hand of God in a bullet grazing an ear, in the turning of Trump’s head just at the right moment to save his life. We see the fist pump and the now instantly iconic image as a proof of Trump’s greatness. We smile that he plays golf the next day. We marvel that he retains his courage and humour. We are humbled but grateful that he is prepared to risk his life for his nation. We see in him that human weakness does not prevent human greatness, that both can fill the same vessel and that a man can choose to embody either one, can turn from one to the other.

The Globalist worldview is not just that Trump cannot be trusted with power, but that you can’t be trusted with it either, it is that the People have no greatness about them, and the Past has no greatness, and the family has no greatness, and America or England or the West has no greatness. They despise exceptionalism because none of them are exceptional. They hate Trump because he has greatness and wishes US to have it too.

The Globalist has wealth and power. But for them the very notion of greatness is a threat and a psychic wound. They can’t believe it in others, because they don’t possess it themselves. They don’t believe it of the average voter, because that would deny their own purely material and purely social superiority over that voter. So for them democracy becomes denying the choice of the people. The people are too stupid to judge. But Trump offers not only his own greatness but the return of national greatness and the idea that all of us share it, and all of us may own it. Can you imagine what a threat that is to small minds and small men who only have their social position and bank balance as the measure of themselves? To an elite that only manages decline, or profits most from decline? To an elite now shackled to anti human ideas and to a sort of sneering, irreligious, contemptuous view of humanity as a whole which sees us as just another mechanistic animal, or even as a polluting cancer on the Earth?

Neither nations nor men are allowed to be great by the petty tyrants that rule today. Trump reminds them that they are small, petty and morally bankrupt, just as Populism does. That’s what they hate more than anything, and that’s what they cannot forgive.

https://jupplandia.substack.com/p/great-men-and-small-minds?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true

[Crafty_Dog]

"Here is Joe Biden on Trump:"

Are there some quotation marks missing in what follows?

[Body-by-Guinness]

"Here is Joe Biden on Trump:"

Are there some quotation marks missing in what follows?

Likely italicized.

[Crafty_Dog]

That makes sense.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Post debate I regularly encounter “Progressive” bemoaning of the lies Trump is said to tell. To be sure he often embraces hyperbole, to my mind to further the contrast between the medial myths we are supposed to unquestionably accept and the reality those of us who are not numbered among the elites or who don’t earn a living carrying water for them endure. Trump’s “lies,” however, pale in comparison to those told by Biden, or more correctly, Biden’s many handlers. The fact so many are unable to grasp this will be dissertation fodder some day.

The disease of our age are elites that seek to maintain the illusion of a constitutional republic while nakedly wielding power in a decidedly undemocratic fashion. Trump is a symptom of this disease. Want to be rid of the Trumps of this world? Tear away the veil behind which the our self-defined elites manipulate perceptions to their ends and avarice.

This piece is a good start to doing just that:

Joe Biden and a Tear in the Fabric of Things

Last month’s debate destroyed the carefully crafted myth of Biden as an empathetic, intelligent and resolute leader. For the establishment that perpetrated this hoax, what comes next won’t be pretty

MARTIN GURRI
JUL 13, 2024

Joe Biden entered the Senate in 1973, at the tender age of 30. He looked like a president, he felt like a president and he fully expected to rise to the top. His formula for success was that of every ambitious politician deprived by nature of directing principles or opinions: Find the meandering mainstream of his party’s establishment, where the big fish swim, then wade in and drift. Biden was in turn strongly against and stridently for abortion, a righteous Vietnam dove and then a stern Iraq hawk, a friend of racist Democratic senators before becoming a promoter of compensatory quotas for racial minorities.

Virtually every time a vacancy arose, Biden, by his own admission, considered running for the presidency. In 1988, at the age of 46, he actually did so—and failed. Biden may look and feel like a president, but he has never sounded like one. Long before old age turned him into a bleary-eyed mutterer, he tended to get lost in his own verbiage. He told fantastic stories about his personal life that could be easily disproven. He plagiarized bits from Bobby Kennedy and an entire speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Biden, it seems, was as needy as he was ambitious. His campaign resembled a prolonged pratfall. He dropped out before the first primary.

He spent 36 years in the Senate but never rose to any kind of power or influence there. His hour in the sun came in 1991 when, as chair of the Judiciary Committee, he was charged by Democratic Party grandees with the destruction of Clarence Thomas as a nominee to the Supreme Court. He failed. Thomas’ eloquence and intellectual firepower easily overwhelmed the woodenly partisan Biden.

Although an elite among elites and a member in good standing of the Democratic Party establishment, few of the decision-makers who knew Biden took him seriously. He was, in the words of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, “an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two”—but not a front man, not a protagonist, never the king. One can imagine Biden’s chagrin as the years passed him by. He had done everything asked of him. He had kissed rings and bowed to his superiors. Yet, though once a young lion, he was now viewed by his peers as “almost ridiculous— / Almost, at times, the Fool.”

How Biden Became a Magnificent Replica of Himself

Then the inscrutable destiny that rules over human lives struck like lightning. Barack Obama, the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, picked Biden to be his vice president. No Democratic insider would have done so, but Obama was very much an outsider and he needed a harmless establishment figure to balance his “transformational” image. Maybe he thought that a shuffling, compliant white guy would be payback for past stereotypes. Anyone paying close attention should have known, by this choice, that Obama was less interested in transforming the system than in taking charge of it.

It is impossible to fail if you are the U.S. vice president, but Biden was locked out of the Obama inner circle and received no sexy special assignments. “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck it up,” was Obama’s famous verdict on his vice president. As in the Senate, Biden had the perks but not the power—or the respect. Nobody saw him as the natural successor to Obama. It was Hillary Clinton’s turn. Few considered him a player in the scramble to defeat Trump in 2020. At 78, he was much too old and slow.

Nevertheless, he shambled into the race. He began as he usually did—by failing. He lost contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, and seemed on the verge of irrelevancy: a has-been pursuing an impossible dream. But then destiny intervened again, in the form of the Democratic establishment that for years had treated Biden as something of a joke. Suddenly, from utter desperation, he became their man.

Younger Democratic stalwarts who could be trusted to take on Trump—Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren—had wobbled or flamed out early in the primary season. That left the field wide open for Bernie Sanders, the wild-eyed socialist who was hated and feared by the elites, if for no other reason than he was deemed unelectable. Some quick maneuvering became necessary. Like synchronized swimmers moving as one, most of Biden’s opponents dropped out of the race and endorsed him. Rules were bent. Money was found. With the endorsement of Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and the rest of the state’s Democratic Party establishment, Biden won his first primary ever in South Carolina—and the rest, as we know, is history.

The campaign against Trump set a pattern that would continue for years. First, Biden was to be swaddled in the political equivalent of bubble wrap. He ran for the presidency of the United States from the basement of his home in Delaware. Why not? It was a time of pandemic. Second, a magnificent replica of Biden was erected by the establishment with the full complicity of the media, and it replaced, in the information sphere, the increasingly feeble, always spiteful, intellectually muddled real man. Third, a ring of iron was placed around the candidate to prevent access by the public. Biden’s appearances were carefully staged in the true sense of the word: They avoided reality and promoted a fictional character.

The establishment was in control and it knew what it was doing. Trump went down in defeat. The curtain rose on that extraordinary era of magical realism in American life, known prosaically as the Biden administration.

The Creation of Bidenworld Explained

By now the alert reader has noticed that I keep using that word, establishment. What do I mean by it?

A political establishment is a caste of mutually known persons organized informally for the purpose of wielding power. Every establishment must meet two simple requirements. There must be an unyielding hierarchy with a powerful boss at the top. In addition, every member must be bound to a set of rules so ironclad that any violator is immediately cast off to the wilderness.

The model and archetype is the English establishment that straddled the last half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. That group was narrow-minded and inept but little could be said or done without its tacit approval. It took a disastrous defeat at the hands of Hitler’s Germany before Winston Churchill could overcome establishment opposition to become prime minister. For all his aristocratic background, Churchill was too unpredictable, too blatantly “not one of us.” The establishment outranked even royalty: Edward VIII tried to break the rules by seeking to marry a divorced woman and stay on the throne. He was told he could marry her or be king—but not both.

In this country, the Republican establishment once boasted fine old names like the Cabots and the Lodges, who were said to speak only to each other and to God, and did much heavy lifting—Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., for example, carried the weight of the Vietnam War as U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam. Today, only the memory of that potent establishment remains. Like so many cliques and coteries accustomed to operating in the shadows, it was undone by the digital age, in which every action must be performed before a rowdy audience, on center stage.

Trump is often credited with the demolition of the Republican establishment, but that’s not accurate. The one insider to oppose him was Jeb Bush, who had the name but not the clout and had been out of public office for nine years. By 2016, the Republican establishment was a walking corpse—Trump merely gave it a decent burial.

The resilience of the Democratic establishment under present-day conditions makes for a remarkable story, one that speaks to the growing fondness of progressives for conservative and even reactionary structures. After coopting Obama into the fold, this establishment has done everything that can be expected of it—which is mostly fixing things. It fixed the rules so that Clinton would get the nomination over Sanders in 2016. It did much the same for Biden in 2020 and 2024, going so far as to prohibit debates in the 2024 primaries, a decision with profound if unintended consequences.

Democratic submission to hierarchy is astonishing. Biden has been in physical and mental decline for years. Gavin Newsom, governor of California, almost indecently lusts after the presidency. Yet Newsom must genuflect before the president and pledge allegiance to his cause. In name at least, Biden is boss. The rules of the game must be adhered to, without exception.

With Biden, the establishment was presented with a difficult challenge: It was reality itself that needed fixing. The president, we have seen, is an inarticulate speaker, has a bizarre personality, is notoriously thin-skinned and lacks humor and charm as a public person. Furthermore, his administration has been responsible for one disaster after another, at home and abroad. All that had to be fixed. The fictional replica of Biden required an equally fictional—and magnificent—record of achievement.

In an effort that has to be unparalleled in our history, every American institution, from the prestige press to the digital platforms, from academia to the entertainment world and very much including the federal bureaucracy, was recruited to portray President Biden as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. He was said to be caring, empathetic, a totally normal Everyday Joe who bonded easily with racial minorities—but also serious about his duties, the dignified adult in the room, a reliable ally who would never be manipulated by Vladimir Putin. His administration had defeated the pandemic, saved the economy, embraced migrants of all races, ended a forever war in Afghanistan and somehow protected Ukraine, Israel and Hamas simultaneously. As for the president’s age, he was old but wise, sharp in private though a stutterer in public and surrounded by the best and brightest in any case.

Nothing like this had been seen before. For the Democrats in power to spin the truth was predictable. For the institutions of information and knowledge to debase themselves so completely on behalf of a political nonentity added to their crisis of authority by precipitating a depressing meltdown of integrity.

An alternate universe was invented and imposed on the American public. It was far more seamless and glimmering than reality. As in the Greek fable, the creators fell in love with their creation. Establishment elites moved their minds permanently to Bidenworld, where the boss was an energetic leader and his policies were always successful. Biden himself, one suspects, fused with his towering replica. The rest of us were told to ignore the evidence of our eyes and salute.

Biden’s actual appearances generated uncertainty and unease, but these were carefully staged and kept to a minimum. Here was the truth of the matter: Bidenworld functioned better without Biden. He was, in fact, its greatest obstacle, and would turn out to be the instrument of its destruction.

The Trump Rationale and the Unmasking of a Fraud

The fantastic universe erected around Biden wasn’t focused on the president but on his fiercest antagonist: Trump became the predicate of Bidenworld, its reason for existence. The logic is pretty straightforward. As a moral and political abomination, Trump provides the rationale for establishment rule in perpetuity. Loathing of Trump in the highest places is no doubt sincere, but that’s not the point. If the former president had never existed, someone else would be found to occupy the supervillain slot. (One could see glimmers of this dynamic in early 2023, when for a few months it seemed like Ron DeSantis might eclipse Trump and win the GOP nomination for president, prompting the media and others to begin characterizing the Florida governor as the next dark lord.) An imminent threat to democracy is required to justify extraordinary measures. The prime directive of Bidenworld has always been: Anything is licit if it helps defeat Trump.

Protection against reality holds the highest priority. Whatever whisper of truth pierces the wall of fictions is ruthlessly attacked as the product of crazed or bigoted minds. If Robert Hur, the special prosecutor tasked with looking into Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, reports that he won’t move forward with the case because the president is “an elderly man with a poor memory,” then Hur must be a Trumpian tool. If a video shows Biden wandering off to nowhere, then the video is a lie. It’s all malicious disinformation, “cheap fakes,” deranged conspiracy theories. To strengthen the faith, punishment had to be meted out to heretics. MAGA fanatics were treated like domestic terrorists. Political opponents were prosecuted like common criminals. An elaborate censorship apparatus was constructed to protect against offending opinions and factual discrepancies. Anything is licit if it helps defeat Trump.

The fixation with Trump had another advantage: He was perceived as a weak and wounded animal. When he took out DeSantis and former South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, his primary rivals, the Democrats cheered. He was their chosen foe—the worst, to their way of thinking, the Republicans had to offer. From a position of strength, Bidenworld planned to set the terms of the general election as it had done with the Democratic primaries. No debates would be allowed. A new basement would be found in which to hide President Biden. With Trump in the race, all they had to do was coast downhill.

The uncanny political resurrection of Donald Trump is a subject for another time. An obvious factor, though, had to be the policy failures and unpopularity of the Biden administration. Another, of course, was the president’s visible deterioration. Promoting an official fiction isn’t really feasible in the age of the internet. For whatever reasons, Trump surged when he was supposed to sink. At some point, he must have passed the president in the internal polls of the Democratic Party: And at exactly that moment began the panic that has now swelled to a glass-shattering shriek.

Why did the president’s people change their minds and challenge Trump to a debate? The only explanation I can think of is that they had migrated intellectually to the fantasy universe. They had come to believe their own comforting lies. Truth had become the habitual enemy, something to shun in horror—so they dreamed they could preserve Bidenworld by producing the real Biden.

The debate was a transcendental event, far more significant than anything that was said in it. While Biden gargled and mumbled, a ripping noise could be heard by those who listened closely, a sound like the rending of a veil, as the whole Gothic fortress of fantasies disintegrated, the replica vanished like a ghost and 100 million Americans could suddenly behold the cruel struggles of a man tormented by a dying body and a dying mind. The shock of what we saw still lingers, not because it was surprising but rather because it was so predictable and consistent with what we already knew: It was truth, and we have grown used to lies. We had witnessed, in real time, the unraveling of a colossal fraud and the end of Biden’s political life.

There is no way forward for the president, although he is a vain and stubborn man and it may take outside intervention to persuade him of this fact. The media that once sheltered him is now competing to expose his frailties. The prime directive remains supreme but Biden now finds himself at the pointy end of that argument. He has fallen behind Trump and, in consequence, he has lost the New York Times. No Democratic politician can take that kind of hit and remain a competitive candidate.

Biden may well be done, but what happens next is uncertain. If indeed he goes and the hierarchy holds, then Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president, will replace Biden at the top of the ticket. Harris carries her own burden of weirdness but at least can be trusted not to drool in front of the cameras. The establishment, however, may not survive the public unmasking of its prurient fantasies. The magic has been lost, and with it the authority to anoint the next chieftain. The Democratic Party, long held together by its collective will to power, may shatter from a clash of personal ambitions. They need only peek across the aisle at the Republicans to learn what this looks like. That would be the strongest argument for keeping the president as a sacrificial offering in November.

I see no reason to pity Biden. He perpetrated a hoax on the American people and has had the misfortune of being found out. The punishment will fit the crime: humiliation for heedless vanity. If he is forced to withdraw from the presidential contest, that will be all the world remembers of his brief tenure at the top. If Trump regains the presidency in 2024, Biden will end up detested by the very elites whose good opinion he has groveled all his life to obtain. Failure, this time, will be fixed and final, like destiny itself.

He will not bear these blows stoically. I expect he’ll spend whatever time remains to him as a 21st-century version of King Lear—fallen, baffled, victim of his own fatal misjudgments, an old man lost on the heath and railing at the storm.
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A guest post by
Martin Gurri
Author of The Revolt of the Public, former CIA analyst, presently a Visiting Fellow at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/joe-biden-and-a-tear-in-the-fabric

[Crafty_Dog]

A great piece of writing.

For the record I do disagree with his assessment of the decision to go with the early debate.   I suspect it to be a deliberate play to set in place what we see now.

[Body-by-Guinness]

A great piece of writing.

For the record I do disagree with his assessment of the decision to go with the early debate.   I suspect it to be a deliberate play to set in place what we see now.

It would certainly be revealing to know who all was a branch of that decision tree.

[Crafty_Dog]

I know this man.  He has served our country in interesting ways.

https://danconiajournal.substack.com/p/war?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1016875&post_id=146602734&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=z2120&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email 

[ccp]

https://www.thewrap.com/james-woods-oppenheimer-oscars-trump-megyn-kelly/

can hear whole podcast here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/james-woods-on-bidens-farewell-and-political-bias-in/id1532976305?i=1000663361747

BTW James Woods has highest IQ of anyone in H Wood, or at least reported as 180.

[Body-by-Guinness]

I’ve been scanning for a story in the MSM that properly reports on the $1.2 million payoff to Peter Strzok, and presumably Lisa Page. There’s none to be found. For those unaware, in a Friday news dump the DOJ relented in its defense against a Strzok suit stating it was really mean for the then Trump DOJ to release texts made of a fed owned device to a fed owned device speaking ill of Trump while colluding to prevent his election.

The DOJ could have likely prevailed, but that’s not the way the game is paid and the MSM knows it. Under the Obama admin the technique was perfected: have some NGO or conservation org sue the, say, EPA for failure to sufficiently kowtow toward some useless reg that doesn’t accomplish anything. The EPA would mount a half hearted defense, the fold like a cheap rag and pay off the plaintiff far more than they deserved, a de facto transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to an org that acts against the taxpayer’s interests with the tacit åapproval of the “Progressive” administration then (and now) in power.

Sounds like a story worth reporting, eh? So why is this vast transfer of wealth not being reported? Because the fair and balanced news media concurs with “Progressive” ends and doesn’t want to get between these covert payoffs and the noble causes they are meant to underwrite with anything so unnecessary as accurate reporting regarding a story American citizens ought to be told of as that would then gum up the game of “Progressives” means and ends that must be concealed until the ends are achieved.

We can console ourselves in knowing useful idiots like those in the press are usually among the first stood in front of the wall when “Progressive” regimes take unchallengeable power.

Way back in the day I remember reading a story in, IIRC, the Chicago Tribune about a fellow arrested for torching a business for pay. The story methodically laid out what he did and why, as well as the results. The last line of the piece, though, told the whole story. It was something along the lines of “the owner of the property declined to press charges.” That was the reporter’s very subtle way of making it clear that this was an arson for hire without saying so out loud and perhaps being sued.

The media these days doesn’t bother with anything as passé these days, instead letting the needs of the Narrative to dictate the outcome instead of allowing the story’s narrative to explain its outcome. All of which is a long winded way to say this is the only thing I could find that comes close to explaining what occurred in Strzok’s recent instance, albeit with numerous superfluous sidetracks. It’s more than a shame that the MSM can’t do the same:

The Obama administration's EPA developed a "sue and settle" process by which people and groups the administration could not publicly support were invited and encouraged to sue the government, no matter how weak the case, and rather than going to trial, the government would settle with them, bending to absurd demands or funneling large sums of money to the plaintiff.

During the Obama years, the sue-and-settle gambit was raised to an art form. The administration would invite special-interest groups to sue the EPA over a regulation that it wanted to change but couldn’t, at least not expeditiously.

Instead of fighting the lawsuit, the EPA would then almost immediately surrender, agreeing to settle. Inevitably, the settlement entailed consenting to whatever outrageous demands were being made by the agency’s handpicked “adversary.”

In the Friday night news dump, there is a report of the FBI lovebirds, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, sued the DOJ for wrongful termination - which given the basis for the suit and the overwhelming evidence they deserved to be fired - was a long shot.

But the government just "settled" with them, giving $1.2 million to Strzok and $800K to Page.

The Deep State takes care of its own.

Page and Strzok are "Heroes of the Soviet Union", they did the Deep State's bidding to get rid of a threat, Donald Trump.
Look around.

Kamala Harris’ message to potential voters is that Trump is dragging us back to the past and she and her minions are for the future.
Well, at least to me, their vison of “the future” doesn’t look terribly appealing.

A world of poorly educated kids, mocking of God, Christ and Christianity, a world where “equity” robs civilization of the rewards of hard work and innovation, is not what I want for my children, their children, and their children.

As usual, the Democrat solution for this is a larger and oppressive government to hand out money, to “correct” society and to ban anything that gets in their way.

Remember, the Deep State is evil and a vicious protector of its own existence.

I watched a few minutes of the Olympic opening ceremonies last night – mostly because I expected the French to put on a weird show, and I know that the transgender Last Supper is all over the net this morning, but I gave up on it when a motorized stage was plying the Seine with a piano player tickling the ivories of a flaming piano and a songstress belting out John Lennon’s insipid “Imagine”.

I hate that song. It is an anthem for atheists and a celebration of man as God.

I love CSI: Miami – mostly for the melodramatic and overacting of David Caruso as Horatio Caine. If there was a CSI: Paris, it was star Robespierre as the head of the Committee for Public Safety and “Imagine” would be playing in the opening credits as people were guillotined in the background.

One must step back and understand what this is about.

Trump is right when he says they aren’t after him as much as they are after you.

Government under Democrats is government under our enemies. It is about rewarding anyone and anything that works to destroy family, to destroy Jews and Christians, Western culture, freedom, independence, and self-determination.

France has already tried this.

Essentially, a vote for any Democrat is a vote for a new Reign of Terror.

One wonders how these needs to destroy everything good and unique spread so quickly. I have thought about this a lot, and no matter how you understand evil, this is the work of supernatural forces corrupting human minds and souls.

I have no better word for it than Satan.

And if Page and Strzok are any example, selling your soul to Satan pays well – at least for now.

[Crafty_Dog]

Quality writing BBG.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/britains-foxes-are-beset-by-wolves?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=330796&post_id=147555144&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1ODg4MTI0MCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTQ3NTU1MTQ0LCJpYXQiOjE3MjMzODg2NDcsImV4cCI6MTcyNTk4MDY0NywiaXNzIjoicHViLTMzMDc5NiIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.1qQ8g_WdYCfm8jMdpqN1BkQXsTEi-lPb7oZqP7azfUM&r=z2120&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

[Body-by-Guinness]

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/britains-foxes-are-beset-by-wolves?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=330796&post_id=147555144&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1ODg4MTI0MCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTQ3NTU1MTQ0LCJpYXQiOjE3MjMzODg2NDcsImV4cCI6MTcyNTk4MDY0NywiaXNzIjoicHViLTMzMDc5NiIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.1qQ8g_WdYCfm8jMdpqN1BkQXsTEi-lPb7oZqP7azfUM&r=z2120&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Very interesting piece.

[Crafty_Dog]

I thought so too.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://victorhanson.com/americas-lab-rats/?fbclid=IwY2xjawEsF4xleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHYMCYaZcMo78tSyCvQOaxQhGIw_VNPodJWkOTP61_wRIij_giTFn66k2Zg_aem_JDvIjrtpRXByKK53IgAQDQ

[Crafty_Dog]

second

Posting this here as well as the 2024 thread.   A friend of mine wrote this.  A fine piece of work IMHO:

https://danconiajournal.substack.com/p/i-hate-your-stupid-face?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1016875&post_id=147763113&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=z2120&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

I Hate Your Stupid Face...
... and I thank you for saving our country.

Francisco D'Anconia
Aug 15, 2024



In the heat of political discourse, it’s easy to lose sight of what really matters. It’s easy to get caught up in the personality clashes, the sound bites, the media frenzy, and the endless parade of social media posts designed to provoke and polarize. You hear your friends, read the posts on social media, scroll past reel after reel of this influencer or that celebrity telling you what all the cool kids think and how you ought to vote if you want to be a cool kid like them. But beneath all that noise lies something that’s actually important: the policies that shape our lives, our communities, and our country. It’s time we got a few things straight.

Let’s begin with a simple truth: Hanging on to your hatred of a particular candidate because you can’t stand their stupid face is your right. You get to cast your vote any way you want to. That’s the beauty of a free society. But let’s not confuse personal disdain with sound judgment. Let’s not pretend that voting based on a candidate’s personality, rather than their policies, is anything other than self-indulgent pettiness.

It is NOT a radical right-wing idea to strive for international peace and cooperation. This is common sense. A diplomatic environment in which every ally carries their weight ensures that wars, attacks, invasions, and killings are less likely to occur. The notion that America should work towards global stability, using diplomacy and alliances to prevent conflict, is not a partisan fantasy—it’s a pragmatic approach that benefits everyone. We’ve seen this in action with successful peace treaties and international agreements that have brought hostile nations to the table, de-escalated tensions, and promoted cooperation over conflict. The Abraham Accords, for example, normalized relations between Israel and several Arab nations, reducing the likelihood of war in one of the world’s most volatile regions.

It is NOT a radical right-wing idea to want to bring an end to wars and the killing of hundreds of thousands of people on foreign battlefields, even if they aren’t in your backyard. The desire to avoid unnecessary conflict, to protect both American lives and those of innocents abroad, is a moral imperative. We’ve seen the disastrous consequences of endless wars in the Middle East, where decades of conflict have destabilized entire regions, created power vacuums filled by terrorists, and cost countless lives. Seeking to end these conflicts and bring our troops home is not isolationism—it’s the responsible use of American power.

It is NOT a radical right-wing idea to want a secure border. This is about maintaining the integrity of our nation, ensuring that immigrants who come here are productive, creative, law-abiding individuals who want to contribute to our country’s success. A secure border isn’t about xenophobia; it’s about safety, stability, and the rule of law. Every nation has the right—and the responsibility—to control its borders. We’ve seen the consequences of lax border policies in Europe, where unchecked migration has strained resources and led to social unrest. We’ve watched so-called Sanctuary Cities here in the US absolutely implode when they have to live under their own declared policies. America can and should welcome immigrants, but it must do so in a way that protects the interests of its citizens and the security of the nation.

It is NOT a radical right-wing idea to want energy independence. Disentangling ourselves from alliances with unstable or theocratic dictatorships is crucial to our national security. America’s reliance on foreign oil has dragged us into wars, compromised our foreign policy, and made us vulnerable to the whims of regimes that do not share our values. The development of domestic energy resources, whether through traditional means like oil and gas or renewable sources like wind and solar, strengthens our independence and reduces the likelihood of conflict. The shale oil boom, for example, turned the United States into a net exporter of energy, giving us leverage on the global stage and reducing our dependence on foreign powers.

It is NOT a radical right-wing idea to want a prosperous economy that encourages robust competition on a level playing field. Prosperity comes from innovation, entrepreneurship, and the freedom to compete. Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy, and they thrive in an environment where competition is fair, where the government does not pick winners and losers, and where taxes and regulations do not stifle growth. We’ve seen the benefits of a competitive economy in the tech sector, where companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon grew from garage startups into global giants, creating jobs and wealth on an unprecedented scale. We now, arguably, see a need to allow new small businesses and innovators the freedom to step up and challenge Google and Apple and Amazon - maybe even displace them in the marketplace. Economic policies that favor competition over cronyism benefit everyone, regardless of their political affiliation.

It is NOT a radical right-wing idea to want people to keep more of the money they earn. The government should not be allowed to spend whatever it wants on the backs of taxpayers. Fiscal responsibility is a cornerstone of good governance. When the government spends recklessly, it leads to higher taxes, higher debt, and ultimately, economic instability. We’ve seen the dangers of runaway government spending in countries like Greece, where fiscal irresponsibility led to a sovereign debt crisis, crippling the economy and leading to austerity measures that devastated the population. A government that lives within its means, that prioritizes essential services over wasteful spending, is one that serves the people rather than burdens them.

It is NOT a radical right-wing idea to want to see American productivity increase and diversify. American factories, American innovation, and the onshoring of American businesses mean more jobs for Americans, more money in American communities, and less susceptibility to foreign influences, supply chain disruptions, and wars. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the dangers of relying too heavily on foreign supply chains, particularly in critical sectors like pharmaceuticals and medical equipment. Bringing manufacturing back to America is not about protectionism; it’s about resilience and security. When we produce goods at home, we create jobs, stimulate economic growth, and reduce our vulnerability to global crises.

It is NOT a radical right-wing idea to love this country. Loving the place that provides us all with a place to live, work, and change things for the better is the foundation that allows us all to work together for the common good. Patriotism is not about blind loyalty or uncritical acceptance of our nation’s flaws. It’s about recognizing the unique opportunity we have to build a better future, to correct our mistakes, and to strive for a more perfect union. Loving America means believing in its potential, in the principles of freedom, justice, and opportunity that it was founded upon, and in the power of its people to overcome challenges and create a brighter tomorrow.

Let’s quit pretending that advocating for these things makes someone a "Trumper" or a radical or a "right-winger." It doesn’t. It makes them a sensible American. Let’s quit pretending that a person who votes for these things is "brainwashed" into some cult of personality. They aren’t. They’re people with eyes and ears and an interest in making life better for everybody. Let’s quit pretending that there’s something wrong with wanting these things, or that there is some evil, malevolent streak that motivates them. There isn’t. There’s just an apples-to-apples comparison of how well one set of ideas works in comparison to what’s being offered on the opposite side of the ticket. Objectively, by any criteria you measure, one is better than the other.

Common sense and reason tell us that these ideas are not just good for one political party—they are good for all Americans. They are the foundation of a prosperous, secure, and free society. They have been demonstrated, time and again, to work better than the policies currently affecting American life. They are not radical; they are the principles that have guided this nation to greatness.

No matter who you like, no matter whose stupid face you can’t stand, no matter who your friends or favorite influencers tell you to vote for, you really do owe it to every single person in the country to vote for the policies you know will make things better. It’s easy to be glib or snarky or petty about a candidate, but this is important. This is the future of our country, the future of our children, the future of everything we hold dear.

Get it right, please.

[Crafty_Dog]

Engages well on some deep themes:

https://darkfutura.substack.com/p/universal-basic-incompetence?publication_id=1463861&post_id=147397021&isFreemail=true&r=379fkp&triedRedirect=true