Scott Adams: Are Things Really That Bad?

 

This past year has been overwhelming to patriots everywhere – and not in a good sense.  Is it as bad as we think?  Dilbert creator Scott Adams apparently thinks so;  he recorded a podcast, and since I rarely listen to podcasts, I was grateful to see that Mark Wauck at Meaning in History transcribed some of it.  Here’s what Mr. Wauck posted:

A reader sent me a link to the Scott Adams podcast from yesterday. It’s nearly an hour long, but I’ve transcribed a brief portion of it. Adams is talking about the feeling he has that people have had enough, that there’s a growing sentiment of: We’ve had enough. He goes on a mild rant about the way he—and we—used to think just a few years ago, compared to where we’re at now. Of course it’s subjective, but I think it can be supported by a wide range of events that speak to public sentiment:

I think a lot of people have hit a wall.

...

We used to think that official data from government and big companies was probably mostly honest and sufficiently accurate, even if it had some problems. Do you believe that anymore?

I think now we believe that all data is fake. Because it mostly is. Maybe not intentionally, but there's always some context left out or something. I think we're now more likely to think that all data is fake as the default assumption. Whereas, it used to be the opposite. Just a few years ago.

Just a year ago a lot of people--smart people!--would have said the Second Amendment doesn't protect you from your government, because the government has better guns. Do you believe that now? Today, does anyone believe that guns are NOT the only thing keeping us from being Australia? I think Australia gave you all the learning you needed on that. The lockdown that Australia is experiencing, that can't happen here in America--because of the Second Amendment.

And then, of course, the Russian Collusion Hoax taught us that there's no limit to government corruption. I honestly thought there was a limit. ... When the people on the Right were first talking about the Russian Collusion Hoax being a Hillary Clinton paid operation with the Deep State behind it, CIA was part of it, and all that--do you know what I thought? I thought, well, there's certainly something sketchy going on here, but it's not THAT bad. It's not like collusion between Intel agencies and Democrats. It's not THAT. But it was. It was every bit of that. The worst thing you can imagine that anyone could do to this country? They were doing it. It's the worst thing your government could have done to you--and they were doing it HARD.

So my understanding of how far my government would go to retain power and screw the citizens is way different than it was a few years ago. Now I know they'll do ANYTHING. I didn't think that before. And they'll tell any lie because they can get away with it. I didn't think THAT. I didn't think anybody would lie in public if it was easy to fact check them. Wrong. WRONG. You can lie all you want in public, cuz you've got your own fact checkers. ...

I have to say, that’s about where I’m at now. Not that I was gullible before, or slow to catch on to the various hoaxes that have been perpetrated by the Power Elite, but I guess—a bit like Adams—I resisted the notion that it could be THAT bad.

Source link is here.  Most of us can add to Adams's list:  election fraud; foot-dragging on election audits (thanks, GOPe); “infrastructure” spending (thanks, GOPe); “vaccine” mandates; an occupant of the White House who has some brand of dementia;  the dangerous pull-out from Afghanistan, esp. leaving behind billions of dollars in equipment for our enemies;  opening the borders;  illegal immigration;  and now, all-too-predictable inflation.  All of it THAT BAD.

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One door-knock only

 

JD Rucker at NOQ Report doesn’t trust the government:

When news broke last week that the Biden regime intended to send agents door-to-door to check on our vaccine status, reactions were immediate and harsh. Even if we disregard the blatant attack on privacy and healthcare choice that this represents, we cannot shake the belief that this is just conditioning for near-future door-knockers with even worse intentions. It starts with vaccine checks and moves to gun checks, child indoctrination checks, right-wing extremism checks… anything but U.S. citizenship checks, of course.

The narrative from the White House has taken two different angles. One has authorities gaslighting us into believing that this is not only acceptable but part of the government’s responsibility to know the vaccination status of every American. The other is that government only wants to go door-to-door for vaccine status checks and they totally won’t take it any further.

Both narratives are false. Government does not have the right to invade our healthcare privacy, nor will they stop with this type of check if allowed to move forward with it the first time.

 . . .

Read the full column here.

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The Tyrants Among Us

The Editorial Board at Issues and Insights gives us fair warning on returning to normalcy:

 Of course they’re not going to let a crisis go to waste.

   . . . 

There’s a natural progression from the pandemic lockdowns to restrictions on freedom in the name of saving the sky from global warming. But the tyrants among us won’t stop there. We find it useful here to quote the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s international affairs analyst, who realized more than six months ago that “the virus of tyranny has already found itself in the bloodstream of liberal democracies.”

For instance:

• President Joe Biden and his party hope to saddle Americans, through undisciplined spending, with debt and a de facto tax (inflation) that can be repaid only by mortgaging the future and bondage to the federal monster.
• There is a core on the left, not even the hard left, that is resisting a return to normal. It wants liberty-shackling rules in place in perpetuity.
• Our freedom to speak will continue to be abridged.
• Our ability to make independent and individual health care decisions will be curtailed further.
• Second Amendment rights will be in danger of being rolled back because of “public health” needs.
• Expect to be forced out of our fossil-fuel-burning automobiles and herded into mass transit.
• Protests and rallies will be put down as insurrections – unless they are in service of the “right” groups, such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

Once lost, freedom is difficult to regain. “Be warned,” says author Michael Walsh. “If you think the petty tyrants currently making your lives miserable are going to willingly relinquish their illicit powers, think again. They’ve got a taste for it now.”

So intoxicated from their deep swig of power are they that they no longer see boundaries, just opportunities to subjugate. Fight back, or lose in a few years what has made America unique and great for more than two centuries

The entire editorial is here.

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Ted Nugent on OAN

 

 From the OAN website:

INTERVIEW: Trump, Guns And Rock’n’Roll With Ted Nugent

Real America

Most people know Ted Nugent as an iconic rock star. However, in recent years, he has gained attention for his outspoken conservative political views supporting President Trump, the Second Amendment and hunting rights. Nugent recently joined Real America for an unforgettable one-on-one with Dan Ball.

We watched the interview and it is fantastic. There's a 12-minute clip and a 6-minute clip on the OAN website.  Neither of them will upload onto this blogsite, so click here to watch. 

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Protect your rights against those claiming a crisis

Our First Amendment rights are at risk because of corruption in Big Tech, and our Second Amendment rights are at risk because progressives are using crises and tragedy to go for the guns. Prof. William Jacobson puts both risks in perspective at Legal Insurrection:

Every time I think the media-Democrat frenzy could not get any more frenzied, it gets more frenzied.

How seamlessly they have transitioned from almost three years of Russia-collusion-mania to the current frenzy claiming that anyone and everyone who supports Donald Trump is a white supremacist.

Trump supporters now, according the narrative, are both Putin-puppet traitors AND Hitler-wannabees. It’s all so dishonest by design; the leaders of this charge don’t actually believe it, they cynically manipulate their media and social media power to drive their supporters, many of whom do believe it, into hating political opponents as an ideology. MSNBC is ground zero for this manipulative denigration of half the population.

If it only were dishonest, it would be bad enough. But it’s worse because it now has become a hunt to find heretics for public shaming. This is not new, but now it is legitimized as an anti-Trump strategy by the Resistance. Congressman Joaquin Castro naming names in his community, including retirees and homemakers, is a symptom of a culture of total political war on the left. Other symptoms include the attempt to deplatform non-liberal voices from the internet and airwaves, led by well-funded groups like Media Matters.

More here. And the Action Alert from my previous blog on proposed red flag legislation is here.

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Coulter on Trump, Media, & Crooked Hillary

art credit: guerillagraphix.com

Coulter on Trump, Media, Crooked Hillary, 

Guns, and the Second Amendment

I run hot and cold on Ann Coulter, but her column yesterday at The Daily Caller -- on Trump, the Media, Crooked Hillary, and the Second Amendment blow-up -- made sense to me:

Even having predicted that the media’s attacks on Trump would be unprecedented, I’m still amazed. Every single news outlet is dedicated to hysterically denouncing Trump, every minute of every day, while cooing at Hillary.

Everything Hillary has ever touched has failed, been engulfed in scandal, resulted in massive investigations, litigation, financial ruin, prison or death. The final stage of any Hillary enterprise is a grand announcement that Hillary did not technically break the law. Or no one can prove she did. Or, even if she did, no one ever gets prosecuted for it.

She’s prone to coughing fits and lapses of memory in the middle of speeches, and falls down all the time. But that’s not nearly as important as the media’s manufactured story about Trump throwing a baby out of a rally!

. . .

The main story this week: The media’s psychotic claim that Trump called for Hillary’s assassination.

Trump said: “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Hmmm. What could Second Amendment people “do”? One thing they could do is what they did do — in 1994. That was the year gun rights supporters voted out dozens of Democrats who voted wrong on guns, ushering in the first Republican Congress in 40 years.

It’s been nearly a quarter century, and the Democrats are still so traumatized by their sweeping losses in 1994, that, even after Gabby Giffords was shot in Arizona, even after the Aurora movie theater shooting, even after the Sandy Hook massacre, Democrats refused to take up a gun bill in the U.S. Senate.

Apparently, the only news you’ll be getting from now until the election is the media’s own insane interpretation of every little thing Trump says or does. . . .There’s no way to phrase something so that it can’t be lied about.

. . .

There’s no strategy for overcoming this level of media hostility. Trump has made some mistakes during this campaign, but he hasn’t done anything wrong for months now. He could say “yes,” and the media would change the question to, “Are you a child molester?”

Just when you think it can't get any worse. . . .

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For or against gun control?

art credit: riversong.wordpress.com

Gun control is not one of the primary planks in the Tea Party platforms (those planks are limited government, fiscal responsibility, and free markets). However, Tea Party patriots may be interested in the gun control bills defeated yesterday in Congress. CNN reports:

Senators couldn't muster enough bipartisan support to pass a series of gun control measures Monday [yesterday], the latest in a long string of failed attempts at enacting tighter curbs on firearms in the United States.

Spurred by the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, senators from each party introduced the measures they said would have strengthened background checks and prevented suspected terrorists from obtaining weapons.

But tough election year politics, paired with disputes over the effectiveness of each party's ideas, proved too powerful to break the longstanding partisan gridlock that's surrounded gun issues for years.

The result was expected. A fifth option, set to be introduced and voted upon as early as Tuesday by moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins, has generated more optimism, but still faces long odds at passage.

Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who sponsored one of the failed measures expanding background checks, reacted angrily after his provision was defeated.

"I'm mortified by today's vote but I'm not surprised by it," Murphy said Monday evening. "The NRA has a vice-like grip on this place."

More of the report is here.

According to Sen. Murphy, the National Rifle Assoc. is once again the villain in the piece. Thomas Sowell published an excellent opinion piece at RealClearPolitics:

Surely murder is a serious subject, which ought to be examined seriously. Instead, it is almost always examined politically in the context of gun control controversies, with stock arguments on both sides that have remained the same for decades. And most of those arguments are irrelevant to the central question: Do tighter gun control laws reduce the murder rate?

That is not an esoteric question, nor one for which no empirical evidence is available. Think about it. We have 50 states, each with its own gun control laws, and many of those laws have gotten either tighter or looser over the years. There must be tons of data that could indicate whether murder rates went up or down when either of these things happened.

But have you ever heard any gun control advocate cite any such data? Tragically, gun control has become one of those fact-free issues that spawn outbursts of emotional rhetoric and mutual recriminations about the National Rifle Association or the Second Amendment.

If restrictions on gun ownership do reduce murders, we can repeal the Second Amendment, as other Constitutional Amendments have been repealed. Laws exist to protect people. People do not exist to perpetuate laws.

But if tighter restrictions on gun ownership do not reduce murders, what is the point of tighter gun control laws -- and what is the point of demonizing the National Rifle Association?

There are data not only from our 50 states but also from other countries around the world. Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm's empirical study, "Guns and Violence: The English Experience," should be eye-opening for all those who want their eyes opened, however small that number of people might be.

Professor Malcolm's book also illustrates the difference between isolated, cherry-picked facts and relevant empirical evidence.

The rest of Sowell's article is here.

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