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Showing posts with label conservatives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservatives. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 6, 2023

Descent into a Clown World


 
 

At Freedom First Network, J B Shurk explores America’s “Descent into a Clown World.” Here’s an extract:

Just as the beer companies, fake conservative news networks, and so many iconic American companies before them, the sports leagues have turned their backs on generations of loyal fans in a display of repugnant pusillanimity.  I wonder whether the Judases will one day regret it.  I know that the ESG- and DIE-pushing communists are castrating corporate holdouts that resist the Woke Borg, but by bending to the Borg’s will, these companies have destroyed any goodwill with lifelong allies.  When the Marxists come for another pound of flesh from their corporate vassals — and another after that — those in charge will eventually be forced to fight back or surrender.  By that time, though, nobody will be willing to come to their defense.

This has always been the shortsighted corporate gamble of the Woke Wars — there’s never been a communist revolution that did not devour itself.  By yielding to those who have always hated them and betraying those who have long defended them, companies choosing to comply with woke orthodoxy are now entirely dependent on remaining in the Marxists’ good graces.  Yet grace is not something Marxists possess in any discernible quantity.

It is not that politically conservative and religious Americans have blindly defended corporate interests in the past, but rather that liberty-loving, rights-protecting people tend to mind their own business.  Their first reaction to a company’s success is not envy.  They do not immediately turn their sights on how best to confiscate another’s good fortune.

People who work hard for what they own do not worry about what somebody else owns.  They simply seek to be left alone.  . . .

One problem is that while communists are organized, passionate, and good at messaging, conservatives “simply seek to be left alone” – it’s just not an effective marketing message.

The full article is here.

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Saturday, November 19, 2022

GOPe swamp dweller: Kevin McCarthy

 

Uniparty

Over the years, Sundance at Conservative Treehouse has shown his readers why he views both Democrat and Republic establishment politicians as two wings of the same vulture bird – hence the term Uniparty.  He recently linked to a key donor to Ron DeSantis’s campaign, with an explanation of what the donor expected from DeSantis in return;  see here.  Now Frankie Stockes at National File reports on some of the cash behind GOPe Kevin McCarthy, who has ambitions to become Speaker of the House:

McCarthy Used FTX Cash to Defeat Conservatives in 2022

Throughout the midterm campaign season, GOP establishment leader Kevin McCarthy (CA-23) used his Congressional Leadership Fund political machine to inject massive amounts of cash into House races nationwide. In doing so, he targeted GOP primary races and even general elections vs. Democrats, in which America First conservatives, aligned with President Trump, were on the ballot.

Millions of dollars worth of the campaign money came straight from corrupt crypto exchange FTX and its top executives.

Along for the ride on McCarthy’s scheme were GOP lobbyist Jeff Miller, described as one of McCarthy’s “closest friends,” and Brian Walsh, an establishment strategist who McCarthy brought in to take down Madison Cawthorne after the young Representative blew the whistle on DC drug use and Capitol Hill pervert parties.

As they often do, over a month ahead of the 2022 primaries, The Washington Post, notoriously used for decades as a uni-party communication rag, openly admitted that McCarthy was using left-wing oligarch money to “sway” the GOP field in favor of his establishment agenda.

Conveniently for McCarthy and the establishment, the piece wasn’t published until after the last of the GOP’s nominating primaries had ended.

. . .

America First candidates and others who couldn’t be controlled by the establishment or, more importantly, couldn’t be bribed into supporting McCarthy for speaker, were sold down the river.

More at the link here.  I’m linking to this report at National File because exposures such as this can help voters to distinguish between America First vs GOPe Uniparty candidates.  And McCarthy is obviously part of the swamp.

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Monday, November 7, 2022

Sunday, October 23, 2022

Don Surber's "unreliable and harmful clams"

 


Don Surber is in the process of closing down his blogspot and moving to Substack.  He’s wing-walking during the transition:

A reader sent me this graphic [above] mocking Google’s censorship of my blog posts for what Google called “unreliable and harmful claims.” Two recently censored posts relied on reporting by the New York Times and the Washington Post, so Google might have a point.

Readers know this Substack account is my response to Google censorship. Eventually I will abandon Google and my blog — https://donsurber.blogspot.com — in favor of Substack. The censors don’t bring me down. They are an annoyance. They are not even mosquitos. They are mere midges. Censoring is a sign that we are winning because they cannot handle the truths we tell.

Mr Surber goes through the laundry list of what he perceives as recent victories for conservatives and patriots.  I am still waiting to see how much election fraud there is in next month’s elections.  Still, this blog also plans to migrate over to Substack;  it is no longer possible to use a Google search even to find this blog -- you’ll eventually find a robot instead.  I also know from tracking the traffic patterns over the past year that someone has tampered with the algorithms.  So we’ll see.  Meanwhile, Mr Surber closes his column with optimism and another clam:

Be of good cheer. We are winning. We will — we will — rock them with our “unreliable and harmful claims.”

We won’t clam up.

Source link is here.

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Tuesday, August 16, 2022

IRS: Internal Radical Service

 

The great David Horowitz and his colleague John Perazzo have a new pamphlet just out and you can access it for free online.  Here’s Mr Horowitz’s introduction:

How the IRS abuses taxpayer dollars to advance leftwing causes
illegally and unconstitutionally

On August 7, the Democrats passed a bill that authorizes a ten-year, $80 billion hike in federal funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which will make it possible for the IRS to hire 87,000 new agents and will make it larger than the Pentagon, the State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.

The IRS has already been weaponized as a national federal police force to harass, punish and obstruct conservative and religious organizations. Under President Obama, the IRS blocked the efforts of hundreds of Tea Party and other conservative groups to apply for tax-exempt status. The objective was to prevent those groups – and the millions of voters whom they might potentially have influenced – from having a voice in our democracy.

But this persecution of conservatives is only half the story. Over the years, the IRS has allowed hundreds of billions of tax-payer dollars to fund left-wing tax-exempt foundations violating its own rules, while denying conservative foundations the same access. This has had the effect of creating a lobby within the Democrat Party that has transformed it into a radical force bent on “fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

The IRS violations include providing taxpayer subsidies to Democrat election campaigns; to underwriting Black Lives Matter riots which caused billions of dollars in property damage and led to the deaths of scores of individuals; the Internal Revenue Code's explicit requirement that all charitable activities should “promote the public good”; and the funding of racist policies which violate the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution.

This booklet -- Internal Radical Service -- documents these violations and their destructive consequences. We publish it now as an appeal to Congress to investigate the abuses, and restore the integrity of an organization which has become a major threat to our democracy.

Click on the link here for access to the pamphlet. 

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Sunday, August 7, 2022

Nigel Farage at CPAC: video and extracts

 

File photo of Mr. Farage at Trump Tower


Shane Trejo at Big League Politics posted the video of Nigel Farage’s speech at CPAC-Texas.  Here’s most of Shane’s report with excerpts:

Brexit hero Nigel Farage gave a rousing defense of Western Civilization during his speech at CPAC Texas on Saturday.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are under attack, under attack as never before, and that threat is not external, no, not even Nancy Pelosi’s one-woman attempt to start the third World War is the biggest threat we face, and it’s not Putin. The biggest threat we face is from within. The biggest threat we face is the fifth column inside all of our countries,” Farage said.

Farage explained how “educational institutions” have been captured by this fifth column to wage war against families, Judeo-Christian values, and our very civilization.

“Kids are not being taught critical thinking, kids are not being taught there are two valid approaches to a problem. Our children are being indoctrinated. Our universities have become madrassas of Marxism, and it needs to change,” he said.

“White privilege did not exist as a term. You didn’t hear about white privilege 10, 20 years ago, and yet, mainstream media ram it down our throats every single day. And that’s just one little example,” Farage added.

He derided the divisive racial agenda from the far left that is meant to pit groups against each other and make young people hate their families and their country.

. . .

“This is a Marxist attempt to break Western Civilization, a Marxist attempt to destroy everything we are, and we are going to fight back hard against it, aren’t we?” he asked, to an overwhelming applause from the audience.

Farage refused to let modern conservative leaders off the hook for their weakness in pushing back against far-left extremism. He said conservative leaders have shown “cowardice” and “fear” in recent years, empowering the Marxists.

“. . . To save Western Civilization, this is the battleground. Because if America falls, we all fall!” he added.

Source link is here.  This Tea Party person loves Mr. Farage. 

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Saturday, March 19, 2022

JD Rucker: what’s wrong with conservative media

 


At Freedom First Network, JD Rucker is on a mission:  to amplify conservative voices that are compromised in a corrupt environment.  He is explaining to readers and listeners just HOW allegedly conservative news sources are compromised, i.e., being beholden to Big Tech, to Uniparty-R, and being paid to be “controlled opposition.” And as a result, 

[t]here are certain topics that we need to discuss, topics that get suppressed or ignored by all but a few. The 2020 election was stolen and is still being challenged today, yet you wouldn’t know that if you get your news from corporate conservative media. The Covid vaccines are dangerous and ineffective, yet the only pushback you hear about from most conservative media sites centers around stopping mandates. Fighting mandates is important, but it would be a heck of a lot easier to do so if enough sites were telling the truth about adverse reactions surrounding the jabs.

January 6, 2021, was not an insurrection. It was a mostly peaceful protest that was steered to get out of hand by Deep State provocateurs posing as Trump supporters. Moreover, we have convicted child rapists getting probation and Jussie Smollett getting released AFTER being convicted, but political prisoners who entered the Capitol Building peacefully are still imprisoned.

Warmongers on the right are pressing for no-fly zones and getting Americans to support sending weapons to Ukraine. They don’t offer these suggestions with an exit plan for WWIII. They just hope it happens sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, they treat Volodymyr Zelensky as a messiah figure despite his government’s history of authoritarianism, Nazism, and a hard embrace from both George Soros and Klaus Schwab. The conservative media personalities who support him claim that I’m a Putin apologist despite the fact that I’m adamantly opposed to the invasion. We don’t have a horse in this race and I do not want America involved, not just because Ukraine is not our ally but also because their leaders are as corrupt as Russia’s.

Lots more here.  (Report is also at NOQ here.)

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Friday, January 22, 2021

After the "mock inauguration"

 


Paul Gottfried at American Greatness traces the history of liberal progress through our bureaucratic and cultural institutions.  He goes back decades.  And he has a plan for conservatives who are reeling from the stolen election and the "mock inauguration" two days ago.  He starts off:

The conservative Catholic columnist John Zmirak ends his inauguration day column for The Stream with this expression of profound disgust:

So by all means enjoy the mock-inauguration of a corrupt, senile hack as the fruit of ballot-box stuffing and fake COVID panic. But remember that now we all live in a tinpot Bananas Republic. And a disciplined, fanatically nationalist, resurgent Red China is smiling. The virus it shipped worldwide succeeded beyond its leaders’ wildest expectations.

I quote Zmirak’s peroration because of the openness of his loathing for the administration that began its reign on Wednesday. Pat Buchanan, Roger Simon, Newt Gingrich, Roger Kimball, and Michael Walsh have all recently produced informative and eloquent columns underscoring the lies, deceit, and intimidation that they associate with the woke Left. These columnists have also documented the extent of leftist control and underlined the need to resist their odious domination.

Here’s Mr. Gottfried’s plan:

Although there are lots of properly indignant Americans on our side, we should not exaggerate the value of our hand. The best course for us to pursue given our relative weakness would be to try to isolate our opposition. Do nothing to cooperate and concede no ground. There should be no plan for “bipartisanship” or for reaching out. I can’t see the benefit of either, and as I watched Matt Continetti, Geraldo Rivera, and then Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) going after Trump for “inciting a riot” during his last weeks in office, I was struck by the futility of this groveling to the Left. 

Conservatives in Congress should treat the Biden-Harris Administration exactly the way the Democrats treated Trump’s presidency, by totally dissociating themselves from any of its actions. This resistance could have started (and for many did) by ignoring the “mock inauguration” that John Zmirak so pungently described.

And, oh yes, avoid the word “president” in designating the implausible new occupant of the White House.

Or put the word “president” in scare quotes.  Mr. Gottfried’s full column is here. 

Bonus link:  Katie Hopkins was in DC for the "inauguration."  Her report is here.

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Monday, June 29, 2020

What can conservatives DO?

art credit:  medium.com


It is alarming to see the riots, violence, lawlessness, and, well, insanity everywhere.  Most of the GOPe / Uniparty are standing around, wringing their hands in despair and doing not much of anything.  What can the concerned citizen do in these frightening times?  Fletch Daniels at American Thinker has an idea of what conservatives can actually DO.

Cultural tyranny reigns in America, the last step before full-fledged political tyranny. 

Lurking beneath the surface of virtue signaling leftists are tyrants seeking to exert their will over those they despise.  The defining leftist culture enables them to ruthlessly use all the power at their disposal, both real and imagined, to enforce a single acceptable viewpoint on society. 
. . .
Democrats in this country do not feel they need to hide their political allegiance or culturally approved viewpoints.  Most never shut up about it, believing they are speaking truth to power, even as they bask in the approval of the corrupt and wicked power centers. 
.. .
I wish I had a dollar for every American who uttered the phrase, “Never in my lifetime did I expect to see…” over the last few weeks.  We are living in the upside-down when patriotism is outlawed, the vilest of criminals are celebrated, and brave law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line daily are slandered as the worst of society so thoroughly that it descended into evil farce, when a kid’s show “Paw Patrol,” came under attack since it is apparently racist to have a positive police character in a children’s show.  

This is war and the left is playing to win.  Anyone who doesn’t get that by now, to include most of the NeverTrumpers, is either irredeemably stupid or an active collaborator.  Every pillar of cultural power in America, to include the unholy trinity of academia, the media, and government has declared cultural war on at least half the country.  And yet NeverTrumpers reserve almost all of their scorn for those with the audacity to not drop to their knees and surrender. 
. . .
The problem is that the silence enables the leftists to continue to drive the narrative and normalize ideas and behaviors that would have been considered unfathomable just a few short years ago while winning more converts, which shrinks that sane majority.  It is their toxic ideas that are being force fed to every young person in America and we are paying a heavy price for that. 

And here’s Mr. Daniels’ suggestion:

I’d like to see far more people vocally pushing back against the mob within their social circles.  Every person who pushes back emboldens others to do the same. 

Even if you don’t want to spoil the party or make everyone at the picnic uncomfortable, it’s worth the try.  My own batting average is low, but I count at least half a dozen in my circle who were apathetic liberals before I started speaking up, and they are now committed and vocal conservatives.  Mr. Daniels' full article is here.
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Thursday, February 13, 2020

Solving non-existent problems

photo credit: Hollywood Reporter


Rush Limbaugh sums up the Democrats’ dilemma:

They’re trying to create problems that we don’t have anymore because we’ve got Trump, because we’ve instituted market economics, because we have a foundation of conservatism here that is being implemented, policy after policy after policy. So they’re having to invent these problems that they have, in fact, created over the years so that they can offer solutions to them.

The Democrats do not offer solutions to the people who make the country work. The Democrats offer solutions for authoritarian, elected Democrats and un-elected bureaucrats and themselves. The Democrats are all about establishing a way of life for themselves, not for the people, not for the country. I mean, Democrats right now want to dump a phenomenal economic model. They want to destroy the engine that has produced the strongest economy in 50 years and maybe longer than that.

And with what? They want to replace it with an economic model that fails every time it’s tried. So that they can have problems that they claim only they have the solutions to. Well, that’s their problem, not ours. They are unhappy with a Constitution that has created the greatest country that has ever existed. That’s their problem, not ours.

Some Uniparty politicians with an “R” after their name play the same game, but in general, it sounds right to me.
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Monday, July 15, 2019

Big Tech is hiding behind the law: update



President Trump convened a summit of social media giants, including Facebook and Twitter. Following the summit, President Trump announced:

“Today, I am directing my administration to explore all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech and the free speech rights of all Americans,” POTUS Trump announced. “We hope to see transparency, more accountability, and more freedom.”


In 2016, before the tech giants began altering their search, publication, and distribution algorithms, conservative speakers were dominant on social media, likely helping propel the president to victory. But by the 2018 elections, based on several studies and investigative reporting, the tech giants had begun — in concert — campaigns to silence conservative, pro-Trump voices, led by the behemoths Facebook and Twitter.

The companies are taking advantage of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which “provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an interactive computer service who publish information published by others,” the Minc Legal Resource Center noted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation added that “Section 230 says that ‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.’” 

But, argue opponents, when Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and other platforms begin censoring content they find politically objectionable, that makes them publishers, and they therefore should lose their immunity to face legal consequences for those acts of censorship, especially if they have taken money from users they are censoring.

The president’s summit may already be having a positive effect on conservative and independent publishers. For instance, The Western Journal, whose Facebook traffic had been reduced significantly, suddenly found its traffic returning to normal levels a day before the summit — after months of battling with the platform to get it restored.

There is a long way to go, however, to ensure that all conservative and indy publishers’ traffic from their subscribers and followers returns to normal. The president has at least gotten the ball rolling, and well ahead of the 2020 elections.

Well, good. It's a start.
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Monday, November 12, 2018

Morning or Mourning in America?



cartoon credit: politicalcorrectnessrunamok.blogspot.com

The recounts continue in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. More ballots are mysteriously popping out of closets, trunks of cars, magicians’ hats. Macron just insulted President Trump again. Etc., etc. Feeling worn down?

Sally Zelikovsky has something of a post-election pep talk at American Thinker. She concludes:

Warriors don’t retreat just as they are making inroads. We may not be fighting a kinetic war, but it is our destiny to fight this ideological war for the soul of this country.  It is just as vital and, in some ways harder, because the enemy is an internal hegemon--progressivism.  Fortunately, it no longer hides in the shadows.  

We see its face every day. It is tenacious, brazenly mendacious, ferocious, avaricious, ubiquitous; it is relentless and merciless. 

This is not a war with swords and guns, but of words and actions.  My father fought against NAFTA for 30 years.  Trump couldn’t have changed NAFTA without the efforts of people like Dad.  The president can’t do all he has to do in the next two years without us either.

The midterms were a mixed bag and left us feeling pretty lousy.  And it’s not over given the looming morass of election challenges.  We also face the exhausting reality that the left will not stop until they take down a president who has our back in a way I’ve never seen in a political leader, let alone a president. Are we going to let this happen? 

America’s conservatives are at a crossroads.  We can tack to the right and commit to a new “morning in America,” emboldened by the power we have as the People, by judges and representatives devoted to  conservatism, and a Senate majority that can punch back working in tandem with a fearless and indefatigable President.  Or, we can tack to the left, where we’d be “mourning in America” because we let the light go out on this beacon on a hill.

The full article is here.
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Thursday, August 23, 2018

Priorities in the Age of Trump



one version of Donald Derangement Syndrome

James Delingpole at Breitbart published an article, “Trump Derangement Syndrome Is Making Conservatives Lazy, Cowardly and Stupid”. He’s sorting through Never Trumpers, conservatives, and semi-conservatives. He concludes:


Let’s get this straight. We – at least the vast majority of us – on the side of the argument that Donald Trump is currently representing believe in stuff like: national borders, free speech, protecting citizens’ interests, equality of opportunity, lower taxes, smaller government, democratic accountability, the family, personal responsibility, rising standards of living, property rights, the rule of law, checks and balances, the Constitution, liberty. There is nothing in any of this we should feel awkward or guilty about. It does not make us Nazis. Or even semi-Nazis. Or alt-right. Or any of the other pejorative terms which – according to our opponents – make it wholly acceptable to punch the teeth out of anyone in a MAGA baseball cap.

Trump Derangement Syndrome has caused some conservatives – not all of us, thankfully – to lose sight of why it is that we fight.

We fight because we’re right. And yes – as Trump is one of the few conservative presidents to get – it really is that simple.

I am posting and linking since I expect it will resonate with most Cleveland Tea Party members. Full article is here.
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Thursday, November 17, 2016

Culture wars, Uniparty, and Deep Values research



artwork from Conservative Treehouse
  

A few days after the election, the William A. Jacobson (Legal Insurrection blog) interviewed "Deep Values" researcher Anne Sorock, since she predicted a Trump candidacy and a Trump win before he even rode down the escalator. Her comments intersect in many places with the Conservative Treehouse’s ongoing exposure of “the Uniparty” and why Trump’s candidacy was an alternative. He was unique in offering the potential to destroy the unholy alliances between the donor class, the political class, and corporate media. Some extracts from the interview appear below:

WAJ [William A. Jacobson]: When I asked you who you supported at CPAC 2015, what made you not just respond, “Trump,” but insist upon it when no one else thought he would run much less win?

Anne: I remember that day we spoke at CPAC. The giddy atmosphere of insiders and wannabe-insiders  was almost ominous. I had been working at The Frontier Lab on mapping disaffiliation by conservatives from using the term “Republican” to describe themselves. These conservatives had had enough after 2012, being told to get in line and vote for Romney, and then the RNC Autopsy report came out basically as a rubber stamp to keep pursuing the same tired strategies.

Those aware of the Autopsy felt it simply confirmed what the Romney debacle had already shown them – that the GOP and its parasites were incapable of reforming themselves. The only answer was an outsider to blow it all up.
. . .
At the time, I was following these threads about conservatism:
The desire for a concrete way to demonstrate the action of “standing up for your beliefs”

Concern that they had been enabling “bad behavior” of the GOP in the same way that a parent enables a child. A taste of empowerment that had come from interaction with the Tea Party movement, but yearning for more.

WAJ: What about this outsider aspect?

Anne: That was the functional part — being an outsider would allow him to do what previous candidates, and all candidates being considered, were incapable of. And that was absolutely reject the king-makers at CPAC and in DC in general.

There was so much anger I had been cataloging at those in charge. There was a seething sense of being disrespected by those in charge. One of the insights from my research at the time was that when people were asked to “choose the lesser of two evils,” they were basically dropping like flies from the Republican label. They might vote that way, but they resented it even more each time. They were looking for an anti-hero.
. . .
WAJ: So why didn’t all the others predict Trump, especially in the consultant/market research community?

Anne: Polling about the economy, jobs, national security, etc., might reveal superficial insights, even move the needle a few important points, but it failed in one major respect. They were asking about issues that are, at best, the outgrowths of their deeper concerns, but not explanatory or helpful in making predictions. What you don’t know about, you can’t ask about.

WAJ: What should we understand about the Americans who supported Trump that we still continue to miss?

Anne: They may care about all these conservative issues too, but they recognize that the enemy is within the gates. Our culture is what’s being eroded. Small government may be the mechanism to restore much of our country’s greatness but it isn’t the emotion, the value, that drives our country’s unique role in the world.

Read the rest here.

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Monday, November 7, 2016

The election and Conservative values


image credit: moviehole

...and Tea Party values

A blogger called The Z Man offers some thoughts about what’s going on with this election (h/t Bookworm):

A theme here over the years has been the fact that the Conservative Movement has managed to conserve nothing. The reason they are in a crisis is the same reason a losing ball coach finds himself in jeopardy. People will tolerate only so much losing. A salesman, who cannot close deals, gets fired, even if he is the nicest guy in the world. What’s happening today is Official Conservatism™ is being fired.
. . .
Official Conservatism™ hates Donald Trump and they hate the people voting for him. That’s been a bit of an eye-opener for people. When [Fox News’ Brit] Hume detailed Trump’s deviationism, he was dismissive and condescending. He then had that gold plated phony George Will come in and dismiss Trump and the people supporting him as knaves and fools. The segment was ostensibly about Official Conservatism™, but it was really just an excuse for the two of them to bash Trump. 
. . .
there’s the creeping realization that their brand of conservatism is all hat and no cattle. Their moral preening and appeals to as yet undefined principles are just postures. 

Read the rest here. And VOTE.


Thursday, September 8, 2016

Last chance for Gas? The Flight 93 Election

photo credit: flickr.com

The Flight 93 Election

Is this year’s election just another in the endless series of election cycles, or is it a do-or-die election, a sort of Last Chance For Gas? Do you have a sense of urgency, or are you looking askance at those who do?

One of the most thought-provoking essays that may be of interest to Tea Party people with any conservative values, whether economic or social, is a piece by the pseudonymous Publius Decius Mus at the Claremont website here. A couple of short extracts: 

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high . . .
. . .
To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.

Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.

Read the entire thing here. Especially if you find it difficult to jump on the Trump Train, as it were.

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Friday, August 15, 2014

Phyllis Schlafly Turns 90 Today






Phyllis Schlafly Turns 90 Today

Very few individuals who were not politicians or generals have had a major impact on American political history.  Phyllis Schlafly is one of the exceptions.  Twice.  In 1964, she helped launch the grass-roots conservative movement that flourishes today, transformed by the internet, and in 1972 she inaugurated what came to be called “social conservatism.” 
More than any other individual, she was responsible for the nomination of Barry Goldwater, and thus, indirectly, Ronald Reagan.  And virtually single-handedly, she defeated the so-called Equal Rights Amendment.
Schlafly was born 90 years ago today in St. Louis, the daughter of John and Odile Stewart.  Her father was a machinist who was unemployed through most of the Great Depression.  But the Stewarts were not Democrats.  “We left the party under Grover Cleveland,” Schlafly says.  Her mother worked as a librarian and teacher to support the family, and Schlafly put herself through college (Washington University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa) working in a munitions plant during the war, test-firing .30 and .50 caliber rifles and machine guns 48 hours a week.
Her becoming a political activist was entirely fortuitous, she says.  She had married attorney Fred Schlafly and the couple had moved across the Mississippi to Alton, Illinois.  In 1952, some local Republican leaders came to their home to invite Fred to run for Congressman.  The district was heavily Democratic, Fred’s practice was flourishing, and he was not interested.  They turned to his wife.  Phyllis agreed.
Female candidates were a novelty in those days, and she was invited to address the state Republican convention.  She gave a dynamic speech to the 10,000 delegates sweltering in the unairconditioned Armory in Springfield, and received a lot of media attention.  Schlafly lost the race in November, but was hooked on politics.
She was frustrated, though, that the party’s Presidential nominees were invariably selected by a handful of “king-makers.”  They didn’t share the convictions of the rank-and-file, nor aggressively attack the opposition where it was vulnerable.  Frequently, they were not even Republicans:  Hoover, Wilkie, Eisenhower.  She was particularly irked by the way Robert Taft was shunted aside in 1952.
In 1964, she was dismayed to see that once again an East Coast liberal, Nelson Rockefeller, was about to be crowned by the party’s establishment.  In a white heat, Schlafly wrote A Choice, Not an Echo, had it privately printed, and began selling copies from her garage. 
The book caught fire like no other political manifesto since Tom Paine’sCommon Sense.  By the time the Republicans convened at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, about 3 million copies were in print.  Virtually every delegate had read it.
After indicting the Democrats for craven policies overseas and corruption at home—what else is new?—A Choice, Not an Echo takes a close look at Republican conventions from 1936 to 1960 and argues that the nominee was selected very much as the hemlines of women’s dresses were determined.  Just as women have no say in the new season’s fashions, so the wishes of the Republican rank-and-file have been ignored or subverted by powerful men meeting in corporate offices and private clubs in Manhattan.  The chapter on the marketing in 1940 of the insipid, unknown Wendell Wilkie, the RINO prototype, is particularly instructive.  So is her account of the manipulation of the Texas and other delegations at the 1944 convention.

Schlafly has recently updated A Choice, and a new edition, with chapters covering the nominations from 1968 to 2012, will be out in November.
Not long after the success of this book, Schlafly was contacted by Admiral Chester Ward, who told her she must write about the Soviet missile threat.  They worked together on a book, and it sold two million copies.  Schlafly wound up collaborating on five books with Ward, and toured the country warning about the danger posed by the Russians.
When a friend invited her to talk to a library group in Connecticut in 1972, she was prepared to give her standard lecture on the subject.  But the friend said her group didn’t want to hear about the missile threat, but about the Equal Rights Amendment.  Schlafly replied that she’d hardly thought about the issue, and didn’t even know if she was for or against it.  The friend said she’d send some literature, and predicted, “You’ll be against it.”  She was right.
The amendment sounded innocuous.  But as with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, there was an agenda not publicly acknowledged (or consequences not recognized, in the case of the Civil Rights Act) by its sponsors.
Schlafly saw that the amendment would grant no new rights to women, while it threatened to abolish two privileges women enjoyed:  immunity from the draft and the legal guarantees in every state mandating that a husband support his wife and family.  Also seemingly endangered were laws against sexual assault, and legal precedents awarding alimony and child custody to women.  With American troops still in Vietnam, these possibilities struck a resonant chord both with young single women and with married homemakers.  Funding for single-sex colleges might also be in jeopardy, critics pointed out, and quotas in the workplace might be mandated by judges. 
As Schlafly saw clearly, the hidden objective of ERA was to deny women any legal claim on their husband’s earnings.  Homemakers, for the first time in history, were to be deprived of the support of society.
The talk Schlafly gave at the library in Connecticut (Ann Coulter’s brother was in the audience) became the basis for a speech she would deliver countless times across the country.
It was peppered with humor  (“Women,” she would note, are not mentioned in the ERA, only “sex”—“presumably the sex you are, not the sex you do”) and her trademark candor (the act was “a cheat and a fraud”).
By the time STOP ERA got underway in 1973, 30 states had ratified the amendment, and five more would do so.  But legislators, obliged to hold public hearings, began having second thoughts.  As Section 2 made explicit, the rights of states would be over-ridden by Congress and federal judges in legislation concerning families and the workplace.  States stood to be big losers.
Five states repealed their endorsements, and despite a three-year extension to the time limit ordered by Jimmy Carter, the amendment was dead in the water.
ERA had almost no opposition before Schlafly swung into action.  It had been endorsed by three presidents and their wives, and by both parties.  The campaign to get the GOP to oppose the amendment could be said to mark the beginning of social conservatism.  Schlafly then lobbied to include a plank in the party’s platform calling for the repeal of Roe v. Wade.
She would spend much of the rest of her life defending the traditional family.
When asked what’s the biggest change in the country that she’s witnessed during her lifetime, she doesn’t hesitate:  “it’s the decline in marriage.”  And the most pressing problem today is “the decline in the number of intact families.”
A new book—her 21st—will be out on this subject in a few weeks:  Who Killed the Family

Read the rest here

Monday, May 7, 2012

Conservative Women Speak


Here's a short videe produced by Marianne Gasieki's (Mansfield Tea Party) son Anthony. It's a quick take on conservative women who know that the so-called "War on Women" is phony baloney. Pass it along.