Michael Anton on some “former friends”

 

It’s a long weekend read.  At American Greatness, Michael Anton takes a deep dive into the personal dynamics of political disagreement:   

The Dishonest and Dishonorable Disagreements
of Former Friends

Most of us, at some point or another, fall out with friends. It’s a painful and, perhaps, inevitable part of life. It’s especially disquieting when former friends turn on you suddenly and publicly, devoid of any goodwill, charity, or benefit of the doubt that one might think were warranted by years of amity. All this, however disagreeable, is at least “normal” in the sense that it has been going on forever—though it massively intensified in the Trump Derangement Era.  . . .

Mr Anton’s concluding thoughts are not encouraging.

Opinion is the element or medium of society. These people, and many others like them, work to constrain opinion in order to rule society, to mark off what can and cannot be said or thought. Their education should have taught them that this is a disaster for human freedom. The books they claim to love make this point forcefully. 

But more prosaically, they are incapable of any honest disagreement. It will be their way or the highway, and woe unto him who dissents. These are the same people who speak of unity and democracy, but their unity is Xerxes’ unity of the lash, and their “democracy” is them getting their way on every issue while telling you how evil you are for disagreeing. 

Just as I find it astonishing to be accused of anti-Americanism by longtime denigrators of America, I find it even more astonishing to be accused of divisiveness by people who casually throw around the term “Nazi.” Is the cause an utter lack of self-awareness? When I encounter genuine surprise that their hate is not reciprocated with love, I am tempted to think so. 

Or is it deliberate, intended to provoke, so that those provoked can be more effectively identified and crushed? This explanation also fits the observable facts. 

When even former friends of decades standing can’t civilly disagree, where are we as a country? Where are we heading? 

Nowhere good.

The full article is here.  I posted this for the same reason I’ve been linking to some of Dr Robert Malone’s columns:  you are not alone.

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Presidential debate on CBS tonight at 9pm

 

The final debate before Election Day is scheduled for this evening, October 22 at 9pm.  You can tune into CBS.  You can go to Conservative Treehouse for livestream links to CNN and to RSBN (UPDATED link here.)  (Our household always goes to Right Side Broadcast News just to show support for their efforts.)  Or, if you have had it with these debates, you can let Mr. Vodkapundit, a/k/a Stephen Green watch it for you and follow his live drunkblogging of the event here  (UPDATED link here). 

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Air Force One flies into Hopkins

Seen overhead at 3:23pm

Pat Dooley Photography   

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COVID-19 panic: the agenda

There’s a political agenda with the never-ending coronavirus hype.  Sundance at Conservative Treehouse reports:

In order to support the most important political objectives of the DNC writ large in the 2020 election, COVID-19 hype is essential:

• Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot easily achieve ‘mail-in’ voting; which they desperately need in key battleground states in order to control the outcome.
• Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot shut down rallies and political campaigning efforts of President Trump; which they desperate need to do in key battleground states.
• Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot block the campaign contrast between an energetic President Trump and a physically tenuous, mentally compromised, challenger.
• Without COVID-19 panic Democrats do not have an excuse for cancelling the DNC convention in Milwaukee; thereby protecting candidate gibberish from himself.
• Without COVID-19 panic Democrats do not have a mechanism to keep voters isolated from each-other; limiting communication and national debate adverse to their interests.  COVID-19 panic pushes the national conversation into the digital space where Big Tech controls every element of the conversation.
• Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot keep their Blue state economies easily shut-down and continue to block U.S. economic growth.  All thriving economies are against the political interests of Democrats.
• Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot easily keep club candidate Joe Biden sealed in the basement; where the electorate is not exposed to visible signs of his dementia.
• Without COVID-19 panic it becomes more difficult for Big Tech to censor voices that would outline the fraud and scheme.  With COVID-19 panic they have a better method and an excuse.
• Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot advance, influence, or organize their preferred presidential debate format, a ‘virtual presidential debate’ series.
• [Comrade Gretchen Whitmer knows this plan, hence she cancelled the Michigan venue]
• All of these, and more, strategic outcomes are based on the manufactured weaponization of the COVID-19 virus to achieve a larger political objective.  There is ZERO benefit to anyone other than Democrats for the overwhelming hype surrounding COVID-19.

Read the full report here.

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No Safe Spaces update: northern Ohio showings

This blog has reported several times on Dennis Prager's and Adam Carolla’s documentary No Safe Spaces.  See here (includes review by Bookworm Room).  The website for the documentary now lists four Ohio theaters, including one in Richmond Heights.  For the northern Ohio listings, click here and scroll down to the Ohio listings.

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No Safe Spaces documentary now in Ohio theaters

Last October, this blog reported on Dennis Prager and Adam Carolla’s documentary No Safe Spaces. BookwormRoom blogged her review a couple of days ago:

. . .every American ought to see this movie. The reality is that only conservatives who are already worried about the death of free speech in America will attend it. On the Left, they’re smugly happy with their increasing ability, both on campuses and in corporate America, to shout down and censor anything they don’t like. And in the vast middle, the Americans who need to start to care, people probably aren’t even aware that the movie is playing.

. . .

Carolla and Prager are the two pillars anchoring the No Safe Spaces. Carolla presents himself as a working class yob and comic (and also America’s most popular podcaster) who has a visceral belief that we are destroying our youth by mentally coddling them and that the answer is free speech for them and for everyone. Prager is the Jewish intellectual, the college educated man who spent time in the Soviet Union during the heyday of its totalitarianism. Prager too is a free speech fanatic. Both men are agreed (rightly) that free speech — true free speech, not the European or Canadian simulacrums — is a uniquely American attribute and that its destruction is the first step on the road to totalitarianism.

Bookworm's full review is here.

The website for the documentary now lists Ohio locations where this documentary is playing, including in Solon, Akron, and Elyria. Click on the website here and scroll down to the listings for Ohio.

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Who do you know who still trusts the media?

image credit: woodylewis.com

I am always on the lookout for reports to share with liberal friends and relatives – on why they should be skeptical of what they read in the New York Times or cleveland.com -- or what they watch on TV.  Today, Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart dissects the lazy, not to say dishonest reporting on the impeachment “inquiry” – and it’s worth printing out and taking to your Thanksgiving dinner for another attempt to change minds. A brief sample:

The Media Neither Read the Transcripts 

Nor Watched the Hearings

The media seem not to have watched the impeachment hearings: they stopped paying attention the moment the witnesses’ prepared statements were leaked and the Democrats’ talking points were posted.

Nor did many journalists bother to read the transcripts of the witnesses’ depositions in the earlier, closed-door hearings.

Partly that was because Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) rushed the public hearings before some of the most important transcripts were ready. Partly that was because the sheer length of the transcripts — hundreds of pages each — was daunting for journalists working on deadline.

But partly it was because some journalists are simply lazy, and others share the Democrats’ goal of bringing down President Donald Trump by any means necessary.

That’s why the media reports of the hearings were so inaccurate. 

. . .

On Wednesday afternoon, I was at the media center outside the Democrat debate in Atlanta, Georgia, co-hosted by MSNBC and the Washington Post. In the hours prior to the debate, MSNBC’s live coverage of the impeachment inquiry was showing on all the screens. Many journalists in the hall seemed not to be watching at all. They were mailing about, chatting to colleagues, or enjoying refreshments.

Some of them were top correspondents for leading media outlets — the ones who pose questions to candidates, and shape public opinion on their panel discussions and Sunday shows. Yet they were ignoring the hearings.

. . .

And what kind of journalist decides what the verdict should be before the other side has even had a chance to make its case?

Schiff and the Democrats broke from tradition and refused to let the president be represented by legal counsel, or to give Republicans near-equal control over the witness list. They held the hearings in the Intelligence Committee so they could use a secret room. Not one media company in the House press gallery bothered to sue for access — the way they sue the Trump administration for any small inconvenience, like the suspension of Jim Acosta’s press pass.

The media did not report what actually happened in the impeachment hearings, but what they want to have happened. They have enlisted themselves in a distortion of due process that threatens the constitutional rights of all Americans. If the president himself is not safe from abuse, none of us can be.

Read the whole thing here – and print it out!!!

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First Amendment documentary coming up

Dennis Prager and Adam Carolla were on Tucker Carlson’s program yesterday. They were there to unveil the trailer for their forthcoming documentary, No Safe Spaces. Fox News has an interview with Mr. Prager:

Radio personality Dennis Prager and comedian Adam Carolla's upcoming documentary "No Safe Spaces" is a film detailing the ongoing debate over the First Amendment on college campuses across the country and how identity politics enables it.

Prager and Carolla argue that younger generations have been trained to hate alternative, often right-leaning, opinions and unleash their anger on those with opposing views.

Prager says he's been working on the film since 2017 and was hoping for a PG rating but the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wouldn't budge from its PG-13 designation.

“Despite our best efforts to meet the MPAA more than halfway, they have continued to deny us the PG rating our film deserves," Prager said in an exclusive statement to Fox News.

"Jordan Peterson’s and my quotes will stay and we will not censor the real-life punching of a conservative student. The much more graphic films that regularly receive PG ratings only serve to illustrate what I have experienced with Google in their efforts to make PragerU videos hard to find: powerful forces in Silicon Valley and Hollywood have one standard for ideological allies and another for people like me," he added of the film which mentions "sexually transmissible disease" and "Debbie Does Dallas" and a student is seen getting punched. 

"I will urge my friends and fans who only go to PG movies to ignore the MPAA’s fake PG-13 rating and go anyway. And please bring friends," Prager continued.

The film features commentary from a variety of Hollywood actors, scholars, academics, political figures, and media members, including Van Jones, Alan Dershowitz, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Cornel West, and Tim Allen.

Carolla also talks to fellow comedians about the challenge of doing stand-up on a campus today. Many comedians, such as Jerry Seinfeld, have said they will not appear on college campuses.

"No Safe Spaces" is scheduled for release Oct. 25.

The home page for this documentary is here. The film premieres in Phoenix/Scottsdale. No dates yet for northern Ohio. Will keep readers posted.

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Debate scheduled: Sherrod Brown vs Jim Renacci

art credit: digitaltrends.com

From Andrew J. Tobias at cleveland.com (posted yesterday):

The two major candidates for this year's Ohio Senate race will debate in Cleveland next month, organizers for the event announced Monday.

Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and his Republican challenger, Rep. Jim Renacci, have agreed to debate at 6 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 14 in Cleveland, about three weeks before the November election.

The debate will be held at the Westfield Insurance studio theater at the Idea Center in Playhouse Square, according to the nonpartisan Ohio Debate Commission, which is organizing the event.

Two veteran journalists -- Ann Fisher, of WOSU public radio in Columbus and Russ Mitchell, anchor at WKYC-TV in Cleveland -- will serve as moderators. Tickets for the event are free, and organizers say more information about how to attend will be posted on their website, www.ohiodebatecommission.org, on Tuesday.

Stay tuned.

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Legitimacy in government: Spengler’s take on Debate #2

art credit: samuel-warde.com

Some polls show Trump the winner, others Hillary. Similarly, the pundits are mostly declaring their preferred candidate the winner. David P. Goldman (a/k/a/ “Spengler”) published his take on PJ Media and here are a few short extracts:

The referee should have stopped it in the tenth. Punching at will, Donald Trump said, "Hillary used the power of her office to make $250 million. Why not put some money in? You made a lot of it while you were secretary of State? Why aren't you putting money into your own campaign? Just curious."  Reeling and against the ropes, Clinton gasped that she supported . . . the Second Amendment. It was a brilliant rhetorical device: under the rubric of campaign financing, Trump slipped in an allegation that Clinton corruptly enriched herself by using the power of her office for personal gain--and Clinton didn't even respond. That's a win by a knockout.

That's the decisive issue of the campaign: the corrupt machinations of a ruling elite that considers itself above the law, and the rage of the American people against the oligarchical ruling class that has pulled the ladder up behind it. Trump's bombshell below Clinton's waterline came at the end of the debate, well prepared by jabs at Clinton's erased emails and Bill's rapes. Trump used the "J" word--that is, jail. That was perhaps the evening's most important moment. This is not an election fought over competing policies but a struggle for legitimacy. A very large portion of the electorate (how large a portion we will discover next month) believes that its government is no longer legitimate, and that it has become the instrument of an entrenched rent-seeking oligarchy.

. . .

The Republican voters chose a reckless, independently wealthy, vulgar, rough-edged outsider precisely because they believe that the system is corrupt. 

Read the rest here. If you missed the debate (or could not bear to watch), you can see the whole thing here. 

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Drunk blogging the debate

If you can't bear to watch, or if you don't have a television, you can go to PJ Media's Stephen Green -- Mr Vodkapundit - who is drunk-blogging the debate. Go here. 

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Preview of tonight's debate

By Branco at Legal Insurrection:

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Forget Wally. Where’s Hillary?

From Sundance at Conservative Treehouse(also via Lucianne.com):

Hillary Clinton is the first and only nominee for President who never held a press conference during the entire Democrat primary race. . . .

If you look at Hillary Clinton’s campaign calendar –SEE HERE– . . . there are 15 listed events.  However, . . . what you notice is that Secretary Clinton is not actually attending 14 of these events; they are being attended by surrogates.

. . .

The only event Hillary Clinton is actually attending is the last one on September 26th, the debate.

Speculations abound: is it her health? Is the fix in (if so, why is she still fund-raising?) Is she staying out of sight to avoid a further drop in the polls due to the unlikeability factor? Whatever the explanation, it is bizarre behavior in a presidential candidate.

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