SCENE. Avery LIBRELLE is wandering the aisles at Barnes and Noble in Maplewood, when h…er, sh…er, Avery notices Mitch BERG poring over the German book aisle. LIBRELLE pounces.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Uh, Schoiße…, er, I mean, hey Avery…
LIBRELLE: Shut up. Why is Trump obsessed with taking over Canada, Greenland and Panama?
BERG: What do you mean?
LIBRELLE: I’ll turn it over to the world’s most courageous person to explain:
Tr-nsgender (a man) Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) blasts President Trump for wanting to take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal. “This obsession with Greenland and Panama really came out of nowhere and has been filled with mistruths and misunderstandings.”
BERG: Oh, yeah. That. Well, for starters, did you catch McBride’s last quote…
LIBRELLE: Miss McBride’s quote.
BERG: Representative McBride’s quote…: “If this president is serious about an America first agenda, he should be focused on domestic economic issues, not some weird obsession with invading Greenland or Panama”
LIBRELLE: Yeah. So?
BERG: So the Representative is talking about “Putting America First”, even if only sarcastically.
LIBRELLE: Cheap shot!
BERG: Uh, right. But tell me – what’s the latest news about Pete Hegseth?
LIBRELLE: Who?
BERG: Kash Patel? RFK Junior?
LIBRELLE: What did they have to do with invading Greenland.
BERG: Huh. RIght. I think it’s on The View right now.
LIBRELLE: Oooh! The View! (Abruptly turns and scampers eagerly away).
BERG: Huh. Where what that trick when I needed it?
And not finishing thoughts didn’t do Giggles a lot of favors (you’ll have to hunker down and get to the “end” of the video to get the reference, and I can’t blame you if you don’t).
But…
I don’t know who had the brilliant idea of name calling, offending, guilting, shaming, and berating anyone who voted for Trump, but it’s a genius strategy.
Are Brzezinsky and Scarborough trying to save their jobs?
Or are they trying to belatedly act like “journalists?”
It’s a coin toss as far as I can tell.
Joe and Mika went to Mar a Lago to talk with Trump over the weekend. First face-to-face meeting in seven years. "We didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues and we told him so," @JoeNBC says. "What we did agree on – was to restart communications," @morningmika says. pic.twitter.com/lyWZWK4CwX
But one things’ for sure – while good deeds might not go unpunished, failing to “denormalize” the “Literal Hitler” certainly won’t:
To political reporters, commentators, liberals, moderates: After this fawning, humiliating, network-destroying surrender, if you go on @Morning_Joe you have endorsed and bought into #VichyMSNBCpic.twitter.com/gyfoFInYcR
(Side question: Why is it that everyone who comes to leftist punditry after a career of yapping about grown men chasing balls around fields and courts inevitably such an idiot?)
But there are some – what do I say – “leaks” on the left:
Now, which side seems more open and inclusive? Which side seems more welcoming and which side tries really hard to drive you away if you disagree even a little with orthodoxy? Which side is asking for suggestions and which one is demanding compliance and obedience?
I am officially no longer identifying as a liberal. The way liberals are reacting to RFK Jr saying certain ingredients are bad because they don’t like some of his other stances are insane. The way they are attacking me for defending this particular legislation he’s pushing is… pic.twitter.com/f1k832OcDy
Progressives – in this case, a guy who was telling us Joe Biden was stronger and more with it than Chuck Norris in his prime until two hours before Giggle defenestrated him – are not cool with RFK Junior running the DHHS:
The irony…
RFK Jr. is now aiming to dismantle the very agencies and programs his uncle fought tirelessly to fund, like the NIH and Medicaid.
Before his death, Ted Kennedy championed universal health care, calling it “the cause of my life.”
After a senseless tragedy, people – almost invariably conservatives – are told to never, ever dare to “politicize” it [1]
46 year old Anthony Nephew of Duluth apparently politicized his family’s tragedy for us over the weekend, murdering his wife and son, his ex-partner and son, and checking himself out afterward.
[Nepohew] also appeared increasingly concerned about the prospect of a Trump-led government.
‘My mental health and the world can no longer peacefully coexist, and a lot of the reason is religion,’ he said in July.
‘I am terrified of religious zealots inflicting their misguided beliefs on me and my family. I have intrusive thoughts of being burned at the stake as a witch, or crucified on a burning cross.
‘Having people actually believe that I or my child are Satan or, the anti-Christ or whatever their favorite color of boogie man they are afraid are this week.’
He had also accused Republicans of ‘making it harder for women to leave’ domestic violence relationships, writing ‘Gilead here we come.’
Gilead is an apparent reference to the Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian republic which overthew the United States and stripped away women’s rights.
Huh. So you mean a decade of saying a political candidate is the plague makes the least stable among us think he’s…a plague?
[1] Spurious references to Naziism and Fascism apparently excepted.
While I don’t endorse Bono’s threat to “drive a car off a cliff” after a Trump election, nor Rob Reiner’s to “set himself on fire” (and doubt Cher get a bullet into her head with all her various, uh, augmentation), I do believe that if Trump plans to be a “dictator”, one useful act would be to make sure the celebs who promised to “move to Canada” and/or “leave the US” if Donald Trump were elected to actually deliver on it.
To wit:
Alec Baldwin
Whoopi Goldberg
John Legend
Chrissy Teigen
Rob Reiner
Barbara Streisand
Cher
Nancy Pelosi
Hillary Clinton
Megan Rapinoe
Tom Hanks
Amy Schumer
AOC
Lady Gaga
Bill Gates
Jane Fonda
Madonna
Mark Ruffalo
Kim Kardashian
George Clooney
Hunter Biden
Oprah
Robert De Niro
Samuel L Jackson
Miley Cyrus
Travis Kelce
Bobbi Althoff
Rashida Talib
Stormy Daniels
George Soros
Diddy
Eminem
Ellen DeGeneres
Sean Penn
Sharon Stone
Ashley Judd
Tommy Lee
Bryan Cranston
Billie Joe Armstrong
Furthermore? I’ll volunteer to serve a cabinet-level (albeit temporary) “Undersecretary of Transportation fo Relocation”
Democrats are shocked, shocked, that Trump is talking about using the guard “on citizens” (who are rioting and destroying cities).
Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:
Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to keep order while they integrated the schools.
He used the military against segregationists, the enemy within, his political foes.
Was that wrong? Was Eisenhower also Hitler, same as Trump?
Kennedy also sent the regular Army to help quell anti-desegregation riots at the University of Mississippi. To be fair, modern Democrats, at least the ones in MInneapolis, likely think of Kennedy as a fascist today, too.
Donald Trump was the target of what the FBI said “appears to be an attempted assassination” at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday, just nine weeks after the Republican presidential nominee survived another attempt on his life. The former president said he was safe and well, and authorities held a man in custody.
U.S. Secret Service agents stationed a few holes up from where Trump was playing noticed the muzzle of an AK-style rifle sticking through the shrubbery that lines the course, roughly 400 yards away.
Chaya Raichik, of the account “Libs of TikTok”, and her seven-digit collection of followers, have gone scorched earth on social media accounts that cheered last weekend’s assassination attempt on former president Trump:
I get the urge. Perhaps more than most. I’ve had at least one job get tanked because some (very “progressive”) management found out about my alter ego life (which I have never, not once in 20 years, mentoined in a workplace. I don’t talk about politics at work – and yet I know of one contract job that didn’t get extended, notwithstanding the fact that I saved the project I was working on (long story for another time) because someone googled up some portion of my shadowy talk-radio existence and complained.
And that’s just the once I know about. I have suspicions about other jobs.
It was fine as far as it went – I found better jobs. But I’m not going to say I was never angry about it.
I never had the time, bandwidth or following to act on it like Raichik even if I had. And Raichik has certainly endured plenty of harassment herself. And the two of us aren’t alone.
Of course, on the right the “cultural memory” of the left’s social oppression is pretty hot and current; “cancellation”, including losing jobs, having professional license challenged, and other active harassment over quesitoning and refusing the Covid vaccine; losing jobs over photos in MAGA caps, having kids harassed because their parents were open conservatives.
And it is a little disturbing to see some people – doctors, nurses, teachers – not only cheering on the assassination, but actively wishing the same on half the population. It’d be great to help them recognize how stupid and evil they are being.
This is pretty much the definition of “punching down”.
I’ve had a policy on this blog from the beginning; I don’t go after peoples (non-elective) day jobs – and I am absolutely hands-off their families.
Does that make me a better person than those that don’t have those scruples?
Yes. Absolutely.
Has it deterred people going after me, my job and family? Well, not all of them. I don’t have the means to scorched-earth them all. WIth some, its irrelevant. With others? Karma’s a bitch. But I’m the one that has to live with myself.
Saturday’s murder of a Trump supporter and father of several, the serious wounding of at least two more, and the miraculously slight injury to candidate Trump, was shocking.
But it was far from unexpected.
First things first: Thomas Crooks was the one who pulled the trigger, killed Corey Comperatore, and tried his damnedest to kill former President Trump. On him alone lies the immediate responsibility.
But creating the atmosphere in which a 20 year old would consider blazing away at a crowd that included a Presidential candidate?
That’s been a team effort.
The left has spent 8 years telling the entire world this man is Orange Hitler, merely because they want government power. What's surprising is that this hasn't happened sooner. pic.twitter.com/EUHRpkf4cb
Of DNA And Psychiatry: This is what America does to dictators.
This is what we did to Nazis.
We’ve brought a lot of them down in our time:
Our cultural memory involves a lot of fighting against actual tyranny – indeed, it’s an inextricable part of our country’s DNA:
And so last Monday, a week ago, whenthe once-presigious New Republic ran this as their cover…:
…and supported it with this…:
We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.
Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.” We unreservedly choose the latter course.
I’m not saying the New Republic intended to inflame some nutbar to take a literal shot a Trump (and, let’s not forget, a crowd of his supporters, murdering one and leaving two more in the hospital). But if they were, it’d be hard to know what they’d do differently.
It’s nothing new:
Untermensch: Of course, it’s not just Trump – although he’s been the focus of most of Big Left’s efforts over the past 8-9 years.
The left’s noise machine has moved someone to put literal crosshairs on Republicans – but the rhetorical iron sights were in play long ago.
POTATUS? As recently as the day before the assassination attempt, this was the President (or at least his loathsome social media tweep):
It’s been a running theme of his entire presidency; here’s his entire “Independence Hall” speech in which, surrounded by fascist re-framings of totems of American democracy, he said that half the population – “MAGA Republicans” – wanted to “end democracy”.
I’m loathe to use phrases like “declaration of (fill in adjective) war” lightly. But it’s too corrosive a narrative to just call “collctive slander”. The President actively tried to stoke irrational fear in half ot the population, of the other half of the population, for purposes of inflaming passions to turn people out for a mid-term election the Democrats expected to lose.
But it’s about way, way more than just elections.
Bad History: Big Left – the collective institutions that support the larger leftist drive for power, the media, academia, big leftybusiness, the non-profit/industrial complex, the public employee unions – have been actively working to demonize, marginalize and dehumanize their opposition as a matter of “etermal campaign” policy for a solid decade and a half.
Locally? Let’s not forget the fact that Major Jacob “Humiliiating Mompants” Frey told the Minneapolis Police not to worry to hard about protecting people coming to see Donald Trump at Target Center in 2016 – and didn’t bother intervening in a wave of assaults on the street.
Also, the March 4 2017 attack by “Anti”-Fa on a group of Republicans in the rotunda the the State Capitol, injuring several in the immediate aftermath of the Trump inauguration.
In the latter two episodes, official actions can be seen as positive incentives to commit violence against Trump, his supporters and conservative dissenter is general.
The surprise is that it took this long to bubble up to Trump.
The counter-gaslighting has already begun:
“It was fake! They sounded like blanks!” (Tell it to the dead man)
“It was just a piece of glass from the teleprompter!” (That’s very unconfirmed – and irrelevant, since any “piece of glass” would have been propelled by f*cking bullet aimed at Trump’s head)
“The shooter was a registered Republican! (in an open primary state, who also donated to ActBlue. This one is in the process of falling apart).
But to me, for purposes of this piece, the worst is this:
Biden has never incited violence against Mr. Trump or any political opponent. Please stop with these unfounded accusations which have the potential to inflame more violence. That’s the last thing our country needs right now.
This is the culmination (so far) of a fifteen year long arc of stoking hatred for political gain. Caling it otherwise is delusion at best, evil at worst.
For Want Of An Inch: But Trump survived.
And the imaging is much more redolent of Churchill…
…whom, let’s be honest, Big Left hates just as badly.
While listening to the debate last week, I did hear one line that I fully expected Big Left’s chattering classes to try to exploit: Trump noted that illegal immigration would heavily impact “black jobs”.
And that brought out the heckling class:
Do you notice a pattern?
It’s a diverse crowd of hecklers. Some of them are upper middle-to-upper-class media figures:
That’s why I’m here in Wisconsin telling folks that today in America Black small businesses are starting up at the fastest rate in 30 years, Black unemployment has hit historic lows, and Black child poverty has been cut in half. pic.twitter.com/LAnpN0WQkl
SCOTUS: You can’t just throw your rival in prison because you don’t like him.
DEMOCRATS: So you’re saying we can drop bombs on him?
SCOTUS: You really can’t even charge your rival with a crime because his presidency made you mad.
DEMOCRATS: Got it. So we can incinerate his house with him in it?
SCOTUS: The Constitution protects officials from being terrorized with lawfare for official actions they undertook while in office.
DEMOCRATS: Ah. Makes sense. So we can officially assassinate everyone we don’t like?
SCOTUS: Prosecuting a politician because you don’t like his politics would destroy our country, and we’re not going to allow it.
DEMOCRATS: Roger that. So what you’re saying is: we are officially allowed to eliminate Trump and the Supreme Court as long as we, like, say it’s official and stuff?
And it’s been all over social media this past day or so.
At first blush, the question might seem to be “why do so many Democrat chanting heads have so much trouble with the phrase ‘”‘presidents have immunity from criminal prosecution for acts that are within the ambit of their executive authority'”?
But of course it’s not. The “elite” among the chanting heads know perfectly well that the SCOTUS just made a fairly moderate decision, remanding the case back to the lower court to sort out what behavior is public and what is private.
But that interpretation – the correct one – is too pollyannaish.
The Democrats, now that they’re committed to running the senile, doddering Biden – need to come up with some way of dragging the corpse across the line.
Panicking people by claiming this ruling gives a president absolute power, in a cycle where the Democrats only campaign hook is “ORANGE MAN LITERALLY HITLER” is the purpose.
“BUT!”, Democrats respond, “this lays the groundwork for unquestioned power!”
George Washington was offered a crown and the ground floor in a hereditary aristocracy.
Abraham Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus.
Woodrow Wilson used the “Sedition Act” to imprison political foes.
FDR trampled the Constitution in pursuit of socializing swathes of the American economy, and unilaterally imprisoned innocent Japanese-American citizens.
FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ and Nixon to various degrees all used the FBI and CIA to spy on domestic opponents.
Obama used the military to extrajudicially murder an American citizen, used Federal law enforcement to try to discredit American gun stores and owners (leading to the death of an American border patrol agent and many Mexicans), sicced the IRS on the Tea Party, and used the FBI to spy on the Trump campaign.
The “roadmap” has always been there; the President already has unlimited power, if they want to use it – especially with the logarithmic growth in executive-branch power since the Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson administrations.
A president needs power to do the job to which they’ve been elected; deciding how much power, and keeping that power in check, has always been the job of a free people and its institutions.
And it took about four hours for all of that “Joe Biden is a modern titan!” to vanish down the memory hole:
Bear in mind, that the Democrat establishment is panicked about their candidate’s electoral viability.
Not the fact that he’s the guy with “the football”.
Not the fact that America’s enemies, who’ve been feasting on America’s diminishing potency, have got to be looking at the fact that America is led by a senile man, his power-mad Edith Wilson-style wife, and a coterie of useless Ivy League political staffers and grifters, and seeing that the shelf date might just end in 2025, not 2029. And maybe planning accordingly:
U.S. military bases in Europe were put on a heightened state of alert over the weekend as installations urged vigilance among their members. At U.S. European Command headquarters in Stuttgart, the Army garrison on Sunday issued a communitywide alert that the force protection threat level was elevated to condition “Charlie” until further notice. Similar directives were sent to other bases in Germany, including the Army’s Rheinland-Pfalz and Ramstein Air Base, which together form the largest U.S. military community overseas. The Rheinland-Pfalz garrison alert includes Baumholder and outlying installations in Romania and Bulgaria. Aviano Air Base in Italy also rose its condition level to Charlie, and other installations in Italy introduced enhanced security measures. The Charlie threat level “applies when an incident occurs or intelligence is received indicating some form of terrorist action or targeting against personnel or facilities is likely,” according to the Army’s website.
Read more at: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/europe/2024-06-30/us-military-bases-germany-terrorism-threat-14342506.html Source – Stars and Stripes
I have a sneaking suspicion Iran and its proxies, and Red China and theirs, are seeing a six month opening to make hummus or kimchi while the sun shines on a world where the keepers of Pax Americana have taken an ice cream break.
Some are saying “I told you so”:
That almost the entire media repeated the same lie with the exact same words is disturbing.
The legacy news is not merely fake, but also unoriginally fake!
And they – we – are right, because that same media that ran interference and told us not to believe our lying eyes, is trying to gaslight us in the other direction:
“It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that—scattered stories and open questions aside—the American press corps failed to penetrate this White House as it did the last one, and failed to provide an accurate portrait of the president,” @semaforben writes. https://t.co/Gy9unzVbOm
That brings us back to [Bill Maher’s proposal, in the post linked] of simply handing the nomination to the nearest white male while overlooking Biden’s current running mate, the black woman Biden selected to be the next in line. The center-Left part of the party might — might — go along with that idea out of desperation. The progressive Left, as Matthews astutely points out, would go into an utter meltdown. Harris’ allies don’t want to win by giving up any power at all.
And in a real sense, they’d be correct to oppose it. Harris may not have been on the primary ballots this year, but Biden won 99% of the delegates with Harris explicitly remaining on the ticket. Newsom never even bothered to enter the race. If Biden pulls out, those delegates may be released in a legal sense, but Harris and her progressive allies have a very good argument that primary voters endorsed her as well as Biden. And you’d better believe that the same progressives that are conducting Occupy operations on college campuses and highways to support radical jihadi terrorists in Gaza will show up in much more force if Democrats pull a back-room switcheroo that leaves Harris without a seat when the music ends.
And you’d better believe the center-Left knows it, too…having anointed her as capable of being One Heartbeat Away in not one but two presidential cycles now, Democrats can’t just toss her into the garbage now. How do they explain her being competent enough to be Biden’s backup but not to run in his place?
Long story short – the Dems may have no choice but to triple down on gaslighting the public. They can count on it working with 33% of the population, anyway.
Snopes finally admits something conservative media has been saying for seven years and change:
No, then-President Donald Trump did not call neo-Nazis and white supremacists "very fine people" in 2017. Speaking about a deadly protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, he said those groups should be "condemned totally." https://t.co/AHjw0mwl3ipic.twitter.com/TtCH1BzZja
Not sure what it was that prompted them to cough up the truth.
Perhaps because, at least among the opinion-making class, the damage is done and irrecoverable; in this case, “Journalist” Christopher Ingraham of the MN Reformer:
Snopes has gone completely off the rails. They published this yesterday, for some reason. pic.twitter.com/XquphwXRoU
Biden may be a good man – signs say “no, not really” – but the “steadiness” of his “leadership” have left the Middle East and Ukraine in flames, and I’m not betting against bad things happening in Taiwan.
But let’s focus on Klink’s other bit: how Trump is “fascinated with dictators”.
Governor Klink:
Set up a snitch line
Presided over setting up a “badthink” database with no public visibility whatsoever
Classified people as “non-essential” – along largely political grounds
Enriched his and the Democrat party’s donors while squashing small business
Hid the math by which he justified his “emergency powers”…
…which, speaking of which, he kept for a solid year after the “emergency” was over.
I’m no Trump fan – but Klink is the one who actually cosplays dictator in office.
Another campaign, another flap about Trump vs. NATO:
Trump still doesn't understand how NATO works, he still thinks allies "owe money" and he's sending a signal to Russia to attack them while the crowd cheers. An invitation to broaden the war. https://t.co/VUZUglr5kn
On the one hand, Trump’s rhetoric about NATO is…not “reckless”, so much as annoying.
On the other hand? At a policy level, Trump strenghened NATO – and his rhetorical, er, “unpredictability” seems to have caused America’s would-be enemies to sit out the aggression and wait for the US to change leadership to someone like, well, Obama and Biden.
But now, as in 2016, the NATO members complaining the hardest are the ones – like Germany – that didn’t get the actual message; hold up you end of the damn deal.
To be fair, Gemany’s spending has risen by something like 30% – although the Bundeswehr has thirty years of sloth to work off; the Luftwaffe’s fighter force at one point was 8% action-ready, the Army is a glorified Boy Scout troop that’s 1/6 of its 1992 size,
(And don’t think we’re not looking at you, Canada, whose Navy is about as old and decrepit as, well, the US’s current leader).
And then on the other hand there are the countries that didn’t need to get the message: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and the other former “Warsaw Pact” nations.
PS: Just so we’re clear: everything you can say about personality cults can be said equally about anti-personality cults. The more insipid (to say nothing of deranged) Never-Trumpers are just as bad.
Since roughly the 2020 election, I’ve simultaneously:
Thought something was amiss about the elections; if not Chicago-style ballot stuffing, at least a world of irregularites with the “legal” changes due to Covid – mail in balloting, and the collusion between the DOJ, the Biden campaign, big media and big tech to “shape” the Hunter Biden story, among others
Told some of the more extreme election skeptics, especially on the air, “That’s an interesting theory, but until Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani bring an actual case with evidence to court, rather than beclowning themselves, what do you expect we’re going to do about it?”
After being falsely accused of rape by classmate Wanetta Gibson, Brian Banks spent close to six years in prison. In 2012, his conviction was overturned when his accuser confessed that she had fabricated the entire story. pic.twitter.com/Ixq5UnEpr4
The legal system isn’t perfect, but it beats most of the alternatives.
Which may or may not be good enough.
Second: In a separate, seemingly unrelated topic: in Minnesota, most judges are elected. But the candidate pool is intensely circumscribed because, as a lawyer once told me, running a campaign against a sitting judge in front of whom one will one day have to appear in court is pretty much a one-way trip toward spending the rest of your career chasing people who bounce checks.
Judges, by inference – who are charged with being our society’s stentorian impartial guardians of justice and fairness and due process – apparently have the egos of a bunch of middle school “mean girls”.
Reading between the lines: the reputation and social standing of practitioners among other practitioners is as much a part of the judicial system as due process and gavels and the literal letter of the law.
Socially Rigged
So – did the social pressure among lawyers, judges and everyone else in the legal profession that we discussed above affect the election, or the way the courts approached questions about it?
