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:

Or parts of the political class, either those who’ve made it…

…or are working on breaking in:

And some who just won’t go away:

And more who are attached to the system like barnacles to a ship that needs a drydocking:

Or highly accomplished professionals:

Or upper-middle-class academics:

Etc, etc.

Of course, it’s as selective as every other lefty chanting point, both in terms of their own rhetoric…

…and the fact that none of them are part of the group whose jobs are being taken by illegals.

Every Democrat, for the past 24 hours or so:

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?

While I wish I could claim it, it’s actually Sean Davis’s bit.

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.

And, oh yeah, Biden has set a politicized DOJ on his own political opponent – part of a pattern of corruption in the institutions that those institutions aren’t even being coy about.

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.

We were told that Joe Biden is so on top of things, he can type in different languages on different iPhones at the same time.

Remember this?

The most credible people ever – dare I say, our “best and brightest” – assured us that Joe Biden at 82 is like Chuck Norris at 40:

And then came Thursday night:

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”:

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:

So what options do they have?

Pulling the plug on Biden may not be as simple as just having him step aside, even if he releases the 99% of the convention delegates currently committed to him:

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.

Notice how many Democrats and media people (ptr) are gaslighting working Americans about the economy lately?

The Dow Jones and the level of GDP is nice and all, but inflation is rising faster than buying power, and is going to get worse before it gets better, if it gets better.

Among Big Left’s great crimes against history is the complete devaluation they have achieved against the term “Fascist”. To much of the parts of society that routinely use the word, it now means “anyone not on board with today’s left’s narrative”.

No, really:

And Big Left knows what it’s doing, since the other options have also been hijacked. Call someone a Nazi, and you’re overwrought. Call someone a Communist, and people start jabbering about the Red Scare.

“Authoritarian” works, but it doesn’t have quite the same emotional impact – and Big Left has been diluting that one by associating it with Trump – a demonstrably less authoritarian president than Obama or The Potato.

So given the options, what does one call a political figure or party that:

• Their ends justify their means – including the use of government force to secure compliance
• Tries to co-opt the institutions of society to further their political ends, starting with government and schools and ending with the family itself?
• Aggressively “sorts” society into “good guys” and, especially, “others” to use as scapegoats and deflections from one’s own actions – up to and including creating an official version of “reality” that may or may not have much in common with the real thing.

Let’s take a thoroughly educational look at a politician who seems to check off all the boxes for…well, the “A” word. And maybe some definitions of the “F” word.

The Real Authority

Maye Quade is a fully-fledged creation of leftist institutions – and pays obeisance to them:

But she certainly has no love lost for society’s actual institutions.

Like parenthood.

She wants to nullify parents trying to teach their children morality and ethics, so her side doesn’t have to work quite so hard to uproot them. j

This is, of course, on top of her very casual relationship with telling the truth if it’s not in her political interest.

Might Makes Right

Maye Quade may not actually have the executive power to sicc government and its monopoly in the use of force on her political (and finanncial?) enemies.

But she sure thinks about it:

“I would love to eminent domain all 98 of these crisis pregnancy centers and turn them into affordable housing for people who do have children,” said Sen. Maye Quade. “I would love to turn them into food banks and diaper banks and formula banks. Like, these are things that actually support people having children when they decide they would like to have children, and everything that crisis pregnancy centers are doing is not that. None of it is that.”

Aggressively Sorting

Maye Quade has a staffer who’s got a bit of a “virulent anti-Semite” vibe.

This is, of course, shocking in that the aide is more antisemitic than Maye Quade’s own equivocating weasel-word-larded antisemitism:

Your tax dollars are paying for this.

It should go without saying Senator Maye Quade, like all leftists, is more aggressively yet casually racist about “othering” apostates – in this case, Senator Tim Scott, a Republican and African-American:

…which is a perfect invocation of Berg’s 11th Law.

And, like every good gaslighting abusive partner, it’s all really your fault:

Hard to miss the fact that the “consequences” in her “culture” are entirely one-sided. But that’s the nature of the abusive gaslighter. But then, I did mention creating an alternate, “official” reality, didn’t I?

No, really – an actual alternate reality…

…deviance from which is considered heresy.

I mean, a Republican with a similiar record of shilling for naked authority, advocating the co-option of instutions and relentlessly cutting out “others” to use as enemies would be called an “authoritarian” at the very least.

And yet it’s Senator Maye Quade that walks the walk

If there are two bright spots in this current legislative session, it is the emergence of Harry Niska and Walter Hudson, as two of the best state legislators in the United States.

Here, Walter finishes the job Harry started, giving the single best explanation of why the DFL, and the StarTribune, are lying about the removal of language, regarding pedophilia from state statute.

Pass this around, like it’s hot.

Dems: Public broadcasting is NOT state media! 1% of their funding comes from government!

Normies: Then defunding won’t hurt anythi…

Dems: NOOO! You’ll KILL ELMO! Why do you hate Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers?

Dems: Trans women are women!

Normies: Except in athletic competition, where their innate masculine physical traits are a huge advantage, not to mention in prison where they tend to rape bio-women…

Dems: Genocide!

DFL: Let’s fully fund education!

Normies: Could you define that term? Because we already pay an awful lot of money, and the results keep getting worse…

DFL: You hate children! Why do you hate children?

Dems: Blue America *carries* Red America. Without us, Red America would starve.

Normies: OK. Let’s talk national divorce, since you don’t need…

Dems: Why are you talking treason!?!? NEVER!

To: Rep. Samantha Vang
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Gaslighting

Rep. Vang,

You wrote the “Social Credit” bill (you call it ‘Stop Hate’, but my title is more accurate) that I talked about on my show over the weekend.

You got a storm of criticism – almost all of it justified.

This was your response:

Well,no. That’s not what it does.

Y’see, the market for hate crime far, far outstrips the supply, notwithstanding the DFL’s “Reichstag Firing”. For example:

The mosque fires were set, not just by one guy, the the one criminal in Minneapolis dumb enough to actually commit a crime that Minneapolis’s city government still gives a sh*t about.

No – Rep. Vang’s bill will essentially collect statemens about “microagressions” reported by protected classes.

Bumper sticker they don’t like?

Something overheard in a cafe?

A Trump sign?

Nobody knows. The bill allows no scrutiny, no Data Practices requests, no accountability or transparency of any kind.

It is, in every respect, a “social credit” bill.

Which is a key part of the Communist system, Rep. Vang, that your parents and her people fled.

That is all.

DFL: Walz runs the most transparent administration in history.

Normies: His administration us utterly opaque, hides information, and communicates only in giggly selfies.

DFL: Our HR office will be in touch.

DFL: The surplus is immense, and a monument to DFL wisdom.

Normies: It’s mostly one-time money. You turned it into permanent spending. It’ll be a deficit next session.

DFL: We ALWAYS said it was one-time money!

DFL: the police are in occupying force of oppressors, and must be defunded!

Normies: we oppose defunding the police.

DFL: hey, we never said anything about defunding the police!

DFL: we will make Minnesota a safe place for children to get gender affirming care

Normies: we oppose allowing children who can’t rent a car or consent to getting a tattoo to opt for life changing gender altering surgery.

DFL: hey, who said anything about altering gender!

DFL: it’s good for children younger than 13 to attend a highly sexualized drag shows.

Normies: we oppose children attending highly sexualized drag shows

DFL: don’t you DARE call us groomers!

DFL: it’s time to ban magazines larger than seven rounds, as well as “assault weapons”

Normies: so, do you want to confiscate firearms?

DFL: how dare you say anybody’s coming for your guns! You’re paranoid!

We talked last week about Peggy Flanagan’s absurd take on parenting.

Here it is again:

She followed up with this photo.

Check out that righteous Bowie knife.

There are only three interpretations for this symbology:

• It was designed by someone who is unfamiliar with American iconography. If this is the case, wearing the shirt was pretty dang ignorant.
• It’s an incredibly crude and juvenline jape about gender transition surgery: I’m throwing up in my mouth a little.
• The Lieutenant Governor is talking tough: Y’know – saying she’s going to stab people who transgress to some indistinct degree or another against trans people. Y’know – like Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs”, only with actual intent.

Not sure which it is. I’m open to suggestions.

Speaking of which – I have four friends that one could classify as transgender. Two of them are from the “Armed Trans Don’t Get Shot” faction of the Second Amendment movement, whom I could see donning one of these:

Of course it’s a photoshop. Theatrical posturing about stabbing bigots is OK; taking a gun to them, probably not.

Which is a shame, since the gun might actually work.

Speaking of which, here’s the MN Gun Owners Caucus’s version:

It goes without saying that if a Republican threw a knife or gun reference into a t-shirt on a social issue, it’d be front page news, with thought-free “think” pieces clogging op-ed pages nationwide.

So I won’t say it.

Badthink is the new…badthink.

Or to put this in terms any Second Amendment activist can relate to, “Don’t be paranoid. Nobody’s coming for the language itself”.

Pathologizing freedom of conscience by speciously linking it to objective evil?

Demonizing dissent?

Oh, yeah – and just flat out lying…

…to gull the gullible – a population the Democrats count on growing to supermajority levels.

I hope you all had a happy, blessed, gratitude-heavy Thanksgiving.

I hope you did not spend the day alone in a New York apartment, sitting on your toilet, hunched over your smartphone, obsessively typing bilge out onto social media.

Like this guy seemed to:

Only to be reminded that graywashing American history is how authoritarianism thrives.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.

I have so much for which I should be grateful – and I’ll be going through the list, as far as I can, tomorrow.

But I’m going to jump the (if you’ll pardon the expression) gun, and say I’m thankful I’m not that this grift.

Whoah – did I say grift? I meant, “dinner party“:

Jackson and Rao are the founders of an organization called Race2Dinner. For $5,000 the two women will attend your eight-person dinner party and bring along “Lisa Bond, our Resident White Woman.” For that price, they will berate you about your racism. They will share their own experiences with racism, which sometimes don’t sound like actual racism. But if you object or even if you agree, they will tell you that’s what white women do and you’re part of the problem. The two have a lot of observations about “what white women do.” White women are mean to each other, for instance. When they are accused of racism white women accuse black women of being “angry” or “crazy.” White women also say they’re not racist. White women like dinner parties. And they like to say they’ve donated money to the ACLU. If you suggest that black women may be mean to each other or that they may like dinner parties, you’re also a white supremacist. Because how would you know? Don’t say you have black friends because that too would be a sign of white supremacy.

Questioning whether spending $5,000 to have people call you names is also “white supremacy,” and the authors explain, “we are tired of it.” The fact that you are complaining about the price is evidence that you “see this work as charity. You doing us a favor. … White supremacy culture has you believing that you are doing us a favor by even caring about racism or antiracism. This results in your incessant demands that we educate you—on your own racism, on a system you created to harm us for your benefit. For free.

On the one hand, it sounds as hellish as the left tells us Thanksgiving with one’s family ostensibly is.

On the other hand, if I had a lot more money than bills – or friends who’d be willing to pitch in – I think it’d be fun to pony up, invite the ladies, and watch the sparks fly.

If I were on the Nobel Committee, this simple meme would be my nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature this year:

It’s simple, and it sums up the modern culture war to a “T”.

We warned you that if marriage got redefined to something other than “a guy and a gal” to “two people getting together to enjoy the legal benefits of a contractual status”, there was literally no logical or moral reason that couldn’t be extended to two or more people – or not necessarily people at all”.

“That’s never gonna happen, and you’re paranoid and weird”, they said.

Of course we were right:

But remember – nobody’s coming for your guns, there’s no such thing as election fraud, there’s no way January 6 was a shake and bake…

Deep thoughts from Chris Cillizza, circa 2015:

Joe Biden’s unique trait as a politician is — and always has been — his honesty. Sometimes that honesty gets him into varying degrees of trouble. Sometimes it makes it seem as though he’s the closest thing to a real person you could possibly hope for in politics.

This didn’t age too well, now did it? I can’t prove Cillizza’s childhood nickname wasn’t Corn Pop, or that he wasn’t at some point a classmate of Biden’s at the Naval Academy, but it’s a useful reminder that our betters have been carrying water for Ol’ Joe for a very long time now. There was more:

The Joe Biden on display with Colbert is the person who has inspired remarkable loyalty — over decades — from a tightknit group of staffers who would form the core of his presidential brain trust if he decided to run in 2016. It’s the guy who, for a time in 1987, was one of the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination. It’s who Barack Obama saw when he decided to pick Biden as his vice president in 2008.

1987. Do you remember why Biden fell from grace all those years ago? I suppose you could ask Neil Kinnock, whose speech Biden plagiarized. You could ask Barack Obama:

One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

After the last 18 months, no one seriously doubts The Leader of the Free World’s ability in that realm. 

Berg’s Seventh Law – “When a progressive issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds” – has been getting a workout lately.

But this next bit – an LATimes response to last week’s Bruen decision at the Supreme Court – may be heading to the Berg’s Seventh Law Hall of Fame. [1]

I’ll let the Times own words do the talking:

Is “California” “ready”? Well, the state’s government clearly isn’t:

California Democrats are scrambling to craft and enact new legislation this week that would somehow salvage the requirement — assuming local law enforcement continues to enforce it — that residents get a permit before carrying a concealed weapon. Current law forces gun owners to show “good cause” for needing such a permit, and that is now unconstitutional.

And they can’t talk about the issue without a certain amount of gaslighting:

Nathan W. Jones leads the Bay Area chapter of the Black Gun Owners Assn. But until a few years ago, he wasn’t even into guns…on Thursday, while many were apoplectic over the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the rights of gun owners to carry a loaded weapon in public — throwing gun control laws in California and New York into limbo at a time when shootings are increasing — Jones was thoughtful.

On the one hand, he wants it to be easy for law-abiding citizens to be able to defend themselves “if and when the time arises.” But on the other hand, he’s a 50-year-old realist who knows that fear and hatred of Black people run deep in the United States, especially when we’re armed.

And this is based on…?

“There’s no overt racism when we go to the gun range, but we know how people are looking at us,” Jones said of the dozens of Black members who meet up to go shooting. “We know the things that people think.”

So, gaslighting it is. “We know what you’re really thinking?” Every signficant pro-2nd-Amendment group, at the national and federal levels, have welcomed the surge in black gun owners – whatever their reasons for joining the tribe.

The writer, Erika D. Smith, is certainly impressively ignorant on the substance of the issue:

And the other, truly weird thing is that race is now actually being used as an argument in support of loosening gun laws

Justice Clarence Thomas, in his opinion for the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen case, waxed philosophical about how the right to bear arms was crucial for the self-protection of Black people in the South during Reconstruction.

And how in 1868, Congress “reaffirmed that freedmen were entitled to the ‘full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty [and] personal security … including the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.’”

Meanwhile, a coalition of progressive organizations, including the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, the Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defender Services, filed an amicus brief in the case, urging the Supreme Court to rule exactly as it did.

Their argument? That gun control laws in New York, like California, disproportionately harm Black and Latino people who carry guns for self-defense. They complained of clients who have been “stopped, questioned, and frisked,” and deprived of their livelihoods because they “exercised a constitutional right.”

“We represent hundreds of indigent people whom New York criminally charges for exercising their right to keep and bear arms,” they wrote. “For our clients, New York’s licensing requirement renders the Second Amendment a legal fiction.”

Smith – and the white LA progressives who edit and publish the LATimes who greenlit Smith’s piece – seem almost amazed to notice the one real thing that the gaslighting just can not deflect from:

But the governor and lawmakers could fail in their efforts, and the Supreme Court’s ruling could stand. And then, California could be forced to confront a reality that has long made many self-proclaimed liberals uncomfortable: Black people — potentially a lot of us — legally carrying guns in public.

Dig beneath the ongoing, lazy slander of all white America, and the McCarthyistic “white supremacists under every rock” rhetoric that’s become background noise in most “progressive’ writing; that’s the real fear. The only thing a white progressive fears, and needs to control, more than a black person is an armed black person.

And when they become armed, and realize that the honky at the range isn’t the problem…

[1] Note to Self: Create a Berg’s Seventh Law Hall of Fame.

To: Democrats
From: Mitch Berg, whose common “irascible peasant” self-appelation has never seemed more on-target.
Re: You

Dear all Democrats,

Every once in a while, in front of a friendly audience, you slip and let the truth out.

In front of the NPR simps in 2016, for example, you said in as many words it was time for the media to put its finger – or arm, or butt – on the scale to tip the public against Donald Trump.

And now, from the (if you’ll pardon the expression) Colbert sixty minutes hate:

You can put most of what this woman says into the mouth of a spousal abuser – which really is a great metaphor for the modern Democrat party.

That is all.