The last time I watched a Presidential inauguration live on TV was when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated. I was in junior high, and they wheeled a TV into our history classroom.
I missed Reagan’s (twice), Bush I, Clinton (twice), Dubya (twice), Trump’s first, and Obama (all three times).
I may break my streak today. Partly to see history. Partly because I’ve become an accidental, skeptical Trump supporter. Partly because, let’s be honest, I suspect some lefty is going to try something stupid.
Speaking of danger: remember when George W Bush took office? And the departing Clinton staffers, in a fit of juvenility, pried the “W” keys off of all the computer keyboards in the west wing?
Biden’s pardons, and some of his other efforts to stymie Trump from the great political beyond, are like that – only actually damaging, as opposed to juvenile and spiteful.
So much so that even the elder statesman of “Never-Trump” is sounding off:
Biden is leaving office dropping one lawless, norm-defying, justly impeachable un-democratic transgression after another. That’d be bad enough. But these are all precedents for the successor he thinks is a threat to democracy. It’s reckless, spiteful, and incandescently stupid.
Tim Walz calls Trump a "threat to Democracy" and a "fascist" who will "put people's lives in danger" just two weeks after Trump survived an assassination attempt. pic.twitter.com/ssNQdGFqEr
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.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is trimming weeds while listening to “Office Ladies” on headphones. He doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE has come up the sidewalk, looking for evidence of herbicide use.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: (Oblivious)
LIBRELLE: The so-called “assassination attempt” was pretty much a fake.
BERG: (No response, as he continues to listen to his podcast)
LIBRELLE: It looks like his ear was cut by a piece of glass! What a drama queen!
BERG: (Nothin’)
GUY RIDING PAST ON BIKE: So what do you think it was that accelerated this supposed piece of glass to a speed capable of taking a chunk out of the President’s ear?
WOMAN WAITING AT BUS STOP ACROSS THE STREET: Yeah! Perhaps magic?
GUY TRIMMING HEDGES DOWN THE BLOCK: Maybe the kids from Slytherin playing around with their wands again?
LADY IN KITCHEN, LISTENING THROUGH WINDOW: Maybe it was Umbrella Man?
BUS DRIVER (Picking up the woman across the street): Couldn’t have possibly been a bullet aimed at the candidate’s head, could it?
President Biden, in his remarkably dilatory and perfunctory statement about the murder of a Trump supporter and the attempt to murder his rival, called for “Unity”.
It was a chanting point that a lot of Democrats took a break for claiming Republicans were “threats to democracy” to gravely intone.
Let’s talk about it.
Back before they called online talk shows “podcasts”, I appeared on one. There was a panel of guests talking politics. There were online “phone callers”. It was sort of like a talk show, only without the radio.
The host introduced a caller. He identified himself as from Detroit. He had a very African-American accent; I say this to describe the sound, not to caricature the person.
He said “What this country needs is unity“.
Eventually, I asked the caller “So, let’s talk about this ‘unity’. True unity has to be consensual. That means everyone is going to compromise a little bit to achieve this ‘unity’. So tell me – what Republican principles are you willing to accept to achieve the ‘unity’ you’re talking about?”
“Oh”, he responded. “Republicans are BUUUUUL-shit”.
Democrat calls for “unity” seem about as perfunctory as someone who’s said the Lord’s Prayer so many times they’ve disconnected their brain from the act. Unity good. Disunity bad.
It’s empty. There is no effort behind it. It has no meaning.
Until they give on something, it’s all just words.
And they don’t have to give on much. Like, “all that yapping about ‘threats to democracy’ and ‘literally Hitler’ and ‘this could be our last election’ was a little overheated. We’re all on the same team. Let’s have a solid American-style election, here”.
You’d be crazy to hold your breath, of course. Dennis Prager says “being a leftist means never needing to apologize”. It’ll never occur to them.
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.
