Darn Those Authoritarian Republicans

Ever wonder why people on the left are so fond, over the past decade, of referring to people who disagree with them as “Fascists”?

Well, of course, it’s because of all the Republican governors who use their power to bulldoze constitutional checks and balances – in the case of this conservative governor, deciding she doesn’t really need the legislature to create or repeal laws, and waterboarding the definition of “public health crisis” into compliance to do it?

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence.

Or maybe it’s this “new right” prime minister, telling the world we need to destroy free speech to save it:

Because we’re “at war”.

Conservative love to turn social disagreements into “wars” to justify their overreach. It of course peaked when the conservative MAGA president gave a speech during which he “othered” half of the nation, in a speech redolent with martial natinalistic imagery…

… that fairly shouted “the time is nigh to do something about it”, part of a campaign of “othering” dissent that started in 2009.

Or maybe it’s the fact that a majority of Republicans favor curbing free speech “for the greater good”

On the issue of free expression, at least, Republicans are not the authoritarian party. That distinction belongs to the Democrats, the party launched by Thomas Jefferson — the Founding Father who famously said that if he were forced to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Wait.- wut?

Why, it’s almost as if Berg’s Seventh Law is inviolable and absolute or something.

Make Those Trains Run On Time

Democrats warned me that if we voted GOP, we’d have fascism in the US.

And they were right:

Last Friday, New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, announced a 30-day ban on the right to carry open or concealed firearms in public. She and the state health secretary, Patrick Allen, declared, “Gun violence and drug abuse currently constitute statewide public health emergencies,” and that provided sufficient justification for the governor to repeal the concealed-carry law, first passed in 2001, as well as the state’s open-carry law.

In New Mexico, about 46 percent of adults have at least one gun in their home.

The New Mexico state legislature is not under fire, missing, or incapable of performing its duties. It adjourned on March 18, and is scheduled to begin its next session January 16, 2024. The state legislature meets for a 60-day regular session in odd-numbered years, and for a 30-day regular session in even-numbered years. The governor can call a special session to deal with emergency legislation that needs attention before the next regular session; the state legislature can also declare its own “extraordinary session” and meet outside of the normal session, if three-fifths of each chamber agrees.

No Democrat can be allowed to live this down.

Berg’s Seventh Law Hall Of Fame

I’m going to guess the relentlessly intellectually-entitled Ms. Sarandon thought she was tweeting about Republicans:

It was probably 4-5 years after I read Saul Alinski’s Rules for Radicals that I noticed one of his rules – essentially, “accuse your opponent of doing what you’re doiing” – basically is the actor’s side of Berg’s 7th Law.

UPDATE: Whoops. I’m informed that Ms. Sarandon may have become, if (certainly) not a Republican, at least a skeptic of the Democrat Party, and that my lede may be wrong, and she may actually be referring to the Democrats.

It may indeed be a season of miracles.

Urban Progressive Privilege: Their Own Dog Food

Governors Abbot (TX) and DeSantis (FL) sendig illegal immigrants to New York, DC and – major kudos to DeSantis here – the epicenter of Urban Progressive Privilege, Martha’s Freaking Vineyard.

The Vineyardians are not amused:

The bleating of the likes of Fernandes (to say nothing of NYC Mayor Adams and DC Mayor Bowser) is pure Berg’s Seventh Law: Big Left’s notion of “helping” illegals is like the PJ O’Rourke’s recounting of Tipper Gore’s account of a drive with the Gore kids through a blighted part of DC; the kids observations prompted Tipper to…

…start a group to plug for public funding for more homeless charities.

The squirming, deflection and projection is glorious.

“But Mitch – those are human beings!”

To me? Yes.

To you? Maybe.

To Big Left’s pols? Not in the least. They are votes and news cycles on the hoof.

The Most Berg’s Seventh Law Op Ed In History

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.

Terrorism

I’ve probably noted this elsewhere, but I don’t’ think it can be overstated: the reason that the first Obama Administration spent so much time and effort barbering about “white supremacist terror” was to start projecting fault on the phantom menace to draw attention away from the mass of leftist thugs that Big Left was in the process of unleashing on society.

Events this week show I’m onto something.

Pro-infanticide terrorists in Buffalo firebomb a crisis pregnancy center – one of several such incidents nationwide lately:

The arsonists left graffiti on a wall that read, “Jane Was Here.” The organization has committed multiple such incidents in the last few months, including one in which it firebombed the headquarters of Wisconsin Family Action (WFA), a pro-life group in Madison, Wis. last month. There, the terrorists left the message, “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.”

Jane’s Revenge also admitted that it threw red paint on the the front door of a crisis pregnancy center in Washington, D.C. last week, spray painting “Jane Says Revenge” on the side of the building.

Here, locally? “Anti”-Fa torches the truck of a contractor who helped the city evict a homeless camp, takes credit:

It’s culminated – for now (?) – with the Democrat hit man who, incited by Chuck Schumer’s rhetoric (specifically calling out Justice Kavanaugh for the attention of extremists) and the partisan leak of a draft of the Dobbs decision and the likely outcome of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association case, rangered up and went cross-country with the stated intent to kill the justice and intimidate the court.

The punk will get virtually no sentence; his crime, little media attention outside the conservative media. Big Left will blather on about “imminent waves of right wing / “white supremacist” terror”, while waves of leftists burn more cities, and eventually just through weight of numbers kill more conservatives.

And Big Left and its media toadies will befrenzy themselves over episodes like Charlottestown and January 6, while ignoring events like this – which are themselves every bit as great a threat to democrach.

If people don’t get law and order – and, more importantly, equality before the law – in exchange for all of the taxes and civil liberties we give up – or, perhaps worse, realistically believe that there are two separate, unequal justice systems – they are going to get it for themselves.

And it will be incredibly ugly.

Berg’s Seventh And Twentieth Laws Never Need To Fabricate Any Truths

Jussie Smolett was convicted of lying about being hate-crimed, three years ago, by a roaming band of Trump supporters. In downtown Chicago.

Most of the lefty commentators who proclaimed the case a damning indictment of American society were – “unexpectedly” – silent over the weekend.

And they may have been the smart ones.

Ja’Han Jones – a writer of sorts for MSNBC who is described as a “futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics”, meaning pretty much someone who partied with the right people in college – warned conservatives about what we “should realize before they relish the Jussie Smollett verdict“.

Nonetheless, the strange, seemingly ever-changing details in the case have provided nearly three years’ worth of material for comedians and online commentators. Some of it has been quite funny, in fact. 

Of course, there’s not a lot of there in the piece, which concludes:

Even more comical, in my view, was the predictable conservative outrage over Smollett’s allegations. Conservatives took to social media in 2019 to express outrage over the dropped charges. How dare someone make such a heinous claim about followers of their dear leader, they screeched. Violent, masked white guys who shout Trump slogans and use chemical agents to attack victims? 

Many on the right shamed those of us who knew such a claim was totally plausible — and then the Jan. 6 insurrection happened.  

And that’s it!

Of course, Berg’s Seventh Law applies. I’m sure there were conservatives that, after a decade and a half of watching hoax after hoax, and retraction after retraction of narrative-based claims of hate crimes, indulged in a bit of schadenfreud at a verdict that, had it not been on a case tried in crazy-blue Chicago, was utterly predicable to anyone with two brain cells to rub together to get some sparks.

But Jones is projecting, of course; it was everyone on the left – not just hoi polloi in comment sections, but an unbroken phalanx of blue-checks – who were dancing and cavorting about the usual chanting points; gut-shot to white cis-hetero privilege that this “hate crime” represented, the spotlight it still showed on the hatred that, they’d tell us, still roils beneath the surface of every honky.

Berg’s Twentieth Law – assume widely-publicized “hate crimes” are hoaxes until proven otherwise, which I obeyed in every particular even before I watched Smollett’s “alibi” crumble like a donut fresh out of a microwave – gave way to Berg’s Seventh Law; when the left accuses you fellow conservatives of moral turpitude, it’s almost invariably projecting.

Smollett’s verdict brings me no joy; we have a society that actively enables this sort of narcissistic showmanship, and uses it to further tribalize a society that doesn’t need any more.

Cause -> Effect?

A few weeks back: U of M “student government” official (and Tina Smith employee) calls for students to resist the U of M police – in as many words, to “make their lives hell“.

Today – the U is turning into a cold Newark:

University of Minnesota police are warning students, staff and neighbors to be on alert after a rash of sometimes violent robberies and thefts in the Dinkytown and Stadium Village areas of Minneapolis…One of the more violent incidents occurred midafternoon Sunday at SE. University and 14th avenues, where a young man took someone’s phone and fled in a stolen vehicle. As the suspect drove off, he hit his victim with the car, causing minor injuries.

Y’know, for all the flak being heaped on all conservatives for the first-ever act of political violence in American history, January6, you’d think someone might do the same for all the damage “progressive” rhetoric has wrought…

oh.

Berg’s Seventh Law Is A Sledgehammer

Democrats. after an election when media both mainstream and social worked overtime to install them in office, propose to “rein in the media”:

During a lengthy Instagram Live on Tuesday evening where she revealed that she feared for her life during the siege, the “Squad” member accused the mainstream media of “spewing disinformation” ahead of the deadly riot in which five people died.

“There’s absolutely a commission that’s being discussed but it seems to be more investigating in style rather than truth and reconciliation,” she said.

“I do think that several members of Congress in some of my discussions have brought up media literacy because that is part of what happened here,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) went on.

“We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation,” she said.

So – yet again, while calling all Republicans “Nazis” by implication and association, Democrats act like…

…well, Democrats.

Subservient

These tweets have made the rounds of conservative social, cable and broadcast media.

Which doesn’t mean they don’t need to be splattered far and wide.

Berg’s Seventh Law is omnipresent:

“Irony” – Judge Coney Barrett is already one of the nation’s most powerful jurists, even if she never gets on the SCOTUS (and here’s hoping she does, and soon). She’s accomplished more in her life, so far, than any of the people yapping on Twitter about “The Handmaids Tale” “parallels” in her faith life.

Just saying – if “People of Praise” preaches “subservience for women”, they’re doing a terrible job of it.

Oh, yeah – Berg’s Seventh Law”

If the left didn’t have double standards…

…well, you know where we go from here.

Look Into The Gaslight

During the Bush years, as many as a third of Democrats had some level of belief that 9/11 was an inside job.

Today, a significant number – on social media, it looks like a supermajority – believe that Trump colluded with Russia, that Kavanaugh raped someone, that “white supremacists” started the riots, that “Anti”-fa is anti-fascist, that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s purported “dying wish” should have some legal merit and that the Electoral College disenfranchises them.

Which is why we’re seeing this sort of “journalism”, doubtlessly placed by a Democrat attack-PR firm, about a movement whose adherence among the GOP is likely in low single digits.

Yep – it’s Berg’s 7th Law, and Urban Progressive Privilege – a gaslighting twofer!

Shot In The Dark: Tomorrow’s News, 15 Years Ago

It’s been percolating about “prog” social media lately – the notion that Trump, should he lose the election, wouldn’t relinquish office.

Never mind how, or whether it’s remotely plausible. All that is necessary for the left-wing noise machine is to get the chatters chattering.

But as to “why would they be spreading such palpable poppycock?”

If you’re a regular reader, you know Berg’s Seventh Law.

And if you know Berg’s Seventh Law, you already have your answer.

In Much The Same Way As OJ Is Looking For “The Real Killers” (Part II)…

…Big Left is scouring the world for that wave of “white terror” that, we have been assured since 2009, is imminent.

But again, Big Left has met its enemy, and they are it:

In Much The Same Was As OJ Is Looking For “The Real Killers”…

…Big Left is looking for the real racists.

But they have met the enemy, and it is them.

Divisive!

The Paper of Walter Duranty, the one that published the deeply ahistorical, revisionistic and nothing-but-inflammatory “1629 Project”, the one that published Paul Krugman’s innumerate claims that “blue” America bankrolls “red” America, which has been openly advocating “progressive” ideals in its editorial pages since I was in high school, which has been one of the primary PR agents for the left in America’s cultural cold civil war, the one that has not only been a “progressive” flak for generations but whose young, “woke” red guard faction has moved beyond shaping the informational battlefield to actively purity-testing the left-leaning editorial staff to drive it further to the cultural and political left…

has the victorian vapours about “cultural divisiveness” over Trump’s weekend speech at Mount Rushmore.

Watch for yourself.

The only thing that I could find that was remotely “divisive” was exhortation about three minutes in stating that Mount Rushmore would never be desecrated – which, I imagine, some post-modern academics find profoundly hostile.

Or maybe the bit around 5:10 here he said the rights of man will never be taken away. That has got to make Tim Walz nervous.

Perhaps the part around 6:10, where he points out that Americans aren’t “weak and submissive” in facing the war on American culture, but will in fact prevail. That’s a pretty clear and direct threat to…someone.

Too bad, so sad.

Berg’s Seventh Law is iron-clad and absolute.

Distillation

From the American Heritage dictionatry, the word “Distillation”

  • n.The evaporation and subsequent collection of a liquid by condensation as a means of purification.
  • n.The extraction of the volatile components of a mixture by the condensation and collection of the vapors that are produced as the mixture is heated.
  • n.A distillate.

With that definition in mind: this article in the Atlantic is as pure a distillation of Berg’s Seventh Law as rhetorical chemistry will allow.

Berg’s Seventh Law: Locked And Loaded

Read this statement by the “executive director” and chief check-endorser of a major gun-grab group and see if you detect the same theme I do:

“Gun makers are softening their image to ‘put a better face in front of people’ & ‘ramp up its appeal to women, children and members of minority groups,'” Igor Volsky, executive director of gun-control activist group Guns Down America, said in a tweet. Volsky, who is also a former vice president of the Center for American Progress, was commenting on a New York Times story about firearms marketing.

“That’s right,” Volsky continued. “Gun makers are increasingly advertising to WOMEN, CHILDREN & MINORITY COMMUNITIES. Firearm industry realizes that to survive into the future it must ‘broaden its reach beyond the aging white men who have been its core customers’—and so they’re now trying to sell their products to other demographics. This is incredibly dangerous.”

Imagine an executive in any other field bemoaning the diminished capacity of “WOMEN CHILDREN & MINORITIES” around any other product…

…not to mention Civil Right?

Let Berg’s Seventh Law Be Your Guide

To jog the memory – Berg’s Seventh Law reads “When a Liberal / “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.”

So – if the Democrats accuse any Republican, especially Trump, of some sort of miscreancy?

You can count on it being a noise-screen to cover up their own perfidy.

And it never really fails:

Following months of angry claims by journalists and Democratic operatives that the Obama administration never spied on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, The New York Times admitted Thursday that multiple overseas intelligence assets were deployed against associates of the Republican nominee. It is not the first time the Times has revealed widespread spying operations against the campaign.
In addition to noting that long-time informant Stefan Halper was tasked with collecting intelligence on the Trump campaign, the Times story details how a woman was sent overseas under a fake name and occupation to oversee the spy operation. The woman’s real name is not mentioned in the article, though the Times says she went by “Azra Turk” and has a relationship with an unidentified federal intelligence agency.

This is going to go on a looong time.

Unless the Democrats sweep the White House and Congress in 2020, in which case it’s going to disappear…

That’s So 1977…

I’m old enough to remember when the American political and media establishment wracked itself into knots over the fact that the executive branch had been using the CIA and Hoover’s FBI to spy on domestic political opposition.

Among my earliest memories of politics and news – after Watergate, naturally – were the Church Commission hearings, which clamped down on the use of intelligence and law enforcement for domestic shenanigans.

For a while, anyway.

Seems like everything old is new again:

Following months of angry claims by journalists and Democratic operatives that the Obama administration never spied on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, The New York Times admitted Thursday that multiple overseas intelligence assets were deployed against associates of the Republican nominee. It is not the first time the Times has revealed widespread spying operations against the campaign.

In addition to noting that long-time informant Stefan Halper was tasked with collecting intelligence on the Trump campaign, the Times story details how a woman was sent overseas under a fake name and occupation to oversee the spy operation. The woman’s real name is not mentioned in the article, though the Times says she went by “Azra Turk” and has a relationship with an unidentified federal intelligence agency.

It would be the ultimate Berg’s Seventh Law reference, if it turned out that the left’s two-year-long tantrum over “collusion” were simultaneously deflection and projection.

The Shorter “Every Argument With A Minnesota Gun Control Advocate”

THEY: You’re paranoid! Nobody is coming for your guns! Period!

ME: The Democrats have been introducing bills that would ban vast swathes of guns, and have been telegraphing that they see the whole thing as an incremental process. Perhaps you could stand to open your mind and learn a bit.

THEY: I don’t have time to obsess over this stuff.

ME: Well, those of us who make the time are telling you – the threat is real.

THEY: You’re paranoid! Nobody is coming for your guns! Period!

ME: Um…again, the proposals are on the books, and have taken effect in some places. Seriously, here are the cases…

THEY: I don’t have time to obsess over this stuff.

ME: Yeah, so I hear – but those of us who stay involved are telling you – the threat is no joke.

THEY: You’re paranoid! Nobody is coming for your guns! Period!

ME: Er…just because you keep saying it doesn’t mean it’s true. Listen and learn.

THEY: I don’t have time to obsess over this stuff.

ME: Well, those of us who make the time are telling you – the threat is real.

THEY: You’re paranoid! Nobody is coming for your guns! Period!

ME: See what happens here? You don’t know the issue, make an unsupportable statement, and wriggle away from getting set straight…

THEY: I don’t have time to obsess over this stuff.

ME: Um…nice weather we’re having?

THEY: You’re paranoid! Nobody is coming for your guns! Period!

ME: Bring me a shrubbery.

THEY: I don’t have time to obsess over this stuff.

ME: Wagga wagga ding dong

THEY: You’re paranoid! Nobody is coming for your guns! Period!

ME: [Walking away].

THEY: I don’t have time to obsess over this stuff.

THEY: You’re paranoid! Nobody is coming for your guns! Period!

THEY: I don’t have time to obsess over this stuff.

THEY: You’re paranoid! Nobody is coming for your guns! Period!

THEY: I don’t have time to obsess over this stuff.

THEY: You’re paranoid! Nobody…

[And SCENE]

THEY: I don’t have time to obsess over this stuff.

.

Berg’s Seventh Law In The News – Sort Of

Psychological Projection is when I assume you have the bad traits that I deny I have.  A liar will assume everyone else is a liar.  It’s embodied in Berg’s Seventh Law.
A mobster predicts Trump will have Cohen “whacked” in prison because that’s what happens to snitches.  The story itself is proof Trump isn’t a mobster.  If he was an actual mobster (or even a Clinton), Cohen would already be dead.

And let’s talk about all those violence-worshiping Democrats yipping about Cal Bahr.