Politics – Page 43 – MILESFORTIS

Eating Our Own: The Fine (Not So) Young Cannibals of the Gun Industry

Whether through articles or posts on social media the gun industry has an unfortunate tendency to readily and joyously eat its own. Toss a proverbial hot topic into the ring and suddenly it’s lions versus Christians with the lone Christian being represented by some poor guy who was “just saying.”

It’s a topic worth addressing even though it will cause more even kvetching and whining in the comment section (commonly-shared saying among writers: never read the comment section). Addressing this topic at all is likely to be called “whining”, “playing the victim card”, or – my personal favorite – “virtue signaling.”

There’s also the opposite end of the spectrum. There we have those who loudly proclaim we as an industry are being divided by the use of “divisive” speech. This often involves the originator of the discussion having asked a question or somehow challenged the status quo. You don’t dare rock the boat, because that makes you “part of the problem.”

What follows are my two cents. They’re sentiments I like to believe are shared by most of us here at TTAG. If my bluntness about this state of affairs offends you, sorry, but I’m not sorry. Continue reading “”

Attorney General William Barr Resigns.

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr is resigning, confirming speculation that he would leave his top cabinet post amid mounting criticism of his performance from President Trump.

Trump announced the departure in a Monday evening tweet.

“Just had a very nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House. Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job! As per letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family,” Trump tweeted.

The president added: “Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, an outstanding person, will become Acting Attorney General. Highly respected Richard Donoghue will be taking over the duties of Deputy Attorney General. Thank you to all!” Continue reading “”

I said it when Trump first took office; The Senate should take up the ‘agreement’ just like it was a Treaty for consideration and vote it down like the crap-for-brains idea it is.
This particular problem would have been solved.
But noooo, they had to play politics with it.
Well – now we have to deal with the possibility of control of the Senate changing hands to the demoncraps.

Channel Yosemite Sam: “Politicians is so stupid.”

UN Chief Calls On World Leaders to Declare ‘Climate Emergency’
Joe Biden: “The United States will rejoin the Paris Agreement on day one of my presidency.”

The United Nations Secretary-General has told world leaders to declare a climate emergency. “I call on all leaders worldwide to declare a State of Climate Emergency in their countries until carbon neutrality is reached,” UN chief Antonio Guterres said on Saturday at a summit marking the fifth anniversary of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The UN chief’s call comes has many in the climate camp are encouraged by the hopes of a possible Democrat-led administration in the United States, media reports say. “Guterres made his call at a summit aimed at building on momentum behind the Paris deal, buoyed in recent months by … the prospect of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden bringing the United States back into the pact,” Reuters reported. Continue reading “”

‘Thought Experiment’

Thought experiment. There are five Democrat justices on the Supreme Court. There was a Democrat president who just ran for reelection. He supposedly lost, but virtually all Democrat voters believe that massive fraud in several Republican controlled states caused him to lose. Many Democrat attorneys general file a lawsuit in the US Supreme Court, essentially identical to the one that is pending now.

Does anyone believe for a second that those five Democrat justices wouldn’t do absolutely anything necessary to make sure the Democrat control of the presidency was maintained? Democrats care about power. Democrats do not care about process, or rules. Now we are being asked to be so meticulous about adhering to the rules, that we are to allow a laughably egregious fraud to succeed, and to permit our own throats to be cut by turning over the executive branch to the people who just committed the biggest political crime in history. I hope five US supreme court justices will show just a tiny bit of the creativity, to put it politely, which Democrat justices had when they, for example, found an imaginary abortion right in the US Constitution. We’ll see what happens..

I hope five US supreme court justices will show just a tiny bit of the creativity, to put it politely, which Democrat justices had when they, for example, found an imaginary abortion right in the US Constitution. We’ll see what happens.

Well, they didn’t, so wherever you came from, here you are.

Is Left Starting To Understand Where NRA Stances Come From?

The National Rifle Association is the boogieman for the anti-gun left in this country. During the recent campaigns, plenty of politicians talk about how they were going to stand up to the NRA, how they were going to put the NRA in their place.

This is the same NRA that’s embattled at every flank, of course, yet still apparently managed to pose enough opposition to prevent a $100 billion effort by Micahel Bloomberg and company from yielding any fruits. At least, that’s what happened if you believe the NRA is the only barrier to anti-gun Utopia.

However, it seems that some on the left are starting to brush up against the understanding that the NRA isn’t what they need to worry about. Continue reading “”

Democracy Has Been Destroying the 2nd Amendment
If the United States truly operated as a Republic, there would be no worries about any laws being passed to infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

“Save our Democracy!” editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books Roger Kimball writes in a commentary piece for The Tennessee Star. Kimball, like many of us, is anxious about the officially unresolved-at-this writing election results and believes he has a way to help President Donald Trump turn the tide in his favor.

“Donald Trump needs to mobilize the public with a series of high-profile ‘Save Our Democracy’ rallies,” Kimball declares. “I suspect that such Save Our Democracy rallies would attract tens of thousands of people, just as Trump’s campaign rallies did these past weeks.

“Save Our Democracy!” Kimball proclaims. “It has a ring to it. I hope team Trump will consider organizing a bunch of them now, today.”

It does have a ring to it, one that falls flat with those who pay attention to such matters. We are a republic, not a democracy. The “D”-word appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence, and more importantly, nowhere in the Constitution, which instead proclaims “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…”

Kimball’s not the only well-intentioned friend who seems to think the distinction is not worth raising. Continue reading “”

Barack Obama Smears Trump’s Latino Voters.

Confounding Democrats across America, President Trump made big gains in the Latino community on Election Day in states like Florida and Texas, vastly improving his 2016 performance with them.

The data doesn’t lie, as Politico explains:

Despite four years of being defined as a racist for his rhetoric and harsh immigration policies, Trump improved his margins in 78 of the nation’s 100 majority-Hispanic counties. And he did better with Latinos in exit polls of each of the top 10 battleground states, a POLITICO review of election data found.

Joe Biden still won Latino voters overall. But as post-election data trickles in, Democrats are growing concerned. Trump’s notable gains weren’t limited to Miami’s Cuban Americans or border-region Tejanos. Although Florida and Texas stood out for the notable shift, Puerto Ricans as far away as Philadelphia and Mexican Americans in Milwaukee drifted Trump-ward.

………..

There are many reasons for Trump’s improved standing with a voting bloc that has long been crucial to Democrat wins at the state and national levels. We’ll get into those in a minute, but first, let’s take a look at how former President Barack Obama tried to explain away Trump’s gains.

In an interview to promote his new book “A Promised Land,” Obama told the New York City-based “Breakfast Club” radio program Wednesday that Hispanic voters who went for Trump ignored his allegedly racist rhetoric and instead supported him because he was pro-life and against gay marriage:

“Those of us who live in DC or New York or LA,” Obama argued, sometimes lack “a good enough sense of how big this country is and how a lot of folks do not accept at all” policies that people living in larger metropolitan areas take for granted.

The former president turned to the topic of Hispanics who voted for Trump as an example.

“People were surprised about a lot of Hispanic folks who voted for Trump, but there’s a lot of evangelical Hispanics who, you know, the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees, undocumented workers in cages. They think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion,” he explained.

While Trump is indeed pro-life, gay marriage was never a focal point of his 2016 presidential campaign, nor did he make it an issue during his presidency.

So with that in mind, on what did Obama base his claims? He didn’t say, but it’s a safe bet to guess that the basis for his remarks came out of the same old Democratic playbook that almost always boils down Republican gains among key voting groups to some form of bigotry or ignorance, because minorities who vote for Republicans couldn’t possibly be rejecting the Democratic Party for legitimate reasons, right?

Contrary to what Obama told the Breakfast Club hosts, the Hispanic voters who pulled the lever for Trump and other Republicans in down-ballot races did so because they rejected the Democrat messaging on socialism, defunding the police, and job-killing initiatives like the Green New Deal:

Continue reading “”

The party of tolerance, diversity and inclusivity:

Morning Joe: We Have No Reason to Tolerate, Understand Anyone Who Supported Trump.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has a habit of picking on his own friends and family members who supported President Trump, but on Tuesday’s Morning Joe, he took it a step further and plainly admitted that his obsessions with the President are more important to him than the concerns of the American people.

Speaking to wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski, Scarborough griped: “[W]e can sit and try to figure out, Mika, why people feel the way they feel. I’m more concerned on why they’re as comfortable as they were with an autocrat —“.

Knowing where this diatribe was going, Brzezinski interrupted: “I am too.” Naturally, their own concerns that they whine about every morning overwhelm those of the American people.

Sounding just like a caricature of a closed-minded journalist, safely shielded from regular Americans in his liberal bubble, he arrogantly added: “I don’t — I don’t know that — that journalists that have been cloistered in New York City and Washington, D.C., uh should — should run around America trying to figure out why people feel the way they feel. I think people have told us through two elections.” Continue reading “”

Yeglesias is to paraphrase Paul( of Tarsus) ; ‘A Proggie of Proggies’
Maybe he’s also one of the ‘new gun owners’ and he bought an AR even?

BLUF:
Yglesias’ piece has been met with mostly positive comments from his audience, and several say that they’ve been persuaded by his argument, which is fantastic. Look, as much as I’d love to convert every one of these folks to Second Amendment stalwarts, I know that’s not going to happen. I tend to subscribe to Milton Friedman’s view of politics:

The important thing is to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. If it is not politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either.

I’ll accept the wrong people doing the right thing for purely political reasons if it leads to our Second Amendment rights becoming more secure. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to continue to evangelize on the issue of the importance of our Constitutional rights, but we also need to think about ways to make our case in language the Left can understand, and Yglesias’ argument is a good exercise in how to do so.

Vox Co-Founder: Democrats’ Embrace Of Gun Control “Misguided”

Gun owners and conservatives have been saying this all along, of course, but it’s rare these days to hear someone on the Left admit that gun control isn’t such a great idea politically speaking. Kudos to Matt Yglesias for stepping up to the plate. The pundit, who recently left Vox because even his progressive views were ticking off the young socialist staffers and he wanted the freedom to speak his mind without them pitching a fit over his columns, headed off to Substack, where he’s writing for a paid audience and enjoying complete editorial freedom.

In his latest piece, Yglesias admits he’s stirring the pot with his lefty audience by arguing that Democrats would be better off dropping gun control as a political issue, but this isn’t just an attempt to troll his audience. As Yglesias puts it, the “juice here just isn’t worth the squeeze.”

The entire piece by Yglesias is well worth a read and far too long to quote extensively here, but his basic point is simple: Americans may say they support a few individual gun control agenda items like universal background checks or red flag laws, but there’s no stomach or yearning for the kind of firearm-free society that gun control advocates embrace.

Yglesias is a lefty, and he’s not making an argument trying to convince his audience of the importance of the Second Amendment as an individual right. His point is that it’s not an issue that Democrats should run on. Continue reading “”

Don’t understand? Au contraire mon ami. They hold it in contempt.

Axios Founder: Most media publications don’t understand 50% of America.

The founder and CEO of Axios, Jim VandeHei, says that he’s concerned America will split in two over the lack of understanding of Trump supporters’ values.

A Time of Chaos Upon Chaos Atop Chaos
There is a series of battles to come in January 2021, in 2022, and in 2024 that will be definitive, if the chaos of 2020 does not become even more chaotic.

America will weather its current hysterias.

But the tensions and furor are reminiscent of the last generations of the Roman Republic. In its last century, Romans began to adjudicate politics by obsequious partisan town criers (their version of our media), mass demonstrations, and freelance street gangs. Looters, arsonists, and demonstrators did pretty much as they pleased in the streets of Rome without fear of legal consequences.

In our time, the media has now vanished—kaput, no more, ended.

Within a few hours, it goes from a Ministry-of-Truth love session with Joe Biden to a steaming verbal assault on the president’s press secretary—without a shred of awareness how ridiculous they appear in their passive-aggressive schizophrenia. The only constant is that reporters unapologetically seem to jettison their principles and professionalism to calibrate what they say and do by whose politics they support. They would prefer to be entirely discredited under a Biden presidency than be real journalists during a Trump Administration.

The current unspoken subtext of the media-progressive party fusion line is the following: It would be a felonious crime should conservatives now dare to disrupt a transition in the manner that the Left did in 2016. They should not dare to sue about voting machines in key states as did the Clinton surrogate Jill Stein. They would never attempt, in 2016 fashion, to sabotage the Electoral College voting by appealing to constitutionally appointed electors, or surveille top Biden campaign and transition officials and coordinate such monitoring inside the Trump Oval Office.

The point of the Steele dossier, the Russian collusion hoax, the calls for future impeachment even during the Trump transition, the abuse of the foreign intelligence surveillance courts and the weaponization of the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department was to weaken the Trump campaign, to disrupt the Trump transition, and to wound fatally the Trump presidency. For the architects, abettors, and enablers of those past efforts now to accuse Trump officials of adhering to what they created on a massive scale is comic. Continue reading “”

Revenge of the Republicans
Political turnabout is fair play

The 2020 election has provided fertile ground upon which Republicans can spend the next four years doing to Joe Biden what the Democrats did to Donald Trump and George W. Bush.

For four years, Democrats and their media allies trumpeted every claim, no matter how baseless or crazy, that Trump’s 2016 election win was illegitimate and fraudulent. Despite zero evidence that so much as a single vote was interfered with, Democrats peddled the hoax that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to elect Trump. Even after the Mueller investigation exonerated Trump and his campaign from the collusion canard, Democrats, led by the shameless Adam Schiff, continued to allege collusion. Their simple goal was to undermine and delegitimize the Trump presidency. It clearly worked to the degree some voters turned their backs on Trump even as they voted Republican down-ballot.

As Biden’s razor-thin win in a handful of states that pushed him past the 270-electoral vote threshold needed to win the presidency, Trump and his allies claimed that voter fraud and other Democrat-led schemes stole the election. Unlike the bogus Russia bunk, however, there are documented voter fraud issues and other unexplained results that call into question the election. For example, one analysis found that Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major city except, conveniently, Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta. Because of this and other election oddities, a significant chunk of voters don’t believe Biden actually won the election. He’ll now spend four years governing an America in which just under half of its citizens believe he wouldn’t have won had everything been done fairly and squarely.

Though he managed to get far more done than people give his team credit for, Trump governed under a dark cloud for most of his presidency. His team had to waste precious time and energy defending him against the Mueller investigation with its phalanx of Democratic hitman lawyers and corrupt FBI personnel. The media aided this assault by running stories over the last four years based on anonymous sources, several of which ended up being false. No president has had to undergo so thorough an investigation on such thinly-sourced claims. Trump may be lots of things, but he is as patriotic and faithful to America as any man who ever occupied the Oval Office.

Continue reading “”

Larry Elder: Don’t Expect Trump Supporters To “Heal” After 4 Years of Being Called “Nazis”

After four years of attacking President Donald Trump as “illegitimate,” “fascist,” “Nazi,” “tyrant,” “dictator,” “racist,” “anti-Semitic,” “Russian stooge,” “traitor,” “grifter,” “xenophobe,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” “ignorant,” “fat” and “lazy,” Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive president-elect, now says, “Let’s heal.”

In his “victory speech,” Biden said: “And to those who voted for President Trump, I understand you’re disappointment tonight.

“I’ve lost a couple of elections myself. But now, let’s give each other a chance.

“It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature. To see each other again. To listen to each other again.

If Biden wins his court challenges and becomes President while capturing both Senate run-off seats in Georgia, you can expect him to pursue a scorched earth pattern of retribution as he tries to remake America. On the other hand, if Republicans still control the Senate and can block everything other than executive order, we’ll get old smiling Joe, calling for everyone to be best pals. Of course, when liberals call for unity, what they inevitably mean is, “Unity is doing whatever we want. Let’s do that while we try to destroy you.”

For example, while liberals are out there making “lists” of Trump supporters they want to ruin, here’s what we’re hearing from Joe Biden right now.

So, what are we working together to do, Joe? How about working together to build that wall and stop illegal immigration? Do we want to work together to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with a free market alternative? Can we work together to reduce the deficit and kill wasteful programs? Oh….we can’t, right? What Joe Biden means is we all need to “deliver results” when it comes to getting rid of guns, producing open borders and beating the police down to make it easier for rioters to do what they want.

No thank you, Joe. Here’s a better idea. How about we block everything you want to do legislatively, file court challenges against every executive order, investigate you, take the House back in 2022 and then beat Kamala Harris in 2024 after you become too feeble and senile to continue on? Unity sounds nice, but to have unity, you need people that have some type of barebones agreement about whether America, Christianity, Capitalism, the Constitution and small government are good things or not. Until we can square that circle, there is no unity to be had.

Well, if you haven’t figured it out already, there’s a simple solution for her and her komrades. I’m not saying it’s an easy solution, just a simple one.

Don’t blow off AOC

One of the things I try not to do is make the same mistake the other side made. The Establishment blew off Donald John Trump only to watch with jaw agape as he was sworn into office on January 20, 2017.

Let’s not blow off Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. You may not see her appeal, but millions of Democrats do. She is the soul of the soulless Democrat Party.

AOC’s danger is that unlike Obama, Manchin, and the rest of the 50 and older crowd in the Democrat Party, she does not seek power. She seeks a revolution.

Oh, that does not mean she won’t pocket campaign contributions. She sees them as overdue tributes owed by the White Patriarchy that has kept her down for 31 years. Under 50 (year old) Democrats view theft as reparations.

As comical as some of her beliefs may be to us, they are very valid to the majority of Democrats. Regulating cow farts is a joke made by conservative skeptics of the global warming concoction. The AOC crowd has no sense of humor. If CO2 must be regulated then so must methane, which means cow farts.

When it comes to taking her racist and anti-capitalist dogma seriously, AOC is not kidding around.

Her call for a “Trump Accountability Project” is mainstream Democrat thinking because theirs is a religion, and we are all infidels unworthy of any rights. Robert “Third” Reich — Clinton’s labor secretary — forwarded last month the idea of blacklisting and punishing President Trump’s supporters. Continue reading “”

Against ‘Unity’

Political unity is an ugly, authoritarian idea. No free place has domestic political unity, nor should it aspire to it.

What “unity” really means, of course, is capitulation. America is once again being subjected to the inane brand of pseudo-patriotic sloganeering we saw during the Obama years. Now, as then, the media will pretend that the moral fabric of the nation must be mended after Republican rule. It’s pretty transparent. When Democrats win the presidency, we are treated to solemn calls for national restoration and political harmony, and to the expectation that, for the good of the nation, the opposition will embrace decorum and pass legislation they oppose. When Republicans win elections, grown women put on knitted hats depicting their reproductive organs and stomp around Washington protesting, all to a hero’s welcome.

Time magazine, the same publication that helped erode trust in our electoral system with conspiratorial covers of the White House morphing into the Kremlin, now offers a commemorative cover featuring Joe Biden and Kamala Harris with the words, “A time to heal.” Unlike some of our progressive friends, I don’t believe in enemies lists or censorship, so my healing process is simple: It involves playing whatever small part I can in extinguishing the political fortunes of those who want to weaken the Constitution. I’m not at all interested in finding accord with those who want to overturn the Hyde amendment, thereby making late-term abortion a state-funded practice, or with anyone who wants to “reengage” without any genuine preconditions with Holocaust-denying terror regimes such as Iran, or with anyone who wants to further socialize our health-care system by adding a “public option.” Like many others, I find disunity quite therapeutic.

I suspect that, in a few weeks, “political polarization” will once again become an existential crisis of American governance. My favorite post-election headline came from the social scientists at Pew Research Center, who informed us that the “2020 election reveals two broad voting coalitions fundamentally at odds.” Two broad coalitions, you say? Fundamentally at odds? What are the chances?

Michelle Obama says we can overcome our divisions, but that Democrats must first remember “that tens of millions of people voted for the status quo, even when it meant supporting lies, hate, chaos, and division.” She suggests that there is “a lot of work to do to reach out to these folks in the years ahead and connect with them on what unites us.” It’s somewhat difficult to process this level of obnoxious sanctimony. Here is a list of demands you divisive Republicans must embrace for the country to “unite.” Get on with it.

Anyhow, I reject this false choice in the name of patriotic disunity.

Not one of those 71 million agents of chaos lied to millions of Americans to strip us of our health-care insurance plans. Not one of those voters has attempted to force nuns to buy contraception — or sued them when they refused. One day I hope Michelle will stop defending the lies, hate, and division that her husband inflicted on this great nation. Until then, though, we’ll have to agree to disagree. Continue reading “”

BLUF:
If you believe that Biden, after his presumptive victory, and the Democratic Party actually want unity, you’re a fool. The only kind of unity they want is where we bend the knee. They don’t want unity, they want submission.

If they think they can spend four years calling me a sexist, a bigot, a Nazi, and get away with it, they’ve got a surprise coming. Don’t forget what they did to you, because the moment their power is threatened, they’ll do it again.

Democrats Labeled Me and Now They Want Unity? No Way.

After spending twenty years claiming that Al Gore won in 2000, four years claiming that Hillary Clinton won in 2016, and two years claiming that Stacey Abrams is the actual Governor of Georgia, the mainstream media continued to demonstrate a rejection of basic reality when they unanimously declared that Joe Biden – on his third attempt – is now president-elect of the United States. The fact that the Trump campaign is actively challenging some results, or that recounts are also scheduled to occur, or that the media are not endowed with the ultimate authority to erase electoral procedure with their enthusiastic projections are irrelevant details.

On the back of this media-endorsed “victory,” Joe Biden took to the stage and delivered what the Left are describing as a “call for unity.” Continue reading “”

This is the ‘revenge politics’ the demoncraps want. It’s exactly the same thing that the marxist/socialist dictators have done since the early 1900s.
As biased as they already are, I’m actually surprised twitter did this

Twitter Removes Lincoln Project Tweet With Trump Lawyers’ Contact Info

Twitter has removed a tweet from the Lincoln Project that exposed the contact information of two attorneys who are currently representing President Donald Trump, a practice known as “doxxing,” the Washington Examiner reports.

The official Twitter account for the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump political action group created by several former Republicans, posted the phone numbers and emails of two lawyers with the law firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, who are both representing Trump, with the message: “Here are two attorneys attempting to help Trump overturn the will of the Pennsylvanian people. Make them famous.”

The Examiner notes that “doxxing” is defined by Merriam-Webster as “to publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge.”

A spokesperson for Twitter told the Examiner: “The account owner will be required to delete the violative tweet before regaining access to their account.”

Biden Vows Swift Action On Gun Control

According to the media, Joe Biden is the president-elect of the United States. Who knows, maybe when all is said and done, he actually will be. Regardless, there are legal challenges to the election outcome in enough states that you just don’t know how things will shake out in the end.

Regardless, Biden is acting like the president-elect. It’s not like the media will call him on it, to be sure.

So what precisely does Biden have in mind for his first days in office? Oh, nothing much.

Joe Biden has a lot of plans for his first day as president, and some of it can actually happen in a single day — a fair amount of which he can set in motion right away even though Democrats have so far fallen short of capturing the Senate.

Biden has promised to rejoin the Paris climate agreement, reverse President Donald Trump’s rollbacks of public health and environmental rules and call allies worldwide to reassure them, all on his first day in the White House. Before that day is done, he says he will put in place a national strategy for containing the coronavirus pandemic, rejoin the World Health Organization, end the ban on immigration from several predominantly Muslim nations and expand rights for Latin American asylum seekers.

Biden has also promised swift action on housing, labor, gun control, LGBTQ rights and government reform.

Yep. Old Sleepy Joe has his sights set on our guns, the same as always. Continue reading “”

Ten Big Takeaways From The 2020 Election.

It appears that the Democrats’ fevered dreams are going to become a reality: they have replaced one old white man as president whom they alleged had a history of racist comments, self-dealing with foreign countries to benefit his family, and major cognitive issues with an older white man with a more clear history of racist comments, stronger evidence of self-dealing with foreign countries to benefit his family, and a much more severe case of cognitive decline.

In all seriousness, this is why many people consider our political class to be so farcical.

I’ve read all your questions, emails, and comments about the 2020 election and rather than respond to them individually, on this Friday, I’ve laid out my ten biggest takeaways and thoughts from the election results so far.

Here we go: Continue reading “”

In Championing the Goodness of America, Trump Defines the Choice in This Election.

Étienne de La Boétie, who graced this planet from 1520–1563, may have died young, but he made his mark, mostly because he was best friends with Michel de Montaigne.

It was Montaigne who helped assure the literary and political immortality of his friend’s most important work, an essay called “Discours de la servitude volontaire” (“Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”).

La Boétie’s curious work has been an arrow in the quiver of anarchists and libertarians as well as classical liberals for centuries. It is an impassioned attack on tyranny, longer, perhaps, on denunciation than prudence but nevertheless a tonic reveille.

Among other things, La Boétie points out that even those who are duly elected can be tyrants, a fact that was pressed home upon me from a recent visit to the state of Michigan, whose governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is the very model of the modern major mandarin.

Whitmer has issued hundreds and hundreds of executive orders that impinge on the quotidian freedoms of the people she was elected to serve (how ironic that sounds: they also serve who only play the scold).

Whitmer was recently upbraided by the Michigan Supreme Court for exceeding her authority.

Her response was to transfer that authority to the state public health establishment, which set about enforcing her edicts about mask-wearing, “social” distancing, communal gatherings, quivering in place, and kindred impositions on liberty.

‘Voluntary Servitude’

“Voluntary servitude”: isn’t that where we find ourselves now? This is no “social contract,” wherein we implicitly pledge allegiance to a regime in exchange for an escape from a sanguinary “state of nature” and entrance to a realm of law and order.

On the contrary, we find ourselves more and more subject to the extraordinary whims of those—and they are legion—who would be our masters, for our own good, we are told, but we can’t help noticing it is also very much for their good, or at least their profit.

Continue reading “”