The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In The Mailbox: 03.06.23

Posted on | March 7, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Magical Thinking In The UK
EBL: MAGA CPAC, Broken City, The Death of Stalin, M3GAN, and Antifa Leftists causing mayhem and destruction in Georgia
Twitchy: Tucker’s J6 Videos From The Capitol Blow Holes In The Narrative, also, Challenging Russell Brand To Give Examples Of MSNBC Pushing Misinformation Ends Badly For MSNBC
Louder With Crowder: Patriot uses ‘Shopping Cart Theory’ to prove once and for all progressives stink at life, ‘Everyone called him a b*tch’, and Steven Crowder announces the return date for MugClub, the daily show
Vox Popoli: What Winning Looks Like, Convincing the Recalcitrant, Nothing But a Psyop, Sweden Heads Toward Bankruptcy, and “Outright Dangerous”
Stoic Observations: Why I Don’t Fear AI

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Disinformation and the Wuhan Lab Leak Thesis, Trump: ‘I Am Your Retribution’, and There is No Constitutional Right to Satanism
American Greatness: Georgia Bureau of Investigation Charges 23 Antifa Agitators With Domestic Terrorism Following Violent Clash With Police in Atlanta, Walmart Shutting Down All Portland Locations, and Life Among the Ruins
American Thinker: Trials and Tribulations, If Leftists Hate America So Much, Why Don’t They Leave?, and Tucker Carlson Calls Out the ‘Professional Christians’
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Cuban dictatorship’s ambassador confronted by exiles in Tampa restaurant, Reports from Cuba: Because the Cuban state doesn’t pay them, cart drivers stop picking up garbage, Cuban dictatorship bans women from marching on International Women’s Day, Lifestyles of the Rich and Communist: Capitalist excess at cigar festival in Havana, and Cuba comes to the defense of Nicaragua after UN condemnation for crimes against humanity
BattleSwarm: University of Texas Announces DEI Pause, also, Blackstone Defaults: Subprime Meltdown 2?
Behind The Black: A confused spiral galaxy, ISRO attempting controlled reentry of old satellite originally lacking in such plans, IBEX leaves safe mode and returns to full science operations, and A blacklist victory? Professor wins million dollar settlement for being blacklisted
Cafe Hayek: On Jobs and Economic Dynamism, Bad Economics, and An Open Letter to a Protectionist
CDR Salamander: March Maritime Melee on Midrats!, also, Retention: the Little Big Things
Chicago Boyz: ChicagoBoyz Miami Meetup – Tentative Agenda
Da Tech Guy: The Navy removes more benefits, I’m Not paying a 350% Premium Just to Tweak Hershey’s, and Trump Should Play the Media Like a Fiddle in His CPAC Speech
Dana Loesch: Biden Asks Congress For Money To Fight COVID Loan Fraud
Don Surber: Highlights Of The Week, Bill Maher’s Normality,
First Street Journal: The electricity is out in parts of the Bluegrass State, also, Killadelphia
Gates Of Vienna: Goin’ Where the Climate Suits my Clothes, Stop The Great Replacement!, VIA Con Dios… NOT, and We All Scream For Ice Cream!
The Geller Report: Twitter Files Release: Soros-Tied ‘State-Sponsored Blacklists’, NYC to Pay George Floyd Rioters MILLIONS, Because Cops Didn’t Wear Face Masks, and Here’s Your Russian Collusion
Glenn Reynolds: How I Was Wrong About COVID
Hogewash: Interesting Bike Handlebar Grips, Disney Cancels Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, An Irregular Dwarf, and Everything Proceeded As I Had Foreseen
Hollywood In Toto: Chris Rock’s ‘Outrage’ Shows Perks, Limits of Anger-based Stand-Up, Woke History of the World: Part II Flunks Satire 101, and Is Fox Nation Finding Its Voice?
The Lid: Bankruptcies Soar As America’s Absurd Debt Bubble Begins To Implode, also, Last Week Was A Good Week For America
Legal Insurrection: Social Media Contributing to Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls, Democrats Furious at Biden Over Change in Stance on DC Crime Bill, Farmers’ Protests Erupt in the Netherlands and Belgium Against EU Climate Change Restrictions, New York Times Makes Ludicrous Case For ‘Helmet Inclusivity’ for Black Equestrians, and Jan. 6 Footage Shows Officer Brian Sicknick Walking Uninjured in Capitol Around the Time Rioters ‘Killed’ Him Outside
Nebraska Energy Observer: Saturday – just for you, also, CPAC 2023
Outkick: LeBron James Claims He Dreams About Fictional Basketball With Michael Jordan, Paige Spiranac Teases Exclusive Content From Hammock Beach For Her OnlyFans Spin-Off, Jackson Mahomes Being Investigated By Police: REPORT, Stephen A. Smith To Ja Morant: ‘The NBA Has FBI Connections, They Know What You’re Doing At All Times’, Golf Influencer Bri Teresi Tests Out New Bikinis At Mar-A-Lago, and Shaq Defends Deion Sanders’ Two-Parent Household Recruiting Comments: ‘Spitting The Facts’
Power Line: Our State Department at Work, Dems Keep Pushing the Limits: ‘So, what are you going to do about it?’, Asian Voters Move Right, and Who smeared Tom Cotton?
Protein Wisdom Reborn: Netflix, Opie, & White Supremacy
Shark Tank: FL Legislature Seeks To Lower Gun-Buying Age To 18
Shot In The Dark: 19, There Are Too Many Potential Titles For This Post For Me To Choose Just One, also, The Message We’re Receiving
The Political Hat: The Memory Holing Of Literature Is Happening
This Ain’t Hell: The U.S. is sending up to $400 Million worth of military equipment to Ukraine, Stolen Valor – Handlin’ Bizness, Russia parades advanced military equipment while Soldiers use Soviet era equipment, Navy lays out policy for 21-day administrative leave for abortion and reproductive care, and Woke ideology seeping into Merchant Marine Academy
Transterrestrial Musings: The View From California, How To Cure American Amnesia, A Young Man Does His Taxes For The First Time, and Upgrade Your AK
Victory Girls: Marcotte Has Aneurysm About Republicans Again, Russian TV Host Wants to Defeat the West. So Does Putin, and SPLC Attorney Faces Domestic Terrorism Charges In Atlanta Riots
Volokh Conspiracy: A Different View of the “Public Intellectual Arc”, also, Ending the Epicycles of the Establishment Clause
Watts Up With That: Scotland Just Banned a Surgical Anaesthetic Because of Climate Change, “Degrowth Communism”: Green Communism whose Explicit Goal is to Destroy the Economy, and The Misguided Crusade to Reduce Anthropogenic Methane Emissions
Weasel Zippers: House Dem Leader Jeffries Says He’s “Not Going To Characterize” Biden’s Position On Pro-Criminal DC Law, Jill Biden: Mental Competency Tests For Politicians Over Age 75 Would Be “Ridiculous”, Biden Makes Absolutely No Sense When Discussing Eliminating Senate Filibuster, and WH Brags: 173 House Democrats Backed Law That Reduces Penalties For Murders, Carjackings
The Federalist: How Corporations Launder Their Race Discrimination Through Third Parties, Newly Released J6 Tapes Show Capitol Police Giving Guided Tour To So-Called ‘Q-Anon Shaman’, If Anybody Should Pay Reparations For Slavery, It’s The Democrat Party, Florida, Missouri, And West Virginia Withdraw From Leftist-Controlled Voter Roll ‘Maintenance’ Group ERIC, and Tapes Show Ray Epps Lied To Congress About Whereabouts During Jan. 6 Protests
Mark Steyn: Tal Bachman: Remembering Getz/Gilberto, Steyn Found Guilty! and Loser Pays: Victor’s Justice, the End of War and Land of Mine

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Category: Linkagery

It Can’t Happen Here

Posted on | March 6, 2023 | 1 Comment

In a post about the new Netflix series Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies, and the Internet, Jeff Goldstein points out the essential difference between neo-Nazism and American conservatism, namely that conservatism has always emphasized individual liberty. Indeed, it might be said that the charter of conservatism can be found in the Constitution, where the Founders declare their intent to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” This is part of the reason why the conflation of conservatism with Nazism has always been false, the other reason — and this is not a trivial distinction — being that America is not Germany in the aftermath of World War I.

Anyone who has seriously studied the rise of the Third Reich has to understand this. The conditions that existed in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s were sui generis, a particular set of historical circumstances that never existed anywhere else at any other time. This is why neo-Nazism is always doomed to failure. The Hitler wannabees are wrong to believe they can replicate in America (or anywhere else) the astonishing events by which Hitler went from being a fringe figure to being the all-powerful leader of what was, in 1939, the world’s greatest military power.

Neo-Nazis are fools and, however dangerous their folly may be — no matter how many acts of criminal terrorism they may commit — there is no real possibility that they will organize a “Fourth Reich.”

Once you realize this, you recognize that left-wing rhetoric warning about the danger posed by the “far right” is as deluded as the hateful nonsense spewed by Jew-hating kooks. The lucrative hustle of the SPLC, sniffing out allegedly dangerous “extremism” everywhere, depends on the fallacy that such extremists are (or could be) the harbingers of a future genocidal dictatorship in America: “It could happen here!”

Well, actually, no it can’t if, by “it,” you mean Nazi Germany.

Some people seem unable to deal with more than one thought at the same time, and thus cannot reconcile two realities: (a) there are dangerous “far right” kooks in America, but (b) they’re not going to take over the country. The incessant fear-mongering of the SPLC — a scam, a hustle, a racket — is wildly out of proportion to the size of the actual threat posed by neo-Nazis and their ilk. As I recently pointed out, the Anti-Defamation League’s most recent report on extremist violence found that the number of deaths from such incidents has declined sharply, from 78 in 2016 to 25 in 2022. In a nation where there are more than 22,000 homicides annually, the “extremist” threat is a statistical blip.

The way the SPLC and other such “hate” hustlers are able to keep up the scare is by expanding their purview to include as threats various groups and individuals who have never advocated or engaged in violent activity. Go ask the Family Research Council where this tactic can lead — Floyd Lee Corkins showed up with a pistol at FRC headquarters after the SPLC named them as a “hate group” for their opposition to same-sex marriage.

To repeat: Some people can’t handle two thoughts simultaneously. People may advocate viewpoints that we disagree with — viewpoints which may, in some sense, be characterized as “hate” — without representing a threat of terroristic violence. This important distinction is frequently lost in discussions of “hate,” where it is used as a pretext for “deplatforming” people whose only crime is expressing opinions that offend liberals. There was never any reason to blame FRC for violence against homosexuals (or anyone else) but, in labeling them a “hate group,” the SPLC made this conservative 501(c)3 the target of actual violence by a deranged gay man. This business of conflating conservatism with “hate” is not accidental, of course. The SPLC did not make an innocent error; they are a partisan political organization, founded by a Democrat fundraiser, and dedicated to silencing opposition to the Democratic Party and its policy agenda. Every honest and intelligent person knows this.

Which brings us back to Web of Make Believe, the Netflix series whose co-executive producer is Ron Howard, and which is directed by Brian Knappenberger, who has an interesting history. He directed the 2012 documentary We Are Legion, celebrating the criminal hacker conspiracy known as “Anonymous.” You may remember those heady days circa 2011, when Anonymous committed various cybercrimes in defense of Julian Assange and Wikileaks, crimes that were celebrated as heroic by liberals at the time. Fast-forward five years, however, when the Democratic National Committee’s emails were allegedly “hacked,” and suddenly hacking was an outrage, a sinister Russian conspiracy to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. So hacking is good, if it is viewed as helping Democrats, but evil when it hurts Democrats.

Are you surprised, then, to learn that Episode Two of Web of Make Believe is aimed at accusing the “right wing” of fomenting conspiracy theories about the murder of Seth Rich? Then in Episode Three, as Jeff Goldstein explains at length, Knappenberger indulges in guilt-by-association between Trump supporters in general and the “Identity Evropa” group whose former spokeswoman is featured:

[The episode] connects white supremacy to conservatism, and depicts a rejection of conservatism as a concomitant Escape from Hate. All violence depicted is perpetrated by “the right”; images of Charlottesville are juxtaposed with images of January 6; the heroes are the leftwing doxxers who fight the haters, or the brave, diverse crowd who stand as a bulwark against rancid conservatism.
The protagonist — who during her online phase went by “Norah Fox” as a member of the group Identity Evropa, where she ultimately became a leader of the women’s arm, and later a popular recruiter — is herself a living metaphor for the episode’s narrative arc and heavy-handed message: she is redeemed by her rejection of the movement; and she is cleansed by engaging in a narrativized struggle session in which she is gently guided by the interviewer, with a gloss on both her redemption and on broader social issues of free speech (and why it must necessarily be policed and constrained) provided by several supporting players: a former FBI agent who bemoans the traditional “whiteness” and “maleness” of the agency; tech writer April Glaser; and New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz, this last of whom is promoted as the intellectual anchor and living conscience of the film, a role he seems to relish.

Can we take a moment to interrogate the idea that a journalist who writes about a subject (as Marantz has written about “Norah Fox”) thereby becomes an “expert” on whatever it is he’s writing about? Because I’ve written about a wide number of subjects over the years, and have never been contacted by documentary producers to pose as an “expert” on any of these topics. This sort of journalistic “expertise” seems only to be possessed by liberals, and is therefore off-limits to skeptical inquiry. You’re probably some kind of right-wing conspiracy theorist if you even call attention to the dubious nature of this kind of “expert” status.

Confronted with the tendentiousness (and obvious partisan bias) of such works as Web of Make Believe, we may classify it as propaganda. And guess who else engaged in propaganda? NAZIS, that’s who!

Godwin’s Law works both ways, you know.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)



 

 

Category: Liberals, Protein Wisdom

Rule 5 Sunday: Amberleigh West

Posted on | March 6, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Playboy and Instagram model, sometime actress (The Last Movie Star) Amberleigh West was born in Mount Vernon, Washington in September 1991.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Lithium Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: MAGA-CPAC, The Surfrajettes, Abba, Tradwife Rule 5, Lucky Number Slevin, 5’5″ & 170 Pounds, The Murdaugh Murders, and Phyllis Kirk

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Evanna Lynch Stands by Her Woman, Fish Pic Friday – A Michigander – Christina Robinson, Thursday Tattoos, Wednesday Wetness, Gone Fishin’, Sunny Day, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Flotsam and Jetsam – Sunday Morning on the Wrack Line and Sunday Sunrise

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Category: Rule 5

It’s Almost as If Freddie deBoer Never Read ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’

Posted on | March 5, 2023 | 1 Comment

Freddie deBoer, future Republican?

If you don’t know who Freddie deBoer is, you should. He is one of those leftists who, a la Christopher Hitchens, refuses to follow the herd, to ignore facts and common sense, or to forgo necessary criticism of his own side of the aisle. Which means that sooner or later, by the inexorable logic of American politics, Freddie will eventually be forced to give up on his socialist vision and become a Republican. Make book on it. Perhaps his rightward journey will take years, and I may not live to see Freddie finally declare himself a conservative, so that when it happens, it will be up to my friends to celebrate my posthumous vindication: “Stacy called it!”

Pity poor Freddie, forced to toil endlessly alone in his apartment to keep his Substack going when, if he played his cards right, he could be in Boca Raton or Palm Beach, dining on prime beef and washing it down with fine wine, at the expense of hedge fund billionaires who’d pay him to be a Senior Fellow at some free-market think tank, and all he’d have to do to earn that generous bounty would be to put on a suit and tie and show up at a monthly seminar, maybe make occasional Fox News appearances, give a few campus speeches sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation, etc. (Get in touch, Freddie — I could make some introductions.) But in the meantime, there’s Freddie in his grubby T-shirt, alone in his apartment, staring into his laptop and, like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a hill, trying to talk sense to his fellow leftists.

Wednesday, our trip to National Harbor for CPAC took about two hours. My brother was driving, so I had time to read Freddie’s cri de coeur about the dumbed-down quasi-anarchism of his fellow leftists. The jumping of point for his essay was a woman who “started a Twitter storm, somehow, by publicly wishing that she could take her child onto the subway without exposing them to secondhand smoke”:

She was beset by a certain online species of ostensible leftist who is against ever trying to enforce any kind of rule, anywhere, ever. See, rules are the hand of oppression, or something, and since most of society’s rules are meant to be enforced by the police, trying to enforce them (merely wishing that they be enforced) is an endorsement of the police and their violence….
I find this attitude has become inescapable. . . .

DeBoer is shocked by the unreasonableness of his comrades in the same way Captain Renault in Casablanca was shocked to discover that gambling was going on at Rick’s. He knows damned well that you can’t have a mass movement on the Left without the type of kooks, misfits and ax-grinders whom Eric Hoffer described in The True Believer. If the animating principles of your movement include, e.g., an unlimited “right” to abortion, for any reason or no reason at all, even in the third trimester, certainly you should not be surprised to find yourself surrounded by people who are, to use a clinical term, emotionally labile.

Surveying the kook-swarm, deBoer laments that “contemporary left-of-center discourse” is afflicted by “total ideological poverty”:

Nobody has read anything, so nobody knows anything, so you’re constantly getting yelled at by self-described radicals who have no solid footing in any systematic approach to left politics at all. . . . They think that to be a socialist means to disdain all rules because there is no substance to their socialism at all.

Cheer up, my fellow neofascists! However bad things may be for us on the Right — and, objectively, they’re pretty bad — at least we’re not doomed to Freddie’s fate, alone in an apartment cranking out Substack laments about the unavoidable reality that most “self-described radicals” are just plain kooks. Sic semper hoc — ’twas ever thus.

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”
— George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937

Why has this quote remained so epigrammatic? What accounts for the endurance of socialism’s “magnetic” appeal to kooks? Probably I could rattle off 1,500 words without exhausting the explanatory possibilities, but a theory about why kooks are attracted to socialism is unnecessary to the simple observation that, like Mary and her little lamb, wherever socialism goes, the kooks are sure to follow.

Something in this paragraph of Freddie’s lament caught my eye:

This backdoor anarchism that a lot of people have fallen into has no content. I understand: people don’t want to be elitists, don’t want to gatekeep, and don’t feel like they have the background knowledge to police anyone else anyway. I also understand that socialism just needs warm bodies, that we have to have converts if we’re ever going to make any kind of inroads into real power. But at this point, a dozen years after Occupy and seven years since Bernie’s peak, I feel confident in saying that the influx of people into socialism who had no interest in doing the work to understand socialism has become an albatross. We’re suffering from a profound information deficit and it’s impeding our growth. I genuinely feel that the recruiting efforts of the past decade-plus have proven to be a net negative. What’s the value of an army of new self-described socialists who can’t be bothered to do little things like “have a coherent vision of change and how to achieve it”?

Who could forget the smelly hippies of “Occupy Wall Street”? It was my misfortune to be nearly trampled by a mob of them when they tried to storm a Koch-funded event I was covering in D.C. in November 2011. Reeking of sweat and bad economic ideas, this disorderly mob inspired a friend who is a Republican consultant to remark to me, “I’ve never seen so many losers in my life.” As I observed in 2015:

What has resulted from this modernistic idolatry of democratic Progress — the utopian fantasy of an imagined future where we all live in absolute equality, free of “old-fashioned” beliefs — is a sort of social epidemic of bipolar hysteria, in which minds unmoored from cultural tradition constantly shift between utter confusion and radical certainty. Anyone who paid close attention to the “Occupy” protests of 2011 saw evidence of what kind of disordered personalities this progressive epidemic has produced. Young people who were clearly incompetent to manage their own lives nevertheless felt themselves entitled to dictate to the rest of us how “society” must be changed so as to “empower” these mobs of emotional unstable misfits. Refusing to take responsibility for their own failures, the Occupiers believed they were supremely qualified to pass judgment on the “system” that served as an all-purpose scapegoat onto which they could externalize blame for their misfortunes.

This isn’t merely my opinion, it’s a self-evident fact, and one which even a committed leftist like Freddie deBoer cannot ignore.

The saddest part is that deBoer is apparently such an idealist that he can’t turn his back on the socialist cause that magnetically attracts all these nudist sandal-wearers and sex maniacs, as Orwell categorized them. One wishes Freddie could muster sufficient cynicism to think about what he’d gain by going Right. Saturday at CPAC, I stood outside our hotel across the street from the Gaylord convention center and watched the Trump supporters making their way toward the conference, the well-groomed young men in sharp suits, the shapely young women in dresses and heels — a much better class of people, all around, than the smelly anarchist scum who comprise the leftist mob. All it would take for Freddie deBoer to become part of this well-dressed (and gainfully employed) Republican crowd is to admit that socialism is a failure, a utopian pipe-dream, a “strong delusion,” as Paul wrote to the Thessalonians.

Bookmark this post, friends. Freddie may be deluded, but he’s just too smart to remain deluded forever. As night follows day, eventually he’ll wake up and ask himself why he’s stuck there in his grubby T-shirt cranking out Substack posts for an ungrateful bunch of socialist kooks, when he could be collecting a fat six-figure salary as a Senior Fellow at a public-policy institute funded by hedge-fund billionaires, and giving foundation-sponsored speeches to crowds of sharp-dressed College Republican boys and their shapely young girlfriends.

When it happens, don’t forget it was me who prophesied it.



 

 

Category: Intellectuals

FMJRA 2.0: Too Much Too Young

Posted on | March 5, 2023 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Too Much Too Young

— compiled by Wombat-socho

No link to the SOTD, which is from Jason & The Scorchers album Wildfires & Misfires, an eclectic collection of outtakes, live tracks, and odd songs that never made it onto one of their regular albums. I’m kinda hoping Britney Spears covers it someday; it’s like the song was written with her (or somebody very much like her) in mind.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
In Defense of Scott Adams
Okrahead
The DaleyGator
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Evening Edition)
The DaleyGator
Okrahead
EBL
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

Obligatory CNN Mention
A View From The Beach
EBL

News From Gwinnett County, Georgia
The DaleyGator
EBL
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: Home Is Nevada
Okrahead
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

NFL Star: ‘Hey, New York Taxes Suck!’
EBL
357 Magnum

Good News From California
Okrahead
The DaleyGator
EBL
357 Magnum

Rule 5 Monday: Lana Turner
Animal Magnetism
A View From The Beach
EBL

WOW: Left-Wing Narrative on Train Wreck Debunked by … Washington Post?
Okrahead
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

If Fetterman Is Brain Dead, Maybe They Should Hook Him Up to Jumper Cables?
Okrahead
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Good-Bye, Mayor Frogface! Lightfoot Places Third in Chicago Reelection Bid
The DaleyGator
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Back to CPAC With the Big Yellow Button
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.01.23
Okrahead
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

CPAC: Founding Fathers
Okrahead
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.02.23
Okrahead
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

CPAC 2023: Celebrity Sightings
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.03.23
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach

Top linkers for the week ending March 3:

  1.  EBL (17)
  2.  357 Magnum (16)
  3.  A View From The Beach (12)
  4.  Okrahead (9)
  5.  The DaleyGator (5)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

CPAC 2023: Trump Is Still the Big Dog

Posted on | March 4, 2023 | 1 Comment

Before former President Donald Trump spoke to a capacity ballroom tonight at CPAC, they announced the results of their 2024 presidential straw poll, and it wasn’t close: Trump 62%, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis 20%, and everybody else in single digits.

Of course, we’re still many months away from the first televised debates among primary contenders, but a result like that has to be encouraging to Trump, and discouraging to anybody else thinking they have a chance to take the Republican nomination away from the man who, in his fiery speech, promised “those who have been wronged and betrayed” that he will be “your retribution.” This was, among other things, a reference to the hundreds of his supporters arrested in the J6 Capitol riot.

Trump spoke for more than an hour and a half, and was repeatedly interrupted by chants of “USA! USA! USA!” More about the speech:

“The Republican Party was ruled by freaks, neocons, open border zealots, and fools,” Trump told CPAC, closing the four-day conference on Saturday. “We’re never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush.”
“We are going to finish what we started,” he said. “We are going to complete this mission, we are going to see this battle through. We are going to make America great again.”
While criticizing Republicans who have proposed raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare, Trump indirectly referenced Ukraine as he tries to distinguish himself from Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who has solidified his position as Trump’s chief opponent for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Trump is attempting to portray DeSantis as being closer to former President George W. Bush than his own “MAGA” base.
“We are never going back to a party that wants to give unlimited money to fight foreign endless wars, but demands we cut veteran benefits and retirement benefits at home,” he said.
“I’m the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent, and very easily, World War III,” he added, after which there were chants of “No more war!”
Trump also took on Democrats and his critics, describing them as people who “hate” the country and are seeking to “destroy it,” while contending they are “coming after” his supporters “and I’m just standing in their way.”
“Our enemies are lunatics and maniacs, and they cannot stand that they do not own me, they cannot shake me, they cannot control me,” he said. “I alone will never retreat.”
“In 2016, I declared: I am your voice,” he went on. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

Whatever his critics may say, the fact remains that Trump still has millions of loyal supporters who will show up to vote in Republican primaries, and unless something changes drastically in the next few month, it is unlikely that anyone — including Ron DeSantis — can stop Trump from being the GOP nominee in 2024.

 



 

 

Category: CPAC, Donald Trump

CPAC 2023: ‘Media Logistics’ & a Strange Memo From the National Affairs Desk

Posted on | March 4, 2023 | 1 Comment

The National Affairs Desk, 9:14 a.m. today

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
Because I was busy doing other things, I didn’t notice this email that went out yesterday from CPAC Communications:

MEDIA LOGISTICS FOR CPAC IN DC 2023
Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center . . .
Saturday, March 4, 2023
2:00 AM – 5:00 AM: A security sweep will be conducted at this time. No media will be allowed onsite.
5:00 AM: Media Entry
Media entrance is located at the Maryland Ballroom Entrance. You will only be able to access the event at the Maryland Ballroom Entrance.
If you do not arrive at 5AM – you will have to wait in the general security line. There is not a press entrance.
All media must enter by 10:00 AM. Late entries will not be granted access. No exceptions. . . .
7:00 AM – 9:00 AM: Pre-Credential Press Pick-Up
Media registration will close at 9:00 AM and not re-open. All late arrivals will not have access to the event without a credential.

It’s 10 o’clock as I write this and, if I understand this email correctly, (a) even to get access to the conference area, I’ll have to go through the security line (metal detectors, etc.) with thousands of other people, and (b) I won’t be granted access to the media area at all. Which means that I’m probably going to be covering today’s events from here in the lobby of my hotel across the street from the convention center. Which is par for the course, really, and however badly screwed I am in terms of this “media logistics” arrangement, I’m not as badly screwed as my old buddy Mike LaChance, who came here to cover CPAC for Legal Insurrection. Mike also writes for Gateway Pundit and Twitchy, so it’s not as if he’s an obscure lightweight in the realm of conservative media. But somehow, the folks in charge of media credentials at CPAC didn’t understand how important Mike is. His email request for credentials apparently got lost in the shuffle, and no matter how many times he went back to media registration — five or six times, I think — they kept turning him down.

In other words, Mike’s going scorched earth and, for the sake of my own access, permit me to say as a professional journalist that I do not endorse scorched-earth reprisals like this, no matter how screwed-up the situation may be, objectively speaking. This official non-endorsement of Mike’s blood-oath vengeance crusade is necessary, you see, on the outside chance that CPAC staffers may actually bother reading my blog. But if they don’t understand how important Legal Insurrection, Gateway Pundit and Twitchy are . . . ? Well, even if I did endorse Mike’s anti-CPAC vendetta (which, I must repeat, I do not), the people who screwed Mike over on his credentials probably wouldn’t ever read my endorsement. Or, to quote Hillary Clinton: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”



 

 

Category: CPAC

CPAC 2023: Why Not This Guy?

Posted on | March 4, 2023 | Comments Off on CPAC 2023: Why Not This Guy?

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
Vivek Ramaswamy is the longest of long shots among 2024 Republican presidential candidates, but anyone who knows me, knows I love an underdog. The official results of the 2010 midterms hadn’t been counted before I jumped aboard the “Cain Train,” backing Herman Cain’s 2012 campaign, which nobody gave a chance until, a few months and a few debates later, he zoomed to the top of the polls.

Ramaswamy’s speech yesterday at CPAC was lit, as the kids say. He is an outspoken and articulate critic of the religion of “Wokeism,” but more than that, is an enthusiastic proponent of American exceptionalism.

Having never paid any attention to him before, I knew nothing about this Hindu son of immigrants with the hard-to-spell name and, of course, being a brown guy named Ramaswamy is just one more disadvantage to his presidential prospects, but when you’re looking for dark horse candidates, you like ’em as dark as possible (no pun intended). Now let’s take a brief look at Ramaswamy’s bio:

Ramaswamy was born in 1985 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised there. His parents emigrated from Vadakkencherry, Palakkad, Kerala, India. His father graduated from a regional engineering college in Kerala and worked for General Electric as an engineer and patent attorney, while his mother graduated from Mysore Medical College and worked as a geriatric psychiatrist.

(You know who else worked for General Electric? Ronald Reagan.)

Ramaswamy graduated in 2003 from St. Xavier High School, a Jesuit high school in Cincinnati. He was his class valedictorian and a nationally ranked junior tennis player.
In 2007, Ramaswamy graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with an A.B. in biology. He wrote his senior thesis on the ethical questions raised by creating human-animal chimeras. His thesis was awarded the Bowdoin Prize for Natural Sciences, and a precis was published in The New York Times and The Boston Globe in 2007. In 2011, Ramaswamy was awarded a post-graduate fellowship by the The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. In 2013, he received a J.D. from Yale Law School.

(Uh . . . “Soros Fellowship”? He’s going to have to explain that, because certainly his opponents will try to make hay of that.)

In 2007, Ramaswamy and Travis May co-founded Campus Venture Network, a technology company that provided software and networking resources to university entrepreneurs. The company was acquired in 2009 by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. From 2007 to 2014, Ramaswamy worked at QVT Financial, where he was a partner and co-managed the firm’s biotech portfolio while simultaneously attending Yale Law School from 2010 to 2013.
In 2014, Ramaswamy founded the pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, which focuses on applying technology to drug development, serving as CEO until 2021. He appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine in 2015 for his work in drug development. . . .
Ramaswamy announced his candidacy on the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight on February 21, 2023.

So the dark horse with the hard-to-spell name has a pretty impressive biography, and if Tucker Carlson is willing to host his campaign announcement, that suggests that I’m not alone in thinking this guy might just have a shot — a long shot, but a real one.

 



 

 

Category: CPAC, Election
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